Try try again

First day back... It came and went. And that's huge.

Sure, I was sweating bullets. Sure, it was hectic. But again, I wasn't a maniac. I didn't feel as if my head were about to start spinning around exorcist-style. I didn't feel as if my mind was going to explode. I actually slept the night before, I even made it out to dismissal on time. The lack of that panicked franticness is another significant absence.

For the first time, I kinda knew what to expect on the first day. I knew I'd need space for their giant tri-fold, shoebox, poster-board summer projects. I knew the closets would have to be cleared to make space for the reams of paper and legal pads and pens. I knew enough to have name labels prepared, with some blanks for kids that register day-of or get shuffled around into my class. I knew enough to have over-planned, but to be flexible about what does or does not get done that day.

As always, it was a haze of collecting and distributing supplies and taking attendance and gazing out over a sea of brown faces, thirty-three of them at last count, that's one more than the legal limit. I wasn't especially differentiating among them, just kind of talking at them, narrating the minute-by-minute play-by-play of the school day. It's weird how quiet and wide-eyed they are on the first day. Scared, unsure. They don't have personalities yet. They will.

***

I never heard back about last year's test scores. A few kids had to go to summer school, so I guess they failed? To be honest, I don't really care. If there is one idea my parents instilled in me it's that grades don't matter. Learning matters. Education matters. Being secure in yourself and your attitude towards school matters. Being a good person and staying happy and healthy matters. But the grades themselves, they don't matter. They are air; ink on a page; pixels on a screen. Nothing more.

So you'll forgive me if I kind of tuned out when we did our annual review of all the cumulative test scores during the faculty conference. But one thing caught my attention, confirmed by the NY Times...

So apparently, according to the chancellor and his cronies, here in New York City the "bar" is "set too low." So the solution from the district's data monkeys, (whom I can't help imagining clicking away on their computers in their hermetically sealed air conditioned offices with no child around for miles and miles) is to make the grading scale tougher. Therefore a percentage of the students that last year were "on grade level" are now, with a wave of the magic data wand and the exact same answers on the page, "below grade level." And a percentage of schools that would have met their standards for No Child Left Behind all of a sudden, ummm, don't anymore. Sorry. Psych! You were doing fine, but now you're not.

Basically, the big solution, the big raising of the bar, is to mess with "the curve," manipulate the numbers... We need results? We need smarter kids? We need to make it look like we give a damn? Hear this, news media, look at us! We're adding "more topics" and making the test "less predictable!" See how TOUGH we're being? We're taking a stand in education!

It seems as if they are assuming that by making the tests harder the teachers will just start teaching better. Maybe they just weren't teaching hard enough. Maybe now they'll really kick it into overdrive and stop holding out on everybody.

And you know what? I bet scores will improve. Teachers will work their magic, they will train their students even more closely to the test and drill them on their testing strategies and sacrifice a little more art and a little more music and and a little more social studies time, and a few more of their hairs will turn from gray to white. And the kids will walk away with slightly higher scores, just as ill-equipped to function in the world as they always were. And the politicians will claim the credit for having "raised the bar" in education and increased test scores by such and such margin, and wouldn't we all just love to contribute to their campaign?

I can't help wondering if they realize how empty and hollow that type of change is. Dressing up like a pilot doesn't mean you know how to fly a plane. Holding a scalpel doesn't make you a surgeon. Scoring the tests tougher, making it harder... won't have any impact on what the students actually know. It won't make the kids smarter. It won't help them learn more. Because neither the test nor the score defines the student, they never have and they never will.

If politicians really wanted to raise the bar in education, I wouldn't have 33 kids in my class this year. (It's beens said, that's not teaching, that's crowd control.) The school would have money to buy new book baggies for the students. There would be enough special ed classes in the school to accommodate the demand for them. There would be enough money to hire the (government mandated!) correct amount of ESL teachers. Guidance counselors and reading and math and speech teachers wouldn't have their offices in broom closets. Assessments wouldn't happen in hallways and stairwells. Even the "old wing" would be able to turn on some AC when it gets above 95 degrees. There wouldn't be defenseless, under-trained, unprepared, bargain-bin novice teachers staring a classroom of trouble in the face all on their own, waiting to err and try try again. I can say that because I was one, and I shouldn't have been where I was.

