What I’m doing here. Again.

Hello again, Internet.

After some fits and starts last year, I stopped writing in public again, to the distress of, I’m sure, nobody. But here I am once more, still writing about school, just from a quite different perspective.

So what have I been doing since last we spoke?

I finished my fourth and maybe last year in the classroom, with all the excitement and guilt that goes along with such a proposition. Then I packed up my apartment and took off for the summer to South East Asia and East Africa. "Mimi ni Mwalimu" means "I am a teacher" in Swahili, but I'm not a teacher anymore.

Now I’m just a graduate student with big ideas. I am about a month into a Master’s program in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies (POLS) at Stanford. It reminds me a bit of my first summer as a Teaching Fellow, though it’s hard to believe that was back in 2005. (Read all about it below this.) Here I am in another “cohort,” surrounded by another wide-eyed group of idealists off to change schools and society. You’re welcome, world.

Here’s something: all of my classes are amazing. I’ve been back in school now for about a month, and I’ve already learned a great deal about policy, the history of school reform, the ways that institutions affect the lives of urban youth, and even a little tiny bit about statistics (more of that to come next quarter.) Every day, I change my mind about what I’m going to do next. I have a massive running list of organizations in New York for which I’d love to work, and another running list of PhD programs to which I may someday apply. Each time I learn something new, my lists change. Who knows who I will want to be when this program ends in May?

Here’s something else: I miss Brooklyn desperately, and I miss my students even more. Sometimes, perhaps strangely, I miss lunch detention the most. All last year, I spent 5^th period in an upstairs classroom with everyone in 9^th or 10^th grade who was “too bad” to eat with the general population. Some kids cycled in and out, but there was always James (not his real name,) a charismatic, high ranking gang member who would probably never see the inside of the cafeteria again. He called detention “the island” after Riker’s, said the cheese sandwiches were the same ones he’d had at intake. James was in the ninth grade for the second time. He’d missed most of the last year because he had been “in the Bahamas.” He told me that he was a born dropout from a family of dropouts, that it was his destiny.

Another one of my students had a brilliant outsider art campaign running. He would save the cheese from the cold sandwiches passed out in detention, and stick it up around the school. A few periods after lunch detention, I’d be pushing through some massive metal door, and there it would be: a greasy slice of orange cheese pressed carefully onto the narrow window in the door frame. It was his version of sticking it to the man, I guess. That kind of stuff just doesn’t happen in grad school.

And yet, grad school is where I am. I’m trying to learn as much as I can. And I’m finding it easier to figure out what I think about the bigger picture now that I have a year off from lesson planning, grading, and checking to make sure everybody is wearing a tie. One of my classes required a mini-biography as a first assignment. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Seems as good a place as any to re-start.

Who I am and what I’m doing Here

One hot day in August of 2005, I swung open two green metal doors and stepped hesitantly into a public school in Brownsville, Brooklyn. I was a scared kid barely out of college. As a New York City teaching fellow, I had been hustled through six weeks of training for this moment, and I was afraid it had not been enough. It wasn’t. My first year teaching 8^th grade English traced a cycle of failing, figuring out why, and failing again. At first, I forgot to eat. Then, I ate alone in the library, staring out at the blacktop of Betsy Head Park, wondering how I could come back the next day. Somehow, I did. I learned how to manage a classroom, how to plan a lesson, and how to fix the copier. Rather improbably, I survived. The following June, I walked out those same front doors a teacher. I had signed on for two years, which seemed an oppressively long time at twenty-three. I stayed for four, and now I worry every day that it wasn’t enough.

A few months ago, I walked out those green front doors for the last time. I walked out across the street from the school to the spot on the sidewalk where one of my student’s father’s had pulled a gun right at dismissal, past the place where another student’s mother had beaten up her daughter’s classmate, through the park where my co-workers had had to drop to the ground to avoid a crossfire. I walked down Rockaway Avenue, got on a train, did something that many of my students and their families may never get to do: I left Brooklyn.

My students are still stranded on an island of poverty in the middle one of the wealthiest cities on earth. I left with the guilty knowledge that even though I tried, even though I helped students go to writing summer camp in Connecticut, even though I planned field trip after field trip to museums and parks and Broadway shows, even though I started an urban farming class that let students market healthy food to their neighbors subsisting on corner store fare, it was never quite enough. The problems were bigger than me, and, it became increasingly clear to me, the problems were bigger than schools. So here I am, looking for a way to help more than my fifty students a year - looking for a way to change neighborhoods rather than bulletin boards. I can't wait to get started.

