This is why I wouldn't join myspace, and why my facebook profile can't even be searched if you are not already my friend.
After school ends for the day, you coach an athletic team until around 6 pm. Many of your athletes live miles away from school, and their parents often have more-than-part-time jobs. The school district does not run any after-school buses for lack of funding. Some of your athletes can't find rides home at night. (One walked for 45 minutes after the first day of practice). You know that the football coaches drive students home routinely, so you begin driving 2-3 of them home a few times a week.
A month later, you receive a memo from the superintendent. "At no time should a student be in a teacher's personal car". You tell the students, and a few begin missing practice.
Later that same week, you run into a problem. The biggest competition of the year is on Tuesday. You have an important practice scheduled for Saturday, the last time you'll be able to really work with the students before the big day. Your best athlete calls on Saturday morning: his mom is gone for the weekend, and he won't be able to come to practice because he has no ride, and no team member lives anywhere near him.
Do you go pick him up?
A quiet, sweet senior girl (we'll call her Jasmine) confides in you occasionally about her home life. Her mother is in prison (drug dealing - this is the third time) and her father has never been in the picture. She has a grandmother in the area, but they aren't close. Jasmine stays with her boyfriend, another shy, sweet student in one of your classes, who just barely qualifies as special ed and who often stays home from school because he doesn't feel like going (she tries to convince him to come -- she is a fairly good student). Jasmine is four months pregnant.
A few days before an upcoming week-long break, Jasmine hangs back after class to talk to you. She tells you that she has been feeling nervous because her boyfriend's mother's boyfriend (who also lives at the house) really doesn't like her. She tells you that he constantly yells at her, calls her names, and has a quick temper. Then, she tells you that the other night he was so mad that he threw a TV at her. She says that she is a little scared for the break because she "just doesn't want anything bad to happen".
What do you tell her? Do you tell anyone?
This morning I had a second article published in More Intelligent Life, the web version of Intelligent Life magazine, about teaching Things Fall Apart. This has been one of my favorite works to do with my students. Not so much for its subject matter (I prefer Beowulf) but because it represents a sort of personal success for me. Although this article is more specifically about this spring, teaching the novel in the fall will always be associated with a positive turning point in my teaching career.
When I was teaching Achebe in November, I finally fell into a comfortable pattern at this school -- where I found a balance between the daily bread and butter of reading and writing, and the more interactive activities like debate and roleplays. It was right around the time that I stopped feeling overwhelmed on a daily basis by my work, and when the students began to suspend their distrust and engage themselves in the material. Everything sort of ... clicked.
I've also been thinking. As much as I would enjoy staying in education (either teaching at the elementary level or, perhaps, sticking with secondary), writing is something I might very well pursue as a career....
From an op-ed in the New York Times today.
"An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds."
Greg Mankiw writes this week about the giant educational disparity between the rich, and everyone else. Today,
he links to a research paper done by Heckman and LaFontaine about the enormously low graduation rates among blacks and Hispanics.
It doesn't surprise me that the national graduation rate is much lower across the board than usually reported. Our school doesn't always take drop-outs off the rolls -- like most other schools, funding is determined by the number of students enrolled for that year. So why not wait until the end of the year to decide who is no longer attending? Add that to the fact that paperwork in a large, underfunded high school is pretty overwhelming, and the offices who are supposedly in charge of said paperwork are quite chaotic... it would a miracle if we managed to get the numbers even close as it is.
The first line of the Heckman/LaFontaine paper:
and the skill level of its future workforce.
Just another way that Mississippi is, by far, the unhealthiest state in this nation.
Tonight, while waiting in line at our little local grocery store, I struck up a short conversation with two children in line. They looked to be about 4 or 5.
"Whatcha got there?"
Beaming shyly, they both look down at the (giant) pieces of candy they are waiting to buy. The little girl finally holds hers up.
"What's that one taste like?"
She immediately responds, "Candy!!" I laugh and point to the other little boy...
"His looks sour.. Do you like sour candy?" He nods.
Like most children around here, they seemed to be dumbstruck when an adult addresses them with anything other than annoyance or physical directions.
A moment later, I am paying, but I hear their mother shouting at them. "Put that down!" She is wrenching the candy from the little girl and putting it on the conveyor belt to be rung up. Then she grabs the little girl by the wrist and drags her around the side of the counter.
