Phrase of the Day

Catch a Feeling

I love the slang in the Bronx - my students always say things that so perfectly convey a feeling or an idea by combining words that I never considered. Today, I talked to one of them:

"How’s Joy?"
"She’s good – she has a boyfriend but she won’t let me meet him."
"Why not?"
"I don’t know. I guess she’s afraid that he’ll catch a feeling for me."

The Book IS the Truth

I took my class to see Hunger Games on Tuesday. They had read the book, and a discussion ensued about whether or not the casting had been what they would have chosen. Of course, for myself and them, there were a few characters that looked different in their mind than they did on the screen.

"Yea, but books be lyin' sometimes!" Kiara lamented

"No, Kiara," Natalie laughed at her friend, "The book is the Truth."

"Kiara looked at her for a moment, and then shrugged this revelation off as if it was nothing, while I got out my markers to make a poster featuring Natalie's words of wisdom.

A Magic Bullet?

Theories about what works in teaching evolve constantly. Class size, group work, technology – every year there is a new idea about what works, and teachers change their practices to conform to the newest trends. After a while, you become as jaded as any consumer – there’s always a new technique being pushed, and it’s not entirely clear why it is supposed to be so much better than what you bought last year.

They told you to put your desks in rows, but the next year you are failing the students if their desks aren’t clumped in groups. One day, all members of those groups should be homogenous, based on reading levels, and the next, you are doing them a disservice if they aren’t allowed the chance to work with peers on all different levels.

None of these theories are wrong or right - I don’t mean to discredit the research or thought behind them. However, in education, it’s nearly impossible to find a magic bullet theory. Some kids work well in groups, and some don’t. Some kids learn well using technology, and others need a human to explain it to them in ten different ways before they grasp something. Some students thrive in a big class, and others get lost, desiring more attention from teachers, and fewer distractions.

Most ideas have come and gone. In the four short years that I have spent in the classroom I have been exposed to more than I can count. But there’s one theory that has come to be accepted as a truth: teacher quality matters.

In fact, it’s the thing that matters most. Teacher quality is the number one predictor of student success. We know this, and yet we take it for granted.

In New York, as in many other places, the teacher pay scale is antiquated and ineffective. Our pay structure does nothing to recruit, retain, or recognize high quality teachers. Rather, it values two things – graduate school credits and longevity, neither of which have been established as necessary factors in predicting teacher quality.

Those who would be great teachers would probably be great at any number of professions. Why should they teach? Not only do they have no prospect of making any substantial amount of money until the tail end of their careers, but they also have no promise of professional recognition. In teaching today, you aren’t recognized for being successful – there are no titles to strive for, no bonuses, no raises. You aren’t given more responsibility as you prove that you can handle it.

As it exists, the pay scale perpetuates the status quo – which today means that highly qualified young people aren’t considering teaching as a professional option, and those who do enter it have no financial incentive to stay.

We say that we care about education – yet no one is ready to actually invest in it. We say that teachers are valuable, but their paychecks don’t reflect that. Society seems to assume that those who choose teaching are receiving intrinsic rewards – that they are replying to a higher calling of sorts. But why should we have to choose between doing something good for the world that we live in and being paid as though we were valued?

Now is the time to change the way that teachers are compensated for their work. We know that a successful education system is an important part of any country, and we know that effective teachers are the most important part of the equation. Students achieve more when they have good teachers – not investing in teachers is the same as not investing in the students they serve.

A reformed pay scale can attract great talent to the profession, recognize achievements and successes, and provide incentive to continue improving practices.
A reformed pay scale can elevate the profession of teaching, and by extension, the level of student achievement happening in New York City.

Changing the pay scale isn’t a new theory about classroom practice – but it just may be the magic bullet towards professionalizing teaching.

Better to Go Away

“ACS took Damien this weekend.” My co-teacher told me this yesterday morning. ACS is the Administration for Child Services, and they are responsible for making sure that children are provided for in their homes. ACS is the organization that is responsible for removing children from homes that are deemed unfit, and placed into the foster care system.

