Teaching in the 408

Where You Can (also) Find Me These Days

2010-08-10T11:55:00.000-07:00

My first short story collection is now published. We Are Almost Always On The Verge is 13 stories of love and loss, the fictionalized first cousin of what many folks found compelling about this site.

Also:

Teacher 2030. It´s a blog! It´s a book! It's a gaggle of admirable educators. Buy it here.

TOP-Ed. Policy thoughts, some of them by me.

Elmhurst Community Prep. Dream. Prepare. Achieve.

Ahem

2009-09-30T21:07:00.001-07:00

Scroll down, just a little.

Teaching In The 408: Author's Index

2008-11-14T07:12:00.000-08:00

It's a strange thing, to posthumously reflect upon and involve yourself in a blog – this undertaking that chronicled an unparalleled, unequaled period of my life. It's a strange thing to have those thoughts and ideas existing outside of your direct focus and control, and outside really, what's happening now. You read something and it comes echoing a little out of the past, this person you used to be, this life you used to live. But don't anymore.

And still, folks find their way here, now, in the post-departure period, and maybe it is unclear what this place represented and why some found it special. The thematically categorized links below are an attempt to close that gap, an index and a primer, as well as a response to blogger's poor navigational tools, and an attempt to address my tendency to intersperse high-level writings and intensely held beliefs with reflections on grading while hungover, which captured the attention of a particular US News & World Report journalist, but probably isn't terribly representative of this body of work as a whole.

Thank you for reading, both now and in the time before.

Metaphysical first principles for teaching and learning
∆ Three ways to build professionalism
∆ Rhetoric aside, this is why many of the best of us are leaving
∆ What the achievement gap is not
∆ What's worth caring about; why it's hard

NCLB, merit pay, and other things union reps aren't supposed to support
∆ A primer on merit pay
∆ A primer on NCLB
∆ False dichotomies: The ways NCLB does and does not affect our work

English Language Learners and their discontents
∆ How we set up ELL kids for failure
∆ Why Ana succeeds where Jorge fails
∆ Leveling the field and ensuring success for the Jorges

Tainted love: TFA and me
∆ TFA's (lack of) commitment to teaching as transformational force
∆ How that lack of commitment becomes enshrined as something great
∆ I repeat these ideas in print, forever alientating the Bay Area Executive Director

Those four walls
∆ I had more fun teaching grammar than should be allowed by law
∆ Maybe gangs aren't what we've been thinking
∆ My super-secret classroom management approach
∆ The end of this work, and its beginnings
∆ A lot of weeks went a lot like this
∆ There is inexplicable tragedy to teaching and we fall short often
∆ Happy trails, POY... and thanks
∆ My own departure triology: announcement, why and not-why

Good Ideas For Inhibiting School Growth (postscript)

2008-09-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

This blog's like that woman you keep kinda hanging on to, even though you know you should move on and stopstop thinking about her. But it's just always been so good, and the APR was made public today, and I can't help but revisit some of the good times from last Spring.

So how'd it all workout? The results of all those good ideas (I, II, III, IV?) What kind of tangible, quantitative results do we have to show for all the undermining, all the fear-mongering, all the focus-diverting?

API -23 points, the school's largest decline in the API era, coming in below 700 for the first time since 2005.

Failure to make AYP for the first time since 2002, with proficiency rates below 1/3 for the first time since 2005.

Not much here anybody should be proud of, not much anybody should be doing told-ya-so about, but maybe, just maybe, a cautionary tale.

Rocking Out In One Day Magazine

2008-08-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

My essay on the "reinvention" of teaching appears in the summer issue of Teach For America's alumni magazine One Day. The original text is below; the print version, edited by One Day's staff and witty-email-composing editor-in-chief, may be slightly different.

(I kinda wanted to complain that none of the featured essays on this topic were penned by current classroom teachers, but then I realized I was supposed to fill that particular quota, and pulled a little bait-and-switch on the One Day folks. My b., yo).

If “Profession” Is the Butterfly, We Are the Larva

Teaching is not a profession. It is a never-ending entry-level vocation, divorced from foundational understandings of training, accountability, and advancement. If we are to enact meaningful reform, we must rescue teaching from its status as vocation and volunteerism, and recast it as a profession of rigor, creativity, and unlimited impact.

Training
It is not uncommon to hear teachers dismiss their credentialing programs as useless and ineffective. You’ve never heard a doctor make this statement. Doctors, pilots, and plumbers are not expected, as teachers are, to learn their profession on the run, by trial-and-error, by searching for ideas on the Internet, or by attending disparate workshops. Teacher preparation is trapped in a dichotomy of insufficiency. Traditional route programs train teachers on generic skill sets insufficient for the incredible language, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity found within urban classrooms. Yet, alternative route programs require prohibitive amounts of on-the-job learning that is impractical and frequently ineffective. Neither approach effectively prepares career teachers for the rigors of high-need urban classrooms.

We need a third way, one built upon the medical residency model, combining training in highly specialized skills with the time needed to fully merge theory and praxis. All prospective urban educators need time to learn from and work with a proven mentor, develop their teaching in meaningful and accountable ways, and engage in coursework that acknowledges and reflects the differences between teaching in Marin and teaching in West Oakland. These Resident teachers would work for an entire academic year with an Attending teacher, participating in the full range of professional responsibilities from the first day of school, eventually taking ownership of all aspects of complete units of study.

This provides a far more authentic model of student teaching, rescuing it from unaccountable summer school and end-of-the-year contexts. It allows Resident teachers the most complete and accurate training possible, one that omits no aspect of the job, and provides the most extensive arena for skill development. Perhaps most importantly, it allows Residents to learn first-hand from a proven Attending teacher, and see the application of effective teaching within the exact context the Resident teachers will one day work.

Evaluation and accountability
Teaching is, at its core, a simple and direct act. Here are kids, a room, and some tools: At the end of the school day, what is the increase in knowledge, the sharpness of analysis, and the refinement of skill? What can the students do and how much better can they do it now? As a teacher, what did you do here, exactly?

Our profession continues to struggle with this essential understanding of our work, failing to connect compensation or even continued employment to educator effectiveness. We must institute evaluation measures that value outputs over inputs. We must develop merit pay and accountability systems that make improvement a professional imperative rather than an act of personal pride. We must invest site administration with the power to hire the teachers they want and fire those they don’t. Until then, we will continue to function less like a profession, and more like rec-league T-ball, where everyone gets to swing but no one keeps score.

Differentiated roles
Teaching suffers from a lack of career development and meaningful acknowledgement of success and accomplishment. To rectify this, we need promotions for teachers that do not require them to stop being teachers. Teachers with the ability to guide peers, develop instructional models, or assume site-based leadership must be offered these opportunities in conjunction with a reduced, but continuing, classroom role.

What limitations – beyond inertia – prevent the creation of the teacher/ vice-principal, the teacher/ curriculum designer, the teacher/ data analyst? Such hybrid roles exist in small, isolated numbers, but more often than not, the assumption of greater leadership responsibilities exists as something added-on to existing teaching responsibilities. This limits overall effectiveness, and encourages martyrdom and burnout, forcing teacher-leaders to either dramatically increase their professional responsibilities or make an inauthentic choice between the classroom and the front office. By seeking the creation of diverse and varied teaching positions, we expand the scope of professional development and advancement, keep talented leaders working directly with kids, and begin to address the problematic issue of mid-career teacher retention.

The achievement gap can only be closed by professionalizing teaching, and eliminating the educator achievement gap—that distance between the teachers we are, and the teachers our students need us to be.

Rocking Out in ASCD's Education Update

2008-08-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'm kinda heavily quoted in an essay in ASCD's latest newsletter entitled Taking the Fear Out of the First Year. If you're interested in such things, it's well-written and smart, and besides the self-flagellation over first year mistakes by yours truly, you can hear from Jesse Solomon, whose voice and work in teacher preparation/ development is one of the best around.

And Another Bond Broken

2008-08-12T09:25:00.001-07:00

I have this old-school hard-shell briefcase, defaced with bumper stickers and ill-treatment, in which I keep my classroom artifacts -- smarty pants, certain pictures, student work samples, balls and bells and skill quiz binders -- that I use when I make the rounds doing workshops. When I saw the smashed car window and the contents of my central console strewn about the car for the second time in six weeks I was bummed, but it wasn't until I realized that dude hadn't just made off with $0.78 from the change collection area, dude had also taken my briefcase o' student work samples.

And now I don't have any.

And I can't go back to work on Monday and make the kids produce more.

And this isn't just about my effectiveness as a workshop presenter.

No one, no one single person, has experienced a more painful or disastrous exit from the classroom as I. The ties that bind me to that place and that time keep getting cut in unpleasant and unpredictable ways.

Rumors Of My Demise...

2008-06-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

…while admittedly self-generated, may prove to be largely exaggerated. Or at least premature.

In a few weeks I start work with the stellar folks at The Education Trust – West, an organization doing heavy lifting on ed reform, and one I’ve admired for some time. None of the jobbiness of this particular job have begun, but it's been a love-fest thus far, I gotta tell ya. I have in my possession this great two-page job description overflowing with bulleted tasks and responsibilities. Luckily, none of the bullet points look like this:

■ Sell-out real hard

Instead, I’ll get to do a wide array of work in both practice and policy realms, straddling that great divide, and harnessing the experiences of the last six years in countless new ways. As part of all that, we’ve been discussing a continuation of blogging. While not necessarily focused on life in and around room D2, this work would certainly touch on and broaden many of the issues and themes that have consumed bandwidth in this space. This blog, or a similar version located elsewhere, will continue to exist. Crank the stereo, the party’s still swinging.

I’m excited. There is much left to be determined of course – not least of which is the issue of just where exactly on the Internet these writings will be found – but they will live somewhere and hopefully will continue to be worth your time and energy.

So… stay tuned.

The Party's Over...

2008-06-25T19:42:00.001-07:00

…a CD skipping/
it’s the same hook repeating
grows more grating with each passing second/
and the walls contain a resonation
laughter and conversation/
it was fun while it lasted
but now I should be going/
-Against Me!, T.S.R.

My resignation has been accepted. I am, currently, not a teacher.

This is weird. I have a new four-word job title that replaces my single-word job title from years past, a new job title that is no where near as fun to tell people in bars. I have no doubt that the reality behind the title is massively cool in any number of ways – just not the I-teach-poor-kids-let-me-buy-you-a-drink way. I have to reshuffle the things I carry around in my invisible knapsack.

I once told a USA Today reporter this blog was about two counter-narratives. He didn’t print a word of what I said, so maybe this isn’t so terribly compelling, but the CD skips in the background and I think its worth repeating here, now.

The first counter-narrative at work was an attempt to balance the massively negative voice that serves to denigrate and cast an inaccurate impression of communities like the ones found in the east 408. Yeah, my students are poor. Yeah, they’re brown and don’t speak English so good. Yeah, you’d probably get off the highway by mistake and feel like you’re in the ghetto. But all the negativity associated with those factors just doesn’t match up to the experience of working not far from the intersection of Story and King. My experiences don’t match the gallons of bile poured forth from blogs, most written, sadly, by teachers or parents or both. My experiences are the opposite. We made hay while the sun shined, and I’m proud to death of what was accomplished. Even as certain folks attempt to throw mud on those accomplishments, I leave with the same sense of hope, same belief in the power of adults to enact change, and the same unironic confusion directed at those who throw up their hands at the perceived futility of this work.

Counter-narrative #2 was my desire to offset, in whatever minor way, all that gross TFA inertia, that supreme failing to prioritize and value teaching, even dressed up as it is in the myth of dual movements. TFA created a cultural undertow, subtle and powerful, that pulls at the knees of even the most successful and committed teacher/ alum. Why aren’t you doing something else? Why aren’t you doing something else? The organization spills oceans of ink celebrating the social entrepreneur/ alum, the newly elected school board member/ alum, the charter founding/ alum, and mere puddles acknowledging the achievement and commitment of those who are doing the work that, uh, ya kinda brought us here to do. Jake and those like him are at Institute right now, participating in a training process that fetishizes the persona of the teacher; those that buy in the most, those that build themselves into what they were told was the highest and the best, they will be the ones most betrayed when the tide goes out, 18 months from now.

The writings here became more than those two counter-narratives, of course. There was middle school basketball! And essay-grading procrastinations about procrastinating! And unpopular defenses of merit pay! And the union of punk rock and ed policy! And ruminations on trying to act as a shaper of young minds while sporting black eyes earned from fighting on the street!

The writings here afforded me a wide array of opportunities. I was invited to travel to Arizona and to Washington, D.C. to speak. I was offered opportunities to write for different publications. I was asked out on a date (there ended up being three in total), the idea of which – contact someone who writes things you think are stellar and later make-out with them – I fully support. I found a way to redeem the January 02 flawed notion that I’ll teach during the day and write at night. I got myself interviewed for a graduate thesis, an ASCD newsletter, and New York Times Magazine. I flirted with the creation and maintenance of anonymity, managed to make some District people pretty furious, and more or less paved the way for the next step in my career.

The writings here were always grounded in the experience of teaching the kids. I’m not so naïve or self-congratulatory as to think they would have garnered anywhere near the amount of attention had this not been the case. A lot of this was less about the nature of the ideas, and more about the uncommon union of those ideas with my various professional titles and identities. Lot’s of folks support test-based accountability, but not a lot of teachers. Lot’s of folks like merit pay, just not a lot of union leaders. Lot’s of folks critique TFA, but not a lot of alums whose approach to teaching is the fully realized vision of the Teaching As Leadership (TAL) handbook (and then some). I guess the perception of ideological schizophrenia makes for a big draw and a good read.

The writings here emerged and were informed by teaching, and living as a teacher – having that conception of self pretty high on the auto-identification checklist. That’s why this blog will not continue in any meaningful way. I’m not going to call this space “Not Teaching in the 408.” I’m not going to start writing about my roadtrip to Portland or my observations on the state of the seemingly unemployed (yet fantastically accessorized!) San Francisco hipster. I’m not going to pen witty remarks about the office culture I will shortly embrace.

What will I do?

I will close shop and direct ya’ll to kindly go back to the original resignation post and read what Rory from parentalcation wrote. Somehow, from his perch all the way up-north, sitting on Canada’s back, he more or less nailed it. I’d say more, but I’m not sure how much mud the mud-slinging folks feel like slinging. Still, education is my field, and will probably be my life’s work. Even if I leave the classroom component of it, opening myself to charges of sell-out-dum, of being hypocritical, of invalidating some of the fire I’ve thrown in this space, my belief in and commitment to the manifesto perched at the top of this blog remains strong.

The days ahead ripple and swell.

Fifty-One Minutes

2008-06-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Jake,

So this is what you want, huh? What you told people you were going to do, what you always talked about? This is what you said you wanted, right? No, for reals – you’re gonna do this? You’re going to go be a teacher, stand in front of the kids?

Okay then.

You will need to get used to the bells. It wasn’t so long ago you were in college, those halcyon days of glorious waste when you refused to abstain from anything, when you did nothing in moderation or with restraint. There was a wide expanse of free time then, entire pristine prairies of it. They weren’t so long ago, those days, but you have moved far, far beyond them. Now, your life is divided into work-live-sleep, and work is further divided into these fifty-one minute chunks. Three-thousand and sixty seconds, one interval after another, bookended by a dull tone that isn’t, really, the sound of a bell. This is not what the hourly tolling of your gothic towered college sounded like. Those were bells; this is a bland tone not unlike the sound your building’s front door makes, that automatic buzzed-in noise.

Here are your six, fifty-one minute chunks. Five are for teaching, one is for “preparation.” This preparation time is when you urinate out the gallons of coffee you consume daily, and also when you read emails from the friends who don’t have real jobs. Not like your job. You can tell who has graduated onto a legitimate job by the email. Everyone you know who works in finance, who works in marketing, who works in fields somehow more nebulous than either finance or marketing, these friends write long, intricate emails. There are frequent links to entries from the urban dictionary, stuffwhitepeoplelike, or youtube clips you can’t open because the District’s firewall blocks pretty much everything. You feel guilt and panic each time you forget about the firewall and click a link from one of your artificially employed friends, immediately ex-ing off the screen and hoping no one is monitoring this. You imagine thick-necked cyber-security guys in dark rooms whose sole purpose is keeping track of how many times you generate the blocked by websense screen on your District-provided laptop. When you have the time to reply-all, the first-tier illusionary-jobbed quickly distinguish themselves from the second-tier illusionary-jobbed by replying-all to your reply-all in an incredibly short time span. Like, within ninety-eight seconds. This is especially remarkable given the inclusion of a thematically relevant link from craigslist’s “missed connection” section you won’t click because you know it will only trigger that blocked by websense screen. Again.

All other fifty-one minute chunks are reserved for teaching, not email. Please remember that the bells are in charge, not you. The bells decide beginnings and endings, not the extent of work completion, which sometimes takes many different sets of fifty-one minutes; not the desire to send the kids packing, which sometimes takes less than two minutes. Atonal chime and they burst out of rooms. Atonal chime and they drift toward the next room. One of those rooms is your room. Eventually they sit, at least until the next atonal chime. Then they leave and the whole process begins again.

You exist within this frame, within these constraints and limitations. Fifty-one minutes. It feels indescribably alien to have an external force shape your days like this. You will need to adjust.

You will need to adjust, also, to the commute. You live in San Francisco, but there are no jobs for inexperienced teachers in San Francisco Unified, the district that launched a thousand pink slips. There are jobs in the east 408, down the peninsula, away from the fog and the hills and the big window’d apartment you share with the fiancée, but much, much closer to the kind of poverty you had previously only read about in textbooks or first-person exposés by New Yorker staffers on extended leave. This is where the jobs are, so this is where you will go, steering your Subaru Outback south and into the flatland schools where no one wants to teach, not really.

Here is what it’s like to wake up in the dark every day, never ceasing to feel the tinge of guilt when the fiancée groans and rolls over, maybe digging her elbow, the sharpest elbow of any living adult female, into your back if you are too slow turning off the blaring alarm. The wood floors that are your favorite part of the apartment are always cold, never mind what month it is, and you shuffle to the bathroom to shower, to shave, to brush your teeth, eat vitamins, and inevitably forget to turn on the coffee-maker, even though you took the time to load it up the night before. On good days, you walk less than five minutes to your street-parked Subaru. On bad days, more. Sometimes much more. Stop for coffee and then get yourself going on the freeway. Getting there takes forty-five minutes on the straight-shot of 101. Getting back takes an hour and fifteen minutes on the curves of 280. It will take you eighteen months to quell the urge to backhand anyone who uses the phrase reverse commute, right? in that hopeful lilting way.

You will drive in a haze of sports talk radio, NPR, and the same loud music you listened to in high school and will never grow tired of, probably. Sometimes you take advantage of the commute and the time zone difference to catch up with friends on the east coast, but mostly you worry about how you will spend your six versions of fifty-one minutes. Sometimes this is productive worry, and it passes for what your teacher-credential program called planning. All such planning comes immediately after you say, out-loud, in the car, definitely loud enough to be heard over the NPR, you say: “What the fuck am I teaching 4th period?”

Sometimes, you come up with a good idea. Usually, your sleep-deprived, caffeine-addled, traffic-distracted brain comes up with very little that is even in the same genus as an idea, good or otherwise. Mostly though, you think about the kids.

There are more than ninety of them altogether, some of whom you teach in consecutive fifty-one minute blocks, some of whom who share, instructionally at least, with other teachers. The kids are an open wound of need and want. You will buy granola bars and carrots and apples for the ones who come to school perpetually hungry. You will stock pens and paper and binders for those who would otherwise never know what it is to own these materials, store them in a backpack, produce them upon request. You will plan to arrive almost ninety minutes before the first bell, because the kids will get there forty-five minutes before the first bell, and their insistent knocking, the desire to come in and out of the cold and use the Internet and tell you tales – this is hard to ignore. Not to mention completely incompatible with planning and preparation because you still don’t know what’s going to happen 4th period.

You will plan to stay well after the final bell has atonally toned, because a different group will wander through, knocking insistently. They want to listen to the radio and use the Internet and stand awkwardly by your desk to tell you tales. Daily, they will need to be chased from your room, often with the mock-exasperated tone that has nothing mock about it, often with threats of physical violence so extreme and out of place no one could mistake them for serious threats of physical violence.

Here are the kids. They are this deep, deep wound, and there is no free time, no mental energy, no chunk of your finances that cannot be poured in that 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.

You will need to educate the fiancée about the nature of this wound. And you will need to keep educating, because until you are there, doing this work, hemmed in by the bells and fighting the inarguable limits of those fifty-one minute, this is not something anyone can be expected to understand. Anticipate her lack of understanding and do not hold this against her, ever. Even with all your explaining and enlightening, she will never fully get it. This is not irony, your inability to educate the person closest to you during the time in which you are simultaneously capable of educating the children of strangers. It is not irony, but it is achingly lonely.

Sometime in the near future you will need to educate your own damn self on the merits of strategic withdrawal. You will need to learn about the digging of trenches, and the maintenance of equilibrium. Martyrs are fun to read about, not share a life with. But you can worry about that later, if there is a later. Most people don’t get that far.

Here is how you will teach.

You will teach vocabulary and spelling and phonics. You will teach past tense irregular verbs and persuasive essays and literature. You will teach cause-and-effect and confirming predictions and you encourage higher order thinking regarding a fictional immigrant father's assumption of bus driver authority in the American public school system. You will teach how to read questions and eliminate wrong answers, the difference in answering the why when you were supposed to tackle the how. You provide the data necessary to update Reading Goal Sheets and Big Goal Sheets, and reward progress accordingly. You will thank two students for arriving on time. You will send a student to copy The Reality of School essay after repeated disruptions and tell him to use his homework on which to write the essay because he previously demonstrated he did not value it as an instructional tool. You will teach myths and introduce the concept of point of view. You will look around at one point and some kids are finishing comprehension questions, some are independently reading, some are prewriting an essay that you’ll focus on later, some are taking reading quizzes, some are at the library or in transit, some are quizzing each other on spelling and vocabulary, and you will feel like a real teacher for the first time, no longer an imposter.

It will be life or death up there, always, in front of the kids. Life if the kids are moving with you, getting it, those glory moments when the hands go flying into the air. Life even if they don’t get it, but plow ahead anyway, offering you that eerie trust, that completely unearned vote of confidence that you know what you’re doing. Anything but that jaded stance, heads down and hoods up, unmoved by jokes or threats or injunctions that – for reals! – this is important stuff you need to learn.

Death then, fifty-one minutes thick.

Frequently, there will be a basketball game. The kids will show flashes of competence but will generally underachieve. You get into it with the refs a little bit, but restrain yourself, because you are conscious of your role as a leader of young men. And hey, someone write down the date, because here is the first time you ever thought about setting an example for anyone, anywhere.

Players will whine about being hurt and you want to repeat to them something a coach once told you about the difference between hurt and injured, but don't, because under the former condition it is still possible to perform a sex act with one's mother, while under the latter such activities are physically impossible, not just socially frowned upon. You won’t share this insight, because it is not a good idea to speak like that to 13 year-olds, even though you were spoken to in a similar vein and even though they will (clearly) remember, appreciate, and learn from the distinction many years hence.

Here is how you will herd the kids through the hostile crowd after the game and toward the bus, mostly without incident. Later you will stand impatiently in the foul smelling locker room, breathing the odor of stale sweat coated by body sprays, which are not, contrary to popular belief, an acceptable substitute for a shower. You offer this mantra, to be repeated as needed: Axe is not a shower. Axe is not a shower. Is it possible the locker rooms of your youth smelled this bad? There really is no way they were this bad, is there? They were, but in this and other things, your memory is really not to be trusted.

After getting every kid out and using that absurd fork-key-janitor-thing to get the lights off, you will only need to go back and reopen the locker room twice. Once to retrieve an i-pod; once to get a math book. The forgetting of the math book will come shouted at you as you’re closing the car door, ready finally to head home, and you really, really want to say screw your math book because you don’t teach math and have a sneaking suspicion your back-up point guard probably isn’t the most diligent math student anyway. You don’t say screw your math book. Instead, you will praise your back-up point guard for his belated responsibility, climb out of the car, making the sound you remember your father making whenever he got into or out of a chair. Thoughts of this new, terrifying similarity between you and your father will not go away anytime soon. Just FYI. You will open the locker room again, use that awful fork-key-janitor-thing, and breathe that sour stench until your back-up point guard realizes his math book is actually in his backpack after all.