So that's my rant, for now. The truth is, I'm proud of my school. We do what we can, sometimes it seems like more than that. It is trying to improve despite cards stacked against it. When the neighborhood kids show up for their constitutionally promised free and public education, we do not turn them away. We find them an extra chair and a desk somewhere, and we let them join the fray.

Oh My God, Charlie Darwin

Heard the song, had to wonder... did this guy ever teach public school?

"Set the sails I feel the winds a'stirring
Towards the bright horizon set the way
Cast your reckless dreams upon our Mayflower
Haven from the world and her decay

Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Fighting for a system built to fail
Spooning water from the broken vessels
As far as I can see there is no land

Oh my God, the water's all around us
Oh my God, it's all around

Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Lords of war just profit from decay
And trade the children's promise for the jingle
The way we trade our hard earned time for pay

Oh my God, the water's cold and shapeless
Oh my God, it's all around
Oh my God, life is cold and formless
Oh my God, it's all around"

A very important note, because Oscar got the wrong impression... The first day of school was great! The song doesn't represent my current state of mind, just the way that it has felt in the past. I just thought he said it eloquently. I feel great! Right now I am floating at the very top of my bucket full of holes.

The day before the first day of school.

Something I realized, or perhaps reconfirmed, from the reunion-like wedding I attended this weekend, is that people never stay the same, and yet they never really change.

The same is true of my commute this morning - a construction project here, a new storefront there, a fresh coat of smooth black pavement on Roosevelt Avenue... but mostly it was just very familiar: The sun in my eyes as I crossed the Greenpoint Avenue bridge, the bouncing through potholes on my aged bike, the restless intrusion of the of the 7 train clattering hurriedly above my head. And the parade of smells, city smells, smells you don't get from inside a car... the early morning cloying sweetness that drifts around the spice factory, like sticking your head in with the cookies in the oven; earthy produce from the corner stores; fresh coffee bakery smell; rancid garbage juice from the back of the garbage truck; spicy tamales from the re-purposed grocery-cum-tamale-cart; bus exhaust; a whiff of after-shave from the early shift waiting at the bus stop.

And back at school, the same cast of characters awaits, almost the same, yet not totally unchanged. Trixie, our vivacious payroll secretary, always ready with a smile and a vibrant animal print outfit... the cluster of ancient tenured "cluster teachers" populating the plush sofas of teachers' lounge...Good old Principal Peeves, talking up a snooze-worthy storm at the faculty conference about standards and percentage point improvements and test scores and data graphs... MoLo, my favorite administrator, who came trotting down the hallway calling after me the first time she spotted me this year and embraced me warmly and gushed about how excited she was about the school year... Ronnie, the literacy coach, dressed all in purple with purple eyeshadow and purple accessories as always, in accordance with her long-standing purple fetish...

All of these characters, more or less just as I left them two months ago. Of course, with the significant absence of Corky, plus the new addition of Sunny, Corky's replacement, whose credentials and capabilities I am more and more impressed with every day.

There are also some noticeable positive changes at school. The playgrounds are (finally) finished and their completion has transformed what was the pathetically barren tumbleweed asphalt schoolyard wasteland into a real playground, like for real children! With a gazebo, a jungle gym, brightly colored maps and patterns painted on the ground, vegetation, pachysandra, even a bike rack, and a coat of paint that makes the tall fence seem decidedly less prison-like. Plus the air conditioners are working again (for those of us lucky enough to have them) for the first time probably since February or so. And the best, most positive change? Drumroll please.........

RECESS!

One period per week per class... but still. Way way way more than nothing.

At the end of the year we do "focus groups" and Rosie and I spent some time making sure that our suggestions were fairly and adequately represented... and you know what? They listened. They listened! They ordered an extra book that we had asked for. They incorporated grammar instruction into the curriculum. They got us some recess. They are getting teachers (including yours truly!) involved in leading Professional Development... if they keep making changes like this, they're going to end up making me want to stay at this school, or in teaching!

