Postcards from a Square State (all NF)

  March 2020 to December 2021. Not a full school year, but two broken years.

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  #1

          I am in a district that had made the following Covid choice: to stay remote until 14 October; which changed last week and is now 23 October, still remote but now we are to teach from an empty building. The daily schedule was eviscerated and replaced by 20 day sessions. This means I teach an entire semester in 20 days, online, in three hour blocks. Do you need a minute to wrap your head around that? Go ahead, take a moment for yourself. This is high school. I am to teach high school theatre, online, for three hours. Then take a two hour break, and teach the next class for three hours for twenty days. Then I won’t see either of those classes again until January. I am teaching an entire semester in 20 days.The district is set to go hybrid beginning the 20th, but our building is holding back electives and keeping them remote. I've started calling us "ejectives", based on a text autocorrect, because we are ejectable. At any time, you can just punt an elective out of the curriculum, nobody cares: Ejectives.

        Teaching theatre remotely from an empty stage is like sitting on a grave. And sitting on a grave evokes Hamlet. The inability to act. The certainty of uncertainty. His proclivity to over-thinking is what brought him down. I'm watching school districts spin and spit and suffer the slings and arrows of uncertainty. The entirety of Hamlet, audiences are flummoxed as to why he doesn't just kill Claudius already. His mind will not allow it. There are too many obstacles and outcomes to perceive and plunder and contemplate. Of course, pretending to be crazy was a great idea, ask Ophelia how that worked out. That's the only thing the guy could decide on: acting crazy. So he acted crazy and spun inside his own head until he sent his friends to their deaths. stabbed the old man, caused a suicide and eventually, finally, five acts later killed Claudius. As we all know from the CliffsNotes we read in college and the Mel Gibson movie we sort of watched, Hamlet does say he will put on an "antic disposition", but the meter is broken, indicating a man with a broken mind; yet he does make complete sense when he answers "Where is Polonius?" with "At dinner...not where he eats, but where he is eaten." Clearly not a stable guy, but possibly driven to instability by the insane circumstances surrounding him, and the power hungry Claudius. and the pending invasion by Fortinbras. and the angry Laertes, and by the way Ophelia's dead and the gravedigger is making sense...

     Teaching theatre remotely from an empty stage is like sitting on a grave. The faces in Brady Bunch boxes are just ghosts, floating in and out from home as they feel engaged or not, popping from camera to avatar. They are Yorick, alas, from a previous life, returning to remind me that at one time there was playing on this stage. I blast musicals and sing at the top of my lungs and the bottom of my belt to no one, attempting to awaken the theatre ghosts, hoping they'll keep me company. Nobody even comes to see if I'm here. Or alive. Nothing happens, nobody comes. I look at other districts, or even buildings in my own district, and they are functioning in performing arts. It's not great, they stand in marked boxes ten feet apart on stage and there are no theatre games that engage or acting exercises that push students to proclaim "Fuck you, Stanislavsky!", nothing that can be experienced to light a fire of passion, but they're there, at least they're present. I envy them. Once a week I travel to another district, south, and teach in person at a performing arts academy that is still open and functioning and doing shows, and I wonder just how crazy I'd be if I didn't have that. I think we're the only dark district. I hear there are other schools where they're managing to rehearse and hold classes. Many have ceased reporting their Covid positive cases, and up north a district is preparing to open full on in person on the 20th.They've openly said that if you want to know their Covid cases, call the district, they won't be sharing that information. 

   I'd be fine doing all of this remotely if the student population was adequately prepared for college level history and lit theatre, but they are not. Three of my classes are freshmen. The others are victims of a shattered department that has seen more loss than should be allowed a high school. But I'm doing it, and those who stay are learning. 

    How is making me teach remotely from the building beneficial to my students? Hello?

    I'm waiting.

    As long as we've stopped here, I'm switching from Elizabethan theatre to Absurdism.

    It isn't. It makes no difference if I teach from home or school or the moon, it makes no difference to the students. Shall we talk about the difference it's making to my mental health?

   Teaching theatre remotely from an empty sage is like sitting on a grave.

   The ghost of Ophelia appears beside me, she's brought a ficus. She slaps it on the stage between us and says "Like my tree?" She begins a monologue about the difficulty of reinventing yourself when what you were told you were is no longer relevant or realistic. She takes a moment to check in with me, as I'm clearly only half listening, and says "Because I was supposed to marry Hamlet, you get me? I was also female in a patriarchal society which rendered me to the status of chattel. Or property. Carrot?" She offers me a turnip and continues, as I phase her out. First her voice, then her physical being die out-she died twice, like Buffy-and I sit on the empty stage again...

  My older colleagues are retiring. My young colleagues are looking to get out of education altogether. I have no such options, I have to stay at least five more years to make retirement even relevant, and I am too old to be of use to anyone else. Ageism is real. I am trapped on an empty stage, alone. Where'd that ficus go? I walk a circle and listen to the same song on repeat. Polonius tries to emerge, but his will is not strong enough through age and death and five hundred years and my own disinterest in hearing him talk any more, even if we are trapped and I am alone. If he says "To thine own self be true" I may just lose it.

    I've never felt so old, so useless, so used up. So used. Who Cares? 

    Nobody Cares.

    Nothing happens, nobody comes. The rest is silence.

     And so, I sit in the graveyard and play music from a dead era and reimagine theatre education for the Brady Bunch cubes. 

    I'm waiting.

     Scene

#2 December 2020

    Admittedly, I have been remiss in recording the hell of the last year. This is in part due to the plethora of memes flooding social media, and many blogs that are much more thoughtful than mine, as well as journalists who are trained to tell stories. I felt like my voice was just adding to the shouting.

    We do not live in a civil society any more. We seem to believe that shouting is the only way to be heard, but when everyone does it, the system overloads. Not everyone can talk at once on a Google or Zoom meet, it gets overwhelmed and nobody is heard. In theatre, you must mute your mike unless you are speaking or singing, because you interfere with the central message of the performance. It's not your turn to talk, so your mike is muted.

    Nobody seems to know that these days. Nobody Cares. Just yell. It's fine.

   Teachers were heroes for about ten minutes in May of 2020 when it became clear nobody was going back to their buildings. Parents understood they had to parent and teach, with the help of the remote teacher---let me repeat that: no parents were being asked to homeschool their kid with no outside help. We were there, with you in the kitchen, at the dining room table, in your makeshift classroom/ playroom. We were working. At that time, it seemed that was understood: teaching from home is still teaching, we're still working. 

    When August rolled around and districts began to struggle with how to safely open schools with no guidelines, parents began to grouse. "I have to go to work, so should you, you lazy ass teacher."

   First, I am working. Thanks.

   Second, I am sorry that you have to leave your house to go to work, that is not my fault. I did not make that decision for your company.

  My "company" told me I have to stay home and teach from home. I did not make that choice.

  So step off, please. 

  I have not worked so hard since my first year teaching, and I'm 18 years in. I had to reinvent everything I do on a dime for a content area that is thrives on energy and succeeds only in person and relies on performances in person. I invite you to come spend a week doing what I do. I will happily switch jobs with you. I would love to leave the house and go to work and see other adult humans, that'd be great. Better, I'd like to see my students again in person.

    "If grocery workers have to work, so should teachers." Again, I refer you to my introductory theme and remind you that we are working. I get that you're mad, but grocery workers are the ones who should be striking because they are not paid enough to risk their lives to do their jobs. If that's your theme, please join their union and put pressure on the corporations who are forcing them to work for under minimum wage in a pandemic.

    I will not beleaguer my point with more examples, you get it. If you're mad because you have to work, then go on strike, work from home, quit your job--all suggestions that have been shouted at teachers via social media--- but stop suggesting that teachers are not working. 

    Speaking of striking, things really got ugly in Chicago, and here in Colorado, when it became clear that the districts were sending us back into our buildings with full classrooms before we were all vaccinated. Mathematically, the grocery worker comes into contact with more people than teachers do daily, but they can control how close they get to them, and limit their time with each customer. Teachers are trapped in a sealed room with 30 kids for anywhere from an hour to three hours, depending on how jacked up their Covid schedule is. Regarding  the  number of people that you choose to come into contact with---please note, grocery store clerks have plastic shields between themselves and the patrons checking out--vs forced, long term exposure in a closed,  improperly ventilated room. Both suck, but one sucks more. Guess which one?

    Got into a pissing contest there for a second. My apologies. That was unprofessional.

   Teachers have been abused for years. I knew that when I signed up. Yet, I wanted to teach kids. I wanted to teach kids in person and ignite a love of theatre. I did not sign up for this online BS. 

  I also did not start Covid 19. It's not my fault we're in a pandemic. Nor is it on me to fix the problems that ensued. I'm just trying to hold my classes and my department together long enough for everyone to get vaccinated.

   I'm exhausted. Emotionally and physically.

   Please do not yell at me, none of this is my fault.

   Teachers did not start the pandemic. Why are we expected to fix the fallout?

   But if you keep yelling at us, we're going to do as you suggest: "You don't want to go back to work, then quit."

    Best Wishes, Warmest Regards to y'all when half of the teachers leave at the end of this year. You think you have it rough remote learning from home now?

#3 CHANGE TO FIRST PERSON

  The copy room contained only two copiers for the 150 teachers in the building and one was always down. Today he walked past both copiers to the paper cutter, hauling his unearthed treasure of pink paper. He had no idea who had left it in the classroom cabinet, but it was his now.

The plan was to make the returning students write a note of gratitude daily to another teacher in the building. It was a language arts class, and any form of writing was good practice. Particularly for his freshmen, who were returning to a full classroom for the first time since the seventh grade. He had been stunned at how his classroom management techniques had been altered since returning in August. He referred to it as junior high classroom management, and his colleagues felt they had sunk even farther: elementary. Things like creating cubbies for their cell phones, policing the depositing of said phones, hall passes, monitored restrooms, writing the day’s lesson on the board and repeating it three times during the delivery. However, with the brain fog that seemed to return to the building with all teachers during Covid, he needed the repetition. The kids clearly needed it as well, however, she did not sign up to teach middle schoolers.

In fact, he did not sign up to teach language arts. 

He walked to the paper cutter and began to slice the pink 8X10 papers into four equal squares. He had had a paper cutter just like this one in the theatre for gels. But he was not a theatre teacher any more, and would not be returning to that end of the building, ever, for any reason.

Language arts wasn’t horrible. Part of his “punishment” was that he was given four sections of freshmen. The punishment was for writing a blog the principal did not care for. Because he had teacher status, he could not be fired.

But he could be reassigned.

This was not the first time he had butt heads with Her Highness. She had originally loved him as a new hire, he checked several boxes: Male, Tattooed, Gay, Young. But she had insisted on putting him on leave and fully investigating when a young female student cried sexual harassment. He literally laughed at the accusation, and yet was escorted from the building like a criminal. The union stepped up for him in a big way, and she backed off but never apologized. So he wrote a blog about the experience.

And so, long story short, all in all, to sum up, in conclusion, he was now a language arts teacher, using the paper cutter for its intended purpose.

He was mulling over how many small squares he would need for the week. There was nobody else in the copy room, which was strange, even with Covid teachers would line up to use the copiers. He figured he could slice through about half of the ream and make it through the week. He looked up briefly to visualize how many students he had in class. The brain fog was real, and to see through it he had to look up and visualize what he was trying to think about–

When he looked down, he had reached for the paper cutter from the bottom instead of the top, and realized he had cut clean through his hand. He silently looked down at the new opening in his body, a clean slice between his thumb and finger. He could see the tendons.

“That’s not good,” he said out loud, staring into his own hand.

He immediately put his hand over his head. Blood began to trickle down to his wrist as he exited the copy room.

“Hey, K—”, his colleague Colleen began as he passed. “What the hell?”

“Fifteen years around power tools, saws and electricity with no accidents. Ten minutes as a lang arts teacher and I’ve sliced my hand open,” he smiled.

“Let me walk you down to Katie.”

He was in no position to argue. He realized walking alone with his bloody hand held aloft was not going to go well should a student encounter him. The halls were empty, it was a quiet fourth period. He was grateful for the company. Things were fogging up again. He and Colleen had shared several conversations about the fog, and how everyone was handling it.

They entered the front office, and Colleen knocked on the nurse’s door. Katie emerged, smiling as always, then looked at the injury and immediately fell into triage mode.

He stood there, allowing the nurse to treat him and his colleague to volunteer to drive him to the hospital, trying to clear the fog in his brain. What, exactly, had happened? He could not remember. He looked at Colleen, who read his face.

“You cut your hand on the paper cutter. I’m going to take you to the hospital.”

He couldn’t hear Colleen, but was reading her lips. There was a high buzzing sound in his ears. He blinked, then swallowed, then looked across the cubicle at the principal, who was standing, mouth agape, watching the small scene unfold.

“I blame you,” he said as clearly as he could. Then he laughed. He looked at Colleen and said “I’m not OK.”

“None of us are,” she replied. “You’ve just got a nice flair for the dramatic. The rest of us keep it to ourselves.”

As Katie wrapped his hand, he said “I can drive myself. I’m good. I’ll drive left handed, he paused, then announced "I am not left handed!” in his best Inigo Montoya voice.

Katie looked at Colleen and told her to drive to the ER, and text when they arrived.  Colleen bundled her friend out the front door and into her passenger seat without any further conversation. The hospital was a straight shot from the school, but Colleen immediately began to drive home. Her injured colleague pointed it out at the second turn, and they both fell silent. There was no more conversation.

None was needed.

