Mentor the Newbies

The first year I taught journalism in high school and junior high, I had taken over the position from the "real" journalism teacher who quit after the first week. I thought, I'm young, I'm strong, I can do this. I should've included, I'm naive, I'm gullible, and I'm a glutton for punishment to that pep talk.

I stepped into a teaching position with no assigned classroom. I was supposed to float between four other teachers' classrooms during their off periods in three different buildings on campus, which meant them having to pack up whatever they were grading or working on and moving to who knows where. Not a good situation for building good work relations. The old journalism classroom had been given to a special education teacher, and the cadillac of a darkroom eventually became known as the best  making out place, I learned later when I caught a couple in there.

My classes were supposed to put out two newspapers a month and two yearbooks that year, but we had no computers. I was told to use computers around campus when someone else wasn't using at the time-- so it had to happen outside of class time, since my borrowed classes had no available computers. I borrowed a number of journalism books from the public library through Inter-Library Loan since no one told me the school even had textbooks for journalism. I found out halfway through the school year that there actually were textbooks stored away somewhere.

I asked someone from the administration office if the journalism department had any budget, and I was told the journalism budget was in the red--that last year's journalism teacher spent this year's budget, and I could probably spend next year's budget. I was determined to change that.

The keyboarding teacher and computer science teacher had pity on me and gave me the use of some small workrooms situated between their two classrooms so I could at least have a place to call home. Until then I was seriously considering acquiring a shopping cart to move my materials from class to class. The three small rooms and hall between the two classes were being used for storage, so students helped me clean them out and create some work areas. I literally pulled the least-broken old chairs and desks out of a trash pile to furnish the small rooms. I found some old word processors stored in there that the typing teacher told me I could use if I paid to get them cleaned and replaced the ink cartridges. I decorated the walls with journalism terms and our new mini-office rooms were in business.

On the Friday after I discovered the word processors, I pulled my car around to the back of the building after school (using an existing road) and was in the process of loading the two pieces of equipment myself when the principal walked up and wrote out a parking ticket to me, saying I wasn't supposed to park back there. I told him that I hadn't parked back there-- that I was just loading some equipment that we could use for journalism. I thought he would be happy that I was taking the initiative to find and get some old equipment repaired, but he was just aggravated at me parking behind the building-- even for the few minutes I was there. On my own time and gas expense I hauled them to San Antonio-- 170 miles round trip-- on the weekend, and went back the next weekend to pick them up, again at my expense, but I was excited that we finally had some equipment we could actually use during class time to type up and save our news stories.

I was being paid a part-time salary-- I had two periods off, but the rest of the classes were scattered throughout the day, so the schedule tied me down all day.  I had to come to school at 7:00 a.m. so students could use the computers in the computer lab before the computer classes started. We also used them during the teacher's off period and while he was at lunch, and I often stayed after school so students could use them then, too.

 For months after I started teaching, I only got a few hours of sleep each night. I couldn't turn my mind off lying there trying to figure out how to make it all work. A few weeks after I brought the word processors back from San Antonio, the principal called me in his office and chewed me out for spending less than a hundred dollars to get the equipment restored to working order. I didn't realize I was supposed to get approval before spending journalism money. No one told me anything. Everything I did was 'jump in and start swimming' and 'trial and error' efforts. I thought I was working miracles to make this impossible situation work, and yet the principal shot me down at every turn. He did absolutely nothing to help me.

During the school year my students and I worked a number of fund-raisers-- including selling old photographs and yearbooks from years past, and by January, the journalism department budget was in the black. A secretary from the administration office called me one evening and told me that I might like to know that the principal pulled $1,000 of our hard-earned money in the journalism activity fund and put it in his principal's fund. That was one of a dozen major offenses this man committed that would take pages to record it all (I plan to use it in a fiction novel someday), and I felt I had no choice but to travel the chain of command to try to resolve all of those issues, including getting our money back to use for yearbook and newspaper expenses. Other teachers were having similar problems, but the threat of getting their funding pulled kept them quiet, and no one would go with me to the School Board. Several long-time teachers told me that I ought to lay low, that he'd be gone eventually. All I could think of was the tremendous damage he was causing in the meantime. Another teacher asked me if I remembered what happened to Joan of Arc, like I was heading toward the same fate.

On the day of the school board meeting, I found in my school mailbox a tear sheet of the San Antonio Express News classifieds with my job advertised and circled with a bold red marker. The principal had put it there to intimidate me, hoping to change my mind about addressing the school board meeting that night.

A friend of mine accompanied me to the meeting, and for ninety minutes in closed session with the principal sitting directly behind me, I told the School Board what had been happening on our campus. Everything was documented; nothing was hearsay. Not one of the school board members ever looked at the clock during that time or asked me to speed up my presentation. They had been so far removed from what was actually going on, and they were absolutely shocked. The wife of one of the school board members told me later that she had never seen her husband come home from a meeting so angry before.

They had already signed the principal's contract for the following year, and school district was too broke to take him to court to break it, but I believe the principal lost face after that meeting, and I think somebody must've had a little talk with him because he ended up leaving of his own accord. The next school that hired him fired him by Christmas.

I even worked with a couple of students an extra month into the summer to make sure the yearbook was finished. The principal had the total authority to hire or not re-hire untenured teachers, and he actually hired a new journalism teacher before school was out that year. I even met him when the principal was showing him around. This same teacher contacted me during the following school year saying that he would be happy to testify on my behalf if I ever decided to go to court based on what he'd learned about what had happened the previous year.

The only reason I share this story is that my first year of teaching made me never want to step foot on a school campus again. My children didn't have much of a mother and my husband had an absentee wife that year because I poured everything of myself into that job that year trying to make it work, and I believe I did, but at a huge cost. Now that I'm older and wiser, I get so angry for being so naive and allowing myself to put up with such horrible work conditions.

Beginning teaching is hard enough in a good school system, but it is a soul breaker in a bad one. No one mentored me. I felt like I was completely on my own, and I was paid such a meager amount for the time and effort I put in to make that impossible situation work. I might've stayed with teaching if I'd had more support.

Every teacher-- no matter how much experience they have-- needs to feel a part of a team and that they have a voice. I can't stress that enough. Experienced teachers, please mentor the new teachers. Take them under your wings and protect them; teach them from your hard-earned experiences. Stand up against unreasonable, unethical tyrants taking advantage of a new teachers' lack of experience. Year after year I see young teachers leaving the profession because it's just too hard to go it alone.

Been there, got stomped on, limped away.