Friday, October 28, 2005

who you are < who you know

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.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

the hour draws near

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.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

curiouser and curiouser

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.














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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

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"...

Friday, October 07, 2005

hate it when that happens

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.