my job
I would do my job for free, I think just not full-time
My job is a teacher is different than most teachers’ jobs
I’m a teacher in a residential psychiatric impatient program for boys.
So the most student students I can have in my classes is eight and there are from one to four other adult adults helping in the classroom in various roles.
The most challenging part of my job in the part that took the longest to learn is being the head Parent with various other parenting vibes happening because teaching his parenting.
And it’s hard enough to work with one other person and find enough common ground that you don’t end up, hating each other while trying to raise a child or children together
So I didn’t choose the people that I have to parent with, but in Pennsylvania at least I have core differences from the adults on my team in terms of beliefs, value, values, and style
And like all adults, I have a nice long list of triggers and times that I’m not behaving in a baseline way for myself. I’m interacting with people from a scared and angry place.
So I’ve gotten into a lot of situations while trying to lead other adults toward my vision of a valuable classroom, but getting triggered by the other adults and then being too aggressive, and then quit quitting or getting fired
I also had Hella problems letting supervisors try to parent me as a parent
I’m just using the word parenting for teach teaching because they’re really not different. We are the day Parents you are the night Parents.
In my case, my team, we are the day Parents and the night parents are a bunch of people hired to socially manage the residential lives and they are chronically understaffed, and it is not a safe place to live or work
But it is not the worst of places like this For some reason right now we have a core group of functioning educational staff that I would vouch for in terms of them showing up in good faith to do the best things for these kids and allow themselves to be challenged as well.
My team has shown that they can take feedback, they can advocate for themselves, and that they care about the kids as much as I do under our care
And this is the first time I’ve been able to manage a team, and before that I could barely participate in a team without going off
I would go rogue in like confront the teacher when I didn’t like her response to a student because it triggered me because it was authoritarian, but you have to be united as a team or it won’t work
And I’ve been in a lot of classrooms where it wasn’t working And those classrooms are not safe
One of my students told me that my teammate told him outside our classroom, God, she’s so fucking stupid! This was a team and I didn’t trust and I found out about that later. If you can’t trust your team, people get hurt
These are kids that have behaviors so aggressive and unpleasant that both their families or foster homes and all educational settings have refused to deal with them anymore
It cost the state like $1000 a day to keep them housed and receiving baseline basic service services And one of those services it’s casually known as booty juice, which is a sedative given by shot, a muscle shot, when patients get too crazy. If you saw one flew over the cuckoo’s nest with Jack Nicholson, my work setting is like a kid version. Well, teenage boys, too.
My boys are between 14 and 17. Working with them is a truly a joy to me But I also have to entertain and engage the adult staff who are helping the students during lesson lessons. If they get bored if they don’t like what I’m doing if they think I’m not working hard enough, all of that they will likely go tell on me to my boss And that’s how the culture is in school because it’s hierarchical and capitalistic, people don’t adults don’t know how to communicate and work out the differences so they just rat on each other and talk about each other behind each other’s backs A few times I got taken down by a team that decided they didn’t like me. I was totally taken off guard because I wasn’t paying that much attention to them. I feel like their adults and they should be able to occupy themselves and I can’t worry about how they’re feeling about every fucking thing, that’s how I felt I wish they would just listen to me and followed my lead And I complained about them to my bosses So the bosses always got an earful on both sides and I’m sure that’s how it works everywhere Because we infantilize ourselves when we are interacting with a so-called teacher, parent figure.
So the other difficulty is that while I’m enjoying entertaining and making low-key jokes and involving the other adults, and any comedian knows this that if you are a funny person, you’re also an impulsive person. Well, maybe some funny people privately painstakingly crafted out their own jokes but for me, I just say whatever I think of that sounds funny I have a low filter and low boundaries, but it creates a very warm involved classroom I do a lot of thinking out loud. I admit when I have no plan I ask people what they wanna do. I accept a lot of suggestions things take a lot of time to decide in all the adults thoughts and feelings matter to me because they broke me down and I admitted that they will have to. There’s no way to have obedient teammates I have to actually care and that means I have to know how they’re responding to everything I do and I have to walk a fine line of pushing them a little bit, but also kind of pretending or over exaggerating how helpful they are to me, the same way I have to do the children. I have to parent them. And let them challenge me.