Too Many Rants?

OK, my Tuesday schedule sucks. After a team meeting and a full day of teaching 8:20 to 3:10, there's the faculty meeting till 4:30. Then it's the race downtown to get to my graduate class, which runs until 8:15. Which means I don't usually see the inside of my apartment until at least 14 hours after I leave it. Such is the case today as I have just returned (thanks to a combination of class and wonderful train issues) past 9:30 PM. On days like today I feel like I missed the sun. I'm up before sunrise, and with the meager exceptions of walking to and from the subway, I’m never outside. By the time I’m home, it’s dark.

Perhaps this is why my Tuesdays have become days on which I feel the need to gripe, complain, or generally express my discontent with the world at large or certain people in particular. Or maybe because it’s that I deal with so much idiocy on a daily basis that every now and then the whole damn thing just boils over and I have to tell someone.

Case in point: school. The high school at which I work is a good school. The standardized test scores are high. Our graduation rates are 40% beyond the 50% average for New York City schools. We have young, talented, and dedicated faculty who are also intelligent and motivated workers. We have small grades full of generally peaceable, eager students who want to enlighten themselves, despite the presence of a handful of troublemakers who make it their business to bring down everyone in their immediate vicinity.

But we never hear about how good we’re doing from our administration. We never hear about the tremendous successes we’ve achieved while catering to students who come from low-income households, sending the first members of countless families to college. We’re never praised for the lives we’ve changed or the difference we’ve made in the continuing battle against the shortcomings of urban education. If we here these kinds of things at all, we hear them from the parents of our students or the students themselves (usually only after they graduate, when they realize that we were justified in kicking them in the ass to force them to pay attention to what was going on in class). The only thing we hear from our boss is how much better we could be doing.

Last year 95% of our 11th graders passed the U.S. History Regents test. 96% of our freshmen passed the Living Environment (that’s the fancy name for “Biology,” for my readers outside of NY) Regents test. All but one of our sophomores passed the Math A Regents test. All but one! Still, the only thing we hear from on high is that we could always do better. I'm begining to suspect that even if we managed to push all the students, kicking and screaming, to pass our classes, we'd get a memo about how three students had attendance under 90% for the school year. This background level of surreality is what has characterized the interactions of the administration with the faculty.

The kicker came today, in our normally boring faculty meeting, when we were asked about suggestions for improving our sadistically inane Professional Development. We all took turns writing on some big sheets of paper at the front of the room and our comments were then read aloud. As the teaching coach started to go through her explanation of what we were going to do with this data, our principal suddenly stands up, literally cutting her off in mid sentence and standing in front of her. “I have to get something off my chest,” he says, and proceeds to ridicule and insult the staff for raising objections in the first place. This from a man who insisted earlier that the faculty be “up front and open” about problems or issues we had.

As his diatribe continued, it became clear that he had neatly grouped the faculty into two groups: new teachers --who don’t know anything about teaching and therefore can’t complain about anything because they don’t know what they’re talking about-- and veteran teachers, who think they know everything and need to be more open-minded. I’m definitely in the former category. My two years in the system don’t really qualify me as a veteran, so I must be one of the ignorant newbies, moving slack-jawed through a profession that I don’t fully understand. It was all I could do to not walk right out of the meeting at that point.

I’ve come to accept a lot in the time that I’ve been teaching. But I don’t appreciate being insulted to my face by the man who hired me. I’ve been fuming about this for a while, and I obviously would do well to sleep on it before doing something rash, but I’ve decided that something needs to be said. See, I like my job. I like my students. I like my fellow faculty members. Many of my close friends are among them. But getting a slap in the face like this has made me consider just how much madness I’m willing to endure from my boss. The only continuing complaint I have about the quality of my professional experience is the insanity of the administration. We’re not at the point where I’m even considering leaving my job or looking elsewhere. But today showed me that such a possibility is not entirely out of the question.