Towards a Better...

At my middle school, testing season is almost over.  Next week we will have make up tests and that's it for the year.  Things got thrown into panic mode since we were set to do paper and pencil tests for the 7th graders and at the last moment the state department said we had to do computerized testing.  We only have about 50 computers in the school and 500 students. It wasn't a nightmare but the counselor had never arranged this sort of thing before so we all suffered a bit.  Both the administrator and the monitor must stay in the room during testing and roamers are to come check every once in awhile to make sure that students are comfortable and that administrators don't need a break.  I really dislike having a room full of kids who have to pee for three hours and nobody comes to get them to take them to the bathroom.

Anyway, I am sure my kids did a great job.  I'm not allowed to see or to help or to look at test scores.  Likewise I instruct the kids not to talk to me about them.  However, it leaks out and sometimes in their exuberance, someone will brag to me about what they got.  I'm happy for them but also say they can't say those things to me. I think that the English scores will increase dramatically this year.  I'm in the English department and the main sixth grade teacher and eighth grade teachers really did a great job this year.  Those scores will follow us as well, wherever we go.

Speaking of going, my student intern is almost at the end of her stint in my school. Next week she is going to institute the poetry unit I asked her to create.  She has used my materials to come up with curriculum, written lesson plans and will institute them and assess at the end of the unit.  She is doing much better in the classroom and I feel comfortable having her there to help teach.  She thinks she is ready to go out on her own.  I hope so.  I've been teaching for that last however long and I'm still never as prepared as I want to be.  There is also a lot the kids throw at you and even when you are prepared, you have to watch your face and reactions.  So I've been thinking of some advice of my own for Title 1 public school teachers.

1. Don't take it personally.  Kids have it rough in public school.  Their home lives, especially those who live in poverty, are sometimes (though this is not the rule) challenging.  When they say or do ugly things, it's almost never about the teacher. When you hear ugliness, look immediately beyond the words to the child spouting them.  At all costs, avoid sarcasm.
2.  Not everyone who is poor is troubled.  Lots and lots of my students have happy home lives.
3.  My goals and values may not be their goals and values.  I am White.  The vast majority of the students I teach are either Hispanic or Black.  While we all have common American experiences, there are cultural differences and I do not have the right to make a kid feel bad because they realize from an early age that college is not for them. I do have a responsibility to learn more of my student's cultures and to pull those things into the classroom so that we can all learn better.
4.  That does not mean that I can give up talking about literacy, a better life, and college.  The fact is that as a 7-8 grade English teacher, I might be the last literacy educator they see.  This makes my job that much more important and urgent.  The buck stops here.
5. You know what my goal is? My goal is to be a better person.  That's why I teach. That's what it boils down to.  I want to look in the mirror every day and see someone I can be proud of.  How I go about teaching ties into that.
6.  My personal life has little place in my classroom.  My students know I am White and that I speak some spanish.  I tell them a little about growing up where I did, about the migrant children who became my friends and about Spanish lessons from 6-12 grade.  I tell them about my past teaching jobs, including the prison which fascinates them, and I talk about my dog and cat.  That's about it. If I am teaching curriculum and listening to their talk and their world and entering a realm that ultimately does not belong to me, I want to be as empty of a vessel as I can rather than a cup spilling over.
7.  Take the weekends off.  I know it is difficult.  Grade papers before you come home.  Set up curriculum and lesson plans on your plan period.  Do as my friend Bonner suggests and touch a door or some piece of the school as you leave and say "I am leaving this place" and do not come back until Monday.
8.  Laugh.  Tell jokes.  Enjoy these students because junior high is brutal and hormone filled and frightening.  Laughter is important and instructive and makes life easier.
9.  When you are wrong, say you are sorry. Publicly and with sincerity.  I apologize to my students when I get stuff wrong.  I take responsibility and get more respect for that than if I never admit mistakes.  This shows that if I can get better and be a strong person who is compassionate, then they can be too. It's a pathway and an example.
10. You spot it, you got it.  I stole this from an Al-Anon meeting (that's friends and family members of alcoholics).  When the kids were spending their lunch hours smearing food up and down the hallways and throwing trash on the grounds, I was dismayed and angry.  I decided that instead of some punitive action, I had a responsibility to teach compassion and responsibility.  I took an entire day and had the students write letters to Margarita and Griselda, who are our custodians.  I walked them around and we picked up trash.  We gave the letters to the ladies and made them cry.  I asked that if anyone saw people throwing trash or food where it shouldn't go that they speak up.  Now our hallways are mostly clear and the grounds look better.  Such a simple thing, really.  If you can, then do.

