Blogging The Portfolio

Believe it or not, I do a fair amount of pre-writing not designed to make it onto this blog.

You are about to be gifted with nothing but a portion of pre-writing.

Here's why: It has been so ordained by God. Okay, more likely, by Blogger.

I got up at 5 am and for some reason, felt able to write. It has been a while since I really wanted nothing but to create a narrative born of my imagination and experiences. All day, I have enjoyed the process, felt very alive. I slammed down pain pills with some Diet Coke, munched on good bread and butter, and wrote with an amazing facility.

Twelve hours later, I was ready for a formal pause. I had been carefully saving my draft all day long, having known the heartbreak of losing compositions on the computer. Yes, I was saving it on Blogger, not a separate non-internet-based program; Why ever do you ask?

I have been struggling to write a cohesive post based on my teaching Portfolio. It matters. I managed to write something a few weeks back and slapped the portfolio label on it, but knew I had not produced the piece that has been germinating in me for years now. Today was the day.

Some of you may be able to write easily, and without suffering much pain. I hate it, except when in the middle of it. In 12 hours, I wrote what may have amounted to 2 pages, and that was before I had unleashed any editing on the mess. A good portion of time dedicated to writing, I spend reading. Today, I read most of Louisa May Alcott's Little Men, several essays by Fredric Jameson, a delightful piece in the London Review of Books by Benjamin Kunkel, "Into the Big Tent." I scoped out a fair bit of information about Wellesley College. Why, you will never know!

I even investigated how to blow up a tank and spent at least an hour deconstructing one paragraph of a friend's monthly newsletter -- the writing that resulted turned out to be the heart of my new Portfolio piece.

So, when I decided to let what I had done sit for a half-hour or so, I pushed "save now," and got ready to go see how Fred was doing (he slipped and fell on the drawbridge this morning).

Everything I had written was gone.

What remained was the piece of pre-writing that I had started back in December 2009. The same little bit that was there at 5 this morning, meant to serve me as touchstone and mental guide.

I think I may most regret losing the couple of good sentences about immigration reform, and the telling of my best friend's story. Maybe I am being punished for telling someone else's story with an intimacy that I have not earned.

I don't think you were meant to ever see anything else, Dear Reader. It would not be too hard to reproduce the several pages that are gone... but I really feel like the message has been clearly given that the post I want to write was not meant to be.

I was trained and educated to teach at the university level. After 17 years of doing that, my health "failed" and I had to take a few years off from working.

During that time, a few tardy revelations set in, such as: the abysmal state of my benefits package and the growing tendency for universities and colleges to amass "adjuncts" and "visiting" profs as slave labor, essentially paying only a "per class," very flat rate.

When I began to miss the classroom, I approximated the experience by taking on private students as a tutor. It's easy to build a base of regulars, from which then are generated interesting referrals by word of mouth. Another element to my success may have been that I undercut the "going rate" in an "international city," where language tutors are a dime a dozen. (Even so, I also often knew the joy of being stiffed.)

A typical tutoring day might include:

*conversational work with Ben, a retired FBI agent -- and his wife, although she never paid a penny, just sat on my sofa cribbing vocabulary and lists of faux amis, whispering, in a dramatic sotto voce, her répétitions. To their credit, they did invite me and Fred for a memorable dinner at their home, where Ben regaled us with stories of derring-do, including a few having to do with Ruby Ridge. True, most people wouldn't brag about being part of that debacle, but Mrs. Ben allotted Special Agent Ben a little wine with his Ossobuco alla milanese.

*efforts at a miracle with Rhonda, who needed to pass her summer school course at the state university, a course she had already managed to take twice without registering a passing grade. With Rhonda, I came close to endorsing cheating. Unlike Special Agent Ben's proclivity for wine with a fine meal, Rhonda invariably showed up clutching a six-pack of beer in one hand, and her lover Catherine in the firm grip of her other. Actually, I confess: We did cheat, as she ended up passing by virtue of writing incredibly gifted essays that were, happily for us, overweighted in the grade computation. Rhonda composed quite ably, even admirably, in English, and provided me with vocabulary to be highlighted from whatever unit her class was covering that week. I then wrote some appropriate stuff in French, a language whose most basic words she could not even pronounce, a culture she could only ridicule. It was an interesting exercise for me, as normally I insist on avoiding translation, but knew that her prof expected her to rely on English paradigms. In one of our most exciting meetings, I stayed in my apartment, penning what we hoped would be a believable effort at composition, and guarding the cerveza, while Catherine and Rhonda rescued a dog from ill treatment one apartment building away. The creepy woman who "owned" the poor thing dedicated her creepy self to creeping me out for the rest of my stay at that address, but it was worth it to have freed the dog, who was kept chained on a fire escape, a solution that Creepy Woman apparently felt was both inspired and hygienic. The poor little guy was out of luck should he tip over his small dish of water. Those girls done good.

