at Liberty Hall

I’ve been half in the world of hunting parties and coming out balls, having just finished two of Nancy Mitford’s books about the foibles of the landed gentry, crushed as they were between the demands of inheritance laws, modernization, and what would soon transform “the war to end all wars” into a prelude to the second. (In other words, it was a world in which one could sell a diamond brooch and use the proceeds to install central heating in a modest Oxford home.)

Physically, however, I’ve been installed in air-conditioned conference rooms, imbibing PowerPoints and limp hotel sandwiches. This summer I’ll be working for Teach For America for the third year, helping to manage operations for its Houston institute, one of the nine locations throughout the country where corps members begin their training, which includes four weeks of teaching summer school. Institute is often described as an intensive experience—many corps members are fresh from college and new to the classroom. The Houston school system is facing budget cuts this year, and is considering shortening its summer school program, which means that our corps members will likely begin teaching three days after their arrival at institute. Setting up and running an institute, therefore, is an equally demanding and rapid endeavor, and requires thick-agendaed weekends in hotel ballrooms named after the stars in the Texan mythology—the Sam Houston, the San Antonio, and Liberty Hall.

In the sepia-ed world of Nancy Mitford, the moneyed classes would host charity balls and donate funds to various improvement societies. Things aren’t very different today, although the ballrooms are used for conference tables and the ladies get nametags instead of dance cards. Teach For America publishes a quarterly alumni magazine, and reports the marriages and births among its prodigious flock, and in that sense, it isn’t unlike the society pages of both past and present.

To be honest, though, the metaphor only lasts so long, for although Teach For America is known for its recruitment at elite universities, its corporate backers, and its appeal to those wanting to fortify their resumes in pursuit of white collar jobs, its structure is far more complex. The selection process assesses the quality of one’s leadership, rather than one’s alma mater, and a considerable portion of funding comes from federal dollars and regional donors. Perhaps a more interesting discussion revolves around the timbre and tone of Teach For America’s recently revised core values, which emphasize the necessity of “transformational change”—that is, “expanding education opportunity in ways that are life-changing for children and transforming for our country.” Integral to this are four other values: leadership, diversity, respect and humility, and team (a better term may have been "community," but that sounds too much another word that starts with a capital "C" and spells political disaster.)

Teach For America is promoting this revised vision both within and without the organization, particularly through the publication of a new book by Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp: A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing an Excellent Education for All. A word cloud analysis of the text would feature the words transformational, leadership, and change in large, bold font. The ideas aren’t particularly new to anyone familiar with the organization, but the revived sense of urgency and clarity is palpable. Perhaps, on the eve of its twentieth birthday, Teach For America has simply bought a set of new clothes, but I don’t think the development is solely cosmetic—there is a steely edge to its voice.

And thus those of us at the institute-preparation conference found ourselves at dinner in the aforementioned Liberty Hall, listening as Teach For America’s Chief Knowledge Officer, Steven Farr, spoke over the sound of 200 dinner forks clinking against hotel china. Multiplying outward, we will be responsible for training over 5,000 corps members this summer. We placed our white linens on our laps, and listened to Farr detail the development of the organization’s teacher training and assessment methods. Teach For America uses what it calls the “teaching as leadership” model to select and develop its corps members. Essentially, it contends that good teachers do what good leaders do: set a vision, invest others, and persistently work toward results. This is a large leap from the early days of Teach For America, when many such as Farr, who taught in Roma, Texas in the 1993 corps, hoped to “reach just one student.”

The world wars of Nancy Mitford’s days had their consequential and unintended side effects—among others, economic growth, increased opportunities for minorities and women, and revisions to socioeconomic expectations. There were, of course, many negative and direct effects of the war, which makes today’s possibilities—expanding opportunity through quality education for all—even more appealing. Maybe it’s a neoconservative idea cloaked in pantsuits and heels instead of furs and jewels. But there is a radical idea afoot: “It’s a broken world,” said Farr. “And the fact is, the leaders who are able to fix its problems are more likely to come out of Roma than the high school I came from.”

Spanish-speaking waiters were bringing cheesecake and coffee. Farr looked around the room in astonishment. “Oh wow,” he said. “I talked all the way to dessert.”

reading, writing, 'rithmetic

In mid-February I attended Teach For America's 20th Anniversary Summit. Numbers, specifically statistics, have a simple, concrete heft to them, and were spotted and cited frequently throughout the conference. Teach For America's genesis story, for example, speaks not of seven days, but of the growth that has occurred since 1990, when the organization's founder, a then-21-year-old Wendy Kopp, launched a program with 489 inaugural corps members. In 2010, 8,200 of 46,000 applicants were selected to teach in 39 regions throughout the country. 

