My mass-mailing of March 12, 2001.

I feel like this e-mail message is going to everyone I know. If you are someone I know and you're not reading this, well... I never said it actually did reach everyone I know. If you are someone I don't know, then you'l probably want to skip most of this.

Last week I found out, much to my surprise, that there were two people who did not yet know I left West Aurora. I mean, lots of people don't know that, I guess, but these two surprised me. I decided now would be a good time to file a brief and be sure I'm not hit with any more surprises like that.

For those of you who don't know, 04 January 2001 was my last day in the math department at West Aurora. I didn't know it when the day started, i.e., I didn't know that would be the day. That afternoon I had a meeting with West Aurora Principal Jill Bullo, and I offered my resignation at that meeting.

A) That's a complicated question. The simplest answer is that I was not performing adequately as a classroom teacher, and I felt like I was beginning to perform a disservice to my students. That was not only not fair to them as students in general, but as West Aurora students in particular.

A) I was warned, as were all the new District 129 faculty, that my opinion of my job would deteriorate over time. We were all supposed to start out enthusiastic, then we were supposed to become disillusioned and depressed. We weren't supposed to become excited again until about April, and I didn't make it that far.

A) For me or for the students? One thing that kept coming back from everyone who ever evaluated me was that I have a love for mathematics. I am absolutely thrilled to have been a mathematics major. What also came up was that my love for teaching the subject was not nearly as clear. As far as the subject matter is concerned, while I understood it well enough, I didn't do a good enough job of conveying it to my students. I don't think it was that my expectations were out of whack for what I expected my students to be able to understand, but what my students were able to understand did not even vaguely approach my expectations in far more cases than not. That's not a material problem; that's a teaching problem.

A) My principal evaluator felt that my two weakest areas of teaching proficiency were climate and management. That is a good summation of most of my difficulties. I'm not a very good disciplinarian, and I probably never will be. I wasn't able to adequately counteract some problems with some students, and it was so to the detriment of all. That was true not just in my lower classes, but in the honors as well; it was merely less pronounced, or at least would have been to an outside observer.

A) I'm not sure. I was exhausted all the time for about the first eight weeks. After that, I felt like I was more able to stay on top of things. Had I been able to reset the experience around the first of November, I would have been better equipped to deal with all the demands.

A) Define "adequately prepared". I don't think I was prepared (participle as adjective), although I was prepared (past-tense passive verb). I don't think all the preparatory exercises in the world really prepare you for the real thing, whether it's piloting a commercial jet, playing basketball, or teaching high school mathematics.

A) No, I don't. I feel like a statistic, but not a failure. I remember being told in Urbana in my first C&I course that over 75% of the people in the room would not survive. I know I got farther than most do. I can also take some solace (as I have been told, and the person who told me this is absolutely right) in the fact that I was able to try.

A) Yes, without a doubt. Every day that has gone by I wish I could still be there, but I also know that I could not have gone on the way things were. My selfish wish that I could still be there is far superseded by the knowledge that I did what was in the best interests of the students of District 129.

A) Part of my resignation agreement, unfortunately, prohibits me from ever returning to the grounds of West High. When one resigns a position within a school, a building where access is controlled to the extent necessary (on espère vraiment) to protect the safety and well-being of the district's students, one becomes persona non grata at that school. It is a sadly necessary safety measure, designed to prevent individuals who might feel vengeful toward the school, its students, or its faculty and staff from threatening the safety of the school community. While I am in no way vengeful toward District 129 (and in part because of that), I respect the need to have me prohibited from the campus. Of course, one of the saddest parts of that for me is that I was and will be unable to attend two events to which I had been looking forward: the DuPage Valley Conference Mathematics Contest last 15 February, and the Naperville North-West Aurora softball game at West in April or May.

A) I feel like I let down my students to an extent, but I feel like that was mitigated by my resignation; by leaving, I stopped being disserviceful. (Ouch, that's not a word. If anyone needs a definition on that, let me know.) The people that I worry about the most, though, are the ones who were my support at West: [Principal] Jill [Bullo], [Assistant Principal] Ed [Schwartz], [Mathematics Department Chair] Pat [Butler], and all my colleagues in the department. The one person who I worry about the most is the bowling coach, Nicola Wethall. She did more work to help me succeed than anyone could have possibly asked of her. I know if I tried to help someone that much and he still didn't survive, I would take it as a personal defeat. Maybe that's another reason why I didn't make it. I don't think Nicola is like that, though. At least I hope not.

A) You mean, other than the last two paragraphs' worth? Actually, yes. I missed the opportuntiy to work more with athletics. I had been working a few basketball games at West, board or book for freshmen boys. That's always been something I have enjoyed. I even got to have Jackelyn Diekemper report to me as a sub during a Thanksgiving tournament game where I was the official scorer. I also missed the 2001 IHSA State Finals for girls bowling. I actually haven't seen a single match or tournament of any kind, in any sport, since I resigned, but the bowling bothers me the most. I wanted to go to Rockford, but I was afraid. I was afraid I wouldn't know what to say when I ran into a parent, or a former student. For that I not only missed West Aurora, the pride of the DuPage Valley Conference, finish second in the state as a team, I missed seeing Melissa Doyens finish her high school career. That really bothers me. Melissa should be the best bowler (career) in DuPage Valley Conference history (there has only ever been one DVC school with bowling, and it has only been in the DVC for Melissa's four years), and I shouldn't have missed that.

A) I don't know what I'm doing next. My instinct is to move away from teaching, at least for a while. Maybe several years from now I will be better equipped for the task and want to come back to it, but not right now. I'm reading a book right now called "Great Jobs for Math Majors," which was written by career counselors and is aimed at people like me. I still feel like I'm not actually qualified to do anything, since I don't feel like I am really qualified to do the one thing I was theoretically qualified to do.

A) I resigned on a Thursday. That afternoon, my mother, my aunt from Seattle, my grandmother, and I went to see a movie. Since my aunt was going back to Seattle on Sunday, I elected to withhold the information until Monday, even though this entailed me hiding/reading in the Naper Boulevard Library all day Friday. Monday I went to Joliet, since I had decided I wanted to talk to my father first, then talk to my mother. Unfortunately for me, while I was between Naperville and Joliet, Tim tried to call me at West (someone we knew had died the day I resigned), and he was told I had resigned. Tim promptly spread the word through my family, so by the time I got to Joliet, everyone already knew and was all upset with me, the precise situation I was trying to avoid.

I guess that's about it. Well, about that, anyway. One last unrelated thing, though: since NCAA Division I basketball tournament time is here again, I'd like to invite everybody to play ESPN's Tournament Challenge games and join my groups. The games are free: just fill out the brackets before the first game starts (Thursday for the men, Friday for the women). In both contests, I'm in the group "26376". Come on out and join; it's a lot of fun. Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope everybody is less confused now.