The Sub

When I got the text on my phone this morning, my heart sank. My mentor teacher would be subbing for the Assistant Principal today, and her classroom would have a sub.

I realized just how traumatized I had been by my last placement. The fight in my classroom had broken out with a sub in the room. I almost wanted to call in sick.

But these kids are a lot better behaved than the ones in the last school - and, as I found out over the weekend, from better financial circumstances. Their families are mostly working-class or lower middle-class, not poverty-stricken and crime-ridden. So I decided to give it a try.

My mentor teacher had picked out a short story called "Crash Room" from a collection titled Working Days. I later looked up the book on Amazon and found that School Library Journal and Booklist both called it "uneven"; I found "Crash Room" pretty boring, but I didn't have a say in the matter so I decided to give it a whirl doing a read-aloud. I'm planning to start a unit on Walter Dean Myers's 145th Street next week, so I wanted to get the students used to a different style of teaching.

The sub was extremely impressed. She couldn't compliment me enough, which of course felt great. I wasn't too happy with the questions I was asking the students - basically, all pretty obvious things like: "So what do we know about the narrator at this point?" Almost none of the questions could spark debate, but that was also in part due to the amateurish quality of the writing. For instance, the fact that the protagonist came from a Latino background was not made clear until halfway through the story, and had almost no bearing on it although it was about hospital workers in Texas. Maybe I should have asked the students if they were enjoying the story or not, and if not why not, but I didn't think it was my place to cast aspersions on my mentor teacher's choice of material in her absence. In any case, it's my own fault for not being able to make lemonade.

But I was gratified that, even if there were a couple of sleepers and a few texters over the three periods, there were no behavior issues that were noticeably worse than what I see when Ms. F is around.

First lesson

Well, it wasn't really a lesson, in the sense that I hadn't planned it. I went over a vocabulary worksheet that Mrs. F had assigned to the students last Friday after having graded them and entered the grades into her computer. The worksheet was obviously at least a decade old and possibly older; one of the sample sentences was about how "word processors" had made typewriters "almost obsolete." I took a poll of all three classes, and no one had ever heard of a word processor (although pretty much all of them knew what "obsolete" meant - that was the vocab word). It also talked about Elizabeth Taylor's violet eyes "elicit[ing] admiration and wonder"; the only students who recognized her name associated it with Michael Jackson, not with any particular eye color.

During the first class, which came right before lunch, Mrs. F had to interrupt me a couple of times because I wasn't reacting to conversations happening on the side. I guess I'm still nervous enough in front of a class to just habitually focus on the task at hand as opposed to what I should be doing, which is paying more attention to the nuances of student response - and nipping any potential distraction in the bud.

There's one 19 year-old senior who has a reputation with all the teachers as a troublemaker. He apparently gets away with all kinds of misbehavior, even severe misbehavior like starting a food fight in the cafeteria, because he's on the basketball team. Mrs. F had an interaction with him that ended in referral this afternoon. I met him last Friday and it was clear within moments that he was an attention-getter and limits-tester, but today his anger was so severe when all she did was walk in his general direction to see whose music was on during class time, it wasn't clear to me whether he was fully in control of himself or just launching a preemptive strike because it really was his music. I'm sure there will be more to report on him as the semester goes on.

Being a Guest

My mentor teacher was out today, so by prior arrangement I visited three different classrooms: A Social Studies class in Government and two English classes. Once again I was impressed by the much more respectful behavior of the students compared with my old placement. Is it just the administration that makes such a difference?

The most instructive was the last class I visited, which was probably for juniors since the teacher is beginning to prepare them for their state standardized graduation test. It was the most word-rich environment I've yet encountered in any of the classrooms, with the walls full of posters, definitions, student work and so on, and the 50-minute period was divided up into various activities: A journal entry, sharing, going over the homework assignment, and then reading aloud from the play THE MIRACLE WORKER and discussion.

When the students shared their journals, the teacher was very specific in her praise ("That was very detailed; I hadn't known anything about that comic book hero and now I feel as if I'm familiar with him") and completely left out criticism, I think deliberately. Unlike my old mentor, she did not give points for sharing and told them exactly how much time they would have to answer her journal question ("If you could be any super hero, who would it be and why?").

And in THE MIRACLE WORKER, she took a behavior modification tack in her interpretation that was extremely effective. The kids really picked up on it. Describing the "fight scene" over dinner when Annie Sullivan first tries to get Helen Keller to eat with a spoon, one girl said: "I think Helen knew exactly what she was doing - she was just testing things out to control Annie. But her plan went wrong."

Now, I wonder how many of the students applied that lesson to 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.