Category Education and Teaching

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I don’t get paid enough.

I know that’s not a complaint unique to me, and it’s not one unique to teachers. But it’s the truth: I don’t get paid enough. The job is appallingly stressful, and also poorly paid compared to other careers with similar requirements as to education and credentials. 11.1% less than comparable careers, according to this article. In the past, this was compensated for by the benefits, which were better than most other careers offered; now, of course, that is no longer true. Teacher benefits are not any better than most other careers, or not much; and it still doesn’t make up for the pay  gap — that article actually shows that teacher pay is 18.7% less than other careers; the 7% boost in benefits that teachers average is what brings us to almost ten percent lower pay.

Almost.

But none of this is news, neither to you nor to me.

What was news, though, was this. Turns out, I’m paid WAY better than I thought.

I got this — letter — in the mail. It describes my compensation.

This is strange for a few reasons.

First, because why is this in the mail? Why wouldn’t it be an email?

Second, because — I already know my compensation? I signed a contract for the year with a number on it; that number doesn’t change. It’s a year-long contract. That’s what I get paid. There isn’t any change to my compensation in the letter. (There is a single notification that they will be increasing their 401k contribution. But that’s buried in the 5th paragraph, and doesn’t apply to me since I don’t donate to a 401k so they don’t match.) So why send it?

The letter says (And I would include a picture, but I don’t actually want to throw the school I work for under the bus; even for those who know what school I work for, this post should not and will not have their name on it, so as not to make this inappropriate for an employee to post. I thought about redacting names and addresses and such and then posting an image, but the company logo is in the background of the compensation chart. Is that why they used letterhead? To prevent me from doing exactly this? Whatever: the letter is addressed to me, it’s my property; I’m going to share its contents, at least in  part. Consider it part of my compensation.) “The leadership is pleased to provide you with your annual, personalized total compensation statement.”

Notice it doesn’t say why they’re pleased to share this with me. I’ve worked there for five years, my wife has worked for the same school for three years; we’ve never gotten these letters until this year, when we both got one.

It goes on to say that my compensation package includes a benefit program “designed to furnish you with protection against financial devastation due to illness, disability, loss of work, retirement, or death.” As a rhetoric teacher, I find the order of the items on that list fascinating. The letter also says that my compensation package includes the contributions made directly by my employer. A strange statement: contributions to me? Of course. Contributions to a third party? How is that my compensation? Is this like one of those deals where you donate to a charity in someone’s name and call it a Christmas gift?

The letter says that some of these benefits are mandated by state and federal law, but “most” are provided by the company because “your wellbeing is important to us.” Then they encourage me to review the statement and share it with my family, so that they are aware of the benefits that apply to them. Seriously? You think my family doesn’t know what benefits I have? You think if my family doesn’t know, it’s because I forgot to tell them? They do, actually, because it says, “Often our day-to-day responsibilities distract us from truly knowing and understanding what protections we have and the value of that protection for our loved ones.”

So they think I don’t actually know what my compensation is. Not my TOTAL compensation. Including contributions made by the company. Well, let’s turn this bad boy over and look at the graph on the back!

Here’s what we see: a header that reads “Cash Compensation and Benefits Summary,” over a passage that reads: “The amount of your total compensation is much more than what is indicated in your yearly earnings statement. In addition to direct pay, your total compensation includes the value of your health care insurance, disability, life insurance, retirement benefits, and government mandated benefits.”

Oh it does, does it?  See, I was under the impression that my compensation was what you paid me. Money that goes to the government doesn’t seem like my money, somehow. I also like how they’re taking credit for what the government mandates. “And also, we didn’t murder you. Not once. That’s 365 days  of no murder, every year. You’re welcome.”

Regardless, here’s where the breakdown starts. And it’s immediately weird, because it has my salary (That would be the “direct pay,” which all other compensation is in addition to) as $48,585. Then it adds the $2,200 I earned for being Highly Effective on my last evaluation, to hit $50,785. But the odd thing is, my contract salary is actually $46,785. And that includes the $2200.

Well, they must be including some of the value of my insurance and so on.

But no, because the next row is where we hit the insurance: my contribution ($6,557.98 annually for employee+spouse for medical, $609.96 for dental, $67.08 for vision) next to the company contribution, which is $7,386.02, apparently. Now interestingly, when you add up my three contributions,  which this form does not do, you get $7235.02. That is a lot closer to their number than the single number that theirs is listed next to, which is just my medical contribution. Why, if I were the suspicious sort, I might think they intentionally put their largest possible number next to a number that is not as large as it could be, so that  their number seems relatively higher.

Good thing I’m not the suspicious sort.

We drop down a few rows of zeroes, because I don’t have life insurance listed on here (Which is also odd, because in fact, I do have life insurance  through the company, as does my wife. Maybe the value of that explains the discrepancy in my salary. But you’d think that value would go here, and also, since the life insurance policy is, if I recall correctly, for $50,000, I’d think they’d stack all $50K onto my total compensation. Maybe they could offer a murder program so I could collect on those benefits. Anyhoo.) or long term disability or HSA contributions. Then we hit the Social Security and Medicare contributions. Mine are $3885.05, and the company’s are the same.

See, here’s that Charitable-Gift-In-Your-Name thing. It’s real nice that the company gives money to the government — also known as “taxes” — but I don’t see how that’s my compensation. It’s not money that I owed the government. I paid the government what I owed them. You could argue that I will get that money back from the government in my SS and Medicare benefits, but we all know that’s not necessarily true. So I question this being part of my “total compensation.”

