Are You Nuts? Read Online Free Page B

upper-grade and high school jobs as more prestigious. As grievance chair and building rep, I didn’t deal with any interschool hassles. “Have any of the elementary teachers applied for the jobs?”
    â€œOf course. It’s not fair the way the elementary teachers have been treated in this district.”
    He’d used the magic words— it’s not fair . I’d heard that refrain so often I was more than sick of it. Besides the obvious response of “life is not fair,” there were other problems with it. Too often when people say “it’s not fair,” what they really mean is “I’m not getting my way.” Further, by overusing “it’s not fair,” that which is truly “not fair” becomes trivial. I didn’t have the energy to get in a big fight with him about it, but I did ask, “What other things are the elementary teachers upset about, and why, if they are so important, weren’t they brought up to Kurt before this?”
    He said, “Planning time. High school teachers have more planning time than we do. We teach far more subjects than they do. They only have to plan for one or two subjects. We’ve got over a dozen. That’s not fair.”
    â€œI hear you’re in favor of ending all the tenure laws.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you nuts?”
    â€œThere are too many unqualified teachers in the schools.”
    â€œDo you understand what tenure means?” I didn’t give him a chance to answer. “For public-school teachers in this state, it simply means they have to give you due process before they can fire you. It means an administrator has to tell a teacher what they are doing wrong and give them a chance to fix it within ninety days. How is that a burden?”
    â€œThe teachers’ unions are out of control.”
    â€œAnd you want to be the head of one? Are you nuts?”
    â€œI think we should have the IEA come in here instead of the IFT.”
    This referred to an old feud between the Illinois Education Association and the Illinois Federation of Teachers. For years there had been bad blood, “raids,” and nasty feuds between the two groups. Fortunately, for the past few years the two groups had been having merger talks and had signed a “no raid” agreement. That meant neither group would try to get the other out as the exclusive bargaining agent in any school district. I remembered vaguely we’d had some problems like this many years before I started teaching at Grover Cleveland. The way I saw the merger talks was that they gave chronic complainers one less threat to make when they were pissed off.
    Battles between teachers could leave scars and wounds that might never heal. I explained to Seth about the “no raid” agreement.
    His response was, “It doesn’t hurt to talk to them.”
    I wasn’t in the mood to argue, and I didn’t see this discussion as going anywhere, but I was curious. “Are you going to the PTA meeting tonight?”
    I caught him off guard. “I don’t think the union needs to be involved in that kind of controversy.”
    â€œWhich kind?”
    â€œYou know, with elections. I don’t think we should have endorsed anyone in the past school board races. Look how that Belutha Muffin has turned against us.”
    â€œI don’t remember her ever being for us. We could have had three more just like her if we hadn’t endorsed anybody.”
    â€œI don’t know that. Those people who are supposedly on our side might have won anyway.”
    â€œOr maybe not. I wasn’t willing to take a chance. How can someone be union president without going out on a limb sometimes?”
    â€œObviously you do take chances. I know that at least one of the PTA candidates has been talking about you and your friend being on all those television shows. You probably shouldn’t have been.”
    â€œWhy