I will not let school consume my life. I will not let school consume my life. I will not let school consume my life.

It's easy for me to remind myself that there are other things in my life besides school, and often happier things at that. But, rereading blogs past, I often realize that it is just as important to remind the internet abyss that 1) I am often much happier than the text suggests, and 2) there is more to my life than my job. So I thought I'd do a brief update:

I'm still playing soccer, but the sports of choice these days are skiing and mountain biking due to the fact that I just purchased my very own skis and mountain bike. Needless to say, last weekend was my most expensive weekend to date, and I have not had the opportunity to use either pieces of new equipment yet. My next phase of time management self-improvement is to make time to go biking after school some time. A couple TFA friends of mine also have bikes, so ideally we can head to the hills in the afternoon. And then pretty soon Jackie and I will be planning out our potential hike of the John Muir Trail for this summer. We hope that 214 miles in California will seem like a walk in the park compared to the 275 miles in Washington last summer. After all, we are both a year older and wiser.

I'll be honest, I thought my "brief update" would be a little longer, but I suppose there's only so much you can fit in between teaching and planning for three different classes. It's funny; one of my former students from last year comes every so often for tutoring and he always leaves telling me that I need to teach Algebra II so I can be his teacher next year, as if it would be no big deal to teach a 4th set of curriculum standards. When I tried today to explain to him the difficulties as it is with teaching three different classes, he replied with, "Well at least you get paid more for it." I think my laughing in his face made clear two things: one, that teaching three classes leaves me a little delirious each day, and two, that our salary has nothing to do with the amount of different curricula we teach. Although that certainly should be the way we get paid, because I guarantee I do exponentially more planning than the teacher who teaches five of the same class every day. Then I could have bought my skis and mountain bike sooner.

I do think though, that this is not the worst job to be consumed by. At least there's so much going on in the school world each day and each week that things are always unique. Disheartening? Sometimes, but boring? Never. From the classroom to the national debate on education, there's always something going on. I hesitate calling it "exciting" because that's not quite the word to describe my roommate receiving a pink slip in the mail from Oakland Unified School District. Due to crazy budget problems, they sent out these potential layoff notices to nearly 50% of the employees in the district, creating a perfect real-life demonstration of the last-in-first-out philosophy in the teaching world. In the corporate world, when money gets tight, a company forces its older, higher-salaried workers to retire to leave room and funds for younger and cheaper employees. In the teaching world, there is not a significant enough difference in salaries between older and younger teachers to make a difference financially in who gets laid off, and a pension system would not work quite as well as in corporate businesses if there's no money to use.

I don't know if I've said it before, but all the ridiculousness at RHS is due to the fact that a positive school learning culture is relatively new to our school, and the district for that matter, so it is taking a long transition for certain teachers and students to understand the seriousness of expectations for them. In fact, we have one of the strongest administration staff in the district, and despite the union rules of seniority and such, they somehow end up getting new TFA teachers every year, even in such bad hiring conditions. There's some loophole they've found or some breaking of rules that is going on, but least it feels like they're doing everything in their power to improve the school, because let's face it: you may have no idea if a TFA teacher will be successful or not at Richmond, but at least you can be 95% positive that TFAers will believe that things can be turned around for the better. We have too many teachers who plainly suck because they can't be convinced that their students can in fact succeed if they are only provided the right environment and guidance. With the union, our admin has had to approach this bad teacher situation from a creative direction, so it seems that instead of trying to fire the teachers, they will bug them until they decide to leave on their own. This involves many classroom observations and asking the teachers to teach a subject that the admin knows they are not prepared for. There is certainly some gambling involved. For instance, a handful of these bad apple teachers are teaching English Language Development classes, and frankly are hiding in the classes with scripted curricula and students whose parents don't speak English. You don't hear much complaining about how much they stink simply because the parents don't know to be concerned. Technically these teachers are credentialed for English classes, so according to rumor, the plan is to ask these teachers to teach mainstream English classes where you actually have to plan your own lessons and there are actually parents who will try to get you fired if you don't teach a damn thing. With this as their only option, the teachers will choose to get placed elsewhere, and it would be foolproof except for the fact that while RHS sends these teachers to another school, we will be receiving replacements that are likely not much better because other schools do the same thing. The downside to not being able to fire them is that you can't get the disease out of the district. It's like trading lung cancer for pancreatic cancer. It's gonna kill you one way or another.

Speaking of which, I found out last week that one of my students from last year has leukemia. How awful is that? I have said before that there seems to be an unusual amount of health problems in the area, and Richmond is not exactly sitting in the most ideal of locations, surrounded by two freeways to the east and south, a major rail route to the west, and Chevron refineries to the north. It's hard to explain delicately to your students that their goal should be to get out of Richmond. For many reasons. But then at the same time you want to educate its citizens such that they have the tools to tackle their own community's problems. For anyone with a Netflix account, you absolutely NEED to watch "Brick City," a documentary about Newark, New Jersey, and the steps its mayor and citizens take to improve their situation. It's crazy how much Newark and Richmond/Oakland are alike.

Okay I'm done. I will not let school consume my life.