At the middle school where I student taught, I was assigned to two mentors.
I received two sections of eighth grade U.S. History, followed by one section of sixth grade ancient history. The logic of this division in the history-social science curriculum still amazes me to this day.
The eighth grade history mentor was a young man, high strung, very power-driven, and focused on becoming a prosecutor. Teaching was a stepping stone to becoming a lawyer.
Yet the assistant principal who assumed me to him thought very highly of him, especially for his work with English Language Learners.
He was an arrogant has-been jock. He loved cutting me off in class, he loved lecturing me as if he was high-and-mighty skilled at what he did. He was also enthralled by the secretaries, always stressing to me not to make waves with the secretaries (which I did, anyway).
He was impressed with everything that he did; he was living a busy life, moving from one project to another. I look back on it, and he appeared to be a man drive to prove something, to undo some bad thing that he had done, or to prove that he was capable of far more that others had given him credit for.
Once, a student asked for a grace period to turn in an assignment. She and her family had been moving for the past three days, and so she did not have time to complete an assignment. I refused, reminding her that she could have brought the matter to my attention sooner. As soon as the student left, the mentor teacher pounced on me.
"Why didn't you let her have another day?" He was angrily surprised. I could not believe that I had to justify expecting a modicum of accountability from a student.
"She could go to the principal over this." Now he was scared and angry. He secreted many teachers' worst fear: being called to accounts and overruled by an administrator and losing face in front of a student.
He told me to call the kid's parents right away. I ended up speaking with the student directly, letting her know that she could have more time to complete the assignment. Incidentally enough, she never completed it.
My eighth-grade mentor was an arrogant guy, not cruel, but he thought that he had all the answers, convinced that I was some apprentice who needed his advice. Of course, when I wanted to teach, he told me to take a seat. Later on, he told me to "get out of the nest" and teach on my own — something that I had been demanding for at least a week.
Also, he was one of those teachers who loved rewarding kids for doing the obvious, mundane, and expected, like sitting in their seats when the bell rang or completing assignments in class. He handed out carnival tickets for the students to cash in every month. I have never been a fan of bribing kids like hapless, slap-happy seals to do the the expected. Still, I went with the arrangement. After two months, the mentor scolded me for giving away too many tickets.
No matter what I did, it would be too much or not enough. He chided me often basically for not being like him. At one point he told me that his class was now my class, then he would interrupt me for ten minutes to explain something that I could have done just as easily.
Granted, one day the students got so disrespectful that he threw one kid out himself, then yelled "I will never forget this! This guy is not being paid to teach, and you're treating him like this!" I did appreciate his stepping in for me that one time. He tried to soften the intervention in the faculty meeting after school that day. "Arthur, I had to step in. Otherwise, it would have gotten out of control."
Still, I never really learned how to channel authority, or to command respect. Those are spiritual matters, something that anyone can receive, but that no one can learn. You have to believe in who you are and what you are doing, demonstrate to everyone you work with, whether student, faculty, or parent, that you have a set of values, a set of goals, and that you are not about to compromise. Unfortunately, most teachers give in because they are afraid of retaliation, legal disputes, or termination. I was learning, and would continue to learn, the hard way — standing up for yourself is more than a mindset, or a set of procedures.
Usually, if student misconduct reached a feverish pitch, I would go home shaken to my core. I vowed never again to let the kids take advantage of me. I became a sheer terror. I nailed every student who acted up, whether they were in my class or outside on campus. When two students were pushing in the stairway, I hauled them both to the dean's office. She was accommodating, at least. If I wrote a kid, she followed through on it. When a student said "F– You!", that student got Friday School — a terrible punishment in which the dean would drag a handful of students around the campus picking up trash from 3 to 4.
I was a mean teacher. I was so insecure, I wanted to make sure that nobody messed with me, which in the end meant that more kids would do anything they could to start something.
At the end of the semester, the mentor teacher got worried. I was writing too many referrals, sending too many students to the referral room or to the dean. He tried to steer me towards giving them trash pick up, sending them to another room, or moving the kid to another class. One week before the end of the semester, when most kids start acting up because they know that they are going to fail, and therefore no point to cooperating, I wrote three referrals in one period.
Ironically, I felt the most productive as a teacher when the mentor was not there. He ended up being absent for about two months with a severe illness. Pneumonia, or some other communicable disease. He had to stay away from work. I even called him during the winter break to see how he was doing. He was so ill, he could not have called me on his own even he had wanted to.
Because I was a student teacher, the district still assigned a substitute to oversee the class those few months. I can admit that I felt free to do what I needed to do as a teacher, even if I wasn't a very good one. Some of the substitutes were very supportive, and even funny. One of them, a World War II vet, liked to tell jokes then mess with the students, "Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop doing that!"
At lunch time in the faculty lounge, he was crestfallen. "I thought we had talked about you not writing so many referrals," he mumbled off hand. I tried to explain, but he cut me off. "That is neither here nor there. I guess the next school where you work will have to decide what they will put up with." He was mad, and I did not know what to say.
He openly humiliated me in front of the other faculty. He was unprofessional, to say the least. And the worst of it, he was angry because his reputation was potentially smeared with the referral room, not because I may have compromised my capacity to manage a classroom.
At the end of my student teaching, he shook my hand, and that was that. I called him a month later, telling him that I had just been hired to work in South Gate. He was not moved, really, then went out to boast about all the things that he had taught me. This was a man whom I had no interest in ever speaking to again.