I retired from teaching over a year ago. It's been wonderful for my health. My blood pressure is lower. My weight is steady. My feet and ankles stopped swelling. My legs stopped cramping. I became more relaxed. And busy with the things that interested and engaged me.
I'd been warned to avoid subbing in my district by several friends who'd also retired. But when I read a frantic Facebook post from a friend that her maternity leave sub had canceled at the last moment, I was lulled by my emotional, maternal gut to offer my services. She delivered two days before the start of the school year, and I stepped in before my substitute application was completed to cover her class for the first 6 weeks.
It only took me a few days to regret that decision.
Though my teaching skills had not diminished and I was able to step in as if I'd not even been gone a year, I found myself teaching a grade level I'd not cared much for the last time I'd taught it. I also found myself in an environment that I can only describe as hearing hell.
The school hangs onto that failed 70's experiment called "open concept", which eliminates the walls in traditional classrooms and opens the learning and teaching environment to the noise of all the other classrooms and hallways. Research has proven that the distractions in open concept outweigh any benefits of such an environment. I'm surprised it is still in use.
While I've found that the teaching styles, curriculum, and classroom organization in the school is pretty much exactly like any other school I have taught in, the distractions and the noise are not. Not only are the students highly distracted by what they see and hear in the other classrooms and the hallway, the environment seems to encourage them to add their own noise to the cacophony, which include an excessive amount of chatting and talking, drumming, clicking, and chirping. Yes, chirping. The feeble attempts of teachers to lessen distractions by defining their teaching space with bookcases, marker boards, and other partitions testifies that the open concept is still a problem for learning and teaching, just as it had been when schools began abandoning it in the mid 80's.
What has ensued each day is a chaotic mangling of noise that makes it difficult, and often impossible, to concentrate, listen, hear, and understand. And an increase in both my anxiety and my blood pressure. I am tired, grumpy, and head-achy at the end of each day.
It has set me to pondering again the plight of students who may have an especially hard time hearing or focusing attention in such an environment -- like the little girl I met in the hallway who is deaf in one ear and has a bone-anchored hearing aid. If I have trouble comprehending speech in this school as an adult, what struggles must this child endure each day as well?
I feel like I am the lucky one, though. I will be gone in 2 more weeks.
I am counting the days.