The return commute is an hour, and somehow, your fellow commuters afford you no special vehicular consideration for the day you’ve had, and the good work you did.

Here is how you will try to unwrap your mind from everything that has gone on between the bells, before and after the bells. You will be too tired to help with dinner, knowing that the too-tired situation cannot continue indefinitely, but somehow not too tired to share a few clever anecdotes with the fiancée, who still finds the anecdotes fresh and interesting. You will remember not to dominate the reminiscence and retelling of the day. But this was a good day, and it will be hard to disengage, especially since good days have pretty much been an endangered species.

1) Carlos brought a pen and a binder, for the first time.
2) Leshondra volunteered to read, twice.
3) You actually completed a lesson in 4th period, almost for the first time.
4) Berto was in school, again.
5) Marcus remembered to roll to the basket after setting the screen.
6) You recalled your credentialing program truism that voice-raising was a silly and ineffective means to address student misbehavior, a strategy that becomes self-perpetuating and useless after a remarkably short amount of time, and shockingly, this turned out to actually be an effective and sound piece of advice, for once.
7) You only forget to take attendance in 2nd and 6th period.

Here is how all these little successes will build upon each other, linking up like carbon molecules into endless chains. These chains are heavy, and clanky, and they wind and wind around your head. Understand that they will be hard to banish. You will be unable to stop thinking about them when the fiancée discusses something a coworker said; unable to stop thinking about them when she talks about a new restaurant she wants to check out on Saturday. You will, finally, stop thinking about them during the thirty-two minutes of sex and foreplay that occurs after dinner, thirty-two minutes that are thankfully unbookended by either a bell or a chime or a tone. You teach in fifty-one minute chunks and you have sex and foreplay in thirty-two minute chunks. You should probably not think too much about the amount of time you spend on sex and foreplay compared to the amount of time you spend on vocabulary development and attendance taking. Comparisons like that will only make you sad.

It goes completely without saying that you should not compare the amount of sex and foreplay your students have with the amount of sex and foreplay you have.

Thirty-three minutes after you banished the thoughts of your day, they are back. They linger in this strange postpartum separation you can’t seem to shake, this sense of just plain down that will come after every little vindication, after every little triumph, after every realization of the life and validity built into your attempts to make yourself into the kind of teacher you see in your head.

Here is how you will lay in bed, next to the sleeping fiancée. You will not think about how different your thoughts are, now, laying with an arm draped across her waist, how different than before, when you would endlessly replay the memories of kissing and touching and all the sexy whispery things she said into your ear, replaying the memories until falling asleep. You will not think of the difference because you will think of your day, and your list of successes. You did all this. Look! You did all this. You worked your ass off, not terribly creatively or innovatively, but bulldog style. You moved all of these kids from here to there. You will think about how awesome and great that movement is and how you’re proud of them and happy that in terms of academic gatekeeping and life-choice they are increasing becoming positioned for success.

But the best part is, you like, finished all your different fifty-one minutes without major interruption. Dig on that for a while.

You did good. Now do it again. No one will ever tell you this, because that’s not how schools work, but you did good. Seven things went right today, and tomorrow you will need to do it again. And the next day: Do it again. And the week after, the month after that: Do it again. In fact, all the years of fifty-one minute intervals that stretch before you: Do it again.

Except really, do it better.

You will need to turn those seven successes into eight, and then turn that eight into ten, then fifteen, then twenty. You will need to have so many successes, daily, it isn’t really possible to list them anymore, and this will need to happen sooner rather than later, and not just because you’re cashing checks for work that you aren’t doing so well, right now. There is, clearly, much more at stake than some simple ethical/ financial math. Do it better, and then do it better, again.

This is what you will think about as you glance at the alarm clock, those red-glow digits getting closer and closer to that horribly low number that sends you out of bed and across the cold wood floors. You will think of the ways your days have already begun to Lego-click together, this masonry of an ideal, thinking of old Celtic strongholds, their foundations slacked in the blood of strong men, of a scattering array of data-point days that stretch on without end.

Go do it better again.

This is what you always said you wanted.

Final Two Days (Three Years Ago)

2008-06-11T19:56:00.001-07:00

For reasons that are redacted, I can't be around for the final days of school, including the graduation ceremony. The less said on this the better, but in place of any thoughts I would have had on these experiences I will not have, here's what I wrote three years ago to the date, the kind of mass-emailed writing that ultimately contributed to the creation of this blog, once upon a time.

I don’t wanna sit back in slack and wasted holes/
Since I’m surrounded with the hearts and souls/
I get back on my feet, wipe my eyes clean and go/
Back to the front to sing out here we go.
--Hot Water Music, The End

Graduation Day, 2005:

I have a hard time with this day, I don’t feel the paramount relief, or at least not primarily, I’m not happy to see them go. What I get is a lot of regret. The feeling that if I’d worked harder, they would’ve learned more. If I’d busted my ass to find more field trips, prepare even more, push them, push their parents, give up more lunches or more time after school, more Saturdays. I wish I’d done those things and don’t like myself for not doing them, and show up on the last days of school sad, and the kids don’t know why.

These kids, these graduating 8th graders, who could’ve sat under a banner that said “We Are People of Change,” who sat to the left of the banner delivered by the mayor to only one middle school in the 408, these kids inherited a school in chaos, whose scores had gone down three straight years, the worst school in the District, County, South Bay Region. These kids who changed that, they listened to the [POY] at the microphone say, “Worst to-” and they shouted “First!”

“Who did it?” he says.

“We did it!” they shout.

And they know it, and they mean it, and there is no one who can say what that understanding will bring them, what future victories have had their foundations laid in these shouts, these assemblies past, that swagger that comes with knowing you’ve accomplished something and laid it before the eyes of others who have no choice but to acknowledge it.

And L. my starting small forward, who gives an address; L. who speaks of coming to [our school] from Vietnam, “knowing three words of English.” Who discusses how hard it was “the constant struggle to understand.” He keeps to that, the desire to understand. He speaks of his teachers, the one who taught him to speak English, the one who gave him his first B+, pushing him to arrive, finally on grade level. He speaks of those early days, the days of struggle that are now behind him.

“When I leave [our school], I will no longer worry about trying to understand. I go forward expecting to be understood.”

And never mind my ELD-teacher appreciation of L.'s ability to manipulative verb tense to make a point, I’ve been thinking of his words as maybe the most succinct statement of what we’re doing here that anyone has yet presented.

These 8th graders did not want to leave on Friday. They wandered around after receiving their diplomas, hugging each other and crying, and we let them because this wasn’t the typical middle school melodrama at life change; this was the action of a group who knows that it will not be the same somewhere else, a group who knows they have made something special in this east side spot, backed up against the highway, the hills towering in the distance. They made it happen, and they’re proud, they legitimately like each other, and have never built stronger relationships with each other or with their teachers. A flood of emotion this week, and when it was over they did not want to leave.

Ti. (Captain, small forward), M. (Co-captain, power forward), and Tr. (Co-captain, point guard) come by my room seven times, each time with more tears. We have spent countless hours over the last three years together after school, running, jumping, cutting, learning. We’ve had Saturday practices, and weekend long tournaments, and they have hearts bigger than the size of the normal human heart, don’t know what it means to quit, in anything, these girls who promised to come to Palo Alto as incoming freshman together, these girls, the class of 2013. They tell me they’ll never forget me. I’ll never forget them.

I. comes by, Notre Dame College Preparatory School for Girls, class of 2009, sees me, bursts into tears. She hugs me, and says thank you for about five minutes. She got her ticket out of the neighborhood she’s come to hate, the family that is a nightmare, and maybe she’ll never come back to say hi. And that’s fine.

I see D. as I’m throwing out garbage and offer my hand. He shakes his head. “Brothers gotta hug.” He tells me he feels like he let me down. He talks about bad choices he’s made, and explains and explains. Enough. “Look at my hand,” I tell him, holding my hand curved out, fingers stretched wide. “That’s where the world is for you,” I tell him. “At your fingertips. That other stuff, learn from it, move on. Whatever you want, at your fingertips. Reach out and grab it.” His eyes are dinnerplates, then he nods slowly.

I wander into the cafeteria to get an update on that day’s assembly. R. throws her arms around my neck and just cries. She’s going to IB, leaving many friends, and today is hard. Her friend A. is right there, too, and A.'s going to IB with her, and these two are so impressive, not brilliant as the other nine I’ve recruited, but no one has worked harder or with more drive and focus. They possess in abundance at 14, traits I am still trying to cultivate in myself at 25. “You taught me so much,” A. says, basically wailing, and I choke back tears because I don’t know how to tell her what she’s taught me.

J. stands at the door, sagging shorts, high white socks in traditional cholo style, shifty-armed because he’s hiding his new three-dot tattoo. He looks me in the eye, sticks out his hand, grips hard. “You were the best teacher I ever had,” he says, the words heavily accented because he’s been speaking English less than two years. I’ve heard that a few times today, will in the following days read it over again in the end-of-the-year surveys they filled out, but there’s something about this kid, and not just his half-cliché tough-guy-whose-respect-you-earned scenario, or maybe just that standing there, still gripping hard and making eye contact like I taught him, he says, even, firm, no embarrassment, “Thank you.” And he walks away, down the ramp.

Now, finally, the 8th graders have left. I look at my own kids, a little shell-shocked from the emotion of the day, and I give out the ribbons I’ve bought to honor their MASTERing of Big Goals (Read 180 words/minute, improve writing 1 point on a 4-point scale, MASTER 80% of standards, improve reading ability 2 grade levels), and they clap and cheer for each other. I tell them I’m proud of their progress and their hard work. I tell them maybe they wished they could’ve watched more movies, or did less homework, or had more free time, but that’s not what I’m about. I say maybe you thought I was mean or too hard, and okay, but everything I did, every time I came down on you or made you stay after school, or looked angry, that was for you. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t try. We must be people of change, I say, and defy the myth-makers who will hold you down because of your skin color or last name. This is not something that comes easy, I tell them.

They leave better than they came in. All of them. I didn’t get all of them to grade level, but I got some, and more got close. I spent hours dissecting work, test scores, charting improvement, looking for patterns, planning lessons and analyzing how I think their brains can structure new information. I have policy about not wasting time, using every second to good advantage, and employ carrot-and-stick practices using stop watches and monitoring the elapse of seconds. I am relentless in pursuit of achievement, and it happens sometimes, that in process of all that evaluation, they can become bundles of data, and I loose their faces. Then E. brings me a card they have made and all signed, “Dear Mr. [TMAO], Thank you for supporting all of your canguritos” -- And then you remember all at once, in a rush.

“Ketchup clap for Mr. [TMAO],” M. shouts, and the smack their hands against curled fists.

“Mosquito clap!” he says, and they make zzzzzz-ing noises, moving their hands in an arc and then smacking them together.

“Big hand,” he says, and they stick their hands in the air, fingers spread wide.

Then the bell rings, and these 7th graders who are now 8th graders, who have been told this school is theirs now, their inheritance a thing of power and dignity, whose summer of freedom waits just beyond the doors, they do not want to leave.

Causation’s Messy, Messy Goulash

2008-06-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t going to do this one, originally. But then I wrote it, and it’s been sitting in my computer, waiting for current events to reach clarity and resolution. That ain't happening, so I'll go with the redacted version here.

The system reason
I already wrote this one – have been writing it for three years maybe. This isn’t insignificant. It isn’t minor. It isn’t something that is limited to perpetually unsatisfied, cranky 28-year-old know-it-alls. What does a teacher-promotion look like? Lead teacher/ mentor teacher/ department chair tend to mean very little except occasionally more work. Instructional coach means not teaching. Vice-principal means not teaching. Coordinator of something at the D.O. means not teaching. What does a teacher-promotion look like? We don’t know, not really. What happens when I figure out my job, do it well, occasionally do it more than well? What are my options for professional growth beyond 1) stop doing the job I do well; and 2) continue to do the job I do well, without change, indefinitely?

Not to mention, how do you decide that I know my job and do it well? Do we have anything that looks like outcome-based professional standards? Yeah, not so much, huh?

Teaching is not a profession because there is no wide-spread system of growth and advancement. I suppose you could make the case that education is a profession wherein teaching is the entry-level position, but that argument is deeply unsatisfying. This would make the career teacher inherently and fundamentally less, and it moreover ignores the reality that the skill sets required at the various hierarchical levels of the education system are wildly varied and do not, in any way, build upon one or another or reflect a type of sustained growth and development. Professionals who excel at their entry-level jobs in everything from medicine to politics, the military to cooking, have the opportunity to advance in ways that continue to call upon, make use of, and depend upon a demonstration of previous excellence. They are not compelled to choose between endlessly doing the same thing or earning the right to stop doing what they’re good at precisely because they’re good at it.

The district reason
It's been like this. I'm the guy in the revolving door.

The school reason
Why do some continue to teach, while others leave? Why was it that in 2006-2007 TFAers were leaving the District in droves, while thirteen of the fifteen TFAers to ever work at our school were still there (not to mention pretty much everyone else)? It’s about working conditions. It’s about the quality of the environment in which you work. We had it. I went to work and got out of the car in the cold 6:30 air and felt so F-ing grateful for the opportunity to do this work. Grateful, privileged, and enthused. I remember those feelings now the way I remember the pure joy of seeing a ping-pong table in my living room Christmas morning 1990 – a fond memory distilled by time and plenty of less fond shit along the way.

Check this. We’re not that school anymore, not even close. We’re Arnie Vinick’s poll numbers after the San Andreo nuclear accident. We’re the buying power of the Papiermark c.1923. A divisive and damaging police presence; a vindictive and ultimately incompetent vice-principal; the rise of pettiness and looking out for number one; a failure of teacher leadership and an absence of next-step mission-building – we’ve got it all.

The inertia reason
It wasn’t always like this. Commenter T-bag, wrote thusly:

“It's about the context. You started this adventure six years ago with the POY, right? You were part of something big. You were on a mission with a fired-up group of teachers and administrators who were all T-ing their AO to defy the myth. It's no big surprise that you are outta there now. The transition from the POY to the next Admin didn't go so smooth. I bet you're not the only one from the days of POY who has turned in the three line note. Ya'll done good. You pulled a school out of the abyss. It's up to someone else, another team, to take the next steps… You've gotta be part of something bigger than yourself and I say your leaving is evidence that you just aren't feeling that sense of a team on a mission anymore…”

And of course this is right on. If I never experienced that worst-to-first turnaround, if I never worked as part of a core group of folks coming together in powerful ways to enact change, if I never saw the nearly uncapped potential of adults to reform an entire school and bring the community along with it, if I had only worked in dysfunctional, bitter, and punitive environments, then none of this back-sliding would matter so much. It wouldn’t feel so terrible and tragic. I wouldn’t know the difference, and so would happily go about my business of holding back the darkness by investing my four walls with everything I got… or I never woulda made it this far, and would be back in Boston, tending bar and trying to publish works of fiction.

The broadening your impact reason
This is an important sentence to learn:

“My experiences have been profound, and to a large extent, life-defining, but I want to broaden the scope of my impact and affect change on as wide a range as possible.”

This is a good sentence, and true. I experienced first-hand how structural changes could dramatically improve the work we all do, and the attempts to impart these lessons to others – at West Ed, at the Arizona DOE, at CABE/ NABE – have been exciting and satisfying, even in the absence of any metric for my own effectiveness therein. This is something I find myself chomping on the bit to pursue more fully. More deliberately.

The means versus ends reason
At Dan's place, a while back, folks were creating a teacher classification system. I think that once you throw out everyone who just plain sucks and is in this cuz it's the best, most guaranteed paycheck they can muster, you're left with a central cleave, one simple line of demarcation.

On one side of this line are those that see the relationships, caring, and (gosh!) love as the end to all the work they do. That’s why they man a desk. They see this is as a high, pure, clean reason to do the job, and all the talk of gross, impersonal data just devalues and un-romanticizes the relationship building and the connecting and the life-changing, like spray-paint on the Venus de Milo. Think Pirsig’s romantic quality vs. classical quality. They traffic in the currency of caring, but it’s a limited caring that, in the name of whole person supporting, never seems to get around to the academic aspect of that whole person.

On the other side are educators who, far from rejecting the power and importance of relationships, appreciate and enjoy them, but also see them as means to a greater end: achievement. Fist-pounds and back-slaps, smiles and jokes and the kid who comes back three years later with big grins and cool updates are all well and good, say second group educators, but if those things don’t take us closer to learning and advancing and progressing academically, then we’re just camp counselors with delusions of grandeur.

I'm in the second group. I can dig a kid being a kid, all that ridiculous goo of the middle school'd, and I dig too on the essential sharing that lies at the heart of teaching and learning. I dig the way that sharing lasts and grows, whether it's my IB kids come back, those achievement-gap-closing kids, to invite me to events and graduations, or just gossiping with Y. for half and hour about all the break-ups and get-togethers of the kids who used to wander through my door. It’s great to get asked to the quincenera or the football game. It's great to get the phone calls, and texts (especially now), great to see the kids all grows up and talking to you about college and careers and how their mom's back is much better, thanks. Even the shitty times, the times you have to go to the hospital to see your boy with his stomach stapled back together after a stabbing, or see your guy, the one you teach for, incarcerated and asking for books, you wouldn't trade those times. I am a better person because I signed up for TFA back in January 02, less solipsistic, less cold, a puzzle piece with more fuzzed-rounded edges and more inter-locking points. I'm better because of all of the relationships and the sharing, everything that dug its way inside and worked its (re)defining work, and this is what I talk about when people ask why I do what I do. It's what you talk about, too.

But if you're in this second group with me, you talk about all that because that’s what people understand. It's also what they want to hear. What they don’t understand is how you feel when you see the CST quintile pie-chart, and it’s so F-ing full of green (interquintile growth) that you cannot sit in a seat and you run out and get drunk on whiskey because that’s what you did together. What they don’t understand is how you feel when you hand kids the first essay they wrote, and place it next to the final essay, and watch their faces because that’s what you did together. What they don’t understand is maybe those invitations — to football games, and parties, and graduations, and jail cells — wouldn’t be as forthcoming if the other part wasn’t there, vibrant and strong. Look at what we did together.

I received a student survey back at the end of my second year. It’s the most valuable piece of paper I own. The kid ripped me a new one, strongly disagreeing all the way down the page. On the back, in the comment section, she wrote:

“I hated this teacher. I don’t know why, but I just did. He thinks he’s funny, but he’s not. He gets butt-hurt about everything.”

Then there’s a five-line pause, and she writes these last two sentences, which allowed me to calm down over the next four years, and do this job much, much better:

“But I gotta admit he’s a damn good teacher. He taught me, like, everything.”

[cue: Rocky theme song]

See, I’ve taught far more kids like this, kids who didn’t come ready to be cool with me, who didn’t need it and didn’t want it. Kids who’ll never come back and visit, kids I never saw again (except that time her brother was being put in the back of a cop car), but you still have the opportunity to teach them, like, everything.

Here's why this matters in our current context: It's harder for us second-groupers to remain. What gets me going is the pursuit of exponential student growth, and what keeps me coming back for more is the chance to hack away at the intensely complex pursuit of that growth. What stymies me, what blunts me, is the unraveling and solving of this particular puzzle. When the work becomes less about discovery and innovation and more about delivery and application, when the achievement becomes less shocked success and more the expected norm, when the cool thing you did to dramatically accelerate progress still accelerates progress but becomes less cool every time you do it, further and further removed from the spark-joy of innovation... I start checking for exits.

This isn't to say I've got it all figured out, so nailed down and hammered out that it's easy to do the three years of growth in one year thing. Of course it isn't. But the difficulty and challenge becomes one of maintenance and minor tweaking, and that just doesn't grab hold of me Temple-of-Doom-style. And because I'm a second-grouper, I can't supplement with the pure joy of the kids, the thing that rolls me over the doldrums and the low points like it does for the first-groupers, like it does for the one teacher I know who may straddle both groups in equal measure. My past successes impair my ability to keep coming round to generate future successes.

("Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."
"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"
"That's all. Let him ask me."
"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.
"No. Then I can't ground him...")

The 4:47 a.m. reason, after shutting off the alarm, but before walking over the cold floor to the shower and the start of your day
It’s time.

Terminal

2008-05-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

I’m renaming this blog “The John Kennedy Toole Experience.”

This is what posthumous success feels like. You announce that you’re a terminal teacher and suddenly your unremarkable little 100-hit-a-day blog is averaging 500 such hits, not counting the absurd 1,000-hit day two Fridays ago (which, interestingly enough, also holds the distinction as being the worst-morning-I-have-ever-experienced-that-didn’t-involve-coming-face-to-face-with-that-woman-from-the-reserve-desk-Sophomore-year). Suddenly, you’re getting compared to LBJ, causing folks to rethink career aspirations, and being held up as an example of the shortcomings of alt certification.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this. Even as current events prevent much public writing, I’m not quite dead yet, and maybe there’s a little more to say.

Daaaaaaamn

2008-05-21T18:52:00.000-07:00

More Ed in 08 for your youtubing pleasure.

This was fantastic.

Everyone in the room stiffened, sat a little straighter, and I'm in the back corner, hidden by that lovely column in the right-hand portion of the screen, giggling and giggling, cuz I heart The Ed Trust (in both East and West Coast incarnations), and I heart anyone who will take a hard-line stance to the whine-despair-whine-hand-to-the-forehead-whine of the tests are big and bad and scary (there was a fair amount of editing on the actual gross tonnage of all that).

For the record, I think:

1) If the kids are scared of the tests and the environment in testing sucks, adults failed. They failed to prepare kids, support kids, and create a positive enviornment that views these tests as opportunity, not punishment.

2) Wilkins is not wrong in her analysis. In a highly functioning system, folks should have to earn the right to teach in the South Bronx. We're 180 degrees away from that.

Not The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming Round

2008-05-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-05-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

...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

2008-05-11T14:56:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-04T10:37:00.000-07:00

[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)

2008-05-02T18:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Sound The Trumpets

2008-04-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-04-17T21:04:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-12T16:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-03-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-03-20T00:19:00.000-07:00

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.

I Am Ready To Step Up (spontaneous classroom eruption)

2008-03-18T21:21:00.000-07:00

I take the unit exams away from them today in fifth period because they’re looking listless, tracking me as I move through the columns to address test questions instead of focusing, not re-reading, not re-checking, and I won’t have it. I take the tests back and stand in front of them, straightening and organizing the papers with great care and deliberation.

We will not work like this, I say. Maybe we’ll do something else today, take these tests tomorrow. Maybe next week. You don’t look ready.

They make this gross teenage noise that is almost naawww but with an aftertaste sound that is somehow Germanic, a linguistic etymology which tends to belie everything we know about these kids in front of me, not to mention the origin of language itself, but is generally used to convey an incredulous disbelief, this sound that is almost, but not quite, naawww.

You’re ready? I say. What are you ready for?

And then, so perfect it’s like I planted the line, homeboy in the back speaks up, loudly, clearly, using a complete sentence even though the lights surrounding the complete sentence sign are not illuminated, speaking the phrase we put on last year’s CST shirts, the one that’s emblazoned across our class-based academic performance awards: “I am ready to step up.”

I hand him his unit exam.

And wait.

"Mr. [TMAO]?"

I look over with a pleasantly quizzical look.

“I am ready to step up.” She gets a test.

Another hand goes up: “I am ready to step up.” He gets a test.

Now nearly every hand is in the air, delivering the line with increasing rigor and strength, taking their tests and working now for real. One kid chokes on the words; another giggles. They do not receive a test. These are serious words spoken by serious people, people who want to do serious work, I say. Another student tries to wait me out. I ignore her and her short-lived rebellion, and eventually the hand hits the air: “I am ready to step up.”

Ascendéte, Jaguar.

