Teachermandc's Blog

I spent a great deal of time these last few weeks thinking about teaching and what it means not only to my students, but also to me.  DC’s new evaluation tool–they call it IMPACT–has a way of making you think.  My first two observations yielded the usual comments for my “performance.”  It seems I know my content very well, and my students mostly appear engaged.   I regularly probe for higher level reasoning, and do a stellar job connecting the material to real life.  So far, so good.

Where I always run into trouble are the areas related to developing student understandings. I talk too much.  The observers say I am a dynamic presence in the classroom, too dynamic.  My “learning laboratory” is too “teacher-centered,” a bad word these days.   In my seventy minute class, direct instruction should take no more than ten minutes.  Most of the time should be used by students discovering the content for themselves through gallery walks or literature circles.  My Master Educator suggested in our post-observation conference that I employ an “I-We-You” method where I briefly explain the lesson, then model with the class whatever skill we are undertaking, and finally release the students to work independently or in groups.  My job then is to circulate among them, prodding here, poking there.

I admit my tendency is to teach to the whole class.  I hated groups in high school.  It always deteriorated into playtime with me and a few others doing too much of the work.  I prefer using my popsicle sticks to call on students randomly to answer questions, tackle passages, and provide insights.  I see the effect of all this in my students’ work.  Their essays are organized now and address the question directly.  They use the text to anchor their perceptions.  They seem to actually understand the purpose of writing, and they are learning to bring a questioning eye to their readings.  They routinely use our vocabulary power words in their writing–not because I asked them to do so, but because they can.

We are diagramming sentences now in all my English classes, and next month we will work to understand the relative design of the ten basic English sentence forms, and their respective impact on expression, communication, and flow.  They will begin analyzing their own choices in nouns, verbs, modifiers, complements, subordination, and rhetoric.  I tell them adverbs and adjectives are like hot sauce on greens–a little goes a long way.  I am looking forward to us making that leap past recognition into application and control.  I think the students are too.

Still, it is difficult juggling vocabulary, writing, reading, and grammar in a single course.  With my school’s block schedule (we meet only ten times a month) I usually try to attack two strands in a single class session, which sometimes makes for choppy transitions.  But there are not enough days to tackle all the goals I have set if I focus on, say, just grammar one day, and reading the next.

What I need to work on is pulling them in more with Socratic exchanges and the like.  Not that we don’t share thoughts; we just do it differently from what the rubric would like.  I guess I lean back on my own experiences with teachers who lifted my mind without me ever leaving my seat.  I had this one history teacher in high school who had actually written our textbook.  Hearing his words turn dusty events into action movies inspired me.  Then there was my tenth grade English teacher whose obsession with Tolkien’s precision and craft ignited me.  But I was a scholarship kid at an expensive boarding school whose trustees were flirting with the notion of small-scale integration.  It happened ages ago, and I suspect the expectations for high school students have changed since then.

Today’s evaluation tools prefer kinesthetic exercises, teaching soundbites, and lots of in-class homework.  I guess I am a bit “old school.”  I always tell my students the time for “ring around the rosie” is over.  Recess now comes at the end of the day, not in the middle.  How else are students to prepare for college where everything is not so “touchy-feely” I ask, not to mention the workplace after that.  For all the clamor about multi-tasking, I still favor a concentrated effort leading to the completion of something worthwhile.  I always look for mastery and learning in the  work they produce, and I assign a great deal of work.   But something is missing, the observers say.

My new Assistant Principal suggested in our observation conference that I might be better suited for work at a university or community college.  I have done a little of both, but found my calling in high school.  I love the silly sanity holding the place together.  So I have resolved to do better.  The competitor in me wants perfect 4’s on my evaluations, but the realist knows that will never be my fate.  I would settle for solid 3’s.

I am not going to pretend.  Some of the comments I received threw me. Some even seemed unfair.  Then, three weeks ago, just when I was briefly considering taking up my AP’s suggestion to move my talents elsewhere, the morning English III class took the occasion of my unplanned absence on a Monday to write me “thank you” notes.  Another teacher covering my class suggested it, but I choose to believe these incredible  young people knew intuitively that a pick-up was in order.  That’s another thing I love about high school.

Some of them wrote:

“I am grateful for you being my teacher because you teach things I never knew about life and myself.”

“You have helped me create some of the best essays.  All your stories are funny.”

“Your class is very creative and sometimes inane.  But it is still important, and I still learn from it.  I’m thankful for you letting me turn in my work late sometimes, even though it’s not good to.”

“Thank you for turning my sad face upside down in the morning.  Thank you for plucking my nerve every other day.  Thank you for teaching me verbs over and over.”

“Thank you for your energy.  I can have a bad day, but you put a smile on my face.  Thanks for your presence.”

“I look forward to coming to your class everyday because I know I am going to learn something new.  You are a teacher that can relate to your students, and your personal stories strengthen us.”

“Thank you for pushing me to do my best at all times.  Thanks for being goofy and my teacher.”

“Thank you for being the best teacher I have had so far.  You have taught me how to read and write.  Also, thanks for believing in me and not allowing me to be less than what I am.”

“Thank you for teaching me.  Thank you for your enthusiasm in learning.  Your sense of humor makes English fun for me.  You are the epitome of a good teacher and even though you may not feel so at times, you are greatly appreciated.”

I cannot overstate the impact of their words.   As I end my two-week winter break, I look forward to walking into a new year with my students present and accounted for.   I look forward to the AP results come spring, and reading Native Son in English III.  I look forward to winning more debate tournaments.  I look forward to luring my students deeper into the lessons of language and life.

I look forward to teaching.

–teachermandc

Sorry for the delay on this one, but my thoughts kept scurrying away to places where I was hesitant to follow.  At night, when I was a child, I imagined a nest of monsters breeding and taunting from the dirty clothes resting on the bannister outside the small bedroom my brothers and I shared.  Darkness terrified me, and old habits, it seems, really do die hard.

Four Saturday’s ago, my mother’s beloved, local church held a memorial service for all parishioners who had passed away in the previous year.  I thought I was ready for it.  By then, it had been five months since she left, and I no longer instinctively reached for the phone to share a funny anecdote about some student’s insightful antics (she revered teaching and loved the stories).  I no longer felt so guilty about the times I should have called, but didn’t.  I started not to attend the ceremony at all.

