The MLK Memorial and Me

In February, I went to a conference in D.C. My wife came down to join me since I hadn’t been there before (update: wait, I have been there before, once as a young ‘un long ago, and another time for a brief few hours for a meeting. Forgive me, I have a really bad memory!), and we wanted to take the opportunity to explore. We don’t get out much, and I’ve barely seen much of my East Coast environs, barring last year’s visit to Philly. At the top of our list of things to see was the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial. It was the newest memorial, and also slightly controversial.

As we approached the memorial, we read quotations from MLK’s speeches that are engraved along a wall that leads up to his statue. We then walked around the central monument, which depicts Martin Luther King with his arms crossed, embedded in a chunk of granite mountain that appears to have slid forward from its face (“Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope”). His hands are sinewy and strong, veins bulging, and his eyes gaze stoically across the water. There is a sense of calm and might, but also a sense of tragedy. The somewhat unfinished look of the overall work contributes to this sense.

We took our obligatory picture of his statue, and then my wife asked if I could take her picture in front of one of the quotations we had passed earlier along the wall. “It reminds me of you,” she said, somewhat shyly. We walked back over and I took her picture in front of the quotation, which read

“I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their heads.”

I asked her why it made her think of me. She seemed to feel that the reason why I am a teacher and work hard every day aligned with that quotation. I couldn’t quite see myself in it, however, and told her so. I realized I seemed brusque, but I couldn’t think of a reason at that moment to explain why. This post is my explanation.

A little further down the wall, I saw another quotation that did speak to me and about what I am passionately committed to in my work everyday:

“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalty must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”

I took a picture of this one as well. We then walked away from the MLK memorial towards the Roosevelt memorial, which is a long, meandering wall and pathway of red stone with many niches and spaces for reflection along the way. Quotations from F.D.R. are sprinkled next to reflective pools, waterfalls, and scattered stones. But it was a quote from his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, in a little niche that reached out to me. In fact, it linked together in theme with the earlier quotation from MLK that had spoken to me:

“The structure of world peace can not be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation . . . It must be a peace that rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.”

This theme of common purpose, of a struggle for a global, overarching vision through cooperative effort, is what drives me and motivates me to do the work that I do. I was flattered by my wife’s belief that I do what I do because of a passion for human rights, but when I read the quotation she linked to me, there was a cognitive dissonance I didn’t feel comfortable with. I can’t quite place my finger on it, but it seems to have to do with a sense of martyrdom (“I have the audacity to believe. . .”), a stance of personal virtue, nobility, and challenge, that I can’t quite identify with.

An almost messianic passion, in fact, is a trait of many that enter into teaching as a profession. It is common for teachers to speak of teaching as a sort of “calling,” as if they have been drawn into the vocation by some higher purpose. I am frequently talked to by others who are not teachers as if I have entered into a sainthood, and given the respect and sympathy attributed to a monk — that is, with an incredulous, I-would-never-do-that-myself-but-god-bless-you kind of attitude.

This has always rubbed me the wrong way. Teaching is a profession. It is a job. And yes, it is a tough one, and it is especially tough when teaching special education in a high needs school in an impoverished inner city area. But I went into this tough career not simply because I wanted to make my world a better place, but because I wanted — purely selfishly — to develop myself as a leader, to learn firsthand the ground level effects of policy decisions, and become a part of something much greater than myself. I have no illusions that I am changing the world simply because I may impact a few childrens’ lives in the confines of one classroom. This is important work and the impact on one child’s life cannot be diminished. But I believe strongly that the system within which I work impacts our nation’s future greatly, and that I can learn how to work together with others to change the world by altering components of the system we work and live within. Teachers, parents, children, policymakers, state legislatures, mayors, citizens, these are the people that collectively will change the world. We must learn to look beyond our individual selves and work towards a common, global purpose.

This is why the second quotation from MLK and Eleanor Roosevelt’s quotation spoke to me. I’d like to think that I as an individual can effect great change, but realistically speaking, I know that whatever impact I can have on my own is nothing in comparison to what we can achieve when we work together.

Differentiating Professional and Personal Streams

I had the honor of being selected to attend a recent conference on becoming a better blogger, hosted in Washington D.C. by Bellwether Education. This was a great opportunity for me to meet influential professionals engaged in promoting their voice and perspectives on education online, and to learn from them how to better promote and develop my own classroom-based perspectives.

I’d been struggling for a while now with how to develop my professional voice in conjunction with my personal voice. I’ve been blogging for a number of years now, but solely for a literary and/or personal reflection purpose (writing for me has always been a necessary therapy). While I’ve been interested in gaining greater readership, I haven’t actively sought for this through this blog, recognizing that my style of writing (which is decidedly eclectic in nature and topic) doesn’t exactly have mass appeal.

I had already begun differentiating some of my education specific content intended for larger audiences by publishing on GothamSchools’ Community page, which has been a great way to get involved in the online education community and advocate for my perspectives.

But this conference helped to clarify a difficulty that I had not really confronted head-on, which is that this blog, Manderson’s Bubble — which has heretofore catalogued and characterized my internal narratives — was not the proper avenue for me to continue to cultivate my professional voice. I needed to fully differentiate those divergent streams of my writing.

Realizing this, I got in touch with a great fellow educator, Will Johnson, who also writes amazing pieces for GothamSchools Community, and who I had been collaborating with in developing the concept of public schools as ecosystems. We began a collaborative blog specifically for our advocacy of this model, and to develop our online professional voices as special education teachers. (BTW, please check out our introductory collaborative post on the concept of schools as ecosystems and how it relates to current education reform perspectives.)

Our blog is called Schools as Ecosystems, and we have the ambitious goal of putting up a post daily in order to build readership and establish our voices online. If you are interested in education, please follow, bookmark, and share this blog!

I will continue to post here on the Bubble, but posts here will remain personal or literary in nature, rather than pertaining to my professional perspectives.

I’m excited about what Will and I have put up so far and believe that our model is rich enough to continue to explore indefinitely.

In other news, I just had a project on DonorsChoose.org for e-Readers for my students suddenly completely funded! Totally unexpected and awesome! Thanks dad, Jennica, MarieElaina, and The Hagedorn Fund! I’ve had quite the amazing year, aside from my school environment turning ridiculously negative (more on that later).

Insomniac Thoughts On Hard Work and Practice, and Some Goals

I’ve been struck, unfortuitously, with a bout of insomnia tonight, which I have been fortunate not to have had in quite some time. Before moving to NYC and plunged headfirst into a whirlwind of frenetic work and survival, I used to get insomnia a fair amount. I tended to utilize such times for writing. Which may be one reason, come to think of it, why I no longer write as frequently as I once did as a West Coast whippersnapper. During college, I wrote sometimes multiple short pieces a day. Now, many moons later, it’s more like once a month.

While I can’t really help that my cognitive and emotional space is spent on other also fairly important things, like teaching kids, I do miss delving into this personal creative space, just as I miss other creative or emotional outlets I used to devote some time to, such as playing my hand drums or hiking/running up the sides of mountains. And I know that every day that I no longer do these things, I am slowly losing the chops that I once had.

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers at the moment, and his argument about success as attributable mainly to extensive practice, as opposed to talent, made a lot of sense to me. I remember my cross country coach in high school (a terrible math teacher, but an excellent running coach) telling us that after two days of rest we would begin losing a certain percentage of our fitness. And I remember reading an interview with John McLaughlin–one of my favorite musicians and world renowned for his lightning fast licks on the guitar–in which he stated that he could tell that he was losing his skills after only two days without practice.