I feel strongly that we are the guardians of innocence.  Our middle school kids are half child, half teenager and spend a good deal of time just trying to figure out what to do next.  When someone or something threatens their ability to do so, it turns me into a raging witch.  For instance, one of our students dropped out for three months.  His dad dis-enrolled him and took him to Texas.  When he got back, his mom came to re-enroll him.  Only he had gotten a gang tattoo on his neck in the intervening time.  He knows that in order to be part of our school, he has to cover that tattoo but chooses not to.  Every single time I catch him, I take him to the principal and he spends time out of class sitting, waiting for his mom to come bring him a turtleneck.  It's crazy.  But I have to do that- to keep gang symbols and tattoos and signs and graffiti out of my school.  It's not just my job, it's my moral responsibility as an adult and as a human to protect others.

In other news, I have bronchitis again.  My doctor will be so thrilled.  Last weekend I missed an important play in Oklahoma City and this weekend, I missed a great play here in Tulsa.  I simply had no energy to walk from the damn car to the theater to sit there for two hours without coughing my head off.  I'll go on Monday for a shot and some antibiotics and blah blah blah...it's the same story.  My job is killing me because each time I walk into the building, I inhale dust and mold and probably asbestos.  I'm hoping next year will be better and working, always working, towards a better world.

Engage

It's been a minute since I last wrote- my apologies, but life has a way of getting in the way.
Many things are happening simultaneously. Some I can talk about, some I cannot.  But all in good time.

I am feeling better, more or less.  Since I got a doctor's note and moved from the perpetually-under-construction building into the perpetually-hot-cold-no-electricity portable building from 1975, I can breathe better and even headed off the last bout of bronchitis.  There are still some days when I cannot go to school and one day this week that I came home and went to bed.

Tomorrow we make good on the zoo trip.  I wrote a grant last year and got a trip to the zoo for 30 of my kids. I actually have 36 going and will pay for those six myself. Each of has perfect attendance, is passing all of their classes and doesn't have any behavioral problems.  It should be fun and I am excited to reward them for their efforts- most were completely unaware that they would get a reward.  This makes it that much sweeter. I did an internship at the Tulsa Zoo back in 1999 and had a blast in the herpetology department.  I do have a degree in biology and love to talk about animals.

My little lunchtime reading group has grown as well.  What started as 8 students reading Sherman Alexie's novel "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" has turned into 24 faithful followers as we sit and eat and read "The Hunger Games."  I picked it because the movie comes out next month.  I had a revelation on the way to work one morning.  I've started carpooling with Cathy once a week just so that we can talk and catch up.  Anyway, I was talking about ways to keep my kids engaged. Don't get me wrong, they like the book. There are 16 boys who are engrossed in a strong female protagonist because she can hunt and kill things.

Since there is a lottery at the beginning of the book and that lottery ultimately leads to our protagonist, Katniss, getting into the games, I decided I would have a lottery too.  Each time my students show up for lunch, they get another "tesserae", an entry into the lottery.  It stands for their participation in my group, in their investment in each other and in their membership in our little community.  You can get extra tesserae by doing extra projects or by writing about the book.  Everyone knows the rules and everyone is game to follow them.  Soon, I will draw five names and give five movie tickets to whomever is on the ticket.  One person could win them all. On the front of the bucket will go a saying, "May the odds be ever in your favor!", a catchphrase from the book. Since I do the word of the week, I have also added references to "The Hunger Games" into each example sentence I construct to demonstrate the use of the word.  For example, for the word "Ponder", I wrote "Peeta sat on the hickory log and pondered his next words thoroughly."

