I don't even want to talk about them, but I guess I have to. They were major factors in what happened with my teaching career. I'll call them P1 and P2: Principal 1 and Principal 2.
(By the way, my teaching career, here in chapter 2, continues in chapter 4, "All Things Work Together." And this is an important part of that, as well.)
You can easily find P1's name in news references of the time. He's even made the news again recently, because of legal actions over failure to compensate some of the victims. He was the principal of Kildala Elementary School. What nobody knew, until well after I got fired and left, was that he had been sexually abusing boys in the town of Kitimat, for many, many years. He, interestingly, did not prey upon the boys in the Kildala school itself. He, I suppose, knew enough to abuse boys who were not students in his immediate orbit. This sexual abuse had taken place over a great many years, possibly as many as twenty. So, even though he did not prey upon the students in Kildala school itself, I am rather surprised that, in a small town, he got away with it for as long as he did.
But he certainly did take steps to ensure that he protected himself, in quite a variety of ways. I am sure that court transcripts are somewhat sealed, because they deal with minors, but I am sure that he did significant social engineering on the boys that he abused, telling them that it wasn't abuse, telling them that it was ordinary, telling them that this was something everyone did but no one talked about, telling them that if anyone found out what they were doing they would blame the boys. But he also worked in the community, to create a position and protection for himself, as a valued member of the society in a small town.
He was very popular with the teachers in the school. There were a lot of parties among the staff at the school. Some of them were barbecues at P1's place. He made his own wine, and was liberal in donating it to those who expressed an appreciation for it. He was, of course, as a principal, in a position of authority, and a respected position within the community.
He ensured that the parents were unworried about the education that was happening at the school. If you actually examined standardized scores, or the needs of the students once they graduated into other institutions, you might have had a few questions about this, but P1 made sure that nothing untoward, nothing questionable, nothing unpleasant happened at the school. The parents were not to be worried. The students were to enjoy their time at school. The school, as I have mentioned, had a specialist program in music, and in science, and whether or not these programs were educational, they certainly were impressive on paper.
And this is where I came in. When I got hired on to the Kitimat school district, and assigned to Kildala school, I was in the science teacher position. As previously noted, almost immediately I realized that the students were woefully unprepared in science, and in math, and even in basic educational activities and disciplines, such as doing homework and completing projects. Actually being required to do some educational work, and produce something for assessment, seemed to be a foreign concept. So, I set about trying to teach the students what they needed to know and do. What kind of work they needed to produce. What kind of homework they needed to do, and how much time to put in for that activity. I was working pretty much alone, and under some constraints.
I had more success in math than in science. Math, after all, is fairly structured, standardized, and it's easier to assess whether the students actually know what they need to know. The science was more difficult, particularly with the imposition of the new science curriculum. I have no idea why the previous incumbent of the specialist science teacher position left that position. He was, in fact, teaching and enrolling a class at Kildala school. I didn't know this for a while, until I started to raise the issue of the lack of science background in pretty much all the students, and he was quite offended at my assessment.
So, I wasn't making any friends, but I was doing my job. As best I could.
And then came the first report card. I had to fail about three quarters of the students. They just hadn't turned in any work at all, or at least not sufficient for me to give them anything near a passing grade.
Well, that set the cat among the pigeons. There was a huge furor. How dare I fail so many students? The parents were up in arms. And, predictably, had I but known the full background of everything that was happening in the school, I was thrown to the wolves. P1 sent set up a meeting, and invited any parents who were concerned about their children's marks to meet with me. Me, you will notice. Not him. I was to handle this on my own, and I was to satisfy the parents. I had created the problem: I had to clean it up.
I met with the parents. Equally predictably (and I expected this), the parents who did show up were the parents of the students who actually had passed, but had obtained marks at a C level, rather than the A's and B's that their parents expected. I tended to refer to these students as members of the figure skating club. All of their parents were not millworkers, but professionals and managers at the mills. They were the parents with lots of money, and they were the students with lots of activities and training going on. As implied by my name for them, pretty much all of them were, in fact, members of the figure skating club in town. They were students who were going to do well, and had the genetics, family connections, money, and ambition to actually work towards a superior life.
As I said, I expected this. I was not surprised. I explained to the parents that the students, all the students, had performed well below what would be expected. I explained that I did not feel that I should allow them to go on to high school without being challenged in this way so that they would know what to expect when they had more responsibility for their own studies. The parents didn't like it, but grudgingly accepted that this was not completely arbitrary on my part, and that it did have some validity.
And, in fact, it worked. During the subsequent terms of the school year, the work improved markedly, and so did their marks. They realized that I was serious about assignments and homework, and they started to work closer to an acceptable standard. As far as I was concerned, I had done a good job: assessing the problem, setting a standard, sticking to the standard, letting the students know what the expectations were, and following through.
But, of course, there were factors in play that I knew nothing about. I had given the school, and, by extension, P1, a black mark. As previously noted, P1's prime objective in the running of the school was that no questions or issues should be raised which might turn attention on him. I had brought attention on the school, and, naturally, P1, as principal, would be asked to address the issue of what to do with me. P1's answer was very simple. In those days, it was pretty much automatic that you were on probation for your first year in employment. Then, once you had gotten through your first year, pretty much automatically you got a permanent contract. Well, I was put on probation for a second year. The fact that I had created a furor was all the explanation anybody needed. This took the pressure off P1, and Kildala school, by making me the scapegoat for it.
