The Long-Suffering Tammy

Well, Tammy has submitted her resignation to Granite School District, though she’ll be finishing out the month. This has been a long and difficult decision for her, and it’s got me a little worried about finances, since she makes more money than I do, and we are generally only barely getting by, month-to-month, but it was a decision that needed to be made.

For the past three years (since about the time I met her) Tammy has been teaching high school math in Granite District. The first year she taught at the Juvenile Detention Center where all of her students were in a locked-down facility awaiting trial. She rarely had the same student for more than a few weeks at a time, though she often that the same students come back every few weeks or months. It was a very disheartening job, so the next year she moved to teaching at ARTEC West, which is still in the youth correctional program, but this school is an open campus (for most students), and a mental health facility, as many of the students are suffering from chemical dependence issues or come from backgrounds and situations that have rendered these children incapable or unwilling to integrate successfully into a mainstream public school.

Unfortunately, the level of professionalism brought to the facility by the “advocates”, who are not teachers or even qualified mental health professionals, but are actually just paid volunteers who come with the presumed intention to help communicate the needs of the students to the school faculty and vice-versa. However, these advocates, more often than not, actually turn out to be nothing more than enablers and excuse-makers for the students.

After two years of the frustration of working in that environment, Tammy made the somewhat difficult choice to leave friendly co-workers who she truly enjoyed working with, and made the move to mainstream public education. She began at Kennedy Junior High School in August of this year, and had regrets almost from the start. She was given 7^th and 8^th grade algebra and pre-algebra classes. Since receiving her BS in Teaching Mathematics and Statistics, she’s been teaching in structured environments, but in public school, the sense of entitlement that seemed to be a symptom caused by the advocates at ARTEC has been replaced in mainstreamed students by a vacuum, a lack of respect for themselves, their fellow students, their teachers, or anybody. Making things worse is the lack of disciplinary actions available. She can send students to the principal’s office, but that doesn’t do anything. She can call the students’ parents, but she can almost never reach them, and when she does, there are other problems, including the fact that many of these parents don’t speak English; and occasionally there is an appalling lack of interest by the parents.

Additionally, she even has some students that don’t speak English, and Tammy doesn’t speak Spanish or Vietnamese (the languages her students who don’t speak English are fluent in). This change has been overwhelming, but would have been tolerable if not for increased illness. Since she became pregnant with Cordelia, Tammy has been sick. An ovarian cyst burst when she was only 6 weeks along, about the same time she developed morning sickness, by 10 weeks, she couldn’t breathe if she was lying down. She saw every imaginable specialist in breathing, heart, back, lung, asthma, or allergy that each previous doctor could think of, none of them could put a finger on the problem. Once Cordelia was born, she could breathe again, but has had intense chronic back pain ever since. In recent months, the back pain has been occasionally debilitating, resulting in an ER visit several weeks ago (they discovered that she had Strep Throat, but it was completely unrelated to her back pain). About the same time that the back pain became so bad, she also became constantly nauseated. For the past 2-3 months, she’s not been able to eat more than about one meal each day, because after only a few bites she becomes ill. Her doctor had her go in for an ultrasound of her gall bladder (no result), he prescribed her an antacid, in case of ulcer (no result), currently she’s taking yet some other medication he prescribed (no result as of yet).

So she is resigning for medical reasons, and she’s going to start working from home. As luck would have it, the job her mom does from home has an opening and can start her training this week (from what I understand it can sometimes take weeks or even months before they have any openings). We’ll keep everybody posted about how it goes.