During this last summer after her passing, I became something of a regular at the Catholic church where my mother converted, and where my brothers and I attended our first school, confessed our first sins, tasted our first communion, accepted our first confirmation, celebrated our first graduation, and buried our only mother.  I really appreciated the priest who officiated at my mom’s funeral. A Nigerian by birth,  I loved his sense of wonder and acceptance.  When they transferred him to another parish in August, I stopped going.  Then I got this invitation in the mail.  The names of the lost would be read.  The letter I received did not clearly indicate whether my mother’s name would be called if no one showed or not.   My wife insisted we go.

I identified myself at the door and claimed a seat near the door.  Just before the Mass began, I was given a tall, glass-encased white candle and a handwritten card with her name on it.  I lined up in the rear of the church with fellow mourners, all of whom seemed bent by their own remembrance.  When the music began, signaling the start of service, I noticed tears on the cheeks of some, and silent sobs drifting from the slooped-shoulders of others.  I waited calm and straight.

We stood in alphabetical order (as opposed to the size order which had marked my earliest travels down that very aisle as both dutiful elementary school student and altar boy).  A lady in white approached and lit my candle.  The feeble flame seemed tenuous.  I wanted to ask for another candle with a sturdier wick, but the usher had already moved on.  I  lifted a cupped hand outside the glass rim to shelter the wary flame, but I grew alarmed as it continued to struggle.  I rolled the card with my mother’s name into a point, dipped it inside the candle.

I reasoned a stronger spark could rescue the light, but all I did was cause a slight stir as the paper began to burn.  I quickly smothered the smoking glow with my fingers.  I ignored the distracted faces around me.  As I silently prayed the still-weak candle light would endure the altar journey, I unfolded my mother’s name card and bemoaned the stain of ash in the missing, far right corner.  When it comes to endings, I just never seemed to get things right.

Somewhere between verses of the opening hymn, our line began to move.  I followed the lumbering procession as we stepped towards two waiting priests.  At the midpoint, less than eight feet from the foot of the altar, resplendent in white cloth and yellow flowers,  I lingered, as the others had done before me, until the griever in front of me received a public sign of the cross and a private, whispered blessing.

When my time came, when a source unseen read her name over the loud speaker, my legs obeyed my intention.  But not my heart.  With each step, with every progression, the heat of the moment suddenly singed my soul in a way I had fought so hard to ignore.  I was wounded–deeply.  And my first protector and healer was gone.  My body began to shake, not outside, but in.  Still, I could feel myself moving forward, even as my spirit faltered.

I don’t even remember what the priests said.  The next moment I  can recall, I was moving back towards my seat in the rear.  I stopped midway in the outer aisle to hand the candle–still lit–to the outstretched hands of another usher in white  She placed it in a larger, red glass container resting in one of those ornate, iron receptacles reserved for silent petitions and alms for the poor.

But it wasn’t until I moved further along and passed my wife (who had arrived after me and sat in a different section) that I realized I finally had allowed myself to accept it all–not the tears so much, but the stillness after.  The pained, worried look in her eyes as she studied my broken face signaled her awareness not so much of the gravity of the moment, as it did of its residual weight.  Or maybe she was simply recalling her own premature, maternal loss some eighteen years prior.  You never can tell with death.  Either way, in her face I saw reflected my devastation.  Those of you who have lost this deeply know what I describe can never touch what I mean.

In the weeks since that day, so much has happened.  At the reception following that same ceremony, I embraced two former classmates I hadn’t seen in too many years, who also came to acknowledge a loss, including one–two grades ahead of me–who found her youngest, grown son dead from a prescription drug overdose after she returned to their home from church.  “He had been sick, too many operations, and felt bad about still living at home with his mother.  I think his demons just got the best of him,” she said.  “See,” my wife whispered, “somebody always has it worse.”

In classes, I have been interspersing reading assignments about race and gender with some grammar review.  We have begun diagramming sentences.  Of late, I have worked on verb types and the energies each brings to a complete thought.  Initially, some students had difficulty distinguishing between action and state of being verbs.  The latter allows each of us to hold the mirror up to our faces and facades.  I tell them it is the last group of verbs a youngster masters.  These are uniquely human verbs, the “is,” and “was,” and “will be.”

Two weeks ago, the black alley cat my family and I rescued from a pound in New York seventeen years ago–my middle daughter named her Abby, short for Abigail–snuck out the house and never returned.  She had slowed down considerably in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, and she almost never went outside anymore.  But the vet said indoor/outdoor cats often vanish just before the end.  They leave to find a private place to die.

I wish I could have been with her to stroke her fur and maybe hum a song as she gracefully let go.  But I generally wish for too many moments I cannot have or repeat.  Here, with the holidays upon us, I understand that gratitude sometimes flickers, but must never waver as long as the moments breathe.

Too many of my students have endured similar crossings at ages much younger than mine.  One, a towering favorite, cradled his mother’s moist head in his fourteen-year-old arms as she succumbed to drive-by “collateral damage.”  Whenever he writes or speaks about it, I always gather my breath and reassure him that death ends a life, but not a relationship.

I want so much to believe it.  I heard it on Oprah once.

I awoke abruptly this morning from one of those “teacher” dreams I often have now.  An unfamiliar classroom with me in the front featured an influx of students, only some of whom I recognized.  During the five minutes before the second bell signaled class, I found myself frantically putting the last touches on a lesson about grammar and sentence diagramming.  I noticed wire baskets labeled with each part of speech strategically placed around the room.  I assumed I had printed sentences and sentence patterns somewhere on my desk, and maybe a nerf ball or two.  I turned and began to introduce myself to the class (all the while wondering where my lesson plan was) when one male student I did not know began a vocal stream of consciousness about nothing I could fathom.  I turned to the faces of the few students I had taught the year before–all seniors now–for an explanation, but they shrugged their shoulders and began to giggle.  I faced the male student and, in perfect stride, broke into a Glee-like spoken word piece about respect.  “All aboard.  This is my time,” I chanted.  “Replete with beats and wicked word rhymes.”   The boy began to nod in step; I did a spin move back to the front of the room, and the class began–mesmerized.  I think the dream was in color.

