When does something constitute torture?

A man makes a promise to another man. You work for me, you work consistently, and you will always have a job. Twenty years later, the man says, "Sorry. I can't afford your salary. You have to go out and compete against people younger and cheaper. If not, you'll still have a job, but you will have no control over the circumstances. You will be unable to be consistent." If this were an agreement between one small employer and employee, it might be easy enough to see that there would be a case for "breach of contract." The day-to-day changes in the employees job description might constitute some kind of torture. But, when you're working for a large system like the DOE, it's harder to make the argument. First of all, you have an unsympathetic taxpayer base which does not imagine what your or your school day are like on a day-to-day basis. Since most of these taxpayers traded competition and bonuses for job security, they can't possibly see why other people who didn't sign on for that career path can't hack it. Finally, we are living in "the age of the bully." Supervisors are being praised for finding as much fault with workers as possible. Much of the steps the UFT has set to protect people from getting "U" ratings without due process are being ignored. Not because the UFT isn't trying. Ultimately, it's up to your principal and a DOE evaluator to decide if you deserved that "U." There's not a lot of incentive to defend people who are experienced and highly paid but who are having trouble making the transition backwards in their careers. What I mean by this is, some teachers have worked 20 years or more in one school and one population and have become finely attuned to their needs. Throw them into a whole new ballgame and they are not likely to be as immediately effective. Imagine you were a doctor working with people with chronic depression. You are then moved to work with a group of people who engage in emotional and physical violence, have ADHD, and you have no MSW or Psychologist to help you navigate the waters. The difference in the kind of aggression is impossible to explain. Plus, you are constantly being expected to instantly transform into someone new. You spent your career as a combination Corrections Officer/Counselor/Troubleshooter and now you are being asked to be Mr. Rogers for a group of students who don't respond to him. Your principal wants to create a "warm and friendly" environment, but he hasn't done anything to teach the students what this means in practical terms. They haven't practiced kindness, patience, respect. It reminds me of Ismael Beah's A Long Way Gone. When he and other child soldiers in Sierra Leone were brought to rehabilitation centers, they started fights and killed a few other new residents. The staff just kept saying, "It's not your fault," that this is happening to you. They took many months to try to settle into some normalcy. Meanwhile, a student body accustomed to punishment is being given the same room to rebel. Except that the speed with which they recover is YOUR FAULT. And you can't go back to methods which you've used before because they are considered too cruel or to blunt.

It's double-think, squared. That has to be a violation of human rights.

Teacher Isolation

At the end of the day, for about five minutes, I sat with a colleague while he played Pink Floyd's The Wall on his personal laptop. We talked about it -- the themes, where we were when it came out -- I was graduating from 8th grade, he saw the movie with a group of friends. The movie had gotten to me later, in high school, along with Tommy. I always want to go right home after school, which is a new feeling for me. I used to sit with kids for hours or just work with a colleague. But now I wondered why I wasn't right out the door. I needed those five minutes. And then I pushed myself out the door.

Last week someone stole my cell phone and I lost all of my contacts -- it's easy to erase your identity when a person has your handset. There are so many people whom I will never see again, whose phone numbers kept me connected to them. It gave me the semblance of a community. Now, I'm a pushy person. There are colleagues I know who have probably never asked for the phone numbers of colleagues with whom they have worked for years. While people worked closely together, they were much more conscious of their privacy in the generations before me. There was no Facebook to casually sign up on, and they probably wouldn't have, anyway. Perhaps they might have shared their "Linked-In" pages. I doubt it. A recent study of new teachers found that many of them are leaving the profession because they feel isolated, too -- although mentoring programs have helped to reduce some attrition. (How Mentoring Programs Can Reduce Teacher Isolation http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number14/) There's been a lot of writing on the plight of new teachers, on the need for teachers to collaborate, to communicate with the outside world -- but little on what is happening to the school community itself which makes these, and just connecting with long-time colleagues, near impossible.

With all the closings of schools and the shiftings of personnel, there must be scores of teachers who have lost their communities, and some of their only long-term friends. Working together means you talk to each other every day. But without that ritual, you don't have a way to continue the intimacy. Some people will call each other for a while, perhaps. Juxtaposing the feelings you have for the colleagues with whom you were close and trusting and that of terror which has come with this new era of instability makes it harder to talk to anyone, though. You don't know if your friends have changed. Are they still for real? Are you for real?

In the coming weeks I want to look at studies on teacher loneliness and see if anyone is looking at what is happening to the population of teachers in NYC who are being continually displaced. Are they socializing anywhere? Are they eating alone? Sure a lot of teachers have joined the blogosphere. What about those who haven't. What does it mean to all of us that we have lost direct human contact with so many, so instantly.

Anyone who wants to write in, please do.