one of my very proudest achievements in second americorps year
was creating a team gmail account. i am sort of a google docs evangelist and NYNP’s then-failure to utilize this or any other reasonable free online storage system just killed me, so within the first month we had a gmail account and they all knew the password, i made sure of that. i wasn’t really sure anyone would use it except me, or ever use it without first asking me if a thing it had just occurred to them they needed it was on google docs, but by january i would usually log in to find that someone had “last modified” some lesson plan or form more recently than i had used it; not long after files and whole folders started popping up i hadn’t even suggested. it was such a useful thing and i couldn’t remotely take credit for all of it, of course — i had a great team when they weren’t annoying the shit out of me (and frankly sometimes even when they were), and they were the ones who made it into the thing they needed, which i could never have done — but i’d had the idea, and i’d given it to them (and by the end of the year to a few other team leaders) to run with, and it had worked out even better than i had planned.
the guy who’s a team leader there now was on my team. he and i didn’t have major conflicts but we didn’t quite click, either, and i could tell by the end of the year there were a lot of things he thought i should have done differently, some of which he was right about, others of which were maybe stupid or the kind of thing you think when you don’t actually know what being a team leader is like (hard, one of the hardest things you can do, the hardest thing you can do at NYNP it’s acknowledged by every single person who works there including the higher-ups, and absolutely harder than you think it will be even if you know all of that going in). i wondered sometimes if he would keep our google account — he had used it, but not as much as the rest, and it was my idea and maybe he wanted to make something that was his own. there were some things i knew he’d keep that the small petty part of me wanted to force him to acknowledge — “you loved my obsessive color-coded constantly updated calendar, and you will completely bring it back, and don’t front like you’d have been as hardcore about it as you probably will be from the start if i hadn’t set the example by failing and then obsessing first!” “admit that as much as you wanted to kill me the first time i sat you and your teamlet down for fifteen minutes to talk about everything that was wrong, and technically also everything that was right which was pretty close to nothing, about the first lesson you ever wrote, that totally made you better at your job in the long run!” — but he is a very different person from me and would be a very different team leader, i knew. hopefully, he would be better, which isn’t me being self-disparaging: if i hadn’t given him the tools to improve on me, that would be a mark against me. but success or failure, he would run a different team.
our old google account just showed up in my gmail contacts list (at, yes, four in the afternoon on a saturday, never change, NYNP). which i guess means it’s not “ours” anymore, anymore than it was ever really “mine” after the first few weeks. it’s theirs now, this guy and the ten or so people he is hopefully pushing to be their best while pulling through a very hard year. feeling like a voyeur i logged in and there was the hopelessly incomplete digital summary of our year, wrapped up in a folder below a matching one for this year, which had the privilege of being starred. there isn’t as much stuff there, although i felt too invasive to really investigate; maybe they’re not used to it yet, or maybe they found something that works better for them. i hope whatever system they’re using is serving them well.
i hope he hasn’t done anything as monumentally stupid as the monumentally stupid things i can’t even tell tumblr about. i hope no one on his team has done anything as monumentally stupid as the monumentally stupid things some people pulled that almost got me kicked out of the school over something i had no part in whatsoever. i hope they each have at least one secret favorite kid and share at least one really beautiful memory. i hope they walk away from this year exhausted — they will be exhausted by june — but feeling the choice they made was the right one.
we did. on the very first day we were a team i told them, you can be each other’s best friends and biggest resources, or you can ruin each other’s year, and they chose the former. and i can’t take credit for that either — i had a great team, and one of the reasons for that was the way they held each other up through some really, really hard times — but i was there, and i’m glad i was.
