Substitute Limbo in BSD

 Image from FridaKahlo.org

This is indeed a thorny and difficult topic to broach, the limbo land of working as a substitute, whether as a certificated substitute teacher or classified substitute aide at Bozo School District (BSD).

Anyone who is hired a BSD is initially very grateful because it signified they have jumped through all the hoops---and believe me there are many---and are able to get into the system.

You are grateful you now have a school account, your own email address, and access to the computer log in, where you can schedule your own work. In fact, many substitutes are grateful and can afford a part-time, temporary status forever. For instance, they are financially secure or have care-giving responsibilities or even work another preferably related job.

Snags around references

However the snags about working as a Substitute circle around the potential for transitioning to full-time, and in particular garnering adequate references or letters of recommendation.

In fact the former is mostly addressed in the plethora of transition to educator programs available through night-school. They also include government sponsored programs such as Teach for America. And many school districts (partnering with the local university) run Teacher Certification programs as well (even BSD offers this).

Both of the snags are somewhat interrelated. In order to qualify for a program, you must have adequate teaching experience and letters, for instance, a letter of offer to teach at a school.

The problem is, especially if you are an older worker, that it's very easy for Substitutes to become overlooked. Although marginalization is often couched more politely for certificated workers, there is nonetheless the stereotype of the Substitute somehow being not up to snuff.

In particular, if you are only on campus a few days a month, the principal or staff doesn't seem to  remember you very well, meaning they are unlikely to furnish you a letter of evaluation. Conversely, if you do not manage the classroom well or responsibly, they have the power to instantly write you up. Even if you have only had one bad write-up in the past 4-5 years, it may count against you.

(And believe it or not, if you have the audacity to complain about anything, they will invent a write-up about you or set you up for a bad situation).

This means that Substitutes (especially long-term ones) are often extremely willing to conform with any and all school district expectations. That wouldn't seem bad, but what if the expectations are somehow a bit unreasonable? For instance, every child must finish a 20 page classwork packet in 4 hours? At BSD, someone had the audacity to point out that the reason local test scores at one school might be low is because most permanent teachers at the school site are lax regarding assigning homework, especially on weekends.

Someone did not have the audacity to discuss the elephant in the room, which is that BSD sits in the middle of a city that is quite segregated, pitting the well-to-do north against the larger poverty-stricken south. The vise on social civility can be quite aggravating. You observe how nice the teachers are to the students, but then playing cat-and-mouse with the parents. The teachers are proud that they may be receiving extra pay for working in a low-income neighborhood for 8 hours a day, at the end of which they race back to where they live on the north side of town.

These are the type of teachers who have more money to spend on Starbucks than time to volunteer for the local food bank. These are teachers who worry about the high test scores of their children, while covertly discouraging after school study programs. You get the persistent, nagging feeling these types of teachers don't or can't take civic order too seriously, since the only neighborhood that really matters are the ones in which they are able to socialize among their peers.

Recently this came home to roost in that the BSD pointedly told someone they cannot furnish any kind of letter of reference, since they are only responsible for administration. Mark, these are the same characters who hire, evaluate based on employee data, and conduct substitute teacher training.

It was really the same snag we ran into earlier, but we thought that it had somehow disappeared.

Snags don't disappear

Here is more evidence that the snags of being in Substitute teaching limbo can land you in jeopardy.

If you are seeking support from the local substitute teachers union that you pay minuscule dues to, you can just about forget about it. At BSD, the substitute teachers union representative is none other than someone from the HR department at the BSD office. You file a complaint at your own risk when it basically is filing with the HR at BSD.

Are there national unions for substitute teachers? Sadly, they are somewhat few and far between. NSTAsubs.org seems to be running something resembling that, and they have conferences only once every few years. In fact, ironically enough, the site is now advertising jobs with Bain Capital, since Enservio seems to detect a similarity between teaching and becoming a claims adjuster for the insurance industry.

In fact, the possibility of you being a substitute for the rest of your career in teaching has never been higher, according to several sources. New York City is running a vast Absent Teacher Reserve. In the pool are teachers who got downsized due to school closures; teachers who failed to improve their students test scores adequately; and teachers who never are offered a permanent job.

Of course in NYC the salary for a permanent teacher is so high, that even half that income would seem to be quite respectable for substitute teachers willing to commute or share housing.

But can the bottom line, as Larry Littlefield points, be that ATR or Substitute pools will become the new trend because Teachers Unions and School Districts and States recognize they can't afford all those retired pensioned teachers? Littlefield, an accountant by trade, seems to have put his finger on the fact that the NYPSD allocates far more money per pupil than may be spent. If you can believe the figures, nearly four times more is allocated per special education student. Is it possible that the retiree pensions are so high that extra money must be stowed away from somewhere in today's budgets?

