I have ten years of teaching experience in the public school system. I initially taught for a few years in the 1980's. Then I dropped out of teaching until I got back into the system in 1997, to teach English at a middle school.

My first two years back in the system were really wonderful. The school facility was in lousy shape, but I didn't mind that at all because I got to teach the way I wanted, and I felt I was making a difference.

Then in 1999, three major things happened. First, the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) began to be used as a major benchmark to chart individual schools' "progress" in teaching students. Second, concepts with buzzwords such as "performance standards," "rituals and routines," and "grading rubrics" had to be taught to students to show them what they needed to do in order to excel at or even pass a particular course. (The majority of the students didn't understand the concepts or just didn't care.) Lastly, based on FCAT and other benchmarks, Florida schools started receiving "grades," and a grade of D or F branded a particular school as needing to clean up its act. As it happens, the school where I taught was a "D" school in every graded year that I was there.

'99 was the year that things started to get hairy for me. Administrators whose jobs depended on making people look bad began doing "focus walks," wherein they would plop their butts down in a class for five or ten minutes and, based on that short time, write down everything they felt the teacher was doing wrong in the classroom. For quite a while, the 1999-2000 school year was my absolute worst year of teaching. Then things slacked off a little bit, and for the next three years, things were only *occasionally* as bad as they were for the entire '99-'00 year.

2003-2004 was the clincher for me. Cut to an August day in 2003, three weeks into the school year. One of the things that English teachers were required to ask of their students was a "book talk," where each day, one or two students would be asked to stand up near the end of class and give a brief lecture on the book he/she was reading.

I had one particular class that hadn't done much of any work for the previous weeks. So on this day, I told that class that they were to read silently for most of the period, and then, about 20 minutes before the end of class, each and every student would be required to do a book talk.

Now, prior to this particular class, I'd been conducting the previous class when I noticed a couple of students outside my room, scuffling, making noise, and otherwise disrupting the quiet of my class. I found out that these two students had been sent out by a substitute teacher on discipline referrals for disrupting her class. One of these students was to be in the upcoming class (the one I mentioned in the previous paragraph). Since they were outside and showed no signs of having turned in their discipline referrals, I assumed they were trying to pull a fast one on the substitute teacher and just skip her class.

When the aforementioned student arrived in my "problem" class, I sent him out on a discipline referral, based on the behavior I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Then I told my problem class to read silently until the final 20 minutes of class.

Now, my grade's house administrator was a very ballsy woman. She acted as though she took no guff from any student--that is, until such time as she actually *took* guff from a student, at which time she would blame it on a teacher. This House Administrator (whom I shall refer to as "HA") came to my class a few minutes later with my ejected student in tow. HA said that the two students had indeed been sent to her office for discipline. As it turns out, HA's idea of discipline was to have them "stand in the sun" out in the courtyard. So, they weren't in class learning, they were disciplined by standing out in the hot sun--which could have made a couple of parents very unhappy if they'd found out about it--and they disrupted other classes while enduring their "punishment."

However, none of that mattered to HA. The only thing that mattered to HA was that I had (unknowingly) tried to usurp her authority. So now she decided to get back at me. In front of my entire class, she asked me why my class was reading to themselves instead of my instructing them. I told her exactly why, but that did not pacify her. "Every time I come into your room," she said, "all your students are ever doing is reading. [Imagine--reading, taking place in a language arts class!] You need to be doing some instructing!" Having berated me in front of my class, she stomped out. I meekly told the students to put their books away and I would teach a lesson.

Ten minutes before the end of the school day, I had my Advanced class doing book talks in front of the class. HA returned to my class, sat down, and wrote an evaluation--not of the class I was currently teaching, but of what she had observed an hour-and-a-half before! She left a copy of the evaluation on my desk before leaving.

I don't respond well to micro-management anyway, and this act really devastated me. The next morning, I happened to catch the principal in the parking lot, and I asked if I could speak to him. We went to his office, where I showed him the evaluation and explained the entire situation to him. For the previous few years, this principal had been extremely supportive of me. But this time, he told me two things: (1) "You might as well get used to this kind of thing, because we're going to have people doing focus walks like this all year long." (2) "Another thing--I don't understand why you're having such huge discipline problems. I've been into classes of teachers who just started teaching this year, and they don't have these kinds of discipline problems." [It seemed strange to me that he didn't understand my discipline problems, considering that he himself had intervened in several of them in the previous school year.]

I could tell I was getting a buck-passing, and my head started to curl. I always enjoyed that Road Runner cartoon where the Coyote mistakenly swallows the earthquake pills and that traffic jam starts going up the back of his head. I always tell people that whenever I get extremely nervous, my head starts feeling just like that. That's what happened that day.

Unfortunately, it hadn't helped that the previous day, my doctor had approved a prescription of Xanax for me to ease my nervousness. I had already taken two pills as per the prescribed dosage, one the night before and one that morning. But after I got the speech from my principal, and I had the earthquake in my head, I immediately went to the faculty restroom, swallowed the remaining Xanax, and left the school campus with the intent of driving to my counselor's office.

So, are you paying attention? I think I've rambled on enough for one day. I shall leave our hero fearful, irrational, and overdosed, so as to have something to tell about in my next posting.

And trust me--this is all a true story.