I haven't seen Waiting for Superplutocrats - I have this thing about controlling my blood pressure - but I understand that the lazy, rotten, nogoodnik public school teacher types sleep while their students fail to learn in this movie.

I don't actually know how that works.  If I fell asleep in my classroom, two students would immediately dispatch themselves to run to the office to alert officialdom.  Three more would make a child tower to get at the Magical Mysteries of the Top Shelves.  The rest would tickle and/or suffocate me.  I don't even have a teacher's desk to sit behind, brooding, while my students have snail races/give each other haircuts/become depressed in a miasma of union-loving child hate.  My class can more or less leave me alone to do Guided Reading and/or assessment, but that's due to months of training (and is made much easier this year thanks to having a Resident).  Moreover, part of the 'leave E. Rat alone' compact is that you will eventually get your turn with the teacher, and you don't want anyone to interrupt it.

This week was a bit difficult.  In addition to some time at the vet, it ends up that part of aging is developing really miserable allergies to life itself.  It was also a week featuring things I find difficult (paper management: field trip permission slips, forms for certain school programs, thank yous to mail) and anxiety-inducing (putting together technological items like incubators, making sure no one jumps in the pond on the field trip, eighty seven thousand little tasks that are in themselves exceptionally easy but become this Doomy Doom in my head).

Also, I had this at my home, waiting for perusal.  And someone gave me a set of these.

So what I really wanted to do was spend hours lettering folders, permission slips, awards and similar for my students, taking breaks only to read my exhibition guide and to blow my nose, cough, sneeze and rub my eyes.

What I did instead was run the annual Read an Eggathon (we have an egg hunt, but with words in the eggs and stickers for prizes), get a snootful of pollen on our buddy picnic field trip (DUCKLINGS!), set up the incubator and leave my new fancy book in its overwrap.

The stars therefore granted me a Donors Choose of fine, fine construction paper - the kind that is smooth, crisp, bright and probably miserable for the planet - and twenty boxes of glitter crayons.  Perhaps one day one of my Kindergartners will rate their own fine museum exhibition of couture, and I will attend as a guest of honor in a bespoke dress.  THANKS TO THE GLITTER CRAYONS.

In other news, SFUSD indicates that - Oops!  Sorry again! - the coming year is NOT the worst.  The one after that could be even more dire!  At this point, I am presuming that if the state passes a budget before August 15 I'll be laid off thanks to the late window.  I'm also frightened by the increasing class sizes forecast for SFUSD (and thankful to the district for keeping them low as yet in K-3).  I started teaching after class-size reduction; I have a hard time imagining 31 students.  And the supports that made 31 more manageable (paraeducators, AM/PM Kinder with co-teaching) are gone, while the standards for students are much higher (and the school year even shorter).

Moreover, what with the financial crisis, every year more of my students are under stress.  In the four years I've been at my school, every year student mobility goes up.  I got a new student this week, for instance.  Of my students who have moved away, most if not all of their moves were directly due to losing housing/relatives losing housing (often complicated by violence and family members' passing).  This year I've held SSTs for seven students; about half my class is receiving some kind of school-provided social-emotional service.  Those are services that we may not be able to afford.

So beyond the academic requirements, the empathy and care needed for a class of 31 at a high-needs school in an ill-funded environment is at the 'psychic vampire' level.  It's hard to listen to education reform rhetoric about failing schools, failing teachers and "we already tried money" and believe they are anything other than self-assured, knowing liars who have enough time to read their Savage Beauty catalogues and enough money to send their own progeny to highly-supportive, exceptionally expensive private academies.

Patient Zero

One of the reasons teachers take more sick days than you might is really obvious: we get sick more often than you do.  I spend my days interacting with 300 children, twenty of those very closely, all school year.  As a Kindergarten teacher, my students are young and building immunity to childhood diseases...by catching them.

There is not enough hand sanitizer, hot water and soap in the world to protect me - and if there were, the dry skin from constant washing would lead to new entry points for germs anyway.

Since becoming a teacher, I've contracted classic common colds and flus, immunizations notwithstanding (remember the year they guessed wrong on the virus?  I sure do).  I've been exposed to conjunctivitis and strep throat more times than I can count - not to mention head lice and fifth disease.  I've also managed to get some more exotic illnesses.  I missed mononucleosis in college so I could catch it in a Kindergarten (two weeks out of work).  I've had whooping cough (the entire winter break with coughing fits to spare for January).

This year, I have missed more days for District-sponsored professional development and events than I have for illness - for whatever reason, this has been a year of Fever and Chills on the Weekend, but Just a Runny Nose by Monday.  (Also, I can now teach fairly easily through the annual bout of cold-with-laryngitis.)

Beyond that, I think people forget that teaching as a profession is not sitting at a desk eating muffins.  I can't even go to the bathroom when I please.  I really need to be in a good, generous mood all the workday long.  I spend my day on stage, performing for my loyal audience.  And so does every other teacher.  This is emotionally wearing work.  It leaves you open to illness.