Scenes from this September

Suffice it to say, this is easier and harder than I remembered. I'm feeling more self-assured than ever, and I don't have the emotional and physical exhaustion at the end of the day that made my first few years so trying. Still, it’s been a busy three weeks, and I’m adjusting to teaching a very different group of students than I’ve been used to in the past. I have both the most advanced kids I’ve ever taught – a group of twelfth graders clamoring for more rhetorical strategies to analyze and apply to their own writing, and the most academically bereft – a group of eighth graders who transferred in because No Child Left Behind allowed them to leave their failing schools.

So far this week:

My senior class analyzed the use of anaphora and epistrophe in Barack Obama’s 2004 speech to the DNC. There was applause at his “there’s not a red America and a blue America, there’s the United States of America,” and kids were calling out, “now that’s parallel phrasing!”

Not for the first time, several intelligent eighth graders learned from me (in English class) that the world is actually round. Nobody had ever bothered to tell them this because geography is not the subject of a high stakes test in elementary or middle school. One boy was so astounded by his new knowledge about the location of the Atlantic Ocean that he wrote about it instead of doing his reading assignment. “Can you believe that if you started on one side of the world, you could come all the way back around to where you started?” The first time this happened, four years ago, I thought that the particular child hadn’t been paying attention in geography. For eight years. Now, every year, I just look for a globe and explain.

I found out that an eighth grade girl who I had suspected was reading on an early elementary level was, in fact, reading on an early elementary level. Then I found out that she had been referred for small group special education services, but that her mother had refused to sign off on it. Then I found out that I had three other students in the exact same situation.

My twelfth graders wrote college application essays.

My eighth graders wrote memoirs about important moments: sixth grade graduation, a family wedding, baking a cake for a little brother’s birthday. They wrote poems about their identities. They wrote about their own names. I learned that one of them loves a certain pizza place on the lower east side, two of them just arrived from Jamaica, and another one of them is a competitive skateboarder. They all learned my major rule: “Be Nice,” which can sound very forceful, depending on the tone of voice one uses to say it.

A student who is perhaps overmedicated for ADHD passed out and had to be taken to the hospital.

We had our first and second fire drills.

I learned that my school received a grade of “A” from the Department of Education, which is great, but also scary, because if we don’t show enough growth the next year, we’ll be down-graded. (Which, by the way, is silly to me. If a student gets a 100 on one test, and a 95 on the next test, should I fail her for not showing enough growth?)

We weathered our first eighth grade love triangle drama, with many passed notes, tears, unfinished classwork assignments, and threats of violence to show for it.

I think my homeroom class made a new teacher quit? Because after he covered for their Spanish teacher today, he didn’t show up for his next period? And nobody could find him?



And…it’s still September. Whenever people ask me about what I do, I kinda shrug and say, “It’s never boring.”

Almost ready

My lesson planning was going so much faster than usual, and I just realized why: this is the first year I'm not required to teach U.S. History. I was assigned to teach it so that I could slip in extra ELA test prep (the social studies test doesn't get counted in our annual report card score until high school, so many elementary and middle schools have abandoned it as a subject.) Teaching history was always a guilt inducing assignment for me because I want my students to know the material, but I haven't taken a U.S. History course since eleventh grade. I tried, but I never felt I was doing justice to the class, especially when it was part of a teaching schedule that, last year, also included 8th grade ELA, 12th grade Shakespeare, 8th grade "technology," and a few periods a week in the in-school suspension room.

I should point out though, that despite my own doubts about the matter, I was designated as a "highly qualified" Social Studies teacher under No Child Left Behind. How did that happen? Well, the federal government sent me an email asking if I was highly qualified. At first I said, "no," because I'd only taken one history course in college, but then I was told by the powers that be that I had to say, "yes." So, to somewhat assuage my own conscience, I counted up any course that could conceivably be labeled as Social Studies - political science, women's literature, film studies, etc. - and submitted that number as the number of subject area courses I'd taken. So then I was highly qualified.

