When you live in Florida, a flat land of drained swamps that collect in retention ponds in order to build on dry land, you get used to it–the collections of Canadian geese that find the ponds and surrounding habitat perfect for nesting.

And what better place than a school? There are ponds and plenty of open grassy spaces, perfect for raising the next generation of honkers that bully humans better than any other species except maybe for humans themselves.

It’s that time of year when we carefully step around the goose dung because they don’t care where they drop it. Keep a sharp eye out! Many students don’t as the black stains that not even pressure washing can remove testify to their stomping and grinding the offensive material into the concrete.

What a perfect metaphor as it’s also that time of year when governors across the land sign bad legislation about public schooling into law. School districts will spend the next twelve months stepping around the goose piles, new and old, as they navigate their way through another year of muck and murk.

Retirement could not come at a better time. During the annual Spring budgeting process, which principals are obligated to share with their faculty, the district said that they were planning for around a 20% reduction in enrollment due to the new universal voucher law. Thus, while our school is maintaining its enrollment and maybe increasing over last year, the threat of losing teaching positions hangs over us.

That worry will no longer be mine. If you don’t teach, you don’t understand that twice a year, toward the end of a school year in the Spring and at the beginning at the end of Summer, teachers sweat out the budgeting process hoping against hope to be able to stay at their school and not have to move. “Surplus” is a dirty word to a teacher.

Seniority flew out the window nine years ago. It’s all about the test scores and, if yours aren’t high enough versus the other teachers in your subject area in the building, you find yourself at the top of the list.

Then there’s the RIF. A surplus means you are moved to another school; a RIF means you lose your job. Grumpy Old Teacher’s (GOT) district hasn’t seen a RIF in decades, but if you talked to the old-timers before they retired, you heard stories of people sitting by their phones over the summer (yeah, pre-cell phone days) waiting for a call that enough people had quit that jobs were available for those who were riffed.

Are those days back? We have yet to see.

Don’t sputter that there’s a teacher shortage. You can solve one by either finding qualified teachers or finding a way that the jobs are gone and you don’t need them.

Florida is not the only state pursuing many strategies to effect the latter.

Meanwhile, the culture wars go on. Teachers are a prime target; to misquote the bard, the governor says, “How do we hate thee? Let us count the ways.”

First up, and this is the joke to lighten the piece, Florida has now banned children from attending drag shows. Damn! go a couple hundred elementary teachers. Now we have to think up something else for our first field trip in the fall.

If you’re not laughing, you’re part of the problem. No teacher would conduct such a field trip, no administrator would approve it, and no show would allow it.

Goosestepping.

Then, there are the pronouns. Teachers and all other school-based personnel must use the pronouns according to the “sex assigned at birth.” GOT promises not to go on a tangent about how ridiculous a phrase that is. The birthing process does not ASSIGN a sex like a teacher would assign homework to be done. Nor is gender-identity chosen. Both occur from the unique combination of genes, biochemistry, and other things that take place when a sperm fuses with an egg.

Oops, to recover from the tangent, teachers are barred from using preferred pronouns that a child might tell them to use. Teachers must use the pronouns, um sorry about another tangent, but how are they supposed to know? It is said that the ancient Greeks began competing in the nude at the Olympics so women couldn’t sneak in and compete with the men … but GOT hopes no one suggests THAT as a solution to the pronoun conundrum. How do we know?

We’re not going to do inspections. We’ll take the child’s word for it.

Goosestepping.

Parents rights. Oh yes, to channel Mr. T, I pity the teacher fool who dares to talk to a child about what bodies do when they grow up. Schools can provide menstrual products for girls, but they can’t explain how to use them or why they are necessary. (At least, in the elementary grades. But then you see what Florida did with its Don’t Be Gay law. It started with K – 3, and now it extends through 12th grade.)

Goosestepping.

Then there are the board members, M4L types, cruising classrooms looking for reasons to report teachers to the state. Looking at you, Hernando County. Good for your superintendent, though, for standing up to the board bullies.

Goosestepping.

What’s a teacher to do? One misstep and they’re covered with <ahem>. The legislators, the governor, the far-right wingnuts, like middle school bullies, watch, jeer, and video to post on social media.

Is it any surprise that teachers are leaving to find better sidewalks?