First field experience ends (at last) . . .

I finished up my first internship today, and it's been quite an education in the minutiae of the achievement gap. It's Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, a Hydra of millions of tiny daily decisions that I'm sure are being made in some form in tens of thousands of schools all over the country: an assistant principal who gives a 3-day suspension for being caught in the hallway without a pass but gives just an hour's in-school detention for cussing out a teacher; the placement of a long-term English substitute in 9th grade Algebra for a semester; an administration that schedules off-site meetings for the faculty with barely 48 hours' notice; a secretary who doesn't know if there's any more copier paper in the office and who won't get out of her chair to check . . . Yes, these students are being failed by their teachers, but not ONLY by their teachers, and the teachers are being failed by absolutely everyone else.

God save me from a job in a school like that.

"Incident Report" - Fight in class

In [Mrs. D's classroom], at about 1:00 p.m., I was helping a student with his creative writing composition while the rest of the class was supposed to be working on their own stories. Besides myself and the class, a substitute teacher and a City Year intern were in the room.

Suddenly I saw M. [an always stylish young man with an athletic physique and a spotty attendance record] shoving chairs out of the way. I went over to him to find out what was wrong, and he shouted past me, "Come on, let's do it, we've got plenty of room now." I looked behind me and A. [a known gang member, I've been told, who has yet to crack a book or notebook in this class as far as I can see] was at the other end of the room, taking off his jacket.

Several students went over to A. to try and calm him down, while I tried to prevent M. from getting any closer to A. - without success. They began fighting, and I attempted to get the rest of the class out of harm's way, telling several individuals to sit down and others to stay back. Everyone wanted to see what was happening, and all of my attempts to isolate the combatants failed. Within a few seconds, A. and M. had gone into the hall.

I stood in front of the classroom door to prevent anyone else from leaving the room, holding onto the door frame with outstretched hands and shouting at the students to remain inside. They crowded the doorway, and those in front began pushing me away from the door frame in order to get into the hall. I don't know who was pushing me, but it was gradual pressure from everyone at the door and possibly from those behind as well. I am not even sure the people who were pushing against me were actually trying to physically remove me, or if it was those behind them who were pushing, but everyone I could see was yelling at me to get out of the way so they could watch the fight.

As A. and M. continued to battle each other, with their arms locked around each others' necks, I tried again to get everyone into the room and was completely ignored. I tried to get past the students, who were now coming out of all the classrooms, in order to alert security - but the crowd was too thick. I ran for my cell phone and dialed 911, since there was still no sign of security. I got through to the police for a moment, but then the signal was cut off as it sometimes is in that hall. The boys were still fighting and some of the male teachers were trying to break them apart, so I tried one last time to get the class back into the room and was ignored once again.

There was an opening in the crowd, so I went down the hall and rounded the corner. At the far end of that hallway, past the cafeteria, I saw a lone security guard strolling in the direction of the fight. I shouted, "We've got a bad fight here, get everyone you can over here." His only reaction was to make a downward motion with his hands as if I was overreacting. I turned and went back into the hallway, where the fight was apparently still going on.

I slipped past the crowd and went into the room. One student was sitting there. Moments later, slowly but surely everyone else straggled in, elated by what they had witnessed. Several students expressed their anger at me for calling 911. I asked the class if anyone knew what had happened, and a few reported that A. had just been "playing with" M., but then it got serious. No one knew exactly what had been said.

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I was, of course, distraught. The principal came jauntily into the room a few moments later, and told everyone that A. and M. had been suspended for 10 days and were on their way to being expelled. He added thank-you's to students who regularly come to school in order to do their work, and ended by threatening anyone who mentioned the incident in class with a five-day suspension. He did not spare me or the substitute teacher so much as a glance. As I was leaving the building later on, I ran into him in the hallway and told him that I had tried to keep everyone in the room but they had pushed past me. He told me to file an incident report; I'll bring in what I've written above tomorrow.

Later on, I went to my evening class on literacy strategies. It's full of working teachers, and one of them suggested that I use my cell phone as a video camera instead of calling the police - which I hope I will have the presence of mind to do next time. I feel partly responsible for the whole thing because I didn't do what the textbooks say - I didn't de-escalate the situation, but rather escalated it by shouting at the students and blocking their way out with my body (although in my defense I would add that nothing less than shouting would have been heard by anyone except those students standing within several inches of me). But I have to admit that I still can't think of anything else I could have done to prevent the students from leaving the room - or, for that matter, to prevent the fight - and of course I'll never know whether videorecording them (or pretending to) would have helped either.

The creative writing unit

I'm getting some good responses, although there's still plenty of chaos and envelope-pushing in class. Yesterday I did a 10-minute free write with the kids. Mrs. D. made it work by offering everyone 25 extra points for just putting their heads down and writing, and as soon as that happened you could have heard a pin drop.

They got very invested in their free writes, and to my surprise a lot of them wanted to share with the whole group. I had them commenting on the details that really stood out, and they all stayed constructive. No one really ran anyone else down, at least not in terms of the writing, although there were plenty of sartorial comments, as usual. ("Get them undies back in your pants, boy!")

One mistake I made was to pass around copies of a "Contract of Responsibility" that I had already signed and then collect them. I should have collected the contracts after the students had signed them, countersigned them myself, and then handed them back to the students so they could be reminded that they had promised to do their best work and to be respectful. I also didn't do a very good job of explaining the differences between the class assignment, which is to do a 450-word short story including three drafts, and the writing competition assignment, which requires a minimum of 700 words. But by the end of the period all of them got the idea.

Today a lot of the class was absent, so things went relatively well even though Mrs. D was out for the day and there was a substitute. Even a few of the worst behavior cases were getting into their stories. I printed out a 300-word competition finalist story from Figment.com and read it to them. They didn't see all the spelling and grammatical errors, but they could still tell it wasn't much better than what they themselves had written the day before. I also printed a screen shot of the author's page - she's a "regular teenager" who lived in L.A. and has recently moved to the East Coast - and passed it around. (What a boon a Smart Board would be!!) I have a feeling one of the guys in the class fell a little in love with her, because he held onto the handout for five minutes before passing it to someone else and then wanted it back later. Her picture is very appealing.

Once again, a lot of people were excited to share what they had written. Many of the stories were about rape, murder and abuse. The sub and I both wondered to what extent these were eyewitness accounts, or even experienced by the writers themselves.

The principal, Mr. S, dropped by a couple of times. Towards the end, when we had finished workshopping a bunch of beginnings and first drafts, most of the kids were sort of hanging out although several said they wanted to work more on their stories. Mr. S came in and I didn't even notice at first. The sound level in the room did not go down, the kids still were wandering around, and Mr. S was chatting with them as well. It didn't seem to bother him that there wasn't on-task instruction going on, so I certainly wasn't going to let it bother me.

He came over to me and said, "If there were two closed-circuit cameras in every classroom, recording everything that went on here, there would be a serious change in attitude. A serious change."

I ventured, "I don't know how the teachers' union would feel about that."

