Its vs. It’s – Two Helpful Graphics

And if you think you fall within the red category, you might want to sit down for a chat with Bob the Angry Flower:

Some Conception

If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job. ~Donald D. Quinn

Hiring Update

Finally got in touch with someone in HR. I have to go pee in a cup today (still intrigued that my new district seems to be the only in the area that requires a drug test) and will sign all relevant paperwork in August. Because I was offered the job in June, I’m free and clear from the dreaded Cat I.

Now I just need to get in touch with my department head and find out what my curriculum calendar looks like! I’ve got some planning to do…

Sweet(er) Dreams (?)

Tonight marks the second night in a row that has passed nightmare-free since I got hired.

“Nightmare” is probably too strong a word. They’re stress dreams. And it’s not that I’m stressed about the job – I’m excited about the job. What I’m stressed about (at least, if my dreams are to be trusted) is my classroom.

Every night I was dreaming a variation on the following theme:

• It is time for school to start on the first day
• I don’t know which classroom is mine, haven’t set it up, etc.
• My kids are waiting on me while I figure out which room is mine, try to get the door unlocked, and then open it up to find that it is either:
• unfurnished
• mid-renovation with exposed drywall and concrete
• full of rotting food
• taken over by another teacher

Imagine my relief this morning to discover that the worst dream I’d had involved disappointing my sister, broken hearts, and losing a friend because he turned out to be an enormous jerk who wouldn’t date my sister because he’d rather go on a hike through the snow in metallic pink platform sandals. (All crazy, because my sister isn’t single, I wouldn’t be setting her up on dates, and none of us live in a Swiss chalet where we wear long skirts and adorable aprons.)

Which reminds me: I think I’d like some hot cocoa.

*  *  *

The thing is that I’m worried about the actual hiring bit. I got offered the job, and accepted, in June. I was supposed to hear back from the district in the last week of June, but did not. Now I can’t get anyone over there to answer my calls. Some school districts shut down for the month of July. If I can’t get this resolved before August, I don’t get to set up my classroom this month and, MUCH worse, I run the risk of being a Category I teacher again. This is, to paraphrase apocryphal Churchill, something up with which I will not put.

Meanwhile, there’s the residual stress over “Juanita” (this pseudonym’s for you, Grammy), the gal who got hired for the other English teaching job at CHS. I am really hoping that the nasty things Juanita did during our student teaching were because she felt the need to compete with me for possible jobs, and that she’ll be a nice normal human being now that we’re both in our respective classrooms. I am also really hoping that Juanita doesn’t want to be my buddy, because I don’t want anyone painting me with the Juanita brush. I am also really hoping that Juanita doesn’t dislike me as much as she lets on, because the last thing someone needs in their first year at a new school is to have another teacher – one who “knows” you from before – talking smack about you behind your back.

My plan at this point is to “hope for the best and plan for the worst.” I’m going to walk in assuming all is roses and unicorn poop, but keeping a close watch on my back and an ear to the grapevines. Meanwhile, I have a certain advantage in that people tend to take a liking to me – and from my experience, people tend to take an UNliking to Juanita. Being an aggressive sort, Juanita will be faster to integrate herself into the social structure, but I should still be able to be in a position where I can have an uncomfortable conversation with another teacher if need be. Unfortunately, I got quite a bit of practice giving Juanita the cold shoulder in our last quarter together during student teaching, so if worst comes to worst…

As Briefly As Possible…

Here’s an update of the past several months:

The Lead Up

The year came to an end without a job for me. There just weren’t any English teaching positions for me to take. Still holding out hope that something would come through, I resisted packing up until too late and had a rough couple of weeks.

The last week or so of school went so quickly that I almost didn’t have time to be sad or stressed. We had an awards ceremony, a talent show, yearbook signing day.

Then it was the end of school, and all the teachers stood out front to wave as the school buses pulled away from the school for the last time that year. I wasn’t sure if I’d see any of the kids or teachers again.

Following that: days of packing and dodging fellow teachers who wanted to know if I’d found anything new yet. The sympathy and “we don’t want to lose you” comments were hard to take after a while.

