I am still learning.

before i dash off...

2007-09-29T23:05:00.000-07:00

It's 11 on a Saturday night and I'm two glasses of wine in..so what's new? The small fact of my field trip tomorrow, is all. Five other teachers (two of my closest friends, my co-chair, and two others) and I are taking 60 students on a three-day trip to UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and some other place you've probably never heard of called UC Berkeley. Hells yeah.

I should probs pack.

Anyway, a few things before I go:

1. We got a new car. I've been meaning to take a photo but it's delayed the post so much already. Anyway, we ended up with a hybrid Civic in "magnetic pearl." Is it blue? Is it purple? Is it grey? I don't know. All I know is it is already dented from a woman in a BMW who decided to move into A's lane regardless of A's extremely-parallel presence in said lane. In other news: move to LA!

2. Cats! We have 300 of them and they are getting big. Big enough to fill the sink, even!

Major has moved back into the loft.

3. I started my grad program on Wednesday. So far so good, except in a logistical sense. UCLA's ed program is extremely competitive and well-respected and worthwhile, but that doesn't prevent them from doing things like emailing you on a Friday that your classes will start Monday, or in my case, emailing on a Wednesday that tuition is due in full by Friday or you'll be dropped. ....thanks. No paper mail or anything. No due dates mentioned, ever. I know that the logical thing would be to check UCLA's website for such things, but a) the website sucks, and b) my credentialing program (also through the ed school) had totally different payment dates from the campus as a whole, and informed us about them separetely, and also tardily, though not quite this tardily, and without threats of revoked admission. UC Regents, how I've missed you and your bedside manner!

4. Mila, this one's for you.

standin' around in pretty dresses

2007-09-10T22:27:00.001-07:00

A couple of things:

Thing the first: We got a new car. It's pretty. I will put up a picture soon, if I can get it together to take one. Also, we managed to scavenge a whole bunch of stuff out of the old one, including A's textbooks, more or less a whole case of wine and another of beer that had been protected from the shattering glass, my new shades which I had been moping about losing, two binders' worth of CDs, and the Bose deck, which was, incredibly, completely unharmed if noticeably stickier than it was at purchasing-time.

Thing the second: Photos are up! Send me an email if you didn't get the link. Be sure and tell Dmitry how awesome he is.

Some of my favorites (though there are many more):

That last one might be the most complete group shot we have. Prove me wrong, people!

How to dispose of leftover wedding alcohols

2007-08-30T04:41:00.000-07:00

...in 5 days or less.

OPTION ONE: Five-day mimosa binge

OPTION TWO: Drinking game in which every time someone asks you if you feel "different" and then looks at you expectantly, you take a drink

OPTION THREE:

Bonus: This option will also take care of your new ipod deck which you have been looking for a way to destroy.

On the for-real plus side, Aaron (who says to tell you that he totally had all his hubcaps when he went to bed last night, and that one must have flown off and landed somewhere out-of-sight or rolled into the gutter or something) took my wedding dress out of the trunk when he got home last night. Not that I know what I'm going to do with it, but it's nice not to have the decision made for me in such an abrupt fashion. He also got to stick his head in the backseat and screech,"It smells like a brewery in here!" a la Nathan Scott Phillips. And, though it sounds funny, when a policeman shines his flashlight in through your screen door at 4 in the morning, there are much, much worse reasons than this.

RIP, ipod deck.

Mourn ya til I go to BestBuy and convince them that the 2-year warranty covers acts of drunk.

the nuclear family

2007-08-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

We sort of accidentally got a third cat. Not that she's staying here permanently, mind...just that she wandered in the door a week and a half ago and kind of refused to leave. She's the sweetest thing in the world, silky and docile with a sort of bemused Luna Lovegood-ish gaze. But then I've been seeing Luna in everything since viewing the otherwise painfully mediocre Order of the Phoenix.

The Tiny (aka Nathan Scott Phillips, aka Bounce-Bounce) has gotten decidedly less tiny. This week I'm calling him Brown Bread, for his incredible weight and density.

For the most part the Major tries to stay out of their way, but the two of them together are a hoot. You can get a sense of their general dynamic here:

That kid I was talking about last time finally got transferred. Did he stab someone, you ask? Commit armed robbery? No, his final offense, the one egregious enough to warrant explusion, was walking out of his IEP meeting.

There's a lot to get upset about there, but whatever. He's gone.

I'm going to [gritted teeth] Stanford next weekend for a school retreat. As a non-improving PI school we're required to have an outside provider come in and magically solve the problems we're too stupid to solve ourselves - you may remember how much I hated our last Outside Provider. I wasn't alone, and collectively we chased them out, only to have them replaced by Stanford. Now, the Stanford ed school is the home of outspoken Program-hater Linda Darling-Hammond, so they can't be all bad, but so far their whole plan for the school involves spatial redesign, and since our school is already so cramped with additional buildings and "bungalows" (what we would have called "portables" back home) and there's no time or money to rebuild, their entire plan consists of "signage." You know - banners and umbrellas and such. Mostly banners. They were paid $2 million by The District for this plan. Not for banners and umbrellas, even - just for the mere notion of banners and umbrellas.

Anyway, I'm there Thursday through Sunday evening. If you're slumming it in Stanford those days, hit me up.

Overheard at work:

One maintenance man to another, heatedly: And they want us to empty trash, and spot-mop, and de-gum, and clean the sodas off the floors, and work as a team!

A kid (next to the side gate, lately closed to students, forcing them to walk all the way to the front of the school to leave): Let my people go! Let my people go!

of books and beatings

2007-07-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

First, the books:

I have in my posession not one but FOUR copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - two mine and two McD's - and, as of about 11:40, I have finished reading one of them. Fear not, for I will not spoil, but I will say that I feel the book's emotional peak came about two-thirds through, and that you should skip the epilogue, and that I was half-amused, half-irritated by brazen lifts from Lord of the Rings, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and - wait for it - Return of the Jedi. All in all I enjoyed the experience - there's nothing quite as nice as an uniterrupted read-through - and I think I enjoyed the book, though it's hard to say since I was clearly going to read it either way, lest I be consumed by the desire to know, before anyone else, How It Ends.

In other YA news I have recently read A Great And Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and Tyrell, which were extremely enjoyable, and Rooftop, which wasn't. Then I got sucked into Shame of the Nation, which is going to be one of my students' choices for lit circles when we come back on track in November. It is going to kick their butts, but I'm on this whole Challenging Kick, which is to say that I don't think I've been pushing anyone nearly hard enough except my ESL classes with Romeo and Juliet last year, and it's about time I hold everyone to the same standard. I expect great things this year.

Which leads us to the business:

From an academic standpoint, the new year is going really well. To my great surprise and relief I love teaching American Lit, mostly because I am completely ignoring the suggested curriculum and instead doing a unit on immigration policy, reading op-eds and articles and interviews and working on discerning the authors' underlying philosophical beliefs and assumptions. This is harder than it sounds. I spend a lot of time talking about "Habits of Mind," and stressing the importance of reading not just for information but for those little tidbits of word choice and rhetoric that give away the author's position. It's difficult for many of the kids because of just how much they go through in pursuit of the literal meaning of something like an Economist article, let alone delving beneath its surface. We're leading up to a complex position paper integrating multiple sources and a variety of modes of writing, so I think next week I have to take a step back and make sure we're really clear on what's gone on so far. Last week was a little crazy, so some of what we've done has started to feel a little unravelled from the whole.

Per craziness: the vibe on campus is changing. We had a series of fights and a resulting lockdown a week ago Friday, and another fight and a lot of (well-deserved) administrative crackdown on Wednesday. The kids are doing this meerkat thing at lunch, standing up on the benches and craning their necks to see where the action is going to be. Rumors are swirling about some Latino kids, probably Florencia, beating an African-American kid pretty badly - maybe a Blood, maybe not - and revenge being forthcoming.

Meanwhile, in addition to this campus-wide tension, my SLC has its own saga unfolding, with one of my former students. While I never had a personal problem with this kid - he was always polite to me and everyone in my class, despite attempting a grand total of one (1) assignment all semester - I know that he's up to his ears in Florencia, on parole (the story behind this is like Russian dolls, one offense nestled inside the next), the owner of some very nasty and unexplained scars, and high more or less all the time.

Our story begins on Wednesday during break, when I happen to glance out the window and see an unfamiliar kid on my balcony whip off his shirt and disappear around the corner to a rapt audience of about 20 kids. I am running towards the door with one hand already dialing the phone when I hear a heavy thud against my wall.

(I was talking to a colleague the other day, and we agreed that while we generally feel dumber than we did before taking this job, it has done miracles for our reaction time.)

So I get outside just in time to see my former student along with three of his friends, clad in Brown Pride finery, take off down the hallway, leaving a kid curled against the wall next to my room and a Hansel-and-Gretel-esque trail of little blood drips behind them. I follow, I find security, I write my statement. I figure, he's on parole. He must be out of here.

But oh! Not so. No indeed; he is back in class the next day. This story continues, but it's getting long already. The quick-and-dirty version is that he brags to me that he had in fact jumped this kid, making a charming stomping motion on the ground and laughing, "This is what we did to him, Miss. Send me back to the deans. I'll still be here." He has discovered, as we teachers already know and dread, that students designated as Special Ed for any reason, not just behavioral problems, more or less cannot be expelled or OT'd. They have to be put on a "behavior plan," which translates pretty well to total immunity. I would like to think that "Do not beat the shit out of people" is a pretty basic behavior plan and that he has clearly violated said, but that's not how it works. Come to think of it, I'd like to assume that beating the shit out of people is a violation of his parole, but that doesn't seem to be a problem either.

Anyway, outside of my English classes and Leadership activities and taking care of my community's two new English teachers, finding a loophhole on this kid is priority one. He knows I'm actively watching him and reporting back to the deans, so while I have personally never felt threatened by him (he seems to feel that being on his case is my job, just as maiming is his), it is probably a good thing that I have no car to key or anything.

changing it up

2007-06-24T14:31:00.000-07:00

As you may recall, we adopted a second cat awhile back. She was really beautiful, but so mean. She chased the Major around mercilessly and bit everyone and he lost a lot of weight because she wouldn't let him eat. They were not the best of friends.

So, we packed her up and sent her back.

It took about 3 seconds for the buddy to get all neurotic and weird again, with no Great Enemy to take up all his time.

So today, we found him a new nemesis. He is very small.

He does not have a name yet, but we are thinking of Zim. I am ZIM!

the best feeling in the world

2007-06-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

An age ago, when I was still in school, I would walk across campus sometimes, and something about the way the breeze would rustle in the trees, or a bit of conversation I would overhear, would fill me with this almost inexpressable joy, a feeling that surprised me at first in how it really is a swelling in the chest, and I would think to myself, "I am really, really happy here." That feeling was gone for a long time when I left. And now, just as suddenly, it's back. It's seven p.m., and I'm sitting in my warm, colorful classroom, reading my ESL students' essays on Romeo and Juliet. This is going to sound like bragging, but I have to say, they are blowing me away. They have really, really learned something this year, and they are honest-to-god ready to move on to mainstream English. And as for me - I, for the very first time, know what it feels like to be successful at teaching. It is the swelling/bursting feeling again, the feeling like I am in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.

Reading Area #1:

Newly-created Reading Area #2:

I swear I have space in my classroom for doing actual work.

teen books = fun

2007-06-17T12:38:00.001-07:00

Because I'm sure you are all really interested in what I've been reading during SSR, and in the state of YA fiction in general, I here provide an update. You're welcome!

Exit Here - I have to recommend this one just because of how hysterically bad it is. Think American Psycho-style brand consiousness meets Valley of the Dolls, only with rich scenesters from Michigan. AWESOME. The death toll is amazing, a mix of murders, suicides, car crashes, etc, plus two in jail and one HIV-pos diagnoisis, all while really, really high.
Elsewhere- I read this one last night and really liked it. It's Lovely Bones for the YA set, which works out a lot better since that book was crazily overrated fluff anyhow. This one has super-charming characters and less pretension. Pay no attention to the Amazon.com editorial review which says it's written in the second person - it's third.
Dairy Queen - Charming, charming, charming. This author has a really strong voice and reads like a teenager, which rarely happens in YA writing. I am pushing this one on my kids like crazy.
Born to Rock - Gordon Korman is one of those rare BOY writers who doesn't write sports or violence, just straight-up fiction. This one is about a young republican who learns that his biological father is a Jello Biafra type, and ends up a roadie on his reunion tour. It's fun but slight.
Skin - An anorexia book where the anorexic actually dies. Unheard-of! The eating disorder plotline is really good, narrated by the little brother who feels betrayed and lost in the world, but about 20% of the novel is given over to the shrill screaming of the parents, which I could have done without.
Sold - A verse novel about a Nepali girl sold into prostituion in India. I'm pushing this one hard, too - my kids have very little idea what happens in the world outside the Americas, good and bad.
Scrambled Eggs at Midnight - Good but not great despite the Jesus/Fat Camp v. RenFaire backdrop. The current printing has a couple of typos in it which always yanks me right out of the narrative. I like this trend of male and female authors alternating boy/girl chapters, though Nick and Norah does it better.
How I Live Now - Dystopic near-future romance - think pastoral 1984 plus, I don't know, The Royal Tenenbaums. I dug it.
Endgame - This one's a school shooting novel that takes you up to the event with the shooter himself. It's pretty brutal. The problem is the audience, as the protagonist is this sensitive dorky picked-on kid, and the ones who want shooter books aren't down with that, and vice-versa. I dunno. Hopefully it will find its niche.
Grafitti Girl - Completely unremarkable except that it takes place in a thinly-disguised version of my hometown. The author must be a hometown girl, and her resentment of the very real class divide comes through in occasionally hilarious ways, like when the protagonist attends a graf party at a three-story home in the rich part of town. Three stories! No joke.
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - This books is all, FUCK FUCK FUCK! ORAL SEX! PUNK ROCK! so of course I loved it. Our rocker girls are really into it - every single copy of mine has gone mysteriously missing. Insant classic!
Rash - Pete Hautman is always great, but this one is a social satire, and I'm worried about my *very literal* students not getting it at all.
King Dork - This one is currently making the rounds with my friends. The last book I handed around this way was High Fidelity - what is it about music/misanthrope novels? Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. Although, I think there's a reason I'm pushing it on my contemporaries rather than my kids - it's one of those "looking back at being a teen"-style books, more than it is a book for teens.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - You've probably seen this one at Starbucks. I read it thinking I'd have my 10th graders do a unit on contemporary world memoir, and it turned out to be just about a perfect fit. The first half is harrowing enough as the boys try to flee the war; when they become a part of it, it's a whole other thing altogether.
They Poured Fire On Us From The Sky - Holy God, what a book this is. I'm including it in the same unit, and I'm really hoping the kids give it a chance at it's not a small book, but it packs a punch.
Slave - Also a part of this memoir unit. I had to put this one aside - I can't quite get myself to believe it. Not that people are still sold into slavery, but just this particular family, this particular situation - it's like A Child Called It: African Edition. I don't know what this says about me, but I'm pretty sure it's not good. There's just something off about the author's voice, though, and it pushes me away.

A partial list of things I'm in the middle of: The Book Thief, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, and Mayflower. All of these have been put aside because they're too good and/or too involved to be read with one eye trained on those boys in the back who keep trying to play checkers during SSR. I mean...checkers? Really?

fire-extinguished!

2007-06-08T13:50:00.000-07:00

The Universe, it seems, was unsatisfied with last week's minor respiratory disaster, my walking out of my classroom and into a cloud of mere pepper spray. This morning, the ante was succesfully upped when I was summonsed to sub during my conference for DR, my most ideological opposite in the English department and luckily, my SLC-mate and four-doors-down neighbor. I am sick once again today, with my throat swollen almost shut this morning and having spent all last night shaking with cold and fever, but much as I wanted to spend the period asleep on my couch, I signed the damn paper and headed over there fourth period, and was rewarded with a faceful of freshly-sprayed fire-extinguishing chemical dust.

Working here has made everything normal. I thought, "Hmm. Should probably document," reached into my bag, and pulled out my digi-cam. Then, covered face and opened windows, took kids waiting on balcony to my room where I supplied them with markers and a small stack of books on tagging, called the front office, and texted everyone I know to let them in on the story. DR is pretty universally loathed; I knew it would be the pick-me-up everyone needed on a dull, plodding Friday like today.

At this rate, I fully expect to be mustard-gassed by the end of the school year.

headache > tummyache?

2007-05-31T12:05:00.001-07:00

I just busted out the ole' day planner to schedule my last 3 weeks of English 9 - I am going to kick their asses with work, here - and realized that the next day I spend without some type of work-related, time-consuming obligation is June 17th, 2 weeks from Sunday. 20 straight days of work? New record, anyone?

Grades are due tomorrow, so of course I got 3,000 assignments today. It actually makes my stomach hurt to look at all of them, even though I am grading in the most minimal way possible. I think I'm starting to understand why people hire wedding planners. Or maybe I'm not, because selfishly I can't imagine people in other professions feeling as swamped as I do right now.

mmmm. peppery.

2007-05-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

Highlights of my day:

I breathed pepper spray for the first time! And it wasn’t even a fight, just some kids goofing around in the hallway connecting my classroom to the rest of the school (naturally.) I stepped in to head to the restroom and got a lungful. It’s like the first time you’re in an earthquake; despite your lack of prior experience, you immediately know exactly what is going on. It really feels like pepper, if that makes sense, and then your eyes water, and you cough violently, and later you get a headache. Or maybe that’s from the graffiti remover I used this morning – who can really say.

One of the other SLC’s leads is attempting to take a room in our rotation. This is incredibly freaking unacceptable. I am hoping it is resolved before I have to scream and yell about it.

Highlights from ESL 4 translations of Romeo and Juliet:

SAMPSON: No, sir, I do not talk smack at you, sir, but I do talk smack, sir.

ROMEO: Is she a Capulet? Oh dear, my life is a mess.

Do you know the times?

2007-05-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you catch yourself thinking thoughts, especially when they are the first ones of the day, that make you reconsider your career choice and/or life path thus far. Thoughts like,

Oh good! We have toilet paper today.

Other times your students write things that are so unintentionally charming and/or hilarious you write them on 3x5 cards and show them to everyone you see that day.

On Romeo’s mental state and motivations:

Romeo is feeling depressed because he is in love with a girl that he will never be able to date or marry because she is a noun.

On asking people if they believe in true love:

I guess that the answer was different depending on which or what age they were. Like little kids think that love is gross. And also that little kids are gross.

Then there are the times when they say things so completely idiotic that you just stare at them, aghast.

After a really rough week with my 9th grade class, during which almost no headway was made in Romeo and Juliet, I gave them a brief talk about why they needed to learn this play: It’s one of the most famous in Western literature; it’s full of evocative, poetic language that will help us with our own writing; it deals with huge themes that help us to examine humanity; and last of all, every ninth grader in the known universe reads this play, and when you go out into the world, you will want to know what other ninth graders assume is base knowledge. My Prettiest Girl, by which I mean the one who has most consciously made the decision to be a Pretty Girl, says in her snottiest, most dismissive tone,

Well, what if we’re already in the tenth grade?

Touché!

Then today, I busted my kids betting on poker after the state test. They were pissed when I took their cards, and I explained (calmly and quietly, I might add) that this was not just my rule, but the school’s, and the government’s, when not of age and in a casino. And this kid says, in his best Gotcha! voice,

But I’m not legal! I don't have papers; I don’t have to follow your rules!

Yeah, buddy. Good luck with that.

Master of Scheduling.

2007-05-21T18:20:00.000-07:00

First off, I've decided I need to do something about how infrequently I post. I find that I tend to shy away from posting because it seems like it's going to eat up a whole bunch of time. And usually, it does. So, short and sweet and if not everything gets covered, who is going to be the wiser?

Bullet points!

-I've been back at work for about three weeks now, three weeks of rock n' roll Romeo and Juliet action. Tonight is the first in about 2 weeks that I left school without attending any other obligation from the three-thirty-to-five-thirty slot. I made the mistake of showing up for the master scheduling info session - the master being the schoolwide course schedule of what's being taught, when, and by whom - and ended up programming the whole damn thing for my small learning community, which necessitated a lot of out-of-classroom time and a reevaluation of the science chair, who is honestly a huge ass, but who did teach me to do the master and then check it for me to make sure I hadn't screwed it up too royally.

-Also, I've been doing hiring stuff. This goes hand-in-hand, really, since I'm the only one who knows how many new positions my SLC is opening (three) and who's leaving (three or four more) and all that sort of thing. We haven't hired anyone yet, but our need is dire and it looks like we may eventually have to go with the hated Program. Ugh. I have made it known that no one will be hired from The Program unless I am present at the interview and give my approval, but it's not like anyone has been going to the rest of the hiring things, so I am probably not in any danger there.

-Finally, FINALLY, I am able to really work. That sounds funny but I don't know how else to explain it. My incredibly draining 3rd period class leaves, and instead of curling up on the couch during 4th and reading a book or wishing it would all go away or eating mini Twix and pretending I'm not there, I can actually plan, or make handouts, or grade. And my plans make sense now. They're not just "Hey! Let's do this now, maybe!" Let the record show that I am not the shittiest teacher The Program has ever had, and it has taken me two years just to get here. To be fair, if I had always thought I would leave after two years I might have rushed things along, and put off my mental collapse for a later a-splosion. But the earthquake method - lots of little shakes to release the tension - seems to have worked well, and I am feeling really good right now, like I might someday get to be a really good teacher, if I do not murder my entire 3rd period and have to flee the country in the meantime.

-This week is state testing. YAY! or not. I'll go with not. I have my second period ALL DAY tomorrow - from 7:35 to a mercifully early 2:11. We are going to have loads of fun, us and our state-issued bubble sheets.

-Crazy upcoming weekend alert: Friday is prom and crazy teacher after-prom party (possibly at a hotel if assman science chair's new fiance's brother, who is a hotel manager, hooks us up), and then Saturday a couple of us drive up and spend a few days in the bay. Wooooooot.

-My ESL students are reading Romeo and Juliet! And they are getting it! Woooooooooot x 1000. Jackpot, I win the internets.

-Also, I got into my MA program, which starts in September. So I am about to be a Master of Education as well. Buahaha.

vacation check-in #1

2007-03-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

Week 3 of my off-track time comes to an end today. Of fifteen "vacation" weekdays, I have spent ten at work or work-related activities (i.e. conferences), plus one Saturday and one Sunday. For once this is very little subbing (only one day of that, though at least five more are scheduled) and a whole lot of other stuff: planning my speech curriculum, attending to ESL duties, and co-authoring a grant. I'm not actually qualified to write a grant, but it paid better than my actual job and it's not like I'd had time to start any kind of projects at home. Besides, the amount of money going to the school, should we receive this thing, is staggering. Read all about it here, and laugh heartily at the line about "district support" for alternative applicants like ourselves, as you picture the grant-writing team subsisting on Gummy Bears and Orange Shasta for an entire week and shouting deleriously at each other about the trolls living under the 100 bungalows.

I learned a whole bunch of things while writing this grant, very few of them about grant writing (though ironically, there was a grant-writing workshop on campus every afternoon last week, and people kept interrupting us to ask where it was. Go away! We are faking our way through writing a grant!) You can learn a lot, it turns out, by interviewing people about their jobs and by digging through data sheets, but even more by simply sitting in the Assistant Principal's office for six days and looking busy. It's as though you're not even there. For example, I know everything there is to know about new schedule proposals for next year, including the much-discussed but never-defined Shadow and Twilight Classes. (Google these terms and see what you find. I was - and still am - convinced that we are making them up.) The idea is that instead of tutoring your struggling students after class, you pre-teach to them by creating a "shadow" period before their actual class, reviewing key concepts and letting them practice ahead of time. Then, when the bell rings for class to start, the other kids come in and join them. Frankly, I liked the idea of Shadow Classes better when we thought it meant a set of super-secret classes run deep under the earth by government ninjas. This is where the real learning happens.

As far as my original list is concerned, little progress has been made.

• Finish knitting baby blanket for increasingly pregnant colleague: 1/5 complete and incredibly adorable. I also made a hat for my sister.
• Plan curriculum for speech class: Generic plan done; one more all-SLC planning session scheduled for next month.
• Plan wedding: Invitations worded and laid out but neither printed nor assembled. Dress bought. All other plans stalled.
• Doctor, dentist, optometrist: No, no, no.
• Attend friends’ wedding in Bay Area: Have yet to make hotel reservations.
• Attend about 8 credentialing obligations: One attended, one ditched and accountability form falsified.
• Clean apartment: Ongoing but trending positive
• Break addictions: Successful when at home, unsuccessful when at work (ie 2/3 of the time.) Although a misplaced hoodie did force me to rush to work on Wednesday without stopping for a latte, and I did not die. It should be mentioned, however, that colleagues brought Starbucks brewed coffee and Krispy Kremes that day, which took the edge off somewhat.
• Read non-Young Adult books: Well, you see... The problem is that this takes time. And mental energy. I have both of these things, but as you see, I am dividing them up in a whole lot of different directions right now. It helps that Heroes is off the air right now and that I've caught up to Aaron with regard to The Wire, but still, reading grown-up books takes a lot longer than kid books, even when they are delightful fluff. The other problem is that I (of course) bought a new stack of YA for the library that I have to read before going back to work. As it stands, I've only read about half of The Terror and the first third of American Gods. I'm so ashamed!

who wants a latte?

2007-03-01T18:55:00.000-08:00

I know I do.

Fawesome things I’ve read lately:

On the library door: The library is close!

In my student’s final essay, comparing belief systems across cultures:
Science believes that when you died thats it thats the end. When you die theres no walking around earth scaring people. When you die thats the end of the road for you.

Science is such a downer!

Then later:
Christian believes if your good and go to church you will go to heaven but if your not any of that you will go to hell. Which it is kind of scary if you think about it.

As far as I can tell, he means the religion, not a person named Christian.

From the minutes of the last School-Wide Design Team meeting:
What are the Principal’s and Professional Learning Communities roles in SLC?
• Focus on attitudes rather than behaviors
• Model behavior
• Promotes widespread participation by faculty indecision making

I have also read some decent books lately, though, disappointingly, none I would classify as “fawesome” - not even Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps, in which Westerfeld suspends his disbelief that people will not associate the name with, you know, PEEPS, and taps into a rich vein of hipness by having his characters constantly say things like "Dude!" and, in the preview of the sequel, "Fexcellent!" This is simply ludicrous; no one in their right mind would ever use anything like this formation. Anyway, Peeps, the instant-cool points it gains for being a non-genre novel about vampirism notwithstanding, is not even close to the quality of Westerfeld's sprawling-and-enthralling Uglies/Pretties/Specials trilogy. In case you were wondering.

**********************************************

I had an hourlong conversation with one of my best, coolest students and one of my worst, most irritating students about video games and the intricacies of Harry Potter while entering final grades this morning. It turns out we all have quite a bit to talk about. Mester's end is always good for moments like these, when all the assignments are either in or not and the harrassment drops away on all sides. Even your most irritating students are surprisingly likeable when not trying to distract you, themselves, and/or the entire class from what you're trying to accomplish.

**********************************************

Plans for off-track time:
• Finish knitting baby blanket for increasingly pregnant colleague (photos of knitting to come)
• Plan curriculum for speech class
• Plan wedding*
• Doctor, dentist, optometrist
• Attend friends’ wedding in Bay Area
• Attend about 8 credentialing obligations
• Clean apartment
• Break addictions**
• Read non-Young Adult books***

*Right, that.

**I resisted admirably for MONTHS before giving in to a combination of temptation and necessity and becoming, once again, a Corporate Coffee Whore. The alarm goes and my brain is like, day. stand. pants? lights. lights, pants. latte? latte! yes. tall soy latte blueberry muffin. muffin muffin muffin. Then it just continues on, stuck in that track, until the objective is achieved. I pretty much need the caffeine at this point, it’s true, but I am also addicted to the ritual. Even as I type this I am wondering if I should erase this addendum and amend the bullet point to “Get up early; spend mornings reading over latte.” Effing Starbucks mind control.

***The shortlist includes The Terror, No God But God, The Blank Slate, No Logo, Perfume, Fraud, In the Heart of the Sea, and American Gods (intended for classroom library use and hence YA-ish but at least not dealing with Older Boys Who Expect Too Much And Move Too Fast.)

Aren't vacations relaxing?

chuggin' along

2007-02-22T21:10:00.000-08:00

I’ve been much less prolific in my posting recently than in semesters past, and when I have posted, it’s largely been in reaction to my administration, not my students. The thing is, my students are still brilliant and hilarious and prone to non sequiturs of the best sort. I love them, but I’m used to them, in a way. They bring me a feeling of deep contentedness, which is great but rarely inspires me to post. Administration, on the other hand, makes the worst kind of non sequiturs a veritable lifestyle, usually resulting in damage to my room, paycheck, or general health and well-being. After awhile people won’t listen to you yell anymore, and you must turn to the web.

