Just why are we doing this?

We’re three weeks into vacation and our time thus far has been totally consumed with the necessities of our wedding and move abroad. Yesterday, as we sold off much of our furniture and watched our carefully organized apartment dissolve into boxes and piles, a not-so-little part of me was thinking: Why? Why demolish this happy life here to move halfway around the world?

We want to move abroad for a dozen reasons, but fundamentally it is because we both realize that without living abroad, we will always see the world only through our tiny Californian sliver of a perspective. Without living abroad, we will always live our lives through our Californian routine. We want to know more of our world and be better people for it.

Traveling lets you taste other countries and cultures, but really digesting a place and a people, forever gaining their perspective in your look about the world, requires a more thorough experience. Visiting Zurich, Paris and Rome last year taught me that real life is defined by the mundane, even in the most refined and densely interesting of places. The differences between places and their people are rarely determined by anything listed in a Top Ten guidebook, but instead by the simple features of life which make people happy or drive people crazy. No matter how many UNESCO sites you pass on your way to work, life is still about the routine, about where you eat and when you sleep, about commutes and conveniences, about shopping and cooking, about washing clothes and taking a walk. While traveling, I could only grab glimpses of the real life I was missing, ---a single shop at a grocery store, posters in the buses, a trip across town at rush hour, an accidental walk through an anonymous residential neighborhood. By living somewhere, the real life of the city becomes my own.

I realize that we clearly can’t “live like the Chinese,” as we will be working and interacting primarily with expatriates. Just as certainly, I realize that many parts of adult life are universal, like paying bills and washing dishes. But by living in Shanghai, we will be forced to learn a whole new routine, one structured by another country and culture. Certainly, there are basic aspects of my life there that I can read about, anticipate and imagine, like living without a car or bargaining for goods, but the more valuable experiences will be those I can’t predict. All too naturally, we become slave to our assumptions. Trapped in the routine of daily life, small changes seem very significant and big changes seem impossible. Eventually, we can’t imagine it any different and so it never is.

Finally, I feel there is a need for me, the person I am and want to be, to live abroad. As an American, especially a privileged white American, I have always lived in an imagined world with me at its center, with my life and my perspective incessantly validated as normal. By moving abroad, I can chip away at that self-centrism a little. I can see a little of how life is lived by immigrants everywhere, outside of the mainstream of their host country, in their small eddies of expatriacy. I can understand a little of how it feels to be inescapably marked, by color and culture, as “different.” I can watch daily news, and even a summer Olympics, without my own country at the center.

So, why am I doing this?

I am moving abroad to stretch my mind and open my eyes.

M--- Who Learned to Read

Lesson the Last: Miracles can happen. Teach and reteach in thirty different ways and a thousand different times. Teach and reteach for as long as they will listen. Never be the first to give up on a child.

M--- was the perfect student to join me as I closed the door to my classroom for the very last time. He is all that is great about children, ---curious, funny, responsible, gentle and generous. He was my incessant helper all year long, coming back on the first day of vacation to help some more, always searching for ways to contribute and never bemoaning a job too juvenile. He was also the embodiment of an educational miracle.

M--- came the year ten-years old and still a non-reader and non-computer. He finished the year working on third-grade chapter books and subtracting unlike fractions. I’ll freely admit that I was not his primary reading or math teacher this year, if it helps to lend credibility to this spectacular improvement. But I don’t believe that even his reading and math teachers would claim real agency in M---‘s success. The real marvel here is M---, who despite falling four grade levels behind his peers, never grew frustrated and never gave up.

Appreciate, for a moment being, four grade-levels behind. It is reading See Spot Run when your class is on A Wrinkle in Time, struggling with spelling and sentences when your class is writing five-paragraph persuasive essays, articulating at 20 words per minute when your class is averaging 110. In math, M--- was working on addition and subtraction while his peers wrestled with dividing mixed numbers. There is no hiding a gap of four grade levels, but M--- was so far behind that no one even bothered to make fun of him.

The only real difference we, his teachers, made was that we did not give up. This lack of quitting fomented a beneficial cycle: M---‘s positive attitude and persistence refreshed our desire to teach him, our desire to teach him seemed to maintain his positive attitude. Helping M--- was easy, after all he did to help me.

