Part I: Access

So, Obamacare is upon us, like it or not.

Why we just can't just have a single payer system, the only real system that makes any kind of sense, is beyond me. Well, not beyond me, I do understand that we live in a country where free market fundamentalist millionaires make all of the decisions and where any kind of logical, efficient centralization that might benefit the working class is a dirty word that makes conservatives hiss “that’s sssssssocialism!"

There's only one problem with this criticism. Obamacare is not socialism.  It’s corporate welfare, a handout to the insurance industry that may incidentally do some good for the average working person, but it's not socialism in any way.

That being said, I personally believe that socialism is the only sensible way to run a health care system, morally and economically. You can bitch about rationing if you want, but rationing is already the name of the game: some people have it and some people don’t. You can bitch about being told what to do by a higher authority, but you don't elect the CEO of an insurance company and you do elect the members of the government. You can bitch about choice, but in a socialized system all reasonable care is covered and all doctors are participating providers, so a patient has more choice. You can bitch about compensation, but in a socialized system doctors wouldn't have to buy malpractice insurance and could spend most of their time practicing their profession and less of their time fooling around with insurance companies. You can bitch about cost but a centralized system can be run cheaper and more efficiently. The list goes on.

Look, there is no perfect system, but health care is a basic need and a little more complicated than buying toothpaste, though if you have tried to buy toothpaste lately, that's getting pretty complicated as well. Socialize the hell out of it, I say. Just one kind of toothpaste that works is fine with me.

You see, I’m the socialist that your mother Anne Coulter and your daddy Glenn Beck warned you about.* I am not one of those crazy racist national socialists who worship Hitler, but a democratic socialist. In my interpretation this essentially means that I think that some things (basic needs) should be centrally managed by a democratically elected government that is transparent and actually concerns itself with the welfare of the people. By "the people" I mean the average people, the working people, the producers, the people who are not in control of the system and in fact pretty much get screwed by it and therefore require representation.

It's not that I think the government we have now is all of these things, but that is another issue for another day. It's not that I think everybody should dress the same way or even make the same income. It's not that I don't think people should take responsibility for their actions and it's not that I don't love liberty. However, the free market is not the answer to everything and it’s definitely not the answer to health care. If a guy is having a heart attack and he can't get to the hospital for treatment because he can't afford it, more likely because he works his tail off and doesn't get paid enough, not because he is a lazy bum, this is NOT liberty. However, even if the guy is a bum and his heart attack was his own fault because it was ultimately caused by eating too many cheeseburgers, I'm still not willing to tell his kid or his mother or his spouse or his best friend, "sorry, health care is a privilege, not a right", though I have to admit that my evil vegetarian brain does think that in this case the cows are getting their just revenge.

Are you going to tell a marathon runner that because her bad knee was caused by too much marathon running that it's her own fault and therefore she should just suffer the consequences and not get surgery? Find me one person who lives perfectly and dies without ever having a health issue. Even this person has at least one relative with congestive heart failure or a thyroid problem.

Anyone can go around shouting “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!” and it sounds really good until one starts to actually think it through. Then one realizes that liberty becomes more complicated when there is more than one person involved, and the last time I looked there were several of us human being types stumbling around aimlessly on this planet.

There are always conflicting needs and conflicting values. There is freedom from and freedom to. There is the consideration that my liberty ends where yours begins. Laws and regulations are necessary unless one wants to live in a world run exclusively by bullies. You may have the right to drive a hummer, but I also have a right not to contract cancer from breathing your exhaust. You see how that works? It’s called civilization.

* Please, Anne, Glenn. Don't reproduce together.

Part II: Access to what?

Since Joe Lieberman killed the public option, I've decided there's no hope for this country. In fact, the day the public option died, I drove my Chevy to the levy and almost decided to throw myself into the raging river. Fortunately for my cats,  I instead decided to die a slow death and throw myself into art.

So I've given up on politics and just do art in my spare time, which I don't have much of, being a working person in America. Never-the-less, while toiling on a project one day I thought about how strange it was that in an indirect sort of way, Joe Lieberman was my inspiration. It was then that I started to think about health care again. What occurred to me was that back when I would run around with my forehead furrowed and my hands on my hips shouting about access, I forgot to examine the thing that I was insisting on access to.

"Access to what?" I thought.

