the end is not nigh enough

My posts have been dwindling, along with my general interest in anything and everything school related. The hot weather comes and all I’m interested in is barbecues and swimming pools and watering holes.

Spent memorial day weekend with my cousins and it felt like summer already. Softball game: check, parade: check, pool: check, barbecue: check and check… I thought to myself, cool, what are we doing tomorrow? And then I was forced to remind myself that I will be at work tomorrow.

Now, it’s not so bad because tomorrow is our field trip to my alma mater, NYU, and Wednesday is the carnival, plus graduation practice takes up a period every day until the last week of June.

I just think that if the month of June were, for some reason, cancelled… the kids really wouldn’t be missing much. Especially now that it’s getting hot and the AC is broken it feels like we’re just running out the clock. We show up, we go through the motions, but especially now that the all-important Standardized Tests are done, it’s hard to feel like what we’re doing matters. I mean, of course it matters, in an inspiring the youth of America kind of way. But the last few weeks stretch like taffy. The end is near, but not near enough.

Three things you can say to piss off a teacher

Today's lunchtime conversation: things people say about teaching that infuriate us

#1. The "Aw, that's so cute" attitude.

I think people think elementary school teachers sit around all day singing the abc's and having story time and eating snacks. The truth is very far from that. When you think teacher, don't think Mother Theresa. Think Stalin. We are not puppies and kittens. We are tigers and wolves.

Sure, a good teacher makes it look effortless, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Basically if you're a classroom teacher, you have to bend a small army of (small) people to your will. You must be a dictator, to know exactly what will happen at every moment of the day, to dispense about a thousand instructions a day and to predict what every student's response will be to every thing you say and your possible responses to all their possible reactions. You must have an answer for everything. You must know what to do when a kid rips his pants wide open, when one loses her keys, when they pinch someone or call each other racial slurs or say that they will get beat for bringing home a bad grade, or they can't find their notebook or the notebook has run out of pages...

You must squelch mutinies before they arise and walk the subtle line between benevolent monarch and ruthless gestapo. You must live each day knowing that every move you make, every sound that escapes your lips is being closely monitored and scrutinized by impressionable, yet surprisingly judgmental young minds. You have to make your classroom run with discipline and efficiency, all the while making your subjects believe they have autonomy. They sit when you say sit, they stand when you say stand, they listen when you talk, they march when you say march. (None of this fits with my idealistic, individualized Montessori fantasy about how school SHOULD be. But the education crisis in this country isn't here because things are how they SHOULD be.)

You must be aware of the actions and whereabouts of 29 individuals at any given moment... I like to think it's like being in charge of 29 extremely needy and dependent employees (who are totally and completely id-driven, impulsive, clueless, irresponsible and who don't have the best judgement in general) and make sure they are doing the same thing at the same time and understand what to do and understand what to do if they don't know what to do

#2 The "You must love kids... I don't know how you have the patience."

Fact: many teachers don't love kids. Some love the act of teaching. Some love the ideals of education. Some love their subject matter. Some love immigrants. But I bet almost all would agree that kids can be a pain in the ass. Loving them is not actually a requirement of being a good teacher.

But what bugs me (and others) about this comment is the underlying condescension... Yeah, it takes patience. But if you mean patience like in Family Circus cartoons when someone draws on the wall with crayons, patience like when the baby spits up on your new outfit, patience like reading the same bedtime story over and over again, or counting cheerios for an hour, that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the patience that you use to build a civilization or plan a war. I'm talking patience like withstanding torture. Like building the pyramids or being wrongfully imprisoned. Patience like what was behind the Civil Rights movement. Patience to confront waste and disaster and injustice and utter helplessness every day, to look the monster square in the eye and not balk or shy away, even though you know it's not going anywhere. Patience like getting up Everest or Kilimanjaro.

It's true, people who go into teaching tend to do so with compassion, with some respect for human beings and what they are capable of. At least I hope most of them do. It's true we take on a nurturing role, we deal with tears and hurt feelings and all that crap. But you can't be soft. You're not necessarily comforting crying kids. You're dealing with them. Dealing with them in the context of a bunch of other needy kids who need to be kept occupied at all times, and a long list of impossible things you're expected to get done this year, and the never-ending power struggle of teacher versus entropy.

Sometimes that means letting the precious tearful child cry, or telling them to suck it up and pull it together, or ignoring them altogether. Being a teacher is different from being a parent or an uncle or a kind friend... You need to calculate your decisions based on the needs of the class, sharpen your knife on the rough edge of always having to be the boss (willingly or not). You need to be right even when you are wrong. And you must defer to the perpetual and unmerciful drive of curriculum and standards and limited time.

