Not The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming Round

Been looking from outside, I’ve been watching
But I don’t know what to say/
Changed the old backdrop, same face
But not who it used to be/
Trying to get out, not getting, thinking you're everything
You said you wouldn’t be
–Avail, Tuesday

I completed three hundred percent of my TFA commitment. I beat the 0-5 year departure curse. But I resigned and I’m leaving. Around the blogs, around the policy world, around the union halls, folks cast about for the reasons why people like me do things like this.

This is why I didn’t.

I wasn’t prepared.
I wasn’t, but that’s not why I’m leaving. I got through the don’t-know-what-I’m-teaching-and-don’t-know-how-to-teach-it-anyway phase, figuring stuff out, thinking about why things did and did not work, selecting areas to get better continuously, and working really really hard. It’s this last part that bears at least some mentioning. My lack of specialized, focused preparation – a lack that is close to near-universal for those of us manning classrooms in the world of high need urban English Language Learners – put some serious stress and strain on the work. Much like the Saturn 4-door I’ve used to get from the 415 to the 408 daily lo these many years, my engine’s fine, my transmission works, but man, I got a lot of miles on me. A lot of miles. This the endless travel over the dashed lines of self-improvement; the grind of figuring out how to do this job well, because my god, there’s too much at stake here to continue being so half-assed and poor at all this. I can still run, but I’m muddy to the windows, and you don’t want to use me to pick up your prom date.

I’m not successful.
I am. By any reasonable measure I’ve been an educator worth the dollars transferred electronically to my checking account each month. It’s worth noting perhaps that teaching is generally bereft of meaningful acknowledgement of success and accomplishment, and so it is difficult to provide any measures for success. To the extent that we have any, I realize I’ve reaped a great deal – leading PD, speaking, talking to reporters, pie-charts, student essays – and that the extent of this reaping is probably disproportionate to the work I’ve done.

I’m not supported.
I don’t even know what this means, but it’s something I hear teachers say all the time. I’m not sure the people who proclaim the not-supportedness could even articulate the nature of this not-supporting or how it could possibly be rectified. For the record, I’m not not-supported. Never have been.

I can no longer stand to work with the disastrously declined youth of today, nor their apathetic, uninvolved families.
Oh, please.

I’m not paid enough.
Okay, so this work is exponentially more “important” than many other undertakings that are far more handsomely compensated. We all should be paid accordingly, and those of us who do the work well should be paid at least as well as your above-average plumber. That said, I’m paid pretty darn well relative to my peers, and certainly well enough for an unmarried fellow whose biggest expenses after rent continue to be whiskey, books, and college loans. Benefits? Got em. Even used em twice [1. vaccinations for S. America adventure 2. separated shoulder hedge-diving on Geary Blvd]. No complaints.

I really want to work at KIPP.

Uh, no.

I’m burnt-out.
This is another one of those things I hear teachers say frequently, and more often than not it prompts an immediate, and probably unfair, response: Burnt-out? Fool, you gotta be on. fire. first. then maybe we can talk about burnt-out.

I think I was on fire, once, and maybe most days still am. If the flames are less high and maybe less intense than they once were, it's only because there's a different type of fuel burning now. Still, the kids are, in the words of Don DeLillo, "an open wound of need and want." There is no free time, no mental energy, no chunk of your finances that cannot be poured in that gaping wound like the most potent of Hydrogen Peroxides, a pouring that fuels the kind of consumption that only reinforces the pouring, justifies it, encourages it, emboldens future pourings and the expansion of the pouring into a variety of other areas. This is the root of the famous many-hats cliche, the thing so many of us simultaneously relish and decry about this work. I'm not happy unless I'm putting the best product in front of kids, but I'm not necessarily happy in the constant construction and revision of that product. I'm not happy unless I use work hours 80-82 to take kids to the District All-Star Basketball Game, but I'm not necessarily happy working hours 80-82. I'm not happy unless I'm being the teacher I see in my head, but the process of finding that guy and living as him no longer makes me happy.