You see, people, it became apparent to me that if we opened the proverbial door to the wild place called “health care in America” we would find a tangled web that is virtually impossible to navigate and even dangerous. In this world communication sucks, wasteful, unnecessary spending is rife, the big picture is often ignored, paperwork trumps people, patients are generally treated like shit, have most of their time wasted and are lucky if they leave the system better rather than more impaired, stressed out or addicted to pain medication. Sometimes they get well in spite of the system, not because of it.

Notice that I'm blaming the system, not the people in it. There are all sorts of competent, knowledgeable, compassionate, hard working health care professionals . However, I have seen the innumerable examples of the inefficiencies, callousness and frustrating serendipity of the health care system in America first hand because A. I'm a nurse working in a hospital and B. for most of my adult life I have been sick.

What I suffer from is a mysterious roaming back/hip pain that is usually absent but can be so crippling that I am unable to get out of bed. Over the years these “flare-ups”, as I call them, have become more frequent, more intense, and last for longer periods. Most of the time, I just plow through it, taking good care of my body with exercise and a balanced diet, but occasionally it gets so bad that I have no choice but to go to the doctor. Usually, by a "doctor" I mean Dr. Jack Daniels, which works pretty well and only costs 16.99 for a 750 ml bottle,  but sometimes, this means an actual doctor in an emergency room or clinic, the only two options I had as an uninsured person, which is what I was for most of my adult life.

 

In any event, over the course of twenty years, and hundreds of tests I was finally diagnosed with “ankylosing spondylitis” and, more recently by a rheumatologist with "some kind of spondylitis but not the ankylosing kind” since my spine apparently slides around like it’s greased with butter. This rheumatologist who I was finally able to see now that I do have health insurance, listened to me for five minutes, examined me for three minutes and then handed me a prescription for what I now refer to as the “miracle drug”: meloxicam.

 

I swear I'm not getting any kick backs, but I’ve never felt better in my life. Meloxicam is just a measly old NSAID, not one of those expensive designer drugs that you hear about on TV. You know, the ones that come courtesy of our clever neuroadvertisers who know that the only thing more attractive to the human brain than a person dancing is a content, smiling person arranging flowers. 

 

So, this may sound like a success story, but it was a bumpy twenty year road to my little yellow pill. For example, a few times I waited around the emergency room in excruciating pain until being sent home half a day later with an information sheet on exercises and instructions to take Tylenol. One time a doctor told me “I think it’s some kind of rheumatoid thing, but you wouldn’t be able to afford the medication so there isn’t much I can do.” One trip brought on a four day stay in a hospital on a heparin drip with somebody telling me I had a pulmonary embolism and another person, four days later, telling me that whoever read the CT scan was “hallucinating”. Most of the time I was barely listened to and then treated like a liar or a drug seeker. Once, a doctor practically shoved me out of her office telling me that, according to my blood tests I was in perfect health and suggested an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory and warm compresses. This despite the fact that I had told her several times that I slept on a mattress made of Aleve and snacked regularly on warm compresses. I was still in crippling pain. 

 

One day, I was hopping around an empty waiting room after drinking copious quantities of water for an ultrasound (this during the era of the “ovarian cyst” hypothesis of my mysterious roaming back pain) and contemplating the closed opaque sliding window that the secretary who I'd spoken to briefly forty five minutes before presumably still sat behind. I thought either everybody had forgotten about me and gone home for the day or there had been a nuclear war and the opaque window was made of some special radiation proof plastic that protected me. This window, I thought, was the perfect metaphor for the system as I saw it. Then, though maybe it was the azotemia since I’m pretty sure that my urine was backing up into my blood stream, I started to fantasize about my perfect health care system.

 

There was no doubt, first, that my perfect health care system would be patient centered, holistic, and completely tax-payer financed. There would be no insurance companies at all. The system would contain health care entities that would operate pretty much the same way they do now but with the stated cultural changes.  What would be really different, and this is the part that would have me hammered and sickled if I ever decided to bring it up at the next Tea Party Rally, would be the annual  weekend “health retreat”.

