#3 The Rubber Room Sets Teacher Against Teacher

I will never forget the first welcoming words I heard in the Rubber Room.

  "Are you normal"?

What she really meant to say is, "Do you belong here"?

 Since I have been in the RR I have read these words from people who are criticizing the BloomKlein Department of Education:
 
"Of course SOME teachers should NOT be in the classroom, but..."
"Of course SOME teachers SHOULD be in the Rubber Room, but..."

It is scapegoating pure and simple.  Teachers are setting themselves against other teachers and constructing an US vs THEM divide within the profession.  This just makes it easier for BloomKlein to destroy the our union and the public education system.

But what I have found to be even sadder, is that Rubber Room detainees themselves do it to each other.

"She belongs here".
"That behavior is what got him here".

Why shouldn't they when the union leadership does the same thing.

"Everyone in the Rubber Room has done something.  Maybe not what they are accused of, but something".  These are words of a high-ranking Union official.

The notion that we are considered guilty by virtue of being accused of something, creates an atmosphere of shame and distrust that engenders a Rubber Room culture of fear, anger, and loathing.

The social norm in the Rubber Room is not the norm of the polite middle class society that we come from.  As soon as we come here, we make a few friends, then stake out our territory and defend it.  Why?  Because everybody else is doing the same thing.    I am told that this is how people in prison behave.  That makes sense, because, like prisoners, we are accused of wrongdoing, and we are no longer productive and respected members of society. 

We are OTHER. 

Wherever they send me in the fall, I will probably be treated as OTHER by those who are not under investigation, but that will be preferable to being treated as OTHER by those who are.  Up until now I have not written about the misbehavior of my Rubber Room colleagues because the only thing that would achieve would be for people to say,

"You see, that's why they belong in the Rubber Room and not in a classroom".

Why help BloomKlein destroy our reputations?  Why blame the victims?

But now that they are closing the Rubber Room, it is necessary to reveal how cruel and destructive it really was. 

Caged monkeys don't cooperate very well, but who can blame them?

#2 Rubber Room Teachers are Not Normal

When I walked into the Rubber Room for the first time and sat down in my assigned seat, one of the women asked, "Are you normal"?

I answered, "That depends on your definition of normal".

A man laughed derisively.  "She doesn't even know what normal is".

Maybe not.  But I do have a picture of "normal" in my mind and it looks something like this:

In statistics, this is the classic bell curve, and no matter what is being counted--beans, babies, bobcats--it means that most of them are in the middle, or average.  Normal to me, means average. 

But we don't always want to be normal or average.  In school, it is good to get above average test scores, and bad to get below average test scores.   My position on the bell curve depends on which of my characteristics you want to count and which group of people you are comparing me to.

Compared to Average Americans, Rubber Room Teachers are not normal.

We are older than average.  A large number of us are in our 40's, 50's and 60's.
We're all college graduates.
Most of us have a least one Masters Degree.  Some have two.  Others have doctorates.
Many of us make more than $80,000 a year.
Most of us have spent 10, 20, even 30 years working for the same employer--the New York City Board of Education.
Most of our children go to college.
Most of us own our own homes.
Most of us were on fairly solid financial footing before we were sent here--good credit risks.  Many still are.
The vast majority have never been arrested or in trouble with the law--if they have been, that's why they are in the RR, and you've read about it in the newspaper.

That's not the norm for all Americans. But it is the norm for the solid American Middle Class.  If you compare us with Middle America, we are pretty normal.

However, if you group us with the families of the children we teach, we are not normal. We are way above average.

Perhaps some will find this statement offensive, but that doesn't make it less true.

Allow me to rephrase:

Rubber Room teachers have chosen to spend their lives teaching those who are socially and economically less fortunate than themselves, in hopes that their students will achieve a higher standard of living than their parents did. In doing so, RR teachers have reduced their own capacity to earn a salary commenserate with their education.

Compared to the Average Joe, this is not a very normal way to spend your life.

#2  Rubber Room Teachers are highly educated, dedicated professionals who deserve to use their skills rather than being warehoused and told that they are lucky to be paid for doing nothing.

#1 Ghettos Are Bad

A ghetto is the real estate where a society isolates and segregates a segment of itself.  After a time, the people who have been confined there start to define themselves in terms of it.  Some actually like being there.  If they are to be ostracized, they reason, it's better to be close to others who are ostracized as well and to deal with those on the outside as little as possible.