Then, somewhere in January or February, it all clicked. His oral fluency exploded. His comprehension activated. His writing became intelligible. It was as if he simply cracked the phonics code. Usually this is a metaphor, but for M--- it seemed to be literally true. Soon he began to learn and recall sequences of math operations too. His confidence climbed and he began to participate in discussions. We had spoken of retention or a special day class at the beginning of the year, by the end of the year, I recognized him at our promotion as the most improved student I had ever seen.

I don’t expect to see another M---, just like I don’t expect to find students as resilient or intelligent as the others I have written about here, but the fact that they are out there demands that all students receive the expectation that they may be as capable. Students are each unique individuals, with strengths and weaknesses all their own. But our job is to expect the most from every student, in every way; our responsibility is to maintain these expectations no matter how many times we are disappointed. Lowered expectations are the most fertile fields for excuses and failure. “They can’t” quickly sprouts into “I don’t need to;” “I don’t need to” blossoms inevitably into “They never will.” The seeds sewn by high expectations will, sadly often, bear no fruit, but when they do it is exceptionally beautiful and satisfying.

S--- Who I Would Not Help

We’re going to bring it home by bringing it back to the kids.

Lesson 23: You’re no help to anyone if you can’t draw the line and demand the space and time you need to keep yourself happy.

S--- brought me ice cream today. He remembered that I liked the strawberry best from the combination he brought me a few weeks ago.

S--- has a tremendously hard road. He is a giant of a boy, climbing to nearly six-feet in the fifth grade. He is ungainly and unathletic. For weeks, little second graders would chase him about the playground calling him “King Kong” until finally their teachers intervened. In addition, he is not Latino, but a vegetarian Indian, marking him for misunderstanding at the least, mockery more often. For a third strike, he was slow to adopt deodorant as a necessary part of pubescent life and his body odor led to him being shunned and teased throughout last year.

I have done my best to help S---, to provide a safe space for him in the classroom, to provide opportunities for him to shine and gain status, and also to help him understand the decisions he makes that push people away from him. But he has driven me slowly to madness.

As recess is a time of intense awkwardness and unhappiness for him, he is always the last to leave the classroom. On days of less patience and more yard-duty, I will find myself shouting at him to stop stalling and dawdling at his backpack and get out the door. As I walk back and forth across the campus, he is quick on my heels with questions and concerns. He is the kind of student who waits for you at the bathroom door. He never forgets an agreement I make with him or the class, and should it be called into question, he will hound me about it incessantly.

One of these occasions was the school science fair. A mandate came down late in the year: all schools were to have a science fair. This is a questionable call in a school district where parental participation is telescopically far from a guarantee. We decided to make ours optional, and of course, only a handful of students signed up. S--- was one of them. S---‘s parents had been spending a lot of time on the road, so I was surprised to see his name on the list.

Then, a week after the sign-ups, S--- began demanding that I help him. It dawned on me that in his eyes, the science project was another way to draw more attention from his teacher. I greeted this realization with a deep sigh, a bit of sadness, but a firm refusal to help. I wouldn’t do it. This was late April, I was spent and the only reason I could be a good 8-3 teacher was that I was no longer being a 7-4 teacher. I was still in the classroom 7-6, but I needed the extra before- and after-school hours to recover and prepare for the regular school day. So I drew the line. I told S--- he just had to do it at home. He tried. It was terrible.

But the world didn’t explode. S--- didn’t quit school, start crying, or even look all that disappointed. I kept my sanity. He learned a lot less about science, but the forty or so other kids I work with learned a lot more from their vastly happier teacher.

I drew the line earlier in the year too. The wedding and move-abroad planning coincidentally peaked in January, and I found myself struggling to come to school and come home with a positive attitude. I was quickly becoming the tired and hot-tempered teacher from whom no one can learn anything. So I reluctantly dropped my four-day a week morning intervention program, helping needy second graders learn to read.

It was heart-breaking. I knew the kids needed me. The Man had once said their parents and teachers were counting on me. But I also knew that my first responsibilities were to my own family and my own students. I still feel a stomach-punch of guilt every time I see the second graders I wouldn’t help on the playground. Yet as I have watched myself recover and regain my focus, I know I made the right decision. Just before testing, I was able to resume a morning program and help the fourth graders pass math. I felt refreshed and ready from my little break.