That being said, the kids are the only reason I show up to work in the morning, let alone look forward to it, so I don’t know why I think people will keep coming back to this blog if it’s all administration, no kid.

KID STORY #1: The other day, I don’t know, there was something in the water and not one but two of my boys in my morning class spilled the sad and sordid details of their personal lives to me, up to and including their crews joining up with dangerous gangs, their frequent meth use, their friends’ meth addiction, other friends dying in drive-bys, families moving back to their home countries without them, the hovering threat of OT, near-miss violent confrontations, arrest in front of girlfriends’ already skeptical parents, raising stepsiblings more or less alone, fear of their own mortality, and mothers who have never hugged them or said “I Love You.” This all from, I remind you, two boys.

It is so interesting teaching ESL, because I have known one of these kids since he barely spoke a word of English, when he was just a punk middle-school type, and now he’s this articulate person with a whole world of concerns he never wanted to have, and I’ve seen him grow and change and become this new person and I’ve helped him – though not nearly as much as I should have – to develop the skills to express himself. I like him a lot better now – he really was a punk at first – and I worry about him a lot. If even half of this stuff is true (which I believe it is, and if you can believe this, I’ve omitted a lot more that I think is questionable) he’s got a lot more to deal with than anyone I know who’s my age, and a lot less support and fewer resources to do it with. I really want to believe that things will turn out OK for him. In fact, I sort of have to.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not wishing ill on the other kid. I’m just a lot more certain he’ll come out of things OK – even if that does mean, for him, joining the Marines. Thanks, cult of RTOC!

KID STORY #2: I have three rules of listening to music while working independently in my class. 1) No blatant misogyny. 2) No excessive profanity. 3) No “Smack That.” They complained at first but now, when the song comes on, someone wordlessly gets up within the first few beats and turns the radio off for just about 3 minutes. It’s pretty cute, actually.

So of course you’ve got the kids who are sassy – and yes, sassy is the right word. They will come up behind you with their headphones in, playing this song just loud enough for you to hear. They will serenade you on their way into the classroom. And yes, when you are teaching literary devices, they will realize that “smack” is an onomatopoetic word and start singing it as they take notes. You will laugh heartily, and they will be amazed, and you will realize that despite what you have been told by administration, you do not smile enough.

KID STORY #3: This one made me smile: my 9th grade boys, tumbling through my door before class like someone had tipped out a bag of marbles, standing in front of the Greek gods and goddesses posters we’d been collaging all week, arguing at a shout (a volume they seem incapable of operating below) about which god or goddess was best represented.

F: Zeus is the best! The women? The thunder? “Make the ground rumble”?!?
R: What? Poseidon! Poseidon is the best! Look at that…eel thing!
E: How is that the best? Where is Poseidon? I don’t see any Poseidon!
R: That’s because he is THERE! (jabbing at the world OLYMPUS, cut from a camera ad)

Also, note the general spike in participation by my skater kids since Hades entered the educational arena.

GENERAL NEWS #1: Ms. McD and I started a game club on Wednesday afternoons, where we sit around eating pizza and deepening students’ symbolic thinking skills via cutthroat All-Play rounds of Pictionary. I whupped a bunch of McD’s honors kids at Quiddler last night, which probably should not have felt as good as it did.

GENERAL NEWS #2: My SLC is really getting it together for the next two years, creating culturally relevant curriculum and planning activities to foster student investment in the community, and I AM GETTING A SPEECH CLASS!!! A year ago I never would have considered this a possibility, but things are changing: we’re more organized, I’m gaining slightly more respect and seniority, and the fates have aligned favorably for once. It will be a combination speech/leadership class with hand-picked kids in the 10th grade and above – a nice counterbalance to my all-freshman, all the time-style ESL classes.

GENERAL NEWS #3: The kids are reading more and writing better, especially the ELLs. It is pathetic, really, how my heart swells when I see a page of writing containing the future perfect tense with the correct, participial form of an irregular verb.

ADMINISTRATION IN BRIEF:

Trust me, you’ll want to hear these.

-One of our APs confessed to a social studies teacher that she believes herself to be the reincarnation of a French soldier from World War I. She does not see anything remotely strange about either the past life or bringing it up during a post-observation evaluation.

-Another of our APs – the highly competent, almost-fortyish fellow in charge of student discipline, in fact – was arrested on campus during lunch the other day, guns a-wavin’, for pulling a gun on the stepfather of a student from his former school when said student, jealous that she had been left for another student, threatened to reveal that they had been in a relationship.

And finally, a partial list of the books I have read in-class since we instituted sustained silent reading four months ago:
Bone 1-9, A Series of Unfortunate Events 1-4 and 7-13, Sorcery and Cecelia -or- The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, The Grand Tour, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, Blankets, Good-Bye Chunky Rice, Dreamland, This Lullaby, Someone Like You, Tenderness, Lush, Stuck in Neutral, Running Loose, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, The Princess Academy, Bound, The Perks of Being A Wallflower, Speak, Running With Scissors, The Handmaid's Tale.

I can heartily reccommend most of these books, and I can most definitely reccommend setting aside an hour a day to read. I feel so much more balanced, I can't even tell you.

the furniture wars

2007-01-19T23:17:00.000-08:00

First and foremost: I'm alive!

That much was probably obvious. Less obvious has been that I'm still teaching. In fact, I'm teaching the perfect tenses right now, and Greek mythology, and how to craft a strong thesis and write a timed essay in under 40 minutes. So I'm doing all types of real teaching, as opposed to the BS-y fake teaching I did last year. This is not to say that I'm doing any of it well, but they say that comes in the third year.

The big drama at work is furniture-centric right now. It's sparked hours of ranting and raving, so I'll try to pare down to the bare minimum here. What you need to know is: our desks suck, and they suck hard. So, the five of us in the farthest-back rooms have fought and wheedled and coerced and gotten tables for most of our rooms, which rule.

About a week before the winter mini-break, we get this memo saying we are getting BRAND NEW DESKS AND CHAIRS for students and teachers and every single room that coming Wednesday!

Pause right here and remember that my school holds about 3600 students at any given time. How many desks and chairs is that, to move in one day?

So they give us these little paper signs, about five flourescent orange reading REMOVE and five flourescent pink reading DO NOT REMOVE. They are only for student and teacher desks as - this will become important - nothing else is to be removed at this time. I take it upon myself to coordinate the five rooms and make sure everything is labeled how it needs to be; this takes about half a day with all the attendant copying, taping, and phoning of off-track people, as we rotate these rooms in "pods" of three teachers for any given pair of rooms. This makes sense in a track-school kind of way and someday, if you are very lucky, I will explain it.

All through break I can't sleep for these vivid and recurring nightmares that I will come back to my room and it will be empty, or that my huge beautiful library tables will have been traded in for cheapie uncomfortable desks. When we come back and I find my room untouched, I am hugely relieved. Riley's room, next door, is a little different. They've taken out her 40 student desks and replaced them with 30 new ones. They've left her teachers' desk, as requested, but they have also put in a new teacher's desk, upside down, next to it. She puts in a maintenance request, but nobody comes for it.

Cool.

A week later, Friday afternoon, and we're still in our rooms at 5:00 for some god-unknown reason. Good thing, because some dude in a coverall sticks his head in and is like, "I'm here about the new furniture?"

Whaaa?

So we are insistent. We DO NOT want new furniture. We watch as he writes DO NOT REMOVE EXISTING FURNITURE in caps all across the instructions on the door. As an added precaution, I leave Mr. Junior Bacon Cheeseburger with what I hope is the cheerful but stern message, "Thank you for NOT removing my tables!" We leave feeling fairly secure that our directions are clear.

Come Tuesday, we enter through my room, where everything is still aces. Riley's room, however, now contains 40 student desks, her old teacher desk, her new upside-down teacher desk, and still a third teacher desk, shoved into the back corner of the room, blocking the fridge, microwave, and door into my room. Mysteriously missing is this amazing wooden table that I swore on several holy books that I would protect as it belonged to our insane dean. This is another story, and a pretty good one at that, but just now the (table-shaped) hole in my heart is too fresh a wound. I have been in alternate stages of denial and rage about it all week. That was my perch, man. My perch.

Riley is more or less just livid. We spend half an hour before school moving seven student desks and one teacher desk outside. The other one is too deep in the room, and too heavy to turn right-side-up. We throw a tablecloth over it, and it slumbers there still. She makes another maintenance request. From this we learn:
-Maintenance is angry that the new desks are outside, regardless of the fact that her room was so crowded we physically could not move around.
-We had been scheduled, all along, to receive our new furniture in this second wave. This second wave that not one teacher in the entire school was informed of.
-Riley's first set of new desks, then, was not actually supposed to be hers. It was in her room as "storage," despite the fact that her room is clearly in use, and that we are literally next door to a completely empty, abandoned wood shop.
-When they came the second week, they did not just add 10 desks. They took out the 30 desks "stored" in her room and put in 40 brand-new ones.
-My perch has been taken to salvage.
-As we were told all furniture taken from those rooms went to salvage, we can only assume this includes the 30 week-old desks that were removed to make way for this fresh batch.

Mr. JBC says:

somebody has been knitting too much

2007-01-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

Look at me! I'm Dmitry!

photos photos.

2006-12-28T20:35:00.000-08:00

Lots of stuff going on since my last post. Unfortunately I can't seem to get it down; I've written a couple of posts and then not finished or posted them. My camera has been up to some funny business lately, mostly of the "let's look blurry and 70s" variety, but this should give you the general idea of what I've been up to, apart from work, lately.

the mysterious disappearance of mr. cheeseburger

2006-11-26T22:04:00.001-08:00

...and the overdue return of me.

First things first: Mr. Cheeseburger was my beloved piggie placemat, bought at the $3.99 store and named by my morning ESL class after I vetoed "Bacon" as too insensitive. Mr. Cheeseburger was taped to the door beneath a laminated speech bubble on which I wrote the day's most important announcements, which students faithfully read until the day the tape came loose and the maintenance staff saw fit to THROW HIM AWAY. I have done my mourning, and some day I hope to welcome Mr. Junior (Bacon?) Cheeseburger into my classroom. Until then, announcements the old-fashioned and oft-ignored way.

This is the logo of the restaurant where we had pretty decent Mexican food while I was visiting folk in New York a month or two ago:

Unfortunately, F13 is not just a brand of tasty Southern California Mexican cuisine, but also a brand of violent Southern Californian Mexican gang. I should be both broader and more specific: it's an extremely violent Latino gang in South Central Los Angeles, with ground zero being my high school. Two weeks ago, my SLC lost a former student - a close friend of many of my students - to eight shots to the chest, resulting from his involvement in Florencia. Since then, I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to ascertain how my students feel about it. At first they seemed callous, inured to violent death; they wore RIP gear (buttons, t-shirts) screened with the student's photos and told each other "if you get shot, I'll wear your t-shirt." Then they started showing me cell-phone footage of candlelight vigils and dropping off asleep in class, explaining that they'd washed cars all weekend to help the mother pay for the funeral. They felt something; I felt relief, knowing that at least we could start to have a conversation. Then, abruptly, I started finding tagging everywhere - out on the quad, in my pristine classroom - saying RIP "SHADOW" and, disturbingly, F13. The conversation is a gentle "maybe you should clean that off," with a rag and a bottle of mandarin orange spray cleaner extended, and while the wiping-down is happening, a suggestion that his name was not in fact "Shadow" but instead E., and that we should remember him for who he was, not where he was from, and that perhaps Sharpie on my tables was not the best way to memorialize him - perhaps this week's biography assignment would provide a better outlet? So far no takers on the biography, but a slowing in the F13 grafitti. If I prayed, it would be that none of my boys - my beloved softies who hang at the donut shop after school - will follow E.'s path in some kind of sick martyr fantasty. It happens all the time, but I hope that I never have to see it. I have been keeping my door open even when I usually close it, but I am resisiting the urge to run out and hug them whenever I see them. We get along because I humor their mistaken notion that they are tough, and I do not want to undermine this relationship.

The nines are starting literature circles, and they are also on my last nerve. They have done some really good writing lately, and they seem really interested in learning the hows and whys of writing, but reading is a whole other animal, one they eye with suspicion and fear. Picture, if you will, the classroom as a cave painting, with crude spears pointed at the object we call Book. It is going to be a long three months of identity and mythology.

My credential is finished tomorrow, HEY HEY HEY, provided I sign over $4000. I went shopping today so I might have a recent memory of what that feels like.

Attended - and presented at! - a Program conference in Las Vegas the other weekend, wearing handmade snarky anti-Program t-shirts, and was confronted about this on camera by The Program's Los Angeles Executive Director. Fortunately the snarkiness is of the direct-quote-that-is-so-insanely-stupid-it-needs-no-further-commentary variety, and I had little to explain. Executive Director Man pretended he thought this was "Great! Really.....just Great!" and that was that, and all of the t-shirt posse was semi-famous thereafter. Vegas sucks but we went to Cirque du Soleil, where you can enjoy a martini and a bucket of popcorn while watching the acrobatics. The only drawback of this is you have to go to Vegas to partake.

new york.

2006-09-25T06:12:00.000-07:00

If I posted at all regularly, you would probably have noticed that I have been gone for the past week. At the moment I'm taking advantage of JetBlue's free wireless while I wait for my plane to start boarding, which should be happening any minute now. Thoughts on travel:

It is SO. SO. SO. easy to sort out the New Yorkers from the Angelenos on these flights.

I'm without lipgloss and am a little stressed about it. They confiscated it because it was a gel. I hold that it is really pretty close to a solid - it comes in a little pot and cannot be poured, but must be warmed up and applied with a finger, like Carmex. It has honey in it so maybe they were afraid I would try to feed it to a baby or something? The exchange went like this:
Airport chick: I'm going to have to take this.
Me: That's considered a gel?
Airport chick: Well, anything with this consistency.
Me: They let it through on my flight out.
Airport chick: They probably didn't catch it.
Me: (silently) And it didn't blow up then, did it.

So now I have no lipgloss. Whine whine whine.

Boarding!

new indignities, haircuts

2006-09-15T15:52:00.000-07:00

So I went off-track a couple of weeks ago; around the beginning of the month, I guess. I've been subbing a couple of days a week for trusted friends with lesson plans, knitting a lot, and bumming around since then. Here I distill the last month or so into several points of interest:

BOLT CUTTERS! My classroom was broken into, three days before the end of the mester. They took my new printer, then went through the connecting door to my friend's classroom and took her new printer, her old iBook, and two LCD projectors. (They also took DVDs of Scarface and Fahrenheit 9-11, but left Hamlet, Indiana Jones, and a few others.) How did they get in, you ask? Why, the very same way the broke into this same room back in June! They used bolt cutters to snip through the heavy-duty metal screen over my windows, reached in, popped the emergency release, and then forced the window. It could have been much worse, as there was no vandalism. In fact, they were (relatively) very polite, stacking the materials that used to live on top of my printer neatly, with the larger books on the bottom all the way up to smaller note pads and things up on top.

MORE BOLT CUTTERS! The very next weekend, two days after I had vacated the classroom, it was broken into again. This time, they entered by snipping Riley's window screen, though they could have saved themselves some work and gone through my as-yet-unrepaired window once more. This time there was nothing left to steal, apart from various markers and batteries, so they busied themselves by throwing books and papers all over the room and tagging all the tables in marker and the glitter paint I keep for art projects. From this experience we have learned a number of things indirectly: that our campus cops are totally inept, that rooms at our school are broken into every single weekend, and that The District has told us that instead of the 28 security cameras they have been promising us for years, we will instead be recieving five (5) security cameras, at some as-yet-undetermined date in the future. I can't even laugh at the ridiculousness of this number as I don't think I will live to see the day. It just took several years - my guess is five - to complete the building of new bleachers, for crying out loud. The PA system has been "in the works" since I started, and someday we're supposed to be getting phones in the classrooms, too, and then and then and then... No. No, I will not only no longer be working at my school when we get these things, but I will in all likelihood no longer be breathing.

FLEAS! I was subbing for my friend Jackie the other days and maintenance came in to talk to me about the Flea Problem. I was like "Oh, is that where these bites on my arm are coming from?" I mentioned it to Riley, who used to teach in those bungalows, as they are uncarpeted and I did not know where the fleas could be living. Her response: "Probably on the dozens of feral cats living underneath them."

THE PROGRAM! It sucks this year, and seriously, no one should ever join it again. It's strayed so far from its ideals that it has no idea what it's doing anymore. Despite all this, I may be going to the Desert Mini-Conference in Vegas in November, mostly to roll out to Vegas with my crew, and to see the lovely Miss Amelie.

YOUTUBE! Seriously, being off-track and not having an existential crisis is awesome. I am all caught up on several seasons' worth of terrible television (ANTM, Pimp My Ride) and have become obsessed - OB.SESSED. - with Demetri Martin.

HAIRCUT! I was all, ugh, look at all this hair. I felt middle-aged and kind of blockish, like my head was made out of Duplo or something. So I marched up to Ye Olde Hipster Barber Shop and managed to get the stylist who is not only from my hometown, but who used to date this kid a year beneath me who I was totally convinced was gay all through high school. (I'm not sure my mind is changed by this experience.) We badmouthed Salinas for awhile and I admired her little bumblebee tattoos, and it was altogether an enjoyable experience. Anyway I look loads better now.

MAKIN' STUFF! I made a cover for my lappy, which I love, despite the fact that I had already started making it when I realized it has APPLES all over it. AUGH. I just think they're really cute, is all. Also, I made this belt the other day. It is crazy long and I might have to change that, but I still think it's super cute.

THE MAJOR! He is the king.

i prefer not to

2006-08-24T23:46:00.000-07:00

*Grades are due tomorrow. They're in the system but it's not showing that they've gone through. 85% of my freshman class is failing - not because they can't do the work, but because they don't have notebooks, so the work disappears, and when grading day comes they have little to nothing to show for themselves. They're really pissed off, but in no way is this notebook thing news to them - I refuse to touch loose paper this year unless it's a final draft of an essay or a project. It's made my life immeasurably better and their grades so, so pathetic. On the plus side my entire morning class is passing - everyone between a 70 and a 91 percent average. This is basically unheard-of for me and I'm really thrilled.

*A lot of money in The District seems to come from court settlements. For example, Rodriguez money, allocated for new teachers, ensured that we got technology like laptops. Williams money is supposed to ensure that students have textbooks that they can bring home if they want, and never have to share, in addition to other educational sundries. Williams money, however, is not spent of books, but instead on a team of what I like to call "scouts" or "spies" who come into our classrooms unannounced, write up how we're effing up on a secret clipboard, and then turn this in to administration. Last time Williams popped in I got two visits: one to tell me that I was out of compliance if I simply had 25 texts for 25 kids, as they had not signed the little white checkout cards that make things legit (nevermind that I don't use the textbook. Ever.) The second one was a silent visit. Today we got the spreadsheet of violatons and my room is listed as one that has "air fresheners and/or aerosols" which could endanger the students. Gee, you mean like the creeping mold the smell is supposed to mask? My homie next door is on the list for having boxes stacked too high. No joke. Thing is, I keep mine stacked that high, and no write-up. They're empty boxes, lest you worry they could fall and injure our flocks. We keep them so that we can pack up and move our books - the ones we buy out of our own money, mind - every two to four months, when we either switch rooms or go off-track.

God forbid that Williams money go toward permanent, non-mildewed rooms for each teacher.

*Bonus item: my favorite Williams citation was for a "daisy chain of surge protectors." Who comes up with this shit?

*For a while I thought about staying at my job but quitting The Program, which is getting more intensely fascist and data-driven with every passing second. Then I decided it would be better, or at least classier, to be the modern-day Bartleby of South Central. I won't go out in a blaze of glory like I used to; I will simply "prefer not" to track and return any standards-based data, in the same way that I "prefer not" to teach my scripted program unsupplemented and verbatim. If you prefer, I am doing things the Office Space way. In particular I'm thinking of "I'm just not gonna go anymore."

excerpts from my personal hell

2006-08-07T17:09:00.001-07:00

Time for a new character in the ongoing saga: Idiot Assistant Principal, who is Idiot Counselor's boss and my observer. Ms. IAP came in today to observe me as part of the STULL process, a process which reflects both on me as a teacher and my school overall.

It was a rough period to begin with. I'd had a rough morning, and third, my freshmen, were looking to make things tough for me. As I may have mentioned before, we're in the middle of a chapter of Freakonomics, the one about why crack dealers still live with their moms, and it's long, and they don't really feel like reading, and they are letting me feel that in a large way. We cannot, simply cannot, listen as our classmates read out loud, so I'm like, "Okay guys, this isn't working, you're in groups now." We read the focus questions on the board, and they let me know that they know what they're looking for, and we start reading. Or at least, 60% of the class starts reading. It is at this point that Ms. IAP walks in. I spend the rest of the period monitoring groups, trying to keep the noise level down so people can read, and setting up the new groups since these kids clearly can't choose their own seats effectively. I ask enough questions to make sure that my kids mostly know what they've read today, and that's that. Pretty typical rough day in a 9th-grade classroom.

This is how the meeting goes after class.

Idiot Assistant Principal: First let me say that I just love your room.
Ms. L: (mentally) Shit.
Idiot AP: (deep breath) You know, as long as I taught, I found that reading in groups never worked. You really should have them read as a whole class.
Ms. L: Actually, that wasn't working. That's why we moved to groups.
Idiot AP: I see. Well, sometimes we try experiments, and they don't work. That's OK.
Ms. L: It wasn't an experiment. It was a class. It was a rough day, but we'll rework it and we'll come back again tomorrow.
Idiot AP: Mmmm hmmm. Well. I couldn't really tell what was going on at all.
Ms. L: (wondering why she neither asked the students nor looked at the board but deciding against asking.) You know, I'd also like to note that this class doubled in size last week.
Idiot AP: In week four? Were they all new students?
Ms. L: No....some classes were collapsed. The students came here. I went from thirteen to twenty-six on one day. So part of the problem is that half of these students know each other and the norms and half of them are just trying to figure things out. Essentially it's week one again.
Idiot AP: Oh. the collapsed classes, to create the Strategic Literacy.
Ms. L: (mentally) Which my department had to lobby for for months...
Idiot AP: That was me. I didn't get the information in a timely fashion. I knew it would affect classes in some way...
Ms. L: (mentally) So this is where you acknowledge that you essentially brought this behavior upon me.

(long pause)

Idiot AP: Have you ever heard the expression, "Don't smile before December?"
Ms. L: Yes. And I don't believe in it. If I am not who I am, my students can see that, and they do not respect that, and I do not blame them. I'm not there yet, but I am trying to find a way to manage my classroom without becoming frightening and authoritarian.

(long, long pause)

Ms. IAP: Frightening and authoritarian... (taking notes on clipboard) ...That's funny.

Yeah. Funny funny. Funny notes going in my file.

why most people are incompetent

2006-07-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

As a new ESL chairperson, you will probably attend many meetings about moving students to a lower level of ESL. This requires a great deal on everyone's part, including reassessment, multiple parent meetings, and the presence of the counselor, the school psychologist, the teacher, and the bilingual coordinator. You will realize, via your own experience and those of others, that students in too high a level are mostly a problem in levels 1 and 2, where students take their other classes in Spanish. The difference between a 1 and a 2 is huge; 1s often can't communicate in simple sentences, or sometimes even words. It is more a basic comprehension and naming class. Students at the other end of 2, however, can write full paragraphs, albeit fairly simple ones, and can ask questions and answer them in English. A 1 in a class full of 2s is doomed. The advanced levels, 3 and 4, are wholly different. They take all their classes in English, and they often speak fluently if not academically. They can read simple texts independently, and more complicated ones with support. My 3s, for example, are reading Holes as a class. This is not approved by The District- in fact, it is specifically discouraged - but it is teaching them how to handle literature that is not in tiny bite-size pieces, and it is a heck of a lot of fun. The problem we have in advanced, mostly, is mainstreamable kids being placed in ESL because they don't write well and they speak some Spanish at home. Realistically, that probably describes about 70% of our school's population, if not more. These students seem disproportionately to have behavior issues or chronic absences. Gee....wonder how they ended up in ESL?

I have four of these students in one class. Two are serious, costant disruptions - think old Tasmanian Devil cartoons, with all the whirling and grunting and howling, only without the recourse of burying them in the col', col' groun' - one is chronically absent, and one spent most of last year in juvy, and now emits periodic beeping sounds from the general vicinity of his ankle. These are really good, smart kids, and they perform just as highly as my mainstream classes have. They're just "issues," so they're here.

This is what happens when you place kids in classes they're way, way too advanced for: they start out great, because it's so easy. Then they shout out all these complicated answers that intimidate the less-proficient students, preventing them from speaking out in class participation or in protest over any kind of inappropriate antics. Then they get bored with that, and they either a) start ditching, or b) scream, throw things, pick fights, sing innapropriate song lyrics with your name inserted, steal sodas and boxes of pencils, throw each others' notebooks in the trash, and generally wreak havoc. If you're very lucky, as I am, you have them for two periods, so they can ditch one and then go aggro during the second.

This is what happens when you decide to get these kids moved to classes where they can actually learn something. You go to last year's department chair, now part of an entirely different department, and ask what needs to happen. She taught mostly 1s and 2s, so she defers to bilingual. Bilingual gives you a form for their parents to sign. You write a letter explaining the change and the form, which bilingual helpfully translates, also making calls home to inform parents that these documents are on the way. You give your idiot counselor the heads-up that these changes are coming his way and that they are priority one, then retire to your room, where you fill out the forms entirely and highlight where they need to be signed. You give them to your students, you explain them to your students, and you send them home.

Every day, you check in with your students, who, it should be noted, have been asking how they can be switched out of ESL since day one. Did you bring the form? They forgot the form. The form is at home. The form is in their locker. Yeah, they have the form right here - psych! Wait, which form again? Meanwhile, their behavior and truancy worsen.

Eventually one form comes back, and you put it in Idiot Counselor's box with an ugent note re-explaining the situation, as Idiot Counselor is never in his office and needs everything in writing in any case. A day passes. The student becomes belligerent, calling you a liar for saying he'd be moved, and accusing you of fabricating the entire thing. The other students, who have still not brought back their forms, vascillate between accusing you of trying to get rid of them because you hate them, and trying to keep them in ESL because you hate them. Eventually, three of four forms are back, with the fourth student no longer showing up to class. You take the remaining two forms to Idiot Counselor, who is IN HIS OFFICE! as Attractive Counselor is there flirting with him instead of working.

You: Hi, Mr. I.C. I have signed mainstreaming forms for students B and C here for you. Did you get that form about Student A?
Idiot Counselor: What? No. No, I lost that.
You: Hmm. Well, I left it in your box. I made a few extra copies, though; I can bring you one if you need it. They all need to get mainstreamed ASAP.
Idiot Counselor: Wait, mainstream? I can't do that. That's bilingual.
You: Hmmmmm. Well, the forms came from bilingual, so you're authorized. Did you want another copy for your records?
Idiot Counselor: No, you've got to take it to bilingual. They need to change the classes.

At bilingual:
You: Hi, Ms. B.C. I just came from Mr. I.C. with those mainstream forms. Here are the originals, except this one. He lost the original there. He says you need to make the change.
Bilingual Coordinator: What?
You: He says -
Bilingual Coordinator: He is the counselor.
You: Well, I -
Bilingual Coordinator: It is his job to help these students. His only job. He sends kids here, and I don't have the authorization to change classes. Go back and tell him that he needs to make those changes, or I will talk to his Assistant Principal. No, I'll have Title 1 speak to his Assistant Principal.
You: (thinking this is probably not going to get you what you want) Sure. I'll tell him as diplomatically as I can.

(Head back to the other buiding. Bearing in mind that you are trudging back and forth in 90+ degree heat, carrying 100 unstapled, single-sided copies of the "Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms" chapter of Freakonomics. Thanks, Title 1!)

You: (speaking slowly and overly sweetly) Hi again, Mr. I.C. So, Ms. B.C. says you're authorized to make the changes, and that she doesn't have clearance for that. Let me write the info down for you.
Idiot Counselor: Oh, okay. Just write down their names. That's all I need. I can figure out everything else.
You: (writing down every piece of semi-pertinent information you can think of) Hmm. You're probably not going to get to this tonight?
Idiot Counselor: (laughing)
You: Right. Well then. I'll come by in the morning with that copy of Student A's paperwork. If you should find it, though...
Idiot Counselor: I can't just make these changes, though. I need authorization from bilingual.
You: (wondering where he thinks the forms came from)

Back at bilingual:
Bilingual Coordinator: Where does he think the forms came from?

Tomorrow I will be in that office about every 10 minutes. I'm learning very quickly that the only way to make things happen is to make people sick of hearing about them. I put this theory to the test by having every single student repeat the question we were trying to answer in class today. That's right, twenty-eight times. You had better believe it worked, too.