And you know what I think is the most significant difference? The change I notice in myself! Somehow, surprisingly, shockingly, I don't feel nervous, really at all. Excited, sure. But not panicked. And today was busy, of course, but not frantic. And what I really really enjoyed was helping Sunny and Henrietta get their classrooms ready for the first time, and trying to walk them through the first day because this time, I actually know what that first day will look like and feel like! It feels great not to be the most clueless person on the floor anymore, to have at least some of the answers and be able to share them, to offer my opinion and have it be listened to. What a great feeling! And to know what MUST be done for tomorrow, and what can continue to wait and be done on one of the other 179 days of school, or which things might end up being pipe dreams, or which things I should just wait and see about...

Now the other big change will be training myself to go to sleep on time and wake up early. But again, without grad school in the picture... just doesn't seem that hard! None of it, as impossible as it once was, seems quite so out of reach.

"Maybe this time I'll be bulletproof..."

So I'm actually kind of excited about starting the school year? (What a geek!)

I've spent this week at school, playing tetris with the furniture trying to fit in the extra desks somehow, with rivulets of sweat pouring down body parts I didn't even know could sweat, as the radio reminds us all juuuust a tiny bit redundantly about the record-breaking heat wave.

Truthfully, it's kind of fun. I mean, not the part where you're wrestling with the backing paper and the stupid borders and end up totally tangled and balancing on three toes and an elbow to try to staple something a foot and a half above your head. And not the part where you develop carpel tunnel cutting out, like 8,000 of the same shape something-or-others. And also not the part where "organizing" your library equals the room regurgitating rando books all over itself until you give up and throw it all back in the closet anyway...

So yeah, some of it sucks. But in other ways it's kind of a great week because it's the one time all year I know I'm ahead of the game. My classroom is the most organized and in tact that it will be all year, before the kids come and (heavens!) start using everything and and putting things back in the wrong places and breaking things and bending them and indulging their graffiti-artist impulses. You can focus just on the "stuff" of teaching, which there's a lot of, without worrying about the hows and whens and wheres and whys. And everyone is all excited to see each other again and you can take long lunches whenever it is that you get hungry. Plus, I'm not gonna lie, I totally love having a reason to spend money at fun places like Dollar Deal$ and Michael's... (although I still maintain that the bigwigs in charge have no idea how much of their precious public school system is based on the charitable spending of their employees.)

And all the fussing with the room gives you lots of time to acclimate yourself to the thought of being in there all day again, and to try to arrange things to make it more bearable.

The new Corky is great - She doesn't have a nickname yet, but she's the best possible second best. She's taught in Ecuador for five years and in the Bronx for one, and is young and energetic and uses the Smartboard. Couldn't have come up with a better replacement if I'd ordered one off the internet...

The playground renovation looks good, all they have to do is take the chain link fences off and (fingers crossed!) tell us we're allowed to use it...

I wonder if N-- has any idea how often I still think of him. Can't think too hard or it makes me a little queazy, but I wonder if he remembers standing in the doorway after some lunchtime incident, and I wonder if he remembers me imploring, "You're a good person! So why are you acting this way?" And I wonder if that will be his take-home message from me. That he's a good person. I hope it is. It could easily be the opposite...Fifth grade. Hovers just before the doorway to the Dark Side. Decisions are made that might impact a lifetime. Or not. No way to know.

I wonder if maybe this year it could be "just a job." Like maybe I will think about other stuff as much as I think about teaching. Like maybe it won't consume me, maybe I will walk out the door at 2:37 and be able to leave it behind. Maybe it won't be draining, maybe just... stasis? Part of me wants that. Part of me doesn't.

And as I write this, Pandora radio has been sort of eerily voicing my general thought patterns. La Roux started it with "Maybe this time I'll be Bulletproof," repeated over and over again like a mantra, and Kate Nash, too -- 'This time, it will be different."

Better. It will be better. Than ever before.

Ms. D returns

I am really wound up right now.

