Somewhere in the last three weeks, B---- started caring. First, very quietly and without asking anyone for a commendation, B--- stopped missing school. She stopped missing days and then stopped missing minutes. After a year of 53 unexcused absences and uncountable tardies, B--- has none in the last month. One day, when I wasn’t looking, B--- tried her hand at an assignment. I don’t know whether she did well, or even if she tried again the next day, but she must have succeeded at least once or twice because eventually she started bringing her homework. Not every day, but most. Not all right, but done. Today, B--- followed the lesson from beginning to end. At the end, she was getting every problem right. Today, I realized, B--- had learned to multiply. She was surreptitiously checking a times table in her desk, but every now and again I would catch her writing the answer first and looking at the table only afterwards.
I wish I knew why. I know it certainly wasn’t my high expectations. B--- is, nay, was, the kind of student whose apathy can make a mockery of my ideals. Amid my speeches that every kid in my class would master multiplication by Christmas, her name hung in my mind as an unspoken exception. I’d long stopped even feigning surprise or frustration when B--- didn’t bring her homework, left her morning work incomplete, or doodled her way through practice time. As we built our lists for extra tutoring, she always fell off the bottom as too low and too disaffected to be “moved” this year.
It’s hard to imagine the metamorphosis came from pressure from home. Our reluctance to fight for B---‘s future stemmed from her mother’s antagonism to our work. We accept parental incompetence, apathy and absenteeism as a daily part of our jobs, but active undermining is a surefire way to deter our investment of scarce time and effort in a kid. When we called about missed homework assignments and absences, we got excuses piled on excuses. Horrific excuses, believable once a year, ridiculous when coming day after day. When we called about poor behavior and a lack of effort, we got dismissals at best, accusations of bias at worst. An experienced teacher told me that this was the behavior of parents who knew their child was going to fail and wanted to provide a soft bed of excuses and reasons, however pathetic, that made it less painful to endure. I easily believed it and easily moved on.
Too soon, it seems.
B---‘s seeming success sparked in me an urgent desire to perform one of the Good Teacher tasks that never manages to make it to the top of my list: the positive parent-contact. It felt like a good way to help address both of the aspects that were letting B--- down. I called home and told her mother that she was doing well, we noticed, and we want her to keep it up. Outside of the embarrassing surprise in all our voices, it was a very satisfying way to end my day.
Yet B---‘s story is a cautionary tale of how willing even a very idealistic teacher can be to perform educational triage and how false our diagnoses can be. With all of the focus and time I pour into thinking about them, with all of the importance that we ascribe to their success, and with all of the gravity of their problems, our kids can swell in my minds. They become characters titanic enough to share a stage with their poverty, their prior miseducation, and their untapped potential and in that enormity, they develop personalities that seem too huge to reform. It might seem silly, but I think I must remember that they are just kids. And I must remember that, even when I'm not helping and sometimes even when I'm not watching, kids can change.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
To the KIPP Crusaders
Nothing seems to get more virulent and antagonistic comments than my impugning the sacred honor of the KIPP schools. Once again, educationalists are falling victim to binary thinking: if I’m not wholly for KIPP in everything they do, then I’m clearly against KIPP and anything they might have to offer. Prompted by yet another aggressive comment and yet another GATE student going to KIPP, I want to respond to the marauding KIPP crusaders, unleash my data, and say: Your school, as a model of classroom instruction, is a paragon of best practices, but your school, as a model of public education, is still the worst thing since Plessy vs. Ferguson. Before you dismiss that as hyperbole, skip past the niceties to the last few paragraphs.
I’ve visited our local KIPP twice and brought several of their best practices back to our school. Did I mention, yet, that we are the most improved elementary school in the district? Our upper grades now use SLANT and its corresponding high expectations for engagement. Our departmentalization this year was inspired by a similar practice at KIPP. We have begun to include college visits and college talk as a regular part of our classroom culture. Half of each day of our first week was spent in indoctrination about culture, pride and the exceptionality of this class and this school. These practices have made a major difference in the focus and achievement of our upper grades, and I duly credit KIPP for that. But to enact these changes in all grades and enhance their power for all students, we cannot be sending our most change-capable students, parents and teachers to KIPP.
Similarly, my criticism of KIPP does not stem from some silly notion that my school is “better.” There is no one harder on my school and its teachers than I am. There is no one who has more belief in the potential of our students and who has more frustration with the achievement of our teachers than I. But that is precisely why KIPP drives me crazy. I am unwilling to place the educational future of any of my students in the hands of a lottery. Solutions that do not equitably offer themselves to all of the children in my community are half-measures, or worse, and simply not acceptable. When my school achieves a 900 API, we will have done so with anyone who walks in our door.
