Opening day is one of the three worst days of the school year for a principal. Imagine if you will twelve hundred students who are collectively ambivalent about school, a hundred anxiety-ridden teachers, and if you are in Chicago, twenty of them are rookies; perhaps a dozen school buses driven by nameless people whose only qualification is that they can pass a drug test, and a goofy array of parents, many of whom do not speak your language, all descending on you at one time. That is what the first day of school looks like to a principal. Every possible question from where is the chalk to why isn’t first period basket weaving class covered, is coming your way.
You’ve spent the latter half of the summer preparing individualized student schedules, at least a third of which are wrong, hiring new teachers at the last minute because the ones that left were hired by higher-paying school districts in their last moments; repopulating rooms with desks, computers, and stuff that was removed so that the janitorial crew from GITMO could thoroughly clean them; and registering students new to the neighborhood, some of whom present false paperwork because the school in their community is worse than yours. Oh, by the way, the first home game is tomorrow night and the lights on the football field aren’t working.
This describes an average, ordinary, garden-variety school opening. My personal worst was day one at Roosevelt Elementary in Bellwood. Just as I walked up to unlock the school’s door at the very early hour of 6:30 AM, the bloody water main in the middle of the street burst. It stayed ‘burst’ all day. Roosevelt, since renamed Thurgood Marshall, was totally without running water for sinks or toilets. I was forced to work out a bussing plan to get my K-6 kids to the restroom throughout the day. It was my very first day as a principal of any school.
The last thing I needed then, or any principal needed Tuesday, was a Presidential speech controversy. Can you also imagine how many parent phone calls principals and real superintendents must have fielded over the last week? It wasn’t enough that parents were holding the principal under siege to get privileged scheduling or the best teacher assignments or special intervention with the coach of one of the autumn sports, nooooooo. This year, the principal also had to explain President Obama’s innermost intentions and covert motivations. There must have been parents on both sides of the issue, which means the poor slob principal likely made a whole new portfolio of enemies as he or she was caught in the middle of the needless political controversy.
It was no bed of roses for teachers either. Establishing class control is an essential day-one task; so is presenting the syllabus or setting an academic tone. How do you do that with a presidential address breaking into your private time with new children and dominating the landscape? Furthermore, given the complete variation in school scheduling across the nation, did Obama’s speech come at the beginning, end, middle, or during normal passing times? Did it interfere with the lunch schedule and force some teachers to hold kids and lose lunch time or prep period time contrary to union contract? Were classrooms all completely set up with televisions on the very first day of school? I betcha the GITMO crew appreciated that added requirement. If televsions weren't universally available, that translates to a school-wide assembly of hundreds of youngsters under the supervision of teachers who cannot yet identify them. Nice.
Students love drama. The clever and theatrical ones certainly used the occasion to generate a little late summer tension and distract the teacher from more mundane tasks. And how many of our educators were able to keep their personal politics from showing in the glare of this foolishness? If you had an opinion one way or another, your bias showed, and since Obama is more of a black guy than any other description, did old-fashioned racism get injected into places where it wasn’t before all of this transpired?
Educationally, this was a debacle. National Nice Guy and U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is, at the lowest level of interpretation, Obama’s education advisor. Duncan was wrong and ‘misspoke’ in declaring Obama’s speech as unprecedented because George Bush 41 and Ronald Reagan also addressed school children. Duncan was inept in suggesting a Pyongyang- style lesson plan inextricable linked to the president’s person instead of the nation’s welfare. When I was in high school, JFK challenged us to ask what we could do for our country, not what we could do for him. Duncan was disingenuously crude in changing the DOE website lesson plan in the vain hope that no one would notice, and then Arne looked like an Arne Duncan in telling the country that we were silly to object to the speech. If he truly believed that, why did he change the lesson plan after it began to take fire?
Worst of all, Duncan made the first day of school across the nation for nearly 100,000 public schools much more difficult than it had to be for the very people he is supposed to be helping: educators, students, and parents. Why? Because this man does not have any idea of how schools work. He has never taught a public school classroom, and he surely has not taken on the gargantuan task of running a school. Yet there are those of you out there completely willing to believe that he reformed Chicago Public Schools. Clearly he failed to provide the President with simple, useful advice in the area of his alleged expertise. Sure give a speech Barack, if you must, but not on the first day of school.
Oh, the other two bad days for a principal. The last day of school, and the day you get fired so the district can establish an Arne Duncan charter school. Madness.
Comments
THIS IS THE BEST PIECE I'VE READ YET ON THIS WHOLE ESCAPADE!!!
GREAT WORK!
"Pyongyang- style lesson"
You're joking, right? The lesson plan was designed to encourage to work with the President's speech and reinforce the idea that -gasp!- hard work and education are important. God Forbid we teach our kids such things.
I'm surprised you don't realize that not all schools had their first day yesterday. Nevertheless, this stupid "controversy" was never about timing or teachers losing control of students because they couldn't crack the whip while the President was addressing them. It was about people who can't stand that Obama is President doing everything and anything to disrupt his attempts to lead the nation. Sadly, their tools of choice seem to be lying, whining, and falling on the floor holding their breath until their faces turn blue. Now that's a great lesson for school children: when you lose fair and square, the right thing to do is pout and scream.
Cynicism, heartlessness, ignorance, stupidity, and boring geekism; just a few reasons I am not a Republican.
Get a life. The man gave a simple, goals focused speech to school kids. An excellent first day event. Unfortunately, many schools started a couple of weeks ago. It's hard to take Obama critics seriously when they find fault with stuff like this. You need to write about something else for awhile, maybe baseball.
I teach in one of those schools that doesn't have cable access in the classrooms. Only a few students were able to watch and even then it interfered with lunch and passing time. Many of us were unable to watch the speech. My own children attend a school that has a tv and cable access in every classroom across the district,however neither of my girls was allowed to watch the president's speech as the scheduling did not fit into either of their classrooms schedules. I believe for my oldest it was passing time and maybe even lunch for a 1/3 of the students.
Was the speech a good idea, Yes. However I think that the timing was bad.
Lets do this again, but this time make sure that all schools across the nation have the technology available to show the speech to the students and some way of making sure that it fits in with each school systems schedules.
Great article. Anyone who doesn't think that Obama's speech was changed due to parental input is fooling themselves. Come on, Obama supporters, you didn't elect a dummy, did you?
Parents need to be their child's first educator and be on top of what is happening in the schools.
Your point about serving HIM and not the country is one I hadn't thought about before.
Oh puh-lease. It's your job as a Prinipal to motivate your students to embrace their education. I wonder why you are now so ungrateful that Obama has actually fulfilled this task FOR YOU and made an effort to inspire students everywhere to take responsibility for their learning. If I were you, I would have done my best to ensure that all students had the chance to catch the speech and change their attitudes towards education, even if it meant disrupting the regular timetables or inconveniencing your staff members. After all, isn't the education of our future generation more important than one "bad day" for a Principal? Like you said, the message is supposed to be what the students can do for their country - not what they can do to make their Principal's life easier.
Wow, you're right (that's not an expression of surprise, I'm addressing the commenter named "Wow.") that not all schools had their first day yesterday. My kids have been in school for two weeks now.
However, it was President Obama's stated intention to time his speech for the first day of school; if he didn't give it on the first day in some places, that was not by his design.
"It takes a village". Never quite sure if we're talking village people or village idiots here. The wonderful part, setting aside the timing issue, is that there was a great deal more interest generated in the message that the President presented to the students than in past first-day speeches by presidents. As a teacher I don't even recall turning on the TV for those speeches! This was a memorable day, as well as historic in nature,and message.
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