My eeevil side emerges

I teach in an afterschool program three days a week. Attendance is sporadic. Today I had only two kids: a seventh-grade girl whom I highly suspect is a high-functioning autistic, and a ninth-grade boy who is hands-down the best artist in the district ( I'm grooming him for an art scholarship). Although he's obnoxious in the way only a fourteen-year-old boy can be, he's a skate-punk and he completely has my back. He'll go off on other kids who cross the line with me.

So the day was pretty laid-back; he's been out for weeks with a skating injury, so I assigned him a Vanitas drawing and we discussed his options for it as he drew some pretty decent oil-pastel skulls. In the course of conversation he brought up a student who is arguably the worst kid at the elementary school--one of maybe three kids out of the two thousand or so I've taught whom I truly believe is hopeless, a criminal; I'd had him in class just hours before and he was so rude to me, so obnoxious, that I had to modify the day's art/opera lesson because we simply ran out of time because of him. Evidently this selfsame brat liked to pick fights with older kids and had recently accosted my afterschool kid and his friend. (What kind of IDIOT picks a fight with TWO older, bigger kids on their own turf?) Well, the dummy started shoving my young artist around, and he got sick of it and gave him a good shove back and made him cry. To top it off, his friend picked a juicy booger from his nose and wiped it on the would-be bully's bike.

I turned my head and grinned 'til it hurt.

This might be the problem.

Today was Parent/Teacher conference day. This was also known as Wednesday at the middle and high schools, because no parents bothered to show up. In my Bitter Half's class, he only had 5 no-shows out of nineteen, which is remarkably good.

His most notable exchange was with the mother of his worst student. This kid is a mean, nasty bully who lives to disrupt class, lie, and quote South Park. He also likes to pretend he's a gangster and shouts, "Yo, my niggaz!" to other kids. (We have one Black kid in school. She's in kindergarten.) He loves to pretend he is shooting people with imaginary guns. Unless you've been comatose for the past ten years, it is common knowledge that this is absolutely verboten in the school system. He even smuggled an AirSoft gun into school in his backpack, only to be rewarded with a shopping trip from his parents, who believed his transparent lie that he "didn't know it was in there".

Anyway, his violent and disruptive behaviors have escalated, and nothing within the schoolwide behavior system has made a dent, because there are no repercussions at home. When his mother was told of this, she shrugged and casually replied, " Oh, that's his dad's fault. They play those violent games on the X-Box all the time. I'd smash the thing with a sledgehammer, but we paid too much money for it."

Oh, okay.

A dumb child by any standard

Lest you think this is all bluster and no entertainment, I offer you tidbits a la tardblog for your eye-rolling pleasure. This doozy is from a future floozy in my Bitter Half's fourth grade class:

En route to Albuquerque (a two-hour bus ride) for a field trip, a nine-year-old piped up, "Are we in Albuquerque yet?" As it's not as clearly urban as other cities, this was somewhat reasonable, if ditzy. My husband assured her that they were in fact in city limits. "Oh," she replied, deadpan, "So, are we near the Twin Towers?"

No Power, No Autonomy, No Reason to Stay

When did teachers get stripped of their personal rights, control of the curricula, and ability to defend themselves and others? What sort of automatons are They expecting to see emerge from our universities? I am hardly devoid of emotion, opinion, a soul. You and I have strengths above and beyond those circumscribed in our B.A., Ed.D., MFA, or whatever decorates your sheepskins, yet for many of us we may not share our knowledge. Educators are at the mercy of rigid curricula, rampant conservativism, pressure to perform well on meaningless exams, and the type of homogenization that can only dull the most brilliant minds and stress the most fragile. Note: I know how meaningless those inane standardized tests are firsthand. Every test I ever took placed me squarely in the top two percent, yet it took me eleven years from the time I graduated high school to earn an undergrad degree, I can't make a bed to save my life, and I still count on my fingers. This is a measure of success?

Worse yet, there is this prevailing misconception (invariably because they are tax-paid) that teachers are paid adequately. In many places, beginning teachers are paid $20-25 thousand a year and are in academic debt in excess of $40,000. It is unjust to assume that everyone entering the teaching force is twenty-two and debt-free. In addition, teachers are expected to earn additional credits, degrees, or in some cases certifications in exchange for a nominal raise. Many detractors point out that teachers work only 184 days a year, which simply isn't true. Those additional certifications are earned on our own time, often at our own cost. I have never been able to take a summer off, working as many as four p/t jobs to get ahead. Actually, I've often had to work two or three additional jobs during the school year to make ends meet. For those of you among us who are reasonably paid, I'm happy for you. Both of you.

The title of this entry certainly could apply to students (of high school age) as well as teachers. Without question it is correct to limit the power of students in the context of education; most of them require more structure than they prefer in order to achieve. However, they need to ease into autonomy in order to function in society as we know it. (They certainly can choose to operate outside of society, but they can't expect much help.) This is a catch-22 in many districts, as many students repeatedly prove themselves incapable of accepting responsibility; but without this guided practice in decision-making, they will be unready to perform adult tasks when it is required of them.

....which brings us to arguably the most frustrating thing about teaching: we have authority and sway over these children's lives for a scant eight hours at the very most. Often it's only an hour or so, yet we need to be resource, counselor, parent, disciplinarian, and of course teacher to them. How does one explain to an anger-saturated ball of hormones that we don't fight in school when that's the way of life he understands from home? Oftentimes the very behaviors schools strive to stamp out are espoused at home, creating a maelstrom within the child or young adult.

This combination is just lose, lose, lose all the way 'round. Why am I still doing this job? I don't rightly know. I suspect I am not the only person who feels betrayed and trapped in a soul-sucking situation, although if one more person mentions "summers off" I may have them spitting chiclets.

Let me at 'em

This is a blog for people who hate school, hate the instructors who taught them, hate the students they teach, hate the system that keeps spiraling downward with sickening haste, and continue to participate in the train wreck that is the American educational system. If you care to be productive, that's your deal. Some of us just need to vent before we lose our minds and start sniping.
This is NOT a place for non-participatory, slack-jawed imbeciles who want to quip, "5k00l 5uxx". Drop out if you hate it that much, but don't come crying to your ex-teachers when the best job you can find is schlepping Slurpees at your local Skippy Mart. Nor is this exactly a forum for the betterment of the System. Most of us who teach in the public schools are at the mercy of our districts, or at best, our unions. If you have a genuinely practical idea on how to keep from strangling the oppositional-defiant twerp in your class, then by all means, let's hear it. But don't assume your sunny disposition/ youthful idealism/smug veteran's status is a panacea for those of us who just wanted to make a difference, but now just want to make it to June.