Hey — it must because this is a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, so really, the taxes the government collects? That’s my money. My compensation.

Then we hit a subtotal line, where they put my contributions at $11,120.07, and my employer’s at $11,271.07. (I’m really just curious now about that extra $151.) And then comes the final math and the grand total. Ready?

“Cash compensation,” $50,785. Benefits, $11,271.07. Total, $62,056.07.

Hold on. So not only are we including the company’s contributions to Medicare and Social Security — you know, paying their own payroll taxes — but also, we are NOT subtracting MY contributions to the same government funds? Nor my payments for my medical insurance? So the money I pay to the government, and to the insurance company, which I never get to spend, is somehow still my money? And the money the company pays to the government, which I also never get to spend, is also my money?

Here’s what I really want to know. I want to know why the administration can’t comprehend debits and credits, first of all; but really, I want to know why they sent me this paper. To make me think that they pay me better than they do? Even though I see what’s on my check and what’s in my bank account? Is this so that if anyone questions their budget numbers, they can claim this is what they actually pay me — are they hiding money somewhere, and using this letter to blur the numbers? Is this so that teachers will think that we already get a big enough piece of the pie, and thus we won’t demand more money? Because they’ve magicked another $15,000 into my compensation? I can accept their contribution to my medical insurance as my compensation; I gain a benefit from that, namely medical insurance. But that still only puts me at $54,171.02 (The actual $46,785 on the contract I signed plus their somewhat dubious number for company contribution to my medical insurance).Where’s my other eight grand, homey? DUSTY NEEDS A NEW PAIR OF SHOES.

This upsets me. Partly because they think I’ll believe this nonsense. Partly because they seem to be imagining me not only buying this wholesale, but then proudly sitting down to share this with my family so they can see just how much bacon Daddy brings home. Partly because this is the kind of shit that gets out into the world and gives dumbass anti-teacher conservatives their ridiculous arguments about how well-compensated teachers are. “Hey, I wish I made $60,000 a year!!!” I’m just surprised this paper doesn’t also say, “And look, you get summers off! And you only work until 3 in the afternoon, and most of your job is just playing with kids, right? Am I right?”

No. You’re not right.  You already pay me less than what I’m worth: don’t try to dazzle me with this malarkey. It just gives you one more reason why you should be apologizing to me.

You already have enough of those.

 

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I hope I’m not getting boring. (I know I’m already pretty boring.) In order to prevent that from getting worse, I’m going to try to wrap up this school idea and get back to the business of ranting.

The last major distinction for this school is: hours. Or OURS. I haven’t thought of a clever acronym yet, but I want to call it that anyway. This is where the students are going to take ownership of their school, by doing the necessary work to keep it running — hopefully under the tutelage of the teachers, if they are willing to take on the extra task, and if not, then with experts who are brought in from the community.

So the bell schedule I envision is five periods a day, each an hour long. Between first and second period is an Activity Break: this will, for students, take the place of PE. They will be required to participate in some form of physical activity: anything from walking around the block to lifting weights to playing a pickup game of whatever sport they wish, for 30 minutes. More strenuous exercise would need time to change before and shower after, but 20 minutes of lifting weights is a decent thing to do, and 30 minutes of kickball is more than enough — and would also burn off some of that demonic energy that small children have, so they could focus on their next class. Then periods 2 and 3 are back to back, with a 5-minute passing period  in between; I envision some classes, some units, requiring a block schedule, and this is where that block would be. Then lunch, for 55 minutes to include plenty of time to digest or do homework and for teachers to relax; then 4th and 5th periods after lunch with another 30-minute activity period in between.

Teachers will teach either five periods, and have the activity periods and lunch off as their prep, or they will teach four periods and also run some physical activity during the 30-minute periods. (Teachers have all kinds of useful knowledge, including of sports, of exercise, of all kinds of interesting things like dance, or yoga, or zumba. What the hell do we need a PE teacher for? And even as non-jock as I am, I’m pretty sure I could teach kids to play kickball.) And of course, teachers will only work four days a week.

So what about that extra period? The one day a week that teachers don’t work, but students are in school? That’s when the students do OURS. So the idea is that basic maintenance, cleaning, landscaping, small repairs like paint and new hinges on doors and the like, could easily be performed by students with adult supervision. I suspect students could also be used to do office filing, make copies, and cook food for lunch. I would hope to be able to use teacher expertise for most of that: there would be a full-time supervising janitor, of course, but then a teacher could take a group of students out to mop floors, or wash windows, or mow the grass with non-dangerous tools. (I’m not sure my school would have grass, but it would depend where it was; if there’s grass, the students could mow it with hand trimmers or push mowers.) I’m sure that teachers could show students how to paint a wall, or maybe install a new pencil sharpener. None of the serious mechanical stuff, but all the tedious day-to-day things could be handled by students. This way, students get experience with the basic tasks of life, and they also learn to take pride in those simple tasks and the clean, well-functioning school they would be able to produce and maintain. I’d hope it would at least keep them from sticking gum on the desks, after they’d spent a few OURS cleaning the gum off. That’s also why I’d like teachers to run the work groups, even if it’s only sweeping the halls; that way the teachers can get to know the students, which would help ease the multiple transitions between two-week units.

I imagine a kitchen expert in charge of the food, with students to do the grunt work of chopping and mixing and washing and such, and maybe teachers could bring in and supervise recipes. After lunch there would be dishes to wash.