As I walk out, another mother is smacking her three-year-old son as he reaches for a Cheeto on the floor. "Stop that! Get away from there!" She adds these statements as an afterthought; she has already finished hitting him and dragging him away from the offending object.
It is so obvious how my students ended up with such small vocabularies, and with such weak grasps of grammar. And why they react with such disrespect towards adults, why they are so hard to discipline. I see this type of parenting everywhere.. in restaurants, supermarkets, at track meets... even on parent conference day.
People parent their children how they themselves are raised -- we fall back on what we know. How can this cycle be broken? I am tried of seeing a style of parenting that holds back a child's verbal development, that encourages physical confrontations over reasonable discussion, and that discourages response or thought in favor of silence and fistfuls of candy.
Ms. G links to a fantastic article by Will Okun, a columnist/blogger for the New York Times who I cannot recommend enough on issues of education. His posts are insightful, and absolutely ring true to everything I experience in the classroom.
Social promotion is a tough issue. I "socially promoted" many, many of my students. Very few of the students I teach are on grade level when they arrive in high school. If the high school teachers at my school did not socially promote, we would have a graduation rate of about 20%. Like Will Okun says, failing a student can cause them to lose their desire to stay in school... I would rather see a student continue learning as much as they can for another year or two, than drop out because they are discouraged.
In the lower grades, my opinion is a little more mixed. These kids come in with a handicap - it isn't just bad teaching. They arrive with low verbal skills, no exposure to correct grammar or books or stimulating discussions. Passing them encourages them to keep trying, rather than marking them as "stupid" or "slow" -- which could mentally hamstring their academic performance for years. At the same time, another year of 2nd grade (where basic reading skills are emphasized) just might make the difference between a child who will be able to read in the future, and one who will struggle, lagging behind for the rest of their time in school.
I do like the idea of more tracking. Creating different levels of diplomas appeals to me. Perhaps there should be a diploma for basic skills and responsibility. It would signal employers that this student went to high school, came every day, worked, learned a good deal, is able to read most material, knows basic algebra, has some dedication, etc --- even if they aren't up to par with a "12th grade" education. We already have a separate diploma like this for special education, why not create two more levels?
"he was french and blind."
A principal in Texas threatens that he will kill a group of teachers if they don't improve test scores. Hey, if NCLB isn't stressful enough already, now you better watch your back. No pressure!
I haven't written much about state-testing on this blog. Mainly, because I am one of the lucky ones that doesn't need to worry too much about it. I teach almost entirely seniors, with some juniors mixed in. In high school, English is only state-tested once, during 10th grade. Because students must pass the English II state test to graduate, most juniors, and almost all seniors, have either passed the English II test or dropped out.
The tests may not affect me much, but they are a huge deal for our school. Principals pound the issue at weekly meetings, teacher and student schedules are rearranged mid-year to provide extra help or space, chunks of the school must be shut down once a month to create silence for re-testers, or mock-testers, or real-testers. Teachers are always fretting about their scores. Students are always fretting about their scores. My school has squeaked by at a level 3 (satisfactory) for a number of years, but everyone knows we are just barely on the cut-off for level 2 (under-performing), where the punishments kick in from NCLB.
My opinions on testing are mixed. Schools need national accountability. Teaching in a school well below national standards has strengthened that opinion. There are plenty of teachers here who do very little "teaching", so these students have been getting shafted since kindergarten. Tests help to get teachers motivated and point out those who struggle. At the same time, tests are a headache. They are not always good indicators of knowledge. And we are being forced into a situation we can't control. You can't get a kid's reading level up three grade levels in one year. And if you don't, and he fails, you and your high school are punished, not the last six English teachers he had at the last three schools. Changes need to start at the elementary level. Once they get to 9th/10th grade, they are already on their path. As our program director says "They are already moving along a predetermined course. You can only nudge them one degree further towards success"
Perhaps NCLB should have phased-in state testing. Started for the first five years just focused on the elementary level. Once all 5th graders became proficient, it could have turned its attention to the middle grades. By the time they were done there, I imagine the high school scores would already have begun moving upwards, and they wouldn't have had much work left.
They've just tried to do too much, too fast. As it is, schools are, quite literally, killing themselves to catch up.