Of late, teachers have been cast as bumbling Clark Kent’s in need of a serious costume upgrade.  Leaping tall promises and stubborn achievement gaps has proven difficult, no matter how young the legs.  As we all know, superintendents come and go, leaving in their wake the latest fix-it scheme.  Principals, at least here in DC, are seemingly as fleeting as the new blueprint they unveil each year to “turn things around.”  My school has endured a host of teacher and staff replacements in our short life.  Only nine remain from the original group.  The one constant has been the steady flow of students–at once distracted, at once engaged–both ducking and chasing recognition and knowledge.  It is a difficult move to master, let alone choreograph, and I, for one, often wonder exactly where is this Superman when you need him?

For instance, we are at the end of the first advisory, and report cards will be mailing soon.  It is always a tense time, and I have never been a strict fan of grading.  I always tell my students to focus on the skills and the grade will follow.  “In ten years, you will not remember what you received on some test. It’s the knowledge you should be after.”  They all nod, and then crowd my desk after class clamoring to see their marks.  As one girl explained, “My mother is not asking me about all that.  She just wants to know what grade I’m getting.” The girl has a point.

More students have failed than I would like.  We covered a great deal of material in our first twelve weeks, and some, especially those new to me, opted not to do a number of assignments, usually the writing ones.  I understand the hesitation.  Writing is a reflective exercise of the highest order, and a few of my students fight being pushed or revealed.  Some have too many memories of red correction marks to trust their inner voice.  I try coaxing them with encouragement and second chances.  I  pull them into hallways and frown.  I even phone a few parents, most of whom yell and promise what they cannot deliver.  By eleventh grade, it is the student who must decide.

Or maybe it is me.  During my second year of teaching, my first principal once declared at a faculty meeting that “it is not the student who fails, but the teacher.”  Talk about a heavy load.  I am still not sure how much I agree with him, but I suspect he also had a point.  Looking over my grade book, I vow to redouble my efforts to inspire the ones who would rather be playing outside, but how?  There is always room for improvement, and I am searching for it on Wednesday when a special assembly convenes.  It is “International Day” at my school, and the afternoon has been reserved to honor students and faculty born outside America, as well as to acknowledge the oneness of the world.

Assemblies are often a funky business, with students attuned more to each other than to the speaker.  But this one is different.  Red lights cover a stage filled with drums and percussion instruments.  Within five minutes of taking our seats, a jazzy Latin beat pulses from the audio speakers while foreign-born students, staff, and faculty march from the back of the room to the front and then the sides hoisting a parade of homemade flags from other countries.  Our international students are a minority at our high school, fifty or less I would guess.  Most hail from African countries, especially Nigeria, but Mexico, El Salvador, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, and Argentina are also represented.  As the bright flags circle the auditorium again and again, the beam of pride on the international students’ faces is palpable.  Many are or have been my students, but I have never seen them so at ease.

Then an Afro-Brazilian band adorned in bright, native garb enters.  As a powerpoint slide show fills a side wall with maps and images from around the world, the band dives into a multi-layered rhythmic piece that quickly has the students tapping in place.  In number after number, the band urges the students to join in an elaborate call-and-response chorus while the drums keep time.  There is excitement in the room, and the students are focused on the unfolding.

At one point, the lead drummer beckons the students to join him.  Most are reluctant at first; they had been warned earlier about misbehaving.  But soon a mass of students from all grades are shimmying on stage while playing an assortment of maracas and percussion instruments.  I am no longer seated, but am leaning against the wall near my assigned students, moving my feet and head to the drums.  I see a few nudge a classmate or two and point my way, but I ignore their chuckles and continue the dance.

The piece ends as dramatically as it started, and the students gently lay the instruments down and return to their seats.  “Now, teachers,” the band leader yells into the microphone.  The students send up a roar, but teachers, too, hesitate.  “Teachers, come,” the man yells, and about seven move to the stage.  I remain seated until my students, old and new, begin pointing at me from around the auditorium, demanding I answer the call.  I laugh as I move slowly towards the stage.  I know how students love to scrutinize teachers.  They will be cataloging my every move.

But then the song begins, and I do not care.  I grab a pair of bright red and yellow maracas and begin finding the inner rhythm.  I am surrounded by teachers, each smiling as the sounds rising from our hands leap outward towards our students, most of whom have never seen any of us move with such abandon.  As I shake my hands and my hips, I can see them imagining us with fuller lives than they had presumed, dancing even in some late-night club with cocktails in our hands.

When the pulsing ends and I walk back towards my seat, a few students give me high fives and fist bumps.  I am surprised that they are surprised I could move to a beat at all, much less play along.  Since boyhood, I had always been known for my dancing.  Just how removed from them did they think I was?  Then, it occurs to me.  For all the time we share together, my students know as little about me as I know about them and their lives outside our walls.  And, while the school year is still young, we will need to bridge that gap of understanding if the knowledge is to really flow–in both directions.

Even at our best, teachers were never designed to be Superman.  Teachers are drummers pushing a beat.  We circle a sound until we get it right, and then we pound it until students have no choice but to join in the dance.  As I review my lesson plans for the week ahead, I ask myself over and over, “When does the music start?”  If it does not, if there is no room for every student, the hesitant and the bold, to find some instrument to hold onto and play along, then I start over again.  I am, after all, a drummer, and that’s what drummers do.

–teachermandc

It’s so cozy living in the abstract.  Concepts and what-if’s assume their own comfort zone. Intellectual gamesmanship is, after all, the hallmark of the ordained, and everyone wants to be considered noteworthy, at least once.  Later today, a Sunday, the airwaves will be full of impressive prognostications about politics and sport.  Scorecards will be tallied and likely losers declared.  It is the nature of our world it seems, this crowning and dethroning business.  If only defeats were as short-lived as victories, we would all get better sleep.  But they are not.  Defeats linger like the laughter of the one who slipped away.

I almost lost a student this week, and, while I know I should be grateful he survives, I still find myself thinking of all the faces flowing through my classroom in the last five years.  The oldest should be graduating from college in the spring.  Some will be, and I wish I could be there to add my cheer.  More will be found trudging towards their goal at a slower pace, which is to be expected in this stubbornly pessimistic time.

