I am retiring from teaching.
I am 63.
I should be working a few more years, but honestly I just can't.
I am tired of change for the sake of change.
I'm tired of administrators dismissing the work I do and have done for nearly 20 years, and celebrating the work of others.
I'm tired of being invisible.
I'm just tired.
What's odd is that I am not alone. My principal is retiring. The head of my department is retiring. The head counselor is retiring. I've heard rumors the lead in science is retiring and the lead in social studies is as well. Basically this is the departure of the entire top staff at the school. There's a message there for anyone paying attention, but it is not just about age. This is about what is happening in our schools and our society.
Society at large has become both more permissive and more accusatory. No teacher in their right mind would dare enter a classroom today without liability insurance. Parents, who in earlier times were partners with teachers, now seek loopholes and make excuses for why their kids fail. They don't enforce dress codes, they don't require attendance, if a child fails someone writes a 504 to make the problem go away so they can graduate. I have seen this happen. It should be illegal. It probably is. I know our administrators have been in ARD's every day the past two weeks trying to make the path smooth for seniors who haven't given a damn about achievement to graduate. Why? Why are they doing this? Are there no consequences left in our society?
I've been on here for years first talking about the lack of rigor, the lamenting the invasion of cell phones and the utter lack of rules under the new auspices of restorative justice-a program which the kids treat like a joke. What used to be a good school-orderly, innovative, encouraging and even fun-is now an adversarial division where students roam in packs and engage in provocative behavior which teachers and staff can't control.
There are many contributing factors to the demise of school:
1. Helicopter parenting, not to be confused with parent concern or involvement. We have parents who even with online gradebooks and a system that provides safety nets to a degree not seen before in education, who don't get involved or concerned until their kid is so out of hope of passing that it's impossible to fudge the numbers. These parents are big on lawyering up and pointing fingers. They are also frequently the types who try to get special perks like extra time on the SAT or take kids out of school for vacation the week before scheduled vacations. These people are insane and their kids are basket cases.
2. Cell phones can be helpful, but too many parents, especially after Columbine, mistake them for electronic umbilical cords. Having a cell phone does not insure your child is safe. What is more, like the pagers before them, your child will lie about where they are, who they are with and what they are doing if they think they can snow their parents-which is often the case. It's been estimated that 70% of kids have porn on their cell phones. This includes boys AND girls. These "children" have secret lives hidden on their phones and too many parents (see #1 above) think that looking at their texts and photos is an invasion of privacy. I have found phones with salacious selfies of girls on their desktop left in the room. I've also seen IPhone 10's plugged into the wall and left to charge so that kids who have depleted the charge watching movies and texting in the morning can continue to do so in the afternoon. As I tell my students, technology is a good servant but a bad master. Trying to get a phone away from a student who will not comply is like trying to separate a junkie from his fix. Just try it sometime with a 15 year old girl. Terrifying.
3. Restorative justice is a joke. The kids treat it as such. They know they can make puppy eyes and excuses and be forgiven for even the most egregious actions. I have kids who have missed more than 13 of 45 classes. By state law they should absence fail, but no instead they can sit in a room playing on their cell phone after having missed classes and instruction to play hooky. I had two boys square off in a class the first week of school who I marched down to the office. They came back 20 minutes later with an AP saying " They've gotten restorative actions and they are really sorry..." Needless to say those two continued to be a problem for the entire course. I think society at large is seeing much of the same. Sooner or later you have to stop letting people break rules. The same code applies to laws.
4. The incoming teachers are not trained in the way they were before. They seem to be full of social justice memes, but short on true depth of knowledge in their subjects. They call kids pet names, something that I was warned against as a young teacher. They try to make kids their friends, make plans to meet for shopping and coffee-things which I have never wanted to do and things that I would find suspicious if my own kids' teachers were trying to do. I keep my private life private. I think that teachers must be separate from the students, but our young teachers don't seem interested in being part of the faculty and instead socialize at lunch and after school with students, which sets up a strange chemistry. These same teachers don't want to teach entry level courses and have been very manipulative in getting our young, and somewhat clueless, administrator to go along. The result was that as department lead next year I would have had all entry level courses because they new teachers claim they can't teach them. One of them refuses to teach watercolor. They other only teaches portraiture. They are big on making scenes and signing up for events that they then dump on others-most often me. One has complained every single day about being on a cart. I was on a cart for eight years teaching just entry level classes. I guess millennials don't want to learn on the job and insist on starting at the top. Whatever happened to paying your dues?
So I am done. I will travel. I will paint. I will renovate my home.
I am sad. I had hoped to end on a high note, but in the end even the senior show got sabotaged by one of my teachers who refused to tell her students.
Of course, she tweeted and posted about HER students' show in the library Friday.
On that alone I would be ready to leave. Combine that with new administrators, construction and what looks like a collision of events of which I want no part.
In closing I leave you with this:The Way