Along with this, I am driven slowly mad by the suggestion that any disparagement of KIPP is an effort to make excuses for what I can’t do with my students. I know and I have proven that my students are capable of KIPP-like results. I have no need to make excuses for my classroom; my results are at the top of district.
Finally, I am simply sick and tired of people –even some very intelligent allies of mine— telling me that KIPP's students are my students. For two years now, I have looked at KIPP students and watched them all read novels while mine struggle with paragraphs, watched them all master math at a rate that would require my students to make truly impossible leaps of language. All the while, I’ve thought, “if only I were a better teacher, I could do this.” All the while, I’ve been told that KIPP students “are the same kids” in my classroom. Well, I have some shocking news: KIPP students are not my students and the publicly available demographic data (here for ELL, here for all others) proves it.
KIPP, at least our KIPP, looks far more like a talented tenth than a typical list of lucky lotto winners. Our local KIPP school enrolls true English Language Learners, i.e not EO, IFEP, or RFEP, at a rate less than one-third of my school. At my school, over 70% of the population is truly an English Language Learner, the district as a whole has 60%. Only 23% of KIPPs students are truly ELL. In fact, in their first year, without teaching anyone anything, KIPP had almost no students below an Early Advanced CELDT level, which signifies the beginnings of competence in the English language. Four kids, only ten percent! To give you an idea how unfathomably disconnected this is from our reality: over 50% of our district scores into a lower range! Did no one at KIPP notice that in a predominately Spanish-speaking neighborhood, with a very large percentage of first-generation immigrants, almost all of their students spoke English? More worrying, KIPP’s percent of students who are on free/reduced lunch is a full quarter less than my school and almost ten percent less than the district average. Surely this figure, if any, should line up. Most disturbing, however, is that KIPP’s ethnic demographics are significantly unaligned with our district's averages. They enrolled some groups at twice the rate of the district and others at significantly less.
I want to say again that I do not bring these points up to discredit KIPP’s academic success. I want to say again, that they are a model of many best practices in instruction and I credit them for a lot of the success in my class and at my school. I certainly agree: if all schools took a few pages from KIPP, all students would be much better off.
But a KIPP school is not a textbook, they are not a passive model of reform. They are a real school, enrolling real students. If they want to teach only our English Speakers, preferably from more well-to-do families with certain cultural mores, can’t we send them to the suburbs where they belong? They need to resemble the community they inhabit. Segregation means a terrible education for all.
I’ve visited our local KIPP twice and brought several of their best practices back to our school. Did I mention, yet, that we are the most improved elementary school in the district? Our upper grades now use SLANT and its corresponding high expectations for engagement. Our departmentalization this year was inspired by a similar practice at KIPP. We have begun to include college visits and college talk as a regular part of our classroom culture. Half of each day of our first week was spent in indoctrination about culture, pride and the exceptionality of this class and this school. These practices have made a major difference in the focus and achievement of our upper grades, and I duly credit KIPP for that. But to enact these changes in all grades and enhance their power for all students, we cannot be sending our most change-capable students, parents and teachers to KIPP.
Similarly, my criticism of KIPP does not stem from some silly notion that my school is “better.” There is no one harder on my school and its teachers than I am. There is no one who has more belief in the potential of our students and who has more frustration with the achievement of our teachers than I. But that is precisely why KIPP drives me crazy. I am unwilling to place the educational future of any of my students in the hands of a lottery. Solutions that do not equitably offer themselves to all of the children in my community are half-measures, or worse, and simply not acceptable. When my school achieves a 900 API, we will have done so with anyone who walks in our door.
Along with this, I am driven slowly mad by the suggestion that any disparagement of KIPP is an effort to make excuses for what I can’t do with my students. I know and I have proven that my students are capable of KIPP-like results. I have no need to make excuses for my classroom; my results are at the top of district.
Finally, I am simply sick and tired of people –even some very intelligent allies of mine— telling me that KIPP's students are my students. For two years now, I have looked at KIPP students and watched them all read novels while mine struggle with paragraphs, watched them all master math at a rate that would require my students to make truly impossible leaps of language. All the while, I’ve thought, “if only I were a better teacher, I could do this.” All the while, I’ve been told that KIPP students “are the same kids” in my classroom. Well, I have some shocking news: KIPP students are not my students and the publicly available demographic data (here for ELL, here for all others) proves it.
