Those Who Can, Teach
Baldacci is evidence for the proposition that sometimes the best way to remain idealistic about the work you do is to change it. In 1999 Baldacci was in her mid-40s, and she’d already been a reporter, editor, columnist, and editorial writer at the Sun-Times. There was precious little left in the business that she hadn’t experienced, and a fair amount that she had no wish to experience again. “I’m not at a stage of my life when I care to chase people down the sidewalk hollering at them,” she says. “That’s undignified for a person of my age.” So she quit the paper to teach.
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Baldacci was one of eight interns who reported in September 1999 to a Roseland school she doesn’t name. She and one other survived the year. “They felt they weren’t getting support,” she says. “It was just too hard.” The interns were needed but not welcomed, and Baldacci understood that she “might be somebody they didn’t want there most of all.” She says the principal never took the time to observe her as a teacher–he pegged her as a journalist who’d wormed her way into his school, and he didn’t trust her.
“The first time I left the Board of Education feeling beaten,” Baldacci writes. “I couldn’t believe I’d spent hours going from one counter to another, one office to another, and the only thing I had to show for it was a piece of paper from the State of Illinois allowing me to substitute teach for ninety days. The futility was one thing, but the insult of being given the slip and hollered at by the people who were supposed to be on my team was mind-jarring.”
“There are not enough opportunities for teachers, who are their own best allies, to really support each other. It’s a very isolating job. You spend the vast majority of your hours alone, the only adult. You speak to colleagues in passing in the hallway or at occasional meetings. But you really need to spend more time working together or planning, and it doesn’t happen at many places.”
Are teachers as interesting as journalists?
As Baldacci knows, a lot of people don’t give teachers credit for being able to. “How unfortunate,” she says.
