my "letter of intent" has been sitting on my desk for a week now, just staring at me everytime I walk by.
The idea of coming back next year depresses me. The idea of leaving depresses me.
Part of me wants a job that I will look forward to in the morning. I want to be excited about what I am doing, and get respect from the people around me. I want to come home and read a book for fun. I don't want to have to work on my job until 10 at night and all day on weekends. I don't want to be stressed, every single day......But I can't stand the thought of telling them goodbye. Or of doing something that does not give me a feeling of purpose. Or of quitting halfway.
this job is not for perfectionists.
I haven't been very good about becoming a part of my local community. Sure, I went to some football games, made an appearance at a few soccer games, and ate my way through two local "new teachers" dinners ... but I really don't leave the house much. I wanted to go to church every weekend, but after a few Sundays I just couldn't do it -- Sunday mornings are the one time I can really focus on lesson planning. So, other than the teachers at my school, I haven't really met anyone (seriously).
Today, I realized I wouldn't get any work done if I stayed around the house. So I packed up my stuff and checked out the recently-opened coffee shop in Leland.
It. was. amazing.
I spent the whole day curled up around a big table, listening to music, chatting away with a parade of townspeople and enjoying the free wireless and yummy baked goods. And I managed to get a ton of work done! I couldn't have asked for a better Saturday.
In the morning, there were the old men hanging out and cracking jokes (one even toting an oxygen tank) -- "Hey, don't call me Mister, you need to have at least a hundred dollars in the bank to be a mister!"
Then there was the family crowded onto the retro couches -- "I want to cook polenta tomorrow." "Now you don't ask no redneck how to cook no grits!" And a few minutes later, "Now, that was an awesome deer down on y'all's place."
Later, the moneyed woman who owns the prawn farm just outside of town calling her daughter over - "Come meet my new friend, Anna!"
A 23 year-old with a killer southern drawl and a dead deer in the back of his truck told me all about the ice storm of '94 (I gather it has a legend that rivals the Halloween blizzard of '93)
Then there was the town crazy man -- I only knew of him as the "weird yelling guy" (he hangs around the gas station yelling at people) until today. As it turns out, his name is Alan -- he is deaf and doesn't realize he is yelling. And while he might not be exactly right in the head, he is actually a very sweet man. He came in, yelled at the girl behind the counter and they proceeded to have a friendly gesture-rich conversation.... who knew! He left with a piece of pizza she gave him, and a happy wave in my direction.
I also made friends with Sarah, the girl working behind the counter -- whenever the place emptied out, she came to sit and work on her coursework from Delta State. From time to time, a few neighborhood kids wandered in looking for something to do and wanting to say hi to her. The owner of the place lets them come hang out after school - if they do their homework quietly, she'll give them a little cookie or treat of some kind. One little boy came in, shyly avoided Sarah's hellos, and worked on a puzzle in the corner for a while. At one point, he wanted to color, but didn't have anything to write on, so I offered him a piece of paper. Without a word, he took it and disappeared. A few minutes later, he ran up, placed a note on my table, and then ran away again to hide behind the counter with Sarah. If I could get the scanner to work on our computer, I'd put it in here -- it made my day.
From: Dj
To: Friend
1. nice to meet you!!!
2. Thanks for the paper.
3. I like your hair.
4. I met you today.
5. you pretty.
I think I'm going to be spending a lot more time at Miss Molly's from now on....
I got seven kids to fill out voter registration forms today. I'm going to bring them to the county clerk by the end of the week so that they can vote in the Democratic primary on March 10. Now that we've chatted about it a few times, they at least know who is running, even if they don't know too much about policy.
My Learning Strategies kids went from hating me (as they worked through a series of ACT reading passages that I broke down for them) to five minutes later, loving my class (as they did improv games). Kendrick and Brittany as "passengers experiencing turbulence" and Ashley and Sharay "arguing over a McDonalds order" almost made me cry laughing. They were so inspired, that reading aloud Raisin in the Sun went really well. Travis, who usually has a very bad attitude about school, even went so far as to say, "Hey, this ain't so bad" as we put away the books.
My fourth block kids were incredibly rude today. From a group of seniors, who are pretty good kids, they were just being so disrespectful. I yelled at them, and shamed them for their stupidity (Sorry Dr. Monroe!). Then I told them that I would no longer show them the awesome battle scene from Gladiator that I had been planning -- to show Anglo-Saxon warrior culture. Frustrating afternoon.
Homeroom was out of control.
A teacher was crying next to me during our faculty meeting. She also had "a day".