Nomenclature notwithstanding, I'm happy to pass the U.S. History job along to someone who majored in the content area. I was an English major. I have this MA in English Education. I'm most effective teaching what I know. I've said I'll help the students with their year end History projects, but I'm otherwise free to plan English only lessons.

And that is what I'm almost finished doing. My classroom is ready. My first day suit is hanging up in the closet. My lunch is packed. I got this.

What I did before the students arrived

Students may not return until Tuesday, but I've been back at work since Thursday.

This year, like every year, we opened with coffee, bagels, and a powerpoint of last year’s test scores. When scores had gone up, we all applauded. We were told that the middle school English and Math departments (there are six of us total) have our work cut out for us this year. Last year’s students scored quite high, and we’ll be heavily penalized if they don’t show progress in the coming year.

More than in the past, I felt almost like I was coming back to summer camp after a year away. I’m lucky enough to work with friends, and seeing them all crowded into the 8th grade math classroom felt like a homecoming. Still, it was hard not to look around the room and try to pick out who was new, and who was missing. There are always several, because they don’t call schools like mine “hard to staff” for nothing. Each year, we lose around than ten percent of our staff. Last year, we lost more than usual.

So, my school had to go out, again, and find new people, again, who are willing to do this difficult job in a difficult place for a difficult salary. Most of our new teachers have experience at other schools, but we have taken on one new teaching fellow, who will teach 9th grade English to all of the students I worked with for the past two years. She doesn’t look scared, so I guess she’s already got an advantage over me, four years ago. (Has it really been that long?) But I worry that her students, who I love, will now have been taught by teachers with less than three years experience for three years in a row. So, I’m trying to help her out as much as I can.

And then there was another new-to-our-school teacher, who failed to impress me when he announced he figured this place might be alright since he hadn’t “been shot at yet,” and then asked me if “these kids” listen to teachers. What kids listen to all teachers? I find that the sooner new teachers figure out that nobody is going to listen to them just because they’re the ostensible grown-up in the room, the easier it will be, and I basically told him as much.

After the whole staff meeting about scores and goals for the year, the English department meeting about the new vocabulary schedule and who gets to use the class set of Persepolis (me, but I'll share), and the 8th grade team meeting about how we will never again have time to meet as a team, it was time to get down to the work of getting one couch taken out of my room, re-ordering twenty books I thought would have been in, re-planning three weeks worth of lessons around the lack of said books, and, of course, putting up bulletin boards. Just as I was headed to the office to make copies of the family information packet I send home on the first day, I was tapped to help double check the schedules of every teacher in the school. It took a while.

So now I’m working through the weekend on all of the lesson plans and syllabi I neglected when I was holed up studying GRE math for the past month, and then I’ll be back in the building on Sunday to finish my first day’s copies and put the final touches on my walls. It took me two months to start waking up without bags under my eyes and an obsessive need for caffeine, and only two days to return to both. My summer technically ends on Labor Day, but it’s already over.

Still, I'm feeling optimistic about '08-'09. When I was walking around my classroom putting my new students' folders out on their desks, I was struck by a thought I've never had before: whatever happens this year, I can handle it. If I still feel that way in March, I'm home free.

That Old Feeling Again

Hi, it’s me again. In 2005, I started teaching 7th and 8th grade at a public school in Brooklyn. I chronicled the ups and (mostly) downs of my first year on this page, and then I kept up the work but not the writing about it.

I’m now entering my fourth year of teaching at the same school, and I am feeling the need to start updating this page again, if only to say: I’m still here.

I’m still a teacher, and I can call myself that without feeling like a kid playing dress-up. In fact, this job has forced me to become a grown-up much more quickly than I had planned on…

But I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s fast forward up to the present.

Year One: Disastrous but incredibly instructive. You can read more than you’d probably care to about it in all of the posts below this one.

Year Two: Was everything everyone told me it would be. The worst day was still better than the best day of my first year. I taught two sections of seventh grade English, one section of seventh grade U.S. History, and a whole lot more than I did the year before. The first day of school was planned out in my head for months, so everything went exactly the way I wanted. My students listened to me and I felt like I was good at my job. I finished my masters degree, fleshed out my teacher wardrobe, and achieved immortality in the minds of certain twelve year olds when I schooled them all in a rap battle. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible. I still cried, but it was over kids, not over my own ineptitude. In short: it got easier.

