Seriously, Teachers, You’re Being WAY Too Difficult
Looking back it’s clear to see how Dr. Todd Whitaker’s management techniques were used at my school. I’ll illustrate a couple of examples and I encourage you to send in your own.
Recall the last post in which Dr. Whitaker’s path-breaking book Dealing With Difficult Teachers was viciously skewered in an evenhanded review. Dr. Whitaker encourages principals to use misdirection and dis-ingenuousness in their treatment of the vile subhumans they have deemed difficult teachers. Many readers think it likely their principals have read this book. This should please Dr. Whitaker.
As a follow-up to the book review, I will describe some of the tell-tale signs that I was a difficult teacher as well as some of the management techniques used to neutralize me.
Dr. Whitaker: The difficult people sit together, in the back, and near the door. p66
Mr. Teachbad: Check.
Dr. Whitaker: I noticed that she was grading papers and pretending to be disinterested in workshop activities.
Mr. Teachbad: Check. But I wasn’t pretending and I’m not a woman. The meetings are terrible and a waste of time and we all know you know that.
Dr. Whitaker: One teacher who resists change can be harmful. A negative leader who resists change and recruits others to fight change can be catastrophic to school improvement. p122
Mr. Teachbad: What if the principal’s new idea is insane or would simply take a great deal of time and yield no benefits? Is every idea a principal has automatically a good idea? I never tried to resist change, I just couldn’t possibly do all the stupid crap she wanted and neither could anybody else.
Dr. Whitaker: Attempting to alter difficult teachers who are held in some regard by their peers is a special challenge…p32 Instead, we need to be the ones who are prepared. We should also plan so that they will not be. p95
Mr. Teachbad: This is possibly the position I was in. Though technically anonymous, the blog was an open secret by January 2010 with many people in the school reading it, enjoying it and passing it around. Ultimately I believe the blog is why I was fired.
Do you remember the assistant principal who had Dr. Whitaker’s book on her wish list? She started treating me very differently after the blog became known to her. Here’s how she tried to keep me off guard: We had a huge snow storm and classes were canceled for a whole week. The day school reopened was pretty strange. Attendance was low. People had a hard time remembering their names. So Amanda came to give me a formal observation first period on the first day back. I can only interpret that as hostility and an attempt to make my score lower by conducting my observation in the most adverse circumstances she could put together. Even so, it took them two years to get my scores low enough to get rid of me.
Dr. Whitaker: One factor that often affects the development of informal relationships is room location. If a follower has a room located next to or near a negative leader, this can easily encourage support for the negative leader. p. 139
Mr. Teachbad: For two years I had been on the 4th floor on the high school side of the building with other 11th and 12th grade teachers on my floor. In my third year, after I had been found difficult, my room was moved to the middle school side of the building. I was now teaching 12th grade social studies in a 6th grade science lab. Everybody else on my floor was a 6th grade teacher with a different bell schedule. The principal strolled into my room the first week and, with a shit-eating grin asked “How do you like your new room, Mr. Teachbad?”
“Fine, bitch. I think nine sinks will be plenty for me to teach U.S. Government.”
Dr. Whitaker: Optional meetings open to all staff offer exceptional opportunities to reduce negative influences. The nice part about an approach like this is that people who are interested can come; others stay away. If negative people choose not to participate, not only will the meetings go better but you can reduce their power of resistance at later meetings…Do not speak sarcastically…Share that you hope to see them at the next planning meeting. p143
Mr. Teachbad: The optional meeting strategy was definitely a staple. Every Monday the Leadership Team, which you could be a member of by simply showing up, met after school. It seemed to me that people went to these meetings for the right reasons and then one of two things happened. Either they became disillusioned and disappointed and stopped going because they realized that the Leadership Team did not lead and was not a team; or they kept going for the wrong reasons…to be recognized as being a person who goes to the Leadership Team meetings. I never heard anybody, except the principal explaining at other meetings how great these meetings were, ever make any mention of the Leadership Team meetings being helpful or useful in any way. My impression was that the Leadership Team was essentially a club of people who wanted to be seen in the club.
1) Keep sending your examples of rat-like management practices;
2) Think about this question for next time: As a teacher, what is the difference between being bullied by your principal, being harassed by your principal, and your principal just being an asshole?
Mr. Teachbad
We have had a revolving door of new admins with a slot machine of various titles. Each one brings fresh new reform replete with directives, templates, websites, menus, in-services, etc, etc, etc.
The latest is a voluntary/mandatory “self-reflection” form which pretty much is designed for admin to cut and paste for their end of the year reports. Nearly all questions are crafted to elicit yes/no responses.
Under “Planning”:
€ Were my plans consistently submitted on time?
€ Did I devote ample time for lesson preparation?
€ Did I collaborate with my departmental/grade level colleagues to assist in the amendments to our curriculum maps?
