Matching Tracksuits

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years in the Greenville county school system it’s that nothing last forever.

Don’t like some software the district is requiring you to use? Don’t worry: the powers that be will change their mind in a few years. (I’m lookin’ at you, Mastery Connect.)

Tired of all the jargonistic names of things? Never fear: they’ll create new jargon and new acronyms based on it shortly.

Don’t like the required verbiage in the district’s lesson plan templates? Don’t fret: they’ll change that within a few years.

Feeling antipathy for the district’s teacher evaluation program? No worries: they’ll change it in a few years.

Don’t like the required template for self-reflection and the format of the accompanying meetings with administrators regarding such self-reflection? Don’t worry: they’ll change that.

Every year they change something. And every year, we hear the same thing: “This new gadget/program/template/software is a game changer.” Always looking for that silver bullet.

The only constant thing in this school district is the inevitable major change every few years.

At first, this used to bother me greatly. Not anymore. I’ve come to expect it. Every time we have a meeting, my thought is, “Okay, what are they changing now.”

We have a new student as of today. She doesn’t speak much English at all. The language she does speak — there’s only one person in the whole school who speaks it. Her sister. Who speaks less English than she does. What did four young ladies do when she arrived in my English class? Swarm around her with welcoming smiles and helped her the entire class period.

It was hard not to feel a little hope for humanity glancing over at them as they worked through today’s assignment.

“I don’t want to be recorded.” I looked up and saw Thompson and thought at first she was joking, that she was sort of pretending to be a student. A sort of inside joke: “We both know that’s coming.” But I know her well enough to realize she doesn’t have that kind of deftness. I don’t think she even knows how to make a joke. I can’t remember what I said — I was standing by the computer, working to get everything ready for the class as they entered, and my attention was not focused on what she was doing.

“I don’t want to be recorded,” she said again, confirming what I’d suspected: she wasn’t joking.

“Okay, we can talk about this in just a moment. I’m trying to get things ready for class.” That’s what I said; what I thought was, “What in the hell is she talking about? Is she serious? How does she function in the school? Does she not realize that she’s recorded all the time? In stores. In homes possibly. Everywhere.” I kept trying to get things going and again I hear it.

“I don’t want to be recorded.”

At this point, I was thinking that we’d have an issue about this in the future, but I was slowly realizing that she wanted me to comply then. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Let me turn that off,” is what she was expecting to hear. She wasn’t letting me know that she wanted this to be taken into consideration in the future. She wanted it then.

“Well, I’m sorry,” I responded, still trying to get the materials ready for the next class, most of whom were in the room at that point.

By this time, she was getting noticeably upset. “I don’t want to be recorded,” she said again, at which point I almost said, “Jesus, lady — you’re as bad as the kids.”

In the end, she said she was going to go to the library, and I could send some kids there. By this time, the class was spiraling out of control because I was dealing with a teacher acting like a four-year-old instead of applying the same routine I’ve used daily. Once I got everything under control, the phone rang. It was Allison in the front office.

“Mrs. Thompson won’t be with you today,” she began, and I thought, “Jesus — I know this. You don’t have to tell me she’s in the library.” Instead, she continued, “She’s gone home.”

I’ve been thinking on and off all weekend about tomorrow and what that might be like. I have no idea what Thompson is going to be like; I have no clue what she’s going to say to me, to Davis, to Finley. She’s not the most reasonable person I’ve ever met, and she’s certainly not the sharpest person I’ve ever encountered, so I have this not-so-latent fear that it will be a disaster tomorrow.

Best-case scenario: I apologize and say I could have handled it better, and she says she was perhaps a little unreasonable. I volunteer to limit recording of the class in the future, and she suggests that it shouldn’t be too big of a deal, that it’s something she could get used to. I don’t see that kind of introspection in the woman, though, so I doubt that will happen.

Worst-case scenario 1: she quits, and the whole Special Ed program gets thrown into disarray. Four teachers (Haenlein, Hinner, presumably Woodard, and I) would all lose our inclusion teacher, and I have no idea the legal repercussions of that. Truth be told, the woman is more of a hindrance than help in class with her continual tendency to begin talking to students privately while I’m addressing the whole class. (Bringing that up will now be tiresome.) So not having her in class would not be a problem for me at all. But there’s the legal issue with compliance for the IEP.

Worst-case scenario 2: she becomes passively-aggressively disruptive in class. I don’t know if that is realistic: she doesn’t seem like she’s sharp enough to pull that off, truth be told.

Worst-case scenario 3: I get in trouble for what happened. That’s unlikely: I’ve already spoken to Davis about it, and her reaction reassured me, as did Haenlein’s and Rutzer’s.

What will actually happen will likely be something I’ve not foreseen, something completely unexpected. And I’ll deal with it like an adult.