#

A friend of mine asked why I wasn’t doing grocery delivery, or at least online order and pick up and I just stared at her. I am not doing it because I didn’t know it was a thing. I tried it today. There are no delivery windows open today or tomorrow, nor is there a pick up window available. So. I guess I’m not doing grocery delivery or online pickup. Still. 

I have used the Ferlinghetti "I Am Waiting' example in classes for years. The beauty is that you can rewrite it every few months, and it has a different tone. I wrote one in December of 2020, and this one was written in May of 2021. I performed it on the stage in front of about 15 audience members and a live feed. It is the first performance I have done “live” in years, and the evening was the first real 'Live' performance the high school stage has hosted in 14 months.

         I Am Waiting  with all of my love and apologies to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Samuel Beckett.

12 MAY 2021

I am waiting for art and theatre and poetry to be revered

I am waiting for students to turn on their cameras

I am waiting for my pay to match my passion.

I am waiting for Broadway to open her eyes and yawn and ask what's been going on

I am waiting for the dog to self wash so he does not smell like a Frito

I am waiting for an apology

I am waiting for karma

I am waiting for a revolution of kindness

I am waiting for Christ to come down from his bare tree and end this absurdist cycle with a tip of his bowler and a magic turnip

I am waiting for Beckett and Ferlinghetti to smite me for invoking their genius in my silly poem.

I am waiting to follow Keanu and Dolly to the promised land

I am waiting to win a new coastal home from HGTV!

I am waiting for the revolution of kindness

I am waiting for my internet to reconnect

 I am waiting for Comcast to care that my internet won’t reconnect

I am waiting for the cats to get jobs and contribute to the household and I am waiting for my obsession with Schitt's Creek to cease

I am waiting for laughter.

I am waiting for Hamlet to kill Claudius already

And I am waiting for weight loss to be easy.

I am waiting for someone to care

I am waiting for the victory of decency

I am waiting to move forward, to stop hovering like hurricane Harvey over Houston

I am still waiting for students to turn on their cameras

I am waiting to feel mentally stable

I am waiting for kindness

I am waiting for my hair to grow out

I am waiting for a haircut

I am waiting to be discovered or uncovered or recovered---

I am waiting to recover.

I am waiting for my groceries

I am waiting in the drive through because everybody quit will you please pay these people a living wage already, I’m Waiting.

I am waiting for the tribes to finally rise up and reclaim what is rightfully theirs and for Karen to stand down and relinquish what is not hers.

I am waiting for my favorite ancient shirt to disintegrate and fall off of my body as a metaphor

I am waiting for the brain fog to clear or the clear fog to brain and I can’t remember anybody’s name I am waiting to see clearly

And now you’re waiting for me to remember your name.

Thank you for your kindness.

You may not wish to wait.

 

       #8

    Mine is not a long story. No moment from my day, or details about my personality.

    I simply burned out.

    I got tired of working harder than the students, getting no support from admin and being asked to work additional duties, go to meetings, blah blah blah, etc. The latest sub shortage put me over. I now sub during my planning periods, which is not OK. 

    That does not even include almost two years now of The Covid Debacle.

    I have colleagues in other districts who tell me that parents are sending their kids to school coughing and sneezing, and then refusing to answer the phone when the nurse calls home. I have two friends who have been sick as hell with Covid that they caught at school. We know they caught it at school, because they do not go anywhere else. Their spouses work from home, their children chose remote and they order their groceries for delivery. So…ya, we know they got it at school.

    I finished my Masters Degree. I think I may leave teaching altogether. Even at the college level, there is a new element of apathy I am not interested in combating.

    I am quitting because I no longer wish to  struggle to teach those who've no interest in learning. From my perspective, the quality of student in every district has been on the decline since early 2002. It began with a surface apathy, and then mutated into a combination of student apathy and parental coddling of their child coupled with the need to control their child's present and future. Somehow teachers got elbowed out, shoved to the sidelines. Until it's time for us to be evaluated, that is. Then it’s all Our Fault that there is an achievement gap. We are not doing enough tap dancing to keep these kids engaged—to keep these now traumatized kids engaged. They’ve checked out. Parents seem to know how to run a school, based on the social media threads I read. OK.

    If these kids and parents want control, give it to them. I'm out.

#9

    Today I was waiting in the center classroom for the students to return from specials. I received a phone call from security that one of our paras was being taken to the hospital. She has been with us only a few months. When I went downstairs, I got the following story:

            The Para was accompanying the student to his art class. The student became dysregulated by a passing general education student who bumped into him, then called him a "fucking retard", and moved on. The special education student turned to the Para and physically picked her up off of the ground and smashed her into the wall twice. She crumpled unconscious onto the floor, and the student then entered the art room. When asked where his Para was, he shrugged.

     I have been a special education teacher for only two years, and one of them  was in remote/hybrid learning.

    While I have been bitten and punched, I have never been knocked out or had furniture thrown at me.

    When I did my student teaching, my mentor teacher told me she had a chair smashed across her back a few years ago in a different building, and she spent the rest of the year recovering from a broken back. Other teachers have stories of furniture thrown, being hit accidentally by students who do not understand what they are doing and being bitten. They all stayed in the profession. I've heard all the stories, and yet I kept going.

  The injured Para is nineteen years old. She makes $15 an hour and my first thought was that I should be the one to call her mother...

    I watched them put her into the ambulance, and was told I had to escort the student back to the center classroom. I escorted the student, who had just smashed another human being, back to our center classroom. He behaved as if nothing had happened. He did not ask where his Para was.

    And then I sat down at my computer and wrote my letter of resignation.

I had to take technical theatre online last year. It was wack, but I had fun, mostly ‘cause I did the stuff. We made a set design out of popsicle sticks, did light stuff with action figures and a flashlight, and a radio play that we had to create sound effects for. They’re called ‘practical’ sound effects though, we couldn’t use like haunted sound recordings or music. Like I had to do lightning, so I used a water bottle that I filled only a little bit, and twisted it by the Google Meet microphone. It was cool, most of the time I was digging through stuff in closets looking for things that could be something else. I made a Greek mask out of a piece of cardboard box I found in the garage. I still have it in my room, it’s dope. It’s Oedipus, so it has a crown on it I made from construction paper. The thing was that not everybody participated, which I know disappointed my teacher. Some kids just logged on and never even turned on their camera. So when we did the radio play, the seven of us that always did stuff had to read more than one part. It was still fun, though. I signed up for a theatre class for this year because of it. It’s been really cool to actually build things on stage now.

#10 A Scene for live or radio play. Lock Down:North

The setting is an urban high school, intended to be anywhere. The names of the high schools mentioned at the end were events that were reported nationwide.

   The characters are three teachers in the lang arts department office and the voice of the principal. Ages are not really too relevant, but FRESHMAN is younger. Sexual identity is also irrelevant, even though statistically we have more female than male teachers. They do not have names for a reason, they are identified by what they teach, furthering the thesis that this could happen anywhere.

    CHARACTERS

    SHAKESPEARE Language Arts Department chair. Near retirement, but likes teaching in a "diverse" school and thrives on the aggravation it begets. They do not teach a Shakespeare class, but teach Shakespeare in all of their classes, just because they want to. 

    SPEECH AND DEBATE New to the building last year during Covid, has yet to experience the "behavior challenges" that plague most city schools. Spend 15 Years at a well known school  after it reopened, left for a diverse school environment after students brought bees into the classroom to be "funny". One of the students had a deadly allergy, was not stung, but admin did nothing to reprimand the student who brought live bees into a high school. After 15 years of tolerating white entitlement, this incident was the final breaking point for this teacher, who opted out of the district.

  FRESHMAN COMP AND LIT Graduated in December of 2020 with their teaching credentials. They  spent the spring of '21 subbing in this building before getting hired in March of 2020 for the fall of 21. This person is not white. They almost dropped out of the education program twice due to anxiety issues, and changed content majors three times, resulting in a double major in Lit and History with a minor in Psychology, which resulted in more classes and a "late" graduation date. They have come to realize they love learning, but are not sure about teaching. 

        PRINCIPAL'S VOICE This principal has just been through a year of Covid Hell and was excited to have students return when they had to immediately call a lockdown protocol. They may sound exasperated, they may sound neutral, but they are not breathless or panicky. They are not new at this. 

    SCENE opening

      Three educators are seated in an office, with two desks, a couch, a microwave, a refrigerator. This was a place that looked more lived in before Covid, but has been unpacked, sanitized and barely moved back into by August of 2021.

    ( SQ Principal's voice: " We are implementing a lockdown protocol, please see the charts in your classrooms to familiarize yourselves with Code Orange. If you are already in a classroom, Please remain there. Students, if you are in the hall, please move quickly to a classroom nearby. If you are upstairs, please go to the cafeteria. Teachers, if you are in the halls, please assist students who need direction. This is a code orange. If you have an exterior window please pull your blinds. If you are in your classroom, please check the hall for students before locking your door. I'll be back on with an update later. Be safe.

                                                            S&D

              Really? (looks at Freshman) on your first day?  It's 7 am, school hasn't even started yet. Are there kids in the building?

                                                   

 SHAKESPEARE

                    Swimmers, mostly. Some newspaper and yearbook kids. Us. 

                                                        FRESHMAN

                                                Does this happen a lot?

                                                    SHEAKESPEARE

                                                      What's today?

                                                            S&D

                                                         Tuesday.

                                                   SHAKESPEARE

 Somebody's not paying attention, today is not Bring Your Gun To School Day, that's Thursday. Tuesday is Shank a Friend. (They laugh). Freshman, your question requires more information. What do you mean by "A Lot?"

                                                    FRESHMAN

                                                        What?

                                                 SHAKESPEARE

    How frequently is "a lot" in your mind? Once a week? Twice a day?  

                                                        FRESHMAN

                                I don't know...once a week? is that a lot?

                                                SHAKESPEARE

            That's cute. Once a week is normal. A lot would be three or four times a day. (pause) I'm mostly kidding. These kids bring guns every day, they just don't always get caught.

                                                        S&D 

    We had drills in my previous building. The only time it was 'real'-well, after the one incident- was if someone robbed the bank on the corner, or a kid at the Alt School took a gun from home and was walking to school with it.

                                                    SHAKESPEARE

   We usually don't go on lockdown. The kids put the guns in their pants with their shirt open, security sees them before they get to the door. One kid shoved his uncle's gun so far down his pants, he tripped on it coming out of his pant leg while walking across the parking lot. Hilarious.

                                                    FRESHMAN

                                        What district were you in?

                                                        S&D 

      White Entitlement In The Suburbs. Our kids opened fire without any warning. 

                                                SHAKESPEARE

  You're safer here, nobody actually uses their gun. They bring it to show their friends.

                                                FRESHMAN

   We had lockdown drill training in the district I did my student teaching. They never had a real lockdown, they said, but they did drills twice a semester.

                                                    S&D 

      During Covid? Are you kidding me?

                                                FRESHMAN

                                            No, no I am not.

                                                    S&D

                Shakespeare, do I need to actually walk over to my room to let kids in?

                                                SHAKESPEARE

    No, your door is locked. Even if a kid was here, they know that and wouldn't try to get in. The ones who are here will go to counseling and clog up the lobby there. They never go to the cafeteria, I don't know why they always tell them to do that. They never go. The performing arts kids all go to the theatre, nobody actually goes where they're told. If we had a real emergency it'd be a mess.

                                                 FRESHMAN

       So if this was real, we'd have to close the blinds and leave the door unlocked?

                                                SHAKESPEARE

    This is real, it's just not an emergency. Class just hasn't started yet. You're in the office, not the classroom. (nodding at S&D) Speech and Debate, What'd y'all do for yours back in the 'burbs?

                                                    S&D

   We were supposed to have an automated system with a pre recorded voice calmly instructing us as to what we should do. But the two times they tried it, the alarm went off but the voice did not work, so the principal got on the intercom and read the instructions. The second time it was real, we went on lockdown when the April 2019 shooting happened, even though it was miles away.The kids were great, calm and on their phones looking up the story as it unfolded. I played BALLZ and waited for it to be lifted.

                                                FRESHMAN

 That was horrible, I was up at school when it happened. A lot of my cohorts changed their degree programs from teaching to anything else after that.

                                                SHAKESPEARE

  We are too far north for it to have mattered here.  (pause)  So, Freshman Lit, first day, first year teaching! How're your rosters?

                                                FRESHMAN

                    When do they stop adding and dropping students? 

                                                SHAKESPEARE

                      When you retire. Next question. (Shakes and S&D Laugh loudly)

                                                FRESHMAN

                     Does class start late today since there is a lockdown before the bell?

                                                SHAKESPEARE

   The principal will make an announcement. Probably we'll start ten minutes late, it depends on whether the kid was caught inside or outside the building. Takes longer if they got in.

                                                            S&D

                  About that, you guys don't have metal detectors do you? I didn't see any.

                                                    SHAKESPEARE

      Nope. We're on the "Eyeball System". Usually security will see it before the kid gets in    the building.

                                                        S&D

                                          I guess that works....

                                                    SHAKESPEARE

 It must. I've been here 20 years, we've never had a shooting. We've had stabbings and a few all out gang fights, but that's it. (noting Freshman's face) Stop with the eyes Newbie. You're fine. You can't go to class with that terrified expression on your face, the kids will eat you alive. We have bigger issues here, like getting kids to come to the building in the first place, and then getting them to come to class in the second place and to stay in class in the third place, if they show up in the first place. Never mind the district's screaming about the Achievement Gap and College Readiness.(Shakes and S&D again laugh too loudly, years of experience and administrative rhetoric recall finding its way out of their systems.)

                                                        FRESHMAN

                                                            I'm lost.

                                                            S&D 

                                              You won't be by May. 

                                                        SHAKESPEARE

             Come talk to me before you implement any Tier of intervention, or classroom rules.

