I miss the way it used to be. I miss when my steps were sure and confident, when we packed all of our stuff into a U-Haul and a mini van. With a smile and a “because God told us to,” we moved from Muncie Indiana to Atlanta Georgia the day after I walked across a stage in a robe too short for me. I had to borrow that robe from a friend of a friend because I had accidentally packed mine. We were young, crazy, broke, and sure. We were so sure.

We still live in Atlanta, where God sent us. The church we came to start never started. We found a different one. We have a house now, two babies, and I have lost somehow that fire in my belly, the sureness of my step. “Because God told us too” has more often turned into “I’m not sure” and “I don’t know.” I don’t know is becoming the holiest phrase I have.

The sermon this week was on Jacob and Esau. We were encouraged to wrestle with God. After the kids went to bed, the wrestling began. For me, the story of Jacob and Esau is like The Great Gatsby. By the end of the story I hate everyone and wish misery on them all. The Great Gatsby at least grants me that ending. Jacob sends his whole family to go face Esau because he is too scared, and he ends up having an extreme encounter with God.

I do what I do when I don’t know the answer to anything. I google it. The answer that keeps popping up is that Jacob was favored, as though that is supposed to make me somehow feel better. I can’t be the only one left wondering, and what if I’m not? What if I heard wrong, what if it won’t all pan out in the end.

I don’t mean the END end, I still believe in ultimate redemption. But how long does that take? What happens when you heard, and you are sure, and then it isn’t at all what you were so sure you heard?

This once sure and steady path is starting to feel like walking on a water-bed. It probably has for longer than I realize, and my legs are so tired from the effort to just stand still. But what I remember from the times I ran around on ever-changing surface, is that the standing still is actually far harder than the moving. If you just keep moving, you feel more secure.

Reading the scriptures lately has been like holding jello in my hands. Squeeze it too tight and it looses its shape and slips right through the cracks between my fingers. I know that there are promises in there for me, but I can’t quite get the right grip. Perhaps that is the point of reading scripture, to get me to keep my hands open.

Keep moving. Hands open. The posture sounds familiar. I wonder if that was the way it was, the way I was, when we heard God and moved here. I wonder if that is the way you are sure.

This is my last blog post for Live58. I have really enjoyed blogging for them and hope you will go look at how they are ending extreme poverty.

Ever since middle school, I have always been smitten with the early Church. Acts 2 says they sold all of what they had, donated the money, and as a result no one was in need. If you think about it, the early Church essentially ended poverty, at least among themselves. I remember my friends and I marveling over that idea.

In college, my yearning for the early Church days became more extreme. If today’s Church would act more like the early Church, I mused, we would run out of room in our pews! Come on people, sell and share, sell and share, that is what the Church is about.

Now that I have a job, a house, two cars and a few pieces of furniture that aren’t secondhand (though they are from IKEA), I have some reservations. Is that really the way the Church is supposed to operate? If I sell my cars, my husband and I cannot afford to go to work. Don’t worry about me selling the house; we won’t have it for much longer.

Then there is my stuff. I like my stuff.

I wonder if selling all my stuff would mean all my stuff.

Does that include the quilt my grandmother made me as a wedding present, my wedding ring, my girls’ teddy bears? I haven’t used the battle cry “Sell and share!” for a very long time, at least not since I had anything of value.

Read the rest HERE

It is rare that I don’t know what to say. It is often I say the wrong thing, but it is rare that I have nothing to say at all. But there has been a lot of silence in my house, on my blog, in my social media streams. For everything I have been saying, I haven’t been saying much. At least not about George Zimmerman and the not-guilty verdict handed down late Saturday night. I haven’t been able to find the words. I am not sure they are mine to have.

What I have been doing is a lot of reading, a lot of listening, and more re-tweeting than usual. I am listening, especially to those whose stories are different from mine. I am listening so that I will better understand. To me, it could have been just a verdict in some media-frenzy court case. It could have, but it is so much more to people who I love. They are speaking up and out, about the things they have faced in this country, the ways they are regularly treated. They are speaking of the fear that is laced through their hearts, that squeezes  every time their sons walk out the door. I am so grateful to these friends, internet and otherwise, who trust me with their stories.

Maybe you think everyone is over-reacting. Maybe you want to point out the differences in legality of not-guilty and innocent. Maybe you just want everyone to move on already. Maybe it is time to weep with those who weep, to mourn with those who mourn. 

