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Institute, Week Six

This is the week where things get, well, interesting and scary all at the same time. We’ve been through so much… learned and experienced so much together, bonded, gotten to know each other’s pet peeves and strengths and everything, and we’re kind of at a place where we feel like we have the ‘final’ group of PTs that will graduate Institute and leave the program ready to change the world. Lord knows it’s been hard seeing people we like and have established relationships with just disappear out of the program, but we’re mending and trying to bring the remaining parts of the cohort to a place where we’re cohesive and a ‘group’ again, instead of brokenhearted, disappointed fragments of … something or other.

So, we pick things up and get back in the swing… we continue student teaching at our sites, knowing that the missing people are like the big elephant in the room, but we’ve still got a job to do. We attend our Framework Sessions and don’t mention the fact that our groups are getting consistently smaller and smaller by the week. We go to all-cohort workshops and pretend not to notice the HUGE amount of empty seats that exist in the room. We even position ourselves closer to the front of the room so that the gaping sea of extra seats is not quite as obvious and disconcerting. And then comes yet another hit.

We’re in an all-cohort meeting with just days to go before the program is all over, and during the presentation, we notice some people getting small notes brought to them by administration. Honestly, I pay very little attention to this at the time because 1)I’m actually into the material being presented and 2)I just figure they’ve forgotten to hand something in or they have some group meeting afterward or something… no worries, right? When the workshop is over, we all pack up and go home, looking forward to knocking out yet another day, bringing us closer and closer to that wonderful ‘graduation day’ that will end this part of our stint in the process. We’re down to single digits now, people. We can see the end. It’s in our sights and it’s soooo close. ..

Tomorrow arrives, and we all go to our practice teaching sites, as we have so many times before. Only this time, we can’t help but notice… cars are missing out of the parking lot. MORE PEOPLE ARE GONE.   More PTs are missing. Classrooms are missing teachers, some of the CTs are upset because they actually have to teach their class today and weren’t planning to, and folks are held up in couples or trios in the hallways discussing the recent events that brought us to this point. Turns out that those ‘harmless’ sticky notes I mentioned before weren’t actually so ‘harmless’ after all. Those people got notices to stay after and meet once the training was over, and for one reason or another, they were let go. Discontinued. Kicked out of the program. We lost 10 MORE PTs yesterday. Seriously, dude. There’s only 4 more full days to go… couldn’t you have just let them stay???

Now we’re down to brass tacks, no joke. No one will give us a definitive number of how many PTs are left in the program, and we’re left to trying to frantically count the people on our own before a workshop or all-cohort meeting starts when we’re all together. We have lost so many people. So many. Talk about low morale. We’re all walking on egg shells now, for real. It seems people are being let go for the simplest of things, and none of us – NONE of us – are in a position to risk getting kicked out of the program at the home stretch, because we’re all incredibly broke after a month and a half of working without pay, and we really, really (really) need our stipends. There’s a serious air of distrust with admin right now. It just seems so cold-hearted… one can’t help but wonder about the benefit for the program and the school system – you’ve essentially gotten a full month of free labor out of a whole lot of people, and because they’ve been let go before they actually ‘graduated’, they don’t get paid for any of it. Not one little red cent. All that gas money, all that time staying up late reading tons of pages and writing lesson plans and completing work products, etc., etc., etc., all that time and effort sacrificed from your own family and household, and … nothing left to show for it. Wow. These remaining four days can’t come fast enough.