today

Today was a hard day. Hard days are when I leave thinking, trying to figure it out.

A former student visited school today. This former student happened to be former class president, with a 93% GPA, in charge of multiple clubs. She pretty much ran the school. Accepted to Dartmouth on need-based scholarships. She came to answer questions about college and the application process.

My 5th period class has some pretty strong students. They had good, insightful questions. And then this is how it got hard. I asked about the reading level. She told them how she had to read 10 books in 8 weeks. I asked if Dartmouth has remedial English. She said they don't call it that, but that all freshman have to take a writing course. She said she started out in Writing 2/3, which was a high level class, and after one paper, her professor asked if English was her second language (it is not). Now she's taking Writing 5/6 (lower level) her second semester. (At this point I asked her to share her high school GPA and all my students freaked out, most likely seeing their futures in remedial English. I quickly pointed out this girl never had me for a teacher, and they should listen to what I tell them when I talk about college essay writing.)

And this is when it got ugly. One boy started sucking his teeth. I don't remember exactly why. He didn't believe something she said, or she swore by accident and he doesn't approve of swearing. Here's back story about this boy: he's very smart, he wants to be a math teacher. He loves math, he doesn't love English. I am the first English teacher whom he cannot pass simply by being polite. You cannot pass my class without reading the novels, and he does not like reading. He has failed twice. He has started to take a gangster, too-cool-for-school attitude in my class. And today it boiled over. The former student and the current student got into it. She said she didn't go here anymore and didn't have to be nice. She was tired of these attitudes like the one she saw in front of her. She was tired of reading about who people had to fight on facebook and the street attitude. She saw at Dartmouth, that for every 10 African-American female students, there was one African-American male students. She wished people got it.

I had to send the current student out of the room. She left shortly after. She was visiting other classrooms. When she left, we continued the conversation. We talked about the culture of the school, and how students don't have the right attitude towards work. Some students shared their anger and frustration with school. Some students cried. We talked about how to get the most out of school and the opportunities it does provide.

I don't really know. I don't know what to say to the boy tomorrow. Nothing I have said to him before has worked, clearly. All the evidence regarding inner-city students and college is so depressing. I try to push them so hard, but will I do a good enough job? Will they flunk out? Get so overwhelmed that they drop out? Even make it to high school graduation?

Today was a hard day.

How the Test Was Won

The day before I have to give my first District Acuity assessment, I show an episode of The Simpsons that challenges the validity of multiple-choice tests. In one scene, Lisa ponders a question in which all the answers can be right. We pause on the close-up of the question and discuss why the question itself is flawed. In another pivotal scene, the principal, who is in charge of taking the most disruptive students out of school for the day, must run in circles on a shipping crate in order to spin it and save a student who has fallen on a barge. The students think he’s crazy. He yells out, while running in circles and causing the crate to turn, that this is centripetal force. All the “disruptors” immediately get it. For the first time, the principal understands that students learn from seeing their teacher run around in circles, not learning tests.

The next day, when I tell my students it’s time to take a District Multiple-Choice test, they all revolt. “But there are questions you can argue multiple answers to!” I calmly explain, this is what we have to measure how good I am at my job and how well you respond. It isn’t perfect. Even if you score well on the test, you may still be placed in remedial English in college, and that says more about the test than it does you. But until you all go and earn your PhD in educational policy, it’s all we have. So I need you to try your hardest so I can continue to run in circles on shipping crates rather than teach you tests like I’m supposed to. They all tell each other to try hard. They’re literally slapping each other on the shoulder to try hard. I have the greatest job in the world.

education reform

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Reverend Al Sharpton and former Speaker New Gingrich were all on Meet the Press today. I agree with everything they said. Teacher evaluation needs reform, parents and communities need to be more involved, we need to be able to fire bad teachers. It's all true.

