10 October 2009

There Are Lots of Alligators

In order to review literary devices with my students we read Sandra Cisneros' short story "Eleven." It's the protagonist Rachel's eleventh birthday, but her day doesn't go as planned when the teacher makes her put on an old red sweater that isn't hers. Cisneros captures the flexibility of age, how just when we believe we've arrived at a particular age we bounce back to years before. In the story Rachel reverts to about three years old when she cries in front of her class, except she is clearly mature at the same time because she is able to recognize that she is not "acting her age."

The class always enjoys this story and it allows me to become more real to my students when I tell them that every once in a while they will catch me acting like a twelve year old. Like Rachel, I can see that I've slipped and will acknowledge that mistake. For example, I have a lovely student who is extremely outgoing and always willing to volunteer. She's the first to put her hand up and call out answers. Since I'm always trying to get more voices out in the classroom and hoping that others will share too, I sometimes have to ask her to wait (not unlike the time in college when my beloved professor silenced me by saying, "We know Sylvia has the answer, but let's hear from someone else"). My student not only puts her hand way up in the air and rises from her chair but calls out, "ooh ooh, ooh ooh" and waves her fingers at me. Well, the other day I slipped back in time and said, "I think it's funny how you always say ooh ooh, like it's gross." I said this in front of the class and thought nothing of it, until I heard her say under her breath, "That was rude." Thankfully, I recognized my mistake and later I pulled her aside and apologized. From all appearances on her part, I have been forgiven.

To anyone who thinks relationships are challenging, try maintaining 90 student-teacher relationships plus 18 colleague relationships with integrity, compassion, and love. It is no wonder I often feel like a therapist, but also need to visit one.

But back to the story of "Eleven." One of the devices I had students searching for in the short story was alliteration. Many of them struggled with the pronunciation of the word alliteration, but most of them were able to identify it, especially in Cisneros' work since her stories are simply poetry in disguise. My favorite moment of the day's class, however, was when a confident young woman said, "Ms. Barrett, there are lots of alligators in this story!"

A collective pause ensued as we all pieced together what she meant.

"Alligators? Do you mean alliteration?"

We all had a good laugh, not at the expense of the student but the play of language and the alliterating alligator, as if we were all eleven together, enjoying a children's book during story time.

23 September 2009

Immigration and the Digital Age

Some of my colleagues speak about their digital story project. The students featured just happen to be my very first group of ninth graders as juniors (they've now graduated).

September Scenes

Almost one month into the school year, and the papers have already stacked up, the steady clip of my teaching life eclipsing my personal life. Isn't about time for a few scenes from my teaching life?

1. A woman from the feds came by my room the other day to have me sign some Title I paperwork. While she took me away from my students for a few moments, they proceeded to stay focused on the task of their morning journal writing. When I'd finished signing the paper work, she said, "What a great class you have. Is this senior English?" I looked at her incredulously and said, "Ninth grade English." She couldn't believe ninth graders could be so calm and focused.

When strangers come through my classroom, usually some sort of audit or someone from another school, I always hear the same thing within just a few minutes, "What a great classroom you have," and "Your students are wonderful." I know that both of these things are true, but I also have decided over the years that such speedy impressions can only be made by comparisons. Strangers who visit my classroom have probably also visited the overcrowded and chaotic classrooms of large comprehensive high schools not too far away from where I teach.

2) Today is Wednesday and on Wednesday's we have a modified schedule. My first period ends at 9:15 instead of 9:37. Somehow in my planning, I completely forgot that today was Wednesday. I'm not sure this has happened to me since my first year of teaching five years ago. At 9:24, my students and I were still reading Richard Peck's "I Go Along," about a high school junior in a regular English class who decides to go on the field trip of the Advanced English class and realizes he's smart after all. Not a single student decided to tell me that it was well pas time to go. The next period's students waiting quietly outside my door, so quiet that it didn't tip me off. Stranger still, the other teachers didn't bother to let me know I was nearly 10 minutes past the end of first period. When I finally realized my error, my class didn't even seem upset with me.

This has got to be the most polite group of ninth graders ever! They seemed perfectly content to keep on reading with me. I think I'm in love.

