2001-06-14
No more teaches, no more books, posted at 9:52 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I just finished giving my last exam of the year to the last group of kids I will be teaching until I have my own real classroom. I'm so glad I decided to take this seven-week substitute teaching position. I feel like it gave me some excellent experience for my first year of teaching, because it was my first time teaching all alone without my mentor teacher around (it's not like she was there all the time, but she was always available).That's one adjective that I didn't much like that I use to describe the experience: alone. I felt like I had no one to ask questions, no one to clarify policies, etc. I had an excellent relationship with my mentor teacher, but she was on the other side of the building and had a different planning period than I. It was hard to connect. The staff here is not very close at all - there's no teacher's lounge, which I think is a major deterrent to that (just antiquated men and female lounges that consist of a restroom with some couches - who wants to hang out in a bathroom?). I hated the teacher next door to me; I think it was he who ratted out to the principal that I had let kids out of their exams early, which I didn't do at all. So I guess that's one thing I really want to figure out for my next school - how close the staff is, how strong the mentoring program is, etc. The kids are the easy, rewarding, and wonderful part of the job, so I'm not worried about that.
As I was sitting here in the school library, an amusing student came in and gave me her final essay. She needed to do it to pass the course, so I'm glad she got it in today, on the last day of school. She's very bright, but was suspended for a couple weeks late in the year for making an underground website about the school. How very "Boston Public" of her! The site allowed students to print out passes and forms, but was generally pretty harmless. I almost linked to it from my diary a couple weeks ago, because that was the day I realized it was her that did it. She had told me stories about the page, and how she didn't do it but she had read it. But she seemed so "into" it that I was a bit suspicious. Not that I was actively investigating her or anything - I knew others were on that. But I saw her check her hotmail account in the library one day, and noted the odd hotmail user name she used. Later that night at home, when I looked at the website for the first time, I noticed the same odd hotmail user name as the contact name on the website. So I almost wrote a diaryland about how I was now in a moral quandary as to whether to turn her in or not. But that evening, the website was taken off-line for violating geocities policies, and the girl was suspended. So I was in a moral quandary for only about a half hour.
The truth is, I would totally have been involved in an underground website if I was in high school now. In fact, I was on the staff of our high school newspaper, which was entirely student-run, and we often joked about making it underground. I am sure that if the web were as prevalent then as it is right now, we would have been involved in something like that. Right, Langoki?. Since the page didn't really have too much defamatory about teachers (only one was mentioned, and it wasn't too bad), I didn't see a whole lot of harm in it - except for the passes. But no one could fall for those passes anyway.
Okay, so that was a tangent. This girl just gave me her essay (she had to create a soundtrack for "Great Expectations" - an assignment that the freshmen really got into), and asked me if I'd be here next year. After telling her the bad news, she said, "That really sucks. You were the best teacher I had at this high school." It hurts to leave these kids. I've been hearing comments like that all day. The rest of the day, I've spent it finaggling grades to help out the kids as much as possible. What am I supposed to do if a kid got a 37% last marking period with a different teacher and 86% this marking period with me? I'm not about to give them a D, that's for sure. I think grades are a crummy and false representation of achievement, anyway.
So I'm still trying to decide where I want to be next year. Richmond has not returned my e-mails or responded to my electronically submitted application. Charlotte called back and offered me a position. Broward County wants me bad. Baltimore keeps calling. I've got to decide by the end of June - that's the agreement Jason and I made, so he can start looking for work.
It will be nice to have a breather now that the school year is over. I'm coming in tomorrow since I get paid for half the day, and I'll be cleaning the room and putting the finishing touches on my grade sheets tomorrow morning. Otherwise, things are good. The supervisor had class last night, and was great when he returned, so I wasn't stressed about about the job like I was the night before. Tonight will be another heavy, high-pressure night for training, however, so those sentiments may change.