While at a conference recently in Seattle, during a roundtable discussion with other educators about “hybrid” roles for teachers, one teacher who was currently in that role (1/2 time in the classroom, 1/2 time doing policy related work) commented on how during time spent away from the classroom, such as the 2 days we had spent at this conference, he felt his connection to classroom practice slipping away.

I don’t know if 2 days is some magic number, but the big idea here is that without nearly daily practice in something, we begin to lose the skills and capabilities (one could even call it a type of ‘muscle memory‘) we had worked so hard to build. Furthermore, I’m reflecting on the notion that mastery is not some peak that one reaches and plants a flag in and retains from there on out for the rest of one’s life. Mastery has to be built through a lot of hard work and practice (Gladwell says roughly 10,000 hours), and then sustained.

Though I do think that there are certain tracks and pathways that, once formed, can be more easily re-awakened, even if they haven’t been practiced in a while. For example, I’ve been running for many years, but l’ll go through sometimes long periods where I don’t run at all, for reasons such as work, the season, or travel. But when I do begin running again, after a short period of initial soreness, it’s pretty easy for me to ease back into it to the point where I was before. Of course, I ain’t a “master” runner. I don’t run races or anything. But my point is that if you’ve invested a fair amount of time in something in the past, if you begin doing it again, after a short re-learning period, you’re back on track fairly quickly based on where you left off.

All of this is essentially to say that I’m realizing that I have to get much more disciplined about investing more time back into activities and practices that are important to me to develop and maintain, such as writing as an avenue of self-exploration, reflection, connection to a larger community, and expansion of thoughts and feelings.

So here is an action plan, which I am hesitant to lay out as I hate promising things that I don’t follow up on, and I also doubt that anyone really cares about my personal goals, but I feel like it’s better to lay out concrete, explicit goals if this is really important to me:

• I will write by hand in my journal 2 nights a week before going to bed (writing by hand forces me to produce a substantially different style of thought and writing, since I’m mainly accustomed to writing on a keyboard)
• I will publish 1 blog post a week
• I will play my hand drums once a week
• I will hike at least twice a year

There it is. Now I’ve got to do the much harder work of holding myself to it.

The Great Bathroom Debate

Recently Newt Gingrich made some remarks about poor children learning the value of hard work through janitorial duties that has generated some commentary in the Twitterverse and on blogs.

My first thought in reaction to this, aside from a general distate for Gingrich’s firebrandism in general, was that he’s got it completely backwards: it’s in fact the rich kids who must be taught the value of hard work. These are the kids who will most likely never have to really struggle, and that have been raised with the expectation that the world caters to their needs and whims. Though poor kids may struggle with developing a strong work ethic in the menial jobs that many of them are unfortunately slated to endure (more on that below) — they hold no illusions that the world centers around them.

But after hastily posting something to this effect on my Twitter, which I botched since I was using a junky old phone, I rethought the classism inherent in both of these positions.

The fact is, as Andy Rotherham points to in his take on Newt’s statements, ALL kids need to be “systematically taught life-skills.” This doesn’t have to be a poor vs. rich kid conundrum. But the issue it does raise is whether in our frantic push to get all kids “college ready,” we are neglecting those character building experiences that help children to learn the value in hard work. We have a tendency in the United States to demean the challenge and value of technical skills and craftsmanship. Recently, I watched the Kings of Pastry, and was inspired by French President Sarkozy’s speech, in which he wisely advises not to consider ”manual knowledge to be less noble than academic knowledge, less capable to create wealth and well being.” This is advice we should learn to heed here in the United States.

I personally learned the value of hard work by cleaning bathrooms. I cleaned a lot of them over the 5 years that I worked at a camp and conference center in South Lake Tahoe, and trained others in how to clean them as well. And I believe that cleaning a bathroom truly shows the nature of one’s character.

To clean a bathroom well, you have to be committed to the personal experience of a complete stranger, whom will most likely not even appreciate, let alone notice, your work. You have to struggle to pick all the hairs out of the crevices of the tile, stuck to the edges of the tub, caught in the base of the toilet. You have to get down on your knees to scrub the grime out of the shower curtain, and the soap residue caked onto the soap dish. Not to get too in depth here, but you sometimes have to witness and clean up the extremely unpleasant aftermaths of a stranger’s digestive issues. That’s a deep commitment to the service of your fellow man.

I don’t think it’s such a terrible idea to suggest that all children should learn to serve others, not merely themselves. Perhaps cleaning bathrooms is a bit too unsavory to expect them to have to perform*, but certainly engaging them in tasks that better their school or community environment, such as cleaning their classrooms, or collecting recycling, or picking up garbage in their local park, or planting gardens around their school, should be considered an essential part of their public school experience.

But let’s remove the prejudice that only certain children need to be taught the value of hard work. And in this recognition, let’s further recognize that we must stop demeaning the value of vocational education and technical skills. We all need to learn to value and appreciate those who serve us, every single day, stocking our supermarkets and convenience stores with produce and products, cleaning our bathrooms and hotels, serving our food and maintaining our cars. There is nothing wrong or undignified with being a plumber, a car mechanic, a janitor, an electrician, or a housekeeper. My grandmother came from Sweden and worked her way around the country, as a single mother, cleaning houses and serving families. In my personal work experiences, I have cleaned bathrooms, made beds, stocked shelves, and served customers in both retail and hospitality industries, and now as a teacher, I serve children and their families. And I value this work I have done and am proud of it, because working hard and serving others is the foundation of our economy.

Until we learn to stop demeaning such work, most children will naturally never learn to see the value in working hard to serve others or to take pride in working their way up through a trade or industry. Especially when it’s perceived as menial labor with no positive outcomes. And while some of our children will be “college ready,” until we teach them concrete skills and the values they will need to succeed, most children will not be “life ready.”

* One of the things Rotherham points to in his article in Time is that cleaning bathrooms is too dangerous for children to perform due to the chemicals that are used. Having cleaned many bathrooms using chemicals, I am acutely aware of this danger, and so as housekeeping manager, I researched and developed my own non-toxic cleaning solutions to protect the safety and health of myself and my employees. These solutions are cheap to make, just as effective in cleaning as the chemicals we unnecessarily invest in, and scalable for larger operations. Please visit my website, Environmentally Sound Solutions, for the specific solutions I used.

That D-Day on the Event Horizon

Image via Wikipedia

As a public school student, I recall dreading the first day back after the summer vacation long before that fateful day arrived. Its shadow loomed large and ever increasingly ominous over the last few weeks, tainting my prolonged nocturnal fiction book reading marathons. The sight of back-to-school sales were enough to make my stomach recoil. I imagine that this is how soldiers preparing to storm a certain beach in Normandy would have felt, readying themselves to plunge into an uncertain future that contained at the most death, and at the least, certain horror — though I suppose mixed in there is that unique elated excitement born from the headlong rush into a danger that you know will change you irrevocably.

As a public school teacher, the feeling as the first day of school draws nigh is disturbingly similar. It’s different, of course, because now I am an adult, and I am the teacher, and I am much more in control of certain variables of myself and my situation than I was as a hormonally charged and overly sensitive adolescent desperately scrounging for social and emotional currency. So there’s a bit more of a positive edge to this adrenaline coursed pulsing of nausea that edges and nips at my stomach as I think ahead to that swiftly approaching D-Day, but otherwise it feels more or less the same. It’s not exactly something I relish, as you can probably tell.

It seems to me that there is something odd about some of the traditions and rituals that we cling to in our society. One of them being this prolonged summer vacation between different grades (another being our adherence to daylight savings time). Most of us are aware that disadvantaged students lose a significant portion of their academic gains in learning over the summer. The students that I have been working with, whom are not only disadvantaged socio-economically speaking, but furthermore cognitively speaking, lose nearly all of their learning if they are not practicing their acquired skills during the summer. Which was pretty far back (2-4 grade levels behind) to begin with.