Is that burn-out? If you can connect the dots, feel free, cuz I don't know how to chase my tail on this anymore.

Ed In 08 Blogger Summit...

...has come and gone, and a good time was had by all. I heard some interesting discussions, listened to some quality ideas floated (extended school days) and some silly ones (paying kids to read books), was unsurprised by the opposition that exists to both the quality and silly reforms, got to talk about the purpose behind this undertaking: the idea that a space that sees our problems as fundamentally adult-created and therefore adult-solveable is inherently a place of hope, regardless of any surface negativity or frustration. I also drank like eight cups of coffee to compensate for my red-eye voyage.

I also got to tell this story (this version is better than the original).

Moderator: Tell us about how you started blogging and how your blog became well-known.
Me: I'm not sure how well known this blog is. There are certainly hordes of blogs with more hits, etc. But for me, the thing that got a wider audience was when this guy named Russo, who some of you may remember as this morning's moderator, listed this blog as one of the top blogs you shouldn't read anymore. Dull and a downer were the reasons given. Then, this other guy, Rotterham, writes to say he liked this blog, and only found out about it because Russo trashed it. Then, Matthews says he likes this blog because there's some heart-warming tales of middle school girls basketball, which, if I never wrote about again, only two readers would miss in the least.

More
Three minutes of stellar interviewing is not available for all of your youtubing pleasure (we should remember that some of the hair situation is accounted for the red-eyeing). Shout-out to my buddy [Victory's] undergrad-paper-writing go-to-line around 0:52.

Meet Jake

Jake's a graduating senior at Yale, with only a few days left, which means that as you read this, he is either hungover or drunk. This is a binary condition, admitting no other possibilities.

Jake's a smart guy, worked hard all four years on an interdisciplinary American Studies/ Sociology/ Econ degree he designed more or less himself. He can tell you a lot about the changing face of the American worker, and how film has reflected, driven, and (re)created our (mis)understandings of the American proletariat. Kid can turn a phrase, read and think, and play Beirut pretty well. Last summer, Jake did some volunteering at an outward bound program his girlfriend was all jazzed about. Her interest soon waned, but Jake stayed involved, and managed to work his experiences guiding the underprivileged New Haven youth through the rigors of proper campsite maintenance into many a classroom discussion and/or drunken pontification. Besides getting on everyone's nerves, this became the basis of the application essay he wrote for Teach For America, and one of the experiences he mentioned in his interview.

Jake's gonna report for duty at the TFA Los Angeles Training Institute sometime in the middle of June. He doesn't know how to diagnose, scaffold, or assess. He doesn't know what CELDT stands for and wouldn't know what to do with that information even if he did. Jake thinks objectives are something second-tier applicants put on the top of resumes and he's generally aware that standardized tests are badbadverybad, but couldn't really tell you why in any great detail. Jake has a vague notion that he'll be teaching reading and writing to some kids who don't do either one of those things very well, but he has not the slightest concrete understanding of what that will entail, or how to go about getting it done.

He's gonna work hard, though. They're gonna drill him on as much of a specialized skill set as possible, giving him enough to get moving, and relying on his passion, vision, and commitment to get him the rest of the way there. Let's hope Jake soaks up all requisite knowledge like a sponge, and arrives armed with some foundational understandings of the work. Let's hope he makes good use of the myriad resources thrown his way, and puts in the time to bring structure and organization to his efforts. Let's hope the smart-and-excited-trumps-experienced gamble pays off.

Let's hope like hell, cuz Jake or someone like him will be in room D2 next year, teaching my kids. I resign on Monday.

Imagine No Barriers

Teach For America's Alumni Magazine, One Day, is sponsoring an essay contest.

"Imagine no barriers. No limits. How would you reinvent the profession of teaching?"

The deadline has already passed, so those wanting to throw down 400 words on this one are pretty much SOL -- my own 160-words-too-long submission just made it in -- but ya'll should feel free to take on the comment section with fervor.