In conclusion, if you ever become a teacher, try not to care about your students' education. It will cause you nothing but headaches and lost time.

i am lame

2006-07-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

...because I have been meaning to post forever, but I'm just too exhausted at the end of the day. A few brief updates: I've been getting to work around 6:20 every morning and leaving around 8 at night, not least because it's just too hot to function at home at anything above a reptilian level. It does not look at all likely that I'll be running this half-marathon; again, I'll probably pull out and run one at a later date, and donate a bunch of guilt money to the cause. My reading challenge is going well; I'm beating the kids, but not by much. Better, though, is that I've read over eight hundred pages in the last two weeks. This, along with the now-traditional Saturday night beer n' swim in my friend Tiff's pool, is what is keeping me sane. I am spending way too money on iTunes and Dr. Pepper.

Other updates: I had my Round Zero Program Meeting tonight and I am already about done for the year. I had eight new freshmen added to my English class today. I have twelve female students in total, all day. I made my first parent phone call today. Riley and I are planning, and teaching, a tremendously ambitious unit on persuasion. Our kids are not really on board, themselves being not terribly ambitious on the whole. I made my first parent phone call this afternoon. I have been killing myself trying to get four ESL students reclassified as mainstream. I have just been killing myself, overall.
Witness! Room Five Thirty-One!

1. Aaron is reading more, too - all of my favorite books.
2.You wish you hung out in my library.
3. Yeah...how much CAN you read? Plus, postcards.
4. Up close.
5. That's a whole lot of felt.
6. The Throne of Power.

new, new, new.

2006-07-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

The new year started. That's where I've been.

I kind of have some new jobs. For example, you may remember that I am the new department chair. I am also on some new committee that charts the course of our professional development to make it less useless. I am newly a 9th grade teacher. I am newly a decent teacher, I think. Not good, but at least approaching decent. For a second-year. By my school's standards, a veretan.

My new room is so, so great. It is, in the words of my ESL 3 students, "quiet, clean, smart, and big." I am especially proud of the library and the expectations wall. I will put up pictures ASAP.

My new students are phenomenal: sweet, dedicated, and gifted. I adore them. Unfortunately I also have some old thorn-in-my-side students who have failed the class three times and have no intention of trying to pass this time. These are not the ones who just don't get it yet, who I can work with. These are the mounds of flesh who sit there staring at the ceiling, pushing each other, etc. I also have a few true jerks. Fortunately, they are misplaced in ESL, and it's now well within my power to fight to get them moved out of ESL and into mainstream English. It's better for them, which is a great cover for the fact that it's way, way better for my other students and me.

I have some new strategies. A for instance: in my somewhat limited experience, requiring outside reading is not effective. This year, I decided to up the ante a bit and challenge my new freshman class to out-read me, page for page. There are fifteen of them, and only one (busy, exhausted) me. The idea is that they will buy in, and that I will then be forced to read, which makes me happier than almost anything else I could do with my "downtime" but almost never happens. The buy-in is initially overwhelming, and they read several hundred pages this week. I started off my campaign with a bang as well, reading Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days cover-to-cover this weekend. Highly recommended, both the book and the all-in-one-go plan of attack.

Ummm I don't sleep anymore. That is not new.

Also I still hate it down here. The heat makes me so sick every day that I feel like throwing up. Clearly I am not going to be able to run this half-marathon. I am still In Training though, in case the temperature plummets or something. Otherwise I will just donate a bunch of money to my hardier friends and lie in the bathtub crying. I am not even joking.

by popular demand

2006-06-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

you may, should you desire, make your donation to my half-marathoning here. Just scroll on down and search by my first and last name. I also have paper-type forms, or at least I will, just as soon as I undo the organizational damage we did by cleaning house this weekend. The place looks awesome, though.

and other quarter-life crises.

2006-06-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Let's see. You have graduated from college, gotten engaged, entered a field and taken a position for which you are woefully unqualified, and gotten a big gnarly tattoo. Two actually. So what's next?

All type of things, as it turns out. I went out to Old Town Pasadena (the O.T.) this weekend and bought myself some crazy expensive new toys, in the form of a new macbook (the extra a-spensive black one, no less) and a printer/scanner dealie and a nano, the latter two of which were more or less free after my educator discount and the "we're unveiling a new model soon"-style promo. Technically this wasn't all that frivolous as my work machine, always imperiled, is down at the moment, and the Major has ripped several keys off my iron-age Dell, which weighed about seven stone to begin with. But yes, I do feel cooler, thank you for asking. It even has a built-in camera that does all kinds of nonsensical effects. Observe:

Then last week I did a phenomenally stupid thing and allowed a colleague to peer-pressure me into signing up to run the Disneyland half-marathon. No, unfortunately, your eyes do not deceive you. She's just so efficient; she asks you if you're into it and then while you're still on the mild high of being a great person, before the reality kicks in, she's whipping out the registration form and offering to fax it in for you and that's that. Anyway, my first action upon realizing what I'd done was to turn around and peer-pressure a bunch of other friends an colleagues into joining us, so that between her peer pressure and mine, our posse is seven deep. May and I have already begun sort of pre-training in the form of edging around the Silverlake Reservoir and realizing just how very out of shape we are. I have budding shin splints today, but as of tomorrow evening, I'm back out there, hopefully up at Griffith Park, where the ground is more forgiving. Anyway, I have until the beginning of September to get myself into some kind of working order, and raise $1,900 for AIDS research to boot. You hate AIDS, right? Right. So sign up and send me some moneys. You will be giving to a really worthy cause, and contributing to my running a long, hot stretch of asphalt in the OC in the late summer, too. What more could you want?

We're in the home stretch of this school year, with the new one starting up July 5th. I'm alternately excited and....excited. I love, love, love my kids, but I'm such a different teacher now that I was at the start, with such higher expectations, that every day kind of hurts me now, since these kids are operating by my much older, much lower academic and behavioral expectations and there's not a hell of a lot I can do about it at this point. It's really frustrating. I'm trying to plan tightly and harness my inner badass and still get this current group of kids through final writing projects at the same time. Not to mention that grades are due, and my credential is in jeopardy until I get one elusive piece of paper, and on and on and on. I have to switch rooms at the break, too, but I'm going to the coveted 530s, right next door to my friend Riley, unless I have jinxed it by typing it down before my stuff is actually being dragged across the threshold. We'll see.

disheartened

2006-06-06T22:34:00.000-07:00

While I was out of the classroom 2 weeks ago, one of my favorite seniors (with "favorite" here meaning not "one whom I like better than the others," but instead "one with whom I have better-than-average repoire") tagged the hell out of my room, beginning with chalk marker on the balcony outside and continuing inside with chalk marker on the board-runners and my flowerpots, Sharpie on the blackboard, the ESL texts and the bilingual dictionaries, and carving into the side blackboard and my own personal stapler, which sits right on my desk. I know it was him beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I can't really exactly prove it, so we had this "I hope you would be the one to remind the other students that this is a space we share" conversation, subtext "I know damn well it was you and you had better not set a toe out of line," though I really was sincere in that I would hope he would be the one to check himself, and until 2 weeks ago I would have trusted him with the world. I feel like he's actually pretty ashamed, and the whole class has been better since they came in and were treated to my seething narrative of the "scavenger hunt of rage" on which I had embarked that morning. It hurt, though, in a personal way that teaching, really, should not. I thought I could not be angrier at or more exhausted by a student I trusted.

Then, this morning, my intermediate ESL class engaged in a mass cheating campaign, resulting in their sharing the entirely wrong answers when I know very well from their previous work that individually, they could have gotten the right ones. The second-highest grade, in a class of 20 students, was a 71.

Then my borderline-failing seniors decided to take the day off for Senior Ditch Day, rather than workshopping their theses and developing support. They'll be gone Friday too, and the essay's firm due date is Monday. I will be at graduation in three weeks and I am beginning to fear they will not.

Then in sixth period my favorite advanced ESL kid, the one I am always defending to other teachers and working my ass off to pull up in terms of literacy, got into a fistfight with another of my students. In my classroom. On my watch. Ever seen two people you care about, who you are physically and intellectually responsible for, start punching each other in the face?

Then, once we'd gone outside and one of them had cried and I had tried not to, and after they had tried to blame me because one had stolen the other's pencil and I had not even done anything about it, I came back inside to the rest of my students laughing and reenacting. "That was tight, Miss."

Linda told me early on that sooner or later, they will break your heart, and only then will you find your toughness as a teacher. She said it happened to her during her first year when (get this) they stole her teddy bear. It is funny the things that set us off, the straws that break the camel's back. We will see who I am when I walk into the classroom tomorrow. And take pity upon the students who have me for the next school year, which begins in just under one month.

Mr. Jesus pays a visit

2006-06-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

Between my PACT, professional development, and required portfolio maintenance, I've found myself out of the classroom four of the last ten days. Additionally, we had Memorial Day off, so I was already pretty disoriented when I found out that I'd have a formal observer in from The District to watch how my scripted ESL program was being implemented. It reflects on the program itself, not me, but it's still been a pain in the ass to have her there in the back of the classroom typing down everything that anyone says. So far she's been there for two straight days, and she's scheduled for one more, for a total of about 7 hours. Argh argh argh.

On one of those on-campus off days, I had the evil luck to get Mr. Jesus in my classroom. I hate Mr. Jesus for perhaps obvious reasons, and I have done since I met him last September (back then we called him Mr. Church.) Though other teachers request him because he will make sure the kids do not trash your room, I don't want my kids preached at, I don't trust anyone who has "met" me upwards of fifteen times and still does not recognize me, I don't particularly enjoy finding propaganda leaflets tucked into my library books and left on my desk, and I just plain hate the way he so expectantly calls out "Teacher!" when he's subbing next door and he needs me to drop everything and go deal with my neighbor-kids or something. So I'm running late for my PD and trying to get my kids to take out their books and study, and in walks Mr. Jesus. The agenda is up on the board, the other classes have photocopied letter/checklists stapled to their assignments, and this class knows they are supposed to be studying so I figure at least nothing can get effed up. I am politely laying out the way I want the day to run while I shove all my files into my stylish milk crate when he, sitting at one of the student desks right in front of my teacherly one, cranes around to look at the class.

"This class is amazing," he barks. "They are just looking at us. Shouldn't they be studying?"
Bear in mind, it is 7:40 in the morning on the first day back from a 3-day weekend. Yes, they are slow to start, but this is not unusual. I express this to Mr. Jesus.
"No, really!" he continues. "I have never seen anything like this! Are you all in Special Education?"
I just freeze at that one, and all eleventeen thousand responses roll through my head at once, but all I can get out is a slow "Excuse me?"
He turns around to address my kids again. "I said, are you all in Special Ed?"
My kids do not respond, as they are all frozen as well and just staring at me. I get out another Excuse Me, followed rapidly by a truly angry rush of words about the complete inappropriateness of that statement, and how I don't even know what that means, and that my students simply lack motivation as it is very early on a Mondayish morning, a feeling which I am sure he understands. He can tell I am pissed and starts backpedaling, talking about how he knows how they feel, and he is that way all the time himself, blah blah fucking blah. My kids, who have heard the term "lacking motivation" before, are sort of angrily chorusing "Yeah, yeah!" while I am telling him off. Later on that day, I hear them telling this story to their friends. It goes something like this:
(rapid Spanish)
Excuse me?
(more rapid Spanish)
Excuse me?!?

I dealt with the aftermath of the whole incident for the rest of the week. My kids were really upset by it, especially the five or so who really do have IEPs and deal with stigma all the time. What really surprised me was that the rest of my students were upset not at the implication that they were SpEd, but that SpEd was in this case synonymous with stupid. I think it's partly because they are all friends, and partly because they deal with the stigma of being language learners, but either way I was really impressed with them, and we talked about it, and it was a good Program Moment all around. Plus I got to yell at Mr. Jesus, so maybe he will remember who I am and stop introducing himself to me, the creep.

Speaking of creeps, our incompetent and creepy-as-all-get-out counselor has taken to coming to school obviously intoxicated and wearing shades in and out of doors. This is against dress code. They are Prada though, spawning lots of devil wearing Prada jokes, along with less sophisticated exchanges such as the following:
Me: What, so you've never worn dark shades indoors?
My co-chair: What, you've never shown up to work still drunk?
Me: What, you've never been hung over for eight straight days?

I am insanely proud of my seniors today. We've decided to spend the rest of the year on response to lit, as almost all of them are going to state or community college in the fall. When I asked them to brainstorm questions they had about essay writing and asked if they felt comfortable writing a thesis, they asked, "What's a thesis?" Ho boy. So that's where we've been living. Additionally, they had expressed that I was not challenging them enough, which was true, so our texts for this essay are short stories which I read in college, under the assumption that if they can master these texts and write coherent essays about them, there is not a lot they will not be able to do. (Although I will cop to letting them write on Esperanza, although it was optional reading which we did not discuss in class.) Anyway, today we finished prewriting and sat down to really "answer the question," and after many times handing back the paper with a "Yes, but WHY?" or "Yes, but HOW?" and one serious conversation beginning, "If I can write a good essay without a thesis, how come I have to have one?", we finally got some theses down. And they kick ass. My favorites, slightly paraphrased (in response to a prompt about how environment affects minorities living in mainstream American culture):

The narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" is traumatized by the stories she is told by her family, making her unlikely to become a wife or a mother.

In Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street," Esperanza is never truly the girl she wants to be, because she is ashamed of the places and people she comes from.

I dance, dance, danced around after those.

check the timestamp

2006-05-30T00:06:00.000-07:00

it's done.

i didn't check it at all. no proofing, no idea check, no grammar check, no "did i get rid of all my [[explain this bit?]] brackets." nothing.

cross your fingers that i don't get pulled from my classroom. woot.

oh yeah

2006-05-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

Also, I took the day off to work on my credentialing paper, due this Friday. You can see how hard I am working. I can't stop imagining my students behind my desk defacing my photos and stuff. Maybe playing with the lighter (which, though it is deep within my desk, I neglected to lock up yesterday. Dammit.)

No paper = no credential.

This thing is a nightmare.

the view from the chair

2006-05-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

So there's this woman in the ESL department, let's call her "Linda," who has been crazy supportive and wonderful to Rachel and me over the last almost-year. She was my next-door neighbor before I moved back upstairs. She's been an invaluable resource. Only, I hate her.

OK, maybe not hate. But things have gotten weird. Historically, Linda has butted heads with the head of our SLC. They just don't get each other. SLC head is an activist for our students, very in-the-trenches. Linda is a teacher, from now until death, and she makes this known whenever possible. You wouldn't think this would be a conflict, but that's because you are neither a teacher nor an activist.

Anyway, the ESL department has always been housed entirely in our SLC, CALA. For the upcoming year, it is being split between CALA and MPA. But Linda, frustrated with our current and soon-to-be-changing-anyway leadership, pulled a fast move and, without telling anyone, got herself switched an entirely different SLC. This has ramifications for everyone, students and teachers alike. Already, I am unhappy.

Imagine my surprise, then, to see that instead of being given the ESL co-chair position unopposed, as is usually the case when someone steps up for a thankless job, I am running against Linda. And imagine my further surprise when, instead of being at the ESL department meeting where we are voting on department chair, Linda instead attends the English department meeting where, I am told, she tells everyone that she would love to run for English department chair, if she were not already the chair of the ESL department, and that next year the two departments should be merged.

What the fuck?!?

Anyway I found out yesterday that I am, in fact, the co-chair, and that our most excellent frat-boy/hardass Rene is the chair, as I'd thought all along. And I can tell you that if I have anything to do with it, we will be working very closely with the English department, but we will not be merging. There's so much drama and political infighting there that I feel the focus very rarely strays back to the students. The strength of the ESL department has always been that, as a closely united front, we don't have this problem. Or at least, we never have before.

ch-ch-changed back

2006-05-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

This just in: one of our teachers, slated to move to A track, has been accepted to teach in Japan this year. Now, Rachel is moving to A to teach his classes, I am moving in to teach Rachel's classes (and reclaiming my chair), and we're hiring a new English teacher for the nines and tens I was assigned yesterday. As the new year starts in 5 weeks, I strongly suspect we will be finding a Program newbie to start late, as Rach and I did last year, and still have not recovered from.

I swear, this place is run by monkeys.

ch-ch-changes

2006-05-17T21:13:00.000-07:00

Today I found out, in rapid succession, that

1. I had been voted the B-track ESL department co-chair

but

2. I cannot be the ESL co-chair

because

3. I no longer teach ESL, but instead four periods of 9th grade English, and one of 10th.

Fuck fuck motherfuck.

i <3 bad boys

2006-05-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

...but not like that.

So I'm back in the saddle again, as it goes, and yes, my classroom is slightly out-of-control and deafening in the afternoons, but ALL FOUR of my previously failing "bad" boys are passing now, three of them averaging B's on their tests; I think that among other things, chiefly the realization that school's over in six weeks and they don't want to be stuck in ESL 3 again, they have figured out that I do not think of them as "bad," and that when I say that I missed them in class yesterday, I really mean it. For my part, I think they're hilarious and the light at the end of my exhausting days. We are working on the whole cursing/chasing each other around/yelling at the top of their lungs issues, but in all likelihood this behavior will continue, they will pass, and my co-workers teaching ESL 4 will hate hate hate me.

All semester I had been considering the possibility that I might be that ESL 4 teacher, but the master schedule is up, albeit in sticky-note form, and unless some otherworldly power disrupts the amazing stability of the stickynote system, I am teaching ESL 3 in the morning, freshman English mid-day, and then ESL 3 again in the afternoon. At first I was nearly delirious with glee at the thought of having only two preps, but then I forgot about wanting to hate my life less and realized it freed me up for other things. A for instance: the official vote isn't until tomorrow, but it now looks like I will be chairing the ESL department on B track, with a co-chair in the new Multilingual Preparatory Academy on track A, the abbreviation for which is pronounced "moopa," as in "moopa loopa doopahdee doo." Technically the responsibility will be split 3 ways, with Rachel and I dividing up work on B despite the fact that only one of us gets our name down on the paper. The idea is that year 3 we'll switch and she'll get all the glory, fast cars, and hot hot women, but you never know; once you start livin' that large it's hard to come back down.

My school has gone completely wacky since Ye Olde Riot, or maybe it's just that I'm noticing. Admin is MIA unless it's making bizarre announcements over my (grrr) newly-working PA, and the kids are restless and looking for a fight. Add to this several new species of bureaucratic hassle/"that's public schools for you" hitch, ie WASC accreditation, several rounds of state testing, and the near-certainty that I am working in a sick building, and you've probably got a pretty decent explanation for the surprising degree of apathy which I bring to my job each morning. This is not what I had in mind last semester when I wondered if the Morning Dread would ever go away. As I say, by the end of the day I'm energized by the unending game of "guess what The Four will get into next and prevent them from doing so," but the mornings are rough, and despite this potential new position of responsibility, I kind of still suck at my job.

Last night I had my penultimate meeting of the year with my Program Dude, in which we were supposed to take an hour to discuss what's holding my students back from SFGs (Significant Fucking Gains.) We got about three minutes into the meeting before I told Program Dude - or rather "spat accusingly," I fear, that I take extreme offense to The Program's exclusionary focus on SFGs, and to its framing of everything I do in SFG-related terms, implying that I signed on to reach SFGs by any means necessary, whether or not I needed a clasroom of students in order to do this, and if not, so much the better. I did not sign on for this, I told him, but rather to teach, and I explained my belief that SFGs are necessary chiefly for enticing investors, so that investors are forthcoming with the moneys, so we can hunt down more would-be teachers and mold them into SFG-chasers, and on and on ad infinitum. The whole point of the Program, I reminded Program Dude, is to educate all our kids, and that at some point we are going to have to stop rah-rahing how huge we're getting and start rah-rahing how our numbers are shrinking if we're going to call ourselves successful, and while I understand that this is a very long ways off, it seems those up at Corporate have forgotten that it is, in fact, the vision. You know: kids, and educating them. The disenfranchised. Or whatever.

At this point Program Dude starts taking notes and asking me for concrete suggestions as to how to change the LA region's extremely alienating Numbers Focus. I was not expecting this. But, I had already gotten going, so I just kept going. For a little over 2 hours, in fact. I have always really liked and respected Program Dude, so much so that I do not think of him as part of The Program, but now I am trying to work out the fact that his very non-Programminess, ie That Which Makes Him Great, is what will likely keep me in The Program for another year. Plus, he has said that he will take me to really bad classrooms next year, and even that he will try to track down a Program Nalgene for me. I cannot overemphasize how much having this Nalgene will boost my morale.

another reason to love myspace

2006-04-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

So of course my more intrepid students, the ones who have my email address for sending me late work (sigh) have found me on Myspace. After some thought and the realization that I'm already caught and there's not much to do about it now, I changed my graduation dates and age (I'm now 43) and accepted the first friend request, from a rather squirrely senior who, for unfathomable reasons, I'm really very fond of. When you accept someone as a friend, all their recent bulletin posts come up on your listing, so I randomly opened one titled "important."

----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
people please call this number and tell that lady shit about spain pleasees (xxx)xxx-xxxx

I'm barely finished reading this before I'm on my feet looking for my cell phone, as I'm remembering my student's long-standing adversarial relationship with the college counselor/CALA co-chair, who is the only Spanish person both he and I know. Sure enough, the numbers match. Now, I pause. What do you do with something like this? Are people actually calling? Do I let it go? Oh, to hell with it.

----------------------Reply---------------------------

Of course you realize that by adding your teachers as friends, they will have access to posts like this one, and that you will have to think seriously about the effects of those posts...
Shouldn't you be doing something with your last few weeks of vacation? Hiking? Throwing parties? Reading a book?
-Ms. L

I love my job.

words fail me

2006-04-08T11:06:00.000-07:00

...but I have pictures.

My excellent hosts

Pamila (with snakes in hats)

Dmitry (bathed in godly light)

Egypt's most invasive species

Cats + Motorbikes = Badass

Legs and Friends

And even some sightseeing.

sleepless

2006-03-25T20:52:00.000-08:00

I have pretty seriously effed up my sleep schedule over the past few days, so after lying awake the last few hours - at first trying to sleep, then trying not to try to sleep, then reading a guidebook, which I neglected to do before arriving - I gave up and wandered out to check my email, in the process discovering that it was only 6:30. Now I'm afraid that I'll fall asleep again and no one will wake me up and I'll nap all day, like yesterday, so here I sit.

My first day here we went to Cairo's main museum, which houses all the treasure from Tut's tomb, the statues of the heretic pharoah Ahkenaten, an expansive collection of things mummified, and a numbing array of pots, miniatures, papyrus, etc. Due to the unlabeled, heaping, back-room-of-the-antique-store organization of the place, I missed my favorite piece, the carved wooden head of the young Tutankhamen emerging from a lotus. I'm not too disappointed, though, as the rest of the museum was hardly underwhelming. It's always so sublime to stand in front of my art history education at life size and just let it wash over me; to understand the light that glows through alabaster, or the proud angle of a new pharoah's chin. Before you ask, I did not buy the supplemental ticket - at about twice the price of the initial museum ticket - that would have allowed me into the Mummy Room. Why petrified cats are worth more than a collection of gilded chariots and intestine-holding mini-sarcophagi somewhat eludes me. Apart from the museum, it's been a lot of market-wandering, falafel-eating, and tea-drinking, pluz lazing around watching pirated American TV with Pamila and Dmitry. Vague plans are in the works for pyramids and coptic quarters.

Despite these outings, the company of my much-missed best friends, and the availibility and small expense of decent beer, I haven't been able to escape the classroom. I've had fitful dreams about bureaucracy and schedule changes and several of my kids, all boys. I worry most about the boys. I know that I shouldn't, and that the girls are drug and dropout risks and could find themselves pregnant or involved with the "wrong crowd," a much more significant phrase than it was in my more suburban upbringing, but still, it's the boys who I see in my dreams, the bright ones with the most academic promise, sheepishly lying about why they skipped class, offering me drugs at a discount, disappearing into strange, crowded cars with no license plates. They are out of school for two months, and of a thousand ways they might fill that time, I am picturing the worst, the reason most likely being the ill tidings I've received from my school.

On Tuesday, while I text-messaged friends through the boredom of a delayed flight, my school experienced its first "race riot." There had been rumors for a couple of months about tensions between two of the neighborhood's major gangs - rumors that administration had not shared with teachers - and no sooner had the alert died down than fights began to break out on campus, initially between the two gangs but moving towards the targeting of students based on their race. The whole thing happened at the end of lunch, resulting in total lockdown, SWAT team presence, and the arrest of about 20 students. My source on the inside - a Program teacher and one of my closest friends on campus - confirms that media reports have been fairly accurate, that there had been police heliopters and cops in riot gear, that students were on staggered release for at least the following two days, that police presence has been substantially increased and that there has been some aftershock-style fighting. She also confirms my strongest suspicion: that administration is being reticent and elusive at best, making strange and disruptive cheerleading-style announcements over the loudspeaker, and urging students and teachers not to believe "rumors" they will not name any more than they will tell anyone what's really going on.

The whole thing is just fucked up, and I'm fucked up about it. I feel like I should be there, but even if I was there in LA I wouldn't be at school, or at least I wouldn't have my own students (though I suspect very strongly that we are hurting for both teachers and subs right now;) and even if I was there at school it wouldn't change a damn thing. The problems and the anger are too deep, the gang lifestyle too enticing or at least too logical, the other opportunities too scarce; I as a person am too hesitant, too half-hearted; as a teacher I am too ineffectual. I can assign my students a schedule for completing their workbooks. I cannot help them understand the world; I cannot do a thing to change it.

i don't know if i mentioned it

2006-03-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

...but I am going to Cairo. Right now.

See you when I get there.

an update

2006-03-13T23:43:00.000-08:00

Remember my first favorite administrator, Mr. B? He is running a cigar shop, now. Apparently he is quite happy.

I have a ton of work to do this week, before my last two credentialing classes and then hopping a plane to Elsewhere. I'm really pretty stressed about it, which isn't cool. At this point I feel like I should be able to breeze my way through anything unfazed. The reality is that, while I do have a new profession, I remain myself, which means I still have to get completely neurotic and make myself sick over everything before I can get it done. Then, I have to analyze it and linger over each and every way it could have been done better were I someone else, someone less inclined to screw everything up.

Lots of pictures of the cat and newly knitted items and my new Ally-Sheedy-in-Breakfast-Club style haircut, but I am on the wrong lappy (we are rocking 3 these days) so you will just have to wait.

i must say i've had better vacations

2006-03-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

So, as you know, I'm a B-tracker, which means our "winter" break started on Monday. It's a blissful/educationally criminal 8 weeks long, and since I've been working straight through since June, I was pretty desperately in need of it.

Monday nights I have class, and this Monday I was supposed to teach a sample lesson to the other teachers. I spent all day modifying and supplementing a not-too-terrible High Point lesson, making handouts, and mentally preparing myself, then set off to class. It was business as usual - I talked to Mom on the metro, met May at Subway to get a sandwich...but decided I didn't really want a sandwich. I wasn't feeling so well all of a sudden. That was about 4:30.

5:00 - Class begins.
5:30 - Starting to have trouble focusing.
5:35 - Realize I'm a little queasy.
6:15 - Stagger the bathroom to splash water on my face. May comes up to check on me and is like "Oh my God."
6:45-7:30 - May drives me home.
8:00-9:00 - Lie in bathtub full of hot water in attempt to stave off vomiting.
9:00-12:00 - Vomiting.
12:15-6:00 (Tuesday) - Tossing, turning, shaking, moaning, interrupted by intermittent trips to bathroom.
9:00 - Aaron goes to Von's to buy me watermelon chunks, the only food I can imagine stomaching.
9:00-5:00 - Too dizzy to stand, I lie in bed, sleeping intermittently and tossing fitfully.
5:00 - Wake up drenched in sweat; take leaning-against-wall-style shower.
5:20- Back in bed.
8:00 - After deciding it is OK to take ibuprofen, I finally feel stable enough to turn on the lappy Aaron left next to me this morning.
9:00-11:30 - Catch up on blogs, mags, Prelinger archives...
11:30 - Aaron gets home from school/gym and makes me some soup. I eat some; Major eats the rest.
12:15 - Back to sleep.
10:00 (Wednesday) - Wake up; feel that standing is an option. Success!

In conclusion, try not to get food poisoning. It sucks. Especially on your first day of vacation.

Over the past ten days I have:

2006-02-18T09:31:00.000-08:00

Made my very first student cry and scream obscenities at me
Gotten autographs from Q and Big Dane from West Coast Customs, to be posted in my classroom
Watched an hour of the Olympics while stretching, cycling, and stretching at the gym (moguls = kickass)
Gotten three hours of sleep one night, followed by twelve the next
Given the "Come to Jesus" talk to the ESL class that told me they didn't do their one page of reading for homework because their other classes are all more important for getting into college
Subsisted on an almost entirely cheese-based diet
Decided that if no one else wants to be lead teacher for the new Beginners' Academy I will likely be moved to on A track, I will step up
Realized that I am no longer a "new teacher" by my school's standards, and am fast-becoming a veteran
Gotten and gotten over a cold
Seen the Watts towers
Spent three hours sitting at the cafe sketching
Had a spontaneous crying fit
Gone out with credentialing colleaguges until 6am
Gotten a student in a headlock
And on and on and on.

don't be a fool

2006-02-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

...follow random bureaucratic rules.