Damien is an adorable boy, with big, bright eyes and tight poodle curls covering his head. He has a wide smile, and an innocent nature. He is fascinated by Alex Rodriguez, covering his desk with pictures of him, memorizing and reciting all of his stats.

“Don’t talk about the past, talk about the future. This year he is going to break the home-run record.” Other kids walk away frustrated, because he refuses to give in to logic. You can’t reason with him.

Damien has a sweet, childish voice, that lilts playfully no matter what he is saying. He tilts his head to the side, and widens his enormous brown eyes when he asks you a question. He is one of the lowest level kids in my class, and seems to have developmental issues of some sort – he struggles to grasp concepts, and, once he has been taught something, rarely retains the information for more than a couple of hours. He reads books that have drawings with veracity, but if I give him a book with just words, he’ll hold it upside down and study it seriously, looking at me with mock seriousness when I correct him, before his face explodes into a mischievous grin.

He likes to talk. He writes love poems about talking, and about A-Rod, and is unapologetic about his devotion to both. He’ll linger after class, talking, even when he has no audience, until someone’s patience reaches its end and he is sent away.

Damien has an attendance problem – only showing up at school three times a week – if that. He gets behind, but doesn’t stress about it. His parent is impossible to get a hold of, and no one has ever been in to meet us, or pick up a report card, or respond to a concerned phone call.

Apparently, he was taken out of his home due to the fact that his attendance at school was spotty, and his elementary school age sister had missed the entire school year. Obviously, these things happen. Kids are removed from homes, one day things are normal, and the next they are not. The only predictable thing about life in this community seems to be its unpredictability.

As a teacher, there is nothing that you can do, or expected to do about a situation like this. I am not even in a position to judge whether it is a good or a bad thing, not knowing the full story of what went on in his home. As a rule, it seems that being taken from their family is something that kids don’t recover well from. But I’ve also seen kids who are victims of traumatic abuse, who are tortured by their guilt of wanting to stay away from that parent who hurt them, but who they still love. The truth hurts those kids – the truth that sometimes it is better to be taken away than to stay.

I feel sad that Damien is gone – sad that he may not return to our school, and that we may never know what becomes of him. But it’s a part of the job, I suppose, that some kids are lost mid year, and all of them are lost at the end. What this really brings up, for me, is the reality of how temporarily these kids are in our lives, and we in theirs. For a year, they are the whole world – you think of them despite yourself, at home, in your dreams and nightmares, on the weekends. And then like a flash they are gone, as they are supposed to be. Growing up. And although it hurt s sometimes, the loss of a kid you invested yourself in fully, it’s the way that it is supposed to be. It’s better for them to grow up, and go away, than to stay.

Judged

Students walk into the room, shouting, laughing, cursing, shoving one another. ‘Play fighting’ is very popular, especially after lunch. From the moment that they enter the room, they are energized, buzzing with gossip and stories and things that they are dying to say out loud –and so they do. Then they remember that they are in school, and glance slyly towards the front of the room, to see if the teacher is also talking, or if there is something that they are supposed to be doing. If what they are supposed to be doing is not apparent in that ten second glance, they relax, and return to their conversations.

There are a lot of moments of realization in teaching. There’s the day that you learn that the students need to be DOING something at all times – just listening to you talk is not enough. There’s the time when you see how awesome it is to teach a class of kids that are actually engaged in what you are teaching them, dying to participate, on the edge of their seats. Then you eventually realize that they need to really be invested in their goals, or else they are fine when you tell them that they will get a zero. There’s the day – a long way in – when you realize that they hear you better when you talk than when you yell. There is the time that you understand how to make sure that the lesson is manageable for kids at all levels, when you master the art of differentiating your lessons. It takes a lot of days to learn how to be good, but it takes about one day as a teacher to realize that you have to have a plan, and that it has to be good.

