Pedagogical Sketches
I knew the statistics:
1. 4 out of 10 new teachers quit the profession within 5 years.
2. Though “educators” insist on calling their work a “profession”, most teachers think of that as bureaucratic vocabulary inflation. Real professionals make oodles more money; real professional are required to have advanced training and degrees which require very rigorous academic and practical work.
3. Teachers’ colleges, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level, are acknowledged to be the poor relatives of the academic world by everybody except those who have a stake[1] in the business.
4. Government schools, or public schools, have been failing abysmally at their primary job–educating the populace. The Congressional Report “A Nation at Risk” (1983) first brought this condition to the nation’s attendance. Except for notable exceptions (such as the state of Massachusetts under Gov. Romney’s leadership), state testing scores remain wallowing in the mire.
5. The State of Arizona Department of Education has been especially alarmed at the high level of dropouts, and the low level of accomplishment in the State designated achievements tests (AIMS).
Thus I viewed the state of education in Arizona. My wife had home-schooled our children. How ironic was this then? I, who was an educational snob, and querulous critic of the whole affair, wanted to be let in to become a little part of it, a teacher myself.
Well, yes, somewhere in my life as a professional student and itinerant cook, I had come to the idea that I never wanted to become a chef–even if someone had hired me. So I became a substitute teacher for awhile, out of a possible interest in becoming a real teacher, and to augment my income from restaurant work.
My very first assignment was about a 45 minute drive from my house, giving me plenty of time to worry. It was to be an eighth honors social studies class for two days. Would the children like me? Would I fumble all over the place and be a laughing stock? Would the students be mean? Or should I assume they would be my friends unless they acted otherwise? I liked that idea. Could I control them, get them to do what they were supposed to do? It was all unknown territory–a fifty year old guy who didn’t even believe in public schools, with fourteen year olds. I had heard enough stories about how rude and irresponsible students were, especially to substitutes, over the past few years, that I had rejected the idea of becoming one until compelled to–out of curiosity and misery.
My nervousness might have been palpable to the students but most of them were either friendly and polite, or bored and concerned with themselves, not some lame sub. David, however, was different. David’s name I remember. I had become his mark, his toy thing, his antagonist, his prey, his enemy. He had freckles, brown hair, was of medium height and build. He jumped up and down like a monkey, taunting and defying me at every point, throwing pencils into the cork ceiling so they pointed down at my head.
His behavior was so bizarre that I asked some students if he treated other subs that way. “Yes, sometimes.” Did he treat the regular teacher that way? “Well, sometimes.” David was a weirdo then, my particular cross, as it were. The first day I was granted a reprieve from the duress because the whole school attended a student production of ’Midsummer Nights Eve’. The acoustics were pathetic; I could hardly understand a word though the young actors and actresses seem to do their roles with vigor and confidence. As I checked out of the school that day I mentioned to the sub secretary that this David had been a handful. “Yes, we often get reports about him. There is a white button in your room to press if you need to call the office for help or security.”
I was expecting but got no reprieve the next day; there was no Shakespearean production again. My worst foreboding came true: a whole day with David. Nobody else truly existed for me in that class. The particularities of that day have vanished in a haze except for the last fifteen minutes. I remembered the white button and ran for it, ran to push it for help. I pressed it and pressed it, pressed it hard several times. But it didn’t work. The time passed anyhow–the school day ended. I checked out, mentioned David again, mentioned that the intercom button didn’t work. “Thank you, Mr. Dodd”. As I walked like a fugitive towards my car, two girls from the class who were walking together saw me and gave a friendly wave, “Thank you, Mr. Dodd.” How gracious, how kind, how thoughtful, how intelligent they were!
I had learned three lessons: there were frightful students; schools had a tendency to be incompetent; and there were normal, polite, charming young people who could was away the grime and grit. Life was good–and I got paid for it.
