A Day in the Life

Let me tell you about my evening. About my evenings the last month or so, actually. At some point I leave my desk, lock my office door and walk to the parking lot to my car that has baking in the sun all day. I start the car, roll down the windows and let more fresh, hot air in, yet some of the steam escapes at the same time. I start whatever audio book I am listening to at the moment – today it is fiction, but over the past month it has been a mixture of non-fiction books; Brene Brown’s, Daring Greatly or Rising Strong, Thich Nhat Hahn’s Silence, Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. It calms me as I drive. I drive back roads 99.5% of the time, and once I cross a certain main highway, the traffic lightens and the scene becomes more bucolic. This is by choice. It is less miles and a whole lot more stress to take the interstate. Along the route I travel I meander around a lake, and each day I look forward to how the lake will look; rainy today, smooth, calm (this time of year not very often). I cross a tributary river and enjoy the sight of people fishing off the bridge. I pass farm land with cows grazing, I pass swampy areas with water standing because of the plethora of summer rain storms. I pass a few abandoned houses, and these always make my heart skip a beat; the story of the people who must have once lived there fuel my imagination. Eventually I wind my way down the north end of my road, pull into my driveway. As I open the car door, nine times out of ten I sit and smell the heat, smell the sunshine or the rain blowing in. I listen to the sound of wind in the trees, dogs barking in the distance, a chicken clucking and squawking down the road. I listen to the quiet and the calm and I feel my shoulders begin to loosen as I set my feet on the ground, grab my bag and walk into my quiet, cool, waiting house. I speak to my cats, to my bird, make sure all have food and water, and I head back to my bedroom to change my clothes, take off my jewelry. I thank God, my angels, the Buddha who all wait patiently on my personal alter. I thank them for allowing my safe return home. I light a candle, a stick of incense, I set a timer on my iPad and I settle in to meditate for 20-45 minutes. This is my time, my sacred time, and it has become a ritual and a routine in my daily life. Without it, I know I would bring home the stress of the day and the tensions of this year. I am determined to not live my job 24 hours a day.

Tonight as I chopped chicken and kale for my dinner my mind wandered. In spite of my quiet meditation and my refusal to dwell on my job, snippets of conversations from this afternoon drifted through my thoughts. It occurred to me that writing is a catharsis, and it occurred to me that someone needs to write about this. It feels necessary to let others to know what the day is like in my line of work. What it is we face each and every day. From the conversations this afternoon, throughout the day, for the past few months, and even the last few years I know that many co-workers are stretched beyond a breaking point. Today the discussion was centered on why they have not walked out the door already. There are many reasons that range from needing the work, from fear of what they would do without the job that has become their livelihood. If someone were to take the pulse of all the people who work where I do, I believe it would be safe to say that over 95% of them are unhappy, over-worked, scared, stressed, worried, fearful of many things; evaluations, failure, their sanity, and worse of all, fearful for their physical safety and that of others around them. I did not today hear any of them talk about the more noble reasons they stay where they are, but they are firmly rooted inside of them, I have no doubt. Today was not a day to be noble, though. Today they were tired and filled with angst.

Now let’s talk for a moment about what I do for a living. I am a school librarian. I work at a high needs, high poverty, inner city elementary school. The state evaluation has rated us as an F school, and we are in our last year of bringing the school grade up to a C or higher. It seems, at the surface, to be a task that is achievable. I would like to think it is. We put in long hours, work hard on lesson plans, work hard to make each day special for the kids, for our co-workers, for ourselves. To get where I am I did not go to school to learn to teach. I attained a BA in Humanities and earned my MA in Library and Information Science. I took 13 graduate level classes and paid a lot of money to become a librarian. More about that another time.
Now let me give you a glimpse of my day today. Just today. I arrived at work at 6:20, leaving my house by 5:50 this morning. I expected children at 7:45, so in the hour before they arrived to do the morning show, I did everyday routine tasks – filled the copier with paper, filled a bucket with ice for myself to use throughout the day, ran the laminator, checked the weather and date for the kids to report on the morning show. I searched for literacy standards for kindergarten through fifth grade reading. I considered the classes I would have later – both 2nd grade. I am the technology resource at the school, which means I have to keep around 400 computers in working order, in addition to managing the library for students and teachers. I have been struggling with three new carts of laptops gifted to us last year; they were all prepared for the school year and then 90 of them dropped off the wireless network. That is long and complicated, but I am down to 61 not connecting; a headache to be dealt with, slowly each day. Throughout my day I hear a lot of “I know you are super busy, but…”. Many people hear that. I do what I can to help; make copies, laminate, gather books, fix a laptop; whatever needs doing.  Essentially, like many people on the job, I hit the ground running each and every day. New to my job requirements this year is being a part of the school master schedule. More about what that means at a later time. Essentially, I fill in for teacher planning time in order to help them concentrate on planning for the needs of their individual students.
This is hard for me. It sounds minimal – about 10 classes a week, for a total of around 5 hours of my week. I only see each class every second or third week, so walking an entire class to and from locations without their teacher is quite a challenge; like herding cats, quite honestly. The first class made it finally, basically intact, and then we ran over in time for me to pick up the next class. In this hour of time I tried to adhere to boundaries set by the school, by their teachers, by myself for media center etiquette. In this I failed miserably. There is no reason to sugar coat it; it was a circus and the chaos circled around me. I was told no, there was shouting, pouting, resistance, tears (not mine), running, jumping….and today was actually a more quiet day than yesterday. Did I mention books? I was able to check out books to one of the classes today – imagine that? I was a librarian for about 40 minutes of my day 9 ½ hour day today.