The image propelled in the media of teacher as limitless super-hero does a grave disservice to young teachers. We imagine that we must work as hard as Esquith and be as successful as Escalante. And when we’re not, we want to quit and many of us do. TFA’s notions of relentlessness and its two-year time frame doesn’t help any, either.

So, my fellow young teachers, they’ll never make a movie about me or you, but if teaching an hour less means you teach twenty years more, let yourself make the right decision and draw the line.

?--- Who Will Soon Get My Job (3/3)

5 Things You Must Know About Teaching Math

1) Fluency is Everything

If reading is really about words, math is really about the facts. Your students must be able to do all the operations with automaticity, that means knowing the answer in three seconds or less. One second would be better. By the time they get to you, however, many have tried to teach them the facts and failed. You need to do it better and do it differently: teach with blocks, teach with arrays, teach with songs and especially teach with games. Don’t let anyone convince you that giving a test every week is teaching the facts.

2) Make It Visual First

Everything in fifth-grade math can and should be made visual. You can use fraction pieces, base-ten blocks, arrays and number lines. Challenge yourself, at the beginning of each lesson, to think about what it looks like. If you can’t visualize it, you don’t understand it well enough to teach it. Sometimes, the visualization will seem too complicated to be worth the effort. Show it to the kids anyway, they will appreciate the routine.

3) Bite-Size Pieces

Learning to divide mixed numbers is a horrendous task. Learning to change mixed numbers to improper fractions, learning to find reciprocals, learning to multiply fractions and then reduce, ---these tasks are not so horrendous. Teach your children one bite-size piece of math a day. They, and you, need to feel the focus and the achievement of learning one step at a time.

4) Let It Marinade

The first time you teach your children to add and subtract unlike fractions, only about half your class will get it. This will make you angry and frustrated because you explained it a dozen times in a dozen different ways, just like a great teacher should. Relax, move on to geometry or algebra or decimals. Then, a week later, when you just taught them to solve for x in a simple addition equation and you see that everyone got it, review fractions for fifteen minutes. Do that with every easy lesson for a month and soon enough they’ll understand. Every kid can learn fifth grade math, but some need to let it marinade in their mind for a little bit.

5) Know What They Know

What makes the above #4 possible is your knowing what they know and don’t know. Don’t guess that they need to review dividing with decimals, know it. On a daily, weekly, and monthly basis you need to know what each child is missing. Use white boards, frequent assessments, and a lot of spreadsheets. (Or use Accelerated Math) This level of objectivity and specificity will save you time and stress as you worry about covering the multitude of standards and as you decide what to review or reteach.

?--- Who Will Soon Get My Job (2/3)

5 Things You Must Know About Teaching Reading

1) It’s About Words

How well kids read is absolutely decided by how many words they know. Don’t let anyone convince you it’s about skills and strategies, grammar and conventions, or the specific terms of literary analysis. That stuff is gravy. It’s good to know, it’s on the test, and you should teach it well. But at the end of the day, know that when you’re teaching the skills, you’re not really teaching reading. No child’s ability to read a word is determined by whether or not they can compare and contrast. A child’s ability to compare and contrast is determined by whether or not they can read a word. So your job is really about making sure they learn new words. And that means make sure they are reading many new things, every day, ---reading myths, reading science, reading history, reading fiction, reading historical fiction. If your students aren’t reading, ---which means them moving their eyes across words, not listening to you talk about similes or plot--- if they aren’t reading three different things and for at least thirty minutes a day, you’re failing them.

2) Every Curriculum Is Terrible

No curriculum has even been designed, let alone approved, adopted and acquired, for the students who will come to you in this classroom. Remember that and remind everyone else, especially people who preach “fidelity.” Curriculum is designed for classrooms where minorities are in the minority and that is not yours. In this world of 80% ELLs and 5th graders reading at second-grade level, we must scaffold and supplement constantly. Don’t let them stop you. Don’t let anyone convince you, even yourself, that students should be constantly reading from a text two or three grade levels too hard. That’s a lie perpetrated by the lazy, by those unwilling to deal with the hassle of differentiating for teachers or students.

3) Make It Real

Whenever you can, have them read with a purpose. Read about upcoming field trips. Read about what’s in the news. Write them letters when you’re upset and make them read them. Write summaries of what they learned in science and make them read them. Let them “research” items of interest on the Internet, which is just reading cleverly disguised as free-wheeling fun. Let them see that reading is a vital tool of living, not a painful process where teacher interrupts all the good parts to make them listen to how to read.