                                                        FRESHMAN

               They used that at the middle school I student taught at. They said it worked really well.

                                            S&D

                                          That was out south, right?

                                                       SHAKESPEARE

                                        You ain't in Kansas any more.

                                                        FRESHMAN

 To be fair I finished my student teaching and graduated during Covid. Nothing was normal, everyone was home.

                                                            S&D

                        But in the 'burbs, y'all were mostly in person, right? 

                                                        FRESHMAN

                        In quarantine a lot, somehow every time there was an outbreak I was exposed.

                                                        SHAKESPEARE

   Nobody knows how this is going to go. We were remote all year, pretty much.  The kids who cause trouble didn't log in, it was very different. I'm shocked a kid tried to bring a gun this morning, honestly, I'd think they would return on their best behavior.

        (Principal's voice on intercom: Thank you for your safe behavior. We have lifted the lockdown. Teachers, you may return to your classrooms, or open your blinds if you are already there. Students, thank you for your quick response. Please continue to your first period. School will begin on time.)

                                                                S&D

                                             Allrighty then. See you at lunch?

                                                       SHAKESPEARE

        I'll come join you in your room. (Looking at Freshman) You are welcome to join us. I'd like to get to know you a bit better.

                     S&D and SHAKESPEARE stand to leave. Freshman remains seated.

                     S&D and Shakespeare say good bye, sound of door closing behind them.

                                                     FRESHMAN

    I should get up and go to my classroom. I need to stand up and walk to class. Today is my first day. Get up. Stand up, and walk to class.  I got this. Here I go... (does not move)

                                                    Door opens.    

                                                        S&D

                                               Are you coming?

                                                    FRESHMAN

          I can't move. 

                                                        S&D    

              Can you turn your head to me? (does) Lift your finger? (does) Breathe (does)

                                 You aren't in a building where kids shoot teachers.  Repeat that.

                                                    FRESHMAN

                            I'm not in a building where kids shoot teachers.

                                                        S&D

        Look at me. I did fifteen years at a school that reopened after a shooting. Columbine reopened. Granite Hills High School reopened. Santana High School. Arapahoe reopened.  Campbell County High School. Pine Middle School. The STEM school reopened. I have the list memorized. People work there. Guess what else I found out after getting hired here? Ten years ago a teacher got caught in the crossfire of a gang "disagreement" and was killed. It wasn't this building, but it was this district, and kids from this building were involved. You get up and go to work and you believe that you are not in a building where kids open fire, otherwise you won't get up.  (pause) Both of our rooms have huge windows, you can see the front of the school. That helps. 

                                                        FRESHMAN

      I believe I am not in a building where kids open fire. I believe I am not in a building where kids kill teachers. I believe I am in a safe building. I believe I am safe. I believe.

                                                               S&D

      Good job. Put it to music and you could be in Book of Mormon. Can you stand up?(does). One foot in front of the other. Just one. Good. Now the other. Great. (Singing I BELIEVE from Book of Mormon)     I beeeeelieeeeeeeeveeeeee-----

                                                    FRESHMAN

                        Will you walk with me to my classroom?

                                                            S&D 

                                Only if you sing along. I beliiiiieeeeeeeeve

       Door closes behind them.cvfff

                                                    Scene.

Why are freshman boys so dumb? I have to put in my headphones in class to get any work done. It isn’t even the teacher’s fault, he spent so much time at the beginning getting to know us, and making sure we were OK, and not even teaching math. Then once he started teaching math the boys just lost their shit. One brings his soccer ball to class even though every day Martens has to ask him to take it back to his locker. And he was late to begin with, then he takes ten years to go to his locker, and every time he walks in the classroom he needs to announce it to his friends, who all have to say “YO” and yell back. I hate them. Do their moms know they’re this stupid? One time Martens said “Alexis (the boy’s name is Alexis), I have asked you thrice to put your soccer ball away.” I started laughing so hard, I couldn’t breathe. Martens smiled at me. He knows I watch Schitt’s Creek, so I think he said it for me. It was the funniest thing that I have heard in years. Literally, like, in two years I haven’t laughed. I laughed for like ten years. I love Mr. Martens, he’s the best.

#11

    "What the fuck, Miss?" 

    She stood four feet away from the student. He was double masked, both an N95 and a cloth mask, and because of his goggles she could not read anything in his eyes. He had already had to repeat himself twice, as his enunciation through the mask was garbage. 

   "That's not stellar word choice, Miguel. I don't enjoy students hurling obscenities at me, regardless of their intent. I can't hear your vocal inflection through the mask, and your eyes are obscured by your goggles." She stopped there, not mentioning that the fact that his gloved hands only exacerbated the situation.  Usually Miguel loved it when she used big  words when talking with him, it was part of the fun. She told him she felt she needed the words to penetrate the masks, goggles and gloves he wore daily. The first day of class, he had written three simple words on his 3X5 card in response to  "Tell me something about yourself: "I am paranoid."

    He looked like he was costumed as a military extra in  The Crazies. It had been twelve weeks, and still she had no idea why this kid had chosen to enroll in an acting class.  To be fair, he was really funny, and he was truly working on being heard and understood through the masks. The gloves and goggles made it impossible for him to truly participate in any acting exercises, and the day they learned to play a verb, he covered his ears because everyone was too loud.

    "I said 'What the fuck' because I just went to the nurse. I have a headache and I'm coughing. She gave me a mint." He held the mint out as evidence.

     “We have a nurse?” a girl seated at the small table looked up from her phone asked.

     "I dunno, Miguel. Can't you just call your mom---" she stopped talking as Miguel began to vomit. He left both masks on, and was clearly struggling to breathe. Somewhere in the midst of the massive upheaval, he removed his goggles. Perhaps he was hoping to breathe through his eyeballs.

    It should have been ten steps to her classroom phone, but she made it in three. 

    "Angelo," she said into the mouth piece "Seriously, security. I have a kid puking uncontrollably in 1409. Send help."

    As she hung up, she watched the other students in class react. One started retching herself. Two ran from the room. One, the closest thing Miguel had to a friend in the class, stood next to him looking helpless, saying "Take off your masks, Miguel!" over and over again. One of the special ed students began to cry, while the other started making monster noises and walking like Godzilla.

    Two girls pointed their phones at Miguel and began to record the event, making retching noises mixed with giggles.

    Her student assistant was kneeling with the sobbing Sped student, keeping an eye to the rest of the room but looking wholly  unsure of what he was to do with himself.

    The rest of the class were in varying states of horror and humor, unsure how to handle the situation. She realized with terror that Miguel had fallen to his knees, his friend was holding him up by his armpits, screaming "Take off your MASKS! DUDE TAKE THEM OFF YOU'RE GONNA DIE!"

    She walked two steps to the bank of windows and opened the first one she was able. 

    She turned and looked at the hysterical commedia slapstick that was unfolding in her room.

    Then she sat calmly down at her computer and clicked on a document she had opened earlier in the day. It was titled "157 Reasons I'm Leaving Teaching."

    As security entered the scene, she typed "Reason Number 157."

The principal of my school is really weird. First, we have to call her “Dr” instead of “Mrs”, and she gets really annoyed when we do it. So I do it every time I see her, I say “Hi Miss”, just so she’ll say “Dr.” I’d like to get my PhD, I think that’d be cool to be called “Dr”, but I don’t want to be the principal of a school. That seems like a waste of a PhD. You have to stand at the entrance every day and remind stupid kids like me that you’re a “Dr”? That’s totally lame. I feel sorry for her. She’s way too tall too, so she probably got picked on in school. Maybe that’s why she got a PhD, so nobody would pick on her any more.

#12

    I teach math in a private high school. It's a middle/high, grades 8 through 12, but I only teach high school.

    I am also an actor.

    I have done musicals all over town, much to the joy of my students, parents and administrators, who think I'm the most talented math teacher ever, and admire my breadth of abilities.

    I love my job. 

    I love being an actor.

    I have no interest in teaching acting, or theatre, I think I would start to hate it. I don't want to teach it to people who don't love it as much as I do. I  already do that with math, which I do not love but I do respect.

    All of my theatre gigs went dark during Covid, I was thrilled to be cast in a play and get back to my love. Last night, I opened the first show I have acted in in two years. It seems to be well received, we had reviewers last night. My director just emailed me the review. I sat and read it at lunch just a minute ago. Absolutely glowing, praise for the entire production. I take all reviews with a grain of salt, but now I think the praise is even louder, the word choice stronger, and I swear they are no longer criticizing the shows, they're celebrating them!

    I just spent almost two years learning every platform known to man to teach my own classes and to attend masters classes. I returned to my building knowing that we were not going to be shown the same "grace" that we are expected to show our students. When I pointed out this inconsistency to my AP, I was told "You're an adult. You can handle it."

    My husband and I had many discussions during what he called 'The Lockdowns', regarding my retirement plan. I openly owned my own mental health crisis, and together we came up with a strategy. We decided that, when the theatres reopened, I would not take the next sugary musical that was offered to me, but look for a play more meaningful. Something to feed my psyche.This sounds like it would be the opposite of what a teacher needed after such a devastating experience. You would think I'd rather to a comedy, or a silly musical. But I've always been a fan of the Absurdists, and when I can't get my hands on a Beckett, I am drawn to dark realism.

    So when auditions for Bent were announced, it was a no brainer. I have loved every second of this soul ripping drama. Every solitary phrase. It forced me to look at an event worse than what I had lived through, and to attach my own experiences as a gay man. Opening night was not just an opening performance for the audiences, but for all of us on the show. We've been changed on a molecular level. The director has walked with us every moment of the way, supporting our journeys with empathy, and the passion of a man who needs to tell this story.

     I was sitting here ruminating on the last rehearsal, not paying attention to my screen, when an email popped up from my principal. My evaluations are all up to date, there is no reason for her to contact me. I clicked on it

     "Mr. M. It has come to my attention that you are in a theatrical production. Please see Mary to schedule an appointment with me to discuss this."

    I would be lying if I said I didn't see this coming.

    Maybe I chose the show on purpose.

    I did not invite my students, clearly the show is too intense for them.

    But as an actor, I do not want to spend my life doing shows that I find unfulfilling.

    As a certain type of person, my principal hates the concept of the show.

    As a certain type of principal, she made it clear that as long as I chose frilly, empty headed musicals, we would not have any problems.

    As an administrator, she has no right to tell me what I can and cannot do outside of school.

    As an educated educator, I knew when I accepted the role that it would cause issues with admin. I accepted it anyway.

    And now I was being called into the principal's office to be fussed at, her unnaturally long, bony finger waving at my face. Shaming me for what she will call my "questionable judgment" and "gently suggesting" that I quit the show.

    I know this because I have had other conversations with her, in other contexts about content. I played her at our senior talent show and received glowing reviews from everyone but her. She called me into her office and wagged her unnaturally long, bony finger at me, called my judgment "questionable" and "gently suggested" that I never imitate her again. Even though every teacher and administrator was skewered at that performance, I was singled out.  Wag wag shame shame.

    What surprised me was this: I was not upset. For the first time in two years, I do not feel anxiety about a decision.

    I will not be making a meeting appointment. I will ignore her email and do my job.

    If she wants to come down here and talk to me, that's her choice.

    Or better yet, come see the show. Talk to me after.

    But I will be damned if I will slink down to her office like a dog who piddled on her rug, just to be shamed for being an actor.

I was walking down the hall to my class, and this kid just shoulder slammed a special ed kid for no reason. I was like, dude, say you’re sorry, and he told me to eff off. Really? Everyone is so mad. It’s like we were so excited to be back and see our friends, and we didn’t have to wear masks for about ten seconds, and it was fine. Then we had to put them back on and everyone got angry. Why are you so pissed, dude, just put the thing on your face. Most of us are vaxxed. It’s like we all forgot how to function in person, you know? I have never seen so many fights in my life. Even the girls are mad, but it’s not as bad as the boys. They took it all out on the bathrooms last month. A kid told an AP he was racist because the kid needed a pass for the bathroom. How is that racist? They trashed the boy’s bathroom, you’re a boy. 

    #13   

     The young man ran into the room, breathless, eyes wild. The class looked up only briefly. He had made such entrances before. They were generally entertaining, and contained some elements of current events. He was like a flamboyant TV newscaster.

    "Oh my God, I almost just died!"

    The statement warranted nothing more than a nod from the students, deeply buried in their WWII jigsaw assignment. Mr. Brown's look lingered, however, as something in the boy's face suggested real distress.  Connor had made some great entrances in the past, from announcing that there was a dog in the building, to sharing his Halloween costume choice. He had had Connor in all of his classes since freshman year. He wasn’t sure how that was managed, as he taught a variety of social studies classes, including Philosophy and Religion. Yet, somehow, Connor had ended up in at least one class every semester.

He stood and walked to him. The boy had collapsed on the classroom side of the door, and was leaning against it, as if to keep whatever was chasing him outside of the room.

    "Connor, what's up?"

    "Ok, I just got in the middle of a gang fight. A Gang Fight."

    "Con, you know the gangs here are mostly cliques. Their moms dropped them off this morning--"

    "'--so pull up your pants', I know. But for real. I was like, walking to this class right? And this huge Mexican kid --" he waved his hand at Mr. Brown, who was raising  his own hand and shaking his head " He's from Mexico, it's fine, his name is Miguel, whatever, the point is, he yelled something in Spanish, and he was right behind me, you know? and I turned around and he was running right at me, he was yelling and running at me, and I was like, I'm going to die, he's going to kill me, so I ducked because -I don't know why, I should have run but I'm small so ducking when there's somebody bigger makes sense, so I ducked and he like jumped over me to punch some kid I don't know, he was white, right in the face and I was right there and then suddenly the hall was full of these kids all swinging at each other and I don't know where that security guard was, maybe he was on his way or something, but I literally had to crawl out of there to get to class. Crawl. On my knees. Mr. Brown, do you even know how humiliating that is?"