"They'd be wise to go for it," he replied. Mr. S is probably about 20 years younger than me. He has a soft face, usually with some scraggly auburn beard growth, and wears very nice suits. I've heard that public school principals make six figures; I don't know if that's still true, or if it was ever true in this district, but the difference in salary between Mrs. D and Mr. S is very obvious in their wardrobe.

"It would help with the parents," he explained earnestly. "'You want to know why your kid is getting a D? You want to know why your kid is failing? Here. I'll show you a video of him sleeping in class for 40 minutes. And I'll show you the same thing the next day.'"

I would bet money that none of the parents whose kids are sleeping through English class are going to come to the principal's office and demand to know why Junior is flunking out. But it's none of my business. I hope I never have to work in a school that treats its students even more like prison inmates than this one does.

Fights in school

A few days ago Mrs. D and I were sitting in her classroom, which has a door leading out into the cafeteria.

We started hearing shouts on the other side. "Probably a fight," Mrs. D shrugged.

I started to get up, and she added, "I don't want them coming in here."

I sat back down.

The terrible thing is, I understood exactly what she meant. Police patrol the hallways, and we knew that they would be in the cafeteria in a matter of moments - even if those moments seemed terribly long to us as we listened. But had the fighters seen the open door and run into the classroom, many more people could have gotten hurt in those close quarters - including us.

Apparently what had happened was that one of Mrs. D's students, a powerfully-built 9th grade girl who is a known gang member, ran unprovoked to another student and began beating her and kicking her in the face. The one who was attacked was the girlfriend of another of Mrs. D's students. He spent the entire afternoon looking shellshocked, his head in his hands.

As I was leaving for the day a few hours later, I saw the gang member being escorted out the door by a security guard. He just let her walk out of the school on her own. "See you whenever," she drawled to the guard.

Later on I heard that a police officer had gone to her home and slapped her mother with a fine, but for some reason the girl couldn't be arrested despite her unprovoked assault in front of witnesses. She had been suspended for ten days. I can't imagine what will happen when she tries to get into Mrs. D's classroom and the boyfriend of the girl she attacked is waiting for her there.

Two days later there was another fight in the cafeteria - once again, between two girls. This time neither was in one of Mrs. D's classes. I couldn't resist this time, and opened the door. We saw security guards arrive and break up the fight.

When the students came back into the classroom after lunch, the principal walked in and read them the riot act. "I don't want anyone talking about what you saw in there and what's been happening at this school this week, unless you want a three-day suspension yourself. This is intolerable. I don't want to hear a word about it, not in MY school."

I was shocked and disappointed. How are the teachers supposed to guide the way the students are thinking about these incidents if merely mentioning them will lead to a three-day suspension? Does the principal think the kids won't talk about it as soon as the dismissal bell rings? This approach is as misguided as believing that a refusal on parents' part to talk about the birds and the bees with their kids is going to ensure that the children remain virgins until their wedding night.

But I shouldn't expect anything different from this administration. Mrs. D is always complaining that they schedule meetings with less than 24-hours' notice, don't let the teachers know what happens with their referrals, and most importantly, dole out harsher punishments for being caught in the hallways without a pass than for cursing out a teacher in the middle of the classroom. The ten-day suspension that the attacker received earlier in the week would have been the same if she had been without a pass; insulting the teacher gets an in-school detention.

The district also contributes to misbehavior, by treating the students like prison inmates. Police patrol the hallways. The district-wide "dress code" - no hoodies or hats, no patterned fabrics, no t-shirts or jeans, only khaki, black, blue or green shirts allowed - is overly restrictive and creates an atmosphere of stifled self-expression without the possibility for pride in the sense of belonging that a real school uniform might bring. It is the worst of both worlds.

At least the kids are beginning to show some interest in my writing prompts. Several of them liked one that I adapted from a University of Chicago program, which involved having them write a chase scene out of a movie. They are enjoying commenting on which details they're finding the most telling, and they are responding more. They're also beginning to work a little better with their partners. I'm beginning to have a tiny bit of hope that my own evaluation, when my professor comes to see how I'm doing as a teacher, won't be a complete and utter disaster because of misbehavior.

Introduction/Seduction

Yesterday I introduced my creative writing unit - subtly. Mrs. D always has a writing prompt on the board when the students come into the class; I've taken over the prompts, although neither of us made that clear to them in advance.

The prompt was: "I'm usually a nice person, but one thing ticks me off. Let me tell you about it." Mrs. D gave them all instructions to begin their paragraph with these two sentences, and most of them followed the direction. I was gratified to hear one student say, "Oh man, this is going to be a good journal!"

At first, their paragraphs were disappointing. One complained about bad breath. Two complained about people who think they are funny, but aren't. One complained about people who call her "little." (She's about five foot three.) But then one girl said she hated it when her mother tells her to get something out of the kitchen, when she is standing right there and could get it herself in a second. Suddenly people who had already shared their paragraphs were raising their hands and saying they wanted to share some more.

When everyone was done sharing, I went right into the center of the empty space in the middle of the classroom and announced that this was the first writing prompt in a series that was going to help them write a 700-word story for a contest - and the first prize was $100 gift card from VISA.

I shouldn't have mentioned the word count. There was consternation at that, although several of the boys kept shushing everyone else: "Hey, she's talking real money here. I wanna know what she has to say about it."

So I told them that they did not have to submit their stories to the contest if they didn't want to. Someone asked what the deadline was, and I told them it was December 31, and that they could get feedback from me up until the deadline if they wanted. I also said they'd be working with partners, and we took a vote about whether the partners should be assigned by Mrs. D or pulled out of a hat. There was quite a bit of shouting back and forth over that, but eventually a clear majority voted for Mrs. D's judgment.

I did a draft of the list based on what she had told me about students who need a lot of help with grammar and spelling, pairing them with those who didn't have much trouble with that. The other major factor was attendance; I paired regular absentees with each other. She made a few changes, and we'll present the list tomorrow. I'm sure there will be plenty of groaning, but maybe a few people will be happy with their partners.

Today I wasn't there, but I had sent in a prompt to Mrs. D via text. She changed it slightly. I had asked, "Do you believe in Heaven and/or Hell? Why or why not?" She told me over the phone tonight that she had written: "Do you believe in an afterlife? For example: Reincarnation, Heaven, Hell, etc." She said that several people hadn't known what an afterlife was and had asked about it. Most of them wrote that they believed in Heaven and Hell because it was their religion, but some mentioned reincarnation.

Tomorrow the prompt is: "Whether you believe in Hell or not, imagine you are there. What do you see? Hear? Smell? Feel (temperature, etc.)? Who is there with you? Why? Why are you there?"

Before they share, I'll tell them we'll do things a little differently. I'll ask the class whether or not they got a real sense of what the writer thinks about Hell from the paragraph, and if so, what was in the paragraph that carried the idea? Then I'll put them into pairs, and tell them to answer the same questions for each other only more specifically. I have to ask Mrs. D. if we can change their seating arrangement for the duration of the unit.