This has been the first summer since I began teaching that I’ve fully enjoyed, as the last two I’ve spent most of taking trainings, exams and classes. And therefore I can state that having extended vacations — during which I am still getting paid — is a very nice thing indeed. But I can also say that I think it’s just a tad overlong. Since coming back from my honeymoon, I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things: waking up early, staying on top of my Twitter and news feeds, responding to emails, putting together to-do lists and checking off items. But it’s really bloody hard when you’ve just completely gone off the whole map of what it means to be in a structured schedule and environment.

I’m not whining. I’m bringing this up to make the point that I don’t think having prolonged summer breaks is good for either students nor adults. Both students and adults may say that we enjoy 2-3 month long summer breaks on principle, but the fact is that even students — except for those sent away to posh summer camps — begin to flounder in the over abundance of free time and get just a little bit, well, bored. Or perhaps just a bit directionless. We all need to have some kind of structure in our lives to help keep us developing and healthy. During the long summer, that structure, unless maintained by strict parenting (on the part of students) or self-discipline (on the part of teachers), tends to fall to the wayside. And much that had been built during the school year is therefore left to fester.

I would much prefer to have more plentiful but shorter vacations, as Kathleen Porter-Magee suggests in this Room for Debate post from a while back. Something on the scale of 2 weeks, as opposed to 2 months. Just long enough to really enjoy it and ease up the pace and tension, but not so long that I’ve forgotten what it means to work entirely. But more importantly, this would much reduce the severity of that adrenaline inducing sense of nausea that the first day of school brings after an overlong summer vacation.

Part of the reason for the fear and nervousness that accompanies the first day of school is not only that summer is ending — it is because you know that you are about to be plunged head-first into a long and seemingly never-ending tunnel of frenzied efforts to stay on top of a pile of emotionally and cognitively and physically demanding tasks during 70 hour work-weeks that never stops piling up in front of you, with only the occasional 3-day weekend or stray “winter recess” or “spring break” to keep you functionally sane and from developing scurvy. If we had more vacations in lieu of a long summer break, these could help keep both the students and adults capable of functioning in a somewhat rational and civilized manner and from developing strange growths in their necks and holes in their stomach linings.

Sigh. Well, yes, I’ve rather been enjoying this summer. Lots of beer (and subsequent belly distending, which I attempt to counterbalance with running) and wine, hanging out with beautiful and wonderful friends and family, savoring fresh pineapple, papaya and coconut. Learning how to cook again. Reveling in my new marriage and amazing catch of a wife. I’ve even been reading fiction books! That have nothing to do with education! Just for the fun of it! (Can you tell that I feel vaguely guilty?)

And as that first day draws ever nearer, I attempt to fight back the eddying fear of the unknown by beginning to prepare in whatever way I can. But here’s the thing, folks. In the world of public education, you can never be fully prepared. So you are just left with that nauseous, sinking, fluttery feeling every morning until suddenly you wake up several weeks after the school year has hit you, and you’ve become fully immersed in your professional self once again . . .

Reflections On My 2nd Year Teaching Special Education

My students graduated from elementary school on Friday. I’m not one prone to getting emotional from formal ceremonies, but I do admit to feeling a touch of pride mixed with sadness that they were leaving me. I felt as if I had demanded a lot from my students over the year, and they had tried their best within the limitations of their own learning challenges and often stressful personal lives.

As I think back over the year, it’s hard to think that I have had much of an academic impact on my students. I think this is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching in a self-contained special education setting: you don’t typically see substantial academic growth. You most likely will not propel student performance on standardized state tests from Level 1s to Level 2s. When all the other teachers get their students’ preliminary test results in June (merely outlined as Met the promotional criteria or Did not meet) and celebrate their successes and mourn the few students who must now attend summer school, I’ve thus far in my teaching experience just sat glumly with a list of mainly ‘D’s (did not meet the promotional criteria). And even as I know that my students have met their own Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals and thus have met their modified promotional criteria, it can still sting bitterly. As a teacher who holds myself accountable for my students’ performance, despite the substantial challenges of their learning disabilities and environmental conditions, I know that I am failing my students. I can be a better teacher. I can be more knowledgeable and fluent in all content areas and use more systematic and effective pedagogical practices. I can be more empathetic and understanding of their cultural differences and better build a home-school connection. I should be able to reach through to that one completely unmotivated and aggressively defiant student who I wasn’t able to reach.

Knowing this, I have only one option: to learn from my mistakes and shortcomings and work to become a better teacher.

The successes I can with certainty and pride point to this year might not seem to be very impressive to someone who doesn’t know my students and the challenges they face in their personal lives. This is what I am most proud of accomplishing this year:

• Pressuring the parents of 2 my children to finally (after years of inaction) obtain glasses for them.
• Understanding that one of my students was experiencing severe anxiety when around too many people, and getting his mother to seek counseling for him
• Working with a sometimes defiant grandparent and a medical treatment center to obtain needed medication and therapy for one of my most behaviorally challenging but cognitively capable students

These may seem small victories, but they were substantial in the lives of my students and their families. I feel like I have learned how to better reach out to community agencies to assist my students. I’ve learned that the parents of my students often suffer from the same challenges that their own children face, such as dsylexia, anger management issues, or difficulty navigating formal society.

Overall, this year was substantially different from last year — my first year. These students (except for that one, highly challenging student) actually liked me, which makes a pretty big difference in the way it feels to head down the stairs every morning to pick them up. Instead of being greeted with “I hate you,” or “I want to punch you in your face,” and running away from me down the hallways, I was greeted with students who ran to line up in front of me and shake my hand. Most of these students were incredibly sweet and caring, and I enjoyed seeing them help each other in class. I only had 2 students who exhibited consistently challenging and aggressive behaviors this year (cursing me out, threatening me), as opposed to a class full of them last year. And yes, those 2 were pretty challenging alright: I had a desk and a trash can thrown at me this year (thankfully, the desk missed me — only the trash can connected), and by the end of the year, one student could no longer sit in my class all day, as he would become so disruptive and aggressive that I was unable to work with the other students.

I really enjoyed this group of students and despite the sense of having failed them as a teacher, I know that they mostly enjoyed being with me as well. As part of my end of the year reflection, I administered a student survey to my students that I made on Google Forms based off of a student survey (go to pages 12 and 13 in this report to see the survey) created by Ron Ferguson’s Tripod Project. My students rated me highly in all areas (such as creating a caring environment and in challenging them), except classroom control (not surprising, given the behaviors aforementioned), and as I reviewed the feedback, I selected a few simple and achievable points for my focus in the next school year:

• Making it always clear that I really care about my students
• Keeping them busy at all times
• Not allowing students to disrupt each other’s learning
• Ensuring students learn from mistakes
• Making schoolwork more enjoyable
• Asking questions to make sure students are following along
• Posting and explaining clear objectives for each and every lesson

Next year will be a new and exciting school year for me. I will be changing from a self-contained to an integrated co-teaching setting, which means that I will be working in the same classroom with a general education teacher, and thus I will have a mix of higher functioning general education students and special education students. The teacher I am slated to work with (you never know at this school when things will change) is from the Bronx and understands her students’ lives in ways that I am unable to–she will help me create a much more culturally responsive and therapeutic environment for students. Plus, simply having another teacher in the classroom ensures that I will have support in lesson planning and curriculum development, as well as other administrative classroom tasks. I’m also excited to get the chance to teach students who will show greater evidence of academic growth. And I will have a brand new SMART Board in the classroom I am moving to! The SMART Board I have been using is an old jerryrigged one that only worked half the time.

