While I kneel on the carpet in the small office, my mouse hovers over the attachment button in an otherwise empty Microsoft Outlook message. I have several other projects to work on; I haven’t yet organized my messy drafted test questions, for one, and I need to copy several tools for tomorrow. I can’t afford to squander away thirty minutes sending a single email. Yet here I am hesitating to add and submit a file that I’d rushed to complete by an admittedly soft deadline.
The ticking of the clock on the wall finds my ears and its rhythmic clicking hands compel me to finish the simplest task on my to-do list. I add the file to the email, type in the subject line, and add a few words to the message. There is little to say; anything beyond “Here it is” would be laughably diminished compared to the contents of that file.
I sigh and the clock ticks over the sound of my exhale. The clock is impatient and rude but ultimately right. I need to move.
I begin to add the recipient’s address at the top, but nothing populates. I pause to weigh the gravity of this fact. I’ve sent her an email before on another device, so the lack of auto-populating shouldn’t surprise me here, in a place I rarely work, but it carries weight here. This is my second email to her under any conditions and the file that accompanies it is a lot. Am I really sure I should—
Laughter from outside the office cuts through my thinking. I shoot a glance at the clock and stand up for a moment before returning almost immediately to my knees.
I glance at the clipboard and a messy spiral of problem ideas glare back at me. My cursor begins to inch across the screen towards SEND but my hand follows suit. I stop and close my eyes.
They remain closed for mere seconds, insufficient time to both make and counter a decision. I open them a d stare at the subject line and recipient name again and look down at the floor.
*****
There are very few elements of being a teacher that evoke a traditional office job.
Theoretically, I should have no authority to comment on this. My experience in the cubicle realm is limited to a couple of “Bring your kid to work” days with my dad at Campbell Soup, two-dozen Dilbert compilations sitting on my bookshelf, and watching Office Space enough times to nail down a decent Milton expression whenever someone walks off with my stapler. This is to say: I have a highly superficial understanding of the corporate world beyond the insights pop culture offers.
But those exposures are sufficient to highlight some of the commonalities between my profession and the proverbial white-collar sector. Both offer salaried positions more regularly than hourly pay, both demand collaboration and fluency with a rich tapestry of buzzwords and acronyms, and both feature a defined structure of management and supervision that includes a process for performance evaluation.
Regardless of occupation, that final item on my list elicits similar reactions. Everyone has a boss and everyone dreads being formally assessed by that boss in the same way students get worked up over tests. There’s something universally unnerving about having someone with greater power and authority than you watching you and almost explicitly looking for your weaknesses. It’s like brushing your teeth across the room from your dentist: you know they want to help but you can also feel their judgment with every stroke of the toothbrush.
I am no exception to feeling anxious during evaluations, but I have been fortunate to never experience an evaluation that felt like a “gotcha”, even when bizarre things have happened during them. (Case in point: my TA, who receives this newsletter, once fell asleep on the floor next to my desk during a formal evaluation and snored so loudly and with such force that I had to wake him.) My supervisors have always been fair and treated the process as a relaxed one focused around not picking at my work but reflecting on the practices that comprise my teaching.
Reflection, you might not be surprised to learn as a reader of this newsletter, is a major part of my life already and that has made the evaluation process a thoughtful one across my career. In exchange for the stress and mortal terror of being watched and ostensibly graded for the work I’ve poured my time and energy into, I get to reflect deeply on my practices and put into words all of the things I do and why I do them.
Some of my favorite professional conversations have come via the evaluation process, particularly across the last eight years with my supervisor, Carlos. Carlos formally evaluated me four or five times and each instance led to conversations that ended only because of ringing bells or growling stomachs. Most years, our evaluation meetings felt like a buffet line of discussions about best practices, brainstorming sessions about various campus issues, and sincere personal check-ins, each with welcoming scents wafting up to my nose. Whether the observed lessons went smoothly or messily, I always left our meetings feeling supported and respected for what I did and how I did it, a fact that I fully recognize is not the norm.
Carlos’ approach to evaluations earned my trust—not that it wasn’t already there. This was a man who said “Call me anytime” and picked up his phone at 10:30 pm when I texted about a concern and a man who gave candid answers to questions even when those answers were disappointing. There were plenty of times we disagreed on things—that is true of every human I have ever meaningfully interacted with—but I felt remarkably comfortable talking to him about any topic that came up.
Including myself.
