These People Like Glee, For Goodness Sake...

  I've mentioned before on here my experience at the first staff meeting of the year, held before the school year started: administration was announcing a stripped-down, "kids just walk in and go to their classes" kind of first day, with a "welcome back" assembly to be held later in the week once we were all settled in.

  This was met with relief by many of us, but an outcry went up from a few.  "What about when we get the school mascot in, and do the school cheer, and really, really just welcome everyone back to our school, and just really make everyone feel how we're US, and we're the best school in our region and everything?" They spoke wistfully of colour-coded schools with uniforms and school songs and marching bands and cheerleaders and other things. 

  These are, too, the same people who squawked when our school's Latin motto was being looked at, in terms of "is 'Enter To Learn, Go Forth To Serve' kind of old-fashioned?  Do we still think that word "serve" has the same context and meaning for us that it might have once had?  Is this something a few of us might be into, but it's not saying anything that is reaching any of the kids it is supposed to be talking about?"

  I didn't judge them, but I looked at them with new eyes and realized they felt as different from me as if they had come from a different planet.  You see, the majority of teachers seem to be individualists.  Every year, zippy, snappily-dressed, smiles-set-to-stunned people from who knows where show up to a hastily-called special meeting we don't want to attend, and these freaks announce "exciting new initiatives that we're very excited to be a part of this year, moving forward."  We see them once and never again.  We don't even know how long they hold their oddly-worded job titles. They promise the sky, and hand out fistfuls of colourful, glossily printed things that will most likely never be mentioned again.  Because we go into our rooms, we do what seems best to us in there, and we resent being bothered by people who don't know what we do in there, not even getting our names, but showing up and telling us what "we're" all going to be doing.

  We don't WANT to "team teach" or "standardize the whole department" for the most part, if it means interrupting or ceasing doing stuff we're trying that seems to be working.  Many of us don't like time away from our classes to attend meetings, leaving our classes in the hands of fill-in strangers who can't do what we've been doing, so at best babysit their way through a placeholder day, and at worst, re-instill the idea that adults don't know kids, don't know what they're doing, and just get angry and demand things kids aren't going to give them, and then threaten things which likely aren't going to happen, and it they do, who gives a fuck?  Rapport is the coin of the realm in a classroom and its sometimes hard won, and it always takes time and can always be cheapened.

  Many of us are as I describe.  But a few of our teachers are different.  They love being on as many committees as possible. They don't think school committees (laughably called "teams" lately, like we're all going to actually wear shorts and not be sitting in chairs the whole friggin time) are most often attention-getting, ego-stroking, claiming-things-and-having-zero-effect, getting out of classrooms filled with teens to sit in rooms with adults kinda things.  Many of us do feel toward them as I have just described.   But some people love teams, committees, groups, collectives, initiatives and coalitions.  As many as possible.  Until they're goggle-eyed with stress and need heavily colour-coded schedules as badges of how sought-after their time truly is.  When you need a union rep, they're on that.  Any "you get a job title and a whole lot of duties and time-committment, but no extra money and probably no real benefit will be seen, nor will what you're doing still be around in three years time" kind of position, and they're first in line.

  They like church.  They like Girl Guides, Scouts, Rotary Clubs, Legion, Civitan, Monarchist Clubs and town council.  It makes their eyes light up.  I really don't get them at all.  They're not bad people.  Sometimes they're almost a quarter as effective and important and influential as they are letting on.  And that's certainly not nothing.  But I don't get them.  They don't seem like part of my species.  They think if one person singing or dancing is cool, twenty or fifty people singing or dancing is magic!  Not to me.  I think the more people involved, the less impressive.  If one singer can bring a tear to my eye, I'm deeply impressed.  A massive choir?  Never going to bring anything to me eye.  These people like Glee, for goodness sake.  So, where I'd like one voice singing "Don't Stop Believing," they'd actually prefer a choir doing it.  Why?  I do not get that... The Beatles singing "The Long and Winding Road" or "Here Comes The Sun" has a quiet, understated soul that is amazing.  A school choir of people who can certainly sing, being conducted lockstep into an acapella, robotic, watery, plastic version?  Not my idea of fun.  Musicals, to me, have no soul.  To me they are cheesy.  Like Cheez Whiz is cheesy.  Fakey.  Insincere.  Painful.

  I think these mysteriously collectivist beings define their own identities very much in terms of what role they play in what groups of humans.  I guess I don't do that very much.  If I listened to what groups tell me, I'd have to accept, for no very good reason (besides "for the good of the group") that I am gay, a Satanist, a religious fanatic, clinically depressed, evil, cruel, lazy, perverse and any number of other things I must conclude I simply really am not.  I've been told I am any number of things my whole life, by any number of people, in groups and individually.  I have had to learn to accept that they don't know who I am, and then I have to just go about doing what I'm doing as a free agent.  I have noticed that the better, deeper, more passionate and more astute my choices are, the more stupid and bad things they can be misattributed to.

