Reflection at the End of the 16th Year
All the best poems are the sad ones. Here are some of my faves:
and of course...
All the best poets were sad people. Maybe the poetry came first, or maybe the sadness did. Whatever the case, there's definitely a correlation. Poetry makes you mentally ill, or mental illness produces beauty. Take your pick.
I am not a poet. But if the inside of my head were a poem, it would look like this:
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| "Boxes" by E. R. T. |
That's the corner of my classroom, stacked with boxes of the books I've bought my students over the years. I don't even want to take them with me anymore. What's the point? I'm just going to have to move again, and every time I move, I lose books, and I lose students, and I lose friends and potential.
I was talking to another new-to-the-building teacher today on plan period.
"I got a $15,000 raise to come here, and I'm thinking about just going back to where I came from," she said. "This year was not good here."
I feel that in my soul.
I had really high hopes for the year, too. I did not foresee losing my job midway through or how that would wreck my psyche. I did not foresee the advent of ChatGPT, by which one student plagiarized literally everything he turned in for me all term. Despite my spending 5 hours printing out screenshots and timestamps, his parents still refused to believe their son would do something like this because, at 18, he's a very creative boy who doesn't need to plagiarize because he's naturally so brilliant. In the end, I insisted he write his final story in a school-provided notebook that would be collected at the end of the day. Of course, they thought I was a monster and insisted he write the story in the office, where the principal informed me that he tried to cheat twice more.
That's where we're at.
He was one of a dozen students plagiarizing in my class in the last 3 months. And now ChatGPT is available as an iPhone app so students don't even need a computer to cheat! They can have a 'bot produce their work in 4.5 seconds right from their desks.
Did I mention no one took the advent of AI seriously, and I was the one to put it on the radar of the Curriculum Coordinator, the district technology head, and the entire English faculty in my building? How is no one reading the news? Or is it just that they're all too busy putting out fires elsewhere? Maybe that's it.
It's really hard being a teacher right now. I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but I can tell you what it's like in a building that refuses to implement a cell-phone policy: teaching is impossible. I implemented an electronics policy on my own. In the end, scores for my lower classmen sky-rocketed, and administrators asked me to consider presenting my plan and data at a staff meeting. But then, you know... they laid me off instead, so I never got the chance.
And while a few other teachers apparently also adopted my plan, I was the only one who stuck to it because it was enormously time-intensive. Every student got one written warning with a phone call home the first time I found them on their phone in class. With 137 students, that took forever. Also, no one likes to be the bitch teacher who has the most office referrals in the building. But Mrs. P was right, once students figured out I was serious, they knew to put their phones away upon entering my classroom.
So I thought I had this big win, right? YAY, NOW IT'S GOING TO BE EASIER TO BE AN ENGLISH TEACHER! Only... then Artificial Intelligence took off and it became incredibly tempting for students to cheat. If the worse thing that happens to you is that you have to rewrite your paper for partial credit, why wouldn't you risk it? This is a real conversation I had this week with a parent:
Me: I'm so sorry, but your son is not going to pass English this semester. He just didn't do the work required. Also, he plagiarized the paper that I agreed to accept a month after the deadline...
Mom: Oh, about that! I think you misunderstood! XXX only plagiarized part of the paper, not the whole essay!
Me: Right...okay...see, he was supposed to write the entire essay himself, like...without plagiarizing any of it.
Mom: Well, I think you misunderstood, he explained to me that he turned in the CORRECT version, in which he had changed some things here and there, but somehow what you were looking at was the original, plagiarized version. You were never supposed to see that one!
Me: I understand that I was never supposed to see what the AI originally wrote. I have software that allows me to see that. It's still plagiarism. I'm...I'm not sure how else I can explain that to you.
Mom: So, you're saying he's not going to pass the semester and he's going to have to do summer school?
Me: Unfortunately, yes. His literal words to me, when I asked why he never turned in another assignment, were, "There were three people in that group! I just assumed one of them would do it for me!" He's failing by 20% and that's just too much to fix with an essay or one assignment. Then he also skipped my class today.
Mom: Well I know that's because he's so humiliated by his actions that he can't face you.
Me: When I talked to him about the plagiarism and missing work, he said, "THIS IS BULLSHIT!" and slammed my door... he didn't seem humiliated?
Mom: ... I'm actually kind of proud of him for finally standing up for himself, he's normally so quiet!
That's a normal, typical conversation with a parent this year. There has been ZERO appreciation of or respect for teachers. You know that 18-year-old who plagiarized everything he turned in for me this term? His parents began the semester by telling me they wanted to start teaching their son accountability and responsibility and would I please help them? But every time I tried, they blocked me. It's been like that all year long.
It was just such a hard fkkking year, and I feel broken.
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| Packing up my room |
Cara told me months ago, "The first year you switch from middle school to high school is rough. Man! When I went from 7th grade to high school, it was really difficult. You start out too strict, with too many rules because that's how you have to be for middle schoolers. But then you eventually figure things out, and the years that follow are so much better!"
But I only got this one year. That was it.
I got just enough time to feel completely inept and defeated.
I don't know if things would have gotten better, if I would have found my footing. Or if this debacle of a year is meant to foretell the beginning of the end for me in Education.
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