So that bittersweet feeling I felt as I watched my students sitting on stage and singing a pop song to the future accurately matches my feelings on the year as a whole: I loved my students, but know that I can become a better teacher.

Now that I have graduated from my own schoolwork, I am looking forward to a summer spent loosening up and enjoying my life a bit more — something I have not often been able to do since moving to NYC. Of course I’m still going to be working on some projects and hopefully a little bit of curriculum, but my main aim is to allow my head, heart, and body to get re-centered (oh, and to get married!).

Progress Towards Goals

In November, I posted some of the efforts and goals I was targeting within my school for the year. As promised, I will now review how I’ve done. I had a wide range of goals and they were kinda lofty. Over the course of the year, I’ve learned more about the challenges that are faced in the actual implementation of systemic changes. Some of the targets I originally began with have shifted as my school’s priorities have changed, as well as my own priorities and interests. Some goals I dropped not because I didn’t believe they were important, but because I saw that I’d be fighting a losing battle. I attempted to focus my efforts in areas where I knew I could make some headway or that I had earned enough political capital to advocate for.

As a review, here were some of the goals I’d outlined in November:

1) Begin tackling the Common Core State Standards in our school

2) Begin coordinating school-wide systems of academic interventions

3) Advocate for a PBIS system for behavior

4) Advocate for a system of referral tracking (SWIS or OORS)

5) Build emotional literacy in the building (understand student acting out behaviors, not simply punish them)

6) Implement the Response to Intervention model

7) Make the process of inquiry and using data authentic

I’ve encountered substantial frustrations in working towards my goals. These hurdles have taught me that for real change to occur, you have to spend a significant amount of time and effort working on the most basic foundations that will sustain that change. For example, one of the systems we were working to put into place in our school was structured grade level team meetings, held according to a consistent protocol. We envisioned these teams successfully performing inquiry into student work and collaboratively designing instructional units, interventions, and assessments together. And some teams did achieve this to a degree that was quite substantive in comparison to the past. However, the reality is that sustaining a focus amongst a group of teachers over the course of a school year requires some fundamental components in place that was all too often lacking. It requires a strong facilitator, consistent and frequent meetings, planning and preparation for the meetings, well established roles and responsibilities, an administration willing to hold teachers accountable for their meetings, and open channels of communication. When these components are scattered or missing, running meetings that are productive can be highly difficult. It’s also difficult when the majority of teachers view the meetings as an encroachment on their time instead of as a useful opportunity to collaborate as professionals.

Despite these challenges, however, progress was made. Some goals we’ve made substantial headway on, such as introducing the Common Core Standards and making the process of inquiry more authentic. Others, we’ve only begun to lay down the groundwork for. For example, thanks to the help of our network STOPP team, we now have an in-school team established for behavior referrals, and we have an official behavioral referral form. The fact that the groundwork has been laid is in and of itself noteworthy, because now there is a basis for renewed effort towards achieving real progress in the next year.

One of the biggest challenges I now am aware of that we face is that of the specters of external accountability, in the form of state testing and reviews of the school. In both circumstances, shit hits the fan. The administration freaks out and runs around like chickens with their heads cut off, and this induces the teachers and their students to assume an unhealthy dose of stress as well. I am not opposed to standardized testing nor to school quality reviews or state audits, but I think that the high stakes attached to them are blown far out of proportion to their actual value. All of the hard work our teams had been making fell to the wayside once we began gearing up for testing and an audit was being performed on our school (we hadn’t made AYP for some student populations). Teachers spent their time drilling in test taking skills and making sure that they had student portfolios neatly accessible for adult visitors. The administration spent its time making sure the halls were decorated and bulletin boards looked pretty. These things are perhaps a necessary evil, but I don’t think that long-term sustained efforts such as team meetings should be allowed to fizzle due to these external pressures. I am beginning to see why teachers become jaded and lambast the systems of accountability that produce this kind of short-term hysteria and frenzy, which is ultimately detrimental to real learning and progress.

One goal which I have expanded upon is the idea of making the process of inquiry more authentic. As it was rolled out to us by the DOE, inquiry was all about these rather dry and academic methods of looking at student data. Which I think can be extremely valuable–but it requires a foundation of professional teams with an established protocol, a culture of professionalism and collaboration. And building that foundation in a public school, as I mentioned above, is significantly harder than it sounds. It also requires that the school has a process of curriculum mapping in place, or at least an acknowledged and shared curriculum map in general. When this isn’t really there, inquiry work becomes hollow and useless, because here we are, looking at our students’ deficits and targeting those deficits, but we don’t have any guide to refer back to when we acknowledge that we need to collectively bolster our instruction in certain areas. Once I realized this, I focused most of my efforts towards the end of the year on building a foundation for curriculum development in our school.

I’ve written at length already about my views on the importance of curriculum, so it should be obvious that I place extreme value on it. I also place a lot of weight on the value of professional learning communities. I believe that curriculum must be developed within the forum of professional learning communities. So I focused my main efforts during the school year on promoting the structures for a professional learning community to develop and in developing the technological resources for curriculum development to occur.

Over the course of this year, we’ve been encouraging teachers to begin actively using our school’s Google account to share documents, record meeting minutes, and communicate and collaborate. Even simply getting teachers to log on has proven to be a significant hurdle, and I don’t say this merely to criticize non-technologically savvy teachers. Most of our computers are clunky and old, running Internet Explorer, which does not operate well with Google Doc functions. It makes it pretty hard for folks not accustomed to troubleshooting on computers to get a handle on. These obstacles to merely gaining access to the online resources are significant, because it reduces the efficiency of being able to simply email all the staff and know that people will respond online. Instead, in order to organize things, we’ve had to rely on a combination of word-of-mouth, printing out memos to place in mailboxes, and email. And since I and other teachers have extremely limited time, this greatly decreases the likelihood of us collaborating outside of the venue of scheduled meetings.

Anyway, I’m realizing that I could go on and on about this all day, but it’s probably pretty boring stuff to an outsider. So let me just wrap this up by stating the things that we did accomplish:

• The Special Education Team met at least 14 times over the course of the year, and discussed issues critical to special educators in NYC, such as implementing the new IEP system (SESIS), understanding Response to Intervention, understanding Phase I special education reform, issues of compliance with state law, building communication amongst all special education service providers, and conducting Functional Behavioral Analysis
• The Inquiry Team and corollary grade level teams met fairly regularly until state testing rolled around, and began the process of establishing a more consistent protocol
• I introduced the concept of core domain knowledge to the school, as well as the concept of developing a structured and systematic approach to developing curriculum within the forum of a professional learning community
• Technology was utilized more widely and some basic issues of access were addressed

Only The Best Every Day

I finished my last graduate courses on Tuesday. As I walked to the train talking with a colleague who had begun the Fellows program at the same time as me, he remarked on how different we had become since that first summer during our initial training before entering the classroom. How innocent we were then! Teaching changes you, indelibly. I remember how on top of the world I felt at that time, even as I knew the challenges that awaited me. I had been a manager at a demanding and innovative grocery retailer and was physically fit, accustomed to breaking down pallets of heavy groceries, dealing with crazy customers, and working on one full meal a day with 4-6 hours of sleep and a 1 1/2 hour to 2 hour commute each way on what was generally a middle of the night series of subway trains. Yes! I finally had adapted to NYC after a recent move from Lake Tahoe and felt I was ready to tackle anything. Phew. Folks. What hubris, what folly.