Today I took a lunch. Most days I can’t, or I eat on the fly. I actually had 15 minutes that I could sit with a friend and we could chit chat about our day, our lives (it is her granddaughter’s birthday today!). She was called away, as she often is when we try to share a few moments for lunch. I finished working on one laptop, switched to another. I checked and answered emails, I created a form to help track equipment repairs, did some maintenance requests, helped a teacher find a few books, logged into the computers for a kindergarten class. This class is without a classroom teacher. Their teacher left last week; she just quit. There are rumors as to why, but I cannot speculate, and really, to me it does not matter; there is nothing I can do except support where I can. The class was doing really well. Until all at once, they were not. These are kindergarteners. This is the same class that last week; the same day their teacher left them, who thought it was fun to run around the library, hitting computers, pounding on keyboards, laughing, shouting NO, shoving books off shelves. It still makes me sweat. I admit I had a bit of a sigh when the exact same behaviors happened today. It was a relief to know that I was not alone in my inability to handle them. And it was interesting that it was the same four students this week causing the same chaos. Very destructive, however, and very scary that in kindergarten they can think of these terrible ways to behave. Together we wrangled them and I helped get them back to their classroom, safely, but it took a toll on her, a seasoned teacher, just filling in to allow the students time to learn how to use a computer. It broke my heart when she came back in a few moments later to gather her belongings, after they were safely out of her care. She fought very hard to hold back tears, and she had to walk away when the tears tried to take over.
From there it was dismissal time. It is in the high 90s each day, with humidity well into the 80s or higher. The noise of the buses, the noise of the children, the heat outside, all make a very uncomfortable wait as we try to make sure that 500 children leave us safely. It is something to be experienced. Indescribable. After dismissal I went back to my office to finish the last minute things I needed to do. 3:10 rolled around, and I made a mental note that I could leave, but it was 4:10 before I finally was able to walk away. My desk is cleared, a pile of laptops waiting to be picked up for repairs, another left to reimage overnight. Emails finished, everything on my desk wrapped up for the day. Tomorrow is another day.
Tonight I still hear the voices of sadness in the teachers I work with. I hear their despair; their tone of frustration and defeat that they are not able to teach, that students behaviors are too unruly and too disruptive. The voice of one or two per class can, and do disrupt the learning of the entire class. It is heartbreaking.

As children we adults of the world today attended school. Some of us liked school (I did) and some did not, but we could depend on our teachers and our school, for the most part, to be a safe environment. Learning was there for us; we just had to grasp it. I understand that not everyone had a great school experience. There is bullying and always has been, there are tensions and rules and regulations. There were tests and failures and successes. There were friendships that I personally have had since kindergarten. I am lucky enough to be from a small town and to have attended the same school as my parents, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. My aunts and uncles, cousins, both younger and older attended those same schools, and the youngest of our generations still do. Times have changed. The world has changed. People have changed. Schools have changed. Today’s education at high poverty, high needs schools is beyond anything any of us have signed up for. There has to be a change in education. We are so quickly losing teachers, losing the attention of students. I do not know the answers. I do know that many people point fingers at teachers and schools, and many people, including the state, set mandates and guidelines about what will occur, or else. If someone could step in our shoes for a day, for a week, they would see that we, as educators, are stretched to the limits of what we can do as human beings. If those who were so busy pointing fingers as if that can make a difference – if they had to deal with being bit, hit, punched, spit on, kicked – shouted at, disrespected, lied to, stolen from, threatened, cursed at, and so on; they might put their fingers down and possibly find a much better way to do things. Because at this point, I am not alone in believing that I have done what I do because I love it. I don’t love it anymore, and in all honestly, I have not loved it for a very long time. And judging from today’s overheard conversation? I am not alone in this either.