Feliz Navidad, Happy New Year, and Happy Hanukah to you all. Once again, my good intentions to send out an actual Christmas letter have been thwarted by circumstances and my own desperate attempts to keep my head above water, so this will have to do.

First off, I want to say both “Thank You” and “I’m Sorry” to anyone of those especially loyal friends who have tried to get in touch with me over the past six months. For reasons that I’ll go into below, I’ve basically been off the grid. (Last night, I finally got caught up on my personal email for the first time since September, and I hadn’t checked my Facebook in even longer. All that to say, I promise I am not deliberately ignoring anyone.)

Picking up where I left off: last June, after a wonderful-but-very-busy six months of teaching Spanish at Bellevue Christian (for me) and a not-so-wonderful-and-also-very-busy year of working at Starbucks and waiting to hear back from Occupational Therapy school, Jenn got a call from the University of Puget Sound informing her that her waitlisted application had been (finally) accepted. Since OT was the whole reason that we moved up here in the first place, and since we didn’t want to do the “commuter couple” thing whereby we would only see each other on weekends, I resigned my post at Bellevue and started house-hunting in Tacoma. In late July, we found a lovely top-story duplex unit within walking distance of UPS (which, in this case, refers to “University of Puget Sound,” not “United Parcel Service”) which was larger, newer, and cost over $100 less a month than our apartment in Seattle. While we definitely miss the coziness of our first home together, and particularly miss the proximity to friends and family that our Seattle location afforded, this place has been good to us.

We moved in on August 8^th. From then on, we hit the ground running and have not really stopped.

The week after we moved in, I had a job interview for a position teaching Spanish at Tacoma public schools. Apparently, this is a great time to get into teaching. From what I’ve seen and experienced, there is a substantial teacher shortage: when the financial crisis hit in 2009, lots of teachers who had had their savings substantially reduced put off retirement. This meant that any newly-minted teachers found getting a job extremely difficult; I knew several people who graduated from college with their teaching credential about this time who had to spend a year or two as a substitute before finally getting a full-time placement. Now, however, the pendulum has swung to the other side: those same teachers are retiring faster than replacements can be recruited, and consequently, there are opportunities even for uncertified folks (like yours truly) to try our hand in the public school classroom under an “emergency certification”. (Spoiler alert: the word “emergency” in this phrase should feel a bit like ominous foreshadowing).

 Moral of the story: the week after we moved in, I got a job interview teaching Spanish at Washington High School: a low-income school in south Tacoma that is, according to the staff orientation that I received after starting, the seventh-most-diverse high school in the USA (!). A few days after the interview, I was hired. The next week, I started job training. The week after that, I was in the classroom. Ever since then, feeling like a hobo trying to catch a runaway train, I’ve been desperately trying to get on board and stay on board.

My foray into teaching in the public schools has been an interesting contrast to my experience at a private school. The first contrast (and the only positive one that I can think of) is the pay. As much as teachers have a reputation for being overworked and underpaid, it is an amazing feeling to be able to make as much as Jenn and I made combined last year, while working only a few more hours a week than I was at Bellevue. (Like I said, I worked an average of 14-hour days on the days that I went in, and did substantial amounts of lesson planning on the days that I didn’t, so my “half time” job at Bellevue wound up being more like time-and-a-half, except without the extra pay). As much as I know that people don’t generally go into teaching for the paycheck, it certainly is nice.

That’s the good news. The bad news is…everything else. (Disclaimer: the following represents my extremely subjective, cynical, and more-than-a-little-melodramatic take on the state of public education, so please take it with a substantial grain of salt).

The first contrast that I noticed was the amount of time and energy that public school teachers must expend on bureaucratic hoop-jumping. In a private school, although they must maintain a certain level of performance in order to keep accreditation, they are largely free to do the administration of their school in-house, and consequently, teachers have a tremendous amount of flexibility. At Bellevue, my orientation consisted of sitting in with the previous teacher for a few weeks in her classroom, and my evaluation consisted of a few informal principal drop-ins throughout the year and one formal “evaluation”. For the most part, though, I was free to find a teaching style that worked for me and my students and implement it. However, in public education, there are an overlapping series of bureaucratic entities, from the building administration, to the district administration, to the local union and ESD (“Educational Service District”), to the state government and state union (the WEA), to the national union and national government (the NEA). In order to justify their existence (and continued support by tax dollars), each of these organizations must make their own contributions to the great edifice of public education. And, since anything sounds more important and arcane if no-one outside the inner ring can understand it, these contributions tend to take the form of three-letter acronyms. There is a veritable alphabet soup of three-letter acronyms with which public school employees must familiarize themselves in order to navigate the labyrinthine warrens of the educational-industrial complex. There are, of course, the standardized tests with which everyone is probably familiar (the SAT, ACT, PSAT, etc.) Then, there are the less-familiar standardized tests (the now-defunct WaSL, for example), the various educational associations in which we are obligated to participate (the NEA, WEA, FPESD), the evaluation that teachers themselves must go through (TPEP), the continued trainings that we must get in order to maintain certification (ProDev and eVal, then an ARC, then either NBC or ProCert), the various educational philosophy acronyms that we are required to incorporate into the classroom (SIOP, PATS, CHAMPS, STIG, SBG, ODRs, etc.), and many more that my tired brain can’t recall at the moment. What’s more, these requirements and philosophies (and of course the acronyms that go with them) change from year to year, so that even my fellow teachers are often at a loss if I ask them what I am supposed to do to complete some particular requirement. The effect of this for me was to leave me feeling so overwhelmed with everything else that I was supposed to be remembering as to have little energy or motivation left for actually teaching.