There’s something different about requesting the work as opposed to getting it handed to you; reaching out instead of accepting, acquiescing. Something strong and real about needing to vocalize a commitment before you’re allowed to work, this thing going on here that speaks to the idea that this isn’t punishment or some sad time we’re about to enter, but rather opportunity. Show what you know. Everything is a little amazing right now.

I pull a chair off to the corner and sit, watching them tear into plot structure, proper-common nouns, essay analysis, and compare-contrast evaluations, wondering how I can make this thing here live everyday, make these words a vibrant ethos, more fundamental even than the reverse print 3-in-1 posters that underscore every piece of work completed, every chance taken. The kids I work with are not ready to work for themselves. The previous seven academic years of under-teaching, under-expecting, under-providing, and disastrous deal-making have robbed them of the chance to work for themselves. Everything is conditional, and way too much of what they do is still for parents, or for peers, or for me. At least for now. We're on a linear progression, launched toward the time when maybe they can do it for themselves, a D.I.Y. infinitely more powerful than that evinced by my long-off friend Brian Sweet Potato who made his own studded belts with mail-order purchased supplies because Hot Topic didn't exist yet.

If it was just one of them and one of me, I'd say, one day you'll look around and realize holy-shit-I-want-this. I want to make sure you've got something in the tank for when that day comes.

Maybe we got a little closer today, to both those occurrences.

Getting My Panel Discussion On

2008-03-16T20:25:00.000-07:00

Last month I had the opportunity to take part in a panel discussion on education reform. Last week, the 408's paper of record printed some excerpts along with a picture where I look more than a little sleepy and jowly. I had no idea this event would be immortalized in print, and all these people at the Mountain View PD were saying, I saw you in the paper. I just say thanks, laugh awkwardly, and hope it wasn't an article about how I'll be getting fired soon.

When I got a copy of the editorial supplement (not available on-line) I realized everything I said was a paraphrased outtake of rather verbose blog posts. I'm quoting myself. That can't be good, right? It's a pretty short trip from paraphrasing your blog in front of business people to doing that third-person self-referential thing. So, rather than retype the words that were reprinted last Sunday, I've included some choice observations from the event, with links to the relevant elucidating posts.

■ "I think meritorious pay is [critical]. I say that as a union rep, as a teacher. I say that as someone who feels he's meritorious." [Rules For the Voyage]

■ "I've been a teacher for six years. It does not matter how good a job I do. I am doing the same entry-level work I did six years ago." [The Ledge]

■ "[English Language Learners and poor kids] cost more to educate effectively. The job is bigger. So, let's stop funding it the same." [Sacramento Gets One Right... So Far]

■ "We have an LCD projector in all the classrooms in my school. That's awesome, right? But do we know how to use an LCD projector to teach kids how to read?" [Budget Cuts, Shmudget Pluts]

■ "Our teacher preparation programs prepare folks to teach in Cupertino, but not the east side of San Jose. They don't prepare people to teach in West Oakland." [Gonna be a whole lot on this. A whole lot.]

Out Sick

2008-03-12T12:22:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty sure I have TB. Or whooping cough. Some Oregon Trail disease.

TMAO has snakebite.

I exist on a buffet of vitamins, mucinx, emergen-C, Halls fruit breezers, Nyquil, Dayquil, no dairy, and enough over-the-counter pseudoephedrine that I'm pretty sure los federales are gonna come crashing through my door any minute now, and oh, what disappointment at discovering a disease-ridden middle school teacher and no meth lab.

I was on-loan to the Mountain View-Whisman school district on Monday to do some PD for them (in addition to Being the Molotov Cocktail, I dropped Wielding the Grammar Hammer: Harness the 3rd-Rail of Literacy) and had to call a time-out in the middle of one session to go cough up a lung for ten minutes. What'd you do during PD? Oh, I watched some crazy guy from east San Jose cough; it was rad.

You shot 562 pounds of meat, but were only able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon.

So I'm out sick. I had to ask the admin assistant for help with the sub finder, because they changed the system sometime in the last 36 months, and I don't have any correct log-ins or passwords anymore. The kids are taking NWEA assessments and doing a whole lot of A.R., there's gonna be a volleyball fiasco, and I just slept for 16 hours, which equals the combined total for the last six days. To my drug and vitamin cocktail I added Bushmills, which really made all the difference, I'm telling you.

Your party is too sick to continue down the trail. Rest 3 days.

Gratuitous Self-Promotion Sheltered By The Wafer-Thin Veil Of Analysis

2008-03-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

Former goofy-nerd student comes by looking like he'd be right at home in the hipster maze of the 415, holding this pink piece of paper and talking about how his sophomore English teacher gave him an assignment about me. Entitled Side-by-Side Essays, it is just that: two essays split down the middle by five reading questions. The one on the right is actually about me. I'll quote in full.

Mr. [TMAO] was my English teacher at [that school in the east 408] during 7th grade. He was a big, chunky white guy who wore a formal suit with some dirty, ripped Converse sneakers.

On the first day of school Mr. [TMAO] gave us a reading test. I had really low scores, at the 4th grade level. I felt like retard. But Mr. [TMAO] encouraged me to do my best. Every day I would have to read at least two books from my grade level.
After a few months I had improved two grade levels. I felt really good about myself. I felt smarter, confident, and proud. When I went home I read books, too. My favorite book was House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros. It was really hard work because I had problems reading. But I wanted to learn badly enough to read at my house! I didn't want to fail, and I wanted to show Mr. [TMAO] that I could do it.

When school ended I achieved my goal of reaching my reading level. I got a B in Mr. [TMAO's] class thanks to his help and my hard work.

My thinking here is don't need a résumé anymore. I'll just send this along.

You want to know how I get things done? Second graph, where I bust out a diagnostic and share the results – no matter how bad – in affirming, positive ways. From there we see evidence of meaningful practice and relevant work. There is a clear goal evidenced in the third graph, an ambitious end-point students work toward. Better still, we see communication regarding progress toward this goal. We see investment, empowerment, and in the last sentence, a clear understanding of that success equation: "his help and my hard work."

And man, you want to know if I get things done? Take a look at the first graph. Someone taught this kid how to utilize adjectives, and I'm pretty sure it was me.

The Secret To Building Positive Classroom Culture

2008-03-04T21:49:00.000-08:00

Dan started a brush fire on this issue, probably fueled in part by the gasoline I poured all over the place. Classroom management and the construction of positive class culture is important stuff, a key component to my big, unbloggable project, and I gotta say, I think I've got it figured out. I have determined how to empower students in their own success, invest them in our classroom goals, and build the concepts of unity and family across diverse student groups. This is the thing that teachers across this great land struggle with daily, the issue that brings many a great and powerful educator to their knees. But I have the secret.

We call my dad.

During class, on speakerphone, always unplanned, to talk about any and all issues that may arise. He's doing financial reporting things down in S. Florida, but we'll ring him up on his cell phone, and he'll always answer with a gruff intonation of his first and last names like it's a stranger on the line and not his first born son calling from the opposite coast, which inevitably sends the kids into spasms of glee, the intonation: "He sounds just like you!"

It started when I presented an exemplar essay that explained the myriad ways in which I have liked pirates far longer than it was fashionable, trendy, or Disney-permissible to enjoy piratical history, esthetics, and vocal stylings. The kids took issue with the first reason/ argument (that's a yellow for all you SUTW acolytes), which outlined the origins of my fascination and explained how the roots of all this lay in a mid-1980s trip to Disney World, wherein I repeatedly rode the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

THEM: How could you go on the ride when you were eight, if the movies came out like three years ago?
ME: The ride came before the movie.
THEM: Nooooooooooo!

Head-butted thusly with the surety of youth and inexperience, all I could think to do was call my dad for that ever valuable third-party validation. This he duly provided, while I grinned my biggest shit-eating grin and nodded like the king of the world. Since then, we've called to speak on a variety of issues, unevenly spaced out and completely unintentional, although I passed on a recent opportunity because it's more or less tax time.

MY DAD: [gruff intonation of first and last names]
THEM: [howls of laughter]
ME: Dad, you're on speaker-phone with a bunch of 7th and 8th graders, so don't say any bad words or anything.
MY DAD: And just why would you tell me something like that?
THEM: When he's angry he sounds just like you! [more howls]
ME: Do you remember the name of the guy we met in Costa Rica that one time...

We call my dad. It's a state change. It's third-party validation. It's my Minnesota-farm-boy-turned-corporate-financial-officer father interacting with teenaged Latino immigrants. It's the secret to everything.

Now go pile your Harry Wong books up in the back yard... and light a match.

Good Ideas For Inhibiting School Growth (II)

2008-03-03T20:04:00.001-08:00

I gotta think that not much is accomplished when a school-assigned police officer detains/ cites the push-cart vendor who, daily, plies our kids with mango and soda and those fried dough things soaked in bags of chili. See, kids don't get issues of permits and whatnot, they just go home saying an entrenched part of our community got in trouble by the cops cuz he didn't have his papers. Right? Didn't have his papers. That kind of thing that doesn't make families real eager to come on by school; doesn't quite get the word out that we're an open and welcome place; doesn't send the clear message that everyone here is about kids, first and foremost.

But man, it sure does keep everyone safe from the unpermitted menace that's been wreaking havoc on our community lo these many years.

In A Nutshell

2008-02-28T19:55:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling misunderstood, so I'll take another swing.

Here are these data you show to this room full of people, surely not the only room you've shown them to. My thing is, what's the point? What do we do with this?

Do teachers need to utilize more culturally responsive pedagogy? (Banks et al) Do kids and families of group X need to start acting more like the kids and families from group Y, and like, y'know, get their act together? (Cosby & the staff lounge) Do we put our efforts into wide-scale social transformation, because schools are not powerful enough to overcome such a pervasive inequity? (Rothstein) Do we stop talking about poverty, because it's not about poverty, but about innate factors out of our control? (silly race-based IQ-gap people)

Or do we say, here is School A which has the same demographics as School B, but kids at School A learn and those at School B do not -- just why is that exactly? (Folks who scribble the word educator in front of every published utterance of the phrase "achievement gap.")

That's my thing. Don't engage an endless debate that may or may not get us closer to bringing a better education to more kids.

Wrong Tree

2008-02-26T17:28:00.000-08:00

The other day I was fortunate enough to attend the opening of what I'm sure will be a stellar event, one organized and run (biennially) by a fantastic organization. At the kick-off portion of the event, Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction, spoke, and amid various calls to action and data-driven illustrations of the achievement gap, he said something that I couldn't quite make sense of.

O'Connell is really doing it, if for no other reason that he's using the phrase achievement gap every time he speaks, and this type of prioritizing, even if it elevates effects over causes, moves reform efforts forward. On Sunday, he was showing graphs of performance data broken-down by ethnicity – Latino, African-American, White. Although I found the exclusion of performance data from Asian students odd, this information should not have been terribly surprising to most of the gathered. What was surprising was the lack of comment regarding a slide that showed performance levels of low-income White students has equaled or exceeded the performance of non low-income Latino and African-American students. In California, poor Whites do better than middle- and upper-class Blacks and Latinos.

By way of explanation, O'Connell says, "The achievement gap cannot be understood strictly in terms of socioeconomic status."

Click.

Next slide.

I find it bizarre to raise such a potentially volatile issue and leave it so bereft of context or interpretation. Cuz interpretation is everything with this one. Without breaking much of a sweat, I can run off a pretty extensive list of different ways to view these data, many I vehemently disagree with and find repugnant. No doubt, you could too. Some are already starting. Folks from the 408's local paper are planning investigations of the achievement gap, driven in part by this observation of O'Connell's, seeking to shed light on the ways in which cultural groups differ in their approach and support of the educational process.

This is a massive issue. The achievement gap is data on prevasive and institutionalized inequity, an inequity that is driven, experienced, and understood by an ever-expanding array of factors. The whole question of how we see the achievement gap, how we view and interpret these data, whether SES or ethnicity/ culture is a more appropriate lens to drive our analysis, all of this can be endlessly mined for its rich haul of investigative reports, op/ed pieces, and policy initiatives. There is no end to the deforestation this debate could engender, and as someone who goes to work everyday with the foremost intention and ultimate goal of closing the gaps O'Connell highlighted, I gotta tell ya: I don't care.

I don't care. I don't know the answers to these big ticket debate items, don't have much in the way of supported theories, and I'm not trying real hard to figure any of it out. More to the point, I'm not sure my not-knowing detracts from the work I do. Because I do know that some districts, schools, and classrooms are capable of mediating the myriad ways economic, social, ethnic, and language diversity influence teaching and learning. And some are not.

And that's it, right there. Across all levels of the system, some folks know how to get the job done at high levels, and some do not. This is an educator achievement gap, acknowledged in the practice of awarding those people and places that can bring it, but almost never acknowledged in name, not enough, not yet. This is where we ought to turn our time and attention. Given equivalent external factors, why does performance differ across districts, across schools and classrooms? That's the only question that matters. That's the only debate we need, and the only investigation worth undertaking.

All this may very well be what O'Connell meant; I certainly hope so. When we come to understand, identify, and implement – on a large scale – those strategies, skills, process, structures, and dispositions that foster high achievement in the key student groups we're so rightly concerned with, we will see a reduction in gaps, and more importantly, a corresponding reduction in the generational factors that can, in a vacuum, pull away from success and make it more difficult to attain. This is what we need to be doing. Everything else is a form of buck-passing or camouflaging – an unfortunate misappropriation of time, energy, and money.

These Four Walls

2008-02-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

I'm probably not breaking any news to the folks who read this space with anything approaching regularity when I say I've been a little, uh, restless of late. Like, for a year. Such restlessness isn't going anywhere, and the continued deterioration of working conditions and corresponding rise in negativity both on-site and across the District as a whole is a big, fat, Roger Clemons steroid injection into my restlessness. (For the record, watching kids get arrested for no good reason while being denied equitable benefits and access to the same COLA teachers across the 408 got 10 months ago are not vitamins. Not at all.)

The storm clouds gather on the horizon, but inside the four walls of room D2, things haven't been this good in a long time.

This job is fun. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds are legitimately insane in any number of hormonely unbalanced ways and that's fun. The kids are nuts, I've got a 13-year-old sensibility lurking just under the surface, we hang out for three hours a day, so let's go. Let's paint the boat. I didn't connect with last year's kids like this, and maybe not the year before either. But we're humming right now, this well-oiled teaching and learning machine, the vibe is strong, and we're making hay while the sun shines.

An incomplete list of recent developments that are driving the fun:

■ The basketball team somehow made the decision that it would be wrong, just wrong, for any of them to pass any of me in any part of the school without doing that mid-air-shoulder-bump-celebratory-greeting thing. We must not pass each other, ever, without doing this. It does not matter that I outweigh some of them by like, oh, 150 lbs or so, or that the entire backcourt seems to travel together, necessitating either a series of mid-air collisions one after the other, or my shoulder connecting with like five teenage shoulders all kind of at once. I have been late to 5th period twice because of this.

■ A. is back. My catch-phrase appropriating, turn-around kid, he's changed schedules after a series of disasters with other teachers, and is back again as an 8th grader. The less said about any of this the better, but his GPA in 4Q last year was 1.8, 1Q this year was 1.3, and last quarter the kid busts his ass and makes Honor Roll with a 3.3. He's playing soccer, MASTERing skills like a champ, and tutoring his classmates in the finer points of the counter-argument. We've turned a corner.

■ C. is back, too. This is the kid who hid in the mud at last year's graduation, and the first half of 8th grade has been similarily filthy and wasteful. I'm bringing him back, and he's gonna follow A.'s path. This kid's getting on the Honor Roll for 3Q. He is. He can't even see the corner yet, but we're going to get there, and we're going to turn it.

■ The other C. Class champion for the past tense irregular verb battles, this girl, armed with barely a year of English immersion is simply destroying everything I put in front of her. From no English to HP C in ten months. She's going to test proficient this spring, a neon bright reminder that ELLs will achieve at the highest levels over remarkably short time periods when we triangulate Newcomer centers, first-language literacy, and achievement-based scheduling.

■ V. and K. wander in one day, looking all adult and complaining about the International Baccalaureate program in exactly the same ways kids have complained about the International Baccalaureate program for generations. I taught these girls in my first year, drove em over to magnet school meeting and helped them with IB applications, and now they're in my doorway, talking about colleges accepted to, scholarships earned, and extended essay topics (The effects of global warming on migratory patterns among North American birds; The nature of visual propaganda in Maoist China). They did it. They made the achievement gap a little less wide.

■ Kids starting picking at each other a little, and I break out the family speech: We're family, and we need to act like a family, looking out for each other, helping each other out, getting each other's back. We don't pull each other back into the bucket, we lift each other up. "We aren't your family," says the kid in the back. Of course you are. My family lives in Florida, Minnesota, and Maryland. I see them once a year. I see you almost every day, for three hours, sometimes more, and I think about you a lot. You're my family. "So you're my tío?" Of course. And the new kid's eyes get wide when after a few days, one kid after another, all those resitant kids, are putting hands up, saying, "Tío [TMAO]?" What's up, sobrina?

■ Learning is happening. A lot of it. Check out the essays. Check out the attendance for 7th period reading program. The fluency gains, the book reports, the shout-out loud enthusiasm for The House on Mango Street. For reals.

Insert Expected Spider-Themed Title

2008-02-18T16:24:00.000-08:00

Eduwonkette is to the world of policy blogs what the Lost Season 2 DVD extras are to the fans of well-written TV. She has created a web outlining the interconnectivity of leading education reform/ advocacy/ policy organizations. Check out the comment section, and the reactions of K.Carey and A.Rotherham, which seem like textbook cases of doth protesting too much.

In the interest of tongue-in-cheek disclosure, I've cashed (small) checks from three of these organizations, and hope to cash (larger) checks from a fourth sooner rather than later, but I think the interconnectivity of these groups is less about string-pulling old men in back rooms, and more about that feeling Cheers made famous. Sometimes you want go where you can skip the ideological foreplay performed on a tightrope, and just talk about doing and fixing.

Budget Cuts, Shmudget Pluts

2008-02-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

While participating in my local Association rally in front of the District Office last Thursday I was asked to speak to a television reporter. We are in negotiations that are more than 10-months overdue, attempting to convince District leadership to release last year's COLA, which they currently have banked, of which they are currently offering around half of the money already received. This reporter asked what I thought of the Governor's budget cuts and their effects on our situation, my classroom, and so forth. This is, more or less, what I told him:

"Those cuts don't have anything to do with this situation. This is about money the District already has, money they are refusing to release to teachers, unlike every other district in the surrounding area... Those cuts may affect stuff that schools get, or stuff in my classrooms. Yes, I need new stuff, more books, more supplies, better facilities, and so on, but my kids don't need that stuff. They need me. If you want to close the achievement gap, you want me in that classroom, me and all my talented friends and colleagues. We are the single most powerful factor in determining the success or failure of the individual student, and you need to keep us around. But you can't keep us around when you play games with money, lie, fabricate unease regarding proposed cuts, and generally demonstrate a lack of respect and appreciation for our importance in the whole achievement gap closing equation. You can't keep us when you invest in programs over people. So yes, the Governor should understand that you get what you pay for, but budget cuts or no budget cuts, you protect your investment in the teachers whose energy and talent make the difference between advancement and stagnation. "

Good Ideas For Inhibiting School Growth (I)

2008-02-11T21:46:00.000-08:00

I was unable to provide supplemental intervention instruction to two students after school today because they had to attend court-mandated anti-tagging "classes," as a result of being caught in possession of a Sharpie.

There's no need to belabor the obvious, but I gotta think that far less good is served by prioritizing continued interaction with the criminal justice system over an afternoon spent interacting with me, learning to read.

In Contrast

2008-02-09T18:09:00.000-08:00

J. came to our school after first quarter, after her parents read that NCLB-derived letter informing them that her current school had not met performance levels for all AYP significant sub-groups. She was given the option of attending one of two other district middle schools that were not in PI status. I gotta tell you, most mid-year enrollees are kids who've been kicked out, counseled out, or moved out of other schools and districts just ahead of the truancy citation, not this awesome kid whose parents were seeking a better education for their daughter.

Sometime in the last week or so, J. started having problems with L. Egged on by lame friends on both sides, the two girls "fought," after school one day.

No one got arrested, cited, or detained.

Instead, the principal and counselor worked to get the whole story, and then pulled in both J. and L. for one of those long talks that reveals (surprise!) they liked each other. They didn't have any problems or anger toward one another; they were being manipulated by friends looking to get in on some drama. Middle school: from fighting to tear-soaked hugging in 24 hours. Later, the counselor called in both sets of friends cuz she's wicked smart, and let's J. and L. tell them there's no beef here, so don't start any, and by the way, you suck for trying to get us to fight.

No one got arrested, cited, or detained.

But it won't happen this way automatically or by happy accident. It requires a willingness to work with kids, the ability to understand kids and the culture they've built in and between groups of friends, the commitment to reform and correct behavior rather than merely punish. It requires patience, savvy, time, and the refusal to buy into the fallacy of can't behave, can't reach for more, can't be more. Sadly, these attributes are nowhere near as universal or compulsary as they need to be.

Interesting postscript to this tale:

Class is ending while J. and L. are doing the crying thing, and both need their backpacks. I unceremoniously throw L.'s stuff in, because I'm not so thrilled with her at this moment, but before I can do the same for J., the little spiky-haired boy who sits next to her, A., has carefully packed up her bag, zipped it closed, and is handing it to me with just the neatest 7th-grader-I'm-proud-of-myself smile, saying, "I packed up J.'s stuff for her. I even put her homework inside the rings." We'll ignore for a moment the fact that he won't put his own damn homework inside those binder rings unless I loom over him for every facet of the operation, and just dig on what's going on here.

I take the bags to the counselor's office, hand J. her bag and say, "A. packed up all your things for you."

And aw man, the smile. That shy look-away smile. What serendipity in the seating chart and necessity of classroom-removing counseling.

The Criminalization Of Misconduct

2008-02-03T20:13:00.000-08:00

The myopic, seemingly p.r.-driven decision was made to install police officers on middle school campuses this year. About this atrocity, I wrote:

When you bring an officer onto campus, you undermine [the teachings of inclusion and full adult control]. Rather than sending the message to kids that adults expect your best and are fully in control of the school environment, the patrolling presence of police sends the message that we expect your worse and are not in control. Rather than sending the message that you will do the right thing because strong, successful people do so naturally, we are sending the message that you will do the right because we will punish you otherwise. We once used the phrase family to describe the school environment we sought to create. External controlling agents are no part of any family I know. Instead of kids hearing a message of inclusion and warmth, one that softens that self-defeating mantle of hard so many reach for, we are sending a hardening message that this is a place for thugs, a ghetto place where the kids are so bad actual armed police officers are needed to ensure control.

Every word of that has been born out and proved accurate this year. Every word has been driven home not only by the presence of the police, but through the actions of an unsettled first-year administrator, who has consistently and obstinately brought a police presence into areas of school function in which they can serve no beneficial purpose. This isn't even about the absurd rate of suspension, the removal of dignity in discipline situations, or just the daily unpleasantness that has arisen on campus. This is about how the police have been used to undermine and chip away at the very core of what it was that made our school a successful and special place.

This year, officers have been brought into discipline scenarios time and time again in defiance of our norms, understandings, and wishes, but apparently in compliance with the wishes of district leadership. The inclusion of police represents a continued gross escalation and over-reaction. We're not talking about a kid selling drugs or using a weapon in an assault. Those are crimes. Our kids are being put into the system, cited and arrested over actions that, while unacceptable, are nevertheless not criminal. A playground fight is not a crime. Yelling things at someone is not a crime. Being a jerk to a 6th grader is not a crime. Having a Sharpie in your posession is not a crime.

Students at my school have received citations and court dates for all these actions.

It's awful. We do not need more black and brown kids in the criminal justice system. We do not need kids with booby-trapped cumulative files, rigged for explosion the first time they step out of line, because suddenly it's a pattern and a repeat offense. We do not need to set so many kids up for failure in navigating legal whitewater (as if it's so out of the realm of possibility that we're handing out court dates to families who lack the money, social capital, immigration status, or plain with-it-ness to get themselves through something like that in an acceptable way). We do not need to function this way to have an orderly, safe campus.

