Hey! Teachers! Leave Them Kids Alone!

Well, it has arrived. The inevitable return to school.

My students, of course, have not returned to school yet. This is the mandatory preparation week during which teachers drag themselves back in to their classrooms and try to recall their login passwords and remember who "Hamlet" is.

I always have mixed feelings about this week. On the one hand, it's wonderful to get back into your office, to organize your day planner, and to have the chance to catch up with your colleagues before the students arrive and you really start running. On the other hand, it's incredibly boring. The only good thing about teaching is the actual time TEACHING ... it's the students who bring the life into the school. The rest of it, no matter how hard administrators try and how earnest they are ... is really pretty boring by comparison. For example, we spent yesterday going over school policy, procedure and ... get ready for it ... the new computer program that will assist us in organizing our markbooks. Boo-yah! And tomorrow, we will complete our mandatory eight hour First Aid course. I think that being trained in First Aid is important, and I absolutely understand why we are doing it, but ... it's going to be really sunny tomorrow, and I just don't wanna.

As a matter of fact, I was working up a pretty darn bad attitude about all of this back-to-school prep, when I remembered that I could be teaching in Harrold, Texas this year. Many of you will have already heard that Harrold is the first district in the United States in which teachers will be able to carry concealed weapons into the classrooms. Not to worry though. These teachers, according to the superintendent, must be registered to carry firearms and must receive training in crisis management and hostile situations. I guess that's how they are spending their preparatory week, if they have one. (Note: The superintendent has also stipulated that teachers must select ammunition for their guns that is designed to minimize the risk of ricochet in school halls. Talk about reassuring!)

Now, this policy may seem ridiculous, even horrific, but the superintendent has an explanation for it. The town of Harrold is 30 minutes away from the closest emergency response centre, so the teachers need to be armed in the event of a school shooting situation. Seem reasonable?

Here's my problem with this explanation. The school district of Harrold, Texas, has a total of 110 students in it. I would never want to trivialize the possibility of a school shooting, as one cannot assume that any particular school is completely immune, but wouldn't it make more sense to monitor the tiny student population instead of bringing guns IN to the school? I don't know about you, but I can't think of one teacher that I have that would have instilled confidence in me as a student if they were packing heat. As my friend Graham recently reminded me, I had a prof in university who couldn't find her TELEPHONE in her office when it started ringing while we were having a conference. And I don't mean a cell phone, either ... I mean a late 70's model, 40 pound, plastic, land-line telephone. With a rotary dial.

Ah ... but the Harrold superintendent has ANTICIPATED the argument about his teeny, tiny town, and has clarified his statements. He is worried not about his students shooting each other, but rather about the school's proximity to a large, interstate highway, which anyone can drive down. So, in essence, he is worried about an anonymous maniac on the highway pulling over, coming into the school, and shooting students and teachers. Now, I am not 100% positive about this, but until I see proof otherwise, let's call this event ... unprecedented.

Of course, the considerable pro-gun faction in the United States is having a field day with this, particularly with the recent gun tragedy in a Knoxville, Tennessee School last week. But I can't help but wonder if armed teachers would have made this particular situation better or worse. It was a targeted attack - one student shot another and then fled. If a teacher, with rudimentary training in crisis management, had flung his bullets into the fray, would there still be only one victim? Would it have been clear in that split second, even to the best-intentioned person, who the gunman actually was, and at whom the gun(s) should be pointed?

I really think that if a school feels the need for increased safety, the kind of safety that can be accomplished only by armed personnel (and I have no doubt that there are schools that are concerned with this) then they should hire a highly-trained individual who will act as a security guard on campus. It is difficult enough for a teacher to build a rapport with their students, and it is tricky to squeeze trust through the barrel of a gun. Then again, Texas doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with teacher/student rapport; according to a recent report by the Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, 48,197 Texas students were hit by teachers or principals in the 2006/2007 school year. That's right, folks, Texas is one of 13 states in which corporal punishment is not only legal, but "frequently used." Doesn't this make the school in Harrold seem even more appealing? I don't know about you, but nothing about an environment where armed adults are allowed to hit students says "education" to me. And it certainly won't say "safety" to the students.

So, in light of all this, I will skip happily to school tomorrow in giddy anticipation of my eight hours of First Aid training, and I will welcome my boring policy meetings with a positive attitude. Because I know that somewhere, in a dark and scary place, some teachers are preparing for their school year on a firing range. And I, thank God, am not one of them.

Summer Vacation ... Ask Me How!

When I started writing today, I thought I
was going to write a blog about my 10-day camping trip in the Pacific Northwest, which, as a special bonus, would have included an open letter to a Jackass. But you'll have to wait a day or two for that one, because I just wanted to get this off my chest first.

I was in the elevator in my condo building today, taking my camping equipment back to my storage unit in the parking lot. A man that I hadn't met before got on the elevator and glanced at my backpack.

"Going on a camping trip?" he enquired.

"No, just getting back." I smiled.

"Oh, so back to work then. Too bad."

I should have just agreed with him. But no, I wasn't smart enough. "Well, I'm a teacher, so ..."

"Oh, a TEACHER," he said. "Two months off. Huh. Must be nice."

