the teacher-administrator relationship

...sucks.

In fact, it can be summed up in just three key points.

1. Drama.
Grades were due Friday. Finals ended yesterday. You do the math. So, many teachers, myself included, were a bit late with their grades. I turned mine in midway through this very morning, as a matter of fact, and as of this afternoon seventy-four of our 220-odd teachers had not completed the grading/verifying process. How odd, then, that my cohort-friend Anne, while turning in her grades first thing Monday morning, was verbally reprimanded by one of our numerous APs, and rather rudely reminded that now she was going to have to verify everything "by hand," as though anyone has ever given the first-years copies of District grading software. In fact we all found out about it, like most things, from veteran teachers. Anyway, Anne is middle-aged and has been a sailor and a limo driver and a theater director and she is not about to take unwarranted shit from anybody, so she rather acidically thanked her AP for the pat on the back. This morning Anne found a page-long, single-spaced memo waiting for her in her box, reminding her that grading - which, as you may remember, she had already finished - was her professional responsibility, and that oh, by the way, the AP would be conducting her instructional evaluations next month, just as soon as we got back from the break.

2. Drama.
Attentive readers and web-untanglers will recall that my school, for being in its sixth recorded year of steady decline, was about to be taken over by the state under No Child, but negotiated a deal in which we split into Campus North and Campus South, expertly helmed by Principals North and South, and allowed an outside organization (henceforth The Org) to come in, hire away our admin (my AP = no instructional evals for me!) and make "reccomendations" to us, which we are "under no obligation" to follow, all funded by the nonprofit arm of a certain unnamed tech gajillionaire. Read as: we are getting restructured.

The Org, you may also recall, has great success in places like Missouri and Texas - places whose English Language Learner populations are largely migrant, whose idea of a "large campus" is less than half the size of ours, which do not have year-round schools, which are not restrained by California's "A-G" college prep requirements, and which otherwise bear little or no resemblance to our school. To paraphrase Grandpa Simpson, it will be a cold day in hell before we recognize Missour-ah as our model. Especially considering The Org's latest, strongest reccomendation: that CALA - my beloved, supportive, successful small learning community- be disbanded as soon as it is feasible. English learners are to spend one year segregated into an English-intensive "Newcomer School," at which point they are to be mainstreamed. ESL and primary-language subject teachers will be divided between at least two tracks, if not all three.

The Org's problem is that having ESL students all on one track violates their civil rights - which, unfortunately, is true. Even more unfortunately, all alternatives to our current situation, apart from tripling our ESL/primary language faculty (RDRR), violate their civil rights while decreasing the quality of their instuction as an added bonus. For example: we are one of the few schools in the area - in fact, the only one I am aware of - that has enough bilingual teachers to provide Spanish-language instruction to its lowest-level ESL students across subjects: history, science, math, even health. If we split up CALA, that will no longer be the case, and students with the most basic levels of proficiency will be taking, say, chemisty in English. As for ESL classes, without all our students in one learning community, we won't have enough students of any level at any given time to fill single-level classes, meaning a move to the dreaded split roster. This is something like the old schoolhouse style of teaching, wherein students of all different levels all sit in one room together with only one teacher. I could, quite plausibly, have a class with five students who are two months away from mainstream English classes, essay-writing, etc, five students who cannot ask where the bathroom is or when we get out of class, and twenty-five students somewhere in between.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Admin is siding with The Org on this one. Not outright, of course, but they keep talking to us about "being open-minded" and assuring us that they're "really trying to understand how the ESL program works." Then they come to our meetings and insist that it's really for the best, and make it sound like we're being openly defiant - which at this point, I guess we are. We're rabble-rousing, stirring up support across all the other SLCs, and getting a huge percentage of SLC design meetings to come to consensus that CALA should stay. This was possible for a variety of reasons, in part because nothing unites teachers like a common enemy, but perhaps more truthfully because of our de facto slogan: CALA. We teach English Language Learners...so you don't have to.