This is what we do now. Kid gets sent to the office, there's almost no chance they escape interaction with a police officer, no matter how piddling the offense. Citations are written at such a mind-boggling rate that teachers have been told officers are too encumbered with paperwork to remove trespassers from campus. I hate it. I see the reliance on, and the acceptance of, a police role in routine matters of discipline and I want to vomit. But this is what we do now.

This is never what we have done.

We moved from a state-rank of 1 to 5, obtained a like-schools rank of 10, quadrupled the number of proficient students, advanced from the worst middle school in the county to the best in the District, and at no time did we need a daily police presence handing out citations, threatening students with a harassment charge if they continued to make animal noises, or entering classrooms to support an otherwise ineffectual and weak administrator in matters of minor discipline. We've presented our success in two states, to numerous county and district officials, received visits from dozens of schools, and every time they want to hear about the instruction, about the scheduling, about the professional development attended, about the extended school day. They want to hear about the mechanics of structural and instructional reform, but the thing that really made the difference, the thing that enabled all those other reforms to take root and be effective is much more simple and direct: We agreed to see in our kids their best, and demand it from them, daily.

This is what Defy The Myth meant. These kids can learn, they want to learn, and it's our job to take the learning to them. We must take our teachings to them and not demand, ever, that they come to us. We will not scream at kids from across a chasm of misunderstanding; we will use our powerful minds and hands to build a big-ass bridge to bring them over. When you defy this myth, you are able to differentiate between esthetic and personality, between a front and a reality, between an annoyance and a disruption, between misconduct and a criminal act. When you defy this myth, you are able to see misbehavior as something unfortunate that contradicts, rather than confirms, your expectations.

The myth is on its way back, and let's be clear about what this means: We have placed our feet upon a path that will pull us back into the bucket, pull us back down into that dank place where there is no unity, no sense of purpose, no common goal, no pursuit of excellence, just a fractured group of individuals, some getting by, some making it worse, some fighting every minute to push out the darkness that once seemed so small and far away.

I feel the slip, and wait for the rupture.

Battling

2008-01-31T18:35:00.000-08:00

The Past Tense Irregular Verb battles wrapped up last week, always arriving right in time to get me through some doldrums. I intro'd this year's competition with some footage of MC Battles from the 80s, the kids watching without the context I didn't provide, and after a few minutes, I cut it off, saying: "You're gonna do this today."

THEM: We're gonna flow?
ME: No. You don't have any skills. You're gonna battle with past tense irregular verbs.

The High Point B battles play out according to CELDT. The Final Four go R-FEP, 5, 5, 4. The winner is my back-up dyslexic center, D., who just steamrolls everyone in class exactly the way he doesn't steamroll anyone on the court. High Point A goes according to CELDT, but in reverse order. The two champions both come out of the Newcomer Center: C. has lived here about a year, while F. is Jorge epitomized. The two of them facing off makes my eff-ing month, and I wanna call their teacher from last year, tell her to drop her kids at the library or leave em in the quad, or something, anything -- just get on over here, because this is awesome. C. wins, and it's a victory for Newcomer Centers and targeted student grouping everywhere.

Today I pull the Final Four from HP B into my HP A class for the ultimate showdown. I've seeded these kids, and my skills as bracketologist inspire awe. The highest seed wins every battle, and the ultimate final feature each class's respective winner. I pump Eye of the Tiger when D. walks up to the battle circle, the Star Wars Imperial March while C. enters. Niether has lost. They face each other. C.'s style is reserved: a quiet, firm voice delivered toward her opponent's ankles. D. squares-up before delivering each verb pair, (the way I wish he'd square-up to the basket), then immediately turns half away, dismissive, done.

I have to quell a rash of betting that emerges with the school's token economy money.

This is the longest battle. They blast through being verbs and the oughts. C. is a big fan of the little utilized consonant changers, while D. has a secret weapon he's been working on this whole time. Even as C. moves through her d-to-t and her no-changers, D. has been applying prefixes to his verbs and the effect is devasting.

build-built
rebuild-rebuilt

He stresses the prefix, and a gasp arises when they see what he has done.

understand-understood
misunderstand-misunderstood

C. knows she's in trouble.

do-did
undo-undid

D. wins, and they applaud as I raise his left arm above his head. I present C. with her certificate, D. with his trophy. Then we battle and I destroy him at his own game. It ends like this:

HIM: make-made
ME: unmake-unmade
HIM: go-went
ME: undergo-underwent
HIM: (after the ten seconds of disqualifying silence) That's just cold.

You Should Know Better

2008-01-28T21:37:00.000-08:00

When the kids come in all abuzz from the first day of sex ed and you forget it's the first day of sex ed, and they want to know how big four centimeters are, don't argue with them about which unit of measurement they've asked you to demonstrate, and don't show them on your fingers, illustrating the difference between the respective units of measurement before once again asking if they are sure they want to see a visual example of these demensions that utilizes the metric system, and when you finally make a variety of contextual connections, walk away. Just walk away.

Sacramento Gets One Right (so far)

2008-01-24T20:54:00.000-08:00

Assemblymember Joe Coto, who reps the east 408, has sponsored a bill that makes enormous sense. AB586 calls for the institution of a weighted ADA formula, wherein districts receive 125 percent of pre-existingADA for every ELL or low-SES kid they enroll. Additional provisions weight funding for GATE and SpEd; and call for alterations to ADA based on prevailing economic differences between districts. This bill has the potential to not only dramatically alter the mechanism of school funding, but in so doing, it has the power to affect school change on a wide stage.

If it becomes law, AB586 would provide formal and financial acknowledgement to a reality that informs all the work we do in education. It is not only more difficult, but more expensive to educate an English Language Learner. It is not only more difficult, but more expensive to educate a low-income child. As long as Los Altos spends $11,000 per student while my district spends $6,000, educational equity will remain a pursuit and never a point of arrival.

This is about more than money. Money can be misappropriated, misspent, misapplied. No, what gets me really excited about this bill is the essential principle at its core, the formal, legislative recognition that getting better results for low-income, high-need kids requires something different and something more. Once the essential binary nature of public education is represented in budgetary realities, the way is paved for all manner of reform.

If high-need urban education is enough of a unique species to require alternative funding mechanisms, than it likewise requires alternative...

...scheduling options
...class size
...teacher preparation
...teacher credentialing
...principal training and certification
...financial control mechanisms
...compensation
...evaluation

Make your own list. It's well past the time when recognition of the vast differences within our school system took on a legal, financial, and effective form. Right now that recognition is limited to bad movies and the drunk moron on the bar stool next to yours. We can do better, and passing AB586 into law is an appropriately massive next step.

via: Educated Guess

Be The Molotov Cocktail III: After Strategies

2008-01-19T16:48:00.000-08:00

KEY PRINCIPLE: Beyond Answer The Questions

We took a strong path into the text, filled with front-loading of relevant content and priming interest, supported readers during the text with active reader strategies and strong questions, and suddenly we're done. So, uh, now what?

Turn the page and answer questions 1-6. Write a two paragraph summary, using appropriate transition words. Have a discussion.

I'm not feeling any of that. All of those things have their place, I suppose, but the reality of urban literacy programs is a series of short readings, completed on a more or less weekly cycle, (maybe more, maybe less), which results in a ton of post-reading assessment. If we're doing the same stuff, or if our stuff is of relatively low impact and low quality, we're in trouble. And the kids are in even more trouble than we.

Comprehension/ Application

■ Summary without words: Students produce, in poster or comic strip form, a summary of the text that uses no words, just images and pictures. This is a nice language-neutral assessment, strong visualizing activity, hits at those multiple intelligences I keep hearing about, and can also function as a pre-writing activity to a more formal summarizing activity

■ Diary entry: Pen a series of diary entries from the P.O.V. of a supporting character. Emphasis text interpretation from this other perspective. Different portions of text can be assigned to different groups/ individuals to ensure the totality of plot is adequately and accurately represented.

■ Answer book: Students create books that feature images and questions from the text on each page. The answer to each question is represented by the image and title at the front of the book. Here is an example from Paul Fleishman's Seedfolks, but the non-fiction applications are huge here.

Page #2

Page #4

The answer to the questions posed by these pages is the title of the book, created by a student who understood the character she was assigned was a middle-aged African-American, but did not understand the identity of the secretary of state:

■ Interactive Powerpoint: I've written about these before, but sometimes we have to answer questions. Sometimes I'm out of ideas, or the text didn't lend itself to much of anything, sometimes we don't have time for the big project we could embark on, given unlimited time and far less limited skills, and so we just need to answer questions. This question answering doesn't have to suck. I created Powerpoint presentations with questions and images and large box marked answers where kids type, uh, answers. They learn how to download, and save, and use USB drives, improve their typing, and never guess they've actually just answering questions, like they have a million times before.

■ Big Paper: We talked about this before, right? Text-related images on big paper, kids move around writing questions, anticipating the text. Once you're done reading, throw the same images back up, but this time, kids go around writing answers, facts, interpretations, and so on. No questions anymore. You've got the answers.

Extension/ Enrichment

■ Now you do it: This is the generic category in my head for the times when I ask kids to create their own version of what we read. Whether this is a two-week novella entitled The House on [my] Street after finishing Sandra Cisneros's novel, or a one-day creation of a mural after reading about Diego Rivera, I try to work in as many quick now-you-do-its as I can for post text completion personal relevance building. Or whatever.

■ Wanted poster: All fiction involves one or more character acting badly. Groups or individuals create old-West style wanted posters that demonstrate understanding of what those characters that caused or contributed to our central conflict.

■ Sequel/ Prequel/ New ending: Self-explanatory, I think, always fun, always lurid.

■ Dr. Phil: Read about it here. This activity used to be called "Jerry Springer," but this established behavior expectations that are not conducive to learning, not at all.

I'm not sure what my big finish is to all this. If this were live, I'd read the masthead of this blog, that lengthy statement of purpose, and hope that no one there thought I was being trite or lame. Maybe you can go back and read those three sentences and we'll call it a good day's work.

[Blogger is just absolutely killing me with the lay-out of this stuff. Now, I kinda suck at all this, but I don't suck as much as the design of this post would suggest.]

Be The Molotov Cocktail II: During Strategies

2008-01-16T21:47:00.000-08:00

KEY PRINCIPLE: Don’t Read With Your Eyes

I'm putting all this work into building anticipation, front-loading content, pre-teaching key vocabulary, and generally getting kids, if not interested, than at least less bored in the text. Like the purchase of a new car, the value of all these efforts begins to depreciate the second I’m done with them. Given a population of ELLs and other academic untouchables, this depreciation probably occurs at a rate more rapid than otherwise – I’ll resist a sub-group to automobile comparison here – and will be less positively affected by the inherent benefits of the text than one could hope.

Upshot? If I don’t keep working, kids start reading with their eyes.

This is bad. People who read with their eyes don’t think, don’t question, don’t contemplate, don’t weigh the new information they’re taking in against previously acquired information. They’re probably unaware of the new information. This is bad.

I’ll head out on that limb of mine and say that this where things fall apart, a lot. As commenter Dina pointed out, none of this stuff on Before Reading is terribly unique or interesting. After Reading strategies tend to be even more well-covered ground. It’s here though, where we try to answer the what-do-we-do-while-they’re-actually-reading question that we can make some hay. This is our barn. How do we keep kids from checking out, from skimming, from avoiding thought, from getting lost John Locke style?

■ Response Journal: Two-columns, chosen or assigned text on the left, obviously deep and thoughtful response on the right.

■ Partner Talk: Sometimes they know it; they just don’t want to tell you.

■ Questions: Oh Dina, I hear ya, I hear ya. Kid’s over here telling us we should ask questions about what students read. What’s next? Does he suggest we should like, teach the standards? (I do, actually). The point here isn’t that we should start doing this, it’s that we should start doing this a whole hell of a lot better. We need to ask better questions, questions that get beyond comprehension recitation, questions that include and scaffold the language we’re trying to build with our ELL kids. We need to ask questions that require responses using the new language we want to see acquired, delivered in complete sentence form (we should also have a sign that says complete sentences, canguros that we surround with Peter Griffin plastic lights, but that’s another tale). These complete sentences themselves need to be scaffolded with hardcore sentence starters displayed in accessible locales.

The real thing here is that we need to think more critically about to whom we ask those questions. Seriously, how often do we consciously plan out not only the questions that get asked, but who we want to answer them? How often do we both lead kids to knowledge this deliberately, but also build in this type of formative assessment? V. gets this question because otherwise she starts checking out. K. gets this question because it gets her using critical language early in the text. A. gets this question because if he gets it right, I know I'm moving at a good pace. F. gets this question because if he gets it right, I know I'm moving too slow.

This also gets us thinking about hits, about the number and extent of content interaction kids have in a given class period. How many hits to kids get with the work? How many with me? How many with each other? Am I keeping them out of the trap of non-participation in exchange for non-disruption? Are their patterns to interaction I need to be aware of (gender, ethnicity, ELL status, social status, proximity, etc.)? To do this, and do it with rigor, is to drastically improve what happens in your room.

■ Active Reader Strategies: Question, visualize, predict, paraphrase, clarify, fact & opinion, make connections, and so forth. These are a big part of elementary, but seem to disappear at middle and high school, never mind that the kids still have elementary learning profiles. You gotta teach these, and then hold the kids accountable to these things while you read. Something like this helps:

I can only begin to explain how huge this has been for my reading instruction, how much my kids have benefited from this type of training-wheels approach to the type of meta-cognition strong readers do as a matter of course. Suffice to say, this has been big for me, even more so because of the massive flexibility build into this approach. The strategies in those boxes can vary based on what you're reading, what's salient to the text, and also what kids have already mastered. Jorge's got visualization and prediction down? Take those off his sheet, and he can fill in other strategies he needs to work on. Ana can do all of these? Let her choose her own way, completely self-guiding. To get to this latter part, you'll need to monitor progress on these strategies. Do this however you do, but when kids monitor their own learning, everybody wins. Something like this helps:

If we can front-load concepts and build interest, and then support reading as we move through the text, by the time we get the summative (after) stage, we will be able to get far more out of the work we assign, and push students' comprehension and analytical skills beyond what many of us are getting from them currently. Then we can really have some fun.

Be The Molotov Cocktail: Before Strategies

2008-01-13T02:01:00.000-08:00

KEY PRINCIPLE: No Cold Reads

“Open your books to page 116 and start reading.”

Gross, right? But you've done it. Me too. This is one of the most odious phrases teachers utter. It has a spot in the pantheon of ineffective and over-utilized statements, sitting proudly alongside because I said so and when you get to [whatever grade/ class comes next] you'll have to work much harder.

We can do better, and really, we need to. It’s possible there was a day when the mere sight of a novel, story anthology, or basal read produced spasmic joy in young people, but if such a day existed, it’s gone now. We’d do well, we teachers of words and their use, to not conflate our feelings with those of whom we teach. I’ll go to Green Apple and just place my hands on the rows of books. I’ll lay my forehead against DeLillo’s tomes and just rest for a while. Mmmmm. At home, I’ll sit with a cup of coffee and just stare at my bookshelves (now half empty), so much do I adore the sight of books and all they represent. The kids are not me though, and they’re not you either.

That’s the obvious distinction, right? That kids are not as inherently, as a priori excited about all this as some of us is. Much is made of this. The flip-side of the equation, however, is less strip-mined territory. Kids probably have a greater capacity to become interested in things like mandated story anthologies and basal readers, given appropriate teacher actions. We forget this part. I pick up Mason-Dixon, and man, I feel like I’m gonna just read this bitch, just watch me get after it, but a slim four paragraph shit-stroll in High Point A just doesn’t do it for me. It does it for them, though, if I play my cards right. If I bring it to them in the right way.

There’s different ways to do this, but doing it is critical. This is how we mediate the interplay of low quality mandated curriculum and low-skill, burgeoning readers.

Prime Interest
I can get students thinking and working about a reading in such ways that they build in a level of interest that carries us into and through the text in meaningful ways. This is huge. This is Ali standing over Liston.

■ The ubiquitous quick-write: You know what I’m talking about.

■ Realia: Bring in stuff, stuff to hold, stuff to look at. Food is good. Persephone eats pomegranate seeds, so we do, too. Julia Alvarez and her sisters watched Miss America pageants so we look at a slide-show of the changing ethnic character of Miss America. Yenna gives her lover ginger root as symbol of their emotional commitment, so we play around with ginger and figure out how that gnarly thing could influence feelings of romantic love.

■ Never Have I Ever: You played it in college with adult beverages. Take out the adult beverages, substitute major themes for embarrassing life events, and we’re in business.

■ Ten Words: Here, play along.

These words are critical for understanding our text. Notice, they are not vocabulary words. Write a quick story that incorporates these words. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Now, read our text.

There’s no place we can’t go with this. Who got closest? Who was most ridiculous? The most creative? More importantly, we just committed resources – time and creative energy – to the text. That’s going to pay off later, because we’re forming connections to the text, we’re interested in ultimate outcomes, and so on.

Front-Load Content
There’s time when we have to do more specific work, something more than just getting kids fired up about black ink on white text. Sometimes, you gotta build some understanding, access prior knowledge, or teach the structure of the text.

■ TNL: This is my re-messaged version of the KWL chart. Think I know/ Need to know/ Learn.

■ Graffiti Stems: Thematically relevant sentence starters written on big paper/ white boards. Kids rotate, complete the sentences, and then we share out and review.

■ Big Paper: Non-linguistic graffiti stems. Content connected images on big paper around the room. Kids are only allowed to write questions. Nice quick-fire diagnostic to see where the level of knowledge is – as illustrated by question level – which can be used to determine how much you need to teach the context before getting into the text. As added bonus, repeat the activity as summative assessment, and now require kids to only write facts.

■ Non-Fiction Text Features: Dig it. Before reading non-fiction text, we complete an organizer that asks students to both quantify and analyze various key features: photos, diagrams, text boxes, and headings. Understanding text becomes a lot easier when you begin to understand how the text is laid out.

These things take time -- time to plan, time to gather realia, time out of lessons and periods that we sometimes feel is slipping away, time when either folks who don't get it or our own internal clocks yell at us to get on with it already. This time is more than paid back in increased student interest and understanding, more than paid back when kids start getting far more out of text than before.

Sampling

2008-01-03T21:08:00.000-08:00

I got this thing I'm looking at, this undertaking, and the folks on the other end want a 2-3 page writing sample. Although not specified, I'm assuming expository rather than narrative, analytic rather than reflective, and focused on big think, hot topic issues in education rather than any of my own personal obliquely boring life-shit.

There is nothing in the many pages I have churned out to earn both a preliminary and professional clear credential that sparks emotions even distantly related to the notion of pride, such that I'd want to submit those. This same lack of self-satisfaction is generated by all writings written in the pursuit of a Masters degree. (Whether this is substantially more embarrassing for me or the various institutions of higher learning I have attended, remains open to interpretation).

Thus and therefore, I think I'll send over some of the work that's appeared on this here Internet locale, appropriately edited where necessary to remove references to drinking, South Florida punk rock, or various biological functions. Because I've never been satisfactorily proficient in the arena of self-evaluation, I need some assistance in selecting the one or two posts to forward. Admittedly, this is self-indulgent, and annoyingly self-referential, but there's this post-post-modern literary maneuver, wherein the act of acknowledging the conceits, ploys, and devices inherent in some written undertaking -- up front, open-handed -- like, disarms the off-putting nature of those very conceits, ploys, and devices. That's what I got going on here.

So. What should I send over?

■ Fix This

■ On NCLB

■ The Ledge

■ ELD Transgressions

■ ELD Functioning

■ Data Has Other Uses, Too

■ Use What You've Learned

Thanks in advance.

Seven Things Meme With Chuck Ragan

2007-12-23T20:41:00.000-08:00

I've been tagged. I don't got much in the way of cleverness right now; don't have much in the way of wit. Gonna call on Chuck for some help.

1) When the air we breath is golden brown/
I don't seem to understand/
We have built a common masquerade
-Don't Cry If You've Never Seen The Rain

I can't help but feel that we've erected massive blindspots and extensive fortifications in the world of education. So much so that we need to spend endless time taking off masks and acknowledging the existence of the masks as masks before getting down to business. Can't help but feel that if we could stop this, things would get better in a hurry.

2) How could we know we would wash away?
-Symmetry

My heart's all smashed into little pieces, the consistency of which varies from the sharp-edged brittle chunks that you shrink away from on contact, to the sticky, disgusting pieces you can't shake off, can't peel away.

3) Never underestimate the glory and grace in the way you move/
moving through me so enthusing/
I've never seen the likes of you in any other year I ever knew/
searching through me just to find you
-Above The Flames

This wasn't a small thing, a minor relationship, a passing attraction.

4) How do you get right?/ with one eye closed so tight
slipping backwards/ falling prey to plastic eyes
-Hearts of Stone

I'm not really sure how to move forward on this one. There's no blueprint or roadmap, no plan or path.

5) I wanna dance like nobody's watching/
And sing like nobody cares/
-Do You Pray?

If granted a wish anytime in the intervening period between 1994-2003, I would have requested the ability to sing gravely rock star style, a perpetual whiskey howl. Since that time, I would use the same wish to develop the talent to dance in a wide variety of socially beneficial ways. Believe you me, any hypothetical male offspring I may or may not have, will assuredly be enrolled in a wide variety of dance classes -- greatest of all social lubricants.

6) Steady after the wine/ time after time we arrive/
To watch the light shine through us/
Like ghosts as the candles burn as low as the go
-Do What You Do

I've got this whole set of memories that have transformed into hurtful ghosts, ghosts that call the parts of the 954 I visit this time of year home. These used to provide comfort, a quiet solitudinal joy, now they lurk and threaten, circling to strike with a thousand razor claws.

7) I can't stand feeling nothing/ I can't stand feeling cold
I can't stand standing for nothing/ when standing up is all I know
-California Burritos

That's why I'm a teacher.

In The Rubble Of The Present

2007-12-18T21:44:00.000-08:00

Better not stick around too long
With your ugly words, with your shaky hands
Didn’t want to give up, didn’t want to give up too easy
Oh well, he deserved this
We all lose in the end, don’t we?
We all lose in the end, don’t we?
…wasted what little time he had
The one chance. The one chance.
–Spencer Moody & the MCD, One Vision of May

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
–e.e. cummings [somewhere I have never traveled]

Things relatively unrelated to my work as a teacher took a turn for the awful and the disastrous two weeks ago. These are the kind of things that leave you sitting on Ocean Beach some time after midnight, shivering, with a rapidly emptying bottle of Bushmills between your knees; that leave you suddenly without a vision for how the days will be; that change all the little things that aren’t really little, down to how you feel as you walk up the stairs after that time when you’re away doing this work; that make you question the value of the work, and its place in your hierarchy of things that matter, because it is undeniable that this current disaster finds at least some chunks of causation in the work being as highly placed as it is on said hierarchy; that leave you wandering around your classroom, unable to finish sentences or remember why you opened the cabinet or what you were about to say next.

It’s never been a more dangerous time to teach the kids.

I know I am not the first to find themselves facing a classroom of 7th graders who sit and acquiesce and wonder why their teacher has gone mumbly and smileless, but I don’t know how other people did it, how they continued to do this work through all kinds of stomach-punch pain that makes it almost impossible, literally, to generate anything even remotely approaching the level of energy with which you urge discussion and analysis of question #7 (the way you stand with the whiteboard marker in your hand, not moving, not talking for way longer than is comfortable); I don't know how those other people continued to do this work in denial of the logic-voice that urges departure and removal and ignoring. Call the sub and drink the whiskey.

There was this moment of bizarrely removed clarity, walking through the city streets late on that first night of the post-disaster era, a moment where competing thought-patterns were running their own arguments.

Left shoulder: You can use the work to get through this, you know.

Right shoulder: If you do that, you’ll end up hating the work and hating the kids.

Left shoulder: There is a gaping hole. Stop being self-indulgent and fill the hole with something positive, and beneficial, and real.

Right shoulder: Too much of the hole is already filled that way. You know this.

