Office Space republished from my Blogger blog, May 29, 2011
I haven’t written in my blog very much during this school year, and with good reason. The stuff I would have written about probably would have gotten me fired, and while it might have made a good point about how tenure really doesn’t give a teacher a job for life, I didn’t really want to put that to the test.
Suffice to say that the turnover in our main office this year is now complete. At the end of last year, we lost our principal, our only assistant principal, and one of our two counselors. We also lost our head custodian to retirement. During the course of the year, our head secretary/office manager retired. And now, with the end of the school year coming, we’re losing our other counselor to another school system. The writing, it appears, was on the wall. So now, we go into the 2011-2012 school year with an entirely different administrative/counseling staff than we had a year ago, when our test scores actually improved so much that we jumped up two levels in Indiana Public Law 221’s ranking model. It’s probably not a coincidence. One staff member (not me) was heard to say, “They’ve taken what we’ve built over the past five years and destroyed it in nine months.”
I’ve felt what others have felt, that I have to look over my shoulder. Things have been reported about teachers in our building that are patently untrue as if they were documented fact. When the teachers in question were confronted about it, the source of the information was quickly deduced and confirmed by an independent source. Then, another backstabber was identified through direct quotes. I was also singled out in a most unprofessional way earlier in the year for, heaven forbid, raising my voice.
The curricular changes that we have experienced this year in tandem with teacher accountability models approved by the state haven’t helped, either. Let’s put it this way: We are supposed to be using these new curriculum materials to support the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), but the evaluation tool being used to determine our pay is based on the Indiana Academic Standards (IAS), and that will remain the case until 2013-2014. So, we were told to teach to standards that won’t be tested for two more years, and to not worry about the IAS that are not included by the new curriculum. I mean, our evaluations will be based up to 50% on test scores yielded from an entirely different set of criteria. It’s only our paychecks and our job performance rating. What’s to worry about? The textbook series that was adopted last year is so egregious, that it has actually driven innovative teachers to retire. In one meeting last year, a math teacher I greatly respect was told that an activity that he had created, very similar to the one presented in the new text, could not be used and that the textbook material had to be used verbatim, like it was some sort of holy writ. This was his last year, and he could have retired some time ago.
Meanwhile, at mid-year, our new principal made our school part of the 8-Step Process, by which windows of standards are taught and assessed every three weeks. This three week schedule was made without communicating any detail to the staff. Unfortunately, the curriculum we were handed is made up of eight books that take at the minimum, four weeks to complete. The 8-Step Process aligns with Indiana Academic Standards, and the curriculum doesn’t. We ended up reteaching one of our 4.5 week units for three more weeks before the high-stakes test, and left out a lot of critical instruction that students needed to move on to high school.
Just a short while ago, I posted how happy I was to be getting free of that curricular nightmare with a new opportunity for next year to teach problem solving. The joy was short lived. The next day, I attended a meeting where I was essentially handed three units of the new curriculum to teach to each semester class. I was warned I might have to teach “one or two” units of it and I agreed to it. That turned into a hard number three in less than 24 hours and was told that I could simply deal with it. When calculated using the suggested timeline for those units, that left 10 days each semester to implement my grand plan to really teach kids math that they could use and would enjoy and remember. That’s not in any way what I signed up for.
I don’t know when it happened this year, but at one point I just wanted to watch “Office Space.” When my brother first introduced me to this movie almost 10 years ago, I remember thinking how lucky I was not to have a job like that. When I watched it again this year, I thought, wow, now I have a job just like that. No one listens. Screwups advance, while people who toe the line and work hard go unrewarded or even punished. The people to whom teachers report contradict themselves and each other with alarming regularity. There’s no motivation to work harder, because all it will lead to is the promotion of the administration. Let me put it this way: I’ve had six principals in my building in 14 years. Many of us feel like we have footprints up our backs. We’re just a stepping stone to high school administration. It’s made me as cynical as Peter Gibbons and on Friday I was about ready to start cleaning fish on my collaboration reports. I even went so far as to put a red Swingline stapler in my Amazon wish list to put on my desk next year. It was really frustrating to feel that way about the career that I’ve loved since the first day in my classroom.
These feelings all came to a head last night. I was at Barnes and Noble with my friends Eric and Rob, and as we were leaving the store, I spotted it. The Office Space Kit. It comes with a little red Swingline stapler, an Initech coffee cup just like Lumbergh carries around, some flair, and TPS report cover sheets. I thought about it, decided against it, and walked out to the car. As I sat there, I reconsidered it. I could just see myself, thumbing my nose at authority, my private little in-jokes mocking the situation. And then, believe it or not, the words of Yoda came to me: “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” I started up the car and went home, resolved not to do that.