For a period of a year and a month I substituted all over the greater metropolitan Tucson area, and substituted for all grades, kindergarten through twelfth. I quickly learned to abhor kindergarten and first grade assignments: the children quickly learned that they could completely buffalo me. They were small and cute, even adorable, but wild and fearless. Soon enough twenty of them would be running around like tiny savages, standing on chairs and desk tops, playing tag, hitting and scratching and pinching each other, crawling, running to the bathroom every five minutes, screeching, laughing, crying, enjoying a grand and glorious precious time of complete anarchic freedom. I would have to be rescued by the teacher next door, who would hear the cacophony, be annoyed by it, and the ineptitude of the sub. She would come in, glare at the rebels, tell them in a stern voice how very ashamed their regular teacher would be of them, how very ashamed she was of them, and how they had better act respectfully to the Guest Teacher. Chastened, at least for a goodly while, the day would pass. I would come home. I would come home and take a nap.
I found that junior high (seventh and eighth grades) or middle school (fifth, sixth, and seventh grades) were not my métier either. I had subbed at Flowing Wells Junior High before. As was frequently the case, there were some obnoxious young men to contend with. Somehow I got along better with them than I had with David; I’d learned we could both hang to our turf if we slip-slided around each and did not butt heads. As the grown-up it was primarily up to me to be deft, to be agile, at the least to reign in my temper, to count to ten. “Pin and needles, needles and pins, it’s the happy man who grins!”
The assignment for the social studies class was to work in small groups on life-sized paintings of Martin Luther. A boy or girl would lie down on a body-sized sheet of paper; an outline of their body would become the framework for the portrait. The children were enthusiastic, went right to work. But there was one problem: we had only one small portrait of Luther to use as a model. What did he really look like? As per instruction from the teacher, I strongly encouraged the kids to use their imaginations. Somehow Martin Luther’s long hair became Elvis Presley’s long hair. Martin Luther grew long sideburns. Martin Luther wore a gold lame suit, he had black boots and glasses. All of these ideas, these painting ideas, just happened…little by little…”use your imagination”…none of these modifications were my idea…it was fun…everybody had .
So the day went. As I left I mentioned to another teacher that the students hadn’t exactly done what they were supposed to do.
“What did they do?”
“Martin Luther looks like Elvis”.
“Uh, oh.”
“They used their imaginations.”
“Uh, oh.”
That school never called me again for a sub job; which was fine with me. I couldn’t disagree with them. Neither did I want to slip slide around bone-heads or try to teach art.
One day my wife and I were shopping at Safeway. A student from Flowing Wells High School waved to me. “Hello, Mr. Dodd”
“Hi, this is my wife, Judy. Judy I substituted for this young lady’s class.”
Judy to the student: “Oh, and did you learn anything? Did he do a good job?”
“He was the cool one, the one who didn’t make us do any work”.
“Oh.”
That wasn’t quite true though. I would tell the students the assignment. I wouldn’t try to force them to do the work, or yell at them or threaten them. What would have been the point? Live and let live. No pressure.
The next important job was a long-term ninth grade math assignment at Canyon del Oro in Tucson. Most of the students were college-track and eager, hard-working students. I also had two classes of regular-track students who took twice as long as the former students to do the same work. The classroom routine went like this: lecture on principles or methods, do examples, then run around helter skelter “Mr. Dodd, come here”, “Come here.’ If my name wasn’t called out, polite hands beckoned to me. It wasn’t as it had been in 1968 in high school, when Mr. Pallack would go up and down the rows methodically helping students. There was a more antic busyness but the spirit was the same: students learning, teacher teaching. Gone, for the time, were the knuckle-heads who can be the ruination of classes and careers.
My laxness was leader must have been noticed by somebody during this long stint. A security guard-former teacher-came in to bring more order into the class. Nobody told me about this arrangement; he just showed up. I wasn’t offended. I told the students, not joking, that I could use all the help I could get. But students have a strong sense of territory and propriety. They rejected him and his rigidity.
