After one year at Hapeville, three at Dunwoody, and many hours of frustrations dealing with Atlanta traffic, I decided to apply for one job opening at a nearby high school. Decatur is one of just a few decent public schools in Atlanta and while I’m open to working at different types of schools, my motivation (as well as my own upbringing) has been in the public sector. This was the only school I applied to (perfect opening) and I once again was lucky (or skilled?) enough to make the change I wanted happen.
Switching to a school closer to home has been good in many ways. In some other ways it’s been very hard but difficult to pinpoint why except that maybe I was expecting for things to be more different. Teaching is teaching though and mostly my life is not drastically different (after all I went from one “DHS” to another) and I feel like my teaching days could be numbered. I have the passion and motivation to do a pretty good job still day-in day-out w/out shooting for teacher of the year or creating a new French exchange program.
First I’ll start with the pros. Besides going from 1.5 hour of commuting most days to 45 min being awesome, I am working in a much smaller school district now. A lot of the check list type things I have to do I understand better and don’t feel as many frustrations with a county system that doesn’t have to apply a one size fits all as we are the “City schools” of Decatur and not Dekalb County. On the other hand, there is surprisingly still a lot of red tape for things like student technology use, fundraising for a club, doing a field trip or having a guest speaker, or getting a “black-out” day off. I had to watch some school safety videos over the Winter break that were pretty much a waste of time. Still, mostly we don’t have do quite as many useless trainings and/or grading protocols we don’t agree with.
My class sizes are also smaller and we have something called learning connections - a 45 minute block once a week to do whatever we choose to do with students (my Fall semester one was board games and I really enjoyed it). Everybody needs a break like this in the school week, it’s smart, and it’s a chance to interact with students in a very different way that is much less explicitly pedagogical. Finally, the teaching support at Decatur is unlike anything I experienced at Dunwoody with real feedback and suggestions for improvement and more support staff (although I don’t always feel like they are that useful). Languages at Decatur, like at Dunwoody (except for Spanish), are not co-taught whether you have 1 special ed. student or 8.
Cons: Most of all, I miss my department and department chair who was one of the best “bosses” I’ve ever had. My current group of co-workers are nice but the department is split and there are no personalities like I had with the guys at Dunwoody. While it may just be a case of being newer and getting to know my colleagues more, I can’t see myself coming as close to the (mostly) ladies in my department as I did with the guys back at Dunwoody. We also have a riff between two of the different groups of ladies and as such the department doesn’t feel very cohesive. There are two German teacher guys but not sure how well I connect there. Beyond coworkers I am still getting used to the IB diploma. The diploma itself is in quite a bit of transition so it’s also hard to judge but it doesn’t feel that much more meaningful or challenging than the accelerated/gifted into AP paths I saw at Dunwoody. It look a minute to get used to using the rubrics, understanding the systems, and I still don’t properly get all of it. I wish I had been more properly trained in it but I am told that next summer I will.
I gave up a couple of k in salary from Dunwoody and I think I preferred the block schedule. The French program is also less existant at Decatur as there is no French club or exchange with a partner high school in France. Yes I could help build these things but not sure I have the energy given what it would mean for Helena and the family. Also, applying for a grant for a language conference at Decatur only to be told after doing all the work that they didn’t have grants for things like that was depressing. None of my colleagues seem to be plugged in or engaged in the broader language teaching community. We also don’t have much cohesion in our curriculum or teaching methods across teachers or languages.
I also miss many of the Dunwoody kids. It could be this is similar to the coworkers thing and it will just take time to forge some of the nice relationships which I had at Dunwoody. The students come from different populations and politically speaking Decatur is much more in line with my way of thinking. Overall though, I think some of the disrespectful kids at Decatur could be worse than what I had at Dunwoody. The lack of care and cooperation and feeling of a few of my students doing the exact opposite of what I frequently ask of them is exhausting. Watching students put their head down and refusing to even respond when I ask them if they are ok is sad and hard to manage. Could their lives really be that bad and incomprehensible to me to justify their behavior? Or am I so far off that I can’t even guess what’s going on?
As always, I try not to take it personally but there have been several emotionally taxing days at Decatur this Fall/Winter. By the time we got to Winter Break everybody was ready for a it. And unlike Dunwoody, Decatur has a year-long rather than semester schedule so although it will be easier coming back, I’ll resume all over again with the same challenges in my first semester. I’ll of course try to implement some changes; namely with the ongoing cell phone challenge and lack of effort/motivation from an incredibly large group of students. I’m pretty pessimistic though unfortunately about things really improving and while my day-in day-out experience is ok, I’m not super excited about my job. All of this may be less of a critique of Decatur and the move I made, despite the length of the cons in this entry vs. the pros, and more of a reflection of where I am at in my 5th year of teaching.
I often don’t feel like I am having much of an impact with my work and this is one of my primary motivating “get up in the morning” factors. I know many teachers feel this way and the long-term effects are hard to see. I know the work is important and worthwhile, but at least as far as teaching French goes, I don’t know that this is the right time of a young person’s life to do it when they lack motivation or belief that it’s even possible to do. I sometimes wish it was an elective course but the language enthusiast in me also recognizes the inherent value of learning a language, whether or not students ever end up using it. On the other hand, I am not proud of how many students pass my classes having such little proficiency in the language (frankly it can be embarrassing) and I never know how much of it is a reflection of me and my teaching vs. the inherent difficulty in the task.
Teaching anything is hard, but learning a language in a non-immersive environment feels unattainable for students outside of the top third of a class. And I do think they forget about what they learn fairly quickly as evidenced by students I meet in the hall a year or so after they take a class with me not being able to say or understand anything in French outside of “bonjour, ça va?” I know this is not really a fair measure of anything since I don’t remember anything myself from high school. On the other hand, one of my motivations behind teaching a language is that it’s practical and I don’t have to explain why students are learning something most days.
I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching over the last several months and started career counseling towards the end of last summer. The progress has been slow but existant. In starting on this path of reflection and planning I’ve realized that teaching is a great fit for me and my personality and life goals in many ways. Simultaneously, the more I’ve thought about it the less excited I feel about continuing down this path namely for the reason cited previously - I feel like I could have more impact using my French in other ways or just in general not even necessarily doing something related to education or language. I still like the idea of building something and learning about something completely different in a different industry. Going back to school is another serious consideration as I think there could be a lot to be gained with an advanced degree. But these ramblings suffice for a pre-New Year reflection and I hope to keep up on this blog a little better in the next few months.
