While reading two articles today some ideas I've been pondering really crystallized.
The first article was from
Education Week in which a teacher relates her horror story of being a new teacher. She, an extremely hardworking teacher, wanted to do well for her students. However, because of a flawed system, inadequate mentorship and administrators, she did not succeed. I, like most teachers, have a horror story of my own which, at the end of October seems appropriate.
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So here’s the real story of my first teaching job. I was fresh off a year of substituting in many different school districts. I was a competent and well-trained teacher. I had to go to a neighboring state to find a teaching job as there was too much competition in the state I was trained.
My first job was in a suburb of Chicago. I was assigned the worst classes, the worst room and given no orientation or even a handbook. Really, I didn't know where the bathroom or the lunch room were located on my first day.
Let’s begin with the classes. I was assigned three hours of freshman English – there was tracking in those days and I got the low track. Because the community had many recent immigrants many of these students were recent English learners. They spoke Spanish, Polish, Italian, and Serbian at home, and broken English at school. I had NO training in teaching ESL and none was offered to me at the school. I worked closely with the ESL resource teachers, but in many cases, the students didn’t know enough English to be successful in the class I was assigned to teach. Students swore at me in every language spoken there.
There were terrible “literature” textbooks; simplified, boring, poorly designed, but NO WRITTEN CURRICULUM. For seasoned teachers having no curriculum to work from might seem like the ultimate freedom, but for a brand spanking new teacher it was a nightmare. There were no other materials and no direction in which to go. I was the only teacher who taught the lowest track course, and none of the other English teachers in the school had taught the course. In addition, no one was really willing to offer help lest they would be required to help teach this lowest track course, the one no one wanted to touch.
This situation forced me to make up every lesson, every unit and every worksheet from scratch. In the days before the internet, this was very time-consuming.
The second course I taught was American Literature – which also had no written curriculum but at least a decent textbook – but I could teach with an excellent, veteran teacher who taught me a lot about fitting the material to the students’ needs.
My classroom was the one in the back corner of the school. It was not even a classroom but a television studio – a black box with curtains – and NO WINDOWS. It was nowhere near the other English classrooms and had no phone. If an emergency had occurred, there would have been no way to contact the office which was on the other side of the school. It was as if they were isolating me from the rest of the school on purpose. There were no affordable cell phones in those days either and only drug-dealing students had pagers.
In addition to the regular teaching load, the principal who hired me expected me to start a drama program from scratch – two plays and a musical a year. The principal had no idea how much work he was asking of me, and being young, energetic and foolish, I accepted the task. The extra-curricular portion of my job – approximately 20 hours of work per week beyond my regular teaching duties – paid $1200.00 per year.
The principal who hired me was to retire that year. My first evaluation from principal one was this: work on discipline. In a school where fights were an hourly occurance and smoke poured from the bathroom, discpline was my fault. I probably wrote too many students up -- causing more work for the office. The next years' principal who 'fired' me by not offering me tenure cited that I had not done anything to remediate my "discipline" issues in the year since my first evaluation. No guidance was given about what to do to remediate those "issues" -- the fights weren't happening in my class; students were, in my opinion, under control. What I was supposed to do to improve was never discussed. I was supposed to improve by magic, clearly.
The point of this story is this: I was completely unprepared for my first teaching job; the politics, the dangers and the class load. Although I believe I had the best available university preparation, there was no way that the classes and student teaching I had could prepare me for ESL students, lax administrators, unhelpful colleagues, gang members, cultural differences, language barriers, no curriculum, and a drama marathon. I’m surprised that I even lived through the first two years of my teaching career let alone wanted to teach further. (I did contract bronchitis twice and walking pneumonia once). I worked 80+ hours every week my first two years of teaching and there was little available help.
I did not receive tenure at my first job – In Illinois at the time, one taught for two years and then was evaluated for tenure. This made me un-hirable in the public school system; I luckily found a decent job teaching in a private school for half the salary, saving me from a life of waiting tables and subbing.
I could not have succeeded at the first position for which I was hired, for all the tasks I was asked to do. I was not alone; the math teacher who was also hired the same year didn’t receive tenure either.
That was 20 years ago. The situation is no different today.
Why are we still throwing our new teachers to the wolves? Next time on my random blog....New teachers are being eaten alive! And you thought a physician's residency requirements were bad!
