February 10, 2012
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Next Episode
Teach: Tony Danza is Canceled/Ended
The Daily News1 It’s Frideeeeeee!!!!
2 What a week.
3 Lotsa good came out of this week. My personal history will mark this as a life-changing week.
4 The story of the lockdown seems tame, since nobody really is that much interested in somebody else’s life.
6 Human nature. Happens to everybody. We are stuck in these bodies, and with these lives, and nobody sees your life from your perspective, no matter how much they think they do.
7 If you go on Facebook, for example, you probably take a look at my “status” or whatever the thing is called, and skip through it quickly with the thought, “Ah, he’s talking about the lockdown.” Scroll.
8 It’s cool.
9 Interestingly, that was a day I truly thought I was targeted. Sometimes we embellish our stuff just to be drama queens. I’ve certainly been guilty of that, especially in my younger years.
10 It’s sort of like the boy who cries wolf. You throw your little life thingys out there each day, and you get nods and “I know, I knows” all the time.
11 Know why?
12 Because EVERONE is going through the same exact daily struggles. There is a courtesy factor that is wonderful in people.
13 Yet we still have to view the world from our own eyes, and from our own daily sruggles.
14 Sometimes, when our worlds get insane, we learn things. Two weeks ago I thought I was going to die. I thought a student had snapped, and that he wanted to shoot me, and then to shoot up the school.
15 I had a threatening note. I barricaded my room. The administration had said that we were in a full lockdown. I notified the office that I had been threatened. Within five minutes, the full lockdown was in place. Police. Helicopters. Reporters.
16 I wrote my family and told them that I loved them.
16 I fully protected my students. I was oddly more worried about them and my family than I was about being shot.
17 It took two days before I got the straight story on what went down at our school.
18 That day changed my life.
19 I suddenly decided that I had to change my daily routine, which was teaching with all my power each day, grading papers and planning on weekends, and having absolutely zero time for anything else.
20 Since that time I signed up for the Red Cross Talent show, became active in the site union, practiced new guitar tricks, went on a healthy diet, hopped on board our current drama production of Grease, and most important, made time for my Dad.
21 I think it’s high time.
22 Moving on, Part the First: Somehow, the DN dodged all those bullets.
23 The DN has traditionally been targeted to former staff and students, particularly my former students who had gone through performances, talent shows, band concerts, choir concerts, and all the rest.
24 This past year, I brought in family and friends. I never figured they would care about my life as a teacher, because it’s exactly the same as anyone’s life as anything.
25 It’s fun to know that people sometimes are interested in how different professionals get on in life. I always thought it would be interesting to hear how a police officer’s daily routine goes down.
26 I’ll bet it’s nothing like what they portray on television.
27 I have never seen a television show or movie that ever got teaching down. Well, maybe the 1984 classic Teachers, starring Nick Nolte as a burnt out teacher. While obviously quite dated, that film is truer to the real deal than any other thing I’ve seen.
28 The book Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman is another, but it is from the point of view of a beginning teacher.
29 To this day,Teachers remains the closest portrayal of how it truly is.
30 A number of teachers read the DN. I’d be interested in their insight as to what the best movie or book about day-to-day teaching is.
31 For me, it’s constant working, planning, and caring about lessons, and about making things happen in the classroom.
31 It’s also about outside demands that pull us in every direction, and that take us away from our real work. It’s about meetings, accountability, supervision, and ridiculous tasks with few resources. It’s now also about job worry.
32 The thing is, I’m pretty sure that nearly everything that happens in the teaching profession happens in every job. We have all been told in no uncertain terms that we are all expendable.
33 Moving on, Part Two: I watch stuff like Glee, and Teach Tony Danza thing that was on, and neither really gets it. Glee catches the essence of performing arts, but suffers from small class sizes, teachers who seem to have only thirty students, and eight-million dollar budgets for shows, which they could choreograph in five minutes and master in ten seconds.
34 As for Danza, the irony of an actor being a teacher is striking. He even declared himself “a schmo who thinks he’s a teacher.”I won’t even dignify that one with a comment.
35 It’s an interesting world, because the media has a certain idea as to what a teacher does. We as teachers sometimes have to play those roles. The one thing that is always left out of film and television shows about teachers it that we have close to a hundred-fifty students each year, and that number is climbing.
36 So when Danza tells the students that the essays they turned in weren’t good, the missing scene was his going through a hundred of them and getting a neck ache.
37 Television teachers have time to care about each and every of their fifteen students. I wish I could have that gig.
38 Parents sometimes think that we have that sort of time, that we see their children with as much depth as do they.
39 Some think we should spend an extra hour a day helping their child.
40 There’s nothing I would rather do.
41 But what happens to the other hundred-forty nine? Because in that hour, I could have graded maybe six essays.
42 The world wants to think that teachers can care about their individual students, and honestly, many of us try.
43 Reality says it’s impossible. Reality says the numbers are too great.
44 And yet, I see teachers caring about individual students all the time. I see two counselors at our school of over 2,500 (I mistakenly thought we had hit 2,700 earlier this year, but what’s a couple of hundred among friends?) try like mad to make every single student feel that they are cared for and important. They do this with grace, and with rolled eyes.They are my heroes.
45 I do the magazines and the fun things in class. When I read my students’ autobios, I feel that I’m sitting in a lawn chair chatting with them. I get to know them that way. I then talk to them about soccer, about baking, about skateboarding, about acting, and about anything that is important to them.
46 I also take my time when I grade their papers because I actually read what they have written. It takes forever, but each time a student writes something about their lives or their interests, I take notice.
47 All of us do. But it isn’t in a class of fifteen, a class that evidently on television episodes, follows one teacher for eight or nine years.
48 What television really needs is a program that ficticiously follows the life of a teacher, with the students coming and going in four years, instead of staying in high school for eight.
49 Interestingly though, a good teacher does get to know as many of the hundred-fifty as possible. We also need each student to think that he or she is special.
50 They all are.
51 I gottago. I’m ditching school today to go up and see my Dad.
52 When the sub service asked me my reason for absence, I said “illness”.
53 Truer words, truer words. This cough just won’t go away. It needs rest.
54 So I’m out. Have a great Frideeeeeee!
55 Peace.
~H~
