My first year of teaching was a pretty solid success overall. The biggest challenge was classroom management in my freshman World History/Cultures classes. I like to joke around with students and that created a really positive atmosphere… but also was seen as permission for them to get super goofy. I would enjoy that, but when it came time to get to work, they’d sometimes have trouble making that shift. But overall my classes went well, I started my first extracurricular activity (Mock Trial), and even moved to Hillsborough to save time on my commute. I had positive evaluations and was rehired.
A couple days into my summer, I received a phone call from Tony Radano, the building principal. In 27 years of teaching, this is the only time I ever received a phone call at home from an administrator (outside of a side gig of handling the announcements of school closings). Tony was calling to let me know that there was a vacancy in an extracurricular position and wanted to know if I was interested. Uh, which one, I asked? Student Council, he replied. Gulp. Ummm….
You see, although I have a huge interest in government, I always found the idea of student government a bit of a parody. In those days candidates for office had to write a paragraph about their reasons for running and it was published in the school newspaper. Nobody actually said anything interesting or relevant. The few that made campaign promises either claimed they would do something that they had no authority to do or gave some vague statement about being more inclusive. A few years later these write-ups were dropped and the entire campaign consists of hallway posters with puns and slogans.
There are schools in the country that have real elections and more importantly, have some input into how the schools are run. Most, however, are about school spirit and raising money for the class and charity. Both are perfectly reasonable things for them to do, but calling it “government” seems disingenuous to me. And although I dedicate time to raising money to charity, I’ve never been personally interested in school spirit or things like school dances.
And yet the principal was asking me — a non-tenured teacher — to do something. Before I could hedge further, he added that he had spoken to the group of student officers who had spoken highly of me. I’m not sure if there was any truth to that… maybe he asked them, “So who do you think would be a good person for the job?” Maybe he gave them a short list of people he could pressure.
In any case, I felt like I had no choice, I had to suck it up and become the Student Council advisor. Fortunately, the job was far less expansive than the one that Caryn Brogan and Brandon Wiater have turned it into. We ran a couple of dances and Spirit Night. The student officers were an experienced, well-oiled machine and I mostly had to chaperon. Troy Dayton, Laura Fenster (no relation), and Maggie Benoit were all awesome to work with and they made my job easy. I was already at the school almost every day to watch my students’ games or performances, so it wasn’t a huge hardship. I still wasn’t happy about having to do the activity and bided my time until I was rehired for year 4 (thereby receiving tenure) to turn in my resignation. By that time I had taken on Model Congress and Model United Nations, so it would have been hard for the principal to begrudge my decision in any case.
Fenster on Education 