"You're Not My [expletive deleted] Teacher"

I've gotten a lot of advice about a lot of different things. I appreciated most of it, took some of it under consideration and that last little bit I pretended I never heard.

One piece of advice I received about writing this blog has something similar to this sentence:

"Maybe you should avoid swearing so you can be taken a bit more professionally."

I considered that and decided that I need to use whatever language necessary to tell my story, these kids' stories and the big story. Sometimes that language is inappropriate for most people. Trust me I don't like reporting some things I overhear and I do my best to be as creative and inventive with my own language to avoid swearing.

However this is something I overheard one urban youth tell another urban youth today:

"Fuck bitch, I fuckin know you ain't fucking with my motherfucking pencil and shit. You fuckin break my fuckin pencil and I'll fuck your shit up. Shit bitch, what the fuck you think you fucking with me for?"

Ironically, I overheard this in my language arts class.

"Sometimes It's Hard"

Sometimes when you show up to a school you don't have lesson plans.
Sometimes when you show up to a school they don't even have a room or a class for you so you end up doing lunch duty for two and a half hours.
Sometimes when a student doesn't finish his apple, you get to have a snack.

The only thing that's been persistent in the last six months (holy fuck... six months?) have been the question marks I see looming around every corner. There is something that's generally disconcerting about relying on substituting and working at a bar with about 200 other people for my livelihood. At any moment I feel like I can be replaced, but the crazy thing about it is the more I do these things, the more I feel like I'm irreplaceable.

Which makes it that much more disheartening when I'm reminded how easily replaced I can be.

Sometimes you show up and the clerk stares at you and asks "What are you doing here?"

"But You're a Teacher"

Stereotypes exist for almost every profession. If an accountant can't figure out what to tip when you're out at a restaurant, someone is mandated to make a joke about it. If a truck driver gets lost someone it's required that someone compare them to a GPS. If a chef can't make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then they're probably not a chef and I don't know how you ever believed their lies.

At my second job I'm known to a few people as "The Teacherman." As in, when they need my attention they'll say "Hey teacherman can you get me two cokes?" or "Hey teacherman, where the hell have you been?" or, my favorite, "Hey teacherman, I thought you were a teacher." The stereotype that comes with being a teacher is that I need to know how to do everything. If I can't figure out what to tip I'm asked, "I guess you don't teach math then do you?" If I don't know directions to our destination I get "You're responsible for teaching people geography, no wonder kids don't know anything." If I can't make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich someone pops out of nowhere to tell me that our education system is antiquated and based on old ideals that are impossible to keep anymore. Furthermore he explains the issues of standardized testing and how it's impossible to evaluate students on such a massive scale and that the lack of data or inaccuracy of data might be a problem in and of itself. After that I politefully ask him to leave kitchen and never come back.

It's hard keeping up with a stereotype and what follows after the jump are situations I've found myself in where someone told me "but you're a teacher..."

"We Tell Them Right Where the Door Is"

Going through my past few days trying to drum up some sort of entertaining or enlightening story I keep coming back to my interview with Preston and a lot of the different things that could be said about that particular institution. It's different than anywhere I've been before. The building itself holds three unique organizations - for lack of a better term. One is an accredited high school, that's where I went last week. The other two train their students in completely different ways. The first is a shipping and receiving center where students will learn the ins and outs of working in a setting like a FedEx or a UPS. The second is a vocational school that teaches its students how to work on cars or become a carpenter.

Preston is a center for dropouts.

To get awful-wedding-speech on this post: A dropout is defined as someone who has abandoned a course of study or who has rejected conventional society to pursue an alternative lifestyle. This is a problem in Chicago. In my short experience I've spoken to several students who were not where they were "supposed" to be. I taught a 19 year old in a junior classroom. I've talked to academic seniors taking a freshman math class. The examples are many and I've been in the field for less than a year officially.

What follows is not the solution, but an examination of the problem.

"That's How A Lot of Us Got Hired"

I'm on my way home from school before I'm able to return a phone call. It's strange how used to receiving phone calls from numbers I don't recognize I've become. I guess all I can say is that it comes with the territory but between texts from administrators asking if I'm available, messages from schools telling me they need me, and emails from teachers letting me know when they need me to cover them I feel like a drug dealer some time. But my drug is knowledge.

Okay... It was bad. We'll move on.

So I see a call from a random number and assume that it's a teacher who knows she's "going to be sick" tomorrow because she's got a stack of papers to grade. I call the number back and had the most confusing conversation ever.

"Preston School."
"Hi! I received a call from this number"
"Okay, you have a student at our school correct?"
"Umm... No."
"Are you trying to enroll your child?"
"I actually don't have children. I think this could be in reference to a resume I sent in."
"Let me connect you to the Assistant Principal"
*Click.... Wait*
"Preston School."
"Hi! I received a call from this number. I think it was about a resume."
"Let me connect you to the principal."
*Click... Wait*
"Preston School."
"Hi! I received a call from this number. I think was about a resume. Also IS IT THAT HARD TO SAY HELLO???"

"Shit's Different Out Here"

Things have changed.

Cue the cliche call-outs, but there's a reason it's talked about so much. Change is what drives us. We keep working to get better because we truly believe that we can.

It's been exactly 160 days since the last time I've posted here. I think I need to start by defending a few things. First off, I stopped writing in this because I got busy, and lazy, and tired, and a lot of things, but the point is I stopped and I thought it was a good idea. It seemed like a good idea because every time I tried to start again things didn't seem the same. I seemed cruel.

I realized a lot of things between September and now. I grew as a teacher, a student, and a person. To beat a dead horse as they say: things have changed. Some things that might have been funny were now sad. Some things that gave me a lot of trouble, now were completed with ease. Some things that annoyed me before bother the living hell out of me now.

What follows is a list of vignettes from the last 160 days - some a sentence long, some quite longer - that illustrate this change.

"We Playin the Girl Game"

August 28th

Current Place of "Residence" The Belden Stratford.
Subbed? Yes.
Grades Taught A myriad again, this time with no seventh grade.
Subjects Manning down my computer room like it's no one's business.
Times I wanted to say "fuck" Once or Twice, but that's a normal day at work, right?
How well did I teach? After despising myself for writing that sentence for so many blog posts now I've finally decided it's time to embrace the verbage of what I do instead of the nounage of who I am. Either way, I sat in a computer room and made sure no one died. Self report? At least a 9.5.

Another day, the same computer room. I feel bad because the more I have control over my space and my classes, the less interesting my posts become. I really am not complaining, because it's nice to have a steady income and a familiar environment.  As the days go by I am starting to recognize more of the students and they all know me. It's a nice feeling.

When running the computer lab I get some time to myself and I really just supervise them and make sure they don't play the wrong type of game. It's an interesting distinction between the "right" games and the "wrong" games. While there are certain sites that I force my students to go on that have educational value, some of them are only based in an educational world. Yes it's good that you are using different types of bugs to fly through the floating circles, but do you even know why they fly differently? Do you even care?

Then there's the game where they race cheetahs, which I'd love to criticize but then I imagine actually watching cheetah racing and I think that it would be the best, though least humane, sport ever. Actually, if dogs can race couldn't cheetahs race too? Dogs and Horses have a tight grip on the circle tracks, maybe we do cheetah drag races.