by Jo Noelle
“Is everything okay?” I ask as we approach.
Mrs. Neff, Dan’s mom, pulls me away a bit. “Mark threw up just after we got to the giraffes.”
The first exhibit?
“So we came right here. He seems okay now, but I wondered if he should sit for a while.”
Mark. Yes, he has a weak stomach and throws up easily, which I learned during my first observation. And again when someone at lunch spit their food out of their mouth. And again when a bathroom toilet flooded while he was washing his hands. Sounds like I can add motion sickness to the list, too. “Sure. If he’s feeling better after lunch, maybe he could join up with you again.” Then I turn to the students. “Mark, you can stay with us for a while. Would you help me with these lunches?”
After everything is set up, Mrs. Hays offers to take the first watch and stay at the playground. She turns to me and Beth and says, “Be back to help get things ready before lunch.” We assure her we will, and Mark joins us as we walk toward the Asian Highlands exhibits.
“Do you want to hear a joke?” Mark asks, then begins without waiting for my answer. “Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Hatch.”
“Hatch who?”
“Gazunheit.”
I laugh a bit. I think I’ve heard that one before, maybe in first grade. Mark launches into another one. “Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Dora.”
“Dora who?”
“The Dora’s locked, isn’t it?”
I give Mark a surprised look and laugh. These actually make sense, not like the usual first-grade knock-knock jokes: Knock, knock. Who’s there? Monkey. Monkey who? Monkeys are funny. I have a stuffed monkey on my bed at home.
See? No point, really.
We have spent most of the morning walking uphill and are finally walking down an incline toward Old Gnarly to set up lunch.
Soon Mark pops up with another joke. “Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Figs.”
“Figs who?”
“Figs your shoelace or you’ll trip.”
We meet with a group from Beth’s class and the chaperone hands a student to her. “I can’t keep her from wandering away. It’s nerve-racking.”
Oh, now I get it. We collect the misbehaving kids or those who need extra supervision. And this is why teachers are not assigned a group—check.
After eating their sack lunches the kids play on the playground, then the groups form up again and go to explore more exhibits.
“If it’s all right with you, I’m not feeling up to walking around. I’ll take the afternoon shift here again,” Mrs. Hays says.
The bus drivers eat lunch with us and offer to take the ice chests back with them, so Beth and I are free to visit the animals. We leave the playground area and I ask Beth, “So, this is a day off for Mrs. Hays?”
“Pretty much. Every year.” Epiphany number two: this is why Beth’s husband insisted on the power chair—check.
We head toward the monkey pavilion. We have also picked up one student from Mrs. Hays’ class. As we move from cage to cage, I notice that Mark looks green.
“Mark, do you need to sit down?”
He nods his head but runs for some bushes, and chucks his lunch. He pulls out his water bottle and rinses out his mouth. “It stinks here. Can we leave?”
“Yes. Would you like to stay at the playground? Did you feel okay there?”
“It was fine. It didn’t stink.”
I let Beth know I’m taking Mark back and to wait for me before they move on. It’s good to know that Mark has a very sensitive gag reflex for smells, and we steer clear of any animal cages along the way. I drop him off with Mrs. Hays and hurry back to Beth who has collected another one of Mrs. Hays’ students.
Our little group visits butterflies, hummingbirds, primates, hippos, and penguins before we start moving back to the entrance to meet the rest of the groups. We reach the meeting point near the stroller rental about twenty minutes early and decide to visit the giraffe-feeding station. I buy some crackers and we walk up the curving wooden ramp to stand at eye level with the giraffes. We take turns holding the crackers above the heads of the giraffes as their soft lips pucker and their long black tongues reach for the snacks. I take a few pictures with my phone, then we go to stand at the rendezvous point. Beth checks all her groups and sends them on to the waiting buses as does Mrs. Hays. All of my groups are back except for one—Mrs. Gregg’s group.
It’s ten minutes past time for the bus to leave, and there is no sign of Mrs. Gregg’s group yet. Note to self: Get cell phone numbers for all the chaperones next year. A couple of minutes later, the children come screaming up to me, with Mrs. Gregg panting behind them. “Sorry, we lost track of time.”
The students and adults are tired on the ride back to school. We have about forty-five minutes until the end of the day, so I turn on a video and let the kids lay around on the floor to watch it. I have to wake a couple of them up when the bell rings.
On Friday after school, I go to Mr. Chavez’s office. “Is he in?” I ask Mrs. Johnson.
“He’s ready for you. Go right in.”
We exchange greetings, and Mr. Chavez motions for me to sit in a chair in front of his desk. As soon as he sits, I begin, “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately. And by lately, I mean, since before Halloween. Teaching is hard work—almost too hard. There were many times when I thought I should just quit. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that. I wouldn’t have left you without a teacher, but I didn’t think I could do this. I was sure I was ruining the students in my class …Oh, not your daughter …well, not the others either, but at one point it seemed like maybe I should step aside and let someone with more experience take over. Then Beth helped me figure things out. Teaching is hard, but it also has a big payoff. Every day has joy. I love watching a child’s face as they struggle to learn something hard, then the flash of ‘I get it’ transforming their eyes. I love teaching. I think I’ve done a good job, and you’ve said you think I’ve done well in my observations, so I just wanted you to know that I’d like to stay in first grade again next year.”
