They Tried To Warn Me

While getting my M Ed, people told me that dealing with the requirements, standardization, etc. of teaching were going to be hard. They told me it would be harder than I could imagine, that it would make me want to stop teaching...and part of me tried to believe them, but the arrogant part thought that I could rise above any administrative bureaucratic stuff. That I would simply shut the door and create a haven of freedom in my classroom. But it turns out, they were right.

I am approaching the end of my third year of teaching, and have decided to start a PhD this fall in Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education. To be totally honest, I am not sure what I will be able to do there - I just knew that teaching was starting to suck the life force out of me, it was leaving me angry all the time, I kept approaching despair. The past few weeks are a good example of why.

Two weeks ago at our weekly Tuesday teacher meeting the reading specialist informed us of the new testing plans for next year. Not only will we continue our monthly testing of reading, math and comprehension levels that take the teacher out of the classroom for a full morning, but next year teachers will spend the first 4 weeks of school administering math tests individually to students. The rest of the class will be in the classroom with the teaching assistant. The school year is now just short of 10 months. That means from this test alone teachers will spend more than 10% of the year not teaching but testing. Evidently with our monthly testing we have done this year we have become an exemplary school. Many other schools in our region will have to do the same because of what we have done. Our requirements will become more strict in terms of timeliness of data entry etc. This is all happening in the context of a school where teachers do not get planning periods, where we are discouraged from taking our students outside except for PE classes that happen twice a week, where student behavior is individually monitored and documented every twenty minutes on a point sheet that determines a complicated set of priveleges and punishments. In short, where education has already slipped into the background.

And then there was this past week of standardized testing. The school I teach at is for students with learning disabilities. Most of my students do not read beyond a second or third grade level. There math skills are on a similar level. Yet they were all expected to take an 8th grade test this year. Most of the math concepts they had never seen. The decoding of the reading for many of my students was nearly impossible. In addition, the district has taken away the read-aloud accomodation meaning we can no longer read the test aloud to students who have dislexia of some sort. The tests leaves the students so demoralized and frustrated that we will spend the rest of the school year helping them feel competent again. Even though we spent the afternoons playing kickball and football and other fun activities we had around double the number of fighting incidents this week as we do in other weeks. The students were clearly frustrated and anxiety ridden even though we had explained to them over and over that their score on the test didn't matter, that it was not their fault that they didn't know things on the test because for a variety of reasons they had never been taught the material.

At somepoint in the middle of all of this a Henry Giroux article showed up on Truthout. Though I am not technically a public school teacher, it all rang so true for me it took me a few days to read it cause I had to swallow so much anger. In addition, the school I teach in is a part of the privitization movement that I am against in so many ways. As a result we are not unionized and we pay dearly for it. Many of the fundamental aspects of our school are passed down through the company that is based in New Jersey, the antithesis of a school that is meeting community based needs. Yes, the teachers and other staff in our school are well intentioned wonderful people, but I feel that the structure that the school is set in, both national, district, and privatized expectations, are making it increasingly difficult to do any good. As a teacher who is asked to teach several subjects, on several different levels without a planning period or lunch (I spend from 8:30 am to 3:15 pm with kids) I feel undervalued and exploited making it difficult maintain any sort of moral or positive attitude towards my work. Yes I love the kids, and yes, there are parts of teaching that I love. However, it is difficult to keep students engaged with lessons that are loosely developed becayse I have simply not had the time to work on them, it is difficult to maintain a learning environment when students are not adequately engaged, and in the end there are just huge amounts of frustration. My following blogs will go into more detail as I prepare to leave the school and need to both analyze and publicize my experience there. At this point, I ask you to read the Henry Giroux article and keep your eyes and ears on education in this country - look at the race to the top guidelines which will be the topic of another post soon - it is all frightening and needs to be acted on. More later.....

Or does it explode?