I don’t know what the answers are. I don’t know that I am called to answers. I do know that I am called to mourn. To sit and listen, to better understand the wailing. To move my posture to a place where I identify with those who mourn. These stories, they are changing me. I am listening. I am weeping with you.

She was screaming at the McDonald’s, and I could hear the shame in her voice so clearly I wanted to crawl into the tunnel of the play place and bury my own head too.

“I want to go home! I just want to go home! Please, please, take me home!” Her mother was ignoring the pleas. (Don’t think for a minute this is some sort of condemnation, three minutes before this story began you could find me telling my 3-year-old, “Fine then! Go up there, but when you start crying, no one is going to come get you!” What exactly were we going to do, abandon her in the plastic maze at the McDonald’s in Corbin Kentucky?)

The screaming girl had been caught bending back the fingers of some other girl she did not know. Her mother had properly scolded her and the girl whose fingers had been bent backward had completely recovered from the situation. But the perpetrator, she was deeply scarred.

“Please, please, can we go home?” Please, please, please take me home!” She knew she shouldn’t have done it.  She probably knew while she was doing it. But somehow, she did it anyway. And now, she was simply begging to go home.

And I saw myself in her. In the middle of a McDonald’s in Corbin Kentucky that we stop at every time because it is half way between our house and my in-laws and because it has a big and little slide. I saw the way she was so sad for what she had done. I saw the way she was begging to just go someplace safe. But also, I saw the way in which everyone but her was already over it.

The pain had subsided, the forgiveness was granted. But the girl would not forgive herself. She would not re-engage in the play she had been invited to. She just wanted to run to a safer place. A place where she did not have to look into the face of the one she had hurt. I place where she could see her mess as forgotten, rather than forgiven. Engaging was just too hard.

So often I would rather have forgotten, not forgiven. I want never-happened, so I reject redeemed. Redeemed is too hard. I can pretend I have not messed it up, pretend my sins are forgotten, but to see myself as forgiven, to step into the redeemed. No, that is simply too hard. Take me home. I don’t want to play anymore anyway. Please, just take me home.

I wish I could have taken that wailing girl’s face gently in my hands. I wish I could have looked her in her sad eyes and told her, that she was the only one who had yet to forgive herself, that everyone else had moved on to the fun part. They wanted her to play too. I hope that she learns, to forgive herself, bravely re-engage and find fun and friendship where there was once wailing. I hope she learns that second chances are often given to those who are sorry and trying to do better.

I hope I learn one day too. I see myself in her. Just a girl, sorry for what she has done, too afraid to re-engage, even though she is sorry. I hope I remember in those moments I am terrified, that often I am the last one willing to forgive myself.

This is the fourth in a four part series. I have a lot of thoughts about education. A lot. The system is broken and this junk ain’t fixing it. Part one here. Part two here. Part three here. There would be more parts, but writing this makes me want to quit, and I love my job.

Today I want to tell you a story, so get comfortable on the story rug, or maybe we will all go outside and sit under the trees. Story days are the best day in the English classroom.

There is a cell phone company responsible for serving all the customers in a city. So, the cell phone company hires you and hires me amongst other people, to open stores around the city. We do not get to choose where we are going to put our stores, after all these stores must service everyone in the city. We wait with bated breath as our placement arrived in the mail.

We open our envelopes and read our fates. I have been selected to work in a store in an affluent part of the city. There are street lights and sidewalks, ample parking. There is even a cupcake store down the street that I realize I better make a “Thursdays only” rule about or I will be in trouble. Before I can unlock the door for the first time all the neighboring shop owners come in to tell me they are excited I am there, how much I will like working in this neighborhood. When I tell people where my store is everyone is very impressed. They keep telling me they have heard good things about that shopping center.

In the same envelope, you are delivered a very different fate. You will be working in a rather notorious neighborhood. When you go and check out your store, it is in a shopping plaza with only a liquor store and a convenience store. All the other stores are abandoned. When you go to unlock your door the liquor store owner walks past you pretending you don’t exist. The convenience store owner comes over to welcome you and gently reminds you to keep your car locked at all times. When you tell people where you work their eyes get big. They ask you if you are scared. They tell you, you are brave just for showing up at your job.

Both of us open up our stores on the same day and have the same schedule. The cell phone company we work for had us lay out our stores the same way with the same stuff.  We serve about the same number of people. Everyone needs a cell phone, so they come.