3. And more drama.
A brief history of the English department's war with administration: The District requires 9th and 10th grade English teachers to give "periodic assessments" - read as, yet more standardized tests. Our department (rightly) decided that we couldn't waste the time and more or less refused, unless there was something in it for us: the return of our computer lab, appropriated by Campus South. As not administering the assessments would jeopardize our compliance and thereby jeopardize our funding, this was agreed upon - until the assessments were administered, at which point a closed-door meeting was held, sans English department representation, deciding that we would not get our lab. We, in turn, withheld the assessments. It is now basically a balls-out war between our head of department and The Principals, growing increasingly more abstracted and petty. How petty, you ask?

School let out today at 2:11. We're supposed to work until 3:24 anyway, the pupil-free time being built in for department meetings. The English department decided to have its meeting/social at a restaurant off-campus. Ordinarily this is fine; CALA did it yesterday. But if CALA is in the doghouse, the English department is in exile, and thus any enjoyment and/or freedom on its part is to be thwarted, priority one. So admin got wind of this off-campus meeting and took decisive action, scheduling a whole-campus meeting at 3pm solely to ensure that the English department could not leave. The English department sent around a memo stating that since we did not have 24 hours' notice, we were not contractually obligated to attend, and that our head of department would in fact buy drinks for the first person or persons to arrive. Apparently Admin got wind of that too, because a second memo was sent around stating that there had been a "mistake" and that the department meeting had in fact always been scheduled for 3:50! How silly of them!

So the whole campus goes to this 3pm meeting, and do you know what it is? It is a "working meeting" with "no set agenda" that lasts ten minutes, during which time they wish us all a happy holiday and remind us that our grade verifications were due this morning. We have been held, according to Principal South, "for [our] convenience."

It really was quite convenient, in the sense that all 220-odd of us could sit in the same room and bask in the warm glow of our collective hatred. Usually, the dual-campus split precludes such things.

words and pictures

My favorite student got OT'd for jumping another student. I saw the aftermath, him slammed facefirst against a brick wall, the look in his eyes. I do not think he did it.

My thorn-in-the-side student got OT'd for his personal safety. He was jumped three times, the first of which resulting in a huge black eye and five stitches. I would feel bad for him if I did not know that he did something to warrant (if not deserve) this, and if I did not believe that he will learn nothing from the experience.

Grades were due Friday. I will probably get them in tomorrow morning.

I baked bread yesterday. Lots of bread. I have so many new systems to implement and lessons to try out next semester...but right now, bread is about my speed. I am so done with students.

Thursday and Friday were finals, so we had full-length days but with four classes per, two of them doubled up, resulting in my having some students for 3 hours per day. Today was finals too, but it was a half-day, so we got out at 12:35. Tomorrow and Wednesday are "regular instruction" days, meaning six periods of post-finals class which students know do not count towards their grades, but they are short days - not our regular 1:53-release professional development short days, but rather, 2:11-release. Thursday, the last day of school, is a completely normal day, releasing at 3:24. When we come back on the third, it is a reverse professional development Tuesday, meaning that we get out at 3:24, but that we sit in a meeting for the first hour-odd of the day, until the students arrive at 8:48. They are really excited about that. I would be too.

I am not even remotely in the holiday spirit. Wonder why.

Please to be enjoying these examples of the odd, mundane, and deformed which have lately caught my eye.

Bow down! Bow down! Before the power of marshmallow Santa! Or be crushed! Be crushed! By....his jolly boots of doom!*

It's officially intentional...the display was switched this week from McCormick to Von's brand pepper. I am still purchasing pepper from the spice aisle. It seems less salmonella-y.

I apologize for the glare and the shadows and the bad angle. It's really difficult to photograph, but this is my favorite sign in South LA. So many messages going on!

At least one person in this town is awesome.

Blurry, yes. And yet...that about sums it up.

*five points for the reference.

sick, cranky

I am home sick today - I feel pretty OK but am periodically coughing my lungs out, and my voice is definitely not at full strength. All my work is at school, so there's not much I can do; I slept until almost 11, dorked around on Craftser for awhile, and am thinking of knitting something or deconstructing my ugly, oversized Program t-shirt and making something wearable. What I have mostly been doing is enjoying one of the many side effects of Los Angeles living: the 37 phone calls we receive, per day, for someone named Paris Barclay. They're usually from Unknown Caller but one was from the Director's Guild - go figure - so I do a little investigating and it turns out that this is in fact the Paris Barclay, the famed guest director of a million and one TV episodes and that cinematic classic, Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood. I, for one, have always preferred the early work of the Wayanses.

