Tweezing the Ex-job Splinters, Part 3

(Before I wade back into the mess, I should say that yesterday was a perfect work day at the new job. Tuesdays are arts and crafts. We made up our own holidays, wrote descriptions of them, drew ourselves celebrating, and made decorations. At the end of the day, my boss told me that she’s really impressed with the job I’m doing, that no other After School Leader had been able to get the kids to write like I do. I feel lucky and safe…)

It should be said that, in spite of her reporting me to the OM, I’d become friends with Contempt Face over the summer. She was one of the few people who would talk to me during camp. I was relieved to know that she was the new coordinator, since I wouldn’t have to shock another boss about the kids still Knowing About Me.

The 2009-2010 school year had a lot of bright points. I got to work with the little kids, which suits me because you get to smile more. I had my own classroom, even if it doubled as CF’s office. Before long, the walls were plastered with the kids’ projects, bright and unassailably beautiful as kid-art always is.

Also plastered on the wall, behind CF’s desk, were like 20 pictures of CF and her family. Her and her boyfriend at prom, them home with their little daughter, etc. To her credit, the OM (We’re back to the boss’s boss from the original “You offend our culture” conversation.) realized the unfairness of this and asked CF to take down the pictures, but CF wouldn’t.

Let’s go through the cast of adult characters: There was W, a guy’s guy who kept complaining that a gay-seeming 6th grader needed to start “acting like a man.” (To her credit, CF thwarted this kind of talk once she realized it pissed me off.) There was a sweet, sweet closeted Mormon boy (hereafter CMB) who came to me for advice and became my confidante. There was Ms. K, the curriculum supervisor who wouldn’t do anything that isn’t in the Bible, including Thanksgiving. (Once I heard her complain that all of us women should be home teaching our daughters how to do laundry, like The Lord wanted us to.) My teaching partner was a very nice Muslim lady who brought a lot of peace and order to our classroom, at first. And there was D, the floater, who filled in whenever anyone’s partner was out.

Looking back, I guess the first symptom of depression was stage fright. I stopped performing at my own venue because I couldn’t stand the sound of my voice. Before I went to check in for the Encyclopedia Show in Chicago, I had a panic attack so bad that I almost ran away from a reading we’d driven overnight to attend.

It’s hard to say when I started to be afraid to come into work. Maybe it was CF’s love of iterating rape plots from Law and Order while everyone wrote their lesson plans. She seemed very offended when I asked her nicely to stop. Not to be culturally incompetent, but the constant presence of religious fundamentalism did not make me feel safe. Nor was it soothing when a closeted friend (She put off her ENTIRE coming out until her AmeriCorps service was done!) at another site told me about a staff meeting she’d been in where everyone agreed it was their duty to set gay-seeming kids (especially boys) straight.

Ms. K, who led the older kids’ class, did a project for Growing Peaceful Communities where they cut out pictures of celebrities and sorted them between ugly and beautiful. She gleefully iterated the vivid, misogynist, racist ways that her students had ripped apart the people in the pictures- no lips, hair, or boobs were safe from dissection and criticism. She said she’s let them do this as a reward. And this was for a project about changing the world through positive language.

In the midst of all this, D. and I became friends. We had a great conversation on the way home from the company Christmas party, and she seemed like an artsy kindred spirit. I sort of overcame my aversion to online chatting to get to know her. The times she’d filled in in my class, she said she really liked my teaching style, and she was so supportive throughout my process of applying to Teach for America. She started to feel like a good luck charm.

Through some coincidence, D. and my teaching partner started being really rude and unpredictable to me around the same time. D. was really close with CF, and I felt really envious of their closeness. Instead of leaving D. alone, I confessed that I had a crush on her, which was a dumb, dumb, dumb, unprofessional thing to do. I also sent her a (chaste) poem I’d written. I am still apologizing to that poem. After I told D. how I felt, she clearly told CF about it, because the two of them began looking at me like I was some kind of monster. D. even said one day to CF, “Escort me to the parking lot, so the Boogie Monster doesn’t get me.”

One day, I couldn’t stop crying enough to teach my class. D, CF, and I decided to have a meeting after the kids left to clear things up. I made it clear that I would leave D. alone and act professional, but the meeting ended with her screaming and flailing at me, and with CF saying threateningly “Leave her alone.” As CMB and I left the parking lot that night, D. came speeding at us in her car, radio turned up like a movie. I wouldn’t say she tried to run us over, but almost.

