Well, it’s almost August and every teacher across the country is starting to feel a sense of dread set in. No, not because summer vacation is ending, though that is never a cause for celebration. No, not because students are about to once again dominate their lives for the better part of ten months. We love students! The worst thing about August has been and will always be the dreaded week of TEACHER IN-SERVICE!!
Essentially this will look the same across the US, no matter which state or city you live in and no matter whether you work in an inner-city school, a private school or on a socio-economic flight campus. First there will be a district-wide pep rally, with all of the schools bused to some central location where four hours of tedious and loud cheerleading will ensue. I always wonder to myself exactly how much money was spent on these elaborate presentations and if that money couldn’t have been put to better use, but I digress.
Once back on campus, teachers sit through refreshers about how to do things they’ve been doing for years. This is mostly to help the new teachers, but it isn’t unusual for districts to have new processes in place and they wait for the teachers to come back to work the bugs out. It’s a lot like when Microsoft used to constantly put out new versions of Windows – it was smart to wait six months or a year before picking up the new edition because it was never actually ready for use. They let the poor saps who had to immediately have the new version suffer through the endless bugs. Fortunately, admin teams usually understand that all teachers are really thinking about during these sessions is getting back to their rooms.
You see, during the summer people come in to strip and wax classroom floors. Teachers have to label everything in their rooms before leaving for the summer with the idea being that custodians will make sure everything goes back into the correct rooms. This never happens. Ever. So the first week of in-service is also a scavenger hunt to try and find the things that were in your room when you left it in June. Inevitably, some things just never turn up. Again, I digress.
Next up is a district level professional development day where every person who works in a particular department (English, Science, Special Education, etc.) shows up at some seemingly unsuspecting campus that is ill-equipped to handle the influx of people. There won’t be enough parking, there won’t be space for everyone and instead of starting at the posted time of, say, 8AM, people will wander around looking (and feeling) disoriented until something finally gets underway around 9:30. Losing that 90 minutes to chaos is OK, though, because the “presenters” really only have enough PowerPoint slides to last an hour or two. I’d rather wander around looking lost than sit and have someone read to me – especially when they’re just going to send out the slides anyway and I can consume in five minutes what it takes them two hours to present.
The best solution is to take a personal day and skip that whole mess.
Now, finally, we get to back to campus and back to business. The beginning of a new school year is a fresh opportunity to get things under control. Mistakes from the previous year can be processed, reworked and, hopefully, headed off at the pass this time around. The first two or three days with students are the most critical days when it comes to determining the success or failure of a classroom. That’s when rules and routines are established – and it’s also when students begin to immediately test the resolve of the teacher to hold them accountable to those rules and routines. Like raptors testing electrified fences for weaknesses, some students are always looking for an opening.
In this way, the classroom serves as something of a microcosm for what’s going on in America’s legal system as a whole. The news of the former US President being indicted for a growing number of illegal acts in states across the country is hard to escape (I’ve tried), the far-right Supreme Court has been busy dismantling a wide range of civil rights for women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. Meanwhile gerrymandering has gotten so bad that it will now take center stage in Alabama. One of the hotbeds for racism in America, Alabama’s Republicans failed to keep Black people from voting in the last two elections, resulting Democratic (GASP!) representation starting to take hold, so they pushed through an even more egregious redistricting map that splits up and somewhat neutralizes Black voters in two different counties. The Supreme Court recently upheld a ruling that it was unconstitutional to target and minimize voting blocks in this way, and Alabama is saying they will ignore the ruling.
Huh. You mean to can just ignore the Supreme Court of the United States??? What will the consequence be??? Will the military be sent to assure the Supreme Court’s ruling is upheld come election time? Of course, it’s not the first time Alabama tried this, and the last time it was the US Marshals who showed up.
Every classroom teacher in America knows exactly how critical this moment is in America’s democracy. Alabama’s defiance is not happening in a vacuum; rest assured, the rest of the class is watching. What happens when you defy the Supreme Court? What if you just take the restroom pass and spend the rest of the period in the bathroom filming TikToks or hanging out with friends who coordinated their restroom pass time with yours via social media? What’s the consequence? It is absolutely critical that teachers have a statement consequence ready to be deployed, and the first one better be harsh to deter the others who are watching for weakness.
Based on what I’ve heard on the array of podcasts I listen to (Lincoln Project, Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Steve Schmidt, to name a few), no one is sure what the consequence is for a state telling the Supreme Court to go jump in a lake. One thing’s for sure, though, the Supreme Court better have an answer, and it better be a severe deterrent. Trust me. The others states already have their extreme redistricting maps drawn up, just in case a weakness is found in this case.
In the classroom, the success or failure of a teacher and their students are at stake with the very first infraction of a new school year. When it comes to this case in Alabama, America’s very system of government hangs in the balance.
-B
End Credits Scene: My other favorite thing that often happens during in-service is the district implements some new computer program to do replace something else everyone already knew how to use. The person who comes to demonstrate will always, without fail, have technical issues with their laptop, the website or the program, and of course the district-issued technology teachers are using will be unable to access some or all of the presentation. At some point the presenter will give up and teachers will be released to their classrooms and asked to “play with” the new tech thing and email someone if there are any questions or issues. What that means to teachers is it’s time to go embark on the aforementioned classroom furniture scavenger hunt and forget about the new tech thing…or watch the 20 hours of digital trainings that have to be endured every year. You never know when someone might forget how not to sexually abuse students or colleagues over the summer!
Ok, back to the pool. 🙂
Ishmael's Legacy 