Thursday, June 08, 2006
Trying to get fired
I don’t think I could be any more on the principal’s bad side than I made myself today.
This morning the third through fifth grades had to take a standardized test, and we got out of school early. I only had to give classes to the first and second grades and one kindergarten class. I went into the second grade class first. I tried to have them act out the story we’ve been reading. It’s about a coyote and an armadillo who have five mules. As I should have guessed, the students couldn’t do it without playing and talking, so I should have just forgotten about trying to get them to read and listen to the story at the same time.
To make a long story short, I just didn’t know what to do, and I broke down. Normally in that situation I would’ve just gotten angry and yelled at them for a while. But I have been trying very hard not to blow up like that anymore, especially after yesterday afternoon.
Yesterday was fine up until school was out. I was walking from the classroom to the office area where we have to sign in and out, and one of the third graders who is always playing and getting into trouble was walking by me and started shouting very loudly, practically right at me. The school has been trying to keep order among the students while they are waiting for their parents to pick them up, so we have been trying to stop them from running around and playing after school. I have also had a lot of trouble with this student, and I was fed up. I yelled at him, asking why he was shouting like that, and he just ignored me, which is the usual reaction they have, especially outside of English class. This has been bothering me a lot. When they’re supposed to be quiet, like during the flag ceremony, or when we’re in mass, I tell them to stop talking, be quiet, or stop playing, and they just look at me and turn around and keep doing whatever it is they’re not supposed to be doing. So I lost it. I grabbed him and took him to the office. His sister was at the door waiting to pick him up, and he said while laughing, “I’m going home now,” trying to get away from me. I stopped him again and said, “No, you’re not.” I took him into the office, but the principal wasn’t there, so I yelled at him some more. He started to cry. The director of the kindergarten came in and talked to him. I left.
I felt terrible. I suppose that’s why I cried in school today, not because my second graders couldn’t act like mules in an orderly way. So today when they weren’t listening to me, I just lectured them a while, and then I started to cry. I just felt so tired of saying the same things over and over again with absolutely no results, like I’m talking to a wall. I talk to them in Spanish a lot now, so it’s not like they don’t understand me. They just don’t listen to me, as if I’m not really their teacher. Well, who can blame them? I only have them for forty-five minutes per day.
Part of me thought maybe this would work. Maybe they would take me seriously if they saw how it makes me feel not to be listened to.
The owner of the school had kept coming into my class and, in my opinion, interfering in my class. While I was lecturing them, telling them that we were not going to play anymore if they kept behaving this way, she came in and told me to take it easy. I told her that they don’t listen to me, and she made a joke, “Just spank them.” Soon after that, I cried, and she saw me.
I went into the bathroom for a long time to regain composure. I came out thinking I had control of myself, but if I cry at all, my eyes get extremely red and swollen, and even if I’m not crying, it looks like I am. Everyone was asking me why I was crying. The teachers all came because it was breakfast time, and they asked me what was wrong and I started crying again. They told me to go home and rest. They tried to comfort me, telling me that I am a good teacher and not to get upset, and that they know exactly how I felt. The second-grade teacher then called all her students to come back to the classroom to write a hundred times that they will respect all of their teachers or something like that, which was not what I wanted at all.
Then the last thing I wanted to happen happened. The principal came and told me to go to the office. I followed her to the office where she was not comforting at all. She tried, to her credit, but if you’ve been reading this blog you know already that she has talked to others about my “problem of getting sentimental,” and she doesn’t believe that I actually feel bad when I cry. I told her I just couldn’t take it anymore, that the students never listen to me. She started lecturing me. At first she was condescending and said, “You must understand that this is a foreign language and that it’s very difficult for the students to learn it.” I knew that she had talked to the owner, because one of the second graders had complained in the owner’s presence, “It’s because we don’t know much English,” to which I had replied, “Do you have to know a lot of English to act out the part of the mule who doesn’t talk?” She thought I was upset because they weren’t learning English. Well, OK, that too.
Then the principal said to me that my problem is that I am a perfectionist and that I expect too much from myself and from the students. I agreed with that partially, though I think I have actually lowered my expectations of the students too much. I explained that I don’t have the experience or knowledge to deal with discipline problems in young students. She said to me, “Why didn’t you tell me you were having problems disciplining the students?” I told her it was tolerable before, but for some reason over the past couple of days it hasn’t been. She said I should’ve talked to her before getting into this state, and that I should never, ever let the students see me cry or get upset. She said she never wants to see me like this again. I said, “How am I supposed to know that I should never do that? No one has ever told me. I don’t have the training to teach these students.”