3) Yesterday I visited the local middle school to see the unveiling of a mural that two current ninth graders worked on over the summer. One of these young men specifically invited me to go, and usually when a 14 year old goes out of their way to invite me, I do everything I can to be there. The mural was beautiful, and I enjoyed being the proud new teachers of these two artists. But what didn't settle too well with me was running into the younger sibling of a student I taught my first year in Oakland. Every teacher has those one or two students who will haunt them forever, and yesterday I me the sibling of mine. He was nearly as distasteful as his older brother. When I suggested he come to our high school next year (prior to knowing his family connection), he said, "My brother would said F- that." Then he proceeded to tell me, quite proudly, that his brother was now in jail, though he couldn't quite explain why. It makes me sad when the trajectory we see some students on is truly the reality. We do everything we can to interrupt the path and re-steer the student, but often we fail.

12 August 2009

Modern Ms. Barrett

It was my former roommate who first told me about Bel Kaufman's "Up the Down Staircase." I was a student teacher at Cal who always came home with stories about the state of public education in California. My roommate gave me a copy of the book, and I noticed that it seemed not too much had changed in education since the book's publication in 1965. The protagonist, Sylvia Barrett, was a young white teacher determined to make a difference in her New York City students' lives. At the time, I liked to think I was a little less naive than Ms. Barrett. Almost tongue in cheek, I named my blog after her. It was a way to journal about my life as a first-year teacher in Oakland and also a place to develop ideas for the Master's Thesis I was writing that same year.

It's been four years since the blog was born with little updating in the subsequent three years that have passed. Looking back, I see I was more like Ms. Barrett than I cared to recognize. I had good intentions, a soft heart, and white skin. And like Ms. Barrett, I thought about quitting a lot. The difference, I dare say, is that I was more aware of my white privilege than Ms. Barrett. I was less interested in teaching children Chaucer than I was about getting my students motivated to fight the system (even as they might see me as a symbol of that system).

So, despite my development as a teacher and the fact that I'll begin my fifth year in Oakland and my eighth year in teaching in two weeks, the moniker of this blog will remain the same. Hopefully in thinking of Ms. Barrett, I can remember to be kind and patient with myself as I continue to grow into my role. This year I hope to write less about the classroom struggles and more about my widening perspective on public education in general. I welcome comments and suggestions along the way because, as I always tell my students "None of us is as smart as all of us together."

03 August 2009

Why We Stay

It’s that time of year when the announcement of a Back To School Sale sends me running to change the radio or TV channel before I have to be reminded that summer is coming to a close. I don’t want to hear about the fall fashion or discounted school supplies; there are still four weeks until the new cohort of ninth graders begin high school and become the focus of my constant attention. I am a fifth year teacher, and yet I dread the idea of the school year beginning, the exhaustion I will feel after just a few weeks, the sadness that overwhelms me as I learn my students’ stories, and the frustrations I face working in an unjust system.

Why do I dread going back, but make the decision every year to do just that?
Research has shown that 25% of teachers leave the profession after the first year and double that leave by year five (Henke, Chen, & Geis, 2000; Ingersoll, 2003). It’s even worse in urban schools where the demands on teachers are usually greater as funding is lower, students are less prepared, and politics can distract a teacher from their primary goal – teaching students. In this context, urban teachers are 50% more likely to quit teaching (Ingersoll, 2003). I’m reminded of the reasons teachers leave every time I tell a stranger what I do for a living. I say, “I’m a high school teacher.” They say, “God bless you,” “you must have so much patience,” “it’s a noble profession,” or my favorite, “better you than me.” These well-intentioned strangers believe they are showing support for the hard work I do or somehow extending empathy. Maybe they are making an indirect apology to all the teachers they disrespected during their own school days. These strangers know why teachers don’t last: the pay is low, the work is hard, there’s all those papers to grade, and on top of it, “students these days…”

There’s no need to pontificate on why teachers leave. Let’s do the reverse and consider why teachers stay. As I approach the statistically pivotal point in my career, it’s a question I ask myself and some of my former classmates from my teacher preparation program – UC Berkeley’s MUSE (Multicultural Urban Secondary English). What I see are some key factors (not all inclusive) that bring me and 56% of my teacher cohort back to the urban classroom year after year, beating the 50% national average of teachers who stay.

