The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City and was respoted at GothamSchools. You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.
Classroom management is usually at the top of the new teacher's list of concerns. Excellent classroom management often takes years to master, and the only way to get there is through experience, largely because it's nuanced. The things that disrupt your instruction in one classroom aren't always the things that will disrupt it in another. Sometimes it's the students' attitudes; sometimes it's a poorly planned lesson; sometimes it's a fire drill; and sometimes it's a pigeon flying around your classroom, pooping on desks.
It was a day in late March, and I had planned a lesson to prepare my students for the Regents exam in US and Global History. The lesson involved a simple strategy for teaching students to find success on the document-based question (DBQ) essay. With pressure to prepare students for the exams increasing, I accepted teaching test-prep lesson, but my heart wasn't entirely in it. This would not be a "Stand and Deliver" lesson.
I arrived to school sweaty and frustrated after having stood for over an hour on two trains and a bus to get to the school in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx from my apartment in Washington Heights. After passing students waiting in line to go through the metal detector, I turned the corner of the building and was blasted by a wave of hot air upon opening the door. I immediately took off my backpack, jacket, and hat.
"Why do they keep running the heat when it's warm outside," I had once asked.
"The budget for next year's heat is based on the amount of fuel used this year," another teacher had told me. Of course.
After gathering attendance and making copies, I pushed through the heaviest door in the building to enter the first of four classrooms I would teach in that day. This one was on the second floor and had a massive radiator lining the wall opposite the door and beneath the windows. Although the door to the room was heavy, the hydraulics in the door closing mechanism created an extraordinarily slow swing speed until the last two feet, at which point the door would slam shut like a Venus Flytrap for slow-moving students. In addition to nipping any student taking their time on the way out, it also created a powerful gust of air that would consistently blow one of my student's hair into the face of the student next to her.
"Come on!" Enrique would say as he brushed Cynthia's hair out of his eyes.
On this particular day, I walked in a few minutes early to what seemed like something of a commotion on the far side of the room near the window. After I told my students (100% native Spanish speakers) about our activity for the day, I noticed Rosie in the back with a smile on her face like she had a plan. As I went back and forth between facing the board and the class explaining the DBQ activity, I noticed giggling around Rosie.
"Mister. Can we open the window?" asked Rosie. "¡Hace calor!"
She wasn't wrong. The room was hot. It was temperate outside and the heaters were going full blast, often making a sound akin to a workman pounding on the side of an aluminum room with an over-sized hammer. But there was something about the beginning of class and the way she said it that made me think she had more at stake in opening the window than just cooling down.
The school aide opened the door to grab the attendance.
"COME ON!" said Enrique as he had to refocus.
"No Rosie," using my teacher instinct. "I think we'll be okay."
I returned to my instruction on the DBQ strategy when the assistant principal opened the door to tell me I was needed in the office as the school's chapter leader. Janet, another social studies teacher, would be covering for me.
I walked out of the room for what would be fifteen minutes discussing a contract issue.
"PPPHHHHHFFFffffttttt!" Enrique made a scene as we left. I imagined a minor skirmish ensuing.
When I returned to the classroom, Janet gave me a sideways smile. The door closed and Enrique thew his paper and pencil over his shoulder in frustration.
"We have a visitor," said Janet, pointing at the ceiling.
I looked up and saw a pigeon perched on pipes near the ceiling. Beneath it was an empty table with bird droppings on it. The five students who had previously been at the table were now clumped with five other students at a table on the other side of the room laughing and pointing at the pigeon.
I looked at Rosie and knew exactly what had happened.
Janet offered a sincere apology, wished me good luck, and walked back out into the hallway. This time Enrique ducked and came back up with a smile.
Preferring to teach and worry about the pigeon after class, I calmed the class down and convinced them they could still learn even with the banging, the heat, the hair in Enrique's face, the pigeon, the giggling with Rosie, and a frustrated and exahausted teacher who wasn't confident in the utility of teaching students to pass a state test. I yelled the rest of my instruction across the room over the noise of the heater. On the plus side, the window was open, so I wasn't sweating as profusely.
