Four-day week

Somehow it always feels like five days of work anyway, just crammed into four days.  This week, though, is surprisingly light on teaching, because my busiest day fell on Friday and won’t occur this week; I’ll meet my classes seven times, twice for double blocks, which works out to just about seven teaching hours.  That should leave a lot of other hours for prep and grading and administrative stuff, particularly since the Snork Maiden has rehearsals after school three out of the four days.  And I need those hours, because I didn’t really do any prep or grading over the three-day weekend.  I’m determined not to feel bad about this, since I needed the break, but secretly I feel like a slacker.

I did spend a few hours over the weekend dealing with an administrative issue, too, which I’ll describe more another time, I hope.

 

Beached

Oh my God what an exhausting day.  I forgot how intense these candidate visits are, and that’s just being the host, not the candidate.  WOW.  I think it’s also that everyone’s reactions were flowing through me (actually, I encouraged people to write directly to the GGE if they wanted and not to feel that their comments needed to withstand everyone’s scrutiny, so I know there were a few people who didn’t cc me), and I had a lot of one-on-one conversations–that added up to a lot of processing.

Things went well, though.  It’s just that I am wiped out now.  Tomorrow is a fairly easy day, but I need to get all three of my Friday classes prepped, because I will  either be teaching or doing candidate stuff all day long.

Don’t be a jerk

I sent out an email reminding everyone (and letting the newbies, Orsino and Sebastian, know) that the headmaster and the GGE like relatively rapid feedback from us during the course of a job candidate visit.  Both the new guys have worked most recently in higher ed, so I went out of my way to let them know what wouldn’t happen: no department meeting, no departmental vote.  We send in our thoughts, and as chair, I express the most specific opinion regarding whether to hire right away, not hire, or wait and see whom else we see.  Since we have someone coming on Friday, and Wednesday’s candidate doesn’t appear to be considering other offers at the moment, we probably won’t move instantly, but last year, for example, Sebastian got his job offer at about 2 pm on the day of his visit.  We were all going about our days teaching and doing the usual stuff, but the emails were flying thick and fast.  It’s one of the things that make these days so exciting!

I went back through my logged email and reread the conversations around our last few candidates–Sebastian, then Orsino and Dinah the year before (remember, the GGE offered the 2012-13 job to Dinah and then hired Orsino in November of 2012 to begin August of 2013), and a few people who didn’t thrill us, plus the one we tried to hire who went somewhere else.  What excited me was that all of the emails about Sebastian, Orsino, and Dinah very accurately pictured who they are as teachers–they were hardly different from what I think we would say now, after three semesters with Dinah and one each with Orsino and Sebastian.  It gave me tremendous confidence in our ability to recognize good teaching that will work well in this environment (and all three of them are reasonably different from one another, so we must be able to appreciate something of a range).

It also made me think that my direct questions should focus on developing a sense of whether the candidates will be good colleagues.  I did some freewriting about this while my students were writing today, trying to get at what I mean when I say someone is collegial–I like someone who has a secure sense of their own interests and values, but who is able to take other people’s perspectives, too, and be flexible when flexibility is needed.  Someone with good boundaries and good instincts about what’s appropriate when dealing with kids, especially in tricky situations.  It occurs to me that one litmus test is how you respond when a kid complains to you about another teacher–how you listen to that student, ask them what they have done so far about the situation, coach them on what to do next, while also not speaking unprofessionally about a colleague and requiring that the student speak with respect as well.

But as Orsino pointed out in another context, it kind of boils down to “Don’t be an asshole,” although after I finished laughing, I said that people can actually be plenty of kinds of difficult without actually being assholes.  Insecurity, as I think I’ve mentioned before, can be disabling in a colleague, even a pretty nice one.  I might prefer a little bit of assholery to a serious helping of insecurity.  I hope we can get someone who is not an asshole without being insecure.  Someone who cares about literature (I always like it when people actually share my tastes, but if I’m being perfectly honest, it’s probably even better if they have different tastes, as long as they’re not execrable; one of the great things about hiring is people bringing in terrific new books).  Someone who likes kids.  I’m pretty sure we’ll know the good teaching when we see it.