See, the thing is that teaching takes much more than simple ambition, physical drive, stamina, and dedication. It takes deep internal spiritual and emotional wellsprings to maintain composure and constancy. Every facet of your being will be challenged, every hidden assumption, every underlying prejudice, every underdeveloped part of your psyche and soul, every trigger of anger or annoyance will be released and exposed and prodded and overturned. You will be scraped hollow. You will be on the verge of mental breakdowns–or actually have them, depending on your level of mental stability. You will nearly break into tears–or actually break into tears, depending on your level of stoicism–in front of other adults or students. Oh yes. Teaching changes you.

And there will be days when you wonder, given how close to the breaking point you can come, just at what point a human mind becomes broken and can no longer be made whole again. And at the verge of this question is a rift of despair and anguish so deep that you can’t really quite go there–you have to wall off the reality of the lives of your students from your own life in order to protect your own emotional and mental well-being. Your students. Some of them living lives so unfathomable that you have to build a wall of professionalism in order to protect yourself. Or risk craziness, despair. Breaking down into tears at the mere mention of their name. Because it’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s always about them. And even during the most challenging moments of confrontation, even during the worst days of acting out behavior, you know that this is all about serving them. About becoming a better person so that you can better serve them. Becoming a better teacher so that you can negotiate the land mine pathways of the heart and mind and guide them there by proxy.

Anyone who thinks that they can step into the midst of this situation and create a revolution will not survive. Idealism has little place in the day-to-day marathon battle of seeking to transform the very soil that these children are rooted within, confined within. Only steady, patient, nurturing, every day, constant, consistent, repeated love–love–love. Tough love. Real love. Love that does not accept mediocrity. Love that does not accept falsehood. Love that does not accept anything except the best from your beloved. Because you know that’s what they really are. The best. No matter what they tell themselves. No matter how much they try to show you the worst in them (and they will–it’s a child’s way of testing your commitment). Every day. The best. Only the best. The best in you. The best in them. Even when neither of you have it in you. You come the next day to try again.

Until one day, there is a moment when you look around you, into their eyes, into their hearts, and you feel it. You can feel it. Again, you almost begin crying, but this time, for another reason. It’s love. It’s real. And it is changing you. And if it is changing you, it must be, it must be changing your students, too. This is what you came here to do. And that is the only thing that can keep you going. That hope. That wish. That love.

True Generosity

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life,” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands–whether of individuals or entire peoples–need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

–Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire

Making Things Happen

It’s been a while since I last posted, which is because I’ve been swamped. My life could be seen as kind of dismal, I suppose, except that I’m excited by what I’m doing right now, so all the hard work and no time to play is all right, for the time being at least. I’m starting to get a bit burnt out, which is not good, but there’s a few spots of days off this month which I think will allow me to squeeze through it.

I’ve been keeping up with my ‘barefoot’ running regimen, and it’s helping me to keep more physically in tune, and also serves as precious decompression time. My feet have fully adapted, and it feels great! It took me all summer to get broken into it, but now it’s like butter.

I’ve realized that the school where I’ve been working, for all its many problems and dysfunctions, is actually the perfect place for me to hone my skills and grow as a professional. It’s a disorganized and often chaotic school, but everyone in the building means well and tries their best. Meaning that for all its dysfunctions, the place is ripe for change. All it takes is some applied pressure.

I’ve been talking on this blog for a long time about a holistic, whole systems design approach to change, and for the first time, I’m really getting to gain practical insight into that theory. I’m discovering that true power is about seeing opportunities in problems and seizing those opportunities to advocate for greater systemic change. Furthermore, true power is working in collaboration with different types of people and harnessing their skill sets as resources.

I may only be a second year teacher, but I have skill sets from my management experience that I’m beginning to draw more upon, now that I have had some space to grow into my current role. I’ve become the go-to-guy for attending workshops (simply because I’m willing to go to them, really), and as I’ve been going to all these different workshops (Common Core State Standards, Response to Intervention, Inquiry, Quality Review, Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, just to name a few), I’ve been thinking of ways for how to synthesize and apply the information in the school.

I want to accomplish these goals this year:

1) Begin tackling the Common Core State Standards in our school

2) Begin coordinating school-wide systems of academic interventions

3) Advocate for a PBIS system for behavior

4) Advocate for a system of referral tracking (SWIS or OORS)

5) Build emotional literacy in the building (understand student acting out behaviors, not simply punish them)

6) Implement the Response to Intervention model

7) Make the process of inquiry and using data authentic

My first strategy was to create a team of special education teachers. It was something I had put on my agenda since last year, but with all the other things going on, especially with my growing awareness of the Response to Intervention model, it made sense to finally get it put into place first thing this year. In tandem with that team, I came up with a short vision proposal and presented it to the principal, which included utilizing the inquiry team and the special education team to begin implementing school-wide interventions to move the school into the Response to Intervention framework, in addition towards implementing the Common Core State Standards. She agreed, and the plan I put in place has begun picking up steam.

I feel good about what is happening, because there are many points that are currently converging in the building: 1) the Common Core State Standards, which are getting rolled out statewide this year, have been examined and discussed school-wide already in an authentic, collaborative way; 2) technology, which many teachers have been highly resistant towards using last year, is now being increasingly used, such as our Google website for inputting team meeting minutes; 3) grade level teams now have discussed and implemented a team protocol, which will help to structure and build accountability for team meetings; 4) the special education teachers are already beginning to be viewed as leaders and pioneers; 5) I have successfully advocated for an assessment for reading to be used in the building that more accurately targets foundational deficiencies, which many of our students–especially students with IEPs–lack, and I subsequently designed and implemented the headers to be used in a tracking spreadsheet that is being created for our school (I had a timeline of about a week to do all of that, from advocacy to spreadsheet!); and 6) I was able to include lexile measure correlations on the spreadsheet, which will position our school to be ready for the Common Core State Standards use of lexile measures.

And this convergence all happened practically within one week! There is a momentum in the building that is exciting to see. Obviously, I am taking some credit for it (why not, I get to celebrate myself sometimes, don’t I?), but the reality is that I simply took the first steps towards putting it together. The actual implementation only has been able to occur because there are great people in the building who want to see things get better just as much as I do and who have been willing to step up and put themselves on the line to make it happen.

It remains to be seen whether this momentum is sustainable, but it’s a great start. I’m chugging along through my graduate work and if all goes according to plan, I should only have two classes left in the Spring semester. Here’s to making things happen.

Not Much At All To Do With You

The fact is is that there is nothing simple. Nothing just as it is presented to you. Because that presentation is based upon some psychological or emotional need that may not have much at all to do with you. It has to do more or less with a specific placement in time based upon considerations of a past or a future in which you are but a provider or representative of some imagined or nostalgic resource or denier of resource.

To be a teacher of students living in poverty with “exceptional learning needs,” you have to be much more than patient. You have to be well-versed in the art of controlling your emotions and your impulsive reactions to events. You have to capable of coping with a constant verbal and physical barrage of harassment, abuse, and manipulation. You have to be a jazz artist in the moment, deftly maneuvering amidst the bricolage of suffering, despair, and aggression to diffuse emotional triggers and focus attention back on development and progress.

Really, you just might have to be some prototypical admixture of saint and comic and motivational speaker. And that I ain’t. Most days, I honestly don’t have the ability to stand back and take the abuse lightly or in a sagelike zen jedi manner. I generally jump into the fray, and I deliver it right back. Or I just simply feel like crying. But there are days where I am able to soar like a hi-hat halcyon guided stream through the jagged emotional explosions of my students, and I find some magic way of twisting each outburst into a teachable moment. Those are the moments that help me keep my nose above the water.