The second contrast that I’ve encountered is (predictably) that of the student population. At Bellevue (home of Bill Gates and Microsoft, and consequently, one of the richest neighborhoods in the world), my students were almost uniformly white (with only the occasional minority student and a few Chinese exchange students), upper-middle-class, and Christian. Washington High (as I mentioned) is one of the most diverse high schools in the country. We have about 64 languages spoken by families within our district. In my classes, I have large numbers of Latino students, African-American students, African students (whose first languages are Twi, Swahili, and Gikuyu), Pacific Islanders (who speak Samoan and several other languages I’d never even heard of, such as Chamorro), East Asian students, and Russian and Ukrainian-speaking students. Now, this diversity sounded fantastic and exciting from a distance; it makes for a number of difficulties, however, when faced as a practical reality. The extreme diversity of backgrounds, as well as the fact that, for a sizeable percentage of my students, Spanish is their fourth or fifth language, makes it very difficult to try and find an approach that appeals to all (or even most) of my students. This is exacerbated by the general instability in many of these students’ home lives. Families where children are living with both married, biological parents are extremely rare (anecdotally, I would guess about 10—15% of all my students). A number of students are living in situations where they have no responsible adult at home at all, or little access to food outside of the two free meals they receive at school, and consequently, have other things to worry about than doing well in academics.

This leads to the next major challenge: classroom management. Classroom management is always part of the job (and, at Bellevue, admittedly the part of the job that I most struggled with). However, in my current post, classroom management is the job. Just getting at least 90% of a class to sit down, shut up, and put away their cell phones for more than 30 seconds at a time is an almost impossible challenge, and consequently, the vast majority of the class time is devoted to trying to achieve this distant goal, with the consequence that any learning that takes place is almost incidental. If it were simply one problem student, I could attempt to deal with them individually. However, when it’s five or ten at a time (as it quickly becomes), I’m not even sure where to start. The disciplinary resources I have at my disposal are also limited. I am authorized to send students out of the classroom for a “Think Time” (which basically means they wander over to another teacher’s classroom, usually slamming the door on the way out as a protest to the perceived injustice of their punishment, fill out a little form saying that they will stop doing whatever they were doing, and return to normal). In cases of recalcitrant or extreme disruption, I can try to write a referral (or “ODR” form). However, in the four occasions I have tried this, the only thing that resulted is that the student called a parent, got the parent to come in and argue on their behalf, and the discipline was thrown out and expunged from the record. Consequently, I’m hesitant to try again, since all it seems to do is give me more unpleasant meetings to go to.

One of my fellow teachers told me not to take it personally when my students disrespect me, because they don’t know what respect is. They haven’t received it, they haven’t seen it modeled, and so they don’t know how to give it, even if they were so inclined. There is definitely some truth to that. Still, coming from a background where respect was automatically granted to authorities, where parents and teachers were both hands of the long arm of the law, I have felt a bit at a loss to try and figure out how to earn or gain what, in my experience, was automatically given.

I have more to say, and if you are willing to read it, I will try to say it soon. I think that maintaining some sort of connection to the outside world and talking about my experiences will probably help to hold on to my sanity. Still, since I’ve written far more than should be permissible for any email, I’ll close with this: in spite of challenges, in spite of frustrations, I try to remind myself that I am immensely blessed. This holiday break has reminded me that in numerous ways. Jenn and I got to go to spend a week and a half with family, and were reminded of all the ways that God has provided over the past year. My dad, instead of dying of a heart attack last January, is now retired, and both he and mom are adjusting to this new season of life. One brother has married a wonderful woman; another is dating another wonderful woman. My brother-in-law and sister are expecting their first child. My youngest brother is almost ready to graduate from college and apply for medical school. After years of preparation and trying, Jenn achieved her dream and made it to OT school. I got a job which I technically am not qualified for, and which is supporting us both as she goes to school. And I know that I have the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of students who truly need it (even if I do not see that difference). Your continued thoughts and prayers are appreciated as we step into a new year, and see where God is taking us next.