The experiment or whatever it was didn’t last long. The helper said “I don’t know how you do it. Of course I like students to like me but other things come first. It’s crazy in here but they’re learning.” So he left. I’d liked him, hoped he could help the class have more of a sense of decorum. The odd thing about him wasn’t his strictness, his trying to Bogart students, but rather a contrary side he showed one day: he played and sang “Itsy bitsy spider” up and down his body–as if they were third graders. They gawked.
Lessons: Classes can be messy but work. Students can be loyal. They can be a hoot.
Mrs. Armstrong: “Let’s cut to the chase. You can’t work here next year. We have a reputation. You can work til the end of the semester. You have to give up your class. You can tutor individuals or very small groups. And you have to get rid of that creature.” That creature was a teddy bear hamster, the class pet. I had been hired as fifth grade teacher for Armstrong Academy, a small accelerated private school in Tucson. Not to reiterate too much, but I had the same old problem. I didn’t want to discipline students, didn’t want to and did not call parents when I should have. Mrs. Armstrong had warned me: “Every teacher has to have authority; it is like having a little kingdom under you. You have your personality. You also have to have your teacher’s personality. Perhaps you should show a teacher’s righteous indignation, a teacher’s righteous anger. Let them know you mean business.” Here I was, fifty years old now. What to do? Become a real teacher in a public school, of course.
Looking for work is a hard job in itself. I did the work, did the best resume of my life, got all the jots and tittles done right, got hired at Santa Cruz Valley Union High School in Eloy. Of course I was exhilarated: my first real teaching job! I’d already forgotten about Armstrong Academy. Le bygones be bygones. While filling out insurance papers in the district office the principal asked me if I would rather teach math or English. I thought it over. “They probably need a math teacher more than an English teacher.” Why I thought that I have no idea now. But that was my choice.
First day in math: more than 40 students talking to each other in all sorts of poses and attitudes. I tried to get order. I yelled:
“Class has started!” I try to bellow but my voice breaks. Some of them look at me; they continue to talk. I try to interrupt them several times. Nobody listens. I run for the principal. He comes in, harried, with his thinning hair sticking out as if it is wind-blown, He yells at the kids: “If you think this is easy you should try it!” This is a complete non-sequitor, as I eventually realize after saying it myself to unruly classes a few times. They are in the cat-bird’s seat; we may not be prey, but are outside their purview unless they are naturally accommodating or have been changed by superior classroom management. Or something. “Mr. Dodd, write down the names of the worst of this bunch and call their parents.”
I never do but I keep applying myself to each class, most of them dreadful. I can’t get any educational purchase on them. I do get a girl who keeps braying like a donkey to control herself. I somehow ingratiate myself with a student who keeps asking me if I am a gangsta. He later returns the Teacher’s Edition Math book, (the one with all the answers at the back, with the problems worked out) that he stole during the first fire drill. I assure lots of students that I am not their “Bro”, nor their “homey”. I learn that if I can get ahead of them on their jokes about me we can be on more equal footing. I can joke about myself and about them.
But often during a class, almost always at the end of the day, I lament “I am a terrible teacher”. When I get home I never want to talk about what happened.
The second year is better than the first. I have learned some important things about the students: at Canyon del Oro, the ratio of good students to bad students is 7-3; here it is 3-7. The kids lack discipline and they are very lazy too, not always mutually exclusive categories. Here they go hand in hand. And sadly, they lack a good background for academic work, especially in math. Many of them don’t know how to work with fractions, percentages, or decimals. Many of them also don’t know the times table, therefore don’t know multiplication; neither could they be sure if their answers are right if the problems involved multiplication or division. But most of them are sweet, are personable even when impertinent. Impertinence has long been one of the standard features of adolescence.
