COLLEAGUES AND ADMINISTRATION
“I really like my colleagues and the administration (…) This, I suppose, is a matter of luck or something, or you find a good place and then you stay, but I can walk into the teacher's lounge and just see a bunch of people that on the whole I'm really happy to see, that I really respect, that are good people. It's a really nice atmosphere. Individually, there are people who are close friends and I really am connected with specifically, but also there's a group atmosphere that's nice, that's supportive, that's professional, dedicated. And our administration are people that I just admire. Yes—incredibly impressive people who are kind and loving and really smart and really good at what they do, and people that I'm really proud to be working with. And they get it, which is nice (…) I've heard a lot of complaints about principals who don't know what it means to teach in a classroom and that's totally not the case here, which I really, really like. They're really supportive and I know that they're on my side and they've got my back. But also, they're dealing with the same stuff I'm dealing with—whether it's the the obnoxious kids or their obnoxious parents or the crazy people higher up in the system. I know that the administrators that I work with are people who totally get it.”
“My first year I taught at this school where there was this curriculum developer with all these big ideas and no connection to real life, and endless meetings to discuss. There was one time—they wrote report cards and they didn't want to give the students a letter grade or a number grade. It was going to be a flower and different levels of blooming. And then we had a three-hour meeting to discuss whether it should be a flower that's blooming or a tree that's growing. I was like, I just don't care and this is so irrelevant and so unhelpful. So my first year I had a a really clear comparison on the level of administration between a place that works, and where they get it, and a place where they don't. Actually, the teachers themselves in the other school were really nice as well. I just kind of felt bad for them. And then, with other places, you hear stories about the nasty principal, about the gossipy teacher's lounge, about the cutthroat competition, all kinds of nastiness, and we don't have that. And it's really nice.”