Teaching: TARFU*

I was prepared for students with attitude. I was prepared to share a classroom. I was prepared to move from classroom to classroom. But I was not prepared to have no classroom whatsoever. Not when classes start next Tuesday.

When I received my schedule/room assignment, I saw that I would be in room 328. But when I got to the third floor, I couldn’t find room 328. Room 332, 331, 330, 329, 326 . . . but no room 328. I wasn’t yet worried. This is Chicago Public Schools I’m dealing with, after all.

So I went and asked the programmer. She pulled out her map of the building and showed me room 328. It immediately became clear to me that this building map was way out of date, because it showed room 330 as half the size I knew it to be—and it was right next door to room 328. At some point, the two rooms had been joined.

Now I had a problem.

Well, I thought, someone will have to share room 330 and team teach two classes at once. I’m down for teaching the sophomores, however, and Jan, who was assigned room 330, is teaching freshmen. Either I’d have to switch with Ms. Harris (the other freshman English teacher) or she and Jan would have to share room 330. Or some other pairing of teachers could share room 330, but someone would have to share. According to the programmer, there isn’t any more room available in the building: sharing is our best option.

I took this plan to the team, the other Achievement Academy teachers. Nobody liked it. “Administration screwed up, administration should give us another room,” was the general consensus. OK, I agreed, let’s ask for the ideal solution. Might as well, what have we got to lose?

We got the principal and the assistant principal upstairs and told them the situation. They were sympathetic, but obviously couldn’t just build another room. This had to be looked into, all possibilities explored.

I should mention that the assistant principal who approved these TARFUed room assignments over the summer found another job and is no longer working here. Either way, we’d have a problem, I still wouldn’t have a classroom, but still, the timing of her departure is just the icing on the cake. I feel strongly that people should always clean up their own messes. That's obviously not going to happen in this case.

This is such a logistical nightmare that the principal won’t be able to fully address the problem, and offer a solution, until tomorrow. Other administrators, people responsible for supporting the Johns Hopkins Achievement Academy model in CPS, have been called and will be present tomorrow to help us resolve my classroom issue.

But since this issue isn’t resolved, despite the hard work and good intentions of the administrators involved (the ones who still work here, anyway) I was unable to spend any time this afternoon putting my classroom together. Since there is a chance I might switch to teaching freshmen, so I can team teach with Jan, who I get along with really well, I’m kind of at a loss as to what to do right now, how to most effectively utilize my time between now and tomorrow. One day of lost planning can’t possibly screw me up any more than this room TARFU has. This isn’t the end of the world. I will eventually figure out what and where I am teaching.

But this is not an isolated occurrence. This kind of crap happens ALL THE TIME in CPS. If it’s not a problem with a missing classroom, it’s missing student rosters, and if the rosters aren’t missing, then they’re late, or out of date, or incomplete or incorrect or all of the above. Supplies are hard to come by. Teachers get shuffled around all the time, with little or no warning. Ella, a young woman who spent six days in training to teach in the Achievement Academy, just found out TODAY that she’s actually teaching in the regular high school, even though The Powers That Be made the change on Monday.

THIS kind of bureaucratic nightmare is the reason public schools are in such bad shape. This kind of slipshod planning creates a tense and chaotic climate during the first days of school, days that are crucial to getting kids on the bandwagon, to getting them focused and on track and caring about school. They can sense when things aren’t right, when the teachers are upset and distracted and stressed out. And all of this could be avoided if someone could just invent a bureaucracy that actually ran smoothly.






* A military acronym related to SNAFU. Stands for Totally And Really Fucked Up. The only condition worse is FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. So you see, I’m being generous by describing my current situation as a TARFU: I know it will get fixed eventually, somehow, even though the solution is likely to be inconvenient for all involved, and not fully serve to undo the damage to the school climate the students will feel the moment they walk in the door.

Vacation’s Over: A Summer of ’05 Retrospective

Although the first day of school is still one week away, I am forced to admit that not only is my summer vacation over, I should have laid these halcyon days to rest at least two weeks ago: I have much planning to do. Still, I’m glad I sucked all of the marrow out of summer that I could.

The first batch of summertime professional development came the second week of August. The following week I spent four days in New York, visiting a friend who is working on his master’s in education at Teacher’s College at Columbia University through a program for returned Peace Corps Volunteers. We hiked all over Manhattan, did some tai chi, put on our sparring gear and went a few rounds, even got cheap seats to a Broadway show. I should have been writing lesson plans, but I wanted to squeeze as much out of my summer as possible.

Not that I haven’t been doing just that through most of June and July. This was my first summer off as a teacher, and I intended to enjoy it. I thought about teaching summer school for about 30 seconds, then embraced the wide-open stretch of free time that lay before me by heading out for Nordhouse Dunes in my home state of Michigan the first chance I got. I spent two days and three days alone in the wilderness on the west coast of Lake Michigan. That trip alone was almost enough to make nine months of first-year-teacher hell worth it.

Almost.

But I had plenty of time to fill with other activities, and fill that time I did. My only firm plan for the summer was to not do any work, and that included maintaining this blog. Over the past year, writing these entries has been wed in my mind mostly with a way to unwind from school, to vent some of the pressures that teaching in a massively inefficient bureaucracy to disadvantaged students can create. So I took a break from blogging, as well.

