Stunned
Current mood: stunned

I am still so stunned, I don't quite know what to say. Today, we had a Staff Development Day, which means that we teachers basically are in meetings the whole day. The agenda included a faculty meeting and a long-overdue department meeting.

At the faculty meeting, my principal mentioned that he wanted to talk to the department chairs for a few minutes when the meeting was finished. Our department doesn't have a department chair. One of my esteemed colleagues actually stood up in the faculty meeting and reminded our principal of this fact, which he acknowledged. THEN, WHEN THE MEETING WAS OVER, MY PRINCIPAL CALLED *MY* NAME AND ASKED *ME* TO SEE HIM. As I reluctantly went over to him, I quickly said, "I am not the department chair. I'm going to catch a lot of flak from my department if you make me department chair." A smart man, he understood what I was saying, and told me, "Go ahead and go." Just to cover all bases, on my way to the department meeting, I announced to anyone I saw from my department, "I'm not the department chair."

The reason we have not had a department chair, a person responsible for all department budgeting and master schedule of Language Arts sections and their staffing and going to District meetings and chairing Language Arts Department meetings and handling all the piles of mail received at the school addressed "Language Arts Department" is because it takes a lot of time. In the past, the department chairperson got an extra planning period as compensation for this. Now, due to budget cuts, the department chair got nothing. Perhaps a small stipend, but even that was iffy. Naturally, this is a job that no one wanted anymore. So, the position was left vacant.

This all became moot, however, when our school was assigned a District-mandated Literacy Administrator. This person was paid about $80,000 a year and was on par in position with a vice-principal. Since no one on our staff wanted to be Language Arts Department Chair, our Literacy Adminstrator stepped up and did it all.

I got along very well with our department's new boss right from the start. Oh, I was warned against her when she first came. Told to watch myself, she's a backstabber, that the other school where she worked had hated her, etc. I experienced no such animosity. In fact, this woman was no less than amazing.

When I told her that Chuy and I were in the last stages of infertility treatment and that it required me to inject myself in the stomach with potent hormones at night, then go to the hospital early in the morning and then drive across town to get sonograms three times a week, the first words out of her mouth were "I'll be happy to cover your first period class for you. Just let me know when you need me" No recriminations, no excuses, nothing but sincere support. And when, weeks later, I was back in her office to tell her that the treatment had failed and to thank her for taking over my classes, we were both in tears.

Then the unexpected happened. Due to an undiagnosed bone disorder (which later turned out to be early-onset osteoporosis), I broke both of my hips. Recovery would take eight weeks. Once again, I called on my boss and she was there for me, arranging a long-term substitute, informing my students, and letting me concentrate on getting better.

Before I came back to work, I called a couple of colleagues to find out the state of the school in my absence. What they had to say shocked me. They told me that my boss had been "going after" a few teachers, harrassing them and writing them up for, it seemed, little reason. Again, I was reminded of the advice I had been given to "watch" my back. I resolved that I would never give my boss a reason not to be pleased with my work.

This became difficult because I had only been back for twelve days before having to have yet another hip surgery. I would be out for eight weeks. This would have been an opportune time for my boss to really let me have it. Instead, she supported me to the utmost. My classroom was more organized when I returned than I had left it!

So, when this caring and ubercompetent woman told me that she wanted me to be on a special curriculum-writing team with her and some of my colleagues this past summer, I readily agreed. The school district was mandating that all ninth and tenth grade teachers use the same curriculum units in a specified order, but was leaving it to each site to develop the methodology. I wasn't exactly thrilled at doing this, especially when I realized that the whole first semester would be devoted to teaching expository text and not literature (I'm a Literature major). Having to teach a three week unit that centered around bold print and subheadings was not why I became an English teacher! But if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. At least if I were writing the units, they would be well done and practical.

Working over the summer with my boss and my teacher colleagues was a lot of hard work. It involved following an exact formula of writing that did not mesh at all with my brain pattern. In fact, I ended up writing each unit twice; once my way, once the District's way. After 40 hours, we had two complete units finished. Our boss wanted us to write a third one, but we balked. This made all of us uncomfortable in the group, because we wanted to please her, but we also couldn't do as she asked. For me, it was a great source of stress, but I never took it personally. There have been times when I have expected too much of my students and had to scale back. It happens.

Before we knew it, school was about to begin and our time was up anway. We spent an entire morning planning a meeting in which we would unveil these units of study. Over and over again, our group expressed the desire for our coworkers to contribute their own ideas and put their own spin on the units. When we had the meeting, the two colleagues who my boss had reportedly "hounded" were no-shows.