Those Teachers Are So Lazy with The Contracts Bust 'Em Already has been a popular trope lately, making its appearance in the New York Times and the usual teacher-loathing sources.  It's offensive.

Buy In Bulk, Part One

Teacher Hoarding Disease is a real and dread condition.  It starts slow: an impressive sale on multifix cubes, a box of golf pencils, a couple of extra homework packets.  Over time it takes over, until one is left with a closet so overloaded with broken crayons, irregular paper samples and lightly chewed teddy bear counters.  Cursed are those who open the closet, for they shall be buried alive.

As I've said before, Teacher Hoarding Disease is an acquired syndrome, and an understandable one at that.  School funding often oscillates wildly from year to year.  In California, education budgets may be more predictable these days, but this is because the pendulum swings only from "Catastrophic" to "Evacuate to Fallout Shelter".  When you don't know what will be available or can predict that nothing will be, the difference between laying in for winter and compulsive hoarding blurs.

Teachers generally are resourceful: scavengers nonpareil with the flexibility of impromptu theater actors.  This disposition potentiates the disease's severity: you may never have the opportunity to buy one thousand watch gears for fifty cents again, after all, and they will be nifty collage materials.  Teacher turnover also complicates the course of the illness: retiring and laid-off teachers always have plenty of lovely, well-made and effective teaching resources that you will never use but cannot bear to throw away.  Some of this deitrus molders in dark cupboards, stealing valuable storage space and every year becoming less useful.

I have been in my current classroom for four years and I still haven't fully excavated what the teachers who came before me left behind.  Every winter break, I put at least ten hours into clearing out textbooks retired in the early 1990s, mostly empty bottles of separated tempera paint and the like.

This year I'm fighting the system.  My particular weaknesses:

*Teaching Manuals, Blackline Master Collections and Education Books
I've found a few incredibly useful guides, which has encouraged me to collect anything that might possibly be of interest.  The Explosive Child changed how I thought about classroom management to lasting and excellent effect: perhaps this research study from the seventies will have a similar impact on my mathematics instruction!  The reality that I may very well have more books than I will ever peruse for homework worksheets, sub plans and pedagogical outlook rarely occurs to me in the moment.  Also, my limited organization skills often lead to misplaced blackline masters, so sometimes I snag an extra copy at an excellent price so that I'm ready for when I lose the first one.

*Children's Books
The day I turned sixteen, I applied to work at a children's bookstore (and thankfully was hired and therefore able to turn in my fast food uniform for good).  Since then, I have always had some kind of involvement with childrens' books, so I know lots of titles very well and want to share them with my students.  My family is overrun by mad readers and my household boasts not one but two Amazon Prime accounts.  Therefore, my book hoarding is condoned and reinforced.  And again, I've made some wonderful finds, like four of the Church Mouse books, which are seriously out of print and available at your local online retailer for a couple hundred bucks.

*Craft Supplies
If I come across the materials for some excellent project, I often find myself wondering if these materials will be available for next year's class.  This typically ends with me buying adequate amounts for the next three or four years.  I use the materials for three years, at which point I begin to worry that I will never see them again.  At this point, I may elect not to do the project in the future, so that there is still a large supply of materials.

This year, I am weeding my teacher manuals by giving second copies to my Resident.  When I go to the the Children's Book Project, I take only the most exciting finds for the classroom library.  My class has already worked its way through several spools of yarn, paper towel rolls and crayon bits.

And while I'm ranting...

In 2005, California had a whooping cough epidemic.  I caught it; despite the romantic image of 'whooping' I developed as a child reading Ballet Shoes, it is really not a good time.  The problem is that the whooping starts up after you're feeling pretty good, so you end up back at work having an uncontrollable, endless and breathless coughing fit in front of twenty-odd frightened children.

Anyway, here we are having another pertussis outbreak.  Lucky California!  No dark sarcasm in the classroom means lots of it elsewhere, you see.  Needless to say, this has become fodder for anti-immigration fear mongering (apparently whooping cough takes on human form and comes to the United States without papers, hellbent on infecting upstanding white nationalists citizens) and bad mother blamers (the New York Times had an article titled something like "Wealthy Stay at Home Mill Valley Mothers Fail to Vaccinate, Thereby Causing Nuclear War").*

DTaP vaccines become less effective over time.  Whooping cough sucks, but not literally seeing as how you will be unable to suck down any air.  Get yours updated today!

*For the record, I find anti-vaccine philosophy the kind of individualist, Ayn Randesque tripe that makes me gag, even when I don't have whooping cough.  I do not, however, think that the ponderings of a few overly-educated, overly-monied mothers makes a trend, and I wonder why it is always the mothers who are to blame for anti-vaccine sentiments.


Also, I personally cannot get a DTaP booster; I have an actual, doctor-verified, terrible horrible no good very bad extreme adverse reaction to tetanus and no pertussis vaccine is made without it.  So while this is a case where I am personally counting on herd immunity, it is also one where I cannot lord it over others while waving my pricked arm self-righteously.

Guilty guilt.

