The Upswing

I went back and I read that post from what...7 days ago? It feels like a year. And my outlook has shifted completely...while my students still yell and shout and throw things, and while I still yell and shout and stand there, none of it seems as serious anymore. The lightness of this job struck me sometime circa Sunday afternoon, and it just doesn't seem like such a big horrible deal anymore.

So it's a job. I go in every day and I'm not great at it, but that's okay. I can get better, slowly, over time, and with many setbacks, and a lot of plateauing...and I'm okay with that. And most importantly...it is just a job. Whether I get good at it and start tracking my students' achievement and running my classroom like a well-oiled TFA machine or not, I still get to go home every afternoon and every weekend. I can still listen to Iron & Wine in my headphones while I type up guided notes, and watch TV on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and take long drives to hear concerts and visit friends and see my parents.

Life outside of school is wonderful. And life inside of school is funny, difficult, and most importantly progressing inevitably forward.

I want to tell stories about my kids now, and actually paint this picture for you, but I have to leave for grad school pretty soon so I can find parking around UPenn and have time for dinner. So to illustrate my lack of classroom management for you, let me end with some quotes from my 5th period boys, responding to the prompt "How do you feel about this class?".

"I feel like this class is fun until we get to learnin, that is when we need to get serious. Our teacher is kind and I think we are not giving her the respect that she needs. I like this class and we need to get serious."

"The way I feel about this class is it's hard to learn. This class is very bad. I can't further my education in this class. You can't learn in this class because everybody is talking and playing. They are disrespecting the teacher, that's why I am happy I am transfering out."

"The way I feel about this class is that it's not fair that when people act up it's not everybody - but all the people's grades go down. This class act like they don't wanna learn. It's not fair to everybody."

"I feel that this class is too loud and obnoxious. Everybody jokes around which is honestly not that bad, but it disturbs me too much. I can't get my work done half the time. And the fights in this class make my class look uncivilized."

"I feel that this class disrespects the teacher too much and don't know when to stop joking and get serious."

"I don't feel nothing. But I would take it serious if the work was harder."

"I feel like I cannot learn because of the noise from my classmates and I can not do my work and concentrate on anything you teach."

"I feel like this class is ok when we actually learn something."

"I feel like I'm not learning anything in this class because people is talking."

"I like this class. Other than the talking, the rude remarks, cursing, fighting, trash talking, ignoring the rules...this is class is alright."

"I feel kind of lonely in this class cause theres no girls and that is kinda strange."

"I think you is a good teacher. I think this class just needs girls."

"I feel shitty and embarrased about my class because if 1 person mess up we all mess up."

"I feel funny, like I can't take this class because everybody makes me laugh."

"What I feel about this class is this class is cool, but sometimes the class acts crazy and the teacher acts mean and puts people in trouble."

"This class need sum girls and these kids in this class need to grow up. This class is too much."

Oh wow.

First off, let me start by saying I thought that this blog got deleted. So while many many things have been happening that I feel ought to be documented, I haven't really had an outlet (nor the patience or time) to write any of them down. The circumstances of my rediscovering this blog are as follows...

It's back-to-school night. Supposedly this started at 6:00 pm, and it's 6:22. Still no parents. So I sat down at my desk (just recently equipped with a functioning, internet-connected iMac) and with this borrowed time, I puttered around the web until I thought of visiting blogger and it automatically logged me in. So here I am, waiting for parents. Ready to hit "Save Now" and close out in a heartbeat...especially since I hear desks being moved in the room nextdoor.

False alarm. Still no parents.

So I almost quit today. I mean there are moments...a few rare moments on isolated days...when my "teaching and management style" just sort of click with the students and some learning happens. Let me emphasize the transience and rarity of these moments. I spend an overwhelming majority of the time in my classroom standing still, holding my ruined throat, waiting in exasperation as the minutes tick away and my students yell, shout, throw things, and tear the room down around me. Anything and everything but show some self-respect by acting like the students they are supposed to be.

This is entry has been cut short due to the arrival of parents. Check in again to see how things have changed in a couple of weeks.