Teacher evaluation: tomorrow I will be evaluated. I will have a pre-observation meeting (only because I requested one) and my assistant principal will observe one of my lessons. These are the items she will look for: Is my aim in question format? Do I have state standards posted? Do I have student work posted on the wall? Is my Do Now under 5 minutes? Do I have a 10 minute mini-lesson? Do I have a 5 minute summary? Do I have a lesson plan? You can have all of these factors in place and students will not learn. Teaching is an art. Good teaching can look like a hundred different things. Artificial measurements on teaching detract from student learning. I don't need a mini lesson. I don't need to write out a lesson plan. Magically, I can hold that in my head. I may write down questions I know I need to ask, but how I get from point A to point B is going to vary between every period, and no plan will tell me how to navigate. Good teachers can turn on a dime when the class doesn't understand a concept. If that happens tomorrow, which it probably will, my assistant principal won't mention it. I'll jump through her arbitrary hoops and at the end of it, I'll receive a "satisfactory."

If my students who worked harder than everyone else and got better results than their classmates only got satisfactory, they'd revolt. Right now they're arguing over who got better stickers on their essays in the student work Hall of Fame, and talking big talk about their next essay that's going to make the board.

Satisfactory stickers don't exist for a reason, and they shouldn't exist for teachers either.

drama day 1

It was a bad day. It was a bad two days. I spent yesterday talking down 5 girls from fighting. They had been antagonized, one took the bait and went looking for a fight. The others went with her, some to stop her, some to back her up. They play on the team I coach. The girl who was supposedly antagonizing the fight came in with her mother to press charges. Because there were more than 3 girls positively identified, it's automatically a gang charge. Today, we had a security issue. About 30 girls were waiting outside for these 5 to come out. Deans and I were rounding girls up so they wouldn't go out to fight. Some were easy to pull from class, one was hiding. It was not how I wanted to spend the last two hours of my day. No one fought. The cops came and arrested a few of the girls outside. We had college representatives coming today to interview prospective students. This is not the type of show you want to put on for college admissions.

But this shit happens every year. I didn't react to the pregnant student whom I asked last year if she was going to graduate college or start making babies for the welfare check. The beginning of the year is over. Now it's time to make a name for yourself. Look tough. Get out of class. Something. I don't know.

So instead of going to a bar, I got two pints of Ben and Jerrys, my husband read my mind and bought two bottles of wine and I'm reading Perez Hilton to complete the brain numbing. It's not that today was so bad. It was, but not mind-splitting. It's the realization that it's only going to keep going. The other side of the school year has begun.

confession/ranting

My confession. I'm not a teacher. Well, not according to the pieces of paper I'm supposed to have. I have a transitional license, which means I'm getting my masters in education in addition to teaching everyday. So I don't have my pieces of paper, but I'm teaching, which either means I'm doing a rubbish job because this would be like a surgical intern performing brain surgery on her first round or my medical school and the whole medical training process is rubbish. It's both possibly, and some days it definitely both.

But here's the great part. As rubbish as teacher training is, sometimes I come across a nugget that even makes the other rubbish my school and district tells me to do look like total and complete rubbish. Because it's right and true and makes sense and totally confounds everything I'm told to do. So that's gotta be hard.

It's better to rant here before I try to write a paper, because ranting doesn't usually earn high marks. Not even in rubbish school. It's been 10 years and two lifetimes since my last confession. Thanks for listening.

my LC

My literacy coach of my school teaches in my room. My LC should be a mentor, providing support, materials, offering advice. This should be awesome. Right now, at this very moment, my LC is teaching the summer reading to her 11th grade class. They're half-way through one of the two assigned summer reading books. She assigns questions about each chapter at night, and then they go over the answers the next day. She reads aloud answers that they are supposed to copy down. I don't think you need to know about learning modalities to have a few questions about this practice.

It makes me feel like I should disinfect the room. When I work in here during her teaching periods, I can't look up from my desk. Afraid I won't look the flower and be the serpent underneath. (I'm teaching Macbeth with my 9th graders.)

The bell rang. It's my house now. Time to finish The Scarlet Letter. Which many students have told me is the first book they actually read in high school, and the first book they actually liked reading in high school. Good thing this is the first time teaching this curriculum and my LC was able to provide support.

I've never been good at not looking the serpent. Flowers are for wimps.

ditch day

It's ditch day for me. That's code for it's Election Day in the city and rather than sit through a day of "professional development," which conversely to it's fancy title really means being yelled at for taking days off, not following directions and not teaching our students how to write, I'm sitting at home not grinding my teeth and not developing the ticks that lead into alcoholism.

