Tales from the schoolhouse 6

I have so much more to tell you about my time as a teacher.

The 6^th grader who stole a car.

The girl with the blue hair.

The mother who told me in conference that her daughter was regularly beating her up.

Teaching “reproduction” to my daughter’s 7^th grade class.

But, there are other things I want to write about too, so I’m going to wind down the schoolhouse stories by telling you how my teaching career died.

I had “alternative certification” which means that I got an interim teaching license by doing a background check, having a college degree, taking a test, and paying some fees. In states that have this certification model, alternatively licensed teachers are evaluated and required to complete some course-work and be assigned a mentor for their first year. Many schools do not want to hire these teachers because of the additional overhead involved, so naturally those schools who have the hardest time filling positions are the ones who grab them.

I started my first year teaching under this system in an inner city school. I was teaching German. Yay, an elective class! I’ll only get the students who WANT to learn German! Uh, nope. In this school, the kids didn’t actually pick their electives, they just got a schedule with their electives picked for them. I didn’t have my own classroom. I didn’t have textbooks or a curriculum. I didn’t have any computer resources for the kids unless I took them to the library to use the laptops-on-a-cart there. I’d never taught foreign language before. I struggled to piece together a teaching plan based on my own old textbooks and online resources.

My mentor was a chap who was no longer an active teacher, although he had taught German once, and he didn’t work at our school. He was at the district office. I saw him once every 2-4 weeks. He gave me some old books and then left again.

With this scant guidance and a rolling cart equipped with a few supplies, a Collins dictionary, and no clue what I was doing, I attempted to teach the fundamentals of German to 150 middle school students who were mostly recent immigrants from Mexico.

I admit that I struggled. Somewhere during the year, I realized that I wasn’t going to succeed in teaching them even basic conversational German. I simply didn’t have the resources, and they didn’t have the motivation. Electives were supposed to be “fun” and they deeply resented my asking them to do anything resembling work. So, I taught them some geography and history. We made a “Berlin wall” and then tore it down again. We learned about that crazy radical monk, Martin Luther. (They were really surprised that there was more than one Martin Luther in history.) I spent all my money on school supplies and all my time off either grading papers or creating lessons. My children learned how to cook or they’d have starved that year.

At the end of the year, my principal did not recommend me for certification. She told the district I needed another year under supervision. This basically made me unemployable at any other school, and I was not going to do another year where I was.  I went home and thought about it over the weekend. And then, I thought, what the hell? I have nothing to lose. It might not make any difference for me, but it could make a difference for other teachers in the same boat. So I wrote a letter detailing my experiences with the alternative certification program and the downsides of the process, which put teachers completely at the mercy of an individual school with no coordinated oversight. I refrained from mentioning some of my principal’s more egregious, personal attacks on me and focused more on the process. Then I mailed copies to the state department of education, the Oklahoma City superintendent, my mentor, my principal, and the president of the Oklahoma AFT.

There were only a couple of weeks of the school year remaining. I knew when my principal got her copy of the letter, because she came to the door of my room on some pretense or another. Her eyes were sparking; she literally looked like she would gladly kill me. I responded to whatever her query was calmly, giving her fury no purchase. Reluctantly she stalked away. I had no more interactions with her. I finished my grading, turned in my final numbers, packed up my dictionary and books, and went home for the summer.

About 2 months later, the state of Oklahoma mailed me a full teacher’s certificate with no restrictions.

I never went back to the classroom. I took an administrative job with a little company in Shawnee while I worked on getting my PMP certification. And I started homeschooling my own children.

I heard later from my fellow teachers that the principal was fired from the district before the next school year began.