what we're facing

Today we met our FAs, the experienced teachers who are teaching the first three days for us and then acting for the remainder of the summer as the legally required Credentialed Presence in our classrooms. Our FA is not an English teacher, and she's not asking or expecting much on these first few days. She seems very friendly and helpful in terms of materials, but also very hands-off, which is probably a good thing. She told us that we will be teaching tenth grade English, not ninth, and that every single one of our students has failed or gotten a D in the class before. Our first period has an enrollment of 68 students, 43 of whom showed up today, and our second has 35-odd enrolled, with a turnout of about 24. None of us understands the logic behind this, but it’s not something we can change. Our classroom is dreary, a long, narrow converted lab with brown water stains on the ceiling tiles and fewer than 30 desks, plus some mismatched tables and chairs in the back. I asked what we could conceivably do if all of our students showed up. “Don’t worry,” the teacher said. “Most will leave.” But what if they keep coming, I asked? “There’s not enough room. You’d have to turn some away.”

There is some good news. While we’re to administer an official diagnostic on Monday, our FA had the students spend today doing a creative writing assignment. As it was administered, it had very little academic merit, but it did provide for us a neat stack of writing samples. When I found out we had these samples, I was like a kid at Christmas, asking if we could go up to the room now, were we going up to the room soon, could we look at the writing samples now?

The assignment was structured with three sentence starters, one each for a beginning, middle, and end of a story. The students were to flesh this out. The prompts involved finding a bag filled with something, a man whispering something in your ear, and an “all of the sudden” ending. It’s a great prompt in terms of roughly assessing the performance level and, to some extent, the psychology of the kids. Reading through the stories, I found that there were a lot of specific, easy-to-address ELL issues like dropped past tense markers. There were larger syntactic problems that needed to be worked on. There was a lack of vocabulary. Students had difficulty sustaining and expanding on a thought past a certain point. Some were far, far below grade level.

But I also found some other things. For one, they’re no worse off, on average, than my Oakland group. The class represents a huge range of levels, from clear English Learners to students who must have failed because they didn’t show up, or didn’t turn in the work. We found one assignment folded up and dropped on the floor, not turned in. I read it; it was brief, but well-structured, grammatical, and engaging. It made me laugh, and it made me wonder: why is this student here – and why is he throwing his work away ungraded?

Their subject matter intrigued me. They chose a lot of common themes: money, and violence, though not in the way you’d expect if you listened to what the news says about kids in Watts. Many of them said they found money, but no one knew what to spend it on – one said, in order, “a PSP, some pizza, and a car.” One said he found a bag of cell phones, nice ones, and he sold them on the street, but he gave the best ones to his friends. Over and over, they said they found money, but men came after them and took it away, or hurt them, or said it didn’t belong to them. One boy said his father wouldn’t let him keep it, so to make his dad happy, he put it back.

One story in particular had an effect on me: the student said he found a bag full of gold, but a man came and said it was his gold, and he tried to take it back. So the student knocked him down, and kicked him in the face, and the stomach, and the legs. Then he got in the car and drove away, but he didn’t have anywhere to go, and he didn’t know what to do. So he just drove and drove. Violent, yes, but sorrowful. It read like he didn’t know how to escape, not from the law, but from his own actions. And why gold? Why not dollars? Why not cell phones? What makes this mythology for this boy?

But it wasn’t all touching or sad. I saw a lot of irony and humor. One boy said he found a bag of money, but before he could spend it, he met a beautiful girl. She said she liked him, but then he head a voice whispering in his ear, “wake up.” It was his brother, and the student yelled at him for ruining his perfect dream.

I read these stories, and I felt energized. It’s clear that if we can reach them, each and every one of these students can improve tremendously. They have so much knowledge for us to build on.

One of my cohort, though – and five points for guessing which one – didn’t feel the same. She was shocked. Horrified, really. She kept asking how this happened, and how they were so far below grade level, and focusing on what the work lacked, where it was flawed. I found myself really taken aback. First of all, the work was better, on average, than I expected, especially considering the lack of explicit instruction they were given on the task. Second, this isn’t something we don’t already know. These kids are behind. They are getting screwed. Every year that goes by it gets worse. This is the whole reason we are here. But she kept saying how disheartened she was, and asking why they kept being passed on to the next grade, and talking about how in fifth grade she was writing short stories, and here these kids couldn’t even write one single sentence correctly. Not even one.

I know we’re coming from different perspectives here, but this struck me as so negative, and insidiously so. Can’t even manage a single sentence? Well, maybe not a flawless, sophisticated grade-level one. But they can do simple sentences. They can do complex sentences with some tense-marking difficulty (which, for Spanish ELL students, is often a phonetic issue – they’re not hearing the –ed, and they’ve never been explicitly taught it’s there, so why would they write it?) or other unrelated errors. They can move me, and surprise me, and make me laugh. Those are sophisticated skills, and they shouldn’t be undervalued. The rest is just the details. And we can teach the details.