I am selling a lot of our fanciest cell phones. I have very few customers who are late on their bills. I don’t have to spend a lot of time tracking the money down. Instead I spend that time thinking of cool new ways to serve my customers. Everyone is very impressed with my innovation. With no over-due bills and lots of the premiere cell phones being sold, the company is pleased and gives me a plaque that tells everyone how great my store is. This only makes more people want to come.

You are having a tougher year. You have been broken into twice. (This sounds terrible but the convenience store has been broken into four times, you are doing better than your neighbors.) You sell a lot of the basic cell phones. You spend most of your time tracking down people who are late on their bill. It isn’t really their fault. You get frustrated with your clients sometimes but they are doing the best they can. The mid-year report showed you were behind on the minimum level of bills paid, so you have started coming in before hours and staying after hours to make phone calls, and sometimes make the rounds in the neighborhood. You started offering incentives for paying bills on time. You bought these incentives with your own money.

At the end of the year, in a report that is published for public consumption, I am lauded as a really incredible cell phone store manager. I have a near perfect record on bill collecting and a very high percentage of my clients are using the most deluxe features on the fanciest phones.

You don’t fare so well. While the cell phone company will repeatedly tell you to your face that they applaud you efforts the only thing that is published is the bottom line, and your store doesn’t make the cut. Yours is a failing store. You are given your first strike. Two more and you are out.

The company gives us good news! We are getting money for store upgrades. You are grateful for the money and ask if you can use it on the incentives that have been working toward the common goal. They say no. This money is for store upgrades. You decide to use it to properly fix the things that were broken and install a security system. I use my money to install a free coffee bar. Some of your best clients want to know why they can’t have a coffee bar too. The company sees their point and lets your best customers, the ones who always pay their bills on time, become my customers.

The next year the company can’t understand why you are failing again. You have to become a succeeding cell phone store or you will be fired. Though you really like your job and believe in cell phone access to all customers, you start looking for a new job. It is unlikely things will change the next year and the extra hours you are putting in are taking a toll on your health, your marriage, your social life.

Meanwhile I will be staying at my job forever. I am good at it. The customers love me, the company loves me. People bring me Starbucks cards during the holidays to let me know they appreciate my service. I go to conferences and show everyone my innovative services. They love it. I write a book. I am the best cell phone store manager ever.

When you leave your job you find out that everyone thinks it is because you couldn’t handle your customers. This breaks your heart. You love your customers, you still run into them sometimes and you love those encounters. Your store is now being run by a 22-year-old fresh out of college, doing the best she can. She was placed there through a program that pays off her college loans for doing the same job you did and she is only planning on staying for two years.

The company continues to operate this way and every once in a while your old store has a passing year, but for the most part it is always the same. I, and my customers live happily ever after.

THE END

I think we can all agree this is a dumb way to run a company. It is also a dumb way to run schools, but it is currently how it works. Perhaps you think I am exaggerating. I have worked both cell phone stores. I’m not. No metaphor is perfect, and there is much I don’t know about economics. I am sure this story has its holes.

Everyone keeps talking about school reform in regards to effective business practices and the market. But schools aren’t supposed to work like businesses. Businesses just leave when a population gets too difficult to serve. This is why food deserts exist. I don’t have very many answers. I wish I had more. It took a year of teaching to start asking better questions.

What I do know is this, the current system is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. The collapse is coming and I hope not too many people are caught in the rubble. I also know these things could be changed, laws could be re-written. There is still hope. But it needs to be changed before more people get hurt.

This is the third in a four part series. I have a lot of thoughts about education. A lot. The system is broken and this junk ain’t fixing it. Part one here. Part two here.

In my first year of teaching I was told how hard it was going to be as I signed my contract. I just wasn’t listening. I didn’t have the ears to hear. The Assistant Principal who hired me (because we didn’t have a Principal that year, not really anyway) told me before the ink was dry on my carefully crafted signature, that she would count this year as a success if I came back the next.

Let that sink in for a moment. The same woman who thought that I was passionate, and competent, who wanted me to teach at her school. She was merely hoping that I would make it through the first year and on to the next. Survival was her only goal for me.

I suppose I could get all defensive, tell you that she didn’t know me and how tough I was. I could tell you that she was judging me by my perky voice and the color of my skin and she didn’t know who she was talking to. I could get all defensive, but that would merely mask the truth. I barely survived that year. I came back the next only because I wasn’t offered a different position before contracts came around. Still, I was tucked securely in the success category, I came back.