I’m not going to break. Not now, and not ever. I am going to do what I set out to do next year. I’m going to teach kids how to solve mathematical problems. I will adhere to both the Common Core State Standards and the Indiana Academic Standards, but I’m not following slavishly the poor textbooks with which I’ve been saddled. I found a little passage that Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett sent me in an email yesterday that opens the door:
Due to the emphasis on the Standards for Mathematical Practice, the cluster design of the standards, the increased depth of the CCSS, and the grade-level content shifts from IAS to CCSS, curriculum planning teams will need to evaluate their current instructional materials. This is true for schools who have already adopted instructional materials, as well as those who will adopt materials aligned to the CCSS. In either case, chapters and lessons may exist that do not meet the full expectation of the CCSS, and others that do not meet the full expectation of the IAS. School corporations will very likely need to exclude certain lessons or chapters in order to focus on what is required of the standards. They will also need to determine which chapters or lessons should be used to teach the required content to ensure coherence in the curriculum. This will likely require teachers to teach out of order from the textbook and only use the lessons needed. It will also likely require teachers to develop gap lessons and to adapt lessons to meet the full expectation of the standards.
Yes, you read that right. If the book doesn’t do the job required by the state, we have to pare it and supplement it. And that’s just what I plan to do. I’m going to approach this next year with renewed vigor. I’m going to create “gap lessons” like you wouldn’t believe. I’m going to Lowe’s tomorrow to get a big sheet of bulletin board to mount on my basement wall to organize the lessons around the standards that the awful textbook doesn’t hit. And every one of those lessons is going to be my flair. And there’s going to be a hell of a lot more than the fifteen minimum pieces of it, let me tell you.
Next year I’m going to express myself, and I’ll never, never have a case of the Mondays.
A story I’ve never written about before. It was the fall of 1982. I’d just had my senior pictures taken, we were in the middle of football season, and my circumstances were a bit unusual, to say the least.
Earlier in the summer, my father had left his fourth wife while I was vacationing for my annual two weeks of visitation at my mother’s house in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He’d had me pack all my things, not that there was a lot to pack, and leave them in places where he could find them easily. When I came back, he had moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Cadillac, away from Mesick, where I had lived ever since seventh grade. The apartment was in the adjacent building to the one where my grandma lived, just down Pearl Street, at the end of which was the ubiquitous Big Boy restaurant that had been such a large part of my childhood. I slept on a futon in the living room, while my dad had the bedroom. I didn’t have a problem with that. I was glad to be away from Number Four.
The problem with living in Cadillac was that I would have to switch schools for my senior year, which my father promised I would never have to do. The solution was unique. my friend, Ken LaFountain, lived in a farmhouse with his mother in nearby Copemish, with his mother, Joyce, who was a foster parent. We negotiated a $40 per week payment for me to stay there with them for the year. My dad was gainfully employed at the time (for a change) but I wanted to support myself, so in the winter, I got a job at Crystal Mountain Ski Resort, where Ken worked. I worked Saturdays in the cafe, and Sundays in the buffet room. Because I had taken all of my academic classes except for two, math analysis/pre-calculus and civics, I enrolled at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational Center. I took electronics, in hopes of becoming a computer systems engineer. This becomes important a little bit later. The vocational school was located in Cadillac, just down the hill from my dad’s apartment. So, I got dropped off at the vocational school on Monday morning, stayed the week with the LaFountains, and my dad picked me up after the Friday night football game to take me back to Cadillac from wherever we were playing. It was really a pretty elegant solution.
So, one Saturday, I had to drive to Traverse City to take the ACT. We didn’t have the money for me to take the SAT, and none of the colleges I was going to apply to needed it, so the ACT was it for me. I drove all the way to Traverse City from Cadillac, my longest solo drive ever, in my dad’s beaten up 1974 Chevy Nova. I got to the college campus where the test was being given, and it was a gorgeous sunny day. I left my jacket in the trunk with my duffel bag, locked the car, and went in. The ACT was given in four parts, and math was first. I didn’t care for math, but it went okay, I thought. I knocked out social studies and English. Those were my best subjects. And then came science. I froze. There was so much on this test that I simply hadn’t learned. I was terrified. What was I going to do? I muddled through the test as best I could, and looked up at the clock to see that there were only ten minutes remaining and I still had about 15 questions to answer. I started to panic until I saw what the next section was: Ohm’s Law. As fate would have it, we had just gotten done with Ohm’s Law in my electronics class at the vocational school and I absolutely crushed the last 15 questions with time to spare. Flushed with victory, but feeling like someone had sucked all my brains out with a vacuum cleaner, I walked outside in the fresh, crisp fall air to my locked car.
And I did not have the keys in my pocket.