"7" Being Strongly Disagree...

It's over. :-)

I have had a lot of things happen in the last couple of weeks that were blog-worthy, but every time I decided I had time to do a little writing, my roommate would shut off the light and go to sleep on me. Of course, I can see my computer screen in the dark, but I couldn't deal with the nagging guilty feeling that I should be sleeping too. So I would just shut down and go to bed.

So this will be a fairly retrospective entry.

The last couple of days that I had students, they started driving me a little mental. As much as I love the little...buggers. They just wouldn't shut up. I am not allowed to use my students' names online and I feel really awkward using pseudonyms for them at this point. So suffice it to say that two particular students, who were reported to have been seen "chillin" in a car outside the school at 7:45, would enter at 8:10 (late) and the chaos would begin. In my strictest voice I would tell them to stop wasting our time and to silently take their seats - and then every effort of mine to engage them in the lesson would result in giggles, "miss why you gotta bug me like that?", and the rest of the class dissolving into laughter.

The transcript would proceed as follows (note Ms. Miller losing control over her sarcasm):

Me: Wayne, what is the discriminant?
Wayne, laughing: Miss, I don't know.
Me: Wayne, what is the discriminant?
Wayne, laughing: Miss, I said I don't know.
Me: Can you read?
Wayne: Yeah, I can read! What you talkin about...
Me: Then read the board, it's written right there. (The class laughs). Wayne, what is the discriminant?
Wayne: I don't know.
Me: Read it. I'm not going to leave you alone.
Wayne: Oh the discriminant?
Me: Yes.
Wayne: Oh well that's b2 - 4ac.
Me: Yes! He can read!

A weak teaching moment for me, I realize, but once I asked him the question I couldn't let him go until he answered it. Sets a bad tone for the other students to do that. Anyway, the excessive amount of rudeness starting getting to me, but we got through the objectives and I just made them do stations so I wouldn't have to talk to them anymore. Of course, during stations, I had to gently restrain Wayne from fighting with 4 different people (one who insisted on saying "Wayne, I'm pregnant" every time he looked at her). By that point, I was starting to find their chaotic energy sort of amusing. Oh, the end of school...

All but one of our students passed the class, and on the last day we had a nice chat about what they want to do after high school. Two of our girls want to study forensic science in college, one with a double major in early childhood education. One of our boys wants to be a music major (he's a jazz musician). One of our boys is joining the plumber's union and one aims to be a Septa bus driver (he says he's got it all figured out - they make $20 an hour). None of them want to be a math teacher!

I have other things to write about...my final thoughts on Institute, my visit to Ithaca, my next two weeks, my plan for the year. How much I hope that I get to teach Algebra II. MLK and all my new colleagues. My CMA group. But right now I need to get some lunch and start organizing all of the emails that have been piling up for five weeks.

It's so nice to be home. :-)

I Understand Now

I am going to have to figure something out to make Sundays more bearable during the year. They can be so...depressing.

The Mathletes

Let me start out this entry by saying that teaching in a high school classroom is an amazing feeling. I can't, right now, imagine any other job that would fit me the way this fits me. From my students...

Q: What do you think of the theory of malleable intelligence?

AJ: I know plenty of people who are smart and they continually get smarter, probably because they think so much. They are continually working and they are beginning to leave me in the dust.

KB: I think it is true because I do not put my brain to the limit when I do not care about a subject (like Algebra) and my brain didn't grow because I struggle with it.

Q: What advice would you give to people who say "I can't, it's too hard"?

AT: The advice I would give people is to try because you're not a failure until you refuse to get up.
CB: Well, I'm one of those people. I don't think I can do some problems because I am not good at all.

EW: This should show everybody just how powerful your brain is. My advice is to use your brain, don't disrespect it by drinking alcohol or smoking. Use your brain to its full potential.