She said, “All you have to do is talk to us and we can work together to find the strategies to work with them. But you have to talk to me.” This bothered me—I felt that she was implying it was my fault for getting upset, that I got myself upset because I hadn’t talked to her. Then I lost it, because she said to me, “You need to discover their learning styles.”
The cursos diplomados that we have been forced to attend are about learning styles. Yes, the learning styles of the students are important. But this mention of learning styles infuriated me, not only because it brought up fiasco of the cursos diplomados, but also because it assumes I don’t take learning styles into account and for this reason I have discipline problems.
I said, “The problem is that these materials are too difficult for the students. They can’t learn English using these books. I’ve been thinking about it recently and wondering whether we shouldn’t get different books, because it’s going to continue this way with these books.” She said, “OK, fine, we’ll order different books, but there’s no reason for you to get upset like this.”
She asked me why I don’t go to the cursos diplomados if I don’t have the training to teach children. (I hadn’t gone to the last ones after the terrible Friday of the Chinese named “Chin Fan-fun.” See my last entry if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) I said I don’t understand them because my Spanish is not good enough, and this is partially true. Then she said, “Rocio is not a teacher either, and how come she can handle the students and you can’t?”
Well, I can’t remember how things progressed, but pretty soon I was yelling at her that I don’t want to stay at this school. I can’t remember if this was before or after she said to me that the students are not the problem and that I was exaggerating the problem. She said that there are some misbehaved students but that most of the students do listen to me. (How would she know if she hardly ever sees me in class?) She told me that the problem is with me, that I get upset too easily, and that I do the same thing with the students. I told her, well for this reason I don’t think I should be their teacher anymore.
Finally I told her that I don’t like being scolded. She said, when have I scolded you? I told her, today, and about the cursos diplomados. She said she was scolding me to help me. She said that she not only scolded me but others who didn’t go to the cursos diplomados, and that this was her responsibility as the principal. This began a long argument about the cursos diplomados. I told her that it’s unjust to require the teachers to go to a course that lasts the entire weekend about once a month, that nobody wants to go because the weekend is personal time. She replied that we have many paid vacations and that it’s not too much to ask us to give up a few weekends. She said, “I have never deducted your pay for all the days that you have been absent from school.” I told her it is not in my contract to work on the weekends. She said that it is a required part of the job. I told her it is not a required part of my job.
I had already told her that I was not in the right state to talk about this with her, and she had forced me to sit down and discuss this with her, telling me to sit down. She had told me that I was taking an attitude with her that was wrong. I had said, fine, I’ll leave. And she had told me to sit down. Finally she said, “You are not in the right condition to talk about this right now. And I can tell you a million things, but you are against me, and I don’t understand why. Finish the school year, and I will continue to treat you with respect. If you cannot treat me with respect anymore, at least treat this institution with respect.” And I continued giving her dirty looks, and we got up and I walked out of the school without saying anything.
I think I was hoping for her to fire me. I don’t really want to stay here. I’d prefer to go home. In a way, I was being self-destructive. I wanted to curl up and die. The consequences of being a bitch to the principal are going to be ugly. But the worst consequences of losing my temper with anyone—with my students, with my boss, with the three-year-old daughter of a friend, with anybody—are that it makes me feel like I’m a terrible, terrible, terrible person.
I came home and took a nap. I woke up an hour later with the same big headache I’d been experiencing since the morning. Two of the teachers came over to see how I was doing. They were completely on my side. They swear up and down that I am good teacher. One of them said, “I’d like to see the principal teach a class at this school for one day and see if she has any success disciplining them.” Ceci said that she has been scolded by the principal very badly as well, that she has also been told that she has a character problem and that she takes the wrong attitude with the principal. They agreed that the principal doesn’t understand how difficult it is to work with these students and that she doesn’t know how to treat her employees.
The other two teachers wrote me text messages to see how I was doing. All of this made me feel better. Perhaps I should have talked to them first to see what I should do to teach better, but I had been talking to the principal about this for the first two months of school, and that hadn’t really helped much, so I hadn’t really considered it. Now it is clear that in the future I should talk more with my colleagues, and not necessarily with a supervisor in whom I’ve lost trust. If I don’t learn anything about how to teach, I will at least feel better about myself knowing that I am not the only one who feels so terrible.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think I should probably apologize to the principal, just so that these last few weeks are bearable, but I don’t know what I’d say. It might start another argument. However I feel in the right, it is probably the right thing to do.