At the beginning of each year, teachers have to fill out a form dedicated to their goals and objectives for the coming year. The document is sterile as can be and, based on the three lines it provides for detailing those very goals and objectives, I’m always convinced that the document isn’t meant to carry much meaning. That isn’t to say the school and district don’t care about teachers’ goals and objectives; they do—but they care more about them than the formal template on which they are written. The document is a formality that facilitates meaningful conversations like those Carlos and I so often had.
When I began my teaching career, though, I did not know that. I received a digital copy of the document and assumed that they wanted thoroughly explained responses. I didn’t write a ton, but I did select three thoughtful, CSTP-aligned goals and wrote several paragraphs of explanation regarding each one.
I followed the same pattern for years. Outside of the time a particular person I’ve written about here before asked to see mine and laughed at their length and detail, no one ever commented on them and no one ever mentioned them. I began to see them as being pure exercises in reflection and began to write mine accordingly. No matter what I wrote, I assumed it didn’t matter. The documents would be filed away all the same.
In the fall of 2016, I wrote my Goals and Objectives just like normal. After two academically-focused goals, I penned my third one about my frustrations over student recognition. The previous year, Mathletes had been given the run around on formally recognizing our involved seniors at formal events. The hypocrisy of similar groups getting recognition at the same events went unheard, and the depth of what we had done hosting events and competing nearly thirty times each year was shooed away as something second-tier. This frustrated me and made me feel like I had let down the students in my program.
Mincing no words, I tore directly into every aspect of the process. I wrote about why I believed my team deserved it, I wrote about why the administration’s refusal to consider recognizing them disrespected their (and my) work, and I attacked the hypocrisy of the way recognition is doled out, with its emphasis on large, national organizations ignoring the actual dedicated contributions participants make within them. This was a piece of writing that maintained a persistent professional tone but skirted on the edge of brimstone. The situation had me hot and I made confronting the dismissal of my students’ work my third goal.
Those goals and objectives were sent to Carlos in the same manner every other year’s had been. I pressed SEND on an email and then promptly forgot about them. I had screamed my piece into the vast abyss of an administrator’s inbox at a school serving nearly 3000 students.
A few weeks later, Carlos set up my pre-conference meeting to prepare for an evaluation.
Where we talked about student recognition.
Carlos had not only read my goals but read them carefully and investigated. He said he could sense “frustration” in my words and that bothered him so he sought out insight to pass along. He confessed to getting nothing satisfactory, bluntly sharing the weak rationale behind at least one decision, and he said he disagreed with the choice and understood my objection. Maybe he truly did or maybe he didn’t—such was irrelevant because I believed him. When he encouraged me to find ways outside the system to recognize the team, I followed his advice. The chip remained on my shoulder but I felt so validated to know he had read what I said that I all but forfeited my goal entirely and accepted the solutions he endorsed as worthy.
Moving forward with the knowledge that he cared enough to read them, I modified the way I wrote my goals and objectives. Instead of taking fully professional angles, I leaned into the personal element with at least one each year. I didn’t hesitate to talk about emotional situations like Katelyn’s suicide, I included extensive context for how various scenarios made me feel in motivating particular goals, and I stopped self-censoring altogether. Navigating physical pain, existential dread, the pressure of living up to the high expectations of being a Teacher of the Year—all of those topics wove into those sterile goals and objectives forms designed for two sentences and clicking SEND. Whether Carlos responded to them or not, I knew that they would reach him. Not unlike the idea behind this newsletter, the act of sharing this small element of myself with him in words brought me comfort. I looked forward to writing out my goals and objectives to share with my supervisor.
Fast forward to this summer. Even coming out of the woeful mess that was 2021-2022, when July arrived, I began to think on potential threads for my goals and objectives in early July. With a new class on tap and a developed distaste for nearly everything about my job having taken hold of me over the previous year, there was no shortage of fodder for reflection. I would be writing my goals and objectives following the longest unbroken period of mental un-health in my life—and that’s saying something—so I would certainly have a lot to say.
But right about the time I began to narrow down my subject matter and narrative approaches, a realization struck me:
Carlos wouldn’t be reading what I wrote anymore.
Rightfully so, he had earned a principal job in another district. I had known this and sent him appropriately warm congratulations, but it hadn’t dawned on me that his promotion meant changes for my goals and objectives. In particular: I would have a new supervisor. New eyes would be reading (or ignoring) what I wrote.
