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.