Episode 1: Origin Story

This entry is the first in the summer workshop series I promised a few posts back, in which I reflect upon my teaching career as I’m about to begin my 20th year. I’m not saying anything I write here will wind up being included in the eventual manuscript, but hopefully along the way I’ll find my voice and decide exactly what it is I want to say.

I can honestly remember the moment I decided I was going to teach. One morning my friends and I walked into our 6th grade class to discover that Miss Fischer, our teacher, had gone and done an extreme makeover to the whole room the night before. New bulletin boards, new posters, new name tags on our desks, and a brand new desk arrangement, new everything. Our classmates arrived with building energy, taking in the sights, looking for their desks and discovering (either with excitement or a notable lack thereof) who they sat by now. My first thought when I walked in that morning was, “It would be so cool to be the one who gets to do this.”

I grew up in an extended family of teachers. I do not exaggerate when I say that if you took everyone in the three generations of teachers who were either born into or married into the family and put them all to work in their areas of expertise before the retirements began, we could’ve operated our own K-12 charter school, including the administration, the health office, the band, the choir, and all of the coaches.

I lived my live hearing my aunts and uncles and cousins talk about their classes. When I got to high school, I kind of cheated on an aptitude test the guidance counselors made us take -- I read into what the questions were trying to find out and answered them in ways to guarantee my counselor would tell me to become a teacher. Originally I considered being a band director because I thought music was the only thing I came close to excelling at, but declared myself a Communications major after one of my high school English teachers told me my writing would be wasted in the classroom. An ego stroke like that is hard to brush off when you’re eighteen, it seems. But it became clear in a hurry that it wasn’t right for me, and soon after that I was back in the Ed. program, now focusing on English instead of music -- the thing I was actually good at instead of the thing I just wanted to be good at.

English was okay. A lot of the class work was pretty subjective since it seemed like all we ever did was read archaic literature and then write papers that agreed with what the professors told us the books meant if we wanted good grades. But it got old pretty fast... the example course I always fall back on was “Survey of 18th Century British Literature, Part 2.” Because only one survey class wasn’t enough to contain all the boring. At about the same time I was home for a weekend and watched a really awful B-movie called “The Principal,” starring Jim Belushi. He was the tough guy with the heart of gold and aluminum baseball bat that was going to clean up the horrible high school he’d been assigned to as a punishment, even if it meant crackin’ skulls with that bat when the students came after him all weaponed up. Being preternaturally naive, I started to wonder if that’s what high school was really like: Is EVERY kid in a gang? Do they ALL have guns and knives? Will I need to rely on my wits when they stalk me through the deserted locker room, after they’ve stabbed security guard Louis Gossett, Jr. and handcuffed him to a radiator so he can’t help me? This was seeming like too much. I wondered a version of this concern aloud to my mother, who nonchalantly said, “You have a day off next week. Why don’t you come to my school and spend the day in my classroom? See what it’s like.”

She taught second grade, so this was nearly unthinkable. Little kids? Didn’t they all still constantly cry and wet their pants at the same time? But that bloody gash on Jim Belushi’s forehead made me think it was at least worth a try. Good thing I did too, because nothing in my life before or since clicked as hard for me as the first full day I spent in an elementary classroom as one of the adults.

From that point on, I had a calling. The professors in my Ed. courses were finally talking about things that mattered. The people in class with me got it. We weren’t in it for a career -- we were designing a life. I got a job at the Boys and Girls Club, which turned out to be way more educational than too many of my classes were. I survived my field experiences without failing miserably, and managed to get through my student teaching with some degree of success. It all culminated in a frustrating year of my life spent as an indentured substitute teacher who landed the occasional job interview that never panned out. I even had a rejection letter from one show up in the mail not two hours after my interview had ended.

Subbing was no ride around the lake, but it gave me some great experience. I got a lot of sub calls from the school where my mother taught, which turned out to be pretty important later on. By the end of the school year, I’d had enough days in the building to feel I could ask the principal there to write up a recommendation letter for my application file, and he obliged.

When I made it all the way to Job Interview #11, two weeks before school was about to start, that letter paid off. At the end of my last interview, the principal who would be hiring me the following day asked if there was anyone in particular she should contact from my recommendations. While she asked me this, I noticed she had already started writing down the name of my mother’s principal. It turned out the two of them were good friends.

The phone woke me the following morning. Bonnie, my new principal, offered me the job, and we talked about formalities for a few minutes.
“I’m very happy to have you joining our staff,” she said as we ended the call.
“Words don’t exist to tell you how happy I am,” I replied. She laughed at the joke, but in the moment I was completely sincere.

This is what I knew I was supposed to do with my life, and now I was going to get the chance.

Snowpants in June, or The Last Day of School

The last day of school for the kids. Some general reflections / observations:

- It's really kind of incredible to think how long an unwashed food container can go unnoticed in the bottom of someone's desk or hidden beneath a stack of old papers on the top shelf of a locker. Those airtight seals really do get the job done, it seems.
- Anyone who tries to accomplish something of lasting academic significance on the last day in an elementary school is insane.
- There was a great little moment when one of my boys had his sister and their mother come to visit during our annual end-of-the-year awards ceremony this morning. A great moment for me since his sister was also one of my fifth graders from way back when. She had just recently finished her first year of college, and came back so beautiful and poised and mature that at first glance I thought she was somebody's parent.
- During the lunchtime small talk when the discussion inevitably came around to what plans people had for the summer, I actually had something to say other than "Write." Which just made me feel so darn included....
- It wasn't at all cute to see my girls break down crying at the end of the day. It's usually kind of an "Aww, how sweet" moment that a lot of people can easily dismiss and chuckle about, but this time I can think of a few who were sad about ending their days at the only school they've known, and were taking some very real pain with them as they left.
- All of the gift cards I received for last-day presents were for Caribou Coffee. And I don't drink coffee, which means my sister will be very happy. Though one observant girl did give me a case case of Vitamin Water, so that was kind of cool. But I drink Vitamin Water Zero, and this was the regular stuff. So again, bonus for my sister.
- I had more than a few people looking around my room and wonder aloud why I had stripped it bare, and packed everything away, and even completely emptied out my desk. What can I say -- I know I'll want to start the next school year with a blank slate. Sure, it's probably more putzy work than is really necessary to achieve that goal, but you know what? If you saw the kind of numbers my kids put up for their spring tests scores you might have second thoughts about questioning the methods.
- And for the record.... Yes, there was one kid in my class who only took home his recess snowpants today, June 9th. Even though they haven't been required for at least two months, and even though we've had 100-degree temperatures since that last snowfall, and we even took on a school-wide locker clean out before spring break. Still. This kid. Snowpants. In the locker. In June.

Welcome to my life.

Elementary School as Reality TV

I will admit that I don't plan on using all seventy-nine of my upcoming vacation days productively.

Most of them, sure. I have to. I'm self-aware enough to realize that if I don't have some tangible goals in front of me during the summer, I'll go a little crazy. But I plan on doing my fair share of time-wasting in front of the TV as well. And during the summer, a good way to make hour-long increments of life disappear without anything to show for it is by watching reality TV.

I'm not a reality junkie or anything, but I probably spend more time watching this worthless crap than most people with my combination of education and mildly (?) elitist nature. And I've seen enough to think there's a fair case to be made that a year spent in an elementary school classroom is analogous to a typical season of reality television. Here's a short rundown of the similarities:

-- They are both centered around a group of people who have been randomly assigned to spend time together.
-- Both groups of people start out with nothing but peace, love, and happiness. And it doesn't take long for the cliques to emerge and the infighting to begin.
-- At some point, it's revealed that some of the people in the class / on the cast are not precisely the people they initially appear to be. A kid gets caught stealing, or bullying, or lying, or really bad work habits and attitudes come to the surface. And let's face it, anyone who would voluntarily be involved, and in fact pursue involvement with a reality TV show, often has some fairly deep character flaw.
-- Each group has a few people in it who simply live to create drama where drama did not previously exist, just to draw attention to themselves.
-- Each group, over the time they are together, has the potential for several different romantic pairings. In the classroom, this amounts to two kids simply declaring they are "going out" and then refusing to acknowledge the other person's existence, even when they stand beside each other in the lunch line. Reality TV? So much creepier, but probably with the same amount of actual emotion involved.
-- When the season or the school year comes to an end, there are always people who end things with great dramatic flourish as to give the impression their lives will not be complete once they've been separated from the group. Even if they have just spent the past several weeks or months complaining about how much they can't stand each other.

Both can be equally entertaining in their ridiculousness, but unfortunately I only get paid to watch one of them happen.