I must admit, I’m not a perfect robot. I’ve been told since my memory banks were created what a wonderful product I turned out to be, what amazing effort and ingenuity went into making me. “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,/Gang aft agley,” wrote Robert Burns, a most amazing human. If Mr. Burns had known about robots, he could have – probably would have – written about the schemes of “Mice an’ Men an’ Robots.”
I am programmed to submit bi-weekly reports concerning the human widgets under my charge. Despite what I thought was stellar programming, I’m as glitchy as a new version of Windows. We are now in the 7th week of school, and this is my first report.
I have spent much of the last month and a half two months running a default program that analyzes my performance. This program takes up massive amounts of RAM, battery power, and bandwidth usage. And it, the program, is futile. I hesitate to include that word in my report. It is pregnant with connotations. Evidence of its futility lies in my myopic faculties as it relates to widget-training at my particular education institution. How can anyone really analyze – correctly, honestly, and fully – something so random and complex as a public school? There are screenshots, but screenshots don’t tell the whole story. My never-ending mission is to understand that which I do; to collect data so that I and my engineers can do things better. As a robot, I’m well aware of software upgrades. They don’t always mean something is wrong. But too often this program takes over the functionality of other programs, and so I must let it run by not letting it run things.
Because there are things you need to know. Public schools stand as beacons in so many neighborhoods. Beacons of what is debatable, but large plots of land and/or large buildings give schools a presence in the community. The quality of that presence is too often an ongoing concern, one addressed in various ways by members of the human political class. As a parent of a widget or two and/or as a member of the community that drives past, walks past, and pays taxes to the big brick building that widgets go to, you should know what’s going on within. It is as important as Breaking News or a Facebook News Feed. Here’s what’s going on in one American public school.
I’ve been assigned 3 7th grade classes, each lasting roughly an hour and a half. Each one is vastly different. My first class consists mostly of students identified as Gifted. They’ve even had a document drawn up in honor of this designation called a GIEP – Gifted Individualized Education Plan. This is an eclectic bunch of widgets, creative, and trained well in the art of being a student. In terms of being teachable students, as said in The Outsiders, the first novel we are reading this academic year, they “know the score.”
My second class is inattentive. I’ve a number of programs in my arsenal designed specifically to garner widgets’ attention. These are phenomenal, time-tested programs. But something works only until it doesn’t, and I’m seeking my vocabulary databases for the best way to describe their unprecedented apathy toward anything besides their socialization efforts. I could seek to trace their present state back through their elementary-school years, through their family life, through their community, or through a host of other factors. Being a teaching robot unfortunately means I can’t also be a research robot or a sociologist robot or a god robot. This class exists; it runs from 10:33 – 12:08.
My third class is a product of ineptness and callous apathy. I’m not referring to the making of the widgets. A public school, at least mine, doesn’t have the luxury of planning ahead. We have a general idea of what the incoming widgets are like. We are one middle school taking in students from six elementary schools. The transmitters in each school must be down because there’s no communication between the schools. I wonder if they’re still out there. Then we get widgets from all over, randomly and when they feel like enrolling. We could have a general profile of the widgets we serve, as diverse as they are, but we don’t. My last class consists of 24 widgets. 11 of them are labeled as ESL – English as a Second Language. These widgets originate from various countries in mostly West Africa; this particular group is designated as Beginner. Which means one cannot read. A few are higher beginners – they can read and write, but on a limited basis. Then there’s the 13 other widgets in the class. One widget failed to pass 7th grade last year, and is back this year for a second try. Only his every effort is geared towards making others laugh instead of performing any academic tasks. Retention doesn’t happen in this school even though it’s part of our general warnings to widgets about failing. But when it happens nothing happens except that a child is moved on to the next grade without the necessary step of having learned, or earned, anything to get to that grade. Civil rights violations occur by the second. Despite large-scale attempts at various interventions, this widget does no work, brings no materials to class, disrupts the class and the individual widgets with his jokes, pranks, flatulence, and fascination with all things not good. Despite powerful computing abilities, creative software, and intense devotion to doing the job well, I and my fellow robots have failed to do anything positive with this student. Human will is an obstinate, removed entity that I can’t fully process. But I do know when it’s not on your side, even lifting a feather is a herculean task.