Mr. Chavez begins shaking his head, and his eyes look at me like he is going to start by saying “I’m sorry,” so I quickly add, “Oh, right. Of course it has to work for both of us. And it doesn’t. That’s that.”
I move my chair to stand, and Mr. Chavez says, “Even when you were feeling overwhelmed, you were doing a good job, Sophie.”
“But I should have done better?”
“That’s not it. Probably the hardest part of my job is letting good teachers go.”
“Letting go” is a euphemism for “You’re fired!” It’s the hardest part of your job for me, too.
“You have done a great job in a difficult grade level with a lot of responsibility. To top that off, you started with very little lead time and pulled your class together well. I am grateful for the service you’ve provided.”
It sounds like he is giving me a compliment. “But?”
“But I don’t have any open positions for next year. You were hired on a one-year contract ending on May 28, 2008. Shelli and her husband are moving back, and she is coming back to teach in the first-grade position.”
“Oh, I hadn’t heard. That’s good news for her—that.”
“I’m sorry, Sophie.”
And there’s the “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks for meeting with me.” I stand and move to the door.
“If we have openings, I hope you will want to apply for them.”
I nod and leave his office and the school.
“You okay?” Mina asks as I push carrots and peas around my plate.
“I got fired today.”
Mina abandons her dinner and scoots her chair closer to me. “You …what happened?”
“I asked Mr. Chavez to let me teach first grade again next year, and he fired me.”
�
��Sophie, I don’t get it. Why would he fire you for wanting to teach?”
“I signed a one-year contract. There are no jobs available. I’m not teaching any more. He fired me for next year.”
Mina puts her arm around my shoulder and squeezes. “You really love this job and you’re a great teacher.” Her arm remains hanging around my shoulder and she looks into my face. “You can apply for other jobs, maybe teach somewhere else. It will work out.”
“It just hurts.” I lean in, and she hugs my shoulder again. “I can move and start over, but it won’t be the same, you know?”
“I know.” Than she pauses and says, “You could do real estate. It’s going well for you.”
I grimace, thinking about the breakup of my last partnership.
“Except with a new partner, or maybe go on your own again,” Mina amends.
April 5, 2008
Newbie Blog:
I was Fired Yesterday…In Two Months
That’s it. Not much more to say. So all my stress wondering if I wanted this teaching thing as a career (no, yes, maybe, yes) was really wasted time. There are no positions available at our school for next year. End of story.
On Sunday night, Liam comes over to console me, which I think he might be gifted and talented in. I know kissing can’t cure everything, but we gave it a good try.
Really—who gets fired on Friday and goes back to work on Monday? Oh, yeah, I do. I console myself by thinking that I still have a couple of months to be with my class, so it’s not like I’m being chucked without any warning. And since it just happened at the end of the day on Friday, no one knows what happened except for Mr. Chavez and me.
I round the corner and head toward my classroom to see Beth and Liam chatting by my door. “Come talk to me at recess,” Beth says and turns to her classroom.
“Good morning,” Liam says as we go in. “Are you okay?” It doesn’t sound like a casual “how are you doing” sort of question, but like it should refer to something specific. “Are you going to be all right at work today?”
“Yeah, I’m okay I guess. I’m coming to terms with it. I have a one-year contract. It’s what I signed up for. I was hoping to stay, but I guess not.”
Liam gives me a hug. “Do you want to go out to dinner tonight?”
“Sure, after Beth’s baby shower.”
“I’ll pick you up at six.”
Lunch in the faculty room was a bad idea today. Apparently Shelley emailed Beth, Mel, Kristen, and Jan to let them know she was returning. By the time I sit down to eat, I’m pretty sure I’ve been asked what I’m going to do next year by half the staff.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, I’m not sure.”
“Nothing for sure yet.”
After school, the other half asks or listens in for my answer as we wait in the library for Beth’s baby shower to start. Good question—what am I going to do? No clue.
I heard it before I actually saw it. I expected one of my students to be sobbing beside the door waiting for me, but as I approach the computer lab, I notice that the overhead lights are off and it’s deadly silent except the occasional sniff and hiccup. As I reach the doorway, I realize that my students are sitting in front of their glowing computer screens with their heads down. The computer teacher’s sub is sitting at her station with her head resting in her palms, leaning over her keyboard, crying.
I place my hand on her shoulder and ask, “Can I help you?”
She startles and looks up. “Are they yours? Can you take them away?”
“Yes, they’re my students. Could you tell me what happened?” I reply, motioning toward the hallway. We both move toward the door, and a few students begin to scoot their chairs. “Stay in your seats until I come back, please.”
