Oh. So that's why...

I learned something in my class today. Whoa.

I realize that this may seem like an obvious and uncontroversial element of multicultural education, but it wasn’t until today that the importance of it struck me. We were discussing the implications of race in the classroom. One of the members of our group is Korean and he described the influence of his family on his educational expectations.

As he described it, starting when he was very young his parents showed him some sort of historical document listing all the Parks back to when they moved to Korea from China. He was told what each of those Parks did, from being a scholar to second-in-command of the state. His own parents and the community all around him were not highly educated. However, he felt driven to achieve a certain level of scholarship simply by the historical success of his people. Maybe his Dad didn’t go to college and maybe no one around him did, but he could look to the legacy of his family for the expectation and confidence to go on. He got a full-ride to an elite university and now, a suitable crowning achievement, teaches public high school.

Hearing him speak, the importance of multi-cultural education for students of color finally dawned on me. Of course I had realized before the neccesity of providing accessible role models for minority students. It wasn’t until today that I realized the need to provide so much more. The singular Cesar Chavez is not going to cut it. Cesar Chavez is an inspiration but not an expectation. Students don’t need a hero or a few, they need a whole pantheon. They don’t need to know that it is possible for them to achieve, they need to see that it is probable that they will. Similarly, they must be presented with such a history that they might see themselves as part of a community of achievement, if not local to where they live, at least historical to the culture in which they belong.

I’ll get right on this with the hour and a half a week I have to teach social studies.

Subtle Savagery

I’m taking my multi-cultural education class this week, all day, every day. I opted to dedicate this summer to preparing for next year, jumping through the credential hoops now so that during the fall I can, you know, teach.

We started by discussing the diverse backgrounds of our classrooms. Chance had it that I was going last... The first two teachers teach private international schools. The next two teach in the public schools in the upper-middle-class valley where I live. Then came another private school teacher. The second-to-last teacher apparently decided that she was going to represent the low-end of our class. She talked about how she wished her friends “in the suburbs” whose schools had APIs in 900s, could come down to her school, with an API in the 700s. To see what it was like. She talked about how she struggled to incorporate her group of CELDT 3’s (mid-level English Language Learners), her lowest-performing language demographic, into her class.

Our school’s API (essentially a reflection of how many students are on grade-level) is in the 500s. The majority of my class is a CELDT 3 or lower. I'm proud to say I kept the "so there" out of my voice.

This pushed me to powerful realization #1: Despite the fact that I take great pride in teaching the most needy of students, I had been immersed so thickly in my environment that I had forgotten that we are not normal. I teach in these schools, all my friends teach in these schools, don’t you? Wait, the curriculum actually works for your students? Whoa. It makes me worry about the easy missteps from there to low expecations for my students or the assumptions I make about education as a whole, based on my experience as a distant outlier on the curve.

Today, after lunch, we watched the Bill Moyers special based on the famous Kozol book, Savage Inequalities. I’d read the book before starting this year but watching the movie got me thinking about it in the context of my work now. My school, in the suburbs-turned-ghetto of San Jose, is quite far from the dilapidation Kozol features for the low end of his inequality. We’re no Hilton of Education, but we’ve got new computers, clean textbooks, copiers, science kits and more. We even have working air-conditioning! Simiarly, our families are in comparatively good shape. They are poor, very poor, but they are intact and want to be involved.

However, our school underperforms all but 3 elementary schools in LA’s notorious Compton (which is, or could be, a Kozol focal point.)

Powerful realization #2: The academic deficit created by my students’ limited English background is more savage to their achievement than going to school in inner-city squalor. To make matters worse, here there is no escape for the teachers. We cannot demand legislation to better distribute English skills. We cannot blame the populace or the parents. This is our void to fill.

Closure... Yeah. Right.

I've been unable to blog the end of my school year until now due to massive and catastrophic computer failure and end of the year busy-ness. Now, on my new iBook G4 (Yes, I crossed over.) and on my second real day of vacation, I bring you the end of my first year in the trenches.

I'm a sucker for closure and I did my best to wrap my year up with a nice little bow, but I realized that this just isn't the 10 year old reality. Or at least not the 10 year old reality under my rookie hands.

The last week went much better than I expected. We took some tests. (For the TFA's out there, significant gains were attained in reading and writing but not in math.) They filled their neglected double-entry journals with a list of things we learned, a page for A, a page for B, a page for C, etc. They used the same little books to write yearbook-esque entries to each other. It all seemed to be going well until the last day. Even that fateful morning, things went swimmingly. We finished moving the classroom, they wrote narratives to the music and movie of Fantasia 2000. But then came lunch and the class party. Much to my dismay, a parent showed up with ice cream cake and caught me unprepared, I had simply planned to use my disposable plates (paper towels, double thick, on top of our work trays.) Then another parent showed up with another cake! I was distracted and the class was getting crazy...soda spilled, chips spilled. I flipped back on Fantasia 2000, which soothed the savage beasts (frighteningly well, actually), while I organized the clean up. But before I knew it, it was the end of the day, the report cards needed to be passed out, the kids were chanting a count-down and parents were banging on the door.