"The Mathletes" is the self-inflicted name of my collaborative group for the summer. :-) Most collaborative groups consist of four members teaching the same content area, and indeed mine started out this way three weeks ago. We have since lost a member who ended up going home to recover from an illness and will hopefully be giving TFA another try next summer. So I'm now a member of a 3-person collaborative (commonly abbreved in TFA-speak to "collab"...only they pronounce it "co-lab" which is completely incorrect).

Collaborative teaching comes with a whole bunch of complications and a whole bunch of benefits. It basically works like this for the summer...there are four hours of summer school each day, in two 2-hour blocks. Our first block is an 18-student Algebra II class and our second block is a 5-student class, both consisting of rising juniors and seniors. Every day, one of us teaches from 8-9 and one from 9-10 (making up the first block), and the third person teaches the whole second block by his or herself. Then we rotate by week. So far I have been with the 18-student class all along. This coming week I switch to the 10-12 block and teach the 5-student class.

Where do I even start talking about our students? I don't know. So here's a picture of my classroom to distract you. We're teaching Algebra II for the summer, and the curriculum was prepared by TFA teachers based on past student performance and the time constraint. We only have 17 days of instruction to get through it, and that includes days for exams. In any case, the curriculum actually covers Algebra I material (I gave my little sister the diagnostic exam and she scored a 31/35 after 8th grade).

Our students have an enormous range of ability and experience with this material, so our biggest challenge is making sure that everyone makes progress this summer no matter where they are starting. We assessed everyone's starting point and struggled for about a week and a half during which we were going too slow for the students who get it, and far too fast for the students who need to relearn and practice basic skills.

There is simply not enough time. (I know that sounds like an excuse, and it partially is).

The motto of the Philadelphia Institute is "Two Goals: One Mission" - the two goals being student achievement and teacher effectiveness. But it seems that teacher effectiveness takes precedence every time. We have no opportunity to meet with our students outside of the one hour we teach each day, because we are in sessions all day long (unless you can get your student to come in at 7:45 a.m., when we actually have 15 free minutes). We are not allowed to be in the classroom when our collab partner is teaching, so I couldn't sit and work with a group of struggling students while Mr. P pushes the advanced students, or vice versa. If we had a little more freedom, I know that we could better serve these students.

But we do the best we can. All but 2 or 3 of our students improved from the diagnostic exam to the midterm exam that we took this week. Still, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. Now that we're pushing into tougher material (systems of equations and graphing, then quadratics and parabolas) it's so apparent that some students are getting completely left in the dust. They need to relearn concepts like distribution, subtracting negative numbers, combining like terms, dividing things by 1 and 0.

If we firm up our execution so that we actually start independent practice (usually in the form of a worksheet) 40 minutes into the period, then we have a hope. We can create differentiated worksheets for the advanced students, and then sit with the 6-7 most struggling students for a few minutes each day while they work on a more remedial worksheet that eventually covers the same material. We have no choice but to keep pushing through the material...it's just intimidating to see how far some students need to come before we can fairly give them the final exam.

Next entry will be about MLK. Check out some pictures of the (empty) school here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rmiller29/.

Mid-Institute Reflective Debrief

I titled this entry as such because the language that we use to communicate here can be quite ridiculous. It's entertaining, almost, especially when you start using it in non-teaching contexts just by force of habit. It's actually kind of scary...it will be one of the things I don't miss about Institute.

That being said, I haven't had much of a chance to reflect on my time here at Institute. If I had to sum it up, I would probably say that I like it a lot (I'm one of those people). Not a very creative descriptor, but accurate. We are living in a dorm at Temple University - the 160+ members of the Philadelphia corps plus about 500 other corps members from the Metro D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, New Jersey, and Connecticut regions. Monday through Friday we wake up at 5:30 a.m. and trek the 10 minute walk to the dining hall where our boxed lunches await, clad in our professional attire and carrying obscenely bulky/heavy bags of classroom stuff. We grab breakfast - which is to say a $1.16 fountain diet Coke from the 24-hour 7-Eleven for me, because I can't deal with the dining hall at 6 a.m. - then break off into our groups of about 90 teachers (from all different regions) and depart on school buses, off to our summer school placements.

