I’ve seen a fair number of people tweet out a link to the Salon.com story, Confessions of a Bad Teacher, so I read it.

It’s a pretty sad, although powerfully familiar and believable story about a second-career teacher who finds himself overwhelmed by the job of teaching and undermined by bad administration. I wondered as I was reading it, what was the point of publishing it? It reads a little like the third season of the Wire, the well-meaning teacher realizing how hard the job is kind of storyline, but also, the administrators are portrayed as tyrants who contribute to the problem, right up until the last line where the writer – who leaves mid-way through the year – writes:

Good teacher? Bad teacher? I suppose it’s how you measure it. As far as I know, there is only one scrap of positive data in my personnel file at the DOE, a memo from the assistant principal commending me for passing enough students to put Latinate’s pass rate in the Department of Education’s "safe harbor."

As far as I know, he and Ms. P return in September.

And I think the reader is supposed to empathize with the teacher who, when struggling with kids is told by the principal "Take them to lunch" and "Frame everything in a positive way," and "Don’t say ‘don’t.’" As if that’s terrible, terrible advice.

And that’s what got me thinking – the advice the principal gave wasn’t terrible.

The problem was, as we accept the writer’s description of events, she didn’t live it herself.

This gets me back to one of my strongest beliefs as an administrator:

You have to be one school.

You cannot want one thing for students and another for teachers. The principal in the article tried to bully the teacher into caring about the kids, when everything we see about her behavior showed that she did not care about the development of this teacher.

If taking a student who isn’t being productive to class out to lunch to get to know the student better is a good thing (and I believe it is,) then shouldn’t principals and teachers share lunches and learn about each other’s needs and ideas?

The writer had a bad boss, yes, but only in the way he thinks he did. It’s not that he got bad advice, it’s that there was a profound disconnect in what the administrator wants for the children of her school and what the administrator wanted for her teachers.

It’s hard sometimes. Teachers are adults, and they get paid. So, as administrators, we want and expect more from them. But the values we hold as an administrator will be reflected in the values teachers manifest when they work with the kids. Both kindness and cruelty flow downstream.

If we want classrooms to be active places, so must our faculty meetings be.

If we want to feel cared for by teachers, then we must care for teachers.

If we want students to be able to engage in powerful inquiry, so must teachers.

The biggest crime of the story is that the principal wants kindness and care from the teachers to the students, but is unwilling to do the same for the adults in her care.

We must endeavor to be one school.