 

This is how it would work in a nutshell. All citizens, from the time they were born until the time they died would be strongly encouraged/incentivized to go. During this retreat, the person would get a full check-up that would include quality time with physicians and a plethora of routine and customized tests. The record that resulted from the health retreat would be in a protected data base that could be provided to the other health care entities as needed, so that the patient’s history/baseline would be laid out, in an organized, linear fashion. In addition, and as an incentive, the retreats would be pleasant, with plenty of down time for people to attend cooking and or exercise classes, get a massage, take a dip in the pool, or hang out in the sauna. It would be a weekend getaway for the whole family, just with some needle sticks and x-rays and maybe a few mandatory classes. For instance, all diabetics might have to attend a refresher course on diabetes, updating them on the latest information. The possibilities for education on prevention and healthy living are endless.

 

I think the benefits of this system are quite obvious. It would save time and money, emphasize prevention, catch serious problems early, improve communication and remove waste generated by redundant testing and scattered health histories.

 

So, this is what I imagined as I hobbled around in the empty waiting room, leaking urine into my panties and having no idea when or if somebody was ever going to come through the door to get me. After an hour and a half I ended up rushing to the restroom and just letting it all out. When I knocked timidly on the opaque sliding door to inform the secretary she shook her head scathingly, clicked her tongue and told me I had to reschedule for another day. 

 

 At least there hadn't been a nuclear war.

 

Thanks a lot

The other day, my loving, secure, generally happy relationship came to a tragic and abrupt end when my boyfriend of five years finally decided to leave me. I am as flabbergasted as I am devastated, since I thought we had a tight, permanent bond. The day had progressed in a normal fashion: we went out to breakfast, we went to the library, we bought a bag of fruit, we went home, we had lunch, I said "you seem uninspired. Was there something wrong with the lentil soup?" and he replied in a quivering voice; a lone tear meandering slowly over his stubbly cheek, "you don't want to know."

We debated this point back and forth for several minutes and arrived at the conclusion that, no matter how painful and difficult, I did, indeed, want to know. I wonder what would have happened if I'd said "you're right...judging from that particular phrase, your tone of voice, and that teardrop, I actually don't want to know. Let's go to the movies!"

Maybe we'd still be together.

He never said directly "it's over" or "I don't want to be with you anymore", but he didn't have to. He went briefly over the issues as he saw them. We are such very different people, he said. The cons had finally outweighed the pros. He had stopped being happy long ago. We have irreconcilable differences like the fact that I defend the rights of the ants in the kitchen and the spiders in the basement. That I think most beauty products are dangerous carcinogens. That I believe the band Styx is sort of cheesy. 

I want to buy some land, start a hobby farm and live off of the grid until I'm eighty-five. He wants to lay around on the deck of a cruise ship, play Eagles' covers on his guitar for baby boomers and eat hotdogs until he drops dead of a heart attack at sixty. He was holding me back from my dreams.

Since under similar circumstances and in less important relationships I had a history of wild emotional outbursts, I am proud to say that during this heavy moment I remained extremely cool. There was no point in begging, arguing, probing, getting angry or throwing things, I reasoned. I knew this only because I'd tried all five of these techniques in the past with terrible results. If you love something, set it free... I read this poem once in sixth grade and I was finally coming around to trying it out. Since I was busy being cool and he really didn't have a heck of a lot to say since none of his complaints was particularly new, the whole thing was over in less than twenty minutes.

"Leave," I told him. It took him a while to comply. He's slow and blubbery. Kind of like a manatee.

After he left, I had a long, pensive, numb moment where I simply sat in the rocking chair looking around the lonely house at all the things we'd accumulated, mostly items he'd scored at estate sales. I depended on him to supply me with wine glasses and bring home weird instruments. He was my decorator. He was my foundation, my best friend, my confidant, my only real family. I held his felt hat and cried.

Later, I got drunk on whiskey and went on a smashing rampage that resulted in several casualties including irreplaceable photographs, a complicated puzzle that required months to put together, and his Takamine guitar that he hardly ever played. Luckily, the Yamaha that he prefers was at a safe distance: out in the car along with his expensive sound equipment. I then wailed uncontrollably for hours and the cats scampered away taking shelter under the bed. I'm glad, because I didn't want them to hurt their little paws on the broken glass.

At the end of it, I still felt like shit. I stood in the middle of the destruction wishing I'd been a little bit more selective about the pictures I'd chosen to smash. For example, I wish I'd smashed the crude line drawing of the corkscrew with wings that was probably painted by some frat boy in Art 101 instead of the Picasso.

