“So Off I Flew to Seek a Newer Land” – Notes Beyond Schoolteaching

Yes, I’ve been following Clay and know exactly what he means. I too want to do away with all of the fluff and wasting of time in a public classroom.

Trouble is, I have this pesky student loan to pay off. And I absolutely love to share the joy of learning with kids, so I don’t want to lose that. I don’t know where I would go, if not the classroom. I’m watching to see what Clay does next.

I’m not quite as brave as him…yet.
Mindy | 06.13.08 – 7:01 pm | (comment on a fantastic defense of unschooling on The New Unschooler web log)

* * *

David Warlick was live blogging and I was intrigued by this that appeared:

Hummm! so what has to start getting closed down for educators to start realizing that education business is in jeparady?

Thinking about Virtual High School, as more and more students start signing up for online literature, or online history, and principals are going to be coming around and say, “Ms Johnson, our enrollment is down, as you know, and we’re going to have to let you go.”

Hmmm -made me think. Just what is Clay Burell up to??? (You’ve been so tight lipped couldn’t help but think this is where you’re headed!!)
–Jenny Luca, reflecting on NECC from Australia

–since people are talking and wondering….

It’s a bit after 8 a.m. Tuesday. Eunjeong is still asleep, and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee in the enclosed little balcony off of one of the four bedrooms in our new apartment in Seocho-dong, a pleasant area in Seoul’s Kangnam district on the southern bank of the Han River.  The view I see as I type is the view you see in the photo I just took with my Macbook’s Photo Booth.

The story of our decision to find a new apartment is not unconnected to the story of why I left school-teaching.  Regular readers will know that Eunjeong and I married on March 8 of this year (and a wonderful percentage of those readers beautified that day by being “virtual guests” on the live uStream.tv webcast of the wedding).  The apartment we lived in at that time was provided by the school, and it was far too small for this new family’s tastes.  Had Eunjeong been a teacher in the school’s employ, we would have qualified for a larger apartment – but she wasn’t.  Had the school agreed to include better housing to accompany the new administrative job I’d accepted as Tech Coordinator, again, things could have turned out differently.  School administrations have their own agendas, their own reasons for doing and not doing the things they do and don’t do, so there was no need for sourness here. Negotiations simply didn’t work out.

This left Eunjeong and me with a classic dilemma: decent job without a decent home, or a decent home without a secure job?  It’s a common enough problem for international school teachers, whose packages include school-provided housing.  It’s all or nothing.  And all not being enough, we chose nothing.

I felt ambivalent, too, about that new job description as Tech Coordinator.  From the outside, it looked attractive enough: oversee the training and implementation of laptop learning in the 1:1 school, while still teaching one “experimental” class in multimedia communication, networked project-based learning, etc.  I’d worked in overdrive for four years to learn both the new tools and the new pedagogies for them. I’d spent a good number of hours, too, drafting the job description for the position that would make it worth the time. (We all know that office jobs alone don’t automatically mean “job satisfaction.”)  But when all was said and done, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I would be spending more hours trouble-shooting administrative software glitches (“Why aren’t the grades exporting with the comments?”) than developing laptop learning pedagogies with teachers, which was my calling and my hope.  In the absence of any conversations about that part of the job description – or about that job description in general – I kept having visions of the old Maytag Repairman commercial: you know, the guy sitting in the office flicking playing cards at the trash can (or drawing monkeys on a banana) because he had no opportunity to leave the office and hone his skills.  Yes, he still got paid; but he didn’t get much job satisfaction with that office job.  I suspect that’s emblematic of many Tech Coordinators in schools worldwide.

Again, this was all subtext, indirect, non-explicit. It was more than anything a gut feeling, inferred from absences more than presences – absences of suggestions to begin conversations with the next year’s new high school principal about how to shape the staff development, about how to structure the work-week, about simply having a plan in place before the year began.  Readers of my post announcing that new job in the form of a little sonnet (forgive me, reader: the Humanities teacher in me  wanted to practice iambic pentameter and Shakespearean prosody) may have noticed the less-than celebratory tone of that little ditty, especially in the sentence following it:

Silly Twitter Sonnet

I tweeted to my twitterverse last week
From high up on a twig on my lone tree.
From that frail height I sang of what I seek:
A future free of grinding schooletry.

I sang of learning far beyond the walls
of bricked-in class, and space, and time, and age;
and students heeding all creative calls
that cried to them from their own chosen page.

An echo back from that lone song I heard
from fledglings, faint from some barred far-off cage:
“We hear you, and would fly there in a word,
Were we but free to heed our inner sage.”

A bell rang then, and my frail twig gave way,
And down I plunged, to just another day.

–

I signed the contract for one more year, but in a new position: 21st Century Learning/Tech Coordinator.  We’ll see how that goes.