Our librarian decided to take a year’s sabbatical, and the principal wondered if I’d be willing to be an interim librarian. It sounded pretty good, except that I hated the idea of being in this position again a year from now. Hedging my bets, I put in an application at what used to be my third-choice school district. Four days after applying, I had an interview at their newest, prettiest high school.

I was offered the interim position and had to have the awkward conversation about the fact that I wanted to interview for the high school spot. The next day, I interviewed at the high school and fell in love with a lot of things about it.

The day after the interview, I got a phone call to interview at the newest, prettiest high school – what I had thought was my dream school – in my own district… and then I got an email to interview at a new, pretty private school for performing arts students. From nothing, I went to four good possibilities.

I was shocked to discover how negatively I felt after the second high school interview. I had thought that this school was everything I wanted, and it turned out to be everything I didn’t want. The private school was fantastic, and probably it and I were made for each other… but there were security issues, and I just couldn’t say yes without setting myself up for a scary next year or so.

I thought and thought and thought, and the more I thought about it, the more I knew: the first high school I’d interviewed at was the place for me. When they called to enthusiastically offer me the position, I enthusiastically accepted.

The Good News

I’m going to be a high school English teacher!

I’ll be teaching mostly sophomores, some juniors. I’m absolutely psyched. I love the school and the admins and the school’s mission. I’m really excited to see what teaching at – well, I might as well call it CHS, for the sake of simplicity – brings me, and I’ll do better at keeping all y’all updated.

The Bad News

There were two positions open. The second position went to a woman who I’ve known for a long time. I used to have a lot of respect for her, and maybe I will again, but let’s just say that I wouldn’t trust her to come and sub for me last year, and I’m not alone in that. She’s a backstabber and a manipulator, and I hate hate hate that she’s going to be in the same school as I am next year. (It bears mentioning that the position she got is the one I’m supposed to be working toward – it requires a completed MA, which I haven’t finished yet – and I suppose there’s a mite of jealousy there.) Honestly, I’m really pretty surprised that they hired her. I don’t think she’s what that school wants in the slightest. And I’m going to have to work twice as hard at doing a good job to counteract the negative untruths she’s liable to spread about me.

Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday!

Good Question…

New Literary Term

Teacher Burnout and Dropout

I read an interesting article about teacher burnout/dropout rates the other day and thought I’d share. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, by any means, but it illustrates a problem in the current education system.

One of the statistics mentioned in the article is a familiar refrain in the “how to be a teacher” classes I took: almost half of all teachers will leave the profession within five years. (I remember also being told that of those who quit, something like 3/5 do it after their first year. That seems indicative to me of a problem in teacher training and support/mentoring for teachers, not necessarily teaching itself.)

A contributing factor to this attrition rate, particularly in the current economic state, is the fact that many first-year teachers don’t have renewing contracts. When funding shortages force the districts to not offer new contracts to those teachers, the teachers end up back on the job hunt. We hear a lot about people seeking alternative certification to become teachers when unemployment rises, but this is the unpleasant flip side of that coin – qualified teachers who lose their positions and have to start over in another industry.

This article cites NCLB – or more specifically, its “stricter-than-ever accountability laws” and paperwork – as a significant cause of teacher burnout. Instead of being fueled by their passion for teaching children, educators are motivated by statistics and personal competition. It’s not enough to love children and your subject matter; now your kids have to out-perform the next teacher’s kids if you want job security. That’s an extreme case, but it weighs on teachers’ minds.

Of course, money is always an issue. We always hear/say that teachers don’t go into it for the money, but it is also true that financial compensation can go a long way toward neutralizing the negative effects of burnout.

I particularly liked what one of the article’s sources had to say on the subject:

“The bottom line is that, as teachers, we have the opportunity to change lives, and literally, in some cases, save lives,” he said. “A teacher’s attitude toward the kids can, and has, saved lives. The voice of those kids who behave badly can’t become the dominant voice in the teacher’s mind.”

The solution to teacher burnout won’t come through a “business as usual” approach, McMahon said. And he stresses the importance of keeping great teachers, no matter what it takes.

“We need innovative, new incentives for teachers to remain in education,” he said. “Government can’t do this alone – the private sector also needs to play a role.”

