The quality of the faculty, the beautifully tended grounds, the abundance of cutting edge technology to aid with teaching and learning, the healthy and delicious food served each day at lunch, and the array of distinguished speakers who came to address the students --- all of this made for a photogenic school ready for the next year's viewbook.
At the same time, when self-congratulatory comments were flying around about how special the place was, I've always thought and often said, "Having good teachers and a clean, well-lighted space in which to learn shouldn't be something special. ALL children deserve this." Surely this is self-evident.
Yes, I got a crash course in the corrupt underbelly of private school management when, from one day to the next, without warning, I was tossed away after twenty years of tireless service. But I learned much more. The swift, relentless decision to get rid of me was followed by a kind of mindless panic that led me to question the good sense of these administrators and their understanding of how teachers work.
Though administrators held to the party line that I was on "administrative leave," the powers that be commanded my presence on the first no-school Monday to come in and clear out my office, under the baleful gaze of two lackies. Two decades of teaching and advising and producing scores of plays and musicals meant that there was a lot to sort and a lot to pack. I was pretty miserable throughout.
My misery became first disbelief, then white-hot anger, and finally deep sorrow when I inquired about the four file drawers and the shelves of CDs and the multiple hard drives full of course descriptions, lesson plans, worksheets, examples of student work, departmental plans and history, and much more. As I'd chaired the Arts Dept for fourteen of my twenty years at the school, I was the custodian for a wide array of documents that had taken all of us in the department years to create and then improve. And because almost half this documentation was from the 1990's, it was indeed on paper rather than all contained on a hard drive. But then, even the terabytes of digital files I had stored for future generations were to meet the same fate.
In addition, I had (entirely voluntarily) served as the school's video archivist all those years. I'd stood behind the camcorder and then created DVDs of all the major events -- distinguished speakers, annual Founder's Day speeches by Seniors, plays and musicals and special days out around The Circle. History is important and providing the school with these rich archives had been my pleasure and honor.
So I inquired of the Powers that Be what they would like me to do with these archives, the many curricula I'd designed and documented and with the scores of discs I had created. The answer, dear reader, made my jaw drop. Hadn't the school paid me all these years to craft and re-craft courses, to develop strategies for all the arts at the school, to add new pieces to the mosaic of our shared history? And wouldn't my successor in the job need to know at very least what all these original courses looked like, even if he or she wanted to do them differently?
"Take what you want. Anything you leave behind is going to be shredded."
PS The teachers (yes, multiple) they hired to take my place were given their keys and told to go teach. Nothing passed on.
For me the saddest of all this is how little respect for the students the decadence this flushing away of all this work, created especially and specifically for these students, this ruthless erasure of everything associated with me, so clearly demonstrated.
The Administration continued for weeks to say that I was on leave, while my office was stripped bare. No Bear, nowhere. Bye now.