KIPP, at least our KIPP, looks far more like a talented tenth than a typical list of lucky lotto winners. Our local KIPP school enrolls true English Language Learners, i.e not EO, IFEP, or RFEP, at a rate less than one-third of my school. At my school, over 70% of the population is truly an English Language Learner, the district as a whole has 60%. Only 23% of KIPPs students are truly ELL. In fact, in their first year, without teaching anyone anything, KIPP had almost no students below an Early Advanced CELDT level, which signifies the beginnings of competence in the English language. Four kids, only ten percent! To give you an idea how unfathomably disconnected this is from our reality: over 50% of our district scores into a lower range! Did no one at KIPP notice that in a predominately Spanish-speaking neighborhood, with a very large percentage of first-generation immigrants, almost all of their students spoke English? More worrying, KIPP’s percent of students who are on free/reduced lunch is a full quarter less than my school and almost ten percent less than the district average. Surely this figure, if any, should line up. Most disturbing, however, is that KIPP’s ethnic demographics are significantly unaligned with our district's averages. They enrolled some groups at twice the rate of the district and others at significantly less.
I want to say again that I do not bring these points up to discredit KIPP’s academic success. I want to say again, that they are a model of many best practices in instruction and I credit them for a lot of the success in my class and at my school. I certainly agree: if all schools took a few pages from KIPP, all students would be much better off.
But a KIPP school is not a textbook, they are not a passive model of reform. They are a real school, enrolling real students. If they want to teach only our English Speakers, preferably from more well-to-do families with certain cultural mores, can’t we send them to the suburbs where they belong? They need to resemble the community they inhabit. Segregation means a terrible education for all.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Newcomers
The joy of my professional life right now is my hourly morning class with our school’s “newcomers.” Though not necessarily brand-new to the country, these are our students who speak only a few shreds of English and need more basic help than can possibly be offered in the regular classroom. We meet from 7:30 – 8:20 every morning to work on everything from decoding to the days of the week.
Transcending the alphabet soup of accountability, my time with these students is the most truly “high-stakes” educational moment of the day. They are counting on me to construct their most basic of reading and writing abilities. In this way, I am sorry to find that they are not the only newcomers in the room. The techniques of teaching blending, memorizing sight words, using decodables and doing basic dictations were probably taught to me at some point in the process of earning my K-8 credential but I have never needed and rarely considered them. Now, ready or not, I must use them intensely each day. Fortunately, our school’s reading coach has been more than willing to help me develop these primary skills.
Now, trucking along through our sight words, I am discovering what an inspiration it is to teach children to read. Last week, I watched as ten kids mastered the most basic words in the English language. “Make” went from fear-inspiring long-vowel monster to a known quantity too easy to be worth its time in our line-up. Today, I listened to E---, who has been in this country for less than two months, read me a short story about a field trip to the farm. I heard P---, who came here in August, whiz through a story about space filled with unfamiliar and tricky words, from “night” to “galaxy.” Later that day, she raised her hand twice to answer questions in math class.
Watching F--- and M--- gives me even greater than satisfaction. Contrary to what the testing folks would have you believe, students do not master English in one year. Both of these students have been here for more than double that, yet between frequent trips to Mexico and an almost exclusively Spanish world outside the classroom, their English has progressed very slowly. They struggle tremendously in the regular classroom but in my morning group they are the top of the class. They know many of the sight words, they can kick off our conversational practice sessions, and they can even translate the occasional melt-down in procedure or community. And they transfer that success to the regular classroom. Now, F--- is starting to actually try on his work and M--- is one of the most participative students in the class. Refusing to allow her lack of English to hinder anyone’s appreciation of her high intelligence, she confidently tackles difficult explanations of math and writing several times each day.
In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should not pretend to be the sole teacher of these advancing students. Every morning, we start with about 10 minutes at Starfall.com. Hands down, this is the ultimate site for children learning to read. Using animated stories and simple games, it teaches blending, sight words, and basic vocabulary with a degree of fun and interactivity unmatchable by a classroom teacher. At the same time, the simple site design and focused “game play” limits time spent navigating or lost in gimmicks and maximizes real learning. Sometimes, I question whether or not the kids would be better with 10 minutes of me and 45 minutes of the site.
Following the sage advice of an older teacher, I put our time on the computer at the very beginning of the morning hour. When the last student arrives, usually around 7:40, we move on. Not only has it done wonders for my students’ punctuality, it means that the students race to my door and line up outside the classroom starting at 7:15. Certainly, it’s more of a reflection of their desire for the website than for time with me but, hey, I’ll take whatever validation I can get.