My summer placement is at Martin Luther King High School in Northwest Philadelphia, which is also my placement school for the fall (I am one of only two people who was lucky enough to have it work out like that). We work at the school until 4:20 every day, teaching for 1 or 2 hours in the morning and spending the rest of the day in "sessions" which are basically classes, learning how to plan and execute lessons and manage behavior and incoporate literacy instruction and all that good stuff. It's challenging to stay awake and the temperature in our classrooms is comparable to that of a meat-freezer, but sessions are not bad at all. We are given some amount of time each day while at work to start the preparations, plans and other documents that are due the following day - and it's up to the individual to maximize the efficiency of this time, or relax or call home or meet with collaborative partners as needed.

We school bus back to the dorm by 5 p.m., and have the evenings to complete all of our preparations for the next day. About 2-3 times a week there is some kind of workshop or learning team in the evening that is helpful and/or mandatory for us to go to, but barring those, our evenings are surprisingly within our own control.

Within that schedule, I work hard during the day (meaning that I lug my 13-lb laptop to school with me every day) and I work hard as soon as I get back to Temple in the evenings. From 5-7, I maximize productivity with a diet coke and my laptop and I pump out whatever lesson plans or calendars are due for the next day. Having missed dinner by this point, I usually waste cash on dinner or buy some snack from the vending machine keeping in mind that I'm too tired to feel hungry and bedtime is in like 3 hours. Then from 7:30-10:30, I prepare for my lesson the following day. I meet with partners, make homework sheets and graphic organizers for my students, I write out whatever practice problems and posters that we need to go through as a class, and I make 25 photocopies of everything for the students.

At 10:30, I brush my teeth and go to bed. Repeat the next day.

The fact of the matter is that I like it because I always have something productive to be working on, and there really isn't time to procrastinate and feel bad about it. Being productive is like a natural high. And as long as I'm in bed by 11 p.m. at the latest, I can handle the exhaustion and long hours.

Of course, I've put things in place to keep my sanity. My iPod on the bus in the morning, from 6:30-7:00 a.m. is ESSENTIAL. It is my favorite half hour of the day, and I use it to think about everything in my life that is not related to teaching - particularly the people and places that I love and miss hopelessly. It might seem odd that I start my day off on that note, but it just started happening that way and it works. At 7 a.m. we get to school, and when I turn off my iPod to get off the bus, I let go of all of those debilitating feelings and focus all of my energy on the work and on my students.

My students. Our students. There is no better distraction. When I am in there with them, or when I am anywhere preparing a lesson for them or looking at their work, they are the absolute single most important thing in the world. Having students doesn't make the rest of life any easier - when I think about certain people and places, it's still just as hard - but as long as I have to think about our students for 8 hours a day, that's 8 hours a day during which all of my heart and energy is occupied.

Of course, since we are working 18-hour days here at Institute, there are still at least 10 hours a day during which I am forced to focus on myself and my development as a teacher and my collaboration with other teachers and everything else. That's the really draining time, but I think that if you surround yourself with the right people and set up your schedule well, there is more than enough energy around to get through it.

I will write more about teaching and MLK in the next entry, since this one is really supposed to be about Institute. I guess to wrap up this vague entry, I will say that I still don't know what my intended audience is for this thing, so I'm going to avoid using names and too many specifics until I do decide. But suffice it to say that I have met many many people in the last four weeks and have encountered many many new ideas and personalities and (if you know me, you won't be surprised) I certainly have opinions about most of them. But something about the fact that we're all here trying to do the same thing warrants a lot of respect. Even I am less inclined to be judgemental. :-)

Getting Hired

The hiring process for teachers in Philadelphia is complicated, and [in my current state of cynicism I believe that] Teach for America complicates it even more.

Due to its poor performance, the School District of Philadelphia was taken over by the state in 2001 and is now governed by the appointed five-member School Reform Commission. The head of the Commission is its CEO. Among other resonsibilities, the Commission was given the authority to reform the teaching staff, hire for-profit firms to run schools, and convert some schools to charter schools. The district is now comprised of regular public schools, EMO (educational management organization) schools, and charter schools. The verdict is still out on whether this reform is succeeding for the students.

