It's October at the workplace. That means the smell of pumpkin latte farts! It means September the dreaded first month is now done. It means it is cooling off (southwesterners, this does not apply to you). It means it is the time for....goal-setting!
What? Yes, you heard me, it is goal-setting time. This is the time of year when we teachers are supposed to set goals to attain during the year. We've been doing it this way for 2 or 3 years now. Basically what happens is, we as teachers are supposed to decide what we want to accomplish for the year. Well, when you think about it our goals are simple
1. Stay out of rehab until mid June
2. Keep from calling strategic air strikes on parents who don't respond to our calls and emails regarding their kids' futures as fry salters.
3. Either get the salaries to just below the tax hike line or below the food stamps limit, either will work.
Now I'm not getting into the salary debate, it is a no-win. However, if you want to pay babysitting wages, $10 per hour per kid, I think you'll find that hiking us up the salary food chain is quite reasonable after all.
Anyhow, we are not allowed such realistic goals. Instead, a transmission sent from Krypton, just after it jettisoned Superman, landed on Earth last year with a whole set of "attainable and measurable goals". This pretty much means more work for us as we decide what we can attain and measure in 6 months when we meet with the boss to see what was attained and measured. It's not like the old days when our goals were determined for us. My goals were pretty straightforward:
1. Bryan's toenail clippings shall land no more than 5 inches from the trash can.
2. Bryan shall remember that he is a (barely) licensed professional and not come to the workplace with mustard stains on his forehead.
3. Bryan will strive to directly teach his students at least for 20 minutes a week using district-approved materials at least in the morning.
4. Bryan shall refrain from psychological torture by exposing the students to goofy Stan Freberg comedy bits.
No, seriously, the real goals were attainable and occasionally measured. The problem was, they were often measured at "off" moments. My first few years as a teacher probably had more off moments than a dead cell phone. Face it, teaching is not a profession that a "Dummies" book can help one master, although between 2002-2005 I probably could have used one.
The California college system had some strange methods of teaching the educators-to-be. Instead of practical advice and knowledge that would help us to immediately know what to do upon signing our first W-4 forms as teachers, they strove to make us independent thinkers, to "think outside the box" in order to be stellar teachers who would rise to fame and receive international acclaim as universal geniuses at teaching 50 different ways to add 2+3.
The problem here is that those methods turn the brain into a bowl of moldy currant jelly. We attended these classes at night, many of us working jobs in the daytime as well. Our brains were already jelly-like in terms of the high carb counts needed to keep us awake past 7! What we needed were classes such as:
Ed 101: Staying out of rehab until mid June
Ed 102: Planning field trips to Nolde Forest for most of the elementary years and not make them seem like retreads
Ed 103: How to become a fun yet useful teacher the kids will remember
Ed 104 How to make watching "The Electric Company" a vital phonics program
Instead we got things like,
Ed101: How to spend hours designing a 15-minute lesson
Ed102: Taking the fun out of using textbooks by removing them altogether and making you find the materials and copy them when there isn't a working copier for miles around
Ed103: The facts of education: say goodbye to a regular sex life
Ed104: Guilting your former ideas of teaching away
Getting the picture? When I finally got out of northern California like Luke and the gang from Jabba's exploding stronghold, and into Las Vegas with a school already assigned to me (er, vice versa on that one) and an apartment waiting for my farts, I was virtually clueless about what to do first. Despite 3 days of orientation (during which I was interviewed on TV for the 6:00 news), I learned nothing about being a teacher and more about desert skin survival for women and cute little crafts that my lefty nature has no way of accomplishing.
What I came to realize after a few years was, the orientation crew had no idea how to make us feel like teachers because they'd probably screwed up meeting their goals as well. They don't do that fancy schmancy orientation crap anymore probably because the district realized they were screwing up the plebes far too early. When I got to my assignment, I noticed a lot of cliqueyness among the veterans. I realized later that it wasn't out of a lack of friendliness, it was survival instinct in a war zone...and as I wasn't ever in a clique, I was pretty much alone in that zone...and had no clue as to proceed. Putting me on the 5th grade front lines 2 years later was like putting Klink on the Russian front on "Hogan's Heroes".
Despite ups and downs in a normally up and down profession, I've come to a point of semi-comfort in my career, maybe too semi-comfortable. That's why we have to make these goals...comfort leads to complacency and complacency leads to a smugness that is dangerous in terms of having embarrassing "off" moments, often happening when scheduled for an observation.
Observation (noun): a random moment when your supervisor comes with with an iPad just as you finish telling about a dark era called "corporal punishment" to the kids, merely to let them know how lucky they are to live now...and the supervisor then types everything you say, notes every eye twitch and sweat stain on the armpit...and you have to justify every sweat bead and connect it to a learning standard during a later conference.
In conclusion, my real inner goals are to be the best teacher I can be and for my kids to remember me fondly, something I can positively predict as reality more than 10 years ago. On paper, it's more specific, but pretty close, just in "edu-speak", a language also originated from a Kryptonian ship...now if you'll excuse me, I'll finish typing up my goals, then see if Betty Ford has a June 15 opening...that is if my food stamps application is turned down!
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