4 posts from 2008

There's a temptation, in writing this kind of reflection, to look back on my MTC experience the way a mountain climber at the summit looks back down the face he just scaled, feeling an immense sense of accomplishment.

Maybe it's my infrequent blogging, but at this point an honest reflection on my journey is far more mystifying, like the climber who sees clouds below and above him and can't tell where he is relative to the summit. Do I feel a sense of accomplishment? Maybe.

I feel a little frustrated that I can't describe the past two years with more pride, but I think a lot of that has to do with my switching schools after the first year. I've had, in effect, two first years, though in drastically different contexts.

In the last week of our first summer's training, I was pulled aside by the MTC'er who had just finished her last year at my school. "It's going to be hell," she warned me. It wasn't quite that, but I quickly learned what she had meant. Between continual administrator and teacher turnover, a typically impoverished Delta population, and a physical environment that made the school feel more like a giant holding pen than anything else, the conditions at my school (like so many others we were sent to) forced me to revise the lofty notions of teaching success I had brought with me. If I could get my classes working and seeing some value in the work they were doing, I'd be doing alright.

Thus, the fall of my first year was, just as we'd been warned, an exercise in trying to stay alive. I spent a lot of that time being shocked at how little respect my students were willing to give me (this wasn't summer school) and how alien my position of authority felt. It took me the bulk of the first semester to even begin taking myself seriously as a teacher.

By second semester, I'd managed to get my students working fairly diligently, and my relationships with many of them began to blossom. With nothing else to do outside of school, even the students that hated my class would drop by before and after hours, for ambiguous reasons. They'd lurk outside the door, make their way into my room and then wander about as I graded, finally getting up the nerve to ask me a question, usually not school-related. Regardless of how they were in my class, outside the antagonism of a classroom setting, they were almost all charmingly immature, sweet kids.

By the time May rolled around, I was sure I would miss the students. My placement, which had seemed just barely bearable for a year, now seemed like an okay place. But a move still felt necessary, if only for a life outside of school. I was living alone in the Delta, with school being the only human contact I had most days.

So I got a job in the Jackson suburbs for my second year. From the very start, the contrast with my first school couldn't have been greater. My school this year is huge, both in numbers and in physical size; we have 1200 students and a new, sprawling building, with a wing for each of the three grades. While my last school was the 99% black school in a de facto segregated district, my school this year is integrated, roughly 60% black, 40% white.

We're also predominantly middle class. When I call home now, instead of trying one home number that's usually disconnected, I have cell phone and work numbers, often for two parents. And when I speak to them, the parents are respectful, eager to work together, and glad that I called them.

I also spent the beginning of this year shocked, but it was at the level of respect that my students did accord me, right from the start. I kept waiting for someone to yell, "Shut up talking to me" or "Get out of my face," but it never happened.

Instead of mere survival, this year's struggle has been in finding the way I want to teach and in getting my students to respect it and learn from it. In many ways, this has been a more frustrating struggle. I've felt as though I'm fighting, even at my resource-rich school, years of teaching that has ingrained in my students the sense that unless they're copying notes off the board and answering worksheets, they're not learning. Or that being asked to explain their answer or to think about why they think something is a waste of their time. The hard thing to realize is that too much resistance to a particular way of teaching makes it an ineffective method, even if I am sure it's the better way, objectively speaking.

In many ways, I imagine that the frustrations of my second year are the same as those of second-years who stayed at the same school. But the one thing I truly regret about switching schools is losing those relationships that I had built over the first year. This year, I strove harder to preserve a professional distance from my students, maybe because they weren't disrespectful from the beginning. It worked, but as a result, I don't feel as close to these students as I did to those from last year.

Still, I'm immensely grateful for the bizarre journey that the last two years have been. I may not know a lot more about how to teach, the plight of Delta youth, or the what's wrong with suburban public education, but the little I have learned has changed me in ways I'm still figuring out.

    I get so used to thinking about teaching as the temporary challenge that it is for me that I often forget that people do this for their entire working life. At this point, I know I won’t be teaching next year. I’m comfortable and happy with that decision, but I still wonder what it would be like to stay at my school another year.