4) Show Them The Love

If you don’t love reading, get out of here. You’re in the wrong job. You’re like a dentist who doesn’t like teeth. As a teacher of reading, you must love to read and you must show that love to your kids. Let them see you read. Silent reading time should include you. Talk to them about what you’re reading. Casually drop, when the next blockbuster comes out, that you read the book. Read aloud to them, daily, from a book you love, and let them hear that real fluency is not about mechanized words per minute, it’s about reading with the pacing and expression that best brings the story to life.

5) Their Happiness is Your Success

Most likely, no matter how good of a job you do, most of your children are not going to pass the reading test this year. You need to accept that. Most just can’t learn enough words fast enough. They will come to you reading at second grade and you will send them on reading at fourth grade. Tremendous progress, but not passing. Next year, they will go from fourth grade to sixth grade and finally pass. But the only way to make that happen is if you teach them to love reading. They must find that reading is a source of happiness, or they will never keep doing it long enough to catch up.

?--- Who Will Soon Get My Job

Dear New Teacher,

Welcome to your new room and your new school. I used to live here and there’s plenty of my stuff left. Hopefully, you’ll find it useful. If not, throw it out. Don’t hoard. Unfortunately, while I could easily leave you my books and supplies, I couldn’t so easily leave you all that I’ve learned in the four years I was here. But I’ll try. Let’s start with 5 things about teaching itself…

5 Things You Must Know About Teaching

1) It’s Really Hard

You are going to fail. If you’re anything like me, you never got an F in your school life before, but now, when it really counts and the work is really important, you’re going to get quite a few. Some lessons are going to bomb and some whole days are going to be wretched. But you know that you need to be successful across the first weeks, building to being excellent in a month, and fantastic by the end of the year. And you won’t be. There will always be more that you know you should do. But you need to try and in trying, you’re going to get you and your kids through your first year. Do all that you can, accept that it wasn’t enough, and do more next year. Teaching is a job where you can never do enough, but you can easily find yourself doing too much, so above all: feel free to draw the line and slow down, but don’t quit.

2) Only Your Routines Can Save You

Inside and outside of the classroom, the only way to keep your head above water is with routines. There is more to know in the function of teaching and more to do in the life of a teacher than you can possibly remember. You have to build hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly routines that allow you to manage everything from paper to your relationships with your own family. Best practices, of teaching and living, will become effective only when the time for executing them is incorporated into your schedule. You will learn what to do quickly, you will learn how to do it more slowly, but it will never occur if you don’t set aside a when for it to happen. When, each day, do you let your kids read for fun? When, each week, do you review the relevant released questions for your standards? When, each month, do you look ahead and download the videos you’ll want to hook your kids with? Routines make this job-life livable.

3) Engagement is Everything

The difference between a mediocre teacher and a great teacher isn’t necessarily in how they teach, but in how much their students listen. Dealing with the extreme students is important, but engaging the vast middle, the majority of your kids, will define your success as a teacher. Engagement comes from your expectations, enthusiasm and energy, in that order. Demand focus from all your students from day one; never talk when you aren’t sure they’re listening. But that focus is a contract, they listen and you provide something worth hearing. It’s easier than you think: if they can see and hear that you care about what you’re saying, they will care too, even if you’re not as well-prepared as Ms. Frizzle. Finally, bring yourself to school each day with the energy to sustain your expectations and enthusiasm across the whole day. Give yourself the sleep and relaxation you need to be successful. A well-rested under-planned teacher is far more effective than an exhausted and overly prepared one.

4) Be Urgent, but Be Flexible

The fire alarm will sound, the phone will ring, an inane assembly will suddenly appear one morning, and half your class will disappear one afternoon. You cannot change these things, despite the importance of what you had scheduled for this time. So don’t stress about them, tweak the routine and solve the problem. But make sure that you fight for every minute of the instructional day you can control. Make it clear that the lesson, not the clock, drives instructional time. Take back minutes they waste by charging them time at recess and lunch. Whittle down the hours wasted in non-academic rituals. Our families can provide little, but a celebration of Halloween and Christmas are two guarantees.