It takes about three years for a teacher to get her feet under her. If you have just come off your first year of teaching, take heart. You did it! You survived. The second and third years will be exponentially easier. But it takes about three years to really feel like you are making headway and not just treading water. (But treading water certainly beats the perpetual drowning feeling that is your first year.)

This is because teaching is tricky. There are a lot of skills that need to be developed that are used simultaneously in a classroom. You have to learn the difference between productive noise and chaotic noise. You have to train your brain to quickly remember everyone’s name. You have to know your material and how to explain it to a brain that isn’t developed. You have to train your body to only need to pee during passing period (and you need to be able to pee in under 5 minutes including travel time). There is a lot to learn, and about half of it needs to be done in the background, simultaneously. Three years is the mark where some of it can go on auto pilot. Three years is the point you can really begin thinking about curriculum and instruction.

In the state of Georgia, three years is also the point you will no longer have a job. There is new rule: teachers who miss the raw score mark three years in a row will be fired and have their license revoked, never to teach again. But every education professor I have ever had tells me it takes three years to figure out what you are doing.

Three years and you are out is a terrible idea. For a number of reasons.

1. Cheating You may have heard that there is a massive cheating scandal in the city of Atlanta. Like, the largest they have ever found (look a little harder big cities, I have no doubt you could find one!). Three and out gives teachers no incentive not to cheat. Let’s say I love my job at my high needs school. I barely didn’t make it my first two years. Despite the fact that it was my first two years of teaching, miraculously my scores are the highest at the school. My third year, my principal notices my success with the tough cookies and moves me to teaching remedial kids. It is spring and I know my kids aren’t going to make it. If they don’t I lose my job. If I cheat and get caught I lose my job. But if I don’t get caught I am safe for another three years. Why wouldn’t I?

2. Teacher Flight One of the problems with urban schools is that there are too many new teachers. The suburban schools have more applicants, so they can be choosier. The already succesful schools tend to hire the teachers who have a few years under their belt. This leaves the urban schools, that really need the most experienced teachers, as a place  to make all of those newbie mistakes. Currently, there are teachers that stay (not enough, but some). But with the three-year clause, after two years of working with under-scoring kids I need to go where I know the kids will make the grade, or I will lose my job. Even thought I want to work with high needs kids, and I am good at it, I can’t afford it.

3. Cyclical Placement Let’s say that I love working with and am better at remedial students, so I have had two bad years score wise. Meanwhile my colleague is a rock-star honors teacher. If I have a wise principal who wants everyone in my school to stay certified he is going to leave everyone where they are for two years, and then the third year when I (his remedial teacher) am about to lose my job he make the rock-star honors teacher teach the remedial kids, and I spend a year with the honors kids. Everyone hates their job and none of the students are serviced well, but then we can get another two years of what is good for everyone. I suppose parents just hope their kids aren’t in the classrooms in the off years.

4. Georgia Needs Teachers I am a little unclear as to why the legislature thinks that kicking teachers to the curb is a good idea. The state is already in a federal state of emergency for many teaching positions. You can’t find a science teacher to save your life around these parts. If they fire every “failing” teach they identify, who are they going to get to fill those classrooms?

I understand the need to make sure that teachers are good at their job. I know the importance of a good teacher, it is why I became one. Three years and you are out isn’t going to fix the problems, it is a guarantee that things will only get worse. But what am I going to do? Those are the rules.

This is the second in a four part series. I have a lot of thoughts about education. A lot. The system is broken and this junk ain’t fixing it. Part one here.

It was the second day of testing. I brought in The Princess Bride to watch  critically view. (For real though, parents, admin we were looking for archetypes and how the movie subverts them. You don’t have to worry, always standards driven up in my classroom. Always rigorous and relevant.) I had properly shamed my students for never having seen the movie and truly shamed the kid who dared to ask me “are we really gonna watch some princess movie?” (Education starts at home people! I am in charge of the classic literature, you are going to have to be responsible for pop-culture classic film.)

My students were quietly watching  critically viewing the movie digital text, and I was putting in grades. (This may sound like a minor deal, but I need you to know that our grading program is web-based and the entire school has less bandwidth cable than your house.) From the part of my brain that was carefully monitoring the noise level in the room I heard this line, “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA THAT YOUR JOB IS ON THE LINE!”