Sadly, though, not long after Catherine's teenage son died in a car accident, I lost touch with them -- it was one of those I-don't-know-what-to-say-or-how-to-act situations that only get worse with time. How do you explain, two or three years later, that you have held them close in your heart, when they've not heard an actual peep from you?

[I am famous for infuriating Straight-Laced Administrators by telling all my students that French is not important.]

*plain old hard work with John, a 9-year-old boy, whom I usually tutored from my church, where I headed an embarrassing do-gooder effort at establishing a school for our homeless guests (that sanctuary was never a wasted space, serving as a bedroom to a couple of dozen homeless men, except for the few hours a week we used it for traditional worship). John was an excellent student, a sponge, inquisitive. It was never clear to me why he was being pushed into studying French, but that meant figuring out John's Mother, which was something entirely beyond me. She brought him early and came late to pick him up. Okay, so she wanted a little extra instruction for her money. Uh-huh, that might fly were her checks clearing the bank! Week after week, I was strung along with a bit of cash, a bad check, lots of totally believable excuses. She was a single Mom with exacting standards for her privately schooled children -- three young boys, all enrolled in a Bible-based elementary school.

It pained me to have to say that dropping off a 9-year-old young one when the only people around were 30 or so homeless men suffering from a variety of ailments, as well as sometimes being under the influence of drugs and alcohol, was not the greatest of ideas. So, of course, I started heading over to the church an hour early. And staying an hour late. It got to the point where we were feeding John dinner there, too. In short order, he became a mascot of sorts, and forged some meaningful relationships with a few guests -- men who had children of their own, and missed them.

So John became a little French ace -- and the most overscheduled lad in a 50-mile perimeter -- whereas I was essentially working 10-15 hours a week as an unpaid tutor (I mean, babysitter). It had to end badly, and it did. When I insisted on being brought up to date monetarily, Mom was more than slightly bitchy. And "bitchy" does not begin to do justice to her mood and behavior when I introduced the novel idea of paying cash upfront. She pretty much attempted to drop the kid off from a speeding car.

Ultimately? She said that I was prejudiced and that my new requirements for payment amounted to -- and I quote -- "racial profiling."

The guys and I really missed John. I would love to know what he is up to now... mumblemumble years later. I am sure he's turned out to be a source of pride for his mother -- whether or not he ever speaks French. I am equally sure that he is emotionally handicapped by the weight of her expectations and the example of how she deals with others.

As I got stronger physically, the lure of the classroom grew. The university job market where we were living was glutted, at least in terms of foreign languages and literatures and, frankly, the universities themselves were not so alluring. Relocating again -- for the sake of a non-tenured position -- was too daunting a proposal, however.

Truth be told, I interviewed at a state university that has an excellent French Studies Department and was offered a job... but decided that I wasn't able to sustain as crazy a schedule as I had before getting sick. More truth be told? The guy hiring me was kinda creepy, and too good a friend with a mutual acquaintance. How's that for sounding vague, paranoid, and conspiratorial?

I needed piece work.

One of my private students said, "Madame, why don't you do some substitute teaching?"'

And so began a very interesting period in my life!

It's crazy, it's nuts -- substitute teaching! I shared a few of the most memorable experiences previously, here. Subbing was exactly what I needed at that time. I could take jobs whenever I was able and pretty much invest as much of myself in the assignment as I wished. Yes, pity the poor students who were anticipating an easy day of heads-on-desks and worksheets-for-the-braindead. Poor things didn't know my opinions on things like the work ethic or proper behavior; They surely didn't foresee a stranger taking an interest in their academics, or their lives.

Once I got the hang of things, I began experimenting with teaching at different levels, different ages, different areas of the city, and different school styles (like magnet and academies, block scheduling and year-round instruction). For the privilege, I received about $100 a day. I had over 15 years experience, several degrees in my field, and I made the same as the person with nothing but a high school diploma. At the time, I bought into the revolutionary notion that "work was work," and it felt fair. Now, I roll my eyes violently back in my head.

Transportation was my biggest issue, it turned out. I was rapidly losing the ability to walk, couldn't drive, and needed several hours to get to most of the schools using metro mass transit. In the beginning, I used a walking stick. Then I graduated to a cane. Toward the end of that year, I sometimes needed a wheelchair/scooter. It was clear that working imperiled my health. It was also clear that NOT working would drive me, and my loved ones, totally ape-shit batty.

