While the university position I’ve applied for might be a great career change for me, recent events have made remaining a middle school teacher actually appealing:
1. Students overall have been better behaved, and I’ve actually enjoyed them. There were even a few days that were much more fun and practically not at all stressful. This was when the 10% of my students who cause 90% of my stress were suspended.
2. Last week we had three two-hour delays (cold weather, etc.), one full day of work, and no school on Friday (freezing rain). The week before also included a snow day plus just one full day, since we were just ending the winter holidays. And my nearing paternity leave possibilities are rather marvelous: 60 days, paid, taken as a chunk or spaced out or pretty much whatever. (The downside, of course, is that missing school is often more difficult than being there.)
3. I like what I get to teach. Right now we’re reading As You Like It in preparation to watch the play at the nearby Shakespeare center. It’s tough, but I think students like it: One day when I ended a substantial piece of time reading the script, one student complained, “But I was just getting into it!” And there’s nothing like a room full of students reading silently to themselves. And there’s nothing like making them laugh.
4. The schedule for next year just might be really interesting. But let me explain the back story:
My instructional team has a lot of gripes about the current (new this year) remediation system. Basically, a set-in-stone dozen of our students, instead of on every other day going to an elective during our planning period, come to “CorePLUS” where they receive additional reading and math instruction. We liked last year’s model, which was a short period for remediation and/or doing homework during which teachers could pull changeable groups of students for targeted remediation.
In December I emailed the principal:
His dismissal of our idea was rather thorough:
1. The old model, which helped more kids but to a lesser extent, was not effective enough, as shown in testing scores. The current model invests heavily in a few select students, which means there is less margin for error but more possibility in helping those select students to pass, for an overall better result.
2. There isn’t enough time for both homeroom and a remediation period, since doing both would cut into the required minutes some eighth grade students need in certain high-school-credit classes.
3. Just because some teachers don’t like the principal’s decisions doesn’t mean he needs to do what they think; if teachers don’t like his ideas, let them try being a failing school with state oversight.
4. Was there something he needed to know from our team? He had the impression that our team (traditionally very positive) was now the most negative. (In terms of what, I asked–the remediation model? “I’ve just gotten that sense,” he said, “from your meeting notes and the questions I hear.” My meeting notes? I’d actually been neglecting to post many of them…. Bottom line, though: whatever the situation, project positivity.)