Sunday, Jan. 02, 2005
New Principal, posted at 8:14 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com The school system has three professional days this week, and they started off with a strange one today. First of all, our new interim principal - who I think has done a great job overall, cleaning up the building and infusing a bit of fear and respect in the kids' hallway demeanor - had her first real session leading us in a meeting.She started off well, complete with a catered breakfast and white tablecloths in the teacher's lounge. Then, the morning consisted mostly of looking at, and assessing, our school's mission statement. Now, I am not generally a cynical person about these things, and I was along for the ride. The principal has a background in elementary education, and sometimes makes us repeat after her, and makes us do dumb cheers, and talks with a lot of buzz words (so much so, in fact, that my colleagues sitting next to me started playing "Buzz Word Bingo" with words like cooperation, collaboration, assessment... words we knew she'd use). Still, I'm for all this. If you show up in your goofy car, I'm going to go along for the ride. I was an RA and an Assistant Hall Director, for gosh sakes, so I don't mind silly icebreakers or long meetings about missions. It was a relaxing day compared to normal.
So, I was along for the ride. I listened to her funny anecdotes about learning how to drive a stickshift, and how that was actually an extended metaphor for her husband, who was not a patient teacher of her for this juncture. I listened to her tell a story about learning how to play golf, and how she somehow fit that into an assessment goal piece. I played along with the group work activites, when she pretended to be Oprah Winfrey, complete with a mic and snappy comments, as the group leader reported the group's findings. As long as I'm not the talker, I'm okay with all this. A silly day that might bring the staff as a whole together more could never be a bad thing. After all, I'm sure that after four years in the building, there are still teachers I've worked with all these years who don't know my first name. Our department works together like a well-oiled machine; however, our school's teachers as a whole don't know each other, and have no concept of what goes on in other classrooms or even other hallways than the ones their department is in.
So, anyhow, we're all doing this silly stuff together, and it's going as well as could be expected. Even the football coach is doing a cheer. Then, all of a sudden, the principal drops this extremely sexist comment on all of us that was hard not to find appalling. It was in reference to her earlier request that all the men wear ties. I thought at the time that the request was sexist, that it should have contained a similar request for female teachers. But I let it go, because I thought she was doing a good job. Today, though, she says, "I just wanted to thank all the male teacher for wearing ties. I don't mean to be sexist when I say this, but don't they all look cute?" So far, it's just uncomfortably silly. Then, she says, "I just think it's time for males to take their rightful place at school. I'm a big believer in heads of the households, and if this school is going to move forward, it will be the men leading the charge." She went on a little bit longer, digging her hole deeper. It was shocking. No one said anything, until a teacher raised his hand and said, "I think your blatant sexism needs to be addressed. If I were to get up and say that this school isn't going to move forward until all the white people stepped forward, then it would be incredibly racist. What you said isn't any different." She deflected the comment, and let it drop. We couldn't stop talking about it all afternoon, though. Teachers in our department were saying it was like living in the Victorian times.
Personally, I think she probably misspoke, instead meaning to say something along the lines that the culture of the students we teach is so matriarchal in nature, and how a strong unified male presence is needed in the school to supplement that. But the way she said it was so clumsy, so awkward, so offensive, that it's beyond me how an educated person could make such a mistake. I now have completely lost faith in her, unless she does a swift and graceful backpedal and apology tomorrow that explains everything. A chemical imbalance, maybe?