Just went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with Corky. While I thought it was a bit long on epic video game-style battle scenes, I did take away from it a valuable positive visualization. From now on, whenever things go my way, like if I nail a mini-lesson for example, or think of a really witty response to something and people laugh, I am going to imagine them exploding into gold coins. And when things don't go my way, I'm going to re-imagine the whole event as a video game sequence where the right moves and nimble thinking will cause the enemy to be destroyed in some titillating and graphically appealing way.

Today I also dropped some cabbage at The Strand on some really awesome non-fiction "boy" books that I found in the dollar rack -- famous quarterbacks, shortstops, paintball, dinosaurs, dune buggies, military bomber airplanes (which I feel conflicted about, but who am I to censor their knowledge based on my own pacifist leanings), surfing, snot, pee, spiders, scorpions... these types of books (that kids, especially boys, actually might want to read!) always seem to be in short supply.

Now the only thing is that in order to actually incorporate these books into my classroom library so that the kids can read them, I have to bend the rules a little. See, the kids read leveled books (A is wordless picture books, Z is like, Hemingway, I suppose, if an elementary student were to make it that far) and the idea is that they read only books on their own level in school (as defined by a reading test that is a whole other can of worms). This is so that they don't waste time reading books that are way too easy or way too hard.

In general I agree with this concept. Seems logical enough, although I do maintain that no one ever suffered that much from reading a book that was a little hard for them or a little too easy...but the bottleneck in this particular highway to literacy is the leveling of the books.

In order to make our lives theoretically easier, you can find out the levels of books by looking them up on various online databases - a bit tedious, but luckily fifth graders can be trained to do this.

The bigger issue is that, of the bajillion-thousandteen children's books in the world, a relativly small percentage of them have been officially leveled by whatever invisible literary scientists make the calls. So that leaves at the very least, half of a bajillion-thousandteen "unleveled" books to languish in closets and on bookshelves and out of the hands of eager burgeoning young readers. Like undocumented citizens: there in the flesh and ready to work, but without any bureaucratic backing and devoid of their official stamp of approval/existence.

I don't know if the formula is like really super-secret, or if the powers that be think that teachers maybe aren't smart enough to figure out the criteria for book leveling, or if it's just an oversight, but some of us have been known to take matters into our own hands. I like to think of it as guerilla leveling. Corky's preferred method is to save really cool books until she finds out a student has a passion for, say, outer space, and then find out their level and then the sharpie comes out covertly and voila! Five great books about outer space that just so happen to appear on that level! Ta da!

Personally, I just eyeball it by comparing these bastard "unleveleds" to the other books in the levels - length, words per page, pictures, subject matter, vocabulary, complexity of sentences - and then estimate. (And naturally I weight my decision in favor of levels happen to be a bit skimpy on cool books in my room.)

At the bookstore I also found some AWESOME books about migrant workers, the 50 states, The Gettysburg address. Even though it's more work in planning, I hope I am assigned to teach social studies to my class rather than leaving it to a string of incompetent long-term subs like they did last year.

So, aside from book shopping and movie-watching, I also did a triathlon today! This taught me many valuable life lessons about learning and goal-setting and failure and success, but I will have to share those with you another time. I have to get some rest so I can wake up tomorrow, crawl out of my summertime chrysalis and get ready to face the world again as Ms. D.

Tomorrow I return to PS OO to start preparing my classroom, like a salmon returning home to spawn...

Whiskers on roses and raindrops on kittens

I just had another school dream but one of a completely different kind -- I was back in high school, only I knew then what I know now. The annoying upshit ( -- haha I meant upshot, but upshit works too) is that the first four measures of "My Favorite Things" is stuck on repeat inside my head. augh!

Anyway, my 25-year old high school self still sucked at the trumpet, but didn't try to hide it. In fact, on my way out I gave the band director some constructive criticism on how he could adjust his teaching style to better support me as a musician. I tried out for the spring musical (hence the raindrops on roses --at this point in my internal refrain I think the roses are pretty much drowning), but it was on a whim and I wasn't scared, and I hadn't invested a whole lot of my identity into the result of the audition. I rolled my eyes at my soporific AP English teacher and sassed back when reprimanded, declaring that I hadn't known eye-rolling was against the rules.

