1. September. A fifth grade student accused me of telling the class that,"White lives matter. Black lives don't." He also claimed that I pointed my finger like a gun, said, "Bang bang," and pretended to shoot the class. Because fifth graders are known truth tellers, the principal asked me for my version. I told her I had wagged my index finger and thumb in a pointing gesture, and mouthed"please be quiet" to a student and then put my fingers on my hip. I didn't intend for the gesture to look like a gun; I was just being a little dramatic by pretending to put my pointing finger in a pretend holster. I understand how the story got started, but it evolved into pure crazy fairly quickly.
The next day I got called into the principal's office at my home school and listened on speaker phone to a person in the county tell us that I was being accused of something VERY serious and I would be put on immediate paid leave. As my principal perp walked me out the door, I broke into tears as soon as I got outside.
The following day I was called to the county office and interviewed by an investigator.( I had been through this process last year when a student accused me of slapping his hands away from his face. He had been a pain in the rear during class so when the students were lined up I took him out of the line and told him his behavior had been awful. When I asked him to explain himself he put his hands up, covering his mouth, and I had a difficult time understanding him. I asked him to put his hands by his side and he wouldn't, so I took his hands away from his mouth in order to understand him. Luckily the entire class witnessed the even, so the investigator concluded it was a non issue.) I waited over 3 hours in the lobby before the investigator showed up and followed her to a tiny room.where I shared my story of the events. I showed her how I pointed my fingers and she said, "Do you always point like that?" I said, "Well, only for the last 38 years of my teaching career." She seems sympathetic, but I leave feeling like I wanted to work as a Wal-mart greeter.
Two days later I'm again summoned to report to the crack investigative team of Doofus and Buttssky, the investigator plus the head of personnel. They produce a bunch of papers written without the use of very many verbs in a language resembling a blend of Welch and Basque. If there were verbs they were in the present pluperfect past subjunctive conditional tense, Apparently, the entire class corroborated the story, which was weird because at the time I was facing only that one student who was sitting way off to the side of the room,and my body was turned away from the rest of the class. That meant that these little truth tellers were presenting alternate facts. My punishment was one day unpaid leave and I returned the following Monday. In total I had three days of paid leave (yay) and one day unpaid (meh).
On Monday morning, I walked by that fifth grade class in the cafeteria and heard whispers of "that's the teacher who whip (sic) a gun at us." After I signed in, the principal told me the onsite music teacher would take that class. In return I got the best second grade class. That was ok by me.
2. October: During Halloween I was doing an activity with my fourth grade using Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King." I've done the same lesson as long as I've taught elementary school. It's the one lesson the kids always ask about. I wear an ogre mask, turn out the lights and say "Boo." The kids scream and ask me to do it again and again. Bu this time I apparently "traumatized" a kid. I told the art teacher and she showed me the monster masks they were making in fourth grade, so I was kind of surprised when I was immediately removed from that school and given a 4 day work week.
3. Ongoing. I broke up 5 fights at my Friday school. Causes ranged from someone looking at someone else, an argument about a toy, and someone saying something about someone else. Sounds like reasonable excuses to lose control and go postal. During one fight, I was trying to restrain a small, but very strong fourth grader and just when I thought I had him calm, he broke loose, jumped on his target and started to pummel his head into the floor. I had to pull his hair to get him to stop before he did serious damage.
4. December. The principal at my home school called in the specialists for a meeting to tell us that we would tutor at- risk students during our planning period. She went around the table asking what we thought. The long term art sub (for some reason, the school didn't hire an art teacher this year) who was pregnant and going to deliver at any minute said she thought it was a great idea. She had nothing to lose by sucking up because she would soon be on maternity leave. The onsite PE teacher wasn't there but the poor, flustered itinerant PE teacher mumbled something about losing our planning period. I kept my head down, staring at specks on the carpet hoping that she didn't notice me. I guess that only works when there are more than 3 people in the room. When she cornered me, I said that I lacked the skill set to teach reading and math (What I wanted to say was, "I'm so glad I went to college and got several advanced degrees so I could become a music educator. Why don't you come and help me work on improvisational skills in my classroom. Isn't that what your background is in? Oh, wait I forgot. You got a degree from some online diploma mill and taught 5 minutes so that you could run a school with the skill set the size of the Trump family. ..although in my head I added lots of curse words as well) She said, Oh, that's ok." There's a script and you just follow it." So, let me get this straight. You just need a script to teach reading and math? Sounds like something Betsy Devos would say. Luckily, my principal is not one to stay on top of things--she had Happy Halloween signs on her door until the last day of school. She implemented the program a month before high stakes testing because, as we all know, cramming is the best way to prepare for a test.