Year Three: I moved up with my students and taught them honors eighth grade English and U.S. History. This was a blessing in that I loved the kids and got to spend another year with them, but it also meant that I didn’t develop as much professionally as a middle school teacher. I didn’t have to re-invent myself the way I had the previous year. I did get cogent essays about allegory in Lord of the Flies, field trips to Broadway shows, and research projects that used primary sources from the public library’s Brooklyn Collection to trace the history of my students’ neighborhoods. Turns out, “Housing in East New York” and “The Development of Bed-Stuy” are more interesting project topics to complete (and to grade) than “The Civil War” thirty five times over.

I also developed and taught a twelfth grade Shakespeare course, which made me feel a little like a first year teacher again. High school, I (re)learned, is a whole other thing. Still, kids are, to some extent, kids, and teaching is, to a large extent, teaching, so I figured it out. We filmed our own adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Bronx Botanical Gardens, worked with visiting teaching artists on interpretations of scenes from The Tempest, and saw Patrick Stewart (aka Captain Jean Luc Picard to me, Professor X to my kids) in BAM’s fantastic production of the Scottish Play. Shakespeare, it turned out, was not wack.




But at some point in my third year, I noticed that the teacher I was becoming wasn’t the teacher I set out to be. I got what I wanted - my students did the work. The school got what they wanted – my students all passed their standardized tests. But too often, I found myself answering my own questions, speeding ahead to “cover” the material, teaching the book instead of the kids, and acting every bit the benevolent dictator I had sworn I wouldn’t be. My kids worked for grades and praise, but it all seemed a little joyless. I didn’t have to work as hard as I had at first, so I pulled back, and felt guilty about doing less, but not guilty enough to do more. I got behind, and then I got really behind, and then I got depressed about being behind, and because as a teacher, I make the weather in the classroom, it was a long, cold, winter for my kids as well as me. We all deserved better.

So I’m bringing my teaching back out into this public space for another year because I’m challenging myself to do this thing for real. I want to move the center of power in my classroom off of me and spread it around a little. I want my students to have more choices. I want to feel like I’m not only demanding their best work, but, more importantly, my own.

And I’ve also kinda, sorta, pretty much decided that this upcoming school year is my last at my school. I’m taking the GRE at the end of this summer and trying to go back to grad school in fall 2009.

So, because I’ve got this one year left to go, I want to make it count.

I’m teaching two sections of eighth grade English and one twelfth grade writing composition course. My seniors will get college credit for the class through a local school, and I get listed as an adjunct professor, which is cool I guess.

Usually, I go into the new year with a fair amount of optimism and even some excitement. There’s a new bulletin board to put up, a vast expanse of notebook paper waiting to be filled, and a chance to start everything over from scratch. How many jobs offer that?

But for the past month or so, I’ve been afraid that I wasn’t going to get that feeling back this year. When I looked ahead to September, all I felt was a dull dread, a creeping sense that I had stayed too long at the fair.

And then a few days ago, miraculously, it returned. I suddenly woke up to myself shopping for binders, researching grants, and cranking out curriculum that I can’t wait to teach. So I found out I’ve got one more year in me, after all. My fourth wind. And not a moment too soon.

School starts in two weeks.

Things I Learned by Accident

The school year finally sputtered to a halt yesterday afternoon. My kids, who had been out of the building taking a self-assigned break or on 8th grade senior trips, all showed up to collect their report cards. My seventh graders were cute, as they have been almost all year, and were sad to say goodbye. My eighth graders were ready to move on to high school, as they have been almost all year, and were nearly as terrible as on the first day. I don't blame them. One kid, with whom I've had a running battle over gum-chewing, stuffed ten pieces of Trident in his mouth in front of me and then shouted, "Now I can chew as much gum as I want! School's out!" And it was.

And now that I know I can survive a whole ten months of this work, next year doesn't look nearly so scary. (Though it is, blessedly, two months away.) As best anyone can tell me, I'll only be teaching seventh grade next year, so I'll only have to prepare one lesson plan a day and only have to teach the new, scared, pliable 12 year olds rather than the newly hormonal and rebellious 13 year olds - a much more palatable proposition. I was offered a chance to move up with my kids and teach them again in an eighth grade honors seminar, but I turned it down for a chance to re-invent myself for new students as the teacher I have spent the past year learning how to be. So next year, when the first day of school rolls around, I'll know where my bathroom passes are and how to get people quiet. Actually, I've learned quite a bit.