You learn when your class is wildly out of control, and other teachers walk by scornfully. You learn when you try to lead them down the hall in a straight line, and half of them run off of it. You learn when they curse at you, and challenge you, and push you to make good on your threats – and you can’t. You learn when after forty minutes, your room looks like a battle zone, your voice is hoarse, and your appearance disheveled. You learn, despite yourself, to be good at your job.
It’s hard to keep up with what research is trendy right now in education. Every year there is a hot buzz word, and every year there is a new philosophy that gets carved in stone, right over the old one, so that modern education becomes an illegible cave drawing.

One year we are told we need to make information more accessible, by creating crutches for the students. The next year, we are told we have taken it too far, and the students have forgotten about independence – we have to take the crutches away. Some years we think kids learnt o read by reading books on their own level, and other years that’s simply not rigorous enough, and we must focus on teaching them to cope with ‘complex texts’. The research changes, the methods, the philosophy, and certainly the vocabulary. They morph over the summer, so that you have to learn new words to describe the same old stuff each year, until it all loses meaning.

The truth, however, is that no matter what words we use to describe out jobs, no matter what research we cling to in a moment – it will change by the end of the year. What won’t change, however, is the reality that it is miserable to teach a class where kids aren’t learning. There is no worse feeling than grading a pile of tests in which everyone has failed. There is no way to feel more pathetic than to not be able to control a bunch of thirteen year olds. There is nothing that tears you apart than a year spent futilely forcing knowledge onto resistant bodies, without ever figuring out how to open them up to it.

We learn to teach because it makes our lives better to be good at our jobs. When I first entered the work force, I lamented that after college – you don’t get grades and feedback very regularly, so you don’t always know how you are doing.
Well, I suppose I ended up in the right field, because in teaching you always know how you are doing – every second of every day. If you are unpopular, you are told. If you are boring, it is screamed at you, both verbally, and through the actions of your unrestricted students. I even know if I am gaining weight, or looking tired, because my students don’t censor themselves – they don’t feel that they owe me anything. They don’t lie to make me feel better.

The new teacher evaluations, and the data reports – those do a lot to our esteem, but they don’t change the truth – they don’t even really reflect it most of the time. They can make the humiliation that we may feel in front of a room of kids, something bigger, that we have to feel in front of our peers and families. But they can’t let us know how we are doing any more than the audience we speak to each day. They, in the end, are the expert judges that we plead our case in front of daily.

Guerrilla Education

Teaching in my classroom is like guerrilla warfare. There are no straight lines or consistent methods that work. Our kids come to us each day with a pile of challenges, anger, and resistance that we spend the day breaking down, trying to pound knowledge and enthusiasm and excitement into their heads.

When I talk to other teachers, who teach in different districts, with different demographics, I am struck mainly by the routine of their days. They see their students for one or two periods, they teach a lesson, assign homework, grade, plan, assist, and repeat. My days bear no resemblance to theirs. My routines can hardly be called a routine, my goals are markedly different, and my results cannot be compared fairly to theirs. In many ways it’s hard to believe that we have the same job – but we do.

I think of it as ‘guerrilla education’ when I teach about guerrilla warfare – win at any cost, break the rules, take them by surprise, take the back route. My classroom is filled with kids from 8:20 in the morning until 5:30 in the evening. My students stay in my room from the time they get there in the morning, until the time that they leave at night. Many of them skip lunch and gym and drama to stay in the safety of our room.

My students also miss school a lot – most of them are out for at least one day a week, and it’s not uncommon for them to disappear for a week or a month at a time. They miss class for a variety of reasons – health – their own or their families, or a lack of supervision at home that means that attendance is up to them, Sometimes they will miss a month or two to travel out of the country to visit family. And, at least one time a year, one or two students will stop coming to school because they ‘fear for their safety’. They return, and in the style of guerrilla education, we pour what they have missed down their throats, into their ears, cramming information into any space that we can find.

My student's education is necessarily different from their peers in other demographics. In my classroom of 32 students, I have thirteen who have IEPs – which means that they are classified as special education. They are special education largely due to their classification as ‘socially and emotionally disturbed’. Eight of my students are ELLs – English Language Learners. The remaining students are general education. In my class, there are two students who read on a seventh grade level. 22 students read at below a fifth grade level. My students, even if none of their challenges have been classified, come to school from homes that are not usually stable or secure. Based on my knowledge of there home lives, exactly three of my students come from a typically 'stable' environment.