I think only The Moms have the house number, and they know we're not generally home during the day, so any and all calls we get are for Paris. I was really mean to the last one, and she sounded kind of shocked, but whatever. I wish we had an answering machine, so I could record a nice hostile message and save my voice from any furthur terse exchanges. Something along the lines of,

"Hi, you have not reached the home or office of Paris Barclay. If Paris Barclay is successful enough to have a secretary, and you are fortunate enough to be in contact with said secretary, please call her at once and instruct her that this is not, nor will it ever be, the number at which Mr. Barclay can be reached. If she is in posession of and has been distributing the correct number, please instruct her that her job responsibilities have just increased, as Mr. Barclay is not to be trusted to give out his own contact information and must be monitored at all times. Congratulations on your fine connections to Hollywood's brightest stars."

Or maybe I will just start taking messages for him.

Getting the hell out of LA: T-minus 30 months and counting.

sick again, jiggity jig

Yay yay yay. I am not sure if it was my students, or some other students via another teacher, or what. But today, after spending the entire morning at work, I came home and took a nap only to wake up literally drowning in my own nasal drip. Awesome. So, apologies for any disjointedness of post today.

Wish I could tell you something good about my classroom. Final grades are not due until the sixteenth but my final ESL fail list was due on Friday due to how long it takes to reprogam the kids' schedules for the next semester - most classes are year-long, but ESL classes last one semester, two periods per day. So last week I mostly gave and graded assessments and writing projects and agonized over both my sweet, hardworking students who are not ready to move on, and my Damienesque students who are passing with flying colors. As of the new year I inherit other peoples' failing sweethearts and howling demons, mix them in with my passing ones, and start this whole thing over again. With better, clearer expectations this time, and some kind of paper-grading system that does not go "Collect it when I remember, put it in a pile, never look at it again." Also, with a fresh data collection sheet, a much better idea of the curriculum, and SigGains on the brain.

In my ongoing effort to read every book in my classroom library, I read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in its entirety today. It was much better than White Oleander - sapfests being more appropriate for adolescents than the middle-aged - and the kind of thing I might have really enjoyed when it was at my reading level. I am really looking forward to when Jarhead and Killing Pablo come back into the room so I can grab them for a change. My ESL students have been taking books off the shelf a lot lately, which is really awesome. When they are done with their work, I have a mixed group of girls and boys who sit and read Neruda aloud to each other. They always look at me guiltily, like I am going to make them stop. I only have one or two more books of English/Spanish side-by-side poetry, but I'm bringing them in as of Monday (or Tuesday, if my head does not clear up) and am officially keeping an eye out for more.

I had planned to knit all afternoon but with the fever, I would probably just have screwed it up.

Random photo time!

Behold the mighty cabinets o' grammar!

The day I wore these shoes, my low-level ESL students searched furiously for the right word to express their reaction. They came up with "clown."

I forgot to mention it, but Aaron was tragically crushed by the weight of our unwashed laundry.

I do not understand this town. Not even a little.

my week in one-liners

My first and second period, on test day, after stonewalling my review attempts for two hours the previous day: But Miss! We need to study!

Me, after leaving my glasses in the library: I can't see. Why is that?

My kindest, gentlest student: Miss, what means the word "titties?" Because my friend, he say you have big titties.

Me, on my students: I swear to God, I'm going to throw them all out the window...which is probably OK, seeing as we're on the first floor.

My rocker kids, on being told that failure to turn in a writing project will result in their failing the class: What happened to cool Miss L?

My fifth and sixth period, when asked what the president's goals are: Send us back to Mexico!

A student with a 38% test average, just before putting put his name on an A student's essay and turning it in as his own: I do all the work and you give me F!

One of my shrewdest and most thoughtful seniors, being asked if facing racism makes you grow up faster: No, it just makes you want to punch everyone in the face.