Our principal, during the faculty meeting, as he talked about other people's perceptions of him:
"That man is crazy! Crazy like a fox, right, that's why the fox chases his tail!"
I am not sure what we were supposed to take from that, but then again, most of what we talk about during the meetings seems somewhat 'off-subject'. No matter how frustrating my day, at least that man somehow manages to make me laugh during faculty meetings.
Kids are ever-obsessed with the stereotypical 'white' high schools of the movies.... "Did the cheerleaders rule the school at your high school, ms. m?" "Was you cool?" "Was there a nerd table at lunch?"
During our faculty meeting this week, our principal had a few great quotes: "If the devil showed up at your door looking like a young Denzel Washington cut like 50 Cent, oh, you'd open the door!" and then later, "If the Devil showed up at my my door, he ain't getting in -- I'll shoot him up in here!"
Darrius, after school: "I didn't know you was the shot put coach, oh i'll be out there"
Student shouting in class: "It was R that was laughin and being loud, Ms. M! (and then, to R) Watch out, or Grendel is going to come and smash you!" I love it when kids make jokes and references to things we learn in class...
I found out today that a former summer school student of mine is in jail. He broke into a house and beat two of its inhabitants with a hammer (they were ICU due to their head injuries). I'm not sure if his intent was robbery, or if he knew the people he went after....
In any case, I am really upset about this. It was fantastic to have Desley in class. He was so positive -- he always had a smile, his hand was always in the air to answer a question. He was bright. He was just behind, and, by his own admission, occasionally lazy. But in our class this summer, he was never lazy. He went out of his way to greet the teachers and ask us how we were doing. He was the center of attention and loved to crack jokes. He was a good athlete --until recently, he had a football scholarship waiting for next year. He was an actor -- always willing to jump in front of the class and help act out a scene or participate in the set. He was a positive influence on the other kids in summer school -- he made it "cool" to try in our class.
Actually, this makes me physically ill. What is wrong with our world/this community/our society/the media/his upbringing/his parents/childhood and prenatal nutrition/our educational system/our expectations/this culture that would warp a kid to this point? He shouldn't have ended up in jail. I can't help thinking that if Desley had been born somewhere else -- away from poverty, or to a family that had the emotional resources to support him and push him in the right direction..... If he had, Desley would be on his way to a fantastic college -- a stand-out student-athlete with enough confidence to do anything.
Its just sickening.
Ms. G passed along a great New York Times opinion piece written by Will Okun, who teaches in an inner-city school and writes occasionally about his experiences.
This article, like most of his others, rings very true to my experiences. My students, by and large, are not readers. There are a few girls who are always toting the latest Zane novel, (Zane being a sort of Danielle Steel of African-American literature) but most have only ever read in classrooms -- and only passages from textbooks. The majority of the veteran teachers exclusively use the literature textbooks in class. Our literature textbooks each have a play in full, (The senior year has Macbeth, the Junior year, The Crucible) but most students go through high school having only read 1-2 books for class. The Teach for America teachers at our school teach books, and a few of the veterans (my predecessor taught Of Mice and Men and an English teacher down the hall teaches Road to Memphis) but its pretty shocking how few students are reading the classics, or reading any books at all. A quick survey of my students shows that about 1 in 15 "might pick up a book for fun".
Ideally, I'd like to do a mix of readings -- read a classic or two, but mix in works which speak to my students in ways that they relate to. While I strongly believe in teaching "the classics", Okun is right -- themes and values (and even boring literature terminology like simile, or alliteration) spring to life in discussion when they are wrapped in a package that my students enjoy. Unfortunately, there are two problems with this. First, semester-long classes are just a little too short to pack in much of a "mix". Realistically, if keep short readings/poetry to a minimum, we can only really read three full works in a 4-month period. (But I do like to do some poetry and short stories!) Secondly, our school does not have many class sets of books. We have the canon. We do not have the kinds of books Okun chooses to read with his kids. With a few exceptions, I can only give my kids advanced, white-male-written, canon-type books--- unless I want to pay out of my pocket. (Although, miracle! Yesterday the librarian announced 5 new sets of books just came in-- all by African-American authors!)
In my Senior English class, I am sticking to the British Literature outline, only because I felt pressure to conform to the state standards in the fall, and I don't want to start again from scratch. I'll be teaching Beowulf and Macbeth (which appear in our textbook) but like last semester, I am going to read Things Fall Apart. TFA is not ideal -- the setting, characters and conflict are far removed from my students' lives -- but the beautifully simple language is much more engaging to them. Now that I have essentially been handed an English elective as my second prep ("just teach them the ACT" the office tells me), I am planning on playing around with books my kids might get into. I'd like to teach Monster, an award-winning book (written like a play) by Walter Dean Meyers about a teenager in jail struggling with his inner thoughts and fears. After seeing the new class sets in the library (and making a few trips to half-price book stores in Minnesota) I'm also thinking of doing The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. This class will be mostly discussion-based -- and I am looking forward to getting a lot from the kids out of these discussions.
