a zero-sum game
At the end the summer, my neighborhood group disbanded and I had to find a new one. Mission is one of the 5 core tenets of neighborhood groups at City Church and each group is supposed to have its own missional focus. Two of the groups work with the KIPP charter school in East Nashville and since I had really been missing teaching and being involved in students' lives, I decided to join one of them.
Adults in these groups either become reading buddies with a Kippster for 9 weeks and read a book with the Kippster or spend the hour reading buddies are reading helping teachers out: grading, organizing classrooms, etc. The idea with reading buddies is to provide these kids with a positive reading experience. I've been a reading buddy this semester with a 6th grader who I've come to adore. We read the first 90 pages of Walter Dean Myers'
Fallen Angels (way above his reading level)
.The first night we had a sheet of questions to ask each other, including "What word would your friends use to describe you." He looked me dead in the eye and responded, "Bad."
"Bad, like Michael Jackson bad, or bad like you get in trouble a lot?" I asked him.
"Bad like I get in trouble a lot." Alright, well at least he's honest. And he does. Over the course of the semester, he let me know that he was in danger of getting kicked out of KIPP because of behavior. He has that mischievous glint in his eye, that "I know I'm about to do something you don't want me to do, but I'm going to do it anyway." His behavior has improved though and he shares his "paycheck" score with me every week.
But he's also very respectful. He always asks me permission before he does anything like use the restroom or get up to throw trash away. And our book has a lot of profanity in it (its main characters are soldiers in the Vietnam War). For the first couple of weeks, all the profanity was in portions I was reading and I just read it. The first time he came to profanity though, he paused and looked at me. He told me he wasn't comfortable reading that word. Honestly, I hadn't even thought about it. As an English teacher, profanity in books never really bothered me- literature is about life and lots of people use profanity. No big deal. My Kippster acknowledged that sure, he uses profanity, but only around his friends and he thought it was disrespectful to say those words in my presence, even if he's just reading them. I asked him if he wanted me to keep reading them, or just skip over them. He said he was fine with me reading them.
I was really impressed with him. As we read, we had to come up with synonyms for a lot of them. Some, that just wasn't possible and he skipped them.
Last night, we had our end of the semester potluck. All the reading buddy pairs had written book reports and illustrated them and they'd been printed in a booklet for everyone to have a copy of. Parents were invited and we ate together and then shared book reports with families. All of the KIPPsters were given a new book to read as well- another Walter Dean Myers book for him.
My KIPPster's mom wasn't there. He swore she was coming. And I prayed she would. We got our dinner and sat down with another KIPPster who had neither family nor reading buddy there. I tried to talk up a storm and keep these 2 boys, who were so clearly disappointed that no one had come for them, distracted. About 6:30, both the other boy's family and reading buddy showed up. Whew.
However, my KIPPster kept his eyes trained on the door, breaking my heart. He's normally upbeat and full of energy, but last night, he was just sad. Finally, at 6:50, he called his mom. Again, she said she was coming. We started sharing reports and she still wasn't there. The other boy's family could tell what was going on and they suggested first one boy share with everyone and then the next. But at 6:55, mom walked in. Thank God.
This post has seriously derailed, so I apologize for its length. Back to my original intention. After the potluck, I joined the other neighborhood group to hear a report from a meeting last week with the Metro Nashville school superintendent and school board representative. Sitting around the table were a number of parents considering whether or not to send their children to East Nashville schools, which, with a few exceptions, are not exactly known for their stellar academics.
We discussed both what they as parents, and more briefly, what we as a community, could do to improve the schools. The most ready solution seemed to be, get a group of parents who are willing to send their children to the same school. Great, I approve. But I still have questions. Based on zoning, when these parents send their kids to the neighborhood public schools when they would've sent them elsewhere, it seems to me this causes zoning to change, the zone to shrink around that school to accommodate more people from that neighborhood actually sending their kids to that school. Which means that kids who might've benefited from more involved parents sending their kids to that school and that school's improvement are now zoned for another school without those benefits. And the cycle starts over.
Someone mentioned that basically, it's a zero sum game. So my question is, what can be done to change that? I like the that these parents want to send their kids to public schools. I think that's one of the things that will contribute to school improvement. But, it still leaves me asking what about the other kids? If it's a zero sum game, someone loses. I'm just not OK with that, since those "someones" are children and the game is of such importance.
