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A young friend of mine – I’ll call him Zach because that is, indeed, his name – graduated from college last May and started his first teaching job in August: 7th-grade Spanish in a school with a fairly high population of low-income children.

Zach is a very good-looking young man, but I must emphasize the word “young” because he has, for lack of a better term, a baby face.

Well aware of the fact that he looks younger than some of his students, Zach decided last summer that every day, he would wear a dress shirt and tie to school.

This was a source of amusement for some of his students, who had apparently never seen a teacher wearing a tie before.

It was NOT amusing to his fellow teachers, however, some of whom apparently felt Zach was making them look bad.
One day, all the male teachers wore ties – loud ties, ugly ties, sloppy ties, with T-shirts and sweatshirts.

“What should I do about this?” Zach asked his kids, and they suggested that all of them – boys AND girls – would wear dress shirts and ties to school the next day as a show of solidarity.

Which further annoyed Zach’s colleagues. Zach opened the door to his room one day to find dozens and dozens of ties everywhere: pinned to the walls, hanging from the light fixtures, roped around desks.

“I know they thought they were being funny,” Zach said, “but let me tell you, some of these teachers wouldn’t stay 30 seconds later than the contract demands, but they somehow found the time to trash my room. And I wasn’t crazy about the message they were giving to my kids, that it’s OK to disrespect a teacher.”

Bear in mind that Zach is the 22-year-old here, and that his “colleagues” were older and more experienced than him.

But clearly not as mature.

I thought of Zach the other day when I read an attorney’s 27-page report on conflicts between the principal and a handful of teachers at Madison’s Glendale Elementary School.

Two salient facts: Glendale has the highest percentage of poor and minority students at any Madison elementary school. And since Mickey Buhl took over as principal in 2005, test scores have risen dramatically.

Most of the teachers’ complaints about Buhl’s “bullying” behavior took place early in his tenure. The district apparently kept hoping the whiners would give up, but that wasn’t going to happen once the union got involved.
So the district hired an outside attorney to investigate the complaints. The attorney interviewed dozens of teachers and interpreters, past and present, and then concluded that Buhl had not violated any district policies, although perhaps at times he had been somewhat “insensitive” as to how his words and actions were “perceived” by the teachers.

I challenge anyone who is not either a member of the education establishment or a professional victim to read this report without laughing out loud. You can read it for yourself here.

Needless to say, the teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., is so upset over the report that they’re demanding the district institute a policy to prevent principals from bullying teachers.

But I felt sorry for Buhl. No boss should have to tolerate the immaturity and whining Buhl got from a small handful of malcontents.

I kept comparing wondering how these crybabies would fare in the newspaper newsrooms where I toiled for 32 mostly happy years. The first time a gimlet-eyed city editor threw a story back at them and snarled “This is crap! Do it over before you leave tonight,” (which happened more times than I like to think about, to me and just about every other ink-stained wretch I knew) these wimps would be reaching for the Xanax bottle.

Grow up. Put on your big boy pants. Your job is to teach, and the kids in your care – especially those poor, black kids from bad neighborhoods – don’t really care if you’ve got hurt feelings or not. You feel “threatened” when the principal stands in the doorway of your classroom? They feel threatened when they hear gunfire while they’re doing their homework.

It’s not just the handful of teachers at Glendale who need to get a grip on reality. It’s almost every public school teacher in the state.

At some point, they all need to take a good, hard look at their districts’ finances and realize that the well is dry. If they insist on demanding more money, districts will have to lay off teachers. It’s that simple. Read the election results on the wall: The public is not in the mood to approve big spending referenda any time soon.

I have no doubt that teaching is one of the hardest jobs there is. It’s also one of the most important. Teachers are supposed to be preparing our kids for the Real World, where bosses do not pass around big platters of free self-esteem and generally don’t give a rat’s patoot about your feelings.

And by the way, my friend Zach? He’s halfway through his first year and still loving his job. And his kids decided to wear shirts and ties everyday. So have some kids in other classes.

“They told me it makes them feel more grown-up,” Zach said. That makes them more mature already than some of their other teachers.

-January 26, 2011