My first year of teaching I loved sleeping. I loved laying in bed, drifting into sleep, effortlessly. It was my favorite 7 hours of the day. Which was still depressing. Sometimes after dinner, I let my face sink into the plush carpet and I passed out while my daughter crawled up and over me again and again.
This year, I feared my bed. I knew that another day was coming, and I couldn’t stop hearing the tick-tock of the damn clock telling me that each second, I was getting closer, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I’d scream in my head, “Stop thinking of those damn kids, go to sleep!” Now it was Wednesday night, I had made it through to Thanksgiving Break, and I still couldn’t sleep so I got up, left the bed, and I wrote it down, everything that was eating away at me. It was a mental detox, and there was a stench that exited my head and left itself on the paper. Journaling was my addiction, but it could also be my therapy.
I wrote about how two of my crazies, Gabe and Ryden, were absent and it had made the day so much more bearable. Absences were one of the few things that made me hopeful during a workday. There were quite a few students who didn’t show up on time, but my crazies usually showed up early, every day, even with nausea and high fevers. Typically, when I didn’t see one of my crazies at the cafeteria, I just pretended like I didn’t notice. It was a game I played by letting my happiness slowly seep in, like an IV drip. It was a slow and cautious happiness because deep down I knew they would just show up late. But on this Wednesday, two of them didn’t show up at all, and the day almost felt normal.
That afternoon, I got my results from my first observation of the year. This was the first year for Michelle Rhee’s new evaluation system which, by the end of the year, would tell me if I got fired, suspended pay, a standard raise, or a bonus. I figured that I would either get fired or have my pay suspended. This one was the first of two announced observations so I had the opportunity to carefully plan out the lesson. I even brought in a carrot to visually show how reading can be like eating; when you come to a big word or a big piece of food, you can break it down into parts. I thought it went well because everyone was seated perfectly, with their eyes on me, except for Gabe who was rolling the edge of the carpet around his body to make a human burrito.
By this time in the year, everyone had learned to ignore Gabe because it was obvious something was wrong with him. The lesson ended with Ms. Coen, the observer, physically restraining Gabe by bear hugging him, so that she might continue observing me. I received a 2.44 out of 4, which meant that I was on track to get my pay suspended. It was hard to be relieved to get one out of the way because it was one of my two announced observations; there were three unannounced ones that were sure to sink me.
By this time of the year, I had already been given feedback from the other announced observation, and this one was conducted by an “independent” evaluator from downtown. For this observation, I at least knew that I had tanked it because I spent half the lesson in a corner begging Gabe to take a few deep breaths so that he could stop trying to hit Evan and just do his work.
I didn’t realize until the spring that teachers in my hall had an elaborate plan to trick the evaluators into thinking they had well behaved children. If a teacher saw an evaluator in the building then she would text her other teacher friends. When it was clear whose class would be evaluated, the teacher sent her trouble kids to another teacher ready to watch them during the observation. I was kept out of the loop, leaving me with all my crazies. The independent evaluator gave me a 2.0, and now I had an average of a 2.2. It was embarrassing, and I didn’t tell anyone. If I was quitting, it didn’t matter anyway.
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