The school year ended for me this week in my position as an English Learner Support Teacher. I told myself after this year that I would make the decision of whether to stay at this job or not. There are 13 of us spread out among the 29 elementary schools in my district. The job is about 50% working with newcomer students and 50% testing and documenting the status of each school’s English Language Learners (ELLs or simply ELs). I’ve gotten good at running reports, doing queries and filling out forms in triplicate.
Being in the same boat, we, EL Support Teachers, help each other and commiserate through group text messages and a monthly in-person meeting which lacks the same level of inhibition since our boss is there. It can be a lonely job. We don’t have the cachet of classroom teachers who are seen as frontline workers doing the real work of teaching. Also, most of us are at two or three schools during the week, so our status is just slightly better than that of an interloper.
In the best case we are seen as support personnel for both students and teachers. Worst case we are an annoyance making demands on teachers for progress reports and group testing while interrupting the flow of their classes to pull small groups of students.
Last week on our group chat one of my colleagues told us that she’d just been called a credentialed paper pusher by one of the teachers at her school. I chuckled a little to myself because of the accuracy of the statement while at the same time thinking it’s not a very nice thing to say.
Typically I don’t begin to work directly with students until the middle of September or later. The first four weeks of school are dedicated to administering the initial ELPAC tests to potential EL students. ELPAC stands for English Language Proficiency Assessment of California. To establish who needs to take the test we do an HLS (Home Language Survey). After the test is taken we do a SIS (Student Information Sheet). Students who score IFEP (Initial Fluent English Proficient) on the ELPAC don’t need to take ELD (English Language Development). All of this goes into the students CUM folder (short for Cumulative). Part of this job is learning the SLA (Shit Load of Acronyms not to be confused with Spanish Language Arts).
February through April is spent administering the annual, summative ELPAC (more encompassing than the initial ELPAC and for all ELs).
My first year in this position, 2019-20, was interrupted by Covid in March 2020 when we went to remote learning. The next year, 20-21 was entirely remote. It was nice to be able to make a sandwich or hang out laundry in between zoom meetings with students. Very little teaching or actual learning went on. It was a bizarre world that I didn’t wholly dislike. If dinosaurs were ever going to repopulate the earth, I figure it would have happened then while I was standing before my front door eating my sandwich looking into the empty street.
The first half of this year, 21-22, was spent with our faces covered with masks. When the masks came off, I was like who the hell are you? At my main school I work with six or seven small groups a day. The five or six kids I typically work with sit just a few feet away on the other side of a kidney-shaped table. You’d think I’d have gotten to know them better, but remember, I work with the students with the least amount of English. The eyes say it all is not an accurate statement. Give me a mouth full of crooked teeth any day.
I can think of at least one kid whose smile is worth the trip to work and when I start thinking about him then the dozens of others start to tumble into my brain. Working with kids is what I love about teaching. I’m still learning to live with the bureaucracy that I’m a part of.
When I graduated from the highly esteemed Cornell University School of Hotel Administration move than three decades ago I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Three years of hanging out with the wrong crowd turned me into a socialist and I rejected the capitalist underpinnings of the luxury hotel and restaurant business. (I’d say I’m more of a social-capitalist–if that’s a thing–these days.) By graduation time, most of my classmates had been interviewing for months and receiving job offers from around the world. After taking a semester off, I’d barely managed to hang in there long enough to get my degree.
My parents, in their last year of being together, had come up to Cornell from a recent move back to their birth state of Tennessee to see the ceremony. My dad still had hopes for me running a five star hotel where he could have a retirement job as an aging bell hop. He liked to mime staring into space and holding his hand out for a tip.
After the big football-field graduation we went to a smaller reception where the dean of the school was handing out the diplomas which were rolled and tied with a red ribbon. As I waited in line to shake his hand and receive my diploma, I could hear him asking each graduate a question, “And where will you be going?”
