Forty years in the Baltimore City Public School System ... that's many times around the carousel of superintendents and principals and curriculum supervisors and department heads, and you know what? Almost all of them didn't matter. Almost nothing, and absolutely nothing good, reached the classroom from the higher powers.

Superintendents I didn't notice at all. None of them affected the day to day classroom - until the most recent one past, who managed - unmanaged? - to create a many million dollar deficit. The cure of choice turns out to be laying off hundreds, many hundreds, of teachers. That affects the classroom. They also laid off about half the central administrative staff; this does not affect the classroom.

I didn't get laid off. I retired, which I never thought I'd do until about ten years ago. It is an axiom of Education that the principal is the instructional leader of the school, that the principal sets the tone for the entire school. It's one bit of Education that's actually true.

In these forty years I've taught in six schools in the Baltimore system. I'm sure all six schools had principals; I remember only one wonderful one and one principal from hell. The rest made such an impression I don't even remember all their names. The wonderful one died of a heart attack on the job, which is how he would have wanted it. The principal from hell was in large part why I retired as soon as I could, in March, rather than finishing the year and retiring in June. Although I must admit that a great decline in my health encouraged the early retirement.

I loved teaching, and I was good at it. I wasn't good at classroom management in the traditional sense, but my classroom was almost always the way I wanted it with the kids doing what I wanted them to do. They just weren't often sitting still and being quiet and studious-looking.

One of the main reasons I went into teaching was to avenge my own high school experience. I loved learning, still do; I hated high school. I had two good and wonderful teachers in high school - Mrs. Townsend in ninth grade English and Mr. Carl in twelfth grade Problems of Democracy. The rest of my high school experience was abominable at its worst and a waste of time at its best. I determined that I would do high school right for my students, that it would not be abominable and a waste of time, that in my classroom it would be all right to be smart and sensible, that there would be one small slice of a community of scholars. It took me many years to get there, but I did and it was wonderful. The early years had their great moments, but when a thousand teachers applied for the twenty-two positions at the New Baltimore City College in 1978 and I got one of those positions I thought I had died and gone to heaven - and for many years, until the principal from hell took over, we twenty-two knew we had the best teaching jobs in the world. When I retired in 2004, there were only six of us still there; as of June, there were just four.

Now, in 2006, I think I've recovered enough from principal in hell to be able to look back and enjoy the good times in forty years of teaching - and there were many, even in so benighted a school system as Baltimore City's. At last I think I can again tell teacher stories.