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Most of my shyness has dissolved by now but my enthusiasm has become just as remote, wrapped up and stored away like the ancient mummies were. Why?

I will have been observed/evaluated for my job performance approximately 38 times this school year. That is a little bit much. It is overkill. It is disruptive and distracting to my students and to my teaching.

The evaluators also begin conversations with students to quiz them about my teaching right there, right in the room. Sometimes these interviews are not brief. It gives teenagers an open forum to complain. Yesterday, after an observation/evaluation students said, “Miss, you owe us now, we made you look good. What did you bring for lunch?”

They were halfway joking, but they know they have the power to end my job. I asked them if they liked Craisins. They didn’t.

The Hawaii Department of Education insists that teacher observation is not evaluation. Oh, but it is. A checklist is an evaluation, pure and simple. Clip it to a clip board and it appears as quality control in a factory.

Thirty-eight observations/evaluations are a lot. Add to that number a weekly sample of student work that every teacher must submit with a detailed cover sheet and copy of the week’s pacing guide to see if it is deemed as matching the specific standard and learning target for that week (mine come back as not having met the standard) and you have teachers either tearing out their hair or filing the thing out of sight.

These weekly samples are also evaluations of teacher performance, albeit roundabout ones. That brings our number to approximately 75 teacher evaluations per year. All data is reported to the Complex Area Superintendent. Teachers then need further “training” because they are judged as “deficient.”

Observations by teams of other non-classroom teachers, other classroom teachers as peer observations, principals, district personnel, and my students who evaluate my performance as a teacher are all included in this number. I am not counting individual student evaluations in this number (two classes of 25 students would make 50 more evaluations) but as a group they will have evaluated me twice this year so I only added the number two to my total.

I have stopped reading these, not just to make a point, but to have some semblance of sanity intact and to listen to a drum that is in there … somewhere inside my own heart and head.

Teachers are enthusiasm machines. Kill that, and you have effectively killed a teacher.

Too many people coming into the classroom to catch students learning — as if they were an endangered form of wildlife — and teachers teaching as if their lives depended on it like a challenge on Survivor, will kill that enthusiasm. Toss teachers scores of evaluation sheets or write-ups, and they begin to feign illiteracy themselves, as corporate America continues to bully its way into the very mind and heart of the classroom. Overkill will kill a teacher.

I must march to the beat of many different drummers, so much so that I sometimes do not hear my own or those of my students. My own enthusiasm for the subject matter, for learning and teaching, disappears, goes underground. It is not the underground chocolate river of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I am talking about here. My enthusiasm dies in a place with a crypt, a tomb, wrapped up and mummified. Each morning I awaken with it, each afternoon it has become wrapped up again.

What creative individual does not welcome feedback, affirmation, and collegial support to share new ideas?

But I have so many bosses that I have none. So many mandates, evaluations, and surprises, that I must go and do what I think is necessary to educate young minds in reading and writing.

The factory continues but there is no Charlie, no Mr. Wonka with a fantastic vision. There are no Oompa Loompas to sing along with. It is a stark landscape of directives, mandates, standards, and evaluations. Professional Learning Communities, Edison Testing, On Site School Review, Danielson Rubrics, Professional Evaluation of Teachers, Common Formative Assessment Cycles, Summative Assessment Cycles, Superintendent visits, and more put teachers under an intense magnifying glass.

Many teachers devote much of their time on the job fulfilling the requirements of data collection for the above, or else they are in after-school meetings that they are required to attend. This takes away from the time teachers need to prepare lessons, call parents, and contact counselors to help address student needs.

Even the testing coordinators and their assistants act as my bosses. They have come out and said that they are. This causes a problem if we belong to the same union. It is hard to tell which way is up, what is crucial and what is not.

Teachers must constantly assess their situations. They must continually make split-second decisions, under pressure of time constraints. At times, they must back-track, pick up scattered remnants of lessons and resume work to begin again, find their focus.

Will my real boss please stand up?

Susan Kay Anderson teaches English at Pahoa High School and Hawaii Community College on the Big Island. She has taught in island schools for nearly two decades.