You don’t teach lessons in the same way that I was taught. You can’t have a book that everyone can read, you can’t teach something only once and expect kids to get it, you can’t assume that they are getting help at home, or that they comprehend the cultural differences in the stories that I ask them to understand. You have to plan for 15 subgroups in a single period – using graphic organizers for some, and having special aids who work with others. You have to carefully choose your content and your words so that you don’t lose them. You have to be prepared every day to diffuse and deescalate conflict when it enters your classroom.

My students need support and stability, and many need counseling and structured intervention plans to help them deal with the challenges of their daily life outside of school. For my students, education is an afterthought. I spend my time as much convincing them that it is important to learn as I do actually teaching them, and my messages are rarely reinforced outside of the building.

I write this not to emphasize the severity of poverty – though of course, I hope that that is understood. I write not to tell how hard my job is, though most days I can’t imagine how it could be harder. Rather, I write it because education is different when your students come from poverty – there’s no way around it. I hear people talk about the ‘working poor’, and about the reasons why schools in high poverty areas fail, and I am struck by how hesitant they are to tell the truth. I love my students, and I admire their families for the struggle that they undertake daily. However, it would be sugarcoating things to say that they didn’t come to parent conferences because they were busy working four jobs. It would be dishonest to say that most of them are responsible and invested in their children’s future success, but don’t have the means to help them.

The truth is that those parents do exist, but that is not the story that I see each day. I see parents who are not equipped for parenthood. I see the impact of poor education on generations of people. The story about parents who work too hard to show up is the story of first generation poverty, it’s the story of the struggle to get out of poverty. That’s a beautiful story, and it’s politically correct and very liberal to tell it, but it’s simply not the whole truth. Most of my student’s families are not struggling for something better, they are fighting to prevent something worse – and there’s a difference.

The difference is in the fact that they come to school to make sure that their kids are staying out of trouble – because they do love their children. Parents don’t want their girls pregnant or their boys in gangs. They don’t want their kids cutting school or getting in fights. They don’t want things to get worse. But getting better? That’s out of their reach – or so it seems to people who have been in poverty for several generations, whose parents and grandparents grew up in the same conditions that they knew.

Teaching in a school like this is hard because it’s easy to feel hopeless. Each year I see my students grow. I see them feel pride in what they have learned. I pound my messages of determination or possibility, and their own potential into their heads, and by the end of the year, they believe it. But it’s just 8th grade. At the end of the year, they leave, and have four more years to survive without losing those feelings, without getting distracted.

Education is different in these schools because there is no end to the amount that my students need from me, and my co teacher – no time of day when it feels like you can stop, and they will get it, or will have enough. When a child enters your 8th grade class at a 3rd grade level, there is no moment when you can say ‘that’s enough’, because they are five years behind and how will they ever compete? How will they ever catch up?

People want to talk about improving education. They want to talk about the things that will make it better and more equal – and it’s not funding, and it’s not teachers, and it’s not standards or curriculum. It’s so much more complicated than anyone can see – than even I can see. It’s a cycle of poverty – it’s the legacy of injustice and institutionalized racism that has made our country the way that it is.

Yes, you need great teachers who don’t give up, who work harder than they have to, who are dedicated to their students. But most teachers are like that. Yes, you need more money, to attract those great teachers, to retain them, to supply the schools with the books and technology that gives them the potential to be competitive. But you also need a cultural shift – in and out of schools. You need to think beyond the parameters of success and schools that we have today.

It’s not the truth that everyone is trying their hardest all the time. It’s not the truth that all parents are good parents. It’s not the truth that everyone is struggling to get out of poverty.

But it’s our fault.

It’s the fault of the education system that didn’t teach about birth control or sex to the middle schoolers who were having sex, who were getting pregnant. It’s the fault of the healthcare system that provides no adequate preventative care for families, meaning that too many of my students spend their weekends in the hospital, or at funerals. It’s the drugs that are all over the streets, the gangs that they join to feel safe, the parents who are in over their heads. It’s the fault of the teachers who lower their standards and of the people who cut funding for head start programs, and the internet that teaches them to speak in emoticons rather than in sentences.