My youth was framed by an almost reckless optimism that seeped into the songs.  I watched from my childhood perch as “We shall overcome” roared past my window.  I danced to “War” and then witnessed one end.  I rode the highways in Florida singing “Sunny” at the top of my lungs with my high school buddies.   The Delfonics, James Brown, Cat Stevens, the O’Jays, Neil Young, Jethro Tull, the Temptations, Donny Hathaway–I reached for them all and found in their yearnings some hope for me and my generation.  I still am not sure what my students listen to on their iPod’s, but I do know they never seem to smile or sing along.

Older people always think they had it better, and maybe that is what I am sipping now.  But I still see the look on my students’ faces this week. I see them processing over and over how close one of their own came to leaving.  It is impossible to be young and black in DC and not know of some fresh life stolen. Few seem to have the illusion of invincibility ascribed to youth.  They know all too well what dangers await outside our door.  Too many tiptoe through their days as though walking on glass.  The question is not whether they will be cut, but how deep.

In their brief lives, there have been tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and genocide.  They know about shark bites and Metro accidents, drunk drivers and hijacked cars. My students have endured 9/11 and several wars.  They have seen their neighborhoods change, and their schools reshaped.  Many buildings look much better now, but others have closed for good.  They know firsthand the topic their presumed inabilities have become as adults fight over education.  The recession thrives in too many of their households, and the hope Obama represented seems a lifetime ago.

On Thursday, as I extolled the joys of inquiry in my debate class, one student challenged me.  We are preparing to discuss whether or not restrictive policies targeting teens are discriminatory.  We were discussing the presumption of guilt as a societal hurdle when one young man said, “It’s not like anything’s gonna change just ’cause we say so.”  Others registered their accord, and soon we were dissecting the role of youth in DC, America, and the world.

I tried attacking each of their claims of futility using analogies of every stripe, from sports to cooking shows.  Young people became the herbs of flavor you add to a meal just before serving.  Teens stood limbered and ready like a relay runner, arm extended backward, waiting for the baton.  Their time to excel and extend the race would come; it always does.  Still, nothing.  Finally, I reached for the obvious, lifted the nearly extinguished bottle of water off my desk, and asked the ageless question:  half empty or half full?  They laughed at the tiny rim of liquid near the bottom.  “Ok,” I said.  “But imagine the water line was here,” I continued, pointing to the middle.  “Now, what?”

“Empty,” a vocal girl in the front volunteered.  “Especially if you leave the room.”  We all laughed together.  Then I attempted the whole explanation about perception and optimism.  But as the bell ended the lesson, the young man who started it all observed, “Optimism ain’t easy.”

“Isn’t,” I yelled as they exited the room.  “Isn’t.  And don’t forget to do your homework.”

Their assignment is to annotate Dr. Kings “Mountain Top” speech, the one he delivered the night before a stroll on a hotel balcony violently ended his life.  I have asked them to look for his use of rhythm and metaphor to make his points.  They are to study cadence and rhetoric, and on Monday we will take turns reading it aloud.  It is my deeper hope that they will see in his vision of the “promised land” some semblance of themselves, and their time, and their promise.  I have a recording I will play at the end of the lesson, allowing them to ride first hand the ebb and flow of his magnificent voice.  We will work hard to link his passion for progress to their own fierce protections of family and friends.  To hear them tell it, everyone, it seems, is “my manz,” and loyalty is the attribute they value most.

I will do my best to fortify the innate sense of wonder that must accompany youth if its challenge is to be fulfilled.  I think I’ll play the Pointer Sisters’ “Yes We Can,” a song I blasted from my car the day after President Obama’s victory.  I rode up and down Seventh Street, and then Pennsylvania Avenue, blaring and waving as fellow Americans of every dimension signaled a “thumb’s up.”  It has a strong beat, so maybe they will take the time and listen.

Optimism isn’t easy, and so much of the media exists to flash its yellow warning lights at every crossing.  Hungry for green, uncluttered roads, we chase celebrity sightings looking for a sign.  We scramble to any scene of unexpected triumph, like we did with the miners in Chile, even as we rubberneck the accidents along the way.  Optimism is the thing that keeps us moving.  Without it, creativity dies, and prospects diminish.

I told a cherished friend once that “only the dreamer can kill the dream.”  It sounds right, but I know it is not entirely true.  The times can squelch it, too.  We need–our young people need–a better chorus if they are to sing their songs with abandon.  Education is part of it, but not all of it. While waiting for this latest cloud of doubt to pass, teachers must find in the words and formulas we peddle some shiny trinket or two to fascinate and entice.

Young people need to know the “rest of their lives” really is a long time, time enough to grow, time enough to mend, time enough to imagine.  Optimism may not be easy, but neither is riding a bike in traffic.  “It gets better” is a lesson we all need to hear if this nascent century is to finally shed its cumbersome training wheels.

Earth, Wind, and Fire anyone?

–teachermandc

Back before I grew my hair back this school year (my mother made me promise in the spring), many students relished yelling, “Mr. Potato Head,” as my shaved head and I walked the school halls.  I always feigned consternation, and they got a good laugh.  I love it when teenagers laugh–especially with adults.  While the unfettered giggle of their younger selves is submerged somewhere, what remains is still a joyous stream of naturalness that is contagious.

I read this week that babies laugh, on average, 300 times a day.  By the time they reach the age of sixty, that number plummets to two or three times daily.  I bet it’s higher for teachers; we get to feed off the wonderful silliness of youth.  My students still like to hide things from me and crack up while I “frantically” search for my missing notebook, or jacket, or board eraser.  I keep hoping none of those master teachers slip in to observe me during one of those scavenger hunts.  I will surely be assessed poorly, as the expanded teacher evaluation guidelines in DC strictly require that every single moment of class time be spent on instruction.  Last year, I tried explaining to one that some “down time” is instruction time.  I have to get my students to relax and trust me if they are going to  move beyond the all-imposing “grade” grab and actually allow themselves to learn from me and each other.