Some days, like today, I can barely even remember what happened. It’s just too much, too raw, too full of a suffering so overwhelming and deep that I don’t even know how to begin to untangle it. It can be shocking, traumatizing, rendering me incapable of thinking, only of thickening my tongue with a glass of whiskey before toddling off to bed. But I suppose that this is the induction into the world of my students.  Some of them have lived in shelters, some of them have been transferred from foster situation to foster situation. Their own mothers given up on them. Rejected. Spurned. Lost. In psychological terms, their daily lives are filled with acute and chronic stressors, in response to which they have learned to cope by finding the point of weakness in whomever happens to be near to them and digging in with their nails and attempting to rip into someone else just the way they’ve been ripped into.

But I will not accept excuses. Either from myself or from them. We must be better than ourselves. We must be better than the world around us. We must be everything and nothing, every moment, every day, tearing ourselves down again, rebuilding ourselves over, until the manna that is either imagined or real begins its earth bound descent into the imperfect folds of our dreams.

The Toughest Gamut

This last week has been perhaps one of the hardest thus far in my 1st year of teaching. It started in the very first minute on Monday and continued more or less unabated thereafter: insults, fights (one of which erupted in the middle of the sidewalk in front of all the parents at dismissal), yelling, and an uninhibited and calculated disrespect of myself and any other authority figure in the classroom. Some of my students spend their time in school determining how to best undermine my lessons (and goodwill) in any manner possible, and they will even coordinate their efforts. It is probably this latter behavior that most drains me.

The moments of breakthrough are few and far between with my students. By breakthrough, I mean for example moments such as when I watch a student perform various types of acting out behavior–such as ripping up papers to shreds, complaining every time I ask her to do any work, or stomping around the room and kicking things–and I recognize that something has happened to her that she needs support with, so I talk to her quietly about something that happened at home that morning and recognize that it is nothing personal against me (sounds so simple, right? Try doing it when you have 4 other students screaming for your attention and understanding). Or another moment of breakthrough with a student who has refused to communicate with me in any way except insults and blatant disregard since I have known him, but then on Thursday I actually got him to have a 2 minute conversation with me. And then he got suspended after that, so all progress has been subsequently lost. But maybe I might be able to have another conversation with him again.

In other words, extremely limited breakthroughs that take an extreme amount of effort and self-control. I’m not going to make much academic impact on some of my students. I understand the need for gauging the effectiveness of a teacher by test scores, but when you have a student taking a 5th grade state test when he reads at a pre-primer 1st grade level and he gets his test read to him but his working memory is extremely limited–well, exactly what kind of improvement are you going to see on that test? The kind of impact I have had on my students has been that I have taught them to stay in their seats 80% of the time and not to stand on tables and not to run down the hallways 95% of the time. I’m not joking or being facetious. There have been a number of different people in the building who have come up to me and told me that they are amazed at how much some of my students have changed. They used to be literally running around the entire building all day long and even terrorizing teachers by cornering them and threatening them physically. Now they sit in my classroom and spend the majority of their time insulting me and insulting each other. So that’s improvement.

But it eats away at my energy. It burns me out at the end of each day. I am sometimes left literally shaking with anger, stress, and despair in the middle of lessons, the moments when I have tried everything that I can think of but I just no longer have the will to fight or to see beyond the displays.

1st year Teaching Fellows are assigned an advisor from their graduate program who comes to observe lessons, lend support, and ensure that the school is treating them decent. My advisor has been great in giving me pep talks, because I am invariably a cynical and critical person, and I can be pretty hard on myself. She came into my school on Friday and arrived early during my prep, and talked to me the entire time, and I think some of my students overheard the conversation and decided that they wanted to put on a show for her. So during the next period, as I began my lesson, several of them really put on a show. I mean yelling, swearing, talking back to me, etc.  This continued unabated the entire lesson and into the next. I think that in some weird way, they wanted to show off to her, to show her how tough they were. It was disturbing, but I think what was encouraging was that there were 3 students during this performance who kept on track and attended to the lesson. So I taught it to them, and as I circulated and began working one on one with them, one of the others began doing their work, and then another, and finally the loudest of them all took out his paper and did a problem or two by the very end of the second lesson. My advisor stayed the entire time and worked one on one with one of my students who had walked out of my classroom upset. I have taught some of my students who have anger management issues to take a chair and sit outside of the classroom when they are angry until they cool down, and then they will come back into the classroom. My advisor was impressed that my student knew to walk outside, and then promptly returned ready to work a few minutes later. I didn’t even notice it, as this has become a frequent daily occurrence for a number of my students.

My students love to complain about the fact that I rarely take a day off. I think they overheard some of the conversation I had with my advisor, where she was talking to me about other 1st year teachers who have had nervous breakdowns in the classroom or quit, because they told me that they were going to make me leave. I told them that I liked them too much to do that. And I told them I would never take a day off even when I’m sick because teaching them was too important to me.

Which is a bunch of bullshit, but I’m not going to let them run me away into despair. They have been taught by their lives that the only manner in which to gain power is to destroy. But there is a deeper power. The power to create. The power to envision. The power to nurture. This is the only power that lasts.

My god I hope that I can heed my own dictums.

Paths to Divinity

It could be that spirituality is best defined by restraint.

Depth is attained by holding ones breath.

If I am to be a part of god, then I must be attentive.

Practice, and struggle, and work–

these are the only paths to divinity.

R & R

Thankfully, there are a few perks in being an educator, foremost of which are the infrequent vacations that spring up at just that critical moment when I am about to turn clinically insane. In this first year of teaching, I’ve been etching my survival along the wall of my ebbing consciousness in accordance to these vacations. This latest one was a whole week off, known unto the New York state masses as ‘winter recess‘. Now I don’t give a shit what it’s called; it’s a godsend to my sanity, is what it is. I’ve been relaxing, looking for a new apartment that doesn’t have strangers snorting coke in the hallways or water that disappears in the middle of a shower, and even venturing out here and there. I know! Amazing, I kind of almost felt like I had a social life for a minute.

It’s also amazing how quickly the sense of overbearing stress from the daily grind in a classroom recedes, and I almost forget what I will be so very shortly returning to. But the stress begins to creep into my swiftly depleted vacation days nonetheless, as I start to try to wade through the graduate coursework that I’ve undertaken this semester.

In terms of where I stand vis-a-vis my classroom since the beginning of the year, I have made some headway into coping with the behaviors that I confront daily. I’m beginning to get to a point where I can sometimes see beyond the behavior and into the source of stress that creates the behavior in the student. As one example, when a particular student begins to throw a tantrum, cry, and sit in her chair kicking the desk and refusing to move (and sometimes begin fighting with other students and picking up chairs to throw them) I know that it is because she has internalized the idea that she is stupid, and that she believes she is incapable of completing whatever task I have given her. So I have to sit with her and try to encourage her to continue with my support until I have demonstrated that she is capable of doing the task.

In another example, I have a student that wants to have any kind of power and attention he can have, so he will take it by calling out and yelling when I am beginning my lesson, seeking to engage me in a power struggle. This is based on his past history of various foster care situations. He has a lot of anger at the world, and as an authority figure and male, I stand as a prime target. He needs to test me continually to reassess my commitment to fairness and justice. He is perfectly aware when he is “being bad,” but seems unable to control himself. There are a variety of strategies that I have to employ, ranging from ignoring, to recognizing him positively when he returns to his work. In the past, I willingly engaged in power struggles with him, and though I would sometimes win the standoffs, not only did it completely sap me of will and energy and vocal chords, but I furthermore realized that I was not modeling for him (and the class) the behavior I wanted  him to demonstrate.

