Matching Tracksuits

Today’s journal prompt for students touches on a universal motif:

Have your parents ever said something like, “Listen to me!” or “You’re not listening to me!” when they’re talking to you? What are you doing when they say that? Why do they think you’re not listening? What does it mean to listen?

We’re working our way through a unit on communication, and this week, we’ll be focusing on active listening. It should be a fairly straight-forward week, especially since we only have three days in school: Monday and Tuesday constituted our fall break, one week after and 100% longer than the Boy’s. (Wasn’t fall break three days at one point? At least two days. Greenville County Schools cut it back this year or last, I suppose.)

As students work, I find myself thinking now-familiar thoughts: this work is so much easier than teaching English, and it’s also easier, I think, than the other teachers’ responsibilities, which leaves me feeling a little guilty.

Why should I? It’s not like I’m spinning my wheels with the kids, just giving them busy work and straight 100s, which I theoretically could. I think that might be one of the reasons why the principal, who was my grade-level administrator at my old school, hired me to teach this leadership class: cruising is so tempting, and she knew I wouldn’t do that.

Compared to what I was doing, I certainly feel like I’m cruising. Gone are the hours of reading and providing feedback on a seemingly-endless pile of essays. Gone are the hours of tedious planning. Gone are the painful and endless meetings about “data.” (I swore last year I wouldn’t use that word anymore. Now that the year is over, perhaps I can lighten up.) Gone are the emails asking me to provide clarification for this or that element of a lesson that the instructional coach (what in the world even is that job? do some research: though every school has one, you won’t find a consistent definition or list of responsibilities) had observed and made notes about. Gone are the meetings leading up to a given benchmark during which administrators (and the instructional coach) encouraged us to encourage our students, motivate our students, push our students to take the benchmarks seriously even though almost none of the teachers took them seriously because of the lack of transparency in the benchmark and our inability to use it as a teaching aid in any sense because of its proprietary nature.

Count that: thirteen individuals with a job title that includes “Superintendent” in it, with the attendant six-figure salaries. With only an average of $150,000 a year — and the superintendent himself making over $300,000 — that comes to $1,950,000 for the salaries of thirteen people who work in public education and do little to nothing directly with students. They do nothing with the teachers. They are so far removed from actual education that to call them educators in anything more than a theoretical sense is insulting.

I often felt the district administrators, from the Superintendent to the Deputy Superintendent down through the seven (yes, seven) Assistant Superintendents for School Leadership, the Assistant Superintendent for Transformation, the Associate Superintendent for Academics, and the Associate Superintendent for Operations all could have used a lesson or two in active listening.

When my previous principal asked me if there was anything he could do that might convince me to stay, I told him there was nothing he could do because it’s all out of his hands. I rehearsed the list; he agreed. But why was it out of his hands? Because the thirteen six-figure-salary superintendents (almost none of whom I ever met except to speak with the superintendent ten seconds when he visited our school a decade ago and one of the assistant- or associates- when they visited our school as we were coming out of COVID lockdown) take those options out of principals hands. “You should tell them at the next meeting you have that you lost a teacher that you most certainly did not want to lose because of your inability to be flexible in any way,” I wanted to say, but they wouldn’t have listened. We’d all be wasting our breath.

So I’m not working nearly as hard as I used to, but I still feel I’m working, and doing important work at that. Sadly I’m not impacting many of the students who would most benefit from a class like mine (and what I could make it if I did have those at-risk students in the class), but I’m coming to terms with the fact that I don’t have to sacrifice my mental well-being and time for my entire teaching career. I made my sacrifice: time to move on.

But the Boy still has to face all nonsense that drove me out, but he faces it as a student. The endless cycles of benchmark tests with their weak questions drive him to the same level of frustration as they did me. He bemoans how poorly he does on them whether or not he tries, and he speaks of the frustration of hearing his teachers fuss at those who did poorly on the benchmark. “Next time they say that, politely suggest to your teacher that everyone might do better the next time if the teacher could take some time with the class and go over some of the questions the majority of students got wrong,” I decide to tell him when I get home today and listen to him fuss about the latest benchmark nonsense. I know full well that the teacher can do this. I know perfectly well that the teacher himself can’t even see the benchmark test but instead gets a report with the question number, the standard it supposedly covers (and don’t even get me started about how poorly the questions align with the standards), and whether or not a given student got that question right, with a cumulative report for each question and each class. It’s like doing target shooting with a blindfold on and being told only, “You missed. Try again.”

One teacher apparently told him the benchmark is so important that it will impact her decision about which high school class to place him in later this year. “Bullshit,” I want to say when he relates this to me, but I restrain myself and simply tell him that that’s not accurate. But who can blame teachers for doing things like this when everyone from the thirteen superintendents down to the principal, the assistant principal, and the instructional coach all harp on the same nonsense: getting students to make an acceptable score on these tests is equivalent to ending world poverty.

“Don’t tell him not to take this seriously,” K constantly admonishes me, and I do indeed tell the Boy that he should look at the benchmark as must an opportunity to practice with questions like the ones that will be on the end-of-the-year SC Ready test (which, yes, is just as useless but useless at a state level instead of just a district level). But even that is not accurate: the company that creates the benchmarks is not the one that creates the actual test, and while one might think that doesn’t really make a big difference, the quality of the questions from the latter is somewhat improved over the former.

So I am out of the system, out of the haranguing reality of GCS schools, but because E still has three quarters of a school year in middle school (all the testing ramps down in high school: it’s just End of Course exams, SAT, ACT, and AP tests), we still suffer through it together as a family.