Mistakes I now know not to make:

Don't single a kid out by name in front of the whole class - that just causes a whole conflict that you don't want to deal with.

Put your bulletin boards up on time even if you think bulletin boards are stupid.

Don't say you're going to call home if you know you probably won't feel like it. In fact, don't say you'll do anything that you're not 100% sure you can do that day.

Don't assume that kids know the difference between Civil Rights and the Civil War, between the East River and the ocean, or between North and South. Don't assume anyone has any idea what you're talking about just because they've been sitting quietly and not getting on your nerves. Chances are, the annoying kids at least have some idea what's going on, while the quiet ones are on another planet entirely.

Don't go in thinking that you will be the kind of teacher who makes kids see the "real world" and teaches them how to rock the boat. Their world is much realer than yours has ever been and they are constantly bailing water. They need structure, not your grad school deconstructionism, before they can work the truth out for themselves.

Don't wear purple tights in March or you will still be hearing about it in June.

Don't hold grudges.

Don't forget to check your mailbox for memos.

Don't get sick.

Don't be afraid to take a sick day.

Don't be mean.

Eat a good lunch, or you will be.

Don't show movies that you've never watched yourself, or teach books you've never read.

Don't be afraid to tell people that they are wrong, but do have the means to make them right.




Things I did Right Without Knowing It:

Keep your bad news to yourself. Spread your good news around.

Laugh sometimes.

Tell the class you love them.

Ask for money and sometimes you will get it. The words "Title 1 school in Brownsville" open more doors than you might think.

Listen to people who have been doing this job longer than you have.

Do not argue with anyone who has the power to make your life more difficult.

Don't grade everything.

Learn how to fix the copy machine.



And so, this, I suppose, ends my internet experiment. This page will stay up, but it probably won't change after today. I am ready to get back to writing in private. Many thanks to all who have been following along - your words of support have meant more than you know.

Class dismissed.

Prom and Problems

The art teacher was absent, to begin with. Plus, there were blocks in the room. What did they think would happen? Unfortunately for my favorite little hooligans, one of the blocks thrown during the commotion hit the unfortunate substitute. So, confessions were made, friends were ratted out, “senior” (8th grade) trips were taken away, and then, the bomb was dropped. Five of my kids can’t go to their big 8th grade prom unless their mothers (or grandmothers, as the case may be) want to come too. For the first time all year, I saw tears from some of my toughest students. So the tension was thick when the accused parties walked back into my class from their meeting with the guidance counselor.

Clearly, the DBQ (Document Based Question – an essay) I had planned wasn’t happening, so I ended up just reading to them to calm them down, and then let them write in their journals about what had happened. Amazingly, many of the angriest kids snatched up their pens and wrote until the end of the period. One girl took up a whole page talking about how she hates “FONY people – and that’s what all the people at this school are – FONY!!!” It’s nice for them to know that writing can be an outlet for their frustration.

Today I felt like a real teacher for a while as we finished the DBQ from yesterday and continued reading Warriors Don’t Cry – an excellent memoir written by one of the Little Rock Nine. My kids can’t stop gasping as worse and worse things happen to the protagonist. In yesterday’s chapter, a white segregationist tried to hit her with a stick of dynamite. Today, girls tossed flaming toilet paper into her hair while holding her prisoner in a bathroom stall, and then a boy threw acid into her eyes. Maybe not as tough as losing your prom privileges, but it gets my kids’ attention.

I can’t seem to stop teaching Brown vs. The Board of Ed. Ever since one of my students, who was doing her project on it, erroneously wrote that the decision was the reason she couldn’t go to school with white kids, I’ve been trying to make the point that after all that people have done to fight for integration, I’m still the only white kid in our classroom. “Look around,” I keep telling them, “Does this look like an integrated classroom to you?” Well, yes, they say, we’re all from different cultures – some Guyanese, some West Indian, some born right down the street in Brookdale Hospital. We have light skinned and dark skinned black people here.

I find myself talking to them about re-segregation almost as if I think that they can fix the system. It’s not that I necessarily want them to want to go to school with other people. “But it’s sort of a shame,” I find myself saying. “Here we are in the most diverse city in the world…”
I don’t know really know what else to say.