The Littlefield thoughtfully imagines a new cottage industry system where all teachers would operate as substitutes, and specialize in teaching online, earning about $20-22 per hour:


"For the more severely disabled, if a home setting were possible, the same pay could be had with a class size of just three or four. A friend whose child has autism fought with the state of New Jersey for years to get the state to pay for education in just such a setting, rather than in a factory school setting.
"And what would a teacher’s career be like in this sort of cottage industry network? Their first five years might be spent teaching, and being trained, in a “mothership” regular school that acted as a central node for the network. That school would make a school building experience available to those that wanted it.

"Then the teacher would start working from home, perhaps conveniently when they had become a parent themselves. Rather than teaching the same grade every year, with the children passed on to other area teachers, he or she could have the option to keep the same children for a decade, right from pre-K to grade 8. Learning a new grade, or math vs. English, wouldn’t be as hard if most of the instructing was done by other teachers, via programs and videos on the laptop."

Naturally this would have every public school district in the nation up in arms. After all, it is not as if charter schools have done that great a job. The Washington Post  ran a series of articles regarding the cornering of the public education market by charter schools. The perception of Walmartization; schools run like businesses; embezzlement of allocated funds; failure to adequately provide needed academic services; autocratic school philosophy; mistreatment of students and teachers; all of these are potential issues when schools become privatized. Working at charter schools, you may have anything from an overfilled school classroom, to inadequate down time for teachers, to absconding by the school administration, to a lack of balance in the curricula.

Hung in Limbo forever

Nothing so symbolizes the current crossroads in teaching as the story of the substitute teacher suspended for showing the students a film about Frida Kahlo.

Firstly, such a teacher ought to garner special recognition for offering her class a lesson intersecting history, art, culture, gender identity, yet instead she is punished for engaging her classroom. BAD!

Second, Frida Kahlo herself is a Latina heroine worth emulating to some degree because she possessed the courage, tenacity, and resilience to overcome different types of personal trauma in the form of disease, accident, marital infidelities, prejudice, and living in her husband's shadow.

She was literally the type of heroine who lifted herself up by her own bootstraps, her complicated sexual identity notwithstanding.

Today, increasingly, we live in a society of instant labeling, judgments, and scorn where one would have thought the Information Age would have advanced human understanding and tolerance.

Trumpsters might only see the surface, a gal with facial hair or hirsutism. A misfit consumed with her art in place of shopping mall narcissism. A woman with revolutionary ideas on political activism. 

How would a real-life Frida Kahlo fare today in the classroom we wonder? Would she be able to work as a teacher and still be an artist? Would not BSD punish her for her outspoken revolutionary tendencies? Would not the school administration and tenured professors try to squelch her sense of humor and fierce independence? How willing would they be to provide her accommodations?

Sadly, one can hardly imagine today's Frida Kahlo being accepted or being able to serve in Teach for America hardly. Why do I think this? Because teaching has become precisely what it should really not be, which is the Master's Degree in Pedagogy. A pedagogic person tends to be narrow-minded, overweening, and even materialistic or pecuniary (since why go to all that trouble if you are not in it for the money). They believe that if you want to advance in education, you must teach 24/7.

Though the teaching programs will never say it to your face, you are unlikely to be welcome to teach if you love writing or art or making music first. Those things must become a distant second and mostly third, meaning you must settle for being a dilettante rather than a real artist. More important of course would be the extra countless hours of volunteering needed to establish more references!

Of course, there are always exceptions. Maybe there are a few Frida Kahlos working in Limbo. We just don't know about them because their lives are troubled and fractured because they are floating from one temporary teaching job to another, their belongings in a mini-storage, and their art literally hanging by threads. In fact that would have to be the case if she ends up in a jobless limbo, as a part-time instructional assistant. 

Today's poor Frida Kahlos would be shorn of any benefits at all unless she set aside time for fighting for a higher minimum wage, for national low-cost health care, and for a guaranteed basic income. All of those things that only paupers need to be concerned about...

Thus, we don't need the Trumpeters to tell us how society is becoming undone. It is obvious that there are fewer and fewer Frida Kahlos being promoted in the media who have the time to juggle art, teaching, homelessness, and fighting for civil rights. Growing a mustache might just signify the audacity to endure in the boundless hate faced for bringing pointless matters up to social attention.
 

Dealing with Sociopaths

Because this is just a blog, it's a relief to get to talk about a problem that has been growing. That, to me, is the increasing numbers of sociopath or manipulator behaviors and personalities.