Left shoulder: Dig deep into the work, into the community, pull the work over your head like a blanket, and read by the light of the flashlight. The kids can be your flashlight.

Right shoulder: That’s not fair to you, or to them. They are recipients of your strength, not providers of it.

Left shoulder: If you don’t the pain will start, and it will grow and continue, like it did that one time, and you are not prepared to fight any of it.

Right shoulder: Then that’s what will happen.

I’m on the ledge already, my friend and mentor has moved on, and now this tragedy sneaks up on me, the disolution of something I've worked and waited years for, years, three, but maybe as many as ten, this tragedy laced with fucking up, and guilt, and the sense that maybe it could’ve been avoided if I hadn’t coached this year, hadn’t taught those Saturdays, hadn’t assigned assignments that required reading and thinking and a written response. It’s all bullshit, but it’s still hard not to think that way, and hard not to walk through the quad and look at the trees and the benches and the kids who show up way too early because there are too many people in their house for them to ever get a good night’s sleep, I see these everyday things and it’s hard not to begrudge the hell out of all of it. It’s harder still when the kids come up short, when they don’t respond, when they give you shit. What is gained is not in balance with what was given, what was taken, and what was lost.

It doesn’t matter that this isn’t true. It doesn’t.

Left shoulder: But what’s your choice? Cuz you can’t go on this way.

Right shoulder: Another strategic withdrawal. Dig the trench a little deeper.

Left shoulder: You don’t have many of those left, and you’re already paying for the temporary respite of the last one.

Right shoulder: That’s not the issue for today.

Left shoulder: Then what is?

Right shoulder: Getting through the night until it’s time to commute, time to teach, time to coach, time to grade, time to place rambling calls to your friends, time to feel the time weighing on you – time of what has gone before, and time of what is to come.

Left shoulder: You’ll get better soon.

Right shoulder: No. I won’t.

Every time I fake a smile, fist-pound, or peace sign to a well-meaning kid passing in the hallways, it feels like the amputation of my entire stomach. I pass a lot of kids in the hallways.

Short Answer Hypothetical

2007-12-15T18:08:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking some thinks. Maybe someone can help me fill in some blanks. Have your bluebooks ready.

Scenario #1:
I graduated from college last May and entered a credentialing program at a CSU or UC school. I want to teach upper elementary. Sometime in October, a professor assigned some reading by Kozol. On a whim and out of the blue, I read the assigned reading, even though this is rarely necessary, and it changed my life. Now I want to teach high need urban ed, specifically and exclusively.

Given this new direction and purpose to my career, in what way or ways does my path through my credentialing program change?

Scenario #2:
I will graduate from college this upcoming May. I know right now that I want to be a teacher, and I know right now that I want to teach in a high-need urban school.

How does this knowledge affect which credentialing program I enter?

Two Links

2007-12-12T20:13:00.000-08:00

On this, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico and, undoubtedly, the little slice of the 408 in which I work, I offer these electronic linkages after barely being able to navigate my car through the crowds pouring into the church a block from school, after buying some sidewalk tacos and churros, and after disingenuously telling a student, Sure, I'll be right in, when she asked if I was going to mass.

The Quick and the Ed: Maybe I'm making too big a deal of this, but I'm impressed with Carey's subtle navigation through the it's-the-poverty/ it's-the-schools white-water. I'm impressed also, with his dismissal of Richard Rothstein's argument for the exact reason he ought to be dismissed, a reason I have yet to see gain serious traction. Admirable too, is his framing of NCLB "supporters" within a context of those who believe that the detrimental effects of poverty are surmountable, given a more effective distribution of resources (humancapital humancapital humancapital). This is especially refreshing in the context of this facile rejection of that very argument.

My First Year: Seven first year 510 teachers blog about the time. While not prolific, or genre-busting, I'm drawn to this because four of the seven found their way into teaching through the alt-route certification programs I either directed or deputy-directed last summer. Man oh man, I used to leave + / ∆ forms in the back of your summer school classroom, and now you're blogging...

Rules For The Voyage: Merit Pay

2007-12-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

Before raising anchor and steering beyond the guns of the harbor fort, this is what I set out with in the hold.

Merit pay, or any system thereof, is not an end onto itself. It must be a means to the type of ends that will improve our schools and systems. We do this not because teachers get so little after giving so much (awww...) but because the principle behind this particular reform takes us to all kinds of places public education needs to go in order to survive. As such, merit pay should only be available in those areas where improvement and reform is critical. Existing conditions already reward and incentivize teaching in the suburbs; further systems of incentives are unnecessary.
Primarily, the monetary recognition of commitment, ingenuity, hard work, and ultimate effectiveness would improve the retention of the kind of teachers we care about retaining. The aim here is to add additional layers of motivational depth to the profession of teaching, as well as establishing a culture or paradigm or ideology in education where being good matters in ways beyond the kids, the kids, the kids.
Acknowledging that we're not doing so hot with a system predicated on the quality and sustainability of somebody else's internal drive to excel does not make you Gordon Gecko, Milt Friedman, or the myriad of shitty people you swore you'd never become during your undergrad days when you were raging against various machines.
Additional improvements potentially fueled by merit pay include the implementation of key methods of school structuring, the establishment of tiered teaching force, and a way to bring talented teachers to low-income areas.
Any system of performance-based compensation would function in addition to existing salary structures that reward longevity (badly).
The implementation of a merit pay system requires quantitative measures. These must be based on a sliding scale of student growth, measured by the types of standardized tests so many consider so gross. The sliding scale would require greater qualifying growth at the lower ends, since there is both so much potential and and so much need for large-scale improvement. At the higher ends, relatively less student improvement would be required, so as not to (further) politicize teacher assignment or disincentivize working with any one student group.
If you teach art, you probably aren't eligible. Bummer.
The implementation of a merit pay system requires qualitative measures. These must be based on the type of teacher actions that tend not to show up in the box scores. Here, principals could reward educators that have shown they type of exemplary leadership and creativity our current system fails to reward in any way whatsoever.
If you teach art, you can get some here, especially if you teach art in all those life-changing ways I keep hearing about.
The dollar amounts need to be substantial. This isn't a tip. Compensation should at least reimburse the post-tax, not-fully-deductible classroom expenditures you make yearly. It should fund a massive vacation, a good used car, get you over the hump on the down payment you want to make on that house at the end of the cul-de-sac.
The system may be abused. Bummer.
Seriously. Get over it. In education circles, especially those composed of teachers, we routinely murder the Good in the name of the Perfect. Whether in terms of classroom practices, school structure and function, or large scale systematic improvements and alterations, if an idea or proposal fails to repel any hypothetical hurled its way, said proposal is immediately dismissed and chests are thumped accordingly. We are the salt on the slugs of innovation. I don't doubt that some administrators will play favorites. I don't doubt that somebody's kids will learn little, score high, and that would suck. The petty annoyance of such things is simply not powerful enough to outweigh the myriad potential benefits. Our continued desire to ensure our systems function at the highest possible level is admirable, but the corresponding willingness to cannibalize ideas that fail to pass absurdly rigorous pre-screenings is just killing us.

The Ledge

2007-11-30T20:56:00.000-08:00

It made Dan call from a Minnesota airport, distressed and downtrodden. It sent a talented friend into spirals of doubt and consternation that almost drove her from our school. It’s the ledge, and if you’re around teachers who’ve made it out of those first years, but are still in the semi-mythical three-to-five year range, chances are they’ve spent some time out on it, and have taken in the view from up there. That view? It sucks.

You get up on the ledge as a young teacher when you realize that there is no formal system of accountability anywhere. The evaluation process is an outright joke, your intern advisor calls you exemplary, and your BTSA lady pops in so you can fill out some forms. If you’re coming out of an alternative credentialing program, you’re used to having folks in your class daily, dropping those + / ∆ forms like they’re hot, but that’s done now, and trying to find/ build the culture of observation in the typical urban school is like drinking the damn ocean dry. No one is making sure you do your job well. You’re relatively new to all this, and things can be uneven. Instructional quality tends to fluctuate, but no one’s around to praise the times you bring it, and worse still, there is no one to suggest that uh, you better step it up if you want to make it round here.

You’re up on the ledge when you want to know how to get better, but there’s nothing there. The vast store of practical strategies you took from your alternative or traditional route credentialing program seems to be running a little dry and district PD is either non-existent or an exercise in futility. There is no formal plan for post-competency-acquisition development, unless it is in the areas of technology, and you already know how to use PowerPoint. You do, however, have the opportunity to be told occasionally how great you are because you demonstrate basic competence in the context of repeated failure, and that tends to have the opposite of its intended effect.

It gets worse when you do get better. Your level of quality as an educator changes, but title, position, responsibilities, and compensation remain stagnant. At best, you’re on a conveyor belt that ascends with the speed of a Miami-Dade airport people-mover. At best, you "earn the right" to teach higher performing kids who more readily acquiesce to your wishes. You look around at the time and effort spent on bringing about better instruction and better assessment for the kids, the energy and will poured into creating dynamic environments and learning experiences, the grit and the grind of trying to make of yourself that turnaround teacher, the kind that reverses the disastrous inertia of the previous years – you look around and realize that none of it has any bearing on your professional standing. None of it.

You realize the profession incentivizes mediocrity. It does not drive people to show movies all day, or let kids text and screw around in class – ineptitude takes folks there – but it does incentivize using the same lame worksheets you used the last time around, the same crap readings, head-butting against the same, predictable failures to comprehend and achieve. Because the only lever school leaders have to lean on is the level of caring inherent in the individual teachers, the only thing driving you to do more is to care more. But there’s a limit to your caring, and a limit to the effectiveness of your caring.

So you’re up on that ledge. On one side is the descent into mediocrity and professional stagnation. On the other is leaving, that mythical path out of the classroom. You’re up there, and like Dan, you call me while the car’s getting some new oil, some behind the ears scratching that will enable the 120 mile commute. You call and say, talk me down.

I can’t talk anyone down.

You can’t get down.

All you can do is pitch a tent.

I live up on that ledge, man, live there in the tightrope narrow space where you need to struggle against the constraints of the system in which you work. It’s in that space where you know you do it for the kids, where everything is for the kids, where you get paid in appreciations and handslaps and end-of-the-year surveys from the kids, and you love doing it for the kids, and you want to do it for the kids, but why can’t you do it for any of the other myriad reasons available to other professionals? Why must you be limited, less? You f-ing love the kids, but you want to also work for the things that everyone else gets to work for. You want the opportunity to put your best out there and see it rewarded by something that comes out of the other side of the Venn Diagram, the side that doesn’t have anything to do with the kids. You want to be pushed and challenged, and when you rise to the challenge you want to receive some form of acknowledgement that does not, and must not, arrive in the shape of an apple.

I want to grow. I want to excel. I want to feel like I’m not doing the same entry-level job I was six years ago. I want to feel like factors outside of my own willingness and drive to improve are at work in shaping my professional life.

There’s a growing wave of this stuff. When the CTA lady came to the union meeting to specifically alert new teachers to the dangers of proposed merit pay provisions, I shook my head in tight side-to-sides, because true systems of meritorious compensation are the future of the work we do. New hiring practices, the dissolution of tenure, authentic evaluations, performance based pay – this is what’s needed to get us off that ledge and quell the schizophrenia of being an ambitious and successful teacher in a public school.

More: When this post meets ideological entrenchment.

Stuff The Ballot Boxes & Vote The Graveyards

2007-11-25T20:42:00.000-08:00

Hot damn. The writings here have been nominated as Best Teacher Blog 2007. Unlike William Tecumseh Sherman in 1881, I formally accept the nomination, and stand prepared to fulfill all duties required of the position.

If you're feeling moved, go cast a ballot.

If you're not burnt out, go cast one for Dan.

Day 2 results: Garnering 9% of the vote. Single digits. It's rough sledding.

More results: Races too close to call. Voting now with new hidden results feature.

Final results: Garnered a fourth place finish with just 11% of the vote. I'd like to thank all the young people who came out to work on this campaign, and I'd especially like to thank the voters for selflessly doing their civic duty. Unfortunately, given the nature of these results, I cannot justify continuing the campaign in South Carolina. I urge you all not to give up hope or lose heart. And never, never "doubt that a small group of commited people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." God bless you. And God bless America.

Harvest Festival As Percursor To Future Black-Outs

2007-11-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Tuesday was the annual Harvest Festival and Turkey Trot -- the alliteration belies the rigor -- as we eased into the break with good vibes all around. The Harvest Festival itself tends to do little to celebrate the gathering of mature food, and is instead a series of games and booths run by individual teachers.

Last year I made sure kids stayed behind the line while they threw pies at the POY.

This year I ran an event entitled: "Sprite-Pong: The Only Game That Prepares You For College."

::cut to::

MISCELLANEOUS U.C. SCHOOL -- FIRST NIGHT OF FRESHMAN ORIENTATION 2013

Y.B., 18, a third generation invite to a dorm party, enters cautiously and rounds a corner where larger males stand, holding ping-pong balls, at opposite ends of a closet door where solo cups have been arranged in ascending triangles at each end.

He watches as one male throws a ping-pong toward a pyramidal cup arrangement. He is immobilized with the force of remembrance, the connections freshly minted on a memory that has long remained dormant.

Y.B.

Oh. My. God. Mr. [TMAO]!!!

The party whirls and swirls, oblivious.

Ana and Jorge [Sibling Edition]

2007-11-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

I'm in [large corporate sandwich chain] getting dinner for the Masters team when P. walks in. He's a junior now, plays keeper on the school's team, tells me about a plan for two years of junior college before heading to a UC school.

P. immigrated with his family 4.5 years ago, in the middle of the seventh grade. He spent a year in our school's newcomer center -- the second half of seventh and the first half of eighth -- before entering my High Point B class. He flourished, and his newcomer teacher later fielded complaints from his 10th grade English teacher that he was "very low," with the lexile score of a ninth grader.

Buried lede: P.'s sister is my class this year, in High Point B.

Get it?

It took P. one year of newcomer work and background literacy (albeit poor) in his L1 to make it to HP B. It took his sister four and a half years of Open Court Reading and 45 minutes of ELD to reach the same academic performance level.

L1 literacy
+ newcomer center
= 1 year to reach third grade performance levels

Open Court
+ pull-out ELD
= 4.5 years to reach third grade performance levels

Yup. Design your instructional program accordingly.

Original Ana and Jorge post
Original Ana and Jorge follow-up
ELD mistakes
ELD fixes

From Ashes Rise

2007-11-15T21:52:00.000-08:00

About six years ago, my buddy [Eisenstadt] wandered into the east 408 home we shared with two other male first-year teachers and announced that he was coaching girls’ basketball. We were duly surprised and used the announcement as a precursor to drinking – a predictable and frequent occurrence.

“Dude, a kid told me to go F myself for the first time!”
“Great, let’s drink.”

“Guys, I broke up my first fight today!”
“Great, let’s drink.”

“Fellas, C.’s IQ is too low for RSP!”
“Great, let’s drink.”

A year later, I followed his lead, both for the money and the opportunity to miss staff meetings. In the ensuing years, the $900 has become less of a draw, but the get-out-of-staff-meetings card has only increased in value.

That first year I coached a core group of six girls who had been playing together for some time. They lived near each other, played on the sixth grade team, and would stay together for the next two years. We ran the nastiest 2-2-1 press I’ve ever seen, the kind of press you have to call off in the 2nd quarter because the other team hasn’t gotten the ball across half court in their last six possessions. I scribbled down play after play during my prep, made copies, and bound them in a folder; the girls studied this when they were supposed to be doing math, or science, or reading. We made the playoffs each year, won a game on a last second steal and three-pointer that sent me diving to my knees, and lost a heartbreaker in a tournament final to a local rival, a game that featured endless pressing, press-breaking, and textbook zone rotation.

When those girls left, the lean years started. No speed, no continuity, less heart, lots and lots of losing. It hurt, a lot.

This year I looked around and felt some cautious optimism. Dig it:
1) A monstrous, athletic center who vacuumed rebounds
2) A big point guard, smart, who played consistently as a 6th grader
3) Two small forwards who could hit open jump shots from 8-10 feet
4) Two secondary ball-handlers

We were fast again. Even the height was fast. I had a plan to build foundational skills while scaffolding the girls into the higher areas of basketball achievement. We had a great schedule, filled with competitive games early and a balanced league. Commitment was high, practices were good, and we lost four close pre-season games by 5, 3, 1, and 3 points. At 0-4 and on the verge of league play, I thought if we could just play more consistently and avoid break-downs, we could really get on a roll and do some damage.

Then four players, three of them starters, two of them captains – including the monstrous center and the athletic, game-changing point guard – acquired some drugs and smoked them at lunch.

Goodbye season.

I began mentally chalking up the losses, thinking about filling the now-vacant roster spots with raw 6th graders and just playing for next year. Having lost four close games with all those players, there’s no way we’re going to do anything in league play without them. Let’s go ahead and get this over with: another let-down and disappointment, another season of untouched potential. The only problem with all this is that someone forgot to tell my girls.

In the first league game, we run our new 2-2-1 press like crazy. Former back-up point guard T., is all over the floor, running down offensive rebounds, making passes, shooting, breaking pressure. Former back-up center P., is getting the ball on weak-side rotation and stepping into the lane to make little four-footers like she’s been doing it her whole life. Former buried on the bench, now 6th man, J. is stepping into passing lanes on defensive and leading the transition offensive like a champ. We win by 25.

In the second league game, we’re hugely outsized. We’re not prepared to play against bigger, stronger team running aggressive man-to-man, and we’re down at half-time. With the dance team miming a stylized boxing match to a driving hip-hop beat, I give a speech, diagram some stuff on my clipboard and send them back out. Replacement player and former dance team member S., leads the charge with a series of steals and six points in the third quarter. The turning point comes late in the 4th, when T. steals a pass, drives for a lay-up, gets fouled, and then watches as the ball bounces around for a near eternity before falling through. She hits the foul shot for the old-fashioned three-pointer, and we win by three.

In the third league game, we travel to a hostile crowd, and my back-brain is saying it’s time to come back to earth. It’s a rough, grinding game. Our opponents committed a total of 19 fouls, and a lot more went uncalled. O. comes out crying after getting cursed at. T. comes out after taking a shot to the stomach. S. comes out when she elbows a girl and spikes the ball after being consistently mauled for three quarters. We score points in two different bursts: getting steals, passing forward, and converting the transition opportunities. They turn up the pressure, and we don’t score for the last eight minutes of the game. Still, we hold on for a three-point victory, and I have to pause before shaking the opposing coach’s hand, because my hand is covered in his players’ saliva.

Without three starters or any of our preseason captains, we are now one win away from a playoff appearance.

I’m bursting with pride at what these girls have accomplished – pride at their tenacity and pride at their commitment to keep working, keep believing, even after their leaders let them down. It would have been easy to give up and give in, go through the motions and revisit our spot at the bottom of the division. They haven’t done that, and have, instead, continued to grow as a team and develop as basketball players.

The next two games will be rough; we face two perennial powers, schools I have never beaten. All of us are undefeated in league play heading down this stretch run. I don’t know what will happen, and I’m resisting the urge to play what-might-have-been-games in advance, bemoaning the poor decisions that have robbed us of a chance to really be something special.

But screw that, man. We’re already special.

Update.
We got crushed. Handled.

Really?

2007-11-10T19:06:00.000-08:00

I don't go trolling for comments, but I was a little surprised that thoughts on courageous followers got no love. I mean really, ya'll got nothing for me on this one?

ELD Functioning

2007-11-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

Commenter Ms. M asked what works for ELL instruction. Based on the work my school has done, this is what I think:

■ Create a master schedule that groups kids by academic readiness.

We accomplish this by triangulating CST, CELDT, and local program assessments/ teacher recommendations. First, put kids into groups based on CST data, then order that data based on CELDT scores, because while an EO and a CELDT 2 may both have scored Below Basic, they will need very different instruction to grow academically. Finally, look at past performance to ensure that starting placements reflect the entirety of student progress. Yes, this kid is a CST 2, but he’d been in the U.S. for three months when they took that test, so it probably reflects guessing rather than skill. Move her to this group. Here’s a kid who also scored a CST 2, but he’s proficient on all the subgroups and just bombed the writing test, so put him in HOLT. Etc, etc.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the beneficial effects this has for the educator. The POY used to speak about administrators’ command to go differentiate as if there existed some magic differentiation dust that could be sprinkled upon the heads of children. This is not to say differentiation is not required, but rather that we must reduce the range of differentiation to make it reasonable, manageable, and time efficient.

This is not something that should be limited to middle/ high school schedules. I see no reason why elementary schools cannot group kids in this way. Nearby Brooktree Elementary does and check out their scores for ELLs. I don't need to tell ya about the hundreds of schools that can't sniff that level of performance.

I used to get all fired up justifying why our approach is not tracking – kids aren’t locked in; there is frequent assessment, tweaking, and regrouping; having middle and low kids see themselves as the high achievers is powerful beyond belief – but I’m over that sell. Dropping every kid into an on-grade-level program regardless of the demographics of academics, in a misguided quest to demonstrate high achievement, is a blatant disregard for the needs of the individual kids, especially the kids who struggle, especially the ELLs, and if you can’t see that, I don’t know what to tell you.

■ Infuse ELD strategies across the curriculum

This becomes easier once you create a master schedule that groups kids be academic readiness. More to the point, it's basically required once you schedule in this way. There’s literally no other way to function (which reduces the chance that folks would balk at teaching ELLs or changing existing practices for more effective practices -- not that this is ever a problem or anything).

One of the most successful math teachers I know has weekly vocabulary and spelling assignments, presenting vocabulary concepts with the rigor and accountability of any good ELA teacher. Concepts are presented with numerous scaffolds – note-taking structures, manipulatives, images, etc. – and are accessed and assessed in ways both language-neutral and language-dependent, all of which adds up to the kind of ELL supporting class structure that is all too often the domain of the ELA teacher.

Things like GLAD and SADAI take us most of the way here, but we need a deeper understanding of what we’re doing. It can’t be just completing your GLAD lesson plan form, right? We need to develop processes that function on that deep-down cellular level, not this superficial connect the dots approach.

■ Lengthen the school day.

There’s more to learn, so you need to more time to learn it.

A painter with a bigger house to paint submits a longer job estimate. A contractor with more
houses to build needs proportionately more time to build them. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had a longer production schedule than Jackass 2. School days need to be lengthened (as they have been at my site), teachers appropriately compensated (we get an additional 1/5 of salary for an extra hour a day), and statewide funding made available to accomplish this (we use SIIP funds for kids at risk of CAHSEE failure).

■ Newcomer Centers

Small classes, build language skills from the ground up, social studies in the this-is-America mold, limited writing toward the end, math in the newcomer setting for those who need it, mainstream math for those who can hang, and of course, lowering of the affective filter.

■ Kids with L1 literacy do better and therefore...

Ana succeeds where Jorge fails. Man, come see em. Ana's in my High Point B (4th and 5th grade standards) after only a single year in the U.S., during which she was enrolled in a newcomer center. She's kicking ass and I'll eat gross things Survivor-style if she's not proficient by the end of her second full year in the U.S. Jorge's in my HP A class (3rd and 4th grade standards) and struggling beyond belief despite the fact that he has been enrolled in our district's schools since Kindergarten. Except for a brief respite in 2nd grade, he has never scored higher than Far Below Basic.

I used to think this was a single-generation problem, but it's really not. We'll call it an unqualified success if Jorge graduates high school, but at this point, he's probably got one or two years of school left. Kid's gonna grow up and procreate (hopefully doing more of the former before any of the latter), and that kid will be a native born ELL who won't receive the type of instruction she needs. Perpetuating.

We need to get more kids more L1 instruction. There's folks who'll bemoan the lack of flexibility in the structure of the respective LEA, but that's not really the issue. We need the will. We need the systematic will to bring equitable, effective instruction to kids. We get that, and the traditional barriers that seem so impenetrable will prove to be very porous, indeed.