Because the fact of the matter is, I don't take days off -- well, actual teaching days that is. And I do follow the rules, unless the rules are wrong. And I categorically do teach how to write papers. So I'm at home, not getting yelled at for things I'm not doing, and I'm beginning to understand why the smartest kids often end up in detention -- because they're smarter than the system and choose not to participate in it.

So while I sit and do some actual work (ie, grade the mountain of papers I assign), I don't feel an ounce of chagrin for ditching school today. Because it's not really school today, it's teacher detention day.

If you happen to be sitting at home too, I recommend this op-ed about how to reform teacher training. It's just a hunch, but if we reformed teacher training, we may not have to remind people that you shouldn't take a personal day once a month (or once a week) when you get three months of vacation time as it is, and that in order to teach students how to write, you're probably going to have to assign papers and return them in a timely manner with constructive feedback. Just a thought. But what do I know? I ditch school.

one brain cell at a time

It's a good thing no one reads this thing, or they would worry that I'd disappear in between sparsely spaced posts. Turns out I don't have a lot of time to write about teaching because I'm teaching all the time. Well, yeah. Kinda. Let me explain.

Anyone who calls a teacher a friend knows that teaching is not an 8-3 job. It's a 7-4 job if you want to not suck horrendously, and a 7-5 job to do well, with another hour once you get home as an added bonus. But there's this vampire-zombie-parasitic-takeover-your-whole-brain thing that teaching does to its fresh cohorts that I think may be slightly unique to the job. Because if you don't do well, you don't just have a bad day, you have a mind and body shit fest that you can't stop. And the amount of time you put in before hand is directly related to how your day goes. Try imaging a bad day when you're in charge of managing 30 people. Now make those 30 people teenagers. Now multiple that times 5. Maybe you get the idea.

As soon as I wake up in the morning, I am in zombie mode. I am counting down minutes until I have to leave to get to the subway. I'm planning how many pages I can review on the train, how much coffee I can drink and if I need to stop by Starbucks halfway to school to reload, because really, I really would rather spend a day with a real zombie than a day at school without at least one cup of coffee in the morning and another caffeine jolt in the afternoon. And that's the thing. The brain takeover doesn't stop until I leave to go home. Every minute I am at school, my brain is working on my job. I don't stop for 5 minutes to check my personal email, unless it's work related. I don't think about my husband or my family. Sometimes when I put a date on the board at the beginning of the day I will remember it's someone's birthday (like today, Happy Birthday Michael!), but the odds of me remembering later in the day to call are a whole other story. And it feels totally guilty. Like I should spend a few minutes thinking about loved ones or anything else in the entire world besides my job for at least a freaking minute or two between the hours of 6am and 4pm. But it just doesn't happen.

It used to be like this non-stop when I first started. Didn't matter where I was, when I was, I was thinking about teaching. There is nothing that spoils a Valentine's more when you haven't had time to think about it in the slightest and you give your boyfriend a random book when he put together a slide show of your favorite pictures and theme song from the movie you saw on your first date. Your brain is always thinking about how to make those teaching periods better because when they suck, as I think I have mentioned, it's like being beat up with a heavy wooden bat (or what I imagine such brutality would feel like).

I unplug my brain now, but that doesn't make me a better person. Ok, I'm a better wife. I'm a better dog owner. But I'm not a better friend, daughter or sister. Because I could call my mom back, but I'd just get tired. I could be conserving energy for tomorrow. And I could check my email and start working on that bs masters assignment, but I'd just get mad about how inadequate the training is and how unrelated it is to my actual job and I'm lose energy. Because that's the other body-takeover factor. It turns out to not have 34 seventeen-year-olds revolt and turn your life into actual living hell five times a day, you have to expend a lot of energy. Double-header Broadway show, staring role, name in the big lights kind of thing. You have to be bigger than they are. And they eat sugar for breakfast. So it's a losing battle. Unless you pound your home-made mug of coffee in the 8 minute train ride and 1.5 minute walk to Starbucks to refill. And if you think I don't know those times exactly you're out of your mind.

