Permissible Advantage?: The Moral Consequences of Elite Schooling by Alan Peshkin

Author:Alan Peshkin [Peshkin, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805824667
Publisher: LEA

I have not gone out on a date since February or March. By the time Friday night comes along I am usually too tired to go out. The last four weekends in a row for me have been involved in something at the Academy. Yeah, I really have no life outside the Academy. You may have to be a little crazy to work here. In fact, I was talking to a teacher here yesterday. We talked way out in the parking lot because we wanted to make sure nobody heard. He said, "Why do we subject ourselves to this place?" I said, "I am going to be 37 in a couple of months. Maybe it is a midlife crisis, but especially as a single parent I just can't say I'm burned out, I am going elsewhere. I need the salary. I have a kid to support. So I will put up with far more. It is survival for me." I have heard of male faculty sleeping in their offices and showering at the gym. So marriages are in serious trouble. You come up here any time, day or night, and there are cars in the parking lot and lights on in offices. I don't know what these people are doing here at 2:00 a.m.

Perhaps faculty members with spouses and children can remain at work all night. Cora cannot. But she can manage to work extensively over four consecutive weekends. Academy teachers are able to visualize work that they think must be done, almost without limits as to when it will be done. This way of working is not mandated by their contracts.

At the Academy, if teacher goodness is one side of a coin, teacher stress is the other side. When I attended an all-day teacher workshop on diversity the spring before my year at the Academy, I heard a teacher, a veteran of 7 years, praise the school in grander terms than I'd ever heard directed to any school. She concluded by speaking of her and her colleagues' stress, which she thought of as self-imposed. Thereafter, I would continue to hear about stress. A member of the counseling faculty thought that no less than 99% of the faculty were stressed as an ordinary condition. Toward the end of the school year, all faculty received this e-mail: "plans for tonight: pizza for those who want it; Sarah leading a discussion on stress; we'll be in the West Campus Dining Hall, 7:00 p.m.; Come if you feel like you need a big hug!!" Stress was too frequently mentioned for me not to incorporate it into my list of words to which I invited reaction: "Is stress part of the job? I asked. "Extremely. When I am around some of the other people, I think, 'ah ha, I'm not the only one.' I can see it in people's faces."

The culture of success, as some faculty see it, would persist at one level because of the teachers' pride, their great ability, and their commitment to their work.

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