I imagine the younger kids participating in some of the cleaning chores, and maybe weeding and watering plants, raking rock gardens, things like that. I also imagine them emptying garbage cans and picking up recycling and litter. They could run messages back and forth from the office, so we could minimize THE GODDAMN P.A. SYSTEM COMING ON DURING CLASS AND DISRUPTING THE WHOLE SCHOOL TO CALL FOR ONE FREAKING STUDENT. And then maybe some beautification projects, some arts and crafts to decorate the school; why should teachers spend time making interesting bulletin boards when students could be forced to do it? Another activity that could be supervised by older students, of course.

I imagine this, as well, would serve as the basic discipline system for the school. When a student is disruptive in class, a teacher could send that student out of class to OURS for the remainder of the period. I suspect that class clownery would be reduced when it led to cleaning toilets for the last half of class.

If there’s not work (and I have no doubt that the amount of work available in maintaining a school is limitless) enough for the students, then OURS could be spent doing homework or studying; the advantage there would be that older, more proficient students could tutor younger ones, also improving community feeling. Teachers could also agree to supervise these work sessions on their days off for extra money.

I’d also think that older students could find ways to improve the school: like writing grants. Running work projects. Bake sales and fund raisers. Advertising campaigns to bring new students into the school. Teenagers are  smart, and when there is a reason to be, motivated as well. They could do quite a lot to make our schools better if we’d just let them. I propose to let them.

 

I think that’s everything. Thank you for letting me dream of a school that will never, ever exist.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I’m embarrassed: apparently my groundbreaking new idea for a school is — a Montessori school. And here I thought I was so clever. I guess it’s true that there are no new ideas, that everything’s already been thought of, and all we can do is change the wording or add a digital clock to it. (That’s an old joke now, of course. Who even has clocks any more?)

Well, this morning, I’m going to say the same thing I said when I realized that my first novel was strongly based on other books I’d read: So what? So what if the idea isn’t mine: I make it mine by spending my time and thought on it. I shape it, convert it, change it, even if it’s only a little bit — whoever first put digital clocks into stoves and coffeepots is responsible for making me aware of the time more than any damn clockmaker — and then it is no longer the story it was, it is the story I made it. Shakespeare didn’t come up with his stories, either — but he told them better than anyone else ever has, before or since.

(In case you’re wondering, my first novel was intentionally based on Harry Potter — 11-year-old boy with a sad home life finds out he’s one of a group of magical people — but about a third of the way into writing it, I also realized that it was a multi-layered narrative about a lonely kid, with a father but no mother, who reads books and tells stories and has vivid dreams of himself being a hero in a magical land called Illusia. Ever read The Neverending Story? Yeah, me too.)

So let’s get back to the matter at hand: my Montessori-rip-off dream school. In Sunday’s post I described how the school would work: students take individual units from subject-matter teachers, advancing to the next unit only when they master this unit, but able to schedule their units in any order and at any pace they like; and they graduate when they complete a set number of units. There will be more to graduation, because school is not (or should not be) solely about classwork, but today let’s focus on the most important part of this school of mine: the teachers.

That’s right: the teachers are the most important part of school. They’re not the only necessary part, because without students, a teacher is just a crazy person talking to desks and walls and making PowerPoint presentations in the darkest hours of the morning; but teachers are more important than students because one of us can provide for dozens and scores of them, and because one student is more easily replaceable than one  teacher. And if you are a student  and your feelings are hurt by that, deal with it; I said you were necessary. In an abstract sense, you are the heart of the school, because without you there is no reason to have a school; but the teachers are the bones of the school, because without them the whole thing falls apart into a puddle of inert goo. With a big beating heart in the middle of it, flopping around like a dying fish. Hope you like that image, students. (We need each other. I hope we all know it.)(I also hope that anyone my age clicks on that link and knows instantly why I picked it.)

So teachers: here’s the most important thing. At my school you will work only four days a week. There’ll be a full salary for those four days, and no required duties beyond them — though I will ask the teachers if they are willing to work more in exchange for more money, any extra duties will be entirely voluntary, and entirely compensated. I don’t know anything about school budgets, and where all the money goes; but I do know that every penny I could scrape together beyond the necessities like utility bills and rent and upkeep and insurance, every penny goes to the teachers. We’ll fund-raise for new books; teachers already do that, anyway. But the salary will be as high as I can possibly make it, partly because you deserve it, and partly because I need good teachers to handle this gig, because they’ll need to deal with a mixed-age class that changes every two weeks or so, and that sounds pretty nightmarish. (I also have a plan to make that easier, I hope.)

I’m a bit torn on salary increases: because I kind of want all teachers to be paid the same. There would be cost of living increases, of course, and like I said, there would be extra duties available; but I’m not sure that paying teachers more for experience is the best way to go. New teachers have a much harder time, so I would want them to be compensated well, and I know that paying experienced teachers more tends to push for more teacher turnover, which I don’t want. At the same time, I know that experienced teachers tend to be better teachers, and I would  want to reward that and retain them. I’m open to suggestions. For now, I think there’s one high, flat rate for all teachers.

I expect the teachers to teach within a single subject area. I think that’s better, because  we all have preferences and areas of expertise, and that’s what I want the students to have access to. The younger grades may get confused by multiple teachers, and they may miss the chance to bond with a single loving adult; but I want them focused on learning, not on how much they love Miss Johnson from first grade. Ever notice that? When my students talk about upper  grade teachers they’ve had, it almost always focuses on the subject, did that person teach them, did they learn anything; but elementary teachers, it always seems to be, “Oh, I loved Mr. Braunschweiger!” “Mrs. Colgate? I couldn’t stand her!” It’s the person, not the subject. I don’t like that. Now, I don’t expect first graders to plan their units and select their new schedules; I’ve got no problem with the units for the younger grades being directly prescribed by the teachers. But I want them to get used to seeing individual teachers as the experts of specific fields.