This morning the third through fifth grades had to take a standardized test, and we got out of school early. I only had to give classes to the first and second grades and one kindergarten class. I went into the second grade class first. I tried to have them act out the story we’ve been reading. It’s about a coyote and an armadillo who have five mules. As I should have guessed, the students couldn’t do it without playing and talking, so I should have just forgotten about trying to get them to read and listen to the story at the same time.
To make a long story short, I just didn’t know what to do, and I broke down. Normally in that situation I would’ve just gotten angry and yelled at them for a while. But I have been trying very hard not to blow up like that anymore, especially after yesterday afternoon.
Yesterday was fine up until school was out. I was walking from the classroom to the office area where we have to sign in and out, and one of the third graders who is always playing and getting into trouble was walking by me and started shouting very loudly, practically right at me. The school has been trying to keep order among the students while they are waiting for their parents to pick them up, so we have been trying to stop them from running around and playing after school. I have also had a lot of trouble with this student, and I was fed up. I yelled at him, asking why he was shouting like that, and he just ignored me, which is the usual reaction they have, especially outside of English class. This has been bothering me a lot. When they’re supposed to be quiet, like during the flag ceremony, or when we’re in mass, I tell them to stop talking, be quiet, or stop playing, and they just look at me and turn around and keep doing whatever it is they’re not supposed to be doing. So I lost it. I grabbed him and took him to the office. His sister was at the door waiting to pick him up, and he said while laughing, “I’m going home now,” trying to get away from me. I stopped him again and said, “No, you’re not.” I took him into the office, but the principal wasn’t there, so I yelled at him some more. He started to cry. The director of the kindergarten came in and talked to him. I left.
I felt terrible. I suppose that’s why I cried in school today, not because my second graders couldn’t act like mules in an orderly way. So today when they weren’t listening to me, I just lectured them a while, and then I started to cry. I just felt so tired of saying the same things over and over again with absolutely no results, like I’m talking to a wall. I talk to them in Spanish a lot now, so it’s not like they don’t understand me. They just don’t listen to me, as if I’m not really their teacher. Well, who can blame them? I only have them for forty-five minutes per day.
Part of me thought maybe this would work. Maybe they would take me seriously if they saw how it makes me feel not to be listened to.
The owner of the school had kept coming into my class and, in my opinion, interfering in my class. While I was lecturing them, telling them that we were not going to play anymore if they kept behaving this way, she came in and told me to take it easy. I told her that they don’t listen to me, and she made a joke, “Just spank them.” Soon after that, I cried, and she saw me.
I went into the bathroom for a long time to regain composure. I came out thinking I had control of myself, but if I cry at all, my eyes get extremely red and swollen, and even if I’m not crying, it looks like I am. Everyone was asking me why I was crying. The teachers all came because it was breakfast time, and they asked me what was wrong and I started crying again. They told me to go home and rest. They tried to comfort me, telling me that I am a good teacher and not to get upset, and that they know exactly how I felt. The second-grade teacher then called all her students to come back to the classroom to write a hundred times that they will respect all of their teachers or something like that, which was not what I wanted at all.
Then the last thing I wanted to happen happened. The principal came and told me to go to the office. I followed her to the office where she was not comforting at all. She tried, to her credit, but if you’ve been reading this blog you know already that she has talked to others about my “problem of getting sentimental,” and she doesn’t believe that I actually feel bad when I cry. I told her I just couldn’t take it anymore, that the students never listen to me. She started lecturing me. At first she was condescending and said, “You must understand that this is a foreign language and that it’s very difficult for the students to learn it.” I knew that she had talked to the owner, because one of the second graders had complained in the owner’s presence, “It’s because we don’t know much English,” to which I had replied, “Do you have to know a lot of English to act out the part of the mule who doesn’t talk?” She thought I was upset because they weren’t learning English. Well, OK, that too.
Then the principal said to me that my problem is that I am a perfectionist and that I expect too much from myself and from the students. I agreed with that partially, though I think I have actually lowered my expectations of the students too much. I explained that I don’t have the experience or knowledge to deal with discipline problems in young students. She said to me, “Why didn’t you tell me you were having problems disciplining the students?” I told her it was tolerable before, but for some reason over the past couple of days it hasn’t been. She said I should’ve talked to her before getting into this state, and that I should never, ever let the students see me cry or get upset. She said she never wants to see me like this again. I said, “How am I supposed to know that I should never do that? No one has ever told me. I don’t have the training to teach these students.”