So this week's fun new wrench in the gears: administration just remembered that we are going through accreditation next year and preemptively went all nutty on us this week, cracking down on any minor infraction. Rachel got written up for a misplaced CAHSEE packet or label or something - no one quite knows anything about it except that she did not, in fact, misplace it - and a bunch of us got nasty notes in our boxes reminding us that attendance rosters are due by the end of second period, and since we did not comply with this rule on Monday, a copy of this note was being forwarded to our overseeing Assistant Principal. Well, the joke's on them - CALA does not have an assistant principal. Ha! Anyway, as my awesomely snarky department chair pointed out - to me as well as to the writers of said note - admin is fond of reminding us that we have a no pass policy. No passes, ever. Not for seeing the counselors, not for the bathroom, and certainly not for running rosters to the attendance office during second period. "Just tell me which rule you want me to break, and I will gladly break it," she told them, predictably receiving no answer.

So I decide on Tuesday, fine, I will try this whole "complying with the roster policy" business, since they're getting all anal about it - a mere 4 weeks before we go to a computerized system, might I add (though I still do not have a working network connection, which is a whole other story. It is short, though. In fact, that may have been the whole thing.) I haven't sent my roster up before the end of 3rd this whole semester, so it seems kind of novel, and besides, my kids will try to out-well-behave each other at the mere mention of any outside errand. There, I think with some satisfaction. That will get them off my back.

Imagine, then, my ironic amusement when I opened my roster on Wednesday to discover that it had been tampered with by a student. Possibly mine, possibly not - we may never know. What I do know is that Selena, who has come to class a total of two days (the first one, and then today, of all days) was suddenly excused for all her absences, and Lara, who is one of my best students and has missed a total of one period all year, was suddenly, crudely, marked absent for a week and a half last month. Also, all of my small purple ink dots had been messily expanded in pencil, changing nothing but the neatness of my roll sheet. Huh? So, I stuck one of those massive lined Post-Its over the roll part so they'd be forced to read it up in the office, and wrote a note explaining the forgery situation (it IS, after all, a legal document) and that I had restored it to its original state per my "meticulously kept" in-class roll book. Meticulous may have been a stretch, but I filled in the gaps before sending the note, just in case anyone called me out on it. Today the roster came back with the note, almost assuredly unread, stuck to the other side of the folder. I don't know if they are illiterate or inconsiderate or think it's just not their problem, but I am keeping the note for the not-inconceivable possibility that I may find myself written up over this.

We had a PD the other night with my UCLA observer, who is kind of like everyone's sort of with-it, progressive grandma, and the conversation turned to administrations that blame teachers for the unpreventable problems in their classroom (ahem, ahem.) Our dean's office, with two exceptions, falls very much under this heading; unless blood has been drawn (which it thankfully has yet to in my classroom) they do not want to hear about it, and are a bit resentful if you make it their problem. This makes issues such as threats, extreme disobedience, constant disuption of the learning environment, and theft (ahem ahem ahem) our problem. My observer had the best-ever story about this. Back when she taught English in Torrance, she had a couple of students second period who had first period cooking class together. Pretty frequently they'd bring in goodies for her: biscuits, cookies, and the like. She always appreciated it, and she always ate them. So, nothing seemed unusual the day they left some brownies on her desk.

At this point, she pauses. "You see where this is going."

It's the next passing period and she's walking with her teacher-friend, and she says, "You know, I feel so strange today. It's like I'm here, and then a second later I'm way over there." Her friend giggles. Then they look at each other, and it hits them. Oh. No.

As I say, she is progressive and realistic and she actually thinks this is pretty funny (come to think of it, she thinks everything is funny just then,) but she also thinks that administration should probably know that some students are carrying pot on campus and distributing it to those caught unawares. So she tells them. And it comes down squarely on her head. She is in trouble with administration, with the cooking teacher, with everyone. The consensus is, This is your fault. You should have known.

Unrelated: For the record, I would like to state that I spend an average of 10 hours per day in my classroom, working through my lunch and all breaks; that I spend additional evening hours grading and preparing; that I log about 8 hours per weekend, unless I'm feeling ambitious. I would also like the record to reflect that I am paid for 6.6 hours per day, 5 days a week.

Word.

why, yes I am

2006-01-27T18:34:00.001-08:00

still alive. Thanks for asking. It's been a rough couple, though.

I was doing OK and not feeling the burnout much, especially considering that I've been working straight through since August, and I was handling all the X-factors pretty well up to and including last week's theft of wallet/keys/checkbook, thankfully not by my students, but rather by identified students who we cannot OT or even suspend. Then I took Friday morning off to go get a new ID from the DMV - my last one having been obtained just this past October, mind - and I got the world's shittiest sub and my kids went ape. I got there and my first two periods had done no work, despite the assignment being on the board, and in third period the sub hadn't read the note on my desk asking me to pass out the work contained in a folder directly underneath said sub note, but instead had turned the note over and written "Ain't yall foolish" upwards of a dozen times all across the back, presumably while my students climbed up on top of the furniture to tape my desk numbers to the clock, the posters, other students' work, etc. It was more the kids than the sub that pushed me over; it was their taking advantage of my shitty situation to act like complete morons. That was six days ago and I've more or less been a ghost in the classroom ever since.

That isn't to say I've been sitting in the back letting things go to shit. It's been ups and downs, really, but I am now consciously counting down the days until the break. Yesterday was a good day; my next-door neighbor/ally and Rachel, my upstairs neighbor/road dog were both out, and the kids went berzerk, and for the first time I felt competent enough to run my class well, keep an eye on next door, create work for Rachel's class, and convince her sub not to leave after dealing with first and second period - my little angels from last semester. Sixth period I had a sublime moment, in which I was actually the teacher I wanted to be, which rarely if ever happens. My school holds soccer games during 5th and 6th, which means the players miss a lot of class and everyone else ditches to go out to the field. About a week ago some of my students, whom I have for both periods, ditched during passing period and went out to the game; their next day's lesson on vivid adjectives included rewriting sentences like "I was surprised at how empty my class was yesterday" and "I was upset when I saw how many students ditched." We learn a new non-High Point word every day; that day it was "livid." Anyway, yesterday we were wrapping up a writing project and my kids were being so great that I decided we'd go to the game for the end of the day, but before I could announce this, two of my boys ditched and went by themselves.

Here comes the sublime part. I took the class out to the bleachers, then searched until I found my two charming boys sitting with a bunch of their too-cool friends. I walked up, sat right down in the middle of them, and said, "Hey, guys. I'm going to give you today's new word: irony." My boys were petrified, but the too-cool friends were rapt. "What does that mean, miss?" "Well, irony is kind of when the opposite of what you'd expect happens, and it's usually kind of funny. The best way to learn it is by seeing it. For example: How ironic that these two young men decided to ditch my class today - on the very day I took the class out to see the game anyway." My boys are squirming at this point, and there is a long silence and a lot of averted eyes. I can't help it and I break out into a smile, and then their friends put it all together and they just about die laughing. "She's your teacher? She brought the class anyway?!?" And then we all have a huge, big laugh at their expense and I give everyone some pointers for identifying irony on the upcoming PSAT and CAHSEE. Then my boys swear that they will be my model students forever until they die, and we shake on it, and we watch the rest of the game together. The sun is shining, and there's a light breeze. It is glorious.

Today was more of a "down" day, or at least an all-around day. I was feeling fine until lunch because my senior class has been turned into a writing seminar and for the first time ever it's really functioning and the kids are working dilligently, which tells me they see some value in what we're doing. Then at the end of the day, Rachel sent down my old problem child because he couldn't hang in her class, and he got up to his old tricks, which revolve around figuring out very quickly what will bother or distract you and then doing it with increasing urgency until you physically want to punch him in the face. He feeds off this energy and only gets worse from that point, gleefully bounding around the room throwing things into other students' faces and more or less demanding that you punish him. We think he is seriously emotionally disturbed. Eventually we had to phone the deans to come get him, and not 5 minutes after they had left, two other boys in Rachel's class got into a full-on fistfight. She is like "What must the deans think of me?" and then we are both like "Why is happy hour only on Fridays?"

This would all be much easier to deal with were my courses not conspiring to bury me up to my neck in work and leave me for dead; I've got an assignment to do by day's end tomorrow that is simply not happening, and another by Saturday morning that's even further from coming into existence. I'm just too exhausted to teach classes and take classes at 100%; it's almost unfortunate that my classes are so good this semester. One is my second term of English methods, and the other is "Social Foundations," more or less my course on radical activism and why if you're not getting written up, you're doing something wrong. It's good to be reminded of this; it's easy to sign on as a social justice educator and then forget everything at the end of the day that isn't keeping your students a) in class and b) from punching each other in the face.

good/bad/ugly

2006-01-16T13:46:00.000-08:00

Good:

Yes, we are getting married. I was going to find some better way to bring it up, but I wrote my last post at the mental equivalent of 4 am and basically just didn't notice what I was saying. Anyway, don't plan on going anywhere in spring of '07.

Additionally, we have added a member to our family. Major Major is nine months old, and he is a bundle of love and playfulness. He gets so much attention from us it is kind of obscene. He still does not think it is enough. Here he is on his chair, in a rare moment of observed sleep, atop his blanket, hand-crocheted by my mother.

In-between:

I am getting observed next week by my Program person, and I'm really kind of stressed about it. Observations are always okay, but the anticipation of being observed always reminds me of everything that is going wrong, or not going at all, in my classroom. My senior class, in particular, is kind of a mess and requires a serious paradigm shift. We are down to about 10 students and the vibe is just really weird. They're kind of hating me right now, and I'm not really happy with (most of) them either.

Good:

My morning class is effing phenomenal. I cannot physically give them enough work; no matter how much I give, how many new concepts I introduce, they finish with about 20 minutes to spare before the bell. On top of that, they do it well - my brilliant kids help out my slower kids and my "trouble" kids, they love reading aloud, and on their last test, we had a class average of 86 percent. No one failed. This is the first time ever I have had a class meet our class goal. I about keeled over. They, on the other hand, were nonplussed, and just wanted to get on with their work.

In-between:

My afternoon class has yet to hit its stride.

Bad bad all kinds of bad:

My small learning community is definitely getting disbanded. The name will stay on the books - huzzah - but the teachers, students, classes, focus, and mission statement will all change. Yahoo. The plan as it currently stands: ESL, currently housed entirely on B-track, is getting moved onto all 3 tracks. As of July, our waiver students (those who take all their classes in Spanish) will move to A-track. They will remain there for one year of "intensive, accelerated" ESL, after which they will be forced to move either to B or C track, where upper-level ESL classes will be housed.

Problems with this scenario: It forces our primary-language teachers to change tracks. If they do not want to do so (as many do not,) they will remain on B track teaching in English, while the empty positions will be filled by long-term subs who will likely not teach at all, let alone in Spanish. It forces ESL teachers to make a choice between low-level (like my amazing morning kids) or high-level (like last semester's amazing afternoon kids), which no one really wants to do. It forces students to constantly change tracks, leaving their familiar teachers and friends several times during their high school careers. It destroys our single greatest resource - the mutual support system we have created as teachers. Worst of all, it is completely unrealistic. The idea is that students will get through their primary-language phase in one calendar year, by attending school year-round with no vacations, and taking "accelarated" four-hour-long ESL classes during intersessions. But Admin and The Org are ignoring a few key pieces of information, for instance:
-The primary-language phase, as it stands now, takes two calendar years, assuming each class is taken only once.
-Students more often than not must repeat one or more of the low-level ESL classes during this time. It is not uncommon to take the same level three times - one and a half calendar years for just one of the four classes.
-We already offer intersession ESL classes. They are intended to boost students' skills for the next level, as no one in their right mind believes two months is long enough for a whole level.
-Students cannot, and should not, be expected to absorb four hours' worth of language per day.
-Students cannot, and should not, be required to attend school year-round simply because of their native language.

The absolute bitch of the situation is that I am not really telling you about it right now. In fact, I don't even know about it myself. You see, discussing it would constitute "spreading propaganda." Those with information about the current plan have been expressly instructed not to spread such propoganda - not to students, not to parents, and certainly not to the teachers who will be affected by the changes. So like I say. You didn't hear it from me.

new year, new surprises

2006-01-09T22:15:00.000-08:00

For instance, thinking you're going to be continuing on to the next level of ESL with your passing students, only to find out, on the last day before your weeklong break, that you will instead be returning to re-teach the same levels, with entirely new students, except possibly for a few who failed your class not two weeks earlier.

As you can imagine, I was pretty pissed off about this, especially since Rachel (my co-worker/fellow Programmer/partner-in-crime) just happened to notice it on my change of room form (NB: I am supposed to change rooms every four months, and have been in this one for just two), as I was never officially notified. Had she not chanced to double-check, I would have shown up to work on the 2nd expecting my familiar students and ESL 2B and 4. I was so pissed off, I just sat on my desk and knit all day instead of updating the ESL portfolios.

In retrospect I was probably already predisposed to avoid working, as I do not generally bring my knitting to work.

Anyway, last semester, as you may recall, I had the Devil Class sprung from hell, who lit things on fire and had farting contests and refused to act like human beings, ever, and also the Angel Class, who asked why we could not read more books or work faster, and when finished, read to each other, in English and Spanish, from Cien Sonetos de Amor. This semester I have two classes of fully functional, sometimes lazy, always hilarious human beings. It is a revelation.

Rachel inherited The Spawn, but mixed with her mellow kids and faced with her newness and warm, nurturing teaching style, they are actually doing better. We have pretty much established that she is a Mothering Teacher, whereas I am a Hip Teacher, and different kids respond to us differently. Rockers and tough guys, especially, seem to like me, as well as girls in general, though not the ones with attitude problems; younger kids like Rachel a lot, especially the "young for their age" ones, and also girls in general. I think it is pretty funny that I grew up to be a Hip Teacher, as they're more or less the ones that got me through school relatively undamaged.

In case you were wondering, I did not give up my room.

******************************************
This semester, I must say, is off to the right kind of start. I've already given one assessment per ESL class, in addition to one spoken assessment apiece - equivalent to 50% of the speaking assessments I managed all last semester. I realized that my "pacing problems" were, by and large, behavioral problems which dragged us ever-further behind schedule. I am running a much tighter ship this time around, in terms of curriculum, preparation, grading, attendance, homework (I am actually giving it!) and behavior, from talking out of turn to gum-chewing, and it had just better not get any more serious than that. I am smiling a lot more too, and praising more. This whole thing is very disorienting for my seniors (11, down from a class of 13), for whom it must seem like I've been body-snatched or something. They got shamed something fierce today, for begging and begging and begging for me to extend the deadline on a project they've had three solid weeks for, two even without counting vacation, and then using the half-hour of classtime I gave them to work to drink soda and chew gum and talk shit about other people right in front of me, none of which is even remotely allowed in my classroom. It was actually kind of liberating to get pissed off at them, as I've been letting a lot of things slide that I shouldn't. We are moving to a seating chart, and they will be pissed.

******************************************

Exchanges:

Student: Miss, was that your fiance [helping you carry in boxes] this morning?
Ms. L: It certainly was.
Student: Oh. He looked like a nerd.
Ms. L: (amused) A nerd?
Student: Oh, I mean a schoolboy.

Student: Miss, how you gonna make us work on the first day back?
Ms. L: Like this. Now get to work.
Student: Oh, you got jokes this year.

******************************************

You might be a teacher if...

You asked for a printer for Christmas (both me and Rachel)
Upon receiving a $200 gift card to Staples in order to buy said printer, you immediately spent the entire amount on supplies (Rachel)
Upon receiving your paycheck, you headed immediately for Staples (me)
Upon purchase of printer, you made excited "birth announcement"-style phone calls to discuss your new printing situation (both me and Rachel)

the teacher-administrator relationship

2005-12-20T17:08:00.000-08:00

...sucks.

In fact, it can be summed up in just three key points.

1. Drama.
Grades were due Friday. Finals ended yesterday. You do the math. So, many teachers, myself included, were a bit late with their grades. I turned mine in midway through this very morning, as a matter of fact, and as of this afternoon seventy-four of our 220-odd teachers had not completed the grading/verifying process. How odd, then, that my cohort-friend Anne, while turning in her grades first thing Monday morning, was verbally reprimanded by one of our numerous APs, and rather rudely reminded that now she was going to have to verify everything "by hand," as though anyone has ever given the first-years copies of District grading software. In fact we all found out about it, like most things, from veteran teachers. Anyway, Anne is middle-aged and has been a sailor and a limo driver and a theater director and she is not about to take unwarranted shit from anybody, so she rather acidically thanked her AP for the pat on the back. This morning Anne found a page-long, single-spaced memo waiting for her in her box, reminding her that grading - which, as you may remember, she had already finished - was her professional responsibility, and that oh, by the way, the AP would be conducting her instructional evaluations next month, just as soon as we got back from the break.

2. Drama.
Attentive readers and web-untanglers will recall that my school, for being in its sixth recorded year of steady decline, was about to be taken over by the state under No Child, but negotiated a deal in which we split into Campus North and Campus South, expertly helmed by Principals North and South, and allowed an outside organization (henceforth The Org) to come in, hire away our admin (my AP = no instructional evals for me!) and make "reccomendations" to us, which we are "under no obligation" to follow, all funded by the nonprofit arm of a certain unnamed tech gajillionaire. Read as: we are getting restructured.

The Org, you may also recall, has great success in places like Missouri and Texas - places whose English Language Learner populations are largely migrant, whose idea of a "large campus" is less than half the size of ours, which do not have year-round schools, which are not restrained by California's "A-G" college prep requirements, and which otherwise bear little or no resemblance to our school. To paraphrase Grandpa Simpson, it will be a cold day in hell before we recognize Missour-ah as our model. Especially considering The Org's latest, strongest reccomendation: that CALA - my beloved, supportive, successful small learning community- be disbanded as soon as it is feasible. English learners are to spend one year segregated into an English-intensive "Newcomer School," at which point they are to be mainstreamed. ESL and primary-language subject teachers will be divided between at least two tracks, if not all three.

The Org's problem is that having ESL students all on one track violates their civil rights - which, unfortunately, is true. Even more unfortunately, all alternatives to our current situation, apart from tripling our ESL/primary language faculty (RDRR), violate their civil rights while decreasing the quality of their instuction as an added bonus. For example: we are one of the few schools in the area - in fact, the only one I am aware of - that has enough bilingual teachers to provide Spanish-language instruction to its lowest-level ESL students across subjects: history, science, math, even health. If we split up CALA, that will no longer be the case, and students with the most basic levels of proficiency will be taking, say, chemisty in English. As for ESL classes, without all our students in one learning community, we won't have enough students of any level at any given time to fill single-level classes, meaning a move to the dreaded split roster. This is something like the old schoolhouse style of teaching, wherein students of all different levels all sit in one room together with only one teacher. I could, quite plausibly, have a class with five students who are two months away from mainstream English classes, essay-writing, etc, five students who cannot ask where the bathroom is or when we get out of class, and twenty-five students somewhere in between.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Admin is siding with The Org on this one. Not outright, of course, but they keep talking to us about "being open-minded" and assuring us that they're "really trying to understand how the ESL program works." Then they come to our meetings and insist that it's really for the best, and make it sound like we're being openly defiant - which at this point, I guess we are. We're rabble-rousing, stirring up support across all the other SLCs, and getting a huge percentage of SLC design meetings to come to consensus that CALA should stay. This was possible for a variety of reasons, in part because nothing unites teachers like a common enemy, but perhaps more truthfully because of our de facto slogan: CALA. We teach English Language Learners...so you don't have to.

3. And more drama.
A brief history of the English department's war with administration: The District requires 9th and 10th grade English teachers to give "periodic assessments" - read as, yet more standardized tests. Our department (rightly) decided that we couldn't waste the time and more or less refused, unless there was something in it for us: the return of our computer lab, appropriated by Campus South. As not administering the assessments would jeopardize our compliance and thereby jeopardize our funding, this was agreed upon - until the assessments were administered, at which point a closed-door meeting was held, sans English department representation, deciding that we would not get our lab. We, in turn, withheld the assessments. It is now basically a balls-out war between our head of department and The Principals, growing increasingly more abstracted and petty. How petty, you ask?

School let out today at 2:11. We're supposed to work until 3:24 anyway, the pupil-free time being built in for department meetings. The English department decided to have its meeting/social at a restaurant off-campus. Ordinarily this is fine; CALA did it yesterday. But if CALA is in the doghouse, the English department is in exile, and thus any enjoyment and/or freedom on its part is to be thwarted, priority one. So admin got wind of this off-campus meeting and took decisive action, scheduling a whole-campus meeting at 3pm solely to ensure that the English department could not leave. The English department sent around a memo stating that since we did not have 24 hours' notice, we were not contractually obligated to attend, and that our head of department would in fact buy drinks for the first person or persons to arrive. Apparently Admin got wind of that too, because a second memo was sent around stating that there had been a "mistake" and that the department meeting had in fact always been scheduled for 3:50! How silly of them!

So the whole campus goes to this 3pm meeting, and do you know what it is? It is a "working meeting" with "no set agenda" that lasts ten minutes, during which time they wish us all a happy holiday and remind us that our grade verifications were due this morning. We have been held, according to Principal South, "for [our] convenience."

It really was quite convenient, in the sense that all 220-odd of us could sit in the same room and bask in the warm glow of our collective hatred. Usually, the dual-campus split precludes such things.

words and pictures

2005-12-19T21:43:00.000-08:00

My favorite student got OT'd for jumping another student. I saw the aftermath, him slammed facefirst against a brick wall, the look in his eyes. I do not think he did it.

My thorn-in-the-side student got OT'd for his personal safety. He was jumped three times, the first of which resulting in a huge black eye and five stitches. I would feel bad for him if I did not know that he did something to warrant (if not deserve) this, and if I did not believe that he will learn nothing from the experience.

Grades were due Friday. I will probably get them in tomorrow morning.

I baked bread yesterday. Lots of bread. I have so many new systems to implement and lessons to try out next semester...but right now, bread is about my speed. I am so done with students.

Thursday and Friday were finals, so we had full-length days but with four classes per, two of them doubled up, resulting in my having some students for 3 hours per day. Today was finals too, but it was a half-day, so we got out at 12:35. Tomorrow and Wednesday are "regular instruction" days, meaning six periods of post-finals class which students know do not count towards their grades, but they are short days - not our regular 1:53-release professional development short days, but rather, 2:11-release. Thursday, the last day of school, is a completely normal day, releasing at 3:24. When we come back on the third, it is a reverse professional development Tuesday, meaning that we get out at 3:24, but that we sit in a meeting for the first hour-odd of the day, until the students arrive at 8:48. They are really excited about that. I would be too.

I am not even remotely in the holiday spirit. Wonder why.

Please to be enjoying these examples of the odd, mundane, and deformed which have lately caught my eye.

Bow down! Bow down! Before the power of marshmallow Santa! Or be crushed! Be crushed! By....his jolly boots of doom!*

It's officially intentional...the display was switched this week from McCormick to Von's brand pepper. I am still purchasing pepper from the spice aisle. It seems less salmonella-y.

I apologize for the glare and the shadows and the bad angle. It's really difficult to photograph, but this is my favorite sign in South LA. So many messages going on!

At least one person in this town is awesome.

Blurry, yes. And yet...that about sums it up.

*five points for the reference.

sick, cranky

2005-12-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

I am home sick today - I feel pretty OK but am periodically coughing my lungs out, and my voice is definitely not at full strength. All my work is at school, so there's not much I can do; I slept until almost 11, dorked around on Craftser for awhile, and am thinking of knitting something or deconstructing my ugly, oversized Program t-shirt and making something wearable. What I have mostly been doing is enjoying one of the many side effects of Los Angeles living: the 37 phone calls we receive, per day, for someone named Paris Barclay. They're usually from Unknown Caller but one was from the Director's Guild - go figure - so I do a little investigating and it turns out that this is in fact the Paris Barclay, the famed guest director of a million and one TV episodes and that cinematic classic, Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood. I, for one, have always preferred the early work of the Wayanses.

I think only The Moms have the house number, and they know we're not generally home during the day, so any and all calls we get are for Paris. I was really mean to the last one, and she sounded kind of shocked, but whatever. I wish we had an answering machine, so I could record a nice hostile message and save my voice from any furthur terse exchanges. Something along the lines of,

"Hi, you have not reached the home or office of Paris Barclay. If Paris Barclay is successful enough to have a secretary, and you are fortunate enough to be in contact with said secretary, please call her at once and instruct her that this is not, nor will it ever be, the number at which Mr. Barclay can be reached. If she is in posession of and has been distributing the correct number, please instruct her that her job responsibilities have just increased, as Mr. Barclay is not to be trusted to give out his own contact information and must be monitored at all times. Congratulations on your fine connections to Hollywood's brightest stars."

Or maybe I will just start taking messages for him.

Getting the hell out of LA: T-minus 30 months and counting.

sick again, jiggity jig

2005-12-11T00:40:00.000-08:00

Yay yay yay. I am not sure if it was my students, or some other students via another teacher, or what. But today, after spending the entire morning at work, I came home and took a nap only to wake up literally drowning in my own nasal drip. Awesome. So, apologies for any disjointedness of post today.

Wish I could tell you something good about my classroom. Final grades are not due until the sixteenth but my final ESL fail list was due on Friday due to how long it takes to reprogam the kids' schedules for the next semester - most classes are year-long, but ESL classes last one semester, two periods per day. So last week I mostly gave and graded assessments and writing projects and agonized over both my sweet, hardworking students who are not ready to move on, and my Damienesque students who are passing with flying colors. As of the new year I inherit other peoples' failing sweethearts and howling demons, mix them in with my passing ones, and start this whole thing over again. With better, clearer expectations this time, and some kind of paper-grading system that does not go "Collect it when I remember, put it in a pile, never look at it again." Also, with a fresh data collection sheet, a much better idea of the curriculum, and SigGains on the brain.

In my ongoing effort to read every book in my classroom library, I read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in its entirety today. It was much better than White Oleander - sapfests being more appropriate for adolescents than the middle-aged - and the kind of thing I might have really enjoyed when it was at my reading level. I am really looking forward to when Jarhead and Killing Pablo come back into the room so I can grab them for a change. My ESL students have been taking books off the shelf a lot lately, which is really awesome. When they are done with their work, I have a mixed group of girls and boys who sit and read Neruda aloud to each other. They always look at me guiltily, like I am going to make them stop. I only have one or two more books of English/Spanish side-by-side poetry, but I'm bringing them in as of Monday (or Tuesday, if my head does not clear up) and am officially keeping an eye out for more.

I had planned to knit all afternoon but with the fever, I would probably just have screwed it up.

Random photo time!

Behold the mighty cabinets o' grammar!

The day I wore these shoes, my low-level ESL students searched furiously for the right word to express their reaction. They came up with "clown."

I forgot to mention it, but Aaron was tragically crushed by the weight of our unwashed laundry.

I do not understand this town. Not even a little.

my week in one-liners

2005-12-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

My first and second period, on test day, after stonewalling my review attempts for two hours the previous day: But Miss! We need to study!

Me, after leaving my glasses in the library: I can't see. Why is that?

My kindest, gentlest student: Miss, what means the word "titties?" Because my friend, he say you have big titties.

Me, on my students: I swear to God, I'm going to throw them all out the window...which is probably OK, seeing as we're on the first floor.

My rocker kids, on being told that failure to turn in a writing project will result in their failing the class: What happened to cool Miss L?

My fifth and sixth period, when asked what the president's goals are: Send us back to Mexico!

A student with a 38% test average, just before putting put his name on an A student's essay and turning it in as his own: I do all the work and you give me F!

One of my shrewdest and most thoughtful seniors, being asked if facing racism makes you grow up faster: No, it just makes you want to punch everyone in the face.

self-sabotage

2005-11-20T19:55:00.000-08:00

The only thing worse than having your students fail because they are either a) not getting it or b) not paying attention (and they usually, if not always, get it when they are paying attention) is having to fail students who can do the work because they are cheating off each others' papers. I have not been hard enough on this, but that changes now, especially since I have talked to one of these kids about it before. I wish I could say it just makes me sad - and that's what I'm going to tell them - but in all honesty, it pisses me off. I know they're insecure and they're scared because they're all on the pass/fail border, but you'd think that would make them more inclined to do their own work, not less. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with them? Do they think I won't notice that they are all writing the exact same misspelled sentences in the free response section? It drives me crazy, because I already know that they will look me straight in the eye and tell me they absolutely did not cheat. Then they will explode in rage at the merest suggestion that I might take off any points. Boy, will they be surprised when I tear up their papers and they get a zero for the assignment.

