Alpha Bitch for [office of your choice]

During the first few years of my teaching career, I carpooled with a fellow English teacher whose schedule matched mine since she stayed at school late to coach volleyball and I was there to work with the newspaper and yearbook staffs.

One evening as we drove home after dark, we laughed about the fact that the majority of our students seemed to think we were some sort of robots that somebody ran around and plugged it just before 8 o'clock every morning and unplugged sometime around 3:30 in the afternoons. At least, that was the best explanation we could come up for with our students' surprised looks if they happened to see us in a grocery store or mall outside of school hours; it seemed never to occur to them that we had lives outside our classrooms.

Those same students appear to be the elected officials who are accusing classroom teachers of draining state treasuries and causing the mounting debts every state and, indeed, the nation are facing. My own state has recently proffered plans to reduce teacher salaries, implement "furloughs" (which is French, I guess, for layoffs without pay), and other steps to reduce this huge and terrible expenditure for education. In our state, the future looks bright: Barbara Bush herself has published at least one editorial that notes that by some measure (or more) we already rank 49 out of 50 states, and with a few deft tweaks, I'm pretty sure we can make it right on down to 50 on several.

I'm pretty sure the reason our state hasn't started a stink about busting teacher unions is that we don't have them, and I haven't heard our legislators say—yet—that teachers have "cushy" jobs because they only have to work from 8:30 to 3. The ones who say that, of course, are the ones my friend and I were laughing about; I'm pretty sure we never dreamed they would be making such short-sighted but damaging decisions.

I don't know that I've heard any legislator anywhere acknowledge that the only way anyone can enter this profession is with at least one college degree, and I don't hear any of them suggesting that their reduction plans will help the younger ones pay off their college loans.

Alpha Bitch seems to know better. I have had a serious student overload with insufficient or insufficiently qualified teaching assistants for the past four semesters. What that has meant is that my day normally starts between 6:30 and 7 in the morning with grading papers until noon or so, when I hop in a shower and dress to go to my offices so I can prepare for a teach class, counsel students, and handle the "administrative" parts of my jobs—all of which typically takes me until 6 or later at night. Weekends are not much different from weekdays except that I don't go to the office, but often my Saturdays and Sunday mornings are consumed by grading time.

That doesn't include time to keep up with changes in theory, technology, or other factors that affect my ability to be a good teacher; those fall into the "after 6" time frame, when I can relax at home with my laptop and download and read relevant literature through the university library and occasionally participate in online meetings for like-thinking souls.

Of course, I have the relative luxury of grading at home because I'm a university instructor. When the kids were small and I taught in public schools, I was determined not to take home anything I didn't have to so I could have some time with my children. I discovered that if I planned very carefully, I could get to school on time at 7:30 a.m., work straight through until 5, and make it back to the day care before closing time. That gave me a few evening hours before their bedtime to spend with the kids, and usually I could finish up last-minute tasks after I tucked them in.

That wasn't a perfect plan, of course. Since I taught English, I had to make exceptions from time to time to take home major writing projects or exams to grade, and except for the "faculty improvement" sessions on student holidays and the required continuing education courses I took during the summer, I had no time in my schedule to keep up with changes in anything, so 12 years into my career I was still teaching pretty much the same way my teachers had taught me 20 years before. I think I was a pretty good teacher; I think that if I had had time to continue to learn as well as to teach, I'd have been even better. But keeping my commitment to "close to 9 to 5" was hard enough without the additional effort of my own education.





At any rate, Alpha Bitch seems to understand something about what it's like to be a teacher. I got up this morning with my usual pile of papers to grade and settled into my easy chair, but AB set up a whine to go outside. I let her out and left the door open when I went back in, but she followed me and set up the whine again. I decided I could give up a couple of minutes on a Saturday morning to play fetch with her, so I picked up our ball chunker to toss it for her.

After a couple of tosses, AB caught the ball and took it back into the house, watching to see if I was following. When I got back to my chair, she started to whine again. Frustrated, I picked up my papers and pencil and followed her back out. She led me over to my favorite patio chair and lay down at its foot.

I think she knew that I needed to be grading, but she also knew I deserved to enjoy the spring weather.

Now if she could just get that across to the legislators.....