They were so incredibly uncooperative yesterday, talking so loudly it was almost impossible to get a word in edgewise, I have pretty low expectations for my success with this. I wonder if any of them will actually finish a whole story, or even work at it in a sustained way. I wonder if any of the partner conversations will be on task. I guess I'll find out soon enough . . .

Taking control of the classroom

Another assignment from my Teaching Methods professor. It starts out with a checklist of classroom management observations I have made in my mentor teacher's classroom - which I've omitted here - and then asks a series of questions about classroom interactions.

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TAKING CONTROL OF THE CLASSROOM: OBSERVING CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

• On the basis of these observations, what would you say about the students’ perception of their teacher’s authority in the classroom? What evidence do you have to make that assumption?

  • I believe that the students know they can ignore the teacher until she starts getting upset; they quiet down for up to five minutes if she yells at them. Fortunately, her relationship with them is warm enough that they do not seem to be baiting her deliberately, but this might become a possibility as the term wears on and their frustration grows. One girl who felt she was being unjustly treated told me that she would just talk more and louder because of the referral to the principal's office that she had received. "Who are you going to be hurting if you are talking loudly in class?" I asked her. "Her," she huffed. "What about you? What about your own education?" I prodded. "No," the student insisted, "I'll be hurting her. I'll give her real bad headaches.

• What would you say is the students’ general self-esteem? How does that relate to the perceived teacher’s authority in the classroom? What evidence do you have to make that assumption?

  Most of the students believe they are not particularly intelligent. In a discussion that came up because of a writing prompt about education budget cuts and how some districts are making "pay to play" rules for sports programs, one outspoken girl stood up and said, "They can't cut sports. You know, not everyone is smart. Sports are our only chance to get to college." This girl exhibits her intelligence, as well as her lack of self-control, by improvising hip-hop refrains quite loudly in the classroom at inappropriate moments, up to four occasions during the course of a lesson. I have no doubt that she could do well academically if she used her considerable talent, verbal intelligence and leadership skills to her own educational benefit. Ironically, sports are unlikely to provide her a route to college because she is overweight.

The general perception that the students at this high school are not intelligent severely undermines the teacher's authority. They believe that they are doomed to intellectual failure in any case, so why pay attention? But I would not say that the students in general have low self-esteem. They seem to be forming a tight-knit community that looks out for each other, except when it comes to following school or classroom rules.

• Are there any generic “rules of conduct/behavior” in the classroom? How do students seem to observe them (if the case)? How does the teacher seem to reinforce them (if the case)?

The classroom rules are posted: "Be respectful, do your best work, be considerate of others." One problem is that these rules are not culturally sensitive. "Be respectful" means one thing in a European American community and it can mean something else in the African American community. Imaginative, colorful insults among peers are not necessarily considered disrespectful among African Americans, but the European American teacher is continually shocked by such displays. This lack of cultural consonance makes it easy for the students to ignore the rules as irrelevant to their lives and identities. They do understand what the teacher is talking about when she argues with them about "ragging on" each other, but they seem not to possess an effective conceptual framework to communicate their own side of the story, or even to formulate it for themselves. Thus the classroom rules are pretty much completely ignored by everyone, until the teacher becomes too frustrated and raises her voice.

School rules are unnecessarily restrictive. There is a dress code imposed by the district, including no "hoodie" sweaters, no jeans, no patterned fabrics, no strong colors and no t-shirts. The dress code is regularly broken by at least a few students each day, and much class time and teacher capital is wasted in confrontations over hoodies ("You know you're not supposed to be wearing that." "But I'm cold!"). The worst of it is that teachers are supposed to be the "front line" in enforcing the dress code even if they don't believe in it, which most of them do not. And they are not backed up at all by the administration. Usually a student will take off the offending item as long as the teacher is standing there and watching. But within a few minutes it is back on, and the teacher often gives up after a few requests.

There is no restriction on having cell phones in school, but they are not allowed to be used in class (another rule that is almost completely ignored). The bathroom break is only five minutes long, and armed security guards with piercing whistles patrol the hallways to pick up any students outside of their classrooms after the bell rings. This leads to the general perception that school is like jail. If the teacher fulfills her obligations and locks the classroom door as soon as the bell has rung, she knows the students will think of her as a prison guard. Resentment travels upward, from the students to the teacher, and from the teacher to the administration.

• Finally, what would you do differently to ensure a degree of classroom control that you think would allow you to teach your lessons this semester?

I admit to being extremely apprehensive about my prospects for success in the lessons I will be teaching. I have formulated two sets of strategies, one content-related that I have already begun to implement, and one behavior-related that I am still considering.

Content-related strategies

• Students have been told that they will be allowed to choose whether they would like their writing workshop partner's name pulled out of a hat, or chosen by the teacher. This is the most responsibility they have been given to determine a course of action since I have been observing the classroom.

• Students have been told that there is a chance to win a prize at the end of the creative writing project we will be working on.

• The project has two real-world aspects:

  • The students will be working on a short story for a contest sponsored by the website fanstory.com. They will be competing against high school students from all over the country for a $100 gift card from Visa for the best submission. The deadline for submissions is Dec. 31, 2011. The prompt is to begin a short story, at least 700 words long, with the phrase: Hell found me.

  • I will be posting all final drafts on a password-protected area of figment.com, another student writing website, so that everyone in the class with Internet access can read and comment on the stories. I will also set up a public area that will be accessible by anyone in the world, but only students with parental permission will be able to post their work there.

• The daily writing prompts will be creative for the entire week prior to the start of my lessons. These students have already reacted positively to creative writing prompts.

• The final writing prompt for the week will involve looking over the results of earlier prompts and revising earlier writing. This will be another first for the students, at least since they have been in this class.

Behavioral strategies under consideration:

• A contract, signed by each student, obliging me to submit their stories to the contest if they so request and to be available for consultation about their submissions until the deadline, as well as to notify them about whether they have won a prize or an honorable mention; and obliging them to focus on helping each other's writing become more effective in order to have a better chance at winning the prize, as well as to work hard on improving their own writing.

• Placing conditions on my obligation to submit their writing based on my opinion about whether sufficient effort was expended to make it their best possible work.

Sad student story

I was in the other English teacher's classroom at the "9th Grade Academy" last week, because my mentor teacher took a personal day. This teacher, Ms. C, is a former principal whose school was closed down - she never told me why - and who is now trying to make it through her last two years in the classroom before she can retire. "Are you REALLY SURE you want to spend THE REST OF YOUR LIFE doing this?" she asked me several times, when the class simply would not settle down and be quiet no matter how many times she raised her voice.

Unlike my mentor teacher, Ms. C has four working computers and a Smart Board - which basically a white computer touchscreen as big as a blackboard. You can type onto a connected computer and what you are typing shows up on the Smart Board; you can access the Web on it; you can run videos or presentations on it; you can switch to the document camera, place your printed-out grammar worksheet under the camera and everyone will be able to see exactly how you fill out the right answers on it. It is a terrific tool, and much more desperately needed in urban schools where the socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds of most of the students cry out for an engaging curriculum than in the suburban and private schools where such boards are already pretty ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, Ms. C doesn't make any more use of the Smart Board than my mentor, Mrs. D, makes of her room's traditional blackboard. All that was on the high-tech screen was the day's assignments, typed out instead of written in chalk. Mrs. D couldn't tell me why all of the technology was in Ms. C's room and not in hers.