Okay. I never know what to say to this, and this is the response that every teacher gets from everyone they meet as soon as the teaching thing comes up. It may or may not be delivered as a "joke," but it is always spoken in the same disdainful, slightly accusatory tone of voice. It always makes me feel like I need to either a) apologize for my offending holidays or b) offer justification as to why teachers really do earn their vacation time. Up until recently, I did neither - just stared at my shoes and shuffled my feet apologetically, and maybe murmured something about all of the evening, weekend and yes, even summer commitments that teachers have.

Because here's the thing; it is nice. It's awesome. Teachers do get better vacations than pretty much anybody else - summer vacation, Christmas vacation, March break. We know this, and it's easy to feel guilty about it when a sensitive individual on an elevator focuses on the perks of the job rather than the monumental work involved. (Note: I wonder, what Mr. Elevator would say if he were introduced to a lawyer? Let me guess ... "So you're rich. Huh. Must be nice." Hmmmmm ... somehow I don't think so.)

But no more! I refuse to feel guilty about my summer vacation anymore, because I have EARNED it and I'll tell you how. Let's just assume that we all agree on the easy stuff here, shall we? The lesson planning, the marking, the coaching, the theatre club, the dance supervision, the lunch duties, the staff meetings and the parent/teacher interviews - yep, they all take lots of extra time above and beyond the normal workday. But it's another, lesser acknowledged reality that can take its toll on a teacher. I am speaking of the relative lack of anonymity, and the constant awareness that everything you do will be scrutinized by a larger community. This is true of your classes, your marking, your material (and of course, it SHOULD be) but it extends further than that. For example, whenever I am in a bar I am always worried that I will run into an underage student that has been able to sneak in. What are my responsibilities at that point? My night out at a bar shouldn't have anything to do with my job, but it's within the realm of possibility that it could, and that's unnerving.

A teacher's website or online blog can be a professional nightmare. Earlier this year, the head of a private day school in Toronto resigned after an anonymous email (I really have to wonder here WHY the email was anonymous, but I digress ... ) was circulated to the parent community which featured six of the several poems that were displayed on his website. Penned sometime between 1973 and 2003, these particular poems contained sexual and violent themes and material. His biggest mistake was arguably not actually writing the poems, but putting them on a website instead of hiding them in a place where no one would ever would ever see them, such as inside the pages of a book of poetry. As a result of the content of the poetry, questions immediately arose in the community as to whether or not he was an appropriate person to lead the school, despite the fact that he had been recruited from England for this specific position four years earlier.

Now, a few things about this. We should probably note that the guy has been writing poetry for twenty years, and only six poems were singled out as offensive (and really, they are not even very good poems.) We should also note that displaying the material on his website (now defunct) was not only dumb, but irresponsible. He knows what the Internet is after all, and he knows what a private school principal is. Finally, we should acknowledge that parents place a huge amount of trust in teachers and principals, and that they are absolutely right to be concerned about and protective of their children.

But is a writer one of the things that kids have to be protected from? One of the first things that I teach my students is that the AUTHOR is an entirely different entity than a NARRATOR or a CHARACTER (or in the case of poetry, a SPEAKER.) If we assume that the content of a literary work reveals the intention or personality of the author, then Stephen King would have to go to prison, and we should probably execute Thomas Harris, who wrote "The Silence of the Lambs." Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro would certainly have a lot to answer for in their writing if they were teachers. And Shakespeare wouldn't even be able to make it through the front doors of a school if we were to assume that he espoused the values of his characters (cannibalistic chef extraordinaire Titus Andronicus comes to mind.) You can pursue artistic interests if you are a teacher - but you'd better be careful that your art is appropriate and palatable and that it is not easily accessible ... and a pen name may be in order.

Being a teacher impacts your entire life, and once you have the enormous responsibility of educating and caring for children, your whole public persona needs to be evaluated and perhaps reconsidered. You agree to carry your professional responsibilities into your personal life to some degree, and you accept the fact that you are held to a higher moral standard than people in most other professions. I'm not saying that this is wrong - far from it. I'm just saying that THAT'S one of the ways that you earn your two months of summer vacation.

In the end, these consessions are worth it for me because I LOVE teaching. Love it, love it, love it. I love summer vacation too - that's part of the package. And, for all of you people who lurk in elevators and sneer resentfully at my vacation time, buck up! There's no need for jealousy! YOU TOO can have two months off a year! Just follow these six easy steps, and eight weeks of bliss will be yours:

1.) Quit your job.
2.) Go to teachers' college.
3.) Graduate.
4.) Acquire a teaching job.
5.) Spend every day with kids who are not yours. If you're a high school teacher like I am, that could translate easily to 75-100 different kids during 3 or 4 different periods in a day. Spend your weekends planning things you'll say to them in the next week and reading stuff that they write. Give up your lunches and do extra tutoring and coach and direct and challenge and comfort, and prepare to get barfed on during school dances/long, field-trip school bus rides.
6.) Take your summer vacation.

See? That's not so hard, is it?

A

P.S. Perhaps you should also include step 7 - establish a pen name. I may have to myself for my upcoming "Open Letter to a Jackass."