They have chutzpah. They have gall. One of the big problems teaching at a school with so many native language Spanish speakers : how do you teach the Spanish speakers and English speakers at the same time? My solution was to teach the groups on an individual basis. The English speakers could be doing review problems while I instructed the other group with the help of their best math student-English speaker combination.
It seemed an equitable solution. But the English speakers were jealous of the attention they temporarily lost.
“Hey, Dodd, you just going to ignore us?” said the ringleader of the mutiny, Josh.
“Why you teaching them instead of us? You don’t know anything anyway. I could teach like you do.”
I reacted–”Just do your work for a few minutes. I’ll be over as soon as I get everybody here going.”
Josh came to the front of the class. “That’s OK, Dodd. I’m the teacher now. What are we doing?”
He had chalk in hand, ready to lead his band. I couldn’t believe what was happening–outright rebellion. Josh did the review problems OK but didn’t know how to do the new material. He looked at the board for a few minutes, and sheepishly sat down.
“It can’t get any worse than this” I thought. “This has to be the low point.” I told Josh I was going to call security, get him out of there. His friends Ben Nipple-Pincher and Brother Marcos came over to my dish to back him. “You turn him in, you have to turn us in.” I looked straight in to Marco’s eyes–he was sincere, sincere and angry. So was I. I called the office.
“Can you send security over to pick up some students? I can’t stand this.”
Security came in a few minutes..
“What’s wrong Mr. Dodd?” Looking at Ben and Josh and Marcos, I said “These three took over my class. They were disruptive and rude.”
“Come on guys,” said the security officer.
“Should I write them up?” I asked. “It’s up to you Mr. Dodd. But if they deserve it, you should.”
I did. They had been disruptive, disobedient. But I felt no anger. I wondered what the next class with them would be like.
Josh: “Dodd, I thought we was homies. Why’d you write us up. We had to go to ISS.” ISS was the punishment place where students were sent at school if they were bad somehow. Dodd: “You guys can’t act like that, you can’t take over the class.” I spoke resignedly, firmly, without anger.
Separating the class hadn’t worked; it wouldn’t work. What next? There is always a new attempt, a new plot, a new plan, to get those who don’t or can’t learn–to learn. There is no such thing as a student who can’t learn or whom I can’t teach.
It took me awhile to catch o to the veracity of the terms that teachers’ casually used when discussing the troublemakers: knuckleheads, idiots, stupid asses, jerks. These terms were nicer than calling them “dumber than a fence post.” I did not like the those demeaning terms. I felt empathy for the students with their most impoverished backgrounds, broken families, little or no hope for the future. “The poorest of the poor” I sentimentally, absurdly thought of them, echoing Mother Theresa, saying to people “these students are the worst of the worst.” It was only when I ceased to feel pity for them did I see them as the same saints and sinners we all are. If, with some of them, there was an accent, a listing, to the side of coarseness, vulgarity, thievery and barbarism, those were traits to be abhorred, discouraged. How many more people had qualities of gentleness, kindness, humor, love, discipline, courage? It was the latter children I would think of as I drove home on a Friday afternoon: what a gift, a privilege to know these people!
Teachers have different personalities: some are strict, anal, thought of as mean and grouchy by students. But they can and do teach if the students are will accomplices. These teachers’ classes generally have the virtue of being orderly and quiet. Other teachers have the philosophy that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. “I am going to nice them to death, nice them if it kills me.” The students think these teachers are friendly and polite and respectful, which they like. But some of the classes of these latter are noisy, carnival-circus like. The teachers may not be dispiriting but the classes are. “Can I go to the library?” That is the plea of the student who has caught on to the hopelessness of some classes’ situation.
The mostly nice teachers, of which I am one, may envy not having something the strict, strong teachers do have: a backbone. Not having a backbone is not a handicap in classes where the predominant temperament of the class is similar to that of the teacher: let us be reasonable, let us be nice together. Laughter and friendliness is encouraged, bone-depth laziness is tolerated; rancor and snottiness and disrespect are absent, as if by a miracle. Some of us may be organized, some not. We can all get by, all get some good work done if we try.