Within those fields, I would want the teachers to design their own units; some administrator (And all of my administrators will be former teachers, in genuine content areas, with several years of experience, preferably at different levels) will make sure all the standards are being touched upon, but I want the teachers to design the curriculum.

The curriculum will include English, social studies and humanities, science, math, languages, art, and Career and Technical Education. That’s right: no PE. I plan for there to be physical activity, but I see no need whatsoever for an ex-jock to yell at kids who don’t like playing baseball. THAT’S RIGHT, GYM TEACHERS, I’M LOOKING AT YOU. AND SAYING “NO.”

There will be no inservice. There will be no required professional development: I want teachers who love their subjects, and will learn more about the subject because they want to. I want teachers who will get better over time because they believe in the value of education and want to do it well; I don’t think that I need to stand over them and watch them do what I tell them to do, and then check a box. There will be observations in the classroom, but they will be frequent and always informal; basically just me coming to watch people teach well. If I see someone doing something I think is poor teaching, I’ll either talk to the teacher about it, or I will ask the department to look into it, and they can decide if the teacher needs help fixing a problem. Otherwise there will be no formal evaluations, no rating system, and good Lord, no merit pay.

I think that’s everything; the extra duties, and the bell schedule, and my PE replacement, and all the specifics about classes and graduation requirements, will all come in future posts.

How am I doing so far? Any teachers want to come work in my school?

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning I am thinking about school. More specifically, I am thinking about the school I would create if I was the kind of person who wanted to set myself on fire by becoming an administrator and dealing with all of the very worst of American bureaucracy: the public education system.

(N.B: can confirm that melancholy leads to creativity; I was blue again this morning, mainly because I am deeply tired because I did not sleep well, and I was cranky and logy until I thought of this idea, and then I was happily off on the tracks of the idea. I got distracted frequently, because neither exhaustion nor creativity are necessarily good for focus; but it was great fun to think about this and to try to problem-solve. So much fun, in fact, that I think this will end up being more than one blog.)

All right, let’s start with the basic structure, and the most fundamental changes I would make to the current education system (while still trying to work within it, which is why this is not something I would ever pursue.). Personally I’d want it to be high school, because I like teenagers more than littluns, and middle schoolers are demons in human skin; but it makes much more sense for it to be K-12, so we’ll go with that, and I’ll just pretend I’d have a partner who would handle the lower grades, and an exorcist for the middle grades. We would follow the traditional schedule with summers and weekends off, and the school day would be 8-3.

But here’s the big difference: there are no grades. (Anyone who knows me saw that  coming from the first sentence of this post.) And I don’t just mean abstract letter rewards for paperwork filled out, I mean there aren’t grade levels: no first grade, second grade, tenth grade, fourth grade, eighth grade. That’s why it should be K-12, because my students should not be divided by their birthdays. It’s just about the stupidest possible way to group people, and it NEVER HAPPENS ANYWHERE EVER outside of education and then, like, bowling leagues. Students at my school will advance through subjects as they master the subjects: regardless of what age they are. When I was in the sixth grade, I was reading at something higher, let’s say the tenth grade level because I don’t actually remember my own lexile scores: that means I should have been in a tenth grade reading class. Or even better, in a class with anyone else who read at a tenth grade level regardless of their ages.

So that’s how it works. The basic idea is this: the classes will be run by unit, not by grade level. You can attach the units to standards, if that makes your ears wiggle, but I think of it like a novel unit, a sonnet unit, an argumentative essay unit, and then those can be repeated at different difficulty levels, Easy, Medium, Hard, Brainmelting, etc. Short pieces, a few weeks to a few months, though that would also depend on subject, like if a math unit on fractions takes a year, then so be it: year long unit. Students sign up for units they need and ones they are ready for, according to what the teachers are offering at any given time.

I realize this would be a logistical nightmare. I imagine it as a series of two-week units, so that every two weeks, students re-register for classes. I think on some level it would straighten itself out because most students would want to continue with a single subject, especially if they liked the teacher, so my units, for instance, could go through my usual “tenth grade English” class in sequence, and students at about that skill level could just keep signing up for my class every two weeks or so, and that would cover the school year. On the other hand, if students are the type who get bored with subjects quickly, they could bounce around more; take more English one month, and then more math the next month, and then nothing but art the month after that. This way, while it would be difficult to arrange the master schedule as it would be changing all the time (And I would need at least one full-time registrar just to track where everyone is at any given time, and presumably more depending on how many students and teachers are at the school and how much technology can fill this need. Though I also have a plan for getting help to the people running the basic functions of the school, which I’ll get into later.), it would eliminate entirely the bored pain-in-the-ass students who disrupt classes constantly just because they’re tired of English and would rather be in science. Fine: go take a science class this month. Come back to English when you’re tired of science.

It would also allow students to re-take single units they didn’t master without having to re-take an entire year of a subject. Depending on how well you could stagger math units, it would solve the problem of students getting lost halfway through Algebra and then never recovering: because they don’t understand everything that comes after that point in their Algebra class, and then in most schools, they either take a second trip through the same class, or move on to a new class they’re not ready for, or take both the repeat class and the new class, and have a horrible time in both. None of those are good solutions, and all of them lead to students hating math and believing they are bad at math, through no fault or actual lack of their own. If a kid can’t get a math concept, they should stick with that math concept until they get it right, and only then move on to the next part.

