It was made very clear to me when I was hired on at S.V. Elem. that I was a part-time art instructor. And although I would be responsible for managing my own classroom and dealing with nearly every student in the school (600) I was, let me reiterate, part-time. No contract, but the job description required me to work 9am-3pm M-Th which amounts to an average of 24 hours a week. The "part-time" nature of my job description was made apparent to me because if I was paid for any more than 25 hours a week for working then they would be obligated to give me basic health insurance. And as it seems that health insurance is now-a-days more of a high-class luxury than a necessity, like a house boat or a summer home, the school would not be able to provide me with such lavishness; thus, I have no health insurance. That's not the problem, well not the one I am going to address in this blog, because I agreed to it and there are some perks to only working part-time. That is, part-time means that you do not have to work more than part-time. That means less time working and less responsibilities because we all know that with less power (I'm no ceritified teacher with full-time benefits) comes less responsibility. However, it would seem that this truism is not as universally understood as I once thought. I began to realize this in the last month and half as parent teacher conferences approached.So I made a plan the best I could with what I had to work with. Hmmmm....only 45 minutes to produce a project students with short attention spans and difficulty following directions. It was not any easy task but I decided that I would do a cutesy project with the younger students where I would give them odd shapes to glue down to a paper and make into a picture and then the older students could do blind contour drawings (this had been a super popular lesson in both my classroom and my mom's). These plans seemed simple enough and easy to finish with minimum clean-up and background explanation. And man! was I glad to have something simple when those mixed groups of pre-deliquents and sincere students showed up. My head and throat was aching by the end of the day.
Point was, I did it! I made it! It was a nightmare of a week but last Monday, 3 days before the conferences, I was feeling all kinds of relief and self-satisfaction. I had only one question left for the Salon Visionaries and on my way to my classroom that morning I conveniently ran into one. I marveled at being able to talk face to face with someone who I could usually only reach by email and quickly started to ask my question about where to hang the murals the older grades had done. She skipped over what I needed to know and went to straight to what she wanted me to know. In listening to her I learned that these Title 1 students blind contour drawings were apparently "unpresentable" and "something we could not show to their parents". It turns out, according to the Salon Visionary that I "should have just done the 1st grade projects with all the 6th graders" because they would have "looked much nicer and it would have been easy to understand what the project was from just looking at it". It didn't help to remind her that I had written up an explanation to be read along with the display as I had been asked to; it didn't help because "hardly any parents were going to take time to actually read that". I found that last bit interesting and reflection on the several hours I had taken to fulfill that part of the vision.
After being sure I left the conversation without bursting into hysteric tears or punching someone in the face, I went on to teach until lunch. When I had made it that far through the day I walked down to the office and let her know that I "didn't think it was a good idea to take on these other projects as I wasn't sure I would be able to fulfill the expectations". I was assured that these projects were "no pressure" and even though it was up to me whether or not I wanted to do them, there was every bit of faith that I could do a great job. "Thanks but I think I better stick to what I was hired for". Concern was expressed as to whether or not I would "be okay not working during Spring Break". I took that as an opportunity to remind her in the most diplomatic way I could muster with my rising agitation that I had another job I went to after this one. However, I didn't bring up that I was planning on enjoying the Spring Break just like all the rest of the faculty, even if that meant a week without hourly wages. Although I hadn't spent the week complaining about how Spring PTCs were the mark of the elementary school apocolypse, like 2/3rds of the staff there I still had, remarkably, found a way to exhaust myself with under appreciated work.
That said, the Spring Salon turned out inspiring and beautiful. My students are up to the brim with creativity.