It seems to be working out well.  More and more students are getting into "trouble" with me and getting "lunch detention".  In the meantime, we talk about the book, predict outcomes, talk about characters and who we do and do not like.  It's great fun and I have 24 kids to have lunch with every single day.  Yes, that also means that I don't have any down time besides one plan period (all others are taken with meetings or tutoring), but those kids will always remember what we did together.

And so will I.

Speaking of tutoring, I have to tutor a group of 8 students twice weekly.  I'm supposed to have 8.  I have 16.  I'm "team teaching" with a social studies teacher but he doesn't know anything about teaching English. At first he didn't show up himself, just sent his kids.  I'm trying not to be bitter, but those kids won't get much actual help if I don't step up.  So I've thrown out the curriculum on this one.  If I have to give up my plan period, I'm doing whatever the fuck I want to.  We are reading mythology and fables, discussing tall tales and telling stories of our own. I'm enjoying it- this is what I signed up for. Literature, the basis of creative and critical thought.  The very same that is going away in the new common core curriculum.  My boss says good riddance- he only read informational texts and graduated (almost) magna cum laude at his (Mickey Mouse) college.  Neil Postman, Neil Gaiman and I all agree that he is an asshat.  And besides, those kids love coming to tutoring.

I guess they aren't the only ones engaged.  I am too. I love doing the things I do and being part of their lives. I'm pushing a few towards a choice alternative school that will push them towards college.  I am helping another kid out with a glove and some shoes so that he can play baseball. Because everyone needs to play baseball if they want to. If I had only the kids to think about, I'd stay here forever.

But tomorrow I'm going to the zoo and the sun will be out and I will have the sweet satisfaction that for several, their first trip to the zoo is with someone who can give a hell of a tour.

21st Century Women Revisited

I've often made the point to my students that revision is writing. I knew that when I posted my last blog, I'd need to add something. There was just some point I hadn't made, some note that didn't ring the right note. Hmm. So I talked to my editor about it and bounced some ideas off of him about what I'd written. Grey is my editor/boyfriend/collaborator/friend. He observed that I had written something about what did not qualify me a 21st Century woman, but not much on what it means to be one. How would I recognize other members of this tribe? What, if anything, did I think of as "woman's work"? To put it differently, is there anything a man might do that would make me feel as though he was infringing on my domain?

That made me think. I guess there isn't much. I think men who clean house are pretty sexy, and since if I'm ever going to live with a man in an egalitarian sense, he should probably do his fair share of cleaning. In the home, I do prefer to be the one who cooks breakfast most of the time, and the one who cleans the bathroom. I suspect, and perhaps someday science will fail to rebuff my theory, that men do not see dirt the way that women are able to do so. Women always love it when men do dishes and to tell the truth, I have one more dirty little secret: I hate dealing with finances. I would clean every toilet every week for eternity if I didn't have to worry about money and what we do and do not have. I care that if I want a new dress, I can just go get one. I care that I have reliable transportation and money for food and maybe something shiny once in awhile. That's it. Seriously, I couldn't give two shits about money unless I didn't have any. But I'm pretty sure that this is much more about laziness than it is about gender roles.

Likewise, I think my upbringing wasn't really so much about gender roles than it has been about necessity. Women and men both can hunt and fish and work like dogs on harvest crew. It's more likely to find men in jobs that require outside work or dangerous work, but it's still pretty common for women to be in those roles too. I have snowmobiled quite a bit, jumped off of cliffs, spoken to audiences of over 2,000 people and stepped into a prison to try to make a difference there. And yet, nothing about me is particularly manly.