The zombies have won. I am a teacher.

the more you care...

Teaching is a really easy job if you don't actually teach. You come to work at 8, you pass out worksheets, if you have good management, you don't have to yell. You can even catch up on your crossword puzzle skills. You have about 2.5 hours to play with during your day when you're not teaching. You go home at 3, in time to see Oprah. And you don't have anything to do when you go home because there's nothing to grade because you don't actually teach anything. This is the life of a gym teacher and unfortunately, many other subject teachers. Gym teachers make the same amount of money as math teachers. Or English teachers who assign an insane amount of work because clearly, no other English teacher has before and your kids can't write an essay to save their life.

The more you care, the more you teach, the harder your life is. The two and a half hours of your free periods are eaten away by making photo copies, planning lessons or grading. You got to work at least an hour early, but some days you have to get there two hours early. And forget about leaving at 3. It's a good day if you leave by 5, because there's still so much to grade and students need extra help after school when you teach a lot.

I share my room with another teacher. She teaches in my room two periods a day. Prior to this year, she has only worked as a literacy coach and has not been inside the classroom. At a department meeting this week, we were supposed to discuss intervention strategies for our lower level students. I said that I couldn't distinguish the bottom third in terms of writing because they are all so deficient. I said I was assigning a two page essay every week. The literacy coach said, "If you don't mind my asking, how will you grade all those papers?"

Exactly. That's the job. It's work. It's a 7-5 plus another hour or two at home job. You work as much as you care. I don't have to assign a paper every week. I could assign work and never grade it (that's the other route teachers go). But I care and they're taking the Regents in January. So I work. A lot. That's the job. That's teaching.

worlds collide

I wish these nuggets happened once a day, but post-worthy things all seem to happen at once.

Husband came home today. He had to go to a board meeting with his boss. His boss is bad at running the company. Husband had to defend a list of 15 business proposals that he did not create. The board, who has very little involvement in the day-to-day running of the company and thinks management is putting people on the spot four times a year, grilled husband. I told his this is what education administrators are like.

I have a few kids who got switched out of one of my English classes after three weeks into school. They went to the programming office to try to get switched back; it wouldn't be difficult. They're in another English class the same period and I have room in my class. The switch was arbitrary. The programming office told them they weren't making any more changes. They tried to tell the office that this was the first time they had been excited about English class, and that this was the first time they had been challenged in English class.

The programming office wouldn't switch them back. I told them to keep fighting. I told them I taught grammar that day in a British accent. Because really, grammar is so boring, you need to do something. I do cartoons for some grammar, but a proper British accent came to me first period, so I ran with it all day. They were mad they missed it and asked for an example of my accent. Now I was laughing and I couldn't get myself to do it. I'm much better in front of a full house than a private gig.

Schools are run by people out of touch with the day-to-day business of the classroom. A place where it is totally logical to code switch from Mrs. Doubtfire and Mrs. H to explain a grammar idea. Administrators wouldn't understand. They just tell me to stop sending kids to the programming office and ask if the state standards are posted on my blackboard.

God forbid a student should want to be in a class. How (please imagine Mrs. Doubtfire) hawrid.

education vs. teaching

I work with a guy who sums up working in schools this way: there's the line for teaching and there's the line for education.

There's a long line for the education group. It has a higher salary. You get more degrees and feel better about yourself. You actually end up working less. Maybe if you're really good, you right a book and do conferences.

The line for teaching is pretty lacking. It's so lacking we've come up with horrendous programs that put inexperienced, unprepared, doomed for failure novices into the classroom to plug the holes of the failing apart dam that is American public education. No one will stay, (they've quit, been put in the rubber room or have switched to the education line) so we con people into believing they can change the world.

The other issue (why education is a crumbling dam and not say, the Great Wall of China) is that you can be in the teaching line and actually do very little teaching, i.e. work. You can be a teacher and get away with doing practically nothing. It's a very easy job if you don't assign work. It's 8-3pm and you get lots of vacation time. But if you do work, and you assign work, it becomes very difficult very quickly. You assign essays and now you have 100 essays to grade. And no one else has ever assigned your students an essay before so they're horrendous. It's remarkably easy to say, "This is more than one person should have to deal with. This is the kids' fault, their parents' fault, their prior teachers' fault, the school's fault. Let's just get through today."