That is my grading pen, right there. Woot.

drink first, then grade

2005-11-20T11:03:00.000-08:00

So, the 100 was actually pretty cool, especially once my PD showed up, informed me that they had $1000 to spend on liquor, and insisted that I stop paying for drinks. Now. I told him I was so done, I would chuck my high-ball glass onto the dance floor and never look back. He mixed me a much-less-watered-down drink, My People started showing up, and things got markedly better all-around. We even had a Small World moment, discovering that Aaron went to elementary school with one of my good Program friends' roommates, who I have never really gotten to know. Also, I am getting better at walking/dancing in heels. The pathetic thing is that I don't wear anything taller than a kitten heel - maybe 3/4 of an inch at the tallest. Heels mess up your feet, though, for real. I try to wear sneakers in the classroom about 3 days a week, and flats the other 2.

This morning I slept in good and late, knowing I'd need all my strength for the Test-Grading Day I have planned. Grading days can be really depressing. They can also be really freeing, though. Today, for example, I am going to rid myself of about 10 pounds' worth of paper and the constant neck-and-shoulder-ache I get from carrying them around. The backache will be around until I quit the profession - or start sitting at my desk during the school day. Guess which of these things will happen first.

improvement / celebration

2005-11-19T20:32:00.000-08:00

Things were better this week. My students are starting to mellow out, and the big problems are gone, leaving me with the dreaded and continual talking while I am talking problem. I met with my PD and came up with a kickass action plan, and a couple of other teachers in my SLC came over to my room with a plan all drawn up to nip it in the bud: since next week is only 3 days, they're each taking two of my biggest troublemakers, first thing in the morning, no questions asked. I'll give them a book and an agenda for the day and then they'll go sit in these well-behaved classrooms, isolated from their friends, facing the wall, and they will do their work silently. If this happens, they will be allowed to come back to my classroom after Thanksgiving. If it does not, they will continue to work in Solitary.

It sounds cruel but it will absolutely work.

This leaves me free to deal with my other, more serious problems: my English class lacks any kind of momentum or urgency, and my Advanced ESL class is still failing their reading comprehension. I'm feeling a tremendous sense of relief - these are the problems I was hired to deal with, not a bunch of post-middle schoolers who refuse to spit out their gum and put the goddamn nano away.

As I type I'm getting ready to go out on Program bid-ness. The LA 100 is a Program tradition, maybe even the Program tradition in my region. After 100 days in the classroom, we all get together and go out for a night of drinking, dancing, and cavorting at some super-trendy nightclub. I'm actually not that into it, but some of my favorite Program people, including my PD, my best Institute friend, and my best credentialing class friends will be there, and there's no cover, and I made a deal with my friend Hess that if we go, and it sucks, we leave immediately after the free champagne and seek out a dive bar. I'd kinda rather just do that to begin with, but I guess that's why I wasn't asked to organize the 100.

watchword: purposeful

2005-11-14T21:56:00.000-08:00

So I went all Program-nuts after last week's observation made me realize that I am just sort of going through my scripted program for the sake of going through the scripted program. This is death in the classroom. If I do not have a clear purpose for being there, why should my students?

I went in on my day off and tracked out all my objectives and made calls to have people come into my classroom to support me and made a behavior log, all of which is very exciting and has already changed my approach, if not the whole mood of my classroom. I also had my head of department make phone calls home. Until now I had doubted the power of the phone call home, but Oh. Man. You should have seen them this morning, slinking in like dogs with their tails between their legs. They just sort of sat there, sullen, for the first hour of class, doing the work and occasionally shooting me a death glare. It was awesome. Then they got over it, and things were back to semi-chaos. But a little better.

Had a very serious conversation with The Firestarter today in which it was made expressly clear that if I so much as heard the flick of a lighter, his ass was OT'd down to Watts, no questions asked. Then I moved him front and center, away from his friends. We will see how that goes.

Lots of my kids are failing, which sucks. The good behavior class too, not the bad one, as the work is just a lot harder. (NOT my fault. Talk to the scripted program.) It does not help that anything below a 70% is a fail; most of these kids actually have what would traditionally be called a D. I swear, wherever we as a society set the bar, that's where they aim. Mostly, they are failing because of reading comprehension, as opposed to speaking, writing, or vocabulary. Very interesting - you would think you could pass that part of the test just by matching up the sentences on your exam with those in the book. It takes zero thought, right? But my kids lack test-taking skills. All of them, not just the ESL kids. It's really sad, just another example of how suburbanites are better prepared for success - no one's sending my students to SAT prep classes (though they are eligible for all kinds of free tutoring, which none of them are taking advantage of.) The scripted program is really good about building in practice for most other skills, but this is one area where I'm definitely going to have to supplement.

One of the Program Ten at my school quit her job on Thursday, and one of my best Program-Friends is talking about quitting. We all go through periods in which we're really despondent. At this point we've been in the classroom just long enough to get past the initial question - How do we get through to these kids? - and arrive at the real question - No, really - how the f*ck do we get through to these kids?

No word on how long you must remain in the classroom before arriving at an answer.

crashing back down

2005-11-08T20:53:00.000-08:00

Of course you knew it could not last.

Today...yes. Today was rough. They are re-promoted to Nightmare Class. One of them stole my glasses today, though at least they were not on my face at the time. He is kind of a klepto, can't seem to help himself from stealing things like pencil sharpeners and random papers off my desk - and I really think he needs to be evaluated by the SpEd people as he also can't sit still or keep quiet or look directly at any one thing for longer than about 90 seconds. Today I also busted him spitting out his gum - which is forbidden in my class for exactly this reason - directly onto my floor. What has happened in these kids' lives for them to have so little respect for their environment? You just have to walk around the neighborhood to answer that one, I guess. There is this shopping cart full of bizarre garbage - abandoned by a homeless person, perhaps, though South Central seems not to have homeless people in the street-dwelling sense - lying turned on its side about a block from my school. It has been there for almost two weeks, trash spilling out across the sidewalk, and no one is making any moves to dispose of it. The worst is that when someone runs over a pigeon or something, it takes a couple of days before someone from the city comes down to clean it up, or someone from the neighborhood gets worried enough about disease to risk doing it themself.

Tangent. Sorry. Anyhow, tomorrow: big changes. I had this whole list of ordered consequences before the break, and then things got crazy, and I kind of forgot about them. They are not even up on my walls. As a result, the kids get warned 3,000 times per day with zero follow-through. Just warnings and talks outside, which really work on the days when my instigators are absent (witness: yesterday) and are just a lot of fun for them on the other days (witness: today.) So tomorrow, the consequences are up and we follow them, in order, no exceptions. There are only five levels before they're referred to the dean, and as I have been warning some of them (shame) in excess of five times a day, I fully expect my class size to be reduced by about 30% by the end of the period. They won't go to the dean - not unless anything else gets stolen, a-hem, regardless of whether or not it is swiftly located and returned by my other, wonderful students - as I don't want to abuse that avenue and destroy the relationship for when one takes a swing at the next and I really do need it. But I know which teachers they are scared of, and I have already warned them that they will be having guests.

Hilarious: one of my students wrote on the papered-over chalkboard that serves as my information wall. It says "PUSSY FUCK." Ummm...yes. We do need to work on those rules of grammar.

Not hilarious: this class knows my first name and they use the hell out of it. Like if I am talking to one student and take too long (over 30 seconds) transferring my attention to another, they will start hollering. "HEY! HEY JASMINE!"

The first one to do this tomorrow goes straight out of my classroom. We have had the "respect" talk too many times. They know what the rule is. But that is not the same as abiding by it.

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I think I am so frustrated because today was such a complete waste of time. First and second were spent attempting, ineffectually, to corral the kids, third and fifth we had an assembly, and sixth was kind of a wash. We are learning note-taking and my kids are either not getting it or bored out of their minds with it. Really, it could be both. The assembly was a bizzare hodgepodge of ideas: free tutoring! global warming! dress code! job-appropriate attire! crystal meth makes your heart a-splode! Then some ex-gangbangers from San Diego talked to us about the conditional love of the streets and how prison is terrifying even if you think you are hard. Unsettling take-homes from the assembly:

Ex-G asks students how many plan to play pro ball, and enough to stock two full expansion teams - per assembly - raise their hands. Instead of "bein' real," as purported, Ex-G chastizes the other students for laughing at them, telling us that we must believe in ourselves above all else because "anything is possible." He himself just finished filming a new movie with Xzibit and The Rock.
Principal, himself a brownish black, consistently refers to students as "black and brown people."
Principal, in denouncing the gang lifestyle, asks, "Ladies, who do you want to marry? The guy who's running around getting shot up and probably going to prison or dead, or the guy who's going to make some good money, and provide for you and your babies?"

Ex-G does say one interesting thing, when he talks about his family on drugs and in prison and how hard life can be for a kid from the inner city, and he asks, "How many of you try to look good so others can't see the pain you're feeling inside?" No joke, 3/4 of the hands in that auditorium shot up without even a moment's hesitation. It was the only moment that felt real, not like some corporate-sponsored cautionary tale, which of course it was. I looked at all their faces then, and for just a second, they looked very old. I think it was the self-awareness, more than the pain.

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I ran into Ms. M today, the new teacher who took over my long-term sub position. She was stressed to the max and said she was starting to doubt that this school was the right place for her. I tried to encourage her, and I hope to God she doesn't quit. She is a good teacher and my kids - er, my ex-kids - have already been abandoned too many times. This stress and uncertainty, that feeling like all you do at work is punish yourself for eight straight hours, is one of those wounds that time will heal - for her, for me, for all new teachers. It's just a matter of hanging in there, and making sure you are learning while you do so. If you are paying attention, it is impossible not to learn every day.

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In other news, I am kind of (read as: desperately) wishing that friends will come down and visit me this fine Veterans Day weekend, but they are busy and this will almost assuredly not happen. So instead I may go to Homecoming, ha ha. It depends on if any other Program members or first-year teacher friends want to go with me. It could be kind of fun, and we have all these hours of "extra" stuff we have to do each month, like our jobs aren't friggin time-consuming enough. Anyway, my seniors ask me every single day if I am going, and some of them are up for royalty (gag), and my mentor says he wants to see me there too. So we will see. There are worse ways to spend a Friday night.

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In still other news, I voted today. If you live in Cali, and you did not vote, and 74 passes, I am coming for you. I will have lots of time to hunt you down and break your kneecaps once the Governator personally comes down here, fires me, and turns over control of my school to The State.

beautiful monday

2005-11-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

Today was a good day. I am cradling it in my hands.

First/second, previously my nightmare class, has been downgraded to my headache class. Last week we did the whole "practicing coming into the room, picking up our books, and sitting down like human beings" business, and we did the "if you are not here to learn, leave right now" act with the holding-open of the door, and we played the "for every minute we waste we will stay one minute at nutrition" game, and we did the we-are-not-amused thing, and all of this kind of helped but not really. Then several of them failed their first test because they were not doing their classwork and were therefore unprepared. The "staying after" bit probably bothered them more, though.

And then, somehow - and I do not know how this happened - I found myself sitting down at eye level with two of my biggest troublemakers, laughing. They gawked at how I hold a pencil, and they showed me how to bend just the top joint of your fingers, and then they lurched at me like zombies, and we were sitting there, just laughing, and I had this epiphany. I had not laughed with this class at all. Not even once. And then I got to thinking, wow. All of the things that make me a good first-year teacher, when I am one - patience, humor, personal connections, individual check-ins and explanations - were completely missing. I was doing the authori-tah dance, and leaving them responsible for monitoring their learning - the complete inverse of my ideal classroom, in which they self-police and I make sure they're getting the material. It was a slap in the face. So things changed.

Today we were about halfway through class when Omar, one of my zombie-lurchers, raised his hand (!!!) and said, "Miss, we better today!" He was right, and he was happier, and I was happier. So the new strategy is, no irritation on my face. Not ever. We count down 5-4-3-2-1 for silence - they respond well to it, and it's the only signal that doesn't completely make me gag. When we have a problem, the problem kids come and talk to me, and each other, outside. It goes like this:

A, explain what happened. B, you just listen.
Now B, you explain what happened. A, you just listen.
Okay. What should you have been doing?
If you were both doing that, would X have happened?
What are you going to do when you walk back into my classroom?
Now tomorrow, I expect you to be my star students. Best in the class. Can you commit to that?
I look forward to it. Come on back in.

It's funny, but the part that makes the biggest difference is the "star students" bit. They really do commit to it, and they come through. It is amazing, and it's all starting to gel.

I was also observed today, with my seniors, who are the coolest, mellowest class. We did this A.MA.ZING activity called Cube Writing (Amelie, hit me up for a copy - get your kids to write developed 2-page essays in-class! No joke!) to come up with a first draft for the autobiographical sketch required in their senior portfolios. The class is small, which can feel awkward because it's necessarily more seminar-style and my students are used to being lectured at, but today it was cool. We were joking and learning about each other and my review was outstanding, which was nice. But really it was all about the feeling when it all works.

Who knows how tomorrow will go. I'm tempted, though, to just type up a handout for my seniors, then head to bed and leave this day perfect. Worry about it in the morning.

******************************

Speaking of worrying in the morning:

Tomorrow is November 8th. To all my Cali people: Yes, it is supposed to rain tomorrow. I do not care. You get your asses out there in the rain and vote. Early and often, as they say. Influence as many people as you can. Be incredibly irritating to anyone not wearing an "I Voted" sticker. There is some mess on the ballot this time around, and we must send the message that we are tired of being jerked around by the government-industrial complex, and that we want Arnold, his cronies, and his financeers out of our schools, out of our unions, and out of our pregnant womens' wombs, minors or otherwise. With that said:

NO on 73 through 78.
YES on 79 and 80.
And a resounding YES, for my LA people, on Prop Y. Pay the taxes, build the schools, and burn year-round minority sabotage to the ground.

But if you only remember one thing:

NO ON 74

who you are < who you know

2005-10-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

I just had a kick-ass Day After my First Day Back. Day One wasn't bad, just kind of exhausting and underwhelming. Today was smooth sailing, and I'm excited to really get started over the next week or two.

The real reason I am so happy today, though, is that I got hooked up.

We are a Title 1 school, meaning that the government gives us money to "improve the academic achievement of the disadvantaged." We just lost one of our teachers - my mentor-man, in fact - to a new post as the Title 1 coordinator. My department is affiliated with the Bilingual program, which gets a bunch of money from lord knows who. I am a first-year teacher, thus entitled to first-year goodies, ranging from tissues to technology, funded by The District. There is a boatload of money in my school, and I have all of these "ins" to help me gain access to it. That being said - it is IM.FUCKING.POSSIBLE. to get a laptop.

The story is that all first-years are supposed to get a laptop when they are hired, for planning/grading/online poker-playing purposes. (That last part was a joke. Only the APs' secretaries are allowed to do that, and they must use clunky desktop machines for it.) Laptops were ordered way back in mid-summer, and at some point, for reasons that no one can really articulate, the money was frozen mid-order and now requires an administrator's all-clear to free it up again. We are supposed to just wait on that, as it should be happening any time now.

In case you have not been keeping track, it is almost November.

Anyway, you can't get a laptop. Don't even ask. Don't make me laugh. Yeah, sure, we can put you on a list. Yeah. You'll get one just as soooon as we get them in.

Unless, of course, your department head, an alum of both TFA and the B-Eng department, is the daughter of the tech guy.

Then when you walk up to his uber-wired little hidey-hole and he says, before you can even take a breath, "No laptops. None. So whoever told you there were, is lying," you can counter with "Oh...because Tiffany told me-"

At which point he produces not only a new lappy but an LCD projector as well, plus two nifty tech bags for the toting. No one has gotten an LCD projector yet. Couple this little duo with the printer I am keeping for an off-track Riley, and I am big pimpin' to the fullest.

the hour draws near

2005-10-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

B-track comes back on Thursday. As my PD James reminded me today, we are the last Program members in the entire country to enter our classrooms and get down to business. I find this a bit ironic, as despite being a paperwork-procrastinator, I prefer to get actions over with. I feel like I've been inching into the frigid waters of teaching, rather than jumping in full-body, as I would have preferred.

That being said, I can kind of see where the inchers are coming from. I told James today, I'm about as comfortable as I can get on campus and in front of the class - any class - which is really a huge part of the early battle, and frees me up for the war.

I was on campus Friday for a meeting with the other Program girl with almost my exact position (except that she got soph English while I have seniors - ha ha!- and, her sub actually did his job - awwwdang) and the ESL coordinator, which was very productive. I was also there yesterday for a "buy-back" (optional but paid) day, which was somewhat less productive but quite informative. Our school has some huge grant from a known philanthropic organization (*coughgatesfoundationcough*) and it has recently come to the attention of the folks Up Above that we are not, so much, on track to improvement despite being handed wads of cash. So, this organization has been brought in to restructure the school in a way that will magically help our scores improve and our students become well-rounded, articulate, and college-bound. This will happen through switching to a block schedule, halving the size of our small learning communities (how? hiring more teachers? serving Soylent Green? or, as I rather suspect, waiting for another school to be built and then patting ourselves on the back for our accomplishment?), and giving every teacher, administrator, and "other qualified staff member" a caseload of 15 students to work with through their four years - creating their schedules, ensuring they are on-track, getting to know their families, and generally insinuating themselves into students' lives. This is going to be either a bloody war, or a complete nonevent, because no one will do it. We have huge culture problems at my school - the students don't want us "up in their business," and neither do many of the teachers think this is their job.

Anyway, I am waiting for them to truck in the fairy dust. Not because I don't think these things could help our school, but because I think people are going to resist the changes with all the strength in their bodies, and that the organization is getting in over its head. Homeboy making his presentation was talking about another "quite large school" they work with in Kansas City, which has 2200 students. My eyebrows went about through the roof - we have that many on B-track alone. We also have a tremendous amount of "teacher mobility" (read as: packing bags, never coming back) and statistics that make your blood run cold.

For instance:
77% discrepancy between sizes of freshman and senior classes (highly suggestive of dropout rate)
67% of students reading below 25th percentile, thus having a 50% likelihood of graduation
8% of students reading above the 65th percentile, thus having a 95% likelihood of graduation.

The Org brought these statistics to us, so it's not like they're unaware, but I did note that they seemed more severe than those of other schools they had serve. I also noted that the schools featured in their little videos had things like, oh, classroom supplies, equipment...

Anyway I am hanging out at home today writing student letters, making handouts, and planning my first week, or at least my first two days, back in the classroom. The first couple of days are rules/procedures days, and I also have to explain what it is we're going to be doing for the rest of the semester/year. I fully expect riots, as my seniors are being told that we'll have an in-class book in addition to an outside reading book, and that they will have homework, in the form of reading, every single night. These are the students who told me they did not read any books in English last year.

My ESL students are being told that they have to do half a semester's work over six weeks with a test about every two days, that their grades up until this point do not count for anything - the scripted program requires that at least 75% of grades be based on tests and assessments - and that they will need to work harder than they have ever worked in their lives in order to pass. In all likelihood they will not, which is in no way their fault, nor is it mine. My sub, in thinking that the important thing was his teaching of the first half of the class rather than assessing student learning, probably prevented students from learning the skills they need to pass the second half of the class. If they do not learn the second part of the class, they can't go on, as they would only fail the higher class. I am expecting about a 75% failure rate. I am not basing this on anything except my desire not to be floored by whatever it ends up being.

This is going to eff up my Significant Gains something fierce, but that is not the bad part. I just feel sick to my stomach when I think that a whole semester will have been wasted for these kids. ESL classes are like remedial college courses - they don't count for credit, and must be mastered before you can do well in your other classes. They've just been set back another four months. The anger is so strong that it's not even sustainable; it's like a blinding white flash every time I sit and think about it, and then I'm just exhausted.

This post feels really sort of sprawling and incoherent. I have been working on handouts for like seven hours; this is perhaps to be expected.

curiouser and curiouser

2005-10-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

To refine my theory:

Teaching: A job.
Special Ed teaching: A different job.
Subbing: Still another job.
Subbing Special Ed: A freaking nightmare.

I subbed a Special Ed math class yesterday composed of about 20 students (HUGE for SpEd), 17 of them boys, about 12 probably classified as "behavior disabilities," with no lesson plan and nothing in the room for them to do - no worksheets, no mini-activities, not even a TV. So they entertained themselves. You might think you can imagine how they did so. But you would be wrong.

Picture this:

Students chasing each other around the room at a flat run
Students standing/jumping on top of desks
Students shouting obscenities and racial slurs
Students pushing/slapping/punching each other
Students standing waay too close to me, asking me waay-too-personal questions, and touching me on the arm and back whenever feasible
Students "chirping" each other on their phones (curse you, Boost mobile!)
Students stealing dry erase markers from the teacher's desk, taking out the cores, and using them to tag
Students stealing paper clips and tacks from the teacher's desk and hurling them, along with the marker husks, across the room at each others' heads
Students sitting in the room's two rolling chairs and pushing each other, very fast, into the walls, or, alternatively, into each other, sumo-style
Students sneaking out of the room, then pounding violently on the doors and windows

All at the same time.

My favorite moment came when the most out-of-control of the bunch, with the biggest-ever glob of snot leaking out of his nose, rather than go get a tissue, started dancing "gettin' low"-style around the room singing his own version of the crazy-offensive "Whisper Song," changing the lyrics to "Wait til you see my snot, b****! Wait til you see my snot!"

To make matters worse, this was the day's long period, which is a combination second period and homeroom. On top of this, the 10th grade classes were all taking the PSAT, so we had a special extended period. Of course so one bothered to announce this, so I also had to try to quell a mutiny when the bell did not ring for an additional thirty minutes.

I kept thinking, This cannot seriously be happening. This is the kind of thing right-wing suburban cartoonists draw to show how insane and fundamentally useless teaching in the inner city is. I seriously considered walking up to the front office and telling the scheduling ladies, who tell me every day how they abuse me by sending me period-to-period where no one else wants to go, that this was it, my limit, and that if they did not find me another class, I was going home and would be back when my track came on. I could not bring myself to do it, though, and it turned out OK - the teacher's other four periods each had a maximum of five very calm students. We are masters of scheduling at my school, we are.

So today I thought things could not get weirder or more stressful, until oh, about 6:25 am, at which point I snapped awake on a no-longer-moving bus only to be unloaded on the street, where four cars' worth of police were waiting to arrest a schizophrenic-sounding young man who had been unnerving the other passengers with his shouted obsecenities (in two languages, no less) and frantic head-pounding. As the police (all eight of them) attempted to subdue and cuff him, for what crime I could not tell you, he kept shouting, "They're terrorists! They're here to kill me!"

I was so sleep-deprived and hazy, all I could think about was that people were going to rush the bus and take my good seat once we got the all-clear to get back on board.

I decided my day needed resetting and stopped on the way to school to buy myself a donut. It seemed to help.

schooly stuff

2005-10-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

I finally lost my long-term students this week. About 50% of them (not an exaggeration) have tracked me down in the hallways or other classes to tell me how much they miss me and want me back. This says more about their fear of change than about me as a teacher, as they spent their first two weeks with me telling me how much they wanted their old sub back and how living with me was like living in a living nightmare. The new (permanent) teacher established herself as “mean” on the first day by understandably kicking a few students out of rambunctious, work-loathing, hormonal, profane, attention-craving sixth period. I miss them already. I have such a bias toward the group I call the “Clever Derailers” – I am consciously working on balancing it out. I have been day-to-day this week, I take a week off to get my shit together, and then I get my Real Kids back and must attempt to win them back over after being The Most Boring Teacher Ever when last we met.

**********************

Weird thing about teaching in an entirely black/Hispanic school: I subbed a class this week wherein three girls had my first name. I swear my students are going to bust me one of these days, because I look up every time I hear it – it’s not something I’ve had to get used to sharing.

You might think it is weird how fiercely I protect my first name (and age, and number of years teaching,) but know this: my long-term students go home after school every day and search for me on Myspace. I think this means I need to give more homework – not that they do what they’ve been assigned already. Regardless, if they figure out my first name, the jig is most definitely up.

*********************

I don’t know if you have discovered Google Earth yet, but if you haven’t, do it – do it now. It allows you to zoom into any location from space via nifty satellite imagery, and it is the coolest Google Toy yet. It also provides the only activity more popular with my students than looking at rare and collectible sneaker auctions: pinpointing the locations of recent drive-bys and the exact 7-11s at which this or that fool got shot. Whenever I catch them doing this, I make them look at different college campuses.

It is getting harder and harder to avoid the “ghetto mentality” post.

*********************

I subbed cosmetology for the first time the other day. I don't know which is creepier: the severed heads, or the worksheets about hair pigmentation headed with inspirational, life-affirming quotations.

*********************

Spot the errors!

From yesterday’s Daily Staff Bulletin:

There was many staff that came out on Saturday, October 8, 2005 to give a helping hand to the many projects that were scheduled by the Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa’s Office, that took place around the school and the neighboring community.

guess who unpacked her camera cables

2005-10-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

So - to catch up.

The Deleted Post was for the most part about this really bizzarre week I had - it got crazy hot and muggy and the air was gritty with smoke from the Chatsworth fires, and true to the ancient teaching wisdom holding that changes in weather make students something something, my kids went completely wacko. I caught my first tagger, helped break up my first fight, busted my sixth period for dropping random items (pens, wads of paper, a bag of chips) through a hole in the floor onto the class below us, subbed a class in which the TA started a fight with a SpEd student which escalated until three representatives from the dean's office were present, and kept narrowly avoiding being run over by a group of my students, athletes all, stealing each others' shoes and tearing around campus (up three flights of stairs, back down again, outside and around the bungalows, over the fountain, etc...) at speeds unsafe for street driving in order to prevent the shoes' return.

FYI - my school is really pretty...as long as you remain outdoors.

Then we drove up to the bay to pack up the last of our worldly possessions, hit up IKEA, eat some good food, and see Aaron's family (including his grandmother, whom I had never met, and his very-pregnant sister, whose baby shower we also attended.) So of course we both got incredibly sick with this thing that my kids all have - they are worse than kindergarteners, I swear - and could not effectively taste, smell, speak, or comprehend. This is probably for the best, because driving through Oakland made me overwhelmingly homesick and I might not have gotten back in the truck had I been able to smell the fresh air or taste Gordo quesadilla instead of merely registering the familiar burn...

We've spent the last week-odd engaged in painting, stocking, and organizing the new place. I realized too late that we'd painted blue and gold - Go Bears! - but that lameness aside, I absolutely love it, and living in LA seems much more managable now that we've got a comfy place to call our own.

Notable local landmarks: Von's Hollywood! (remarkably similar to normal Von's, only with better produce and lacking anti-theft cart protection;) Eat'n High Thai Restaurant, for which, no matter how I try, I can only get one reading; and the tux rental place, which, like much of Hispanic LA, sports mural-style signage, and whose painted bride looks like a pool-hall killer on the lam, caught in a desperate Bugs Bunny-style attempt to avoid going back "inside"...

hate it when that happens

2005-10-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

I wrote this sprawling post the other day, only to have it obliterated when Blogger unexpectedly crashed on me. The "recover post" button only works when the page can be found.

I have been too miffed to update since.

Anyway, I am over it now, but I have an apartment to set up. Updates and pictures soon.

happy tuesday!

2005-09-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

And a very happy one it was, as it was a short day. For on-track teachers this meant an hour and a half of PD; for me, the sub, it meant going home at 2pm. I tried the new bus-metro method I've worked out for getting to the new apartment; it is gloriously simple. A complete success.

In fact, I had a few successes today:

I walked into an alien classroom this morning and, before I could even take stock of my situation, students were calling out, "Hi, Ms. L!" and hastily putting their cell phones away.
(Technically that would be Miss L. They are not good on the whole Miss/Ms. thing, though they seem to understand it intellectually after our feminism mini-lesson. I am picking my battles, and this is not really one of them.)

Upon discovery that said classroom's regular teacher was out longer than expected and had not left enough work, one unfamiliar student asked, in a very familiar gleeful tone, if we would be having free time. Again, before I could say a word, one of my long-term students more or less shouted, "Yeah, right! You know we be doin' work in Ms. L's class."

This felt better than I can describe with all the words that I know or can reasonably expect anyone (apart from Amelie) to comprehend.

Also, when checking out this afternoon (at 2 pm - did I mention that part?), the principal's secretary told me that another teacher had requested me for Thursday morning. I am being requested! In addition to being formally asked by the SSLC to continue covering this long-term spot!

It's like being asked to a high-school dance. And then a party on the weekend. By separate boys.

It is not quite like being asked out by boys you like - more like those early dating years when you are not yet discerning enough to decide whether you like them or not, or to have realized that such things matter. It's definitely more about being liked than by whom.

Less fun things:

I have one of those pounding, splitting headaches that makes you lose your equilibrium and your head sway side-to-side. I am attributing it to a combination of dehydration, inadequate nutrition, sleep deprivation, stress, noise, eye strain, smog (which is drying out my eyes and all-around aggravating my allergies) and shifting rapidly and repeatedly from darkness to harsh brightness and back again - otherwise known as "my lifestyle." Does anyone else get these?

I have officially lost my taste for both soda and fast-food french fries. In addition to not tasting good, they both make me very, very sick to my stummy.

Root beer is still OK.