A few numbers, then, gleaned from the conference:

• Nearly 75% of students at the country's top highly selective colleges (146 of them) come from families at the highest quartile of the socioeconomic scale.
• 80% of low-income students are deeply impacted by an inability to afford college.
• Changes to the Federal Application for Federal Student Aid enabled 750,000 additional applicants to receive financial assistance for higher education. The IRS commissioner who worked to streamline the application process is a Teach For America alumnus.
• A friend of mine who taught in a low-income school in South Dakota reports that 10 of her former students are currently serving in the infantry in Afghanistan.

dream acts

During the time I lived in south Texas, stuck up right against the U.S.-Mexico border, I often experienced a deep sense of isolation and listlessness. Claustrophobia is not the correct term to describe it, for there were miles and miles of scrub brush, mosquito-laden lakes, and scalded highway. Surely part of this feeling was due to the overwhelming task of being a brand new teacher. But even though I came to love that space, slashed however haphazardly between two countries, I can still conjure that melancholy today. As a friend who grew up in Brownsville mused, life on the border meant you had "the worst of both worlds."

El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are located over a day’s drive upriver, and thus not synonymous with my life along the Gulf of Mexico, but I know well what landscape dance teachers Gemtria St Clair and Zulema Galindo work within. It is, of course, a landscape eroded by the steady northbound current of drugs, a current which roils and cataracts along the banks of the Rio Grande.

I recently wrote a story about the partnership between Gemtria and Zulema: Gemtria runs a dance program in El Paso, and has worked with Zulema to start a similar program across the border. This hasn't been easy. Things are so bad in Juarez that some schools have started teaching their sixth graders what to do when they hear guns fired; visa renewals don't come easily, it appears, for dance teachers trying to support community education programs. But there are some very good reasons why Gemtria and Zulema (and the organizations they work for) have decided to keep at it, one being that, as they mentioned in their interviews, they teach students who may never have seen a live dance performance, heard a full orchestra, or had the chance to perform in a play.

Some might think that this represents the distinction between one's income and one's interest in the arts; a distinction in which the arts become synonymous with the elite, and is clearly false. A very vivid distinction, however, can be found between the schools of the elite and those where dance, or art, or theater, or music, are cut in the name of improving math and science test scores. We forget to wonder what might occur if our future mathematicians and engineers, or, more accurately, low-level workers do not have ongoing opportunities to witness and explore music, movement, and the power of creativity.

Which is what Gemtria and Zulema’s dance programs, based upon the National Dance Institute curriculum, allow students to do. They use dance to inspire students to excellence and make them more curious about learning—including math and science. Students can dance out fractions, explore tempo, describe movement with adverbs, and move like water molecules. More importantly, the classroom techniques ask students to self-assess, meet high expectations, and act together in community—all valuable skills back inside the classroom, not to mention within a national economy.

nightmares are relative, i suppose

Ask nearly any teacher about the teacher dreams. Their eyes will grow wide, and they'll nod slowly. They will recount the nightmares: Their classroom disappears. They are unprepared. They lose their lesson plans. They are possibly unclad. T–, their honorary student-from-hell, is—somehow—the principal. Their third period class pulls off a coup d'etat.

The nightmares often appear in August. Perhaps it is the moan of school buses, shuddering past the house on practice runs. Or the prodigious advertisements for mechanical pencils and Mead notebooks and My Little Pony Trapper Keepers. Something slips into the subconscious and worries the pedagogical nerves.

The nightmares lay in wait. I shouldn't have been surprised when they appeared last month, even after two years away from the classroom. Relax, I said, banishing visions of T– and gum-slathered desks. There's no school for you this year.

But that was before the brouhaha over the President's speech, which he will be delivering tomorrow to students across the country. I'll be heading to a nearby school, for one big voyeuristic round of watching-the-students-watch-the-speech. The brouhaha is a story for another day; tonight I'll dream of English class and brown bag lunches, not-so-secretly delighted that even this year, I get to go back to school.

to-do, houston

pandemic

the phrase "swine flu!" (shouted loudly and often) appears to be in vogue among the Bushwick, Brooklyn high school set.

study on a seventeen-year-old boy

The conversation begins with six envelopes filled with a single letter of recommendation, one incomplete essay, and sealed high school transcripts. Contact information is indistinguishable.

