The Real Master Calendar

It may seem, looking in from the outside, that the schedules chosen by the public schools of America are pretty obvious: most often semesters, trimesters, or quarters. There are long holidays (Winter [no, not Christmas or Hanukah] and Spring), there are two-day holidays (Thanksgiving and the State Teachers Convention) and one-day holidays that are never numerous enough.

All these dates, along with assemblies, sports events, the National Honor Society meetings and staff development are written in a Rosetta-Stone like document called the Master Calendar, that spells out the exact sequence of the school year. It’s all organized, perfectly sorted out, up on a giant white board in a back hallway of the main office.

This perception, of course, could not be more incorrect. Within the walls and halls of the school, teachers and students alike know the real master calendar is unwritten, and follows no state or district guidelines. The real master calendar? It goes something like this.

Honeymoon/Recon (Day 1 to about mid Week 2.)

After running around frantically setting up the classroom, sitting in meetings and making copies and powerpoints, you greet students, lead them in engaging community building games, and hand out textbooks. The students usually do everything you ask, and you think, “This is looking pretty good. I have some good groups this year.”

That’s because The Class, the one that varies each year, but which by mid-October you will be calling “my ____ Period” (sometimes with @$! added) has not yet revealed itself. No, they are watching you, scoping out the weaknesses in your classroom management like Ukrainian hackers looking for backdoors into bank accounts. They are looking for cracks in the system, the cross-currents in the classroom that show in no lesson plan. They are looking for opportunity. Will he lend out pencils? How many times? What about the nurse? Can I go whenever I want? Does he have Teacher Ear, so he can hear whatever we say from the front of the class? How hard will he push if we don’t finish something? What happens to kids who misbehave?

The Class sits. They watch. They wait. Their patience, especially compared to how it manifests itself in mid-February, is endless. Then, it begins.

True Colors/Run Up To Halloween (Week 2 to Week 7)
This is point when things settle down, and both teachers and students suddenly realize, Oh My God, were are here, all together and with very few breaks, for the next 170 days. In six, roughly hour-long chunks of time will we move, all together, slowly sliding across the Ocean of Time like an iceberg blown by a gentle wind. No Exit, with No 2 pencils.

The Class, knowing somehow on a cellular level that the time has come, begins to bubble up. First sporadic episodes of stubborn resistance to a single task, then group resistance. Then hallway drama brought in from the breakfast line or lunchroom that explodes in a thermo-biological nuclear blast 15 minutes into the period after lunch just as you were going over the sequence of star evolution. A daily walk through Valley of the Shadow. At the same time, all the other classes seem to give a collective sigh, settle in, and begin to run like a well-oiled machine. And so you are left with one period each day that defines your day. I will be fine until/after Period ___.

In the school as a whole, leaders emerge, hand-written posters announce student government elections, the first sports teams are chosen, and the newest grade to the building stops getting lost all the time. The great voyage is underway, and things are going fine.

Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas: The Golden Times (Week 7 to Week 18)

And thus, except for Period ___, and unraveling the mysterious demands of the latest pedagogical initiative (there will usually be one, requiring professional development sessions with a visiting expert, often a poster or other papers you have to hang on the wall, usually certain things you have to say and do), things are good, most of it useful. You enjoy the day-in, day-out joy of just plain teaching, the rush of kids learning things, the spark of discovering a new way to do something that works, the flow of it all.

The seasons change, Halloween comes and goes, Thanksgiving runs smoothly into the holiday season, the first grades are out--there is still time for kids struggling to do better, and you get to know you kids and how they learn. Maybe you learn a little about their lives, and they, as you tell stories that tie in to whatever you are teaching, get to know you. Still, every day, Period ____ lasts ten thousand years and leaves you with a headache, but that’s only once, for less than an hour. Holiday (Christmahankwanzahkah) Break comes, and you enjoy your time with the family. If only, if only, this was the end of the school year. But no.

