Saturday, May 16, 1998
Decisions have been made.
Last year, just around this time, both Aimee and Bob made the jump from Chumash to Bard. She took over the 2Honors program there (where she would be working with her husband and closer to Devon’s day-care... does one mention her Chumash misery?). Bob became Assistant Principal there, putting to use his administrative credential.
At the annual Chumash school-year-end party at Coach Smith’s last June, I was telling anyone who was asking (and that was just about everyone) that I probably wouldn’t be returning to the classroom in September. I had found a job in the waning weeks of the summer of ’96 (just days before my self-imposed "you’re-now-officially-allowed-to-panic-since-you-still-don’t-have-a-job-you-miserable-excuse-for-a-breadwinner" deadline of August first); sure, it was in L.A... sure, its salary was only marginally above what I was making in the classroom (and more than that margin was eaten away by car payments for the old Tercel’s commuter-car replacement), but the job was still marginally in education (with a high-tech training company) and completely in technology (I became their webmaster, using many of skills acquired in the last year’s "build(ing) a market for myself"). I was having fun and learning new skills by the week. In the midst of this (what do I call it, revel-lation?), Aimee pulled me aside to put a bug in my soup, or at least in my ear. Bard had a Drama and English position opening up. Would I be interested?
Lisa and I talked long and hard about it in the next weeks. By the time we returned from a short vacation in Vegas, I had the next three years’ productions laid out. But Lisa, though she wanted me back in the county, had reservations. Since, Bob (in one of his last acts as Chumash Union Rep) had discovered for me that I could request a second year’s leave of absence, she reasoned I should probably take another year off. I missed the kids. I missed teaching. But she was worried that I didn’t miss the classroom, and its connection with administrivia and political bullshit. Calmer heads prevailed and I requested the second year leave of absence.
Request denied.
I was forced by the district office, who, I was told repeatedly, never turned down this kind of request, to submit either a letter of resignation or a letter of intent to return to Chumash. I chose the former over the latter, only after I won the guarantee in writing (as dictated by the State Ed Code) that I would have 39 months from the time of my leaving the classroom to return without losing my position on the pay scale (I would lose seniority and tenure, but at least I wouldn’t be starting out at the insulting salary of a rookie teacher).
So it was back to the commute (an hour and small change on the way down [as long as I left before six-thirty in the morning] and an hour and a half to two hours on the way home). The commute sucked, of course, but by July of ’97, I was valuable enough to earn one day a week telecommuting. By the end of the calendar year, I had earned a twenty-plus percent pay raise (impossible to fathom for a former teacher). And all along I was receiving training. Databases, operating systems, software applications, programming languages. I fell in love with learning all over again. It was wonderful, so wonderful that my missing the kids and teaching began to fade. Sure, the rewards were only monetary, there were no moments where I saw the light bulb burst into a glow above a kid’s head, but Lisa marveled at how much emotional energy I now had (I might be physically beat when I came home, but at least I wasn’t as drained as I had been in the classroom years).
But, in a class during the first part of last month, I received training in Windows NT server and workstation. As I was taking in this information about user profiles and system polices, all I could think about was its application in the classroom. The yearning came back. I wanted to teach again. I wanted to direct again. And it was at this moment of weakness that Bob Johnston called and said simply, "All right, Billy. It’s time to fish or cut bait." It seemed that the teacher hired at Bard to fill the Drama slot I declined last June didn’t work out. The slot was mine if I wanted it. Bob sold hard, telling me of administrative changes he had implemented and foresaw coming down the pike (with a new high school—one that hopefully would help alleviate crowding in the district—opening in two years, it is most probable that the current principal at Bard would be moved to the new school [his campus being the home of the new school’s demographic majority], and Bob, the district’s new fair-haired boy [no bilious letter-writer he], was being groomed for the head slot in two years).
I called Aimee to get her take. She was, to be understated, very happy. She sold me harder than Bob. The kids were great, motivated. More than twenty percent went directly to a university (as opposed to Chumash’s disgraceful two). Student and staff morale was high. Technology was blossoming (and threatening to explode if the Digital High School grant came through, as everyone believed it would). It all sounded so great.
The idealism that had been so buried started to see and feel daylight again. Despite some lagging doubts, I was ready to return. My only fear was that if I wasn’t happy back in the classroom, everybody and everything would be fucked; Bard’s Drama program would get hosed, I thought I would be disappointing Bob and Aimee, and I would be screwed because I couldn’t return to my L.A. job (which was now paying me a sizable chunk more than next year’s teaching salary... a real consideration since Lisa will be teaching half-time next year). But I also knew that if I said no to teaching this time, I was probably saying no forever. I would probably never feel this strongly about returning to the classroom again and after next year the salary dilemma would be insurmountable. Lisa saw these concerns and agreed with some of them; she would love to have me closer to home, but... And thus, she pointed me back to what you’re holding now. Read it, she said, and if then the classroom still beckons, go for it.
And I did. All the bullshit came flooding back. And I searched my soul again. Fears that I didn’t have what it took to slog it out against ignorance on a daily basis began to raise their really ugly heads. And then I visited Bard. It is a beautiful place (not physically... no thirty-plus year-old school can be, but vibrant, spirited, maybe even visionary). So beautiful, it made my decision even tougher.
I said no. Again. For the last time. Every time I thought seriously about re-entering the classroom, my stomach tightened. Not a good sign. My supervising teacher, the greatest classroom teacher who ever lived (even greater than Frankie), the one and only Bob Miller, once told me, "You can think what you want. You can even fool yourself in believing you’re comfortable when you’re not. But your stomach keeps score."
I loved being on campus again. I had brought Bob some software, taught him how to use it, showed him how it could accomplish some of his technological visions for Bard. I realized then that my dream gig would be a combination of creating technological solutions for sites and teachers, in-servicing those teachers in the use of those solutions, creating curriculum for student-based technology classes, pilot-teaching those classes, and teaching teachers how to teach those classes.
This, I even told Bob when declining the position. Sites, visionary sites, would jump at creating that position, if they only had the resources, he told me. And I replied that the districts, who do have the resources, have neither the vision nor the will to allocate those resources. It is a Catch-22.
What can we do?
We can either cling to the past (the way we teach kids today is not much different than the way it was done a century ago) or we can look to the future.
Lisa asked today if we should accept the wedding invitation of a student of mine from back in the PeeVee years. I haven’t seen this student in years, and at first I wanted to say yes. But, again, I said no. I can’t look back anymore. When I was a young teacher, I could see the future in front of me. I was comforted by its seeming certainty, its security. Today, I have no idea what I’ll be doing five, let alone, twenty years from now. I can look forward all I want, and everything is there, not just a seeming certainty.
And I like it.
There’s no looking back now.
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