Things look a bit bleak in Sailorville. No one already on
the payroll has come forward to take over the reins (or, as it is commonly
misspelled, reigns, which adds a certain Joycean quality that only the best
typos can provide). Is there someone out there who wants to run a debate team
in Westchester? It’s there for the taking. Seriously.
So many jobs… Bronx is hiring them up the wazoo: I posted a
whole raft of them last week on the NDCA site, head coaches for every flavor of
forensics, plus a general director. Byram Hills was looking, Edgemont… And
those are only the ones I know about for sure. I suspect there may be a couple more in
the region. There’s a lot of oil in the local turms, in other words. I would
hate to think that my moving on has irrevocably left the Hudders uncoached; it
shouldn’t be so dependent on individuals. But it has been ever thus. Some
programs are completely institutionalized; these are the ones you tend to see
at every national event year after year, that reserve their hotel rooms for TOC
in November. They’re good at what they do because their schools are as
committed to forensics as they are to science and social studies. Other
programs are lucky to have a committed coach, but given the expense of a team,
and the usual self-selectivity if not privilege that forensics engenders (most
general high school teams are pretty tiny percentages of their school’s
population), they are not missed when they go away. The smart kids will find
some other way to exercise their brains, and the school will pocket the profits
from the loss. Maybe they’ll spend the money on something similarly positive.
Maybe not.
I guess I could feel guilty about this to some extent—I
didn’t have to retire from
coaching—but I don’t. I did a perfectly good job, and left a perfectly
operational team behind. If the school really wants to keep that team
operational, it will do what it does when a social studies teacher retires,
assuming that it really wants to keep social studies operational in the school.
I don’t envy the schools in this sort of situation, and I don’t fault
Sailorville. My sense is that education is a battered business in general, and
usually not a terribly well-financed one. Of all the jobs I’ve witnessed over the
years, one of the seeming worse is that of high school principal: you get
nothing but flak from everyone on all sides. Damned if you do, damned if you
don’t. Oh, well…
Hey. You’ve read this far. Wouldn’t you like to take on a
little night job?
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