The Long Abyss (Week 18 to Infinity)

Sometime in early January, students and staff return to face the grim reality of weeks and weeks with no holiday, classes when you feel like you need a taser to wake people up, and the feeling that it will go on forever, world without end. In some places it snows. In others it rains. Everywhere, hours pass like years. Days, mysteriously, pass like seconds. You begin to get to the bottom of your bag of teacher tricks. You begin to think that, in fact, none of them will work. And yet, minute by minute, the weeks pass, and suddenly, it change is on the horizon.

Spring Break (Week 30?)

Heavy drinking, and travel if you’re lucky. Heavy drinking and gardening if you are on a budget.

Fire in the Hole: Standardized Testing Time (Week 32-33)

Back mid-February or so, uneasy sleep begins for administrators and district officials. On the horizon, looming like the stormclouds of an incipient war, the standardized tests. Dreamed up by pyschometricans determined to create a perfect core sample of the academic skills of middle-class white kids, but, oddly, taken by everyone else also, these tests are an excellent predictor of future success. Not necessarily academically or professionally (SAT scores of famous people [Craig Vetter, Nobel laureate biologist 550 math, 500 reading]), but for the ability to endure boredom and pain. Like a root canal. Or a five hour presentation on your company’s new sales commission structure.

The central office people send out posters that ask the kids to Show What They Know, hand out mints, and encourage all the kids to do their best. The subtext remains unspoken (Please, Please Pretty Please so they don’t put our school on the List and we get torn apart.)

The kids take hours and hours of tests, leaving them simultaneously groggy and belligerent for the better part of two weeks. Then, with a few weeks left of school, we all struggle with an odd feeling. Having been immersed in messages designed to make students and staff believe in the importance of the Tests, we then feel like this: So, I guess we’re done then, since none of the rest of the stuff we are doing will be tested.

Of course, there are many weeks yet to go.

Field Trip and Award Ceremony Season (Week 35-38)

This is the part of year when your lesson planning internal dialog sounds like this: “OK, Monday I want to start Chapter 15. Let’s see, but that’s College Fair, so I’ll be missing half the kids, so I can start, Tuesday is OK, but Wednesday is a half day because of African-American Community Assembly, and so half the guys will be gone, Thursday is an Early Release Day, so there will be a dance, and Friday I’ll have a quiz. So I’ve got about a day and a half.”

Then, there are the small field trips. The bell rings, you walk in from the hallway to get rolling and you have maybe three students out of 22. You ask, “Where is everyone?” The kids tell you it’s Cinco De Mayo, so some kids are there, it’s also the Service Learning picnic day so that’s some other kids are gone, six kids from the Mentor Program went to see a baseball game, the Student Council people are electing their officers for next year, all the girls went to the Girl Power assembly and two guys are suspended since they are so sick of school they threw food all over the cafeteria and got two days. So you have the three pull up their desks and go, “So, remember when I said we could talk about the possibility of Life On Other Planets some other time? I think now is good.”

Hand over the Candle/Let My People Go (Week 38 till the Last Day)

How long O Lord how long? Not few enough days to release the Gulag-like grip you have on the students. Suddenly, with the end in sight, students and teachers develop a rush of good feeling. Kids who used to tell you daily that they hate you and the school, and would greet your questions with “Shut up talking to me!” are now hugging everyone and greeting you with a big smile and “What up?” In the last three days you convince yourself that movies and pizza parties, are, in fact, pedagogically sound.

And then, suddenly, they are gone, the building is quiet, and you find yourself strangely moved. I can’t believe it, you think. I really will miss them. And then, you do something even more inexplicable. You start planning.

Thinking Time

So that is the last part of the Real Master Calendar: No much in June, but more and more in July and August, as you drive your kids to soccer or summer camp, you find yourself mulling over new ideas. Maybe next year I’ll do that lab differently, maybe I'll…until, it all begins again.