Ghettos are created by sick societies as a way to redirect criticism, guilt, hatred, fear, and a host of other uncomfortable emotions onto a specific group of people. They are also created by ruthless leaders for the purpose of consolidating their power.  Having a group of targets in one location makes pogroms much more convenient and therefore much more likely.  Pogroms desensitize people over time to expect worse and worse behavior on the part of the larger society and worse and worse suffering on the part of the victims in the ghetto.

This can lead to genocide.

I am NOT saying that the teachers in the Rubber Room are about to be carted off to concentration camps and gassed.

I AM saying that New York City has created a ghetto and is therefore sick.

Ghettos are bad.
Societies that create ghettos are sick.
People who are isolated in ghettos are victims of a larger, sicker society.

The Rubber Room is a ghetto.
The Rubber Room is bad.
New York City is sick.
The teachers in the Rubber Room are victims of New York City's sickness.

On general principals, we cannot allow ghettos to exist.  We must fight to tear them down as they are built.  Life outside the Rubber Room might be more challenging and uncomfortable for the detainees, but there are better ways of helping each other than sitting together in ghettos.

Reason #1 to celebrate the closing of the Rubber Rooms:  GHETTOS ARE BAD.

Eleven More Days

I have never counted the days until the end of the school year until I could start counting them on my fingers.

Because of the ridiculous fact that we have to come back on Monday, the 28th, there are now eleven more school days until the end of the 2009-2010 school year; but what the heck, I'll start counting anyway. 

It's also eleven more days until the infamous NYC Rubber Rooms are closed forever--that is, if BloomKlein honor their word.  But that would mean that they would have to be honorable men, which they are not.

No one knows yet what will happen to the Rubber Room detainees;  not even, I suspect, BloomKlein.  Let's remember that the Rubber Room is not about real estate; it's about people whose professional reputation is under assault.

Nevertheless, I celebrate the closing of this chapter in BloomKlein's war on public education.  It's time to reflect on what they have done to us here, and what we have done to each other.

Victim

According to an article in the NY Post written by intrepid reporter Erin Calabrese, the young lady in the photograph above was shoved and punched by a teacher.   This supposedly happened on Wednesday, April 28, 2010.  The article appeared the next day, Thursday.

I was going to write about it as soon as I read the article, but I thought I'd better let myself cool off first.  I'm glad I did.

My first reaction to this article is to ask:  What mother would allow her daughter's picture to be published in the New York Post along with the headline, "Female teacher walloped me: girl"?  What mother would allow BOTH her daughters' full names to be published along with her own?

And it's not just her name and face that we have.  We now know that Tytahnisha is 15 and in 8th grade, and that leads one to the conclusion that she's been left back twice.

We also know exactly where she goes to school:  P.S. 335/ M.S. 534 in Crown Heights.

So lets review.

We know Tytahnisha's first and last name, her sister's name and her mother's name.  We know what she looks like.  We know her age, what grade she's in, and where she goes to school.  We know she has some kind of learning problem.   The only way the Post could have put her picture and full name in the paper and online was if her mother signed a waiver.  Am I wrong?  Please correct me if I am.

But the victimization doesn't stop there.  Have you read the comments?  There are 84 at last count.  Whether they believe her story or not, few if any are on her side.  People make fun of her name, the names of her mother and sister, the fact that she was left back, the fact that you can't see any so-called wound in the picture.  They say she deserved to be walloped because she pushed the teacher first.  They call her ghetto.  They hypothesize that this  family is on welfare...  that she is retarded...  And on and on.

Did she actually get punched and shoved by the teacher?  I doubt it.  The teacher is 44 years old which means she has probably been in the classroom for more than ten years, and has experience working with students like Tytahnisha.  I think Tytahnisha did the shoving and punching and, with the help of the DOE and her mother, engineered what I call a Guilt Flip.  She flipped her own guilty actions onto the teacher.  The so-called wound?  She could have gotten that in the riot that she initiated.  

If I am right, this is the worse victimization of all. She has been taught that she does not have to take responsibility for her actions if she can figure out a way to blame them on someone else. 

However, she and her mother have learned that the good old Guilt Flip can snap right back in your face--especially if you let it be photographed by the New York Post.

Welcome to the Rubber Room

A new teacher arrived in the Rubber Room last Friday.  She spent the day crying her eyes out. Several people tried to comfort her, but she wanted to be left alone, so they backed off.   It has been against my personal Rubber Room ethics to comment on daily happenings here, but since we are about to be relocated to new, as yet unknown, DOE dungeons, I have decided to comment on what we will be leaving behind.