    He paused to take a breath.

    Mr. Brown looked up. The entire class was now on their cell phones. He heard "It's true, it's on snapchat. Oh my God, Connor, you're hilarious, look at this!"  The students were all on their phones, all sharing snapchats with one another. “Mr. Brown, look! Someone recorded Connor crawling under everyone. He’s not kidding, that kid is huge.”

    And just like that, class was over for the day.

    Mr. Brown sighed. At least once a week his class was disrupted by some sort of fight. The kids in this building all came back angry, apparently.

    There was a pounding at the classroom door. A  young voice demanded he open the door. The voice said "It's the police." Mr. Brown reached up and locked the door.

    Every American teacher and student know not to open a door during a lockdown, or when someone bangs on it. Connor crawled away to the other side of the room.

    He heard the lockdown alarm go off, and the automated voice told  him to lock his door, turn off cell phones and cover the windows.

    He turned to the class, whose entire focus was on the door.

    "I'm too old for this, " he said, as he flopped into his desk chair and put his head down on the desk, like a child playing 'Heads Up, Seven Up". Maybe if I can just go to sleep, I’ll wake up and it’ll be next year, he thought. It’s gotta get better next year. It has to get better.

 INTERMISSION  postcards from a shooting

 I rushed into the theatre when the lockdown announcement came, running from the office and through the choir room, because I knew there were kids in the theatre. When I arrived,Kaylen said clearly, eyes wide "We shut all the doors. We didn't know if we should try and find you, so we shut all the doors." I said "You're definitely Aurora kids." Which made her smile, but was unsettling on every level.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The second or third time the principal came on, he sounded annoyed. I think kids were running out every door instead of obeying the lock down. His subtext was "I SAID lockdown, people and I meant it. Do not make me turn this school around...." which is funny/not funny as our school is, in fact, in turn around. I laughed at his tone, anyway, which invited concerned looks from the students. That laugh may be why Kaylen brought me a small teddy bear the following day, saying I looked like I needed it. 

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        The kids were in the theatre during lunch rehearsing for cabaret that night when the lockdown happened. Once everyone was relatively comforted and had located their friends and texted family, they said "So I guess cabaret is canceled tonight?" I shrugged "Anyone feel like coming back here tonight?" They shook their heads. "Then it's canceled." Fifteen minutes later, I received an email  from the district that all after school events had been canceled. I read it to the kids. We all had a chuckle. "Way ahead of you, buddy."

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    "It's technically not a school shooting. Those are white kids inside the school. These are brown kids outside of school..."I looked at a student who replied "You're not wrong," and proceeded to show me a snapchat of one of the shooting victims.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The kids on stage were watching snapchats and reading tweets from kids in the parking lot. One was of one victim, in a white shirt, covered in blood, his buddy trying to apply pressure. Adam said "That's my math partner. Guess I don't have a math partner any more. Hey, do you think my math teacher will give us an extension on the quiz due today?"

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    When we came off of lockdown into secure perimeter, the kids immediately started singing "When You're An Addams" and doing their choreography. Because that's how theatre kids process trauma. I texted a friend "We've reached the musical theatre portion of the lockdown." The random kids who had been pulled from the front of the school and the lobby, and then thrown into the theatre, sat silently in the house. Theatre kids are weird, and we have proven it yet again.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    When we realized, after an hour, that we could be here multiple hours, we started strategizing where in the theatre we could pee. We were not allowed in the halls. The semi permanent band sub who was stuck with us said brightly "Which part of the stage do you care less about?" We laughed.

The same sub received a text from her father "I saw your car on the news."

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    When the Aurora police banged on the door of the theatre and said "Aurora police, we're coming in" I answered "Thank you, Aurora police." Because theatre. (For those of you unfamiliar with theatre protocol, we are given call times by the stage manager, who counts down to curtain. For example, the SM will say “Fifteen to curtain”, and all the cast and tech will reply “Thank you, Fifteen.” This is so the SM knows they were heard, and cements the gratitude of saying “thank you “ to everyone, all of the time.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    When I left, I drove straight to the pub. I hadn't spoken to anyone outside the building all day. When the bartender asked how my day was, I laughed and said "Watch the news". She said "My God, I know right, what the hell is going on?" I took my beer and said "I work there." When I returned later to settle my tab, she quietly told me she had bought my round.

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    I’m taking a CLDE class. Nothing is due right now, the assignment is in process, but I’ve been struggling. Today I tried to work on it, only to be embattled emotionally.

    I sent a note with the assignment to my lead teacher: “It is what It is. There are shell casings outside my classroom window. The struggle is real.”  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are shell casings outside of my classroom. There are shell casings outside of my classroom. There are shell casings outside of my classroom. If you say it enough times, it doesn’t matter any more. I say it to people and they do not respond. It’s like I’m saying “I have a headache” and they don’t respond because why would they, I’m an adult, I know how to take Tylenol.

______________________________________________________________________

    Things I have said this year, snap shots:

    Three weeks ago there was a shooting off campus, involving one of my students.

    He sent me an email “ I have to pass this class to graduate, but I’ve been shot. What can I do to make up the work?”

    My reply “Survive senior year, dear. “

 

     An email was sent to me at 11.14 am on Friday, 19 Nov regarding a scholarship recommendation, due by midnight on Friday.

    At 12.05 Friday we went into lockdown.

    Today I submitted the letter of rec, with this note: “My apologies for missing the deadline. We had a  shooting.”

          

 

        The Six Things That Have Driven My Spirit Out Of Teaching

            6 entitled lying students

            5 their entitled, snowplow parents

            4 bullying admin, in kahoots with #5 and #6

            3 Covid

    ``       2 Tik Tok Lick Trend

             1 School Shooting

    Nobody is OK. I process by writing. Nobody said you have to read it.

I asked my Creative Writing teacher for a letter of rec for college. He said he would be glad to, then asked what I thought I wanted to major in. I told him I wanted to be a teacher. He said “I’m not writing a letter if that’s the case,” and just stared at me. I thought he was serious. It took me a minute, he’s got a weird sense of humor. That’s why I like him. When we were online, he made every day a costume theme day. Musicals, movies, holidays, he had a hat for everything. Some kids put on makeup, and did their hair. It was really fun. Once I realized he was kidding about not writing the letter, he said he was actually glad to hear that the last two years had not killed everyone’s desire to teach. He looked sad. I think he was talking about himself, but I can’t say for sure. I don’t know him well enough to ask, that’d be awkward.  

#14

    I have been a  middle and high school music teacher for thirty years. 

    I don't want to leave, but I think it's time.

    In thirty years, I have been in six buildings and three districts.

    I stay for five years, then I go. I tell people I'm like Mary Poppins, I go where I'm needed. 

    Which is a bald faced lie, I've always been in privileged schools with strong performing arts programs. All I had to do was swoop in and maintain the status quo. 

    The first time it happened, it seemed natural enough. My first job was a suburban building with an amazing, award winning program. I took over for the teacher who had been there for 25 years. He had left a deep legacy, and it was not difficult to keep the momentum going. After four years, once I began to get to know the kids, I became engaged to my college boyfriend, Kyle. His job was out south, so we decided to move that direction after the wedding. I got hired in the other district easily, as the urban sprawl was getting under way.

    The second time, I was pregnant with my first child, and thought I would take a sabbatical. My building would not allow a sabbatical; my choirs had won many state awards, and they did not want the program to languish for a year under a one year substitute. Their relentless pursuit of trophies was reprehensible. So I quit, and was hired at the middle school-which was, after running two strong programs that frankly Ate My Life, very much like a sabbatical. I stayed there another five years until my son started kindergarten.

    When my son was five, he was in a private school near our home, and I stayed local again and was lucky enough to find a job nearby in a new building that had opened in the still expanding district. Looking back, it's really surprising I was able to switch as frequently as I did, as performing arts jobs are not easy to find. We are usually a one person show, unlike the cores who have teams, and someone usually has to die for one to get hired. 

    I had become aware of my commitment issues with buildings, and started to wonder about the PERA program. If I was going to bounce around, I had to make sure that for  the last three years of my career,  I was working at a high salary. My fourth year I ran into a friend from high school  who was a former teacher. He had only taught a few years before leaving for an investment firm. His specialty was teachers. This would have been 1996  or so, he was convinced the PERA set up was not going to make it through our careers. So I started saving with his firm, and that took the pressure off of me to worry about my last years. I only had to make sure that what I made was enough to bridge the gap left after Kyle's salary.

     The first building I worked at, there was an art teacher who retired after 33 years...in the same building. I remember wondering how somebody does that? The mere idea of walking the same halls for more than a few years makes me cringe. Sure, the building changes, and principals change, and the kids graduate, but it's the same building. I would take a hostage.  And it would likely be an administrator. It's best for everyone that I do not like to stay in one place for too long. I like different choir rooms, different pianos. I like adjusting and bringing in my one box of personal items to display on the desk. I have colleagues who dug into their rooms, and started photo galleries of their choirs on the wall, and banners of every All State and Southwestern Conference with kids' names. I was in  three of those rooms, and I kept up the tradition. But I never started one, and I never ended one. 

    I won't drag on here with every story. As one language arts teacher I worked with used to say "All in all, to sum up, in conclusion", it's been thirty years and six buildings. I survived marriage, raising two children, twelve principals (it's true, one building had a new principal every year for the five years I was there), six student suicides, four fatal student car accidents, five students with cancer, students whose parents were getting divorced, a number of non fatal car accidents, a school shooter, sibling deaths, musicals, concerts, state choirs, my own divorce and teaching choir online.

    I did online very well. I taught the tonal qualities of water in a glass based on how full it was and the thickness of the glass. We made string instruments from yarn and dining room chairs. They sang their hearts out into Sound Trap, and I spent hours editing it into a choir.

    And in August of 2021, I realized the kids I had been teaching online were the top 10% of my classes. Those who cared. The rest...did not. I had forgotten about them while online, they never logged on or participated. You can't run a choir program that has 150 students enrolled and only 15 that are committed to showing up, learning music, and performing. This is simply a fact. Because we were remote, I had been fooled. Once they arrived in class, live in person, late, in pajamas and addicted to their cell phones, I realized I had been duped. Sadly. I blame my age.

    This year, which everyone keeps saying is "after" Covid (but that's ridiculous and all thinking people know it, we're still dealing with a pandemic) has been the hardest. THAT is true. The expectations on teachers have not relaxed, and our kids have been taught during remote learning that the expectations for them are so low for success, they really only have to wake up and show up. This year was harder than any of the previous 29 years. Period. It broke the back of the choir I was working with, even though I did everything I could to keep them interested online. I've never taught so much history or allowed so many days of karaoke;  I created music lessons with glasses of water, and with found objects and spent hours mixing their individual recorded voices into a "choir". I believed that the kids were actually getting something out of this debacle. I thought we "made" it.  

    Then when they returned, they just couldn't get to class on time anymore. They were bringing blankets, wearing slippers and refusing to put away their phones. They talked incessantly and can't sit still for an entire class period. Our fall concert was disappointing, they waited until the day before to learn their choreography, and the entire tenor section was out sick the week before the concert, causing me unprecedented  anxiety. The holiday concert will be only slightly better, as I have had kids out sick every day, and for days on end, and they can't rehearse. I was going to feature the smaller groups more, but out sick is out sick, and you can't learn your harmonies from home on your Chromebook. I have never been this exhausted, and frustrated, and angry. 

    For the first time in thirty years, I wake up in a great mood and by the time I walk in the building, I'm already mad.

    So, after thirty years, it's time to go.

 I was so nervous to start high school in person. In Google Meet my name was  ‘Andrea’ like on attendance, but I never turned on my camera, so my teachers didn’t know. Now I have to be in person and they’ll see that I do not identify as the sex that I was born. LIke my parents are OK with it, they love me no matter what, although my mom still calls me her daughter. She will call me ‘he’ in public, but forgets to switch daughter to son. I think maybe my Lit teacher may be like trans or gay or something cool, I think I’ll be comfortable with them. I heard from other students that they haven’t said anything, exactly, but the kids can tell. She may just be a lesbian, which is still great, just someone who might understand would be helpful. I picked this school because of the diversity, I’m afraid of white kids. I went with my brother to School of Mines when he was looking at colleges, and everyone was white. I was like, um, where are my people? I know, I’m so white I’m almost transparent with my red hair, but I don’t identify as white. I do not get those people. I get the kids I’ve been going to school with since kindergarten. These guys are my people, and I was really looking forward to seeing them again as high school students! I still have a few friends, but mostly everyone seems to have lost their minds. I can barely learn anything because the teachers spend all of their time dealing with kids coming in twenty minutes late, or talking, or whatever. I was so nervous about my gender identity, and it’s like not even an issue. There are other things to worry about now.

#15

   She sat on the couch in the principal's office, wondering what it felt like to have a private bathroom.

   As the newspaper sponsor in the building, she had been called into this office on several occasions. Every principal she had in the building seemed to need a tutorial on student's rights to freedom of speech. She had only been in the building for five years, this was her fourth principal. She'd joked that she was the Principal Trainer, like How To Train Your Dragon. She was always the first under fire, and she was always in the right, and the new principal did not seem to know what the students' rights were  before calling her in.