Ms. C told me a terrible story, though. A few weeks ago one of her best students - she pulled out the girl's notebook to show me pages filled with writing, with that wide penmanship that looks like the outline of a daisy chain - went out to the bathroom during "lockout," when police patrol the hallways and classroom doors must be locked. Ms. C had been busy with something else and had forgotten to write her out a pass; the girl's bathroom was just across the hall and down a few feet anyway.

Her student was busted by an officer and taken to the principal's office, where she was summarily suspended for three days. When she came back in tears, the teacher ran down to the principal's office as soon as she could to plead the girl's case. The principal turned Ms. C down, saying "lockout is lockout" and he couldn't make any exceptions. The girl was suspended for three days.

I was shocked. It verges on criminal negligence to punish a motivated young woman so unjustly, perhaps destroying her desire to work hard at her education in the future. Not only that, but at a school like this one, in a rough neighborhood - a school that was labeled "failing" under the No Child Left Behind law and is only in its second year post-reorganization - students like that girl are practically worth their weight in gold, in terms of how few and far between they come. How could anyone be so shortsighted as not to realize that, and still have made it into the administration of a public school in a major city?

My professors assure me that the parents can complain and go over this principal's head, but the whole incident occurred several weeks ago. I don't know if Ms. C ever advised the parents of their options, but as she was a principal herself, she must have known that options exist.

The whole thing is utterly depressing. I'm not scared anymore to teach in an urban school because I am afraid of gang members or drug dealers in my classes. I'm scared to teach in an urban school because I'm afraid that the administrators won't have my back.

Seating and movement

This is an assignment I had to do for class. I describe the seating arrangement in my mentor's classroom, the way she moves throughout the classroom, and the educational implications of this arrangement.

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My mentor teacher has a cavernous room. But fully 1/3 of it remains unused because it shares a wall with the cafeteria and the noise would make learning all but impossible, so she only uses the front of the room. Even so, there is quite a bit of noise from the cafeteria for much of her teaching day.

There are two parallel lines of chairs, one along the wall next to the door, the other about two feet in front of it, following the diagonal line of the wall. These two lines make up one side of a triangle. Three more parallel lines of chairs going diagonally in the other direction are the second side. The third side of the triangle is the front wall with the blackboard, and there is a very large triangular open space in the middle of the room. The teacher's desk is tucked away behind the line of chairs along the diagonal wall, in the space leading off to the darkened, unused part of the room. Three large windows are almost entirely painted over, so virtually no sunlight reaches the classroom.

I find this seating arrangement unconducive to just about all of my mentor's goals. She wants the students to work individually most of the time, either on journals, worksheets or doing independent reading, and yet they are crammed tightly and regimentally together in a rather large space. The students are literally shunted off to the sides, leaving a gap in the center in which the teacher rarely takes up position. The teacher wants them to share their journal entries aloud with each other; but because of the large open space in the middle of the classroom, it is very difficult for anyone on one side of the triangle to hear someone speaking on the other side of it. Many students go up to the blackboard to share instead of speaking from their seats, but even then the apex of the triangle is about 20 feet away so unless the person sharing is speaking loudly and distinctly there is not much chance of everyone understanding what is being said. In addition, a significant portion of the students - those who are near the bottom of the triangle, formed by the blackboard - cannot see most of what has been written on the board from their seats.

The seating arrangement works against the most important goal of teaching, which is increasing the amount of time students spend concentrating on their work. This time on task comes in spurts that can be measured in seconds before another conversation breaks out somewhere in the room. The chairs are much too close together, inviting small-scale conversations. In one of the classes, there's a girl who I almost only see from the back of her head because she spends pretty much the entire 4-period English block turned around talking to the girls behind her.

My mentor told me that the students had originally been assigned seats in order for her to be able to learn their names. Now she occasionally tries to "break up groups" who are constantly talking, but because the whole class stays together pretty much for the entire day it doesn't seem to matter who is sitting next to whom - there's always something more interesting going on with one's fellow students than the work that has been assigned. The teacher also allows students to get up whenever they need to sharpen a pencil, get a tissue or sanitize their hands. This leads to students strolling casually across the open triangle and making comments or entering into conversation with other groups while everyone is supposed to be working.

The teacher spends most of her time behind the perimeter of the triangle, far from her desk. When she is giving directions she will sometimes come into the open space, but not often - and she does not stay there for long. She almost never moves between the seats because there is not enough room; she is a heavy-set woman and only someone much more slender could negotiate the space. When she is sitting at her desk and writing a referral for a student, a procedure that takes about 3-4 minutes and one which she has done at least once every time I have been in her classroom, it is as if she has disappeared because her desk is outside the communal classroom space. If she comes into the triangle at all, she is usually standing at the apex, near her desk, and speaking from there. I tend to sit close to her desk, since that is the only vantage point from which I can see most of the students and the blackboard as well; but my mentor writes on the blackboard first thing in the morning, before the students arrive, and does not change anything on the board for the entire day. There is no functioning technology of any kind in the classroom, with the exception of the electric pencil sharpener and the loudspeaker.

This may sound harsh, but the message that this whole arrangement communicates is that the teacher doesn't want to be with the students, and there is nothing for them to learn. It is hard to imagine how instructor and students can engage productively with each other in this classroom setup.

However, because there are more than 30 students in the class and so much of the room is unusable, coming up with an adequate seating arrangement is difficult. Contrary to what would normally be my impulse, which is to be the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage," I would probably put my desk in front of the blackboard and have three concentric arcs of student chairs around it. I would set the chairs up with enough space between them so that I can walk up to anyone in the room in less than two seconds if I am leaning on the front of my desk, and I would make it a point at the beginning of the term to say that a walk-through space between desks has to be maintained. I would also try to stagger the chairs so that I can see everyone in the class from my desk, although this might not be possible.

The real question would be whether I could keep the chairs far enough away from each other to discourage side conversations and still have room for everyone in the class. Because these are ninth graders and they are just learning what it means to have an in-depth discussion - or at least they are supposed to be learning that - it is probably not such a bad thing if they have to direct their comments tp me and then I bounce the comments back outward to the rest of the class. I would prefer that they engage each other, and in fact they are doing so in the classes I observe - it's just that most of this engagement is completely unrelated to their education.

Wild and exotic animals

On Friday Mrs. D passed around an article detailing the suicide in Zanesville, Ohio of a man who kept dozens of wild and exotic animals as pets. He freed the animals from their "dilapidated" cages before shooting himself in his driveway, and the police only caught wind of what was happening when a bear and a tiger were spotted on the road. They spent the rest of the day hunting down the reportedly aggressive animals in order to prevent anyone from being injured or killed; only six of the creatures were sedated and brought to area zoos.