The hiring process for staff teachers, even more recently reformed, entails three phases. In the first phase, known as "site selection", principals and hiring committees from schools are able to review resumes, interview potential teachers, and offer jobs to the best candidates. Site selection is open until July 31st - after that point, principals no longer have any say in the teachers who will be working in their schools. At some point in the first two weeks of August, the second phase of hiring ensues in which veteran district teachers choose the jobs they want from the list of remaining openings. Finally, in the last two weeks of August, new teachers and anyone else who has been hired by the district but still does not have a placement are paired with the remaining jobs. They work in these jobs on a "probationary" sort of one-year contract, and can approach their principals at the end of the year and ask to be officially hired by the school for the following year/indefinitely.

For Teach for America corps members, this means that it is extremely beneficial to try and get ourselves hired through the "site selection" interview process. The alternative is not knowing our teaching assignment until the end of August and hoping that jobs in our areas of certification are still available at that point. For corps members assigned to "high need" placements (MS/HS Math and Science, HS Spanish), there will almost definitely be plenty of jobs available all the way up until the first day of school. It's mostly just comforting to know earlier in the summer what subject material we will be responsible for teaching in the beginning of September.

Now, even in my cynicism I can acknowledge that Teach for America has been extremely helpful (actually essential) thus far in preparing us for the fall. They gave us timelines and detailed instructions for taking all of our certification tests, they set up district screening interviews and work tirelessly to make sure that all 162 Philly corps members will have a job by the first day of school. It just frustrates me that those 161 other people are affecting my placement so much.

If TFA gave me free rein right now to distribute my resume and interview with schools, I know that I could get hired somewhere great. Teach for America will only let us work in schools that meet certain criteria (namely schools that serve the lowest performing or most at-risk student populations) and I agree with that stipulation completely. Within this segment, there are certainly schools where I would be better able to achieve significant gains in math with my students than others. When I say that I could get hired somewhere "great"...I mean a neighborhood where I feel comfortable, a smaller school with younger students, an administration that is trying to achieve something progressive, resources for students and teachers, existing parental and community involvement. There are high-risk schools like this in Philadelphia. Other Teach for America corps members will be hired by them.

I will not be. With Teach for America acting as my agent, I have no say in where I interview. The interview weekend that I attended in Philadelphia last month was beyond frustrating because I knew that there were schools represented at the interview fair where I would feel comfortable and honestly be a better teacher (middle schools, charter schools, all-female schools). I was set up to interview with some of them, but I got bumped to make time for other corps members or was pushed until almost the end of the day. In an interview at 5:30 pm on a Saturday, after the committee has been interviewing corp members since noon, how am I supposed to make myself stand out as the one they should hire for their single opening, especially when TFA has trained us all how to answer every question they ask?

And what about the next round of interviews that TFA is going to set up with principals? By the end of June, many more principals and schools will be ready to hire teachers. There will be more schools represented, more openings for middle school math teachers, more opportunities. I just won't be able to interview with any of them. Because TFA needs to place 162 people, they will accept on my behalf the first job offer I get and will turn their attentions to placing all of the other corps members. I can't blame them for that, but it does mean that I've ended up in a school and grade level about which I am extremely apprehensive.

In any case, I do realize that it's not entirely fair for me to complain and that getting hired anywhere is an accomplishment (it is just impossible not to feel a little frustrated about the whole process). I understand how important it is for us to be flexible and willing to teach anywhere that we are needed. I am happy that some of the other brand new and equally scared corps members will be hired at great schools. Most importantly, I know that no matter where I am teaching I can still achieve great things with my students.

It will probably be harder for me to teach at Martin Luther King High School than at any other school in the city. I think that I won't hypothesize any further about what my experience there is going to be like, because I probably have no idea. I don't want to look back in three months and laugh at how pessimistic, or naive, or unprepared I was on the day that I got hired. When I get more concrete information on the school and the position, though, I'll certainly write about that.

Wow. Here goes nothing.