We once went to a workshop where all the teachers were asked: “What sort of boat are you? Ocean liner, speedboat, catamaran, dugout, sailboat, canoe, or kayak?” I was a kayak. The other two members of our math department were ocean liners. What does a nice kayak do with the irrational, with crazy people, people who act outside the boundaries of normal propriety? Students have terms for those who act so weird, so crazy, that even they see danger: wack, mental.
Victor would go to a file cabinet, open and close all the drawers very quickly, slamming them shut very loudly. He would go to my teacher’s desk and do the same thing with my drawers. Slam! Slam! Slam! He wouldn’t ask for anything or take anything. He would turn the TV in the room on. He would go on my computer without asking. The other students would say “why do you let Victor get away with that?” I couldn’t answer them at the time because I didn’t want to say “because he scares me”, but he did. Being over six feet tall and weighing well over two hundred pounds and having a skull net or bandana like a ninja helped his image, but mainly–he was crazy.
Some of the common marks of disrespect I hardly notice anymore. I can’t tell whether the kids were not taught manners and so are ignorant, or they are just thoughtless and rude, or plain ornery. If I’m in a good mood I ignore irregularities in decorum. If I’m in a bad mood I warn the students, snap a few times. We coexist: détente has come.
But the squeakers, whistlers, bubble gum poppers, brayers, bird callers (white-winged dove), have mostly disappeared from my classes. Maybe I have something, a little something, of a reputation at last. It was the nipple pinchers who made me stand up for myself.
At first I couldn’t believe it. Ben thought it was fun to pinch one of my nipples. I told him to stop it: “Will you knock that off?” He wouldn’t, treating me just like one of his friends. He did to me for a few weeks, a pinch every other day or so. How you ask, could I put with this? Was I a ninny, a sissy, a wimp, a coward? I was dumbfounded every time it happened. Outrageous! Finally one day I threw a screeching fit: “You son-of-a-bitch, will you stop that! Keep your damn hands to yourself.” I had at last been truly riled, so riled I couldn’t simply walk back quietly to my desk, saying “I have to go calm down,” before getting back into the fray. The magic time had come–they left me alone. For the first time for me, a teacher’s righteous anger had paid off.
Bad Day at Santa Cruz
He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.
I am an English teacher in Eloy, Arizona, a small rural community in southern Arizona, fifteen miles from the small town of Casa Grande, one hour south from the megalopolis of Phoenix, one hour north from the booming metropolis of Tucson. I drive one hour each way from Tucson and back, therefore a total of two days a day.
I had become comfortable in the nexus between teacher and student and administration. I had found my niche; the school days became weeks and months and years; three day weekends followed major holidays with weeks off in the Fall and Spring and two months off in summer. Frustration with recalcitrant students would be more than made up by students who had real potential and used it; problem children would be more than balanced by genuinely personable and attractive young women and men. In the flux of the coming and going, the business of teaching and learning would be broken by vexations and disruptions, or punctuated brightly by wit and laughter and warmth.
Thus I had found my place. I was almost seven years secure, almost had a sinecure I had never anticipated since I had become a teacher at what is now considered mid-career, at age fifty.
But I had a recurrent day-time nightmare. One of the normal ways for a teacher to be evaluated, that is, to be deemed worthy by the Administration of keeping his job, is to be observed for an hour or so once a years by the principal or another designated watcher. The problem from the teacher’s point-of-view is that by no means are classes all created or made equal. The groups of individuals named classes range from quiet to noisy, docile to belligerently rude, from apathetic to energetic, with all shades of abilities and temperaments making up what we may call a classroom’s personality.
I had done well in previous years’ evaluations: the combination of my assiduity
and the students’ friendly compliance overcame a certain amount of disorganizations and lacunae in my performances with ragged classes. With good classes of course we, the students and I, sailed through like champs.
