I Herd That

Back when I was a high-school teacher, I always sort of enjoyed the first day or so of Pre-Plan (a label that makes no sense, now that I think about it) or Plan Week, or whatever it was called, except for the meetings, of course.

On most years we got new “spirit shirts,” meaning shirts with the name of our high school on it, and usually adorned with a sort of modernist, wind-blown lion, a lion that looked to be a close relative of the Denver Broncos logo. Because teachers are a mostly monastic bunch, ascetics by necessity, this was sort of like a birthday or some other gift-giving occasion. Yay! A free shirt!

We typically didn’t have those on the first morning back when we sat for our yearbook photos, so some of us wore an older spirit shirt, others dressed up a bit, others would wear just what they’d wear to work. We wore whatever someone like us would wear. No big deal.  

In my last year of teaching, things changed. Yearbook photos got pushed back a day or so. This gave us time to get our new shirts first, which, sadly, were a garish, road-worker, prison-inmate orange. The administrative team received slightly nicer, but still orange shirts, as a reminder that they were administrators and a part of their own team. The varsity, I guess, and we the teachers would be the junior varsity.

We’re used to that!

And we were required to wear those things for our yearbook pictures. Required? I was so stunned when I heard this, I raced home, unlocked my Home Security Box, and thumbed through my vital documents until I found my 1973 honorable discharge from the United States Air Force.

Having dutifully completed my military obligation, I realized higher-ups no longer got to tell me what shirt to wear. So I put the shirt in a drawer where I couldn’t see it and skipped out on the yearbook photo.

Also, we were supposed to put on some black pants with our orange shirt for our Entire Faculty and Staff Photo (EFSP). Because I was required to, I didn’t do that either. Also, I don’t have any black pants.

Later, those of us who “missed” the first round of photos were told we could get our pictures taken when our students went in for re-takes. But, we would not be photographed unless we wore our orange shirt.

(Back home for another look at the discharge papers. Yep. Still not in the Air Force, thank God.)

Seriously?! If any of us, including your beloved author, had possessed the kind of courage that is often likened to certain male organs, we would’ve walked over with our students and caused a scene. We would’ve said, “Hey, I’m here to get my picture taken for the yearbook and I insist you take it. Either take my picture or call over whoever’s enforcing this thing, and we’ll have a discussion about what’s important.”

And our students would have looked on with envy and admiration, and they would’ve learned there is a time to resist trivial, meaningless orders, something we likened to poultry droppings back in the Air Force days. No one at my high school was going to fire us for doing that or even make us do 50 push-ups or clean an entire john with a toothbrush.

What poultry droppings we all were! How I regret it! Missed teaching moment!

Now to be fair to those who required the shirts, there was method in their rigidity. They wanted it to be a show of teamwork, and maybe even family, even though many families don’t require all their kids to wear the same clothes to show they’re part of the family.

So I gave serious (for me) thought to the teamwork concept. Who would benefit from our being a team? And does doing what you’re told when it’s a violation of your freedom – not so much as an American, but as a grownup – make you a team? Does conformity equal teamwork?

And what would you call a team of grownups who have next to no say in changes in policy, what text(s) they use and how, how many students they have in a class, how to discourage students from taking advantage of soft make-up policies, how they actually teach in their own classrooms – the poor folks’ last refuge of autonomy – and how and by whom they are evaluated, how often they are yanked out of class for something with the faintly obscene name of “pull-outs,” so that continuity, coherence and rapport are all damaged?

And what do you call a team of grownups who have survived off piddling, pathetic pay raises over the last seven years and who have had a good portion of their retirement pension plundered by politicians?

What possible difference does it make that all of these well-meaning, hard-working grownups, drawing menial wages while they do their damnedest to educate Florida’s youth, i.e., protect them from the wildly incompetent shenanigans of the feckless boneheads who’ve forever tarnished the Muskogean word “tallahassee” – what difference does it make if they all form a team wearing orange shirts?

I hate to think that that kind of team is just meant to placidly go along with every outrageous directive that gets channeled through in-services and department meetings. “Where’s your spirit? This is a team! We’re family here!” That, my friends is an ad populum fallacy, and every student who’s sat through my AP Lang classes would recognize it as such. There’s another term for it, and it has to do with bovine droppings.

Speaking of bovines, this particular team incident brings to mind the days of my youth, milling about in my granddad’s cow pasture. There were about 50 Black Angus out there, all, so to speak, wearing the same black shirt and pants. They were a team.

One of them, a female, would decide to be the Head Cow, and the rest of the bunch would be all “Whatever. But you don’t to get wear different clothes.” The Head Cow’s main job – I swear she was working for The Man – was to make a cow path. She would walk up to the water trough or under the shade of a pecan tree or over to the next pasture, and the rest would follow exactly in her footsteps.

Soon, there would be a narrow dirt path winding through the grass, weaving and winding as if the herd had elected a tipsy leader.

So when it came time for them to be hauled off to you-know-where, she led them to the chute and they followed.

So as a little kid, I learned what “herd mentality” meant, and for me it wasn’t a metaphor. And I learned that being a team with no power doesn’t help anybody, even if it has a leader.

At my school, it was just another freaking distraction to prod frustrated, financially vulnerable grownups to tough it out for another year.

Pre-Plan: The Real and Not So Real

What are you supposed to do during Pre-Plan, that week of work for teachers before students return? And if the first week is Pre-Plan, when is just plain old "-plan"?

It turns out there are three versions of Pre-Plan week: One occurs in the ideal world, one in the real world and one in my world.