The article created a productive uproar in Mrs. D's classroom. Most of the students were against killing the animals, while a significant minority was for it. I suggested Mrs. D have them go through the article and pick out words and phrases backing up their opinions, and noted that most of them were able to do it - including those who recognized that the "dilapidated" condition of the cages meant that the animals were poorly cared-for.

After that, Mrs. D decided to give her original plan a shot and have them work in small groups to develop a list of five questions that the article did not answer. Between the two of us, we managed to keep the groups enough on task to accomplish that. But I noticed that the kids either weren't able or didn't want to make enough effort to have a civil discussion on this subject, about which they all felt so strongly. The comments quickly became insults about the intelligence, physical attributes, or maternal physical attributes of those who disagreed with each other.

When school let out Mrs. D and I sat together for a good half hour talking about possible strategies to motivate more courteous discussion habits. She suggested we divide them into teams and add points for a good argument while deducting points for shouts or personal remarks. Today there was no discussion on the agenda, so I didn't see that strategy put into practice. I'd like to know if it has an effect.

But during our discussion, Mrs. D came up with an interesting cultural contrast. In the suburban high school she attended, she told me, there were cliques galore - Goths, jocks, punks, cheerleaders, etc. - and all of them were set on tearing down members of other cliques. "I don't see that here," she said. "There aren't even body image issues that are so typical of white high schools." I theorized that there was violence woven into the culture of most high schools, but in suburbia the violence tended to be more psychological. "Maybe there's a strongly supportive community here that might be weaker in a more individualistic suburban setting," I suggested.

It brought home to me a lot of the reading I've been doing in other classes about respecting the contributions of various cultures to the class. Mrs. D's classroom - in fact, the whole high school - is not particularly diverse. Pretty much all the students are from lower economic status African American families; the teachers are the ones who provide a little variety, such as it is. But of course that isn't the kind of diversity that counts, or the kind I'm reading about in my Education courses. I'm not sure if it should count or not, but my gut feeling says that teachers have to be included in the learning community as well.

"Not everyone is intelligent."

My mentor teacher had a great writing prompt for the "bellwork" writing assignment yesterday: "If you were in charge of balancing the district's budget after big budget cuts from the state, what would you cut? Security, sports, new books, something else?"

Of course, a bunch of the kids said they would cut teachers "who don't teach anyway," not realizing that, in their case, this would mean that there would be 70 kids in their 9th grade English class. But almost all of them argued against cutting sports. My mentor talked about some districts in the area that have cut school funding for football, demanding that the families of team members pay up to $300 per season plus the cost of uniforms and helmets. Nobody liked that idea.

A female ringleader in this class, who will occasionally burst out into a spontaneous and loud rap in the middle of being given directions and who will constantly and casually toss out outrageous (and loud) insults while others are speaking - who, when I was standing in for the sub on Monday, would barely let me get three words out before she would interrupt me with a loud question - made a particularly telling comment:

"We can't cut out the sports program, because not everyone is intelligent. The sports program is the only way a lot of us can get money for college."

I raised my hand, and the teacher recognized me.

"Darlene, I want to ask you something. You say not everyone is intelligent. But is everyone good enough at sports to get a scholarship?"

Of course, she and her backers in the seats around her thought so. The thing is, Darlene is intelligent. She has made strong, commonsense points during the few discussions I've witnessed. But she is so much more interested in negative attention than positive, it's going to be pretty tough for her to get past the F she will probably receive during this marking period.

They had me for breakfast.

Correction: They had the sub for breakfast. I didn't get in until 11 a.m. Me they had for lunch.

They liked the writing prompt I had for their bellwork: "Since so many people text and IM, why do we need to teach writing anymore?" A few of them did the required paragraph. But then a couple of seniors who were on a project came up to me and asked me if they could write some questions on the board and have the kids write responses, so I changed the prompt and had everyone write to those questions.

This of course caused confusion, but it wasn't too bad. Maybe the problem was that they thought that if I was going to change my whole lesson plan at the drop of a hat, I didn't know what I was doing and they could get away with anything they wanted - so they just kept trying to get away with more and more. All I know is that there were TWO visits by the principal but neither had any effect lasting more than 30 seconds.

By the time we got around to the creative writing assignment, things had already deteriorated pretty badly so there was not much chance it was going to spark anyone's creative genius. The sub, a tall, distinguished African American with an MBA, tried to help. But the moment he spoke out loud - he had a strong Caribbean accent - they laughed in his face.

What I should have done was set up a positive contingency right at the beginning: If everyone cooperates, you'll have 15 minutes of free conversation time at the end of class. If I don't get cooperation, there will be a grammar worksheet at the end of class. And I probably should have dealt more clearly with disruptions from the very beginning. I fell into the trap of wanting them to like me because I'm the teacher-in-training. One girl began shouting questions and rude comments the moment anyone else started speaking. I ignored her most of the time, but I couldn't completely.

I finally just adopted the "I'm waiting" pose, which ended up highlighting my helplessness. I took away their break time for the rest of the week; I hope my mentor teacher follows through on that, but I'll understand if she doesn't.

I realize this was an extremely difficult situation. I realize I was setting myself up for failure, taking over a class that I have just begun to get to know. I realize that they behaved this way for a few days last week as well, when their regular teacher was in charge. I realize that this is why urban school teachers burn out after an average of two years - and why my mentor teacher is thinking about applying for a transfer. But I still cried on my way out of school.

Mostly, I feel humbled. Maybe I'll do better when it's my classroom and I can establish myself from the beginning. The class gave me a chance - not much of one, but they did give me a chance. I didn't know how to use the chance they gave me.

Hopefully, I planted a few seeds. The fact that they didn't visibly rattle me, maybe, will earn me some respect. If my mentor teacher follows through on the withdrawal of break time privileges, maybe this will end up being a turning point. But for now, all I know is that I have a lot to learn.

Homecoming Friday

I missed Wednesday's class, and when I returned on Friday my mentor teacher told me there had been serious behavior problems all week. One boy whom she had sent to the principal's office never showed up there - he just walked out of the building, and the next day he tried to get into the classroom as if nothing had ever happened.

A girl dressed in maroon showed up on Friday; my mentor showed me her attendance record, and there were about three times more absences than "present"'s. As has become my wont, I went around to the students and asked them what they were doing, or if they needed help. The girl in maroon should have had her notebook out to do the bellwork, and there was nothing on her desk.

"Do you have your journal?" I asked her. "Because it needs to be out right now."

"I don't know where it is," she said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

I act as if I hadn't noticed. "Maybe it's in the blue crate over there. Mrs. D said there were a few journals that had been left in there from the last time she brought them home to grade."

"Oh, I remember," she deadpanned. "I left it at home."

"You don't want to check the blue crate?"

"No. I definitely left it at home." And she makes no move to get out a piece of paper or do anything else; she's waiting for me to leave, as if I was the one being rude.