It’s so many people’s fault, and no one’s fault, and the solutions feel so impossible. How do you solve a problem that has so many causes? How do you fix a system that is so thoroughly broken.

Guerrilla education works for a year – we make do with what we have, do our best to make it work, to overcome the obstacles. But it isn’t a solution. It doesn’t eliminate any of their obstacles.

I am in an education reform group which designs policy recommendations, and they could recommend a way to improve all part of education, because everything – evaluations, pay scale, curriculum, unions, principals, high school processes, regents – it’s all imperfect. It’s a system that fails 50% of the kids who are a part of it, and it’s a system that people talk a lot about changing, but never really do. I get it – change feels impossible from where I sit. And yet, if we don’t change, the victims of our inaction are the ones who sit in my classroom each and every day, all day. And they become the next generation that will struggle to avoid the bad, rather than reaching for the good.

Kevin

There are certain moments that still touch you, no matter how many times you have seen them.

I have a boy in my class who is searching for trouble. He shows up every day, wanders the halls until someone yells at him, comes to class and does a little work before growing bored or distracted, and searching for an excuse to leave again. He does stupid, reckless things. He smokes pot in the building, leading to an arrest. He sexually harasses a teacher. He finds themselves in any number of questionable situations.

He is the type of boy who a teacher doesn’t give up on, because beneath his aggravating behavior, there’s a glimmer of hope. He is still showing up at all, which means that he is still hoping to get something from us. And where some kids abandon class altogether, and defy any authority who approaches them, he reluctantly listens, becoming aggressive only on very rare occasions.

There is a transparency to this boy - it’s almost pathetic how clear his motivation for misbehaving is. If someone doesn’t understand, he will all but tell them.

Kevin is seeking attention. His father moved away a couple of years ago, and started a new family, and, as it seems happens quite often with boys his age, the absence has begun to wear on him. He has started to feel the anger and resentment toward this abandonment that is probably long overdue. His mother’s frustration with him manifests itself in complaints and long sighs, and lots of sadness. He doesn’t feel the love.

He writes papers about almost any topic, and finds a way to weave into the essay a story of a child doing wrong, hoping to get noticed. When you stop being annoyed for long enough to talk to him, he reveals the depth of his loneliness. He asks questions that haunt me - what if a parent stops wanting you? What if no parent wants you? Why do some parents just not love their kids?

Outwardly, he is arrogant and reckless. He is proud of his behaviors, speaks openly about his love for a girl in the class, his boxing triumphs, and his weekend jaunts. He dwells on his drug use (marijuana), wanting attention for it - be it good or bad.

When he was handcuffed this week, and put into an ambulance, everyone assumed that it was because he was in trouble again. He had smoked, or violated his probation. Nobody knew that he had threatened to take his own life. None of his friends suspected that his pain was so real - when theirs was just adolescent angst.

Watching him lose control, when he realized that he would be taken to the hospital, was a clarifying moment. Earlier in the day I had reached my wits end with him for the thousandth time. My co-teacher and I had talked to him about his actions and his feelings, felt we had a moment of breakthrough, and then been disappointed when he walked out in the middle of math just a short while after.

I was sick of it. Tired of this boy being allowed to do as he pleased with no apparent consequences. Frustrated after four months of the same.

But he transformed on the steps of the school into the vulnerable, broken child that he is beneath the tough thug boots and black hoody that he wears each day. There were consequences, I realized, much bigger than any that I or the school could provide.

It wasn’t the first time that I saw something like that. It wasn’t the first time that my heart clenched and my throat closed, watching a child who I rarely admitted to liking be subjected to something so unfair. No matter how terrible a student can make your days, how far they can push you, how stymied you feel in your progress with them - there are always those moments that grab you, and remind you that they exist beyond your classroom. Moments that remind you of your own limitations, and the enormity of all that you can’t touch.