Warren Smith
speaker
1,257 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 2 May
Warren Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I interviewed well. I'm going to strive to be as honest as I can throughout this. So I interviewed well. I think they saw potential. They were... I think they were looking for young teachers that could weather that kind of storm. Were they mostly boys in the school?
High school age, whether there are some middle school. It was interesting the way the building is divided to where a subset of middle school specialized with one group. But because of COVID, it was divided up into pods because they were worried about cross-contamination of COVID. So there was 10 students approximately to one site.
And I was assigned to one site as the multimedia teacher, teaching the same thing I've always taught. And there was no crossover. And then there was three teachers assigned to one site to manage those 10 students, which ratio of teacher to student is quite high. That's what their needs were. How long did you teach at that school? Up until losing my job, so four years. Four years.
Okay, so you stuck it out too. Well, I remember when the first speech they gave, the principal that hired me, I'm very fond of, and the assistant principal, they are no longer there. They were dismissed a year prior to me, but they are the ones that hired me. So when you ask why they hire you, he's the only person that could answer that. I remember I was in the interview.
And this assistant principal walks in and he's like dressed, there was really no dress code. And he walks in and he's like, blow my mind in eight seconds. And then I forget what I said. And then he just walked out and didn't say a single word. And I left thinking, I just blew that interview, but I got the job.
So anyways, we're there on the first day and he's like, look guys, if you're still teaching at this school in four years, Something's probably wrong with you, or you have some sadomasochistic, or you just have some, I think he was alluding to, there's some reason you have that, like, this is not your typical pathway for educators. He's trying to...
illustrate the reality that most times they get traditional educators that realize where they are and it's too late at that point and then they just vanish and they're like i mean they last a week if that we've had teachers come in and last a day one day and just get in their car and leave what happens to them they just they're like this is chaos this is I can't survive this for a year.
We were walking around with walkie-talkies so that you can respond quickly. We're trained in safety care so that you can go hands-on if needed. I mean, fights breaking out. It's not juvie, but it's one step away from juvie. Though you also have students that are not headed to juvie, but they're the ones that get bullied. Or for whatever reason, they have an IEP plan that... And what's that?
An individualized education plan. Yeah. I have dyslexia, though some students would have dyslexia to a degree where they need... It was a special education school, and it's designed so that we can accommodate...
everything right so and so the students that are hyper aggressive are put in one so there's going to be flaws to this logically are put in one um like quadrant one site they were divided into sites one two three four whatnot so that there's no you can't put the bullies with the bullied right but then you have hyper aggressive people yeah a lot of fights right that's the site i was on
So it changed, the landscape transformed.
Those first two years were the most chaotic, perhaps that had something to do with COVID. So I arrived during COVID, suddenly there's a kind of an outbreak at the school. I remember driving into the parking lot one morning, half the staff are coming out of the parking lot, getting into the cars, and they're like, they're telling us to leave.
So I'm on site one for whatever reason, all the teachers were sent home on site one, except me. Now there was no students in the building though, for three or four weeks, this went on. And so I was teaching remotely in my classroom, on my computer. And I kind of expanded the curriculum to like help. They needed me to fill in with other things. I remember that distinctly.
And so then we get through that. That might have happened. It was like every few months there was an outbreak on this site and they're gone. And so, you know, and you can't walk through these doors for contamination and COVID ends.
And over the course of the next two years, it changed because originally multimedia, I was able to grow the program to where I was able to work with the entire building. It was no longer just limited to one site, which was remarkable because in Upstairs, they have students with severe physical challenges. Down syndrome, challenges such as that. And that requires a completely different specialty.
No doubt. And a different type of staff and professionalism even, because you can't afford a mistake. It's life or death. And I began to work with those students as well. And you're always going to have inner politics, office place politics and whatnot and certain clicks form. And I mentioned the principal and assistant principal both just got fired in the middle of the day, same day.
And they put out a reason, you know, they're like, oh, they just, they keep it vague. And it was clearly, it was kind of a, in the first year, the school tried to unionize. There was a movement to unionize. And that principal that hired me was very against it. And I voted against it because my previous experience with the unions was starting to wake up to the reality of the drawbacks.
I understand the motivation behind unions, but. So there was, my point is that interplay is politics and it took them out. but I was able to, this new principal arose who was a very nice guy. There was originally two assistant principals and one was the kind of the guy who
in my mind, almost positive, kind of led that formation of what caused them to leave, and he ascended in power, became the only assistant principal, and his good buddy, who was 30 years old at the time, became the principal. Which is pretty young to be a principal. He was a very nice guy, though.
For whatever reason, I got moved across the street into a separate building though, which I actually liked because it gave me more room to grow. And so the students would, when the teachers, I had all the students would rotate. The teachers would bring them across the street. I had this great lab, multimedia lab with a 3D printer. We were investing in new equipment, camera technology, Photoshop.
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