If you let your heart bleed it will quickly be bled dry.

#3 cause of teacher vitriol: "You're so lucky to have summer vacations!"

To which I say, we earn that shit. It's not about luck. If you calculate the hours of actual "work" we do - which is, for most teachers I know, the second you walk in to the second you walk out, plus some extra work you take home, I'd wager against an office worker any day... We schedule in our bathroom breaks at the beginning of the day... (Better go now, I won't have another chance until 1pm!) No coffee break, no facebook, no surfing the web, no extended lunches or water cooler conversations. We are on stage, front and center, every scene of every act of every show. And if you want to see 45 minutes stretched to maximum capacity, come watch me on my prep. We battle anarchy and we battle hard, and we reserve the right to bask in our hard-won vacation time.

Tune in tomorrow for tales of teachers who *don't* actually work that hard, but whose jobs are steadfastly secured by seniority.

But the other part of this question of whether to stay a teacher is more than just getting tired of all the paperwork or the repetitiveness of it... The bigger question is, how much does it really "matter" in the long run. Ultimately, what difference do I make as a teacher?

The education system is a leaky boat. Do you stay inside and keep on bailing water with your bucket full of holes? Or do you jump ship and swim for a different boat?

I'd have no problem bailing water to the end of my days if I thought it would save it in the long run. But it really sometimes feels as if "the system" is beyond saving.

Absence

The weather is weird, and matches my mood. It is bright, but not sunny, warm but not hot, almost drizzling but not actually raining, gray and muggy as all get out. It is non-committal, indistinct. Make up your mind, weather. What do you want to be?

You'd think with the lifting off of my thesis from my shoulders, I would be taking advantage of this opportunity to get my life in order, make use of all this spare time in my two-week reprieve before the final set of grad classes begins in June to get organized! Run miles! Clean the bathroom! Polish the floors! Plan ahead! Do errands! Dot i's and cross t's that I'd previously been ignoring...

But it's almost unnerving not to have the excuse of grad school and the constant threat of the thesis deadline -- I could hide behind those things, and my overstuffed schedule could explain the dirty-clothes carpet in my bedroom, the empty cupboards, why I never seem to have energy for anything but Hulu and Netflix on weekends.

Without my big excuse, evidence points uncomfortably towards me just being generally not an effective human being domestically. Maybe it's not some external force that's throwing my life off balance -- maybe I'm just not that good at balancing in the first place. Now the overbearing presence of the thesis has become an absence, and I have no more groceries or clean laundry than I ever did... I kind of feel absent from my own life, school too. The unintended side effect of all that emphasis on the state tests is that now that they're over, it feels like what we're doing really doesn't matter. I'm just trying babysit them through 'til June, when we can all go our separate ways and forget, for a while, that any of this ever happened.

I feel stuck like flypaper, like I'm doing laps in a wading pool. Waiting for a bus or a train that I'm not convinced is even coming.

***

My thesis is not the only absence I am feeling. I spent the entire weekend with Corky, playing connect-the-dots all around the boros with various friends' social events. I'm in love with our friendship, do you know that feeling? I am trying to capture her sunshine and bottle it up to stash away for later. And even though I am doing my best to love the fleetingness and impermanence, and to appreciate the present of her presence right now, and to be excited for the adventure that she absolutely deserves to have next year... every time she says something witty or clever, and every time we have the same thought at the same time, I am reminded what a gaping hole is going to be left in me when she leaves.

Her leaving is making me think about my next big step. Ending grad school is kind of a watershed moment. Once I have the degree, my commitment to the Fellows will be finished and my life is mine again to rearrange as suits. And I know I'll be going back to PS 00 next year, the immediate future is sorted. But what about after that? I promised myself I wouldn't become a "lifer," that I won't just wake up one day and find that ten years have gone by. I promised myself wild adventures and excitement and travel and the taking up of ambitious challenges... And not that teaching isn't challenging or meaningful...

But where do you go with it? I believe that's part of the trouble, part of the reason that a really big percentage of these driven young people that join Teaching Fellows and Teach for America tend to leave it after a few years. After you learn to be a teacher, what then? After ten years, you're still hot-gluing Word Walls and re-organizing your bookshelves and deciphering bad handwriting and typing up teaching points and making infinite copies of things. Pretty much the only place to go career-wise is administration, which is actually a totally different profession, since the best part of teaching is the kids, and administrators spend way more time shuffling papers and answering telephones and holding meetings than they do with any children. A conundrum.