It's quite sad that there are quite a few reasons for this. First, in my humble opinion, since 9-11, this country has been at war officially with any country that might have terrorists. With (according to one source) up to 1000 bases strewn around the globe, it's safe to say that the US believes that might makes right.


How can you teach children to actually believe that bullying is bad, when in so many ways, that doesn't apply overseas. No matter what doctrine or how else it is justified, it is still amassing arms, selling them, for the purpose of conducting war, killing, bombing, and creating waves of refugees.


War to create peace, is in fact, still war, still violence, still bullying.


Aside from this, there are the plethora of war games, war movies--fiction and science fiction and nonfiction---on TV, in movies, in games, on DVD, at YouTube, in game-sets, on I-pads, etc.


From the second-grade on, the average American boy probably spends a great deal of time obsessing about games pitting one's intelligence to maim, eliminate, or kill opponents since it's a cool thing.


The average American girl will obsess over Barbie dancing, Barbie preening, Barbie dressing, Barbie make-up, Barbie make-over, so that by the time she is a teen, the nose-job, hair-dye, breast-enhancement and whatnot is clearly the cool thing to do.


Sex and death, both had for cheap. Violated or self-violated, new bullies are in the offing.


And then if there are not the virtual sociopathic role models, there are the REAL ones, you know, from Hollywood, Bollywood, access Hollywood, People magazine, American Idol and reality T.V.


In fact, the real question is how many of the condoned role models these days are not sociopaths. We don't hold these ordinary workers to view unless they earned some kind of civic superstar rating.


But the rat-race is what engenders the ruthlessness and egotism that feeds the bully-meme. After all, bigger, brasher, bolder, is what makes better. We have to push and shove our way up.


Arguably, the whole point of the American education system is to keep students blind to the realities of the workaday jungle. Behind their gated schoolyards, they are kept busy at tasks that provide them the illusion they are learning a lot. They are mastering a lot of learning that is graded and will keep their egos stoked for the great American dream.


There are so many hopeful activities, once they get that high school diploma. They can at least go to college where they can get their dreams downsized, or cut down, or shifted, or sent around and around, sort of like visiting the cleaners. They can get their clock cleaned out.


All this time from kindergarten through high school, if they are very lucky, they might get to work a part-time job, most likely nowadays in the service sector. Otherwise, yes, no wonder they start playing games, imagining a reality that isn't but are told is something good to do.


It's good to live in an imaginary world, I mean, you can even play President of the United States, and be living in an imaginary world nowadays, imagining you are living in the United States of the Great Sargasso or something....(just kidding, of course).


Then, there are the genetically prone to be sociopathic. I am not sure why your sibling might be a manipulator or sociopath, but it happens. Wikihow is very comforting to me, because a few years back, I never dreamed things could be so unabashedly presented with such appeal, thanks to some fabulous writers and illustrators.


I'll post "How to spot a Sociopath" first, even though you are more likely to encounter a Manipulator.


Here's WikiHow How to Spot a Sociopath: http://www.wikihow.com/Spot-a-Sociopath


I thought it was important because a full-blown sociopath is often, depending on how it suits him or her, a bully, a manipulator, and controlling person. They will use any means to get what they want out of you.


Now in education, there aren't just students to deal with but also your working peers. In fact, the students are pretty harmless compared to your peers. While the students, you can mark down or refer or take punitive action or preferably guide to more sociable outlets, you cannot change your peers.


In any profession these days, I call them the lettuce-wrappers. They turn your job of joy, it doesn't matter what, into work-maze. They obsess over every single little detail on the job and talk about those details endlessly and just won't let go. They jackknife their way into your personal space and then try every which way to disempower you. You know or sense that this is not friendly productive conversation, but there is an underlying agenda of play-to-eliminate.


Here is one description of toxic mannerisms by Kim: https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/5-tips-for-handling-toxic-people-in-the-workplace.html


The lettuce-wrappers may have grown up in hard situations. They had to out-compete everyone else in order to remain in the field picking lettuce. They don't give a fig about how the supervisor mistreats them, or planes flying overhead spraying chemicals...they are totally company-made.


That could explain why some parents or neighbors are this way too. Maybe they grew up as refugees or underwent war-time conditions. They internalized and internalized to the extent that bullying is their only outlet. The countries they lived in, the boarding schools they attended, the churches or whatever molded them to become controlling.


Here's a good checklist on Controlling People and how to identify them: http://www.wikihow.com/Recognize-a-Controlling-Person


It really is painful to acknowledge that someone near (and possibly dear) to you is a controlling manipulative person. But the only way to start protecting yourself is honestly admitting it.


