Saturday, June 24, 2017

Summer projects




What do teachers do in the summer? They work. Two years ago I took a job teaching 11th and 12th grade at a small college prep boarding school in the Santa Ynez valley. Previously I held several other teaching positions in public schools. What is the difference between working at a public school versus a private school? Where do you begin? A colleague at public school once told me, "I know a few people who've gone to teach at a boarding school. It sounds like a completely different job." In many ways it is. As a boarding school student, nearly twenty-five years ago, I appreciated seeing my teachers inhabit the multiple roles an adult human plays in real life: professional, parent, coach, advisor, host, colleague, driver, handyman, artist, editor, welder, carpenter, etc. I knew my teachers were not "just" teachers, but also human beings. Ironically, as many students see teachers as one-dimensional beings who must "live" at school, all my teachers did indeed live at school, as did I. Allegedly, boarding school teachers also work longer hours. This seems especially true since we work six-day weeks and also have a weekly duty of checking students into their rooms at night. However, it seems most k-12 teachers in public school arrive at work early, stay late, grade in the evenings, and prepare for classes over the weekend. I am still at the early stages of my craft, so this is certainly my case as well. Another supposed difference is that private school teachers may be stretched to fill more roles. I have a friend who spent his first year teaching at a remote charter school where he taught five different classes (social studies, music, Spanish, and a few others.) However I also take issue with this: At one of my public school positions, I was hired at 0.8 time, so I was not quite making full-time salary and I had a family to support. To make up the difference, I was the Associated Student Body advisor, and a lunch-time supervisor. Many public school teachers also coach sports or lead extra-curricular clubs like Gay-Straight Alliance. At boarding school, I coach, and have morning and evening check-in duties once a week. Recently, I've taken on managing the school archive, acquisitions for our school library, and I hope to have some responsibilities over the student store as well.

Am I trying to work myself into the ground? I care about the place where I work. Sometimes, I love it so much, that it doesn't even feel like work. This brings me to my first two summer projects:

1. Writing for the school paper

The summer issue of our school paper, which is really like a cross between a magazine and a newspaper, because it features long articles written by students, will have an "alumni news" section, highlighting the classes that graduated during my time as a student. The reason for this is purely coincidental: In the last issue, a younger member of our board of directors collected alumni news from the classes that graduated when she was a student. I was in the class that graduated right after she arrived as a student, so it preserve reverse-chronological order if I gather news from my former classmates.

Reconnecting with long-lost classmates brings back feelings of nostalgia and pride: Some of them are in far-flung corners of the globe: Mozambique, China, Vietnam, Japan. Some are single parents with full-grown children of their own. Their careers range the gamut from plumber to professor. 

I also wrote an article about the 1956, '57, '58 class reunion. I oringinally wanted to interview an alumnus from one of these classes who wrote the novel, The Graduate, which became an Academy Award-winning film. However, said alumnus did not attend, so I collected anecdotes and cobbled them together. As students, these alumni had held school jobs like "sharpshooter" for carrying the headmaster's bb gun or "pig-boy" for feeding slop to the pigs or "dam master" for opening the pipe to the reservoir after it rained. None of the buildings in the yard where they boarded are still standing, but their stories remain.

2. Facing-out books on the shelves in the fiction section

Our school is small, so we do not have a full-time librarian. This means that students, faculty, spouses, and faculty children check books out of the school library by writing their name on a check-out slip with the date and putting that slip in a box. A student has the job of taking the check-out slips and marking those books as "checked-out" in the school library database. However, there are no overdue notices that go out (at least as far as I know) so all books are returned entirely on the honor system. What this means is, like a teacher's personal classroom library, many of the books go missing. We have no magnetic strips in the books, no theft-prevention system, and people tend to lose and forget things, including library books. Sometimes they forget to check the book out and just walk off with the book. When this happens, the school library database shows that the book is still on the shelf, when in fact it is not. This has been happening for awhile so I am going through the fiction section with a printed copy of the fiction titles in the library database, making sure that what is in the database is actually physically on the shelf.

Sounds fun? It is! What makes it all worth it? Facing books out! I mean, how else do you get people to realize we have a copy of The Fault in Our Stars or The Secret Life of Bees? Twilight, Harry Potter, and Stephen King books have thick enough spines that a patron can see them from across the library. I personally love facing out titles that have been adapted into films like The Life of Pi or Bourne Identity. I can also highlight books from non-White or LGBT perspectives such as House of Spirits, The House of Mango Street, Stone Butch Blues, or Annie On My Mind. And of course we have a corner facing-out Joseph Heller, Hemingway, and Herman Hesse. So you see, going through the fiction collection allows me to indirectly forward my literacy agenda.

I am also forwarding my cleaning agenda by blowing dust off the books and wiping down the shelves. Our school is very outdoorsy, rural, rustic, and experiential, so everything gets very... dirty. Of course by September all the dust and cobwebs will be back, but such is life.

Other projects:

3. Put loose photos in photo albums
4. Alphabetize my zines into magazine holders
5. Print and delete photos off my phone
6. Write
7. Draw comics
8. Fix speaker wire (-$)
9. Sell records (+$)
10. Sell books (+$)
11. Donate kids' clothes
12. Get rid of my ripped clothes
13. New battery for my laptop (-$)
14. Get Subaru towed to the mechanic (-$)
15. Take stuff behind our house to the dump (-$)
16. Build drum kit (-$)
17. Read!!!
18. Go to the beach
19. Go to La Bufadora
20. Go to Minneapolis to see my brother

Okay that is enough! Pretty boring isn't it? As you can see, getting rid of stuff is a big goal of mine. I have so much junk after four decades of collecting books and records. It's like I am constantly acquiring and discarding. But I barely have time to deal with it until summer. Summer is here: time exists. The items followed by (+$) indicate that income might follow and are more likely of being completed. The items followed by (-$) indicate an expense and are less likely to be completed. The items followed by nothing are most feasible. On that note, my next post will be about #17: Read!!!


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