That Moment When Your Job Becomes Disgusting

A "I’m Mad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore!" Moment

Self-help motivational speaker Jim Rohn has said that the most important day of your life begins with a feeling of disgust. Mine did.

You should always pay careful attention when disgust wells up inside of you. It’s often a message.

The research of professors Debra Keltner and Paul Ekman, the consultants for Pixar’s 2015 movie Inside Out which includes a character called Disgust, has shown that disgust works evolutionarily to protect us from such dangers as poisonous plants, rancid meat, and spoiled food. They also show how disgust is an adaptive system that also moves into the role of punishing antisocial behavior.

Moral disgust is that visceral feeling over wrongdoing and injustice that makes us feel revulsion to certain social situations. It plays a role in what we consider right or wrong. Dr. Leon Kass has termed this “the wisdom of repugnance.” He has argued that we should reject things like cloning just as we reject incest (the Hapsburg dynasty notwithstanding) and cannibalism because our revulsion expresses a deeper wisdom.

As an educator, I would add administrative fetishes for testing data to that list of morally repugnant behavior we should be repulsed by.

One of the Most Disgusting Days of My Vocational Life

It was the end of October 2008. The very last day of school before my winter break (we were on a year-round calendar). I was a walking zombie of exhaustion. I was also just a few hours away from vacation. Tick, tock, tick, tock went the school’s clock as well as my own internal ticking time bomb.

There was a big problem: I hadn’t finished administering my reading assessments. (Who effing cares, right?)

The Literacy Coaches (a made-up position of yesteryear) needed those tests completed and the scores imputed prior to the end of the day or else…I don’t know….the Apocalypse would seemingly be triggered? Civilization might end?

The District and the Coaches treated these assessments and the imputing of the data like an elevated national security situation.

Truthfully, I hadn’t even started the tests. Oops.

I asked for assistance. One of the coaches offered her services.

Great. Teamwork. Yay. Let’s do this together and get this incredibly boring paperwork done.

In the late morning, Ms. E arrived to my classroom carrying a stack of test booklets.

She immediately started administering the tests individually to my students.

I was surprised, I thought she was going to “coach” me through the administration but hey, if she wanted to help me out by actually administering them herself, then more power to her.

Administering tests to young kids individually is absolute torture. As I have written before, if the C.I.A. ever needs new ideas for enhanced interrogation techniques, they should abandon waterboarding and study the effectiveness of forcing detainees to assess the reading skills of young children.

This torture is especially acute if you are in a rush. Ms. E was in a rush.

After a few students, the Ms. E started testing my student Kevin.

My little first-grader Kevin had many, many issues. He had not yet been assessed for special-ed services yet because he was an English language learner, but I had my hunches about his learning abilities. He was a special one. Despite his sweetness, he could drive you insane trying to read with him.

For instance, he would sound out the letters c-a-t and read, DOG! Or see the word see and read LOOK! which could be confusing because you’d want to give him points for intending to read the right thing, but then he was just not getting it quite right. It confused me and sometimes made me suspicious, like, are you fucking with me, Kevin? This was always a thought in the back of my mind when attempting to read with him.

As Ms. E was trying to assess his reading fluency, I could tell she was becoming frustrated.

At one point, Kevin looked aimlessly around the room, kind of wobbling his head like he was hearing music no one else could hear. The little dude did that all the time. I was his teacher so I knew that Kevin wobbling his head was him just being wobbly Kevin.

The coach wouldn’t know that because she wasn’t his teacher. She mistook his head-bobbing as him trying to, supposedly, with intention, seek out the alphabet cards (A is for Apple, B is for Bus, etc…) so he could decipher what sound went with what letter. She mistook his aimless movements as him searching for the picture of, say, the shell to remind him that sh made the shhhhhh sound.

Ms. E was reading way too much into his head wobbling. I had known Kevin since he was four, and he was now six. He always moved his head around like that. He wasn’t looking around for any specific alphabet card. He was just bored and distracted.

Ms. E soon looked around the room along with Kevin, and she noticed something “off” about my classroom.

Uh-oh. My warning-antennae perked up.

The Open Court curriculum at the time was extremely prescriptive. What teachers should say to the students was scripted out, word-for-word on its pages. It was as if we educators were amateur actors reading sides at an audition.

Also, how teachers should order our rooms was mapped out in the teacher’s manual. Uniformity was scripted and made into schematics in the reading program. Administrators took these curricular suggestions as gospel. They became curricula fundamentalist. No teacher could deviate from the Teacher’s Manual. It was the Gospel according to McGraw-Hill Education.

In particular, it was strongly suggested that all the alphabet cards (A is for laaaamb, B is for basketball, C is for Camera, etc…etc…) be displayed solely at the very front of the room.

But all my alphabet cards didn’t fit at the front of the room, at least not in the way I liked them to fit. So, I took the liberty of placing some of the alphabet cards on an adjacent wall because we live a free country and children are capable enough of turning their heads to the right.

Let me stop right here.

I know this sounds incredibly inconsequential and innocuous. Like who the hell cares where the letters X or Y or Z are placed on a classroom wall?! There are children starving in Africa and migrant children in cages at the Border, a war in Ukraine and in Gaza!

But the culture cultivated by Superintendent and the District’s bureaucracy, including the principals and coaches, involved writing teachers up because of the misplacement of their alphabet cards and other nitpicky ridiculousness. (Just to fast forward a bit, another kindergarten colleague had our principal come into her room and physically raise the alphabet cards higher on the wall against her wishes because he insisted she displayed them too low. The teacher preferred them within reaching distance of the children so they could point and touch them, but Principal P. decided that she was not following the prescribed protocol and came in to forcibly make that change himself. He was a spectacular douche.)

Be forewarned: this is the type of pettiness that school-teaching often involves.

After sizing up my classroom, Ms. E announced, “Mr. Villegas, all the alphabet cards should be displayed in the front of the room.”

“I know,” I admitted, but then I reminded her that in order to see the cards the kids just have to do this: I then turned my head to side like a normal human person.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she persisted, “while you’re on vacation I will come in and change them for you.”

My temperature rising, I instructed her in no uncertain terms, “Do not come into my classroom and change anything.”

“It’s no problem. I’ll just come in and change them myself,” she insisted.

“Do Not. Come. Into my room. And move. ANYTHING.” (Bitch, was insinuated in my tone)

“Well, I’ll just talk to the principal about that,” she said. There’s nothing as infantilizing as a literacy coach basically saying, “Well, let me talk to daddy about that.”

I was enraged. If I wore dueling gloves to work, I would’ve slipped one off and slapped her with one of them as if I was Bugs Bunny facing off with Yosemite Sam.

Instead, I silently rose up out of my chair, walked up to her, grabbed the pile of tests she had just administered, and ripped them to shreds, tossing them all into the trash like spent confetti. She wasn’t going to get her precious data or numbers unless she had some time, some tape, and a penchant for solving jigsaw puzzles.

To this day ripping up a pile of standardized tests fills me with such sweet satisfaction. It was a tantrum for sure, but one filled with such exhaustion and being fed up with these asinine assholes assigning assessments (as Dr. Seuss might say) that I had reached my limit.

I was mad as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

She bolted out the classroom, presumably to go tattletale to daddy.

My students, of course, noticed the hubbub amongst the adults. Little Giselle asked, “What happened, Mr. Villegas?” I told the kids I got angry at the coach because she wanted to come and change our classroom around and I didn’t want to her to do that. Of course, all the subjects of my little kingdom agreed with me.

The class went on with our day as if nothing happened. We had some lessons. We went to lunch. When we returned to class, we read some stories, and then we went out to the yard to play dodgeball.

Our semester was coming to a close. We were thirty minutes away from vacation, waiting for the freedom of the dismissal bell to ring. Let freedom ring! Let freedom ring! my internal voice sang.

But then as we played on the blacktop, I noticed The Principal striding toward us from far across the playground with his two henchwomen by his side, Ms. E and Ms. C-W, the other literacy coach. Imagine Darth Vader’s The Imperial March playing right about now.

Oh shit.

They had us, me, in their sights. When the trio reached our dodgeball game, The Principal demanded that I herd all the students back into the classroom.

“We are all going to administer those tests, together, right now, Mr. Villegas,” he said.

We all walked back to the classroom as a big, angry, confused group of people.

Now twenty minutes before vacation, there was a flurry of tense activity inside my classroom.

One coach was administering fluency tests individually while the other was administering another aspect of the test that could be done in a larger group. The Principal was walking around, acting as the heavy.

I was pacing around making scowling faces like an insane person. It was utter ridiculousness and I was in a rage that was as turbulent and red-faced as that never-ending storm on Jupiter.

The trio of administrators could not admit that they were defeated. They weren’t going to get their complete set of precious data by any means. But they were so hell-bent on administering the tests, collecting any data they could, they didn’t care about whether it was too late or even feasible.

I continued to deliberately undermine them. I instructed the kids to guess at their answers. “Just guess! Mark whatever answers you want, kids. It doesn’t matter!” I shouted out loud.

The Principal was extremely displeased. He escorted me outside the classroom and gave me a directive to help the coaches finish the administration of test. I sulked back inside, silently fuming, until the dismissal bell finally rang.

It was over.

The kids gathered their things and ran out the door. Have a great vacation! I thought. They fled to their appropriate meeting points and afterschool programs. They were gone, and there was no way The Principal and the coaches were going to finish all the testing. The data was incomplete and corrupted, this being close to the worst sin in education at that time besides fondling your students.

The goons departed, thwarted but vengeful.

I was left to my clean up my class, alone and incensed. However, something extremely important happened just then.

For the first time ever, as a professional educator, I felt disgusted with my job. Truly, morally repulsed.

The way the coaches and the principal had treated me and the children, as means to an administrative end, truly sickened me. I didn’t care about myself. I knew I was in trouble regardless. Go ahead, write me up, I thought. Reprimand me. Dock my pay, whatever. (Don’t worry, I was eventually written up and reprimanded for those who side with the administrative state).

But to try to eke out the stupid data at the very last moment only to service their own sense of duty revealed their true priority. They had, at some point, in the era of No Child Left Behind, convinced themselves that numbers, statistics, test scores, data were more important than the wellbeing of children and teachers. This is not too dissimilar from law enforcement officers gaming their crime statistic numbers in the infamous data collection program called CompStat instead of engaging in actual policing.

These data-collection priorities leave professionals such as educators, peace officers, and medical care workers, focusing on number aggregation and data input rather than on the delivery of actual professional service.

I can honestly say the principal’s and coaches’ sickening need for data over the welfare of the children led me to face a different direction in my career.

However, the time for departure wasn’t immediately available because, well, I liked getting a paycheck, eating food, and having a roof over my head, but I also knew that there was a new direction opening up in my life.

I could not spend the entirety of my working career operating under this data-collection madness. Enough was enough. After nearly a decade of standardized test regimes, I had had it. I thought we were safer in the early grades from this over-assessment lunacy, but this was not the case.

The professional trouble I was about to experience because of ripping up the tests was simultaneously the worst and best thing that could’ve happened to me. It was a true turning point.

If you ever experience this sense of disgust in your job, pay attention.

It’s a true warning.