Last Day In The Schools

Written Monday, June 24, 2019, my last day teaching school.

Here it is, my last day at school. In just a few hours I will no longer work here or have the place to complain about. I'm writing this on a school computers, in a private browsing window because I have scrubbed any trace of ever having been here. I worry that anything I leave behind can and will be used against me. I'm not taking chances.

I still haven't sent my resignation letter though I've been resigned about this place for nearly a decade. My concern is that management could find some way to do me harm. Paranoid? You bet I am. I'll be paranoid about upper management even after I'm gone. This school has left its scars.

People here are going about their work: entering grades, cleaning classrooms, planning for next year, and turning in laptops. I've done all of that except planning next year. I'm done.

It's good but already I feel us all moving on. They have to face another school year, a negative change in management, the probability that the job will become even worse. A couple days, one teacher here said breathlessly and with eyes wide, "it can't possibly be worse next year." Another teacher said that it will be better, but even she didn't sound convinced. I said nothing, having nothing good to say. Later the first teacher asked me, "do you think next year will be better or worse?" I said that it has been worse each of the eighteen years I've worked here. That trend is tough to deny.

What that teacher will do with my opinion is up to him. I have no more influence on this place.

Several times today I've thought of suggestions for next year: a beeper on the doors down the hall, use the vestibule of the men's room for storage. With each idea I have begun to suggest but realized it's no longer my place.

It's not my place to suggest things any more. Upper management never wanted my suggestions anyway. My suggestions here in the school were valued, but in a few hours this will no longer be my place. I'll have no classroom. Only some papers on the walls will remain to show that I was ever here. I'll be gone, gone, and gone.

Come September this place will go on without me. Thinking it will grind to a halt without me is folly and depends on the myth of indispensability. No one here is indispensable. Management seems bent on making us all disposable. They'll all get along without me for better or for worse. There's not much reason for me to think too much about it.

So long, school. It has been something. I'll probably need the next few years to figure out just what it was or maybe to let it all go. That process begins today.

Weird Ending In The Schools

I'm at school and won't be able to say that for much longer. Tomorrow I'll be at a different school to grade the English Regents exam. The next day I might not make it to work — there's an end-of-the-year bug going around — and then I'll have my last day ever in this building, in this school system, possibly in this profession.

It's weird this ending.

I knew it wouldn't be all yahoo! I'm not great at endings. On New Year's Eve I get depressed about the end of the year instead of excited about the beginning of the new. Still, it's tough not to be happy about leaving this school and today I found more reasons to leave as I went through old documents and email.

I'm leaving very little trace behind. For years I've kept home life away from school. Most everything here stays put or has gone into the garbage. I didn't even need a box to get my stuff home. Today I went through the school Google Drive and Gmail. I downloaded a copy (Google Takeout is a good tool) then went through and deleted everything, taking a walk down memory lane which is a dark and dreary path here.

I found emails about my disciplinary meetings, an administrator's note telling me to keep my opinions to myself, a notice from our superintendent about "good work ethic" that busted the contract, and some of my responses to these things. It's all deleted now and I feel a bit lighter but saddened too.

This could and should be a good school, but for the ways in which it is managed. I'm not such a great teacher, but I've been good for this place and could have done more with only the slightest encouragement. Instead, I'm deleting my email, removing every document, and leaving behind very little of my expertise and experience.

This is why I'm glad to leave but in no mood to celebrate. This whole thing was eighteen years of failure, to one degree or another. What a shame. What a waste.

That said, I'm no longer following failure with more failure. I'm leaving and have every chance of making a difference now, of being happy in my work, of doing more than just trying to survive the year.

Still, it's weird, the end of all this.

I'll miss the windows in my classroom, the standing desk, the music playing in the background. I'll miss being here by myself, no kids, no colleagues, and no administrators. But I'll walk out into the wider world and the missing won't amount to much. I won't miss it very much at all.

Western Stars, Bruce Springsteen

For a while it has been mostly used vinyl, old records, that I've been after. Then a couple months ago my friend and I went to Albany for a show, stopped into Last Vestige Records, and I went through every record in the rock and jazz sections twice but couldn't find a single one to buy. Some of that is due to luck — there's no telling what I'll find on any given day — but a lot of it has to do with having built out my collection to the point at which the used albums I might want are too pricey and rare. There's just not that many old albums I need right away. Sure, I'll find some time to time as I have since that trip to Last Vestige, but I've reached a kind of tipping point.

This morning I'm listening to Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars on my turntable and thinking that it is one of several newly-released albums I've bought lately. There was Brad Mehldau's spectacular Finding Gabriel (which seems to have been mastered much better for vinyl and CD than it was for streaming), and I've preordered Mehldau's Live In Tokyo which is one of my top five desert island albums. There have been others and more are on the way. This is the way to listen to new music.

I stream these albums too. Or at least, I do until I buy the records and they come with an MP3 download. Then I copy the MP3 to my computer, spare hard drive, and phone so that I'm listening to something I bought. (I'll stream them too just to make the streaming company pay the artist a cent and a half or so, but I prefer to play the copy I own.) Streaming is fine. I'm not going to complain about something so convenient, but today I walked into The Sound Garden, grabbed Springsteen's Western Stars out of a display right up front, talked with the clerk about the album, drove home, put the album on the turntable and sat down to listen. My daughter rode with me to the record store and looked at stickers and t-shirts while I paid for Bruce's album. We talked about prom and stopped for coffee. Streaming's fine, but doesn't touch this kind of experience.

I just finished side D of Western Stars, pulled the album from the turntable and put side A back on. I'll listen again and again and again because it sounds and feels so good. Anyone who isn't raving about this album isn't listening. Or maybe they're listening to the stream and just aren't paying attention. Digital can have that effect on a person. Even as I'm typing this, I pause and savor what's playing. It's so good I have to stop writing now and go listen. I'm curious: What album will be next? Will it be old or new? Who is it going to be and where will I be when I find it? How will I be feeling when I let it spin for the first time? I wonder all these things, but for now this album is about all I need and answers all the questions I need to ask.

Noise & Technology

I have just turned music back on. A Manu Katche jazz album I've written about before.. The music is accompaniment to my writing and blots out some of the white noise produced by a network switch in my classroom. That thing's driving me crazy.

The switch have hung in a box on the wall of this classroom since before I took up residence in 2011, but early this year the tech folks replaced an old unit with a new one. The fan on this new one runs constantly and it is loud. I've just measured it at about fifty decibels. That's not technically loud, but is like a window air conditioner run all day long. The noise pulls me away from reading and writing.

I've asked the technology people for a fix, but they say it's not loud. Oh, well, in that case. I pressed them further, saying, it is loud in a classroom where we try to concentrate. They said, nothing we can do about it.

So it goes with technology. I'm to accept it without complaint. Or with complaint. Either way, I am to accept it, but I don't. This is not the way things ought to be.

I'm trying to read Wendell Berry's essay "Faustian Economics" which would be difficult for me in a silent room and is stretching my limits with that network switch running. One quote I've hung onto is this:

Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine. &endash; The World-Ending Fire, 209.

It is also embarrassing when someone questions the machines, technology, and constant burning of energy. The network switch is necessary for moving internet bits about the school. Live with it and stop complaining.

More and more I'm less interested in living with things that don't seem worth the sacrifices they demand. Music and writing, yes. A lot of technology and noise, no. There are other ways to live and most of the good ones are evident in our history and the traditions we all too often abandon.

I'll return to Wendell Berry now, as best I can with that switch's fan running. It would be bad for me to go up there and unplug it. Terrible in fact. It would be a violation of our true religion. Hmm, come to think of it, that sounds like fun.