Mississippi Teacher Corps. 'Nuff said.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

World of War

This has been the best week of the school year for me. It all changed when I decided to stop playing World of Warcraft. I was fooling myself to think I could somehow indulge my computer games addiction while balancing it against the demands of my profession, etc. Playing that stupid game every available and unavailable hour of the day was sapping all my energy and perpetuating my depression. Computer games are my only addiction, I tell you. Always has been that way for me. Now that I have deleted WoW from my hard drive (and stopped taking Lexapro), I have started to catch up on sleep, my energy levels have returned to normal, and my outlook has improved quite a bit. I have been productive during my planning period, grading papers and whatnot, for the first time in quite a while. I still have a long way to go to catch up to where I should be in various responsibilities, but at least I am now moving in the right direction.

As the year marches along, people occasionally ask about my plans for next year. As it stands, three alternatives stand out in my mind:

  1. Teach in New York City. I love cities. I love subways and skyscrapers and urban grit, and ever since adolescence, I have felt drawn to the Big Apple as our biggest, most important, most cosmopolitan city. I want to live there for at least a few years before I die. It would also be a good way to finish off my student loans by teaching in critical needs schools for three more years. It could be a public or charter school.
  2. Teach in an international school, anywhere in the world, from Cairo to Bangkok to São Paolo. I refer of course to those private schools that typically cater to the children of diplomats and the like in capitals and other important world cities. I think it would be a blast! I would meet more of my favorite kind of people: world travelers. I would travel and see more of the world. I would probably even become a better teacher and at least get a different perspective teaching children of more educated parents, in a well-run, ambitious school.
  3. Join the Marines. Crazy as it sounds, I am still thinking seriously about the military. I am something of a moderate pacifist, at this point. I opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, but recently I have come around to believe that, now that we got ourselves in there and overthrew the previous government, we have a responsibility to leave it in peace, not in chaos. What draws me is the danger, the adventure, the challenge (completely different in many ways from teaching), and the moral ambiguity of it. The way I justify it is this: The war is happening, with or without me. People are going to be holding those M-16’s in their hands, with or without me. Might as well be me. I think I have a slightly more developed sense of moral conscience than the average G.I. Joe. I might have something important to say at the end of it all, and I have the writing skills, as well as the conscience and the passion to do so. So it might as well be me.

Teacher Corps has been very supportive of me as I have struggled through my recent depression. I am grateful to Dr. Mullins and Ben Guest for taking an interest and helping arrange for me to seek treatment. Even Dr. McConnell sent me an encouraging note. I commend them for this.

That said, I take issue with Teacher Corps. We recently lost one of our best teachers. Much as I teased her for being “perfect,” the fact is she was not. None of us are. But as a pure classroom teacher, you will find none better, anywhere, ever. I respect her as a friend and a colleague. Now she is lost to the teaching profession forever. Anyone who questions her decision to leave, I say, you go and become the best teacher in Teacher Corps, then get put on an “improvement plan” (in truth a preliminary step toward firing lazy, incompetent teachers) for completely scandalous reasons, then let’s see how you feel about your job! It burns me that some of my colleagues feel judgmental toward her leaving. It also burns me that Teacher Corps as an organization is apparently doing nothing to support our teachers who are going through state evaluations. This became abundantly obvious when Ben was asked last Saturday if there is anything we should know if, say for instance, the state were coming to take over our school. He had no effing idea! The Teacher Corps administration has left some good teachers to the wolves, and they bear some share of the responsibility if things go badly. In my opinion, losing one of our best teachers to the profession entirely is a far greater harm and a greater tragedy than the loss to a few students when she picks up and leaves in the middle of the year. Teacher Corps should have been supporting her and her colleagues from day one, before it ever came to any of this. Our professor is just a phone call away from the state superintendent, for crying out loud! How does this happen? You should do your homework and support your teachers, Teacher Corps—even if they are too proud to ask—just like you supported me. Not that Teacher Corps necessarily could have prevented this. Ultimately, it was always her decision to leave. But it is also clear that the Teacher Corps administration did nothing to help and likely only made the experience more miserable for her once she decided it was time to go. And that, to me, is a damn, damn shame!

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