I think you've missed the deadline.
Well, the difference is that you'd be eligible for scholarships for Africans, whereas someone not born in Africa wouldn't.
Do you have your financial aid document?
I hope you chose the school based on more than distance from your mother.
What do you think your mother's going through, with her baby graduating and moving out?
There's probably not a fridge in your dorm.
There is cable, but you have to bring your own tv.
Do you know the racial demographic at the college?
I'm not saying people will "go racial on you."
I'm just saying a school that is 88% white will be different from where you are now.
If your roommate is gay, he isn't going to rape you.
On that note, rapists are not synonymous with gays.
Starbucks is a type of coffee.
No, you don't have to drink coffee.
Yes, you have to buy a meal plan.
I don't know if they have Chinese.
But I'm pretty sure they'll have rice.
No, you can't have my number.
My email?
Yes.

spiced ham

Seeing as I've been working on a particularly unwieldy [read: unpublishable] piece on the death of note passing in the classroom--it's much simpler to send a text message--I was delighted to meet two high school-aged boys who don't even own cell phones.

One has an email address, but he doesn't really use it for correspondence, although he gets a lot of emails.

I was incredulous. His friends send emails but he doesn't write back?

No, he said. People email me--do you know about it? I think it's called Spam?

teacher school

"What's another word for initiative? Initiative...initiative..." mumbles one. She spends her evenings in master's classes, plans her lessons during lunch.

"Use the thesaurus," says the other.

"I know, but I don't know how to get it on this computer." She types in initiative, hesitating over the i-n-i-t-i-a...t-i-v-e.

Two sets of hands fumble with the mouse.

"Click on the word. Right click," says the other.

"Oh! Right click!" She clicks. Scans. "Inventiveness... originality... ingenuity! That's what I want. Ingenuity." She selects the word, replacing initiative with ingenuity. "I don't want to plagiarize," she says, with parentheses.

She types a few sentences and clucks. "Man, this essay is supposed to be 15 pages. I'm at 12. I'm going to have to puff it up a bit. Fifteeeeen pages." She saves her 12 pages and goes off to teach her next class.

the short answer

This seems to be a week of channeling ire toward standardized testing. Perhaps it's just a reflex; this is the time of year where, if I was still teaching, the districts would bring out the benchmark tests--practice tests written in-house, which guaranteed two things: a badly written test that provided no helpful results, and a squandered week of school. After November benchmarking, it was time for December review and polishing. Rest up on winter break, because when you burst into the classrooms in January, it's time for the the six week sprint before state testing. In many ways, the approach mimicked the activities of a person hoping to be in shape for a Spring Break cruise: curse yourself for all those years of overeating and then employ all sorts of desperate tactics--starvation, colon cleanses, exercising in plastic--to make up for lost time. Don't worry--keep it up and I'm sure you'll look great next year.

Actually, this is a terrible metaphor. For more productive information, read this piece by someone who's graded standardized test essays for the last 14 years. I have some pity for him for doing this (it must be a mind-numbing task) but, hey, he's writing a book about it, so my jealousy balances that out.

wonky wishes

I have sighed many times over Joan Acocella's writing--a sigh of desperate admiration. In a recent New Yorker article on the rise of overparenting, Acocella makes a succinct and astute observation:

No Child Left Behind: that sounds like the expression of a democratic wish. More likely, it was the product of an economic wish--that America not be left behind by India and China.

If one has any doubt this truth, let me show you the latest language on the need for a successful education system--it is tinged with a fear of losing our accustomed world order. Battalions of foreign students breath down our necks. We must devour our math and science textbooks not because their content might help us unlock the beauty and power of scientific and mathematical theory, but because a country that can't add can't calculate tax breaks for U.S. corporations; a country that can't reason through science experiments won't own the means of energy production. In the new era of xenophobia, it's not that we can't imagine a world where resources are freely shared, but that we can imagine it all too well--we see that it means we might have to give things up.

Of course, like most selfish impulses, it's wildly illogical and will, at some point, come to a diseased and deadly fruition (known in Texas as shooting oneself in the foot). As Adrienne Rich observed:

Universal public education has two possible--and contradictory--missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization. The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally "gifted" few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as the alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope, an underclass to be funneled--whatever its dreams and hopes--toward low-wage temporary jobs. ...The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole society is incalculable.