You are probably shaking your head at this juncture thinking "no wonder he left you. You are a lunatic and a destroyer of art and instruments and a frightener of felines". You are also thinking: "there must be another woman involved." 

And of course...you are right.

I'd had these thoughts for a while, not so deep down, in fact, they were pretty much perching like hungry pigeons on my frontal lobes. He'd been displaying odd behavior consistent with "cheating" for several months. I know how to identify these behaviors because I educated myself utilizing a credible website with pictures of really foxy people on it called "ten ways you know your partner is cheating" and he hit almost every one. I confronted him directly and often, though usually I tried to stifle the paranoia. I told myself that if I bugged him too much it might become a self fulfilling prophecy. Maybe his behavior has nothing to do with me at all, I thought. Maybe he is merely depressed and he'll talk to me about it eventually if I just give him some space. He is fifty-three. It is about time for his mid-life crisis.

The next day following the twenty minute drive-by break-up, I found out the truth when he came over. Lest you think he came pleading for me to forgive him and take him back, I need to disclose that his visit was only after I insisted that we at least needed to give our five-year relationship a few more minutes of our attention, and perhaps discuss those practical things like what we were going to do with the lease and the picture of the flying corkscrew.

"I smashed your Takamine," I said, gesturing to the splintered wreck in the corner as he walked through the door.

"I was going to give it to you anyway," he shrugged.

"Damnit!" I yelled, "I needed a good guitar!"

"Serves you right," he replied.

It was after this discussion that he slunk into the chair across the table from me and began to methodically and tearfully spill the beans. There was another woman involved, he confessed. A woman from Ohio.

"Ohio?" I asked, scratching my head, and taking a protracted sip of my blueberry tea, "you've never been to Ohio."

"We met on-line about a year ago," he said, "we've never actually met in person."

His wet eyes grew wild with disillusionment and pain as the absurd tale unfolded. They had started out as friends, he said, playing a mindless on-line picture guessing game. I remembered when he started playing this game. I remember him showing me a drawing she'd done of a rooster and thinking, "that's stupid". Just another one of those irreconcilable differences that he spoke of.

Eventually, they got to know each other. As it turned out, she was fabulously wealthy, talented, educated, kind and beautiful. She owned vast estates, jets and horses. He knew all of this because it had been confirmed by pictures that she had sent him and a few text messages from her uncle. At some point, he began to disclose intimate details of his relationship with me.

"Why aren't you married?" Miss Ohio sagaciously inquired one day while drawing a picture of a sausage.

"I don't know," he replied, "is that a submarine?"

It was then that he had the epiphany that perhaps he didn't want to make a life long committment to me. I was not the right person.

After many encounters like this and a growing bond, it began to occur to my boyfriend just who the right person was. She couldn't draw a sausage to save her life, but other than that, she was perfect. She was his soul mate. God had finally answered his prayers and it wasn't in the form of a scratch ticket. Miss Ohio had been provided by God to rescue him from the clutches of his destitution and his inadequate meat eschewing ant-loving hippi girlfriend who he had absolutely nothing in common with. In contrast, the lad who was raised on radio in a shack by the Mississippi river and worked in factories most of his life had much more in common with his rich jet-setting Julliard trained equestrian princess.

At least I can draw a decent sausage.

"At first I didn't understand what she saw in me," he confided, "a fat, broke, street musician who plays Eagles' covers? But she told me she was surrounded by so many fake people who were after her for her exquisite beauty and her deep pockets, and I was real."

Unfortunately, however, as it turned out, and as you probably suspected: she was not.  

When he left the afternoon following the twenty-minute break up he left with the knowledge that he had eaten his very last lunch of lentil soup and endured his very last conversation about the many possible designs of chicken coops. The next morning, she was sending a jet to come fetch him and carry him off to be with her for eternity. From hence forward, he would eat steak every night and make beautiful love. He would play Eagles tunes on the custom-made Gibson she bought for him and she would play Chopin on her polished grand piano naked beneath billowing muslin curtins. No more would he fret about the fact that he could not provide for his children. No more would he have to clean cat boxes, take out the recycling and cope with the fly infested compost. In addition, Miss Ohio was so generous she was even going to pay me off; his poor, abandoned, grumpy girlfriend who provided him with health insurance but never once put on a six-thousand dollar piece of lingerie. It would soften the blow and make him feel like less of a louse if I were compensated some how. It wasn't as though he didn't care about me at all. He loved me and wanted me to be happy, too.

