Work update

This is personal.

I was a “founding teacher” at my current school in 2002. And from the first day of September that year, I was the programmer (that’s what we call the scheduler in New York City).

In return for the work I was compensated in two ways: Most years I taught fewer classes, generally three instead of five. I get the sense that the “comp time” for schedulers is generally greater than that, but I hated to give up classes – I enjoy teaching. For two of the last nine years I took an extra one-day-a-week graphing/tutorial assignment. In two earlier years I took a twice-a-week research/writing assignment. And for one difficult term I worked as programmer while teaching a full load.

The second form of compensation was cash. As I taught a lot, during scheduling crunch times I would stay late, or work weekends, for per session payments. And every year I would be in for at least half the summer (usually the first two and last two weeks).

And while I wrote schedules that worked, and in our school that is particularly tricky, there were probably better things I could have done with weekends, evenings, and summers.

Two years ago I decided that I would take a sabbatical – and that would be my jumping off point. Someone else would need to be programmer for at least one year BEFORE I disappeared for a year. So in April 2009 I announced to a chapter meeting that I was giving up programming, and then notified my principal. I gave him time to replace me.

Two years and two months later that time arrived. As of the end of school, I am no longer programmer. I did an extra week, and left my successor a hand-written master schedule that will work, after some substantial tweaking. I’ll drop in one day to see if she needs help. And then maybe one day the last week of August.

But I am done. And ready to apply for that sabbatical. Except we traded them away for 2012-2013 as part of the no layoff agreement. Hell, I planned this three and a half years in advance. I’ll wait one more year.

In the meantime, I’m back to teaching math full-time. Next year I have three freshman algebra sections (I have seven years teaching this) and two calculus sections (never taught that before). It’s what I like to do.