We stand in the doorway. “Every half hour, a new class comes in. Then I tell them what to do and they can’t do it and they all need help at once. I don’t know how to do this. These are the youngest ones I’ve had yet. I help one student and two more hands go up. So I go to help them and the rest started lining up behind me and following me around as I moved to the next student.”
“They all have their heads down. Did they do something?” Her gaze toward me is vacant. “Something they got in trouble for?”
Her eyes stare more intently into mine. “I needed it to stop,” she says with a shiver.
So that answer would be no. “Okay. I’ll take my students now. Will you be all right?”
“Thanks. Sure. I have some time for lunch now.”
The sub mumbles to herself as my students line up at the door. “Last month, I managed a web-design firm—trained employees, ran the office, contacted clients, tracked accounting … and I can’t do this. There has to be something else.”
My students are very quiet when we return to our classroom. We sit together on the large rug at the front of the room. Marcus raises his hand. “Are we in trouble?”
“No,” I answer as I sit down beside the easel.
“We had to put our heads down for a long time,” Ellie says.
“The computer teacher just needed it to be quiet for a bit. She wasn’t feeling very well. You’re not in trouble, but thank you for helping her. I’m so proud of all of you.”
After school, I sit at my desk, thinking about the computer sub. I could sub. Well, probably not for the computer teachers, and maybe not for the older grades. But I could be a sub for teachers in the primary grades. I would still get to be with children and work in a school. If I don’t get a job at another school next year, then this could be plan B, to sub.
I open a web browser and find our district’s home page. I select personnel, hiring, pay scales. There are four scales for different kinds of subs—substitute teacher, non-certified long-term sub, certified long-term sub, and permanent sub. I scan through the scales and pull out a calculator.
So a regular sub gets seventy dollars a day—yikes! That’s half of what I get now, if I could get work every day. Certified long-term subs get a hundred dollars per day, so two thousand a month before taxes, if there are no holidays—might work if I’m desperate and don’t need insurance. A permanent sub, like what Liam does, has the same pay scale as teachers, and they have benefits, too.
Being a permanent sub would work if I can find an opening. That’s plan B. Plan C might still be real estate. Then plan D is long-term sub, cutting my budget again and probably selling plasma.
After work on Thursday, we have our first planning meeting for the Girls’ Celebration at the end of the year. The first-grade teachers have all invited a parent to be on the planning committee for the event. I walk behind Mrs. Hays just as she says, “Would you really want your child in a first-year teacher’s classroom?”
My mouth drops open and the woman she was speaking to jerks her head in my direction, then walks quickly away. Without missing a beat, Mrs. Hays says to me, “I wasn’t talking about you. You’ll be a second-year teacher, after all.”
“I doubt that,” I answer. “You have been sneaky and cruel to me since we first met at the interview.” But instead of listening to my defense, she turns away without a word and sits at a table waiting for the meeting to start, a smug look on her face.
After we introduce ourselves, I suggest, “Let’s start by listing what the events have been in the past, then we can make another list for what ideas we have for this year. Karen, could you write a list on the whiteboard?”
Beth starts us off. “Last year, we had a beach party on a Saturday at the water park. It was fun.”
“True,” adds Mrs. Hays, nodding approval at the comment. “And minimal planning.” Her face now turns toward me. “Since this is your first year with us, you don’t know how important it is to make plans that don’t tax our time or energy and diminish our ability to teach well.
I take a deep breath. So that’s how this meeting is going to go. After brainstorming more ideas, we look over the choices: beach party, fiesta, book character picnic, princess party, rolle
r-skating, luau, Old West.
Beth suggests, “We want the students and parents to feel a connection to the school and to each other, so maybe at whichever event we choose, we could organize some games or crafts.”
“Great idea, Beth.” I’m so glad she’s on this committee too.
Mrs. Hays clears her throat and asserts, “I think both the water park and the roller-skating rink will make all the arrangements. And I can speak for anyone who has been with our school community over the years that it is excellent teachers, and not parties, that make people feel they belong to the school.”
After her comment, I smile broadly at her, concentrating on making my voice sound calm and say, “I beg to differ; both are important.”
We stare silently at each other until Lyndi suggests, “Since we did the beach thing last year, let’s do something different. And if our goal is to have people interact, maybe we should cut roller-skating, too. Our list has a lot of other good ideas.” Everyone nods in agreement, and Karen crosses beach party and roller-skating off the list. Mrs. Hays rolls her eyes.
“What looks fun, then?” I ask the group.
We vote and I announce, “We’re having a princess party this year. We’ll get together again next week and put together the agenda. Thanks for helping, everyone.” I’d thought Mrs. Hays would rush for the door, but she chats with the parents and takes her time leaving. When she and I are the only ones left in the room, she picks up her purse from the floor and hisses toward me, “Looks like committee leadership has gone to someone’s head. You’re only doing it because I’ve had to shoulder this responsibility too many times over the years.”
I step into her path so she’ll have to hear me this time. “Maybe that’s exactly why I’m the leader—a fresh approach.”
