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'Welcome to CHMSFHD, Mr. May!' - office secretaries on my first day
My first public school teaching job was at Chelmsford High School. I lasted there exactly one year.
Right next door to me at school was an expert math teacher named Andy Pasquale (I remember his name because he was a good teacher and person.) Andy had a surefire panacea for maintaining discipline: 'Lance those wounds!' he would declare to me. By which he meant: call the parents when things gave even an inkling of going bad.
(Unfortunately, I was very reticent about doing that. As a result, I allowed my wounds to fester until they infected the entire organism.)
The only person I recall observing me was Kay Merseth, the Math Coordinator who had hired me. Visibly pregnant, she came in halfway through the year. After praising a couple of things I did and offering some suggestions for improvement in others, she declared brightly, 'Well, you'll make a good teacher!' (Me, forlornly: 'I'm not one now?')
But other than that, I received no positive feedback from any administrator in the school. In particular, the competence of a given official to deal with the subject of discipline seemed to be inversely proportional to their rank.
There was, for example, Jack McCarthy. The son of the man who had been principal just before the present one, Jack was my housemaster and was nearly inarticulate. He was an ex-math teacher (he was also an ex-prizefighter, but that's another story) who would fill in for an absent teacher on occasion. (Jack was dramatic in the classroom: I could hear him several doors away ranting and raving. Once we heard a huge crash: he had driven his fist through the blackboard.) Jack, of course, had no discipline problems.
And then there was the principal. I recall neither name of that cipher. The man seemed obsessed with discipline. He had once led a delegation from Chelmsford to find out what other high schools did about students who had a free period (at CHS they herded them into the cafeteria.) When they got to Newton North High and saw 'Main Street' (an indoor mall with trees and benches and the like), our principal freaked out: 'How do they know what those kids are doing? Why isn't someone watching them?!'
It was this uptight person who called me into his office toward the end of the year in order to dress me down on the subject of discipline. (Jack was present too, I recall.) Had he observed my teaching? He had not. So what specific complaint did he have? Just this: that he had walked past my room one day and observed students sitting on the register. I pointed out that this would only happen until the bell rang for the class to start. 'Besides, it's natural for kids to want to chat together in their free time before class.' But it did no good: there was an appearance, a suggestion of informality, even of potential disorder, which he could not abide.
So he tore into me on that fascinating subject for a few minutes (I began to realize that this was my 'kiss-off' meeting) when suddenly he sneered, his voice dripping in understated sarcasm: 'You're not exactly the best math teacher we have here at Chelmsford high school!'
My immediate response was to begin to rejoin, 'Well, at the risk of courting paradox...' But luckily Jack quickly intervened with 'Ted!' and thus probably saved me from being fired on the spot (while obliquely complimenting his father.)
When I returned to my room and told Andy what had happened, he said, 'Do not despair - there is still hope.' But it soon became clear that my cause was hopeless. For one thing, Kay disappeared just around that time to have her baby, and no write-up of her observation of my teaching was ever produced in my defense.
Jack wrote me a generic evaluation - a document so full of tautologies ('Mr. May teaches the classes he teaches'), non sequiturs, and obfuscation that any administrator who didn't know him might think it a masterpiece of post-modernist writing. Luckily, it did not hinder me from getting my next math position (at Lincoln-Sudbury)!
'Sorry you're leaving CHMSFHD, Mr. May!' - secretaries on my last day
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