In addition to the draconian word limit (seriously, it takes me half that to just get through an opening anecdote), I struggle with the imagine no barriers line. Cuz we've got barriers. Lot's of em. And it seems to me that such a huge part of what we do is struggle to find success within the context of those barriers, push the constraints of the barriers out as much as we can, uproot and replant the barriers a little further down the road. Now, suddenly, I've got no barriers? Who's got time to think like that?

More: (cuz I know ya'll were holding your breath)
My essay has been chosen as one of the five winners. It will run in the summer 2008 edition of One Day.

From Alan Keyes To John Edwards

The writings on this site have been nominated for the Ed in 08 Best of the Blogs Award.

Allow whatever Spirit you understand most fully to move you in whatever ways you feel are most appropriate, given this particular bit of current events.

More:
I did not win, nor did I finish second. Popular vote mechanics for these things do not work. The voice of the people is actually the voice of a dog, and I have no love for their mumbles and grunts. We need awards that are selected on the basis of pre-determined markers of quality, as chosen and evaluated by residents of the ivory tower, and not the gutteral howl of the faceless masses.

Overkill

[1] A gaggle of girls in my various classes have decided the whole tío-sobrina shouldn’t die, and we’ve pretty much abandoned using each other’s names at this point. New kid’s struggling with this like you wouldn’t believe, coming up to me and saying: “But… like… you’re not really their tío are you?” I assure him that I am, but he’s still having all kinds of problems with it: “But… like… how is that even possible?” I offer a non-explanation explanation, and he walks away mumbling: “I don’t even think you know what tío means.”

[2] I’ve written more referrals in the past six instructional days (6) than in the previous one thousand forty-three (4).

[3] The other thing with those girls is that they are now getting with guys from my various classes, (Spring has sprung! Spring has sprung!) and are extending the nature of the relationship to that traditional role wherein the familial elder (me, apparently) has to grant some kind of permission before the whole novios thing takes off. So now we’ve got this scenario going where I’m chastising male students for not discussing with me beforehand the nature of their gross adolescent romantic plans. Like I want to hear any of that.

[4] Seriously, I got dumped on last month. HP C is not rocking, because of these four loud girls, one given up kid, but we’re doing okay, and with 23 CST 1s and 2s, I’m holding it down.

Next, the deluge.

Enter, project kid, who I’m trying to rescue and rehabilitate (#24). Enter, two 8th grade girls who should have been in HP C since the beginning of the year, got dumped in the wrong class, and are coming back in to receive the instruction the deserve (#25 and #26). Enter, frequently absent girl with a host of self-described issues; she completes work, but can all attempts to engage in partner and group work (of which there is much this time of year) is an adamant non-starter (#27). Enter, kid who got kicked out of three middle schools in the last 18 months, hung out with us for a few weeks, withdrew, and is now back, without binder, backpack, or any inclination to work (#28). Enter, kid who got kicked out of his continuation school for non-attendance and drug use (#29). Enter, two kids who got moved to a higher level math class and so are making a parallel move into my class, bringing with them a refusal to work, inexplicable crappy attitudes, and just a host of crummy, petty annoyances (#30 and #31).

All this happened over the course of like two weeks. Twenty-three percent of the class is brand new. With the exception of the two returning 8th graders, every kid is a project kid, someone I’d eventually get on my team, given sufficient time and relationship building. We don’t have that time. And I’m tired. And it’s end-game time. And we weren’t doing so hot before. And they all connect with each other in their pursuit of dead-end shittiness, luring two-three other kids out of the boat and into the dark water. Suddenly the room is packed, and instead of struggling with the loud girls and the kid who lives to antagonize, I’m struggling with the loud girls, the kid who lives to antagonize, the redemption project kid, the two kicked-out of everywhere kids, one of the returning 8th graders who can cause problems after her A-quality work is finished, the in-check-but-barely kid who now is just completely lost to us, a calm poor-worker who has decided to up the ante on me, and anyone else who thinks all this crap is more interesting that indirect characterization.

