I’ve got the blues.
Most of my teacher friends get them on Sunday. My husband usually has a particularly crippling case. When I check in on Facebook, most people are lamenting the end of a weekend and looking forward glumly to a Monday of work (or school — many of my FB friends are former students who are now in college). Many of us have “homework” we’ve procrastinated all weekend. At 4:00 this morning, Odie got up to get our thrashing-all-night baby another dose of Tylenol and couldn’t go back to sleep. I heard the all too familiar shuffle of paperwork as he used the insomniac hours to catch up on grading.
Grading. The bane of my existence as a teacher.
Planning is creative and often fun. When a lesson goes well, the act of teaching can be like performing opening night in a play to a sold out crowd with a standing ovation at the end. When it goes badly, it can be like trudging through a performance of “The Glass Menagerie” at a senior citizen’s dinner theater matinée (paradox completely intentional).
Grading is tedious, mind-numbing, and time-consuming, but I see no way around it. When I have a stack of papers that shows everyone did poorly on the assignment, I know I either designed the assignment badly, explained it poorly, or taught it inadequately. Then it’s back to the old drawing board.
On Friday, I felt that if my classroom had been equipped with an emergency evacuation slide, I might have grabbed a couple of cold beers from the galley and quit that bitch.
My students don’t listen. They feel totally comfortable turning to each other while I’m teaching and having a completely separate conversation. Not even in a whisper. Nothing surreptitious or polite. In fact, they might decide to include someone in the conversation who is sitting on the opposite side of the room. By shouting over to him. They are speaking a language that I don’t speak, and somehow my not being able to understand them translates to my not being able to HEAR them. Like some sort of verbal cloak of invisibility.
So some days, like Friday, I just want to run screaming from the room. Knowing that my own child is at day care instead of with me while I’m being ignored by teenagers makes it that much more challenging. There is nothing I want more than to be a stay-at-home mom to my daughter. But we spent all of our savings so that I could do it for her first year, and now we simply can’t afford it anymore.
We live in a world where people tell me I’m “lucky” to have had the time I did have. I realize this, but it’s still a bitter pill to swallow. Not that bitter pills are bad. Xanax has a terrible taste, but OH, MAGIC PILL, I love you so… Where was I?
I could have continued to stay home with Baby V. It would have meant giving up tenure. Something I just found out Oprah and Bill Gates think is ruining America. I caught a rerun of The Oprah Winfrey Show Saturday night, and it was an advertisement for a movie called “Waiting for Superman.” This episode had her basically stunned that teachers get a job “for life,” and that it’s almost impossible to fire bad teachers. Oprah, of course, knows everything about being a teacher and running a school. It’s not HER fault the school she created in Africa hired teachers who sexually abused the students. That could happen to ANYBODY.
Child abuse allegations aside, I really hate it when people who have never stood at the front of a classroom think they know how to fix education. Know who to point their diamond encrusted, manicured fingers at. It’s those LAZY teachers with their cushy jobs that they can’t be fired from. It’s very frustrating to see teachers, and particularly teachers unions, vilified. I don’t want to get into a discussion of tenure and state testing, though I have plenty of obscenity-laced comments to make. Believe it. What really got my knickers in a twist was Oprah’s belief that teachers should be available by cell phone at 11:00 at night to answer homework questions. THOSE are the teachers who are dedicated. THOSE are the teachers who care about students’ learning.
Bitch, please.
I’m asleep at 11:00 at night because I need to be in my classroom at 7:45 in the morning to teach my first class of the day. And I have a family of my own. Is the future of American education really dependant on me or Odie interrupting our family dinner to take a phone call from a student? Because what really makes a difference in a student’s education is PARENT INVOLVEMENT, and when I’m off the clock, I need to be a parent. The student who’d be calling me would most likely be a student who had the opportunity to ask that question in class but was too busy texting on his cell phone to look at the homework and see if he understood the directions. No thanks.
I know teachers who are dedicated like this. Good for them. Huzzah. I have an air-horn I’m blowing right now in their honor. Seriously, you’re just going to have to trust me on this one. I’m standing up in my living room and lighting a match.
I wonder if Oprah believes that teachers who are “on-call” until 11 pm (not sure if we get weekends off. Probably not) should be paid hourly for this service. What? We’re supposed to do it for the love of teaching? Yes, that’s what I thought. Teaching is supposed to be a “calling,” not a job. It isn’t the priesthood, folks. Teachers don’t take vows of poverty and obedience. We have degrees and expertise and we deserve to be paid for our work. Like doctors. Like lawyers. Like Kim Kardashian. Brian Crosby wrote a superb book called The Hundred Thousand Dollar Teacher, and a follow-up called Smart Kids, Bad Schools, that says all of this better than I could any day of the week. If teachers were properly trained, they’d be more effective. If the profession were properly respected and appropriately compensated, it would attract the best minds. Read his books if you care about this subject. He’s a bit conservative for my taste, but he makes a terrific argument.
Whenever I write about these issues, I don’t do a very good job. It makes me SO MAD and when I get mad, I don’t exactly get articulate. Or funny. For that, I apologize. I saw my city’s local newspaper a few weeks ago and the headline trumpeted the school district’s successful test scores. I don’t teach in the city where I live. I rent. My town is incredibly expensive and a teacher could never afford to buy a house here. What I know about test scores is that rich kids get high test scores. Schools in affluent neighborhoods have high APIs. The biggest determiner of success in school is the socioeconomics of the parents. Period. The teachers in the schools here are good, bad, and mediocre. The parents hire private tutors and send the kids to test prep academies on Saturdays.
