Ding Dong the Witch is...

Gone.

Finally. We have a new superintendent. My principal announced the official news today. Cheers erupted. I looked two seats over at another un-tenured teacher, shooting him a knowing glance. We exchanged smiles, knowing what this meant for us. HOPE.

For the first time in our history (at least as far as I know), we have a superintendent specifically for transfer schools. According to those who know, she is someone who understands and values what teachers in my school do everyday. As a former transfer school principal, she can review our tenure portfolios, keeping in mind the population of students we work with: students on the verge of dropping out; students with a myriad of external issues negatively impacting their ability to be successful in school. Perhaps this superintendent will recognize the amount of social-emotional support we provide to our students who desperately need it and how integral it is to their development and success.

And so here we are—some of us five, six, seven years in—tenure once tucked away in a wild dream is now becoming a tangible reality.

Why does tenure matter? Because without tenure, it is much easier to get rid of teachers. As Paul Horton says on Diane Ravitch's blog, "The impact of the loss of tenure will demoralize teacher’s unions and allow school administrators to hire and fire at will. The immediate objective for education reformers is that a victory in the tenure fight will allow big city school districts to rif out senior teachers who are expensive and replace them with young, less costly teachers." Without tenure, administrators have the power to end a teacher's career, for any reason.

In my first two years of teaching I saw Peter Greene's arguments firsthand. “The lack of tenure, of due process, of any requirement that a school district only fire teachers for some actual legitimate reason– it interferes with teachers’ ability to do the job they were hired to do. It forces teachers to work under a chilling cloud where their best professional judgment, their desire to advocate for and help students, their ability to speak out and stand up are all smothered by people with the power to say, “Do as I tell you, or else.” It is not until you have tenure, that you can finally feel free to speak your mind, to advocate for students without fear of repercussions. Greene continues, “Tenure is not a crown and scepter for every teacher, to make them powerful and untouchable. Tenure is a bodyguard who stands at the classroom door and says, “You go ahead and teach, buddy. I’ll make sure nobody interrupts just to mess with you.”' I love the bodyguard metaphor. As a dues-paying member of the UFT, you hope your union rep can be your protector, but there's little the union can really do unless you have that security blanket known as tenure. I remember after meeting with an union representative about the harassment I was facing during my second year. I was told, "If you don't fight her, you might still have a job at the end of the year."

Diane Ravitch also includes on her blog a letter written by two teachers explaining not only the process but the importance of tenure. They write, “Without tenure, we could not stand up against the injustices we witness against children by districts that may temporarily have forgotten our reason for being here – our students and educational community. Without tenure, we could not stand up to our administrators/supervisors when something is wrong. Without tenure we could not stand up against harassment and workplace bullying. Without tenure, we could not stand up against racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry and age discrimination." And here again, we inevitably describe much of what I faced during my second year of teaching: deciding whether or not to stand idly by as injustices were committed against my students, being bullied by my principal, being sexually harassed by an assistant principal and feeling unable to stop any of it.

Three years later, on June 20, 2014, the end of my fifth year of teaching, everyone in my corner, fingers crossed that I would finally get my tenure, I was called down to the principal's office. My union chapter leader was sitting by my side. They didn't have to say anything. The looks on their faces said it all. "I didn't get tenure, did I?"

My assistant principal expressed her frustration. "It's bureaucratic bullshit. The system is so messed up. No one deserves this more than you." Then she started crying.

As safe as I feel in my school, as much as I know I am valued as a "highly effective" teacher (with an arbitrary teacher score of 96/100 under our new rating system), baby still wants her security blanket. We all do.

ANNUAL PROFESSIONAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW (APPR)
OVERALL RATING

Measures of Teacher Practice State Measures Local Measures 0-60 points: 56 0-20 points: 20 0-20 points: 20 Highly Effective HEDI Rating Highly Effective HEDI Rating Highly Effective HEDI Rating

Overall Rating 0-100 Points: 96 Highly Effective HEDI Rating Safety Net Result:N/A

The Zombie Teacher

Three years ago I was finishing my masters program, reflecting on my first two years of teaching and my philosophy of education. I thought about my undergraduate program at Hampshire College and realized I was teaching in a school that went against what I believe education should look like. I yearned for the creativity that places like Hampshire inspire and support. I missed the freedom of choice not only when it comes to students choosing classes, but choosing and designing what classes to teach. I missed writing about things that matter rather than just writing to prepare for a test. And I hated watching my students in special education suffer from a punitive discipline system when what they really needed was a holistic approach. I knew where I needed to be: a consortium school.

Consortium schools oppose high stakes testing by instead requiring students to create a written portfolio of their work across all subject areas which are then presented to a panel of teachers, peers, and other community members for evaluation. Sound familiar, Hampshire folks? This was my new dream: I needed to work in a consortium school. So I did some research and found a list of the 28 consortium schools in New York City. I went down the list alphabetically sending out my resume and cover letter to each principal. I had gotten just past the D's when I received an email from a principal in the C's. I walked into the school at 2pm on July 13, 2011 and was greeted by a smiling school safety officer. While the school safety officer took my ID and signed me in at the front desk, I thought, "This is the friendliest school safety officer I have ever encountered." I watched a young Asian man talk to a teenager sitting in a red chair about his bike a few feet away in the lobby/gym. The man rolled the bike back and forth across the light gray floor tiles a few times before handing it back to the teenager and walking towards me. I whispered to the school safety officer, "Is that him?"
She nodded.
"Are you Jamie?"
"Yes. Are you Alan?"
"Yes." We shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and I followed him through the maze of hallways covered in student murals. We sat at his desk, he pulled up my resume on his ipad and we talked. I took what felt like too long to think answering certain questions and he just smiled and said, "Take your time."