Again, how did I go in to work the next day? I was so ashamed, of the crush, the poem, the crying. I told CF that I’d gotten on a waiting list for therapy, that I would be strong and professional from then on. I took D. off my facebook and treated her with cordial professionalism.

My teaching partner, however, was being less and less help and was being ruder and ruder to me. She and CF did a two-person eye roll almost every time I was talking. That thing kept happening where conversation would stop whenever I’d walk into the office. Finally I asked CF to facilitate a team time with me and my teaching partner to help us get along better. Why did I keep going to her for help? I don’t know. I guess I had to go to someone.

About a month had gone by when CF said “We have to meet on Monday. Just you and me. Can you come in early?” I tried to get her to change it to Friday, so that I wouldn’t have to be nervous all weekend, but, no, Monday it was. I knew it was going to be bad, and spent the weekend sobbing with my heart racing.

Old Job Venom-Removal, Part 2

I thought I’d come up with as many clichés for removing bad feelings as possible.  I absolutely CANNOT wait for this series to be over—editing a trauma is so distracting from the general niceness of life, I don’t know how memoir-writers do it!

Anyway, I was superexcited and super daunted by my new position. I would be the main teacher for grades pre-K-1st and 4th-8th at the summer camp, in the same place where I’d just finished the school year. It would be my first real-sized paycheck and I was just blown away by the amount it seemed possible to accomplish. The trainings, especially the literacy ones, were so compelling that I stopped being able to sleep or read- I was just nervous and obsessed about how to pull this off.

This was also the first time that I lead adults in a job. I got a meeting together with the counselors who’d be sharing the classes with me. I made it clear that since a lot of the curriculum we were working with was tolerance based, I wanted us to treat each other and the kids with respect. I’d overheard one young dude making lots of “That’s so gay” comments during training, so I got on a little soapbox about avoiding those kinds of comments. Other than that bit of soapboxing, I tried to be collaborative and egalitarian. It is possible that I might have been a bit of a jackass.

(Sidenote: The “That’s so gay” dude always wore a keychain around his neck with a picture of him and his girlfriend. Those were common, and reminded me that my relationship was not considered equal to his within the company.)

Most of the camp counselors decided that they hated me. Instead of working as a team to lead classes, they were always texting, correcting me, or rolling their eyes. Especially the leaders of the older kids’ class, which had 50 students in it. The kids picked up on the teachers’ dislike and made it very draining to get through a lesson or project. One morning I found that a discussion group had veered off topic onto a discussion between the kids and adults about how they didn’t like me. The mean-girl grown-ups had made sure I heard it.

I cried to the coordinator (a different one from the school year) and a team time was called. The Operation’s Manager (also a different one from the school year) joined in the team time. This was basically nine people, including my superiors, sitting around telling me that I was too full of myself, that I wasn’t working hard enough because I wouldn’t yell at the kids, and that I had to grow a thicker skin. (In case you’re wondering, I still haven’t quite gotten to that magical skill of not taking things personally.)

After I apologized (?!) to everyone, the OM said that there was one more thing that we had to discuss. She cleared the room of everyone except the coordinator, co-coordinator, and me. Then she made this clearly well rehearsed speech about “Not teaching about my lifestyle.” She said it several times and in a very menacing way. I had to ask what the heck she was talking about—I hadn’t mentioned my family situation since that meeting in the spring.

With a look of absolute contempt in her face (good LORD contempt-face should be illegal), the co-coordinator said “A student came up and said to me “Ms. Jane is a lesbian.” and I just don’t know why you would’ve said that in a classroom situation, so I let the OM know what happened.” The student was of course a student from the school year, and at no point in the intervening weeks had anyone asked me if I’d taught a class about being gay.

Instead of apologizing for the misunderstanding, the OM said “Some of the counselors were very hurt and upset by this. I hope you’ll take some time to apologize to them.”

I definitely did not apologize for whatever aspect of being queer hurt their feelings so much, but we all did manage to get along better for the rest of the summer. I finished up the summer with successful student surveys (The older kids still didn’t like me, but they learned everything they were supposed to learn) and a 20% increase in letter-recognition among the pre-K students.