5. November. 48% of the people in this country elected a traffic cone as president. Now instead of just having to teach in stressful schools, the news is filled with a daily s**t storm of wtf as he and his genetically modified army warrior ants march us into the 19th century. I stayed in bed for three days. The fall of the Roman Empire is here.
6. March. My laptop committed suicide. I had filled out the required request for service forms at least 5 times but the county has cut the number of tech people as they arm more and more small children with mobile device that they use--no kidding--to take pics of their gherkin- sized genitalia. I explained that my laptop was freezing and blacking out and making strange, gurgling noises. The county's fix is to reimage and I said it had already been tried, but it got a lobotomy again and when it came back to me the door of the CD drive broke off and my USB ports stopped working. " Couldn't I get a new one, I asked?" "No, you have the newest model," the tech answered. But that wasn't true; new teachers got the newer models. My model was considered new if you voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Finally the tech at my Wednesday school found me a working laptop . It's still the older model, so I kept the suicidal one at home as a spare. I use it mainly as a paperweight.
7 April. Stopped teaching music the first week in April because high stakes testing either obliterated my classes or they were shortened to 20 minute, which meant the kids came in, sat down, and lined back up. After testing days, my Friday school hauled my portable away so the on site teacher and I had the pleasure of having 60+ students in one room. Another of my schools announced that music classes would be showing some kind of videos from Youtube students would dance along with (i'm still trying to digest that one) I think the PE classes were doing war games and art classes were finger painting with concrete and I thanked the administration for dictating our lessons., and I use that term loosely.
8. May. The admin team has been escorting the fifth graders at my Friday school to their specials now because their behavior has been so awful. I had two admin in my room because the onsite teacher and I had combined classes .The onsite teacher and I quickly figured out that we shouldn't be showing a movie, so I decided we'd play a few music games. During the first game , a student lost a round and was eliminated so he called me a f**ing b**ch. I went to the back of the room and told the two administrators what the student had said to me. They looked up from their cell phones and facebook and said, "write him up." That was after they gave a speech to the class that they would send anyone home who was disruptive or a discipline issue. I guess calling a teacher a charming epithet doesn't belong in either of those categories. The only pleasure I got out of the situation was getting to write both words on a discipline form without using asterisks
The following week I asked the onsite teacher if that student had been suspended. She said he hadn't been. I told her I was going to the AP to follow up. The beleaguered AP said that all admin had been in the fifth grade hall daily from morning until dismissal because the students were on lock down after 18 out of 119 students had passed the high stakes test I was surprised I thought there would only have been 7. But my estimate was somewhat correct because all 18 had passed with the minimum passing scores. Now the remaining students were busy cramming for summer school so that they could pass the retest. The principal's salary and probably her job depended on test scores. At the end of the day, I finally found the AP and to my astonishment her office had the three worst students in that fifth grade group: My Potty Mouth, Mr Crazy, whose behavior is indistinguishable from a crack addict and Mr. Criminally Insane who stole stuff all the time-- important stuff like the little rubber piece on the bottom of the bongito stand or bars from the xylophone. Some day he will become a magpie. The AP apologized for not suspending Mr. Potty Mouth because she was on sentry duty in the fifth grade hall.
I found out that the principal's salary is also based on reducing suspension rates. That means that a few students in every class would hold their classmates hostage while they acted out scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I suggested that they hire an in-school suspension person who would sit with the disruptive ducks and supervise them while they worked in silence. The test scores would probably improve if teachers were allowed to focus on those students who can sit still and learn. But no, there "aren't enough resources. I think there are too many administrators.
9, Late May. Got an email from my second worst school whose subject line was "students will remain inside." The body of the email said, "Gun shots were heard in the neighborhood." That's the third time this year. You can't improve schools until you improve living conditions. Period. End of discussion. You may go now.