I go over to the blue crate and look for her journal while she studiously disregards me. It isn't there. I head over to my mentor and ask if the girl can write her bellwork on a piece of paper. When I inform the girl that that's what she should do, she takes out a piece of paper and continues to ignore it until I come back.

"So what are you writing about?" I ask her a little too brightly. She shrugs.

"What am I supposed to write about?"

"Whatever you want. It's Freewrite Friday."

She considers this. "I think I'm going to write about how fake people are," she decides. I give her two thumbs up. I don't think I need to take the topic personally; she had been talking to her neighbor about the Homecoming Dance on Saturday night and how everyone gets all dolled up for it, so I think that's why it was on her mind.

She actually does write her paragraph, and shares it afterward. But then Mrs. D asks everyone to share their bellwork paragraph from the day before, which there hadn't been time for because of a fire drill. The class gets deep into a discussion about whether or not any of the students would ever consider plastic surgery. It was the most engaged I had ever seen them. The girls all think it's okay to be fake for the first impression, but then if the guy really loves them he ought to be able to see beyond the bad hair days. The boys in the class didn't have much to say about that. This is still 9th grade, after all.

Now it's Sunday evening, and my mentor teacher called me to say she'll be absent tomorrow. I'm going to try to put into practice a few of the ideas I've gleaned from reading Mike Rose's LIVES ON THE BOUNDARY as well as my textbooks. The classes are still showing almost zero engagement with their short story, so after their bellwork I'm going to ask them to pick a picture from the story and write something about it (there are several illustrations of various kinds). I'll ask them to imagine they're seeing the picture for the first time, and write what they think it's about. Then I'll ask them to write about what happened just before the moment the image is depicting, and what is about to happen afterward. Then I'll ask them to write about what happened one month later, and finally one year later. Finally, they should take a fresh piece of paper and put it all into whatever form they want: A narrative, a poem, a rap, a conversation. When they share, I'll first ask for positive comments, then I'll ask for questions about what was written. If they seem into it, I'll have them write down the questions and think about them, and then maybe rewrite their pieces on Wednesday.

Afterward, I'll read some more of the story to them. Hopefully they'll be more engaged.

Was it a bad day, or are we slipping?

"Where's the class?" asked the Americorps "City Year" volunteer in my mentor teacher's classroom. He's supposed to follow around several students who need individual help staying on track for graduation.

He looked around at a bunch of empty deskchairs as the rest of the class slowly filed in, chatting and joking."There should be 15 more people here."

My mentor grinned. "I know. Isn't it great?"

Apparently a few more kids in the class had been suspended, besides the six who were out last week, and five had been bumped up to the Honors class. The teacher, the two City Year volunteers - one a little too cheerful, blonde and blue-eyed, but who never quite met my gaze, the other a mild-mannered African American at least 6'7" tall, both wearing red City Year insignia vests - and I assumed this would be a pretty good afternoon. After all, there were four of us to a much-reduced group of 9th graders.

More fools us. Silence never once descended during either the 5-8th period class or the 9th period class - not when the teacher was speaking, not when the announcements came over the loudspeaker, not even when, per the usual routine, students shared their bellwork journals about their favorite relatives besides their parents. I flatter myself that there was relative quiet when I read aloud part of the short story"The Most Dangerous Game" from the literature textbook , but I'm not sure that was the case since I was concentrating on giving my reading some dramatic flair.

The Americorps volunteers spent their time at the back of the room, apparently doing schoolwork; I didn't get a chance to ask them how old they were, but they both looked to be in their early 20s. My teacher kept threatening to "break up some groups, because you can't settle down and write," but she didn't move anyone for almost 15 minutes. In any case, the moves were ineffectual as the talking did not stop.

While they were working on their "favorite relative" prompt, I read the short story they were all discussing and was shocked by how inappropriate it was for this classroom. Written in the 1920s, the vocabulary was Victorian; the historical background needed to understand the main character was almost certainly unfamiliar; and the subject matter (an exile from the Russian Revolution buys a remote island, builds a castle on it, and hunts shipwrecked sailors for sport) completely irrelevant to these kids' lives.

"This is an awesome class," the white City Year volunteer told me at one point. "You should have seen them last week. They're like on their best behavior."

"I was here a couple of days last week, and they seem a lot worse now," I replied.

"Oh no," he insisted. At the end of the day, when I told my mentor what he had said, she widened her eyes. "Ridiculous. This is the worst class I've had all year."

This internship is supposed to give me the opportunity to put into practice what I've been learning from my textbooks, and what it's doing is showing me how right my textbooks have been. High school English classrooms are hard to manage because the material is so boring, instruction is not in the least bit tailored to the individual students' needs, and the teacher-student dynamic resembles more a power struggle than a learning community.

Still, my mentor brought home a good point for the class. In the story, the Russian exile talks about how it is a "mathematical certainty" that he will always bag the hunted animal, and that nothing is more boring than perfection - which is why he decided to hunt the most dangerous game of all, i.e., men. In order to explain that sentiment, the teacher asked the kids whether they like doing video games once they've perfected them, or whether they start looking for a greater challenge. They related to that right away, and I'm sure they came away with at least a little insight into the character.

Next time I get the chance, I need to ask her how she grades all these journals - what her scoring rubric is, whether she does a lot of correcting for grammar. If she does, that would be another point for my textbooks over what I am seeing in the classroom.

Introduction to students

On Fridays, the students are supposed to come into the classroom, sit down quietly, take out their notebooks and do a freewrite. This was my first encounter with the non-honors students, and there was quite a difference.

Five minutes into the class, everyone was still socializing and no one was writing. Not only were there no uniforms to be seen, one girl was wearing a Nike zip-up jacket backwards. Several girls had gold braids in their hair, and one boy had broad gold streaks in his swept-back Afro. One boy was wearing two strings of long beads. Several of the kids were in mock fights, including one powerfully-built girl punching a much frailer-looking boy hard in the arm.

"It's halfway into the marking period, and you should all have two notebooks by now," said the teacher at last. This time she was standing in the center of the large empty triangle in front of the blackboard. "I'm not going to accept loose sheets of paper anymore. If you don't have a notebook you can put the pages in a folder. Who doesn't have a notebook or a folder?"

Two-thirds of the class raised their hands. She began distributing used folders.

"Now if your reading journal is mixed in with the bellwork, or if there are math or social studies pages in there, you'll get me angry while I'm grading," she continued. "I don't think you want to do that."

Her tone was gentle, almost humorous. I think the kids didn't take her terribly seriously, but they also weren't hostile to her.

After about 15 minutes of "writing" - i.e., mostly chatting with each other - came the sharing time. Nearly everyone had chosen to write about what he would do over the weekend, and I say HE advisedly because only one girl shared. Mostly they said they would be chillin', trying to think of something to do, or going to school sports events with their families.

Next comes the adverb work. The teacher hands out newspaper articles she's clipped and carefully taped to sheets of paper. The students are supposed to look for verbs and write them in dry eraser marker on their desks. The teacher later explains it's just a way to keep them interested by letting them use their graphics skills, but it's an organizational nightmare - distributing the articles, dry erase pens, cleaning off the desks with paper towels and spritzes of cleanser - both of which are in short supply - and then the kids are supposed to write sentences in their bellwork journals anyway, using at least five of the verbs they listed and incorporating adverbs.