Students strained to hear me during instruction, and wore looks of agony and frustration as we moved into the work period. They complained of being unable to concentrate. But many worked hard to write something down in their second language with the banging, the heat, the hair, the pigeon, the giggling, and the frustrated and exhausted teacher.
When the bell rang, I collected their papers and stuffed them into my backpack in a hurry to get to my next classroom.
By the end of the day, the pigeon had escaped unharmed. The students, I'm not so sure.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Teach for America: Here We Go Again
It's been so long since I last complained about Teach for America, I apparently just couldn't go another day without. Now is a particularly conflicting time for me as some of the first students I taught are being accepted into Teach for America. In the last weeks, I've gotten more than a few Facebook messages from former students either telling me of their acceptance or asking my opinion.
I have no idea how to react. There's a part of me that wants to go on a tirade, wants to tell them everything I think about TFA. And there's another part of me that is so proud of their commitment to education, because I don't think I have any former students who are using TFA to get into law school or work in Congress.
It's just so frustrating to listen to those new to the profession preach about their commitment to educational equity without the necessary understanding of what really drives policy and inequity.
Alas, I should keep my mouth shut. I was no different six years ago. I did not have the background knowledge I have now, and I was downright ignorant of the way education policy works and what drives it. (Inequity is no accident.)
My frustration has me typing this blog post on TFA's cons (more for my own purposes than anyone else's - plenty of capable bloggers and journalists have done extensive work on reasons to be wary of TFA here, here, here, here, and here). In essence, I'm trying to figure out how to explain my worries about Teach for America to a soon-to-be college graduate without sounding like a crackpot. How can I tell them what I worry about without making them think I'm against their ambitions? Without being overly vitriolic?
Let's see what I can do....
Without boring the hell out of you, I think there are four main reasons I have such a problem with Teach for America.
1) It assumes that quality teaching is an effect of innate ability and passion rather than experience. It uses this specious line of argument to place woefully under-prepared 22-year-olds (the majority of whom do not stay in classrooms long enough to learn from their errors) in front of our most underprivileged students whose quality education demands so much more. On top of this, it expects these poor recruits to be doing graduate school work WHILE teaching. Perhaps more detrimental, TFA, along with the media, have found a way to convince the public that this is appropriate.
(Side story: I was in a doctor's office in Manhattan last year getting tests done to try to determine the origin of some weird chest pains when the doctors asked what I did for a living. I told them, and they asked if I was in Teach for America. My expression must have betrayed my feelings because they asked what problems I had with the organization. I just shook my head. "Who's going to teach those kids if not for TFA?" they asked. "How about qualified professionals?" I said coldly. "I wouldn't feel very good right now if you two were just out of undergrad and about to go to med school, would I?")
2) Teach for America indoctrinates its recruits into a vision of quality teaching that understands test scores as synonymous with student achievement. (See here on why this is something of a problem.) This is perhaps the point for which the negative effects take the longest to see clearly. You can go back in forth in your head for years on how valuable standardized tests are, and to what degree they should be used in judging educational quality. I have come to the strong opinion that, the way they're currently being used, these tests do far more to harm than good.
3) TFA has transformed from an organization that used to talk about putting itself out of business to a public relations behemoth. Every year it scrounges more money from Congress and more money from districts for placing its low-cost teachers in positions that demand the most experienced (districts have to pay TFA for each recruit they accept). In the disgusting world of hard-ball education politics, this allows districts either strapped for cash or under the leadership of those who believe the public sector should be starved of funds to point to TFA's propaganda around closing the achievement gap as justification for paying its teaching force significantly less money by forcing out experienced teachers in favor of much cheaper TFA recruits (as happened just recently, and so disgustingly, in Memphis.)
