A year off to think (part the second)

So in the summer of 2003, I packed up my teaching stuff for the first time and left for a 2 1/2 week solo trip to Europe (that's a whole post of its own).   When I returned, we had about two weeks to pack up our two separate apartments and haul it across the country.  We were in a bit of a hurry because we still had not heard if our teaching licenses had transferred so we had no jobs.

A very long story short, we were both unemployed until November when I found a full time job teaching elementary general music grade 3-5.  I spent most of that year surviving on lesson plans and games I acquired during student teaching (thank God for Eileen Treusch....), and learning about the still very much segregated city of Chicago.  In December, Tyson was found by a "headhunter" (recruiter) for Chicago Public Schools.  The recruiter (a balding Italian man who interviewed us at a restaurant in Cicero over a plate of lasagna....you can't make this stuff up....) guaranteed Tyson a job as a regular band teacher after he worked that year as a building sub, a position we had never heard of---basically, so many teachers call in sick every day, that the individual buildings actually have to employ full time subs to cover classes.   He recommended me for a full time choir job at a high school, which I started that following September.  My third job in as many years.  I had four beginning choirs of anywhere from 35-45 students, and one class of mostly seniors for Music history/appreciation of about 40, where I was able to develop a decent high-school curriculum and keep my philosophy intact.

What we learned in those two years out in Chicago was this:

1) A majority of primary schools in CPS are K-8, and whether they have music is hit and miss.  There are no ensembles for grades 6-8, generally.  This only applies to neighborhood schools, though, not the magnet or charter schools.

2) Because of the inconsistency of music instruction at the primary level, students do not start ensembles until high school.  Beginning band with 9th grade gang bangers.  Wrap your head around that....

3) Principals have absolute power, private industry style, over their teaching staff.  On the surface, this sounds like a libertarian dream come true.  But what actually happens is this:  If you don't do as you are told, you will find yourself "laid off" regardless of years of experience, effectiveness with the students, accomplishments or progress made. You get "volunteered" for extra duty and not paid for it.  You get suspended without pay for an accusation---even when there are multiple witnesses that contradict the accusation.  You can have all of your fundraising money wiped out because the principal needed it for some other activity. 

4) If the superintendent (Chief Educational Officer, or CEO) doesn't even know all the principals by name, you as a teacher are a nameless statistic and number, as are the kids.  Everything and everyone depends, lives and dies by the paperwork.  Phone logs, lesson plans, discipline, memos, reminders paper paper paper paper paper paper everything (because if you're lucky you have ONE computer per subject department, and if you're REALLY lucky it's hooked up to the internet.  Our music department had one phone to share between the four of us, and it was in my office.  Tyson's entire floor had no phone, they had to go downstairs to the math office). You are a cog in a machine.  Period.

5) To survive in this environment (forget actually being effective), you have to avoid the teachers who have burned out and have nowhere else to go.  You have to mentally shut the kids out at the end of the duty day, because there is so much need you could never hope to come close to meeting it.   Or you have to pick and choose which kids to help, like triage in an emergency room.  Pick and choose based on who you think might make it.

In the end, we decided that if we continued to teach in CPS, we would both quit teaching within a few years, so we both started applying for jobs in the suburbs, around Seattle, and around Portland.  By August (the end of Tyson's second summer at Northwestern, and the end of my first) I had secured a job at a brand new middle school in Longview, WA, and we packed up our things into a moving truck and came home to the Pacific Northwest.