Andre the Giant is pulling the entire party up the cliff, and the boss whose name I always forget, but the tiny bald guy played the dad of a friend on the Cosby show, he yells in frustration “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA THAT YOUR JOB IS ON THE LINE!” and it is funny, to the audience, because it is completely obvious that job or not Andre the Giant is already going just as fast he can.

Despite my students protests I pressed the back button and watched the scene again. It was the perfect  metaphor for what is going on in education right now. This  is the way that merit pay is being instituted. As teachers are strapping their classes to their backs and climbing up an impossible cliff just as fast as they can we are being yelled at that we better kick it up a notch, because our paycheck is on the line.

NEWSFLASH: People who are seriously motivated by the big bucks don’t become teachers. I am not going to gripe about my pay check. I knew how much I was going to make when I signed up for this gig. I signed up for this gig because I believe in education as a way to empower students to rise out of whatever circumstance they find themselves in and live a beautiful life.

Teachers want their students to succeed. We are already doing every single thing we can think of to get our students to succeed. Threatening us with a pay cut if we don’t do better is not going to help. Because we are already doing everything we can think of. Really. I promise. This threat is coming out in one two-word phrase: merit pay.

So let’s talk about what I mean when I say merit pay. Saying merit pay is like saying “enough cheese” my idea of enough cheese and my girls’ idea of enough cheese are vastly different and still both far, far greater than what the USDA says is enough cheese (whatever, those people don’t know anything).

At its base teacher merit pay just means that you get money for doing certain things. Sometimes people think of it like an end of the year bonus, and sometimes it is like that, but as more and more states move to merit pay to get more federal funding, bonus isn’t what it is shaking out to be.

So, when I tell you I have a problem with merit pay, I am not whining about not getting a bigger bonus at the end of the year. I am whining about having my paycheck potentially cut in half. (We will get to the losing my license and getting fired part tomorrow.) I am speaking up about the fact that potentially, it could be more lucrative for me to quit my job as a certified teacher, become a substitute teacher and never have to write my own lesson plans again.

Take for example, the state of Georgia. If I read the legislation correctly, (and please Jesus let me be wrong) in the 2014-15 school year fifty percent of my paycheck will be based on merit pay. Not fifty percent of my bonus, not fifty percent of my raise, fifty percent of what they already pay me. So, if I make $40,000 I am now only guaranteed $20,000 of that. The rest depends on my students test scores. Because, while merit pay theoretically can be based on far more than test scores, practically speaking it is almost always based solely on how your students do on one lousy test.

Merit pay doesn’t mean how much extra are you going to get, it means how much of your paycheck are they going to keep. 

The standards are so impossible that I am beginning to suspect that the legislature saw a way to make massive, massive cuts to teacher pay and get away with it. As it currently stands, merit pay will be handed out based on two questions. Did your students make the raw score that means they have passed? and Did your students make improvements while in your classroom? (25% of your merit pay for each metric)

So, if I work with high needs students who are way less likely to make the cut, if I have a deep passion for English language learners, if I am really great at teaching special ed kids, if I long to make a difference in the lives of kids whose lives are being adversely affected by systemic poverty, I won’t get all of my paycheck. These kids are the least likely to make the raw score needed for a million complicated reasons, none of which are that their teachers are terrible.

Meanwhile, if I teach honors kids, if I am really great at taking a kid who is used to sitting back and raking in the A’s, if I know how to push them to write a better paper, solve a harder equation, and inspire them to do something truly remarkable, I will be punished too. While teaching honors classes means you are pretty much guaranteed to receive the piece of merit pay marked “raw score,” good luck getting your students to improve. If they come in with a 98%, you have to get them to 100% or you don’t get your improvement merit pay.

I work at a school that is regularly named in US News “top schools in the nation.” Never, not even one time has a students scored a 100% on any EOCT. Ever. Now, all the kids in your honors class will have to make a score that has never even happened once in order for you to earn all of your paycheck. Pardon me if I am beginning to suspect that merit pay is just a thinly veiled attempt at paying teachers less.

The most irritating thing about this whole merit pay business, is that really, when done holistically, teachers are generally for merit pay. There are lots of ways to do it well. My personal favorite is a points based system. The teachers choose from a list the ways that they will earn their merit pay. You earn ten points, you earn 100% of said pay. So, you are a class advisor, 2 points. You work at a high needs school, 4 points. You developed curriculum that the rest of the school now uses, 3 points. You took on the added responsibility of leading a program for your principal, 4 points. Test scores are just a portion of the points you can earn. Denver school systems use this system, and it works. It gives teachers the added benefit of being paid for the extra work that they do, and it still takes into account test scores. This system treats teachers like the holistic professionals they are and trusts them to do good work, while still paying them for it.