The ideal with math, then, since math is so sequential (Though I question that; I would guess that at least some of the sequential nature of math instruction is because we’ve always done it that way. I’d guess that some algebraic concepts could be taught much earlier than others, and would be helpful in mastering other mathematical areas.), would be for a math teacher to focus on, say, the first half of what is now geometry, divided into month-long units — say five of them, though we’ll get into the class schedule later — so Geometry Month 1, Geometry Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, and Month 5. If that teacher taught five classes, they could teach all five months, one period a day each, all year long, and students could advance through the months or repeat the months as needed by shifting what period they took math each month. (If the teacher got bored with that, the math department could rotate the months through several teachers. Point is, all five months of the first half of Geometry are constantly available.)

Each unit would be basically pass/fail, with whatever final assessment product the teacher wanted to use. After the unit and the assessment, the teacher would approve the student to move on to the next unit, or say the student had to repeat the unit. I imagine that each student would collect stamps or stickers, essentially, each stamp saying that they had completed and mastered a single unit; graduation would come after the students collected all of their stickers.

 

I’ve got much more to say about this school, but I think I’m going to break this imagined school system up into several posts, so it doesn’t get too ponderous. What do you think so far? Is this clear, what I’m proposing here? If not, please comment and ask questions, and I’ll try to clarify. There will be more to come.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about procrastinating.

Not for myself — though I’m not entirely against procrastinating — but because my students were assigned an essay about challenges they’ve faced, problems they’ve solved, and several of them wrote about their struggle with procrastination. My seniors are far worse about it: they take pride in their refusal to get anything done in any kind of timely manner. “Senioritis!” they cry.

Bullshit, I say.

Sure, seniors suddenly get several notches lazier in the second semester. They’ve gotten into college, they know they won’t fail their classes — they’re not that lazy — and so they will definitely graduate and go on to the next stage of their lives. That being the case, it’s hard to see the need to complete vocabulary assignments just like the ones they’ve been doing for years, now, and which, in a few months, they’ll never have to do again. (Not that they like thinking about graduating in a few months and being done with high school forever. It’s a tempting prospect, but also terrifying, because that, they know, is when they get sent out into the Real World, which they have been taught to fear throughout their time in high school.) And sure, I get that. But “senioritis” implies first that it is something out of their control, an inevitability, a condition that afflicts people in their situation; and second that they haven’t been pulling the same crap for years now.

There are exceptions, of course. A few students get all their work done on time regardless of the relative value of the work; in fact, they take pride in completing both the large difficult assignments and the measly, mindless ones, because that way they show that their work ethic knows no bounds, that no grade is too big, and no grade is too small. There are students who were slackers, but who pick it up in their senior year, though even they tend to fall back into old habits as graduation day approaches. There are, of course, seniors who really do get lazy only at this final stage of their high school career, who go from diligent to dilettante once February rolls around.

But for the most part, it’s not senioritis, it’s studentitis. And it’s not that: it’s just procrastination. But here’s the thing: procrastination doesn’t have to be bad. It usually isn’t. It can be, of course, but for the most part, it’s simply — prioritizing. A student has an assignment due on Friday, and that student knows they can get it done in two hours; there’s no particular reason to do it Wednesday night instead of Thursday night. They may get a surprise assignment on Thursday and have to do two things Thursday night, but usually not, and if they do, they simply give up some sleep, which they don’t mind at all. (Students are divided into two groups: those who do nothing but sleep — the sloths — and those who only sleep a few hours a night — the squirrels. Sloths mind giving up sleep, but they make up for it by sleeping 18 hours the next day; squirrels are already awake until two or three in the morning every night.) The assignment that isn’t due tomorrow is a low priority, so it doesn’t get done until it is a high priority; it’s not lazy, not irrational, it’s nothing more than what we all do all the time. This last Sunday I had time for one chore, and I had to pick between cleaning out the birdcage or vacuuming the floors; I cleaned the birdcage because the floors weren’t that dirty. Because unlike the bird, we don’t crap on the floor. Priorities.

It’s more troubling when the work is daunting, and they have time to do it, but they put it off anyway because they’d rather not do it. Not managing their time, perhaps short-sightedly but reasonably; this procrastination just keeps going, past when they have a reasonable chance of doing the work, sometimes past the due date entirely. This is the kind of procrastination my students wrote about in their essays, as a problem to be overcome, a challenge they have to face. Because now the procrastination causes stress, and makes them miss out on things they don’t want to miss out on, things they care about more than sleep. This procrastination is especially troubling because often, the activity they choose over completing their work is — nothing. Watching Netflix or YouTube. Laying on their bed and staring at the wall. Saying to themselves, “Wow, I really should do that thing I have to do.” And then not doing it. Over and over.

But even this, I would argue, is prioritizing: something in that lack of activity, that laying on the bed, that video watching, is more important than getting their work done at that moment when they make that choice. I think the two best possibilities for their reasons are, one, that they are so completely stressed and anxious that they are desperate for anything that can help them calm down — more common among today’s youth than you would like to think, but if you knew how many of my students are in therapy and on mood-altering drugs to handle their anxiety, you would know this is not an unlikely reason for procrastination — and two, the work is so unimportant that they refuse to do it, because doing it feels almost demeaning, almost insulting.