(I have to add one of my favorite and, it turns out, prophetic comments to that post from the best friend I’ve never met, Diane Cordell, who wrote an alternative couplet¹ that may have done its little part in changing the course of Eunjeong’s and my lives:

Or, in another universe:

So off I flew to seek a newer land
That hope and dream and promise ably spanned.

diane)

Prophetic it became. All those things converged – the housing, the absence of evidence of any teeth for the Tech Coordinator position, and my general rejection of the tragicomedy of schooliness – to bring me to my decision not to sign that Tech Coordinator contract after all.

It didn’t feel great. I’d put so much energy into the school’s decision to go 1:1, to go Macbook instead of PC, to adopt blogs and wikis and bears, oh my, the whole nine yards.  And now, after only one year, my unwillingness to be a Maytag Repair Coordinator living in a crackerbox was going to end that relationship.  Wasn’t there a third way, beyond either-or and win/lose (or lose/lose, in this case)?

For a few days, I thought I’d found a solution and a “Yes” – a third way – in another example, like Diane’s comment above, of how life-changing simple online conversations can be. This one involves my reading of a post on the web log of that loveable “bitch, hellcat, and absolute doll” Taylor the [ex-]Teacher‘s web log.  Taylor’s guest-writer, Daphne, wrote an open letter to schools in which she suggested, under the heading, “Want Us to Stay?”, the following:

Give us the option to teach online or in a more flexible schedule.

If those things don’t fit in education today, then neither do we.

Long story short, that comment reminded me of my own posts’ evidence that teachers no longer have to come to the physical building to do their jobs so much – see the “teaching from home with Skype” post, or simply think about how much tech coordinating can be done from home, instead of sitting in the Repairman’s office flicking playing cards at trash baskets. It’s not like I need to be a full-time office-sitter in a Seoul school-building to administer a Moodle and WordPress MU server in Virginia, or to work on school calendars, portals, and info-management systems online.

So I made a new offer: let me drive to school the two or three days a week to teach that one experimental class, as a part-time employee. Pay me by the hour, forget the housing and benefits:  I’ll spend my newfound freedom in the other 36 hours a week creating other ways to pay my bills. As Daphne suggested, those things can fit in schools today, with enough outside-the-box thinking.  Pay me for the occasional tech work you need by the hour, too, instead of hiring a full-time card-flipper at a massively more expensive rate.

Win-win, it seemed to me.  But it didn’t turn out that way (schools are boxes, after all). So it was, after all, to be goodbye.  Beyond School, here I come.

* * *

Eunjeong is awake, now, and we have to go to the immigration office one final time, so I’ll answer the “what are you doing now?” question in a follow-up.  I’ll only add, before closing, this short version:  I’m already teaching.  Will Richardson’s post in the wake of my On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher post last January is relevant here.  Will writes:

….[D]espite what the system takes away from good teaching, few write about teaching as if it is something that can be done just as meaningfully outside of the system. That’s obviously what Clay is struggling with. And it’s what my brain continues to be chewing on. How can we start to think differently about teaching? How can we teach in meaningful, important ways outside of the current construct? How can we give good teachers the opportunity to teach without the  inconsistencies and constraints of the system? And how do we do it in ways that can still serve all of the kids the system currently serves?

That last one is the really tough one…

–and that last one is a tough one for me, too. I’ve dropped out of schooling, so traditionalists and other moralists have a wide-open target to shoot me as a sell-out – because I’m now a private tutor, for rates any self-respecting academic and educator with the knowledge, skills, and creds I have would demand.

Sticking with a bankrupt system to pay your bills is another form of selling ourselves, so by that logic, I can at least comfort myself that, either way I go, I’m still selling out.  I’m just trying to get – and give to my students – better terms in the bargain.

I have a lot more to say, and will, but in regards to that “tough one,” I’ll just point to the Eggers post I did a few months back as the direction that pulls me: teaching, like law, can include a pro bono arrangement. That’s what I’m looking at, in a very outside the box way.

And now, free of that same blasted school bell that stole so many potentially productive hours from me over the last decade, I’ll have hours and hours to freely play with tough questions like that.

A quick close: This post is shot through with how transformative the new world of writing and reading and conversing is. I’ve long meant to post about how, since starting this blog, my writing, reading, and conversing seem to literally create new futures for me. It started from the very beginning, day one, when I chose the title of this blog in December 2006. What was then hyperbole is now literal. It’s all still so very amazing.

Sorry for the length. Happy summer.

Photo credit: Monkeys on a Banana by furryscaly on Flickr (love it!)

1. metrically spot on, the English teacher adds with a smile [↩]

1. An Old Prophecy Confirmed? On the Uses and Abuses of Laptop Learning
2. Podcast: With Dean Shareski on _Natural_ Global Collaboration and Networked Learning
3. Beyond RSS: Using Alltop.com to Teach Writing
4. Notes on Warlick’s Keynote, Second Viewing

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