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Imagine it:
After nine months of unemployment in George W. Bush's glorious economy, you're offered an interview for a teaching position with a private Christian school 25 miles from your home. It's either this or hoping for something at Costco. You Mapquest the address and get in the truck.
Thirty-some-odd minutes later, you arrive at the address, a 100-year-old former residence in Lawrenceville, Georgia. A liberal, you've driven past the Georgia Right to Life headquarters to get here. You wonder what, exactly, you're in for, but you park and get out, clad in your best suit and tie, all the same.
After a period of sitting in very small chairs at very small tables, the interview goes well. Another 25 miles home and the phone rings that afternoon. You're offered the job. This is Thursday, mid-June. You're to report Monday, and the kids will arrive (it's a year-round school) in a week.
Training week - the principal/owner of the school informs us that, while she isn't going to ask, she assumes that we're all Christians. You, an agnostic raised in the Methodist church and very familiar with the liturgy, vaguely nod your head while deciding what you're going to say when you have to lead prayers. She then launches into a weeklong diatribe that mixes neurobiology with faith. Yes, it's odd.
The kids arrive. As in any school, they're a mixed bag of eccentricities, egos and followers. Some will go away and others will take their place in the weeks and months to come, but such is the life of the teacher. You will wonder what happened to the ones who left.
By the end of July, you realize the trick regarding how much you're going to be paid. You earn $12/hour, but you're only paid for 35 hours per week. If the school is closed, for any reason scheduled or not, you're not paid. If you get sick (and imagine getting sick working in what is, essentially, a large petri dish), you're not paid for sick days.
Thus follows several months of learning, administrative farting-around and prayer. These are the constants. Wash, rinse, repeat. This particular school tends to focus on stage performance (the owner is a failed actress) and so the last couple of weeks before "winter break" are pretty much given over to preparations for the Christmas Pageant, which is replete with songs that denigrate the intellect in favor of faith. This is a school program.
Over the two-week unpaid break (did I mention that there's no pay during school breaks?), you recharge your batteries by visiting family and asking them for money.
January - the art teacher has quit (the language teacher left in September for a job with the Gwinnett County schools - she was dismissed on giving her notice and the kids were told that she'd moved out of state.) and so the front office admin staff covers the art class until the pre-primary school art teacher is browbeaten into taking the elementary school position. The rest of the faculty finally begins to talk to each other and all of you realize that everyone else is fed up with the passive-aggressive crap from the front office. Some few deeply Christian faculty members hold out hope. There is much talk in the air of faith, faith that God will open doors, open minds, save the day. The administration talks of glorious divine works. You just want the hell out.
The Middle Passage - by the end of February the administrative interruptions to your class time, when the kids are finally starting to show real, tangible and exciting progress, have you ready to spit poison. The sense of front office letdown from the Christmas spirit is palpable, and so you retreat further into the excitement of your students. Would that you could hide there and actually do what you were hired to do without interruption.
Alas. By early spring, your employer has taken it upon herself to interrupt your class yet again, this time to encourage a nine-year-old African-American child to fail because his bookbag is messy. No matter that the child in question is struggling in a winning battle with both long division and something like ADD. He is encouraged to fail in your classroom, by your boss, and you're too stunned to tell said employer, in a timely manner, to go piss up a rope.
(That child, for those who read my earlier thread on that incident, is doing fine and is currently wrestling remainders to the floor.)
By the end of April, you enter the final stretch. The entire elementary school faculty is actively looking for better jobs, while standardized tests and the end-of-the-year program are all fast approaching. Talk of the glory of King Jesus and of completing one's contract have again appeared from the administrative realms.
The tests are a complete joke - the school buys the test *preparation* booklets, but fails to obtain the teachers' editions of those booklets (the tests are oral for the younger grades, leaving you, the math teacher, with a test item the answer to which is either a fish, a pencil or a fox...and you have no idea what the question is supposed to be) or the fricking tests themselves. You make do.
The end of the year program is equally inane. The opening tune is "The Happy Song" - you wish you were making this up, but you're not. More Jesus, more about how this school is superior because we pray and sing and dance for King Jesus. The last two weeks of the year are taken up with rehearsals. Academics are forgotten.
And so, here you are. It's a week before the end of school, most of the kids know you're not coming back next year and you want to say goodbye to them, but the last teacher who tried to do that got told not to come back just before her scheduled last day, and so now the kids think that she didn't care about leaving them when you know that she left in tears.
***
No, private, Christian schooling is not like this across the board. It is like this occasionally, maybe often. It has been exactly this in my experience with this school.
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