Or you say. "Wow, they don't know their from there and write an essay as though they're talking on the phone." Except no one talks on the phone anymore, they text, so you actually have a kid write "u" in an essay and you begin to worry about the end of the world. And you get over the sinking feeling that they may never get better because they're starting so low, but you put your head down, and try to teach.

And you end up holding a burial ceremony, complete with a tombstone (ok, a picture of a tombstone you drew on poster paper) and you hum a funeral song (which you tell them is called a dirge), and you say a little eulogy for all the awful words that they have used in their papers and you write these words (such as, big, thing, like and stuff)on the tombstones and offer suggestions for rephrasing these words. And you ask if anyone else would like to share a few words before you cover the coffin, and your students have been laughing at you the whole time because you actually hummed a funeral song (which now they know is called a dirge and they will never forget, even on the SAT) and marched around looking solemn, and plus there's a poster of a tombstone in the room and that's a little weird, but hey, that's teaching.

So you go home, take their essays with you and you start grading. Because teaching, real teaching, is a lot of work. It is not an 8-3 job. Mine is a 7-4 at school job, and a 6-8 at home job, and there's always something else I could be doing. I'm never not thinking about teaching. When my dad used to be quiet at the dinner table and his head was clearly somewhere else, I now know where it was. When you work hard at your job, your head is always there. Mine is. I try to pull it back, for my husband, for my dogs and for myself every once in a while, but even that is hard. My only friends are my teacher friends really. I don't talk to my family a whole lot, although I'm trying to more. It's hard to maintain relationships when your head is elsewhere. So I focus on my husband and my dogs. My life is small and focused.

But my kids know what a dirge is, and if you give me another week, they'll be able to write an essay.

It's been a busy week. It's back to school, which for me, means going to sleep thinking about the next day, waking up far too early and not being able to sleep and waking up lesson planning and hearing your opening day speech in your head. When anything infiltrates your brain to this extent, it is cause for concern.

Here's my brief take on the week.

Teachers take many approaches to the first day. Some don't talk at all, some put up a military front. Any good teacher will teach their rules as a given, but style and message can be worlds apart even though they're across the hall from one another.

I sat on top of my table cross-legged and told them if they needed to go the bathroom, they should go themselves.

Maybe what I said didn't strike a chord. Let me devolve. The emphasis in many schools is order and silence. Having students line up silently outside your door before allowing them in is not unusual. Students are expected to enter quietly, take out their notebooks immediately and get to work immediately. Many tell students to not even bother asking to go to the bathroom during their class. In many classes, students don't have the opportunity to talk at all. They are supposed to sit straight, do the Do Now, not ask questions. The administration wants teachers to limit the amount of getting up and walking around because students will bump into one another. They're treated as though they can't be trusted to talk, walk or sit on their own without guidance.

So I tell my students, there are things that bother me, not doing homework, and not talking during the Do Now, mostly because I have to mentally decompress between periods and figure out where I am. But that's kind of it. I discourage shouting out during class discussion, but I also know when you're talking about heated topics, sometimes it can't be helped. And I told them, that if they need to go to the bathroom, they should go. One person at a time, sign out, take the pass, don't take more than 5 minutes. Don't go during the first 10 and lat 10 minutes of class because those are the school rules. But otherwise, police yourselves. Abuse the privilege, and you'll have to ask permission. And I was sitting on my table when I told them.

So it's a little radical. Not for every school. But for mine at least, and I'm guessing a few others. We'll just have to see how they respond to being treated like adults.

crawling out from teddy bears

After three days of sorting, hauling, throwing and (insert violent, action-packed verb here) old crazy hoarding lady's former classroom, I have found mine underneath the stolen, mice-dropping strewn, five years of dust laden, t-shirt covered, if for lack of a better phrase, insane hot mess. My assistant principal came in to help me for about 10 whole minutes, and spent part of the timing wondering out loud how it got like this? (Answer, she may have been crazy, but you let her express her craziness out loud in this room.

But here's the good part. For those of you who know, cough, competent literary coaches, you'll understand.

