2 posts from January 2008

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.