And now, with my second year of teaching looming before me, ripe with both trepidation and promise, I decided to pick up the blogging banner again and have at it.

It’s also a great way to put off writing those damn lesson plans.

I spent some time during the fourth week of August trying to get my mind back into teacher mode and my emotions ready for the onslaught of stress that is the school year. It was time well spent, but, as is typical of me, I spend so much time just overcoming inertia that my net output is rather small.

My mind keeps wandering back to the two days following my return from Michigan solitude. After that 48-hour video game binge early on, I put the Neverwinter Nights disk away and settled in to some serious lounging around. My first order of relaxed living? Celebrate my eldest nephew’s fourth birthday party.

That was followed in short order by a visit to the Taste of Chicago, a Fourth of July weekend spent in Michigan with my family (including that now four-year-old nephew, Nolan, who loves “marshing marshmallows” to make s’mores), a barbeque with some friends where most of the conversation was in Polish (which I don’t speak), a trip to Lansing, Michigan, to show my girlfriend off to my best friends in the whole world, and also to get shot in the head with paintballs by one particularly bloodthirsty paintballing friend (I was on your team, Cam!).

The Lansing trip was also my only summer opportunity to get my Dungeons & Dragons fix. The withdrawal symptoms involved telling my patiently amused girlfriend many stories of past gaming glories. That she still loves me is a testament to her wry sense of humor. She says she really enjoys my stories, but can anyone be that super-humanly patient?

Lisa, the aforementioned girlfriend, also dragged me to not one, not two, but three live tapings of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” the NPR weekly news quiz cum laugh riot. If I laughed any harder, I swear I would have needed surgery. Lisa, those tapings are dangerous. That much hilarity is going to kill someone some day.

Late July saw my youngest nephew finally get the kidney transplant he’s needed since before he was born. I gotta admit, I had always kind of hoped that my kidney would end up being the best match. Give up an organ, be a hero. But hearing my sister’s dry comments about her husband’s kidney—which ended up being the match Evan needed—was much more satisfying. “Do whatever you want to him, just don’t hurt the kidney!” was a phrase we heard often in the days leading up to the transplant. Chris bore the price of his hero-dom well.

It was that wry, dry, and sometimes long-suffering sense of humor, I’m sure, that helped my sister through the transplant and the constant doctor visits that have followed. If I ever have to endure what my sister is going through with her 22-month-old son, I hope I can do it with as much grace as my little sister.

After the kidney transplant, the rest of the summer seems mildly anticlimactic. I went camping once more, this time meeting friends from Michigan at Nordhouse. I took my first trip to Madison, Wisconsin to spend a weekend with Lisa’s mother. I didn’t hear nearly enough embarrassing stories about Lisa that weekend, but I’m sure we’ll go back at some point, and I’ll be able to hear more.

Then there was my trip to New York, some professional development that most other teachers skipped, and, most recently, a weekend spent hiking around Chicago with my father; I’ve wanted to show my parents around what I’ve come to think of as My Town almost since I moved here on August 15, 2004. Mom is staying with Anne in Aurora while Evan recovers from his transplant, however, so this weekend’s sightseeing was a guys-only affair.

So I’ve had a pretty full summer, even if I never did make it to a Cubs game. I did, however, get to see the Bean (covered and uncovered) and Millennium Park, once by myself and once with Dad (I think people like the Bean mainly because they can see themselves in it—I know that’s one reason I liked it); Lisa and I went to the top of the Sears Tower (a merely shrugworthy experience, I’m sorry to say); I walked among the graves of some of Chicago’s brightest historical figures at Graceland Cemetery (the closest I’ll ever get to the likes of Daniel Burnham, Phillip Armour, or George Pullman); I got to take Nolan to Shedd Aquarium (it was a much faster trip than I had anticipated—I had forgotten that four-year-olds are not famous for their attention spans); and I toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House with my father (the restoration isn’t complete, but what a house!).

It’s been a full, fun summer—everything I had hoped a summer off would be like. I know it might sound really mercenary—perhaps even cynical—to say that the best part of teaching is getting my summers off. It was, truthfully, one of the top five reasons I went into secondary education (another being that teaching in college on a contract basis was not providing me with a stable income).

What about the kids, you ask? Isn’t seeing the light of understanding brighten a young person’s eyes supposed to be reward enough? Isn’t teaching supposed to fill teachers with joy at the lives they touch? Honestly, teaching mostly fills me with anxiety—there is always so much to do and rarely enough time or resources to do it. For an OCD perfectionist like myself, that is not a formula for happiness. I do get pleasure from teaching, but it comes later, when I can look back and reflect on the good and the bad and realize, when everything is added up, that I have actually done some good.

This summer off has provided me with the chronological and psychological and emotional distance that I need to appreciate last year, with all of its bright spots and dark hours. Because I’ve had a chance to relax, to take care of me, I can go back to school next week feeling ready for the nine challenging months ahead.

Theoretically, that would mean I’d be writing lesson plans now instead of blogging, but I gotta work on one thing at a time, here . . .