Having a Career as a Career Studies Teacher -- by Anne Shier

Imagine that you’ve been trained and have worked arduously in industry as a technical systems analyst on large computer systems and that you are also qualified as a computer science and computer engineering teacher in a high school. In other words, you’re more than capable of teaching any computer-related subject, particularly at the senior level.

Now, imagine that instead of being given teaching assignments that involve computer science or computer engineering as you’d like, you are now being asked by the principal or a vice principal to teach the easiest course being offered at a high school anywhere—career studies—to a Grade 10 class. This person (a VP) tells you it is merely a “stop gap” in your teaching career, for only one year. She says there is no one else available to teach this subject. But what she really means is, “No one else in this school wants this teaching assignment; it’s just too easy, so now it’s yours.” You have no idea what to make of this new teaching assignment. All you know is that all of your elaborate training to be a computer science and computer engineering teacher of the senior grades is being totally wasted, and the administration doesn’t seem to care.

You try to accept the inevitable and ask yourself, Why not? What’s the harm in doing something different from what I usually do in terms of teaching? It just might turn out to be a terrific experience!

So you tell them you will accept this new teaching assignment temporarily (even though, in your mind, you know you’re being used for something no one else wants and that you are now very under-employed!). You wonder, Well, it could be a really fun assignment, but will anyone in this school ever take me seriously again as a computer science and computer engineering teacher?

As if that isn’t bad enough, the nightmare you never anticipated actually happens! That year (during the first time you ever taught career studies in your life), you are put on the list of teachers who are to be evaluated by the principal or one of the vice principals. The evaluation is to be done via a new legislative process called the Teacher Performance Appraisal (TPA)—not that teacher performance appraisals are anything new, mind you.

This new document, drawn up by the current Tory government in Ontario, is at least 100 pages long and is much more complicated than any previous process of appraising teachers. The evaluation process used to be simpler, more straightforward—something principals could carry out in a day or two. Now the whole process could potentially take months. So something you have known in the past to go smoothly and seamlessly turns out to be anything but. It’s not even your boss’s fault or the fault of anyone who is an administrator working in the school system. The government just wanted to come up with a way to “prove” that many teachers are incompetent, and if that fact could be “proved” by re-legislating the process and then carrying out its mandates, that would be deemed “just cause” for getting rid of teachers the government had long ago decided were “overpaid and under-worked.” It was a totally unfair thing to happen to teachers at that time, but it did happen as a result of the new TPA to some unfortunate teachers somewhere.

Now you are part of a process that turns your days and nights upside down in complete turmoil and causes you to truly wonder if you are, indeed, “teacher” material. You carefully prepare and deliver your chosen career studies lesson (the one to be observed and evaluated). You think it’s a pretty good lesson that involves the whole class in interactive and participatory activities, as it should. Then, just as you think you’ve got this whole new process licked and you should pass with flying colours, you get the bad news—that the evaluator, a middle-aged female VP who has an agenda all her own—declares that the students were not “engaged” in the learning process in your classroom at all, in her mind—that only some of the students were involved in said activities. In her mind, most of them acted bored and didn’t appear to want to be there. Well, that’s no surprise, you think, most of them don’t want to be there, in fact, and are bored as a result. Is that my fault? Kids in Grade 10, with few exceptions, do not tend to like career studies.

Later, in the privacy of her office, this same VP tells you her rating of you on your lesson is “less than satisfactory”! At the same time, she also tells you a certain number of unidentified students had previously already complained about your career studies class. She refuses to tell you who these students are or how many complained.

You ask her, “How come I didn’t hear about any of this before being evaluated by you?”

But she has no good answer for you. From there, the process goes from bad to worse. You tell her she is “full of sh*t” and that you are very upset with her assessment of your teaching ability. (As a matter of fact, you are truly upset, but you try your best to hold on to your temper, knowing that losing it will not help your cause.) You tell her, before leaving her office, that you will get the school’s union representative involved.

When you talk to Michelle, the union representative for the school, she tells you that she will monitor the situation between you and the VP, making sure the TPA process is being followed properly. She tells you that as long as the VP has followed legal procedure, she can’t do anything else for you.

Later, when you get the “post-mortem” (post-observation) reports from the VP, you show them to Michelle. The reports are all negative. Nothing positive is said about you, even though you have done good things for the school and for the board. Any positive contributions you have made up until that moment are being ignored.

At this point, you start to wonder, Am I being “railroaded” or simply losing my mind?

Michelle sympathizes with you, saying that that particular VP has been “on some other planet” in her dealings with other teachers and that every single thing she says must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Perhaps she feels she has something to prove. The news on the teaching grapevine is that she ended up at this school after many transfers, wherein the superintendent (or someone else at that level) said that, at this school, this particular VP should now be safely “out of harm’s way.” After all, what could go wrong at this school? It usually has such great students and staff. Surely this VP could not do any more harm here than she’d already done elsewhere? But the superintendent was so wrong—oh, how wrong he was!

In your last meeting with this VP, you were to discuss a draft improvement plan (part of the legislation’s requirements) where you were to provide your own input. You give her a list of 26 of your own ideas for how to improve as a teacher. You ask the VP (and the union rep., who was also present) whether anything should be removed from the list, but both parties agree with all the stated items. There is nothing on that list that would not have added variety and “zing” to your career studies classes.

Shortly after that last meeting, you get a call from one of the more senior male VPs in your school, a much more reasonable and seasoned person who actually talks to you like you’re a teacher and person who deserves respect—something that was sadly lacking in your dialogues with the first VP. You start to feel good for the first time in months!

He not only offers to re-evaluate you in the coming three months but also offers you a chance to teach a more fun course—marketing—in the near future, despite the fact that you’d never taught marketing before either. But that doesn’t bother you. In fact, teaching new courses never bothered you before, only the people (administrators) who deem themselves “experts” in teaching methodology simply because they were previously teachers for five or so years in the past! So the fact that you still have to teach career studies this term and next doesn’t bother you much at all anymore. After all, it isn’t the course or even those kids who complained that bother you—just that pesky female VP who just didn’t seem to know when to quit harassing you.

Anyway, due to knowing the “CYA” (“Cover Your Ass”) Rule—the cardinal rule of business—you had started documenting everything right after you found out about your unsatisfactory rating from the first VP. Hopefully the union would be willing and able to fight for you if the necessity arose, but it may not have been necessary. This new VP looks like he actually cares about what the outcome of his evaluations will be. He appears to want to make the process as fair and impartial as possible, and you find that you can’t really ask for anything more than that. This time, your evaluation will be a good one, or at least satisfactory, and that has to be good enough for now. Thank God for good and competent school administrators who know what they’re doing and want to do a good job for hardworking teachers like you!

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA