Why Veteran Teachers Don’t Want to Hear Your Brilliant New Idea
The Double-Edged Sword of Institutional Memory
You know when you’re sitting in a faculty meeting and you look over at Mr. or Ms. So-and-so and they are either snoozing or shopping online and you find yourself also being lulled into a similar stupor, but then suddenly something new happens, like the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed student teacher on staff decides to stand up and share a brand-new idea with the faculty and everybody perks up because who doesn’t like to see someone about to be annihilated right before their very eyes?
“What if we start a school garden and serve a vegan option in the cafeteria?” the newbie might say.
“Maybe we can create an afterschool committee to apply for a grant for a new playground set?” they suggest.
“How ‘bout we organize a STEM family night?
“Wouldn’t it be great for the school to hold an arts festival on the weekend?”
Their new ideas are creative and visionary and earnest. And dreaded.
As they present these ideas you stare at them trying to telepathically induce them to shut up and sit down so the meeting can end faster and you can get onto the 10 freeway before it attempts to break the Guinness World Record for the largest flash mob-parking lot ever.
However, these can-do optimists can’t help themselves. They’re new teachers and they have ideas to share that no one has ever thought of before in the history of education.
Or so they believe.
After they share their idea, there is a moment of silence similar to that tension in a horror film right before the monster strikes. Then a veteran teacher, maybe number one or two on the seniority list, will not even stand up from her seat in the back row of the lounge before she throws some shade such as, “Oh honey, we tried your idea in 1997 and two students died and a teacher got sued for child endangerment, then lost her job.”
And then the new idea will also die, right then and there, in front of everybody like the Wicked Witch of the West melting after Dorothy threw water on her. The new teacher will stop and quietly and confusedly sit themselves down wondering why her colleagues come off as so disgruntled.
Of course, two students didn’t actually die in 1997 and no teacher lost her job, but the veterans will say something melodramatic to that effect in order to shut down the new idea and scare the new teacher into submission.
What is on display here is the double-edged sword of institutional memory: the collective remembering of all the teachers who have come and gone from your school and the over-application of this remembering when protecting us teachers from new (and mostly stupid) ideas.
Institutional memory is the privileged knowledge veteran teachers carry like little golden lockets hanging on a chain suspended between their hearts and throats. Inside the locket is a treasure trove of new curriculums, new pedagogies, new management philosophies, new technologies, and new safety procedures that have been tried and abandoned over the course of decades.
We keep these metaphorical lockets close to our hearts to protect us from the unending pile of work people seem to want to bury us in.
Examples of How Institutional Memory Gets Built
For years, Los Angeles Unified teachers were required to flush out their classroom sinks and water fountains every morning because of possibly high levels of lead that maybe, might have settled in some of the water pipes when inactive. The District’s solution to this maybe-problem was to mandate that its teachers flush out every faucet in every classroom every morning.
Teachers were then asked to record this flushing activity in a “Flushing Log” which was to be kept near the classroom sinks. On the log we would record the time and date of the flushing and then sign our name certifying that we had in fact flushed the faucets. We were then to hand-in the completed logs to administration at the end of every month.
Most teachers were immediately and rightly dubious of this newly required duty. We knew we were slowly being snookered into another meaningless task as well as also somehow being made responsible for monitoring the lead levels in the District’s pipes. Suddenly, we were not just educators but plumbers, too.
Through our union, educators pushed back on this legalistic cover-the-district’s-butt movida.
But the pushback had to go through a very long bureaucratic process. We couldn’t just stop the flushing. As the formal dispute dragged on for years, teachers continued to complete these stupid logs as a way to comply with the mandate and not get written up for noncompliance. Eventually the union succeeded in doing away with this extra layer of insincere paperwork but not after years of wasted time and paper...and a growing resentment.
Memories of such little inanities build into a larger malaise of apathy that new teachers encounter from veteran teachers. The newbies come in and wonder why we are so hostile to any new initiative.
It’s because of the flushing logs!
Well, not simply the flushing logs.
It’s all the new initiatives, collectively, that have ever been imposed upon us. Teachers constantly suffer from the bane of new ideas. New ways to teach, new ways to keep kids safe, news procedures, new research-based this and that, new administrative protocols, etc…etc… The newness never ends.
Districts are perpetually nickel-and-diming teachers’ time with added tasks and responsibilities they argue are essential and novel and better and safer and easier and simpler.
Novice teachers, with the institutional memory of houseflies, often gladly accept any new mandate and wonder why older teachers make such big brouhahas over simple little things. Why wouldn’t you want to flush out your facets every day for the safety of your students?
Oh, just you wait, newbies.
Wait until the District eventually proposes to apply some “newness” to your paycheck.
District Better Have My Money
LAUSD moved to a new computer payroll system in 2007.
The union requested a pre-test of the new payroll system while simultaneously running the old system in order to assure continuity of payroll. Afterall, experience had already taught us teachers to be wary of such new initiatives.
However, the District and its highly paid consultants ($55 million for Deloitte Consulting!) ignored the requests (as well as warnings from barely-trained payroll clerks) and they went ahead with a full and complete implementation of the new system.
Of course, there was chaos.
Some teachers received checks for pennies, some received $10,000. It was a totally predictable mess.
Then the District required the employees with wrong payments to come to them and prove what their true pay was supposed to be as if the snafu was the fault of the employees. Many teachers spent months trying to get correctly paid. Deloitte Consulting got $55 million.
And teachers got another instance to add to that little golden locket of institutional memory.
The Doozy by Superintendent Deasy
He was living his “Oprah’s Favorite Things fantasy” and wanted to give every child an electronic tablet. “You get an iPad! You get an iPad! You get an iPad!” probably rang in his ears as he visualized tossing free technology at our students.
However, he started this initiative without any transparency in the bidding process and in clear coordination with the corporations that were to be paid. He diverted construction bond monies set aside to repair schools and pay for WIFI upgrades. Using the bond money for iPads (devices bound to be outdated in a year’s time) was financially unwise and another hyped up, device-centric education scheme to be executed with very little teacher buy-in.
Apple and Pearson turned out to have an inside track to winning the contract even before the bidding process had begun. Meanwhile the District’s facilities chief was not even included in the planning of the project. WIFI usage at early-adopted school sites turned out to be overwhelmed by heavy data demands on their Internet while the partial rollout of the tablet program also resulted in older students hacking the computers and bypassing security features. Who could’ve possibly seen such snafus happening? (Teachers.)
Again, the school district’s bigwigs had demonstrated a blind faith in technology as a panacea for the challenges of teaching. Upper management at school districts often likes to focus on engaging with gadgets and doodads and not their employees when seeking to improve the educational experience of students.
Although this debacle resulted in Deasy’s 2014 resignation, it was nevertheless a costly distraction and yet another instance to add to the golden locket of institutional memory.
There are many instance we have in our gold lockets. So many we could smelt a golden double-edged sword (I had to work in the mixed metaphor somehow!).
When novice teachers dismiss the concerns of veterans as bitterness it adds to maddening stereotype of public school teachers as lazy, incompetent, and recalcitrant. But it’s us speaking from the locket, from experience, from that long list of the misuse of our labor.
Every year across the educational landscape there are new ideas bumping up against the long memories of teachers who have had to endure a plethora of fads, trends, and brilliant new ideas.
Tread carefully.