So I can only explain applying for a fulltime job with this urban public school system as being the result of obvious insanity.

I jumped through the various hoops required of job applicants to teacher positions. Although I said I was open to teaching any age group, that was just a brave lie. I only had experience with adults (or pseudo-adults!). I did not know how to negotiate with my students' relatives or guardians -- outside of those university students who had been so self-important as to query "Do you know who I am?" -- and whose celebrity parent would then condescend to telephone...

I paid the money to be tested and retested, fingerprinted and evaluated. It turned out that I was hot stuff. That being the case? If I were a parent of a child in that system? I would be very worried about the quality of instruction! I ended up working with teachers whose scores on testing of their subject knowledge were abysmal. There were foreign language teachers who couldn't carry on a basic conversation in the target language, who were terrified of fielding questions, yet who had earned "education degrees," often graduating with honors. They could discuss ideas about "classroom management" and "assessment modalities," but they could not teach their subject with anything close to proficiency.

As with all such moralizing statements, there were a good number of exceptions. The problem there was that these exceptional teachers were merely passing through. Some of the women were teaching a few years before starting a family. Other folks were working on graduate degrees, with an eye toward teaching at university. Most, though? Most simply burned out, overwhelmed by the apparent infinity of renewable problems.

Scary stuff, scary stuff, the state of public education.

I lucked out and was offered a position at a high school that had some really fine things going on: the international baccalaureat degree program and two magnet programs (performing arts and business).

The high school was situated in one of the wealthiest sectors of the city. Most of our students arrived by bus from less advantaged metro areas.

Just getting back and forth from school to home was a major part of my day, and the process quickly sapped my energy.

The first year, I would walk, limp, or wheelchair my way from the house over to the homeless shelter (where I continued to work, feeling called to it), where they allowed me to hitch a ride on the church bus with the men. The bus left at 6 am. I was dropped off at the closest metro station, from which I began the hour and a half trek to school. This entailed changing lines twice more, and ended with another bus ride. The school day ended at 15:35 but I couldn't leave until at least 17:00. By then, I was usually in pretty bad shape, as my chronic heart failure was badly out of control, and the avascular necrosis that was destroying my bones had kicked in way more than anyone realized. Not home until 19:30 or 20:00, I often simply went right to bed.

Fred was not a happy camper in those days!

After the first year, I hired someone to drive me in the mornings and tried to beg rides in the afternoon. Things went well until a student managed to break my hip. That's a whole story in and of itself, but we will let it pass into oblivion for the moment.

I don't belabor these transportation difficulties for sympathy -- although the story of being run off the road in my wheelchair, tipping over and falling into the adjacent ditch begs for telling -- but I do recount them to help you get a grip on the huge investment of *time* necessary to the job.

The time between 08:15 and 15:35 passed quickly, was fun, challenging, and highly rewarding.

During the journey home in the evening, I tried to formalize the rest of the lesson plans for the week, maybe jot down test/essay questions and even do some grading (difficult in moving vehicles!).

After scarfing down a dinner that often consisted of nasty canned things and pasta, over which I would melt something, I dealt with contacting parents/guardians, touching base with certain students who were having a hard time, and trying to catch up with grading.

Memory can be a gentle taskmaster because I cannot recall how I managed to also attend the ridiculous classes that the school system said I needed in order to have a qualified certificate -- including show-stoppers like: How to write a grant; Classroom management; Technology in the classroom, etc. Somewhere in there, I also entered a second doctoral program. It was such a hot new program, in fact, that I was their entire first class. Given my lack of fellow graduate students, the administration decided that I should first tackle my elective credits -- the following year, they would institute their core coursework. That should have been a sign unto me that the thing was destined to go nowhere. Instead, I took two grad level courses per quarter. My mind has almost wiped out the recollection of Fred's anger, my swollen body and drowning lungs, and the months without more than a few hours sleep a night.

The short version of life: The last years I worked as a teacher, I taught French (and some Latin) at the high school level.

The longer version can best be told with the aid of a remarkable document that I prepared as part of my evaluation for the local public school system. The administration was experimenting with new ways to gauge the qualities of their employees. For reasons that would shock my old vice-principals and that would make the eyes of my erstwhile bosses bug out of their sockets, I have come to cherish the scrapbook, the snapshot, the time-capsule of my life at that era.

Yes, they instituted The Portfolio.