The other mentor teacher was a much older woman, one who lamented her terrible student-teaching experience in West Torrance. A home economics teacher by training, she struggled to get by with a mentor teacher who openly belittled her in front of the students.
She summarily did the same, mocking me for being "too nice", when she would crow about how tough she was. I came to realize a few years later that she was masking a very deep-rooted insecurity. She did not feel competent as a teacher in many ways, although she lorded it over the class time and again that she was "the teacher's teacher."
This deep-set panic defines the decorum of many teachers. They go out of their way to pat themselves on the back for a job well done, when in fact they have not done all that well to begin with, or they have gotten away with annual incompetence.
She was not a good teacher. I know this in part because she labeled me exceptional in my final evaluation. I was better than she, that was for sure, which in the final analysis is not saying much.
She had no procedures in place. Routinely, I walked into her classroom during my conference periods, and many of the students were talking, refusing to listen to her. She would remind them repeatedly to get out their journals, their books, their assignments. One time, the class was so chaotic, all she could do was smile meekly at me while sharpening a pencil. Kids running around the room, interrupting her; off task, not getting any work done. It was a joke that she assumed herself to be a stable, capable teacher.
And she would not assist me in parent conferences. Not once! I had to meet with parents alone. One parent was aggrieved because she felt that I had slighted Native Americans in one lessons. I assured that I had not intention of targeting any group of people. Still, this graduate student in Native American studies insisted that I devote ten minutes of class time teaching about native American cultures. With the state standards pushing every teacher to do as much as possible with as little time as possible, I told her such an arrangement would be impossible. It was a stressful experience, to say the least; but my mentor teacher was nowhere to be found.
She would not deal with difficult parents. She even mocked parents and staff members openly in class. One of the teachers whom she routinely targeted ran the referral room, Mr. H. He was a gruff individual, did not take too kindly to students or teachers. One of the counselors was pressed to explain how the man was able to get so far in education. Needless to say, he was an industrial arts teacher whose classes were closed, and he was sandbagged with running the referral room.
At that school, at least, students did their best not to act up, because they did not want to deal with Mr. H. for one period. And he was very critical of how my mentor handled student discipline. Often, she would send students down without having called the parents first. No intervention on her part, and that frustrated him greatly. Halfway through the semester, the referral room teacher threatened to post her name for all the faculty to see because she had been sending down so many students. Livid, she squawked at my other mentor teacher, but learned very little from the threat, refusing to tune up her discipline skills.
Most of her sixth grade students liked me; they liked me a lot more than they liked her. Even she had to concede that. I pushed her kids to do more than she would have done on her own, and they liked it.
I liked calling their parents because usually I had a good report. Some students would beam with pride the next day. "You called me parents?" They were surprised and grateful. If I had to tell a parent that his or her kid was acting up, usually they handled it. Kids did not want to act up in my class, generally, because they liked being there, and so did I. Mutual harmony has a funny of feeding and perpetuating itself.
I liked working with the sixth graders. I could be mad, and they would forgive me. If I asked them to do something, they would do it. It was a great class, one of the best. I only wish that my sixth-grade mentor teacher had been that gregarious and supportive.
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