This is how I felt about high school when I was in it. It was beneath me. It was a waste of my time. I thought the teachers, who weren’t any smarter than me, were giving me homework just to push me around, and by God, I wasn’t going to let them get away with that. I would show them: I wouldn’t do the work! I’d take that F! That’s right, teacher, I’ve called your bluff: what are you going to do now? Huh?

Nothing. That’s what I thought.

Exactly what I do when my students don’t do the work. Because I don’t actually assign work to push my students around. And if they don’t want to do the work I assign, that’s their choice. Hell, if they don’t do it, that’s one less paper for me to grade. Win-win.

In either of those cases, crippling anxiety or petulant rebellion, procrastination is not laziness. It’s prioritizing. They may not be doing a good job of making those decisions, but they are making decisions, not just blowing things off for no reason. Because of that, I think that a student who procrastinates should be allowed to make that choice, and then face the consequences of that choice, of their own free will, which is why I don’t hound them, asking if they finished their work yet. They’ll finish it eventually, or they won’t; either way is their choice.

Just so long as they don’t call it senioritis.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about rules. And breaking them.

I don’t have any particular plans to break rules today, apart from  the ones I always break (I am insufficiently formal with my students! I don’t take their cellphones away! I DON’T ENFORCE THE DRESS CODE!!!); since I have become a teacher, I am generally on the side of rules enforcement (Not the dress code. Dress codes are a poor system. I’ll write about that some other morning.), because I recognize that most rules are intended to uphold the One Rule: Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. In my classroom that is the first rule and the only rule that gets regularly and consistently enforced. But other corollary rules are reasonable when they help maintain that one rule: the tardy policy is acceptable because students who come in late miss class, which is harmful to their education; they disrupt the classroom, which is harmful to everyone else’s. It is a minor harm in both cases, and so the punishment for tardiness should be a stern look, maybe a talking to (Especially in the case of schoolchildren, who are rarely tardy on their own behalf; I was late to homeroom for essentially my entire freshman year because my older brother drove me to school, and he didn’t have to be in homeroom, ergo late.), but there is harm, and the rule makes sense.

The more interesting situation is when someone — like me — decides that some rules should be enforced and not others. Because then it becomes a matter of reason and authority; argument, in other words. I have decided that the no-cellphones policy at the school where I teach will not be enforced in my classroom with the sole exception of tests. I confiscate their phones during tests; otherwise I let the students use them during class. Conversely, I insist that essays and projects be on school appropriate subjects. I can justify the enforcement of one rule and not the other, but am I the one who gets to decide that? My supervisors would say No. My students, who like my laxity, say Yes. I do what I want, ‘cause a pirate is free, and I am a pirate.

But then there are the rules, and particularly the uneven enforcement of rules, that I believe are problematic. My administration insists that the students do not talk during fire drills, that the entire school remain in absolute silence. They instruct the teachers, during every drill, to send the students who talk to the administration to be disciplined. They do not have a reasonable argument for this. The district insists, as a precaution against school shootings, that all classroom doors be closed and locked during the entire school day, with the sole exception (Other than when people are coming in and out of the doors, of course — though I have been frequently tempted to slam the door closed and yell, “IT’S A SAFETY PRECAUTION!” when people are trying to come into my classroom. Particularly when it’s administrators.) being when there is a teacher alone in the room with a single student; then the potential lawsuits override the risk of being shot, and so the classroom door must remain blocked open. They do not have a reasonable argument for this. My administration is constantly walking by my classroom and closing my door, which I habitually leave open because I have an open-door bathroom policy, and also because it helps keep the room a comfortable temperature.

Those rules, despite being irrational, are enforced consistently and vigorously. But other rules, such as suspension and expulsion for serious offenses — rules which do have a rational basis — are consistently bent or broken, generally for the same fear of lawsuits that governs our door closings. There are students at the school who should probably not be at the school, because their actions pose a genuine threat to themselves and the other students. But those students are generally allowed to remain, and even allowed to make up work missed during suspensions. I am not one to insist on expulsion; other solutions to the issue could certainly be tried — but those things don’t happen, either.

Let’s imagine, as an example, that a student was running around whipping people with goat skin in order to increase their fertility. (What? That’s where Valentine’s Day comes from.) A student who did that should be suspended, and certainly, if the student was naked as the Romans were when they did that, that student should be expelled and probably arrested. I could understand if, instead, the student was required to attend counseling, GoatWhippers Anonymous and the like; but my school, and the school where I taught before this, frequently did nothing post-suspension. The goat-whipper comes right back, sits in class, makes up work and gets their credits. And frequently, re-offends. With the same result.

I broke the rules almost ten years ago. I wrote angry blogs about my students, while I was in class, using a school computer; I also named former students and insulted them. I’m honestly not sure that my particular actions caused direct harm (largely because none of the students I talked about knew about or read the blog), but certainly the rules that I violated are intended to prevent harm: teachers should not insult their students, we should not post on social media or the internet during class; we should not name our students and violate their privacy. I should not have broken those rules. I was punished for them, and I still pay for it; and that’s as it should be. Especially because I still write this blog, I have to remain aware of where the line is, and not cross it. I suppose you could argue that I do cross it, that I shouldn’t write, that I shouldn’t write about my school or the administration or similar topics; but rules that prevent harm should not cause harm. And censorship is harm. My punishment taught me to be more responsible, and therefore I, who am closest to the potential damage, have become a means of preventing further harm. This is exactly what rules and punishments are supposed to accomplish: reform and prevention. For the offender far more than others who observe, but the idea of a deterrent is not absurd.

