very small very rural very middle

very small very rural very middle

reposted from Feb 15

I have almost always taught in small schools – VERY small schools – very small, very rural schools. Heartland. Bible Belt. God’s Country.

There are advantages – few (none?) of my students are in gangs, and few of them actually go to jail while enrolled in school (Of course, I teach 7th and 8th grades, so our high school mileage may vary).

We do have drugs in the community – ‘hemp’ grows wild around here – and once (long ago and far away – but still small and rural) a teacher that I worked with was indicted for raising the stuff. But we haven’t had any here at the middle school (that I know of). I heard teachers discussing one particular student using drugs, but I know the symptoms, and he sure wasn’t using at school.

Another advantage is that we rarely lock anything. In fact, I have nothing in my classroom that CAN be locked. (There is a lock on my desk, but the key disappeared many years before I inherited it.) I lock my purse in my car (Hey, I used to live in a city), but many teachers just leave their purses in an unlocked desk. In fact, I have passed empty classrooms where teachers’ purses are lying in full view. (Insert joke here about no one having any money because our salaries are so low.)

We leave gradebooks lying out in full view while everyone on the hallway mills around on their way to lunch. But I haven’t heard of a single instance of gradebooks vandalized, disappearing, or ‘being adjusted’ (Of course we are not still mired in the last century, and grades are entered into the computer, but we still must keep paper copies. Our principal looks forward to the time when the electronic version will be the final word, and we can save the trees.) I also keep candy in my desk ( rewards for winning Bingo or Concentration – I teach World Languages) and I can send students to get a pencil or scissors out of my desk, and know that they won’t take the candy.

(There’s one kid here who steals – I have caught him, other teachers have caught him, and other students have caught him. He has other behavior problems too. Needless to say, it’s a plaintive cry for attention and love, but he’s a hard kid to love. We live in hope.)

But the major DISadvantage is that we are complacent. We don’t realize what a great situation we have here. We get lost in the day-to-day scrabble, the paper/computer work, the phone calls home to parents. We get furious when we are told that Dallas can’t find teachers willing to work for a salary that’s TWICE our beginning pay scale (But then, we wouldn’t teach in Dallas either.)