We are moving this weekend, which entails finishing painting the new apartment tomorrow (in the lurid brights I so adore), packing this apartment on Thursday, and driving up to the bay on Friday evening so the four of us (me, Aaron, Jody and Seb) can pick up all of our remaining possessions, jam them into a truck, and drive back down again. I do not anticipate having any free time to see anyone, which makes me really sad and lonely, but I'm telling myself (probably not incorrectly) that they're all so busy with classes right now that they wouldn't be free to see me anyhow. Also, the baby shower (Aaron's sister) is on Saturday, so I must finish the sweater before then. All the pieces are done now; I just have to stitch it together and do the design work. This will probably happen tonight, despite the whole splitting-pounding-balance-losing business.

Assigned the students the prologue to Kindred tonight and warned them that they would be quizzed tomorrow. As the prologue is two and a half pages long, I am steeling myself for the gut-blow of how many students fail the thing. Not to have low expectations or anything, but some of them wouldn't even carry the (264-page paperback) book home with them as it was "too heavy."

My job is awesome.

back on campus

2005-09-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

After last week's "vacation" (ie 40 hours of professional development,) it is back to the sub's life for me. On my triumphant return, I discovered:

My school is now approximately 85% less competent.
I arrived this morning to see that Mr. B, 1/9 of our Assistant Principal force and the man in charge of assigning subs, coordinating and ordering resources and technology, and working with new teachers, among other things, was not at his ordinary post in front of the gates, greeting the students and turning away those in blatant dress code violation. Instead, it was Campus South's principal, Mr. B's boss, looking grim. In the front offices, no one knew what sub jobs were open or what the plan was for the day. Once in a classroom, I noted that the voice making the morning announcements over the loudspeaker was not, as it should be, Mr. B's. While Mr. B has been absent from time to time, this seemed different, unplanned - and nothing was going right. It took another few hours before someone confirmed my worst fears: Mr. B quit last week, apparently in frustration at the lack of support he had in running the school more or less single-handedly. I can't really blame him -he had to lie in bed every night and wonder, What do the other 8 APs do? Anyway, I'm sure he got a job at a better school which will hopefully realize his worth. As for us...well, God help us now.
My long-term position was dissolved...and undissolved.
Apparently they got rid of all but two English classes, then had a balancing meeting and decided they could keep the class after all. A teacher has been hired, but she is at another school right now and needed to give them notice. I will be the sub for the next two weeks, until she gets here. The drama classes are gone (praise Jebus) and some new English classes are being brought in. Additionally, the head of the SLC, who has been laying the smack down on these kids the last few days, has come up with a list of assignments which need to be done in the next two weeks and which will be part of the students' permanent grades. So, that takes away the planning element, leaving me free to ward off student advances, confiscate cell phones, encourage/cajole/beg students to work...
The drug problem is that serious.
I haven't witnessed much of it myself, though friends and colleagues have busted kids for smoking pot and sniffing glue on campus, and in one very special episode, actually doing meth in class. Today, though, we had to drag our kids back into first period because we had paramedics in the main building, and no one had bothered to make the Please stay in your classrooms announcement until after students had already begun flooding out into the hallways. (This would not have been the case had Mr. B been there.) Once we got the all-clear, a distinctly not-Mr. B voice announced that we'd had four students ill and that the paramedics had needed the hallways clear to tend to them. Four? One is a seizure. 75 is food poisoning. But four can only be drugs.
Vacation makes everything easier to deal with.
Even if it is professional development.

out of the classroom!

2005-09-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

I'm in professional development this week, getting trained to use my program. Exciting! It's a five-day training with three days of follow-up over the rest of the school year, and if today was any indication, there will be enough material to comfortably fill about 1/3 of that time. The worst thing about it, apart from the length (for which my years of schooling have more than adequately prepared me), is the veteran teachers. Some of them are wonderful. Others are bitter, angry, prone to derailing the conversation, incapable of turning off their snarky running commentary, and generally much worse-behaved than I would tolerate from a classroom of teenagers. Additionally, one gentleman who has been in the profession for "30 or 40 years" is given to asking things like, between English Language Learners and monolingual English speakers with extreme difficulty reading, "which ones are dumber."

It's horrible to say, but I am glad not to be at school, the reason being that my long-term position will not be there when I get back. Long story short: A-track, being closest to the traditional calendar, is very popular and thus generally overpopulated. My school attempted to correct for this, and in fact corrected for it so well that there are now "too many classes" and "not enough students," necessitating the speedy removal of seven or eight teaching positions. My sub spot, as an unfilled position, is an obvious target, as it involves no actual firing. So it is back to day-to-day for me. Sigh.

Problems with this scenario:

"Dehired" teachers likely to leave for other schools in frustration rather than shifting to still-unfilled B and C track positions
Not sure how a track with "not enough students" still has classes where students must sit on the floor
School is still aggressively trying to OT students who were late on the first day of school, regardless of their attendance, behavior, and work habits in the meantime
Day-to-day blows

Clarification: "OT" means "Opportunity Transfer" which means "we are sick of yo' shit and are shipping yo' ass to another school." An opportunity, theoretically, to start fresh, as though you're not blacklisted from the minute staff realizes you're there (which is the second you set foot on campus.) I have heard of students being OT'd at least six times.

It's not like these kids are all hard cases with one too many strikes against them. Two case studies in the educational burlesque that is the OT:

Shaun, a junior, member of the varsity basketball team. Sits by himself when his teammates do groupwork so he will not be distracted; asks for comprehension strategies and reads with silent, ferocious determination. Says, unprompted, that his biggest goal is to be the first in his family to go to college. Takes extra time to explain the assignment to Jamaal. Is in his seat, on time and prepared, every day.
Jamaal, another junior, also on the team. A SpEd student who loves to make people laugh and who has trouble with comprehension of verbal instructions but who checks himself when he gets too distracted and will not let you leave until he understands what to do. Also in his seat, on time, prepared, each and every day.

Last week both of these boys had looks of real distress, and when I asked them what was wrong, they told me the same thing: They're OTing me. I was late on the first day.

I told them, call your mom. Go get your coach. Get all your teachers - anyone who will fight for you. Nothing - nothing - makes me angrier than an educational system that works to weed out students who are desperate to learn.

not a rant

2005-09-13T17:15:00.000-07:00

Last week was Hell Week as far as subbing was concerned, with me running class-to-class baby-sitting more or less feral children, as they all become when they go weeks on end without a consistent teacher for more than two days in a row.

Then I got hooked up with these really cushy jobs. We have some new teachers who did their student teaching here and were hired, but are still finishing up their last credentialing classes or haven't done their mandatory training week with The District, so they require a credentialed presence in the classsroom at all times. That was my job. I was more or less an FA - chilling behind the desk, making notes, helping students with their work. My mentor was responsible for my getting these cushy jobs, as he thought it would be good for me and the other teachers to gain different perspectives. He also wanted to displace the sub who had been filling this position in one particular social studies classroom, as he has the unfortunate tendency to commandeer the lesson from the teacher and preach God's word to the students. So he got kicked out and I was moved in. He was not happy.

Then we found out he'd gotten moved next door to an open long-term English position. You know - the kind I have been asking for since before I went off-track. The kind no one was aware we had available. After a few days someone did the complicated math and moved me into the English class, displacing "Mr. Church," as my kids call him, once more. Now he is day-to-day again, meaning he's taken a cut from ZZ (long-term) pay. Boy, does he hate me. He will not even look at me when we run into each other at the sign-out counter.

The English position has three preps, meaning I must prepare for and teach three different subjects per day. They are: English 10, American Lit, and Drama. Drama?!? Out of two full classes, only two students wanted the class. The rest were just sort of put there. One of the drama classes is a delight; the other requires constant maintenance. In American Lit today we started reading The Things They Carried (the short story, not the larger collection.) It took all period to get started because none of them had any clue what Vietnam was all about. As in, I asked what would have been going on in the world when O'Brien got out of college in 1968 and they were like, World War 2! Me: No, that was in the early 40s. Them: Oh. Uh...Pearl Harbor! One period was really into it and listened intently to my shoddy explanations of geopolitical intrigue. The other period, my last of the day, kind of made me want to die inside. The one girl giving me the most grief was like "I wish I had never come to school today. I am never coming to this class again." I told her, "Well, that's your choice. But I'll be here, and I hope you come back."

Pants. On. Fire.

Again, though, most of my kids are insanely sweet and really just need structure.

They did get one of their previous subs fired, though. At least, one girl did, and then transferred out of the class. The rest of the class is up in arms about it and I notice she hasn't been around lately, which is probably wise. The story is that she asked the sub, who was "tight as hell" and "real," about how drugs get into the US, and then went to the office and told them he was telling the class about drugs, which got him into trouble. I don't know the specifics; the social studies teacher I was FAing for tells me that kids used to say he talked about "weird stuff" even before this, but never specified what said "stuff" was. All I know is, he's gone and my students feel terrible about it, especially since it brought Mr. Church down upon them. This is also an excellent reminder never to trust your students with anything of real importance to you. This sounds like low expectations but really it's just covering your own ass. Example: the first of many students to tell me this story reported that "We were supposed to go to the dean and tell him what happened. But...we forgot."

I started school last week. I have class every Monday night and all day Saturday a few times a month. It's not hard, just inconvenient, though located very close to the apartment.

That being said, we're moving! We have new apartmenty goodness all lined up; the lease is signed and we get the keys on Thursday. It's cute and very cat-friendly, just like me and Aaron, so we will soon be an even larger, furrier, happier family.

Rant #2: Documentation

2005-09-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

Back at Berkeley, I remember the reactionaries at BAMN endlessly shrieking about boosting minority enrollment. At the time I thought them short-sighted for focusing on the last step of a systemic problem, effectively protesting the symptom rather than the disease. They should be looking, I thought, for a long-term solution, not a band-aid: ways to make sure more minority students are prepared to go to college, made competitive by any standards, so this perpetual fight about quotas, lowered standards, and the displacement of qualified white and Asian students can someday end organically.

I've only been in LA for a few months, but it's already clear that my stance was not broad or strong enough. I was (and am) deeply concerned with the institutionalized racism that prevents minority students from achieving at the same levels as their more affluent caucasian counterparts, but I had largely ignored another issue: that of the children of "undocumented workers" or "illegal immigrants" or whatever else you want to call them. Like it or not, a significant percentage of minority (ie Latino) students in Los Angeles are undocumented. Many of them are in my ESL classes or have gone through the ESL program in the past, and many of their families chose to relocate to this country because of the educational opportunities it affords. The irony is that while all students are all entitled to go to high school, their undocumented status prevents them, unless they have private funding, from going to college. Ever tried securing a federal loan without a social security number?

As a result, some incredibly bright and highly qualified students are prevented from going any further than community college. Of 500 students graduating from my school last year, 174 were undocumented, many of them at the top of their class. Lest you think that being "at the top of the class" in a low-performing urban high school means nothing, consider our '05 valedictorian, who in her senior year passed five AP exams across multiple disciplines - English literature, statistics, environmental science, biology, and Spanish language - and now attends prestigious Long Beach City College. This year, the top two contenders for valedictorian are in the same boat. My colleagues joke thinly about marrying them off to American citizens.

It's true that not all undocumented students far outperform the national average. For every student like our valedictorian, there are a handful more who simply shut down and stop trying at all. When you ask them why, they explain to you, quite simply, that since they cannot go to college in this country, they see no point in preparing for it. It's a tough point to debate.

We need to take a good, hard look at our national values. We claim to value hard work, education, and self-improvement above all else. But who works harder than those who come to our country and do the exhausting physical and "menial" labor that native-born, "established" Americans would never touch? Who works harder than their children, who often come here neither speaking nor reading a word of the language, who must become fluent despite home lives conducted primarily if not entirely in Spanish, who daily must prove themselves and their right to be here?

If people want to do something about the racial and ethnic makeup of our colleges and universities, instead of just screaming about it, they'd do well to divide their problems between these dual problems: Why are so few minority students adequately prepared for college? And why are some highly qualified minority students kept out?

------------------------------------------------------

An interesting sidenote: between previewing texts for my English class, I'm working on Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser's follow-up to the bestselling Fast Food Nation. It's a collection of three long essays discussing America's black-market staples: marijuana, pornography, and unpaid labor. The labor section discusses the worst-off of California's immigrant farm workers, the strawberry pickers, and focuses on three geographic areas: San Diego, Santa Maria, and Watsonville/Salinas. So it seems that I'm from all the interesting places in terms of the study of misery.

Madness, incidentally, would be a great book to read while you're waiting for Shame of the Nation to come out.

Rant #1: Kozol

2005-09-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

If you've done any kind of social justice study, you've probably heard of, if not read, Jonathan Kozol. Over the last 40-ish years he's written a number of excellent and important books on the underserved, overlooked and otherwise dispossessed of our society, including Amazing Grace, Ordinary Ressurections, Death at an Early Age, and Rachel and her Children. I first read his work two years ago, on a dreary break from school when I found myself cooped up in my barracks-style apartment with nothing much to do and nothing new to read. Wandering between the apartment's two rooms, I happened on a stack of my sister's sociology texts, and picked the one that looked least dry. It turned out to be Savage Inequalities, a searing indictment of the United States' segregated public school system. It was one of those books that didn't tell you anything new, per se, just forced you to look at an uncomfortable problem very long, and very hard. It is one thing to acknowledge that schools in poor, largely minority areas are "worse" than schools in affluent white areas. It is quite another to realize what that really means, every day, for the students of those schools. How can you read about schools with sewage leaks, schools without books or desks, schools located in abandoned, windowless rollerskating rinks, without anger and disgust welling up inside, without being angry with yourself for having nothing to give but hand-wringing and tears? It was while reading this book that I remember, for the first time, thinking, I shouldn't be teaching English in Africa or Asia. I am needed here.

The last Kozol I read was Amazing Grace. I carried it with me while I was going through the district hiring process, which, much like a DMV appointment, can involve hours of patiently waiting in flourescent-lit rooms full of the irate unemployed. A colleague glanced at my book and, spying its subtitle -The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation - told me it was an appropriate choice. This subtitle is dead-on for what we do in The Program: it's about education, yes, but moreover, it's about realizing that in our society as it is currently structured, education can determine the rest of your life - and about having the conscience to act on that realization. My colleague asked if it was worth reading. I told her yes, and also that I read Kozol when I have trouble getting mad. Because really, it's amazing how quickly we become inured to the injustices of society. Those of us from Berkeley are familiar with the cycle: at first you're shocked by the amount of homelessness you see, and you want to help, but you soon start to feel powerless. As time passes, that apathy changes to avoidance, and you shift your eyes away from their gaze; you tell yourself you need your change as much or more than they do. Eventually you become irritated with them - begging all the time, smelling so foul, sitting in your way when you're trying to get to class. You can fight these feelings, but if you don't, they can sneak up on you and catch you unawares.

I have been at my school for just two weeks, and already I am used to it: the lack of bathrooms, the shortage of teachers, the complete absence of keys, the library closed to the students, the "Tardy Sweep" that forces any student late to class to spend the entire period rotting in detention, the track system that robs them of 21 educational days per year - over the course of a K-12 education placing them one full year behind students on traditional calendars. I don't like these things - I outright despise them - but I am not surprised by them anymore. They have become the status quo.

And then, the other day, I looked in my box in the main office and found a copy of an excerpt from Kozol's new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. The book comes out in two weeks, but Harper's Magazine is running a long essay adapted from the text as its September Report. The book was researched over five years, with Kozol visiting 60 schools in 11 states. The Harper's excerpt focuses heavily on mine.

Is this what you call "coming full circle?" Or is it called "getting what you asked for"? I read Kozol and I wanted to teach in those schools, the ones he talked about. So here I am, suddenly free of any doubt that this is indeed the kind of place he was talking about. He came here, and he talked to our students. And this is what he has to say about our school:

We have fifteen fewer bathrooms than the number required by law.

Bathrooms are so rarely open and operational that students often must go the whole day without using them.

Many rooms lack air conditioners and become so hot that students become sick and cannot focus.

The only vocational classes we offer prepare students for low-paying jobs: cosmetology, sewing, hairdressing.

We in fact offer two levels of hairdressing: hairstyling and braiding.

We force students into these classes, even those who request high-level and AP courses, because academic classes are overcrowded and few.

We force students into classes like "Life Skills," which teach things like the names and locations of the continents.

Rats have been documented in 11 classrooms and the kitchen.

Attending my school teaches students that they are not wanted by society.

All of these things are true.

So here I sit, pissed off at myself, because it is somehow so much easier to get angry about these things when you see them on the page than when you see them every day. Moreover, it is easy to get angry in theory, but to take absolutely no action. I am realizing how many times, already, I have told my students, "I'm sorry, that's just how it is," or, "I don't like it either, but you'll have to bear with me." They come to class hungry as their breaks aren't long enough to purchase food and eat it, and I am instructed not to let them eat; they spend their brief passing periods in line for the bathroom but never make it in, and I can't send them out because they'll get caught in the infernal Tardy Sweep, regardless of whether I write them a pass. My school is a bit militaristic this way, and completely illogical; they believe that students should be in class learning at all times, a proposition I agree with wholeheartedly until the student I have sent out for three minutes, to return much happier and more able to focus in my class, is detained and denied the right to return to the classroom for the remainder of the hour.

I remember Program veterans telling me, early on, that you have to decide if your loyalty is to The Program or to your school. I'm realizing that this is something of a false choice. Everyone involved is ostensibly trying to help my students, and "choosing a side" doesn't necessarily do much for me or them one way or the other. In the end, I think, I need to remember (as I always try to) that my loyalty is to my students. Crucially, though, I must act on it. I have students in classes like fashion, cosmetology, and the ubiquitous "Life Skills" (which one of my Program colleagues, interestingly, has been assigned to teach.) I have students taking "soccer" as part of their academic day, and also "filmmaking," which might be great, although I'm not entirely certain we own any kind of filmmaking equipment, and I'm certain students wouldn't be able to take it off-campus. I don't know what I can do about these things, especially in my first year. I do know, though, that I can be the teacher who makes my kids read a few young adult novels in addition to their ESL program, and who pushes my seniors to read tough novels and write long essays no matter what I'm told about what they are and are not capable of. I can start investigating the AP situation, how many we have and what I would have to do to start one up in the coming year and on my track. Our school has some AP classes, but in a school of 5,000 with three separate tracks, there can really never be enough.

Anyhow. The question for me is mostly how to hang on to my anger, and then how to turn that anger into a better life for my students. It would help me, though, if other people would get angry, too, so they might scream at me when it seems like I'm accepting my situation. So, if you can, go to the newsstand or the library and read that Harper's piece. If you are out of country, it may take awhile for the expat bookstores to get this month's issue, if they stock Harper's at all, and I certainly don't expect you to buy the thing at import cost - but maybe you could keep an eye out, too, and read the thing on the sly. I could even mail photocopies, if people were interested. As for me, I'll be buying the book when it comes out. The reality is that sometimes it's easier for me to believe what's in black and white than what's all around me every day. No one wants to believe they're surrounded by misery.

Week Two: Still going strong(-ish)

2005-09-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

This week I started my temporary career as a day-to-day sub. Anecdotes/observations from the past three days:

2: Number of classrooms I was sent to which contained no students
2: Number of classrooms I was sent to which already contained another sub
1: Number of classrooms I was sent to which contained the actual teacher
0: Number of times I have held a room key - any room key - in my hand
Covering four periods of geometry, I initially thought kids were having trouble with their algebra review worksheets because they had forgotten the order of operations. They had, but that wasn't the whole problem. They had also forgotten their times tables. They did not seem to realize that they could just do the (admittedly tedious) addition; instead, they sat staring at their papers until I came around to each one individually and helped them through their problems. They were intially suspicious of this seemingly foreign practice, but by the end a few expressed regret that I was not staying in their class. Little do they know: I have entirely forgotten any geometry I ever knew.
Covering one peiod of special ed, I had some students who read more fluently than my seniors, and others who could neither read nor write at all. One boy labored over his name for several minutes, then told me that his classes mostly consist of teachers "helping [him] spell." I intellectually knew it when I declined to check the "Special Ed" box on my application to The Program, but I really, really know it now: teaching SpEd is a whole other job than "regular" and ESL teaching (already two very different jobs.) It requires a whole other set of skills an an arsenal of personalized tactics and support strategies. I have the hugest respect for the good special ed workers out there. There are many - though of course, nowhere near enough.
High school sports directors should not be allowed in the classroom. Today I covered for the sports director, who was on campus all day setting up for tonight's football game but who pounced on me the minute he overheard me asking who needed a sub. His students did not know what class they were in (all levels of English, incidentally, though the room betrays no hint of it) and told me he intends to "start teaching on Tuesday" when there's no first-game-of-the-season to worry about. I spent much of the morning flashing back to my own high school biology class, the bulk of which was spent sans teacher as he made equipment- and scheduling-related phone calls from the storeroom.
The administration at my school is a joke. We have two principals and nine assistant principals. No one seems to know all their names or what they all do; the two principals are engaged in a protracted battle of one-upmanship and active undermining of the other camp. The schools is being divided into two campuses, North and South, which communicate by radio when at all and may be on different schedules next year. As the student who led me around campus on my first observation day astutely remarked, "There should only be one king for every kingdom." Not wanting to undermine my administrators before my first day of work, I told him that was true, if we automatically assumed we were dealing with a monarchic system. But even then, I knew he was right.
All those people, and still, no one knows what the hell is going on. Who needs subs? Where is the person in charge of subs? How do I get to the top of the day-to-day list? No one has been able to answer any of these questions, with the exception, today, of "Where is the person in charge." (The answer, incidentally, was "Not here.") I have just been showing up every morning and asking who needs coverage. There is almost always someone, though I usually have to ask about four different people, and yesterday I got stuck in the principal's office for one period, helping the secretaries out with data entry. I debated refusing to do it, as it's about ten thousand leagues outside my job description, but they really needed the help, and besides, I was getting paid for the time. I also learned a lot about my school, not so much from the data I was entering as from all the gossip and backbiting you overhear when you're sitting in a high-traffic area in the chair of someone who most people routinely ignore anyway. It was a good experience to have, but I won't do it again - it felt too weird, like being back in middle school when I used to help my mom and the secretaries at her school make up student packets and end-of-summer mailings.
Overcrowding is a real problem, and no one quite knows how to fix it. However, we also have the equally severe and completely solveable problem of uneven student distribution. First period geometry, for instance, had thirteen students; fifth period of the same exact class had about 50. They covered every available surface, including desk- and tabletops. A few refused to sit on the floor to do their work, as the floors have not been cleaned in months. I could not in good conscience force them to.
I was intitially fearful of subbing, but in my incredibly limited experiences so far, other peoples' kids have been great. They have nothing to prove with me, there's that permanent Day One taboo against stepping too far out of line, and there's no grading involved at all. Of course, the experience is a thousand times better when there is a lesson plan waiting, which is not always the case. My plan this labor-dabor weekend is to make up a small Emergency Sub Kit which I can use in unprepared classrooms and leave for my own sub if I ever have a sudden emergency that's so big I can't spare ten minutes to scrawl a rough outline of the next day's activities.
I finally went to the textbook room. As I suspected, it took over an hour to inspect and preview all my options. The selection is wonderful - I was hoping to find "a modern play or two," but instead found Jean-Paul Sartre, August Wilson, Eugene O'Neill, Lorraine Hainsberry, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. I was crossing my fingers for several specific novels, including 1984, The Bell Jar, Things Fall Apart, and Snow Falling on Cedars. All were present. I was pleasantly surprised by books like The Stranger, The Sound and the Fury, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Heart of Darkness - all rich and complex works whose presence seemed too much to hope for. Maya Angelou and Barbara Kingsolver were both there - but so were Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Munro. And of course, let's not forget Sandra Cisneros.
The textbook lady seems to like me a lot more now, presumably since I spent so much time poring over the stacks. I must say, I like her too - she does her job well and she's clearly there for the kids.
I wrote a couple of big rants this week, one about undocumented students and one about Jonathan Kozol. Stay tuned.

let's get political...political

2005-08-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of B-track break. For my small school learning community (henceforth SSLC or CALA, Culture and Languages Academy), that means two days' worth of professional development. Today's meeting was mostly about creating and implementing a unified discipline policy, but at times it veered in other directions. Let me be clear that I am off the clock right now, and that the opinions I express are solely my own (for questions of education award), and then please allow me to call your attention to political matters. This fall, Californians will have the pleasure of voting on Prop 74, an insidious little piece of legislation backed by "Governor Schwarzenegger's California Recovery Team" that will increase teachers' probationary period from two to five years, and then completely undermine the idea of permanent status by allowing school boards to terminate, with a "modified process," any teacher who has received two "unsatisfactory" evaluation marks.

In theory, this is great for our students because it means only the best teachers are in the classroom, no matter what their status. Practice, however, rarely aligns with the theoretical, this being no exception. Teachers at my school are scared, based on their past experiences with administration, that the passage of Prop 74 will mean not that the bad teachers will go - there are too many of them, for one thing - but that it will instead be a tool for school boards and administrators to get rid of the vocal teachers, the ones who voice displeasure at idiotic "reforms" that do nothing for the students, who demand pay for time worked, and who commit any other crime against the well-oiled machine that is the educational bureaucracy.

The thing to remember is that "permanent status," as it stands, does not mean you have a job forever. The dismissal process, however, involves lots of documentation and, if requested by the teacher, a hearing, as well at 90 days in which to improve. Prop 74 wants to get rid of all of that unneccessary "procedure" and "due process." My overwhelming impression is and has always been that when bad teachers are not fired, it is because a bad teacher is still slightly better than no teacher at all, and with a teacher shortage as severe as California's, I think we would do best to spend our efforts aggressively recruiting and retaining excellent teachers. People don't want to teach in California because it's not worth their while. They work too damn hard for too little money, with the guillotine ever hanging over their heads. And while Prop 74 claims to "[reward] the best teachers [while] weeding out 'problem teachers'" (and yes, that phrase is raising my eyebrows), the only "reward" it offers is "being allowed to keep your job."

The fear around these parts is that the whole thing is part of a sinister Republican plan to completely and intentionally undermine the public education system, priming schools for lucrative privatization. It sounds a little crazy until you notice that for more information, you're directed to joinArnold.com - and until you hear that this kind of thing is happening all over the place, even down the street, with one of LA's most troubled high schools in talks to be taken over by Green Dot, a successful but controversial charter-school organization. I haven't been around long enough to start weighing in on conspiracy theories, and I need to see charter schools for myself before I commit to a stance one way or the other. But what does worry me is an issue captured succinctly in the "Fiscal Effects" section of the prop report:

Given the longer probationary period, districts could dismiss more teachers during their first five years. This could result in salary savings by replacing higher salaried teachers toward the end of their probationary period with lower salaried teachers just beginning their probationary period.

My mom works in schools; she always has. In my young life I've seen more pink slips, reduced hours, ingenious ways to avoid paying health insurance, and multiple-positions-combined-into-one than I can even now make sense of. One of my friends here works in Jewish day schools; she has her MA in religious studies and has heard that this may make finding work difficult because she is entitled to higher pay. I have never - never - heard of an increase in any budget that was easy to access, came with few strings attached, or lasted longer than a yer or two before being decreased to below the original amount. My life experiences up to and including this very moment have made me immediately suspicious of any way to cut costs in schools. School costs a lot, but it does not cost nearly enough for what we are asking of it. It's only the future of the nation we're talking about here, only the life prospects of entire generations. For my kids in particular, a good K-12 education isn't the difference between a state school and an ivy league; it's the difference between learning the language of their nation of residence, or remaining effectively illiterate and doomed to repeat the cycle of poverty. They should have the best teachers we have, no matter what that costs. I'm sure the people behind Prop 74 think that's what they're giving us, but the best teachers we have think differently.

Anyway, the thing is ahead in opinion polls right now, and it sounds pretty good on paper, the way the whole "Defense of Marriage" thing did a few years back, until you stopped and realized that marriage didn't really need defending. All I'm asking is that you not go with public opinion on this one - look into it, read the counterarguments, think it over, and above all, talk to an educator or someone else on the ground inside schools. Then, take that information and pass it on.

This is my favorite part of the ballot:

Unfortunately, Opponents of Prop 74 Don't Want Reform:
They will stop at nothing to defeat Prop 74 and have spent millions for television ads to confuse voters on the reforms we need to get California on track.

Advertise? How dare they!

the week in review

2005-08-26T22:39:00.000-07:00

Oh, that first week of school. As a student, I remember having all kinds of feelings about it, positive and negative, but I can honestly say that I never even considered how it must have been for my teachers. I understand completely how my mom feels: I came home today, face-planted on the bed, and slept for three and a half hours. Then I woke up and spent about an hour lying there, feeling melancholy and wrung-out. Eventually I decided that starving to death wouldn't help a whole lot, and made some pasta. That about brings us up to speed.