Nowadays, I try to reduce the amount of conflicts I have with my students, and spend more time investing in Life Space Crisis Intervention-style counseling talks. It’s not always possible to address every crisis situation that arrives every few minutes in my classroom in a completely supportive manner; after all, I’m not a counselor, I’m a teacher, and I have a class of students who all demand my attention equally, and will begin fighting when I have turned my attention solely to one student for too long. But I’m doing what I can, and the students are responding to the awareness that I am there not only to provide structure and discipline, but also support and guidance in their daily interpersonal conflicts.

It certainly is a learning experience, and I’m doing the best I can. But even though I keep trying to tell myself that (and accept it gracefully when others tell me it), there is always a hard ball of despair that sits lodged within my gut, because no matter how hard I work, it always feels like it will never be enough.

But a one man army can’t win a war, that much has become devastatingly evident. The only war that I know I am capable of winning is the battle for self-control. And this is a battle where I am beginning to move the front lines forward.

Tip of the Wreckage

Well, I should be preparing my presentations and lessons for tomorrow, but I’m onto Sam Adams Winter Lager numero dos and I’m feeling lackadaisacal and somewhat inclined to write, which is a rarity nowadays. I guess I’ve just never been one to post a lot about my occupation and employment, and that’s where all of my energy and application of thought has been going. Also, a lot of my feelings have been that of anger, despair, and overwhelming stress, and those aren’t exactly things that I need to share consistently with the wider world.

I don’t know if I’ve conveyed exactly the situation that is my everyday, but to make it clear, it’s not something that’s pleasant to face, unless you enjoy being disrespected, slandered, lied to, cussed out, threatened, etc, on a continuous basis. And it’s not simply enough to say that my students are children, or that they have really tough lives, or that they have disabilities. Sometimes, I’m just a human being too, and I need some kind of positivity to keep me going.

But I’m learning how to keep my head straight, see some humor in their inability to say something pleasant, and keep my cool as a professional and leader and adult. I’m learning how to use yelling as a level-headed strategy, only employed when I need to get it through to them that I really care, not when I’m actually angry. I’ve been doing a lot more empathetic talk, one-on-one chats outside the classroom about how to cope with anger. I’ve been ignoring challenges to my authority more instead of getting sucked into squabbling. And I’ve been learning more about their home lives, getting just enough of a glimpse to put into context their attitude at school and why they never turn in homework.

Sometimes, I’ve discovered, I’m the one that has to try to convince the parent that there’s hope for their child.

Anyway, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much shit going on each day that I don’t even really know how to cope with it, to be honest. This is warfare. The only problem is, the war is far beyond anything that myself or my students can grapple with. We just bear the effects, and struggle through the bricolage, fighting with shadows, fighting with enemies who should be friends, fighting ourselves.

Keep Your Chin Up, The Sequel

There have been many points within the past few weeks during which all that I can think about is quitting. The kind of day in which I am greeted in the morning by a child who tells me he wants to punch me in the face. And then another child who is angry because of something that happened during a basketball game during lunch (something I am only to piece together much later) and so he begins swearing at me, telling another student that he will slap her, and slamming his desk against the ground. And another student who is unable to stop talking for more than 1 minute, rendering me incapable of completing a full sentence during most points of the day (I’m not exaggerating). And another student who  becomes frustrated when I don’t allow him to do whatever he wants, so he grabs a computer monitor in order to try to break it. And another student who goes into violent hysterics when I gently and quietly suggest that she choose a book where she can read most of the words. And two students who begin punching each other because of something that happened between two other students. And so on and so forth. This is just a snippet of one day I’m talking about here.

I got pretty low there for a while, compounded by sickness. But eventually, I turned the corner. That’s just the way it goes. You get the bear up on your back, digging in his claws, and you’re getting dragged down, but then you turn the corner, and you find some sap and succor to carry you back into positivity. You find those moments of breakthrough, when students have a light in their eyes at the connection they are making to what you are saying.

I’ve also been learning coping strategies, to manage my own anger and upset. I sometimes have to step back and take a moment to allow students to have a completely off topic discussion, or to insult each other, until I can regain my composure and enter back into the fray. Because when I lose control of myself, that’s when my students begin to explode. They are like dry tinder in a forest, just waiting to be sparked. A little bit of anger from anyone, whether myself or another student, will spread like wildfire, and then the day will be spent in putting out flames. So I have to be able to take whatever they throw at me. I have to be the zen master, transforming their reactive stratagems of despair into teachable moments of development.

My students have learning disabilities (in addition to growing up in areas of high poverty), and I’m only just beginning to get a glimpse of what that really means. It means that nobody knows exactly how to teach them in just the way that they need. You can give them fragments of a standard education, but you have to find a way to pitch everything you do in a completely different way. And figuring out how to do that isn’t always clear. For example, a student may only be able to decode words at a kindergarten to early 1st grade level, but their comprehension is high. Meaning that they grow weary of low-level books about dogs and cats very easily. Or a student may be able to read words fluently at a 4th grade level, but their comprehension (or at least, their demonstration of their comprehension) of what they read is minimal. Traditional assessments don’t really convey exactly where they stand, in other words. It just tells you that they are behind, way behind.

So solutions may be, for example, that the student who can’t decode many words needs a graphic novel that requires complex understanding but has few words. And the student who reads fluently with little understanding may need books with clear and well-organized narratives, like well-written children’s books or short stories. But these aren’t solutions that you come to through training. You have to know the student that is in front of you and be able to see through their behaviors and symptoms and into the source of the obstruction to their learning. And you know, with all that free time and money that teachers have, you can develop all your own curriculum, get tons of great books, and tailor it just right for every student! (That last sentence was sarcasm, in case you didn’t catch it.)

I just keep on reminding myself — on those days in which I feel like breaking into tears in the middle of the classroom because my students are insulting each other in a way I would never even consider talking to any human being — that this is the challenge that I was looking for. I sought for it, and I got it.

And I remember last winter at this very time, I was going through the same struggle, in a different sense. I was sitting on the E train at 3 in the morning with the drunk and the homeless, then walking through the icy pre-dawn streets of Queens to shoulder the mythological struggle that is the American Dream. I was getting 4-5 hours of sleep and eating one and a half meals a day. So now, yes, this challenge right now, right here, is exactly what I came here for.

I’m here to work my ass off in order to make my world a better place. And what better place to do that in than New York City, the gateway portal to manifest destiny?

Fortitude

This was a rough week. I have one student who takes meds, but I think there are days where the effects wear off or when he doesn’t take them. It’s kind of disturbing to see the two sides of him: one where he attempts to model an idealistic vision of a ‘good boy’ (it is endearing but also kind of upsetting to see him try so hard to please me), and the other where he erupts into sadistic shrill curses and screams. This darker side of his two faces erupted after something had happened during lunch (a common occurrence with my students), and he began spewing angry verbal filth at me in the middle of a lesson. The guidance counselor couldn’t coax him out of class, and eventually he sat there drawing without saying anything, then finally gathered his things and walked out of class. I had to spend time that day and the next day discussing how to deal with anger and being upset.

What is interesting about this circumstance–and an innumerable number of similar occurrences–is that I constantly discover that I am learning the same things that my students are. It isn’t about multiplying decimals or writing complete sentences or Algonquian Native American wigwams; it’s about learning how to handle our frustration, deal with anger, mediate conflicts, and communicate what we feel in appropriate ways. These are the very areas that my students force me to struggle in. When they cuss me out to my face, when they turn around and have a discussion in the middle of my every sentence, when they are busier squirting glue onto their fingers instead of doing their math, when they fail to perform an activity I had planned, when they cry or yell or insult each other endlessly, when they hit one another . . . these are the times when I find myself struggling to force myself past the anger and hurt and upset and frustration and try to understand the root source of their problems. And most of the time, no, I am not the model of calm fortitude that I wish I could be. I end up yelling, bullying, forcing order and rigor upon their disorganized lives in every manner that I can. And part of this is necessary. Sometimes I have to yell in order to demonstrate that I care. Sometimes I have to be strict to give them the structure that they need. But sometimes, I know that I have failed them as a teacher, and I am yelling to obviate my wounded pride. I am yelling because I don’t fully understand their disabilities. I am yelling because I don’t fully understand their lives and their needs.