4) It was founded by a Princeton college senior who never had (and still never has) worked in a single school in her entire life, much less an underprivileged school. Listening to Wendy Kopp speak (or reading her book) is like doing a case study on narcissistic personality disorder. Self-righteous would be an understatement, which sort of explains the flaws noted above.
From my perspective, TFA is, at best, analogous to putting a band-aid on a brain hemorrhage. At worst, it is a racist, staggeringly arrogant organization that profits (both in money and fame) off the poor.
How was that for nicely communicating my feelings? Pretty crappy, huh?
It's not the TFA corps members I have problems with (although a good many of them personify the organization's arrogance and lack of respect for the teaching profession); it's the notion and push behind the endeavor itself. I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who join TFA out of a sincere desire to effect change and teach their hearts out. I just caution them to be prepared for a potential rude awakening. (See Gary Rubinstein's beautiful post on why he joined TFA, and why it's no longer needed.)
To the new TFA corps members for the coming year, I wish you all the best, but try to keep an open mind during the propaganda process, I mean, "Institute."
I have no idea how to react. There's a part of me that wants to go on a tirade, wants to tell them everything I think about TFA. And there's another part of me that is so proud of their commitment to education, because I don't think I have any former students who are using TFA to get into law school or work in Congress.
It's just so frustrating to listen to those new to the profession preach about their commitment to educational equity without the necessary understanding of what really drives policy and inequity.
Alas, I should keep my mouth shut. I was no different six years ago. I did not have the background knowledge I have now, and I was downright ignorant of the way education policy works and what drives it. (Inequity is no accident.)
My frustration has me typing this blog post on TFA's cons (more for my own purposes than anyone else's - plenty of capable bloggers and journalists have done extensive work on reasons to be wary of TFA here, here, here, here, and here). In essence, I'm trying to figure out how to explain my worries about Teach for America to a soon-to-be college graduate without sounding like a crackpot. How can I tell them what I worry about without making them think I'm against their ambitions? Without being overly vitriolic?
Let's see what I can do....
Without boring the hell out of you, I think there are four main reasons I have such a problem with Teach for America.
1) It assumes that quality teaching is an effect of innate ability and passion rather than experience. It uses this specious line of argument to place woefully under-prepared 22-year-olds (the majority of whom do not stay in classrooms long enough to learn from their errors) in front of our most underprivileged students whose quality education demands so much more. On top of this, it expects these poor recruits to be doing graduate school work WHILE teaching. Perhaps more detrimental, TFA, along with the media, have found a way to convince the public that this is appropriate.
(Side story: I was in a doctor's office in Manhattan last year getting tests done to try to determine the origin of some weird chest pains when the doctors asked what I did for a living. I told them, and they asked if I was in Teach for America. My expression must have betrayed my feelings because they asked what problems I had with the organization. I just shook my head. "Who's going to teach those kids if not for TFA?" they asked. "How about qualified professionals?" I said coldly. "I wouldn't feel very good right now if you two were just out of undergrad and about to go to med school, would I?")
2) Teach for America indoctrinates its recruits into a vision of quality teaching that understands test scores as synonymous with student achievement. (See here on why this is something of a problem.) This is perhaps the point for which the negative effects take the longest to see clearly. You can go back in forth in your head for years on how valuable standardized tests are, and to what degree they should be used in judging educational quality. I have come to the strong opinion that, the way they're currently being used, these tests do far more to harm than good.
3) TFA has transformed from an organization that used to talk about putting itself out of business to a public relations behemoth. Every year it scrounges more money from Congress and more money from districts for placing its low-cost teachers in positions that demand the most experienced (districts have to pay TFA for each recruit they accept). In the disgusting world of hard-ball education politics, this allows districts either strapped for cash or under the leadership of those who believe the public sector should be starved of funds to point to TFA's propaganda around closing the achievement gap as justification for paying its teaching force significantly less money by forcing out experienced teachers in favor of much cheaper TFA recruits (as happened just recently, and so disgustingly, in Memphis.)
