Joy Bliss This - A Teacher's Journey

 

 

 

 

 

 

Endings, Beginnings, and the Ends of Beginnings _________________________________________

 

 

The day before winter break in 1993, a meeting took place in the office of my principal, Frankie St. James. Outside the sun was shining, a glorious winter day in South Florida. Inside, the atmosphere in the room was the opposite — cold and bleak. Attending the meeting were five people: the two teachers who had mentored me since August, the school’s two assistant principals, and the principal. All five were caring and dedicated educational professionals. All were people I greatly admired. Each was an excellent example of great teaching and leadership. All of them worked tirelessly inside the classroom and in the making of a school for the best interest of kids and teachers. I had turned to these dedicated coworkers when I needed advice and guidance. Each had cared about me and helped me, and had gone out of their way to assist me on my journey.

I was not present, but I was the subject of the meeting. They were discussing whether I should be fired.

And the truth is, I should have been.

I had been in almost every way possible a complete failure as a teacher, not just failing in the ways so many new teachers do but in completely new and novel ways.

I was boring. My lessons were dull. I lectured hour after droning hour and called it teaching. Kids fell asleep in my class or worse, they acted out, and honestly, when they did, how could I blame them? I didn’t have the skill or the ability to make my class the passionate and vital place it deserved to be. I was teaching block schedule classes which meant each period was nearly 90 minutes long; this coupled with no idea how to really engage and involve kids led to disaster.

I had no control, no classroom discipline. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to get a group of thirteen-year-olds to listen. Though my classroom was never chaos, it was also never really in control.

As an example of my lack of control, let me introduce you to one of my students. I will call her Karen. Karen had nothing but contempt for me. My class was so boring that she made her own excitement. She talked back; she yelled things out; she asked inappropriate questions. I responded in the best way I knew how, which was to confront, respond haltingly, answer shaking with anger, turn beet red, and challenge her in front of her peers.

These daily confrontations were some of the few times the class seemed to wake from their stupor and pay attention to what was happening.

Our school had an in-school suspension program, and whenever a student acted up, we teachers sent the student to this “class.” For several weeks straight I sent Karen out every single day. The ultimate example of my lack of ability to manage my class took place one day when I was going on and on about the settlement of the American West circa 1880. I had placed Karen in the back of the room and surrounded her with my very best male students. On this day, I noticed that the boys were all looking at her. I left my lectern and hurried over to where she sat. When I got there, she was sliding a pen in and out of her mouth making slurping, sucking sounds, and just as I approached, she looked at each of the boys and asked, “Okay, who’s next?”

Of course I threw her out of the class.

In each of my six classes, I had students who were like Karen: they ran the class, and I had no idea how to get them to stop. What is worse, the good kids were getting cheated out of an education.

As the meeting in my principal’s office progressed, all of my failures during the first half of the year were talked about openly. They hashed out each of the times and situations when administration had been alerted to my classroom failures. They were well aware of the number of times kids had been thrown out of my class. They knew all about my lack of control and how poor a job I was doing trying to control my classes.

My lack of control was only matched by the lack of quality teaching that was going on in my classroom.

There was another cloud, never mentioned, but it hung over every word spoken in the meeting that day. There had been other good reasons, since my first week of school, to wonder about my fitness as a teacher.

I am so glad those reasons weren’t discussed openly with me there, because I would have simply died, died, died if they had been.

I have always been self-critical to a fault. It would have crushed me to hear my own words presented to me as an accusation, to sit through the list of my professional failures, and to hear a litany of all the mistakes I had made. It would be several years later that I would be told about the meeting at all. And even though by then I had figured out how to do the things I had so readily failed at as a new teacher, I would grow red with embarrassment at the memory of that impotent time and my inability to do this job.

I should have been fired.

Five months of futility and a nearly complete lack of success had culminated two days prior with an event that led to this meeting to discuss my fate.

I was attending the middle school Holiday/Christmas band and choir performance. I had been a band student during my middle and high school years. To this day, my favorite school memories are of my time spent in marching and symphonic band. It was exciting to be on the other side, to sit in the audience, to be a teacher of the kids performing. The performance was everything middle school band is: a few squeaks, lots of sharp and flat notes, the sounds of young voices singing sweet familiar carols, and tons of proud parents.

In one of the last pieces the highest middle school band played, they featured each of the sections of the band, and when each section came up in the song, that part of the band stood up, played several bars, and received attention, applause, and happy parent smiles from the audience. The piece played on, with each group receiving their moment, and as the flute section got ready to play, one of the musicians got her foot caught on something and with a loud crash fell back hard into her chair. There was an audible gasp from the audience. The girl (we’ll call her Betty) was one of my students. Betty was like many middle school girls, self-conscious, growing into her body, very sweet, very quiet, and she turned bright red as her friends helped her up so they could play their feature piece.

Without any more disturbances, the band completed the performance, the chorus sang, and the night was filled with the sounds of Christmas.

As I mentioned earlier, the school was on a block schedule, which meant I taught eight classes but only saw four of them on any given day: one day I would see four, the next day I would see the remaining four and then the following day back to the first four and so on.

It so happened that the next day was Betty’s class. It was the last time I would see her before winter break.

It was a relaxing school day, with not a lot going on, and at the end of each class, I stood up to talk to the kids. I congratulated them on getting through the first half of the school year, telling them how much I appreciated all the work they had done and how good it had been to get to know them.

When it came to the end of Betty’s class, I started with my usual spiel about how the year had gone so far, but I decided at the end to deviate from my script:

“This whole school year I expected you to fall down and fail, but I guess Betty did that for you last night.” The moment the words left my mouth, I wanted to take them back. I looked at the class and then at Betty expecting them to laugh, but instead they gasped, and Betty’s face was turning brighter and brighter red. I gulped and started to speak again, stumbled and finished going through the usual goodbye blather that I had used in my other classes, and every time I looked over at Betty, I could see her getting more and more upset, a growing horrible look of utter and complete embarrassment suffusing her expression. As I was about to finish speaking, she stood up and ran from room. I was shocked, and I reacted by violating every rule of teaching by taking off after her. The bell had not rung, there were several minutes remaining of class time, but I left my students unsupervised and ran after her.

My classroom was in a portable at the back of the school, and as I came down the walkway from my portable, I saw Betty headed straight for the front office a few hundred feet away.

She got to the doors before me and threw them open just as the bell rang.

I entered the office lobby and looked around for her but all the visitor seats were unoccupied. I entered the swinging door that led to the back administrative offices. Room by room, office by office, I peeked in trying to find her. I can only imagine how crazed I must have looked to these people as I searched franticly for her.

As I got near the back of the building, I heard sounds of sniffling coming from the very end of the hall. I knew whose office this was, and what I heard next made my stomach drop with the worst dread I had ever felt as a teacher.

“Oh, Auntie, he was so horrible.” This was followed by another wrenching sob. Something was mumbled, and then the words I had said to her in class came out of this sweet child’s mouth.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

No one had to tell me how bad this was.

Until that moment, I had no idea I was teaching the principal’s niece. I did not know how thin the ice I was standing on was, but I could feel this coldness creep over me, this...