There are other instances where, rather than a poor policy or an unfairly enforced rule, specific individuals are allowed to skirt the rules — or simply to break them with impunity. Where, say, family members are allowed to have freedoms and privileges that they should not have, in violation of rules. This is, quite simply, corruption; not only does it allow harm to happen to all involved, but it creates harm directly. It allows others to be corrupt themselves, and therefore the harm spreads. And it begins at the top.

Looking at you, Mr. Trump. And your children.

When  the people who are given the authority to make the rules and enforce the rules do a poor job of choosing which rules are vigorously enforced — generally, rules that allow them to maintain and increase power and control over subordinates, but which do not tangibly prevent harm — and which are laxly enforced or not enforced at all, then the system is broken; then, unfortunately, it falls to those not in the position of authority to make decisions regarding which rules to enforce and which not. That’s where I come into this. If my students were not consistently and adamantly protected, by their parents and de facto by the school in that they do not enforce a schoolwide ban, in their right to have a cellphone with maximal functionality, I would enforce a ban in my classroom. If my administration acted in all ways with the safety and benefit of the students foremost in mind, then I would enforce their reasonable rules vigorously. As none of those things are true, I am forced to pick and choose.

I hope I choose well. I will take responsibility for the choices I make.

I learned that from my punishments.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

(Twenty mornings! Score!)

This morning I am thinking about yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon, following a full day of teaching, and right on the heels of a vapid and hollow staff meeting (“Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ all at once to everyone who’s had a birthday in the last two and a half months! Then, as a special gift, the birthday people can cut this crappy cake we got for them! Also, teachers with high test scores win all the prizes! Yay math and English!” Except with less energy and verve.), we had an interesting and useful training. It was called Stop the Bleed, and it was about how to deal with critical bleeding, how to apply first aid, tourniquets and wound packing and pressure and the like. I was glad to get the training, because I learned things I hadn’t known before, things that could be useful in a crisis, and I learned them from actual medical professionals and first responders.

But there were a few things that bothered me. Apart from the graphic wound photos and the fake detached limbs with enormous puncture wounds for us to practice stuffing gauze into. Geesh.

The first was the audience participation; we were asked to identify some signs of critical blood loss, and also some consequences of it if left untreated; there’s nothing quite like hearing a bunch of teachers, who are all lovely people, and who also want to be the one to give the teacher the right answer, shouting out, “Spurting blood!” “Missing part of a limb!” “DEATH!” The flip side of this was the trainer’s comment that our practice hemostatic gauze lacked the chemical additive that is in actual hemostatic gauze, which helps cause blood clotting, because our gauze was “educational.” I love the idea that the crappy knock-off version, the one that doesn’t do the critical thing that the actual product does, is the educational version. It’s like school Chromebooks.

Then there were the trainers’ unintentionally strange comments. (At least I hope they were unintentional…) “We are fortunate to have the experience of the military, so we’ve seen tourniquets applied for up to two hours without loss of limb.” “They have tourniquets for the torso now so you can apply them to the lower abdomen, but unfortunately they’re only for the military at the moment.” (I think they had a different understanding of “fortunate” than I do. Is the military really fortunate to have the opportunity to field-test tourniquets for hours at a time without losing limbs? To have access to abdominal tourniquets? I mean, I’m all in favor of saving lives — but “fortunate?”) The better one was the trainer’s attempt at humor: when explaining that wounds to the “torso junctions,” where the limbs meet the trunk, at the shoulders, neck, and groin, the trainer said, “Now, you can’t apply a tourniquet at these places  — although I’m sure many of you would like to…” which is either, if she was talking about the groin, the weirdest and most inappropriate dick joke I’ve ever heard, or else she was joking about us strangling our students to death, ha, ha, ha. It’s especially disturbing that the murder joke is by far the more likely.

That’s especially disturbing because the impetus for this training? Sandy Hook. The program was put in place after the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, because at that horrible scene, the paramedics could not reach the victims in time to stop their critical bleeding because the police had to secure the scene before the medical personnel could be allowed in to help. So that means two things: one, this training is being given to me because, if the worst happens, I’ll already be in the unsecured scene, and so will have nothing to lose  by applying first aid to people who are bleeding to death, because I will already be in mortal danger myself. And two, that means we were sitting in the library of my school, at the end of a day working with students, talking about when a psychopath brought an assault weapon to an elementary school and murdered more than twenty people, most of them under the age of seven: and at least some of those people died by bleeding to death because the paramedics couldn’t be permitted in to reach them.

And this, this, is how my nation and my school respond to those facts, those unspeakable horrors. Not with gun control, not, in the case of my school, with hiring a full-time security guard and nurse: no, no. With training for the teachers in how to apply a combat-tested tourniquet, and how to pack gauze into a wound — gauze that, I learned, comes with an x-ray opaque strip so that once multiple yards of it are shoved into the wound, the gauze can still be found and removed in the hospital. Where the firefighter teaching us pointed out that we had to be careful putting our fingers into the wound because there might be sharp shards of bone inside, or even a bullet — which, he said, would still be sizzling hot.

All I can say is, God bless America.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m tired.

I’m tired of incompetence, malfeasance, and foolishness. I’m tired of administrators who are so afraid of lawsuits that they make bad decisions and do harm to the very school they are supposedly trying to protect. I’m tired of those same administrators being so slavishly devoted to conformity and universality of results that they take away everything that is good about teaching and learning, and about school. I’m tired of students who are more willing to fail than try to learn, who take every opportunity to ask for a free day, who say, “Why don’t we just do nothing today?” Who say “I don’t know how to do that” when they do, just because if they don’t know how then they won’t be asked to try, and they can sit and stew in their own torpor, staring at anything even vaguely stimulating. I watched four students watch one student spin a quarter on the desk for half a period. Just watching him. None of them doing the work they were supposed to be doing. I mean, I was a lazy student, sure, but — seriously?

