Since You Been Gone.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that "Fastred1" is my brother [?]... No, my blog has not died per se. More like it has taken a long restful vacation for recuperation. And apparently, during this hiatus, Blogger has changed over to some new Google format? I'm not sure what this means exactly, except for that it is somehow linked to my Gmail account now which makes me wonder, is Google planning on purchasing everything for sale in the universe of internet services?

The real reason I haven't been writing, asides from the obvious fact that I am not teaching, and therefore lacking in entertaining adolescent anecdotes, is that I'm not sure what I can write about in the realm of education that will be even remotely interesting for other people to read and not completely depressing and cynical. I continue to visit my former 6th graders in the Bronx about once a month, and I also visited a handful of my third graders from my first year of teaching, who are now in 6th grade at a charter school in Brooklyn. A former colleague of mine helped open the charter and took some of our kiddies with her.

I visited both schools within the span of 48 hours, and it was like night and day. At my old school, the children have quite literally taken over the halls. At any given moment, T-Rex and an assortment of hyper-sexual girls can be found roaming the halls, cursing, pushing each other around, hiding in the bathroom, ignoring the security guards, etc. They have found a replacement for the teacher who has my old students that quit. He is from England, and Shamra wrote me an email about him saying "Ms. ______, a new teacher has started teaching us ELA and he's from England and we can't understand anything he is saying. We miss you, Ms. _______. We could understand EVERYTHING you were saying." This, while flattering, just makes me feel sad. From what I have seen, there are a handful of new teachers at the school that are really great, and getting things done in the classroom. One guy, who actually taught his demo lesson in my classroom last year when he interviewed, is working with an all-girls class on writing personal narratives, and when I visited, I sat in on the class and was impressed. But from what MFT tells me, this is not the norm. About 6 teachers have quit mid-year, and have been replaced by people who were excessed and sitting in the district office waiting for openings.

When I visited the new charter school, which is known for its somewhat controversial behavior management tactics [namely that they are notorious for enrolling smart inner city kids with "tough" attitudes and basically putting them through "manners boot camp" and getting impressive results, but some question whether their tactics are dehumanizing or unethical in their harshness]. This network of charters is also known for producing high levels of achievement with low-income school populations, both in standardized testing and in graduation rates and higher education enrollments. I had braced myself for the worst, picturing some kind of robotic classroom setting and children who had been stripped of their personalities participating in rote drills. My favorite teacher-friend from my old school came with me, on a freezing cold day in December, to visit with our former students [I had taught them in the third grade, she in the fourth].

Fortunately, I was, for the most part, pleasantly surprised. The school is housed with in a larger building, just like the middle school I taught at last year, and from what I know about the rest of the schools in the building, they are pretty rough. We walked all the way up to the top floor, and learned that the students were finishing up a practice exam. The hallways were dead silent, which I generally find to be an eery quality in a school. But since it was a testing period, I guess this was appropriate [Later on, when regular classes were in session, we saw kids singing and chanting math rhymes and eavesdropped on music class with a full band of sixth graders playing instruments]. A teacher appeared in the hallway with her class, and they walked in one straight single-file line, down the center of the hall, and each of them turned on a dime, a perfect right angle, as they entered the stairwell. The boys were in suits, the girls in dresses. Apparently Friday is "professional dress" day. This was a little creepy.

We found our old colleague, and she was able to come into the hallway to speak with us, leaving her students quietly finishing up their practice test. She said they'd be out in 5 minutes for lunch and that we could all go downstairs together. When they came into the hallway, I saw three of my now-gigantic students and they asked their teacher if it was ok for them to come over and say hello to us. They were all taller than me and looked like little grown ups in their professional outfits. Paula started jumping up and down when hugging me and we almost both fell over. It was cute.

My friend and I, and about 8 of our old kids sat and ate lunch together in the cafeteria, which was shared by one of the other schools, and the environment on our side of the cafeteria vs. the other side was so completely distinctive that you had to wonder what it was that prevented the kids we knew from acting like the kids in the other school. Our former students were amazing. They showed us their writing, and their vocabulary lists which so far surpassed the sixth grade vocabulary I taught last year that I was embarrassed. They told us about the awards ceremony coming up, and the cool elective classes they take on weekends and how they love their teachers like they are family. I asked the kids if they minded that the kids from the other schools were being loud or rowdy in the hallway or at lunch and one of my old students said "Not really. I know they aren't climbing the mountain to college." I guess that is part of the behavior-brainwashing I've heard about...

I ran into Shavon on the lunch-line, from my second year of teaching, all dressed in a little shirt & tie and I thought about the day we sat in the cafeteria and he cried and said he wished he could go to a school where things weren't crazy all the time and from what I saw that day, he had managed to do just that. Unfortunately, my old favorite Demetri had transferred to another school after last year, and Tommy had apparently gone back to living with his real parents in the Bronx after his foster dad had become sick and was not well enough to take care of him. His foster dad was basically my right-hand man my first year of teaching, coming in and sitting with Tommy on his "bad" days, and tearing he and Demetri apart when they fought, if I couldn't do it myself.