Instead of going into our work with 90 percent of the kids fundamentally down, and I’m at about 60 percent, and you just can’t work like that. I’m cancelling projects and reevaluating end-of-the-year work because we lack the culture and stability to complete anything, trying to find a way to put that other 40 percent in a box that doesn’t look or feel as good as the way the rest of us roll, but there’s just too damn many of them, and too much of the other 60 percent too enamored of the new way of things to make fundamental change.

Six weeks left and I don’t think I can get em back.

Good Ideas For Inhibiting School Growth (iv)

In addition to pretty much making a sloppy mess of the first two days of state testing, next accuse one of the more talented and ardent teachers* at the site of intentionally sabotaging the testing process by encouraging students to guess, leave portions of the exam incomplete, and generally perform as poorly as possible. Claim this teacher asked students to skip questions on last March's state writing exam, allowing the fact the assessment consists of a single question, impossible to skip, to inform this claim not at all. Cite as motivation this particular teacher's discontent with recent mean-spirited, absurd, and unprofessional HR decisions and his desire to lead a cabal of teachers in ruining five years of sustained school growth as protest of said mean-spirited, absurd, and unprofessional HR decisions. Make sure stuff like this becomes the focus during state testing.

[Past good ideas: (i) (ii) (iii) ]


*This particular teacher's resignation is available upon request, by the way, and there is no need to engage in the type of character assassination and credential threatening courses of action that have colored all recent interactions with individuals who had the temerity to bust brains and asses to dramatically improve the worst middle school in the county, demonstrate the possibility of district-based reform based on investing in human capital, and provide one of the few legitimate, non-fabricated sources of positive p.r. for this particular school district.

Mark Your Calendars: Washington, D.C.

I'll be heading out and leaving the kids in the assuredly capable hands of a District substitute on May 15 & 16 to get my panel discussion on at the Ed in 08 Blogger Summit.

Rumor has it I'll be speaking on a panel about blogging in the trenches*, one of those ed phrases that just drives me nuts. My job is difficult, and on days like yesterday, appallingly frustrating, but no one's chucking mustard gas at me and I've never been asked to charge a fortified position, so maybe we could dial down the rhetoric a wee bit, hmm? Also, one of my co-panelists is the guy who throws down over here, and while I read frequently and with great interest, there's just no way we're both in the same trench, is there?

Additionally, there will be awards for the best blogs. Given this blog's Alan-Keyes-like performance in past blog competitions, I can't hope for much, but will nevertheless have remarks prepared well in advance of the announcement.



*Click, link, and scroll all the way down. Seriously, do it.

Sound The Trumpets

My team and I finally finished our Master's Degree "thesis," known locally as an Action Research Project, overcoming some pretty intense distractions along the path toward completion. Here's everything you need to know about this stellar piece of work.

71: number of pages
20: appearances of the word quintile
1:1: ratio of pie-charts to bar graphs in the research findings
0: number of respected statistical measurements utilized to determine the extent of statistical significance of the reported findings
0: number of respected statistical measurements taught and/or required by the degree program to determine the extent of the statistical signficance of the reported findings
4: appearances of the word homogeneous
3: references to a certain geographical land-mass used to illustrate a lack of academic performance
2: inside jokes
14: number of words in the title
7: percent of the words in the title that are not real words, but rather words made-up by this particular researcher

Good Idea For Inhibiting School Growth (iii)

When kids leave backpacks unattended in front of classroom doors during breakfast, brunch, and lunch, some things will inevitably go missing. Sometimes the things that go missing are candy. This is sad and certainly damages the campus environment. When grossly out of their league vice-principals tacitly encourage campus police to lay hands upon a potential student candy thief, pinning both arms to the small of the teenager's back and then forcing them painfully and unnaturally upward toward the shoulder blades, incapacitating further movement before searching him for weapons, and thereafter detaining the young man in a classroom and threatening him with incarceration in the juvenile detention facility before bestowing upon him a court citation and summons to appear, I gotta think the damage done to the campus environment is far, far worse.