Today the room situation grew even more dire. It turns out that no one, in the past two days, had actually tried to fix our locks - they had just been picking the door next to mine with a paper clip. Mine still had half a key broken off in it and would only open from the inside. Today, though, the door wouldn't open, no matter what they tried, by which I mean "no matter how much they jiggled the paper clip." So, instead of cleaning up my room and returning books to the already-testy textbook lady, we stood outside for an hour waiting for a custodian to "come right back" with an empty room to take us to, until we received an invitation indoors from Mr. Labat, a veteran teacher, well-liked by both students and colleagues, who has sort of taken me under his wing. His class was watching King Arthur with the Spanish subtitles on, as film English is often difficult for ESL students, and British and fakey-Saxon accents make understanding well-nigh impossible. Fortunately, there is not much talking in King Arthur. Mostly just battle cries and stabbing.

Eventually, the master custodian (the most useful person I have met yet) came and persuaded the door to open, by hammering Mr. Wulf's key into the lock with a big chunk of cement. We were lucky it didn't break, as I still do not have one. The A-track teacher who has my room as of Monday says that he hoards every key he has ever been given, because it's the only way to ever get into your room: the front office actually does have enough keys for everyone, they're just too lazy to organize them. One of the assistant principals (we have nine) is in charge of the keys, but today alone she was described to me by three separate people, all of them unprompted, as "completely incompetent," "useless," and having "no idea what's going on." She has big key rack thing in her office, but there are only about a hundred keys on it. My key is a 1B, for which there is no label on the rack. The A-track teacher told me that there is a room (I have seen it and can vouch for the believeability of this statement) where all keys go that do not have a little sticky-label on the key rack. Then, when you ask for them, they tell you what they told me: we don't have any, but we're calling the key man later in the week...

Moments and situations of note from the week:

While waiting for my door to be opened, getting to know the kids. Some of them have just come from traditional middle schools into B-track, meaning that they had one week of summer, then came to high school. Considering that they have been in school for the last thirteen months without a break, I am all the more impressed with their dedication.
Meeting Mr. Harris, who gave me advice on the best places to buy summer fruit in LA, who has an avocado tree that gives bags and bags of the things the size of softballs, and who cannot stand avocados. It is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Also: another new teacher who has my "trouble students" in her class and with whom I can collaborate on a behavior plan; my head of department, who studied English at Berkeley and has answers to the questions I did not even know to ask; the long-term sub who was raised on a ranch in Arizona by cowboys.
Learning the ingenuity of my students, who taught me how to turn on the air conditioner, the knob of which is broken. It involves the holes in the top of your house keys and some clever angling.
Unexpectedly discovering that the lunchroom, usually home to all things deep-fried and covered in dressing, was selling big slabs of watermelon for 50 cents.
Being expected, despite being completely untrained in the program, to teach 20 hours' worth of ESL classes.
A long conversation with a student my sub had told me to "watch out for," in which he told me he moved here from Guatemala three years ago, right about the time he started learning the alphabet. He's proud of his rising grades, especially his improving work habits and participation marks, and he says his teachers tell him, "You're a good boy, but you don't come to school!" He explained that he works several days a week so he can help send money back to Guatemala, where his little sisters still live. I told him if he works hard for me, we will find a way to make sure he gets an A or a B in my class. I fully anticipate this being the case.
A short conversation with a friend of one of my students, who looked at my stomach and asked, "Are you going to have a baby?" No," I laughed. "It's just a tummy." "Oh," she said, not unkindly. "Because it looks like it."
Another brief conversation with a student, one I already have a deep affection for. He works hard, loves to draw, and always takes time to think before he answers or asks a question. He is very small, and though he has many friends, they are not kind about it. Today he spotted my paper towels and spray cleaner, and asked if he could clean the desks. While doing so, he called me over, telling me he wanted me to see something. "See this?" he asked, pointing to an artistic tag in the style he himself favors. "That's him." He pointed to his t-shirt, a picture of a boy not much older than him, with birth and death dates and a Tupac quote, "Only God can judge me." The boy died in April; already the shirt shows wear. "He was my friend," said my student. I asked what happened, and he explained matter-of-factly, "In Los Angeles, the blacks and the Mexicans are fighting. The black people killed him. In a drive-by. They shot him in the mouth." He continued cleaning for a moment, then paused again and pointed to another name carved into the surface of the desk. "That's my uncle," he said. I asked what happened to him. My student smiled. "He's in college."

Wednesday chaos

2005-08-24T18:49:00.000-07:00

For those wondering where I've been: I started work on Monday. So, I've been there, or curled up inside my High Point teacher's manuals, or, excitingly, at the gym. I started going on Sunday night, and it couldn't have come at a better time. I had intended to go, cycle a bit, and use that time to think about my classes the next day, forgetting entirely the whole point of going to the gym for me: I absolutely cannot think about anything of significance while I am working out. I think my system is so out of shape that all possible energy must be devoted to making the muscles work at all, leaving nothing for the higher brain functions. In case it is not obvious, working out again has been amazing.

I realized today that I haven't worked out in almost exactly four months - not since the week I found out I was accepted to TFA. Coincidence? I think not. The preparation, the practice, the evaluation - it takes over your life. I must say, too, that I feel like years have gone by since that day in April when Amelie and I found out we were accepted, when we talked for hours on the phone - about what? what did we know, then, really? - and I tore so eagerly into the FedEx envelope, reading and re-reading my acceptance letter in case it was some kind of terrible mistake. But, yes, it has been four months, three since I took my CSET, two since I showed up at regional induction. In all honesty it feels at least a year since I left my summer placement school, though it's been only three weeks. These life-chapters have been brief but intense lately. I'm hoping for things to mellow out a bit, though I know that's folly.

This latest chapter, this Permanent Job thing - it's interesting. I'm thrust into the middle of the school year and this massive bureaucracy in the middle of a major restructuring as we shift to the small-school format, and no one really seems to know what any other department is doing (and neither do I,) or what my sub has been doing (my impression: nothing,) or what I should do all week (consensus: nothing, which I am violently resisting,) or who I should get the key to my classroom from (I found her today, day three, but there was no key to be had.) I'm meeting about a million people a day, all of whom want something from me - Did you fill out that sub form for the intersession? Can we meet about your retirement fund? When can I get a draft of your long-term plans? Are you aware of the meeting tomorrow after school? - and none of whose names I remember. Meanwhile, I have three classes and they are all trying to figure me out - What can they get away with? What's my class going to be like? Am I really going to stay? That, incidentally, was a drawn-out conversation that broke my heart for what it told me about their prior experiences. The short version:

Me: I'm Ms. L. I'll be your permanent teacher. So, I will be here for the rest of the year.
Classes: Until the break?
Me: Yes, until the break. And then I will be a substitute for another track. And then when you come back in October, I will be teaching this class again.
Classes: This class?
Me: Yes. I am your teacher now.
Classes: And you're staying all year?
Me: Yes. All this year, and the year after that, and the year after that.
Classes: So you are staying?

As for my kids: they are all amazing. My seniors are just rolling with the punches - I walked in and said "Hi, I'm your new teacher and we're doing a unit on tone and style using Neruda's Elementary Odes" and they are like "We like Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market better than Ode to Wine because it is more serious and sorrowful." No BS, no "testing period," nothing. My ESL classes, mostly because they are younger (mostly freshmen and sophomores) and more numerous (hard not to be, as only about 10 show up to senior English on a given day), are more of a mixed bag. Most of them are fiercely devoted to learning English, and even though it is incredibly obvious that I am as yet untrained in the program and I have not quite figured out how to convey difficult concepts at their understanding level, they are willing to do bookwork and silent reading about very boring concepts for two hours at a stretch. When they get the teenage giggles, to which both classes are prone, all it takes to get them back on task is a gentle reminder that we are here to learn English, and that we cannot do this if we are not doing the work. Notice, however, that I say most. The others are most definitely testing me.

Today was the roughest day I've had this week, much moreso than my first; it was the first day when I started to feel mental and physical exhaustion setting in while I was still in the classroom. Usually being around the kids energizes me, no matter how little food or sleep I've had access to, but today was particularly trying. I showed up early to get my key, and there was no key to be had. No problem, I thought, the sub next door always lets me in. On my way to the room, I stopped by my mailbox and discovered that it was ID Photo day for classes with 9th and 10th graders - no prior warning whatsoever. As I approached the room, congratulating myself on not having planned anything major for today (yes...a brilliant strategic move...) I noticed that my neighbor, Mr. Wulf, was trying to open my door - Great, I thought, he sees me coming. How thoughtful of him. But alas, the lock on his door was jammed with some bits of toothpick, and he was trying to get in through my room, which is connected to his by an interior door. My lock, as it turned out, was jammed worse than his. After some unsuccessful toothpick-manuevering, he went to the office to get a custodian, while I watched both classes and attempted to prevent them from disturbing the classes below us with their noise, projectiles, and/or saliva, all of which had been a problem under the reign of my sub. When he returned, we took our classes to take photos, which went fine but took half an hour, at the end of which time our locks were as jammed as ever. By the time campus security had arrived, assessed the situation, and sent for the custodian, and the custodian had made a diagnostic trip, wandered off to get the WD-40, returned, and unjammed the locks, we had lost over an hour of instructional time and my kids were riled up beyond all calming. Fifth and sixth period, the locks were clear, but the photo ID trip alone took a full hour, and my kids were all over the place, pushing and punching each other, calling names, attempting to prevent one of my best (and smallest) students from breathing by crowding around him and pressing him bodly against the wall, and producing a guitar, which they variously wrestled over, strummed atonally, and abandoned entirely in favor of the guitar strap, which they used to beat each other over the head. Again, attempts to get back on track when we returned to class were mostly futile, despite the ratio of calm and focused to riled-up students being about 7-1. It only takes a few.

Tomorrow, we are spending the entire first hour reviewing respect. I told 5-6 today, "We will talk about respect every day until I see it every day." One of my most thoughtful students looked up at me balefully and said, "We will never stop talking about it."

so i DO have a job!

2005-08-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

I'm the type of person who likes to know what they're in for, and prefers knowing they're in for a fresh new hell to having things up in the air. So today, I went to my school, hoping for the best but knowing that anything would be an improvement over my what's-gonna-happen neuroses. And of course, things are nowehere near as bad as they could be - they are, in fact, overwhelmingly positive, and even exciting.

First things first: the school itself. It's big, three stories of red brick in a horseshoe shape, with a huge tree-filled courtyard enclosed at the back end by a low brick bulding (possibly a gym) and dozens of gray "bungalows," behind which are the tennis courts, swimming pool, and athletic fields. We are the Pathfinders, and our colors are burgundy and something else. By employee estimates, the school is home to 54-5600 students this year, with 36-3800 on track at any time. We are roughly the second or third largest around, and we are not sad to see the torch passed to other schools. More students mean more problems, and my school is remarkably free from problems, considering. Walking though the courtyard at lunch, I witnessed one fight waiting to happen, two girls screaming at each other with a crowd jostling for the best viewing positions on the surrounding benches, but nothing major. The kids seem mellower than those at my summer site. I don't see the sharks, those students who slink around scanning the horizon for trouble just waiting to happen. They also seem less hormonal, or at least the culture is less open to overt public displays of libido.

I'll be housed in what I can only describe as a semi-bungalow; it's not a building proper, but it's not entirely portable either. It's most like a two-story barrack, built to last a short time but eventually considered permanent. I'm told the carpet smells funny if you turn the air conditioner off, so wear a sweater. PlugIns also work, though they are often stolen, likely by other teachers. The mixed blessing here is that every time we come back from a vacation we're in a new room, so I must only bear the carpet-smell for a week, after which time it will be passed on to some other unlucky nomad. As far as my students are concerned, I 've heard varying reports: according to my sub, they're great, just a few clowns, but ask Ms. Lewis, who teaches ESL directly below me, and they "sound like a herd of elephants" who will definitely need reigning in. I can tell you, though, that there are very, very few of them. My school is on a six-period day, but ESL is blocked, so Im only teaching three groups of kids. It breaks down like this:

Periods 1 & 2 - ESL 2
Period 3 - English 12
Period 4 - teacher prep
Periods 5 & 6 - ESL 3

The classes are small, too, with 22 students in the first, 14 in the second, and 34 in the last. I am more or less dancing around as I type this - I HAVE 70 STUDENTS! IN TOTAL! ALL DAY!

Compare this to someone who has 5 classes with a standard 35 students apiece. You'd be dancing, too.

So I was pretty right-on about what classes I'll be teaching: ESL 2A, ESL 3A, and English 12. My ESL classes, being two different levels, use two different texts, the A and C levels of High Point. Level B is actually 2 texts, and I'm not really sure how ESL 2B encompasses both, but that doesn't seem to be my problem. English 12 is Modern Lit. It has no curriculum. None. I can teach whatever I want, as long as it fits any definition of both "literature" and "modern." This is pretty exciting for me, but it presents a unique challenge, as I want to go into the textbook room to see what relevant novels they have class sets of, and the textbook woman's policy is Do. Not. Let. Anyone. In. Period. In order to successfully retrieve books, I need to know specifically what text I need from her, how many, and for how long, and even then I need to be on her good side. In the long run, people tell me, this is achieved by sufficiently demonstrating that you really care about your kids and that you are not going anywhere. As I do care and I'm here for the semi-long haul (at least 3 years, though I'm kind of assuming closer to 5) , that will work itself out eventually, but right now I'm trying to work out some kind of short-term fix. I think she likes me well enough to give me a list of all the novels they have, if she has one handy. If she does not, she will like me less for asking.

I met many valuable contacts - that is, great people - today, including my small school co-chair, the bilingual coordinator, a couple of really likeable and experienced ESL teachers who share my prep period (score!), and last but not least, my substitute. He has been there since the second week of the semester, and, mindful of my eventual appearance and not wanting to "step on [my] toes," he has helpfully not had my seniors write anything, taught a single standard, or "gone into anything too deep," thereby reducing the time I have to make significant progress by two full months. Thanks, long-term substitute!

So, I go in Monday and have one week with my kids, effectively the "first week of school" wherein I set up my expectations, diagnose the seniors' writing and make a mad dash to actually teach some standards based on one or several short stories I will have photocopied for them, and clumsily grope my way through High Point with my ESL classes. Then my kids go on two months' break, during which time it looks like I will be long-term substituting for an English class on another track, taking short breaks to move into a new apartment and do a weeklong, mandatory, and much-needed High Point training. Or, I may be utilized as a day-to-day sub. I'm hoping not. You know. Because of how much I love things being up in the air.

"downtime"

2005-08-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

A logistical update, for those who were wondering:

I left Institute on the 5th, had a few free days, and then had two days of Orientation last week. (See posts per decreased numbers, crypto-racism.) This week, I've got lots of school and schooling-realted business. Tomorrow, I'm going to my high school with another girl (remember the one, back in June, who had never seen fog?) to see, not to put too fine a point on it, what the hell is going on. I in particular have a lot of questions, based on my track.

A quick refresher: My school is massive. I've heard rumors that it has the largest enrollment in the state, and also in the country. Despite my best investigative efforts I can neither confirm nor disconfirm these rumors, but I can tell you that it is BIG. We have 5,000 kids, broken up into three tracks so that only about 3,000 are on-track and on campus at any given time. A-track is almost like the traditional calendar, just a few weeks shorter, with winter break from the end of December through February, and summer break in July and August. C-track is a little skewed, with summer in May/June and winter break in November/December. I am on B-track, the least coveted of the three, with "winter" break in September and October and "summer" break in March and April. In the future this will be wonderful, as travel is always best in fall and spring, but at the moment it means that I will be walking into a classroom for my "first day of school," while the kids will have been there, with a substitute (or twelve,) since May. My official start date is the 22nd, meaning that I'll be there for three days before the kids go back on break until roughly Halloween. As you might imagine, I have some questions about how this is going to work.

As near as we, the new hires, can tell, everyone at this school is wonderful and helpful in person, but unless you're there face-to-face, you had better have some combination of persistence, unlimited local calling, and God on your side. So tomorrow, Riley and I are going in, armed with a list of questions, and we do not intend to leave until they are all answered, or 12:30, whichever comes first. Those questions include but are not limited to:

What am I teaching?
Where is my classroom?
How many students will be in my classes?
Have I had a long-term sub or a series of short-term ones?
What have the kids been taught since May?
Can I have a copy of my scripted program?
What am I supposed to be doing for those 3 days?
Will I be substitute teaching for other tracks while I'm off-track?
What does subbing involve?
How much do I get paid for it?
What small learning community am I in?
Who is my boss?
How many periods are in a day?
What time do I need to be here?
Do I get a set of keys?

You know. That kind of thing.

At 12:30, we have to drive back up to mid-town to go to lunch with the lone Program alum at our school site. There are ten new Program hires this year, and he's determined that we will build a community, as he didn't have that opportunity. For the most part, I really like everyone so far, though one of the girls seems really cliquey and will only talk to one other girl, who I assume is a friend from Institute. I figure that will change, and if it doesn't, I still get along pretty well with the other eight-girls-and-one-guy.

Wednesday, I get myself out to Westwood to a) figure out when my program starts, and b) pick up my C-19 letter from UCLA. This is the piece of paper that tells The District that I am enrolled in a University credentialing program and that I have completed all other requirements to receive an emergency credential. I did some quick math, tallying up all my testing fees, processing fees, fingerprinting costs, and one of my many transcripts, and this little piece of paper has cost me in the ballpark of $550. While that's nothing compared to the 18 grand I'll be paying for my credentials and MA, at the moment it's a shocking amount of money.

Thursday, I go back to The District, take my little piece of paper up to the 15th floor, and get hired. I get to go to the salary office and everything.

And unless I find out otherwise, Monday is my first day of work.

half a conversation

2005-08-12T18:09:00.000-07:00

We were just wrapping up regional orientation today, were even into the closing announcements and take-home messages, when our facilitator made an announcement that a "Radical White Anti-Racist" group had flyers for meetings up at the front of the room. "For the white corps members," the facilitator helpfully clarified.

My first reaction was to turn to Mike and crack up. He offered me five bucks to ask the facilitator if minorities were welcome at the anti-racism group. (For the record, I tried. My hand was raised, but not recognized. I was not, however, as vocal or persistent as I could have been.) Rather than listen to the rest of the announcements, we advanced theories about these meetings. Would minorities be asked to begin their own separate anti-racism group - separate but equal, of course? Would we be allowed to show up, but have to come in the side door?

It wasn't until the drive home that I realized my initial laughter had been of the "or you'll cry" variety. I made a comment about the flyer, something like "That kind of bothered me," and both of my colleagues in the car were quick to defend it. It's great, they said. White people may be just coming to terms with these things, just having their eyes opened. They want to take the first steps by talking about these issues in a setting where they're comfortable - with other like-minded people. I was floored. Racism by its very nature demands an integrated conversation, I said. No one group understands the entirety of the issue. This could be a first step, but the flyer gives no hint of a second. It's divisive. They were not hearing me at all.

We hashed it out a bit, listened to each others' sides, and went home. I hopped in the shower, my think-space, and mulled over their comments, looking for what I could learn and add to my own knowledge base. I really wanted to hear them. And yet, if indeed I understand their points, I still believe they are dead wrong. And now that I've had more time to formulate my thoughts, I will attempt to explain, from where I stand, what's wrong with an anti-racism group for white people.

Problem area #1: "They're just more comfortable sharing out their uncomfortable biases..." Fine. But the fact that white people have that choice at all - to get comfortable with themselves, and then, if they choose, to see the minority perspective - betrays immeasurable privilege. The reality of minority life, very often, is that you have to see the other side. You can't get away from it. That's what being a minority means - being surrounded by a perspective larger and more pervasive than yours. And maybe this is my issue, but as a "minority" (and God how I hate that term,) I am not entirely sympathetic to people who want to ease into the frigid waters of our racist society inch by inch, one toe at a time, while the rest of us wait there for them, up to our necks, treading water. We were thrown out there before we could swim, and we've just had to learn. No one waited for us to "get comfortable" with the idea of racism before it was something we had to face. Comfort is a luxury just as much as ignorance was, and to "ease in" denies the urgency of the problem. For every person who wants to take their time and talk amongst themselves, irreprable damage is being done to the people on the other side. It's insulting to me personally when I hear "Just sit tight, we'll be ready to talk to you about it eventually."
Besides which, a little discomfort is a good thing. If you're comfortable, you're not really pushing yourself and you're not learning. The day you are comfortable with racism is the day you've accepted it, and then who are you helping?

Problem area #2: "...among other people in their same situation."
A white person turns to a black person and admits, bravely and honestly, "I fight it every day, but deep down, I think my black students are less intelligent than my other students." Is that as deep if it's one white person turning and speaking the exact same words to another white person? It's still honest, but it's nowhere near as brave, and I would venture to say that it's still racist, to admit things to yourself and others like you but out of fear or discomfort to avoid having that conversation with the very people you are making assumptions about.

Problem area #3: Racism within the conversation.
This point I find particularly boggling: one of the girls in the car told me, point blank, that I was having problems with this group meeting just because it's white people. That if it was black people getting together to talk about black power, that would be fine, but since it's white people, I see it as white supremacy. First of all, it's offensive to me to hear that I think this is about white supremacy, just because I'm nonwhite. Those are words that I neither spoke nor implied, and I have no doubt that the group in question intends to honestly talk about racism, and that's noble. Here's the problem, though: they're talking about racism. I thought this would be obvious, but while "black power" is an inherently black issue, racism is an inherently inter-ethnic issue, not an inherently white one. Which brings me on to my last, and overwhelmingly most important, point:

Problem area #4: Dialogue cannot be one-sided.
Racism can only happen when two groups come together; I believe that for a true conversation about racism, more than one party must also be present. I want to stress that the following questions and answers are grossly oversimplified, and that the terminology does not divide cleanly down racial or any other lines, but these questions are at the very heart of the issue and therefore need to be asked.
So here it is.

Q: What does the oppressor know about racism?

A: Half the story.

Q: And the oppressed?

A: The other half.

213 in tha 2-1-3

2005-08-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

A head count:

LA corps, pre-institute: 237

LA corps, post-institute: 213

I can't remember anymore - too many numbers - but I think something like 249 were invited to matriculate in the first place. Regardless, it's a big drop.

One girl I really liked - a Cal girl, no less - is gone, for reasons that seem vaguely sketchy and political. Everyone else I was hoping to see back was present today, which sounds funny considering we've been in the same place for the last five weeks, but unless we ran into each other in the computer lab or the dining hall, we really had no contact with people teaching at other school sites.

Many frosty looks were exchanged between my ex-colab teammate and myself, of the "I did not just even see you" variety. Ouch. I spent the whole day scanning the crowd for my ex-roomie, who has Jody's copy of Harry Potter, and it seemed like every time I lifted my eyes, there she was, coldly looking right through me. I never spotted the roomie. 213, however diminished from our starting numbers, is still a lot.

I was surprised to find, though, that each time I glanced up I also spied someone waving me over, mouthing hello, or calling my name. I don't know how I failed to notice this, but I've made some real friends here - good ones, strong ones, which sounds like an odd adjective but is really the best one to be under these trying circumstances. Also, very funny ones, who always have a cutting comment at the ready whenever things get just a little too Program. You can only see so many PowerPoint presentations before it's all a hideous blur.

helping where you can.

2005-08-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Last week was a rough week. Technically I had time to post, but things within my collaborative had finally reached critical mass and we had a big, ugly incident that needed mediation and resulted in my disappearing into myself for the last few days of institute. I skipped closing ceremonies and generally avoided being social, and after a few days it more or less blew over, by which I mean we all went home so it doesn't really matter anyway. Or it wouldn't matter, that is, if the one who I don't get along with wasn't in my master's program. Which she is. Meaning we see each other twice a week for the next three years.

There are a few things I could choose to do here, but the only practical one seems to be treating this as a learning experience. I am going to meet plenty of people in this profession who, to my mind, have no business being here. People whose motives are, at best, inscrutable. People who constantly assume the worst. People who aren't doing their kids any favors. I spent some time really upset about this, but after thinking about it a lot and talking it through with Aaron, I'm coming around to the hard reality that I can't be there for everyone. There are going to be bad teachers out there, and while it's a really hard thing to do, you have to focus on your students and on what you can do in your classroom. This summer was hard because I felt like the work I was doing - that three of us were doing - was being actively undermined by our fourth member. But in the fall, it will only be me, and while that should sound scary, it's actually a really comforting thought.

-------------

On our next-to-last day of class, we asked students to write us a letter telling us what they liked about the class, what they didn't like, and what we should do differently in the fall. They gave us a lot of good advice about sticking to our guns, putting ourselves in their shoes, and not lecturing so much. The next day, as students filed out the door and we wished them luck in the fall, one of our most serious and thoughtful students came up to me with four sheets of paper, each folded once and bearing one of our names, and asked me to give them to the other teachers. He had gone home and handwritten these four letters, all four of them deeply personal. To my caucasian female colleague, he wrote that he had been concerned when she opened up a discussion of racism, but that she had handled the difficult topic well, and he asked her to think to herself how she really felt about it. To my mellowest colleague, he wrote that at the beginning, he had thought the teacher would be boring, but that as time passed he had grown to appreciate his style. This is, in its entirety, what he wrote to me.

Hi! I heard tha you are a new teacher
I mean you graduated some months ago.

When I heard you the first time in the class, you sounded like my teacher from elementary (Guatemala C.A.) and I don't know why.

I think you can be one of those teachers that are always helping students I mean individually. You should not take your profession just like a job, be cause being a teacher is not a job is like a "Don" (Spanish word). I was studying to be a teacher in my country (is not a lie I was in college before to come here) but I realized that it was not for me so that's why I'm here now, I cannot be a teacher.

I hope you find a good school. (Not like this one believe me student here don't appreciate good teachers). Espero haya aprendido algo de nosotros.

--------

Don't worry about my grammar on this letter.

remembering who I'm here for

2005-07-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

Looking over my last few posts, I realized something: I haven't been talking about my kids much lately. It's easy to get bogged down in the paperwork and bureaucracy and in your own teaching. But in the end, all of that is in place not to drive you crazy, though it may, but to help your kids.

So, before I go outside and enjoy the Saturday sun, a few words about my students.

1. They're making progress. Those who have stayed, and who do their work every day instead of sleeping, are really showing improvement. Are they all going to get A's? No - because they aren't all doing all their work, and even those who are are not all mastering everything, and in the ends, that's what grades should reflect. Are they all ready for the next grade? It's harsh, but most of them, by state standards and by my own, are not even ready for the grade they just finished. But that's what we're here for, and that's what they're working on. They're getting closer, and most important of all, they know that. They don't know it as well as they should, and that's something I need to work on as a teacher. Teenagers are a funny group. In a lot of ways they're still kids, but they definitely think they're too cool for learning. Yet show them that they're making progress, and watch how hard they have to fight to keep a smile off their ultra-cool faces. Then, the next day, watch how much harder they are willing to work.

2. They crack me up. Seriously. And they're angels. On a behavioral scale of 1-10, with 1 being a pod-child genetically engineered for behavioral perfection and 10 being Damien, spawn of the dark underlord, the worst I've seen in my classroom is probably about a 3. Our main problems are with talking out of turn, a bit of inappropriate language, and sleeping. That's another thing I need to work on: while I'm getting pretty good at managing the first two, I'm not so great at making sure everyone's paying attention at all times. I've caught myself, more than once, waking up a student twice, and then, seeing their head down a third time, thinking, "Fine. I tried." It's a terrible feeling, and I need to make sure that even if I have that thought, my actions don't reflect it.

3. They're amazing students. Not just in the sense that they're making progress, but in the sense that by and large, they care about their education. Now that they're more comfortable with me, they're starting to do things like pull me aside and have me explain things over again until they understand them. They approach us when they have jobs that prevent them from doing their homework and ask us for modified deadlines. They check to make sure they're doing things right. This is maybe the most heartening thing of all for me as a teacher. While it is my job to check that they are understanding, I'm trying to teach them that it's their job, too. They are adults, and they should care about these things and be actively involved in their own education. While it would theoretically feel great if 100% of my students told me that they all understood something the first time, it would probably mean they were lying to me or overestimating their own understanding, and it feels even better when one or two raise their hands, wait to be called on, and ask me a clarifying question.

4. I do not want to leave them. I know, this one's about me. But it's true. A lot of us are feeling this way, realizing that we have just five days left with this group of amazing human beings, and things are just starting to happen. What if we had just one more week with them? What if we had a whole year? What could we accomplish then? Would Claudia and Alma perfect their verb tenses? Would Vashawn's grammar start to catch up with his amazing talent for descriptive detail and rhetoric? Could Terry start to believe that he's not stupid, and feel confident enough to write more than three sentences at a stretch? Would Pebbles ever be comfortable enough in the classroom to even say hello to me, like she does in the hallways? Might Anthony start believing that he could go to college after all? We all know that we'll have an amazing new group of students to work with very shortly, and that we will have them for an entire year, long enough to move beyond this beginning, getting-to-know-you stage. But that doesn't make it any easier to walk away, when they ask you with either a pleading voice or an accusing stare, why you have to leave. It doesn't make it easier to walk away from the rest, either, the ones who never started to warm up to you, who still don't care about or don't believe in the possibility of their education. In a year, you wonder, could you start to change their minds?

meltdown.