5) You Change Lives

Regardless of how good or bad your day was, it changed the life of a child. Sure, your job doesn’t afford the glamorous moments of spectacular success or failure of the lawyer or neuro-surgeon. Instead, you succeed or fail slowly, day in and day out, but realize that it adds up to results of equal gravity. Every humanizing or de-humanizing word and every objective learned or failed, makes a difference because your lessons and your words are so primary in the life and mind of the child. The joy of elementary education is that it matters, to every person, no matter their eventual occupation. Because of your work, a child will read or not, will multiply or not, will thrive and succeed or not.

C--- Who Just Needed to Tell Me

Lesson 4: Starting every day with a “Do Now” tells kids that what’s most important in our classrooms is the work. No, that’s not a good thing. What’s most important in our classroom is the kids; they and we both need to know it.

C--- is one of those students that doesn’t really have someone to talk to at home. I can pick them out by their early arrival and late lingering around campus, their willingness to go home with kids who aren’t their friends, and the ferocity with which they try to tell me stories in the morning. Many such students will drive me to frustration with their incessant desire for proximity and conversation. They often break my heart, but also tend to try my patience even more.

C---, however, isn’t the clingy teacher’s pet type. I’ve decided that is only so because he’s cynical enough to know and dislike the stereotype, not because he doesn’t feel the urges. Instead, he channels his desire for my attention into barely amusing and occasionally unacceptable banter. C--- is a sharp kid, and he hones his quick wit in legalistic debates of every classroom rule he breaks. He plays with words and recalls vocabulary with remarkable facility, though again, doing so primarily at my expense. If it didn’t reveal how much he was learning, I’d be faster to cut it off, but if poking fun at me is how he shows he’s actually retained something, I’ll take it.

C--- is also the reason I think the “Do Now” is bunk. That’s right, I’m spitting on one of the most holy instructional precepts of TFA. (In order to instill the proper sense of purpose, to calm and focus the kids, and to maximize every possible instructional minute, we are supposed to have work ready on an overhead, or on their desk, waiting for them to “Do Now” immediately upon entering.)

During my institute experience, “Do Now” seemed to be the absolute manifestation of The TFA Way. Then it seemed a sine qua non of relentless teaching. Now, I think it’s deluded.

C--- does not come to school ready to work, and a five-minute quick write, geography review, or critical thinking problem is not going to change that. C--- comes to school ready to share. He comes to school bursting with the happenings of the day before, as no one else has been willing to hear them. Once, before his desire to be cool could stop him, he blurted to me on first sight, “Mr. AB, you have to let me be the first to share in morning meeting.” Whatever it was that’s on C---‘s mind, my best word problem of the day was not going to push it away. C--- can either share that urgent thought or he can think about sharing that for the entirety of the time he needs to be thinking about reading. The choice, relentless teacher, should be clear.

So to give C---, and the dozen or so other kids in my class who are to a lesser and greater degree just like him, I’ve put the “Do Now” away and start each day with a morning meeting. It’s a chance for the kids to share their consuming thoughts and ask their pressing questions. There’s no loss of relentlessness or urgency, only the release of stressors that makes the next six hours of focus more tenable. I have the rest of the day to be a hard-driving taskmaster who’s all learning and no class parties, ---and I am. But I start the day by making it clear to my kids that I am interested in who they are and that I believe their lives are worth hearing about. I spend the rest of the day demanding more and more, not granting sympathy or excuses, and sometimes even reveling in their tears. But I can do that without a mutiny because they know I care. In short, I think the morning meeting makes all the relentlessness that follows possible.

Way back in September, an experience I had with C--- sealed my commitment to the meeting for the year. On Back to School Night, C--- biked up to my door a minute or two before the rush started. “Mr. AB,” he started sadly, “No one is coming for me.” “Awww,” I replied, “Can I call them and tell them it’s important?” He told me they were still at work. I was in a little bit of a bad mood and my thin veneer of patience let a blemish of “Then what can I do?” slip out. C---, through his incessant goofy smile, looked a little hurt and replied, “Nothing, I just wanted to tell you. I thought you’d want to know.” He biked off before I could say anything more.

After all the parents had left, I thought about what C--- had said and felt awful. I realized that in his ten-year-old-too-cool-for-school way, he was recognizing that I cared and he was caring a little back. He knew I was going to be disappointed when he and his family didn’t show, and he wanted to ease that feeling a little by coming by to warn me. Though I knew I bungled the moment, I also felt satisfied. Now we both know that he is important to me and I am important to him. That was a good place to start the education and C--- and I have had a great year.