When certain high-ranking District officials tell a group of outraged and angry parents half-truths about recent hiring and firing decisions, blatant lies about the lack of complaints regarding the police presence, and make the incomprehensible statement that these officers have been nothing but a benefit to our schools, you start eye-balling the calendar in a whole new way.

Mercury News Craps The Bed On The Achievement Gap

Maybe you read or saw or followed a link to last week's launch of a five-part series on the achievement gap, as viewed through the lens of culture. The article posits a destructive "cool vs. smart" dichotomy in the 408's low-income, high-Latino schools, concluding "too many Latino students are choosing cool over school."

And you see this thesis, and the accompanying CDE-released charts on student performance, and you can't help but think you just read something with all the value of a fart in a carpool.

Two reporters -- one of whom I spoke with for more than two hours before this thing was published -- found some Latino kids that said it wasn't cool to be smart and some Vietnamese kids who said it was. It's not cool to be smart? Fine. I'll take that on that face value. But these Merc reporters want to go further with this. They want us to believe that this cool over smart attitude arises out of an individual's cultural identity. They want us to believe that certain cultures support smart while other cultures support not-smart, vis-a-vis that inherent nature of the culture/ ethnicity itself and its place in the American experience. One reporter said as much to me when we spoke, and the structure of the article, that pairing of smart vs. cool rhetoric with achievement data, says the rest.

Thing is, the writing fails to support this implicit claim of causation, and outside of junk science and right-wing talk radio, there's little else to support it either. For what it's worth, anyone who teaches in the 408 can go track down some Vietnamese kids who don't like smart and some Latino kids who don't like cool. I'll get that done for you in about three minutes. Yet, our intrepid reporting team sees some data on achievement gaps, finds some teens who say being smart goes against their peers' cultural understandings of the self, and does some post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc thing that gets spewed out in thousands of newspapers. None of it is valid or useful. None of it promotes a deeper or more nuanced understanding of the expression of inequity we find in these data.

What's really going on here is (yet another) confusion of causes and effects. You think those kids for whom achievement is uncool, unpopular, and bizarrely un-Latino had these a priori notions driving their under-achievement? You think these notions arise out of their DNA and the functionings of their families? Oh, please. These attitudes, to the extent they exist when reporters aren't around, are the effects of a massively under-performing school system. This is what happens when you take children who already have less, and then you give them less of everything that matters in education. This is what happens when adults have failed, for generations, to harness the human capital, technical knowledge, and simple will to make good on the promise of work-hard-get-ahead. This is the type of ideological blowback that occurs when poor kids receive fewer resources, crappier facilities, teachers unable to teach, principals unable to lead, and school districts unable to identify problems and formulate even the most basic plan to remediate them.

You think these kids don't know they got screwed, but good?

This cool over smart thing is the most basic type of defense mechanism, the thing you reach for to cover up past disappointments. It's that simple, and we don't even need to point to the massive difference in experiencing American schools as a Vietnamese kid vs. a Latino kid to underscore the silliness of passing off these attitudes as analysis.

The solution, as always, lies with educators. The solution lies with the people who work with kids everyday, whose passion and intelligence, knowledge and effort make the difference between success or failure, graduation or incarceration. Why are some schools and districts able to foster success in various student populations, and others are not? Why are Black, Brown, and poor kids graduating from district A and not district B, when they are no more or less Black, Brown, and poor? The writers makes some head-fakes in that direction, but can do no better than some vague illusions and trotting out the tired tale of a KIPP school which, yearly, looks less and less like the community in which its borrowed buildings stand. Future attempts will have to do better, no matter how enamored one may be of silly KIPP hype or this new Jack O'Connell inspired call to look at achievement data through a racial/ ethnic/ culture standpoint.

To which I say, ultimately, fine. Let's understand these data in ethnic/ culture terms, but let's really understand them that way, and not beat this thoroughly dead horse any further. Let's do some serious work and serious thinking on this thing, and not print the worst staff-lounge shit-talking in the name of quality reporting.

In researching and writing parts 2-5, let's hope the Merc chooses smart over cool.



