Causes

We had a session today about getting parents involved in students' school lives. It opened with a Gallup poll that said that most of the general public blames school failure on parents; they aren't doing enough, aren't encouraging enough, don't care. I never really believed that, probably as a result of my own experiences with many kinds of families. Simply put, with a few rare exceptions, parents care about their children. But I can say confidently that by the end of the first week I was absolutely convinced that it is not the parents who are to blame for student failure- it is the schools. This is not to say that schools aren't up against innumerable challenges. They have budget constraints, endless rules and regulations to follow, and other obstacles. But what I have seen so far in the school where I work this summer, and what I have heard from people working in other schools, confirms that the schools are not at all focused on how well students are doing and what they are learning, but on how well they function as bureaucracies.

An example: The principal wants every student to pass summer school. An admirable goal. Rather than running her school in such a manner as to facilitate students learning the material to earn passing grades, she "unofficially" declares that no student can fail and any student determined to be "in danger of failing" is to be given remediation work until his/her grade has been sufficiently boosted. In the rare event that a student is allowed to be marked as "fail" the grade must be at least a 60% so as not to weight down the schools average.

I was trying to play devil's advocate in this and say that maybe she does this because she doesn't want the school that allows Teach for America (read: rookie) teachers to control its classrooms to look bad. That might endanger the program. And I suppose there could be some element of that. But the truth is, our kids, the ones we teach, failed under the guidance of experienced teachers. If we can guide even a marginal percentage of them towards success, that should be evidence that we're doing something right. I'm not the only one to have heard in my classroom "man, if my regular teacher taught like this I wouldn't be in summer school."

sleep

Last week I got 13.5 hours of sleep over 5 nights. On Friday, I ate dinner with my friend Rachel, giggled through most of it because I was so loopy, came back to my room, showered, bought an episode of Law & Order SVU from iTunes, got in my bed with my laptop and was asleep before the opening credits. I slept from a little before 7 until 10 the next morning. Glorious.

William Penn

The school where I'm teaching this summer is called William Penn. There has been much talk amongst those of us working there about how poorly it is designed. There are huge open spaces, classrooms that are oddly shaped, with useless corners, dividers that don't block noise but do keep air-conditioning out, and hallways where the classrooms on one side are half a floor below the classrooms on the other side. We were speculating that since it as built in the early seventies, perhaps the designers had been under the influence of something. Last night, I found out there is a real reason.

On the bus on the way back from a night out, I pointed out my school to the corps member I was sitting with. "hey, that's my school! William Penn!" to which he responded, "Oh, you mean William Penn-etentiary?" "shhhh!" I hushed him, looking around to see if anyone else on the crowded bus might have heard him. "I can't believe you just said that!"
"Oh, wasn't that in a song you guys sang last week?"

Walking the block from the bus stop, we talked a little more, this time joined by someone else from my school. Turns out her advisor had told their group that when the school was designed, one strand of thinking (and of extra public funding) was that schools in low-income urban areas should be built as models for potential prisons. The idea was to test designs on populations that would likely be using the facilities. It floored me, but probably not as much as it would have if I hadn't already known this little tidbit: states look at 4th-8th grade literacy rates to decide how much new prison space they need to build before the kids reach 18. That one actually made me cry. The state gives up on kids when they're ten. Ten. Years. Old. Working against that kind of expectation is an absolutely monumental task, especially since that's not the only place that is making clear those expectations.

Last week someone told me that one of his students said she hated coming to school because it felt like being in prison. I don't blame her.

Staying positive

I was feeling very stressed and sad and overwhelmed today, even with my extra hour and a half of sleep and only a half day of sessions. The reality is sinking in that at this point, I'm just not a good teacher. At all. And really, I don't think it would be fair to expect that of myself. I've had ONE week of training. It was intense, but it's just not possible to be great in a week, or even average. The conflict is that I am actually in front of students. My lack of skills and knowledge is going to have a direct impact on how well they do and how much they're able to learn. That is an incredible amount of pressure and it's definitely a struggle to positively channel that pressure into working harder to improve when I am constantly feeling discouraged about how very unskilled I am.

So I took some time to be alone, bought a non-cafeteria lunch, and sat in a little park on campus. It's a few steps below street level, sheltered from the busy intersection by a subway station on one side and a brick wall on the other. I was alone for a few minutes before a couple of teenage boys, looking similar to the ones I am teaching, biked down the ramp into the park, whizzed past, and demonstrated why the tree grate had been jimmied up at an angle and propped with bricks. They sailed off the makeshift ramp on their bikes and headed back for another lap. This time, they noticed me watching them and smiling. And from then on, I could tell that each time one of them went by, he would check to make sure I was watching, concentrate very hard, and speed up. Their heads would turn just enough to see if I had seen another successful jump. After a few trips around, they started popping wheelies, always glancing to make sure their audience was still interested. They reminded me of five year olds, and made me think that maybe teaching high school isn't so different from teaching elementary. I think kids of all ages (and adults, too) want approval. They want to know that what they're doing is being recognized. Teenagers are just too cool to show it as often.

Why is it raining inside the building?

I arrived at Institute in Philadelphia on Sunday June 24. As nutty as it was, I think the first week was probably the easiest. There was no lesson planning the first week, just lots of lots of sessions. The days were intense- getting up at 5:15 and being at school 7-4:30. To be honest it's all kind of a blur right now. A hot blur. The school where I am working is not air-conditioned, and Philadelpha summers are like Chicago summers. On Friday a pipe burst, sending waterfalls through the school. Every sink in the building has a spray-painted sign above it warning that the water should not be consumed. I learned that the pipes in the building are all made with lead. I'm hoping the water fountains use different pipes.

On Monday, even thoguh it had not rained, we arrived at school as normal only ot find huge puddles and more waterfalls through the building. The water began to rise in some of the classrooms, so as the kids were arriving they began having all of us move our classroms to the other half of the huge building. This meant moving all of the posters and decorations we had hung up, rearranging all the desks and other items we had moved, basically re-doing our classrooms that had taken us a few hours on Friday to set up. Not a great start.

The kids were supposed to have a 15 minute advisory on the first day only, so they were sent to classrooms based on that arrangement. They weren't told where to go for first period until 9:40 (school starts at 8, second period starts at 10:10) in spite of the fact that we teachers had been assigned to our rooms. So the administration knew where each calss was going to be, it just took them an hour and 40 minutes to tell the kids where to go. I had a class of about 15 students plus my faculty advisor, who was in and out trying to get any info he could about where we shoudl all be. I chatted with two boys for most of the tie, finding out about their lives and what had brought them to summer school. Jadon told me about how he missed all his chemistry labs because he wasn't allowed ot sue the calculator he had already bought and didn't have money to buy the calculator his teacher was requiring. I also intercepted the beginning of an altercation ebtween a couple football players who had come straight from an early morning practice and weren't particularly keen on being in "school mode." Jadon showed me a song he wrote, and talked about how hard it was to be a smart kid in his school- once you let other people know, they want to cheat off of you, and teachers assume you cheat if you do well. He told me about being on an award winning chess team, and how he now coaches younger kids. So, while it was annoying to lose a day of teacing, it was great to get to chat with high school kids and get a feel for what I'd be doing for four weeks. It was only four years ago but I feel like i'd forgotten a lot of what it's like to be 15.

When I finally got my class, only one student showed up. We talked for a while, since we on;y had 15 minutes and there was no way I was fitting two hours of lessons into 15 minutes.