    She knew what it was about. A senior, who had spent their entire junior year in remote learning, wrote an opinion piece on the vaccine numbers in the district. They had cited research from the local health authorities, interviewed parents and students, and concluded that the truth of remote learning slowing the spread of Covid will never be known, because parents did not have their students tested. It was widely known within the district that parents were sending kids to school with coughs and fevers, then not answering the phone when the school called. The student did not get any parents to admit this, but it was an "open secret" in the community. A twisted take on "don't ask, don't tell".

    The student reporter had been visibly frustrated while originally writing an article on remote and hybrid teaching in the district. They said they could tell adults were lying to them, and had asked to write an opinion piece instead. As the sponsor, she had cautioned the student against any language that would be incendiary, or misunderstood as name calling. Teaching journalism in 2021 had become more difficult than when she started ten years ago. Students had to be taught what a fact was and how to research it without any real, contemporary examples to pull from, professionally.

    The principal entered, five minutes after the meeting was scheduled and said "Good afternoon, Mr. Stern,"

    She was not ready to do battle for herself. She thought this meeting was about the kids, not the principal's complete disdain for her gender status. After three years hiding her true self from admin and students on the western slope, she'd thought she had landed in a safe building. High socioeconomics, ninety percent of the parents had college degrees, LGBTQ club, two openly gay teachers and the median age of the teachers in the building was 46. 

    That was last year, before the new principal. She had not experienced any problems with staff or the previous administration misgendering her. She had not told her students, it was stressful enough to go through the process as a teacher, and she had decided that  in two years, she would leave teaching altogether in order to complete the transition. 

    This particular principal, a PhD educated woman who had clearly thought the building she had been hired to captain was closer to Harvard than a public school, had made it clear she would not be referring to Chris as "she/her". Chris knew the union would back her, but because she had not known the topic of the meeting, she had entered the office alone. Rookie mistake, experienced teachers know to A) ask for clarification of the meeting topic and B) never go to an admin meeting alone.

    The fight was going to be a long one. She had talked to the union and other teachers who had been forced into legal action. They all won, and their prize was to be returned to the same building under the same administration. 

    How is that "winning" ?

    At that moment, she made a choice.

    "I am she, you have been asked repeatedly to gender me correctly."

    "That is irrelevant. I'm here to address a concern about your mental health from a student," the principal sat, crossing her ankles and staring through Chris' soul.    

       "Where is the union rep? I won't have this meeting without the union."

        "I'm sure this won't take long. I want to address your identity with students."

       "No. I was not informed ahead of time as to the nature of this meeting. I will not stay without my rep." She stood up and put her hand on the door knob.

        The principal remained seated. She turned at the door to face her. She opened her mouth, ready to say something particularly cutting, then stopped. Instead she said "You aren't worth my breath, " and walked out the door.

We love our elementary school. The teachers had to wrangle so much last year. I set up a teaching room in our den for my first and fourth graders. We had their computers, and a white board with their names written on it, and crayons and markers. We got some great ideas from the teachers, they were so helpful. Now that we’re back to normal, I’m the room mom. I love that job, I love setting up parties and doing reading groups on Tuesdays. Yesterday I asked my daughter’s teacher what else I could do to help, and she teared up. She told me I was already doing more than I should, and that she appreciated it. There are other moms with time to help, too, but they do not step up. I don’t judge anyone. I know I’m fortunate that I do not have to work, or take a younger sibling home to care for them. I know. But I can’t help judging just a little bit. I can find the time to help. You find time to do what matters, right? Isn’t that on a coffee mug or tea bag or something?

   #16

        Principal Mark sat in his office with the door closed.

        He liked being called "Principal Mark",  and he loved being an elementary principal. The worst thing  that had ever happened, until this morning, was...nothing. Nothing had ever really gone wrong in his building. Kids brought their Epi pens and never needed to  use them. A few scrapes and the occasional fourth grade bully, but an appointment on his couch for a stern talking to was generally enough to stop that behavior. Of course, throughout the 20/21 year, there were issues with Covid tests, and parents refusing to comply, and coughs and sneezing and students who were compromised, and a staff of dedicated teachers who were exhausted. They had to create two separate lesson plans every day, one for the students online and one for those in the building. They were rock stars, and he showed them his gratitude in every interaction they shared. He knew they were all truly in it together. His staff called him a leader, not a boss, and this year he had subbed in many classes, and expected to do so in many more. The sub shortage was just one more delightful ripple of reopening after a pandemic. Or, as some would say, while the pandemic was still raging on.

        This morning he was posted at the bus line entrance, ready to greet the kindergarteners who rode in on the bus. He felt they needed to see him when they disembarked, and he would always smile and give them a thumbs up. Pre Covid, they'd received high fives from their PrinciPAL, which he liked to emphasize. As they disembarked, he smiled at each one and made sure they saw him. There should have been nine of them on the #5 bus, but he counted ten. They all looked at him and gave him a thumbs up as they started toward the building. Before he could move to stop them and count again, a car pulled up between the buses. A women emerged and ran toward of the smallest children who had just stepped off the bus. She scooped up the child and, holding her, turned and began hurling obscenities at Principal Mark. In that hysterical moment, he realized he was not her "pal". He kept screaming it in his head "But I'm your PAL, I'm your PAL."

        He stood doing his best to decipher what was being said. It seemed that the child she was holding was the younger sibling of one of the students, and had stepped onto the bus with her brother. How or why it happened was not as important to the parent as yelling at the principal for not being at the bus stop to manage the students, and for not driving the bus or in some other way being physically responsible for the child. Who was a younger sibling of one of the students.

        The hysterical mother screamed at Principal Mark while walking toward the bus, where she screamed at the bus driver. Frightened students huddled at the entrance while teachers looked to him for guidance. He indicated they should go ahead and walk their students into class, remaining as calm as possible. The older sibling of the hysterical mom followed his class into the building, not looking behind him for even a moment. His teacher put a protective arm around his shoulders as she walked him in.

        Principal Mark walked to the #5 bus to see if he could defuse the situation. The mom was clutching her child on one hip and waving her other hand at the driver, a woman in her sixties, who happened to be a retired teacher, expounding on the sub par public school system. Mark gave her a few feet of clearance, hovering and waiting for her to recognize him. When she did, she whirled her free hand back and punched him directly in the nose.

    He did not react, he simply turned and walked straight to his office, where he now sat with an ice pack on his nose that the gym teacher had kindly located for him. At 38 he was a young principal. He had a degree in chemical engineering, but turned his career toward principalship after substitute teaching for a year in an elementary school.  He loved the kids, and he loved the teachers. In recent years he had begun to become wary of parents, something had shifted around 2015. He noticed a definite alteration of focus from parents at that time, and a sad affectation of apathy among students. Of course post Covid, he was only one of a handful of principals left standing in the district. They'd also lost their Superintendent and thirty percent of their teachers. But he had held on.

    As he stared at his framed Master of Education diploma, a small plastic ice pack with the school mascot-a puma- stamped upon the cover pressed to his nose, he wondered why. Why had he held on? He sighed deeply, opened his lap top and began the incident report.

My freshman year, we had this big assembly on the first day of school. It was really cool, one of the teachers rode the new principal into the gym on the back of their motorcycle. There was a fog machine, and the principal dressed like Batman. I know, now it seems hokey but at the time…wow, we were all in the gym together without masks! We were just there and the principal and all the teachers, and everybody was yelling and there was a motorcycle in the gym! I found out later that the motorcycle driver was the theatre teacher—she’s a she! She rode the new coach/principal in on the back of her bike. We loved that. The principal they have now killed the assemblies, even before Covid. She said it takes away from instructional time. My sister goes there now, she hates it. She says it’s not the same.

    #17

 She thought he'd already been through the worst of it. As a science teacher who was also the Chess Club sponsor, she had little to no patience for a principal who was a former football coach. A principal that the coaches called "Coach" and all the female teachers avoided.

    She thought that was the worst.

    They'd hired a new principal, a PhD educated elucidate who clearly had no time for sports. She had only been principal two months thus far, and some things were changing that seemed a bit like micromanaging, but nobody called her 'coach', so he felt good.

    She pulled his motorcycle into her usual spot, up against the door by the science rooms. She'd been parking there for ten years.

    Today, the principal was standing in his spot. Not understanding what was happening, he pulled right up to her, turned off the bike, and removed his helmet.

    "You can't park here any more, Stevie," the new principal stated with the flat tone of someone who believes everyone else is a moron.

    "Why?" she asked, then said "I've been parking here for ten years."

    "It's too close to the building. It's a fire code."

    "Wasn't it against fire code yesterday? Or two years ago?"

    "Just because you did it before, doesn't make it right." Again, that horrible bored tone.

    The next day, when she pulled in, there were two orange cones and yellow tape over the spot.

    Two days later, there were two by fours and poultry wire, clearly setting the stage for a cement block. She looked up to see the principal's face in his classroom window, watching her.

    The day after the chicken wire, there was a cement block. 

    That day, she pulled in,stopped to regard the cement block, looked into her classroom window. She flipped off the face floating there, turned the bike around and rode home.

    Two days later, she was hired at the community college.

    She parked the bike by the science room doors.

    Nobody cared. 

I wonder what is going on in everybody’s heads any more. Everyone is arguing constantly, and my son can’t concentrate on anything except his video games. He tries, I even bought him noise canceling headphones so he can do his homework. But he can’t be still. His teachers say he won’t be still in classes, either, and is disruptive. This is not like him at all. One teacher has to call me to say that he is playing his video games in class, and she spends a great deal of time making him turn it off. She said she has to ask him at least four times a class period. He just clicks the screen off while she’s standing there, and then clicks it back when she walks away. Why would he think that behavior is acceptable? I talk to my son about it and he says he will change, and then his teacher calls again and says he changed for two days, then went back to watching video games.

#18

The bell rang, indicating that B lunch had concluded. She unlocked the classroom door and returned to her desk. 

            They had been on a closed campus all semester. Masked, on a closed campus but the football team was free to play. She shook her head, nothing had made any sense in almost two years, so she was not allowing herself to get upset about any of it. Even when parents sent their clearly sick children to school. Even when the parent of the clearly sick child refused to answer their phone when the nurse called. Even when the clearly sick student pulled down their mask to sneeze. Even when a colleague was in the hospital with Covid.

She was hoping things would go more smoothly after B lunch. Her fourth period, right before B lunch, had not gone well. In all honesty, nothing had gone well since they returned in August of 2021. They thought they were prepared, they thought the kids would be happy to be back. They prepped for the remote learning gap that was headed their way, but not the lack of maturity. It was not just their learning that arrested, but their emotional development had not only ceased, she believed it had regressed. She had students who not only could not sit still, but refused to do so. She had never heard had so many kids who were simply defiant before. Everything in their demeanor was a challenge to her authority over her classroom. It was her classroom, her rules, her domain. She found herself posting rules and spending time in class revisiting those rules, and she had a class full of seniors. That is not the usual structure for a senior level class. Things had regressed. She had no idea how, but they definitely had. The events of her recent fourth period were a testament to that.

Riley, age 16, had entered the room. Riley was not new to the building but she was new to Alex. She knew the type of girl, as much as teachers hate to stereotype, they do it. They just call them ‘archetypes’ to get away with it. Riley had likely never been told “No” in her life. The Covid remote protocol had been just what she needed to solidify her hold on social media and do the absolute minimum amount of work, exerting the least amount of effort, to pass classes. 

The cell phone rules were put in place on day one, every student had a plastic slot with their name on it. She regularly skipped the ritual of placing her cell phone in one of the plastic slots with her name on it, hung on the back of the door, as her classmates all did. This, instead, was her ritual: she pretended she did now know the rule.

Per her ritual, Alex  had waited until Riley was seated to remind her that her cell phone was to be placed in the plastic holder with her name on it.

Riley rolled her eyes dramatically and stood up. “This is my freedom of speech, “ she held out her phone to demonstrate. I have freedom of speech as an American student. You can’t tell me what to do. I told my mom and she called our lawyer.”

“Did she?” Alex replied tonelessly. “Because I talked to your mom, and she said if you do not surrender your phone in class today, the AP will liberate it from you when you arrive in the morning.” Riley had lost any and all school phone privileges when she snapchatted a photo of a girl in her class, with a nasty caption commenting on the girl’s appearance and fictional sexual conquests. Admin had met with her mom, and they decided she could have the phone between classes, and each teacher would police the phone use in their own class. If she was unable to adhere to this rule, then she would lose the phone when she walked in the building. Why her mom simply did not take the phone away from her herself remained an unanswered question. First world problems, Alex figured. Not my monkey, but she’s in my circus. So I’ll take her phone.

Alex stood at the front of the room, watching every student place their phone in its respective plastic pouch.

“Riley?” she indicated the plastic shoe holder she had repurposed for phones.

Riley continued to stand with her eyes rolling around in her head when she finally surrendered her phone to the plastic monolith. The phone immediately began to ring.

“It’s my mom, goddammit, we have a family emergency, are you fucking kidding me?” Alex blinked and thought Wow, that escalated quickly. “It’s my right to have my phone, you are interfering with freedom of speech and private property, you can’t hold my phone hostage, it’s an emereeeegggeeeency—”  Alex reached for the phone, she supposed she intended to hand it to Riley and ask her to turn it off, but before she could reach it, Riley hurled herself at her teacher, teeth bared, fingernails flexed.

 Riley began to screech at an inhuman decibel “It’s my fucking phone you bitch, you can’t touch my property, it’s mine!” 

Without missing a beat, Alex picked up her classroom phone and hit the number for security. 

“Riley”, she said into the phone. Security arrived with the school psychiatrist within two minutes.