So, I have the blues. I’m prepared for class. My weekend papers are graded. Tomorrow I’ll walk in and smile and give them the best performance I have in me, even after a night of comforting my teething toddler through her pain. I’ll shake it off and do what needs to be done. I will be ready, willing and able to answer my students burning, pertinent questions.
Which undoubtedly will be, “Can you turn the air conditioner on?”
The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie 
I’m Sorry I Deleted Your Comment
Please don’t be mad.
Come on, baby. Don’t be like that.
You see, the comments I was receiving were falling mostly into one of two categories:
Fuck that bitch.
or
Fuck YOU, bitch!
And frankly, I wasn’t fond of either.
I posted some comments that were critical of my blog in order to show that I don’t JUST publish the sycophantic comments. That opened the floodgates for further comments and it didn’t take long for them to turn to insinuations about my parenting and my child that make me want to spit hot fire.
I’m a good enough mother. I’m sure I could be better. I know for damn sure I could be worse. I have tried my best to preserve my daughter’s dignity, privacy, and identity. I used to post photos of her when I first started blogging, but she just looked like a chubby baby, and most chubby babies look alike (just like Winston Churchill, my friend Trixiebell points out). I took down some more recent photos of Baby V. There are creeps out there, and I don’t want them scrolling through pictures of my child.
When a person makes herself a public figure by posting thousands of pictures of herself, using her real name, and giving intimate details about her life, that’s pretty ballsy. It’s not something I’m interested in doing. My writing is for public consumption. My life is not. That’s me.
When thousands of people declare how beautiful and perfect a person is, it tends to make some people frown and say out of the corner of their mouths, “She isn’t THAT cute…” Observe the huge Megan Fox backlash on www.celebitchy.com. I agree, however, that it’s unkind to criticise someone’s specific features. I have crooked teeth, close-set eyes, blotchy skin, and cellulite. I am average in the attractiveness department. I would not want to hear what people have to say about my looks, were I to include numerous photos of myself here (there are a few in the old posts). So, I deleted the comments that insult a blogger’s physical features.
I have more to say about this, and I’m sorry to leave you hanging, but my child just finished her snack and I want to play with her before she goes to bed.
Annnnnnd, I’m back. Odie came home from his Men’s Warehouse errand having made a stop at Borders, so we enjoyed some new books together before bed. He also bought her some stuff to entertain her on the plane this Friday. We’re taking our first trip together as a family and I’m scared shitless (and not just of the credit card bill), but that’s another post.
I was talking about deleting your comment. Again, don’t freeze me out, baby. Not after you’ve been so good to me. Just hear me out.
A commenter, whom I’ll call The Reverend, called me to the mat. Accused me of being jealous. Told me I wanted to BE K-Hizzle, but could not be. Suggested I stop “obsessing” over the blog and better use my time to make some “fairydust memories of [my] own” with my child. I admit, that made me really mad. The implication that I am taking time away from Baby V to “obsess” about something irrelevant and unimportant. I have said recently that I skim the offending blog while I’m at work, during my lunch hour (which is actually only 30 minutes). I can read extremely fast, it’s my job, so I really waste very little time on the website.
I would have been done with the commentary a long time ago, but I got so many emails from readers begging me to continue. That’s very seductive to a writer. I’ve admitted to being jealous of other bloggers’ READERSHIP, and of their affluence compared to mine. The latter is a flaw. I am ready to confess it. My mother was briefly married to a very rich man during my formative tween years, and I got a taste for the finer things in life. Security. Superior health care (there have been serious health issues in my family). Central air. A swimming pool. Veterinary care for my pets. Higher education. Weekly maid service. Oh, that was the life.
My current situation is a result of my own choices and perhaps my karma, so I really have no one to blame. In fact, I’m grateful on a daily basis. I just don’t write about it. Many people out there would envy ME my rented home, my secure employment, my healthy (knock on wood) child. There’s a reason envy is a deadly sin. It leads to very ugly, dark thoughts.
I do not disown my shadow self. I recognize that I cut myself off from empathy as a coping mechanism during a traumatic childhood. I have a rough abrasiveness to me that comes from a life of having to be especially tough from a young age. I can honestly say, though, I don’t want to be anyone other than me. Which is a good thing, because I have no choice.
The Reverend claimed to be a reader here for a while, but I don’t believe that. I have nearly 80 posts here, and like 10 of them are about dooce or Tori or the little stuff. People who read my writing know that I’ve admitted to all of the shit I’m accused of (envy, greed, lust for power, attention whoring) in my blogs, and that I’ve always had a tone of self-deprecation and playful tongue-in-cheekness. So, The Rev’s call to action, “Prove that your blog’s existence doesn’t rely on KH or any other blogger you secretly wish to be. Can you??!!” is moot, as far as I’m concerned.
And I call her/him “The Rev” because s/he had to bring God into it. “Do you believe in God?” “Pray for a change of heart” and “What would he think?” God tells me He doesn’t read my blog. He just doesn’t have the time. But, he loves me, just the same, being how I am made perfectly in his image and all. And then He’s all, “Besides, I know everything you’re thinking as you think it, so what would be the point?” And I’m all, “Good one, Lord.”
Reader, I’m sorry if I offended you when I deleted your comment, or never posted it in the first place. I love nothing better than intellectual debate (and gummy bears), and many of you have really made me think. Having my ideas challenged or being shown a point of view I didn’t consider before enriches me and makes me better. I used to spend my evenings after Baby V went to bed watching television. Now, I write. And I bloom.
Also, I watch television.
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