ELD Transgressions

2007-11-06T20:02:00.000-08:00

I got a flyer, someone left a message with the front office because I can't remember to empty my voicemail -- it filled up in Spring 2005, and this is no lie -- so I went. I went to the ELD meeting, in full possession of as much of an open mind as its probably possible to maintain at this point. I went to the meeting entitled "ELD/ Newcomer" and tried to be excited about an expanded teacher role in things. I went, and it's always an iffy process to write about things so close to home, but aw man, we're messing up so bad.

We're messing up on reclassification of ELLs. Check out the California Department of Education's Suggested Steps for Reclassification and then dig on the fact that we've been requiring a far more rigorous standard than the state suggests. We require higher CST performance as well as a proficient score on the notoriously flawed 7th grade STAR Writing Exam. This is a test that EO students fail in mother f-ing droves. In droves, and we're asking ELL kids to score proficient before we'll classify them as no longer requiring instruction in the English language, a distinction critical for future university matriculation.

When I asked why we do this, why, as a district of ELLs, we make it more difficult for our students to achieve success, folks first commiserated with me regarding the difficulty of the test by proclaiming that only two students passed in the whole district. This seems strange, because cruncher tells me that almost a dozen of my students from my classes alone passed. If that many kids from the lowest group of 7th graders in the District passed, my guess is the pass rate is somewhat higher than two kids. And man oh man, the frequency of District employees making demonstrably inaccurate statements regarding student achievement is increasing exponentially.

I was then told that perhaps this requirement will be ammended (good), but that it was in place in order to maintain high expectations. High expectations. Okay, turn your attention to the screen and we'll run a short presentation on why rigorous standards in the absence of appropriate support is not a demonstration of high expectations but rather the systematic screwing-over of the largest student group in the District.

We're messing up on writing. At the meeting I heard that we're in year-five of Step Up To Writing implementation. No, we're not. We haven't paced the strategies across grade levels, lack the use of these strategies in content areas, and do not have anything remotely like universal or even wide-spread use. One participant said these strategies were pretty much absent from her entire school.

But because we're in so-called year-five of implementation, and becaues only two students passed the most recent STAR Writing Exam, Step Up To Writing must be failure and we should return to Six Traits. No, no, no, no, no. I'm sure Six Traits is swell with the kids from Cupertino, who learned to construct paragraphs in second grade, full essays by fifth, and are working on rounding things into shape by the time that seventh grade STAR Writing comes round. That's not who we teach. Look at Six Traits. It's all about voice and style and presentation. There's nothing there on direct instruction. There's nothing there that teaches kids to actually put these required essays together. I can't believe this is even part of the discussion. My kids need to learn about topic sentences, arugment structure, organizational strategies, and internal consistency. "Sentence fluency?" How about sentence existence?

We're messing up on our understanding of ELD. They said, fill out the paper telling us when you teach ELD.

I wrote 7:30 -- 3:00.

ELD is not a period. It is not pull-out. It is not a class. It is not something that ELA teachers do. It is not derived from a book. It is not a minor subset of our work with kids. It is not High Point Basics, and it sure as hell isn't Language!. It is not wholly contained within the domains of the read-aloud and lowering the affective filter.

English Language Development is an approach to providing kids with necessary skills that stretches across every classroom, every subject, every schedule creating process. Until we get past the idea that ELD can be done in 45-minute chunks, while the rest of the day we maintain grossly irresponsible and inequitable educational offerings in the misguided pursuit of high expectations, we're f-ing doomed. Speaking of...

We're messing up newcomer centers. The CDE reports that in our district last year there were 183 students, grades 2-8 with less than 12 months residency in the U.S. Throw in K-1, and we're talking 240. We have two newcomer centers, but none on the elementary level. Even assuming that these newcomer centers are operating at absurdly packed capacity, we're still failing to serve 200 or so young people.

Except there's more, really. Because newcomer centers are designed for kids with 18 months residency and below, we're talking about half again as many kids. That's 300 kids, 250 of whom fail to receive appropriate instruction.

Except there's more, really. Because when you fail to provide kids with the instruction they need when they have less than 18 months residency, they continue to function as newcomers, even when they no longer qualify as such. Those skills don't magically appear, no matter how hard you close your eyes, click your heels, and hope Open Court weaves its magic. So we're really talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 kids with newcomer level skills, 550 of whom do not receive appropriate instruction. Most of them are Jorge.

Except there's more, really. Because when you force lower elementary classrooms to serve the purpose newcomer centers are meant to, you delay the skill and language acquisition of entire sets of kindergarten and first graders. Because these students are not removed from the general population to receive the specialized instruction their academic profile demands, you force teachers in heterogenous environments to reduce the scope and pace of instruction. You then produce life-long CELDT 3s, as well as non-SpEd EOs with a perpetual 3rd grade reading ability.

The solution? A pilot program -- as if the two existing newcomer centers do not provide sufficient opportunities for analysis -- that consists of a 45-minute pull-out period for fifth graders, after which they'll spend the rest of their day with Saxon Math and Open Court Reading, which is written on a sixth grade reading level. There will be close to 30 kids in a class, and no other opportunities for homogeneous grouping.

At the meeting I said: When your pilot program fails, will this failure be used to justify not having newcomer centers in the future, or will the failure get us to realize that pull-out and part time is not the answer?

Vegas insiders say they can't get any action on the latter option.

Ya'll Can Relax And Breathe Deep

2007-11-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

Much virtual ink has been spilled round here over the effects, merits, and consequences of NCLB legislature, and it looks like the trend will continue. A recent study serves to add data to our anecdotal and principle-dependent debate. The work,** entitled Accountability Incentives, looks at the achievement trajectory of kids during the reign of NCLB, and seeks to bring data into the debate over whether higher performing kids are getting the ol screw because of the focus on lower performing AYP endangering youngsters. Conclusion? They aren't. Author Matthew Springer concludes that schools aren't "trading off" performances for different groups, or sacrificing achievement of the highest and brightest.

I think this is so far a number of reasons.

1) The process of raising scores for your lowest achieving students requires a general improvement in all school functioning, the kind of rising tide that lifts all boats.

2) One can focus on more than one student group.

3) If my district is any indication of larger trend, schools just aren't agile enough in the use of data to provide different educational opportunities to different groups of students, as defined by student data. The idea that schools are capable, on a large scale, of providing structural and instructional differentiation seems far-fetched.

Now, Eric will agree with these results, but point out that the tests do not accurately measure the kind of higher order thinking skills and work product, and that performance in these areas might very well be in decline without our being aware of it. And Nancy will assert that while some poor kids are becoming better art critics, affluent kids are becoming artists. To which I reply, all this may be so, (or it may not be) but this study is a strong refutation to the kind of charge frequently laid at the NCLB doorstep, a charge that is increasingly baseless.

**I never really thought I'd be linking to the Hoover Institute, unless it was under the heading feckless thugs, but strange times make for strange bedfellows.

Closing The Achievement Gap Online

2007-10-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

That's what WestEd's got planned for next week. What're you up to?

The on-line discussion cum policy initiative incubator is entitled: Achieving Success For All Students: A Statewide Initiative on Closing the Achievement Gap. Each day of the week is devoted to a different aspect of the mission, with with panelists, participants, and facilitators on-hand to stir the pot and get things rocking and rolling. I'll be a panelist for Monday's topic, Access to Learning Opportunities. Catch me early morning and early afternoon, cuz after that it's on to our second game of the year (0-3, 0-0).

So...
I was a little underwhelmed. Too many people, too many perspectives, too little structure and organization. Moreover, too little interaction and engagement. A lot of folks (including me) posting their sound-bite chatechism perspectives in isolation of one other.

Courageous Followers

2007-10-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

Practice is over, I unlock the girls locker room and back away quickly, oh so quickly, and then I see I. walking over. She's a junior at a charter high school that I've got no love for, one located on the campus of the school we feed to, a not-so-symbiotic pairing that has generated its fair share of norte-sur garbage.

ME: I hear stuff's going down at your school.
HER: It's not us; it's them.
ME: No, no. It takes two to tango, two to mambo, two to meringue, two to...
HER: Okay, okay, okay.
ME: So what's the problem?
HER: Not me. It's other people.
ME: But aren't you a leader?
HER: No, not me.
ME: You're a follower? Who do you follow?
HER: The right people.

Dig on that. Dig on that wisdom and self-awareness from a 16-year-old. The right people.

There was more, about who the right people were, about pre-calculus and UC Santa Cruz, but I was all about that line. Because we talk and talk about building leaders and developing leaders and the fostering of leaders, and while that's all well and good, our efforts are exclusive and exclusionary. By definition, leaders are the minority. It's literally impossible for everyone to be a leader, and what you're left with is a large number of folks who are, generally speaking, followers.

Take away the stigma, cuz that's how we live.

I. is a special kid -- thoughtful, articulate, committed -- but she isn't a leader, and that should not make her less. She gets it, and she's found the people, the right people, who support her and allow her to move forward. The fact that those people can be in rather short supply only underscores the extent of this accomplishment. Seriously, we don't want more of this? Kids who can evaluate situations, find the best path, even if they can't blaze the best path? We don't work on this kind of thing enough, developing our courageous followers. Like I., resisting all kinds of negative shit to find the right people and strike out with them, forward to the limits fo their ability.

Yet Another Example Of Irony

2007-10-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

If you were to type I hate teaching into google, fail to use quotation marks dictated by successful search engine use, you'll come to this here blog. True story. At least two people find their way here, daily, according to the statcounter folks.

Rules For The Voyage: NCLB

2007-10-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Before anchors are raised on the kind of post this was, the kind many folks disagree with, I set sail with this in the hold:

NCLB says test kids, report what happens, and if you blow, feel the pressure to pick it up. If that makes educators stressed or sad, that level of stress is nothing compared to the stress of being a young person without the skills to be successful.
The pass-rate is incredibly low, and it's absurd for us not to meet them, and absurd to complain.
NCLB does not dictate how students are taught, what they are taught, what happens on a Wednesday at 10:36, and if schools and districts make poor choices in their response to the legislation, we ought to critique those poor decisions, and not the context in which they are made, especially given the nature of that context (see 1. and 2. above).
Basic skills are not basic. They are fundamental, foundational, and critical. In their absence, almost all other leanings are undervalued and under-realized.
Instruction in basic skills is not necessarily mind-numbing and awful. This manner of instruction, in these settings, undoubtedly exists, and it is the reason so many fail so mightily to acquire these skills.
There is a difference between using the arts in instruction, and providing instruction in the arts. The former is right on; the latter can be right on, but I'm always reminded of a line from the West Wing: "If the government were in charge of science, we'd have the best iron lung, but no polio vaccine."
If we acknowledge that there are twin problems in education, one being a so-called "narrowing" of opportunity for high achieving kids, and the other being an inability to provide huge numbers of primarily Black and Latino skills essential, foundational skills, I'm always going to advocate for our efforts to be directed toward solving the problem of how we get more kids learning at a level commensurate to their abilities and the requirements of future life. Always. I'm not denying the existence of the former problem, or that it is a problem, but that it's incumbent on us to fix problems of survival -- and yo, it's diplomas or jail in our cities -- before problems of enrichment.

Appealing Rhetotic Drives Out Real Issues

2007-10-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

Writing for Teacher Magazine, Anthony Cody cites economic axioms and a recent exchange in the comment section on this blog to make the case that the provisions in the NCLB legislation that currently call for, like, 1/3 of kids to learn, like, something are destroying the potential to reach a "gold standard" in education. Man, where's the hemlock when you need it?

Cody's not a bad guy. He knows there's all kinds of cool science stuff sitting in that High Street warehouse, and not enough teachers making good use of it, and he's right that there can be more to education that success on a single measure of academic performance. But he's not right that NCLB is to blame for this and he's not right that a focus on teaching kids, especially Black and Latino kids, the skills they need and have been historically denied, is an impediment to bringing deeper levels of learning to our school communities.

This article, and the phalanx of ed school kids who support its underlying argumentation, creates a systematic dichotomy where it does not exist. The NCLB false dichotomy argument states that teachers, schools, and districts face a choice between teaching either a bland, mind-numbing, soul-killing, love-of-learning-destroying curriculum of skill-based instruction, or a rich, multi-faceted, Duck-Dodgers-and-the-21st-and-a-half-century curriculum that fills up every fancy verb on the upper echelon of Bloom's Taxonomy. The NCLB false dichotomy argument further asserts that otherwise good, hard-working, whole-child-supporting folks are being forced to choose the former or face all kinds of of big badness.

This argument doesn't hold water for any number of reasons: pre-2002 teachers didn't like curriculum either; there never has been a so-called "gold standard" in education, much less one "drive(n) out" by a commitment to standardized measures of achievement; more kids learned less in the past than now; not to mention the widespread post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning in terms of how teachers, schools, and districts choose to respond to the federal mandate to ensure that at least 1/3 of kids should know some stuff.

The NCLB false dichotomy argument persists because it's appealing, easy to learn and repeat, and confuses a systematic dichotomy with an individual one. An enriched curriculum filled with electives, school 2.0 technologies, and 21st century skills ought to be set-up as pay-off for demonstrating mastery of all those basic skills so many folks work so long and hard to instill. We should establish basic skills as the necessary pre-requisites for the further avenues of study we all acknowledge as so very critical -- you know, yearbook, dioramas, and the french horn. The choice, then, is one faced by the individual, and determined by the individual's progress, and results in a tiered system of education, where students receive instruction geared toward their academic profile. This is also known as teaching kids what they need, and it's something more of us should do.

[Cue: Teacher, with hands clasped, making the argument that kids who struggle in school are the kids who most need electives like wood shop, which is the only class they are "good in."
To which I respond: Bullshit. Kids who struggle in school need more help in school, not classes designed to make them forget that they aren't good in school. To the extent that these kids exhibit negative behaviors, the behaviors in question are derived from the negative feeling that comes from being bad at school, feelings which will not be changed by making a bird house. Low-achieving kids are helped by receiving the kind of instruction that causes them to no longer be low-achievers.]

Ultimately, Cody's claim that a commitment to basic skill acquisition takes priority over developing "deeper learning," isn't wrong. No one except the strawmen of the world deny more is better, single measures are problematic, and rigid, binary conditions of pass-fail are incomplete, at best. Cody leaves terra firma, however when he starts applying causation where none exists, and when he asserts that we should be worried about what we paint on the bow of the boat before fixing the leaks in the hull. This is all a matter of prioritizing, and ending a denial of appropriate education comes first. The brothers Wright preceded Neil Armstrong, The Ramones preceded Green Day, and the commitment to develop an educational system that ensures kids gain the type of skills that makes all future learning possible must necessarily precede the nebulous "gold-standard" I don't feel the least bit guilty for not embracing.

What It Is

2007-10-10T23:08:00.000-07:00

During the commute I'd play loud music and think my thinks long and hard, and after arriving in the 408, launch into some pre-dawn writing. Not anymore, because the District has blocked access. I can't look at the blog, nor a smattering of others, can't access the internal workings therein, can't edit anything, can't get around the websense wall, and a tiny paranoid portion of my brain thinks this is not accidental.

More: Last Friday, about 6:15 in the a.m., I click on this blog because even though you know websense won't let you in, you click anyway. Thirty-six hours after writing that I'm bummed I can't type things at work before the sun rises, all of a sudden, I can. For some reason, websense is no longer keeping me out, almost as if someone read this and then... Naw, really?

In the event this new occurrence is somehow not accidental, let me also state for the record that all middle school athletic department budgets are underfunded to the tune of $7000 to $1200 per school. Transportation costs are up, officiating costs are up, it's unfair to expect schools to rely on parents to take kids to games during standard working hours, and extensive bureaucratic roadblocks stand in the way of fundraising. So, um, I'll be checking my budget print-out in about thirty-six hours.

⁫ ⁫ ⁫

I'm real big on speak-in-complete-sentence-time. I plug in some newly purchased lights and, all thematic disconnects between Peter Griffin and then complete sentence notwithstanding, it's on. You better believe I want subject-predicate-punctuation, and you better believe I can hear, literally hear when you didn't capitalize the first letter in that sentence.

⁫ ⁫ ⁫

Girls basketball started. I've got two tall girls with long arms who'll stand under the basket, a little quickness, and an almost point-guard. I don't know how we'll score, but who knows. If only I can navigate the winding road of game scheduling and rescheduling, making nicey-nice with the youth center folks, and not getting too down when the losses pile up, things will be good.

⁫ ⁫ ⁫

Everything's about tweaking. You used to read the AR Goal Updates outloud? Nah. Make a schedule and have kids take turns updating while you review homework, starters, and so on. You used to haphazardly wander through the REWARDS program? Save it. Make a 14-page user's manual for the middle school teacher, and work with consistency of forethought. You used to give kids mild guidance on binder maintenance, but remained hands off? Forget that. Make a sample binder available for student access, post a table of binder contents, and hold binder detention for the fools (which are well attended). You used to endlessly staple new quizzes on top of the old ones they needed to retake? Please. You hole punch everything and place them in nifty three-pronged folders, and dig it: They're ain't nothing classier than working out of a quiz binder. You used to wait until December to break out the consciously unself-conscious hand-ball playing as relationship building? Nope. Do it now, and often.

⁫ ⁫ ⁫

Back in the day, [Eisenstadt] and I pioneered the Flatbook, a diary/essay/portfolio designed to engage kids in writing, practice general writing structures, build writing tolerance and gumption, and apply all those nifty grammar skills you've been practicing. Kids took to it, mostly, like ducks to water, finding outlets for Raiders stickers, ticket stubs, and all those gross pictures they take of each other at the mall. The thing is, grading those things sucked. I had to carry the notebooks home in at least two, but sometimes as many as three androgynous teacher bags, and sometimes there just weren't any more comments you could write about another poorly penned essay on the merits of Chivas.

But I'm getting back on the horse, committed to using Flatbooks as the authentic assessment portion of my English Experts Program (for which I created a tremendous rubber stamp at Office Depot). Okay kid, you achieved Masters status for NOUNS [pronouns] on my quizzes, now let's see you produce some writing that demonstrates pronoun knowledge without being prompted to do so. You can do that, you earn Ph.D status for that skill. Big time.

⁫ ⁫ ⁫

Two wicked smart guys, with no previous connection to each other, have been whispering in my ear about the level of explicitness in education, especially teaching, especially in those places where folks are finding success where others have failed.

See, nothing in teaching is explicit, expect all that stuff that you don't want to be so, like Saxon Math, Open Court, and the introduction to High Point thematic units. Instead, all those so-called best practices exist in the gross, murky realm of the personal. These strategies are always somebody's, whether we're talking about big names who charge big dollars for appearances, or that guy who did a workshop you thought was pretty cool. No one will leave my workshop talking about an objective-based, mastery-driven approach to grammar instruction, with required retest and student driven assessment tracking, but they will say I want to use some of [TMAO's] stuff.

It's not a small problem, because we're all so dependent on human capital to function as the human caulking solution in our broken and inefficient systems. Those individuals perform in ways that exist outside of, and in many ways contrary to, prevailing norms. They also tend not to make 30-year careers out of this never-ending entry-level position*. And when they go, their knowledge goes with. And then we start over again.

All of which is a preamble to my new project of making my program explicit. I created a graphic organizer, type into it and embed my documents, and the resulting product is an explicit rendering of what I did with the kids. While there's not a lot here for the all-important how of instruction (like, at 10:47, I made a goofy-ass face that broke the tension of non-understanding and got us going again), but it hits pretty hard at the what. And that's big. Not in the sense of what were the big topics or main points -- those I've got down -- but I'm laying out all the instructional spirals, implicit reviews, explicit front-loadings that make the difference between gap closing and gap extending.

*teaching

In The Magazine Of The Paper Of Record

2007-09-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Magazine today published an article on Teach For America. I'm quoted.

For it's size, and the relatively large scope of its topic, the article does a strong job laying out issues. I want only to respond to this quote by the Senior Vice President of Recruiting: “We are completely agnostic about what people do after their two years.”

1) The talking point situation within the TFA power structure has gotten completely out-of-hand. I can no longer count the number of times a TFA employee has used the word agnostic to describe the organization's stance with regard to teaching past the two-year cut-off, both in person and in print.

2) TFA is not "agnostic." I believe that in TFA a) nothing is accidental and b) frequency of occurrence connotes degree of importance. TFA chooses to highlight, and thus place value upon certain accomplishments and courses of actions -- grade school acceptance rate, charter schools, corporate partnerships -- at a much higher rate than anything having to do with teaching. An organizational agnosticism would be evidenced by a far more equal distribution of PR.

3) TFA should not be "agnostic." You got us here by fetishizing the role of teacher. You filled heads and hearts with the powerful stories of life-change, and some people had experiences that matched the rhetoric. You demanded improvement and set high expectations for corps members to succeed a level beyond that which most teachers achieve, and some people did just that. Two years later you're "agnostic"? From whence does this agnosticism derive? This institutional schizophrenia smacks of self-promotion and a certain amount of blindness. TFA has been around for over a decade at this point. All those folks running off to engage the "second half of the mission" should have had a demonstrable effect on public education at this point. How exactly have all the doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and grad students with two years teaching experience improved the educational outcomes of America's poor?

More:
In thinking and writing about TFA's second half of the mission, some folks (here, for example) bring up the examples of The New Teacher Project, Michelle Rhee, and the little KIPPers. Once, maybe, what was meant by the second half of the mission was folks who continue to work in education as principals, central office staff, non-profit founders, consultants, etc. No longer. For TFA, the second half of the mission has nothing at all to do with education. They say so themselves. The second half of the mission is former teachers working in politics, former teachers getting elected to things, former teachers winning awards, starting companies, and so on. The second half isn't other stuff in education that isn't teaching; the second half is the nebulus, non-data driven, PR-dependent movement to make TFA corps members be to America what the Hapsburgs once were to Europe.

Still more:
My mom said I sounded "whiny."

Year Six Themes By Against Me!

2007-09-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

I cannot get Against Me! out of my stereo. Simply cannot. Not even recent appearances on Conan and Rolling Stone, videos on myspace, and the general sense that the band who produced an entire tour DVD about not selling-out have now gone and done exactly that, have proved able to diffuse the joy I garner, just me and the stereo, up and down 280. I was in the 831 Wednesday, fist in the air, screaming along to every line, and here we are now, year six, looking ahead, with a little help from the Gainseville boys.

“It doesn’t even turn my stomach to see the pictures of atrocities anymore.” –Ya’ll Don’t Want To Step To Dis

The number of Far Below Basic (FBB) students enrolled in my classes continues to grow. Up from eight in 2003, I have 43 this year. Contrary to claims made at a recent board meeting by an individual who is either 1) a liar or 2) grossly incompetent, scoring FBB does not mean you don’t understand the slope of line. It means you cannot add two digits without your fingers. It means you cannot subtract at all. It means there’s a 50-50 chance you cannot write the alphabet and correctly identify the vowels. It means you can neither read nor write a complete sentence, and there’s a good chance you cannot speak a complete sentence. It means you’re in seventh grade with the academic profile of a below average 2nd grader.

Contrary to recent public assertions that students scoring FBB did so as a result of a capricious test, these are young people with no discernible academic skills; gross language deficiencies; no sense of how to be student; typical, predictable, and boring resistance to the learning process, and a sense of impending doom. Is there someone who can explain how they spent the previous five to seven years of schooling? Can anyone justify this without resorting to that old saw about migrant kids ruining everything, as if our failures weren’t home-grown? Barring the obtainment of our 3-in-1 goal, I teach sixty future high school drop-outs each day. This isn’t about not knowing the slope of a line; these are kids who could not even hit the twenty-five percent correct achievement mark guaranteed by the laws of probability.

In our attempts to homogenize middle schools, promote the growth of only the top-scoring select, refuse with mule-like stubbornness to implement effective Newcomer Centers, we continue to doom these kids.

“I don’t think that you’re bad people/ I just think that your aesthetic is horrible.” –Piss and Vinegar

In large part driven by Dan, and his insistence on the importance of design, and in small part driven by me, I’ve tried to improve the presentation of my materials. I’ve always been a minimalist – in this and other areas of design – but I think my minimalism is sometimes unnecessarily stark and counter-productive.

