Happenings

Submitted by
Wanda Plyler Bullock

I look at them. They look at me. Thirty years have and have not passed. Their faces are so familiar.

Today, I am the substitute teacher for the same band class that I once sat in as a teenager thirty years ago. For each student, I remember my classmates who in someway looked or acted as they do now.

There is a perfect irony in this moment. So perfect, that ether it offers a rigorous proof of a grand, divine entity executing its master plan or it is an example solution to the ultimate question of quantum mechanics – the existence of parallel universes.

Do they really know how very important these years are, will be and someday have been? Here and now they are making decisions that will infinitely affect the course of their lives.

These students, like my former classmates, are mostly college bound, have a kind demeanor, and appear to be concerned for each other’s welfare. Edgewater High School and the band students in particular remains a relative oasis in what has become a largely brutal school system.

As a substitute teacher, I’ve been to just about every middle and high school in Orange County. While I’m certain that there are likely many opinions that disagree with mine, I have an abided perception of the school system that is my reality.

In my travels I heard several teachers during the relative privacy of lunch together call students “stupid”, “dumb” and “liars.”
More often I heard teachers say that they were just doing their time to earn a healthy pension and health insurance. There was a sense among them that they felt trapped, even hopeless.

For a long time, I marveled at these attitudes. How could so many people with bad attitudes succeed? How could they do well in the face of seemingly so much personal misery?

One experienced, even dedicated educator once told me that in the teaching profession - “You’re public enemy number one.”

The lesson for me in this experience was not about the widespread existence of seemingly bad attitudes, but the fact that they so often occurred at schools that held good ratings under the No Child Left Behind Act. There was NO CORRELATION between the behind the scenes negativity and FCAT performance.

And that was the telling truth - the teachers who expressed these things got up, pulled what is easily a 10-hour day for many, and never for a moment let their inner feelings show. A major feat because teachers get slammed from every direction and in Florida their jobs are often not secure. Florida state law provides that for the first three years of employment a teacher can be fired within the first 97-days of the school year without cause, due process, and reason. While the law reads as if such an action will not affect either party, and is a kind of no fault policy; in this county, with rare exceptions, when a principal evokes the 97-day rule that individual is blacklisted from ever being employed as a teacher in this county again.

Students have seen so many quick, unannounced changes in their classroom instructors that they’ve gotten a picture that the job security for teachers is about the same as hamburger flipping.

Young people are very observant and highly perceptive, a talent that many folks loose as they age. In an instinctive way, they see the lack of security some teachers have about their jobs and are pretty aware of their abilities and the power they can reap from these.

Once I plainly overhead students bragging about how they were able to get rid of not just one English teacher they didn’t like, but were able to effect this outcome over several occasions. When I heard this I checked. Sure enough, the district’s web site showed an opening for a Language Arts teacher at that very school.

I would later learn the common scenario that gets carried out with impunity.

Students get together and talk about a teacher they don’t like and complain to their parents, often taking something the teacher said out of context and twisting it just enough to make it sound both heinous and believable. Parents get angry and call the principal. The principal in turn doesn’t have the time or support to really sort out the situation and knows that their own job is more secure if they tend to side with the parents and so the 97-day rule comes into play.

Not long ago I walked into a classroom where several teachers were having lunch. I looked at them. They looked at me.

“Let me guess,” I said, “Mean kids, complaining parents, an unsupportive administration, and a teacher’s union that is worthless.”

Preaching to the choir, I was told, and not only did they nod Amen like tired Pentecostals during the third hour of Sunday service, but mentioned too that teacher’s could not strike in Florida and would risk arrest if they did.

From this experience, I feel inspired to re-read Lord of the Flies. Is it possible to draw a parallel to the themes of that classic book and the state of education today? Or is the question merely redundant and rhetorical?