The Tale of the Evil Principal

At one time, I worked on the copy desk at a small-city daily newspaper. I actually liked the work and the hours. I was a night owl and getting paid to read the news and then place the portion of it that I liked in an attractive pattern on a computer screen is probably along the lines of what I was meant to do. There was no significant human interaction, especially with people I didn't like. The 4 p.m. start time meant I didn't have to hear an alarm clock. I still spend hours that I'm supposed to be working by reading the news.

The problem was that the pay was lousy, the chance of promotion unlikely, at least without moving to another city, and my schedule kept me, a newlywed at the time, from seeing my wife conscious more than two days a week even though we slept in the same bed. So, instead of sticking with newspapers, I became an English teacher.

I started off my career change the traditional way, by going back to college to earn my English Education degree. However, a year into my studies, I found an alternate (and much cheaper) path to public-educational glory. My state offers an alternative certification program for teachers with bachelor degrees in relevant areas. Instead of paying a university to train me, the regional education support agency trained me for free while I got paid to be a teacher.

The only problem was that while they trained me to be a teacher, I was already a teacher. As we took a crash course in classroom management, I'd already been managing my classroom for a week.

I should probably backtrack a bit and focus in on that "alternative school" part. By alternative school, I don't mean some magnet school full of gifted artists, musicians, or future astrophysicists. I mean a school full of kids coming out of lock up or deemed too dangerous or disruptive to attend the regular middle and high schools. My class rosters were ever-changing as kids came in and out of the youth detention centers or dropped out of school. My average seventh-grader was already 15 years old and my average ninth-grader already had a child, a lucrative drug business, or both.

Then there was that fifth-grader they stuck in with my middle school group because he'd phoned in a bomb hoax to his elementary school.

Oh, and the principal only worked half a day, and the resource officer, the policeman who was the only other adult in the building besides the teachers and secretary, usually left whenever she did. In other words, when problems arose in class, we were often stranded without support.

Let's just say that my first semester was a freaking disaster. There was screamed profanity (at me, not from me), threats, aggressive posturing, a doctoral level course on inner-city linguistics and drug culture, and all of this without a planning period or even a lunch to myself. The funny thing is that starting in the second semester, these kids started getting used to me. My calmness, even in the face of their temper tantrums, eventually won them over and they started to realize that I wasn't out to get them. I started to have a bit of success with them to the point that by my second year, I writing fewer discipline referrals than anyone else in the building. My juniors even had a 100 percent passing rate on the graduation test for English and writing and this with me having to teach 9th-12th grades in the same classroom at the same time. Of course, I'd have left that school within a couple of years anyway even if I hadn't had to deal with the issue that pushed me over the edge. I may have worked okay with the kids, but that doesn't change the fact that they made a stressful and difficult profession even more stressful and difficult.

Still, the kids I could understand. The kids I could manipulate. It was the principal who made life a miserable hell for my coworkers and me.

One thing you have to understand about bad kids is that you can't yell at them. This seems a little counter-intuitive I know, but you have to learn how to be politely strict with these kids and you also have to learn to pick your battles. These kids are used to screaming and violence. All it does is set them off to do the same. Good kids, college-bound kids from middle class families, can be yelled at. It shocks their systems and gets them to pay attention. Kids from rough backgrounds don't handle it so well. Unfortunately for the teachers, this principal was a screamer and she loved to come into your class, scream at some kid for some minor infraction and then leave you to get your class settled and back on task. This usually meant that the rest of the period was a wash. These kids just aren't mature enough to let something go and move back to the task at hand. Even the ones who weren't being yelled at took offense for the one who had. A few of these kids even had psychological problems that left you sensing that they were always on the verge of freaking out and going violent. I always kind of wished that one kid would have physically attacked the principal. I wouldn't have stopped him, partly because I'm afraid of pain and he was a big kid, and partly because I think the principal kind of deserved it.

The worst thing she ever did wasn't to the kids, though. During my second year, the principal apparently forgot to tell me and a coworker that we were supposed to go to a meeting at the central office. We didn't find out until after lunch the day we were supposed to go. The principal had the secretary call us in our rooms to let us know about the meeting, and I think she had already gone home for the day. It was fine, although annoying for me. I had no plans, so I went to the meeting. The other teacher, however, had a cardiologist appointment in another state that afternoon and knew that rescheduling would be a major hassle that close to the appointment. She didn't go to the meeting.

The next day we found letters in our boxes, dated a week earlier, informing us of the meeting. I checked my box daily, so I knew the letter hadn't been there for a week. It hadn't even been there for 12 hours because my box had been empty when I signed out the afternoon before and I was the last one to leave the building. The secretary confirmed my suspicions. The letter had been typed up that morning, dated a week in the past and placed in our boxes. This, much more than the last minute announcement of the meeting, pissed me off. I can understand being forgetful and unorganized. That's pretty much just being me. Lying in order to cover up your mistake, especially by taking advantage of an underling, is not something I would do.

The other teacher had been called to the central office for a meeting about her "insubordination" and she came by to ask me for a letter to confirm her claims, I happily obliged. I even managed to stand my ground when later in the week the principal came in to yell at me in front of my students about sticking my nose where it didn't belong and how I didn't know who I was messing with.

Oddly, nothing bad ever happened to me. At the end of the school year, she was actually disappointed that I was leaving (probably because everyone else was as well), and the students seemed to give me a little more respect after that. After all, even criminals understand integrity.

When getting address information for a resume last spring, I found out that my old principal had retired again and that one of the teachers, my mentor for the certification program my first year there, had become the new full-time principal. I e-mailed her to ask for a recommendation and found out that she had managed to retain her entire faculty two years in a row. The previous principal had never gotten anyone but me to come back for a second year, and I had only returned because I had to. If I had left that school, I would have forfeited my teaching certificate.

I'm happy for the students. Some of them actually deserved a little stability in their lives.