But, as we learned yesterday, teachers aren’t allowed to have opinions about how they should get paid. If they are the saint teacher they don’t care about making a living wage they will do this job no matter what! Only the lazy teachers are the ones whining about the pay and they don’t deserve the money anyway.

Teaching is complicated, merit-based-pay need to respect the complications and see the teacher as more than just a test score factories. Merit pay needs to be based on the idea that teachers are already doing the very best we can. Putting our paychecks on the line won’t kick anybody into a higher gear. We were already going as hard as we know how.

This is the first in a four part series. I have a lot of thoughts about education. A lot. The system is broken and this junk ain’t fixing it. 

Folks, I am tired, tired. I did the unthinkable today. I stood in my kitchen and talked with my husband about the possible need for an exit strategy from my current job. An exit strategy. From teaching. The legislature in Georgia has accepted “Race to the Top” money and has to institute merit pay. So, they are doing so in the 2014-15 school year, and the way they have chosen to institute merit pay leaves me wondering what else I could do for a living.

I love my job, and frankly, I am damn good at it. Ask the parents who are calling the office to demand a kid I taught for ninth grade is put in my room for tenth. I am passionate about it. Ask my department head who on more than one occasion has found me standing in front of his desk in a puddle of angry tears because I don’t think my kids are being fairly represented . I am innovative. Ask my assistant principal who regularly shows up in my room and later emails me asking me for my lesson plans because he has never seen anything like that before. I am inspiring. Ask my student who wrote in the Christmas card “you make English class not suck.” (You have no idea what kind of compliment that is from a tenth grade boy. Gold standard!)  I have been reading new books I am thinking about teaching all summer.  And I am not the exception to the rule. I have worked in three schools in six years, and most of my colleagues are just like me.

It is irritating to me that I have to even pre-emptively defend myself like this. That I have to explain how much I love my job, my students, my subject matter. I hate that I have to prove that I work my ass off every day for my kids.

But I do, because the way our culture talks about teachers is as much the reason bad legislation gets passed as anything else.  As a teacher, either you are the answer to all educational woes, or you are the problem. You are either a savior teacher, the kind who uses your body as a human shield to protect your kids, or you are a lazy bum. You aren’t allowed to be what most teachers actually are, people who do their job to the best of their ability because they believe it makes a difference. You aren’t allowed to be that. You are either saint or sinner of the worst kind. That is the way we talk about teachers.

We don’t talk about people who want to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. They may gripe about the grading they have to take home, but don’t you resent having to take work home too? Like most people in this world, teachers are doing the best that we can. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but that simply isn’t allowed. We have to be miracle workers, and if we aren’t? Lazy, money-grubbing, union slobs who grew up and chose teaching so we still get spring and summer break.

So, if I have to choose between someone thinking of me as a terrible lazy person who hates students, and Freedom Writer (who on the record only taught for two years, because that model isn’t sustainable) I choose Freedom Writer. It is what my students called me the first six months of teaching when they couldn’t tell white people apart anyway.

But why do I feel the need to try to convince you that I am the world’s best teacher anyway? Because I want to critique merit pay, and the first thing that people want to get all up in your grill about, when you are teacher who has the nerve to have an opinion about your own paycheck and how the state is about to seriously jack with whether or not you get every cent that is owed to you via your contract, is how you just don’t want merit pay because you won’t hack it.

See, with the “teacher is either a perfect saint or a terrible glutton” dichotomy there are only two choices. The perfect saint teacher is too far above griping about her pay. Besides, she is the perfect saint teacher; she of course will have the test scores to guarantee her a full pay check. So it must be the terrible glutton lazy hater teacher who is complaining about teacher pay. And they don’t deserve the money they are raking in anyway. They deserve to be fired.

Well, I am speaking up about teacher merit pay and the dumb ways we are instituting it. And yeah, I have some off days where I don’t get it all right. But I am far from the lazy teacher that hates her kids that everyone likes to talk about. I am just doing the best I can, like Donna Summer, I work hard for the money. So hard for it honey!  So you BETTER treat me right. Or at least hear me out.

