My daughter, who goes to a local high school, said that there are floating teachers at her school this year. “I see them with their little carts,” she said, describing a new species of instructor.
New for her.
More and more schools are floating teachers these days. The reason? Class-size reduction, which is active in almost every state.
Have you seen an increase in floating teachers at your school this year?
What was your worst day of floating? What was your best?
Floating reminds me of Dicken’s introduction to The Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
It was the epoc of belief, it was the epoc of incredulity,
It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness.
My worst day of floating was a midblock period for English Honors IV. We were winding up The Tragedy of Macbeth and I had promised to show them the movie. That may sound simple, but for a floater, any type of audiovisual is fraught with conflict because there’s no way to get into the room early and set it up in advance. And once you start examining the technology, you never know what you’ll find.
I parked my cart in the room I was using, which had no hookup for film, ran to the media center, pulled the big heavy DVD cart all the way back, only to find that there was no remote. A phone call to the media center resulted in a mini meltdown on the part of the librarian for whom remotes were a sore issue as they were frequently stolen, and she had to replace them with her own money, and, no, I could not have a remote because of the larcenous duplicity of my collegues.
By that time midblock, a one hour class, four days a week, had started. Since hooking up a DVD in another teacher’s classroom was always challenging, I employed some students to assist me. We struggled for 15 minutes until we determined that a cable was missing. I sent a student off to the library to fetch the errant cable, an errand that earned him a stern rebuke from the librarian.
Finally, 20 minutes into the period, the DVD was set up. I reached into my mobile cart for the DVD-and could not find it. Later, I found it nestled behind a file that had been put in backwards and obscured the file I was looking for. But, already flustered, I panicked and could not find it. Like Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker, floaters should wear badges that say, “Don’t Panic.” Once you do, all is lost.
My best day of floating was the last day of school. There were two reasons for this. The first: I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment, finishing such a challenging school year with a minimum of whining. Also, I had hope, hoped for, my own classroom in the fall (the first year this hope was dashed).
The second reason was that all of my teacher friends with classrooms were painting, spackling, counting, and cleaning. It was as though the hard work of the first year of floating paid off in full that week of postplanning. I helped out a little, took long lunches, and basked in the first dose of leisure I’d had all year.
What was your worst day of floating? What was your best?
My students have been flinging late work at me all week. It makes me wish I didn’t accept it; in fact, it seems wrong to accept it. Why should a kid who goofed off for nine weeks get the same grade as someone who worked just because he recycled some homework?
It makes me think back, though, to when I was floating, and I had to provide make up work and make up tests for three preps out of my mobile file box. That meant I had to carry all of my lesson plans for a least a month, all of the current work, folders of student work, and all of the make up work. It was even more fun during exam week and nine weeks test week because then I had an additional wad of test folders and makeup test folders.
I have to admit that there were some days when I just gave up and stuffed papers into my cart. Then I’d spend hours reorganizing them. If a student accused me of losing work, I was never quite sure. I could have left it in Ms. Fetcher’s room…
Whenever I changed periods, I would clutch a little at the start of each class. I’d think,’Where is that lesson[handout, DVD, test, form].’ Sometimes two folders would obscure the legend on a tab, and I’d root frantically for five minutes. Often, I’d obsessively check and recheck my cart to ensure everything was in there, and I knew where it was. Still there were days I had to alter my lesson plan because I couldn’t find the materials in my cart or I’d left some vital handout in another teacher’s room. Then I’d try to analyze which room it could have been…
The bright side was that I was super organized. But I’m super organized, still, and I have a room. And my stress level is less.
Does floating and teaching kick your adrenaline up a notch or two every day?
During the two years that I floated, I spent about $750 on supplies in addition to the normal classroom stuff that all teachers buy: markers, poster board, papers, pens, pencils, tissue paper, hand disinfectant. In fact, I had to buy more of the normal stuff because I had six classrooms to outfit.
The “floating” supplies were things like mobile carts (two per year), expandable file folders (two per year), duct tape, files, file boxes, hanging files, a lunch box, notebooks…
What “floating” supplies do you consider important to your teaching success? And how much do you spend per year for the privilege of floating?
Do you all remember those bumper stickers that were popular a few years ago? If You Can Read This, Thank a Teacher.
Banal or not, I find it ominous that these sentiments have disappeared. Nowadays public school teachers are to blame for everything. American youth are falling behind academically and it is our fault. Graduation rates for American students are dropping from high school to college and it is our fault. Students don’t write well enough, don’t read well enough, don’t calculate well enough, they have no critical thinking skills, and they don’t understand how to research and to support their opinions with facts. All, all our fault.
In fact, Florida legislators want to strip us of our salaries, our certification, our tenure and our benefits.