In the meantime, my boss had purchased her first home, about a two hour drive to our campus. Also, she earned her doctorate. Those two facts pretty much spelled doom. It was obvious she would be moving on, which she did, mid-November.

The teacher a couple of doors down from me practically threw a party in celebration. He, along with a couple of others, had chafed under my boss's leadership. He was visibly gleeful at the prospect of going back to using packets and assigning only one essay per year. I was disgusted. But I held my tongue. What good would it do to say anything now?

Fast-forward to today. To the first department meeting since November. To the bloodbath it became. The principal and the Math Administrator had put me in charge of running it. I obliged, since I had been Department Chair a few years ago, when I taught junior high. I should have been more wary.

We all sat in a circle, about 14 of us. After deciding overwhelmingly that we wanted a ninth-grade chair, a tenth-grade chair, and an eleventh/twelfth grade chair, I asked who was interested in the jobs. No one volunteered to chair the ninth grade. I waited. Waited some more. "No one wants it?" I asked. "I'll do it," I added, "but I just want to make sure that no one else wants to throw their hat in the ring." Not one person objected. "Okay, but I don't want anyone saying, 'Who does she think she is?'" Still no one objected. With that, I became ninth-grade Language Arts Department Chair.

The same procedure went on for tenth-grade chair. One of teachers who had worked with our boss and me during the summer curriculum writing volunteered. Again, no one objected.

When it came time to elect the eleventh/twelfth grade chairperson, one of our veteran teachers raised her hand. This woman is a powerhouse -- outspoken, highly competent, and not exactly popular. Another teacher raised her hand. The second teacher is very cool, easy to talk to, great at what she does but not threatening. The second teacher said she wanted to do it, but would defer to the other woman, who had more experience.

That's when the first shot was fired. "I'm not comfortable with that!" objected my colleague from down the hall, his red face even redder. "Now we have three people in charge who are from the other side!" HUH?! Immediately, the powerhouse exploded. "What are you talking about?" she demanded. It seems this guy didn't like it that the three of us had gotten along well with our now-departed Literacy Administrator and that we were all now in positions of (albeit limited) power.

What's really strange about his assertion is that this woman wasn't part of the "inner circle". This woman, to put it bluntly, didn't toady up to anyone. She is a leader, not a follower. In short, she was wrongly accused of "collaborating" with "the enemy". Unlike me. I collaborated willingly and gratefully. As I sat there, listening to teacher after teacher join in on making this woman the "whipping boy," it was all I could do not to cry.

The salvos went back and forth, profanity was used, the room became electric with anger...misplaced anger. If anyone should be yelled at, it shouldn't be her, I thought.

Once the ugliness died down, and a couple of teachers had done their ineffectual best to calm the situation, I felt it was my turn to speak. My voice trembled a bit, but I told the group just what I wrote above. How I had been warned against the Literacy Administrator, how she had won me over, had bent over backwards for me. How I wasn't sure I wanted to be involved in District-mandated Units of Study but decided to out of loyalty to my boss and out of a sincere desire for quality curriculum. I looked around the room and said I didn't see one person in there who I felt I had harmed or harrassed. I said I didn't want to be lumped into a "side". I am myself and would remain so, no matter who else came along to work with us. And then, as a gesture of peace, I passed around the small container of grapes I had brought to the meeting by happenstance, and we each took one and ate it.

Meeting adjourned for lunch. "Are you alright?" someone asked the teacher who had taken most of the hits at the meeting. "No, I am most definitely not all right," she said, and burst into tears. A few of us stayed, consoling, listening, smoothing, comiserating, until she seemed like she could stand alone again.

After lunch, just the ninth and tenth grade teachers met and my red-faced colleague was conciliatory. He told me he liked what I said and how I had handled myself. I got the sense that, while he would continue to be wary, he did not see me as "the enemy". A good start.

When we all met back for one last pow-wow before going home, my principal announced that we must have had quite some meeting, since one of the teachers had to go home after it. I happened to be sitting next to the man who was the cause of this, and he assumed she had gone straight to the principal after the department meeting to tattle on him. He was wrong. The principal later told me that he hadn't even spoken to the woman.

As I was leaving, the new eleventh/twelfth grade department chair came up and offered, "Call me this weekend if you need to talk." I don't know that I will take her up on it. At this point, I'm still too shell-shocked. I want to forget it ever happened and move on. I just hope we can all do that.