Maybe the things about being a woman that I like best is the ability to slip into a nurturing role, a mom-type of role that offers comfort, guidance, support and help. I usually can tell when one of my kids is upset or hiding some emotion. They don't seem to mind speaking to me about personal issues or asking advice. I like being a care giver. I dislike that Grey is sick and hope he feels better. If he isn't better when I get home from Louisville (I'm here for a conference), then I will bring him some cold remedies and cluck over him like a chicken until he either passes out or pretends to feel better so that I will go away.

Speaking of conferences, I happened to end up in a workshop with the Assistant Superintendent of the school district where I teach. I stepped out to take a phone call, and in my absence, my assistant principal told her we were having difficulty implementing the America's Choice curriculum. When I returned she asked "What do you think of America's Choice"?

In my defense, I was far more polite than one might think. I strongly believe that as a for-profit company, Pearson does not have my student's best interests at heart. Their curriculum is for 1 hour classes and I have only 45 minute classes. Furthermore, this year none of the grade level teachers have ever seen or had training on the curriculum. We have since had a one-day workshop wherein there was a group grump session at the organizers. They suggested implementing adaptations tot he curriculum that the teachers in the district often were gotten in trouble for doing. In fact, the Pearson "coach" for my school threatened me several times by telling me that her report would go to the very woman who was standing before me, asking for my input. I almost quit over the unsupported mandates and the coach barging into my classroom, writing reports about me that I was not privy to, reports that did not cast me or my teaching practices in a positive light. This from a non-district book company. A corporation.

But I was polite and I was diplomatic. And at the end of our long discussion- I think it was productive- the Asst. Supt. decided to come visit my school in the next two weeks. I offered to create an instrument to help gauge district teacher's attitudes towards the curriculum and immediately went back to my hotel room to construct a survey. As I exited the workshop and overheard my assistant principal exhale loudly and say to his friend "Well, the Assistant Superintendent *did* ask. What was she expecting?"

This guardianship of my students, fighting for what I believe is their best interest, and being willing to speak my truth and not back down- this is what a woman does in the 21st century. I could get fired. My principal may get into some trouble and life could become more uncomfortable than what it is right now. It's a risk I am willing to take. And man or woman, you had best step aside when in that particular arena.

I am a 21st century woman; articulate, adventurous, athletic and sometimes brave. I am not good at mopping floors or mowing grass, but I can split an infinitive or demonstrate the correct of the pluperfect subjunctive on short notice. Usually I'm ok for a laugh. My very romantic relationship is multi-platform and highly engaging with a man I like, respect and find to be more than qualified to handle a woman such as me. And handsome. Perhaps that's what I like best about being a woman. Maybe It's as simple as great sex and emotional connection; feeling safe and cared for and knowing that the one you care for in a healthy relationship also cares for you. Yeah. Glad I'm a woman.

The First Days of School

Monday (yesterday) was my first day teaching in a public school.  Sunday night I had to grade papers for the online course I'm teaching.  The grades were due the next day and students were just turning in their final papers.  So I did that and got to bed around 1:30.  Got up at 6 a.m., not enough sleep for me. I'm a total zombie when I don't get enough zzzz's.  And I'm also a little bit cranky.  So I got up, got ready and went to work, arriving at 8:20.  It's a hike to the city and it also takes me awhile to wake up.  I immediately found my schedule and realized that not only am I teaching 7th grade, but 8th grade also.  It would have been nice if someone had noticed, let me know ahead of time or prepared me in any way.  

After having a mild freak-out attack, I scrambled to get together some materials with which to greet 8th graders rather than 7th grade.  Nothing.  Both of the Assistant Principals and the Principal are new.  They were busy anyway, running students like cattle through the scanners and sorting everyone into classrooms.  There was a lot of bustling and a little hustling.  I went to my classroom and had a mild freak out attack.  Seriously, who tells you that you're teaching one grade and then sticks you with two different classes with absolutely no preparation?  But there was little time for rumination as I had half an hour before I met my first class, which incidentally was eighth grade.  They were a quiet group and full of stony looks.  I watched them and asked them to do some writing.  Cancel that- I made them do some writing.  One of my students made insulting comments when she thought I couldn't hear.  They mumbled on their way out the door.  