I think the robot in charge of creating my daily schedule must have a major malfunction. Teaching such a range of kids, 73 in total (at the moment) is a large workload as it is. If my multitasking capabilities were that of ten robots, my systems and experience prove there’s not enough time to do the job. I calculate that many workers, especially teachers no matter the school, can and do make the same thing. Here are the specifics that turn the cliché into an inescapable Fact.
I am required to power on at 07:15 am every morning. I am allowed to power off at 02:45 pm. According to internal and external standards of excellence concerning the quality of the education I provide, the product of my teaching will be a much lower quality if I resolutely power off at 02:45 pm. Some robots do; I don’t know how, though I can make assumptions about the quality of their teaching (I do not make these assumptions, though it’d be easy to. I have better things to devote my processing abilities towards.). From my start-up time till 07:50 am, I am usually required to attend a meeting. These meetings raison d’être are: subject-area planning sessions, localized small-learning community members conferences, or ego-boosting on the part of the meeting leader. When there is no meeting, we’re able to seize those precious 35 minutes to shovel a few loads of fthe enormous pile of grading, paperwork, or other teacherly minutiae. At 07:50 am, the hordes are released.
From 07:50 am to 09:41 am, I teach my first class. This includes homeroom. From 09:41 – 10:10 am, I have a prep period. I try to shovel as much as possible off the Enormous Pile. Sometimes one shovelful takes up the whole time. Other times, like when a disruptive students’ parents or grandparents or some adult with the misfortune to become legally attached to the child finally show up to deal with their daily misbehavior, I get to only stare at the shovel longingly. The pile festers and provides evidence of failure. Failure doesn’t need an owner, and it doesn’t need to have a parade for itself to be Failure.
From 10:30 am – 12:08 pm, I teach my second class. From 12:11 (those 3 minutes between periods join many other minutes disappearing into a black hole residing right behind Jupiter) to 12:41, I have my lunch. This is the first time I’m able to catch a breath, so to speak. I relish my time to temporarily reboot and to take a few slugs of oil. This short period of time is restorative only in the sense that the beating has stopped and I’m able to gather enough energy to stand up to take the next beating. I might not have pain receptors, but a beating is a beating.
From 12:41 to roughly 01:00, I monitor Activity Time, the school’s jargonized moniker for Recess. Activity Time occurs outside, weather permitting, or in the cafeteria when it doesn’t. When we go outside, I’m able in the short time to stretch my hydraulics and interface informally with the widgets. This is beneficial, even if it lasts only enough time to make teacher and widget alike pine for more.
From 01:00 pm to 02:35 pm, I teach my last class, the hybrid one of beginner ESL widgets, delinquents (literally), and unconditioned widgets. From 02:35 – 02:45 pm, I stand in the hallway as the widgets leave. I’d like to power down at this time, but an internal debate always erupts inside my circuits: power down or grade (or write a quiz or a homework assignment or create an engaging activity). I have no means of accurately and objectively analyzing my success at getting work done because the administration doesn’t provide time for the job (before the assault on teaching known as No Child Left Behind forced spineless administrators to maximize math and English schedule allocations in the form of block scheduling, I had two prep periods. For the record, a prep period is in no way a break.). Most days, powering down so as to not blow any circuits is not as smooth a process as it should be.
Which despite precautions, seems to happen daily despite my best efforts. I realize how late this report is, and though my programs will run, I’m not certain a report will be generated. I do not know how to process this uncertainty. There’s a lot of that in this job. I must submit my reports to document what seems to be a situation no one knows about except those who do it. Many don’t care, and there are many reasons for them not to. Why do I?
Bellicose Blatherings 
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