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

- Langston Hughes

* A friend recommended to me that I make this post more of a conversation, so consider it unfinished, but also consider yourself a part of the finishing process - ask questions, give answers...

I have gotten into answering rhetorical questions lately, sometimes obnoxiously, and in response to Mr. Hughes, rhetorical or not, I say yes. That dream explodes in my classroom everyday, it sags, it dries up, it festers. It stinks and it crusts over. I have been overwhelmed this year by the frustration and anger that is present in my classroom on a daily basis, a frustration I frequently contribute to as my students engage each other and at times myself in power struggles over minute details, fine lines, and different truths. Many days I have found myself biking home with an angry look on my face, cursing under my breath at every car that thinks of getting in the way, at the stoplights that slow me down. For months I have been trying to trace some concrete historical path to what happens in my classroom every day. Today if felt like finally realizing the obvious when the above poem slipped into my head on my bike ride home.

My students, all African American, all eligible for free and reduced lunch, are the living result of a dream deferred for generations. And yes, it explodes in fights, yelling, seemingly unreasonable reactions. It dries up in students who have already given up on themselves, who are too afraid to put themselves out there, to try. It stinks like rotting meat in students who are so unsure of their own place in this world that they establish themselves through their cruelty to others. It festers in students who come in angry every single morning and cannot seem to let their hands relax from fists to pencil grips. And it sags when students sleep through the day, or simply say it is too hard. Finally, it crusts over with a false sweetness all the times my students say what they know I want to hear, instead of what they think or believe.

My students are living results of thousands and generations of dreams deferred. Washington DC was at one time a safe haven for slaves. Freedmen's villages were set up to receive escaped slaves (and also keep them segregated from the white population) Now those villages, sometimes keeping the same names are huge housing projects. Under served and under educated the illiteracy rate in DC is one of the highest in the nation (after all we are just a few generations away from a time when it was illegal for Blacks to learn how to read). Incarceration is another way in which the dreams of Blacks in Washington DC are being deferred. Disenfranchisement whereby the residents of our nation's capital (majority Black) are not represented in the congress that makes the final decisions on the cities budget and laws. City spending has left some neighborhoods untouched while others are pristine. Finally the AIDS rate in the District of Columbia is the worst in any city in the United States. Most of these issues are not exclusive to DC, and I would argue that my classroom is not the only one that explodes.

The amazing thing is that middle schoolers have this resilience that makes it so that even as they sit amongst mountains and mountains of dreams deferred, they still have moments of kindness, of trying for something different or better, of working together. They don't have as many moments like this as I would like, but I also sometimes miss these moments in the midst of the sagging explosions and stinking festers and the drying crusted over sweetness.

So what is my role in all of this as a white woman? I don't know exactly. Maybe it is to remember and to voice that there are historical roots to behaviors, not from bad families, or bad genes, but from dreams that have been deferred over and over again by the forces or oppression, indifference, racism, ignorance. I must resist the urge (that is both classist and racist in nature) to simply label my kids as "bad" as though they carry some inherent evil. Maybe I need to work with students in sifting through the dreams and understanding the forces that keep them dreams and not reality. Maybe it is my role to help my students see through the words others place on them. I am utterly inadequate in all of these things and frequently fear my failure does more harm than what little good I am able to do. And yet every morning, I find myself on my bike, cursing at the cars under my breath...

Love Rant

Who hasn't written one of these, about a love lost or found, a betrayal or a connection? This one is about definitions of love, of me, of we. Of a love that goes beyond Valentines hearts and wedding rings. No, i am not hating on your partnership, just offering up another vision, another way of having a life overflowing with love that flows between more than two people, flows through more than blood and water.

So let me stop this hallmark card and get real.

I am single and I am happy, and I am complete, and I am not waiting, I am not "in between" something, or preparing myself for someone - I am not unloved or unlovable - I have a long list of people to lean on at the end of a hard day, I have deep loves with many hearts, and if you ask me why I am "alone" I will tell you that I am not and that I don't have to, nor do I want to justify my single state against partnered expectations.