And that was fourth period. The period during A lunch, and before B lunch, which was unsteady and unnerving to kids, anyway. It made classroom management just that much more challenging when friends at lunch felt like they could come to the classroom and talk to their friends who were in class. This was also a new phenomenon post covid, where kids just roamed the halls at will. She was hopeful that after lunch, everyone would have spent their crazies and calmed down. It had been like this almost every day since August. Now, with three weeks left until Christmas break, things were ramping up. The kids were done. The teachers were done. Admin was done. Parents were done. Just stick a fork in us, close the buildings and send everyone home, Alex thought. Let’s just call it and be done.

Fifth period  began to file in. One boy rushed in carrying what looked like a small jar, and immediately took his seat. Once the class was in, Alex approached the boy. 

“Jared, “ she started cautiously, “what’s in the jar?”

He just giggled. She shook her head. Freshman boys seemed to have weathered poorly during remote learning.Something about going virtual in the seventh grade had stunted their growth. She had seen a lot of insanity over the years, but nothing compared to what was happening the fall of 2021. There were more fights. More defiance from students.The apathy was contagious. Kids didn’t even bother to change into their clothes to come to school, they arrived in pajamas. She would wake up feeling great, and as soon as she entered the building she would say, outloud (behind a mask, nobody would hear her) “What’s the point?”

“It’s bees, Miss,”  Maddy said. “ He has bees. I saw him catch them in the courtyard. I’m allergic. He needs to take them out of the room. I will die.”

How did he even catch bees in October? Where are there bees in the courtyard?Alex was honestly confused, when Maddy jarred her back to the room. “Miss, he has to take them out of the room. I. Am. Allergic. I. Will. Die.”

As if that were his cue, Jared opened the jar of bees and released them into the room.

There is a card in Cards Against Humanity that simply reads “Bees”.

Alex put that card in her wallet.When anyone asks why she left teaching, she shows the card.

“Miss, I'm so sorry I'm late, I had to talk to my language arts teacher. I'm not behind or anything, I just had to check with her about a kid in my class. Did you know he died from Covid? I had to quarantine when he went into the hospital, but not everyone in class did. My teacher tested positive but she didn't get sick, so I just did stuff in google classroom. Luckily it's lang arts so I just had to read and do vocab stuff. Did you hear about that kid? I think he's the only one so far that's died. You know I've had to quarantine three times this fall? I've missed almost four weeks of school in quarantine. My parents are really worried about it.  I mean Covid, not missing school. It sucks to miss ROTC and my theatre class, but like math is fine. Nothing is really getting done, no offence, with everybody sick and everybody else trying to sub for them. Like my theatre teacher was my physics sub. The math teacher subbed art for a week. Is she OK, by the way? My art teacher has been out for like two weeks. Do you know if she's OK? My lang arts teacher didn't know, either.

    The kid who died was really nice, his name was Alberto, but he said to call him Jose. Funny kid. He's the first person I've known that's my age that's died. My aunt died last year, from cancer not Covid, but we couldn't have a funeral because everything was closed. We had to wait and my mom was a mess, then they only let my mom come to the funeral, everyone else had to watch it from home online like Hamilton. I loved my Aunt. She lived with us when we first moved here, she was always playing board games with us. She made quarantines not so terrible, you know? Like she taught me how to crochet. I know Miss, right? Imma guy, and I can crochet my dog a sweater. It's hilarious.  Anyway. I had to talk to her and make sure she is doing OK, because she's got a little kid at home and I’m worried about adults right now. My cousin shot himself last week, right in front of his wife. So I told her that,then we started talking about Jose, and how funny he was about his name because he had three names, and none of them were "Jose", and then we talked about my Aunt and her son, my cousin, and she said I should go to see a counselor but they're busy. Maybe I'll try again. I think I'll try again. Do you think they're maybe not as busy as they were last period, Miss? Can I get a pass?"

#19

         He checked his email as he did every morning, to see that the lockdown drill was scheduled for fifth period. He shook his head, they had  just emerged from a year of remote and hybrid and partial classes, last year had been a mess. The kids seemed grateful to return, he had trouble believing the lockdown drills were necessary. More security around the restrooms would be great. He had taken to shaking his fist at students and declaring "Curse you, Tik Tok!!!" Other than that glitch, everyone seemed happy to be back.

    He had been the Speech and Debate coach for ten of the fifteen years he had been in the building. He enjoyed the weird celebrity that came with being a POC in a white, suburban school, and S&D gave him more visibility. He also loved being the only Shakespeare teacher in the district. He had proudly built the class to withstand any cuts or disinterest, and had started a small "Shakes Day" in the district, which was not unlike a Renaissance Fair, but with staged beheadings to compete with the plays, He liked the kids, he had no real issues with the current administration, and had met his wife in the building. To be clear, she was a fellow teacher, not a student. The only issue seemed to be the stress level of the students, which infected the entire student body as well as teachers.

        He turned YouTube on his laptop and listened to the Wednesday morning fall jazz coming through the tiny speakers. He sipped his coffee and continued to check emails. Once complete, he flipped to his google classroom to check plans for the day. As he did so, another email popped up, this one from the principal.

         He clicked on it.

        The first words were those he had read too many times before. Too. Many. Times. 

        "Sad news...."

         He caught his breath, knowing what would follow. 

        "...died unexpectedly...send students as needed to counseling for support...."

        He sat quietly. He had stopped counting the number of times he had received this exact email. Nobody ever said "suicide" in an email, the code words were "Died unexpectedly."

        He heard his classroom door open and close quietly. He did not have to look up to know it was his wife, she had also received the email. They both knew the student.

        She waited. It was if they had rehearsed. She was standing with her backpack, as if she'd just arrived. 

        He stood. He retrieved his own bag, his coat and car keys. He removed his badge and left it on his lap top. His wife laid hers beside his. Wordlessly, they walked out of the room, and out of the building. The security guard, someone who had been there as long as they had, quietly nodded as they exited.

        He believed he had stopped counting, but as they got into their car, he said "That's thirty. Two each year I have been here. That does not include alumni or car accidents."

        She nodded. She turned on the radio and let the jazz fill the car as they drove away.

My freshman year, my math teacher quit. In the middle of the day. He just walked out of the classroom. He was the third teacher to quit that fall, but I think he was the only one who left in the middle of the day. The new Assistant Principal had come in. I guess teachers get graded or something, ‘cause he had his computer open and was clicking things off. The kids were their usual stupid selves. I was not participating in it, but the others were on their phones, or up looking out the window. They’d go to the bathroom and come back twenty minutes later, or not come back at all. Mr. Michaels was almost crying. He could never get anyone to listen to him.  I heard he’d been talked to a lot about not being able to control kids, but honestly, I had like two teachers who could control any class at any time. We just weren’t interested in learning. So this day, when the AP was there, a kid stood up and said “Why we gotta listen to you, cracker?” and he just stood there for a second. Then he handed his badge to the AP and walked out the door.

# 20

 I've watched teachers retire for years now. I never understand how they are so excited to do something else, anything else as collectively, they've all been people who loved teaching. They will miss the kids. 

       They will not miss the bullshit.

       The New Thing That Will Revolutionize Education every six years. You could sell these directives on late night TV alongside Ginsu Knives. Adjusting focus and lesson plans to, say, include writing every single day in math class, which math teachers did because if they did not, they would receive an "unsatisfactory" rating because their admin couldn't Check That Box on their evaluation, and whammo: job insecurity. 

      Those that retire "early" is generally code for one of two things: “I can't deal with this administration any more/I'm being bullied and it's not worth my health" or "I won the lottery". Under the first heading you can include; a few retiring ten years early (or so), or simply leaving teaching altogether or finding another building,  and those who would never admit why. But we who've watched from our classrooms believe it was the unrelenting reign of a cyber human. That was one building, sorry, not all buildings. And my mind is not what it was a year ago, forgive my scattered...ness. I just reread that paragraph, and I know it does not make any sense, but I know what it says and I cannot seem to fix it. This is why I write this stuff down here first, I can sort through my thoughts and nobody has to know that I’m so scattered.

     I have only known one whose heart literally would not let him continue. Too kind hearted, it wasn't the kids or the parents or the Education Revolutionizing objective. He stepped into a role as a union rep, and his kind heart could not take it. He lived, Thank God, but was told he needed to retire early, Again, "early" is pretty subjective, some who choose to go "early" are only a few years away from the magical 35.

    The difference in celebrations between buildings is also telling. I've seen sterile, awkward  retirement parties and jubilations-different buildings. Before you agree to teach in a building, find a way to watch how they treat their retirees. One building at the final faculty meeting, they had taken up a collection and they sent their principal and his wife to a dude ranch! He was the kind of principal who stayed late, swept the floors himself, walked the halls, was present in classrooms but not oppressive. He was so loved. If I was a new teacher, or someone looking to teach in that building, I would have signed up. Then there are the ones where the principal drags on in front of a cake, for the five people who showed up after school in the teacher’s lounge, to bestow upon a retiree an envelope of donations and a piece of glass with the school name etched on it. A paperweight.

     Ya, go to a staff meeting before you choose  a building to teach in.

      But first, before you teach, change your major. 

      Don't do it. Save yourself.

      I wish I was kidding.

I’m in this class called “Unified PE. It means regular kids have class with Special Ed kids. My friend doesn’t have it at her school, which is weird, I thought we all had them. We have a Unified Basketball team, they play other schools. It’s so great, I get to spend all period with the Sped kids playing games. We get to watch videos of the Special Olympics and stuff. There is one girl, she’s my favorite, every morning she high fives me and says “Hey, Girl!”. She has down syndrome, but takes regular elective classes. Sometimes it’s not great, sometimes Kenny will go to the bathroom and not come out, so somebody has to go in after him. Luckily I’m female, so I don’t have to do it. I heard he just goes in, takes off his clothes and lies on the floor.  I think it’s great for us regular kids to have sped kids in our classes, I like helping them out. I had an intro to theatre class last year with four sped kids in it. I was always in their group. That’s why I decided to take Unified PE this year, so I could learn more. They’re so great, I totally love these kids, they’re so happy to be in school. Most of my friends are miserable, they have too much homework and complain constantly about being overbooked, but these kids just love being at school. They smile constantly, and they’re funny. I don’t think people know how funny Sped kids are. They are amused by the littlest thing,and they say funny stuff. This one kid loves cats, so he meows when you talk to him, and then he starts laughing. They are soo great. I am so glad we went back so I could be in this class with them.

# 21

    "Miss, what are we doing?"

    "The same thing we've been doing for three days, dear. You've been in class, I have seen you with my eyeballs."

    "Working on the scene, right, right? With our group, “ he paused. “Sorry I called you Miss, Miss, I mean Smith. I keep forgetting.”

    Smith nodded at the student, named Devin. Generally speaking, they had no issue with autistic students-in fact, they were some of their favorite people. However, this young man was not really high functioning enough to be left without a Para in class, and was eating up at least twenty percent of their class time. Mostly repeating themself for his benefit had become routine. 

    This is my fault, they thought, I'm the one who said "Rehearsal means repeat."

    The general population in the class had acclimated to him, for the most part. For the most part. There was one girl remaining who had some sort of issue with Devin. Which confused Smith, as both students had parents from Ghana. The Islanders in the building all seemed to get along, and the kids from Mexico and Vietnam, so Smith made the very wrong assumption that camaraderie held for other groups. 

    It did not.

    The student was named Layla, and like Devin, was a freshman. Both students were freshman in a district that was primarily remote or hybrid for 20/21. This meant that they had not been in a full classroom since the seventh grade. This was a factor all teachers district wide thought they were prepared to face back in August, and they immediately discovered there was not enough man power to deal with the waves of issues that were drowning the building.  

    When Devin performed, Layla would sit on her phone, deaf to Smith's nudging, protocol reminders or the low grade she was receiving in the class. As a cheerleader, she was allowed to have an "F" and still cheer. It appeared she had chosen this class as her token "F".

    Smith stood on the apron, watching as Devin gleefully set the stage---his favorite part of scene work--and Layla, as per her habit, strolled in ten minutes late with a Starbucks. Without looking up at her, Smith said "Layla, trashcan. Hallway. No food or drink in the theatre. You know that." Layla rolled her eyes and dragged her feet back to the hallway, where she finished her expensive iced coffee while talking to friends. Smith heard another teacher in the hall urging the group to disband and get to class. 

    Smith watched Devin's group for another minute, then fussed at a second group who were on their phones instead of rehearsing, before venturing into the hallway. There they found Layla, leaning against the wall on her phone, ignoring the security guard who was walking toward her saying "Get to class, please."

    Smith stopped a few feet in front of the student and said "Hey, Layla, your group needs you to come rehearse."

    Layla shrugged.

    Smith tried again.

    "Layla, is there something up today? Do you want me to write you a pass to counseling?"

    Layla shrugged and rolled her eyes. "Just because I don't want to be in this stupid fucking class don't mean I need a counselor."

    Smith paused, looked at the security guard, who was within two feet now, for help.

    The security guard said quietly but authoritatively "If you are supposed to be in class, please go to class."

    "Make me."

    Smith stood flabbergasted. They had no authority to ever touch or speak harshly to students. Teachers had been told repeatedly to have grace, to speak softly, to allow kids to readjust after eighteen months in remote learning. Smith had encountered everything in the last twelve weeks from being completely ignored to being told to fuck off, both when asking students to be on time to class. In ten years of teaching, it was the roughest they'd ever seen it, but there had been no confrontations.

    This was new.

    Usually the expletives were thrown over a dismissive shoulder. Passive aggressive seemed to be the new trend, and Smith preferred it to confrontations. 

    "Excuse me?" Smith asked quietly.

    At that moment, Devin blew through the double doors of the theatre into the hallway, bellowing "Layla, are you in a group? We need another girl in the group, can you be in our group? You're supposed to be rehearsing, the scene is due Friday."

