About midway through my first year at the school where I now teach, I drew a set of job assignment cards for my students. I love doing this - drawing the light switches for lights on/lights off, a row of generic children in silhouette for line leader and line ender. Hanauta was hanging out with me as I laminated the cards and stuck tabs of hook and loop tape on the backs to hang them. She began thinking of other possible tasks that could be assigned to children. She made a set of cards representing alternate, and terrible, classroom jobs - things that either teachers or children (or both) would not gladly have happen. They made me laugh out loud and I still do love them.
Sometimes teachers, myself included, say to a child: THAT is not your job (to chide a friend, struggle their cot dangerously through a crowded sleeping/waking classroom, open a heavy, finger-hungry door, turn off bathroom lights while a peer sits hapless on the toilet.) But what IF, what if all these things are their jobs? Serving a centrally important purpose and providing tangible rewards. Precisely. What if it is my job, expressly my job, to lose my patience, turn my back on the busy classroom and wash paint brushes, resent parents and colleagues, curse under my breath when alone in the supply closet. That might be nice: to think that these behaviors have a positive, indispensible function. Nice to think that I am being paid for THAT!
But not this:
