Before Donald Trump ultimately delivers his own coup de grace (surely some statement so outrageously stupid will finally sink his ship, although current polls and events offer depressing evidence to the contrary, despite his best efforts to live down to my expectations) and fades into (at least) political oblivion, I thought I’d share my story that ties into his (typically despicable) catch phrase. I am going to post it on both my Hancock and personal blog because, well, I can.
The setting: Year 5, which some of you might know as Tenure Year. Although tenure’s protections are vastly overrated, it does mean that administrators must at least follow procedural rules to fire you. (They do NOT need to actually prove their allegations.) Prior to that, it’s a simple, “Buh-Bye.”
I don’t claim that I had achieved anything close to Master Teacher status by this time in my career. In fact, I make no claim to have ever achieved that. But this was an especially tough year.
• A new principal, the late John Gibson, arrived.
• I was the president of the teachers union and was a constant (and some would argue, perpetually obnoxious) PIA to administration. I was also effective.
• I had the worst class in my entire career (of course, I didn’t know it at the time; I probably DID intuitively know that if many more like that had followed I would have self-terminated, at least as a teacher): Freshman English, a class roster of 28 students, 24 boys and 4 girls, with family names that read like a Who’s Who of Lemay infamy (including a couple of the girls). Average reading level of 12th percentile, with the highest at the 25th percentile. 20% were off the chart at the bottom. (I know of only 3 from that group who graduated, although I may have missed 1 or 2.)
• I was naive, believing that I could change the world and them. I kept trying to actually teach instead of just retaining (some semblance of) control. I had yet to learn that you couldn’t actually teach unless you had control; I hadn’t needed to know that the previous four years. So at least I learned something that year.
• I was not a good teacher for those kids. Could someone else have done better? I don’t know, but they could hardly have been worse. (They DID provide me with some of my best stories, though.)
• Relatively new father, with new responsibilities in that area and resultant marital stresses did not help.
Did John Gibson actually have orders to fire me? Can’t prove it one way or another, but he was an ambitious man and knew, at least instinctively, that getting credit for my leaving the Place would be a feather in his cap.
I was struggling. It was no secret. Gibson told an English department colleague concerned about evaluation that it would be unfair (his words), for example, to evaluate me based on that one class. (I remember no particular problems with any of my others; neither do I remember even one bona fide evaluation prior that point in my career. One year’s consisted of the principal stepping into my room and throwing me a mini-basketball from Lemay Bank; I successfully reached down and to the left to make the grab and earned praise: “You’re all right!”) Guess which was the ONLY class he sat in on and on which I was evaluated.
That spring, the late Jim (father of Cardinal broadcaster Dan) McLaughlin and I were in the lounge next to my room when the late Don Steckhan, math teacher emeritus, came huffing and puffing up the stairs. (Steckhan was a 5x5 smoker, so that description is pretty literal.) PCs were at least a decade away from common usage; everything was handwritten on paper, and Steckhan had a habit of perusing said papers on the principal’s desk while he was away.
“You need to get down there,” he wheezed. “You're being fired!” Mac (and I? – maybe) immediately headed down, confirmed what Steckhan had seen on the evaluation, and the wheels started turning.
I met with state union reps, lawyers were contacted, strategies discussed (including initial preparation for a lawsuit claiming a violation of my 1st Amendment rights – did I say I tended to be outspoken and critical?). Most importantly, Mac (the law school graduate) set up a sidebar meeting with Superintendent Brodbeck. As near as I can tell, whether this was a plot or just a rogue operation, Brodbeck was either not in the loop or up for a fight. In any case, he assured Mac, “We don't want to fire the union president.”
They didn’t. When the evaluation conference was finally held (the shortest in my career, except for the year the [different] principal wasn’t speaking to me and just shoved it in my mailbox) the cover sheet, and ONLY the cover sheet, had been changed to read, “Recommended.” This despite, if you believe what was actually written on the evaluation itself, my being the worst teacher in the history of the universe. If I had believed it, I would have fired me. Instead, not even attempting a rebuttal, I took the win, signed the document, and left the office.
And life went on. By the time I finally retired, 29 years later, I think my personnel file had its own file drawer.
I find myself being drawn to the stories that you have about the students in your class. I believe that there were a group of families that didn't believe there was a world outside of Lemay, or cared. It seems to me that there were a lot of bullies in Lemay and the only way they knew how to get what they wanted was at the expense of someone else.
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