Labels: education
Luther on schools
"I am of the opinion that the government is obligated to compel its citizenry to send their children to school. If a government can compel its citizens to bear spear and gun, to run about on the city wall and to assume other duties when it desires to carry on war, how much more can and should the government compel its citizens to keep their children at school."
Labels: education
a brief rant
This is my blog, so occasionally, I get to rant. And you can join me: If you feel like getting really angry, then you should read
this article on the "rubber room" from The New Yorker. I listened to an
episode of This American Life on the same subject a few years ago. Aside from the day in and day out aspects of teaching in an urban public high school that made me want to pursue teacher reform at a policy level, the level of outrage I felt after listening to that show played a significant part as well.
I was just assigned the article as reading for my teacher policy seminar and from what I remember from
This American Life, you should listen to/read both- they offer rather different and together a more rounded perspective on the whole concept of rubber rooms. Both made me spitting mad at the ludicrous difficulty of getting rid of poor teachers.
The article does, however, do an excellent job of delineating the most basic of reasons I would like to take a sledgehammer to both tenure and teachers' unions. This crazy concept that some old men in white wigs put into play a few hundred years ago comes to mind: balance of power, anyone? The list of things related to teacher pay and tenure from this article that just don't make any rational sense are myriad and all go back to that union contract protecting incompetent teachers.
And if this sparks your interest at all,
the Widget Effect study the article mentions can provide some good info. Meanwhile, I'm off to scream for a little while in an attempt to ease my ire.
Labels: education, teaching
it's official
Well, I've told all my students and put it in my Facebook status, so I guess I should post it here too. I've quit my job and have 16 days left in my secondary school teaching career. Lord willing, this summer, I'm moving to Nashville, to pursue my doctorate in Education Policy at Vanderbilt, with a research focus on teacher quality.
Labels: education
John Adams
My reading tastes tend towards fiction, but this summer I have picked up David McCullough's
John Adams, widely recommended to me.
I'd never thought much about John Adams before our trip to Boston last summer and haven't thought that much about him since. But I am thoroughly enjoying the biography so far and had no idea how influential Adams was in the formation of the USA. Adams was the originator of the three separate branches of government idea, with all of its checks and balances, in his "Thoughts on Government."
But, what has endeared him to my heart are his thoughts on education:
Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
Labels: books, education
technology
This article in the AJC may help to explain why the student computers in my classroom have been there since I was a freshman in college and technology around our school suffers so abominably.
Labels: education
frustration
Yesterday was one of the crappiest days I have had at work in quite awhile and it had very little to do with the kids. In fact, with the kids, it was one of those days where I could see that they are eager to learn and even got a glimpse that they had learned something over the course of the semester. It was a glimpse I sorely needed after the morning I had.
It started on Thursday with a meeting I attended for 5 hours that got started half an hour late and spent about an hour actually on topic. Friday morning, during my planning period, I was at another meeting that added more work to my plate and pushed my frustration level to the point where I was ready to bang my head against a wall for a good long time.
The long and short of it were reaffirmations of the numbers of adults in education who don't actually care about education or are in utter denial as to the true state of things, as reflected in their actions. As my co-worker who had to listen to me said, "Laying a solution over a broken system is never going to work."
Said co-worker urged me to do what I could do in my classroom and just accept the rest of it as is. "You can't change everything," she said. The problem is, I want to change everything. I don't know how, but even after 5 years of working in this broken system, even with my conviction that humanity is totally depraved, I still have hope that things will be better, that most students will want to come to school and that they will have opportunities for
real learning in
each of their classes. I still have the hope that
every school in the system will be able to provide this type of education for its students. I don't know why I still have this hope when the majority of the evidence is to the contrary.
Wouldn't it be easier to just accept the status quo and be apathetic? Probably, yes, but its just not an option for me. Reminders like 20% of people do 80% of the work everywhere are just not comforting. WHY? Why is it so broken? Why do people throw solutions at education and when they don't fix things miraculously in two years, move on to something else?! WHY? Why can't I just be content to be the best that I can in my classroom and teach the 165 students that I have to teach? How can anyone really expect me to effectively teach classes of 30+ students, on reading levels from 5th grade to post high school?
Ultimately, it boils down to the complex I have carried with me much of my life... that I
can save the world, or at least fix America's public education system. My family, my friends, my circumstances, my logic- all tell me differently, yet it is still my overwhelming desire. At this point, however, it just feels like I am going to die trying.
Labels: education
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