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F@!# You, Mr. French
A Teaching Story
I was walking on 10th and Pennsylvania, on my way to get groceries, when I saw a familiar face. As a car turned in front me at the intersection, the rear window rolled down and a teenage boy’s head poked out. For no apparent reason, he was yelling at me. “F#@&, you! @#&%-a#@ %$#^&! F#@# you!”
The kid was angry, or, more likely, he was pretending to be angry, trying to get a rise out of me, just having a bit of fun. Regardless, I was smiling at him. It’s been years, I thought, since anyone’s called me that. This kid. I know this kid. I used to see him every day.
Suddenly, I was back in my classroom in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After being disillusioned with journalism, I thought I would retrieve my soul in America’s education system. I was young, still in my twenties, and a kid myself. Beaten, in other words, but not broken. So I haphazardly resigned from my job as executive editor of a tech magazine based here in Denver and began making preparations for the move south, where I would begin my short teaching career.
I love New Mexico. I graduated high school in one of its most notorious towns. I still remember when my parents moved us there, and my brother and I heard live gunfire for the first time in the suburbs of Roswell. My first week at school, a fight broke out in the cafeteria. The security guards—something I wasn’t used to seeing—began pepper spraying the mob, and the burrito cart lady (a staple character in the Land of Enchantment) was knocked over, along with her goods. As the woman lay writhing on the tile floor, without hesitation, the kids dove for the burritos, snatching up as many as they could.
This is all to say that I probably should have been more prepared. But I, like so many new teachers, believed that I was somehow exceptional—that I was an inherently inspirational person, whose spirit could never be trampled. It also wasn’t my first rodeo, I thought. After all, I’d taught community college part-time up here in Colorado (FRCC in Fort Collins and CCA in Aurora), and that had been easy enough. I would be teaching kids just a year or two younger (I wanted to teach high school). What was the difference?
Besides, finally, I would have a job that would give me what I’d always wanted: to talk about books and think for a living. In my experience, it is very, very difficult in this country (probably in this world) to have a job where you think for a living without doing something that’s at least slightly crooked. But as an English teacher, I would be living the pure life, the good life. I imagined the quiet peace of the desert—margaritas, cheap rent, and real green chile.
Write Your Name
I’d never gotten a job so fast in my life. As soon as my application was in, I received the call. This should have been a red flag, but my thought was “Well, I’m probably the most qualified applicant they’ve ever seen. I’ve had high-level career experience. I’m a Denver big shot, come down to ABQ. I’ve interviewed Scarlett Johansson.”
My first day on the job—teaching alongside Ms. L. in her 9th grade class—I couldn’t get a word in. Every time I tried to start a sentence, there was some new disruption. Kids were throwing pencils and sticking them into the ceiling, toppling over desks, cursing at each other, and playing on their phones as Ms. L and I tried to lead a discussion of Act II of Oedipus Rex.
“Do you know this play?” Ms. L asked me after our “class” was over.
“Yeah, of course.”
“What happens in it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I haven’t read it,” she said, shrugging.
“Wait, how are you teaching it then?”
“I just stay a few pages ahead of the kids,” she replied, shrugging again.
I was overjoyed. Oh, so these kids have already been spoiled, I thought to myself, by this unprepared, lazy teacher. Once I get my own class, I’ll be able to set the tone. I’m basically being given the substitute treatment right now.
How I condescended to her after that. But Ms. L, I would later learn, was one of the finest teachers at the school.
A Room of One’s Own
The students’ attitudes did not change when I got my own class. In fact, because they were the older 11th and 12th graders, they’d had plenty of time to game out the school’s scandalously broken system (we’ll get to it). My arrogance didn’t help either. Instead of rolling with the punches and pushing forward, I was often stunned silent by the negative levels of respect the students had for me.
Still, I was full of resolve—passionate, idealistic, young. I began trying to connect on a human level. I would understand them, and then they would understand me—all as we tried to push through our first assigned reading, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.
Sadly, they don’t really make teacher propaganda films anymore—not that any of them ever get it right. The only one that came close to depicting a rough school was Stand and Deliver with Edward James Olmos, where the classroom is shown in a constant state of bedlam. The big difference here, and the moment where the film diverges into fantasy, is that once Olmos delivers his stirring speech and gets the students on his side, the bedlam largely ceases and he earns their respect. This does happen, and I gave many a passionate plea during my tenure, tugging on their heartstrings whenever I could. Yes, they nodded their heads. At times, they even applauded. They were on my side now, I thought. Converted! They would be good from now on!