For now, I am content with the responsibilities, great and small, that running a classroom entails. I'm 25 - chances are, any job I'm likely to get will involve some measure of tedium... stapling 29 folders to the wall, taking them all down again, walking kids up and down the stairs, copying things onto chart paper, hanging up bulletin boards, rearranging furniture...all that's part of the job I'm fine with all that now. And some people are really great at all those things and don't mind doing them in perpetuity. I just don't think I'm one of those people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html

Interesting article about Race to the Top and teachers' unions in the New York Times magazine...

I recently received notification that I've been recommended for tenure.

Interestingly, Mr. P has seen me teach exactly twice. Three if you include the time he walked into my classroom for a couple minutes last fall.

finishing

Woke up last Friday feeling empty and out of sorts. No particular reason, I think it's just that time of year - like mile 21 of the marathon... where's the finish line already??! Am I STILL doing this? Is it really going to end as they promised?

It's so easy to love my job in the summer -- I remember thinking last year, as I rode down a dusty road far far far from New York City, you'd have to be crazy not to be a teacher! I can't believe I'm being paid to be on vacation for two months!

And in the fall you can love it too, there's possibilities and potential to get excited about, sharp pencils and juicy new markers.

But your drive and ambition get spottier towards the end of the year, as you're worn down to a nub, and pencils are short, chewed-up, blunt and eraserless and all the markers are either dried up or lost.

And you're still in the boat rowing and rowing though your arms are getting tired and the shore doesn't seem to be getting any closer, at least not with any discernable speed.

What can you do?

Just keep showing up to work, I guess, one foot in front of the other. You make the most of your weekends and afternoons. Try to outrun your dispassion. Make plans for next year. Maybe a mental health day is in order, too. Drink sangria and sit in the sun. And you keep leaning on your friends.

A three-hour tour (three hour tour)

Today is the day of the fifth grade cruise... Yesterday the kids were buzzing with excitement, to the tune of not settling down for more than eight seconds at a time.

I have misgivings about the cruise, namely that I think it's a bit presumptuous to ask a community like ours to spend $40 on a luxury like a 3-hour boat ride. But Sh-- was walking around yesterday telling everyone what a 'milestone' it was going to be... they amaze me sometimes... milestone? where'd he get that word?

Milestone or not, it does mark the fact that the end of the school year is fast approaching and my class, my kids, all the intrigue and drama will evaporate before I know it like a long and very involved dream.

Part of me cannot wait to banish them from my psyche and to say so long, kiddos, go bug somebody else for a while. Part of me is DONE, boiled like a twenty minute egg in counting.

But part of me grieves the inevitable loss. They grow on you like a tumor, you know? Part of me feels so protective of them, like I would defend them to my last breath, even the ones who never seem to listen or who are completely oblivious and never know what's going on. Maybe especially them, they're the ones who are most likely to need defense. Part of me dreads letting them out of the careful homeostasis maintained within my four walls, to let them out into that big uncertain world where anything can happen. Exiting elementary school means exiting the bubble - no more safe zone, no more bumper lane. This group of kids have changed me like no other. Letting go of them will mean letting go of a part of myself.

Momentous things are happening.

For all the shit that your 'twenties' get -- for being tumultuous and uncertain and full of ups and downs -- important stuff happens, too. Like Jafa and Court just got engaged this weekend. Their foster child could be as close as one phone call away. Corky's off to new and unknown worlds. I handed in my thesis and presented it on Thursday! (My professor said I did a great job) Everybody's breaking up, having babies, getting married, getting cancer, getting degrees, getting new jobs and new apartments and promotions and getting drunk on weekends.

Put all that together, and you have yourself a life.

the bad old days

Yesterday as we were in MoLo's office, Corky mentioned the positive changes that have happened in school since MoLo has come, and it's the truth. When I first came, we were teaching literacy in a totally back-asswards way that made no sense, especially not to a brand new teacher with no teaching experience and no one explaining WTF she was supposed to be doing all day. Not only that, but P.S. 00 was absolutely ruled by a culture of fear - I can attest to this. MoLo said that the legacy left by the previous assistant principal was such that teachers would come to the post-observation meetings and start crying, before she's ever even said anything.

My first post-ob made me cry, too, though I think I managed to hold it together in front of the administration, but I did break down in front of the kids (I clearly remember little Johnny saying, "Mr. P made you cry?"). Peeves had forgotten he'd hired me, thinking I was a long-term sub. By the time he realized I was on the payroll and he had to come and do an observation, the school year was almost over and I was spending the bulk of each day peeling small children off the walls and going home each day to have daily mental meltdowns, with many a tearful phone call to my aunt to save my sanity ... not a whole lot of teaching going on. I'm be the first to admit, I was being eaten alive.