I’m tired of parents who expect teachers to parent their children, and of teachers who are willing to do it. I’m tired of parents, and teachers, who focus on the signs and symbols of learning rather than on the actual thing itself. I’m tired of telling students that they’ll need this in the future, and that their boss won’t put up with the same crap that I put up with, as if everything I do is designed only to train students to be good employees.

I’m tired of doing things designed only to train students to be good employees.

I’m tired of being a good employee. I’m tired of teachers who obey inane rules rather than rock the boat, and I’m very tired of being one of those teachers. I’m tired of being cautious, and tired of being afraid, when I should be respected  and proud. I’m tired of wasting my time on things that don’t really need to happen, and of falling behind on the things that really do need to happen. I’m tired of trying to find time for myself in between the time I spend on others.

I’m tired of making the same old complaints and accusations.

I’m tired of being tired.

Boy, thank God it’s Friday, right?

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about my coffeepot at school. My coffeepot is unsafe. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this: at my last school, coffee pots were unsafe unless they were industrial or restaurant grade, which basically means they have better safety features, automatic shutoff in case of a power surge or a short circuit, and whatnot. Don’t want my coffeepot starting a fire. Sure, whatever — but they overlooked those ancient overhead projectors, which, if you’ve ever stood in front of one, you know heat up to at least 836.9 degrees Fahrenheit, so. Maybe the coffee wasn’t the biggest risk.

Anyway, I heard that my coffeepot was unsafe a few months ago when the health inspector said I couldn’t sell coffee to students, which I had been doing as a fundraiser for the English department so I could buy extra copies of books and such. I don’t have a food handler’s license, so I cannot prepare and serve foodstuffs to the public. Don’t want to get any salmonella in their coffee. I also heard that coffeepots needed to be secured so that the students couldn’t spill hot coffee on themselves as they walked by, nor pick up the glass carafe and smash it over their own heads in a fit of teenage pique.

So I stopped selling coffee to students (Some of whom are still heartbroken, and still ask wistfully if I will sell them coffee) and moved my coffeepot behind my desk, where students never go. For two months, it’s been sitting on the floor, where, presumably, nobody will spill the hot coffee on themselves, nor easily fall onto the carafe and get glass shards embedded in their innards.

Yesterday I got an email informing me that my coffeepot was unsafe on the floor, that it needed to be on a desk to minimize the risk of hot spills and “electrical” risks. Apparently the chances that coffee will pool under the machine and work its way into the insulated power cord are greater when it’s on the floor. (By the way: it sits on a carpet. I suppose that increases the risk of toxic mold.) I just wish they had told me that when it was on the desk.

Actually, I wish they would just come and tell me, “You can’t have a coffeepot in your room.” They wouldn’t really have to explain; the health inspector didn’t explain, he just said, “You can’t do that.” The fire marshal at my last school who informed us that coffeepots in the classrooms had to be industrial grade didn’t explain; he just told the school that that was the law, and the school told the staff, since there were four or five of us who had personal coffeepots. Actually, they wouldn’t even have to speak to me directly: I’m an introvert, I’m a writer, I prefer email. Love it. It’s the best thing to happen to teaching since tenure.

But they didn’t do that. The email I got informing me yesterday? It was actually a general warning to all the staff that they can’t have coffeepots on the floor. For all of us who are making that same mistake, so that we know this is not an acceptable situation, because of hot spill hazards and electrical hazards.

Want to guess how many teachers in the school have coffeepots on the floor? Scratch that: want to guess how many teachers have coffeepots?

Yup. Me. Just me. Worst part is that I walked into the room while the two administrators who did the safety inspection were walking out, and I asked if they were looking for me, if they needed me for any reason, and they said, “No, just doing a safety inspection.” Two weeks later, general email about floor coffee.

So this morning I am annoyed. I am extremely careful with my coffeepot, simply because it is precious to me: it makes the coffee. That’s the only thing that keeps me going. The coffeepot in the teacher’s lounge is a Keurig, which means I can’t make a pot and then run down there between classes and fill up my cup; I have to make a fresh cup, and with four minute passing periods and a hall full of students to navigate, I just don’t have time. It also means huge amounts of waste, and the genuine risk of toxic mold and just disgusting nastiness inside the machine, which is impossible to clean out properly. I am honestly not sure now what the answer is, what will make my school happy other than me simply getting rid of the coffeepot, which is clearly what they would prefer.

But I’m not going to do it. Not until they come speak to me directly and tell me to do that.

If they do, I will offer them a nice cup of coffee. And then smash the carafe over my own head.**

 

**Because I once nearly got in serious hot water (HA! Get it???) for making the apparent threat that I would “shove a desk down a student’s earhole,” I would like to make clear that this comment about the carafe-smashing is no more than a poetic way to end the post. I do not in any way intend to commit violence against myself or any other person, or my coffeepot. Though I will absolutely be putting salmonella in the coffee from now on.

 

**!! UPDATE TO ADD: There was a new email this morning.

“Hi All

Sorry, a correction from district from my previous message:
There are to be no coffee pots in any rooms at all. Any liquid that is in a room that has electricity must have a GFCI (Ground fault circut interrupter) plug.”
Good thing they let ALL of the teachers know about this.