evaluations – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Well, okay, that’s probably overstating things, but today went pretty well after a not-great run of a few days. Helpful facts: my midday knuckleheads were tamed through a combination of fortuitous absences and a couple of notable suspensions, and on top of that I had an unscheduled observation by my principal during 3rd hour. After eighteen years of teaching I have lost all fear of these events; I’m going to keep doing what I was doing before you came into the room, and sometimes that’ll mean I teach a really good lesson and sometimes it’ll mean I’m not doing a whole damn lot if, say, the plan was to have the kids on one of the various computer programs we’ve got them working on. If it’s one of those days I might seriously just be sitting in my chair monitoring their computer screens and not actively “teaching.” I’m not changing the lesson; you didn’t tell me you weren’t coming in. Some teachers panic and feel like they Have to Be Doing Something when the boss comes in. Me? Fuck it, I’ve been highly effective two years in a row and I don’t see a lot changing this year. I’m going to enjoy the slight bump in cooperation and good behavior I get from having an administrator in the room and keep on keeping on.

My student observer starts tomorrow, and frankly that has me more worried than formal observations– mostly because I genuinely want this to be a useful experience for the kid (he’s a grown-ass man, but … whatever) and I’m a little nervous about that. It’s not going to change how I do things with the kids or anything like that, and I’ve told him to have no fear about challenging me on anything he has questions or concerns about, so I hope it goes well, but as everyone who follows this site knows very well, one determined kid can blow up a lesson any time they feel like it, and I don’t feel like having my dude exposed to that just yet. The notable suspensions will be continuing through the rest of the week, which is awesome, so at least his first day ought to go reasonably smoothly, but who the hell knows. Watch, there’ll be a fucking fire or a power outage or some such shit tomorrow.

(There can go ahead and be a power outage tomorrow. I’ve decided everything is on paper for the next couple of days anyway. So long as I have access to the photocopier. The outage can happen after I have my photocopies done. Or, fuck it, I can just write the damn problems on the board. It’ll be fine. Dude can learn teacherly improvisation on his first day. It’ll be fine.)

Anyway. It’s 7:00 already, so if I’m going to be ready for tomorrow I probably ought to get my lesson written.

On account of the fact that it’s 8:30 already and I literally just got home for the evening, this is going to be an abbreviated post. Nonetheless, I pose you this: I am on a probation assistance team for my school district (this is a new thing; I just joined) and have been assigned to help a teacher at another school. This team, composed of me and three other people, is literally going to decide whether this person is allowed to remain in our district or whether ou(*) is going to be terminated at the end of the school year. We’ll be doing observations and having meetings and conferences and one of my responsibilities as one of the peer mentors is going to be to do whatever I can to help em(*) get better.

As it works out, I already know the person on probation. I’ve known this person for as long as I’ve been working in this town, in fact– and I’ve thought this person was basically incompetent and useless for most of that time. I was not surprised to find out that xe’s(*) up for probation.

Here’s the thing, though: my job is going to be to help this person get better. I considered suggesting that I be moved to a team with a person that I don’t know (and, note, this isn’t exactly a close relationship– I’m pretty sure this person does not know my name; only the aggravation factor has fixed hirs(*) in my head) and rejected the idea after discussing it with the rest of my team; the simple fact is that the corporation isn’t that damn big and that we can’t really keep the groups “teachers who have similar jobs and work with the same population of kids” and “teachers who know each other” apart if we want to have any sort of functioning peer-assistance training going on.

I am pretty certain that I’m capable of helping someone I don’t like very much be better at their job; if we’re willing to consider “student” a job that basically describes half of my first and second hour class, so this isn’t something I can’t do. What I have to work on is the prejudging factor: I’ve said the words “I can’t believe Alex is a teacher” on more than one occasion (Alex is not zir(*) name, obviously) and I need to walk into these observations believing zhim(*) to be redeemable.

We’ll see how it goes.

(*) Did a quick Google search for gender-neutral pronouns and my brain broke. Started choosing them at random when I needed them.