This year, I have in my debate class a senior girl who first came to me in the tenth grade.  Our relationship did not begin well.  She never laughed at any of my jokes–even the good ones.  I could see she was trying hard not to laugh, and I started to resent it a little.  Not a lot, but a little.  She was very serious about “her work,” and I appreciated her willingness to answer questions or volunteer to go to the board.  She especially enjoyed diagramming sentences.  I just could not make her laugh.

As the first advisory neared an end in late October of that year, I did notice her building bonds with some of the other students in class.  She began to share with them, then smile, and finally laugh so big she covered her mouth with her hand.  I loved the way her eyes danced when she let go. But still no laugh for me, not even when I unveiled my most embarrassing moments, or pretended to plead for a right answer in my best “woe-is-me” voice.

For much of the first advisory, our readings had focused on short stories and the importance of conflict in literature and in life.  “Without conflict,” I told them, “there is no pulse.  Somebody has to want something they do not or cannot have.  Conflict comes from the quest, and the obstacles placed in his or her path.”  At the end of story, the main character is changed somehow by the journey.  My students always understood that part intuitively.  By high school, conflict and obstacles are as familiar as rain, and what I then try to get them to see is the necessity of each for a bountiful life.

I tasked them to write about a moment in their life that “changed everything.”  They were instructed to “let the moment breathe” by describing events before the conflict arose.  Then, they should carefully guide the reader through the unfolding.  Obstacles, real or imagined, must interfere with a strong desire, and they should be altered somehow at the end.

Students always loved that assignment and attacked it with zeal.  Some wrote about family celebrations gone awry, or the day a parent disappointed.  A few focused on romantic adventures, or the loss of a loved one and the messy aftermath.  The one girl who wouldn’t laugh with me shared her story in a way that sealed our relationship in an unexpected way.

She wrote about the incarceration of her father on a serious conviction involving a younger sibling.  She used her words to sketch a moving picture of the little Daddy’s girl she once was.  She moved skillfully, using the metaphor of a candle, to detail the day the “lights went out.”  She said she buried her childhood that day, along with any positive feelings about men.  The thing she desired most, but could never have back, was her innocence.  I can still remember sitting in my chair after reading her paper and marveling at the weight her young shoulders bore.

I gave her an “A” on her paper, her first from me, and in the note I always attached I praised her choice of words and imagery.  I also asked her to see me after class.  When the lunch bell rang that day, she lingered around her desk, packing and repacking her book bag, until the other students had left.

“You wanted to see me?” she asked.

“The story you wrote about–it’s true isn’t it?”

“Yea,” she said.

“You want to talk about it?  I mean, how are you doing with all of it?” I asked.

“I mean, I miss him and all.  But I can’t forgive what he did.  I just can’t understand it,” she said, her eyes cast downward.

I asked her to talk to me about her childhood, and how she was before all this happened.  She described Christmas’s past, and the big party she had when she turned seven.  We talked that whole lunch period about her favorite color, and the dog she wanted, and life at home with her mom.  I asked her what was her favorite toy when she was younger.  She laughed, finally, and told me “Mr. Potato Head.”

“Do you still have him?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said.  “I threw all that stuff away.”

“You’re still a child, you know,” I continued.  “Don’t let what someone else did, even someone you love, take that away from you.  That little girl you wrote about still lives inside you.  Don’t be so quick to send her away.”

After that afternoon, things between us changed.  She shone those bright eyes at me more than a little, and we came to laugh at jokes even the other students didn’t always get.  At the beginning of the eleventh grade, she came to see me on the very first day.  I was no longer her English teacher, but she wanted me to know her father had died suddenly over the summer.  I asked her how she felt.  She told me she was doing better with it all, and I urged her to write about it and get her feelings out.

She did for her first English III assignment, but her new teacher did not believe her story and said so in a note.  The young lady again came to me, very upset.  I promised to speak to her new teacher and did.  Their rapport subsequently improved, and my former student continued to visit and smile whenever we passed each other in the hall.  Last June she ran up to me and said eagerly, “I have you in debate next year.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed as we touched fists.

This year, she has been a good student, but not great.  Like with most seniors, debate just seems like too much work, and she is not looking forward to Saturday tournaments.  Last Thursday, I pulled her out of class and into the hallway.  “Look, I know you are nervous,” I said.  “But I know you have it in you to be a great debater.  I just want you to try harder and set an example for the younger students.  Remember, you’re a senior now.”

She smiled at me and promised to settle down.  Then, just before she reentered the classroom, she looked at me and said,”You remember that little Mr. Potato Head you gave me?  I still have it on my dresser.”

Up until that moment, I had completely forgotten.  The day after that lunch time talk two years ago, I had given her a small gift I rummaged for in my children’s old toys.  I had said something to that young lady about holding on to childhood, and I had presented her a tiny Potato Head replica from one of those Happy Meals my daughters so loved.  He had rubbery white arms and big feet, a black baseball cap, and a heavy mustache.  I had forgotten in all the rush of classes since, in all the students moving in and out view, how much that long ago moment had meant to her and to me.

Later back in class, even after I caught her checking email on the laptop I had assigned for research, all I could do was smile her way until she had no choice but to return my gaze and get back to work.

–teachermandc

My mother passed away in early June.  There are days when I still find myself weak.  But I gather strength from the lessons she taught me.  Our home in Anacostia (they call it the poor part of town) shimmered with books.  She proudly escorted each of my three brothers and me to the local library branch where we obtained our first official ID’s.  She cleared the unfinished basement and stocked it with three desks and a chalkboard where my brothers and I played school.  I always insisted on being the teacher.

After her husband and our father left when I was about six, she trudged on alone.  A Howard University graduate, she found a meaningful job in the federal and then local  government and poured her life into her clients and into us.  She became a Catholic after my father vanished, and, like all converts, she memorized her newfound faith.  All of us children attended Catholic school, and the white nuns who taught us honored their vow to give Negro children the best they had for little wages and “heavenly”  reward.

When I later married and then became a father, I searched out my new neighborhood in Upper Manhattan (while I attended Columbia) for a similar place to nurture my first-born.  But the Catholic schools in the area seemed distant and removed.  My wife and I settled for private schools at first.  When the time came, we enrolled our eldest in the famed Riverside Church preschool, and then Bank Street.  Somewhere around the time she reached the age of six, her teachers at Bank Street recommended she be retained for another year in her same grade despite her clear academic dominance.  When we learned that almost all the other black children had been similarly “saved,” we pulled her out of the school and moved to Clinton Hill in Brooklyn.

