Friday was Yay Day.
Don’t google it.
It’s mine.
I just thought that the final day of school should have its own special name.
Yay Day seemed appropriate.
It’s been a hard year marked by breakdowns of several types.
There was a stress induced personal breakdown,
a self inflicted professional breakdown,
and the ongoing and sometimes violent physical breakdowns.
I kept the personal breakdown rather quiet.
Nobody really needed to know that I was spiraling.
Most of it, well, at least a lot of it,
came from the fact that I was simply overbooked.
At the start of the school year, I was a special education middle school teacher.
That’s a pretty exhausting full-time position in and of itself.
Special education is one of the most paperwork intensive areas of teaching.
The amount of legally required documentation is insane
and of course, time devouring.
Teachers are supposed to get a half an hour lunch break and a prep period
to get some of this done.
Due to a normally difficult group of SpEd students
and a terribly abnormally difficult paraprofessional,
I got no such time that I wasn’t hands-on with my students
From the moment they got to school
until the moment I handed them back to their parents,
I was hands on child-engaged.
Add add to this full-time job with no time to catch my breath,
my continuing education requirements.
Because there is such a shortage of special education teachers,
teachers who are not certified in special education are currently allowed
to teach special education if they are taking the required graduate courses
to add the specialty to their original certification.
Hello grad school.
Don’t forget my 94 year old father who requires daily care.
We are trying to keep him in his own home.
He’s lived there for 55 years and it was in that home that my mother died.
Dad wants to die there too.
It’s not easy, keeping him safe and cared for,
but it’s what needs doing.
So there I was two months into the school year
with a pretty exhausting part-time job taking care of Dad
on top of an already exhausting full-time teaching job
and grad school (on nights I wasn’t with Dad)
with all those wonderful time consuming papers and projects
along with the studying and exams.
Oh! I almost forgot.
Numeracy.
This year a brand new requirement for public school math teachers,
including all sped teachers,
was to take a full year online numeracy course.
Let me share a little of my math background..
I liked math all the way through high school.
I did well in math until I hit calculus in college.
(I was woefully unprepared for calculus –
stupid, stupid high school guidance counselors -
But the whole calculus debacle is a tawdry tale for another day.)
Not to brag, but I scored a 33 on my ACT test.
My scores on other standardized tests netted me a national merit scholarship.
I say all this simply to explain I am not a stupid woman
(though I freely admit, I’m not as smart as I used to be ).
I should’ve been able to take this stupid unnecessary online course
quickly and easily.
Should’ve been.
But the damn thing was so convoluted and labor-intensive,
Teaching you and testing you on all the new methods of teaching math
including not only the methods but the reasons for the methodology.
Which would be fine, except that every one of the countless bloody sections
had multiple videos to watch,
followed by graded essay questions on how you would personally
implement these strategies in your own classroom.
Oh my imaginary deities!
I effing hated numeracy.
I didn’t have time for that nonsense.
I didn’t have need for that nonsense
I was teaching nonverbal autistic students
who were at pre-K to first grade level in math skills.
No matter how blessed clever these methods are for teaching math,
I was never going to use a single one of them.
So, of course, I fell behind in the mandated curriculum guide.
Eight weeks into the school year I was already six weeks behind in numeracy.
One of my favorite stories which I will share now
is of being called in to the principal’s office to discuss
why I was so far behind in my online class timeline.
Lovely man, Mr. C.
He asked me, not for the first time as this was a question
he used on many occasions with many people I am told -
“Do you think that your lack of effort is giving the taxpayers their money’s worth? “
I kid you not.
The man had used that line on me several times.
Speaking of the taxpayers money’s worth,
because of my teaching outside of my certification,
I, a third year teacher,
was getting paid $10,000 less than a first year teacher.
So when the man asked me if I thought
I was giving the taxpayers there money’s worth,
I missed a perfect opportunity for the perfect comeback
I should have pulled up my sleeves to show him the brilliant bruises on my skin
and told him the taxpayers were getting me damn cheap.
I should be getting combat pay and he ought to be personally
bringing me a daiquiri and a bunch of flowers at the end of every day.