This left a current of internal crisis in the back of my head for a few weeks. The new person who would be evaluating me was someone I had never met from a different district. People spoke glowingly of her, but looking forward to working with someone is a different cat entirely than sharing vulnerably about the mental health challenges and deep insecurities that motivate your goals. Rather than simply enable discussion with someone I already knew well, this document would serve as a first meaningful introduction to who I am and how I do my job. My goals and objectives had stakes.
For the second time in my career, I felt self-conscious about how I approached my goals and objectives. How could share any of what I’d sketched out with not just a total stranger but a total stranger imbued with authority over me?
I wasn’t sure I could. Internally, I weighed the possibility of scaling the project back to my first few years’ response lengths and contents. Such a move would still demonstrate an impressive amount of thought and dedication to my new boss, but it would avoid any semblance of oversharing. It would be a controlled characterization, a careful distillation of myself that, based on her response, would start to tease out who this person I would be working with for the foreseeable future actually was.
Pushing myself to compose those goals and objectives, though, led me to writer’s block. The goals I was describing read as toothless generalities; they were inauthentic without the context. There is inherent emotion in the way I do what I do, and I am awash in emotion despite living a solitary life beyond the workplace. Divorcing my words from any emotion and truncating the stories behind my selected aspirations felt like a betrayal of who I am.
There isn’t even one meaningful relationship in my life, professional or otherwise, that isn’t aware of my emotional self. Even the shorter relationships (like those fostered in a two-block AP class) are given insight into the whys of how I am and what I do. How can I expect someone to get to know me without offering some slice of the real me?
It would be backwards to write the same goals and objectives for my new supervisor that I would have for Carlos, a man I had grown to trust before opening up in that document. But trust gained via inauthenticity isn’t trust and, as I demonstrate in my classroom every year, one needs to model trust to receive it in turn.
Instead of an accidental validation of trust that strengthened an already solid professional relationship, this year’s goals and objectives could be an invitation to forge a new one. They could be not just an introduction to me but also the way I treat people. Because talking openly with a near-stranger about how you see yourself and what that yourself wants to accomplish across the next year has the power to transform an inert, static hoop to jump through into something enriching.
That’s the goal anyway.
*****
My eyes return to the pixelated paper clip at the top of the Outlook client. Clicking SEND is trivial, straightforward, a formality—and yet I can’t pull the trigger.
I stare at the recipient’s name one more time. The letters in it, arranged in that order, barely conjure a mental image for me; I might as well be sending it to a random Gmail account! But, of course, I am not. I am sending these 3000 words to my new boss.
The name at the top is just a name for now, but that might not be the case for long. Why second guess my own identity? I’d prefer to talk about the truth than try to build upon anything else.
I press SEND.
I originally conceived of this piece in July, right about the moment I realized that the goals I’d been outlining in my head for Carlos would never reach him. That alone made this an interesting writing experience: I was, in a way, conceiving of what I would write while deciding what I would do.
Along the way, I ran through many different configurations for this piece. One told two parallel stories—this one about goals and objectives, the other a parallel one involving an AP Lit voice journal assignment from the summer of 2003–but that felt too similar to last week’s piece so I sought alternatives.
Among those was a structure built around the carpool tangent game I’ve written about before. Under that arrangement, I wanted to trace back my history of trusting other people to its ultimate origin. As someone who doesn’t trust himself but regularly trusts others with that same self, I imagined such an exercise would be illuminating.
I thought deeply about it and ended up tracing back through nearly six different stories of trust. Come Tuesday, I felt certain my frame would be those backward racing tangents, each subsequent instance informing and enriching the previous one, and I spent my running combing through each story for connective threads.
But I had no idea where that original moment of trust would appear. I was actively tracing backward in pursuit of a memory I knew had to exist but that I wasn’t actively aware of.
I found that moment eventually, right as I exited Morse Park on the walking stretch of my cool-down. I also found myself suddenly ice cold, my body seized up by a story I hadn’t thought about for decades but that in a snap gained wholly new context.
I flew through an outline for that piece when I got home, every piece of it flying out as if my mind were present simultaneously in both 1992 and 2022. The connection between that story and this one motivated me to deem them as parts one and two of the same piece.
But the more I thought about the second story, the more it overshadowed this one. As revelatory as the other memory was for me, I felt power in this story too. I decided to save the second part for the future rather than indulge in 5000 words tethered loosely together. I’m not sure when I will write it, but you’ll know it when you see it.
I didn’t have to share this context, but “Goals and Objectives” feels somehow incomplete without it present in some form. Thanks for reading.