Unavoidably and non-negotiably, I will be missing two days of school in a couple of weeks.  My attendance is required at a wedding in L.A.*

In your general professional job, my understanding is that if you're out, you're out: calls go to voicemail, you set up an away email, and it all gets done when you get back.  I've spent long hours and traded excellent shifts to get someone willing to cover me in my days as a server/bartender/retail grunt.

Teaching of course is different: there will be a substitute teacher in my classroom.  Like most teachers I know, I have dragged my feverish, pale self to work - uphill in driving snow - to drop off lesson plans (even if emergency sub plans are already available).  Through advance planning, I have managed to arrange not only a sub but a good one, who will be kind to my students and make every possible effort to get through some portion of the plans I leave.  This year I also have a Resident, who knows how things work and is fully capable of getting through a day, and who is well-known to the kids in my class.

Before I rant, I should say that I have thankfully never done a substitute gig.  I cannot imagine anything more difficult: different school, different kids, different grade every day for low pay and rotten benefits.  You may or may not be left plans that make sense.  You may or may not be left name tags, and you will be blamed for anything that goes wrong.  YUCK.  Even the very best teacher is going to be challenged by these requirements.

That said, SFUSD seems to have more than its share of sub problems.  First there's the issue of availability. No matter how big the sub pool is, some schools can't get substitutes.  During my one year out of the classroom I witnessed this firsthand at a school to remain nameless.  I'd estimate that three-quarters of the absences meant splitting a class.  That only happens occasionally at my current school.

SFUSD used to have "site support subs" at the STAR schools, but that funding evaporated.  Now they have "core subs" (which has been around for a long time, I think): guest teachers who agree to take jobs at hard-to-substitute-staff schools.  Unfortunately, being willing to take such a job and being able to do it are two different things.

Many of the subs inflicted upon my students have been decent, but it's the bad ones that stick out.  Like the one who left me a note that my students were "awful".  I don't care what they did - that's not okay.  Or the one who left half an hour early, or the one who fell asleep (luckily, neither of these were in my room).  After an illness I came back to a trashed classroom.  A lot of things stored up high - out of students' reach - were particularly messed up.  A little questioning informed me that some of these things had fallen during attempts to get them as the kids led themselves through various routines.  What was the guest teacher doing as they climbed on chairs to retrieve calendar tags, readers and whatnot?  Reading the newspaper.  The paper and the sub's coffee cup were thoughtfully left for me to clean up.  I was especially irritated to find that the coffee had been spilled all over my lesson plans (helpfully labeled "SUB PLANS" with a red trifolded paper), since this same guest teacher claimed I didn't leave any.

For guest teachers who can't return, there is a process for "blacklisting".  Yet too often it seems not to go through; there have been cases whereupon a substitute comes to our school site and is immediately sent packing.

This is not really a solveable problem, unless teachers are somehow able to convince all friends to have summer weddings, have families who are immortal, are made immune to all illnesses and are cloned for maternity leave and whatnot.  I'm crossing my fingers I don't have any major illnesses this year; having a Resident will also make a big difference.

*I have an outstanding dress to wear, too, and an iron-clad agreement that we can visit at least one designer concession that I cannot visit in San Francisco.

Teacher Pack Rat Disease

Packratitis is an understandable side effect of the constant spectre of budget cuts, newbie colleagues who need stuff, purchased curricula that call for unpurchased manipulatives, students who like to chew on things, and the MacGuyverism of any urban school teacher ("The microwave in the staff room blew out all the power in the school and maintenance gave us "top priority" status, so we've got at least 72 hours without heat? NO PROBLEM - with this gum wrapper, dust bunny and...").

When I started teaching and had nothing I used to go bug-eyed at the supplies others had stockpiled - several thousand dinosaur counters stored in an overflowing 40 gallon container, shelves full of used pencils, paint last used in French caves, etc. Teaching in a portable classroom kept me from indulging too much for a couple of years. Now I look back upon the shelving options in the portables with fondness, since my current classroom is huge but lacks storage.

And I have so much stuff, because I might throw this copy out and not be able to find the original (the last major reorginization job I have is this one, but it's been in the pipeline for three years and barring a cure for ADHD I don't think it's happening). And then there have been a couple of dream world Donors Choose projects that actually got funded. Plus, once I got rid of all the garbage that was left behind by the person who taught in this room before me I had some extra cabinets. I couldn't have known that when my dear friend's mom retired, she'd give me so much awesome stuff (half of which I still have to pick up, since the first half overwhelmed my car). The last three years have all been budget cut years, too, and nothing makes one pack rat it up more than that. Also, my superpower is finding. I hope one day to discover something truly excellent, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, tucked inside an old discounted teaching manual published by the Department of Health. I will use it to fund the classroom of my dreams. Until then, I am the queen of the mysterious drawer at SCRAP or RAFT, the miner of the Children's Book Project, and the superstar of sales.

This is why I am the proud owner of six raccoon-in-garbage-can handpuppets. Hey, they were a buck apiece (marked down from $25). I'm sure they'll come in handy.