Writing this in 1997, Rich was specifically referring to tracking, which has passed out of vogue in its most blatant forms. But regardless of this, we must remember that tracking was merely a symptom of a larger fear-plagued motivation--a motivation that remains just as viable in 2008 as it did during the Cold War.

Relatedly, the connections between George W. Bush and the testing companies were made years ago, but this remains an excellent article about the other economic wish that drove the development of No Child Left Behind. If there is one quality I will allow G.W.B., it is that he seems to know how to have fun. But I am befuddled by his cronyism: based on their inane curriculum and testing materials, the friends that made millions off NCLB appear to be the dullest of people.

zip codes

Last year I tutored at a school in Brooklyn. You could see the Empire State building from the classroom, but life still seemed far removed from "the city"—although one student surely had studied the subway map more than once, he was shocked to learn that the East River flowed half a mile from his doorstep. "There's no water around here," he insisted.

Now I work within a few blocks of the familiar Empire spire, at a charter school in Chelsea. The sixth graders have made multi-page, multi-colored reports on their neighborhoods: Gramercy Park, the West Village, the Lower East Side; their projects are more developed than a number of high schoolers' I've seen. It's a magnet school for readers and writers. When they finish tests they pull out hardbound sketchbooks and begin doodling. Last week the seventh graders held a raucous impromptu debate on disposing of nuclear waste. (As precocious as they appear, I must say I am glad they aren't calling the shots on that piece of policy. Some of them hardly quibbled over the pitfalls of shooting plutonium into space—one trigger-happy girl had a disturbingly detailed plan to deposit it on the moon.)

When I introduce myself on my first day of work, a few classes break out in applause when I tell them I'm studying journalism at New York University. Many of them are members of the newspaper club, which is anxiously awaiting publication of its first issue. The newspaper's political writer, a bespectacled sixth grader, tells me it should hit the stands by Election Day. “Election Day?” asks the boy beside him, although a second later he knocks the palm of his hand on his forehead. “Oh yeah! Obama!” He raises his hand in the air, and his tablemates lift their hands in solidarity and simultaneously cry, "Obama!" The original instigator, a slight boy with cornrows, grabs my wrist and tries to push it in the air. Seeing as the city has forbidden public school teachers to promote candidates, I resist, but can't help telling him, "Obama wants you to do your homework."

They ask which publications I want to write for. I mumble something about the New Yorker, and they bob their heads in recognition. One girl raises her hand: "My friend's dad is the music critic at the New Yorker," she says.

"Sasha Frere-Jones?" I stammer. She nods. I ask if she ever read his pieces. Sometimes, she says.

Later in the day, a boy comes over and asks if I want to be a journalist or a teacher when I grow up. I tell him I used to be a teacher and now I’d like to write about teachers. I say nothing about my age or state of grown up-ness.

They may need some clarity on the nuclear issue, but at the very least, they are generous.

why I wish I was still teaching English

Sarah Palin et al. do not [currently] have their red pens on the education policy of the nation, but the vice presidential candidate has provided at least two day's worth of lessons.
Poetry

Diagramming

Today's vocab word: public

Just in case I wasn't partisan enough in my prior post (warily! warily! I say to you):

According to the New York Times, Senator McCain announced that "the federal government should play a limited role in public education."

If not a government (for the people, by the people) who then shall regulate the public school system? Will the government (that faceless entity) whittle away its hours with the private school system?

“Education is obviously not the issue Senator McCain spends the most time on,” said Lisa Graham Keegan, a former Arizona education commissioner and McCain adviser. Oops--not anymore.

Hey, teach

I think Teach for America slipped Obama some of their Koolaid. From a speech in Dayton, Ohio:

A while back, I was talking with my friend Arne Duncan, who runs the Chicago Public Schools. He was explaining how he’d managed to increase the number of kids taking and passing AP courses in Chicago over the last few years. What he said was, our kids aren’t smarter than they were three years ago; our expectations for them are just higher. Well, I think it’s time we raised expectations for our kids all across this country, and that’s what we’ll do when I’m President of the United States.

Actually, it's probably the influence of ED in '08, an advocacy group focused on education reform. They share a number of philosophies (and former alumni) with TFA, many of them reflected in the candidate's speech.

A few things I worry about:

The overenthusiastic push for charter schools--just because competition works for grocery stores does not mean it should work for our country's intellect.