And when I got into "His" office to discuss what he had observed (after setting foot in my classroom for the first time in the six months I'd been there), I was told that my students were the lowest class in the entire school and why was that? and he took me to a string of kindergarten classrooms and said, "Look! Even KINdergarteners can sit still for Reader's Workshop," and led me from kindergarten to kindergarten of quiet, well-behaved children, as if to say, what's the matter with you? It's really simple, everyone else can do it, why can't you?... Why is your room such a zoo?

I have never before or since felt so small or worthless or such like a failure.

A long litany of shortcomings of my lesson and my classroom management were discussed. But what was never said was HOW to make them sit still, WHAT I had to DO to be able to teach.

But MoLo came, and quietly, slowly, things started changing.

To be continued...

poaching

Today Corky officially gave notice that she will not be returning to PS 00 next year. And even though I knew, and I'm happy for her new adventures and plan to go visit her in whatever far-away land she ends up in, and even though I had been steeling myself for it, I was taken aback by what a hole the official-ness of it left in my heart.

It's a discussion I've had over and over, with never a satisfying conclusion: Why does the institution of education drive out the innovators, the idea people, the movers and shakers, the ones with drive and ambition?... The average teaching career of a Teaching Fellow is I think three years or so?

What really needs to happen in education will not happen over the course of a couple years, or maybe even decades... what we DON'T need is quick-fixes, band-aids or more flash-in-the-pan snake oil remedies. We need a long term, well thought-out, planned, organized effort to pull education (probably kicking and screaming, in many cases) into the 21st century.. What that entails will entirely be determined by those people who step up to the plate.

And I'm really happy to report that some of those people are at P.S. 00 right now. MoLo is one of them.

MoLo is our nickname for the newest (and by my estimation, most effective) administrator at P.S. 00. This year she decided to paint the blank, barren walls of the fourth floor. She rallied a group of artistically inclined volunteers, organized Saturday painting sessions, and I think paid for all the paint out of pocket. The result is AWESOME -- Frog and Toad, Wild Things, Clifford and other story book characters now adorn the walls of her academy, and I think it is just such and expression of love and empowerment, and an expression of who MoLo really is.

to be continued...

budget buzz

I guess it's not really news to anyone, but budgets are a problem.

The buzz around the DOE of late has been around the hiring freeze (no new hires, no exceptions) and the threat of massive budget cuts, potentially resulting in teacher cuts. Staff are all aflutter. Especially new teachers, since everything involving the teachers' union is based on seniority, tenure and years in the system.

However, I have it on good authority that our jobs at P.S. 00 are, to an extent, safe. I heard through the grapevine that the Big Kahuna has said that he will cut absolutely every other thing before he lets go of any teaching position. (First thing to go? $100,000 staff development from Columbia Teacher's College, which I have always suspected was the teensiest bit of a rip off. 'Til now I just never knew the jaw-droppingly large dollar value of their helpful hints.) We may have to teach without supplies next year, but teach we will.

My nameless source of inner sanctum conference table gossip also gave a nice heart-warming shout-out to the hard-working, green-tinged teachers of my untenured ilk. She said if you look around the school, some of our best teachers are our newer teachers, and if we lose them, who do we have left? (Give it up for newbies! Rough around the edges and worn through to the bone, but doin' their darndest with whatever they've got) And, if any current teachers leave, they will have to throw the out-of-classroom teachers back into the classroom...Which is kind of like pulling 'em off the bench and putting them back in the game. With exceptions, "Out-of-classroom" positions are kind of like a gated community for 'active adults...' not exactly retirement, but not exactly the real world either.

So, you might wonder, as I did: With all these budget cuts and the global economy gone white water rafting down the porcelain throne, why was it raining Elmos (the highly coveted "document cameras") and brand new rugs down on P.S. 00 a few weeks back?

Well, regardless of anything else I've said of our inimitable Principal Peeves, he his nothing if not a shrewd business man. Shrewd and cutthroat.

