You know you’re in trouble when the President of the Board of Trustees faxes the school to say that his son will not return to school until you’re fired.
What had I done to provoke this terse fax? That’s a longer story. I was reminded of it recently while teaching teachers. My adult students, many in their first year or two of teaching, too often assume that my colleagues and I must have it all figured out, that we have stepped from success to success in our own teaching and haven’t shared their struggles, travails, and challenges. False.
About twelve years ago, as I was finishing my dissertation and planning a career as an academic, I was offered a 7th grade class at the Steiner School that my children attended. The 6th grade teacher’s husband had a terminal illness, and she took a leave of absence to care for him. I took the job in early June, ready to start in September.
The teacher’s husband died a few weeks later. I offered to return the class to her. I told the committee that hired me that they could give her the class, no hard feelings. I didn’t want to take her job, I was doing the school a favor, I could easily go elsewhere and do other things. The teacher and the committee assured me that she didn’t want the class back. Her husband had just died. There may have been other reasons, too.
For her own reasons, however, she was unable to tell the parents that she wouldn’t return. I don’t understand it—somehow, she listened to the parents plead for her return, but was unable to state simply that she wouldn’t return. Before I even stepped into the class, then, a group of them saw me as a usurper, someone who took away their beloved teacher’s job just after her husband had died. I was unaware of this at the time.
I stepped into the classroom, the antithesis of this thin, sincere, quiet woman; a thick, glib, loud man.
The school year started. I spent hours before the first day of school making nameplates for the students’ desks in calligraphy, but I didn’t put a chalk drawing on the blackboard. School started, and I discovered that the 7th graders needed lots of work on their writing. We started the year with Marco Polo, Henry the Navigator, the Age of Exploration. I decided that, rather than draw lots of pictures (as might be more customary in Waldorf schools), we would write. Summaries, essays, dialogues, poems, you name it.
The Board President and his wife had a child in my class. Within a week, mom asked for a meeting after school. She had a list of my transgressions on a small piece of colored paper. We met with her husband and a representative of the teachers’ Council and went through her list, item by item.
“You didn’t have a drawing on the blackboard to start the year.”
“No, the nameplates took so long I didn’t have time. There’s a nice picture there now.”
“There are no drawings in the students’ good books.”
“That’s true. I decided we needed to work on writing.”
“But Waldorf education is about making pictures.”
“Yes, and we’ll make ours in words. We’ll do plenty of drawings later on.”
“I can’t imagine going on a ship without drawing a picture first.”
I bit my tongue. Really? There were other items on the list. I can’t remember them all. I was polite and tried to explain myself, but I gradually became aware that no explanation was necessary or sufficient. The real source of feeling was the loss of the teacher on leave, and the real agenda was to get rid of me. I’m reporting this, years later, dispassionately, but it was a tense, difficult meeting, and I left it—as I’m sure Mr. President and his wife did—reeling and with a knot in my stomach.
We parted without resolution, and, later that afternoon or evening, the Board President faxed the school to say that his son would not return until I was gone.
I offered, again, to resign. I didn’t need fraught meetings after hours and hidden agendas. If I wasn’t fitting the culture of the school, I’d gladly go and save the school the tension and bad feeling. My colleagues reassured me that they wanted me to continue. An experienced retired teacher sat in my class and reported that all was well; he and I are now friends.
The son of the Board President returned to school after an absence of three days. He was a nice, normal, quiet, polite, diligent student, caught between his parents and me. We had a good enough year—I always felt sorry for his having to be in the middle of this—and his parents withdrew him at the end of the year.
I was lucky in several ways. Although this was a new job, I already had a dozen years of experience as a teacher. I had the support of my colleagues, and, as it turned out, most of the parents in the class, too. I was confident in what I was doing and could explain myself. I was willing to let the job go, to be fired or to resign. I didn’t require the job to support my family or for my own sense of self-worth.
Many, many colleagues, especially those just starting out in teaching, work themselves into similar situations but aren’t so lucky. They find themselves, months or years into a sincere commitment, without support and, in the end, without a job. As George Hoffecker, an educational consultant, put it: “If you want to make economic compromises, work in a private school.” Too often, tuition-paying parents hold the reins, and can force schools to remove teachers they don’t like. I escaped. Many don’t.
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