Transcending the alphabet soup of accountability, my time with these students is the most truly “high-stakes” educational moment of the day. They are counting on me to construct their most basic of reading and writing abilities. In this way, I am sorry to find that they are not the only newcomers in the room. The techniques of teaching blending, memorizing sight words, using decodables and doing basic dictations were probably taught to me at some point in the process of earning my K-8 credential but I have never needed and rarely considered them. Now, ready or not, I must use them intensely each day. Fortunately, our school’s reading coach has been more than willing to help me develop these primary skills.
Now, trucking along through our sight words, I am discovering what an inspiration it is to teach children to read. Last week, I watched as ten kids mastered the most basic words in the English language. “Make” went from fear-inspiring long-vowel monster to a known quantity too easy to be worth its time in our line-up. Today, I listened to E---, who has been in this country for less than two months, read me a short story about a field trip to the farm. I heard P---, who came here in August, whiz through a story about space filled with unfamiliar and tricky words, from “night” to “galaxy.” Later that day, she raised her hand twice to answer questions in math class.
Watching F--- and M--- gives me even greater than satisfaction. Contrary to what the testing folks would have you believe, students do not master English in one year. Both of these students have been here for more than double that, yet between frequent trips to Mexico and an almost exclusively Spanish world outside the classroom, their English has progressed very slowly. They struggle tremendously in the regular classroom but in my morning group they are the top of the class. They know many of the sight words, they can kick off our conversational practice sessions, and they can even translate the occasional melt-down in procedure or community. And they transfer that success to the regular classroom. Now, F--- is starting to actually try on his work and M--- is one of the most participative students in the class. Refusing to allow her lack of English to hinder anyone’s appreciation of her high intelligence, she confidently tackles difficult explanations of math and writing several times each day.
In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should not pretend to be the sole teacher of these advancing students. Every morning, we start with about 10 minutes at Starfall.com. Hands down, this is the ultimate site for children learning to read. Using animated stories and simple games, it teaches blending, sight words, and basic vocabulary with a degree of fun and interactivity unmatchable by a classroom teacher. At the same time, the simple site design and focused “game play” limits time spent navigating or lost in gimmicks and maximizes real learning. Sometimes, I question whether or not the kids would be better with 10 minutes of me and 45 minutes of the site.
Following the sage advice of an older teacher, I put our time on the computer at the very beginning of the morning hour. When the last student arrives, usually around 7:40, we move on. Not only has it done wonders for my students’ punctuality, it means that the students race to my door and line up outside the classroom starting at 7:15. Certainly, it’s more of a reflection of their desire for the website than for time with me but, hey, I’ll take whatever validation I can get.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Stress!!!
I find myself more stressed out this year than ever before, even compared to my year and a half of full-time teaching and studying. I come home so fret-worn that I can barely tolerate human conversation and I go to sleep so restless that I can clearly see all my dreams as simply expressions of anxiety. What’s driving the stress? I’ve spent a few days trying to figure it out…
The Tests: After a year of successful test scores, based on a loose set of best practices and a very general week-by-week pacing guide, I find myself concerned that I will not repeat whatever magic combination I dialed in last year that got my students so ready for The Tests. I try to reassure myself that, at the very least, I’m teaching them the basic math skills they will use the rest of their lives. Nonetheless, every time we talk scores and data and Program Improvement at school, I can barely sleep. I feel expected to deliver in a way that a barely trained novice who makes $43k a year shouldn’t be expected to deliver. Save the high-tension performance pressure for the millionaire pro athletes and stock-optioned executives. At least I should get a condo for this stress. The knowledge that someone so similar to me did so opposite, see Two Days in May, really doesn’t help.
The Pacing…or lack there of: Come assembly or Halloween Parade, we have allotted each class its two hours. Last year, I taught math and reading lessons until they were done, everything else shrunk to fit. Now I teach them in the time I have. Assemblies, interruptions, trips to the library, all the various realities of life in an elementary school must come out of some class’ math time. I am left with a sickening sensation that each class is losing a lesson each week and falling farther and farther behind the plan. I never feel like there is enough time to teach anything to completion and constantly feel like I am sacrificing sensible instructional planning on the altar of logistics. How do the middle schools do it?
