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.

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.

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.

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.