Next Season

 I have been out of school since May 30, but haven't spent much time away from my job since then. I have been participating in online interviews for  positions that have yet to be filled for the coming school year and attending meetings with our ILT regarding our MTSS that will hopefully help align our ELA and SEL programs to allow more more effective COST meetings to help those students with an IEP. 

Because after three decades of work I have finally banked enough sick leave that I could be absent for two full school years allowing me to review and comprehend all the TLA associated with my job. 

Three Letter Acronyms. 

Approximately one billion years ago when I first appeared on the scene I worked with a fellow newbie who, like myself, had done a variety of jobs before landing in the intern teacher credential program. We went to school by day and attended school by night. One was our job and the other was our way of maintaining our job. The circular irony of this process was not lost on either of us, and at one point he suggested that "someone" should write a sitcom based on the experiences of new teachers like us, "like MASH," he clarified. "It should be funny but full of the dark humor that exists just outside the tragedy we see every day." 

Over the past week as I have been less physically present at my school, I have been wading through the first season of The Pitt. It's not a comedy, but there are moments of dark humor to be found amid the interwoven narratives of a day in a Pittsburgh emergency room. I found it completely reminiscent of all those episodes of ER I watched thirty years ago. Without the distractions of a moment outside the titular emergency room. 

I found myself swallowed up once again by the Sissyphusian nature of my job. At the end of one of the Zoom interviews in which I participated, my principal carried her laptop out into the office. A few people were still hard at work there, preparing to close down the regular school year and prepare for the influx of a summer school program. She wanted me to see the monstrous monitor that the district had come to hang high on the wall just inside the office door. I asked what I was for, assuming that it was for parental announcements and calendaring information. Instead I was informed that it was a screen on which the office staff could watch the feed from all the various security cameras we have placed around our campus. 

We did not request this. It was a "gift" from the district. It comes to us at a time when budgets are being slashed and programs like the take-home computer program that our school had participated in to finally break down the digital divide that exists between those schools that have students with computers in their homes and those like ours that do not had ended. In that same office there were stacks of Chromebooks that had been returned by families in order to be refurbished and handed out to middle and high school students. Because we could no longer afford to share them with K to 5 kids.

My work faucet never actually turns off anymore. The job I took so many years ago has become my career. I know a Social Emotional Learning program from an English Language Arts curriculum and even though I don't attend our Coordination Of Service Team meetings every week, I stay appraised of their ongoing effect on the Individual Education Plans of our students. 

All of whom I could sit in our office and watch on our brand new big screen TV. Or more episodes of The Pitt. Or Abbot Elementary. Or maybe I should be outside on the playground making sure that there won't be anything that exciting to see on that new big screen TV. 

Just your every day happenings at an urban Oakland Elementay School.