I wouldn't have let him go for less than twenty-thousand.

"So, what happened?" I asked, since judging from his expression things hadn't exactly gone as planned.

While he waited for her, he explained, the story took a nefarious turn. First, a little background. Several years ago, Miss Ohio had watched as her prosecutor husband was brutally murdered in front of her by angry thugs and she had lived in constant fear for her life ever since. Consequently, she was under close survellience and had her own personal security guard. At the very moment that Miss Ohio was readying her jet for take-off to come rescue my boyfriend (did she mention she was a pilot, too?), her personal security guard, the man who had watched over her for years, flew into an unexpected jealous rage. Secretly, it turned out, he had always harbored deep feelings for her and now his chances for fulfillment of his fantasies were about to be crushed by the fat broke street musician. He wouldn't let that happen, he said. He sent my x-boyfriend threatening texts. He had no choice but to take her hostage. He sent him pictures of her naked, bound and gagged. My x-boyfriend didn't know what to do. He began to panic. He ran to our local police station, burst through the door and announced that the woman he loved was in trouble. Somebody had to take action quick!

"Sir," I imagined the police officer saying with a note of pity in his voice, "Calm down. Have a seat. You've been suckered. You've been scammed. You've been...catfished."

Catfished? I can see the look on my x-boyfriend's face as the truth finally dawned on him. As absurd as it may seem, it had never even crossed  his mind until that moment that the woman he loved wasn't telling him the truth. The very qualities that make my x-boyfriend so wonderful are the very same qualities that led him into this trap. He is honest, trusting and ethical to a fault. He could never have even imagined deceit of this magnitude. It is incomprehensible to him.

Trusting? Ethical to a fault? Honest? Though his behavior under these circumstances belies this description, I insist that for the most part, it is apt. The spell worked on him so perfectly, as though he'd been brainwashed. He reminded me of a person who had joined some sort of cult. I could hear the scaffolding cracking in his brain as he began to consider the stony reality that faced him. Even though the woman he had fallen for was not real, she had been real to him and the loss of her was just as painful as a death. In addition, he was questioning his faith in humanity and his faith in God. The night before he went to bed brimming with anticipation and hope for the future. Today, he woke up broke, unemployed, homeless and unhealthy.

Is it true that my boyfriend was unhappy? Probably, since I'm pretty much intolerable to live with. It is true that I wanted to perhaps adopt a child, something he didn't want to do, and that I was pushing an alternative life-style on him that he didn't really care for. So, yes, I think our relationship was destined to fail. However, as recently as six months ago he was buying me pianos and writing spontaneous love notes to me in soap on the bathroom mirror. Our relationship has been under a dark cloud since she entered his life. I think it brought out the worst in him and, in response, the worst in me. Compared to this perfect woman my flaws became more apparent. For example, the fact that I defend the ants in the kitchen might have remained a humorous quirk, a testimony for my true love of living things, instead of an annoying habit that reveals my disgusting tolerance for dirt and grime. Compared to this perfect life on easy street our humble slog to get by paycheck to paycheck must have seemed unbearable.

This brings me to the point of this entire essay. Obviously, I'll never know who this person(s) is/are or what her/his/their motive was. Since there was really nothing to gain, I have to conclude that it was merely sick entertainment carried out with no regard for the real consequences. Maybe the person who orchestrated this deception was lonely or suffering some how. Maybe they were bored. Maybe they were just mean.

However, no matter what the pathetic reason, I have one thing to say to the person or persons that scammed my boyfriend and wrecked my life. I'm forty-five and I waited forever for a relationship as wonderful as this one.

Thanks a lot, assholes.

My three minute fiction essay that didn't win

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally decided to walk through the door.

“I can’t take it any more,” she grumbled, as the door slammed firmly behind her: heavy and air tight, like the lid of a coffin.  

The now deserted chamber was hardly empty. Buried beneath the clutter and dust, Blattie perched upon the edge of a stool finishing off the last of his supper. Churning his head mechanically and crushing macadamia nut between his jaws, he pondered her departure with a mixture of curiosity and dread. Though it was true that she often left the apartment, there was something about this particular incident that felt portentous.