    Without any change in tone or demeanor, as if she were answering any other question, Layla spoke again.

    "Fuck you, retard."

    Smith recoiled as if they'd been hit, and the security guard blinked.

    "I don't gotta do nothing I don't want to, nobody can touch me, and-" she looked directly at Smith "I don't want to listen to this bitch dyke any more."

    There was a pause. Layla sucked down the last of her beverage, the sound of her empty plastic cup floating eerily in the air between the two adults. Smith surrendered the fight to the security guard, and returned to class.

       At 3:35, Smith dropped their keys and badge at the front office and said simply "I'm out. I've lived too much life to be treated like this."

    They were the seventh teacher to quit the building since the beginning of the  2021-2022 school year. They were twelfth in the district. They were the first of the school year to walk out midday.

    They were teacher number 27,005 ,nationwide, to quit since August of 2021.

    Today my teacher had these pink square note cards on each table. We have to be in assigned seats because of Covid, so he’s always putting stuff on the tables for us to do, and each table has numbers. I feel like I’m in preschool and I’m a senior in high school. He made us do this pair/share thing where \he drew popsicle sticks with our names on them. I mean, I get it, after the shit show last year, we’re a pretty rough bunch to control. The asshats in my school trashed all the boys’ bathrooms for no reason other than a social media platform said it’d be a good idea. Morons. Anyway, I can tell by looking at every teacher’s face that this has been rough on them, too. My teacher put out pink squares and said that in all of his classes, he’s making us write a thank you note to someone in the building. It can be a teacher, a counselor, a coach, a Para, a security guard or custodian. He puts the notes in their mailboxes so they can have something nice to read at the end of the day. He does this twice a year, he said, but of course with Covid it didn’t happen last year. I love my teachers, I wrote four notes, front and back to my Civics teacher, science teacher from freshman year, lang arts and ceramics teacher. Everyone groaned when he told us what we were doing, but I looked around and we were all doing it. I wasn’t the only one to write more than one note. And we wrote, I mean we wrote a personal moment, not just a generic “Thank you.” It was cool. I felt really good after we did it, and I asked if I could take some pink cards and keep writing in other classes. He said “Please, this should be a habit in your life, not just an assignment in my class.”

  #22

    He sat staring at the broken drum. 

    He knew there was no money to replace it.

    He knew he didn't want to be here any more. 

    What he did not know is which student broke the drum.

    He was the fifth band teacher in three years, one of whom--his friend William- didn't even make it to the end of the first quarter. To be fair, Will had quit during Covid, so that one didn't count in his mind. Will was s a fellow jazz musician that Li had worked with in college. He had quit over administrative issues. Since William had been teaching online, he was unaware of what the student population actually was. 

    Now, at 27 and in his second building, Li should have known better than to apply under those circumstances. He just wanted out of where he was, thinking nothing could be worse. He had blindly applied to every open position. Nothing could be worse than the hell he had endured for the last two  years.

    He had been wrong.

    William had come into conflict with district policies on grading, which he found to be insulting and racist. He had had no issues with the building admin, or with the students he was teaching online.

        Li knew immediately that the kids showing up to class online were not going to be the majority he would encounter in person. The live majority were talkative, restless, addicted to their phones and relentlessly rude to teachers. He thought he could handle it, then the Tik Tok "Hot Lick"challenge destroyed their small bathroom and flooded the hallway. Twice. The drinking fountain in the performing arts hallway was deliberately clogged and left on to flood twice.

          But he came back the next day.

         Then his car was vandalized.

          He came back the next day.

          Kids used racial slurs in every exchange with him. 

          He kept coming back.

          He stared at the drum. It was worth more than a month's salary, and they had simply beaten it to death. What he couldn't figure out, was how this happened? He had been in the room all day. At what point did they snap the struts on this thing? How did they kill both the resonant heads and top heads, as well as punch a hole right through the center without him seeing or hearing the attack?

            He sat looking at the destroyed instrument, trying to convince himself that he had somehow left the room unattended. Maybe he had forgotten to lock the door? But his office was off of the band room, he would have heard it. 

            He sighed, a tear slipped from his eye as he gently bundled the drum up and left it silently in his office. He scribbled a few words on a peach sticky note, picked up his trumpet and left the office. As he locked it behind him, he placed the sticky note on the door.

            It read simply "Reason #156".

            He sobbed as he drove home, feeling like he had been beaten in a boxing match. When he got home, he went to bed.

    "Miss, can I go get math help during this class? I have an A and my project is done, I'm sorry to ask. My math partner got shot right before Thanksgiving, remember the one that got passed around Snapchat? He's my math partner. Well,  he didn't come back after Thanksgiving. Neither did my math teacher, he hasn't come back yet and nobody knows if he's going to. They got a sub last week, after two weeks of the art teacher subbing, he was really nice, don't get me wrong, he really tried, but he's not a math teacher. We got a math math sub last week, but she's still trying to manage everyone's freak outs. Nobody told her about the shooting before Thanksgiving-which sounds stupid because it was on the news, it's not like she didn't know- and the kids in classes are all telling her terrible stories like someone died,  and some are like pretending to have freakouts and leaving class. I don't like the way my classmates are behaving, and I don't think this sub is going to stay, but I have a B in the class and I'm not going to keep it, or do well on the SAT, if I don't go get help. My teacher from last year said she'd help me, Thank God, but she doesn't have any off hours because she’s subbing for other teachers, so I have to go during her freshman class and she'll help me while they're working. And since I have an A in this class and my project is done, I was hoping you would let me go see her during this class. I'll bring back a pass. I'm really sorry, I just don't want to fail, I don't know how so many of my classmates don't care. How can they not care about their grades? I want to go to college. My art teacher said I could get scholarships, but my grades have to be good enough to get accepted into the school. I'm not very good at math, but I was really starting to get it right before Covid. I did OK in remote because I could work in groups with smarter kids. Now I'm just lost. It's not that my partner was smart, he was just someone to work with, and I like that, it made it easier to figure things out. Thank you for the pass. I'll bring one back after class."

 #  23

    After the shooting, the kids were still in a mask mandate and closed campus. The honeymoon of returning to the building in person was over. A group of girls were hedging at putting away their phones. She stood over them, annoyed; only a week until Christmas break, two weeks since the third shooting, five weeks since Tik Tok Licks destroyed all but one boy's restroom, seventeen weeks since returning after Covid Remote Hell and the steady uphill trudge toward the Sisyphean illusion of regaining control of her classroom/re engaging kids who had started the year by coming to school late and in their pajamas and stuck to their phones. She again said "Please, put your phone where I cannot see it."

    "Man, my friend at Overview just snapchatted me, she's going to lunch at Panera. They get to go off campus, that's not fair."

    Unable to stop herself, she said flatly "Do the kids at Overview shoot at each other?"

    There was a dead silence, as four pair of brown eyes widened. Then the low whisper "Damn, Miss, that was rough."

    She shrugged.

    Truth is truth.

So my mom won’t let me go back to school. It was hard enough after Covid, but the shooting made her too nervous. She kept me home the whole week after Thanksgiving, trying to get me enrolled online. The school only has a few online classes now, and they’re full, so she can’t get me in and she won’t let me go in. I’m supposed to be a junior, but I am not going to have enough credits after this. I don’t know how I’m going to graduate if they can’t get me online and my mom won’t let me go in. What am I supposed to do?

#24

 7 December 2021

I don't care. 

I don't care.    

    I don't care i don't care idon'tcareidon'tcareidon'tcare

they don't care so why should i care?

    I used to care soo much I felt like I made them care, they were caught in my tractor beam of passion

        Now I'm being slowly sucked into their lazy, apathetic indifference.

         I remember people saying that Jim and Pamela Morrison sucked one another down, spiraling downward  in their own drug induced cycle. It's like that. Without the drugs. Or the sex. Or Val Kilmer. Or love.

    Just the sucking down part. 

I used to love my content, I had such passion.

        I used to love coming to school to teach. I would get up at 5 am so I could work out, walk the dog and make coffee before I headed out, and I'd still arrive an hour early to warm up my room, make copies, just be in the space, ready to welcome my kids.

       I get up now with just enough time to feed the animals and start coffee. Most days I forget to bring it with me. I don't bring lunch, either, because I'm not hungry during the day. I don't really eat dinner, either. 

                    I hate the kids. 

How can they drag their feet and not care about getting to class on time? How do they have jobs? Do they have jobs? Will they ever have a job? It's like watching herds of sloths moving across the freeway, teachers are stopped along the edges waiting for the kids to move faster, move faster, stop talking you're clogging up traffic, get to class.

                They Don't Care. Their indifference makes me angry. 

                So I hate them. I don’t’ hate them I hate what they’ve become

            I know I am no longer engaging, and I don't care.

My margins are garbage, and I don't care.

        This is neither literature or poetry, and I don't care.

                                    Jimmy Crack Corn, and I Don't Care.

            I used to be engaging. Students did not stop attending my classes because I was not engaging. I stopped being engaging when they stopped attending my classes. Those who do act out act  up after Covid it's an uphill battle against behaviors with no hope or support or belief that they will recover from the trauma. Now I feel like a prison guard, my only job is to keep them in the room. 

    The impressive pile of discarded and frequently used acronyms clogging up my evaluations gives me anxiety twice a year, when I have to dig them up and write more useless words to prove that I am teaching, I do teach, I teach: here are some acronyms, a graph, unit planner, lesson plans and hours of my time to create these documents that I only look at when I'm evaluated an my evaluator only looks at when I'm evaluated but hours of my time, hours of my time and years of my life have been spent defending and proving that I Am Relevant.

    Clearly I am not.

It isn’t even that there was an inciting moment. A Trigger Event. I’ve just reached December of 2021 feeling like I cannot possibly go on. I remember years ago, having additional energy to do things like “perform” in an air band at an assembly, or be part of a teacher skit at the talent show. That stuff was fun and voluntary. But now, everyone is panicking because the kids are so far behind THEY’RE SO FAAAAR BEHIND that teaching six out of seven class periods is not enough, I must also read college essays and monitor projects for kids who don’t have enough credits to graduate but here, Do A Thing and that will count for a year of classes so you can get your diploma because all you had to do for a year was log on to pass, you couldn’t even manage that so now let’s try making you do a project. Which you won’t do because you can’t even put clothes on to come to school, your slippers are preventing you from moving any faster than global warming.

    So I don't care. 

    I don't care, I don't care....I Do Not Care.

            lALALALALALAlalallaalallalalaaaaaa

            No Care I

                Nope nope no cares.

     If anyone were to read this they would lock me up. I labeled it “SHADOW JOURNAL”. My therapist recommended it as a way to get the garbage out of my head. It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s just verbal vomit. I don’t think I hate the kids.

Sometimes I do though, I really do, and sometimes I don’t how come I’m held accountable and they’re not OOH OH ya, last year, during my evaluation  which WHY WERE THEY EVALUATING US DURING REMOTE LEARNING? NOBODY WAS DOING GREAT WORK I asked why we had to show the kids so much ‘grace’ that they need only log on for a minute to get credit and they were passing without doing any work why aren’t they held accountable and why am I not shown the same grace and my evaluator said “Because you’re an adult” so I think maybe I should move like sloth and not care I don’t care nobody cares

                Including me. If a bullet strikes me in a school shooting,it will be because I didn't care enough to move quickly, out of range.

                            just like a sloth

Wow, that got dark. I suppose that is why this is a SHADOW journal. 

I just got that. 

Funny.

I don’t even know what’s going on in my art class. Everything is in google classroom, but my teacher has been gone like, most of the semester. I think she has asthma or something. I guess there aren’t any art subs, so like a math teacher subs one day, and a science teacher another day. They’re nice and everything, but they can only say they like my art, which is great, I love hearing that, but I want to get better at it. I’m in an art class to get better, not to be told what I’m doing is fine. I plan to major in art in college, and my teacher is writing me a rec. But my work isn’t getting better, and I want to send my best to apply for scholarships. I feel like I’m being selfish, you know, because everyone’s getting sick. My friend’s teacher died at her school and they’re still going in. Like, that’s so selfish, and I feel selfish for wanting my art teacher to be here so I can get better but what if my art teacher dies? What if she already died and nobody told us? Like, the districts are so crazy now about keeping the buildings open that they don’t even care that people are dying. A kid died here, I didn’t know him, but I heard he died. And they said it weird they said “complications from Covid”, but isn’t that just Covid? The colleges that were all supposed to come back in person have started going back online, I hear the spring they’re all going online, even the ones that say you have to be vaxxed. Why are we even bothering, dude? Nothing is ever going to be the same, so just stop it. Just stop it and figure out how to make this work in a different way. I don’t need to be in a class with other people to paint, but I do need someone to teach me so I can get better.  Like I think about this stuff and I get anxiety, and then I can’t breathe, like I thought I had Covid all October and kept getting tested because I couldn’t breathe. Then I started passing out, like, why am I passing out? Am I sick? Does Covid make you pass out? What’s happening? I have a friend who won’t get vaccinated, but she’s still coming to school and I’m like, but they said we had to be vaxxed to come back, how are you back? And she said she has severe asthma and her mom won’t let her but dude, I’ve known her since first grade and she’s never had asthma, and also, why is she in school? How did she get a pass for the vax? Like I don’t want to be mad at her but what the actual fuck, man? I can’t breathe…

#  25   

  The email read:

Happy Monday after break!

We have eleven teachers out today and only four subs. If you can help us out, come on down.