S--- Who Looked Away

Lesson 3: No single teacher can reach every kid, every year.

My whole first year of teaching was a blur; my first days of teaching went by incomprehensibly fast. I don’t know how long it took, but somewhere in the early weeks of my first year, I realized that S--- always looked away from me. She sat in the middle of the room, yet wherever I stood, she looked ninety degrees away. Often, during quiet work, she would put her folder up and her head down so that I could not see her. She didn’t talk, write notes, or otherwise misbehave, but she simply would not look at me. Every time I called on her, I was rewarded with an exasperated “Uh.” Every time I positively noticed her, she gave sidelong glances to her friends that said, “Whatever.” Every time I tried privately to broach with her what our problem was, I was met with complete denial and a speedy departure.

After a few weeks of this, I found myself close enough to her 4th grade teacher to ask for some help. Ms. M--- mediated a conversation between me and her where the truth was finally revealed: S--- simply couldn’t handle the fact that I was a man. It was just, in her words, “So weird.” The physical barriers, she explained, came from a belief that I was staring at her. Ms. M--- noted, “Honey, he has 34 kids in his class. You should be so lucky.” The three of us talked a bit more, and I conceded not to praise her publicly and she agreed to track and to keep her folders down, but the terrible sense of awkwardness between us never really dissipated.

For me, with “One Day” and “All Children” still tattooed inside my eyes, the possibility that sheer biology would keep me from reaching one of my students was terrifying. In retrospect though, I should have been grateful. S---‘s reluctance to learn from me forced me to realize that while every child deserves to be “reached” every year, I will never be able to do it alone. It was hard to admit this, as the “whatever it takes” mentality would seem to include molding yourself to the needs of each student. That is neither possible nor prudent. The kids will quickly detect any pretensions of an inauthentic personality, and in the case of S---, I just don’t look good in a dress.

Another teacher at my school, Ms. K---, was a woman with whom S--- quickly connected. After I opened up about the struggle, she gave me advice on how to keep S--- engaged and satisfied. When S---‘s behavior had its downs, I asked Ms. K--- to reach out to her and find out what the problem was and help me solve it from afar. We did. Before school, after school, at recess, S--- was in Ms. K---‘s class. That connection, even though it wasn’t with her own teacher, let S--- come to school feeling comfortable and that kept her learning.

Some kids will clash with some teachers, sometimes just because that teacher is their teacher, sometimes just because that teacher is a man. But such disharmony does not allow us to abdicate our responsibility to see that every student has an effective year, every year. For this, and so many reasons, we have to fight against the mentality whereby we close our doors, sequester our students, and try to be superhuman. We have to reach out, beyond our classrooms, to offer opportunities to our students and to be that opportunity for others’.

H--- Who Took No Excuses

Lesson 2: There is no end to the sorrow in The Trenches. We’re here because the kids have tough lives and we want to help, but making excuses doesn’t help anyone. Our love and sympathy need not exclude our high expectations.


I first wrote about H--- as the events of her life unfolded in the fall of my second year. She was a bright light in my classroom, undimmed by her perpetually dirty clothes and chronically unkempt hair. H--- was undoubtedly one of the poorest and one of the smartest children in my class. The Man described M--- as embodying everything right about my class [that] year. He said that you could see in her eyes that this would be the first student in her family to go to college. Yet, her parents “weren’t from around here” and when that caught up with them, it was months of terror for her whole family.

What I didn’t know then was that H--- would respond to the terrible wrenching apart of her family with tremendous fortitude. Watching across the weeks as her parents battled and lost their deportation cases, H--- didn’t become emotional and disruptive or apathetic and withdrawn. She had every reason to slacken her effort, but aside from a few missed homework assignments, when she cared even more extensively for her siblings, she only worked harder.

I remember standing on the playground with The Man, watching H--- be consoled and dragged into play by her friends, when he said, “This could happen to any of two-thirds of our families here.” Usually children are vehemently attuned to issues of “fairness,” yet H--- did not rage against the singling out of her family. Bitterness in children often becomes malice, a lashing out against the near and weak when the truly responsible are too abstract and distant. Not for H---, who I vividly remember affectionately hanging on the shoulders of other kids. At times her willingness to remain a loving friend and dutiful student seemed inhuman, I thought perhaps the events weren’t really that bad, but then she would linger in my room during a break and sorrowfully mention that her parents were in jail, were selling all they owned, or hadn’t called in a week.