  I am a chronic lone wolf.  Many teachers are like this.  One lesson that is dying slowly and hard is that I can just go do what I want, and I don't need to argue with people before doing it, and I often don't need to get permission, and I don't need to announce why I'm not doing what has been done before, or by others, or might generally be expected.  I can just go ahead and do my thing.  Better that way.  Avoids conflict.  Spends the time in possibly succeeding rather than in talking to others about trying to succeed in ways they don't like/understand/approve of.

  Every time I say "Now, I know you're used to..." or "Now, instead of..." or "Now, usually...", I'm kinda drawing attention to a potential fight we could have, or inviting comments as to "Well, what's wrong with the old way?" or "Why take the extra trouble for no reason?" or "Do you think you're better than..?"  I might sound terribly arrogant also.  I have actually worked with people who assumed that if I didn't do pretty much exactly what they were doing, the way they were doing it, that I clearly disrespected them and didn't think what they were doing, and how they were doing it, was any good.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Fact is, I'm not paying much attention to what they're doing or how they're doing it, unless I for some reason want to steal and retool some bits of it. 

  But I have offended people by adapting the current way of doing stuff to something a bit more me.  They have felt that I was arrogant or disrespectful.  That really upset me.  I have had to explain to many people over the years that I'm a lot like that kid who feels a whole lot better once she's drawn the logo of her favorite band on the front of her binder.  Now it feels like mine.  So, when I work, I like to make things up and try them out and learn and innovate.  In fact, that's the only thing that makes my job something I'm into. Inventing.  Experimenting.  Adds suspense.  Means I am often wondering "Now why did this thing work so well?  I don't get it..." while others are wondering "Why does this thing never work?  Kids sure are stupid and horrible."

  This has been called "re-inventing the wheel" in the past, usually in the context of "I don't see why we(you) need to be..."  Thing is, it's about growth to me. It's about having a class that is changing each year, and maybe adjusting and being flexible enough to show the mark of whatever kids are being run through my little system, for good or bad.  Some classes are more red-necky than others.  Different things fly with different groups.  Increasingly, I teach very differently depending on who my audience is.  It's like if you play music in various different venues.  It's like being The Blues Brothers and singing "Stand By Your Man" and "Rawhide" because you're in a bar with both kinds of music (country and western!). 

  So I'm an individualist.  Every time something says "Alright everyone..." they've lost me.  When they say "You know what would be so fun?  Let's all..." they've once again lost me. My whole family's a bit like that.  I remember growing up and every time there was a one-size-fits-all, or "go on, try it.  I guarantee you'll like it because how can anyone not like it?" thing, whoever was offering this turned out to have no clue about me at all.  How could I not like football?  How could I not like coffee?  How could I not like Armageddon?  Pearl Harbor?  Transformers?  The Tragically Hip?  I could alright.  I could not like the shit out of anything anyone tossed at me.  Because someone was tossing it at me and assuming I was enough like everyone else that I'd like it?  Maybe a bit.  But it certainly couldn't be explained wholly by that.

  Was I weird?  Yeah.  Liked things many others didn't.  Didn't like things many others did.  But I'm not that weird.  Every single thing I like (and I like so many, many things, many of them nerdy or dark) is liked by an awful lot of others, and not just weird people on the Internet.  How can I like Babylon 5?  How can I like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore?  How can I like Pink Floyd?  Are those even questions?

  I don't like packages, I guess.  I want to pick and choose.  I have paid extra so as to avoid getting fries with that.  I don't understand why I should compromise when I'm signing up for something I could just as easily have nothing to do with.  When it comes to cable TV, I want the package that gives me only the few premium channels and none of the others.  No such package exists.  To me, it looks like a scam to make you have to pay maximum rate to get any two good channels.  Not into that.  I don't like the radio.  I'm not willing to listen to the talking, and the songs I don't like.  I don't like network TV.  I'm not willing to have to watch things at a certain time, and have to spend an hour doing it instead of forty minutes, just because someone wants to try to sell me life insurance, toilet paper and lady razors.  

  I don't like church.  I'm not willing to try on that one-size-fits-us-all thing.  I will meet up with Christians and discuss stuff and talk about the bible and write stuff and worship or the like with a great deal of contentment.  But I don't join things.  I don't like being a member.  Membership has its fees, responsibilities and obligations.  If you're an individualist, you really start to notice just how many compromises are made to maintain groups and status and peace within them, how much of who people are and how they live their lives are molded by the groups they find themselves in.

  When you meet people, they try to slot you into an identity based on what groups you're part of.  Protestant or Catholic?  Modern or traditional worship?  The "married with small children" group?  The gay group?  The hockey fan group?  They Star Trek nerd group?  The stoners?  The jocks?  The preps?  It's like high school all over again.  Like any good little angst-ridden goth/emo/scene kid, I gotta be me, and if you think you know me by identifying some group you think I fit into, go ahead and see how well that works.
  If you want to actually know me of course, you'll have to be willing to hang out with me.  And I'm not willing to hang out in groups.  I won't be at your church.  I'm not going to the Rotary Club meeting and paying membership dues.  You'd have to actually go out for coffee/a beer with me.  And if you're not willing to do that?  Don't worry about it.  But don't judge me and don't tell others who you think I am.  Because you don't know me.