And finally, a quick primer to help us all recognize the symptoms of teacher burnout in time to do something to help:

Folded Up

I wonder if every student teacher is told that they’ll almost certainly collapse into tears at some point. I know that every time I turned around, someone was talking about Teacher Breakdowns as if they were just a fact of life. And of course, teaching is a draining and emotional experience – especially when you add on the stress of school, and applications, and the whole “year-long interview” process of the student teaching.

That said, I never once felt like crying, all the way through my student teaching. After that I taught summer school and never once felt like crying. Now I’m more than halfway through my first year of real-live teaching – and for the first time ever, this morning I thought it might happen.

This student – we’ll just call him Angel – is one of the ones whose name became familiar in our household within the first three days of school. He walked into my classroom and caught my attention instantaneously. Enormous green eyes, dark hair that he tried to spike but that preferred to lie, baby-fine, against his scalp. Nickel hoops through each earlobe. Black t-shirts. There was something about him that grabbed my heart. Being a naturally empathetic person, it didn’t take me long to figure out that this kid was hurting badly. He wasn’t a naughty kid, but he was a messed-up kid.

Fast-forward through months of trying to help Angel. We’re talking about a boy who had a suicide attempt at age 10, who had been on a wide array of antidepressants and anti-psychotics until his mom’s boyfriend “manned him up” and took him off the pills cold-turkey. This kid would sit in my classroom and pound the butt of his pen into his forehead until it was pockmarked with deep dents. (The forehead, not the pen; he broke more pens into tiny pieces than I cared to count.) He’d refuse to do any work, or refuse to try. He’d do the work and then throw it away instead of turning it in. My seating charts were crafted around giving Angel a place where he could rock his chair and desk, even shove the desk around, without hurting any of the other kids.

Meeting after meeting after meeting. The first meetings were my doing; everyone else saw a kid who was full of meanness, but I saw a kid who was full of pain. It bothered me and I fought for him. Then the other teachers saw what I saw, and we began the difficult process of trying to convince the parents.

Dad in prison. Older brother off in the Marines. Mom suffering from chronic illnesses and terminal toughness. Boyfriend determined that there was nothing wrong with Angel that a summer at a logging camp couldn’t cure.

I said, early and often, that one of two things was going to happen with Angel in the next five years. Either he was going to walk into my classroom in his shiny new Marine uniform and tell me that he’d graduated high school and had a new life – or I was going to be attending his funeral.

In late November, Angel started folding paper. He made me a jumping frog. It was about that time that I heard from a counselor that Angel liked me – quite remarkable, given that I taught Angel’s least favorite subjects and that he’d never admitted to liking a teacher since early grade school. Then I got an origami flower – a clover, he corrected me – and another, until I had a small bouquet of paper clovers erupting from my pencil mug.

We broke for two weeks of Christmas vacation. (They still call it that around here; in fact, we had Christmas trees in the building.) In the last days of December, I began digging through displays of 2009 calendars looking for what I needed. I knew that I might not be able to get Angel to write an essay, but I could give him a reason to come to class. Finally I found it: a daily desktop calendar, one origami project a day, printed on origami paper. On the first day of class, I told him that “someone got this for me, but I’m terrible at origami, so I was hoping you might be able to help me with them.”

For the last two months, Angel has come in and asked for his calendar page. I’ve got a little plastic bin on my desk overflowing with ducks, cranes, flowers, bug-catchers, and curious angular jumbles. And he’s been reading the books, and doing his homework. Not a miraculous turn-around, but something.

This morning he ran into me before school, with an armful of Grisham paperbacks – his favorite author. He told me that he had extra copies of these books, and that he wanted to give them to me. I took them, thanking him and wondering if there was ever a better gift than one of books from a kid like Angel.

Then I realized that his mom was standing there. “It’s Angel’s last day,” she told me. “We got the call last night. He’s going to be going to [Alternative Middle School].”

I know that the correct reaction would have been pleasure. The Alt school is a MUCH better fit for Angel, and it just might bring him actual success. There, he can get the one-on-one help he needs. He can be supervised, monitored, assisted. And let’s not forget how much work Angel had been for me. My case load just lessened a ton.

But I still feel like I’ve lost something precious. Perverse as it might be, I am going to miss Angel badly.

I sent him home with ten months of origami calendar and a note that I hope he’ll read. Me? I’m going home with a strangely sore heart.