She said, “All you have to do is talk to us and we can work together to find the strategies to work with them. But you have to talk to me.” This bothered me—I felt that she was implying it was my fault for getting upset, that I got myself upset because I hadn’t talked to her. Then I lost it, because she said to me, “You need to discover their learning styles.”
The cursos diplomados that we have been forced to attend are about learning styles. Yes, the learning styles of the students are important. But this mention of learning styles infuriated me, not only because it brought up fiasco of the cursos diplomados, but also because it assumes I don’t take learning styles into account and for this reason I have discipline problems.
I said, “The problem is that these materials are too difficult for the students. They can’t learn English using these books. I’ve been thinking about it recently and wondering whether we shouldn’t get different books, because it’s going to continue this way with these books.” She said, “OK, fine, we’ll order different books, but there’s no reason for you to get upset like this.”
She asked me why I don’t go to the cursos diplomados if I don’t have the training to teach children. (I hadn’t gone to the last ones after the terrible Friday of the Chinese named “Chin Fan-fun.” See my last entry if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) I said I don’t understand them because my Spanish is not good enough, and this is partially true. Then she said, “Rocio is not a teacher either, and how come she can handle the students and you can’t?”
Well, I can’t remember how things progressed, but pretty soon I was yelling at her that I don’t want to stay at this school. I can’t remember if this was before or after she said to me that the students are not the problem and that I was exaggerating the problem. She said that there are some misbehaved students but that most of the students do listen to me. (How would she know if she hardly ever sees me in class?) She told me that the problem is with me, that I get upset too easily, and that I do the same thing with the students. I told her, well for this reason I don’t think I should be their teacher anymore.
Finally I told her that I don’t like being scolded. She said, when have I scolded you? I told her, today, and about the cursos diplomados. She said she was scolding me to help me. She said that she not only scolded me but others who didn’t go to the cursos diplomados, and that this was her responsibility as the principal. This began a long argument about the cursos diplomados. I told her that it’s unjust to require the teachers to go to a course that lasts the entire weekend about once a month, that nobody wants to go because the weekend is personal time. She replied that we have many paid vacations and that it’s not too much to ask us to give up a few weekends. She said, “I have never deducted your pay for all the days that you have been absent from school.” I told her it is not in my contract to work on the weekends. She said that it is a required part of the job. I told her it is not a required part of my job.
I had already told her that I was not in the right state to talk about this with her, and she had forced me to sit down and discuss this with her, telling me to sit down. She had told me that I was taking an attitude with her that was wrong. I had said, fine, I’ll leave. And she had told me to sit down. Finally she said, “You are not in the right condition to talk about this right now. And I can tell you a million things, but you are against me, and I don’t understand why. Finish the school year, and I will continue to treat you with respect. If you cannot treat me with respect anymore, at least treat this institution with respect.” And I continued giving her dirty looks, and we got up and I walked out of the school without saying anything.
I think I was hoping for her to fire me. I don’t really want to stay here. I’d prefer to go home. In a way, I was being self-destructive. I wanted to curl up and die. The consequences of being a bitch to the principal are going to be ugly. But the worst consequences of losing my temper with anyone—with my students, with my boss, with the three-year-old daughter of a friend, with anybody—are that it makes me feel like I’m a terrible, terrible, terrible person.
I came home and took a nap. I woke up an hour later with the same big headache I’d been experiencing since the morning. Two of the teachers came over to see how I was doing. They were completely on my side. They swear up and down that I am good teacher. One of them said, “I’d like to see the principal teach a class at this school for one day and see if she has any success disciplining them.” Ceci said that she has been scolded by the principal very badly as well, that she has also been told that she has a character problem and that she takes the wrong attitude with the principal. They agreed that the principal doesn’t understand how difficult it is to work with these students and that she doesn’t know how to treat her employees.
The other two teachers wrote me text messages to see how I was doing. All of this made me feel better. Perhaps I should have talked to them first to see what I should do to teach better, but I had been talking to the principal about this for the first two months of school, and that hadn’t really helped much, so I hadn’t really considered it. Now it is clear that in the future I should talk more with my colleagues, and not necessarily with a supervisor in whom I’ve lost trust. If I don’t learn anything about how to teach, I will at least feel better about myself knowing that I am not the only one who feels so terrible.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think I should probably apologize to the principal, just so that these last few weeks are bearable, but I don’t know what I’d say. It might start another argument. However I feel in the right, it is probably the right thing to do.