Under “Classroom Management”
€ Do I create an environment where students want to be?
€ Do my students know I care about them?
€ Do I handle my own discipline issues?
Under the barf-worthy “Other” :
€ How have I positively added to the culture and climate of the building?
The deadline came and went. Those who did not “participate” were sent individual follow up reminder emails. Twice.
Never mind that self-reflection is introspection not intended for scrutiny by others, professionally or personally. Never mind that the lesson plan directives and template were changed every week, then every month for the first 5 months of the school year. Never mind that this inane form is just one of a slew of cooked up new directives that are too voluminous for even the admin to keep tabs on so conveniently they are used punitively as needed.
What’s important is that we validate their new and ever changing ideas jumping through each new hoop they hold up. In this case, the hoop is actually helping to complete their 6 figure salary job on our half-their-salary time.
Yes, Miss Friday. Sometimes there just isn’t enough vomit in the world.
As someone deeply engaged in getting a very large suburban school district to be accountable, transparent, and responsive to advocacy (including teachers’ unions — oops — associations), I have a most sincere question:
What would happen if public schools were turned completely over to teachers to run? If all other staff all the way to the current tippy top were assigned their duties by teachers in some way?
I have often fantasized about this. Would it work? Would kids be better off? How would/could it work? How would education advocates, parents, stakeholders, be involved?
How could real collaboration/cooperation/engagement happen with those stakeholders if teachers ran the show (e.g., with parents who are required, I mean privileged, to imprison, I mean gently repose, their kids in school all day)?
If I could require the secretaries who can’t spell, run email, or be civilized to the public, to take courses until they learned, or leave within 5 years? If I could get the teachers in a school to decide which grades/courses they should teach, or which grades/courses students should be in? If the math teachers could access and interpret the data that’s needed for the school, so they could be accurate and intelligible? If the English teachers could write legible reports instead of the illiterate garble that is sent out to represent our school? If we could counsel out principals who protect the violent criminals in our schools and encourage the academic talent to leave?
Wow, we might look like an educational institution. Remembering that teachers are who bring in the money,even if they get paid crappily, it might just be too expensive to give teachers release time to do this, rather than have specialized admin., but the admin need to be at least on the same level as the high school students. As it is, they do a shoddy job, then present it to teachers like two-year-olds who just painted a picture on the wall with feces in hand. Really, we are not that proud of you. Admin need to remember that they have their jobs because we teachers are too valuable to spend our time on form-filling. We could do their jobs, but they could not do ours.
Actually, if we teachers did the admin instead of PD, and split the salary of the admin people among us, we’d have a much more efficient system.
Oops, back to the original proposal for charter schools. Lost my mind for a moment.
I did a quick Google, and found many places experimenting with this model. One specific shining example is Avalon School in MN. You might want to look them up; sounds amazing.
I had an administrator refuse to talk to me. Here, verbatim, is a conversation I had with the Ass:
[in the hallway, afternoon]
Me: I really need to talk with you, do you have a moment?
Ass: No. [walks to car in parking lot]
Oh, the Ass tried that Whitaker “postpone meetings so the teacher isn’t prepared” bullshit on me. Problem was, I practiced my West Wing-fu on him by preparing for every conceivable meeting topic. Always made him look like an idiot. By the end he resorted to bringing backup to our meetings.
The fascistic downtown “leadership” team tried to require “institutes” over the summer. These are uncompensated, district wide, collaborative planning sessions. When they found out they could not be mandatory, they became “optional” and thus, I believe, a trap to identify difficult teachers, particularly with the higher salaries.
See, the corporatist that uses the title Superintendent was never an “educator”. Rather, this person was a financial suit; a bean counter, if you will. I tend to think this person’s interest in schools has more to do with the inability to score six figures elsewhere.
So, I will be attending these “voluntary” sessions. I will check my name off the list and then go enjoy my “compensation in time”.
For anyone who has been teaching for a least a few years, they know being viewed as “difficult” simply means not acting content as the system continues to spiral downward, and spiral down at an alarming rate. Perhaps more than any other field, ours is the ultimate definition of the phrase “Just when you think it can’t get worse…”
I’m only a few years in and already working on a “plan B”. I know I won’t last; not in this diseased system.
I know Ms. Warthergle and Ms. Mudd. The following story only scratches the surface!
http://nyceducator.com/2009/10/another-true-story-from-darkest-doe.html
After a one hour meeting that our principal designated as a way to get informal feedback from the staff, but which he dominated for 45 minutes, belittling the legitimate concerns of one teacher, so that only two or three teachers out of the 25 present had a chance to say anything, I made what turned out to be a fatal career mistake. When the other teachers had left the room, I took the opportunity to suggest to the principal that he was a bit argumentative and that it didn’t give time for much of the feedback he claimed he wanted. Since this was his second year as a principal, I thought my comments might be seen as some of the feedback he was looking for. I had no idea of either the depth of his insecurity or his need for control.