So I’m stepping up. I’ve unified my fonts (Georgia, Century Gothic, Impact). I’ve put more thought into presentations and design of posters, homework, classwork. I’ve eschewed some of the D.I.Y. we’ll-make-our-own-organizer for pre-made and dutifully copied assignments. In this and other areas, I’m attempting to raise the bar. Big improvements come in the form of the parent letter:

And the interactive powerpoint comprehension quiz.

“You believe in authority, I believe in myself/ I'm a Molotov Cocktail, you're the Dom Perignon.” –Baby, I’m An Anarchist

Because it was "successful" in one place, because all middle schools simply mustmustmust function in identical ways, because inside the box is the new outside the box, the District decided to place a police officer on all middle school campuses. The individuals themselves are fine, the message this decision sends is disastrous.

Our school was once the most violent campus in the entire 408. We sit at the intersection of multiple norte/ sur neighbors, and adults had abdicated control to kids. Fights were frequent, common, and seen as inevitable. We eradicated this situation and made our campus safe, not by compelling behavior through the threat of force, but rather by defining for young people the concepts of dignity, honor, excellence and holding them to that standard. We sought to change behavior rather than punish. When kids came up short, they received more instruction, not more punishments.

When you bring an officer onto campus, you undermine these teachings. Rather than sending the message to kids that adults expect your best and are fully in control of the school environment, the patrolling presence of police sends the message that we expect your worse and are not in control. Rather than sending the message that you will do the right thing because strong, successful people do so naturally, we are sending the message that you will do the right because we will punish you otherwise. We once used the phrase family to describe the school environment we sought to create. External controlling agents are no part of any family I know. Instead of kids hearing a message of inclusion and warmth, one that softens that self-defeating mantle of hard so many reach for, we are sending a hardening message that this is a place for thugs, a ghetto place where the kids are so bad actual armed police officers are needed to ensure control.

You don’t have to go far to find people who disagree with me on this issue. They’re wrong. They don’t understand the perception of police in the surrounding community. They don’t understand how a police presence could negatively influence families already wary of the official nature of a school. They don’t understand the negative ramifications on relationship-building when administration/ counselors/ teachers become affiliated with police officers. They don’t understand that there is a difference between protecting the campus from outside influences and patrolling the campus. They don’t understand that those officers need to be out in the ten-block radius surrounding campus from 3:00 – 6:30, not on campus during brunch. They don’t understand that it is a privilege to live your life outside the presence of the controlling agents of the state, a privilege we shouldn’t so readily deny our students. They don’t understand how goddamn powerful we are when we function together, and it is beyond silly to give that up – not for anyone, not for anything.

"And there's no need to shit talk or impress/ cuz honesty and emotion are not looked down upon" –Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious

We're picking at each other a little. The king is dead; long live the king, and folks are trying to see how they fit in the new order of things. Some of this is good: new ideas, new leadership, new initiatives. Some of it isn't. Some of this becomes a jockeying for position that feels gross to me, unwelcome, and ultimately unnecessary. Let's take some deep breaths, ya'll, and remember that it was the unity of purpose, and the mutual enthusiasm that took us here. Ain't none of us good enough, strong enough, or smart enough to steer this ship alone.

“The president’s giving a speech in Georgetown/ to remember the voice of a slain civil rights leader/ Do you understand what the Martyr stood for?/ Oh, Condoleeza, do you get the fucking joke?” –From Her Lips To God's Ears

Around me are powerful educators busting butts and brains to bring educational equity to an academically starving community. When we’re successful, we benefit two organizations – the prevailing District power structure and Teach For America (40% of the staff) – that do not support our fundamental principles nor our understandings of how to bring about more effective teaching and learning. The former would have us abandon the instructional flexibility and structural creativity that have allowed us to more perfectly meet the needs of an academically diverse student body, teaching exactly what needs to be taught to exactly the type of kid who needs to get it. The latter would have us leave the classroom for the greener pastures of charter schools and program director positions.

The more successful we are, the more press releases that can be written, the more fund-raising that can be done. We cast our best efforts into a contextual frame that inherently devalues the work, the thought process behind it, and our great hopes for the future.

“Standing here like a comedian I repeat what I say/ again and again and again/ until the meaning has become an imitation of itself/ An impression of an original defeats the purpose/ I don't know where this is going/ but it's looking more and more like the same place that we started.” –Holy Shit!

How many times I have taught proper and common nouns?

How many times have I explained how to put homework in a binder?

How many times have I defined the word define?

How many times have I spoke the short /i/ sound, waited to hear it repeated, and corrected mispronunciations?

How many paragraphs have I colored green, yellow, red?

How many times have we compared theme in Social Distortion and Eminem songs?

How many times have I held up the school money and said, Con dinero, el perro baile, and then waited for laughter?

How many times have we used dialog to identify examples of indirect characterization?

And how many more?

“If you had told me about all this when I was fifteen/ I never would have believed it.” –Tonight We’re Gonna Give It Thirty-Five Percent

It’s still a little weird, being a teacher.

"Last night a room – full, drunk – sang along to the songs / I never had the courage to write." –I Still Love You Julie

There's things that need doing. There's ruts that need breaking. There's extensions and applications, and new ground to be struck. There's been times when I've felt paralyzed by past success (don'tchange don'tchange theywon'tlearn don'tchange), hesitant beyond belief to take what has worked, lay it as the strongest of foundations, but as foundation only, and move forward, ready to build a tower of small-d differences.

Those Teachers Are Also In Napa

2007-09-20T18:30:00.002-07:00

This is pretty old as things go in the land of the blogs, but [Archimedes] asked for this specifically, and it dovetailed nicely with what went on previous.

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article that was intended to pull aside the NCLB curtain, but ending up revealing something else entirely. Napa Valley High is a California Distinguished School that is also (gasp!) in PI because they aren't so distinguished when it comes to educating English Language Learners (ELLs). The steps the school is taking to reform instruction are causeing all kinds of consternation and outrage. Here's the big-time, haymaker pull-quote:

"There are a lot of people living good lives in this country who aren't able to write a cohesive paragraph and don't know grammar. I'm more concerned about them being able to put themselves in someone else's shoes - which is the essence of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' I'm more concerned with them being able to feel compassion and to question authority in a constructive way, which is the essence of 'Night.' I'm more concerned with them looking at the nature of friendship, which is at the heart of 'Of Mice and Men.' " -H. Zunin, 18 year veteran

Maybe some of this is sheer socio-economic preservation, the desire not to do anything that may alter the pecking order of life in the 707. More likely, this is a rather dramatic example of the prevailing misunderstanding of the nature of public school teaching. See, you can't, like, just do what ya want, as if you were firmly entrenched in a small liberal arts college* where the leaves turn pretty colors in the fall. There is a duty to provide exactly the nature and extent of education the young people who occupy your desks need. I hesitate to use the words ethical responsibility, but it pretty much doesn't matter if subject-predicate knocks your socks off, it's your job to get it done. If they need it, teach it.

Rather than showing the futility and absurdity of NCLB, the article illustrates its importance and ultimate success. Does anyone think the Brown kids over at Napa were on anyone's radar screen before they suddenly became a statistically significant AYP subgroup? Anyone think there was a single school structure in place to support those kids prior to 2002? I don't know, maybe there was, but NCLB ensures that, at the very least, there always will be. NCLB forces schools that would otherwise tolerate inequity of performance, inequity of access, inequity of outcome to reform. NCLB forces these schools to actually attempt to educate everyone, even the children and grandchildren of the people upon whose under-paid backs you built your wealth.

That said, we owe Ms. Zunin some measure of respect. Her actual professional environment required her to do a number of things -- teach ELLs to read and write, for example -- that she found either abhorrent, beyond her abilities, or both. Rather than join the ranks of shit-bag teachers who sign up for assignments they cannot or will not perform, she quit, left, presumably to a small or charter school that does a better job at keeping out those pesky Brown kids with all their pesky needy academic profiles. I wish her all the best in her continued zeal to teach BS Standard 1.1: Students will understand empathy, compassion, and friendship through literature they lack the skills to read.

There's a burgeoning generation of teachers teaching the kids Ms. Zunin rejects. They are generally young, or new to the profession, eager to reject the bitterness others try to pass off as wisdom. They have entered into things post-NCLB and are therefore unburdened with memories of the halcyon days of life-changing oboe practice and friendship bracelet construction. They have developed an understanding of their responsibilities that places an emphasis on student results over teacher actions and owns student behavior as a primary function of the effective teacher. They are not afraid to use the phrase educator achievement gap. They embrace this work, even as the coalition of the unwilling swells its ranks with folks who will wring their hands over misunderstood legislation, bolster every boutique school around, and ensure I always get the best deal on car insurance.

*If I were so entrenched, I'd teach:
EN189 The Literature of Men
EN 486 Advanced Fiction Workshop
AS 369 Gender Roles in Pop Music
ED101 Dynamic Instruction
ED743 The History of Piratical Activity in the Caribbean Basin: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Acquisition of Basic Skills in the 6-8 classroom

The Teachers You Hate Sitting Next To During All-District PD

2007-09-08T10:12:00.000-07:00

Are writing this post and responding to it with a gushing all-caps enthusiasm that is generally reserved for the comment section of Tori Amos's myspace page. I can't even begin to explain the all-over grossness I felt while reading this. Suffice to say I'm not down with the sentiment expressed therein. While everyone is free to write from their point-of-view, I resent the attempt to speak for others, the universal prognosticating, and the unverified assertion that experiences like this are somehow part of the norm.

Generally, the flight of teachers concerns me, but if the teachers that leave schools are the ones who think it is not their job to motivate, not their job to convince, not their job to get their hands dirty, I got a couple of inches of Bushmills I'll raise in their honor, and applaud the decision to go sell insurance.

The Well (doing better III)

2007-09-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

"Yes, you will need more teachers...

More teachers, and you'll need to allocate staff to individual sites in different ways.

For all EOs/ RFEPs/ IFEPs: 33 to 1

For all CLEDT 2-5: 25 to 1

For all CELDT 1 and/or Newcomers: 15 to 1

We have committed to the understanding that SpEd kids require different learning environments and instructional support to be effective, as primarily realized through scheduling and class size. That same realization and fundamental understanding of what it means to effectively teach ELLs needs to somehow sink into the psyche of those who make decisions. The nature of your student populations, as much as the sheer numbers behind your student populations, needs to drive how you schedule, but also how you staff your site (and how you are allowed to staff your site).

...Hire fewer consultants."

Big time, and then you can pay for the additional teachers you need. While districts are often loath to cough up the funds necessary to hire new folks and pay for their benefits, the specific nature of these teachers -- countering a civil rights violation vis-a-vis the denial of appropriate instruction -- provides all kinds of options. Use your Title II money. Use your Title III money. Stop sending people to attend conferences and trainings to acquire the kind of instructional strategies readily available in your schools already.

But who will teach? I have confidence. Beyond the fact that ELLs quite simply represent the future of public education in California, I have confidence we can find the folks to teach in these specific, high-need, highly valued positions. If the rise of charters has taught us anything, it's that teachers are desperate for the perceived title bump inherent in teaching somewhere selective, sought-after, and important. The Teacher Leaders Network echoes this sentiment nicely. By presenting these positions as the domain of the mission-driven, results-committed, high skill educator, we can staff them for folks who need to move beyond the just-a-teacher job description.

Use What You've Learned (doing better II)

2007-08-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

I've taught in this district for six years, and I've never once heard an accurate identification of the main challenge(s) facing our schools. I've heard platitudes, starfish analogies, seen mediocre progress elevated to a heroic victories in the face of the evil accountability monster, even heard it suggested that our students can somehow compete with "top schools." I've seen instructional goals presented to the board that made my stomach turn, but I've never once heard a clear statement -- that was supported in any way by data -- about the nature of our limitations and barriers. I've never once heard any one talk about Ana and Jorge.

Now it's a momentous journey from tales of starfish to a clear-headed, data-driven identification of the problems at hand. No doubt. But once the summitting has occurred, you can't stop. The data that outline your issues, also suggest your solutions.

Newcomer Centers
Lot's of em. All over the place. The CDE tells me there's 300 qualifying kids, but if you extend the definition to include kids who've been here 18 months, or those who have been denied access to needed instruction, it's much, more more. Create these classrooms. You need one at four of the seven middle schools (one middle school in particular probably requires two), two for every three elementaries west of Capital, maybe one for every three east of it. These need to be capped at 15, taught by competent people, and left alone to do their jobs.

Starfalls is not a Newcomer Center.
Differentiation within Open Court is not a Newcomer Center.
High Point Basics is not, in and of itself, a Newcomer Center.

Yes, you will need more teachers. Hire fewer consultants.

For what it's worth, the lack of such classrooms continues to be beyond my ability to comprehend. I just don't get it. Even assuming districts function only to maximize test scores, why the hell would you want 300+ kids limping through the system, inevitably scoring Far Below Basic year after year after year, until they (rightly) give the fuck up, and come to my class as the academic equivalents of Lindsey Lohan on a Monday morning?

Learning to Read Centers
This is a temporary fix, to bridge the gap until the entirety of the reform effort is put into play. These are, quite simply, classes for kids who can say, "Hi, my name is Jorge," but cannot read this same sentence. For the first few years, these classes will be populated by the causalities of Open Court, the kids who missed phonics and sat through futile attempts to differentiate for years. Some RSP/ SDC kids can roll on through, too.

Here you'll teach kids how to read. You'll do it by teaching letter sounds and blends, by modeling what reading sounds like, by providing decodable books for kids to read. Assessment will be frequent; instruction will be responsive and elastic. The second a kid reaches the 2nd grade level of independent reading ability ship em out to the nearest available High Point or Open Court classroom. You will need different curriculum, or you will need people who know what they're doing. Both are available.

Once the next step is taken, you will no longer need these classrooms.

L1 Literacy
Go back to Ana and Jorge. Beyond dumb luck, Ana's got a big leg up on Jorge because she is literate in her first language. When you teach how to write a topic sentence in English, her learning curve is dramatically shortened because she can do this in Spanish, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Tagalog, Farsi, Tigrinya, or Mandarian. She's building on what she already knows, which speeds her acquisition and retention of new information.

Thing is, those places where Ana is coming from, they're not doing so hot on the education front. They produce relatively few Ana's. We need to pick up the slack.

English Language Learners, immigrant or otherwise -- of course we have native born ELL's, of course -- need literacy in their first language. This is another of those no-brainers: Is it easier to learn to read and write in a second language if you can already do so in your first language?

We need to provide L1 literacy using the alternatives provided for in the racist knee-jerkery that was prop 227. By combining literacy instruction in a student's primary language with simultaneous L2 instruction (see: Newcomer Centers), and using Mathematics instruction to bridge the two, we will finally create the instructional model to reach Jorge. Dig it: Jorge learns to read and write and think in Spanish in the morning. He gets BICS English in the later morning. He learns math in the afternoon, which is eventually taught in English, because he's got the BICS to handle it. That's year-1. Year-2 repeat, except now the L1 literacy is advancing to higher levels, and the L2 literacy begins. The math goes quicker because L2 is stronger, and there's time for Science, which, when done right, is a fantastic source of ELD. Year-3 goes much the same, but at a higher level, and maybe with fewer kids. Many Jorges would be ready to jump into the general Structured English Immersion (SEI) pool by this point.

This is the Golden Hinde of public ELL pedagogy, set to sail beyond familiar coastline and out to open water.

Money may well be needed to hire and compensate more teachers (see: hiring fewer consultants; see also: meeting state filing deadlines, avoiding costly law-suits, making better choices regarding insurance providers). Courage may well be needed to assume a multi-year approach to education, rather than an isolated single-year sprint to nowhere. AYP looms, API beckons, and I can see folks rightly concerned about how providing instruction in L1 will affect CST data. We know we get the first year free, but then what? Won't kids bomb those tests and adversely affect the district because of lack of English instruction? Maybe, but the CDE tells me that we've got 5,000 Jorges stuck on open water, becalmed, now. Under the current model, Jorge is testing Far Below Basic indefinitely. With L1 instruction, he may test Far Below Basic for two years (the first of which won't count), but will begin to move forward with actual foundational skills -- in both L1 and L2. Years one and two won't be much different either way; the ballgame is in year three and beyond, where Jorge may actually begin to learn things, like, for real.

Even as our schools fill up -- slowly and impermantly -- the Proficient and Advanced portions of the STAR reporting page, we are often populating the bottom sections to do so. Faustian bargains like this tend not to have happy endings, and hoping for an '08 donkey-victory and the continued growth of the low-wage service sector seemes like a disingenous way to go about doing our jobs. We have data. Do we have brains and spines to use them in new ways?

Data Has Other Uses, Too* (doing better I)

2007-08-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

(*Beyond gaming existing accountability systems and manipulating one's way out of PI status, that is.)

I made a point in the last post that certain students' success demonstrated the necessity of structural reform in my district. It was a throwaway line, but I was cruising through the scores of my incoming kids (63 percent Far Below Basic, 98 percent Far Below Basic and/or Below Basic), and I realized that this issue deserves more than a few passing rabbit punches. It deserves a Kruschev-shoe-pounding-on-the-table-at-the-UN moment. Maybe a lot of these.

Meet Ana. A composite of many former students, Ana immigrated with her family a few months ago. Ana is reasonably literate in her primary language (L1) and because she was lucky enough to live in our boundaries, was able to attend an actual Newcomer Center for kids with less than a year's residency in the U.S. In her first year Ana scores a 1 on the 6th grade CST in ELA and Math. This score was exempt for API and AYP purposes, given her recent immigrant status.

In her second full year in the U.S. Ana leaves the Newcomer Center and is enrolled in an intervention class that begins with 3rd grade standards. Armed with L1 literacy, functional L2 conversational skills, and emerging academic skills, Ana works hard, has access to the material, and soaks up syntax, vocabulary, and conceptual understanding like a sponge. At the end of the year, Ana scores a 3 on the 7th grade CST test in ELA and 4 in math.

In her third full year in the U.S. Ana enrolls in the on-grade-level ELA program, but in a strategic setting, wherein teachers support ELLs and skill-deficient kids, specifically in the areas of vocabulary development and reading comprehension. She also takes Algebra. Her L1 skills continue to serve her, as she further develops her writing abilities and literary analysis skills. The academic vocabulary is challenging, as are the extensive grammar demands and poetry analysis, but she's hanging in. She improves slightly in ELA, scoring a 3, while in algebra she earns a 4.

Her three-year test performance looks like this:
ELA 1 / 3/ 3
Math 1/ 4/ 4

Now meet Jorge, another composite. Jorge immigrated two years prior to Ana, in the beginning of fourth grade. Rather than begin in third grade, which would allow an additional year to learn English and garner basic skills, Jorge is placed into fourth grade. There is no Newcomer Center. Open Court and Saxon Math are the mandated curriculum. There is a 45 minute ELD period that is largely ineffective. Jorge is completely unable to access the curriculum because he lacks English language skills that are not offered as part of his educational program. He gets by because his teacher doesn't ask for much, let's him play Star Falls on the computer, and other kids translate for him.

Jorge limps through 4th and 5th grade, beginning to acquire some of the basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) he needs, but no academic language or higher order skills. When he enters 6th grade, after two years in U.S. schools, he speaks English like he's been here a week. Jorge has almost the same English needs as Ana, but is denied access to the Newcomer Center -- which do not exist at every site anyway -- because he has been in the country too long to qualify. Luckily, he attends a school that schedules by student readiness, and begins to receive the instruction he needs, including phonics, decoding, fluency, and key reading strategies.

Jorge is still a CST 1 at the end of 6th grade. By the end of 7th grade he has pulled himself up into the 2 range. By the end of 8th grade, he is still scoring Below Basic in ELA. His computation skills and conceptual understanding in General Math are adequate, but reading deficiencies impair his ability to demonstrate his full range of abilities. He scores Below Basic, again.

His five-year test performance looks like this:
ELA 1 / 1/ 1/ 2/ 2
Math 1/ 2/ 1/ 2/ 2

Data's other use is to remind us that while Ana is successful, Jorge is not, and none of this has anything to do with families, economics, or whether or not they were offered electives. The data show us that the district has (barely) sufficient structures and resources to foster success with the Ana's of the world, but dramatically fails to do so with Jorge and his ilk. The data show us this has been happening for quite some time, and we're doing pretty much nothing to change it.

I will teach five Ana's this year.

I will teach forty-three Jorge's.

Box Scores (me)

2007-08-24T08:32:00.000-07:00

It's possible there's little worse than hearing about other teacher's test scores. I didn't always think this way. Lately, I've been getting that look-at-my-slides-of-the-Grand-Canyon feeling whenever the conversations crop up. If you're with me, feel free to stop reading.

That's my pie chart over there. Green represents students who improved one quintile; yellow for students who remained in the same quintile year-to-year; red for students who dropped to a lower quintile. That green section accounts for over 70 percent of student performance. There is no red. As a class, each of my groups averaged one quintile of growth.

Feeling good about a lot of green, but especially my Special Ed (RSP) kids. These kids accounted for 20 percent of my overall student population. Every one posted a higher scale score than the previous year. Over 80 percent moved up one quintile. Nineteen percent moved two quintiles.

Feeling bummed about all that yellow. It's too much. If I taught kids who began the year Proficient (4) or Advanced (5), that (generally speaking) static growth would be fine. I don't. I teach, in the parlance of the times, critically at-risk kids, those who fall many years of academic performance below what it would take to scrape out a high school diploma, nevermind the A-G requirements, nevermind higher ed matriculation. Massive, dramatic growth is called for, and even when the scaled score goes up within the quintile, that's not enough.

Feeling good about the writing scores. I've never taught so many students who scored proficient.

Feeling bummed that the stupid-ass narrative writing exam saved my butt. I'm thinking that pie-chart looks a lot more yellow without those weak proficient scores on that weak March assessment.

Feeling good about my just-out-of-the-newcomer-program kids. There were three of em, CELDT 1s and CST 1s all, and each kid scored Basic (3) on the CSTs, and two of them did so on the 8th grade exam. Those kids are awesome, and a walking advertisement for 1) the importance of teaching kids primary language literacy first and 2) the importance of a true newcomer center to teach, as a primary function, the English language.

Feeling bummed in general. It's been suggested to me that the previous post took an unnecessarily harsh and gloomy view of things. Maybe, but I expect better. From myself and those around me. We struggled a little, let the embers smolder rather than build that towering bonfire. I have more static students. I have far fewer proficient students. I have fewer students who achieved the goal of three years growth in one year. There's an obvious danger in looking yourself into a must-get-better-constantly model, especially when we're dealing with variance in the extent of success, the kind of success that if cruncher data is to be believed, no one's been having with these kids; still, it doesn't feel as good getting my pie charts back, and there's a clear imperative to come back with more focus, more energy, and more grit this year.

Box Scores

2007-08-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

First there’s a cryptic message from the administrator formerly known as the V-POY, then a strange cross-section in the newspaper. You backtrack the link, which is not the normal navigational path on the California DOE website. Soon you will look up the feeder elementaries, the other middle schools, your friend's schools, the schools in the 510 you worked with this summer, but first you use these absurdly time-consuming pull-down menus to find your school, and examine the percentages listed next to the quintiles.

First thought: These fucking suck.

Second thought: Holy shit! We didn’t make AYP!

In language arts the proficient and advanced scores are low, only cracking the magic AYP benchmark in seventh grade. Math looks better, but not as good as the year previous. No, not nearly as good.

05-06 Results: ELA 36% Math 44%
06-07 Results: ELA 30% Math 38%

We did make AYP. Barely.

Not long ago I wrote about paging through CST results for schools and districts with demographics like ours, and how everyone seems to be hitting that same 1/3 percent proficient ceiling. Based on last year's results, institutional knowledge, and mission trajectory, I thought we were positioned to escape that 1/3 ghetto. I thought we could take steps toward the fifty percent mark, the eventual 2/3 mark that results in the mythical 800 API. It's not that those things are impossible, currently, but we took a step back, and it sucks.

The sky isn't falling. Five hundred of our seven hundred students were new to the school last year, a plurality performing in that Below Basic and Far Below Basic range. We expanded to include sixth graders, who had not been on our campus for the previous three school years. Accordingly we added 1/3 new staff, the majority composed of first year TFAers. We experimented with new means of scheduling, and yet another way to bring increased instructional minutes to our students.