Blattie went over the sequence of events in his mind. First, of course, there was the piqued expression on her face followed by a horrified shriek. Second, there was the book:  larger and flimsier than others he had seen. Third, there was the ominous phrase “I can’t take it anymore”.  These words seemed prophetic. These words summoned doom.

Blattie attempted to quiet his ganglia. He told himself he was overreacting and appeased himself with gratifying memories. In fact, in most cases when she left the apartment Blattie was delighted, since when she returned, her arms were laden with a variety of colorful, crinkly containers. These packages would eventually be opened with a fresh, liberating pop followed closely afterwards by an indulgent deluge of food. He had become accustomed to the rich, sweet crumbs that gushed bountifully from these bags and her fingers like succulent rain.

For most of his life, as if enchanted, Blattie had trailed her through the well-worn paths of the cramped apartment. He scurried over stacks of papers, books, clothing, and electronics. He disguised himself among crates of toys, boxes of pens and skeins of yarn. While she slept, the gentle rise and fall of her body felt soothing as Blattie meandered and foraged for delicious treasures along the vast folds of her bed sheets.

Still, he could not suppress the visceral chill that originated from deep within his hemolymph and radiated along the ridges of his exoskeleton. “From plenty follows danger,” he knew the presage well, but since he had been born into prosperous times, the significance of these words had never fully resonated until this moment. There was an eerie connection between this event and the stories he had heard around the colony, harrowing stories of chemical Armageddon and scarcity that made the hair on the back of his legs stand up.

He knew, for example, that before his hatching there was nothing around the house to eat but wet newspaper, soap scum and, if one was fortunate, a little piece of fetid fruit. Once, his uncle Arthro had lived for months on a sliver of dried crust and a small cardboard box. Previously, there had been someone in the apartment who had similarly provided his ancestors with abundant sustenance. When she left for the last time she had uttered the same words: “I can’t take it anymore”.

Blattie flicked his antennae contemplatively. He had to uncover the truth and warn the colony. To confirm his suspicions, Blattie decided he needed more proof. Now confident and without hesitation, he darted to the table and mounted the book.  Peering over the edge, he apprehensively fixed his two-thousand eyes on a slip of yellow paper that had been torn from its pages: “Exterminator” had been marked with a thick red circle.

Blattie’s spiracles tightened. Just then, the lock clicked open. Blattie dashed into the corner as a fine, deadly mist filled the room.

From the bottom: a simple solution to the education crisis

“Ping.”

The first time I heard it I ignored the sound and enthusiastically returned to giving instructions for the day’s project to my generally apathetic ninth grade class.

“Ping. Ping. Ping.”

This time the sound was accompanied by giggles and snickers. I identified it immediately. Someone had lifted the beads that I used to illustrate how alleles separate during the process of mitosis and meiosis and was now playfully flinging them around the room.

“Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.”

 Not wanting to appear too alarmed, my first reaction was to pause long enough to let the class simmer down. I then calmly requested that the “alleles” be returned. I waited. A few students shuffled reluctantly over to the supply table, deposited their booty, and shuffled back. I waited some more.

“Sorry for chucking the beads,” one student mumbled.

“You mean alleles,” I corrected.

When I felt like the distraction had been satisfactorily extinguished, I jovially began to address the day’s project, again. We had already wasted ten precious minutes, and I had spent all night planning and preparing. I was excited to get started.

“Ping.”

This was my first period class.

By third period it felt like an epidemic. I locked up the beads. I admonished myself for leaving them out in the first place. It was too late; there were already hundreds of them circulating. I tried humor, anger, even begging to get it to stop. At the end of my last period class, amidst beads whizzing through the air, ricocheting off of every surface, I crawled back to my desk, put my head in my hands and cried.

The bell rang. A few of the kids came up to me and said they were sorry. A few gave me lectures on laying down the law. Most of them hurried out the door, giddy with mischievous excitement. One student stayed after and helped me sweep up the beads.

This was one day of my first and last year attempting to teach ninth grade biology. There were days that were better. There were days that were worse. As the year wore on, disillusionment began to set in. Gradually, I was less likely to stay up all night designing and preparing some magnificent lesson and more likely to hand out a work sheet.

Half way through the year I alerted the administration that I was failing as a teacher and quite possibly having a nervous break down. They promised to visit my classroom more often. This happened for a few weeks, but the visits tapered off and chaos was eventually restored. I began to despise going to work. Everyday, I felt as though I was at war and had been shot full of holes. I made up my mind that I was going to quit.