In the ideal world, Pre-Plan gives us time and space to get everything in order for the big day on which the State forces students to return to school. We can decorate our classroom, finish (or start and finish) our syllabuses, map out a few weeks of lesson plans, pick up supplies (a wonderful time that always makes me feel the State loves me and wants me to be happy), try to remember the difference between learning objectives and learning goals, get ready for the first couple of days of administrivia, and write all the necessary stuff on the boards.

In this version, teachers also attend a few, brief, informative faculty meetings to make sure we're all on the same page and that we continue to provide our students with the challenging, rigorous education they expect and deserve.

At the end of the ideal world's Pre-Plan, teachers go home to a restful, serene weekend, put their feet up, perhaps sip an adult beverage in moderation, watch episodes from a couple of seedy but nicely produced cable dramas, and look forward to a smooth beginning to another successful academic year.

In the real world, on the other hand, the meetings are a little longer and more numerous, and they focus chiefly on a torrent of new initiatives, policies, procedures, regulations, and points of emphasis (e.g., stricter dress code, a crackdown on cell-phone use, etc.) for the coming year. 

In some years, there have been long sessions on the district's new insurance plan, allowing an aging faculty to add to its already bulky stockpile of anxieties an awareness of its advancing mortality and the terrifying prospect of extended care.

These meetings also allow teachers to be anchored in one spot for long periods of time while they conduct an internal worry-fest over all the stuff they need to do back in their classrooms.

The real-world Pre-Plan does, however, allow some time for teachers to experience rare moments of solitude as they labor alone in their quiet chambers of learning, simultaneously trying to block out the frightening images from the insurance session while attempting to prioritize tasks for their few remaining hours (of Pre-Plan, not their lives).

Then there's the Pre-Plan week I experience.

First, I always show up on Monday, the "optional comp day." There are no meeting interruptions on that day, and there are always plenty of anxiety-easing chores. I know that the first few hours will be spent putting stuff back where I want it (everything gets rearranged a bit by the nice people who wax the floors over the summer).

One of Monday's treats is seeing previous students and meeting new ones as they drop by to get acquainted and find out what they'll need for next week. I thoroughly enjoy this and strongly recommend that new teachers try to show up for this nice little bit of banter.

By the end of the week, I  have transformed my classroom into what I hope will be a welcoming, comfortable environment -- one that has my personality or fingerprints on it -- for the soon-to-arrive students. I try to find a balance between the room as my place and the room as their place. For example, quotes on the wall should reflect my philosophy or values, but somewhere, somehow the room should also acknowledge that it's a temporary home for frequent youthful visitors.

I try to avoid the temptation to overdo the youth appeal of my room so it comes off looking like a mall video arcade combined with a Justin Beiber Fan Club meeting site. (I'm not sure they even like the Beibs, now turned enfant terrible, anymore.) Anyway, I'd rather my students not think I'm trying too hard to be cool, because, let's face it, I'm not, and you probably aren't, either.
  
Besides the whole ambiance thing, I put the finishing touches on my syllabuses (more about this in a future post), put together at least a week of lesson plans, and make absolutely sure I know what I want to happen on the first day of class (more on this later) and what my plans are for going over their assigned summer reading (assessment and discussion).

But truthfully, I never do nearly as much as I think I will during Pre-Plan because I bounce around my room like a pinball (ask your parents) and keep making unnecessary trips down to the mailroom and having longish conversations with colleagues about what they did over the summer and how little I did and trying to establish some sort of filing system that'll work better than the one I had last year and going through scraps of notes and old lesson plans in an effort to keep make-up work from being quiet as stress-provoking . . . well, you get the picture.

Then some years, when we're told the campus will be open on Saturday, I come back to make up for all the time I wasted during the week, but quickly begin to fret about how soon Monday a.m. will be here, and this causes me to lose focus, so then I try re-entering the room as if I'm a teenager to see the whole thing through their perspective, then I run through the first-day procedures and despair about the whole thing, then I head for the exit and look back once more at my room, knowing I'm forgetting something, flip the light off, then flip it back on, take one more look, then head home for an anxious remainder of the weekend, and while the cable-drama characters commit stylish acts of violence, I'm thinking chiefly of Monday, thinking "Is this any way to live?" And answering, yes, I love every second of it.

Welcome to high school, kids.

Let's Try Again!

This blog has been dormant for a long time now, but is awakening as if from a deep but satisfying sleep. Where am I? What time is it, anyway?

In some districts, schools will open in a matter of days. The week called "pre-plan" (more on that in a future post) begins in a few hours, and early in the first day or so of that week, a principal will introduce us to new teachers, the ink still wet on their degrees and teaching certificates.

They do not know what awaits them during this week, and they certainly can't imagine what the following week -- the one where the "kids" show up in order to have their young minds molded -- will bring. In fact, the whole premise of this blog is that education departments don't prepare people to teach, nor does carefully observing one's own teachers over the years, though that certainly doesn't hurt.

Even people who are pretty sure they've heard the winds of pedagogy calling them to teach tend to make some pretty big, but mostly survivable, messes of their job the first few years. I personally have been making those messes for over 30 years, but if Old Me had been around to write this blog for Young Me (oh, how I miss that well-meaning goof!), I would've made fewer, would've become a pretty decent teacher much earlier in my career.

So I'm resurrecting this blog with a series of brief posts for committed but clueless young teachers. I'll try to help you avoid my mistakes and the mistakes I've seen other newbies make. I've covered some of this ground in posts dating back to the blog's inception in 2011, and when I believe those longer, more reflective pieces will be helpful, I'll refer to them by date.