Focusing on new teacher recruitment, if it is at the expense of retention and stimulating career development. (Stimulating is key here--I don't mean those teacher in-services with smiling motivational speakers and PowerPoint slides. You don't know boredom until you've sampled a few hours of one of these. Unless, of course, you've wallowed through a week of state testing.)

The underlying theme of competition. Yes, we need a knowledgeable workforce, and I don't wish this country into the Dark Ages. But there is something suspicious in lines such as "When the story of our time is told, I don’t want it to be said that China seized this moment to reform its education system, but the United States did not." I hope it merely reeks of rhetoric.

But these things worry me too:

High school sophomores counting on their fingers.
Seventh graders unable to write in complete sentences.
The junior who slapped her chapter book shut in frustration, unable to understand the words and old enough to be embarrassed.

I could go on.

This is not about competition. It's about dignity.

I admit I've tasted the Koolaid too. I suspect some batches contain Nutrasweet--synthetic and ultimately unsavory methods that create more problems--but it sure is better than dying of thirst. Let's just not forget to hold each other to our high expectations.

Gross

T decides she is not going to research "Why do girls get their periods?" because it is too gross. Friend and ICU nurse E vows to find pamphlets to give to her.

Later in the day, O comes in announcing that she had lettuce for lunch. It's part of her weight loss plan. Not only has she started running, but she has started eating less as well, thinking that it is the only way to lose weight. I run to the chalkboard to give her a quick summary of how the body uses calories. Yes, you CAN still eat chocolate.

Vow of Silence

L comes into 1st period and shoves a $5 bill in my face. He flutters his hand.

"What?" I ask.

He continues motioning, pointing to his mouth and back to the bill. He wants to buy chips [they are bane of my life, by the way]. His friend walks in and informs me that he has taken a vow of silence, and also lets me know L wants Hot Cheetos.

A few minutes later L grabs my chalk and writes "gay rights" on the board. "I can't break the vow," he writes.

L has posted two questions on the board: "Are the products that hair stylists use harmful?" and "Are gay people born unique, or do they chose to be that way?"

Earlier this year, L submited a story about his first kiss with a boy. He almost didn't turn it in, afraid of my judgement about him. For once, the uncanny sense that I'm only beginning to develop as a teacher told me what it was about even before I read it. "It's okay," I reassured him. "I can probably handle whatever you're writing about."

After school, L stopped by my room to say hello, as he does nearly every day. The vow of silence had lasted until 7th period.

Yes, L. Unique. We must choose it every day.

Research, Day 3

During the fluster of state testing, I decide to teach my students how to evaluate sources. Three of the computers are down, so they scrunch around the remaining ones, trying to balance a mouse, a screen, and two pieces of paper. They are the antithesis of my internet-savvy yearbookers who can always track down a proxy so that they can post on MySpace during class. These students have never googled their name. Some of them don't know about wikipedia.

By second period I realize they need a little more. I run through the difference between searching for David Ramirez and "David Ramirez". They do not know what credentials are. I give them the run down on B.A., M.A., PhD. I remind myself I couldn't keep the degrees straight until I was in college.

I set them loose. And forget to remind the stinkers that yes, I do see them trying to minimize the email and IM window when I walk by.

As of yet, day 1 has been the most entertaining. All their heads perk up when I mention that we will be reading a chapter titled "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Mom's?" (from Freakonomics). The purpose is to show them how research begins with a question; they are tickled that I even mention the subject and swear in class while I'm reading a section aloud. Of course, few of them get that that's exactly how I'm hooking them into this little stinker of a project they'll be doing.

When I think they've gotten the point of asking questions, I ask them to write down a researchable question of their own. "It's got to be something you don't know the answer to," I tell them, dreading the "what is the capital of Texas?"-type questions I might see up on my very non-me bulletin board (I inherited it with the classroom). So I walk around to make sure they're asking good questions--yes, there is such a thing as a stupid question, I tell them--and come across T-'s question: "Why do girls get their period?" I stop with a smirk on my face, asking "You're sure you don't know the answer to that one?" and she tells me "yes" in all seriousness. She is a junior.

G-, also a junior, presses me on the assignment. "We can ask ANY question?"

"Yes," I answer.

"Well, I've got this question I asked my coach, and he never told us," G- replies. I decide to check it out before posting it up: "Why do we have pubic hair?"

English is so done, guys. Sex ed, here we come.