Old School BOE...

Back in the 1980's when I first completed my Bachelors from Sarah Lawrence, I arrived home entirely unsure about my career goals. I was in the middle of several exciting plans as I recall now, including leaving New York City behind and travelling around Europe,and/or going for my PhD in language and learning disorders for which I had applied and was awaiting acceptance. More than that, I just remember being perfectly happy to be out of school and very glad to be on my own, living the city life with friends, primarily spending my time relaxing and going out nights.

In the interest of disclosure too, it should be said that my mother was still herself working as a NY Public School Educator, which I have to admit to anyone who gets any other impression was NOT a particularly good motivator for me to do the same. Having watched her survive the many years, arriving home each day exhausted and with tales of children in crisis, school building in decline, curriculum in flux and apparently ever changing... all that did not bode well for my own determination about what to do with myself. And while I had spent a good deal of time myself in classrooms around the city, at college and even abroad, and even though I had always been told I was a great teacher in the making...I just simply was not sure.

And all that being true, I still trudged off that summer after college, to the cavernous offices of the BOE as it was called then in Downtown Brooklyn. And this is what I remember: Mazes of soup green walled rooms, with 8 1/2 by 11" papers stuck on doorways with scotch tape marked sloppily with codes, rooms of plastic orange and green chairs in which we waited, and older women - employees of the organization- many with beehive hairstyles, sitting at beaten metal desks surrounded EVERYWHERE by huge standing piles of applications (such as the one I was there to complete). I remember it took several such visits to get through all those rooms, to deal with all those ladies, and to see how my application found its place somewhere in all those piles of paper. All of which ended up with a notification of a test date, instructions to show up (no preparation guide, just to have a few sharp pencils and some form of legal i.d).

What I recall beyond the sheer bizarreness of the place, those chairs, ladies and lines is this: the test and the subsequent one-on-one interview with a retired New York City Principal was actually about education, about teaching and learning, about 'best practices' for handling many difficult but realistic scenarios. What I recall was that the interviewer spent more than an hour with me alone, discussing what I had learned first in school, how I had been able to that point to apply any of those skills and accompanying knowledge and generally what I thought was the purpose of 'being a teacher'. It was a fine interview; and that along with the written test sticks with me all the more so as I compare to more recent 'adventures'. The essential point about the earlier experience: I was well prepared to teach, the process though paper heavy, people and time consuming (nothing online yet!)..it still took into consideration the elements of teaching and learning. My interviewer was a seasoned educator himself, articulate and interested in how I would proceed in the profession with what I knew and learned prior. And the written test was similarly designed; albeit not based nearly as much on specific goals or scoring, and fairly unsophisticated in format as it has become now..it still took well into consideration the nature of teaching in the big city schools and demanded some depth of understanding and desire to teach in the city's schools.

Some weeks later, a provisional certificate, roughly xeroxed and stamped, arrived in a plain unadorned envelope. That was then. Instead though, I never used the paper, instead headed off to some travel, followed by some graduate work, and then leaving the field entirely, went to the corporate life for a job where, all things considered, it was entirely less stressful or challenging than standing in a classroom and attending to children and students in need would ever be. It was to be quite some time before I returned to try my hand at the gift of teaching and in that time many many things had changed. More than I was properly or reasonably prepared for as it turned out.