    Today’s professional development was future-oriented. Our principal told us we’d be getting our letters of intent this week. We talked about the testing schedule and how we were preparing our students for May. Then he described a major scheduling change that the district is considering for next year, something that made me curious enough to want to stick around, if just for a little while. TST (Teacher Support Team, the process for identifying and remediating students in danger of failing) paperwork is a pain for teachers at our school, and we have two employees working full-time on TST. It must be far worse for teachers at other schools, provided they do anything at all for TST (unlike my last school). Our superintendent is thinking of cutting the high school schedule short an hour, dismissing most students at 2:30 rather than 3:30pm, and then holding one hour of remediation and TST work for only those students with at least one failing grade. If the change looks successful at the high school level, the superintendent is open to applying it to the middle school for the second half of next school year, although it’s more likely that he’d wait to start with a new school year.

    I actually think this could be a pretty good idea. For a school like ours, running on an alternating block schedule, an earlier regular dismissal would mean reducing blocks to 80 minutes, rather than 92, but I think that change would be negligible for most teachers. The advantages of this program are similar, I think, to those that Mack Currie of Tupelo High School cited for his school’s schedule. The majority of students would qualify for early dismissal, giving a highly visible incentive for doing well academically. It could even foster a kind of positive peer pressure to get out of school early. The one major problem I could foresee with this schedule is that teachers might be encouraged to pass students. There’s already an incentive to pass kids in order to avoid paperwork, but I’m afraid teachers might pass even more undeserving kids if it also meant getting rid of them an hour early. Still, it’s an experiment. If there’s one thing that has persuaded me to try something other than teaching, it’s the feeling that little about the job changes from year to year. This scheduling idea is change, and it’s exciting.

I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and started watching “The Wire,” as every T.V. critic has been exhorting for years now. It really is as good as they say. I’ve made it up to the fourth season in embarrassingly little time. The wonderful thing about the show is that even a T.V.-phobe like myself can feel okay watching it—it’s like reading a novel, I tell myself.

The show portrays the Baltimore drug trade and its intersection with city politics, economics, and—in the fourth season—education. Even though I grew up in Maryland, I know practically nothing about Baltimore, so it hadn’t had much personal resonance for me until I started the fourth season. While I never taught in an inner-city school, I still recognize so much of the educational system that “The Wire” depicts. Before the start of the school year, teachers slump through a professional development session, nearly comatose, as a woman tries in vain to lead them through a chant of some meaningless acronym (“I.A.L.A.C.—I am Loveable and Competent!”). A few teachers finally erupt and ask the speaker how her talk could possibly help them with such-and-such student, who threw textbooks through windows. On the first day of school, trouble with the bells cuts homeroom to one minute, just long enough for students to sit down.

What I’ve found most impressive is how accurately the show depicts the four middle-schoolers it follows. These boys come from backgrounds that are, in a general socioeconomic sense, similar to those of my students from last year. I recognize their tough-guy posturing and their moments of genuine immaturity and maturity.

It’s painful to watch, often, especially those scenes featuring a first-year teacher, a young and earnest white guy. But there’s also something satisfying about seeing such an eloquent, if fictional, expression of the kind of challenges we, our kids, and our schools face.

I realize it's in right now, but my buzzword for this last semester is "sustainability." For the past year and a half, I've struggled to find the appropriate balance in how I prepare for school. Sometimes I'm planning each day as it comes; the lessons I produce are usually dry, heavy on the individual practice and disjointed with respect to each other. This isn't a sustainable pattern, because I'm always frantic the night before and then bored stiff when I have to teach them. More often, at this point, I'm over-planning each day, or spending too much time and energy on high-concept sets and activities that require a lot more of me, both in terms of preparation and presentation in the classroom. I'm rarely bored when I'm teaching one of these lessons, but that's because I'm doing the bulk of the work. I'm not asking much of my students, certainly not as much as when I'm burying them in independent practice, and I worry that they're not learning as much. To be honest, my classroom management still isn't what it should be, and for all that an energizing set can do, it's a detriment if it gets the kids too riled up to focus. So my goal is to maintain a sustainable work ethic with respect to planning, to make sure that I'm neither bored nor exhausted.

What's sustainable for me might also prove more sustainable for my kids too. Either unsustainable style of planning that I described is less interesting--both for me and my students--than one that organizes work around longer-term projects. I'm hoping the projects I plan will be more memorable as well.