The day NYC Mayor Bloomberg and Flatulence conspired to End my Teaching Career

These assistant principals and principals are unprofessional as well as untrained except in a new tactic of widespread mean -spiritedness.

These A.P.s and principals are taught in closed workshops, secretly encouraged by the Mayor’s Office and the Chancellor’s Office to rule by abject bullying.

Under the Mayor’s new total control, these principals have new found medieval powers over teachers in the New York City educational system.

The Teacher’s Union, the U.F.T. appears as helpless in this power struggle as David was against Goliath, and equipped with no real stones to cast.

Letters placed in teacher’s files can lead to a “U” rating which can lead to a forfeiture of license, in just two years of concerted harassment; a teacher with no letters in file for over twenty years can be railroaded out of a job quickly by a harassing Assistant Principal who takes the time to construct, ‘a paper trail’.

Teachers have fewer due process rights now than we did twenty-five years ago. We could then immediately summarily ‘grieve’ letters in file; now, we cannot instantly do so. They reside in files unchallenged.

Letters in file from unprofessional and jaundiced A.P.s and predominately now unprincipled principals, can quickly jeopardize one’s teaching job in such a skewed and unbalanced system.

I once had a letter placed in file by a virulent A.P. in Jamaica High School, on a day when I was absent, stating that my absence allowed behaviors in my pupils that my attendance would have prevented, had the substitute teacher, who could not control the class, not been needed.

You can’t make this stuff up.

With this in mind, here’s my story,

It’s October and outside of the paned windows the trees were dropping their alphabets again.

Inside, student’s pens forced writing onto newly started journals; I had handed out 8×11″ official sized paper, had distributed it to set the standard size for all the future acceptable, gradable journal entries, when

a student’s ha-ha hit the ceiling.

It had seemed to mushroom down like an A-Bomb.

It had circulated the room like an entity, the plague in Egypt.

We knew ‘stink bombs’ ; this was no ‘stink bomb’ ; someone had ‘lost their cookies’.

We had opened all of the windows, but to no avail.

Students had pulled their sweaters over their heads, had covered up their mouths and noses with my loose leaf paper and had exited into the hallway with muted mutual sounds of disgust.

An SBD, a Silent But Deadly, and true to the dinosaur fart that it was, it had emptied the room.

Not enough to have had a gasping class of thirty-six teenagers stagger into the hallway agog and offended, my teaching effectively stopped, but who had immediately stumbled onto us, arrived on the scene?

Nobody less than the “Butcher of Buchenwald”, as she had been called, trained in the Chancellor’s Leadership Academy, a severe, diminutive Assistant Principal of English, a predator with a Napoleonic complex, carrying a yellow pad just looking for trouble, who didn’t like me, and now she had found me and my class in the hall, during teaching time. 

I had tried to explain to this neo Nazi WHY we were in the hall, but dubious scorn and contempt had deeply etched her face; one could see that she was already formulating a strong disciplinary letter to place in my employee file and was drooling stapling the envelope shut.

She had then stalked into the empty room,  taking notes on a large yellow pad, her face red with anger and disbelief and she had exited the same room just as quickly, a few moments later.

She had looked cheated but nonplussed, had looked nowhere in particular and had loudly stated, “It WILL dissipate!”

She had quickly stalked off down the hallway, her birdlike frame hunting other victims; I never heard from her concerning that unfortunate and untimely incident .

In retrospect, I am most thankful for whatever lasting aftereffects had lingered in that deserted classroom.

That malodor had negated my having to defend myself, had prevented me from having to accumulate thirty some odd testimonies from my students about the power of that bestial stench to evict us from that room.

That one letter in file would have been a bloodied pecking spot, a peg for her to hang her hat on, for more letters to come soon afterwards.

She later gunned down some three, senior, other teachers, that semester,  fine teachers who had done a splendid job, teachers who had loved their craft but they had been destroyed because they had stood up to her bullying.