Teaching from the Deep End by Belmonte Dominic V.;

Author:Belmonte, Dominic V.; [Belmonte, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1994157
Publisher: Corwin Press
Published: 2009-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Dealing With School Hierarchy and Politics

You get your first assignment, and your focus is on the necessary and mundane. You practice the drive to the school to check traffic conditions so you never arrive late. You purchase sufficient materials to make your room attractive and inviting. Once in the building, you memorize routes and routines so you can fit in as seamlessly as possible. You stare inside your classroom at the space and imagine your career unfolding. These are all necessary parts of the acclimation phase of your first couple years, but there is one element frequently overlooked that could adversely affect that initial time. New teachers must realize that their impact on the school goes beyond what occurs within their classrooms. New teachers enter a school, a place that is a learning environment, of course, but is also a political environment, one in which the rules of engagement are subtly drawn and visible to the perceptive and reflective, and those who do not exert effort understanding the machinations of a school will ultimately be drawn into its adverse elements.

Your first thought is that the political study of a school is anathema to your reason for entering it. It's supposed to be all about the children, and if everyone within the school are also all about the children, then that force will dominate policy and procedure and those enforcing policy and establishing procedure will certainly act as if of one mind, a community that interacts with altruism and civility. It does not take too long for the perceptive person to note that the school, like every work place, operates under the mission, but those inside interpret it in such sundry ways there'll be days when you wonder how the doors get open at all. Remember in school environments power is truly in the hands of the few, so many within the building manufacture power out of sheer air and bravura, on the basis of proximity or tenure. Who holds the keys, not the metaphoric ones, I mean the actual keys, presumes authority. So in trying to go about in your gosh-I'm-glad-to-be-here first-year teacher way, you may unwittingly find yourself within the cross hairs of those whose seeming existence is focused on the maintenance or demonstration of the pseudo-authority they have created.

How can you detect such actions? Use your powers of observing your students to determine how best to meet their needs and train those powers on the adults with whom you interact throughout the course of the day. Administrative assistants, custodial staff, coaches, librarians, receptionists, assistant principals—each of the office holders within a school has arrived at their positions with some exercise of political acumen. The sensitive should note its elements. Who has the thin skin, who curries favor with the principal, who gabs about the new teachers or students—sometimes right to their face? Which person likes to flaunt their responsibility by cowering others? Who has control over a space—and woe betide those who attempt to use, occupy, store

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