I panicked. Where were the keys? Then I realized exactly where they were. They were in my jackeg pocket. I had locked them in the trunk! Now, these were the days before cell phones. I used a quarter and a dime to call the police to come help me unlock my dad’s car. I waited about an hour until they showed up. They popped the door lock for me, and I knew well enough how to get into a trunk by taking down the back of the back seat. I retrieved my jacket and my keys, and they asked me to unlock the car door to prove it was my car. The key didn’t work. I thought, oh no, they’re going to think the car is stolen. I went back to the trunk and the round GM key opened it right up, but the rectangular key didn’t open the door. I was puzzled. I was able to start the car, though, so the police were satisfied that I hadn’t stolen the car. But I was sure confused why the key wouldn’t open the door. That was a mystery for another time. I thanked the officers and commenced with my post-test celebration.
My dad had given me $10, and I wasn’t going to bring change home. I drove just down Garfield Street to Bonanza. Back in those days, Bonanza was where you could buy a steak and baked potato, and then eat off the food bar until you couldn’t move for about five bucks. And in those glorious days, I was burning about 4,500 calories a day so I could pack it away. I was 6’4″ and 210 pounds and pack it away I did.
When I got home, My dad grabbed my grandma and took us both down to the Big Boy. I told them both of the great adventure I’d had and my brush with the law. My dad said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Those are replacement doors. Don’t lock them.”
My back may argue against me, but my brain doesn’t. Although I retired over six years ago, I really wasn’t ready to. I may never be. I settled into a boring daily routine of substitute teaching and doing puzzles to keep my brain sharp. I worked on my supposed reitrement hobby, buying, repairing, and selling old Mego action figures, and tried to keep my brain engaged with the world.
It didn’t work.
I got so bored that, three years ago now, I wrote a novel. You’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? It takes place in November every year. I didn’t join the website or the official group or anything like that. I just read the guidelines, which suggested writing a 50,000 word draft during the month of November and off I went. I wrote 60,000 words in 26 days. Done. Are you ever going to read that novel? No. It was a romance novel set in 1998 and the main characters are two middle school teachers who work in a school very similar to one that shall remain nameless, where very early in my career, many shenanigans were going on. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” was a complete lie. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
When I gave up, bored, and went back to the classroom full-time, I was not in the best mindset. I started off teaching freshmen, who were feral wolves during COVID and didn’t know how to behave at all. And then I had to transfer to the city’s grade 10-12 building because I was the only one certified to teach most high school classes. That turned out to be even worse. I was saddled with teaching students Algebra I. These were students who had failed Algebra I in eighth grade, and ninth grade, and were now on their third try. With the academic challenges came behavior challenges and by the end of that year, I was ready to walk away again and go mine coal or something.
But this past year, an opening at my old middle school came up, and I found myself not just teaching in a school where I had worked for 18 and a half years previously, but in a classroom I had taught in previously. I was home. And with that change came the return of my best and favorite creation, Solution Squad. Here I was, teaching seventh grade math again, and one of the first standards we were expected to teach was writing the prime factorization of a number using exponents. What else would I use? I had created an entire graphic novel based around prime numbers, prime factorization, simplying fractions, and solving proportions with them. And the target audience was here, right in front of me.
Earlier in the summer, I had used ChatGPT and became familiar with it and Canva as well, and suddenly I was able to make my characters appear in presentations without drawing new images, as described here. And when school let out for the year, I sat down in earnest to see if I could make my kids come to life.
3 x 5 Banner for my classroom next year
One of the first things I did was to create animation-style turnarounds of each of the characters. And no, this wasn’t a case of simply prompting with words. I have had to refine my prompts at least 100 times to get the results I want. And even then I have to go into Photoshop and adjust the boots of the costumes and make sure the colors were consistent. Generative AI is known to have its own ideas and is not intended to follow specific guidelines. That tool may be coming down the road and when it does, I’ll be all over it. But for now, I’ll work with what I have available.
Now, I’m not taking any work out of the hands of actual artists. I haven’t paid anyone to draw in years, except for the occasional blog banner or profile picture. I’m not going back into the comic book publishing game ever again. I’m doing this for my classroom. Once I got my turnarounds done, I dug through my old Solution Squad papers and found the first page of a comic book story I never finished. It was pencils only, no backgrounds. Here’s what I got back:
All I need to do now is drop these elements onto Canva slides and add letters and balloons. I don’t need to be fancy and use Illustrator. Again, not looking to publish. These 72 dpi images are good enough for Canvas. My digital comics are back in the game!
As opposed to my short period of retirement, where I thought I had to adjust to doing nothing, I have a million things I want to do. I want more comic stories for my kids. I want to try animation. I want to put music to the stories. I want to learn again, and it’s been a while since that’s been true. So, do I feel 90 anymore? Heck no.