I need teachers to be treated like any other professionals. Of course we have opinions about the ways in which we are paid. And it isn’t just about the money. It is about the respect of a profession, it is about trusting us to do the job you are (sort of) paying us to do. And it is always, ALWAYS about what is best for our students. Putting teachers up on impossible pedestals or throwing them under the proverbial bus. It isn’t good for anyone.

I am not against merit pay. I actually like the way some school districts are instituting it. Stay tuned tomorrow for my thoughts about merit pay as the state of GA is instituting it and why it isn’t going to fix what is broken.

They say that when you put an invisible fence up, the kind that shocks the dog when their collar gets too close, the dog learns where the boundaries are, and soon enough you don’t even have to have the fence on, the dog doesn’t have to be wearing the collar. The dog has learned his place. He will stay in the yard. No one can see it, maybe the fence isn’t even there anymore. But the dog knows his boundaries, he knows how to stay where he won’t get hurt.

In elementary school, in the span of a couple of weeks, we wrangled the same pair of dogs into our garage three different times. The first time my mom called the electric fencing company who got ahold of their clients. The owners called us up and came to get their dogs. The next two times the owners phone number was written on the inside of the collars so it was a much faster ordeal.  The invisible fencing people explained to my mom that the fencing will work the majority of the time, but not when a dog’s natural instincts kick in. If a dog, especially a hunting breed, catches wind of a rabbit or squirrel, the dog will leap through the invisible fence. Their instinct to chase is much greater than the learned behavior of avoiding a shock. In an instant they are on the other side of the boundary, ready to be lost into this great big world.

I have been reading some depressing studies lately, about later teens and early twenties and their propensity to leave the church. They go to college and before freshman or sophomore year is over they are questioning whether they want to be in the church at all. But here is the hopeful thing, they still identify with Jesus. They still love God.

I’m wondering if the we haven’t put electric fences around the hearts of our kids. In our desire to keep our kids safe and close to home, I wonder if we haven’t constructed boundaries around when and where and how to interact with God, and then shocked our kids a little bit every time they came too close to breaking free. I wonder if the standard church nursery, to pre-school, to sunday school, to teen room church experience isn’t fencing in our kids. I know we don’t do it intentionally. I know because I am guilty of it myself. I know that we do it so our kids will stay safe, so they won’t run out into the street, so they won’t get hurt.

I’m wondering if, in their late teens in early twenties the instinct to chase the Wild and Free God doesn’t come on them so strongly that in a moment they find themselves on the other side of the fence. They are excited but completely ill-equipped to run around in this world. Isn’t there a better way? Doesn’t there have to be?

I am involved in a project that may hold the answer to these wonderings. It is a book called Wild Goslings: Engaging With Kids in the Mystery of God. It is an alternative to the fencing, a deconstruction of the boundaries that go against our instincts. It is an invitation for us to learn, as we teach our children the Master’s voice in whatever way He speaks to them. Because if they know the Master’s voice they can never be lost, they will always find their way home.

I am starting to believe that we are born hearing the Master’s voice, engaging with the mysteries of God. I am starting to believe that the anxiety I have been feeling lately about the calling I have heard so clearly, has to do with my own invisible fence, my instinct to bust through as I chase a wild and free God.

Sometimes you sign up for a guest post and then end up handing over your heart on a platter. There is no one I would rather give it to than Elora. Her way of living and dreaming brave and true is teaching me how to live braver and truer myself.

Dear One,

When you announce your entrance into this crazy dance called motherhood, there is going to be cheering and laughter. There will be parties! With presents! And hugs, and tears, and crying and congratulations. Then, there will be questions, so many questions. What are you having? Do you have a name? Are you planning a natural birth? Have you considered birthing in water? Are you going to breastfeed? (Get ready for it darling, perfect strangers will ask you about your breasts in the middle of the cereal aisle.) Is it an international adoption? What country are you going through? Can you accurately express for me your views on adoption ethics in three minutes or less?

Beware the questions that are only asked as an opening to an opinion you do not want. The follow up opinions will be frequent. You can’t name your baby that. You really should consider natural birth. You will ask for the epidural when the labor starts! Breast is best! My kids were raised on formula and they are fine!

People will have opinions about sleeping and eating and baby carriers and strollers. There will be endless debates about breasts and bottles, epidurals and water births, the merits of open adoption. I don’t have any advice about any of that. I only have my story.

You can read the rest here. And while you are over there, poke around. Elora has a book releasing August 27th. She just revealed the cover and title and it is going to be gooooood!