Worst Teacher of the Year: Notes for an Acceptance Speech

Hooray once more for Spokane producing this year's Teacher of the Year, but say: Is there an award for worst teacher of the year, worst schedule, worst school? If there wasn't before, I might claim the inaugural recognition. Somewhere, a student goes from class to class with teacher after teacher nearly as bad as me (and maybe I'm one of them). And whatever the worst school is, I would guess it's a middle school (and maybe it's the one where I find myself).

How did things come to this pass? In a word: cupidity.

As the remarkably still-relevant local press has been reporting, the state of Washington recently coughed up millions of dollars for funding public education, which the state's teacher's union promptly pounced upon for teacher pay raises. All very well so far.

Then a couple of weeks ago the conscientious if somewhat haughty substitute teacher you see before you received a welcome email: the first opportunity of the year to work at the same placement for potentially weeks on end, for a teacher out with a broken bone.

Now, the calculation which entered into my mind was a far simpler one than that animating the teachers' union--if I work the same job 20 consecutive days, my pay roughly doubles. Middle school is not my favorite, and I knew this would be a particularly difficult school, but the decision was simple. Mercenary gain outweighed any other considerations.

For a week or so all went well enough. It was still early in the school year, and the students were not sure yet who I was. Despite being responsible for only three periods a day, I was there over half time and thus being paid a full day rate, until the 20-day policy should become retroactive and my cup start to runneth over. Then one morning I arrived to hear some troubling news: the time-sheets would be adjusted to show just .5 days, with the other .1 entered somewhere else as "supplemental pay." Thus, even once I got to the magical twentieth day, my hourly boost would only result in a slightly higher amount of money per day than if I had been working random jobs here and there, which would have been much less stressful.

The administrator in charge, the sub dispatcher, explained that this shift in policy had come about due to the teachers' raise. Suddenly, because as a long-term sub I would be paid according to experience and educational attainment an hourly salary, like any non-substitute teacher, my take-home pay would sharply decrease! I heard from the custodians that they--the district admin--were going to let go of veteran staff and not rehire, so as to prevent shortfalls in the future budget. But the immediate consequence of the squeeze on me was a wave of cynicism. The scales dropped from my eyes. Here is what I beheld:

The disastrous scene at the high school already mentioned, at which I was present only because I was now available to take half-day morning jobs so as to fill up my newly-jiggered time-sheet.

Then on my bike ride up to the middle school, I wondered how much of that money would go towards the union's continued lawsuits against charter schools in WA. How much to early-release days for collaboration time every other week. To walking the fine line between breaking students of their disrespect and bending to their sweetness--all the time spent on refocusing and behavior contracts and social faux pas rather than actual instruction or practice, a vanishingly small part of any class period. How this balance is reversed whenever students are allowed to play sports or games. How long it will be before flipping the school day means not just swapping in-class time from instruction, which can be delivered just as well via video, to practice and coaching, but until academics become the extracurricular and athletics the ostensible focus. Until public schools, like universities, openly devote their resources toward producing winning teams and top players, rather than to teaching. Following the market forces to their natural endpoint: to LeBron James funding schools, just as to Gates funding Khan Academy...

The raucous class in the Spanish room the period before I started drove me out from my borrowed desk to an empty chair down the hall of the third floor mezzanine. I sat there typing some of this on my phone as kids downstairs played with the elevator. Its door opened, no one going in or coming out, and closed again.

The mezzanine--love that word--wraps around the cavernous library, the one room in the school which is consistently quiet, mainly because it is generally empty. It takes up a huge amount of space and seems to pay two librarians full-time to preside over this vast emptiness. I figured out how to get my school laptop connected to the printer there, only to be passive-aggressively scolded by one of them for printing out copies of black-and-white images, causing the expensive toner to run low.

Those copies, then, mostly turn into cuttings and crumplings to be thrown gleefully around the room while the images are supposed to be getting pasted into the students' interactive notebooks, often as complex flipbooks and foldables designed to engage those kinesthetic and spatial learners who, as I've said, will be mostly throwing things at each other instead. It becomes a daily purgatory for the few students who do listen and take down the minimal notes of actual Spanish into their notebooks, and for me. Deeply humbling, to daily ask for attention to teach the words with which to understand the world anew, and be ignored, I tell you what.

Taking their four or five phrases and questions, all we had managed to copy down together, the class was supposed to put together a comic strip of a conversation in Spanish. Here I should have showed them, I realized while listening to Art Spiegelman deliver his talk at Gonzaga that night, a sample of a finished comic. Having deprived them of Peanuts, I'm just as hopeless as the English teacher who deprived her class of the Adoration of the Magi.

One great thing the author of Maus said: wasting time like he had to do before the internet, he used to look up words. He showed a definition of comics from an old illustrated dictionary. It mentioned story, so he had looked that up next. Apparently, the two meanings of story--the narrative and the architectural--are deeply related. The story in a building comes from the same word, historia, as the stories we tell, and in that case it refers to the comics in stone and stained glass which used to wreath the houses of worship...

The opulence of the Gonzaga campus, blocks away from the chaos of the middle school. Its hum and buzz of elegant industry, beside our cacophony and squalor. There are flyers posted around the middle school about Gonzaga students coming to play basketball certain days after school. I hope that makes some kid's day.

Then there was the time the door to the classroom opened and admitted a student who had never before come to class, though he was on the roster. I fell over myself to give him our cutable handout of the day.

Somewhere between the private college and the public school, between homeschooling and truancy, between bending and breaking, there has to be a better way.