Finally I get to introduce myself. I tell the class that I lived in Germany for 20 years, and they're all amazed. They want to know if I speak German, and when I tell them that I do, they start clamoring for me to say their names in German. I try to encourage them to ask me about different words, since the names are almost exactly the same, but they all want to hear my slightly different pronunciation. Only one girl, named Treasure, has a completely different word. I didn't realize that was her name - I thought she was asking me how to say the word "treasure," so I told her: "Schatz." No one could believe it. They started cracking up. "Shots? Does that really mean 'treasure'?"

For the third activity - this class meets for an hour and ten minutes a day - the teacher says to take out the literature textbook. Everyone groans. They're supposed to read aloud, but the text - Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" - is full of words they can hardly pronounce, like "champagne," and words they don't understand, like "refectory." Also, the dining hall is next door and the walls badly soundproofed, so we can hardly hear each other. Usually, the text comes from an audio CD, but the CD player in the classroom is broken, like the computers.

For the final class of the day, my introduction goes beyond the kids wanting me to say their names in German - although they want that too. Someone asks me about Anne Frank, and whether there are any Nazis in Germany. I start talking about neo-Nazis beating immigrants to death. When someone asks me why they did that, I turn the question around and ask the kids to come up with reasons. One girl suggests that it's because "the immigrants are taking all the jobs from the people who really deserve them." I smile at her and ask: "Do the immigrants not deserve jobs?" She's terribly embarrassed, and I apologize to her later.

During the bellwork "Freewrite Friday" sharing, one boy stands up and does a verse of a rap, after much encouragement from the rest of the class:

I was sittin' in the class, just
Singing my song
When I pulled out a booger
Fifty feet long

Everyone laughs. Later the teacher tells me he has an IEP because he's been diagnosed with an emotional disability.

The teacher has a much tougher life than I do. Not only is she teaching full-time, she has a seven year-old daughter and twin five year-old sons. She's single and also works part-time at Sam's Club because, she says, "once I've paid all the bills there's nothing left and I need a little spending money." Her mother gets the seven year-old off to school; she can drop the boys off at preschool earlier.

She collected all of the bellwork and reading journals from all of her classes to grade over the weekend. I hope she doesn't get too angry while grading - that's the last thing she needs.

Meet the Mentor

I met my mentor teacher yesterday for my first field experience. She hadn't been planning on having a teaching intern, but the teacher I was placed with first decided she didn't want one this semester. So we both ended up with each other - hardly an auspicious beginning. Despite that, we related pretty well to each other.

It's an urban school with an illustrious past and a major sports reputation. Among the alumni: several NFL players, a former mayor and a former U.S. Senator, a few popular entertainment legends. But two years ago the school was deemed "failing" under No Child Left Behind, the principal was fired along with half the teachers, and now there are three "schools within a school" in the old building. One of those mini-schools is called the Ninth Grade Academy; that's where I'm placed. Its purpose is to bring together students of disparate backgrounds and neighborhoods and make them jell as an eventual graduating class.

When I got into the classroom there were only about a dozen kids in the room. Two of the boys were in uniform, one was in a sweater and tie. I was told there was a dress code, but it wasn't explained to me and I'm not sure what it was. Maybe everyone needed to be wearing a collar of some sort, precluding t-shirts and low necklines.

The kids were grading an "adverb practice" worksheet; they exchanged papers with their partners, then went around the class reading sentences aloud and telling everyone which words were the adverbs. The sentences were stereotypical: "The train raced quickly down the tracks." I immediately thought of ways I would spice them up: "The defensive back blatantly fouled the runner." One girl was marking her partner's worksheet with a crayon. But the students were extremely well-behaved. I later found out that this was the honors class.

After the adverb exercises, the teacher had them silently reading from whatever books they had brought from home. This gave my mentor and me the chance to chat in low whispers. She complained that the principal of the Academy was going to double the number of students in this class over the next few days, based on new standardized test results. She had begged him to wait until January, because the group was already in the middle of THE LORD OF THE FLIES and she didn't even have enough books for that many kids - but he had apparently decided to go through with it in spite of her objections.

Once the silent reading was done, they spent the rest of the period reading aloud from LORD OF THE FLIES, with most of the students taking roles (including the biggest role, that of narrator). I was a bit worried when I heard them read, because I literally did not understand a lot of what they were saying - I haven't encountered pronunciation like this in more than 20 years. The teacher never stopped the reading to ask questions or make comments. A few of the students followed along with their heads on their deskchairs turned to the side to look at the paperback books resting on the edges, the picture of literacy drudgery.

I remembered my own high school study of this novel in 1977. My teacher broke us up into small groups to discuss a bunch of questions he had on a list. One of them was: "Why is this book called LORD OF THE FLIES?" We tossed that one around for a few minutes, and then finally one of my co-future English majors opined wryly, "Because flies are attracted to shit and this book is a lordly pile of it."

No one would use language like that in this school building, but I bet the sentiment would have been cheered by most of the students in the room.

First impressions

For my "Methods" class, which is one of the few courses I've taken in the past 15 months that is actually required by the state, I have to have a "field experience" that people at the university seem to be calling an "internship." I need to log a total of 60 hours in a classroom with a mentor teacher, observing, maybe doing some tutoring, and then teaching a one-week unit under the supervision of both my mentor teacher and my Methods professor.

The Office of Field Services placed me in an urban high school that is apparently a "school within a school," i.e., it used to be huge and have its own building and in the meantime it occupies space along with several other schools, each of which presumably has its own administration and policies.

My professor and the placement office both emphasized that I should get in touch with my mentor teacher RIGHT AWAY, and one of my class assignments was to write a draft letter. But I didn't receive a phone number or an e-mail address for my mentor teacher - just the school's phone number. I got the e-mail from the placement office on Friday afternoon and called right away; no answer. I called five more times today, Monday. Finally someone answered who didn't seem to have a clue about how to get in touch with my mentor teacher. After several minutes of back-and-forthing with her supervisor (who apparently didn't want to speak to me directly), she finally gave me an e-mail address and I shot off the mail to my mentor teacher.

It bounced back. Not a very good impression.

Summer semester

I spent part of the semester break looking into transferring to other programs. It's still frustrating that despite my BA in literature, MFA in creative writing, experience as an adjunct professor in English and graduate teaching assistant, and decades of teaching music, it's still going to take me three full-time years to fulfill the requirements for an Ohio teaching license at Cleveland State University. I was surprised to find out that there are enormous differences in college-based teacher-training programs: one of them won't accept a single credit that was taken more than five years ago, while another won't make post-baccalaureate students take any classes at all in the major subject. I probably should have researched this more thoroughly before deciding to go to Cleveland State, but I naively assumed that state requirements were pretty standardized and so the differences between programs wouldn't be that dramatic. I also didn't have much time to make my decision: I found out in April 2010 that I hadn't been accepted to a Ph.D. program in English, and if I was going to start on my high school teaching license I would have to begin coursework in May.