So how it works is (according to my understanding) the school projects its budget for the coming year based on how many students it expects to have enrolled, and Uncle Sam dispenses monies accordingly. Apparently, we had over-projected this year, and Uncle Sam was going to shake us down for the extra undeserved shekels, but Peeves fought tooth and nail, hired lawyers, went all out protecting the money, doubtless using his pit bull-like ferocity against the keepers of the coffers, and he won! (Not surprising, I've seen him when he's mad.) But the catch was, we had to spend it by a certain deadline (which I'd peg as about three weeks ago, when the Elmo Fairy came around)

So there was a a major spending frenzy/forced shopping spree.., like, what can we buy, RIGHT NOW!? AP's were told they had till the end of the week to figure out how to spend the money. (Hence Candy asking me if there's anything else I needed for my classroom) The budget had to be cleaned out - we spent every last dime, to prove that yes, we really needed the money. Because if there's any unspent change left in the couch cushions at the end of the year, they take that as an indication that we didn't really need that money in the first place..._

SO yeah.. perhaps not the most ordered, planned out of educational spending... but if it's a choice between a benevolent rain of new tech toys, or less money available for next year, the choice seems obvious. Peevey don't mess around where money is concerned.

Cat's Cradle

After the math test I taught the kids how to play Cat’s Cradle. Their minds were appropriately, and adorably, blown.

I’ve been weed-whacking my way through Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom bit by bit. It occurred to me that the impromptu Cat’s Cradle workshop, although it had absolutely no relevance to any TC curriculum calendar or Everyday Mathematics Teacher’s Guide I’d ever been handed, was totally awesome. And, compared to the test prep unit, perhaps slightly closer to what Freire intends in his utopian educative dream… rather than force-feeding the kids “steps” to solving particular math problems, or shoving the prime numbers song (musical masterpiece or not) down their throats, I was simply creating conditions in which they could learn.. nudging them to become aware of new possibilities… hey kids, look what you can do with a piece of string!
And they were off… teaching each other, learning from each other, and inventing their own variations. All 28 kids totally absorbed in the joy and wonder of discovering something they never before knew how to do.

Who knew Cat’s Cradle is the answer to all of public education’s shortcomings…

bike wheel

Yep, it’s that time of year. We are frazzled and fizzling. Hot weather makes us lazy and recalcitrant. Nearing the ends of our wicks at the bottom of the candle, the promise of summer beckons seductively from eight short infinite weeks away.

I can feel that things are changing. Jafa’s foster baby could be here by the end of the month. Next year Corky, my bedrock-keystone, is leaning toward some other adventure in some other part of the world – really far away! like Cambodia or Tanzania. Soon the much-anticipated Organization Sheet will appear in our mailboxes, sealing our fates for the next school year. I feel the cycle taking its turn.

I’m trying to be okay with change. Corky had a great poem at her grassroots Inner Resilience that she started at her house, about enduring change like a tree – losing your leaves gracefully, knowing that they will return; bending with the wind, letting it shape you, but remaining your true self, standing tall, uncompromised.

A similar, somewhat less bucolic analogy occurred to me today in the form of my bike. My bike which I discovered this afternoon as I left school, chained to the signpost where I had left it that morning as usual, only missing one important piece: the front wheel.

This bike I have had for a long time now, since I was fourteen or so, and like anyone, it might be just a bit worse for the wear. Left it out in the rain and the chain rusted up a bit. Gear-shift not what it used to be. Paint is tarnished and scratched in spots… I’m not trying to imply that I, or my bike, is a decrepit old hag, but no one gets through all those miles without some wear and tear.

But anyway, this bike, my bike, the bike of me… it’s comfortable, it works well. It has gained and lost various acoutrements across time, but it is still the same, reliable old bike. The chain can be greased, the wheel replaced, with a little love and tenderness it will, hopefully, continue to serve well for a long time.

So that’s kind of what I’m relying on. That the sameness of me will carry on throughout the changes. I just know that every year of teaching is a whole different universe, and I’ve really liked this universe. This universe, despite everything, has been the best year yet. I’d say I wish it could stay the same except I know I really don’t because even if you could keep your life always the same, the rest of the world inevitably goes on without you, and then your life changes by virtue of trying to keep it un-changed…

And the last two days, since on Testing Days there’s not really so much teaching to prepare for, I have managed to leave school the earliest ever, and it’s been glorious! Going to the gym, time for groceries and laundry and mid-week errands, drinks with a friend, warming a chair in my newly opened neighborhood coffee shop…

I can begin to anticipate what it will be like next year, working for the first time ever without the burden of grad school heavy at my back… imagine! What WON’T I have time for??!! Volleyball and NYCORE and triathlon training and gosh, maybe resurrect my social life?

Can't wait.

A momentous day for me... I have been MIA for the last week or so because a) I have been immersed in my the completion of my thesis and b) my computer broke such that I have not been able to access the internet for a week...

But here's the skinny. Today I:

1) Finished my thesisssssssss! wooooooo!
2) Bought a new computerr!!!! wooooooo!

Here are my updates from this week.