Then he asked me, "If you could design and teach any class here, what would it be?" I knew this one. There was no pause. No thinking time needed. "A zombie film class."

Six days later I came in for a follow up interview with the assistant principal. When she asked why I wanted to leave my current school I told her, "I want to be in an environment that matches my educational philosophy and allows me to advocate for students." And she told me, "That's extremely important to us. Our teachers are advocates. It's not looked down on. It's expected of them." Where was I? I felt all my stress and anxiety worked up into tangled knots from the previous school year just melt away suddenly. This was where I needed to be. This was my dream school. After she gave me a tour of summer school, I turned to her and said, "I really want to work here."

And when September rolled around, I was rolling out my first Social Issues in the Zombie Film class. Shortly thereafter I became known as "The Zombie Teacher". During registration for classes, I was approached by students I had never seen before, "Are you the zombie teacher?" At parent teacher conferences, "So, you're the zombie teacher?" And when we hired new staff, "Oh, I heard about you. You're the zombie teacher."

Zombie Teacher. Halloween  2013. 

Last summer I received an email from one of my former "Zombie" students filled with kind words. The subject line, of course, was ZOMBIES. She wrote:

Hey Jamie! So I've been watching the Walking Dead nonstop these days, and I just wanted you to know that your class actually taught me a lot. As I watch this series and observe society in general, I find that a lot of things we discussed in class are SO relevant/applicable. Whether it's our society's growing mindlessness and general disconnect, or our constant use of euphemisms to represent our fears (instead of directly confronting them), I've been realizing a lot of things about myself and humanity as a whole. Only thing is I don't know whether to remain hopeful or lose faith in humanity. I dunno.
Anyways, the point of this email was to thank you for teaching such a cool class and for giving me things to think about.

Hope you're having an awesome summer!
Stay safe out there O.O
<3

Emails like that might be the nicest thing a student can do for a teacher. Often it's a job where you wonder if what you're doing is really helping anyone, whether it has an impact on any of the thirty-something bodies on your roster (of which maybe fifteen or twenty showed up for class, if you're lucky). It's an incredible feeling to know that one class could keep a kid thinking about it months later. It only reinforces my views on how important alternative education and performance based assessments are. I'm getting emails that kids can't stop thinking critically about the world! That's incredible.

Around the same time I received this email I was taking a workshop, "Teaching the Academic Paper" at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking. For my final paper, I wrote about alternative approaches to academic writing, specifically research papers. In my own experience as a teacher I have come across academic research papers where students write full page introductions setting the scene for the paper and later analysis. Students often times are “conscious of constructing alternative text” for the readers they imagine, who may be quite different from rational academic readers, who like to stick to the rules. One student wrote an 11-page paper for my class, Social Issues in the Zombie Film, where she spends the first 2 pages describing the setting of the zombie apocalypse in the second person narrative.

“17 days , 6 hours. You keep track of time since what you lovingly refer to as “The End” occurred, although it serves no purpose to you. Night and day are now completely related to survival advantage. In the day, you can move, you can see. In the night, you are nothing but a target. A target to them, those moving corpses that feed on the living and turn the faces you knew into targets.

You run from the moving dead, or not-so-dead-anymore, and you try to scrape together the scraps of knowledge you have related to basic survival. Too bad you didn’t pay more attention in school, seeing as not once in your dull, day-by-day existence, did you ever consider preparing for a world-wide apocalyptic event, because really — what were the chances of that happening? How many times has “the End of All Days” been predicted now? What is the world now? An image of its original savage state? You don’t want to get all Nietzsche or Jung on yourself, but man do you feel like you’ve time traveled back into the Paleolithic Era.”

After displaying a clear understanding of the zombie film genre and establishing a clear voice, she then transitions into her thesis stating,

“The struggle of survival and weighing the worth of continued life is a recurring feature in zombie media. A contender for one of the most paralysing fears in existence is being confined to an inescapable fate. In the context of a zombie apocalypse, it is the constant threat of danger combating the innate human desire for survival, in an unforeseeably bleak future.”

This student demonstrates a clear understanding of the conventions of academic writing, yet she is able to create a piece of writing that ventures outside this box and allows for a more creative writing process. She displays a strong voice, a sense of writing style and experiments with different writing genres. This student was so engaged in the topic that she was able to write a paper twice as long as required. This one example demonstrates that when students are given the opportunity to think outside the box and use an “alternative” approach to academic writing, the results can be astonishing.

And so I wonder, by following the rules of scholarly writing, by following a traditional approach to education and teaching, are we, in fact, losing our humanity? Are we giving up a part of ourselves? Our voices? Our morals? Are we, as educators, giving up who we are in order to follow the norm? Are we simply mindless drones, following an academic path that stinks of rotting flesh?