47/365 Teaching is Hard

After Christmas, it was announced that Joey would be teaching computers once a week to the middle school students during the wasted "library" hour. It was in fact wasted--the library had been packed up and sealed in boxes due to water damage two years before and nobody had reopened it. I tried for a while with my friend Mary to make it happen the following year but it was overwhelming. We got shelves set up and fiction sorted but got bogged down in the dewey decimal system. And chatting. But that's what happens when you have volunteers do your job.

Bingo. That's what I said. When volunteers do your jobs, you have no true way of making them do their jobs.

The younger kids' teachers contracted with Joey for computer time here and there. Sr. Bernie never brought her class. Laura down in 1st grade didn't think it was worth the trouble. So for the most part, Joey had middle school students (4th-8th).

Library hour was suddenly an extra free time if you were one of the teachers in charge of library. I had a library class for the 6th grade; Ina had it for 5th and 7th; Terri had it for 4th, and Margie had it for 8th. Free hours in a week are golden for a teacher with many preps and lots of responsibilities and not much pay. They are free, and you don't let other people infringe on them. Library was a semi-free hour. You weren't in charge of a lesson, but you did have a group of kids sitting in your room pretending to read or do homework. Most of the time for my library class I let them talk quietly if they could prove to me they were done with the homework I'd assigned. I got along with my 6th grade well enough that it was a sort of free hour. I graded papers and planned.

But now, with Joey, I had an extra free hour a week. Truly free. Ina had two. The only one who missed out was BeBe, the 7th grade homeroom teacher. We never asked her about it, though, feeling guilty that it worked out this way. She could have used another free hour, too--she was in charge of confirmation that year with the worst auxiliary bishop on earth.

I asked Joey about the arrangement, about volunteering 5 hours a week plus prep time. I didn't even do it in a saucy way. I just was curious why on earth she'd want to do this.

"These kids don't have a lot of resources at home," she replied. "They should have access to computers at school. I mean, look at this school."

I had looked. It was on the lower end of resources when it came to teaching positions I'd held. But the classes were small and we did a good job for the most part.

"And they like me," she shrugged. "It won't be hard--it's not like teaching is hard. I used to work in HR at a Silicon Valley corporation, after all."

"Yeah, well," I started, but I didn't finish. I don't like to be proven wrong. If teaching was going to be a breeze for her, that's great. If not, then I could stand there and smile later.

In January, I got my library time to myself. Joey was across the hall with the 6th grade, which included several thuggy boys. It didn't go well, frankly. These boys respected me enough (or feared me enough) that things were fine in my room, but not always on the outside. Joey also had a hard time with the seventh grade.

She stopped coming in early February. She would be there for the 4th grade, for Terri's extra break, but the rest of us were on our own. Ina got really angry--she had gotten used to two extra free hours a week. She went to Sr. Fern. I don't know how it went, but Joey would come after that, sometimes. Sr. Fern would sit in the room with her. Or Terri would. Or Joey would feign illness and not be there for a full week. She took a vacation in April and didn't show at all. I no longer counted on this unearned free time.

In April, I went down to Sr. Fern. She had mentioned at the last faculty meeting that she needed a volunteer to help with next year's middle school schedule. I was coming to volunteer. She was happy and handed over all the information.

I went home and spent a week with strips of paper on my living room floor, arranging and rearranging the schedule. And at the end of it, everyone had the same number of free hours, including computer time (library was now a thing of the past). But none of my breaks coincided with computer time. Later in the coming year, I would be very glad I did that.