There's a lot of environmental complications that shows these results in a rather positive light. At the start of last year, I would have predicted a hold-steady or a small-dip. It was a survival year, as is this one (to a lesser extent). Still, somewhere along the way I got to thinking that we could be looking at incremental improvement, not merely holding ground. But the numbers are here, and we did not even hold that ground. Without beating ourselves or each up over some backward sliding, we need to critical examine our practice so that this does not become a trend.

Rigor The days when time was demonstrably wasted in our classrooms are well behind us and good riddance to that tired shit. Kids work. They work all day, in every class, so much so that I think we're noticing an up-swing in skipping and cutting precisely as a result of this -- you can't come to school and hang-out. Still, the constant work does not always mean that students are working at the highest levels, or pushed to achieve at the highest levels. These are difficult waters to navigate when the vast majority of your school is working in intervention models, constantly seeking to hit on the right balance of remediation, language acquisition, and standards mastery. I believe we need to teach less to ensure they learn more, but man, that's a fine line to walk.

Choice Teach less so they learn more, but how much of which topics do you hit em with? The POY put forth a theory on instructional obesity/ anorexia, wherein kids grow fat on certain areas of class (grammar) while failing to get the required nutrition in other key areas (informational text). We need to monitor these trends in our instruction and evaluate our teaching accordingly. I'm working on developing a grid to record how many hits my kids get on given topics -- everything from direct instruction, explicit review, embedded application, and so on -- something that will enable the conversation to move beyond the pacing guide, teacher's edition, and a general feeling about where time was spent.

Numbers This summer I watched raw teachers (raw as onions) consistently struggle to engage the whole class in instruction, in accessing the material, in responding and working through the central learning objectives. This is really easy to observe in 20-student econ class where the teacher has physically shifted instruction toward the two kids who respond, or the six-student elementary class, where the kid who has already read the Open Court story is spewing the answers, but maybe it's harder in the middle school class of 33, where you're getting hits from a majority. Maybe you're getting interactions from 15, or 20, or 25. But maybe you're not getting all 33. Maybe you're not using the strategies that allow and require all 33 to consistently hit the objectives.

I hope we engage the reflection and analysis piece, and not too readily reach for the host of explaining environmental factors. That's never been a part of who we are as a school or how we approach teaching and learning. Let's not start now.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2007-08-15T11:29:00.001-07:00

The East Bay Express will explain, spilling much ink over what folks are wearing, the color of the chairs, and where it was I drew my conceptual map.

Welcome to the Party, Congressman Miller

2007-08-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

Recently, Congressman George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee gave a speech heralding proposed changes to NCLB. In the section outlining how these ammendments will help teachers and principals, Congressman Miller spoke thusly:

"We will not meet our national goal of closing the achievement gap until and unless we close the teacher quality gap. No factor matters more to a children’s educational success than the quality of their teachers and principals."

Teacher quality gap, huh?

Nice turn of phrase.

Today, Now

2007-08-13T15:35:00.000-07:00

Dan tagged me with this one random fact meme, sometime back in the last decade, and here’s mine:

RANDOM FACT: I am, at last, done.

Today marks the first day of summer vacation. That’s August 13, for those scoring at home, and I’m still wrapping up loose ends, one of which includes bringing a burrito over to Oakland to compensate for previous failures in the burrito delivery department (don’t ask). I’ve been working all summer for the Oakland Teaching Fellows and the Oakland City Teacher Corps, running alternative route training institutes. This is good work, a broadening of the mission, and hits at the heart of how I’ve come to think of reform for high need urban ed: We cannot begin to address broader issues of inequity and failure until we put a competent, effective educator in every classroom.

Working in this capacity, at training institutes like these, becomes all encompassing. We occasionally get negative feedback from folks about the hours being long and my response is 1) Yup. Welcome to teaching high-need kids; 2) Wow. You think your hours are long?

I never started work later than 6:30. I never finished earlier than 6:00. I had scheduled email checks at 9:00 pm, which often necessitated responses, which drove further email checks, which necessitated response and work product that took us well into the night. A common morning saw me juggling teacher observation times by stopping at the training site in West Oakland, driving to the high school north of downtown, observing, then driving to the elementary school in East Oakland to observe, then popping up into the hills to observe in a special ed setting, back down to the elementary, back to the high school, and finally to the training site in West Oakland. This before the collaboration meeting at eleven, observing and critiquing framework sessions, coordinating and presenting workshops, and all the various other little things that eat your day.

The hours aside, the work is interlaced with this profound worry that the folks we’re preparing won’t be prepared enough. You watch and work with this they’renotready they’renotready scrolling across your brain like the update bar at the bottom of SportsCenter. And you push push them to get better because these are high school seniors who desperately want credits, and you’ll never have so much built in motivation with any group of students you’ll ever teach. The majority get it and appreciate, but some resist and are resentful, providing no benefit of the doubt that maybe you know a little bit about what it means to teach and teach successfully in environments like this, and you tell them: These kids don’t need any more mediocre teachers.

But I’m done. With the 6-week training and the 1-week training, and already I start to feel the little pulls from the school at the other end of 280. Little tuggings – on my time, on my brain – starting to call me back.

I want to make a users-guide for the REWARDS phonics and fluency program because my methods should be explicit.

I want to create reading strategy mastery tracking guides to complement the High Point program because if that’s what the program is designed to do, that’s what we need to monitor.

I want to make interactive power point assessments for each High Point selection. Here’s an image, here’s 1-3 questions, here’s a space for kids to type responses and email me the assignment so I can type my own response and email it back.

But my summer break is now begun, and I need a few days in the new 415 sunshine before I’m ready to go back.

Health Class Redux

2007-08-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

I had to go back. It was similar, except worse. Folks perpetuated the myth of vaccinations causing autism, committed post hoc ergo propter hoc errors in reasoning, and ignored their presentation time limits in a manner that bespoke a disregard for the feelings and needs of others. On the bright side, I am a better educator now.

If Ya Ever Get Stuck

2007-07-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

I threw down my own workshop yesterday, a jagged and quick-paced thing that incorporates information on attention span, state changes, classroom zones, juicing up your procedures, and improving the independent practice section of your lesson plan. The thought-line that holds all this together is the word dynamic, repeated consistently, and held up as the small-g god of all classroom interaction. "Subject-verb agreement doesn't get my juices flowing," I tell them, "and I don't expect my kids to groove on it so much either. The solution is to create a dynamic environment and a dynamic set of processes in which the subject-verb stuff occurs."

I told three pirate jokes, including an inappropriate one that I wouldn't have gotten away with at the County Office presentation last Spring*, referenced fly-swatters as the premier pedagogical tool, and was completely stumped on how to send folks away when it was over. So I recited the masthead of this blog thing, and the snapping and clapping started.

It's becoming a stump speech.

*Q: What's a pirate's favorite sexual position?
A: MissionARRy

Health Class Diary

2007-07-21T18:46:00.000-07:00

A running record of the pursuit of higher certification.

8:54 I walk in. Where's the agenda? Where are the objectives? I immediately want to being filling out + / Δ forms.

9:17 First egregiously late individual arrives. I'm setting the over/ under on lateness at thirty-minutes.

9:22 Rules. There are rules. No computers, no reading, no newspapers, no cell phones, no grading papers. It's clear I can pen blog entries, however, if for no other reason than writing looks like work. Back in college I was working on becoming a novelist, and throwing a chapter down into a notebook always looked like taking notes. My big concern today is there will not be enough actual content to justify fake note-taking.

10:13 Apparently we will perform yoga today. I'm frankly terrified. Can I please read something and write critically about it?

10:27 If you took the under on lateness your wallet is considerably lighter right now.

11:03 Yoga makes my neck and quads feel weird. In other news, the overhead doesn't work.

11:08 I fail to participate in the discussion of spiritual health... and the odds-makers take a beating.

11:15 I learn that violence, which is unavoidable, is a major health issue.

11:16 I learn that war, which is horrible, is a major health issue.

11:40 Most egregiously late person continues to over-compensate by over-sharing, over-participating, and over-personalizing.

11:55 The starfish analogy comes out... and the odds-makers take a beating.

12:05 Topics covered since the starfish analogy include role of the counselor, off-base parental expectations, importance of school board meeting attendance, grant-writing, fieldtrips, how teachers know better than district office employees. I can't believe we haven't talked about Donor's Choose yet.

12:08 Yes! We talk about Donor's Choose. Thank God.

1:56 During the lunch break I eat Thai food and return to class feeling decidedly unhealthy. I engage in a great deal of self-talk regarding whether or not this constitutes an example of situational or dramatic irony (perhaps you've read D. Eggers' screed on the topic, penned with all his trademark dog-chasing-its-tail logic). I decide that merely feeling unhealthy in a health class does not in and of itself satisfy the requirements of irony. If the health class were actually making me unhealthy, rather than merely providing a venue in which I felt less than healthy, then we'd find ourselves in an ironic situation, but in the absence of this, we're simply dealing with an interesting coincidence.

3:02 Group work ends. My group is assigned meth. We're supposed to present for 20 minutes. We're supposed to be creative. We're supposed to have hand-outs. My group decides to play a game called "Name That Addict." This is not my idea. I go to the bathroom twice.

3:05 Time wasting begins while waiting for the arrival of a guest speaker. My group discusses the problematic nature of working in a professional environment with women. This segues nicely into a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. I go to the bathroom.

3:27 The sun has come out and shines beautifully. Our guest speaker addresses, in great and abiding detail, the topic of depression. This is not ironic either.

4:45 Class is dismissed, and I am now a more effective educator.

Up The Cuts

2007-07-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Big ups to Dan, who undertook some serious preparation an serious driving to deliver a stellar workshop at the Training Institute in the 510. Read about the preparation, but know that for all that, the success still resides in the delivery -- the passion, understated humor, and call to action. And the metaphors. Here's Dan's best: You see what I'm doing? I'm throwing leaves and grass over the hole. I'm leading em closer to it. They don't see the hole, and I'm throwing down more and more leaves.

The evaluations are good, the looks on peoples' faces walking out were good, and for a bunch of folks who spend their days plowing through all-morning summer school and all-afternoon sessions on how to teach well, feeling good about a pseudo-optional workshop that concludes at 6:00 pm is high praise indeed.

What struck me watching the presentation is that while Dan and I were educated in the ways of the teacher in vastly different settings -- he the traditional route through a UC, I churned through the gears of Teach For America -- we've arrived at remarkably similar understandings of how to what we do. We share a certain baseline approach that isn't, as far as I know, taught as a full conceptional and pedagogical -ism. We're making our own -ism.

1) You're teaching in the age of YouTube, myspace, TV, and video games -- act like you understand what that means
2) Different is your management
3) Teach skill-based instruction geared toward content mastery rather than content coverage
4) Use skill-based remediation
5) Consistently and repeatedly offer chances for assessment
6) Teach for the ones who aren't ready, don't like the subject, and don't like you

I'm sure there's more, but I sat there thinking about how rarely I hear other people talking about teaching in ways that reflect, mirror, or relate to how I go about the process in East San Jose, and how strange it was that I had to go to Oakland and listen to a high school math teacher from Santa Cruz to do so.

The Wrong Boxes

2007-07-13T08:12:00.001-07:00

In the last post I spend some time parsing culture versus class. I said our efforts around promoting diversity have been somewhat off the mark, that it’s money and its effects on day-to-day living that create the real differences, the ones that impact what we do in the classroom. That said, it's been suggested -- more than once, and more privately than publicly -- that the big ticket item of classroom diversity is less about the tension between class and culture, and more about the differences in and between cultures. What I hear folks say is that my sense of how diversity impacts teaching is derived from my environment, and skewed by it. I wrote this:

…It’s been easier for me to understand (a little) and connect (a little) to my kids’ ethnic and cultural backgrounds that it has been to understand and connect to their socioeconomic background…

and I’ve been told it’s less a product of being a White, upper-middle class male, and more about being a White, upper-middle class male teaching in a predominantly Latino immigrant community.

Last Year’s Kids:
Black 5%
Asian 7%
Latino 88%

The claim here is that I would have increased difficulty connecting, understanding, and valuing ethnic/ racial (and when can we stop using that jingoist, white-man’s-burden, non-biologically valid term?) differences if you flipped the percentages. If my class looked like this:

Black 88%
Asian 7%
Latino 5%

people tell me I’d think and talk and write about these issues much differently. I get this from people I respect, people who have taught in both communities, and some environments that have a more even distribution. There seems to be a great deal of private agreement on this topic.

And I wonder what this means.

Are we saying Black culture is less compatible to the White culture of public education than Latino culture?

Are we saying White teachers are less compatible to Black students than Latino?

Maybe ethnicity is again the wrong way to view these issues. Are we saying that it is easier to value the cultural differences in immigrant populations?

These are important conversations to have, and valuable. But I think they underscore the problematic nature of conversations around diversity. All too often we put White in one box and Everything Else in the other and draw comparisons. Failing that, we put White in one box, Black in the other, and ignore all the other ways in which these issues come into play. This is how a place like my school, which is 86% Latino (of which almost all are Mexican), earns the label of diverse. If it were 86% White, no one would call it diverse. Words are the intellectual frames that contain and support discourse, and when we get sloppy in their implementation, our thinking gets similarly weak, and slopped around.

Diversity... or I Roll With Delpit

2007-07-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

"[They sang] protest songs in a response to military aggression." -Tom Gabel, White People For Peace

I've been reading a little about the recent Supreme Court ruling on racial assignment, mostly over here, (even if they link to Lynne Cheney's group of McCarthyists.) It started me thinking of some big-ticket issues. More was to come: SCOTUS, the conclusion of what I think of as diversity week at the summer training institute I'm helping lead, a conversation with a friend who's down at TFA's LA training institute, the realization that I'd fail a quiz on the Black leaders muralized in the 510 high school hallway, a recent commenter calling me out for a sarcastic reference to ethnic labeling -- all of it an avalanche in the brain.

Most recently a New York Times Magazine reporter called me up to speak about Teach For America. We had an interesting talk, made more interesting when the reporter mentioned she was given my contact information by a three-names professor who penned the book I just finished reading for my Masters, someone whose name made my TFA-regional-office-employed friend gasp. The reporter asked for thoughts on diversity (it's a badly misused phrase), about how well TFA was doing in recruiting a diverse corps (inexplicably terrible) and what I thought of their diversity curriculum (ineffectively confrontational). Then she asked about my own experiences overcoming cultural differences in my teaching.

To this last question I didn't have much of an answer. Which is troublesome. In the last five years I've taught and coached over 400 students, not one of whom shared my ethnicity (White), not one of whom shared my socioeconomic background (upper middle class). And I've done a pretty good job most of the time, if only in comparison to what was going on before, and to do a pretty good job, you would think the issue of overcoming or addressing these essential differences is not minor stuff. You would think this is not something I would give so little thought to. So little, in fact, that it marked the only time in an hour-long interview where I didn't have a snappy response, the snappiness therein probably derived from those long a.m. commutes down the 280 where I'd interview myself on a variety of issues. It's troublesome to have no answer, or a weak-sauce answer, especially because that luxury is such a part of the privilege I enjoy.

So, okay. I don't teach a class on social justice. I've hung no posters of Martin, Malcolm, or Che. I do not turn my kids into Freedom Writers. But I've got something going on, right?

I think issues of identity, of which cultural and ethnic heritage are no doubt central, are mediated in simpler ways when you're 11, 12, or 13. To the extent that I make connections with kids -- and that's the point, right? that's the ballgame, isn't it? -- to the extent that happens, I pull a lot from the pop culture that infuses too much of their lives. I don't enjoy, but I do know what they listen to. I've seen the movies and can fake it when I haven't. The slang and silly trend de jeur makes its way into my homework assignments, and I know all about the games.

R: Are you mad?
ME: I'm the cops in Grand Theft Auto after you stole a car, ran over two people, and shot the rocket launcher at a liquor store.
R: S.W.A.T. team's coming for me, huh?
ME: Big time. Get to work.

A little goes a long way.

So too with language. I'm lucky enough to have a baseline knowledge of the dominant language spoken in the community, which is not the language of instruction. I do not teach in Spanish, but neither do I forbid its use in my classroom. I didn't think people still did this, forbid its use, but during a classrooom visit last year, an observer motioned me over, and pointing furtively across the room, hissed, "Those two girls are speaking Spanish." Why shouldn't they? Thought is channeled through language, and since I want students to think at a high level, there are times when they'll need to speak at the level that best mediates those cognitive heights. Group work is clearly an opportunity for this; I want them speaking the language in which they think best. And nevermind the pedagogical validity, who the hell am I to forbid such a fundamental expression of self? They're talking about the work and they've got it all right, I told the observer, even though they weren't and it wasn't.

A little goes a long way. I can help them find the word they can't think of in English. I can trade pleasantries with their family, maybe have a short conversation if it's about food, school, or Salvador Dalí.

Validating what's important to my students, and making space for it in my classroom has always been a high priority. It has been relatively easy to pick up on those little things, add them to the bigger issues of equity of access, opportunity, and curricular representation. What has never been easy is understanding how to address the issues raised, not by differences in "race," but by issues in class -- something that SCOTUS ruling touches upon.

I don't know what it's like to live in a garage.
I don't know what it's like to only have one uniform shirt.
I don't know what it's like to share one bed with three people.
I don't know what it's like to call a conference of all your teachers because you want to go to high school, now, so you can graduate sooner, get a job, and help your mom with the bills.

This was my challenge, my diversity issue, and it took a long time to understand what was going on. Your kid's got an F, I checked the "contact teacher" bubble on the report card, we had conference days, where were you? And then I decided that they didn't care. And if they didn't care... shit man, fill in your own blank. This is something I still struggle with, needing to rethink my knee-jerk reactions to situations I don't fully understand because that is not, and never has been, a reality for me.

At the risk of sounding like all types of bad person, it's been much easier for me to understand (a little) and connect (a little) to my kids' ethnic and cultural backgrounds than it has been to understand and connect to their socioeconomic background. To put myself at further risk, I think the latter creates more educational barriers than the former. On some level, it's kind of gross to think otherwise. To the extent that the prevailing culture of the American public education system is White and middle-class, I tend to think that it is more middle-class than White. Maybe that makes me near-sighted, maybe it reveals the extent to which my own ethnicity has been so thoroughly valued and reflected, or maybe it makes me a bigot. To be sure, the only time I have ever been called a racist was after making just this assertion, claiming that I'd seen differences in social class -- at my Title I high school with magnet school busing, at my elite private liberal arts college -- divide people more completely than differences in ethnicity. This is something I still believe, even as I acknowledge that this isn't true everywhere, and that class characteristics are increasingly conflated with ethnic/ cultural characteristics.

I don't know what the upshot of all this is, or if there's any big take-home message, but I do know this: The reason I don't have posters of Ghandi, Hidalgo, or Aguinaldo on the walls is not because I am afraid of addressing underlying issues of large-scale inequity, but because I need that wall-space for the instructional materials I use to fight those very inequities.

There's A Height Beyond Skyscrapers

2007-06-24T15:58:00.000-07:00

I was almost a bartender.

That would have been different.

A lot would not have happened. I would not have had the same conversation with [Todd Anderson] today. I would not have paid the Mets-A’s gem only half attention because I was writing Framework Session questions aligned with the Teaching for Student Achievement (TfSA) rubric. I would not have written so little. I would not have abstained so much, from so much. I would not feel that deep-pit good when St. Ignatius’s famous ditty kicks through my mind. I would not know as much about generosity, or courage, or what the East 408 hills look like in a freezing bright sunshine, their tops dashed with snow.

I would not have spend these last five years working with the POY.

He is no longer the principal of our school, gone on to a new challenge, an attempt to do at the high school level what he set in motion for middle schools. Gone with him is some of that high purpose time, where motivation and innovation kept us up past the tree-line, in the alpines of our work. Along the way there’s been so many almost-goodbyes it’s damn-near comedic: hints and clues, then the initial announcement, then Chaminade retreat, the last staff meeting, graduation, last-day-of-school-plaque presentation, the party later that night, and for all that, I went into school the other day, and he’s working with the V-POY, still trying to push us forward and lay the groundwork for the smoothest transition in the history of public education, and we’re talking about 700 things, while phones are answered, budgets analyzed, and I type a plan for fluency curriculum and show-off some cool document I got from TNTP.

If I were as good a reporter as my buddy [Victory], I’d hit ya with the defining anecdote that illuminates the guy in sharp, clear lines, illustrates the essential aspects of character and influence, one that is informative in this way, but entertaining, too. I would retell it in great detail, build an entire essay off the crisp details in the recollection and revelation of personality. I'd tell ya what it all means, all that he has meant, but I can’t. I don’t have anything that clear and clean, just a jumbled collage of recollections that probably don’t paint a picture anywhere near as lucid as I’d like. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe I don’t want to tell stories.

I could spit out retellings and rememberings, frame them within a bulleted list of lessons learned -- all the myriad ways I became better. I could do that, and it’d be a pretty good piece of writing, the way, probably, these things are supposed to go. I could do a repetition cadence thing (Thank you for…) that would probably get to a lot of the truth. I could explain how he was that one great, inspiring teacher I searched for and never found, never until now, when I try to be that person to others. I could do a lot of these things, but the truth is, I’ve been trying to write something like that for two months, and I can’t. I just don't have it.

The experience of working with him is intertwined with everything I’ve done in education. It will be the foundation of everything I go on to do. There’s something ugly about picking it apart, like a med student and his cadaver. Man, I don’t need to see the brush-strokes; let me stand back and dig on the art.

On the wall, heavy frame, roped off:
These have been the defining years of my life, when I was pushed and driven deep, when you gave me the gifts of perspective and conversation, made me think hard and clear, when we worked to harvest something fragile and beautiful and real. Thank you for the opportunity given and the time taken, for everything that came before, all that will come after.

Education Week Craps The Bed On KIPP Story

2007-06-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

The June 13 issued of Education Week published an article on student attrition at KIPP schools, particularly the two in San Francisco and one in Oakland, that didn't bury the lede as much as it pretended it didn't exist. Somewhat surprisingly, all manner of bloggers and commenters performed the same intellectual sleight-of-hand.

The article is trapped behind a subscription wall, making it unlinkable, but Ed Week correctly reports that fewer than half of the kids that begin the Bay Area KIPP schools as 5th graders in 2003 make it to 8th grade in 2006. In the Oakland incarnation, the attrition rate climbs to 75 percent. The article ignores the fact that these lost students are overwhelmingly African-American males. The three Bay Area KIPPs lost 77, 67, and 71 percent of its Young Black Males (YBMs) during this time period.

That's the story Ed Week. That's the story Eduwonk. That's the story, KIPP PR fixers.

There's more Black males on the KIPP website than in the KIPP classrooms.

The internal exit interviews that Ed Week references lay the blame on student migration factors brought about by the low SES of the community. This would suggest that KIPP schools have some of the highest student mobility in California, definitely in the 90th percentile, if not higher, and I'm not buying it. Yes, these schools serve poor kids, but so do many others, and in communities with far higher mobility rates than those located in the Bay Area. Do the OUSD and SFUSD based schools that serve comparable populations report such dramatic rates of student mobility, or can the attrition rate be accounted for in some other way?

Anecdotal evidence would suggest so. Students at my school who have left KIPP have done so because of the debilitating effects of the shame and exclusion based discipline policy, because they were flat kicked out, or because they were told to change an aspect of their physical appearance (hair color; hair style) before being allowed to return. None of them left because their families moved.

The ability to remove students, or create the conditions in which students remove themselves has numerous ramification and implications -- on school culture, classroom management, and issues of testing and accountable. Charter schools like KIPP operate on an entirely different level of freedom from constraint, but are nonetheless compared to public schools to further political and economic goals. They benefit from a poor public understanding of what they do and how they do it, an understanding that is driven by bizarrely (or not) poor reporting. We need to better examine these schools and their operational policies, and not accept their rationale for failure quite so blithely. Meanwhile, if KIPP Bay Area cannot keep Black males in the classroom, maybe we can all dial down the rhetoric on how truly wonderful places these schools are. Or at least attach the appropriate asterisk.