I experience a love that allows me to develop community, to make more choices, to express myself more widely, to be in awe of more of the amazing people I share this space with.

So now I am going to stop the poetic and get a little political. The hyper-focus of our culture on romantic, heterosexual, family making love is detrimental to our ability to join together, form community, experience solidarity. The energy that we, in the United States, spend on finding that special someone and then keeping that special someone is huge. Again, I don't want to put down those who have found these amazing and wonderful relationships. The love between two people can create worlds, not to mention more humans (or the space to care for humans. However, when we are taught to focus so much on that one relationship, that narrow definition of family, it discourages the collective action that is necessary to keep the power in the hands of the people. So find your love, but also appreciate all the love you already have with family and friends. The hours we spend in bars, at parties, on match.com or okcupid, could be spent organizing, meeting and working with people to make change, thinking and reading about how to turn this world upside down.

So expand your heart to love more, to love those who suffer due to your comfort, those who work for no pay so that we can have our cheap Walmart products, those who are targeted with our fear. Make that love so big it will cause you to want to act in a way that will undermine your own privilege so that others will not have to lack in order for you to have. Keep the romantic love, and make it grow into something more - make yours a revolutionary partnership, or community of friends, or family.

Honest Moments

I wrote this several months ago in response to my discomfort with myself. I need a moment of honesty - I thank those who have been honest with me in reading the poem and in many other moments of my life.

The boys leaning against
the wall seem familiar with
the place. Cops swarming "Move off
the corner! No loitering here!"

The memory of my students' stories...
"The I-pod was right there. I could have lifted it off
the white man so easily!" and
the only colors I see are black and white and
the blue of the policemen's uniforms and
the blue men make me mad glad all in one breath because
the fear is rising up past
the hatred of abusive authority and
the racism rises above
the solidarity and
the confusion reigns supreme.

The questions in my head are too many and
the answers keep coming from
the eleven o'clock news and
the education of a little white girl and
the absence of another voice

The manifestations of oppression validate
the ideology of
the dominant group so well I can't see past
the rhetoric and
the lies. I only hear
the voices of my friends and family
the assurance that
the world IS as it seems, as we believe it to be and that
the "we" DOES include everyone

The problem is I know just enough to know there is another story
the story that some would rather not hear
the story I must find so I can understand
the truth in
the lives of
the boys standing against
the wall so familiar with
the place.

Choosing Human-ness

(I am going through and finishing old posts, this one was started months ago and is simply a reminder of something I think we all know, and the image, well, I agree with that message as well)

I was having one of those afternoons today when nothing seemed to be going right. I showed up in the wrong place for the thing I needed to do, got lost going to the other place, didn't have the right stuff, blah blah blah. I am sure we have all had those moments - I was hot, sweaty (I was biking this whole time) and tired of the backpack that seemed to have grown twenty pounds heavier during the whole experience. And then a person treated me in a less than human way...I knew it wasn't personal as he had treated the woman in front of me in a similar way, but still it jarred me. The next human interaction I had (other than between me and drivers of cars) also felt less than human...and my initial response was to retreat, be less than human to others myself and simply stop interacting as much as possible.

And I thought about people who receive less than human treatment every day, due to the color of their skin, their class, their ability, their gender or sexual orientation. First I thought about how awful that must be, but then I realized that many of these people manage to remain human, and treat others as humans despite of, or in defiance of how they are treated.

The retreat always feels safer, more protected. When faced with an awkward situation, it almost always feels better to be aloof, or disdainful, or just plain ignore a human. And when we are hurt, or down in any way it also feels good to retreat into ourselves, assume the weight of the world, and either martyr ourselves or others. I know all of this because it is my usual response. I hope that some day I can find the strength or the inspiration, or whatever to maintain my human-ness in defiance of all that is not human.