Of course, in reality this gimmick only works for that day. The next day, the chaos will resume. All that passion you won them over with becomes a distant memory in just 24 hours. And soon even your speeches won’t help you. The kids aren’t stupid. Just like you, they’ll notice that your efforts have failed, and so next time you try to “stand and deliver” some sermon about the importance of education, it won’t work at all.
Because the fact of the matter is that you, as the students’ high school English teacher, simply don’t have much influence over them. Your time with them is limited to maybe an hour and a half each day, and even that time is also intruded on by administrative tasks. You cannot begin to compensate for the influence of abusive relatives, local gangs, and online personalities. You’re also a teacher in America—that is, you have the social status of pond scum and they know it. I can’t tell you how many times I saw this gag: A student would drop a few quarters on the floor in front of a teacher and say, “Oh, shit, isn’t that your paycheck?” How can you tell them anything, when they don’t respect you? Yours is a low-value profession, and so the students don’t value you. They view you as a failure, and here’s the thing: in some cases, they’re not wrong.
The Faculty
Let’s talk about the teachers. I’m going to get a little nasty here, but this is genuinely what I observed (and please grant that my sample was limited/skewed by the kind of school I taught at): the majority of the teachers I worked with were lazy, stupid, or even downright malicious. And if they weren’t that way coming in, they often became that way after a year or two (this pertains to yours truly; more on this later).
These are fuzzy, anecdotal statistics (aka, not statistics), but I would estimate that of all the teachers I worked with, approximately 20% of them were good. These teachers were good for one of two primary reasons. Half of these teachers were good because (probably the best reason) they loved nurturing the students and bonding with them on a deeply personal level (Ms. L was one of these). The other half were good because they had a passion for the subject matter and wanted to communicate their knowledge to others. I belonged to the second camp, which, of course, is the more selfish of the two. Still, my heart was in the right place overall—at least at the beginning.
Of the bad teachers, the majority of them were checked out. They just didn’t care anymore. They’d seen their efforts fail too many times, and for whatever reason (maybe due to lack of experience, maybe due to sheer complacency) they didn’t exit the vocation. Instead, they coasted and let their classrooms go to pot without putting up any resistance.
I’d always hated these teachers, even when I was a kid. I remembered an English teacher I had in 10th grade in Roswell who had a flask of bourbon in his desk and basically let the students roam freely doing whatever they wanted every period.
There were also teachers who were completely unprepared to discuss their subject matter. I thought that Ms. L was one of these until I later learned that she was a math teacher by training and had just been thrown into an English class by the administration. But there were plenty of other people who just had no business teaching. It seemed that they’d been hired because the administration simply needed someone who could fog a mirror to be present in their classrooms. There were English teachers who didn’t know basic grammar, math teachers who didn’t know algebra, etc. Needless to say, I don’t think my getting the job on the day I applied had anything to do with my impressive list of celebrity interviews.
Finally, there were the teachers (thankfully only about 5%, I’d say) who were just plain evil. These were the ones who sold drugs to the students or who engaged in sexual relationships with them. Most of the time, as a colleague, you just heard rumors until someone was caught. But yes, this was/is a thing, and I’m sure there were plenty of supposed educators who get away with it.
On a more positive note, being in the trenches with other teachers led to some incredible bonding. I’ve never developed such wonderful friendships with coworkers as during my time as a teacher at that awful school. Every Thursday and Friday, we would all meet at Bosque or another bar off of Central (not too far from ABQ’s infamous War Zone) to debrief and vent about the student body. More importantly, this would be our chance to gossip about the administration and the fubar system of the school itself—which was the core of the problem, and, to this day, has made me cynical about education in this country, especially when it comes to the privatization of schools—a growing concern for some and an advancing agenda for others. The school I taught at was, simply put, a scam.
The Institution
So here I’ll provide a few notes about the school itself. This is poor form on my part, but I want to go ahead and tell you the rhetorical reason for portraying these horrors. I’m not really trying to single out a particular school. Rather, I want to use these details to stress the fact that parents, politicians, and the American public at large have no idea what’s going on under the hood at many of these institutions, especially the ones that serve poorer communities. Despite its countless scandals, triple-digit turnover, and abysmal student outcomes, this school received (and continues to receive) positive write-ups in the press and multimillion-dollar grants from famous benefactors. Why?