As far as preparedness is concerned, there are two types of people who come into the Rubber Room.   The first group is composed of people like me who have been targeted over an extended period of time.  They have been submitted to a lengthy period of harrassment and mobbing and pretty much saw the RR coming.  The second group consists of people who were at the top of their game, without a cloud in the sky and suddenly, wham, they were accused of some form of misconduct.  Either way, the first day in the Rubber Room is difficult.

At some point in Rubber Room history, the detainees decided that they needed a representative other than the official UFT rep who was hardly ever there.  They decided to elect a representative who was also a detainee, and who would serve as their spokesperson to the DOE and UFT.  One of the jobs of the liaison is to "welcome" new detainees.   The liaison is very important because he is one of the first people one meets in the RR.  He offers important information and can even help prevent a teacher from being further abused by incompetent and corrupt  DOE investigators (see my blog post "Don't Talk to SCI" ).   After the RR's close, I doubt that there will be a liaison for every reassigned teacher as there is now.

Those coming into the RR for the first time might be intimidated by the reputation of the place and the idea that the people in there are a bunch of abusive and/or perverted teachers.  However, once a person has been there for a few days he or she discovers that most of the teachers are pretty normal.  The good news is that everyone in there is pretty much in the same boat.  They are all being charged with something:  incompetence, physical abuse, verbal abuse, insubordination, theft, etc.  If we are assigned to different sites all over NYC, a reassigned teacher might be the only one facing charges at that site.  Other workers who have not been brought up on charges might be unsympathetic and even cruel--   hopefully not, but my experience over the last five or six years has not filled me with optimism about the kindness of strangers.

Rubber Room vs Teacher Reassignment

           










When I disappeared from my school, some of the other teachers asked the union rep where I had disappeared to.  The union rep replied that I had been "reassigned".  I met one of these teachers on the street shortly thereafter.  She said that the union rep had told her that I had been reassigned, but the parent coordinator was telling everyone that I had been sent to the Rubber Room.  She wanted to know which version was true.  You see, she thought that "reassignment" meant that I had transferred and was teaching at another school.  I told her that "Reassignment" meant being sent to the Teacher Reassignment Center, which was also known as the Rubber Room.  She looked horrified.

A few weeks later, a newly reassigned teacher was placed at our table in the empty seat in front of me.  There were a total of eight people at the table:  one at each end, and two at each side.  The newbie asked us how long it would take for her to be "reassigned" to a new school.  The reply was that it could take two years or more.  She looked confused--why does it take that long, she wanted to know.  Well, first you have to receive your charges, then meet with your attorney, then wait for a hearing date, and then go through the hearing.  Depending on the charges...Charges?  She hadn't done anything wrong.  Neither have we, we replied--you don't have to do anything wrong to be brought up on bogus charges and sent to the Rubber Room.  I thought this was the Teacher Reassignment Center, she said.  It is, we replied, but they also call it the Rubber Room.  She looked terrified.

Then she put her head down in her arms and started to cry quietly.

So, as you can see, there is a certain amount of confusion among the rank and file as to the relationship between reassignment and the Rubber Room, which means that teachers aren't really paying attention, aren't really doing their homework.  There are probably several reasons for this.  First, teachers tend to be very focused on their students and on the job of teaching them, and that is time consuming.  Whatever time they have left over is taken up with family, friends, and the courses they have to take in order to get a salary increase.  Second, they think that the Rubber Room is not about them; it's about bad teachers.  If they don't personally know anyone in the Rubber Room, they probably go with the New York Post version of Dirty Rotten Rubber Room Scoundrels.  Our union leadership confirm the major media version by not forcefully denying it.  Third, there is fear.  Outside the illusion of safety sustained by the bubble of their predictable classroom routines and schedules, lurks the Rubber Room bogey man, ready to pop out and carry them off--no mater how excellent their teaching skills, no matter how much they try to please the administration--and somewhere deep down inside, they know it.

Now Chancellor Klein and Michael Mulgrew have entered into an agreement to close the Teacher Reassignment Centers aka Rubber Rooms.  However, unless this agreement means that investigations will be carried out fairly and impartially, and that principals will be held accountable for bringing teachers up on bogus charges, then there will still be large numbers of reassigned teachers, and no matter where they are warehoused, they will still be in the Rubber Room.