First, I continue teaching because I know there is nothing else I could do with my life that would be as important as this.
I teach because it’s the only way I know to truly fight an institution that systematically offers students of color and students who live in poverty less.
I teach to fight the good fight. My former classmate Mendel Chernack feels the same way about his job. Years after graduating from Berkeley High, he returned as a reading specialist. He writes, “I think that what I'm doing matters – I’m teaching students who have a desperate need to improve their literacy” (M Chernack, personal communication, July 9, 2009). What Chernack and I refer to is what has been called a “sense of mission” (Warshauer Freedman & Appleman, 2009). It’s easier to keep coming back if we believe what we do has an impact.

However, as Chernack points out, “…if I felt that I was not being successful at this task, the nobility of the goal itself would not matter. But since I do notice improvement each year, the job remains fulfilling” (M Chernack, personal communication, July 9, 2009). A sense of accomplishment is vital if teachers are going to be able to stay in the classroom. Without a doubt, this is one of the factors that keeps me in the classroom. In fact, every year I see myself improve as a teacher. I have gotten better at classroom management. I have become better at teaching writing. I understand how to scaffold assignments, and I’m beginning to learn how to differentiate for students’ abilities. On top of it, I am praised by the administration and district for test scores, which have improved every year that I have taught at my school. This is a measure of success that is less important to me personally, but because it is tied to so many sources of outside perception, it is key. My former classmate Suzy de Blois, now a teacher in San Francisco, feels similarly. She writes, “Over four years, I have seriously grown as a teacher – instructionally and emotionally. It's been exponential. And because I have a serious achievement-based personality, it feels good to see positive results. I feel good about what I do: my students are learning and are able to demonstrate that learning in multiple ways (including the highly-prized standardized exams), I have positive relationships with many of them and their families, and have critical friendships with colleagues who help me improve. Each year, I feel more successful” (S de Blois, personal communication, July 10, 2009).

People often claim and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) dictates that the most important factor in improving education is the quality of the teachers. I can’t deny this to be true, but teachers can only be their best when working within a supportive environment. In my own reflection and questioning of colleagues, several support structures emerged as common, albeit unusual in public education, among those of us who stay. For one, a manageable schedule will go a long way in keeping a teacher in the classroom. My first year teaching at a small school within the Oakland Unified School District, I was expected to teach two sections of ninth grade English, a twelfth grade poetry elective, and an Advisory of 18-20 mixed grade level students. Sounds pretty straightforward, but it wasn’t. The English classes were 105 minutes long every day and each section had 32 squirrelly ninth graders. Still, I couldn’t complain about that: teachers at comprehensive high schools would be grateful to have only two different classes for which to prepare. But on top of teaching English within that block I was also supposed to instruct my students in physical education. Yes, an integration of PE and English was enough to drive me to the job hunt in the spring of my first year. Thankfully for me and for the students, we made changes for the next year, and I decided to stay. We split up the English and PE sections (I still taught both, but not simultaneously), dug in to class size reduction funds for ninth grade, and built a team of ninth grade teachers. Since then, I’ve swapped out the PE for a section of Read 180 (a reading intervention class more aligned with my education). My manageable schedule allows me to feel sane about lesson planning, grading, student interventions, and ultimately the longevity of my career (at my particular small school).

De Blois cites a similar situation at her school across the Bay. “Unlike many teachers I know,” she writes, “I have never had more than two classes to prep for per year. And, for three years, I taught the same subjects, which meant I really got to dig in, have multiple chances to succeed (just like the kids!), and feel like I was getting a handle on my curriculum and practice” (S de Blois, personal communication, July 10, 2009). Chernack also credits his schedule to allowing him to continue teaching; “In my years at BHS, I've been blessed to only teach this one class (Accelerated Reading). This has allowed me to constantly revise and improve upon what I've already done. This focus has been a huge part of my growth as a teacher. Many of my colleagues teach so many different classes that they don't get to master any of them because everything is new” (M Chernack, personal communication, July 9, 2009). Talk to any teacher who has left the profession and you are bound to hear stories of unwieldy schedules, more than 150 student contacts a day, and hundreds of essays or assignments to grade every weekend. No one can sustain that and remain dedicated to their work.