The answers were impressive. I’ll be at the Maui Hilton. I’ll be starting the management training program at the Marriott Copenhagen. I’ll be at the Okura Tokyo.
I desperately tried to think of what to say and resented that I had to say anything. Wouldn’t it have been nice if I’d felt comfortable in my own skin? When I got to him the chip on my shoulder had grown big, “I’ll be working at the Cafe Des Amis here near downtown Ithaca,” I said in my best, most polished voice, holding my head high. It sounded pretty good because the Cafe Des Amis had great Tunisian food and a nice French name and “I’ll be working at” made it sound like I was taking a great opportunity as a manager or chef when really I’d been there for the last six months working as a waiter and I was about to show up drunk, sit down next to the famously volatile owner and quit the next day.
I didn’t expect any follow up questions from the dean. He hadn’t done that for anyone, but the way his eyes slid from me to the next person let me know I hadn’t passed the test, if there had been one.
I was still staying on campus when I graduated. I was at the Watermargin coop for the summer. I met a kid there whose parents owned a motel in Florida. They were looking for a manager. I talked with them on the phone, but it was obvious I didn’t have what it took to manage a business—which by its nature means managing people. I could barely manage myself.
Still, I thought I should make some effort to get into the business world. I landed a job at Citizen’s Bank in downtown Ithaca as the wire desk operator. My job was to wire money to people all over the world and by the end of the day to wire money to the federal reserve to maintain our daily required balance. Sometimes I wired them several million dollars.
There were fascinating aspects to this job, but I could not handle sitting at a desk all day and was slow to learn the ins and outs. The job ended daily at 5:00 o’clock and after trying to put on my coat several times at 4:55 my boss let me know that I was not to leave my desk until the minute hand landed on the twelve. Mid-afternoon I was often having a hard time staying awake. It was torture to keep myself from nodding off.
After a few months, including a final probationary week when my boss, a stout middle-aged woman, let me know that I was going to be closely watched, she had a final meeting with me and asked that I bring in a letter of resignation the next day. I went home that night and pondered that request. I wasn’t wild about the job, but it seemed inauthentic for me to write a letter of resignation. I decided that they would have to fire me, so I told her that the next day.
Apparently this was a big deal because I was sent to talk with the bank vice-president in an office at the top of the five story building. His office was big and dark with curtains drawn over the windows. I was ushered inside and sat in a chair facing an enormous desk. The man smiled at me and asked how I was, but before I could get out my answer he yelled, “What the fuck do you think you are doing?” I was shocked. I told him very simply that I didn’t want to resign and that it seemed like it was not my duty to do so.
That was it. Later I realized he was pissed because the bank would have to give me unemployment. I was completely ignorant of how those things worked and never put in a claim even after I was told that I could. I was more concerned with the principal of the whole thing. I’d handle it the same way today except that I’d probably take the unemployment.
I’m bringing this all up because there are elements to my current job that are similar to that wire desk job that I got way back in 1988. I have to sit down a lot. I have to look at a computer. There are systems and protocols in place that sometimes seem stupid and repetitive.
Still, there are enormous differences. Even with all the red tape, the overall goal really is to benefit children though to what extent all this accounting does that is debatable. The job is far less stressful than classroom teaching, but substantially more boring. However, even when I’m testing I still work with kids on a daily basis.
It’s sort of a golden handcuffs job—easy now that I’ve figured out how to do everything, but slightly soul-sucking. I’d retire next year, but if I put in one more year with the state retirement system I’lll have a substantial bump of about $400 more a month. I have a strong urge to get back in the classroom after being a first grade teacher for 14 years. I have an equally strong urge to get out of education all together. Society is constantly giving teachers the message that we are heroes—that is, when we aren’t being told we suck and that public education in America is a failure. Well, I’m here to tell you it’s all true—the good and the bad.
I think I indicated in my last blog how I’m getting tired about being pissed about so many things. Well, I still haven’t worked that out. Still trying to hold being angry at the same time as finding joy in the world.
Spotty West Goes East 