4) It was founded by a Princeton college senior who never had (and still never has) worked in a single school in her entire life, much less an underprivileged school. Listening to Wendy Kopp speak (or reading her book) is like doing a case study on narcissistic personality disorder. Self-righteous would be an understatement, which sort of explains the flaws noted above.
From my perspective, TFA is, at best, analogous to putting a band-aid on a brain hemorrhage. At worst, it is a racist, staggeringly arrogant organization that profits (both in money and fame) off the poor.
How was that for nicely communicating my feelings? Pretty crappy, huh?
It's not the TFA corps members I have problems with (although a good many of them personify the organization's arrogance and lack of respect for the teaching profession); it's the notion and push behind the endeavor itself. I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who join TFA out of a sincere desire to effect change and teach their hearts out. I just caution them to be prepared for a potential rude awakening. (See Gary Rubinstein's beautiful post on why he joined TFA, and why it's no longer needed.)
To the new TFA corps members for the coming year, I wish you all the best, but try to keep an open mind during the propaganda process, I mean, "Institute."
Monday, January 16, 2012
Something to Consider
The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City and has been cross-posted at Gothamschools. You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.
The assistant principal’s office is crammed into the corner of the second floor of the nearly ninety-year-old James Monroe Building in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. Behind me the door into the hallway, an opening into the dizzying array of students from different schools and languages from different countries. Before me sits the instructional coach our administration hired to help us make sense of outcomes-based teaching.
I sit in tennis shoes, jeans, a flannel shirt, and keys hanging from my three-year-old caribiner attached to my right belt loop. My unshaven face pushes against my right hand pushes against my elbow pushes against the desk frustrated. Not frustrated because of my missed planning period, nor the student I chased down for stealing breakfast that morning. Not because stacks of papers loom over us on both sides of the desk we're working at like Manhattan skyscrapers, nor because boxes of books and newly ordered materials touch nearly every floor tile, making the movement from one corner of the office to another a journey four times longer than it would otherwise take. Frustrated for a different reason.
Peggy and I stare at the plan I’ve created. “These outcomes are really nice, very impressive. I’m just worried you may be overestimating the students' ability levels. This looks like something you’d do in freshman-level college course.”
How would you know if I’m overestimating their ability. They’re my students.... is my thought, but only fleeting. A brief ego shield that quickly melts away under the heat of reality.
It’s so easy to fantasize about teaching the really interesting things about history and social studies that require the background knowledge they don’t yet have to really engage in, to expose them to rigorous standards and high expectations that you know you don’t have time uphold.
My assistant principal looks at my eyes and asks how much sleep I got. “Enough,” I say, knowing it was at least twice as much as she got.
In a rush to cover everything at the end of the year in a meaningful way, I had created jumbo outcomes for what traditionally gets taught in history between 1870-1945 that every student would be responsible for.
Explain how liberal ideas of democracy developed during European imperialism, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
And then I had created smaller, more manageable outcomes that only some students would be responsible for. In my teacher Narnia, students would then provide information to the whole class on their assigned outcomes.
Analyze European motives for African and Asian imperialism.
In a way, I wanted to scream, “WHY CAN’T I TEACH THIS STUFF!!! We’re supposed to be holding them to high expectations, right? We know that when we hold students to high expectations, they’ll rise to them? Isn’t that what we all learn in teacher school? The stuff I’m trying to teach isn’t even really that advanced!” But I knew every bit as well as Peggy why these outcomes were overly ambitious.
“Do you really think you can get your students to do this?”
“I KNOW every single one of them can do this, and I KNOW I could get them to do it. (In Narnia I could.) I’m just not sure I have the time and resources to help them get there....”
My assistant principal reviewing new teacher resumes on her blackberry now. Peggy slowly and confidently nods at me. Her eyes say this was the conclusion she was hoping I’d come to when she began her line of questioning. “That’s something you’ll have to consider.”
I put my backpack on and leave the office with the outcomes I’d spent an entire weekend creating.
