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.