I’ll break it down as simply as I can. Because this was a charter school, it operated as a hybrid of a state-funded institution and a business. The school’s funding was connected to its performance, which sounds great until you realize these schools can often determine how their performance is measured.
For instance, this school often boasted a 100% graduation rate. If this sounds ludicrous to you, you’re a rational human being. How they got to 100% I don’t know—as I saw many a student drop out (as will happen, of course). But as to how they could even get close to that number: easy. They simply didn’t allow students to fail. If you wrote your name on your paper, you received a passing D grade. And the grades from the work teachers assigned didn’t matter much anyway. As many new teachers discovered after a few months, classwork only accounted for about 10% of a student’s grade, with the rest largely determined by standardized tests scored by the faculty on a dramatic bell curve.
Students caught on to this system quickly. And I remember when the sinister irony of it dawned on me as their teacher. In this dynamic, you were effectively penalized for trying. If you automatically passed all of your classwork just by sitting there, and if getting a good grade on classwork didn’t really move the needle all that much, why bother? It was more trouble than it was worth. In fact, the smartest move would be not to do any work and rely on whatever innate intelligence you possessed to carry you.
The truly tragic aspect of this system was that the few students who actually tried in class always shared two traits: they were the most hard-working and the least-gifted. They simply weren’t clever enough to understand that their efforts were in vain. My heart would sink when I found myself giving these students who had tried and failed at an assignment the exact same grade as students who had just written their name on a piece of paper.
As a result, students rarely grew at our school. They simply coasted on whatever genetic or environmental gifts their parents had bestowed on them. Oh, and did I mention there was no homework? Yes, not a single bit. Not even reading assignments. The stated goal behind this was that it would allow teachers to guide students through their work in intimate one-one-one coaching (in a classroom of roughly 30 students, mind you). However, cynically, I imagined that the real reason behind this was that 1. Students would be less likely to steal property (books, etc.); and 2. Teachers would be spared the daily embarrassment of their entire class not doing their homework (because it didn’t matter).
And since the school didn’t have homework, the days were considerably longer—with the final bell ringing at about 4pm each day. This in turn helped the school market itself and recruit more students in the community (and thus more taxpayer funding) by essentially providing a daycare service for students throughout a typical adult workday.
However, this posed problems for my 17-year-old students, who were stuck in a seated position from 7:30am to 4:00pm for five days a week with no athletics (this school didn’t offer any for upper classmen). Imagine being a teenager and having to undergo what drives a lot of adults crazy (without getting paid for it). You’d feel like a prisoner, yes?
Indeed, the president of this school was the former superintendent of a juvenile detention facility, and that very institutionalizing influence permeated the school’s policies. I could point to the ban on art, for instance. Teachers were not allowed to decorate their classroom with artwork (with rare exceptions), and the hallways of the school were bare except for posters emblazoned with quotes by popular entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Mark Cuban (the school’s CEO was a huge fan of Anthony Robbins seminars and Shark Tank).
The school’s template as part-business, part-penitentiary seeped into the culture and into how students and teachers were expected to behave. You left your dignity at the door. Even old women, veteran teachers, would be scolded in front of their students by the school’s vice president, a man in his late 20s with a gel-steeped hairdo (a former Chiles manager, I was told).
The abuse was not random, nor even ill-intentioned, if I can be gracious. It was designed to promote order through intimidation. The school’s executives would intimidate their subordinates; the supervisors would do the same to their teachers; and then the teachers would pass it all along to their students (who gave as good as they got).
When onboarding teachers, no matter how experienced, supervisors instructed them to use specific “power postures” to inspire discipline. They would model stiff upright positions with hands clasped, looking indeed like prison guards. They would discuss how to firmly vocalize commands using an economy of language—efficient direct phrasing, which, to their credit, was essential in an environment where students would chatter over any instruction that ran over ten seconds.
Despite these martial attitudes, there were very few penalties for misbehavior. If a student was disrupting the class repeatedly, the only recourse a teacher had would be to call an escort from the classroom phone. There was an old man, the school’s formal disciplinarian, who had received multiple social science PhDs from online universities such as University of Phoenix and Walden and who thus demanded that everyone refer to him as “doctor” at all times; and, after a while, this old man would come pick up the students and take them to a room where they would sit with him in timeout. Of course, teachers learned quickly that this was not a viable option, as picking up a phone, waiting for someone in the office to answer your call (which they sometimes never did), and then waiting for the old man to walk across the school to your class was often a far greater disruption than anything a student could accomplish. So most teachers eventually resigned themselves to the fact that they could do nothing to discourage bad behavior besides bluffing at authority—having no carrot, no stick.