I was very conflicted about re-upping, so I wrote a letter to the CEO (LinkedIn is amazing, isn’t it?) telling him what’d happened at the Scary Team Time. He was upset and promised he would speak to the OM about it. He sought me out at the end-of-summer picnic to see if I was alright, and that made me feel like something might change.

So, when organizing the craft closet made me curious about the school year to come, I signed up for another school year as group leader. Little did I know, I would have a new coordinator again: Contempt Face herself.

Old-Job Exorcism, Part 1

The other day at work, I was sitting around with the children's librarian and a couple of students watching the Philadelphia Free Library’s “It Gets Better” video. I wished that I could send a video of that moment to my eight-months-ago self.

My high school bullies seem dumb and insignificant to me, as they should at 36, but the adult bullies of the past few years feel like zombies: I’m safe for now, but they’re always coming for me, ready to take everything.

I guess “exorcism” would be mixing my monster-metaphors, but I really hope that writing out the homophobia and fear from my old job will go some distance towards getting the fear out of my mind and heart.

Disclaimer 1: If you come to this blog for a cheer-up (and why shouldn’t you?) you may want to skip this series.

Disclaimer 2: Some people that I like, including one of my favorite readers, still work there. They do a LOT of good work and this is definitely not meant to hurt them.

Disclaimer 3: I don’t want to paint myself as a victim. My inability to deal with my own culture-shock went a long way toward making things harder, and I have a lot of regret about my various storm-outs. I wish there was a way to make it up to the kids I left suddenly, to the friends I lost.

The company that I worked for during my AmeriCorps service (Sept 2008- March 2010) had this mission statement: “To enrich the lives of children, youth, and families by providing educational programs and services in communities confronting high rates of poverty and other barriers to educational achievement.” That’s worth going through a lot for and I’m glad that I tried as hard as I could to accomplish that.

It is not illegal in Pennsylvania to discriminate against someone based on sexual orientation. However, since my AmeriCorps stipend was paid with federal funds, I do believe that the law was broken. You’ll see, though, why I feel like there’s not much I can do about that. Partly it was my own dumb choices.

The first afterschool site was straight-up sexist and racist. When I asked the manager for help with classroom racial tension (I was feeling drained from kids’ and coworkers’ near-constant “White people are evil” type comments, and I was unsure of how to address them) the manger responded by saying that we needed “a male teacher in the classroom, to bring more order.” My teaching partner and I were in the middle of trying to facilitate some kind of object lesson about unity, and this man wanted to pull a barrier down the middle of the room to separate the boys from the girls. I was so shocked and livid that I packed up my little pink teacher bins with my supplies and left before the kids arrived for the day. I felt like a horrible abandoner to my partner and students. I still feel that way while typing this.

The company was kind enough to transfer me to a site with a more progressive coordinator. One of my first days there was for the yearly field trip to Washington, so it was pretty easy to bond with the kids quickly. As I always do, I answered their “Who are you married to?” questions honestly and matter-of-factly, and the coordinator supported my choice to do so. One little girl spent the trip saying things like “That’s disgusting, that’s wrong, that’s a sin,” but most kids kind of just took it in stride after a few follow-up questions.

Things went really well at the new site. We published a chapbook of the kids’ poems, I got to emcee the talent show, and I brought in some slam veterans to create the tiniest performance poets. My artsy boss made me feel like my skills were welcome, even calling me “The Poetry Lady” rather than my real title, “Group Leader.” I felt like I’d found a place to fit in.

But a coulple of months after I started, The Operations Manager (my boss’s boss) pulled me aside at a training and let me know that a parent had complained and accused me of showing a kid pictures of Amy on my phone. (I hadn’t, but that seems pointless to say.) She said that talking about my family was offensive to people’s culture, and would I please show some more respect. She said that she wouldn’t want her own children to know about Amy and me.

I responded calmly but asked for a meeting about a week later. I told her that I felt discriminated against, since my coworkers could talk all about their families. My boss’s wife was always around with her pregnant tummy and their little daughter, flaunting their heterosexuality for all to see. I felt like OM and I reached some kind of understanding, but of course I never mentioned my family again, and my “progressive” boss acted terrified whenever the kids brought it up.

Since I’d accomplished so much, projectwise, in my first school year, I was promoted to Summer Program Facilitator. Stay tuned, if you can stand it, for what happened that summer.