Anyway. I didn’t tell the man off as I truly truly should have.
I sorta kinda took it to heart instead.
I was obviously doing things wrong.
I wasn’t managing my time properly.
I was working hard enough.
I was indulging in too many frivolous activities like sleeping and such.
If I just learned to invent more conscious time, I could do what needed doing.
The problem was obviously me.
Okay, I told you I was losing it.
It took me way too much wallow time before I finally had my brainstorm.
There was nothing wrong with this particular workhorse,
It was the freaking workload that was insane.
It was the breakless all days at work
before running off to take classes
or take care of Dad.
It was dealing with an asshat of a principal
and being incarcerated with a lazy duplicitous paraprofessional
all workday long,
then spending my commute times on the phone listening
to my now permanently feuding sisters each rhapsodize
about the wrongs the other had done
while I tried to be supportive and neutral simultaneously.
It was getting pummeled by children I was trying to teach,
knowing that no one had my back
while feeling incredibly guilty that I wasn’t a good enough teacher
to keep them from raging in the first place.
It was a thousand other things.
It was f-ing Numeracy!
And that, my dear friends, is how I quit being a teacher.
I evaluated my priorities and decided which obligations I needed to tend to
and which I needed to prune.
Taking care of Dad - nonnegotiable priority one.
Taking better care of me - also priority one.
Work? - I found some wiggle room there.
I need a salary and health insurance
But being a teacher?
Well, that just wasn’t working out,
But I had 2+ years in the school retirement system,
and it takes five years to become vested.
No, I wanted to stay in the system.
What else was I qualified for?
I could go back to administrative support.
I worked 19 years in the office at Saint Rapp’s.
Of course, office staff aren’t as well paid as teachers.
( and remember, teachers aren’t well paid at all.)
But office staff don’t take work home
and office staff don’t have to take grad courses to add onto their certification.
So that’s a plus.
Oh darn.
I remembered office staff work 12 months a year.
Big minus.
That’s a killer of the one truly lovely thing about working in education.
Say goodbye to yay day.
Heavy sigh.
Then I came up with a tragically brilliant idea.
There’s another position in the school system that doesn’t require
all that outside of work time that I do not have to give it.
It pays just about the same as the office work would
But it follows the school calendar and his the two month summer vacation.
Welcome to my world of perpetual irony.
I took what is termed a self demotion,
Cut my own salary ( $10,000 less than a first year teacher if you recall ) in half
and have become a paraprofessional.
I still work with autistic students though now at the early elementary level.
I was hired to work in the classroom with the most difficult children my current school has.
The administration hired me to help back up a problem teacher
who was having quite a bit of difficulty with her difficult children.
They figured they were getting a bargain,
an experience teacher working as a paraprofessional.
They were right.
No matter what kind of teacher anyone wishes to judge me to be,
I am a damn good paraprofessional.
I take reasonable care of unreasonable children,
and do not let their rages upset me.
I take reasonable care of an unreasonable teacher,
help her with her paperwork ( I write better IEP than she does ),
take charge of the kids as much as I can to give her necessary desk time,
remind her that if you’ve done everything you can to calm down a raging child
sometimes you just have to put them in the pillow corner,
pull up a chair to keep close watch,
and let them tantrum it out.
Unlike the teacher, I don’t complain about the unreasonable children
and I constantly counsel the teacher not to either.
Her constant complaints to the administrators
about the children was what got her labeled a problem.
It announced that she wasn’t competent in her position.
Because of all this, the administration likes me – a lot.
I got my evaluation last week.
My scores were exemplary, four out of four in every area.
I was asked not to share I evaluation with any other paraprofessionals because,
“ Nobody gets all fours.”
So here I am at the end of the year,
correction - at the start of the summer,
Having survived a difficult year.
I’ve earned the next two months of not work.
I can use the rest and recuperation time – seriously.
My latest x-rays show that my broken rib
(a souvenir from one of my lovely little charges]
is healing fine,
but I’m getting older so much faster these days
and my cats do not have the same tendency
to pummel me that my students did.
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