When we first enrolled our daughter in the public school across the street, they tried to place her back in first grade because of her diminutive stature.  But we insisted, and she entered second grade in a new Gifted and Talented program designed to attract gentrifying parents like us.  Her teacher was outstanding, and my wife and I celebrated our good fortune.  With high spirits, I attended the first PTA meeting, only to find eight parents literally fighting with each other over something I could never figure out.

I made a vow to get involved and ran for PTA president.  I won, and, over the next five years, watched a school transform.  Attendance at our monthly meetings grew from a few to plenty.  As our parent association expanded, so, too, did the depth of the school’s offerings.  Our PTA raised money, put on original plays, weeded out low performing teachers, replaced a sleepy principal, stocked the library, and hosted Career Days, open mics for parents, holiday galas, and father/child days. By the time my time at the school grew nigh, local politicians considered a stop at our monthly meetings a necessary function.

When our second child was born, my wife and I continued our mission at a new school in an adjacent neighborhood where we had moved for more space.  The presidents of the adjoining PTA’s in our 16,000-family district elected me president of the PTA presidents (a position mandated by city-wide Parent Association rules), and the goals shifted.  I worked hard to educate the other PTA’s about the “Blue Book” which governed parent power in New York.  Parents discovered they had a mandated place in their children’s schools.  They had a right to block the tenure of poor performing new teachers.  They had a right to challenge the appointment of a principal they did not trust.  Parents had a right to sit on a local school restructuring committee where their signature was not suggested, but required in order to release the school budget (unlike in DC).

Back then, school districts in New York had local boards, an outgrowth of the Brownsville disruptions.  Board members were not always scrupulous in their dealings, especially with some personnel staffing decisions, but it did not matter.  Parents were unleashed in the schools, and everyone was on notice.  Especially children.  Public education became a communal event, and parents were no longer deemed ill-advised interlopers in their children’s education.  Suddenly, parents and community belonged at the table, and not underneath.

When we moved to DC in 1995 (with our third, young daughter in tow), I expected to pick up the banner of parent involvement as a key ingredient in the success of any vibrant school.  But it was not to be.  In DC, there were no rules legislating meaningful community involvement in local schools.  PTA’s were not required; LSRT’s were strictly advisory, and PTA presidents did not even have to have children in the school they claimed to represent.

There were no monthly meetings with parent leaders and the superintendent.  Principals did not have to consider parental voices in their staffing and budgetary decisions.  Poor teachers were safe as long as the principal wanted it.  PTA’s not only did not have to exist; they did not have to meet.  Principals could even self-appoint parent leaders with no PTA election to substantiate their selection.  Predictably, entire buildings buckled under the weight of old paint and insulated administrators.

After two months, I heard about a loophole in the whole arrangement.  All my wife and I had to do was find a “connection,” and we could move our children out of the range of the neighborhood schools she, an Ivy League grad, and her brother, a doctor, once attended, and enroll our children across Rock Creek Park in the “whiter” part of town where a slew of attractive choices awaited.

We took the advice, and, each morning for many years, we transported our two youngest children across Military Road to Ward 3 and waved them inside.  We sent our oldest to School Without Walls, and I poured my rejuvenated energies into the Home School Association there.

Once “out of boundary,” we found vibrant parent bodies which demanded excellence and raised supplemental funds to help provide it.  Principals had to be engaged if they wanted to retain their employment.  Weak teachers were assisted with PTA-sponsored classroom aides.  If the weakness persisted, they somehow disappeared.  Parents met regularly with whomever they wanted.  No concern was too small.  I was impressed.

Now that my children are grown, I still look back on the lessons learned.  I was told once it takes three things to craft a great school:  a visionary principal, a motivated faculty, and an engaged parent body.  Somewhere along the way, the parent portion was abandoned.  The current model being floated on national TV and in other forums views parents and community as an obstacle to be overcome.  Highly touted charter schools boast about their programs which generally remove linkage from the equation altogether.  Yes, most require parents to sign “pledges” to encourage their children, but lengthy school days, weekend classes, shortened summers, and sequestered “prep schools” are all promoted as the magical elixir.  If these poor, mostly black and brown children could just have the contact with their undereducated, misguided community diminished, or at least tightly controlled, then many could be saved.

What this rationale ignores is the need for a true triumvirate.  Just as parents in the affluent sections of DC have a role to play (something defeated Mayor Fenty and surrogate Chancellor Michelle Rhee never dared to ignore), so do all parents and guardians across the city.  The answers to the problems in public education will not be found unless and until the families of the children we purport to care so much about are also involved in shaping the solutions we espouse.  Without significant parent and community involvement and empowerment (parents know where the bad eggs lay), all our newfangled solutions become nothing more than just another clumsy missionary wave with no real conversion in sight.

-teachermandc

Friday afternoon finds my last class of the day, English III, restless again.  The new seating arrangement has helped, but there is a football game tonight against a beatable rival, and the young men have a nervous energy.  Generally, I like football days.  The whole school is a bit electrified, and the players get to wear their jerseys all day.

At my high school, way “back in the day,” sports cemented the place.  Lodged between pine trees and a man-made lake, the prep school had a real love affair with contact sports.  Every student had to participate in some team activity.  “You are scholars and athletes, athletes and scholars,” was practically our school motto, especially when the school was all boys.  I participated in wrestling and track.

The high school were I now teach does not have many winning traditions yet, not since the reopening, but the full roster of sports (except wrestling) gives our students an outlet too many alternative programs ignore.  This week alone, I have cheered on boy’s and girl’s soccer, girl’s volleyball, and I will be at least making an appearance at the game tonight.  Students like it when their teachers show up to watch them work outside the classroom.

Back in class, I begin by having my English students outline the differences between sentences and sentence fragments.  We discuss how, in English, a complete thought requires a doer and a deed, something all languages do not.  I mention how I read once that in the Hopi language “airplane” is a verb, complete unto itself.  We talk about how the difference in word order in Spanish might shape variances in thought as well.  How we see the world is deeply dependent on the words we use to articulate that sight, as well as on the order in which we arrange them.