The disturbing question was: what would happen if I was observed in a very bad class on a very bad day and I was a very bad teacher. I had often enough had days where I thought “I am a very bad teacher”; days where I was happy to survive, to sit in the last class for thirty minutes afterwards, just waiting for my jangled nerves to calm down.
Arizona, as with forty-seven other states, has gone to high stake tests to make sure that all students who graduate have demonstrated a basic level of competency in writing and reading in English, and in solving mathematics problems. The idea behind this is to be assured of receiving federal money from the No Child Left Behind program; is to assure the Arizona State Department of Education officials that schools are doing their jobs in preparing pupils for college and/or the real world work force; is to be able to show local school boards and local parents that the educational system is working. Howsoever this state of affairs came to be, it has been patent for at least twenty-five years that the American educational system has been a failure, hence the incessant clamor for State Standards, for accountability requirements for all involved. The constant failure of many, many students, to be even minimally competent has bred Standard and Rubric and Accountability mania, desperate pleas for everybody to–BE RESPONSIBLE!–PLEASE! The high stake tests in Arizona are called AIMS, which stands for Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards.
I have always gotten along well with high school students. This is partially because I have, and also adopt, a low-key, laid back attitude (no pressure, no pressure). I am also an easy grader, desperate to encourage and pass everybody who will try at all, who will even pretend to try or move forward an iota in effort. In today’s educational parlance this is called “setting the bar low”, or “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” My philosophy has always been to allow the students as much freedom as I can stand, the freedom to talk freely with each other as much as possible with regard to what we are busy about. I would prefer that they work as much as possible on their own, following, as Thoreau and Emerson said, their own genius. A certain amount of messiness is an inherent possibility, a great deal of messiness is an inherent danger, in this approach.
I gave up on one class this semester, left it mostly to its own inclinations. This was an AIMS tutoring-writing class, composed mostly of students who had already failed the test at least five times. I did not, could not, I thought, give 85 minutes of myself to people who had to be prodded time and time and time again to do what any other normally mentally endowed student should be able to do by the time they were a second semester sophomore. This kids all had major league incapacities of one kind of another: some were, for lack of kinder or more accurate words, goofballs or knuckleheads or idiots. They were always, in educational parlance, acting-out, or behaving like obnoxious buffoons. Others were quiet, self-contained people, students who seemingly had a learning disability or just low ability in the business of writing a coherent essay: the ability to consistently use correct grammar or make sensible word choices, to make normal sentences, was very difficult for them. They used to be the students who would graduate from high school with a C or D average; they tried and were responsible, but were found wanting in some important intellectual areas. But now they would be denied the prestige, the accomplishment, of being a high school graduate. In many of the families these children came from, such a “piece of paper”, as others would condescendingly call it, would be a first, an attestation of success of which everybody would be proud. The last category of non-achievers were those who primary language was Spanish. They had either gotten involved in the educational process too late to become proficient, or had not paid enough attention, had not practiced enough, had taken the all-too-easy way out by always speaking Spanish when it was possible, with friends and family, in church and at work, whenever possible at school.
We, the students and I, all tried a little bit every once in a while.
One of those times was the day before the latest AIMS test. It was crunch time even more than I knew, for that was the day the Principal chose to visit. Oh, shoot!
