Soul searching

Everyone gets to a point where they have to do some hard thinking about whether or not they're doing the right thing with their life, whether their talents are being exercised, whether their relationships with colleagues and friends are fulfilling, and whether or not they need to make a change.

I'm at that point again, and I didn't think I'd get her this quickly.

I'm not sure I spent much time describing the group of students I have now, but the short version is that this 6th grade class makes the juniors I had last year look like saints. All the tools I have to get these kids on track make minor and incremental changes in their behavior, so getting the class to act the way they should is going to be a long, long process, one I'm not sure we can complete in the 10 weeks or so before I expect to leave the charter school.

But that's a fight I think is worth fighting and one I think we can fight successfully. The 6th grade teachers are a good team of dedicated and talented people who I like working with. The problem is with the administration.

The begining of the end came last Monday. I came into work to find an email from the principal, saying that said she wanted two of us teachers to change classrooms. It was simply three sentences, ending with "Make the change by Friday."

She's concerned about the behavior of the classes and getting them back in line because they simply aren't learning much. So are we.

Instead of sitting all down and talking about the problem and at least talking about possible solutions and what we need to do differently as teachers, she just assumed that changing the classrooms would make the change and said "do it."

She even invited us to talk about it, but when we talked about it she said it was not at all negotiable, even after we expressed our concerns.

This came after a week and a half of me waking up every morning and really feeling like I didn't want to go to work, most of it because of apprehension about the administrators not backing us up very well when stuggling with a kid.

I really had to think hard about it, but in the end I decided that the writing is on the wall and it was time for me to bail out before I ride this one down in flames. Two teachers have left in the last three weeks, and I think that only one or two of the remaining teachers are at all happy.

In the end, it came down to money. See, I'm only making about $15 or $20 a day more than I would as a normal sub, and I'm putting in about 14 hours of work every day. I started asking myself "Would you trade that $20 every day for less stress, and shorter hours?" The answer is unequivocally yes. YES. Emphatically YES!

If I thought that I was fighting the good fight and had a chance of winning the fight and that we were all part of a team working together I'd probably stay. To be honest, I desperately want the sense of achievement that comes with overcoming such a huge challenge, particularly since I wasn't fully successful last year. With the disconnect between teachers and administration, I don't see that happening here, not before my contract is up.

I resigned Thursday. It was only my respect for my colleagues (and a healthy dose of guilt) that made me decide to complete next week too.

So I'm looking again. If anyone knows of a job in a good school, or a cute blonde with good hands, send them my way. I need a job and I still need a good back rub.

...but it just don't work on you

That's how the chorus of Got My Mojo Workin' ends:

I got my mojo workin'
but it just don't work on you

Muddy Waters was one of the masters of mixing self-depricating lyrics into songs that have become anthems of virility and power. After listening to Muddy shout "I got my mojo workin" three times in a row with the band echoing the line, I'm not sure anyone really lets the punchline sink in. At first it sounds like a proclamation of male prowess, but in the end it's a song of lament and lost love, like a lot of blues songs.

The "it just don't work on you" part is what I've felt like for a couple of weeks now. It seems that so many promising things have come and gone so quickly now that I feel like I'm on a downward slide.

1. I interviewed for a teaching job that sounded incredibly promising: a half-year position in a high school, full salary and benefits, and lots of time to prepare. It's not often that I come out of an interview feeling like I had a job in the bag, but I really felt like it this time. A week later I found out that I didn't even make the second round of interviews.

2. A girl I was interested in is evidently not as interested as she thought she was, and she fell off the radar a couple of weeks ago.

3. The new job is really not working out and I'm seriously considering an exit strategy.

The job is the worst part right now, probably because it's also the most stressful and time consuming. Once again, I was thrown to the wolves to survive on my own. While I'm forming alliances an friendships with other teachers, it is not yet turning into anything that I would count as an improving work environment. The kids are beyond disrespectful a lot of days, the administration is slowly becoming less and less supportive, even slightly combative, and I am so stressed that I'm having to concentrate awfully hard on enjoying what little free time I have.

I need two things most right now: a couple of good, healthy meals, a good back rub from someone who cares (I'm partial to blonde girls, but the blonde part is negotiable), an extra day or two of rest, and a couple of good days on productive projects. Lord knows there are enough guitar projects in the basement to keep me busy for a while.

I need to recharge for a bit, focus on some me stuff, and then go back at it. Problem is that I had to pick up a Sunday job to help pay for the trip to Chicago for my Grandmother's 90th birthday party, so there's hardly enough time for the minimum amount of rest now.

Perseverence. It will pay off. That I'm sure of.

And I know we don't end sentences with prepositions.

Got my mojo workin'

A couple of weeks ago a friend wrote to ask why I hadn't posted to the blog in a while. I'd had this nagging thought in the back of my mind that I ought to post something, but the honest truth was that I wasn't feeling all that excited about teaching and didn't have a heck of a lot to say.

Not being offered a permanent job after doing a one-year leave feels like being kicked back down to minor league ball, even after batting .300 and hitting a few home runs in your rookie year. I guess sometimes you're just not on the right team. (Forgive me the baseball metaphor, but my hometwon Cubs are in the playoffs and I’m pretty happy about it.)

I spent the summer in a bit of a funk (and not the James Brown kind of funky). My car broke down and needed to be replaced, so instead of spending the summer working on guitars and lazing around with the dog, I spent it working as a temp in a cube-farm doing IT work. It was barely enough to pay the bills and there wasn't really anything redeeming about it. I had to work hard to get out of bed every morning to get to that job. Going into the new school year without a new teaching job just fed that funk a little more, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't feeling some anxiety about my teaching career starting to slip away.

I guess my penance this year was to spend most of September on the bench before getting called up again. I was finally able to land a long term position covering a maternity leave, and in the first week of the job I feel like I've already been able to shake any doubt I had in my abilities as a teacher. These kids are a tough crowd (more about them in another post), but there's no doubt in my mind that I'm making big headway with them every day. I had to take a day off yesterday to interview for another job later in the year, and the first two people I saw were a pair of girls who are the toughest cookies in their class, and they were almost happy to see me this morning. A few days ago I could sense outright hostility, so I'll take almost happy from a pair of 12 year olds. The third person I saw was one of the administrators, who told me that my presence was missed yesterday and that he can already see behavior improvements from my classes, who started to slip again in my absence. If that ain’t success, I don’t know what is.

Thanks, Mark, for letting me know that you missed my presence too. I'm back, and I feel like I'm already kicking ass.