As I walk down the stairs to my classroom, a war wages in my mind that disrupts my emotions. I’m reminded we don’t have enough rooms so that I can have a quiet last ten minutes of my planning period, so I instead choose to join the Spanish class. On one side of my head fights the six-year-old expectations for what I’d been led to believe was my immense capacity to educate students and change lives coupled with an innate lifelong idealism. On the other, the fresh lessons of the past six years learned battling student apathy, poverty, and the staggeringly negative effects of adult incompetence and ego.
As Spanish class ends and I begin digging through my backpack for the work I’d planned for my ELLs (primarily recently-arrived Dominicans), one of my students asks me if I want to collect the homework from last night. “Oh my gosh, yes! Thank you for reminding me. Please, everyone give me the homework from last night.”
Most students look at each other and snicker. One with a big smile on his face: “Come on, mister. You know we don’t do homework.”
Something I’ll have to consider.
The assistant principal’s office is crammed into the corner of the second floor of the nearly ninety-year-old James Monroe Building in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. Behind me the door into the hallway, an opening into the dizzying array of students from different schools and languages from different countries. Before me sits the instructional coach our administration hired to help us make sense of outcomes-based teaching.
I sit in tennis shoes, jeans, a flannel shirt, and keys hanging from my three-year-old caribiner attached to my right belt loop. My unshaven face pushes against my right hand pushes against my elbow pushes against the desk frustrated. Not frustrated because of my missed planning period, nor the student I chased down for stealing breakfast that morning. Not because stacks of papers loom over us on both sides of the desk we're working at like Manhattan skyscrapers, nor because boxes of books and newly ordered materials touch nearly every floor tile, making the movement from one corner of the office to another a journey four times longer than it would otherwise take. Frustrated for a different reason.Peggy and I stare at the plan I’ve created. “These outcomes are really nice, very impressive. I’m just worried you may be overestimating the students' ability levels. This looks like something you’d do in freshman-level college course.”
How would you know if I’m overestimating their ability. They’re my students.... is my thought, but only fleeting. A brief ego shield that quickly melts away under the heat of reality.
It’s so easy to fantasize about teaching the really interesting things about history and social studies that require the background knowledge they don’t yet have to really engage in, to expose them to rigorous standards and high expectations that you know you don’t have time uphold.
In a rush to cover everything at the end of the year in a meaningful way, I had created jumbo outcomes for what traditionally gets taught in history between 1870-1945 that every student would be responsible for.
Explain how liberal ideas of democracy developed during European imperialism, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
And then I had created smaller, more manageable outcomes that only some students would be responsible for. In my teacher Narnia, students would then provide information to the whole class on their assigned outcomes.
Analyze European motives for African and Asian imperialism.
In a way, I wanted to scream, “WHY CAN’T I TEACH THIS STUFF!!! We’re supposed to be holding them to high expectations, right? We know that when we hold students to high expectations, they’ll rise to them? Isn’t that what we all learn in teacher school? The stuff I’m trying to teach isn’t even really that advanced!” But I knew every bit as well as Peggy why these outcomes were overly ambitious.
“Do you really think you can get your students to do this?”
“I KNOW every single one of them can do this, and I KNOW I could get them to do it. (In Narnia I could.) I’m just not sure I have the time and resources to help them get there....”
My assistant principal reviewing new teacher resumes on her blackberry now. Peggy slowly and confidently nods at me. Her eyes say this was the conclusion she was hoping I’d come to when she began her line of questioning. “That’s something you’ll have to consider.”
I put my backpack on and leave the office with the outcomes I’d spent an entire weekend creating.
As Spanish class ends and I begin digging through my backpack for the work I’d planned for my ELLs (primarily recently-arrived Dominicans), one of my students asks me if I want to collect the homework from last night. “Oh my gosh, yes! Thank you for reminding me. Please, everyone give me the homework from last night.”
Most students look at each other and snicker. One with a big smile on his face: “Come on, mister. You know we don’t do homework.”
Something I’ll have to consider.
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