Academically, H--- truly took her parents’ sacrifice to heart, she redoubled her own focus and she succeeded. Her parents did their job, providing her with the opportunity to learn, and now she was going to do hers. She did. The following August, I found that she had still reached grade-level in mathematics. Facing tests she had every reason to disregard, she pushed herself and she passed.

After watching H---‘s spectacular success, I have held to the belief that no “story,” no tragedy, trauma or turmoil, precludes a student’s ability to behave and to succeed. Yet as I am daily informed of stories that achieve new levels of awful, to excuse is an incessant temptation. No one becomes a teacher out of a desire to deal with disruption or argue with adolescents, and when the misbehavior is founded in legitimate emotional disturbance, it becomes much harder to discipline. But we must hold the line. We must be loving and sympathetic, but never back away from our belief that our students must learn.

In the face of great personal difficulties, not every child can be as strong as H---, but we must help them try. The consequences of a failed education will never be mitigated, no matter the “story.”

M--- Who Would Not Be Stopped (1/10)

We’re ten days from the end. I want to close my four years of writing from The Trenches by sharing what I have learned and review it through the lens of the students who taught it to me.

Lesson 1: The mighty language barrier can be reduced to nothing by a student's intelligence, focus and determination. Unreadiness to pass an English test says nothing about a child's ability to learn. For many students, our low expectations are the real obstacles.

It was of little consequence to M--- that she did not speak English. Such a detail was never allowed to slow her meteoric pursuit of learning. Her unwavering belief in her own abilities overwhelmed the language barrier like a rising tide against the wall of a sand castle. Many students are intelligent, eager or even ambitious. M--- was ferocious.

Many of my female students use highlighters or colored pens to make their papers more pretty. M--- took four-color notes, aligned with the board, and highlighted key words. A tiny 10-year-old who came from Mexico at the end of third grade, she seemed more ready to enroll in college than middle school. Often, M--- seemed to have been the victim of some magical shrinking potion. Once, ill and unable to participate in P.E., M--- sat in my room helping sort papers. I gave her a stack and asked her to find her own. With the manner and efficiency of a professional secretary, she promptly licked her finger and paged through the pile.

Frequently, as the class shared a story, she would understand our text and my question and furiously raise her hand, only to pound the table as she found herself unable to articulate her answer. She churned through the more elementary books appropriate to her language level, keeping a fifth grade chapter book in her desk as a handy reminder of her goals. Every week, I noticed her attempt to read a chapter, before angrily pushing it back in her desk and returning to something simpler.

M--- learned to write in English through a firm belief that paragraphs are merely the assemblage of words in consistent patterns. For her, sentences were simply formulas, completed by the variable words relevant to each topic, no more intimidating than a math facts test. With the aid of what must be a photographic memory, she recalled language from examples of writing I produced with the class months before. By the middle of her first year working in English, she was teetering on the edge of producing passable writing, far from fluent, but better than most of her peers.

M--- turned in all her reading homework, generally done to perfection. I asked her mother how M--- does it. She explained that another girl with whom M--- shares a room helps her. The girl, she elaborated, reads her the story in English then explains it in Spanish. Then they do the same thing with the comprehension questions. M--- refused to accept other homework or to let the girl just do the work for her. I exclaimed that the process must take a lot of time. M---’s mother answered it takes about an hour, but it’s worth it for both girls as M--- will help her partner with her math. The other girl is 14.

In math, M--- was a giant. With fewer words to hold her back, she devours mathematical concepts with ease that belies the accomplishment. She was the preferred tutor for most of my students, regardless of their language or hers. Her line in my grade book was an almost uninterrupted string of As, broken up by the occasional F ---appearing always and only for objectives centering on word problems.

Other teachers called M--- the Mexican embodiment of Betty Bao Lord’s Shirley Temple Wong. As the one who actually worked with her, however, I always thought Ghengis Khan would be the more appropriate Asian parallel. Like a merciless conquering army, M--- would not be stopped, not by her language, not by anything.

Few students have half of M---'s determination, but many have similar abilities. M--- helped me realize that my high expectations can ---and must--- activate those abilities in the students who do not yet or no longer have the confidence to do so themselves.