I’d just like to thank Starbucks…

School ended Friday on a particular high note for me: our first annual spelling bee. The event had all the trappings of your typical elementary school winter performance ---nervous students, harried teachers, and parents with camcorders--- except that instead of being an ill-concealed celebration of Euro-Christian cultural bias it highlighted our school’s true raison d’etre: academics. Parents, teachers, and students, all came together to value and celebrate the learning of words.

What made me happiest is that we did it so well. (I should also add that I only helped push for and plan it, The Man himself made all the elements of quality happen.) Too many of our efforts, including many of my own, are undertaken with insufficient time or resources. I don’t blame us, there’re so many areas desperately in need and the handful of committed staff members must spread ourselves very thin. But, somehow, the spelling bee got all the time and energy it needed and it showed.

We started the process on Halloween, when we reclaimed another holiday by trading class parties for a showing of the movie “Akeelah and the Bee.” In this inspiring family film, produced (oddly) by Starbucks, Akeelah Anderson goes from South-Central LA middle school of intellectual doom to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The movie simultaneously let our students see that children of color can be involved in academics and still be cool and taught them how a spelling bee works. As they walked out, we handed them a page of words that would be in the first round of spelling bee. Even if only ten kids in each class really cared, a critical mass of kids started studying. For a little while, I got to see kids studying spelling words during recess, without anyone else batting an eye. A few Fridays ago we had a practice round and then a semi-finals last week.

The children who sat on the stage Friday knew how to participate and took their role seriously; their sincerity brought the kids in the audience into the drama and everyone was remarkably well-behaved. Parents of the finalists turned out in force, even at 1:30 in the afternoon, a rarity in our working-class world. Our school’s parent group created a lovely banner declaring the “2006 M--- Elementary School Spelling Bee Finals” and decorated the auditorium. The principal and our school’s reading coach officiated, bell and all.

When the first student up got nervous and spelled hospital “sospital,” I started to worry that the Bee would last about five minutes. But competition quickly improved and it became clear that some students, at least, had prepared. S----, a second grader who had studied tremendously, added no small amount of drama by staying in until the final round and leading the teachers to worry that three years at our school would conspicuously be proved detrimental to students’ spelling. In the end, however, the Bee was won by a smart 4th grader, who managed to remember that there is only one L in “harmful.”

We plan to continue this excitement for academic competition with a Math Relays in January. We did this last year and it was great. Our top 30 multipliers form teams of five and compete, in front of wildly cheering students, to fill out a 100-problem test sheet. Each student does 20 problems then races back to tag the next. The fastest student team competes with the teachers. Believe it or not, it works to get them enthused about learning their facts.

There is so little in my children’s world that really proves to them the value of smarts. Their pantheon of heroes is filled with pro-wrestlers and pop stars, who are certainly not achieving fame and money through brain power. We TFA teachers constantly talk about college, about building a self-expectation that they will go to college, and that is great. But college is a very distant goal for an eight-year old, who is far closer to being in diapers than a dorm room. In elementary school, we need to build a culture of learning as cool that will build the drive to get them to college. The Bee, if it can be true to its title as “annual,” is a great first step.

The Pimple as Progress

I have a pimple on my face. Two, actually. You might wonder how this is possibly blog worthy, but give me a chance…

See, when I was a first year teacher, I remember distinctly the fear with which I entered the classroom pimpled. “Would the kids notice? Would they take me less seriously? Would it lead them to realize that I was so young and completely inexperienced?” Was I ever so foolish?

Your first year of teaching should be like your middle school years: out of bounds for self-critique or external judgment. Too bad you’re in charge of educating 30 young minds rather than just mastering Pre-Algebra.

My first year I grew a beard (I ritualistically shaved it the day school ended), I incessantly wore a tie, and I even considered buying a faux-wedding ring. All of this was out of the earnest belief that my children didn’t already realize that I had no idea what I was doing and that controlling such superficial elements would somehow improve my command of the classroom. As a first year teacher, I was supremely self-conscious and utterly self-centered. In my class, it was all about me. A good day, a bad day, I was certain that it was purely my practice that decided it. Consequently, I easily convinced myself that the personal minutia really mattered. I knew, theoretically, that my kids were coming to school hungry or watching their uncle get knifed in the front-yard, but I was semi-consciously willing to set that aside and I decided that if my shirt was pressed, they would learn.

My second year was a little better. I had a degree of confidence and, to a smaller extent, competence. I was still nervous though. Things seemed to be going so well, I was worried that at any point I might derail it. I was anxious that if I let up for a minute, all would be lost. Rather than the denial of first year : “Pimple? No, it’s a bug bite.” (I actually said that!) it was the hell-bent for achievement tirade, “Pimple? Why are you talking about pimples? Is that in the problem? Don’t you know you’re three grade levels behind? We don’t have time to talk about me, do the math.”

Now, in my third year, I think I’m starting to see the pimple for what it is: a rarity on the face of someone who’s leaving the acne-ridden-age of adolescence behind and absolutely meaningless in regards to education. Now, when the little voice chirps, “Mr. AB, you have a pimple!” it’s met with “Pimple? You’re 10, I’m 25. Come back in five years and we’ll see who’s laughing about pimples. Get back to work.”

Help Prevent "Mr. AB's Law"

I am taking part in AFT’s "Build it Up" blog campaign renew the discussion on the state of our schools’ physical environment. For my school, the most pressing issue is a combination of physical plant and school safety concerns.

I’m not that paranoid, but I can already imagine the news lead… “Voters also overwhelmingly approved Proposition XY, dubbed ‘Mr. AB’s law,’ in memory of a San Jose teacher who died in a 2012 school shooting…”

Last week, our school wiled away two perfectly good instructional hours practicing for “Code Red,” the school’s reaction to a dangerous situation on or near campus. I say wiled away because the hours were spent building and much more so unbuilding barricades. Barricades? Teachers spending hours piling and unpiling desks in front of doors is how we prepare for disaster? Yes, sadly. Our school is generally in good shape, physically, but there is one gaping hole in our safety: most of our doors don’t lock from the inside.

Consequently, in case of a “Code Red,” teachers wanting to lock their doors must race around to the outside, lock the door and dart back inside, exposing themselves and their classrooms to the threat. The police department advised us to use our best judgment about whether or not to take this risk and to additionally build barricades at the door and inside our classroom no matter what. The master key, we were told, might be compromised if the attacker starts with the office or a custodian. During the drill, my best efforts at a barricade took many minutes to set up and only slowed the intruder by a matter of moments. We simply don’t have enough time and enough heavy objects to really seal off a door without locks.

When I brought this concern up for discussion, I was told that there were fire and safety concerns about doors that lock too easily from the inside. The police officer also added that our handle locks were unreliable because they could be shot out. All it would take, however, to meet these issues and secure our doors is a set of deadbolts on each door, requiring a teacher’s key to lock from the inside and a safe-secured key to unlock from without. Requiring a key inside would prevent kids from locking themselves in, a safe-guarded key outside would keep the door secure in case the office is attacked.

While I accept that there is a small amount of paranoia implicit in suggesting such a plan and an even greater amount in enacting it, we have seen that such attacks are sadly far from the realm of inconceivability. If not the Amish, truly, what community can possibly imagine their schools are safe? And when compared to me, let alone an older teacher, trying to stack boxes of paper and layers of bookshelves in front of a door, it’s a simple addition that would make our classrooms vastly more secure. What a shame that, like so many steps in safety reform, we will wait to make this happen until its real necessity has been horrifically proven.