However, unfortunately this didn’t prevent teachers from having to use the classroom phone, as school policy mandated that no student (no matter how old) could use the hallways without an escort—this being the prison warden mentality again. So anytime a student needed to use the bathroom, the teacher would have to walk over to the phone and call the office to request an escort in the middle of class. Not only would this remove any semblance of authority from the teacher (while preoccupied with the administrative office, there was a room of 30 teenagers with nothing to do) it also made the students resentful. Having someone escort you to the bathroom and wait outside the door every time you have to go will make you resentful—and it won’t exactly inspire the adult autonomy that colleges are looking for either (Note: I never heard of any student from the school graduating college; the school was, however, an excellent feeder for the armed forces).
No Exposé
So I’ve digressed quite a bit from the original question of that last section, which was, “Why did this school maintain its reputation and funding?”
Here’s how this can happen, from what I observed/experienced:
1. Non-Disclosure Agreements: All staff were required to sign NDAs, and the school had an extremely litigious reputation. Teachers are also rarely equipped financially to battle things out in the courts. I hear that NDAs are becoming more common across the teaching profession in general, which is alarming. And I’m sure you’ve noticed that I haven’t named the school in this piece, despite the fact (or maybe due to the fact) that I outright own a media platform.
2. A Corporate Media Mindset: Since positive media was a crucial component of how this charter school received funding, the leadership team had proven tactics for communicating their messaging/marketing to the press. They’d even received national attention for their astonishing student success rates. So it wasn’t like a beleaguered local newspaper would be able to send a reporter to do some digging on a school serving a poor community. The local press in the area was extremely weak. However, during my time, one of my colleagues did try to go to the Albuquerque Journal to blow the whistle at his peril, but his story was killed by the editorial board, for reasons unknown.
3. A Story People Want to Hear: Nobody wants to hear that a school serving a poor community is corrupt. Disgruntled employee stories are easily dismissed, especially when the school’s messaging of helping struggling students through rigorous standards is so much more appealing. The only people who really knew about the school were the hundreds of teachers who’d worked there over the years. To be fair, this did poison the well of word of mouth in the working community. After I’d stopped working there, I heard from a colleague that the school had started shipping in teachers from the Philippines to fill vacancies.
4. In the Blind: I can’t stress enough that, as an outsider, you would have had no idea what was going on my school. If you visited—as many politicians did—you would be given a highly curated tour. You would be guided to a specific classroom where the students had been coached beforehand and bribed by treats or other perks to be on their best behavior. And meanwhile you would have the vice principal chirping in your ear, vaunting the school’s revolutionary system, enumerating one fluffed stat after another. Again, there would be no way to know the reality unless you actually worked there and had signed an NDA, rendering you speechless.
Caveat: Again, I don’t want to suggest that my experiences with this charter school are indicative of other institutions—but I do want to suggest that my school probably wasn’t an anomaly either.
Goodbye, Mr. French
I won’t bore you with a full chronology of how I changed during my time at this school. You’ll know the broadstrokes: sadness, heavy drinking, attempts to renew passion, attempts foiled, heavy drinking, and then final surrender.
In my last three months of teaching, I was one of those awful teachers I’d always judged. Just getting through my classes a day at a time, throwing up my hands, doing just enough to stay employed. I didn’t care, and not caring depressed me even more. The only thing I enjoyed was playing chess with a few of the kids—Klayton and Leo, among them. All the kids loved to play chess, and we’d sometimes arrange impromptu tournaments with them. The best player in the school turned out to be a janitor who’d mastered the game while doing some time in prison, and it was always fun to watch the look on some of the science teachers’ faces when he’d demolish them.
I could’ve continued like that—checked out, hungover, playing chess with the kids. Not exactly the positive role model I’d hoped to be, but maybe not as negative as some of the other adult figures in their lives. Of course, that’s me rationalizing.
Eventually, I quit and moved back up to Denver, where I resumed work as an editor. I wish I could give you a better ending. Failure is so uninteresting, really.
When I was telling a colleague about detailing my past experiences as a teacher, he said I should probably add something here at the end to make it a little less grim. But I don’t really know how I’d do that without being dishonest.
This is what teaching was for me. And if you’re out there doing the work, I salute you.