Finally, it comes down to the adults that teachers have the opportunity to work with and learn from. I feel lucky to be able to say that I love my department. We look forward to meeting together in order to build our program across grade level. We challenge each other’s practice with a balance of compassion and rigor, keeping our students’ needs at the forefront of our work. Such cohesion is unusual and rather recent. It wasn’t until we participated in the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools’ (BAYCES) initiative called Impact 2012 and were anchored by our instructional coach Shane Safir that we were given space within our staff meetings to meet together and do serious work on a regular basis. Because teaching can feel so isolating despite being surrounded by people (young people) all day, being a part of a professional learning community bolstered my commitment to teaching and inspired me to improve my practice.

Since she began teaching, de Blois has had a professional learning community built right into her schedule. She explains, “…we have daily Common Planning Time (CPT) and loads of opportunity to do PD, which means that I get regular chances to learn more and reflect on my practice. At first, the daily CPT meant my curriculum was way stronger than it would have been otherwise, since I was put on a grade level team with our strongest teacher at the time” (S de Blois, personal communication, July 10, 2009). Regular, systemic planning time is rare as most master schedules and budgets just don’t allow for it. In contrast to de Blois’ experience, another teacher who left the profession after three years told me about the lack of intellectuality she found within her department. She said that in order to have stayed in the classroom, “there would have to be some interface between the research and the intellectual side of how to teach well, a place for me to have those conversations with other teachers… professionals who were intellectual beings, who were excited by the art of teaching” (Anonymous, personal communication, July 14, 2009). Had she been a part of an initiative like Impact 2012 or had common planning time with her colleagues, she may have been able to stay in the classroom longer.

Beyond the department, I feel integral to the success of my whole school because it is a small school. With only fourteen teachers and five support staff, everyone’s opinion matters. Everyone can and will need to take on leadership positions. While this adds to the load I have to take on as a teacher, it also makes me feel more responsible for the outcome. My school feels like a family. I know every single student at my school and they know me. I am invested in the success and improvement of my school, just like I would be in seeing my own family thrive. As de Blois so eloquently puts it, “In many ways, we're a family, and I feel committed to showing up for them just as I expect them to show up for me” (S de Blois, personal communication, July 10, 2009).

Each year hundreds of new teachers decide not to show up again. In Oakland the problem of teacher turnover is standard. The sad truth is that I know one day I will be one of them. I may have almost beat the statistic, but how much longer beyond the five years will I stay? I know I have a better than usual situation within OUSD and within urban education. I keep coming back because I have a workload I can manage for now, colleagues who challenge and inspire me, and goals which I succeed in each year. But is this enough to beat the 50-60 hour work week, the weekly migraines, and the regular anxiety dreams my high stress job invokes? Very few teachers quit because they realize they don’t care; they quit to save themselves. If retaining good teachers is at the core of improving urban education, systemic changes that support this goal are the answer.

When I thought about leaving at the end of my first year, my colleague told me that if I stayed, the students would love me for it even though they had seemingly done everything in their power to drive me out. She was right. Our students need us to commit to them, to offer them unconditional love, and see them through to their success. Teachers are the face of this commitment, and it is my hope in a systemic commitment that keeps me optimistic, a hope that the systems that should hold us up, from the district, to the union, to the state and federal governments will eventually make the same commitment to our youth. This is why we stay.


References

Henke, R., Chen, X., & Geis, S. (2000). Progress through the teacher pipeline: 1992-
1993 college graduates and elementary/secondary school teaching as of 1997 (Paper No. NCES 200000152). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

Ingersoll, R. (2003). Is there really a teacher shortage? A research report co-
sponsored by the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy and the Consortium for Policy Work in Education. Document R-03-04. Seattle: Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/ctpmail/PDFs/Shortage-R1-09-2003.pdf

Lyon, L.G. (2009). “Beginning teacher attrition: A result of the intense workload
and resulting exhaustion” Unpublished Master’s Paper, University of California, Berkeley.

Warshauer Freedman, S. & Appleman, D. (2009). “In it for the Long Haul”: How
teacher education can contribute to teacher retention in high poverty, urban schools. Journal of Teacher Education, 60, 323-337