Shortly after my last post, I had a phone interview for a teaching job at a charter middle school near my apartment in Brooklyn. In a moment of temporary insanity, I decided I was up for the challenge of a completely new position in a completely new and unfamiliar setting at a school I'd never seen before. So I took the job. And that was the last moment of free time I ever had.
I had about four days to attempt to map out the annual curriculum for four classes--two remediated reading, one SETSS, one technology. Yes, technology. WTF? What was I thinking? In my defense, I was pretty misled. I was told when I interviewed that technology was more or less planned out, that my primary responsibilities would be the reading classes and a SETSS pull-out class. That has not turned out to be the case at all. They also told me that the students in the Technology class were chosen based on a demonstrated interest in computers. Also not true. These students--18 7th grade boys--were essentially kicked out of Art because of behavior problems. It's pretty much a nightmare. I'm teaching a class I could care less about to a bunch of rambunctious, verbally abusive middle schoolers who should never be put in a room together. It's ridiculous. And I'm supposed to figure out somehow what to teach them without any support or guidance whatsoever.
I am part of the Student Support Services department, a nice way of saying Special Education. I teach two reading classes, one for sixth graders and one for seventh. The sixth grade class is fine. The kids are well-behaved, and they do their homework and are making some progress. The seventh graders, on the other hand, are a completely different story. Some of the kids in that room are poster children for the strong correlation between learning disabilities and behavior problems. And I get it: you're thirteen and you read at a second-grade level, so you develop some destructive habits to get out of doing your work and feeling like a failure all the time. It becomes deeply ingrained. I understand all the reasons why. But, when you put three or four of those kids together in a class with a bunch of other kids who are also not so inclined to do their work or to try very hard, and you end up with a big pot of disaster soup.
And so it goes with all my classes. On top of which there are also a million bullshit administrative things that are assigned every couple of days. They're often redundant and pointless, and occasionally they end up negating each other. This school is quite obsessed with state tests and data based on the standards those tests measure. Understandable, because they're beholden to a Board and they have to demonstrate strong test scores for the Board of Ed to keep their funding. But as a result, EVERYTHING is centered around test results, and the data they use to measure progress is often faulty. Example: my department tracks five "power standards" identified by the ELA and math departments in the students we serve. Sounds appropriate. But, in reality, that ends up being absurd. We created these "assessment calendars" mapping out how we're going to give 3 opportunities for each of the 10 standards every two weeks. In my SETSS class, that means basically all we do all the time is read and answer questions based on the standards or do math unrelated to what they're learning in class right now because it's based around those standards. OK, fine, so I created three calendars, one for SETSS, one for my sixth grade reading class, and one for the seventh grade reading class. I spent an entire Saturday working on these stupid calendars, trying to figure out how to assess things they haven't learned yet without completely stressing them out. Then, about four days later, I get an email from the principal saying my assessment map is late. "Wait, you mean the assessment map I made for my department? I'll show it to you." "No, not that assessment map, a completely different, unrelated assessment map in which you're going to test all the things you listed on your curriculum outline periodically." "Well, that doesn't really work with the remediated reading class because we're focusing on things like fluency and decoding strategies... The things that can be tested that way are already being tested ad nauseum by the ELA department, and I was just planning on using their data." "Not my problem! I want your map next week!"
I want to cry. All the time. I hate this job. We have meetings every single day after school. I'm at work for 11 to 12 hours a day, every day. Then I come home and do more work. And I get paid less than I would in the Board of Ed to do all this. I have no time to hang out with friends, ever. I have no time to even go to the gym. I cry on a daily basis. I hate the classes I'm teaching and feel like I have no support. And I get an endless pile of assignments that are unrelated to the actual teaching of daily lessons. None of this is making me a better teacher. It's just making me feel frazzled and stressed out all the time. And resentful. And miserable. And a million other synonyms for unhappy.
So... That's why I haven't written for awhile.
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