My daughter Sera came home for a visit this week. Yes, it was a visit. She’s 20 now, and lives in Indianapolis while she goes to Purdue, majoring in mechanical engineering. She stayed in Indianapolis this summer, subletting from an intermational student while she does an internship at Glassboard. She had this week off, and is flying to California to spend a weekend there with friends.
It’s hard.
It’s hard to be a parent who did their job well. She’s independent, confident, competent, and brilliant. She loves us, but she doesn’t need us; not really. Yes, we pay for school, but that was always the plan. She pays for a lot of her living expenses, and her travel. This is her second trip to California this year. She never asks for anything.
It’s hard.
The energy in our house changes completely when she’s home. Her things are on the bathroom counter, a reminder that our family is complete under the same roof once more.
When she said goodbye a few minutes ago after packing up her car, I sat on the edge of my bed, holding back tears. It was the same way when we dropped her off at school two years ago in August. I don’t think it’s ever going to get easier. My wife and I rely on the saying, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Be happy it happened.” Every single day, we tell stories to each other about raising Sera. We send each other Facebook memories. Occasionally we peek in her bedroom.
It’s hard.
Her life is an absolute joy to witness, and thank goodness for instananeous communication. I love seeing projects she works on (the ones not covered by NDA, of course), and photos of the places she goes, and I just think to myself, this is how we raised her. We gave her the skills to live this life. We can’t be sad that she’s doing it right.
It’s hard.
It’s a few hours later now, and I just checked her progress on Life360. She’s almost back at her apartment. I don’t stalk her during normal life, but I watch her when she travels. I want to know that she arrives safely. In a few days, life will return to our new empty-nest normal, and we’ll start looking forward to seeing her just before school starts again. But for now…
When I started working on lessons for the 7th grade math classes last year, I inadvertently resurrected the Solution Squad. It wasn’t my initial intention. I just wanted to make a school for super-powered teens. The Mutants & Masterminds roleplaying game had a fictional school called The Claremont Academy, named after X-Men writer Chris Claremont. I thought, well, my favorite teen hero artist was George Pérez, so I’d name mine after him. And once I thought about how they would get around, I thought, why waste a perfectly good design? I have the Coordinate Plane.
But where would they get a Coordinate Plane? Why, from La Calculadora, of course. She designed and built it for her team. And that’s when it hit me. Her last name was also Pérez (not a coincidence). The school could be named after her! But she was an eternal 16-year-old. She couldn’t run a school. And so she and the rest of the squad got aged up to adulthood, 21-22 years old, and the story took place five years after the graphic novel. When I tried to design La Calculadora in ChatGPT, it could not, would not, get the uniform right. I spent no less than eight hours trying to force the image generator to get the suit right. It just couldn’t do it. It also gave me some frighteningly real-looking images in its attempts.
Now, I have a secret. I have always thought that most live-action superheroes look like Adam West playing Batman. People in superhero costumes look ridiculous to me. They have ever since I became an adult. I don’t judge people who choose to do it. It’s just not for me. For me, superheroes belong in comics and cartoons. After all, they were intended for kids. So, when I chose to create La Calculadora for everyday classroom use, I went with an American animation style with cel shading.
But still, every single time, it failed to get the boots right, and it failed to do the rib panels on the costume right. Eventually, I just settled for saying the Squad’s costumes had evolved over time.
And that’s the way it went for the whole school year. Every time I brought a member of the Squad in, I modified their costume to match this set.
But then this morning, I found, quite by accident, a picture of La Calculadora’s inspiration, George Perez’s niece, Milla. And I went back to ChatGPT and asked it to model the character closer to her. And what do you suppose it did? It got the costume 95% right on the first try! Suddenly, there’s 16-year-old La Calculadora, staring me right in the face! I did five minutes worth of Photoshop work on it to get it just right. A year later, ChatGPT has figured out how to do what it absolutely couldn’t do before.
This was, without a doubt, the closest image to how my mind’s eye saw the character. And just as suddenly, the floodgates opened. There’s nothing stopping me from making new Solution Squad material, just as they were in the graphic novel that came out nine years ago!
I worked on a turnaround sheet for the character and now it can be drawn on-model again and again. Now, I know all the arguments against AI are going to come up again. I have recently been attacked online by one of my former Solution Squad artists. But perhaps, not coincidentally, said artist still owes me artwork that I paid $400 in advance for, eight years ago. My time for spending money on artwork that I wait years for (or that I never receive at all) has come to an end. I’m also not rejoining the comic book world. I did my time out there, never to be repeated. This time, I am going to stay in my own little corner of the universe, doing what I’m best at: creating materials used to teach kids math!