Mr. AB, also of the east 408, is holding this one down as well.

Getting Housed By The Bush Tax Code

Seriously ya'll, I'm a 28-year-old public school teacher with a bucket-full of deductible expenses and I'm not within shouting distance of a tax refund. I am, in fact, currently facing substantial tax debt as a result of limping into a "higher" tax bracket last year. That's what I get for receiving compensation for my off-contract time and skills. All you summer training institute attendees, all you workshop participants, all you teaching as leadership professional learning community members, you brought me to this.

Thanks a bunch.


UPDATE:
The final bill has me owing an amount equal to 69% of my monthly take-home pay. I hate almost everything right now.

A New Light

Here's E., who bears an unfortunate poultry-related nickname, sitting in the office, sullen, hood up, face a battered mess. He's got a big egg on his forehead, an eye that will turn black and blue, and the kind of scrape marks you get when someone kicks you in the head (I've got a little experience with such things). I talk to his grandma a little, and then jerk my head a little: C'mere.

So we're here now, I say. You've been heading here all year, getting all suerenoed out, and now you're looking like this. I do some standard stuff about choices, about decisions, about how you never need to feel like anything has gone so far that you can't stop, turn around, and head in a different direction. He pushed back on how this isn't any different than getting in trouble last year, when the worst thing he ever did was talk too much and be annoying, all of which is easily debunked and deflated. I talk about friends, what we should look for in our friends, and how our friends don't always help us show our amazing. In the last five years and eight months, I've had this conversation many, many times.

I run out of steam a little, and there's some silence. I let it sit because I am not afraid of child-generated silence, and then E. says: "I don't know how to have fun."

He repeats it, looking right at me, all that vaunted eye contact. "I don't know how to have fun." And then, "I have no imagination."

I'm floored and flummoxed, prepared with nothing, when my parents, who are visiting from S.Florida, pull up in their rented Kia. I tell him I don't believe those things are true, and to go back inside and apologize to his grandma for fighting. I tell him we'll talk more. I leave feeling ineffectual and weak. A kid offers this extraordinary level of openness, directness, honesty, and I respond with... what exactly? In sixty-eight months of teaching, no kid has ever said something like this to me.

Some thoughts since then:

■ He's probably right. Where is the model of teenage fun that doesn't involve something illicit, illegal, or not age appropriate (in either direction)?

■ He probably has less imagination than he should, based on a reliance to have fun constructed for him, a product of too much T.V., too many movies and video games, too much Great America, too many examples that fun is a passive thing to be experienced, rather than a product to be created. Language itself promotes this mindset: "having fun."

■ What an interesting take on (minor) gang affiliation! Forget the stuff about belonging, generational inertia, cultural identity, fitting in, and living in no-choice neighborhoods, E. is drawing a clear connection between his increased gang-affiliation and resulting beating with an inability to construct and conceive of fun. It casts the problem in a wholly new, and much more approachable light.

■ I (still) don't know what to say to him next Tuesday.

Update:
We talked about the difference between a full shower and a strong coating of Axe Body Spray.

I Am Ready To Step Up (assembly)

The projector wasn't always working well, I messed up the timing a couple times, made some kids late to brunch and 3rd period, logistics could've been better, but I think I brought it.

I show em this. There's three states on this map, California, Arizona, Nevada, maybe some of Oregon. And that gold star? That's us. That's you. And those white stars? Those are the schools and districts that have come here, here, to watch how you learn, how your teachers teach, how your principals principal. They came here from all over for you.

Why?

Then I show them some data from 2002, that shows us at 502 API, 8% proficient, the lowest middle school in the county and district. I pull up ten volunteers and have them stand in front of chairs. We operationalize proficient as being able to stand up to anyone and say I understand everything I am supposed to understand. Ask me anything, teach me anything, cuz I'm ready. Then I make nine volunteers sit down. You take ten kids in 2002, I say, and only one of them can stand up say they know what they're supposed to know.