My second hour class of 7th graders were just giddy by comparison.  They talked easily and didn't seem to mind the writing.  Nobody is overly excited about English but they are willing.  My other classes are about average- poor kids, lots of potential, just becoming full fledged teenagers. A few of my students are parents.  Yes, 13 and 14 year old kids.  I didn't register any shock.  After all, this is not the culture I'm accustomed to and I have no right to judge.  I have to get my bearings and look around, see what normal is.  See what kids these days do in this neighborhood.  One of my classes had 37 students registered into it.  Not all showed up, but we had to borrow chairs from the teacher next door.  In my last hour class, one of the kids farted loudly and others swore in Spanish.  I ignored the swearing and made the perpetrator sit still.  My overall first impression was that either the kids have to improve their attitudes or the administration needed to step up their game where newbie teachers were concerned.  Several on faculty noted that they had never had such a poor first day.  It made me less cranky to know I wasn't the only one.  As I was leaving, a co-worker handed me a copy of the curriculum that I would be teaching.  So at least I had some curricular materials. 

I went home and crashed at 7:30.  At night.  I have, to the best of my knowledge, never, ever done that.  I've awakened at 7:30 p.m., but never gone to bed at that hour. And I slept until 5:30 this morning, when I made my lesson plan and got ready for work.  

Today, Tuesday, was day two.  It was much better.  My first hour class decided not to do a group participation exercise so we did some writing instead.  Next time I ask for students to raise their hands, I expect there will be more people volunteering.  They talked today too.  My second hour class came up with their own glossary words, which was way ahead of the other classes.  My teacher heart did a happy dance since that was all their own idea.  They sometimes seem upset that I walk around and talk to them, instead of hanging out at my desk.  My butt only  hits that chair during lunch or plan period.  I had even more kids register into my large class- 40 according to my paperwork, though I am assured that ten were dropped.  I wonder then why we had to borrow more chairs.  I was assured that my class is back down to 30, though I find that number to be exceptionally large. I asked for that number to shrink.  "It will", came the answer.  I will wait and see.  At least two of my students do not speak enough English to be in my class but I will have to wait for them to be moved too.  In the meantime, since most of my students are bilingual, someone translates for them.  On the balance, today was much better than yesterday.  I met with my fellow English teachers to confer on our plans for this week.  I gave a little emotional support to other new teachers and hung out in the hallway with the kids between classes.  They are beginning to greet me back.  Someday soon, they may even crack a smile.  But don't get me wrong; I'm a hardcase as a teacher. Today I corrected the cursing in Spanish, thereby admitting that I knew what they were saying and prohibiting cross talk in a language they thought I didn't understand.  Ah well, we play the cards we are dealt. 

This inner city school is much different than a suburban or rural school. I still have to rely on my wits and problem solving skills.  And as early as I get there, there are dedicated teachers who arrive an hour before me and who stay later.  Many of my students write and read below grade level.  They don't know what to make of a teacher who uses big words and takes time to explain what those words mean.  Some look at me and see "outsider" and I look in at them and wonder how long it will take to change their minds. Some have behavioral disorders and others just cannot sit still for the life of them.  I know they are trying.  I know it takes something just for them to make it in the door in the morning.  Yet still I am keeping my standards high.  This will be a challenge.  I have to somehow raise test scores and still teach what children need to know.  They are children, too.  And for the most part, they are well behaved.  Not one has openly defied me, nor been disrespectful to my face.  All of my instructions have been followed, if only half-heartedly by some.  

Tomorrow is another day, and I am sleepy.  It takes a tremendous amount of energy to teach, run up and down stairs twenty times a day and find things to enjoy.  Because I will enjoy this.  I can feel it. I am going to get attached to the kid that I pulled aside and talked to today about keeping himself in check.  I later saw him in the principals office and stopped to offer him encouragement.  I think he needs that. I think I have something to offer here.  

Ah hell, I always wanted kids.