Yes, they embarrass you on purpose. Yes, they put you down a lot of the time. Yes, for specific reasons, they want to make you feel incompetent or that your methods are not sufficient. Yes, they threaten you or do things to disempower you. Yes, they want to make you miserable because somehow that makes them feel better.


The stealthy way that sociopaths do this also includes the perpetual wet-blanket airs of negative people, who are also toxic, as described here: http://www.wikihow.com/Deal-With-Negative-People


You really have to be sort of strong and stoic inside to counter all these negative types of people if they are family, then friends at school, and cultural schools as well.


Over time, as the WikiHow describes, it is indeed tempting to break out altogether. (And this is where the Asian guys hating Asian girls going out with non-Asian guys can really become intensified). But you should never completely break out unless you really trust those you are breaking out with. Because you can be just shifting into a new abusive situation, even more dangerous and toxic, not knowing it beforehand, because you have built-in your co-dependent tendencies.


I really am grateful for the variety and breadth available at WikiHow because they don't just describe, they also diagnose, which is of course very important if you need to try to break free, fight back, deal with it, broadcast it, or whatever.


In case you can't find it, here's the one for dealing with sociopaths:
http://www.wikihow.com/Deal-With-a-Sociopath


And here's the one for dealing with manipulators:
http://www.wikihow.com/Deal-With-a-Manipulative-Person


WikiHow also posts related articles in the side-bar which is great to reference or compare.


You can't always use these tactics and be assured they will work. In fact, these sociopaths and manipulators, being somewhat sick people, will also be reading these articles to devise new ways to torment you or check your attempts to protect yourself.


You also need to practice these tactics, and take notes on what works with whom. But the rule of protecting yourself is very important. Don't let your guard down. Learn to be assertive.


What if they are your elders or teachers or people of authority like the school principal?


You have to weigh your options carefully. Maybe there is someone you can talk to about it, maybe there isn't. Maybe your fellow students or peers just let things blow off and don't take matters too seriously. In fact, it's a good thing to develop hobbies like meditation, such as Falun Gong, so you can learn to behave truthfully, compassionately, and with tolerance, and be better able to cope.


Turning the other cheek may only work to a certain extent though, especially if this abuse is undertaken to seriously undermine you and cause you psychological harm and distress.


For instance, there are a few people who make it a habit to visit the public library and play or visit super-weird websites. The other day, this poor sick teenaged gal spent almost a couple hours playing dancing Barbie Doll as a game video. It was pretty homophile in nature, and she was also glancing at me askance, as if trying to gauge my interest. Guys will also do those same sick things there too.


Or the school principal can be a draconian Greg Gianforte type, the kind who is pretty nice until things don't go his way. Or the more sinister type like who seem clean-cut, popular, honest, but nevertheless is cut-throat filthy scheming to put one over on people so they can get ahead. Sometimes, you really have to keep your acting hat on, while keeping some notes about things.


In any case, you should not be afraid to be assertive. To this end, I always keep a copy of my bill of assertive rights somewhere, with a few bits and extra pieces added on. http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1085484-when-i-say-no-i-feel-guilty-how-to-cope---using-the-skills-of-systema


For instance, keeping your information to yourself, you have to practice saying "I don't want to talk about that right now" or "Maybe later" or some other diversionary tactic. The lettuce-wrapper typically won't back down very easily. They want, need, you to tell them information about yourself, because just as soon as they do, they can devise ways to attack you.


I know because the other day, the lettuce-wrapper targeted someone else besides me, someone who stated something to the effect she felt afraid of doing such-and-such. The lettuce-wrapper, with her hidden agenda of play-to-eliminate, immediately latched onto the person's fear and indeed, embellished the validity of such a fear as being a valid deterrent from pursuing a meaningful goal.


Here's advice on saying no:


"Know that it's alright to say "no." A person will continue to manipulate you as long as you allow him to. You need to say "no" to protect your well being. Look in the mirror and practice saying, "No, I cannot help you with that," or, "No, that isn't going to work for me."^[14] You must stand up for yourself, and you deserve to be treated with respect."


Here's advice on carrying on a neutral conversation:


"Carry on a neutral conversation. Instead of letting the sociopath do all the talking, speak up and take the conversation where you want it to go. That way you can keep it in comfortable territory, never giving the person a chance to catch you off-guard with some kind of barb. Agree with the person in complimentary ways whenever you can."


Finally remember, your strength can be your weakness, but conversely, your weakness can be your strength. Knowing yourself, their strength can be turned against them.

No, I don't to talk about that right now. Because I just don't.