If our school was a car in 2002, we'd be this:

Why are people coming from all over California to see our school when we looked like this? I wouldn't walk across the street to look at the car. So why are they coming?

We got better.

I ask them to tell me what a myth is. Then I tell them about The Donut Lady, this potentially fictional woman who once told one of our teachers how sad and unfortunate it was to have to work in east 408 schools. I told them how The Donut Lady and people like her don't believe that you can be strong and powerful and excellent if you're a Latino or Asian kid from our neighborhood, how those people believe you are violent, sad people doomed to failure. The Donut Lady believes a myth about you, I tell them, but here's the thing: Some kids believe it, too. Those kids who walk around and say we're ghetto, we don't do work, we fight, we're lazy, and that's just who we are so why change it. Those kids believed a myth, too, and they did it because they were scared to show how amazing all of you really are. It's scary to be amazing, I say, scary to show all the amazing each of you has inside.

The kids scoff a little at this one, make some grumbling noises. No, no, no, I say. This is better. We can take this on the highway, take it down to Santa Cruz, dive on rocks if we want. You want rims? We gotta work harder. You want a hot little sports car? You want to be an Escalade? We gotta work harder.

I show em all this, talk about defying the myth, do the thing with the chairs, and show how now we can get those same ten kids and almost five of them can stand up and say I know what I need to know. I do all of this, and then I put up a slide with two words in 94 pt font.

Big deal.

You didn't do this, I say. You were in kinder, in 1st grade, in 2nd grade. You were learning how to subtract without using your fingers and doing that thing where you turn your card to yellow when you don't work hard. Your brothers and sisters and cousins came through here and said I don't feel like that crappy car, I know I've got something better. They stood in the quad and shouted worst to first and then they went into their classrooms and did something about it. You didn't, and that's why I say big deal. Because that's the past. I want to know about the future. What are you going to do? What do you want to be? What mark will you leave?

I show them two more car pictures -- a beat-up hippie van, and a hot silver Mustang smoking down the street -- and say, nothing is set in stone. We can go in either direction, and it's really up to you. What do you want to do? For the 8th grade assembly I thrown up another 94 pt slide.

12 more weeks.

This freaks them out. What will you do? How do you want things to end here? Then I show them the huge posters we've made. Here's the challenge. Here's what you need to bring.

No one here will make you do it. No one wants to make you. Forget it. Save that garbage. That's baby. Do you want it? Then go get. Sign your name and show everyone you are ready to step up because you want something better, because you know you've got something amazing inside you and you're tired of keeping it small and hidden.

For the 8th grade, I say, who has the courage to step up right now, in front of everyone? Who can walk across the room and sign this right now?

And a dozen kids fly out of their seats and reach for the markers in my hand.

I Am Ready To Step Up (planning late-night)

It's 12:30 in the a.m. and I have to be awake in about four hours.

Later today my kids will take quizzes on vocabulary, spelling, and prepositions. One group will try to figure out the four goals of the Lewis & Clark expedition; the other will be charting the generational progression of Patricia Polacco's quilt, and later creating their own (fictional) family tree, one that projects five generations into the future, outlining the uses of the legacy they themselves will begin.

I won't be there for most of that. I've been tapped to lead the kind of rock-out, get-em-going, leave-em-fired-up assembly the POY used to roll out pretty regularly around here. I've been tapped to translate the school reform presentation we've thrown down in front of folks from all over three states into something kids can appreciate and understand. Three shows. Each grade level. I'm not really sure how this happened, but I think it was during a staff meeting where I was so knocked out on Dayquil and mucinex that I didn't know what I was getting nominated for. Now I'm sweating it a little, stuck, tired, frustrated and blogging about sweating it with the presentation half finished and the eyelids getting heavier.

I'm not the POY, and this shit is hard. I don't have the title, or the extra vertical inches; I am a teacher standing up in front of a school one grade level at a time, saying Listen: I'm gonna drop some stuff. Ya'll in the front might want to be careful -- I think it's hot. We'll find out how much cred I've got later today, how far my run extends out past the walls of room D2.

Man, I'm tired.