Winding Down

Visitors

The state Department of Education is to make another visit – one of at least three over the year. An advance person comes to do a pre-inspection. She criticizes a lot of bulletin boards. Teachers do them over more than once.

We are asked why all our classrooms look alike, and why so many teachers are teaching the same lesson in the exact same way. We explain that we are following S.F.A. procedure, which recommends identical decorations and lessons so students will be comfortable surrounded by familiar material. We are flabbergasted. How can she not know about one of the costliest, most intricate reading programs we have ever had to learn? By now we have started to dream about S.F.A.

A fourth-grade teacher tells me that she wants to hold back half her class, 12 students. But she has been told to cut that number in half! She knows that they are not ready for fifth grade and may face greater failure if they are promoted. But holding back many children makes the school look bad.

It is practically a lost year for one second-grade class, which in addition to the two new academic programs has had three permanent teachers and a lot of substitutes in between. The first teacher quit out of frustration. The second left to recuperate after being punched by a parent (and returned as a cluster teacher). Another cluster teacher picked up the class for the rest of the year.

The assistant principal is transferred from the school in May, to be followed by the principal in August. Two other teachers leave by year’s end, one after being threatened with a “U” and one to have a baby. Three teachers are sitting in the district office with full pay awaiting child abuse charges. Seven teachers are threatened with a “U”. For the record, I get an “S”. But I become ill – with undiagnosed episodes of double vision – and I too will not return next year. About 30 to 50 percent of new teachers quit within three to five years, according to the National Commision on Teaching and America’s Future. Almost 10 percent of first-year teachers leave.

Teachers receive both praise and blame for much that is out of their control. There are kudos for work produced by bright, self-motivated students and reprimands when poor work is forthcoming from less talented or disruptive children.

In the teachers’ room, we talk about conditions. No administrator gets high marks, not Randi Weingarten, the teachers’ union president; not Rudy Crew, who had been ousted in January; not the new chancellor, Harold O. Levy, who we decide won’t have a clue for at least two years. The veterans in the room put our principal in the average range.

At different times over the year I have heard teachers’ wish lists: first, more security (in the 1998-99 school year, 1,700 school personnel were physically assaulted in New York State, according to the state Department of Education); second, smaller classes with stronger disciplinary measures and freedom from reprisals if disruptions are reported.

I think teachers in the city should be paid the same wages as their suburban counterparts, but would they do a better job if they got more money? I ask a half-dozen collegues in the teachers’ room. They all say no. One reminds me that she took a sick day just a week ago, for stress. Another says she doesn’t have the energy or time to do better, but adds that she would use some of the windfall on supplies to supplement her “teacher choice money” - $200 a year, spent at a teacher’s discretion. (Some buy clocks for their classrooms!)

“I am working as hard as I can right now,” a teacher says. I couldn’t do more lesson plans, write more reports, attend more meetings if I wanted to.” “I never go out for dinner,” another says.

The system and the internal politics wear you down – not with intellectual challenges but with emotional and physical demands out of proportion to the job, creating fear, frustration and sense of futility. The children, too, import a host of problems into the classroom. Unless the underlying problems are addressed by school personnel, parents and politicians, I wonder, who can expect it not to be business as usual.

Дата добавления: 2014-11-16