I suppose my own personal goal for my classroom all along has been to create readers out of my students. Or, if not readers, at least students who enjoy reading when assigned it. I think I miserably failed with my seniors in the fall, but most of my juniors loved To Kill a Mockingbird -- like Will Okun, I was surprised, (and blissful!) when my students said, "No, keep reading!" in class....
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"Ms. M, you got fat! You must been eating good during break"
"She cut her hair, too!"
"Yeah, she put on a few pounds and cut her hair, but she look good though."
"Yeah, you look better, Ms. M."
If I were principal of our school, I would begin by hiring two new in-school suspension supervisors.
The current supervisor lets the kids hang out, listen to music and talk. His back-up is entirely too friendly, and borderline inappropriately unprofessional with students. That is not ISS. The two new ISS supervisors would be tough talking women. They would be trained to meet the student at the door of the room, escort them to a desk facing the wall, and give them a copying assignment. The student would be forced to silently copy the assignment -- the bigger the offense, the more times. Students would begin to hate silent-ISS, to the point where they would actually get sad about being sent there, and perhaps even beg to stay in class.
No student would be allowed to leave ISS without a signed piece of paper (by both women) stating his or her clearance, the amount of time spent in ISS, and the time at which they were released. These women would be competent enough to compile an accurate list of which students were in ISS when, (EVERY DAY) and bring that list promptly to the attendance office at the end of the day. The attendance woman would then remove those students from the cut list. I cannot count the number of times students have claimed to have been in ISS (truthfully) but shown up on the cut list - the attendance woman gets no list, and gets confused easily. I also cannot count the number of times a student returned from ISS in the middle of a class without a slip. I would also buy ISS a phone. Because it does not have one. If I do check later with the incompetent ISS man, my student was almost always telling the truth, they simply had no way to prove it.
I would buy ISS a much larger trailer to accommodate more students, and send many more of them there. If a student is sent to the office and the principal is out doing observations -- the student goes to ISS.
I would get rid of homeroom. There is no reason that kids need to sit in homeroom from 3:30 until 4:05 every day. It is just asking for them to go crazy.
During the old homeroom time, I would require that teachers participate or lead remediation, test prep, a post-college class (college application/ACT prep/resume writing class), or an extracurricular (we need theater, art, book club, a better newspaper, a fiction compilation, dance groups affliated with school, etc) . The lowest performing students would be required to stay for remediation/test-prep, seniors would be required to stay one day a week for the college/job extravaganza, and everyone else would have the option of staying for a club, or going home.
I would distribute questionnaires to students about their teachers' abilities. Incompetent teachers practice, and put on, a show for observations.
Per Ms. D's suggestion, I would expel students with more than 15 referrals. After the 8th referral, every single additional referral would warrant one day of parent monitoring. Not only would this bring more parents into school, it would be a severe deterrent. Parents do not want to take a day off of work, students do not want their mothers breathing down their necks. Parents would do a better job punishing their child if their own time and energy were at stake. And every day that a parent is monitoring them is one less day that they can act out and disturb the learning environment. it is not the school's job to teach these children how to behave, it is our job to educate them -- we need to put the accountability for behavior back on the parents, and move our focus to accountability for education.
I would take the 7 million dollars that the school just came into, completely scrap the plans for the "beautiful new athletic complex" and put the money into something meaningful. I would invest it wisely, and use the interest to give big salary bonuses to teachers who improve scores, funds for teacher-proposed projects, and, perhaps, small financial bonuses for students who make the honor roll. Not only would this draw community attention, and perhaps, support (which we are lacking) to the school's new innovative methods to "turn itself around", it would more than likely draw good teachers from other areas and schools to replace the horrendous ones that I would fire at the end of the year.
Cash incentives for teacher and student performance would be fun; New York City is doing both. Related article here.
Growing up my dad gave me cash incentives -- he paid me 25 cents for every 50 pages of a book I read on my own. As soon as I finished a book, I entered it on a spreadsheet which kept statistics on my progress. Certainly the quarters had a big influence. I ended up averaging 80 pages a day from about 1992-1995 (I loved Boxcar Children, Beverly Clearly, and Avi, in case you are wondering). Even though my dad stopped paying me at a certain point, I kept up at this rate -- by that time I didn't care anymore about the money.....