About a month before the year ended the students had all heard the news.

“Why are you quitting?” they would ask, entirely bewildered, apparently ignorant of the extent of my torment. “You just started!”

“Because I suck at this job,” I replied, committing myself to the principle of complete honesty. “I want to teach you biology. I want you to love it as much as I do, or at least understand it. I want you all to be successful. The truth is, however, that I am unable to make those things happen, because, quite frankly, I don’t know how to handle your behavior.”

“Well,” one student said sarcastically, “they are just going to replace you with some earth hater.”

Okay, so sometimes they were funny, too.

I share this riveting story of downfall and defeat in order to raise a point that I find is omitted from every discussion I hear or read about education reform. Most experts seem to agree that “good” teachers are the most important factor in improving education. Therefore, much of the debate seems to center on how to attract “good” teachers and remove “bad” ones. However, what I believe goes unrecognized in this ongoing dialogue is the dual nature of the teaching profession. In order to be an effective teacher, one must be adept at two very disparate, sometimes irreconcilable, skills. The first is being able to teach and the second is being able to manage.

To illustrate this point, I am now going to brag that I am an excellent teacher. I am creative, interactive, enthusiastic, passionate, patient, and knowledgeable. Teaching biology is more than a job for me, it is a mission. I had been teaching for several years at the community college level, a job that I loved, but I needed full-time work and benefits, and felt I would be “good” with this age group. I, myself, had been a defiant kid who had been highly disenchanted with the prison-like, uninspiring atmosphere of public school. I remembered how this felt and was determined to make my classroom different.

On the other hand, as I believe the story above clearly exemplifies, I am not an effective manager. My disciplinary skills are pitiful. I am easily manipulated. I am a transparent pushover who hands out second chances like candy. Some of these kids scared me; they knew it and took advantage of it. Every day I would write up scores of students, only to find myself ripping these documents to shreds, telling myself that the kid really was not that bad, convinced that I would solve the problem “in house”.

Obviously, without these management skills, my teaching abilities were rendered irrelevant.  Despite my sincere efforts, very little biology was learned that semester. Though it is worth noting that it was only a few students who were regularly causing me trouble, I devoted the majority of my time attempting to address behavioral issues that were disrupting the classroom, and very little time actually teaching. Some days I was lucky if one full sentence escaped from my mouth.

So, the question is, where do I fall? Was I a “good” teacher or a “bad” one?

While we are oversimplifying, I would like to address this question by calling for a slightly more complex descriptive model. Instead of the good/bad dichotomy, I would divide up the profession into four categories: those who are good at managing and teaching, those who are good managers but bad teachers, those, like me, who are good teachers, but bad managers, and those that are terrible at both.

The first category is rare. These are incredible, superhero like people. The second category, unfortunately, is more common. I think it is obvious why this must be the case. It is a pretty good gig to get paid to play around on face-book while students sit quietly filling out work sheets all day. There may be a few teachers who fall into the fourth category, but most of them would probably never enter the profession to begin with. It is the third category that concerns me. There must be a lot of us, and I think that we are the ones that leave the profession in droves.

Could good teachers learn how to be good managers? Maybe…or maybe there is something inherently incompatible about these two roles. If a teacher is engaging her students she must be moving around the classroom. She must be physically next to them, conversing with them, asking them questions, keeping them on task. A good teacher rarely sits down to survey her classroom. She cannot always be aware of the spiteful little monsters in the corner, quietly dismantling her microscopes.

It is for these reasons that I propose my very simply solution to the education crisis. For those teachers who want it, I think all classrooms should have two adult figures: one who handles the teaching, and one who handles the managing.

Though there is not the space to lay out the details, I can think of many ways this could be achieved. Somewhat facetiously, my favorite would be paying fully vetted ex-prison inmates, former gang members, or other menacing characters to do the job. We could call them “bouncers”, though I would never advocate grabbing students by their collars and tossing them unceremoniously out into the hallway.

In any event, there is one thing I am absolutely certain of. I am certain that if discipline had been taken entirely out of my inept hands that year, all of my students would have learned…a lot. In addition, I would have loved my job. I would have gone back. I would still be teaching.

There must be a lot of us out there.