I hope.

Crossing paths

The title of this post is borrowed from a book I just got from the library–Crossing Paths: How Your Child’s Adolescence Triggers Your Own Crisis by Laurence Steinberg and Wendy Steinberg.  The title sounds rather dire, but I am looking forward to reading it.  It was cited several times in the New York magazine excerpt from Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood,  “The Collateral Damage of a Teenager.”  (The subtitle says it all: “What adolescence does to adolescents is nowhere near as brutal as what it does to their parents.”)

It isn’t, by the way, that the Snork Maiden is keeping me up nights.  High school still feels better than middle school.  But I spend my days with teenagers and I talk to a fair number of parents and anyway I’ve always been interested in reading about stages before the Snork Maiden gets to them.  Before I was even pregnant I’d read Penelope Leach’s Your Baby and Child multiple times, if that gives you an idea.

I picked the title, though, in honor of this week’s job candidates.  It’s exciting to think about meeting prospective colleagues.  Will we like them?  Will they like us?  How will their sample classes go?

I don’t know if this is typical, because I was never officially on the independent-school job market, but we have the candidate meet with the department chair, the high-school administrators, the GGE, and the headmaster; teach a sample class; observe a class; eat lunch with whomever in the department is free to come; and tour campus (usually as part of one of those meetings).  The candidate does not have a separate encounter with students, which seems like a missing piece to me, although of course there’s a lot of interaction in the sample class (and we do ask the students what they thought).  I’m going to try to arrange an informal chat at the end of the day for both of the candidates with a small group of students, partly because I do think it is a missing piece, but, if I’m honest, partly because I would like us to be the kind of school that loops students in on these decisions a little more than we actually do.

Small wonder

Did I tell you that I sustained my Morning Pages practice for the whole month of January?  I missed two days when things got busy and I just literally did not think about them–one was the day before I took a professional day off to contribute to a project at BAC, so I was doing all my usual stuff plus getting materials ready for the sub and getting myself ready for the project, and the other was the day itself, when I left the house before six and didn’t think about them until I was getting coffee at a supermarket Starbucks near BAC. Otherwise, though, I’ve written them every day, sometimes to discernible good effect, sometimes not–but I like doing them, that stretching of the muscles, the time to muse and ruminate.  I believe that I go into work with a clearer mind because of them.

For February, I am continuing to write Morning Pages, but I’ve added a second goal–a draft of a new poem every Wednesday.  So far, so good–today was Wednesday and I had the draft by the end of Tuesday.

The next seven school days will be pretty busy with teaching and special events, including two candidate visits next week, the first round of honors and AP approvals, wrapping up my part of the teacher evaluation cycle, speaking at a school event, and a couple of deadlines for things I want to apply for (oh, and buying a plane ticket for AWP).  Fortunately, the weekend should not be too crazed–I think the only things planned are a haircut for the Snork Maiden and a birthday dinner for our nephew Snufkin.  And the weekend after that is Presidents’ Day, which is a) a three-day weekend we will all surely welcome and b) the day before sixth anniversary of my arrival at SA.

Peek-a-zoo

Just a quick hello.  Although I’m only teaching three classes right now, the administrative load has suddenly increased.  Hiring, the whole process of approving students for honors or AP classes, and various other issues for next year have all become daily realities.  I guest-taught one of Romola’s classes today, and I’m working with a student who is planning to attend university in the UK next year and wants to fill in some gaps in her knowledge of British and Irish poets.

But I’m loving teaching Crime and Punishment for the first time, especially being able to talk with Dr. Tea about it, but also just working with the AP students, who seem to be getting really into it.  I am calling them by their first names and patronymics, just to make it all a little more Russian.  I say things like “Here is your quiz, Emily Stefanovna” and “Please take your seat, Marcus Marcusovich.”  Hee.

Seriously, though, what a novel!  This is about the only level at which I could ever manage to teach it, but I’m also pleased with the way the discussions are unfolding, and with the students’ willingness to tangle with big and meaningful questions.  I’ve heard my colleagues complain about the flakiness and regression of seniors, but I am also struck by how open they are, at this stage of their lives, to certain books–C&P definitely being one of them.