From that moment on, I became the object of a series of efforts to make my life difficult, culminating in the last year having five different classrooms, numerous hostile observations by an assistant principal who, of course, wanted to see my lesson plans every week. All this after having a satisfactory teaching record for 35 years and good working relationships with numerous principals during those years.
One new wrinkle used on me was also being made to feel like an abused spouse when told by the AP that other teachers did not want to work with me, which was contrary to my experience, but nonetheless was
painful to have to listen to. It was just one more technique to try to isolate a teacher deemed difficult.
In my teaching career, I often felt like an abused spouse might feel. Gaslighted, impossible expectations, etc.
Even after being out of the field for two years, I still notice how much of a mindf$^* the almost 20 years of teaching did to me.
Ok, here goes. A couple of months ago, when it was painfully clear the admin had no control over the student body, they attempted to gain control over the faculty, by means of a new seating directive at faculty meetings. Instead of the usual self-imposed comfort zone seating, we were directed, after we sat down of course, to move to the center isle.
Here is a dramatic reenactment of that announcement (with apologies/thanks to Teachbad. A smidgeon of hyperbole was used, but the quote about it “being a part of our contractual obligation if you want to get technical” is verbatim. No, the seating directive is not in our contract.
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/13262047/faculty-meeting-the-center-isle
I have sat back row by the door ever since.
Eeeehehehehe I laughed my ass off!
Yeah, I get my asshole ripped all the time about the fact that I sit away from everyone. I don’t want them to see my drawings and budget plans.
I know, right!?!
Glad you found it as funny as me and my fellow difficult colleague did.
She’s even more B. A. than I am. She refused to move to “the center isle” and he stood in front of her and told her, “That’s what we have the kids do.” She shot back with arms folded looking him directly in the eye and said, “That’s exactly the point. WE’RE not the KIDS.”
I’m afraid being treated like a child is a serious occupational hazard of teaching.
We had a principal a few years back that was right out of this book. I know he did not read the whole thing, because he often bragged about never reading much, but I know he must have browsed it. He did all this crap. We negative types banded together, contacted school board members, talked to the Superintendent, and the creep was given a quit or be fired ultimatum. He choose to quit on the very last day possible (sure, he was all about the kids, now wasn’t he?). We were victorious here because we hung together.
I was just “let go” from my job in my charter school because I was too difficult-i.e. telling it like it is, not what my three administrators for a student body of 300 want to hear. They didn’t like that I wouldn’t bend to their every whim. I am excited to spend my summer relaxing and not be nervous as hell for August to roll around.
Sorry about your news. And congratulations. Have a good weekend.
@aburns,
They just did you a big favor. Enjoy your summer and I’m sure you’ll be a lot happier elsewhere. I’m planning my “plan b” as I type this :O)
After the initial shock, I had coworkers coming up to me and saying that they wish they were in my position. I feel happy now. Happier than when I had a job.
Yup. There was a teacher who left (bullied out by admin) at the beginning of the year. I was so happy for her and envious at the same time.
Gilbert Public Schools (Arizona) tried to fire an acclaimed National Board Certified Teacher after she reported bullying, racial discrimination and retaliation. Sarah Green, M.Ed. NBCT, has become a poster child for what happens to teachers who report bullying in the classroom. The teacher is pretty, but the poster is ugly.
Sarah reported bullying in her third grade classroom at Meridian Elementary School in February 2011, where she taught for six years. She worked diligently to resolve the problems she reported internally and informally. The situation was dire: at least one student was afraid to come to school for fear of the bully. No one at the district level would help the students who were victims of bullying. The district instead commissioned investigations that stretched out past the end of the school year. An investigating attorney provoked the bully’s parents into filing a complaint against the teacher for her “unprofessionalism” with regard to her reporting of their child’s bullying.
The district brought 20 charges against Sarah on December 6, 2011, the first of which concerned her initial report of bullying. The district appeared confident they could nail her for such zingers as “donated five copies of her book to the library” (Charge #8), “sent the Technology Services Help Desk an email” (Charge #11), and “referred to efforts to monitor her as ‘double secret probation.’” (Charge # 15). The GEA President commented to a Board Member was that Sarah is a “great teacher, just not suitable for the Gilbert environment.”
Sarah immediately demanded a public hearing on the charges. The school district waited until May 2012 and decided to withdraw all charges against Sarah rather than convene a public hearing. Sarah gained a full year of pay and benefits, as well as the district’s reimbursement for her legal fees. The most important aspect of this limited settlement is that Sarah retains all of her legal claims against the district!
Read Sarah’s story at http://www.WesternConnections.com and use the resources we have assembled to help teachers in similar circumstances. Local media coverage with citizen commentary is online at http://www.azcentral.com/community/gilbert/articles/20120524gilbert-teacher-loses-job-settlement.html