2005-07-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

Today was the hardest day I've had since I got here - but not the way you'd think. I was up late last night putting together a test that probably shouldn't have been my responsibility and a couple of lesson plans, including today's, but it all came together. Along with my teammate Heather, I co-led two great, productive review sessions. My class was bouncing off the walls by the time I got there to teach, as they had just finished the test and it was the last hour of a warm, sunny Friday, but I had changed my lesson plans to reflect their energy, and we got through a noisy but productive session on descriptive writing. I sighed my way through the irritating "week in review" quiz, and along with my working group heard yesterday's terrifying rumors of a weapon on campus confirmed. It was a lot to deal with in one day, but I got through it, and I was still smiling. And then I went to the campus meeting.

The campus meeting is how we end every Friday, all 150-odd of us in our high school's gym. We call it the pep rally, as it's usually intended to make sure we end our exhausting weeks on an inspirational note. We'd all rather just go home half an hour earlier, but it's been made pretty clear that this is not going to happen, so we deal with it. Today, though, is the last Friday before closing ceremonies, and our high school has a reputation to uphold. Last year we entered closing ceremonies with a choreographed step that blew all the other schools' little chants out of the water. This year, the other schools are kicking things up a notch, and in the grand tradition of escalation, so too must we. At today's meeting, then, we were all supposed to learn this very complicated, but unarguably cool-looking step, which one of the advisors had put together. She and the other advisors led, and we were to follow. What could be simpler?

Something you might not know about me: I get anxiety. Bad anxiety. It doesn't come out in the classroom, thank God, or when I'm giving a speech or meeting new people, though these things of course make me nervous. It comes out at odd times, like when I have to cold-call someone I've never spoken to before, or when I have to approach a store employee with a question, or when I have to learn something entirely new, like driving. But mostly, it comes out when I'm in front of a big group of people, and someone asks me to do something I don't know how to do. It doesn't matter if those other people can't do it either, or if it's normal to take awhile to learn. The feeling takes over, regardless of logic. I don't know if you've felt anxiety before, but for me, it's just blind, irrational terror, flooding my brain, seeping into all the cracks, filling up the places where logic should be.

I sometimes tell people stories about when I was five and taking swimming lessons, because in all honesty the stories can be pretty funny: how I used to refuse to even put my face in the water, how I couldn't jump in even when someone was standing there in the shallow end waiting to catch me, or how I would try to hide in the dressing rooms and refuse to come out. But today I remembered what it was like to be that little girl, terrified of something horrible that I couldn't even name, something that clearly was not going to happen yet left me petrified anyway, to feel that icy hand closing around my insides. As a five-year-old, you can't articulate that, and people think you're just trying to get out of what you're doing, and force you into the water anyway. Today, I tried to shove it down inside, and just try the stupid steps. I got about 30 seconds into it before the thoughts going through my head were, "I can't do this." "I'll just skip closing ceremonies." "They can just put me on probation if they need to." I honest to God had the thought that they could kick me out of The Program over this, and that I didn't care. It's scary to have these thoughts. They're so irrational, so overly dramatic for the situation, and you recognize that, but you can't control them. All you want to do is run away and never come back.

The scariest part of it, for me, was that my advisor came over to my group, and when I told her I couldn't do it, that I'd just skip closing, the look on her face was like the one my mom had when I begged her to let me stay home from the pool on my sixth birthday. It said, For God's sake, just try it. It won't kill you. Stop overreacting. And, as I loved my mom, I respect my advisor immensely. She's more or less responsible for every bit of growth I've had as a teacher. So I tried again. And again, about two moves in, it was all I could do to keep from vomiting or running out of the buliding.

In the end I sat it out. My working group politely ignored my nonparticipation, and after it was all over, I went to my advisor and explained my situation. As soon as I opened my mouth, the tears started. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I feel like this. I don't know why I can't do this. It is so simple. I know I can learn. I just can't. I feel awful about it; my poor advisor didn't see it coming, and she was so gracious and apologetic and insisted that, no matter what, I would walk in with the team, because it's not the team without me. She understood, and she was so upset that she didn't know, or see it on my face. So I don't have to learn the step. But this does not make me feel any better.

There's irony to be had here, if you're looking. I've been such a rock through this whole experience, shaking off my worse days in the classroom, refusing to be upset about anything I can learn from instead, taking on more than my share of responsibility in my classroom, and having those late-night heart-to-hearts with really emotional people wondering if the Program is really for them. I don't think it's too boastful to say that I've been really strong through everything the last month has thrown at me. But today, faced with this stupid step, I just broke down. I feel horrible inside, like you do after a stomach flu, when everything aches. I'm intellectually over it, but still, I can't stop crying. I hate it that I can't just work through this.

you have got to be kidding me

2005-07-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

Today: Frustration Post!

Normally, things at my high school are pretty smooth sailing. Things get done, you know where you're supposed to be, and you more or less know who to talk to if you have a problem. Today, though, I am pretty miffed at the relationship between my school and The Program. It's just a mess. Three lovely examples, all from the last eight hours, of incredibly poor communication between the two:

First off, last Friday we were all "offered the chance" to buy t-shirts from my high school, meaning that we pretty much had to. Fortunately, the t-shirts were awesome: a yellow/black on baby-blue vintage athletic design that I would have picked up off a store shelf in a heartbeat, and all for the low low price of $8. Great, I said, and all weekend I collected singles and a five so that I would have exact change, and first thing Monday morning I walked in and pre-paid for my shirt. I was about the eighth person on the list, and I ordered a small. The t-shirts got here today...but they were not the same t-shirts. They looked like boring, rejected $3 Old Navy t-shirts. No style whatsoever. The Program told us that there were no L or XL in the cool shirts, and only about half enough S and M, but that they made sure that everyone in our group got the same shirt! Wasn't that great of them? How they didn't check what they had in stock before they told 200 of us to buy shirts, and then didn't respect the time-honored process of first come, first served?

That is offense number one.

Now, I marched right back to the office and returned this t-shirt, as I did not give them $8 to give me something that I did not ask for and will never in a million years wear. As it turns out, it doesn't especially matter that I returned this t-shirt, because the intention was to have us all wear them this Friday when we did our big community service project. Last Friday (at the very same meeting where they promised us the awesome t-shirts,) when they told us about this project and had us brainstorm things we could do for the school and its surrounding community, we assumed that this had been run by the school. Not the case. So today - which is Wednesday, for those keeping score - we got this memo saying that Oh, we ran the whole "community service" thing by the principal, and he's dead-set against it. So, sorry that we went about the whole thing backwards and wasted everyone's Friday afternoon and will now be wasting another one. Except without the "sorry" part.

That is offense number two.

Then, midway through the afternoon, we found out that preliminary final grades are due first thing Monday morning. The Program says they only found out this morning. So now we are all scrambling to change our deadlines and make this work for the kids without undermining what we've been saying or killing ourselves with grading.

You would think that's the kind of thing The Program would have asked, now wouldn't you.

So, three strikes, and all in one day.

On another, slightly less bitter note: the lovely Miss Amelie, formerly of the BLing department and now of the prestigious South Dakota corps, has suggested that The Program has more or less pre-printed its feedback forms to say "Wow! So positive and assertive!" I hold that this is in no way the case. We have some effed-up teachers at my school. They're getting better, but they're also getting walked over. Please refer to yesterday's post for a running comment-debate.

Also, my feedback is awesome, and I do not completely suck at this. Just in case that was in some way unclear.

let's talk feedback

2005-07-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

I've been teaching for over 2 weeks now. It's high time I let you all know how it's going.

The first thing you should know is that the only reason I'm updating at all is that I'm not teaching tomorrow. Generally I teach one half-period per day - about one hour - on my own, plus co-teaching two half-hour literacy sessions. This week is scheduled differently. We still have the literacy responsibility, but each day M-Th is assigned to a different teacher. Today was my day - two full classes, a total of four hours. I'm pretty drained, especially after an intense 2.5-hour diversity session, an English teacher team meeting, and a pretty serious talk with one of my collab members, so I decided to skip workshops and come up here to blog a bit. The "detox" playlist is getting aired for the first time since I stayed up all night writing my credentialing essays. Thank God for Sleater-Kinney.

That being said: teaching today was a lot like teaching any other day, in the sense that every minute I spend with my kids, I feel like I learn more than I did in an entire semester at Berkeley. Today I learned: how not to approach a long and difficult text, how important during-reading activities like text coding are, and, excitingly, what it feels like to be stonewalled by your students. That sounds like all kinds of bad, but it really wasn't. We got through the lesson. We made some good connections and laid a solid foundation for the week's big essay. I made some real mental adjustments per how much talking and sleeping I'm going to deal with in the future, as in beginning tomorrow. I irritated the hell out of my kids by repeating the homework over and over, and I'm OK with that, if it means it gets done. And my kids still do not hate me. Not that it really matters, but it feels nice.

One big stress today was the sheer amount of observation going on. Probably because of my classroom's location, I often go a whole period with no observers. Today I had six, up to three of them at one time: my advisor, another (particularly hostile) advisor, and our literacy specialist, all of whom I respect deeply. Stressful as it was, I have to say that constant and varied feedback has been one of the best things about my institute experience. It's an immediate check, letting you know what's working and what you can change, starting the very next day.

A little about my feedback. The single comment I receive most frequently - and actually from every single person who's ever observed me - is that I have a really positive, assertive tone with my classes, and that there seems to be a culture of mutual respect in place (alternatively described as "a great/natural/confident classroom manner.") It's nice to know that that attitude of respect and positivity is coming through, because it's something I strive for, and that means my kids either see or feel it too. The negative (or "delta," meaning "growth area" in touchy-feely Programspeak) feedback I get varies from day to day, and person to person, which is a really good thing. It means that I'm not making the same mistakes every day, that I'm advancing enough to make fun new mistakes, and that there aren't errors so outrageous that everyone who walks into my classroom dives for a pen and a feedback form to correct my egregious oversights, ASAP. For one reason or another, my advisor in particular seems to believe deeply in my potential as an educator, and therefore gives me an overwhelming amount of constructive criticism. I implement as much of it as I can, but if there's one thing I can tell you about teaching, it's that no matter how many things you have ever thought about at one time, you need to multiply it by about 30, and then you're maybe getting close. It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

For illustrative purposes, please find here a partial list of things I am already working on implementing in my classroom: Giving explicit instructions, providing visuals, consistency in classroom management policies, whole-class checks for understanding, adjusting lessons based on diagnostics, lecturing less, having more dynamic introductions, emphasizing the importance of our lessons, neither overemphasizing nor ignoring higher-achieving students.

An even more partial list of things I need to work on this week: Consequences for persistently nonparticipating students, hearing more student voices, student-to-student communication, time management, effective grading, communicating student progress toward objectives to students, addressing different modalities and learning styles, acting decisively in response to disturbances, streamlining grouping strategies, making activities more student-centered, ensuring that students know what they should be doing at all times.

Oh yeah. I'm teaching content, too.

I hope.

can we really be getting through?

2005-07-21T02:08:00.000-07:00

We gave our first test today, and I'm in mini-crisis mode I was handed what I was told was the Bad Stack to grade, and the kids are doing so well that one of three things is happening:
1. I was given the Good Stack by accident.
2. I am being way too easy a grader.
3. They are really getting it.
I would like to think that it's #3, but I'm thinking that realistically it's a combination of all three. I don't think this is the Bad Stack, because some names I expected to see were not there, and everyone attempted all the sections. This was not the case for the class as a whole, based on what I saw on the way out of our literacy hour. I am definitely being a bit too easy, but I just can't help but see the good things in their essays. Everything else is much more objective. It's kind of worked out so that my over-niceness can only skew their tests by one letter grade or less. So, even still, they can't be failing in massive numbers.
And for the record, "Doing Really Well" in this case means:
A - 1 (it's a 90.0%)
B - 7
C - 5
D - 6
F - 1
I am really hoping this is the Good Stack and I don't have to re-grade them all during my prep period tomorrow.

day by day

2005-07-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

Things are getting weird around here, between all the freshly minted acronyms (for example: IBFs/IGFs/IONs: Institute Boyfriends/Girlfriends/One Night Stands; SFGs: Significant Fucking Gains; etc.), episodes of Cafeteria Tummy, and 2am Kinko’s runs with people whose names you no longer bother to find out. I just walked out of the dining hall and ran into Mike, who was marching around wearing some type of WWII-style helmet for no apparent reason. I did not even blink.

I ended up getting just under 4 hours of sleep last night and I’m hoping for 5 tonight, but time will tell.

We wrote our first exam tonight. I don’t get to proctor it, though. Instead I get to teach a lesson on brainstorming, outlining, and drafting an essay - immediately after they are done taking that exam, and at the very end of the school day, no less. I expect it will be a real treat.

My bed is covered in stacks of papers. Some of them are mine, some not. Some are graded, others not. Some I have never seen before in my life.

I wish that I had lots of insightful things to say at this point, but really all I’m doing is going day by day, making sure my lessons work, trying to connect with my students, and doing my damndest to sleep, eat, and shower, in descending order of priority. I haven’t really had a bad day in the classroom yet. There have been lots of what I call “Learning Days,” days in which I walk out of the room knowing that if I had it all to do over again, not more than two words in a row would remain the same. This is not the same as a bad day. Bad days are when five students in the back of the class are sleeping face-down on their desks, and someone is making birdcalls in the back of the class, and one girl is giving you sass and two boys are hitting each other and that’s when your regional director walks in with the review sheet. Bad days are when teachers go into the hallway between periods and cry, and over dinner they talk about going home.

week one debrief (pt. 2)

2005-07-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

Immediately after my post-teaching prep period yesterday, I met some other teachers down in the parking lot and drove to a local middle school for placement fair #2. It was light-years away from my last job fair experience. For one thing, I was more comfortable. I ditched my expensive black suit - too hot to teach in, apart from making me feel like an indestinguishable teaching drone - in favor of my favorite brown slacks and a jacket I got separately at Target, which somehow matches exactly, with a comfortable shirt and the funky silver necklace my mom bought me as a graduation gift. I felt like a real, practical teacher, and more importantly, like myself. I also walked in unconcerned about my job status: teaching this summer class is my chief concern, and everything else has been categorized "Will Work Itself Out Eventually." And even though it's only been a week, I've learned a lot about myself as a teacher, and I knew that I wouldn't have to make up what I thought I would do if a student cursed at me. Most importantly, I walked in knowing what (and where) I would and wouldn't be happy teaching. And that is how I ended up being hired at a high school three miles south of where I'm placed for the summer, teaching ESL.

I know. I was surprised too. But I really clicked with the two women who interviewed me, both assisitant principals, and I felt in them both a real love and faith in their school and its children. They were also incredibly straightforward about the neighborhood these kids live in, and the role of the school in their lives. This school, they say, is a safe haven, free from the "race riots" reported at other high schools throughout the city this spring. It is a quiet place, a green place, where the students feel comfortable, and where they spend as much time as they can before the place is closed up at night. At the same time, the neighborhood is not a nice place to live. Gangs are a serious problem, as the LA Weekly reports this week, and the police can be just as serious. There has been a tension in the air all week, since the much-publicized deaths of baby Susie and her father - whatever his role, no one feels safe where a 2-year-old dies at the hands of a police SWAT team. No one feels that reasonable attempts were made to go in after her. My high school has sports, but no other extracurriculars, mostly because parents don't feel safe unless their kids walk home in groups. Plans are being considered for an after-school homework help center with a shuttle to drop kids off at home.

That being said: I love Watts. I had been hoping, despite the drive, that my summer placement school might have a spot for me, and I'm thrilled to remain in the neighborhood (though my kids will be incensed when they hear I'll be teaching for their rivals down the street.) My kids are so sharp and perceptive. They have big dreams. They are generous and forgiving. And all of this comes, clearly, from their families and their communities. It's a really scary place to grow up, and these kids are so brave. I want to be there with them, saccharine as this sounds, and help them in any way I can to achieve those dreams.

And then there's the question of subject matter. The women who interviewed me seemed to really like me, and to be incredibly interested in my linguistics background. We had chatted for about twenty minutes when one of them looked at me with big doe eyes and said gently, "I'm sure you expected to teach English. But what we really need is an ESL teacher." She told me all about the department, its energetic young staff, and the school's fast-rising rate of promotion to standard English classrooms. She also told me that she's never known someone who started out teaching ESL to go back to a regular English class. It's the kids. They are the ones who really want to learn. My interviewers explained all of this, told me I should only go where I will be happy, and then asked me, what did I think?

The truth is I didn't need to think. My classroom this summer is integrated, even if it's not officially designated as such. I have kids whose reading and writing are so sophisticated that they really shouldn't be retaking this class, and I have kids who need their friends to translate for them when I ask a question. And the assistant principal was right - they are the ones who show up every single day. They call me over and ask me to check their work, to explain things again and again. They call me "Miss" and smile at me on the courtyard between classes. Some of them are rowdy, sure, just like all kids that age. But they desperately want the knowledge I have. Their student surveys reveal it: I am not very well at writing but I like read about sports. I like English because I learn some thing new everyday. I am not good at write esays but I will try harder.

So here I sit: an ESL teacher. I'll have two periods a day of ESL2. The school has 3 levels of ESL, the third being very similar to standard English 9. Every kid I teach will have passed at least one full year of ESL, and my job will be to build on the skills they have learned in that first year, and progress them as readers and writers. And in case the cake needed some icing: my third period will be standard English 12, which focuses on modern lit. That means that unlike my othe classes, or even standard 9th grade English, grammar will be present but will take a backseat to critical thinking, writing, and reading the short stories and novels that make me happiest. I'm hoping that I can pass some of that joy off onto my kids.

There are still a few details to be ironed out. For one, I may have to switch back to stanky LMU credentialing, depending on if I can get the required bilingual certification through TeachLA. For another, my school is year-round, and I'm on B track. This means that when I go in to work on the 22nd of August, I see my kids for 3 days before they go on 2 months' vacation. Probably I will be teaching intercession or doing subbing for the other tracks in those months, so I can continue to grow as a teacher and keep a roof over my head. I'm not worried about these things, though. I have a placement. And really, I couldn't be happier.

week one debrief (pt. 1)

2005-07-16T17:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finished my first full week of teaching. It was a good day.

In a style true to The Program, we each begin our lessons with a "Do Now" exercise on the board. These are usually academic, either testing retention of the previous day's objective or asking the students to begin thinking about what we will learn that day. Since it was Friday, and they'd been great all week, and we were curious, we gave them a non-academic Do Now at the beginning of each of the two periods: On a sheet of binder paper, write down any questions you have about your teachers. Do not write your name on the paper, and be sure they are not personal questions.

They grumbled for a minute - what can they ask that's not personal? - but after about 30 seconds and a reminder that they only had two minutes, all of them fell to writing. Some of the questions they wrote were for all four of us: What schools did we all go to? Do we like teaching at our high school? Aren't we just practicing on them and we'll go be real teachers elsewhere? Why are we so strict/boring/into assigning homework? Others were for individual teachers, and I was really happy with the ones I got. From an incredibly bright boy who I don't allow to talk out of turn regardless: You're cool - so why do you try and act mean? From another student: How many years have you been teaching? On Thursday, I walked past as our class cut-up quickly tore out a sheet of paper and said, in Spanish, "The teacher's coming! Take out some paper!" I tried to hide it, but it cracked me up. He gave me the shrewd eye, and come Friday, tons of questions asked, Did one of the teachers speak Spanish? Which one? Do I speak Spanish? Did I just take it in school, or am I Hispanic? Another asked, Ms. L, what is your favorite sport? (They will be thrilled when I tell them it's soccer- which I'm hesitant to do because of all the high-level Soccer Talk sure to follow. How do you explain that you're only a lay soccer fan?) And maybe my favorite question, the one that validates my disdain for the unofficial but much-repeated first rule of teaching, Do Not Smile Before Winter Break: Does Ms. L always have such a nice smile?

We discussed one of these questions in my second-period class - why we chose to teach at our high school. I told the kids that honestly, we were assigned to that school, but that we did all choose to teach high school, because even though it might not seem that way, we all genuinely love high schoolers, and that we all chose to teach at schools very much like this one: mostly urban, mostly without some of the resources and advantages that schools in rich areas have. They asked me, rightly so, what I knew about it, and I told them that I was pretty familiar with schools like this one, from where I grew up and from the work I did in college. S, the kid who asked me why I try to act mean, asked what college I went to, and seemed surprised that I was from California. I told the class that I grew up in Salinas, California, and they started buzzing immediately. Salinas? She's from Salinas! "You from Salinas?" asked S. "Then you do know."

Now they are trying to pull stuff on me. I bust them for talking instead of working, and they say, "C'mon, Ms. L, you know how it is. You from the ghetto."

Yeah, I tell them, and I know how hard you have to work to get out. That shuts them up pretty well.

My lesson went pretty well, I think. It was about identifying structures and content of different types of informational text, and it let them get up out of their seats a little bit and stop listening to me talk so much. We're all very aware of how easy it is to just stand and lecture, and also that we have about 5-7 minutes of lecture time before they glaze over and shut down, so Goal #1 is for week 2 is to Shut Up and Let Them Learn.

thoughts / delerium.

2005-07-14T00:43:00.000-07:00

I feel that an update is needed.

It's been three days in the classroom so far. Our first group has a regular attendance of about 45. They are wonderful. The biggest problem we have is that four or five students tend to dominate the discussion, shouting out answers before others have a chance to think or volunteer (which they are disinclined to do in either case.) Our second group has a regular attendance of about 24, and they make you work for it. It doesn't matter what "it" is; you will be working. Today I had the great pleasure of teaching the last quarter of the day, when the kids are amped up on soda and candy from breaktime, tired of sitting in a classroom for five hours, and antsy for the final bell. It was what The Program likes to call a "Learning Experience." Lesson: have different strategies in place for the post-lunch, pre-bell hour. With fall students, have frequent and frank talks about proper nutrition. Get some sleep, because by 3pm, you will feel like you ran a marathon, regardless.

Had a bit of disappointment today. We have a kid who's clearly bright but shockingly far behind. His diagnostic was very poor on the reading comprehension, and he did not even fill out the grammar section, let alone the essay. His "Do Now" activities reveal sentences dotted with random periods; he uses "do" in place of "the." He is the textbook case of the frustrated kid who acts out. Our FA warned me about him, telling me "he's a troublemaker." In fact, he's the one who found my Teacher Voice for me the other day, for which I will probably always remember him. This kid has had a rough few days. I cracked down on him on Monday, because I kept catching his misbehavior and no one else's. He was sullen and resentful the rest of the day. Since then, he has been moved to the front of the room and has of course not been allowed to sleep in class. We have been trying to reach him, if only to have a conversation, but it has not been working. This morning I saw him in the halls and said hello; he greeted me more politely than I would have guessed. And then, this afternoon, he did not come to class.

It is, of course, possible that he decided to skip out with some friends during nutrition, or... Well, there is no "or," really. He's checked out. Gone. Is he coming back tomorrow? It's possible. But it is not likely. We are all hurting over this. What could we have done to make him stay? And if he comes back, what can we do to help him, if he's hostile to showing that he needs help?

Today's good news is that Mike got transferred to my school; his had low enrollment in Special Ed so he and a few others were shipped over to fill spots left by our deserters. Mike says that the CMs at his old school were, on the whole, much more attractive than the ones at my school. I am willing to believe this; we seem to have all the quirky people, which I vastly prefer.

Mike jokes a lot - we all do, really - but he had a hard first day. One of his kids, who he suspects was born with FAS, came up to him today and said, with his slow, heavy stutter, "Mr. [Mike], I won't be in school tomorrow." Mike asked why not - did he have an appointment? The kid said, "Because I'm going to go home today and kill myself." It is your first hour of teaching in your entire life. What do you do? Mike goes to his FA who goes to the school counsellor who goes God-knows-where. Does that kid come back to school tomorrow? For how long?

Many of us in my CM group are concerned about whether we're really doing our students a service by being here this summer. We're doubtful that we'll make any kind of gains, and we wonder if they may not just be the guinea pigs through whose suffering we, as humanity, benefit. I am definitely not OK with this thought. As one of the other English teachers pointed out tonight, though: they are high school juniors and seniors, and many of them cannot tell the past from the present tense, coordinate subject and verb number, or write a coherant paragraph. Clearly someone down the line has given up on them - maybe a long list of someones. As long as we are not on that list, and as long as we are working hard to improve every day for them, we are doing more good than harm.

I have another placement fair on Friday. I'm stressed about it because realistically I will have slept six-ish hours between now and then. I am going to show up looking haggard and thinking about my lesson plans for Monday. I need to do laundry tomorrow night or I will show up in some kind of clashing-floral ensemble. It is difficult to think about these practical things with my lesson plans looming over me and my kids to think about.

it kind of reminds me of the bene gesserit voice

2005-07-11T22:56:00.000-07:00

I'm just putting the final touches on tomorrow's rewritten LP - the goals have been expanded to include finding the main idea of a passage as well as paraphrasing - and I'm thinking how exhausted I am and how I wonder if I can get in bed before 2 tonight after this morning's fiasco, when I missed my alarm and woke up an hour late, unprepared, with the printer in my dorm both broken and out of paper, and I look at the clock and realize - it is only 11 pm. And I am already this tired.

Today was more of a challenge than I thought. I was thinking that because I'd only be administering a diagnostic, not actually teaching a lesson, that it would be kind of a wasted day for me, in terms of lessons in being a teacher. I was not, of course, anticipating a variety of challenges ranging from a lack of motivation to honest belief in the inevitability of failure to general goofballness. I was also not expecting to have to stand my ground so firmly on Day One, nor to find my Teacher Voice, as though not a part of me, somehow delivering effortlessly the words "That kind of language is unacceptable in this classroom and I do not expect to hear it again. Now you need to work on your diagnostic. Thank you," in such a way that "Thank you" are the most forceful words. I especially did not expect this to work.

So there you have it. I am really, honestly a teacher now. I will be grading essays on the bus in the morning, all I have to talk about is my classes and my kids, and I have been exhausted since three this afternoon. This will be my life for the next three to five years, with only summer breaks between.

I hope to post more these next couple of days, but if things keep on keepin' on, I'm not sure I can promise anything. In the meantime, please do note that my sister has established a little bloggin' action of her own, to add to the international flavor of this neighborhood.

one night in bangkok

2005-07-10T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've been working nonstop for the last 12 hours. Written today: a student survey, a behavior contract, a parent letter, and three lesson plans, none of which are finished. It's a lot more than it sounds like, once you factor in all the sorting, stapling, signing, and negotiating personalities. I've been made the official secretary of my group on the grounds that I'm "the most organized person in the group," according to the Problem Girl. This in itself worries me.

I've discovered that that best music for my concentration is the Chess soundtrack. Why?

My goal is to be in bed by 1:30. I'm skipping breakfast in the morning, no doubt.

As of tomorrow, I'm a classroom teacher.

Wow.

this photo has not been retouched.

2005-07-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a really long couple of days. Lesson plans need revising, we completely rewrote our entire summer curriculum tonight, I'm deeply concerned about the motivations and potential of a member of my cohort, I've slept a combined total of five hours the past two nights, and on top of all of this, my teaching career starts first thing Monday morning.

In case you're wondering if it's really that hard or if I'm blowing things out of proportion, I give you the following task: look at my social photo from last week. And then consider the implications when I tell you that this is what I look like as of right now.

Harrowing.

what we're facing

2005-07-06T22:46:00.000-07:00

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.

kiddies & cohorts

2005-07-06T22:45:00.000-07:00

I alluded earlier (if you can call it an allusion) to the fact that I’ve been butting heads a bit with one of the other girls in my cohort. We worked together pretty intensively today, and it seems like our problems are getting ironed out as we all get used to each others’ working styles; three of us are very big-picture, freeform thinkers, and this last girl is very methodical, organizing as she goes along and mentally blocking out time slots. I think we need to work in more explicit clarification and reassurance that we’re all on the same page, plus more frequent check-ins in general, but it seems like we’re all dedicated to making this work, so I’m optimistic. Everyone who’s team-taught in this way tells us the same think: it’s really a lot like a marriage. You’ll bond, bicker, learn to read their signals and predict their needs, and grow to loathe each other – but no matter what happens, you’ll just have to make it work. For the next five weeks, anyway.

Today was the first day that kids have been at school, though we don’t enter the classroom until Monday. There are a couple thousand of them. I had the good luck to leave for my interview while they were out on nutrition break, and I have to say, it boosted my energy and confidence more than anything all week up until that point. I kind of remembered – oh, yeah! Kids! Really, teenagers are teenagers, and I’m so much more comfortable around these teens than I was around all the richie Caucasian kids at LMU computer camp. They remind me of my kids up in Oakland: extra-tall t-shirts, meticulous hair, too much jewelry, and big fake attitudes to mask their curiosity and insecurity. A couple of kids yelled out at me, “Hi, teacher!” It felt so good to say “hi” back, to not have to correct them. Very weird.