Here is what I think- instead of the Thank a Teacher slogan, we could have avoided this whole mess if we’d substituted Ask a Teacher, instead.
Who is better equipped to understand how the broad spectrum of public school students think, learn, and succeed than their teachers? But no one asks us.
President Obama was touting charter schools and merit pay during his candicacy, and I didn’t hear one peep from the teacher unions or anyone else in public education challenging two really bad ideas from a politician, however good his intentions, who clearly didn’t understand public education. To address both of these bad ideas, briefly-
Charter schools are businesses, prey to all of the inherant corruption that downed giants like Enron and WorldCom. There are no standards, whatsoever, other than a blind trust in the ethics of administrators who may not even be qualified to run a school. And merit pay is just ridiculous. How can public school teachers be held solely responsible for outcomes that are largely beyond our control? Blaming us for student test scores is like blaming Christa Mcauliffe for the Challenger disaster- she did her part, but how was to know about the O-rings?
I watched a special on 60 minutes about Bill and Melinda Gates and their valiant efforts to save public education through common core standards. Please explain to any public school teacher in Florida, how these are different from Sunshine State Standards or the “benchmarks” that we pursued so vigilantly for two plus decades? Or is just another name for the same old thing- like “content-based writing” and “writing across the curriculum.” Like “whole language” and “literature-based curriculum.” Like “phonics” and “sounding words out.”
On the other hand, there are a lot of things we do know about education that could help students if only someone would listen to us. We know that the class-size reduction act is a great idea in the strictest sense of the word. We know that relevant professional development, with topics requested by teachers, would help. We know that teachers are too isolated, that administrators are too removed from the classroom, that parents need to be brought into the fold. We know that students need to write a lot, read comprehensively and analytically, that they need encouragement, understanding, discipline and adult mentors who care. They need standardized tests, too, not whining excuses for avoiding the test. And, OK, go ahead and use the test to grade my school. Then show me research-driven methods to improve my teaching.
But don’t threaten me, scold me, and treat me unprofessionally. Keep your crackpot schemes, your second guessing, your unsubstantiated novice suggestions to yourself. If you don’t, I may leave the profession, and you don’t want to lose teachers like me and my collegues. You could learn a lot from us.
Just ask.
Although I am not floating this year, I retain my floating habits, which entails doing anything to please administration so they’ll let me have, and keep, a classroom. This explains why in the past three years I volunteered to teach PD, join SAC, help with the prom, and ultimately, chaperone the Homecoming Dance.
It’s not that it was a bad experience. It was just an experience. A four hour experience in high heels, I must add. I should have kicked off my heels like the girls did and sloshed around in the spilled lemonade in my bare feet. But no.
The theme was “Welcome to the Jungle,” and the halls were decorated with brown butcher paper, green paper chains, hand drawn monkeys and cardboard cutouts of elephants, apes and hippos. Green gauze hung from the ceilings and the student union pulsed strobe lights shot through with vapor from the mist machine. “This is too dark,” one of the deans told Paul, my department head. “I’m just telling you.”
All of the APs, the Principal, leadership team, the Drama and Journalism teachers were there. Another floating teacher, the science teacher who uses my classroom fifth period, was there too. “Make yourself known,” Paul said to us. “Be a presence.” The husband and wife janitorial staff told me that they’d been there since 6 am setting up, and they’d be there all night until 3 a.m. breaking down.
The first rush of students was, indeed, like a herd of elephants. The girls tottered in their Jimmy Choo knockoffs, which they soon abandoned for bare feet. The boys shambled self-consciously in their dress up clothes. I hung with the only parent volunteer; we went outside to slice and serve cake and lemonade. This is not as easy as it sounds, involving gallons of liquids transported at intervals from the faculty dining room and, ultimately, the remains of the largess set out for the teachers. The magnitude of carbs and liquids that an adolescent can put away, that 1000 adolescents, to be precise, can put away is infinite.
Overall, the students at my school are polite, funny, cute and respectful. At least around me. I did see one boy filch a gallon jug of water during a time I was trying to refill the cannisters. Some couples slunk into dark corners. When I finally ventured into the student union, it was indeed dark, and the band had some succuss leading our students in line dancing. Soon, however, they reverted to the popular “grinding” a dance that doesn’t bear description except to say that there is no eye contact involved, which is a good thing, first, because it’s so embarrassing and, second, so students can send and receive texts, such as, “Hoo m I grndng?:)”
All in all, it was a splendid evening in the jungle, in the halls of my school where I rolled my cart back and forth hundreds of times like a target in a pinball machine, in the presense of the homecoming court, my department head, administration and attendant royalty. I stayed until 11:30 and signed off.
They retired my floating cart. It was the least I could do.
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