The discussion is interesting, and I can literally see ideas and thoughts grabbing hold of some of my students.  But not the ones in the back, the football players and their crew.  They are interested, but just not enough to commit.  I take note of it, call on a few for guided input, and then move on.

The primary focus today revolves around the art of persuasion.  I use the same analogies and flow charts from my earlier AP English class.  Since both sets of students are eleventh graders, I try hard to expose both groups to the guiding question this year:  how do words and their arrangement impact action?  We are no longer just asking “what” a particular piece says, but “how” does it say it.  I am enjoying the shift in focus, and most of my students seem to be as well.

I decide to focus first on speeches, and, after a lesson on rhetoric, logos, ethos, and pathos, I distribute their assignment.  They are to read Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech and track his various appeals to logic and to emotion.  Then, they are to pretend the month is June; the class of 2011 has graduated, and they are the seniors-to-be.   They are running for president of the Student Government Association.  Their audience consists of ninth graders who don’t know them, tenth graders who might know them, and their fellow eleventh graders who think they know them.  How will you convince this crowd to vote for you?  What words will you use and to what affect?

Most students like the exercise, but my crowd in the back groans audibly even before I can finish explaining it.  The notion of seizing leadership outside of a sports captaincy is a foreign body to them.  Which is, in part, why I assign it.  I want them all to see themselves not just as followers, but as leaders who can inspire and be relied upon.  Midway through my reiteration of the mandatory assignment, Mr. Rhines enters my room.

I met him, or rather he was thrust upon me, on Tuesday after school.  A 1958 graduate from the old school located where we now sit, Mr. Rhines described himself as a poet and speaker who wanted to connect with young people.  I could barely hear his words for his outfit, a matching pants and shirt ensemble of African garb much too heavy for the heatwave we have been experiencing.  His pointed hat matched his clothes, and from it long gray dreds fell almost to his waist.  He also has a full, gray beard and a thin, angular face.  His wife, who is younger, wore a similar outfit with her hair in braids and said nothing.  I listened as Mr. Rhines recited poems to me while periodically pulling from a black satchel handfuls of other documents and signed thank you letters from classes he has visited across the country.  I nodded politely at first, but then became more engaged.  Once he told me he ends his talk by doing one-hundred push ups, I was hooked.  I invited him to speak to my “football” class on Friday.   But when he enters my room at 2:30 PM, as scheduled, I am as surprised as my students.  I had forgotten.  He is wearing clothing similar to when we met.

He and his wife find a seat while I complete my talk on leadership and quickly review the basic structure of rhetoric.  Just as I finish, the public address systems asks all Junior Varsity football players to report to the gym.  I know my players are all varsity, but they attempt to rush for the exit door using this tailor-made excuse.  Before I can say anything, Mr. Rhines barks, “Sit back down” in a voice much deeper than I remember.  “I said sit down, young man,” Mr. Rhines says to one, placing his body between the towering young man and the door.

All return to their seats.  Mr. Rhines then tells all my students how old he is (70), and that he once sat in that very room.  Back in 1958, integration had just come to DC, and the majority of the school was still white.  He introduces his wife and says he has come bearing wisdom.  Before he reads his poems, he makes then recite “I am so glad to be alive.” He  then asks the students to applaud themselves and their families for having survived the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and benign neglect.  Only his voice can be heard.  Then, he asks them to applaud me.  He says the little part of the lesson he heard was masterful and urges them not to take my efforts for granted.  He reminds them how few teachers are black males, especially English, and then he calls me “deep.”

The student, especially my athletes, rise from their seats and salute me.  I wave them off with my hands and look down to conceal my emotion.  I am touched.   Then, Mr. Rhines promises my students that if they listen to him he will do one-hundred push ups for them.  He recites four lengthy poems from heart about the joy of living, the power in knowledge, the need for self-love, and the balm in education.  After each poem, my students applaud loudly.  Some record him on their cell phones.  When he is done, one student in the back yells, “What about the push ups?”

Mr. Rhines moves to the center of the “U” and proceeds to lift his body up and down off the floor while counting down.  One male student tries to mimic him, but quits at around fifty.  When he is done, all my students gather around him and shake his hand.  They invite him back, and most linger even after the dismissal bell.

On the ride home after the football game, I kept thinking about Mr. Rhines, as well as the mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunts who came to watch the game.  Thursday was Back-to-School night, and I met almost seventy parents, grandparents, and guardians then.  The line connecting my students to their community is a deep one, and I make a note to thank the village in my prayers.

–teachermandc

Today, after school, a senior I have not seen in a while comes to visit.  I am in the midst of rearranging my room.  I have this one English III class at the end of my B days with 15 boys, mostly football players, and ten girls.  You almost never get an upperclassmen grouping in high school with more males than females (unless it is remedial), and my pleasant surprise has turned into a challenge.

Most of the gentlemen are boisterous, except when it comes to reading in class.  Then they sometimes retreat and defer to the young ladies.  But then, when the boys are at their peak involvement, the girls become quiet.  Having a large room becomes a curse sometimes.  The back desks are too far from the board in my “V” arrangement, so I decide today to change things.  I need a seating flow that encourages group activity more than individual quests.  I need to find a way to blend this odd group of individuals into a supportive family of learners.

I opt for a modified “U” arrangement and decide to assign seats.  I mix boys and girls so that no one mass can develop.  I blend the shy with the outgoing, the humorous with the weighted, and the advanced with the struggling.  At first, students balk at this alteration in their comfort zones, but then the class goes well.  Funny how a simple change in scenery alters so much more.

After school, I prepare for my classes for the morning.  Rumor has it the master educators are in the building, and everyone is warned to lift engagement and cross all “t’s.”  There can be no lull during the instruction, and every jester must have a purpose.  After last year, I have decided to just be myself and let the drums roll.  I feel confident about the learning taking place, but you just never know how other eyes will record it.