It was time for all of us to perform. I was very roughly prepared as I had some prompt questions for them to choose to write on. I did not have the required beginning-of-class bell work for them to work on, help them get warmed-up and settled down. I did not have the daily objective (that which the student will be able to do) written on the board. I did not have the vocabulary objectives (lack of a good vocabulary was one of the primary reasons Eloy children did badly on the AIMS tests) [This is how the Eloy children compared to the rest of Arizona’s students: The rest of the state passed roughly two-thirds(67%) to three-quarters(75%) of their children in the three tests: reading, writing and mathematics. With the Eloy students the success rate was half that: only one-third to 40% would pass reading and writing, only 20% to 25% would pass in math.] I did not have an agenda, or daily plan, written down anywhere. I did not know where the prompt-choice papers were. I did not have a pencil sharpener. What did I have?–The naked (so to speak) teacher scuttling from student to student telling them to write a sentence outline for a five paragraph expository paper. They had all heard this routine for years by many other teachers. How was saying this again, on the eve of the big game, going to help? Nevertheless, caught as I was, there was nothing else I could do but bustle from student to student, chatting them up, establishing a three-minute rapport, lending out a pen or pencil and sheet of paper to many of them.
The students watched my back, did their best, within their abilities, to cooperate, to produce. Our hustle was; I mean we hustled, I sweated. We did the best we could under the circumstances.
The Principal left after an hour. We were relieved then of course, relaxed. Some students turned on the radio, listened to Mexican dance or pop music. Others went to buy ice cream from the vending machines. A boy named Juan hugged me, as he did every day his almost-charming way. I asked him once if he had a job. “No, but I always have money. I sell drugs on the street.” Me–”Don’t you think you should get a real job?” Juan–’Oh, yeah, this drug selling is dangerous. I could get some real time in a bad place.” Me–Yeah. That day he came over to me and asked if I would like to see his knife. He was proud of it. So out of a scabbard stuck in his belt underneath his shirt, he pulled out a good looking knife with a very sharp six inch blade. The hilt was white porcelain or hard plastic, with a hand-painted red and white oval design. I lightly ran my thumb down the blade, and said “it’s good and sharp. I sharpen my own knives. My son in interested in knives too, and swords.” “I just love knives”, Juan said, and replaced the knife.
The evaluation: She let me talk on and on…but something was wrong. She then started talking educationese. I asked her if she would say in plain language what she meant. She leaned forward, paused, and then eviscerated me. “You took nineteen minutes just to pass out those papers! People were wandering around all over the class and you never noticed. One boy came in twenty minutes late and you did nothing. One student came over, asked how I was doing, what was I doing. Why were so many people speaking Spanish in an English class? It should be called insubordination if they do.” There was much more. I could have tried to explain all these badly ordered events as “special circumstances-every one of them’!. And it all would have been sort of true.
She showed no understanding. It was the letter of the law that killed, not the spirit, which gives life. My face was very, very red. All I could say was “You spoke the truth!” very loudly. It was an accusation. She said, with her head lowered in sympathy and perhaps embarrassment for me, “I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings. Don’t worry, you won’t be prevented from renewing your contract.” Behind my red face and affronted feelings was the thought “Well, that’s good at least.” It hadn’t occurred to me that I could lose my job. “So life will continue.” I said again, out-loud, very loudly, “You spoke the truth!”
There was more than her truth though, there was my truth. I was telling my wife about it. She agreed that it was ridiculous to judge a teacher’s whole work by one visit. She soothed my aggrieved feelings to some extent though since she shared the Principal’s work and responsibility ethic she wasn’t letting me slide all the way. There was also this principle: he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. I, who had so successfully negotiated the dangerous shoals of revelation for six years was now undone, had crashed because of unfavorable circumstances and students who weren’t even good at pretending to work.
Anger raged through me for a few days. Then I was telling my wife and daughter about the aftermath of the class, when we had all relaxed. I told the story of Juan’s exhibition of his knife, how understanding I had been, how I praised his knife and encouraged his interest in sharp things. I looked at my audience, my family–they looked at me….well, my goodness gracious sakes alive….
Somebody has to be the grown-up here.
[1] “Stakeholder” is a popular term used to distinguish, within a class, those who truly have a legitimate, personal interest, versus those who don’t. Parents as a group are thus stakeholders when their children are involved. Deans and professors at teachers’ colleges are thus stakeholders in the same way. They need to maintain the intellectual prestige, such as it is, of their institutions.