After lunch, we got to see some behavior-management-in-action. There was a fifth grade boy, who we didn't know, sitting on a chair in the hallway, looking at the "school motto" which was basically a pledge of rules for the students to follow. He had a stack of about 100 sheets of looseleaf and a pencil, and he looked totally pissed. There was also a masking taped "X" on the floor nearby. His teacher came into the hall and dramatically told us how this little boy had stood up during the practice exam and thrown a crumpled up piece of paper at a classmate, and that his punishment was to recopy the pledge until all of the paper was full. This teacher, and the teacher we knew there, did a little back and forth banter, chastising the child in kind of a joke-y way, how they were disappointed, etc. She also explained that the masking tape was a mark to show where he had thrown the pencil she had originally given him. It was "evidence." The boy was basically silent through their banter, and continued to look very unhappy.

So here's the thing. I wonder whether this boy is actually going to fill up 100 sheets of paper with the school pledge, and what happens if he doesn't. I wonder who can "force" him to do that, or if at a certain point in the process, the teacher changes her mind and says he's done enough and maybe he goes to detention or something? Apparently, there is an extended-day detention in the evening after school ends for kids who have not behaved or are missing homework. I'm not sure I take any issue with the punishment, although it is a fairly pointless exercise. I just wonder whether it is effective. Will this kid think twice the next time he wants to act out? Apparently, according to our friend, it works. And based on the fact that they have about 35 kids in each class and virtually no behavior problems by the time winter rolls around is decent proof of this phenomenon. Is this the only way to get results? I've heard tales of misbehaving kids having to turn their uniform shirts inside out and none of their classmates talking to them. Is that humiliation? Is it only humiliation if the kid is so proud of their uniform shirt that they are upset when they cannot display it properly? Does it take something this extreme to manage tough kids?

There is an ongoing discussion both in schools and in grad programs on education about what "works" for inner city kids. I have worked in two places that have definitely not "worked" and visited about a half dozen other schools that have not "worked" to varying degrees. The only schools I have seen that have "worked" have had one thing in common: A staff that is essentially willing to give up their entire lives in order to serve the school & their students. They work from 7am till 5 or 6pm on weekdays, teach Saturday school, and do lesson planning and staff meetings on nights and weekends. They may be paid more, but only to scale of the extra hours they work. They are relentless in pursuing their school's mission, and the most crucial thing is, this is consistent across every single teacher and administrator in the school. There is staff support from administrators, and staff collaboration across the disciplines. Lesson planning and behavior management is shared and uniform across the school. In the schools I have taught in, there were always a handful of excellent teachers who were willing to go the extra mile, but this was generally so severely compromised by abusive administrators or teachers who never pulled their weight or used their contract to get out of anything they saw as "extra work" that it created an environment that was neither collaborative or conducive to wanting to put in extra time, especially since you were rarely given any kind of recognition for the extra effort. Who wants to hang around for extra hours in a building with an unpleasant or hostile environment? Who wants to collaborate with unfriendly staff members, or share their hard work if there is no reciprocation?

What I wonder is, is the only way a school can be successful in meeting the needs of underserved communities by having teachers who need to basically sacrifice their whole lives? If so, where can you find enough teachers like this to staff an entire city of public schools? And even if you could, is that kind of model sustainable for more than a few years, when these teachers inevitably burn-out from the hard work?

One of my professors suggested that if public schools had enough money, they could afford to pay two people to do the job of one person in a school. I guess he was implying that these hardworking teachers could halve their hours and share responsibility, thereby avoiding burn-out. But I'm not sure that two people could achieve this goal--part of what was so amazing about the kids in the charter school we visited was the intense bond they recognized between themselves and their teacher, and their awareness that the teacher was so entirely devoted to them. I don't know if two people could be consistent enough to create that same bond. On the other hand, would a teaching job requiring an 70 hour week be worthwhile if the salary was comparable to other professions with insane hours and stress? I don't know if a six figure salary would eliminate the "burn-out" factor, although I suppose it would make rationalizing the job easier.

Basically, after seeing both of these schools, and having always been in favor of public schools, I wonder whether public schools have enough autonomy or funding or man-power to create consistently effective schools, and whether there will ever be enough "amazing" teachers to fill the schools that need them. I'm not saying I don't think public schools can "work," since there are obviously many examples in NYC and elsewhere of inner city public schools that "work," but the common characteristic between all of these schools seems to be a staff that is willing to go above and beyond what is required of them by a teaching contract. And in my last school, our staff appeared to be on board with this kind of devotion, but mostly jumped ship by November, and many of us left at the end of the schoolyear to pursue other areas of education [myself included]. I have to wonder if I would have left if the rest of our staff had been willing to put in the time and effort as the handful of us who were not constantly using our contract to avoid extra responsibility. How can you really know for sure that a teacher is any good until you put them in the stressful environment of a public school and see how they react?

I think the other reason I haven't been writing is because most of the things I am thinking about schools are just plain depressing. I think the length of this post makes up for the last two months that I have not written, no?