If I had kept dreaming, I would've let my biology teacher know that text books really don't work for me as a learner and that's why I didn't do the reading, and had he considered some other ways of addressing different learning styles? And I would've taken woodshop (or metal shop or whatever it was we had down there) and chatted up all the delinquents who were also taking it to find out what's inside their heads, and I would've cut class a lot more and worried a lot less, and not lost sleep over unfinished homework.

Anyway, it was a very satisfying dream, and I feel like there's a message in it for me somewhere.

Possibly in the sense of taking the advice I'd give to my former self and applying it to my life now - hey self, RELAX! ENJOY! Don't worry so much, because it all turns out fine!

I've always taken myself pretty seriously, and as I learned from hanging out with my favorite uncle, am the daughter of "accomplishment junkies" which pretty much makes me one, too, by heredity. But I think I can accomplish things and be laid back about it, too. At least, it's something to strive for.

Now, it's plenty easy to be relaxed in August. The demands of my job are at their weakest, just whispers and intimations, vague notions of a more troubled time, when there are other concerns besides where I could go swimming today, and what type of new bicycle I should buy and when, and did I drink too much wine last night?

The trick will be maintaining my cool Dude-like attitude when reality crashes down like a worn-out refrigerator pitched over a cliff for disposal. Smash!

For the moment, though, I will take the time to bask in the glow of the best part of the school year: right before it starts. Everything is rosily colored by anticipation and unbounded potential. Right now, I am convinced I will have the energy to do all the things the Rafe Esquith and Esme Codell in me want to do... Another pep rally, but with superheroes! Roof garden! Recess! Better field trips! Cooking projects to help with fractions! And also I will have a social life! And extra-curriculars! And enough sleep! This year, of course, I will finally be Jaime Escalante! I will be Michelle Pfeifer in a fictionalized and simplified version of reality, I will know what is right and what is wrong, and I will only do what is right!

This year I will not lose my temper. This will be the year when I finally get organized. This year my Teaching Points will be standing at attention in their ready positions on the Flow of the Day. This year my students will be quiet in the halls. This year I will not die of public humiliation by forgetting how to do long division while teaching it to the class. This year I will not come to school grumpy and sleep-deprived, and just a liiitle too amped up on Dunkin Donuts coffee. This year I will not work through lunch. This year I will not forget my lunch, or eat meals out of the vending machine, or have to beg food from my friends. This year my conference notes will be pristine. This year will be planned ahead of time and paperwork will not be overdue. This year I will not lose anyone...

The beginning of the year is sharpened pencils, crisp folders, fresh paint and newly waxed floors. Blank empty notebooks ready to bear the burden of knowledge...

Now part of me knows that those marble notebooks can't stay empty or clean, it's simply not in the nature of education. Superimposed on top of my mental image of fresh notebooks with military-sharp corners and pages all lined up in formation is another notebook: the end of the year notebook. The dog-eared notebook that has been scribbled upon with sharpie and ball-point pen, that has been lost and found and lost again, that is missing a cover and the other is ripped, exposing cheap brown cardboard underneath that black-and-white marble, and with papers falling out and someone else's science notes hastily mixed in and maybe used bubble gum wadded up in there somewhere...

I know the chewed up end-of-the-year notebook exists, is inevitable. I know there will be wasted efforts and forgotten ideas, horrendous mistakes, broken promises, bad days. But it is part of the function of the summer, and my duty as a teacher, to forget all that. If I didn't I'd never be able to face it all again.

Yup, the teacher clock juuuust kicked in again -- last night I had my first school dream of the 2010-2011 school year. (Typically, I was unprepared for the first day of school and the kids were out of control. )

Funny how cyclical and, now that I've done it a few times, how predictable it all is. By the end of June you don't care if you never see the inside of a classroom again, and in July, the part of your brain that deals with school has more or less be lobotomized. But here it is... sometime in August your brain wanders back, you can't help it.