Teachers Lounge 5/27/12

One of the challenges our protagonist in Teachers Lounge must face is the threat to her self-respect that becoming a full-time temp for SubForce represents. She has been seeking a teaching job for nearly a decade, since Measure 33 when voters approved the corporate takeover of public schools in her state. K-12 teaching positions had not been easy to find prior to that legislation, and afterward, the promise of steady work had diminished even further. The traditional Home Room position that she had experienced as a child was long gone, and because only administrators and a few “elite instructional staff” were allowed to remain fully employed under the new management, many teachers like herself had joined the “grassroots teachers” as the new chancellor often referred to his teaching force. 

Cheryl remembers flinching at the use of the term which she wasn’t sure Delgado had meant to use in his acceptance speech. She’d been watching the speech on her iPad while pairing socks at the laundromat. Delgado was a thin, tall man, she observed, but not without muscular stature. She liked the way he gripped the podium with one hand as he spoke, and he had a pleasing baritone. “It is in our civic interest to promote the highest teaching standards in our schools without imperiling the integrity of our grassroots teaching force.” She liked those words, Cheryl did, even though she felt ever slightly the object of condescension, she loved the attention. She inserted the toe of one sock into another and turned them inside out in her automatic way. Delgado seemed to be speaking directly to her and she paused at the counter with the next load humming in the dryer next to her. She set the podcast back, replayed the sentence: “Civic interest...imperiling integrity...grassroots teaching.” That is when she flinched, a spasm that would become a nervous tick on her upper right cheek near her eye. The tick would develop into a wink later in her teaching career, a confusing facial gesture among her students and peers alike.

As a grassroots teacher, Cheryl is a naive one, this lass. But there is a survivor in her, too. She observes the ways in which her fellow teachers fail or succeed in their jobs, the choices they make and the obsessions that lead them in one direction or another. She is a student of her field, a reader of her own tea leaves as well as those of her peers. She is both non-judgmental and pragmatic, aggressively pragmatic, like a mother of 5 with shopping bag full of coupons. She is driven, this lass. Driven to keep this job, she is; and so she will. So she will.

She will understand. She will fly into this field, this necessary field of young budding minds, and it is her personal drive to water them and shade them and be present when they bloom. But above all, she will defend her right to work. As a member of SubForce, she is compelled to fight against the almighty Teachers Union, which has become a force for evil, as she is told. It is Pepsi Corps that will and must win in the end. This is the benign organization that is pulling public education out of the ashes and giving it, finally, the direction it always needed: the programming of society toward innovative entrepreneurialism and consumerism. It is through the education that children will learn to appreciate plastic again, and to once again understand that sugar consumption, not exercise, is a child’s natural inclination.