The senior who comes to visit finds the 2007-08 yearbook I keep in my desk.  I have purchased yearbooks for every year since the school opened, and I like to show seniors how innocent and open they looked “back in the day.”  After chuckling at all the current seniors’ changing faces, he begins counting all the classmates who began their high school journey with him at the tender age of fourteen, but are no longer enrolled.  A few left of their own volition, but most slipped and faltered on the road.  Especially the boys.

He then turns to the faculty and staff page.  In 2007, the school was only two-years old, and the faces of the forty some-odd adults also shone with the gleam of new beginnings.  Today, only nine remain.

It is not easy being a teacher.  A handful left to pursue other options, especially the Teach for America crowd fulfilling their two-year obligation.  Some of the older teachers were “forced out” because their methods were deemed ineffective and out-of-touch.  A few needed to go, having lost their connection to “these kids” years ago.   We are now on our second principal and our fifth set of Assistant Principals.  We lost fourteen staff in the rift, all but one female.  Like those scrub-faced freshman in my aging yearbook, we have seen our share of change.

Back in 2005, as my foothold into teaching began, I took a class in educational theory and practice.  I should say my wife believes I have career ADHD.  After stints as a radio disc jockey, community gallery coordinator, Assistant Director of Economic Development in a local development corporation, graduate student, entrepreneur, and marketing consultant, I came to teaching relatively late in my voyage.  While my instructional experience matched that of the younger recruits, my years did not.

Last week, while attempting to clear my desk, I came upon a paper I had written back in the winter of my first full year of teaching.  The assignment in that evening class of fellow “newbies,” almost all of whom had also entered classrooms rather late, was to write about our new purpose.  Why had we chosen teaching?

I want to share what I wrote then because so much of it is still true.  During the whirlwind of the last two superintendents here in DC, seasoned teachers left standing still regale us with stories of past initiatives abandoned, new-fangled theories disproved, and a host of expensive textbooks and learning theories adopted and then dismissed (anyone remember open classrooms or whole learning?).

Through it all, the students remain and keep coming.  Graduation ceremonies are as loud as ever, even as the faculty lounge shrinks to make way for something new.  The words I wrote way back then revive me as I move forward.  I think of that “young” man composing his new life at his computer, and I smile:

“I spend my days with city kids one-third my age.  Not children really, but young people–teenagers–just starting to author their own stories, musings, and lives.  At times, I can hear their fears.  Mostly, I feel the fires rising within them, and I try my best not to put them out, or let them smolder unattended.  The flames are theirs to keep and mine to borrow.  I am a teacher.

Fifteen years is old enough to understand life’s containments, yet young enough to plot escape.  I asked them once to sketch their lives in 2025.  Such visions they shared–thug ambitions and bling dreams; high ceilings and loving mates; achieving children and uplifting careers–doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, radiologists, computer game developers, hair salon owners, fashion designers, and even America’s Next Top Model.  They wanted it all.

My job is to show both the need for and the benefit of hard work in any self-portrait, and I must do so without dimming the lights, or burdening the visions.  But children–and they still are–learn best from what they see, not what they hear.  If I do not offer my best, neither will they.

My challenge this year was to learn how to motivate while teaching, to learn how to regulate while engaging, to learn how to speak and how to listen.  The subject matter itself is the easy part.  Time management, planning, and empathy are the utensils I must master if I am to deepen my grasp.  Without these powers, I am adequate.  With them, I am the unflappable voice inside their eye saying, ‘Yes, yes, of course you can’–even when I sometimes must smother my doubts.”

I was, and am, a teacher being taught, and I still feel so lucky, yet worried.  What possible calling could ever top this?

–teachermandc

It took a while to post this week.  On Wednesday and Thursday, I sang “Make that change” to all who would listen.  I was pleased with the election results, but not with the analysis that followed.  To hear others spin it, I voted against Fenty, and not for Gray.  Like many native, African American voters, I turned my back on efficiency and embraced nostalgia instead.  As a teacher, I opted to return to lower scores and complacent colleagues.  My vote was irrational, emotional, racial, and, worst of all, heralded devastation for the children I teach.  I needed a little time to digest what change meant to me and for them.

Then, on Friday, my first period English III class comes scrambling into the classroom.  “Yea, son.”  “Nice, cuz.”  They share their original myth illustrations with great enthusiasm.  I watch their interactions and note, for seemingly the first time, how much they support one another.  Their familial greetings mask a deeper connection.  They know what is being said about them.  They have heard all the talk about failing schools and lazy teaching.   They realize they are the object of much speculation, and even the recipient of pity from some well-meaning quarters.  “Those poor kids in those awful schools.”

My students know now that they are eleventh graders, all the special attention, one-on-one meetings, and trips they received last year–the testing year–will not be repeated.  In some ways, they are on their own now, with college looming and graduation finally in sight.  They lean on their parents and grandparents, cousins and aunts.  They lean on each other, and they lean on me.  It is an inspiring embrace.

As they settle into their seats, I turn their attention to our earlier discussions about the Puritans, a humorless but hardy bunch.  We discuss the lingering influence of this group on popular notions of the American Dream, in particular the idealized role of community as a shared space of mutual obligation.  Then it occurs to me.  My vote was a tally for a broader definition of community and common concerns.

In the past four years, too much of the District government seemed to paint by the numbers with no concern for the resulting portrait–a stilted creation with no vibrancy, no unity, no soul.  Schools turned into testing factories and war rooms where a single exam became the yardstick, and people became interchangeable notches easily dismissed, or replaced, or belittled.  Civility was weakness, and collaboration an excuse.  If progress meant “dissing” some in the name of others, so be it.

Community became a narrow thing, especially in the classroom.  Do this.  Don’t do that.  Teaching as recipe seems to work on paper, but I know the constraints, restraints, narrow curriculum, and constant observations drove me out of 10th grade, the last year that “counts,” despite my individual AYP success.

The support my students give to one another is something we all could use more of in our rush from here to there.  We need more mutual consideration, especially at a time when contempt and derision pass as discourse, and “my way or the highway” is the national song.  We need more terms of endearment to acknowledge our common fate.  The divides so trumpeted in the press make our city seem on the verge of collapse.  And yet, on the roads I travel at least, I see movement, and hope, and the kind of mending that only happens after a storm.

“Yea, son.”  “Nice, cuz.”  What a great day to teach.

–teachermandc