Somehow, though, P1's star had somewhat dimmed. In the second year I was removed from the position as specialist science teacher, and given a grade 5 classroom. In addition, though, P1 moved from being principal of the largest elementary school, to one of three vice principals of the secondary school. You could see this as sort of a lateral transfer. Even though he went from principal to vice principal, you could say that secondary schools are larger and more complex institutions, and so it doesn't necessarily mean any loss in status. P2 was one of the vice principals at the secondary school, and came to Kildala as principal.
P2, in addressing his new staff at the elementary school, spoke of tightening up on educational standards, and avoiding some of the laxity that had been observed at the elementary schools in the city. To me, this sounded good.
What none of us knew was the extent of P2's ambition. Merely moving up to a principalship wasn't enough. In successive years, he went from vice principal, to principal, to director of instruction, to superintendent, to a position with the Ministry of Education. One year per step. That's very rapid advancement. And I'm fairly sure that he climbed over bodies all the way.
I was the first.
At the same time as all of this was going on, the government of the day was carrying on a fight with the civil service, and, in particular, because it was a strong cohesive group, with the educators of the province. The government passed various laws (a number of which were later struck down after challenges in the courts, but until that happened were in force for a number of years), rolling back wages for teachers, eliminating hard won limits on class sizes, and generally making life difficult for teachers. This was known as a "restraint program," and was seen as an economic necessity at the time. It never did any good for the educational system, and probably did an awful lot of damage, over the years.
I was in a very vulnerable position. I was the only teacher actually on probation in Kitimat, in that second year. No teachers have been hired in that year, so nobody else was on probation. And, of course, everybody knew that there were going to be job cuts. We didn't know the extent of P2's ambition, but he knew that the best thing he could do, to help to trim budgets, was to fire people. And there I was, already in a position where I could be fired very easily.
Teaching is, despite the appearance of collegiality, actually a rather isolated and isolating job. The teacher is in charge in their own classroom, and everybody has their own classroom, and their own concerns. Getting teachers to work together is not necessarily hugely difficult, but you do have to come up with a plan and explanation as to what there is a benefit for the teachers you would like to group to work together. Teachers are used to working on their own, obtaining their own resources, running things their own way, and really do not, ordinarily, collaborate on their jobs.
So, it's relatively easy to ensure that somebody fails as a teacher. All you have to do is remove the resources that you notice this particular teacher relies upon, and wait for what is pretty much inevitable. Unless the teacher objects, and mounts some campaign for support from their colleagues, this goes unnoticed, and probably unrealized even by the teacher you're attacking, until it's far too late.
P2 came up with a number of cost saving measures, all of which, oddly, limited my access to tools, and resources, that I was trying to use in a number of areas that I was teaching for the first time. This was probably overkill on P2's part: he probably didn't need to ensure that I was teaching badly, since you really didn't need to fire someone on probation for cause. But, messing with me, and ensuring that I was feeling bewildered by everything that was going on, simply allowed him to find areas that he could pick on and say that I was failing as a teacher. It wasn't an awful lot of fun. Even though I was having fun actually teaching.
The day that I was fired, someone from the school board office came down, and he and P2 came and called me out of my classroom, in the middle of a lesson. Predictably, as they were droning on in the hall about how I was failing and I would have to be removed, the class got noisier and noisier. At one point, while they were still talking, and I hadn't even responded to anything, I leaned back into the classroom, and gave a one word command, and the class immediately went silent. When I stepped back out, the person from the school board office, made a very interesting comment. He berated me for doing that, and said that no one had ever questioned my classroom management skills.
This is interesting because, while educators talk about all manner of skills in teaching (and they are important), the one prime consideration is always classroom management. If you can't handle twenty-five not terribly motivated students, keep them in line, keep them from getting out of hand, it doesn't matter what other educational tricks you get up to. Classroom management isn't the "be all and end all," but it is the one factor with the single greatest importance, of all aspects of teaching.
There were additional indications that the school board realized that they were pulling a fast one. The school board said that if I took *any* other educational training, they would rewrite my teaching assessment. If, in fact, I did have failings as a teacher, why did they not specify what particular type of training I should take?
I was also dumped by the union, the BC Teachers Federation. The BCTF, at that time, was not merely a union, but also the professional association for the educators in the province. However, the BCTF, and all local representatives, knew that they were in for a fight with this supposed restraint program. They were all assured of savage fights over contract negotiations and were trying to prepare for it. They didn't have time for one single teacher's firing, particularly a new teacher, whom nobody really knew.
Subsequently, as I'll go into later, I was teaching computer courses at the BCTF's Unemployed Teachers Action Centre. One of the teachers from Kildala showed up there. He apologized to me, saying that nobody realized, when *I* got fired, how much at risk their own jobs were.
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/02/mgg-24-teaching-pea-soup.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/02/mgg-26-teaching-online-from-paradise.html
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