Freshman Physics 1: period 3,4,5,6,7            IB Chemistry: periods 2,3,4,5,6,7

Ceramics 1: period 3,4,5,6                         Ceramics 2:1,2,4,5,6,

Honors Algebra 2: 1.2.3.5.7                             Civics; 2,3,4,5,6

   IB Biology:  1,2,3,4,5,6

There are no lesson plans for any of these classes, they were all last minute. Most have class projects in process loaded into GC.

Thank you.   

    I am not a biology teacher she thought grumpily. This better be babysitting. She was walking through the halls, looking at the room numbers. The science wing was upstairs and on the opposite end of the building from social studies. It was a pain to navigate, but upstairs was where the only open boy’s bathroom was located. The others were still under repair. I already teach six periods of IB, subbing today means I have no planning. The teacher and sub shortage had hit the building hard. So many teachers were overwhelmed that back in October the principal made the decision to assign subs per off period. So, if you had second period off, you were assigned a partner teacher to cover for second period. If you were lucky enough to get an older teacher, or one who was just a bad ass, you never had to worry. But if you got one with small children or anxiety....you were screwed. Thankfully, Tina had been assigned a bio teacher who was known for never taking sick days. Today, however, he was mysteriously out. There were no sub plans, and the secretary suggested he could be out for a while. Which was usually code for "Covid".

    Great, there goes my planning period for two weeks, she thought selfishly. Then she yelled at her own voice in her head I can be selfish, this is unprecedented, I survived Covid remote. I'm surviving the tidal wave Covid remote caused, I can be selfish. I earned the right to think of myself first.

    She found the classroom. It was sterile. There were no personal items on the desk, no encouraging posters on the wall. It was just...empty. She checked the room number a second time. A student entered, walked straight to a table and sat down. "Is Harmon not here today?" she asked.

    "No, you're stuck with me," she smiled. "Easy day, I don't know jack about biology and he didn't leave a lesson plan."

    "It's in GC, we have a whole project we're working on, “ the student looked up. “Is he OK?

   “I don’t know. Was he sick when he left?”

   “ Ya, he said he felt really tired. Then he was just gone. We haven’t seen him in two weeks.”

   “Is the room always this empty? I don’t see any photos or posters, isn’t he a coach?”

    The student looked around “Oh, ya, you’re right, huh. I never noticed that. He had a picture of his wife on the desk by his computer, that was all.”

   “They say a clean, organized space is the sign of a clean, organized mind,” she ventured.

   “That is so true about him, Miss. He is so…specific. Really precise about everything. His lesson plans are in GC and easy to follow, the labs are written really well and we just follow his example. You’re right. I never thought of that, either.” 

   The rest of the class filed in, and she took attendance. Then she addressed the class.

    "I believe your project is in GC, so y'all just go ahead and work independently." The students all nodded silently behind their masks, and either got to work or watched Tik Toks. Not her circus, not her monkeys, she wasn't going to fuss at them.

    A female student suddenly stood up, made a strange strangling sound, and collapsed.

    The class sat frozen at their desks. The girl was clearly having a seizure, Tina immediately removed the student’s mask. She looked up at the class and said "Can someone----" one boy ran out the door, and another picked up the phone in the room to call the front office. The girl's eyelids were fluttering madly, and she was still gurgling in her throat. Tina noted that she had also wet herself. Another girl knelt by her, looking down at the seizing student's face. Tina adjusted her focus, turning to tell the girl to return to her seat, when she was stopped by the girls' posture. She had her hands clasped in front of her, as in prayer. Her eyes were closed and she was whispering to herself. “Does she have seizures?” she asked the praying girl.

   “I don’t know, I’ve never seen it before. I don’t really know her.”

    Suddenly, a voice screamed in the classroom, some random words she did not recognize as English. A student on the other side of the room, who appeared to be screaming from the other side of a void, was sitting with his eyes fixed somewhere far away, screaming at a high pitch.

  She knelt by the girl, who seemed to be through the worst of it. That is, until she sat upright and began to scream as well. She stared into empty space and screamed at whatever she saw there. It was a bloodcurdling, shattering, how are you not doing this outside? scream. Then she looked directly at Tina and said "I know you" before collapsing again.

    The boy who had run out the door returned with an AP. The student who had begun screaming on the other side of the room stopped and asked if he could go to the bathroom. The AP stood in the doorway, seeming to try and sort out what to do next. 

    "Why was he screaming, is he hurt?" He asked, backing away from the boy as he exited the classroom.  The student turned back to Tina “ I have to use the one downstairs, ‘cause this one is still under repair.”The AP looked vacantly at the student, as if trying to place him from years ago .

    “Do you have a pass?" he asked the young man, who stopped for a moment to reply. "No," and kept walking. “You need a pass.” He stepped into the room to grab a yellow pass off of the teacher’s desk. He handed to the student wordlessly. The boy took it from him and stared at it like he had never seen a yellow pass before. “What’s the point?” he said, standing a few feet from the AP. “They already trashed the bathrooms, man, they’re closed. Why I need a pass?”

   The AP looked at the student. “Because it is the rule. We will follow the rules.”

   “It ain’t gonna make me come back. Mister, this is racist. I didn’t trash the bathroom,” as he walked away he threw a final thought over his shoulder “Ain’t no tracker on this, either, I can go wherever I want.”

  The AP stood, speechless for a second, before the student turned and walked away. Then he returned his attention to the science classroom, where students were in varying states of engagement with the unfolding drama.

    "What happened?" he asked the room in general.

    "I dunno, I'm down here,” Tina answered from next to the fallen student.

    "What is his name?" He asked, indicating the boy who was walking down the hall.

    "I dunno, this is not my class."

     "Why are you here?" He looked around the room while Tina watched his face contort. He looked like a five year old trying to understand algebra.

    "My parents met at a school dance...I'm subbing, dumb ass,” she had fifteen years on this administrator, and had established a certain relationship with him when he arrived.  “Certain” meaning she thought he was an ineffective moron, and had no problems letting him know as much.

    "Did you call 911?" He stepped inside the door.

    "No, I've been down here planting tomatoes. "

    "Someone should call 911, " he offered, moving toward the phone in the classroom.

    "Or the nurse. Where's Katie? Why didn't you bring Katie?" she looked at the male student who had brought an administrator instead of a nurse to a medical emergency, "Why didn't you bring Katie?"

    "Who's Katie?" The boy asked.

    "The nurse."

    "We have a nurse?" The boy walked back out the door.

    "I don’t think you were supposed to take off her mask, Miss," a student from the other side of the room said.

    She picked up a piece of paper, crumpled it, and threw it at different student to get their attention.

     "Your turn,” the student  looked up. "Go get Katie, the nurse. She’s in the nurse’s office, next to attendance. It says “NURSE” on her door.”

     Students began to leave the room, pushing past the AP. "Students, you must stay in the room and remain seated, please, let us handle this." Tina looked up at him and laughed. In her head she heard Kevin Bacon saying "Remain calm! All is well!" which she knew she couldn't share with this young AP, who had likely never seen Animal House.

    “Miss, everybody’ s leaving,” said a seated girl, looking over the top of her phone.

    “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

    “I’m just sayin’, they ain’t gonna come back, Miss.”

    The teacher next door entered just ahead of Katie.  The tide of exiting students were pushed back by the entering adults. They sighed heavily and returned to their seats and cell phones. She'd never been so happy to see a human being in her life. Katie immediately took charge. "Tina, I have her."

       "Tina, will you call 911. I’ll call her mom.” Tina grabbed her cell and dialed. She noted the AP had disappeared. Maybe he’d been washed back out to sea by the undertow of students leaving the room. Maybe he went to meet the ambulance. Maybe he went to get Katie, not knowing who Katie was and that she was already present. The two teachers and nurse got the student safely stowed in the ambulance, parents called, reports written, incident logged in IC and remaining students calmed down within thirty minutes.

       “Miss, that was whack, I ain’t never seen anyone have a seizure,” a boy said from behind his Chromebook.

      “Me, either, this is my twentieth year teaching. First seizure.”

     “My friend has been passing out since we got back from Covid. I think she has Covid and it’s making her pass out. She’s a cheerleader.”

      “What does Harmon think of that theory?”

     “He told me it was interesting and I should research it. So I did, it’s possible Covid is causing some brain issues,  you know, that we don’t really understand yet. Then he was absent, though, and I never got to tell him I found stuff out.”

     Just then, the fire drill went off.

   “This is a joke, right? We did not have a drill scheduled today.”

   The students stood up, put away their Chromebooks,  shrugged their backpacks on all without looking up from their phones. Again without a glance up, they shuffled out of the classroom. Tina walked behind them with the attendance. She practiced her zen breathing as the kids shuffled toward the exit.

She heard the AP before she saw him. “Go back! It’s not a fire drill! Lockdown! Lockdown! It’s real, get in the classroom!” The kids,who had been moving at roughly the speed of global warming, turned and started running back toward the classroom. 

“It’s not a fire drill, it’s a lockdown. It’s real!!! Get inside get inside!!”

The kids were in the room seconds before she was, even though she was physically closer when the AP began shouting. They had been doing practice lockdown drills-students sometimes called them ‘Shooter Drills’- since kindergarten.She slammed the classroom door behind them, and watched the kids expertly close the blinds. She locked the door and looked around the room.

“You know the drill. Stay away from the window. Turn off your phone ringers. Text your People. Don’t talk.”

Quietly, eyes wide, masks in place, they lowered their heads as if in prayer and texted their families. Outside the door, she could hear the AP continuing down the hall. Faintly, from the direction of the front of the building, she heard gunshots.

“Since I’m the sub, I need to get attendance, OK?” she whispered. “Raise your hand when I say your name.” She started at the top and began to quietly read their names. Each student raised their hand as they were called, eyes glued to their cell phones. It’s December, she thought. We’ve only been back four months. Feels like forty years since August.

______________________________________________________________________

Dear Mr. Alcott,

Thank you for teaching me math freshman year. I had no idea how to do algebra at all, and the way you explain things made my mind calm. I hope this year is going OK for you.

Dear Mdme. Michelle,.

I have learned so much from you in French class. Not just about French, but about France and history, and art and so so much. You make the class interesting and fun.

Dear Ms Morgan,

I don’t know if anyone has thought to thank you for being the head custodian. I really appreciate you, the school is always so clean. And I’m sorry the boys were such jerks and ruined their bathrooms. I know we have no money to fix them and I’m so sorry.

Ms. Fare,

You aren’t my teacher, I’ve never had you, but you pulled me into your room during the lockdown. Everyone was so calm and I loved that you read us Dr. Seuss books. Thank you for that.

Dear Miss Evers,

I  am sorry I was such a bad student. It wasn’t you, you are a great teacher.  I was just going through a lot of personal stuff sophomore year. You were always so nice to me and I never did anything in that class, but I always came because I knew you’d be nice to me.

Dear Miss Birdie,

I hope you are OK, you haven’t been at school in three weeks. I wanted to tell you I think  you’re the best painting teacher ever. I did not know I could even paint until I took this class, I thought I could only sketch stuff.

Dear Coach

Thank you for making me run so much. I really hate running, I still hate it but because  you made me do it, I’m swimming so much faster. I beat my own time at the last meet!

Teaching theatre after remote Covid learning is like sitting in a graveyard.

 Teaching theatre remotely from an empty stage is like sitting on a grave. And sitting on a grave evokes Hamlet. The inability to act. The certainty of uncertainty. His proclivity to over-thinking is what brought him down. What would happen if Hamlet simply ceased to think? What if, like our friends Didi and Gogo, he simply existed? Teaching theatre after remote learning is like sitting in a graveyard, but it is the bombed out hellscape of Waiting For Godot. There are students present, in person, I can see their eyes. But everything else is behind a mask, preventing them from being heard. It’s as if the mask hobbles their entire being, and they must wiggle and poke and shake and attack and run to overcompensate for the handicap. 

They adapted to Brady Bunch boxes, maybe too easily, and got comfortable there. Walking a meaningless circle, searching incessantly for something they cannot identify or define, but they know is missing. Waiting.

Ophelia and Pononius and Gertrude and Hamlet are dead. Didi and Gogo are waiting for Godot, who is never going to come. Nothing happens, nobody comes, death is the only way out. Lucky Ophelia and Polonius and Gertrude and Hamlet.

“Dying is easy, son, living is harder”. They all saw Hamilton on Disney Plus. Those references can be used. The others are only ghosts, allusions made by the teacher instructing them in a dead art form. Nobody cares. Nothing happens, nobody comes.

Except the AP, here to evaluate the teacher, who barely survived the last year and a half, let alone is inspiring students. We Are Still Here. All teachers in this moment should be stamped “Exemplary” and allowed to roam free. The Omicron spike has everyone jumpy about going remote again. Back to Brady Bunch boxes. Back to an empty theatre.

My fractured, clouded brain and bruised psyche cannot take this for another year. It’s been two years. I have watched teachers ramp themselves into a relentless positivity that makes my head hurt, while others are succumbing to despair. Neither group has any real hope, it’s all in how they choose to deal with it. Some schools went fully open in March of 2021, while others were hybrid or in cohorts. There is no consistency, even within districts. Couple that with the inconsistency of information being shared, new variants and conflicting protocols, it’s a wonder all of us have not lined up at the psych ward. I would love to wrap this up neatly but there is no end, this is never going to end. I can’t write an ending for something that I believe will continue forever. 

I can’t even manage a coherent metaphor. I feel like that first piece was solid, the certainty of uncertainty, because at the time, I believed this would end. 

As I tried to write a nice bookend metaphor for this piece before submitting, the wildfire in Superior exploded. There is no greater metaphor for this piece, this time in education, than a brushfire in December that is out of control because 100 mph winds are keeping the tanker planes grounded. And snow is not predicted until tomorrow.

Waiting for Godot has become waiting for the snow.

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