Some musings on Garfield High School

Hello everyone,

Two years ago, when I first started my current job as PSP adviser for Garfield, I met a PSP adviser from another school.

"You're from Garfield?" he asked.

"Yes. I've been there for 15 years," I said.

"You're the first person from Garfield I've ever met who wasn't angry all the time," he said.

I laughed, "You only caught me on a good day." We shared true stories of Garfield contention, and as the conversation turned to other things, I thought about what he had said, and I have thought about his (completely serious) observation many times. Now that I know I'm leaving, I worry, frankly, that I'm taking that contentiousness with me.

I think back on my seventeen years here, and a large percentage of my memories are about fights among the staff. Really. I have been both observer and participant. I've engaged in fights over the auditorium, over class schedules, over the school newspaper. I've been in shouting matches, memo blizzards, and grievance proceedings. I've gained and lost friends because I agreed with or disagreed with the wrong person at the wrong time (or the right person at the right time). I've been drummed out of the faculty cafeteria and drummed back in.

I've observed fights--spectacular matches: shouting both logical and ill, profanity screamed and spat, fistfights threatened and promised. I've seen secret meetings with whispered innuendos, conspiracies and conspiracy theories, grudges held and nursed for years.

Within my first semester here, I had seen so many arguments that I was a bit shell-shocked. A veteran teacher told me, "Just stay in your room and avoid meetings if you can. You'll need to do that to preserve your health." I have had that advice from veterans on more than one occasion and in more than one circumstance during my time here. Indeed, almost all the fights I've been in or seen on campus have occurred because I didn't always follow that advice.

It's clear from what I write that I can't excuse myself from culpability, and that my ability to point out the problem doesn't mean that I was never a part of it. Frankly, if I have seemed calm in the past few years, and if I have been able to laugh off the dysfunction of our large family here, it's because I have been outside it all with a different job. And I got help from a psychiatrist.

This email is intended for the new teachers, most of whom have had to be helped through the same shock I experienced, and often in the same way. But I expect that many others will read it, so--culpable or not--I would like to say something broadly:

It doesn't have to be this way. You can change this one thing--this constant urge to fight--you can change it to an urge to cooperate, to help, to forgive--and that change alone will open the way to great achievements at Garfield.

It doesn't take much kindness and consideration to help someone through a bad day--one or two words really. It's not that hard to disagree cordially. It's easier to forgive than to hold a grudge.

The Psalmist wrote, "A soft answer turneth away wrath." Even at Garfield, this most cantankerous of schools, I have been the beneficiary of that soft answer as often as I have felt the wrath, and I have learned I much prefer the softness.

In seventeen years of in-fighting, what has been gained? Is the school appreciably better than it was before? Wouldn't our little islands of excellence become continents if we just felt more comfortable joining shores? Is it really worth it to resist forgiving?

For those of you that I leave behind, I beg you to stay and "turn away wrath."

It's possible.

It's really the only way.

Jeff Combe