How many more interviews was I going to put myself through before I realized how inane, insane, and in vain the whole enterprise of public education would be?
I went to a make-shift charter school in Inglewood (two, actually).
Two other teachers and I had come together to make our case to the director/assistant principal that one of us was the ideal teacher to staff the extension of this new charter.
Actually, the set-up was new; the building was very old and smelly, the stench probably aided by the compost breeding (or brewing) in the inner courtyard.
And I neglected to mention the the school was housed in a church! P. U. and pews!
From the outset, I fielded many of the generic questions posed to neophyte teachers such as myself: why do you want to be a teacher, what is your experience working with this grade level, how would you work with students who struggle with difficult assignments, difficult parents, all questions that anyone could have easily scripted.
Then came the interesting part. Not only did the assistant principal give us a walk through of the diminutive campus, she asked us for ideas, the types of projects that we could create.
Right then my heart darkened. One more time, having to think of silly little assignments to capture the creative minds of young people. Is not the real world interesting enough?
CSI meets Harry Potter, Facebook pages of a famous person from history, my goodness, are we teaching the kids to be fully-fledged individuals or really good adolescents? I was also shocked by the reading selection that the school was proposing. Honestly, some of the selections looked like they had been picked out of a flimsy book fair flyer, glossy pics, eye-catching cover, but not much else.
Young people are not teething on the classics, and they are not learning new languages to confront the discrepancies between the original text and the translation.
No matter how diligent are details the projects that students engage in, they seem to cater more to the creativity of the teacher than the needs for the whole student.
The other two teachers were fawning, to say the least. Not only did they know what to say, but they took every opportunity they could to praise and send up what was already set up.
Oh, that's so cool!
I would love to do that this year.
Why don't we get the students to create posters dealing with environmentally friendly trendy topics, etc. etc. I have heard of the hind-lick maneuver, a life-saving technique for instructors desperate for work, but whatever happened to finding a correct fit for the needs of the student?
Of course, the teachers to be spend as much time as they could talking about all the things that they had done for their kids in previous settings. One teacher had already been privileged (?) to work with middle school students in another charter school in Los Angeles. The other teacher, a substitute teacher from Anaheim, but willing to commute to the South Bay, talked about the unique challenges of working with choir students.
Yes, I heard all about the fulfilling fun that they had, teaching kids, seeing them learn. Still, the rewarding aspect of it seems rather overrated. A truly rewarding experience is not creating some artificial product, assignment, or set of busy work, but contributing something to one's individual experience, challenging a status quo notion, learning something new about oneself, sharing it with another. Most importantly, learning should be about establishing values worth living by, or at least broadening them if they are limited, or discovering them if a person does not have any.
It is shocking to me that no matter how creative or innovative a school may be in vision and design, that students are not exploring, expounding, and expressing eternal verities, timeless truths, finding something worth living. That is an adventure that will take a life time, that cannot be fit into a standardized test, nor be measured efficiently for the state to determine the worth and welfare of a school.
Alas, I was bored within thirty minutes of the interview. Honestly, I expected that this school was not going to be a good fit, anyway, considering the green bias, with environmental investment practically throttling a visitor at every turn. Even classrooms were named after elements of nature.
Ridiculous. Do these charter school operators sit down with themselves in a quiet place in nature and ask themselves: "What are we doing here?"
It seems pretty inane, all these glossy thematics.
It's insane to expect parents to plop their kids in a school where one creative idea still dictates the placement and performance of the pupils.
And to top all this, the whole thing rings out once again the "in vain" element of much of public education.
Suffice to say, I left the interview early, stating that I had other things to do. In fact, I was inconveniently confirmed that not only would that particular school site not be a good fit, but that public education, at least on a full-time basis, was going to be an inane, insane, in vain waste of time.