Ultimately, even though I am rather annoyed at Cleveland State for having rejected my petition to waive their extremely stringent Practicum requirement (15 weeks of mornings, Mon-Fri), the fact is that I am learning a huge amount and am enjoying my classes thoroughly. I was very tempted to switch to the university that wouldn't have required any more English classes, even though it was a long drive from my house. But because of the peculiarities of that schools Education requirements, I would have had to take a freshman-level class in the fall and wouldn't have received my license before December 2012 anyway - and the credits are more than double the cost of CSU credits. So at least for the summer I am going to stick it out here, but I may reconsider later on.

Mothering, teaching

I was thinking yesterday, Mother's Day, about how becoming a mother affected my desire to become a teacher. I always admired teachers - I put them on a pedestal, even, thinking they were the most important members of society bar none. I thought I was too selfish, too concerned with my own advancement, to be a good teacher. That changed within a few weeks of giving birth, when all I wanted was to survive the 180 flip my life had taken. Then, as my child grew and I read to her and played with her, I discovered that I was a born pedagogue.

It's a discovery I think a lot of women make when their experience and knowledge base are taken more seriously than they ever have been before. Okay, teaching "Eency Weency Spider" to a 13 month-old doesn't involve a lot of classroom management technique, but it's still an addictive feeling when something you'd almost forgotten how to do yourself can bring so much delight to the most important person in your life. Suddenly, you are always right and you are always in charge. How big a step is that to the front of the classroom?

But to be great teachers we can never let the kids know that we know we are right. We should never even be in front of our students. That blocks their view. We should be behind them, leaning down and pointing over their shoulders, whispering questions to them, so that they can see and think for themselves.

Accountability in education

A comment by Joel Shatzky in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-shatzky/educating-for-democracyis_b_856861.html) describes how a technology official allegedly defrauded New York City's school system of millions of dollars by billing for computer-related services he never performed. This relates to something I am seeing ever-greater evidence of since it was pointed out to me last semester by Ann Cook, one of the founders of a specialized high school called Urban Academy on New York's Upper East Side.

I went to Urban Academy after watching "Talk, talk, talk," a half-hour documentary about the school, as part of my Social Foundations of Education class. Urban Academy is one of the purest examples of inquiry-based learning in the country. Cleveland State University's teacher-training program is a clear advocate of inquiry-based education; at least all the ed courses I have taken so far have sung its praises, and I'm convinced at this point.

Cook talked to me about how the private sector has been encroaching on public education for years:

- School lunches, which educate children about how to take care of their bodies for good or ill, are provided by private companies.

- Textbooks, which in many ways determine curriculum, are sold by for-profit publishers.

- Technology and consultancy fees cost state boards of education millions, if not tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions every year.

- Standardized tests that purport to measure "student achievement," and which are now supposed to be the fulcrum on which teachers, principals and entire schools are to be jettisoned under No Child Left Behind - and, last but not least, which all too often determine the remainder of the curriculum not entirely spoken for by the textbook - are also examples of how much money there is to be made when your client is the Department of Education and the product is the future of our children.


Earlier this week I phoned into a local Cleveland radio talk show called "The Sound of Ideas" when I heard that the new Ohio budget plan slashes public school funding in favor of new vouchers and charter schools. The first-in-the-nation badge of shame for Ohio is that these schools, funded with taxpayer dollars, can be run by private management firms. At the same time, practically all regulation and accountability rules will be removed - even the requirement of receiving a certain level of competence in basic skills as measured by standardized tests taken by every other student in the state. On the show I called it "the privatization of public education." But what I really should have said is that is was an immense government subsidy to for-profit school management companies.

What will be the result of this? Same thing as we used to hear about in the military-industrial complex all the time: $500 hammers and multi-billion-dollar Star Wars defense systems that couldn't swat a football stadium-sized hydrogen bomb out of the sky.

I really wonder whether the current large-scale attack on teachers' unions isn't so much politically motivated as economically motivated. If you have teachers as powerless as waitresses to affect their salaries, benefits and working conditions, you have a great situation for the school management companies that want a piece of the $800 billion (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_chart_20.html)U.S. education spending pie.

Intro

I'm a native New Yorker and a graduate of The High School of Performing Arts in Acting. From 1978-80 I attended the Juilliard Theatre Center and then went to Bennington College, where I majored in Literature & Languages (emphasis: Creative Writing) and minored in Music. After graduation I worked for a couple of years as an editorial assistant in New York, the classic English major job, and then got into the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I started doing journalism at Iowa, becoming the main arts critic for The Daily Iowan, and stayed in Iowa City after graduation to work at the University of Iowa Foundation as a staff writer and to finish my first novel. Eventually I moved back to New York and started freelancing, which I've been doing ever since.

After a couple of years back in the New York metro area I met a German guy in a bar across from Lincoln Center and fell in love, which might be regarded as a strange move for a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx. It was right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we started a long-distance relationship. After 18 months I moved to Berlin; the relationship fell apart soon after, but I had started singing in "kneipen" (pubs) and formed a band so I stayed. I worked as an English teacher, correspondent and music teacher as well as gigging regularly in Berlin and environs. I was one of the first Western performers to work with East German musicians, and we toured the now-defunct East German youth club circuit for a few years.

In 1993 the former "Radio In the American Sector" (RIAS) television news station was taken over by Deutsche Welle TV, the German equivalent of the BBC World Service. I started working there as a translator and voiceover specialist, and eventually worked my way up to producing English-language adaptations of half-hour documentary programs on everything from the history of Santa Claus to the science of aging.

I met my now ex-husband at a meditation weekend in the Bavarian Woods (and thereby hangs a tale, but it's not one I tell much anymore). He lived in a small mountain village outside of the town of Rosenheim, about halfway between Munich and Salzburg, and I moved there full-time when we got married. Soon afterward, I became the German correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter. At the same time I was still teaching music and recording my own songs as well as working for Deutsche Welle.

In 2003, at the age of 42, I became a mother. As is so often the case, the stress of parenting put enormous strain on my marriage. I moved to Ohio with my daughter in June 2009, to a place that was about a 10-minute walk from my brother and his wife's house.

After an adjustment year, I started the post-baccalaureate teacher licensure program at Cleveland State University. That's where I am now. I still teach piano and early childhood music, and I'm the Song Leader at Fairmount Temple in Beachwood, OH. I also sub, although not as regularly now that I'm in school. I've recently written the first draft of a young people's novel telling the Exodus story from the point of view of two 12 year-old Israelite twins who are about to become slaves to Pharaoh. I'm calling it THE GOSHEN TRILOGY, and planning to e-publish in the fall once I've had a chance to revise it.

My goal is to be a high school English teacher. I'm thinking of this blog as an unstructured opportunity to reflect on teacher training in this country at a time when education is such a controversial topic. Please feel free to comment, to "like" the blog or to contact me on Facebook.