The Lack of Prep Time: If I don’t teach the newcomer’s class, the GATE class, and the after-school math intervention, no one will. So I do. And so I teach an additional two hours a day, each and every day. I already get to school almost as soon as it opens and leave as late as I can, just in order to make the copies and shuffle the papers of the day. But I’m unwilling to sacrifice sleep and I can’t go without dinner and an hour or two a day for the necessities of life, so I have to give up my prep time. I have no time just to grade tests, organize my room, update incentive charts, prepare the next day’s lessons, and so on. This leaves me with that terrible gnawing feeling of knowing all the best practices I am not practicing and all the exemplary performance standards I am not exemplifying. And now, done with my credential and nearly done with clearing it, I know even more than ever before about what I should be doing.
The Kids: They steal my stuff, they trash the room, they goof off and ruin every moment where I try to inject fun or silliness, they make me yell more than I ever thought I should or would. But in the end it is their absence, rather than presence, on my mind that stresses me. Departmentalization has left me thinking less and less about the individual kids I believe in and connect with, left me with less opportunity to ameliorate my anxiety with an amusing anecdote or satisfying moment of progress. Instead of smiling about children and their learning, I am worrying about lessons and their logistics.
The biggest problem is that I cannot change most of these stressors. We have lost half of our upper grade students, our high percentage hitters in the great scores game. Consequently the remaining students must perform or we will not only fail to reach our marks, but decline. I cannot cancel Halloween, fundraisers, the rain, or any of the many things that disrupt my days. Nor can I give up my extended-day programs because someone must teach P--- the days of the week, and someone must challenge E--- to think more deeply, and someone must teach S--- to subtract. If I don’t no one will. As for the last…I think I’m going to spend some time tomorrow picking out faces and successes to take into the weekend with me and see if that helps some.
The Tests: After a year of successful test scores, based on a loose set of best practices and a very general week-by-week pacing guide, I find myself concerned that I will not repeat whatever magic combination I dialed in last year that got my students so ready for The Tests. I try to reassure myself that, at the very least, I’m teaching them the basic math skills they will use the rest of their lives. Nonetheless, every time we talk scores and data and Program Improvement at school, I can barely sleep. I feel expected to deliver in a way that a barely trained novice who makes $43k a year shouldn’t be expected to deliver. Save the high-tension performance pressure for the millionaire pro athletes and stock-optioned executives. At least I should get a condo for this stress. The knowledge that someone so similar to me did so opposite, see Two Days in May, really doesn’t help.
The Pacing…or lack there of: Come assembly or Halloween Parade, we have allotted each class its two hours. Last year, I taught math and reading lessons until they were done, everything else shrunk to fit. Now I teach them in the time I have. Assemblies, interruptions, trips to the library, all the various realities of life in an elementary school must come out of some class’ math time. I am left with a sickening sensation that each class is losing a lesson each week and falling farther and farther behind the plan. I never feel like there is enough time to teach anything to completion and constantly feel like I am sacrificing sensible instructional planning on the altar of logistics. How do the middle schools do it?
The Lack of Prep Time: If I don’t teach the newcomer’s class, the GATE class, and the after-school math intervention, no one will. So I do. And so I teach an additional two hours a day, each and every day. I already get to school almost as soon as it opens and leave as late as I can, just in order to make the copies and shuffle the papers of the day. But I’m unwilling to sacrifice sleep and I can’t go without dinner and an hour or two a day for the necessities of life, so I have to give up my prep time. I have no time just to grade tests, organize my room, update incentive charts, prepare the next day’s lessons, and so on. This leaves me with that terrible gnawing feeling of knowing all the best practices I am not practicing and all the exemplary performance standards I am not exemplifying. And now, done with my credential and nearly done with clearing it, I know even more than ever before about what I should be doing.
The Kids: They steal my stuff, they trash the room, they goof off and ruin every moment where I try to inject fun or silliness, they make me yell more than I ever thought I should or would. But in the end it is their absence, rather than presence, on my mind that stresses me. Departmentalization has left me thinking less and less about the individual kids I believe in and connect with, left me with less opportunity to ameliorate my anxiety with an amusing anecdote or satisfying moment of progress. Instead of smiling about children and their learning, I am worrying about lessons and their logistics.
The biggest problem is that I cannot change most of these stressors. We have lost half of our upper grade students, our high percentage hitters in the great scores game. Consequently the remaining students must perform or we will not only fail to reach our marks, but decline. I cannot cancel Halloween, fundraisers, the rain, or any of the many things that disrupt my days. Nor can I give up my extended-day programs because someone must teach P--- the days of the week, and someone must challenge E--- to think more deeply, and someone must teach S--- to subtract. If I don’t no one will. As for the last…I think I’m going to spend some time tomorrow picking out faces and successes to take into the weekend with me and see if that helps some.
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