My literary coach is teaching two periods of 11th grade English in my room. (And it is mine, I found it under the rubble.) I am also teaching 11th grade English. As I disentangled the books in the room, I pulled aside the ones I wanted to use (aka, Huck Finn, Awakening, 451, Gatsby, etc.). I asked her what books she wanted to use. She said, "Oh, just the Regents prep books, grammar text book, vocabulary workbook and World Literature textbook."

[It should be noted that in a lengthy series of meetings at the end of last year, meetings in which she was a participant, the entire English department agreed on reading lists and curriculum mapping for each grade, and decided 10th grade would be World Literature and 11th grade would be American literature.]

When I reminded her that 11th grade was American literature and not World literature, she sounded confused, and said she didn't remember that, and that she'd have to ask the Assistant Principal. She pulled out a course syllabus from last year that outlined the fact that 11th grade would have World literature textbooks. I said, since all the 11th grade teachers taught American literature last year, that syllabus is wrong.

It sounds minute, it sounds so unworthy of spending 15 minutes mentally regurgitating the whole brief episode here. But imagine it this way. Imagine you work for American Express. Imagine that this whole episode took place, but in a fancy corporate America conference room and not in the shambles of an old crazy lady's classroom formerly decorated with teddy bears. Maybe gross incompetence happens in corporate America. It most likely has on an astronomical scale given the economy. But was the conference room covered in teddy bears? Did the CEO walk by the conference room decorated with teddy bears and say hey, kinda cooky, but we'll let it slide?

No.

Thank goodness for public education to keep the craziness alive and well.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

new year, new revelations

I was nervous about going into school today. For the past two years, I have had crazy schedules. When I say crazy, I mean CRAZY. Last year, I began the year teaching Japanese for a month. For the record, I don't know Japanese. I was so excited about the new year that I didn't want it to be ruined with news that I'd be teaching, oh I don't know, home economics, in four different classrooms. (Yes, for the past two years, I have also had to rotate between five different classrooms for the five periods I teach. With three minutes in between classes, there's no need to go to the gym to get your cardio in when you're hauling a projector, books, binders and lessons up and down a flight of stairs in a race to get to your classroom before your students).

So I get to school, and I find out YES! YES! YES! I'm teaching ALL high school English! And in one room! Cue the score! Joy! I take the napkin my principal has written my schedule out for me on, grab a donut with another napkin and run up to my room. And I find....Room 307.

Ms. Bell, who had 307 the past 8 years, is a hoarder. Have you heard of that story of the two brothers who lived in a brownstone and who filled it up with stuff so thoroughly that they only had tiny hallways in between mountains of stuff, and that one day, something shifted, I don't know, maybe one of the 14 pianos they had buried, and they were killed when everything collapsed in on them. This is Ms. Bell's room. You pull off a poster, and there are three more layers of posters underneath. She had walls, literal walls, of stacks of photocopies. On top of each stack sat a stuffed animal. I filled a 10 gallon trash bag full of stuffed animals. On top of the back book shelf lay six layers of t-shirts as decoration. Not a total of 6 t-shirts, but 6 layers of t-shirts. I don't think the windows had ever been opened because each time you picked up a poster or a t-shirt or a stuffed animal, a mushroom cloud of dust burst into the air. And it was my job to clean it all up.

Of course, when I finally get my own room, this is the one I get. The bigger question? Everyone knew about Ms. Bell's room. EVERYONE. What they didn't know? Every single time I complained about not having books last year, it turns out Ms. Bell was to blame. There are more books in her room than we have the library, because she's stolen them. There are more books stacked and piled and hidden by t-shirts than there are in the book room. The 50 copies of Hamlet I bought myself last year? She had 40 copies. That's when I got mad. Not at the fact I had to clean out her insane room. That I found over 400 books that had never been read, whose front cover had never been even opened. At first she was the old lady in Absalom, Absalom! hidden in her room for the past decade, hoarding nicknacks and stuffed animals and magazines and photocopies. Now she was the reason why our students come back saying they're not prepared for college reading because they never read any novels during the year.

Why was she allowed to stay?

I needed a bottle of wine.