I had pictured another class circle, a nice word from and to each kid, a quiet handshake and a nice goodbye. Yeah. Right. Instead of kumbayah, there was chaos. But I'm okay with that. First of all, I looked back on my own experience a few minutes after the smoke cleared and realized that I can't tell you about a single "last day of school" in my entire educational life. Kids aren't thinking back to all the good times they had with each other and their wonderful teachers, kids are thinking forward to the fact that the NEXT HOUR IS SUMMER! More importantly, I'm just too glad it's finally over.

Good, Bad and the End of Year Survey for TFA

Before a lengthy post on TFA, here's a disturbing anecdote from the real world:

I took my kids out for P.E., to play basketball. I segregated boys and girls onto two courts. The boys did their thing, picking captains, picking teams, "do or die" shooting to decide who got the ball. The girls did their thing.

One loud girl immediately declared that the teams should be Good Girls versus Bad Girls. In horror, I watched while my girls quickly self-segregated into two cliques, the academically successful and sweet and the underperforming and psuedo-sophisticated. I was horrified by the intensely self-conscious, explicit, self-identification and more horrified by how in line it was with my own feelings. I have to wonder, did I push these girls into these roles, or did they come to me like this?

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My TFA supervisor has had an on-going bet that he could push my off the Neutral category when it came to my "overall satisfaction with Teach For America" by the end of the year survey. He failed. Here's why, following the TFA critique format of Plus / Delta / ?s.

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Explain your general satisfaction with TFA...


Pluses---

*Institute – While nightmarish in living quality, Institute did an amazing job of preparing me for my first year as a CM. Between the sleep deprivation training and really growing comfortable being at the front of the class, the practical were aspects were very powerful. The academic aspects were also excellent.

*Corps Camaraderie – If I weren't living and teaching with other TFAs, I don't know that I'd still be here. My fellow CMs are a constant source of satisfaction, advice, resources, and hope for the future.

*Networking – I like the fact that I can keep a finger on the pulse of the whole district through other TFAs.

Deltas---

*Corporate Culture – For example, the consultancy protocol, the TFA font, the consistent language of “take-aways” and “norms” drive me a little crazy. I’m an outlier on the spectrum of conformity/non-conformity, I admit, but I still think this is justified. Perhaps it’s an effort to appear Professional, but it often feels like filtering and structuralizing what should be normal, organic, human relationships. I have great difficulty expressing this, but here’s an analogy that I feel does it effectively. Take LPs and CDs. CDs are a vastly superior consumer product. Easier to store, easier to play, cheaper to make, longer lasting and, on most stereo equipment, superior in sound quality. But! On the highest end equipment, LPs produce the best sound quality, because they are a natural, analogous representation of the sound. The piercing highs and rumbling lows are not capped or flattened by the structure of the CD’s pits and peaks. Corporate culture, communicating through calculated structures, is perhaps more effective for the masses but TFA is not the masses. TFA is more selective than many of our most prestigious universities. Can’t we trust ourselves to thrive best speaking freely?

*The two-year commitment – Bad policy is problematic, it’s true. Underfunding is an irritant, but relatively little more. (at least in my district) What really cripples our students are bad teachers. NCLB didn’t send 20 5th graders to me who can’t multiply. Gov. Schwarzenegger didn’t just sit down and decide that we should send a girl who doesn’t know the alphabet on to middle school. Educational equity will only be attained when low-SES students have so many solid years of good teachers. I just don’t feel like TFA is helping to make that happen. I feel like TFA is staffing legions of policy-writing offices that will dictate great reforms that will be enacted by incompetent laborers. I feel that, too often, corps members see their two years as a valuable and insightful experience that will give them the knowledge they need to go up to a place of power and right the wrongs they’ve seen. With such a model, their “service” is about them, not the kids, no matter how great of gains they make. If they were truly focused on student achievement, why withdraw their effort when their practice is becoming its most efficacious?

*Incestuousness – Two of my greatest resources this year were my mother and grandmother, who collectively taught for roughly 5 times the span that TFA has been in existence. No offense, TFA-Man (My Program Director), but they offered me a lot more support than TFA did. I feel that TFA does a very weak job of reaching out to the true master teachers in the field; ones who have taught for more than 3 or 4 years. I feel that there is a TFA Way, and while that way is very effective and more effective than the practice of most teachers, it is not The Best Practice.

Questions---

I propose an interesting poll, if it hasn’t been done already. How many TFA-applicants (those accepted and rejected) would have applied if there was a 3 or 5 year commitment? More importantly – How many of those narrowly rejected by TFA (and perhaps statistically identical to the accepted corps) would do a longer commitment? How many degrees from the crème de la crème that we’re accepting now would we have to go to build a corps of people who would teach for 5 years?

Pick my class movie.

Okay, after a year of "relentless" pursuit of significant learning, I'm going to relent long enough to show my kids a high-interest, high-quality movie, rated PG or lower, that we can use to discuss and write about the various literary elements and reading comprehension techinques we've learned this year. Of course, I don't know such a movie. Any suggestions?

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Also - I am still the same blog-writer I've been all year, I just realized it was a bit of a liability to have something so close to my name publicly accessible.


One week more... One more week... ONE WEEK MORE!