I had a meeting with my supervisor today which I found calming. Oh yeah, she's a counsellor, she knows how to talk to lunatics. I have been experiencing a mild sense of panic combined with a stronger sense of impending doom while looking at my calendar between now and Christmas feeling certain I have scheduled more hours a day than there actually are available to me. But talking to her about hours required for my internship was helpful. The fact she has confidence it can be done made me feel better. She also said nice things to me about how well-suited she figured I was for counselling which was probably just counsellor-kindness but it was still reassuring because I used to think I was well-suited to teaching theatre and I had no awareness of the fact that I would one day come to hate noise. Maybe I should have sought an outside opinion back then.
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My Drama program has grown enough that it was necessary to bring in a second teacher. She is not happy to be there and she is bitter about the fact that she wants to be teaching Art in that block instead of Theatre. I'm not exactly happy about it either, but I have really made an effort to share my stuff with her, to accommodate her gigantic filing cabinet that takes up half the back wall, and her strange quirks that included needing to remove all the red chairs from the theatre and replacing them with blue ones so the furniture would match. She also took away my brown pupil desk that I used to sit at while marking projects and replaced it with a blue one she found somewhere. Matching, apparently, is important to her. Because I do not give a rat's ass about what colour my chairs or desk are I said nothing while she made the changes she needed to make to the space so she would feel more in control of it.
Students have been dropping her class in droves complaining that she is too controlling. She is controlling, but the real problem, of course, is that they are used to me, the Queen of Chaos, and next to me everyone looks a little controlling. The reason I am not controlling is not that I am so free-as-a-bird relaxed, but more because I just do not have the skill to know how to make people do what I want them to do. I also have trouble caring about some things (for example, she makes them sit in three straight rows of ten, an idea that has never occurred to me in eleven years of teaching and never would have). It's creating some negative feelings. Today after school she asked me to quit talking to her students. Not that I dance through her classes waving and blowing kisses to her students or anything, but sometimes I have to leave my office and this requires me to walk through the theatre as there is no other exit. She would prefer me not to respond to the students who say hello to me as I walk by. I'm not sure how I am to accomplish this without being blatantly rude but I did not argue with her. Sometimes people surprise me and I have no idea what to say.
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4 comments:
I don't see how all that rigidity makes for a good learning environment.
I don't either. And it seems unnecessarily stressful to both her and the students. Their ability to learn acting techniques is unaffected by how many students sit in each row but she spends a lot of class time struggling to micromanage this kind of thing. She should teach math, I think.
Ahh -- she wants to control your actions with others. That is out of bounds and I think she should be told so.
I think so too though I have not quite figured out how to approach it. On Friday I told her she really needs to tell her class they are not supposed to be chewing great wads of gum in the theatre, which she lets them do for some inexplicable reason considering how strict she is about everything else. After I said it I felt like I was being passive aggressive... but I'm not sure why. This is a rule that actually has a rationale, unlike the one where students must sit in three rows of ten.
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