And this is what makes it hard. Not the hours of lesson planning every night and all weekend. Not the hours of meetings and paperwork and phone calls. Not the hours organizing bulletin boards and leveling books and creating SMART board presentations. It is the constant holes that are pricked in my self-esteem, the consistent reminders that I am frail human being with emotions and prejudices and self-induced blindness. The feeling and taste and texture of failure. Every single day. And this is the very experience that my students have endured since the beginning of their young lives.

The greatest struggle right now I have is trying to keep my energy levels up. I haven’t been able to run for a long time now, and my health is declining as a result. I’ve lost weight. I have strange growths in my neck. I’m developing asthma. So my focus, beyond simple survival–which is the mode I have been in–is to find a way to establish an exercise routine. And if I can keep myself healthy and keep myself positive, then I can keep myself calm and patient with my students.

With Struggle

I know that the wind has been knocked out of the sails of my blog posting. I’m finding it hard to justify setting aside time for self-exploration; much of my energy and thought and emotion, even when I’m sleeping, goes towards my students. I have dreams about them, and I lay awake thinking about them. It’s not like I want to.

I have a new student (I jinxed my luck in my last post), who I haven’t gotten a chance to get to know at all because he showed up yesterday, but there seems to be something going on in his home life that may make him a difficulty in class.

I made my first report cards this week, and I had my first parent-teacher conferences tonight, and two moms showed up. Which is one more than I expected.

I also broke up my first fight today. Fists and feet were flying. One part of me was angry for my student who began throwing the punches, but another part of me also recognized her need to stand up for herself. She has been getting picked on everyday, and she just couldn’t take it anymore.

So I am going to have to find a way to resolve the situation as a class. We will have to have a conversation about bullying and about the fight that happened.

I’ve realized that I can no longer ignore the way students in this class are treating each other in the cafeteria or in the schoolyard. Because they will bring it into class with them and then I spend the whole day trying to keep a lid on it.

So I have to teach them how to interact with each other. How to be friends. How to show kindness. Right now they think that picking on easy targets is “playing.”

So teaching is not only about meeting the standards. It’s about reaching your students where they need you in their lives. With material that will guide them and shape them. And that’s why I don’t have time to write much on my blog anymore. Every free second I have, even when I’m wasting it on Facebook or whatever, I always have it in the back of my mind that I should be writing lessons, planning units, writing goals, brainstorming activities. Many of my lessons at school just plain suck. I’m doing a lot of lecturing. I’m in survival mode as a teacher. But the faintest taste of success–knowing with certainty that I am making a difference in their lives, even when all that means is that I am keeping them in their seats–keeps me motivated to see it through. I’m not perfect, but lord knows neither are they. We give each other second and third and fourth and fifth chances.

Until one day, with hope, with struggle, we get it right.

A (perhaps) Premature Giving of Thanks

Well, now that I’m no longer terrified, at complete wit’s end, nor totally overwhelmed at all times, sometimes I even have these moments where I actually realize just how easy I’ve got it. Such that I almost even feel bad. For a moment. At just how lucky I am to be in my current situation as a new teacher.

Let me list the ways in which I am fortunate:

1) I’ve got 7 students. I expected to have 13 (I teach in a 12:1:1 special education classroom. For the uninitiated, that means twelve students to one teacher and one paraprofessional). If I had just 1 or 2 more students, the whole dynamic of my classroom could shift substantially — in the wrong direction. Even at the beginning of the school year, I had one student who didn’t show up ’til the second week. That one student alone completely changed my classroom from well-managed to always chaotic.

2) My para is great. She has managed to get all kinds of supplies for my classroom that I would have no idea where to find in my school. She leaves me apples on my desk. She’s been with my students for a few years now, so she knows the kind of trouble they have been in the past, and she continually boosts my frazzled ego to remind me of how much they have been turned around this year.

3) I’ve got a Smartboard in my classroom. Sure, it’s an old one and the projector is askew and it continually gets off-kilter whenever a student knocks into it. I have to lug my old 15″ laptop to and from school each day to use it. But it’s a great asset to have in a classroom. As a technology geek, it makes my life a hell of a lot easier for lesson planning. And even more importantly, it brightens the day of my students. Just the fact that they have a screen to stare at and a technological gadget to play around with is enough to make them slightly more engaged.

4) I’ve got windows in my classroom. This is a luxury not to be discounted.

5) I’ve got most of the supplies I need in the school.

6) My students may constantly harangue, harass, punch, and belittle each other — but they do not stab each other. They do not draw blood.

7) My students are all smaller than me.

8) It takes me less than 50 minutes to get to work.

Compared to some other teachers I know, I’ve got it cake. And compared to others, I’ve got it tough. It’s all relative of course, but the important thing is that I feel like I’ve got a handle on the situation at this point. I’m still strung out and overwhelmed by many a thing each and every day, but I’m beginning to get into a rhythm. I’m in a situation where I am learning just what I need to at just the right balance of overwhelming but not debilitating. And there’s a lot of helpful and positive teachers in my building who go out of their way to share when they have a spare second.

So I’m just gonna leave it at that and keep it focused on the positive. Because that’s what keeps me going each and every day.

Learning

Now that some kind of routine has been established each day, my new work incarnation as an urban public school special ed teacher has settled into a rhythmed pace, and the stress has somewhat eased up. Or at least become a more manageable kind of stress. Before, it was like fight or flight response high strung anxiety, with moments of frustration so intense that I almost cried. Now, I know that I can handle whatever is ahead in my day, even if I’m not fully prepared.

It’s that last half of the last sentence that still gets me, though. The not being fully prepared thing.

The fact is that at some point, I just shut down. I wake up at 5 in the morning and get to work at 7, where I spend my morning preparing my classroom until school starts at 8:30. Then after school I stay until 5 or 6 preparing my lessons. Then when I get home I tie up the loose ends, like printing out my lesson plans and worksheets or filling out IEP paperwork. By 8 o clock, I just can’t focus anymore on it. I need a glass of Chartreuse, a parsing of Facebook, a reality show on TV. That is, if it’s not one of the nights where I go to class for my graduate coursework.

Same thing on the weekends. On Friday after school, I desperately want to just sit there and take care of all of my planning for the next week. But I need to get out of there. And then I get home and I don’t want to think about it anymore. And on Saturday, I don’t want to think about it anymore. So on Sunday, I force myself to spend the day preparing.

But the things that I need to get done, I should be working nonstop. I should be working til 10 or 11 every night, I should be working every day of the weekend.

That’s what I mean by not fully prepared. It’s like I’m getting stressed out because I’m not working hard enough, but if I worked any harder, I would be burnt out.

The good news is, so far all I get is positive feedback from the administration and other teachers. That’s great, and it keeps me going. But at the end of the day, none of that matters. What matters is whether or not I am truly teaching my students and meeting their needs. They are the ultimate gauge of my effectiveness. And every single day I feel like I have failed them. Because I lose my temper, or I mishandle a situation, or I have not been able to differentiate my instruction effectively. They want to learn. They want to succeed. They want me to be the best teacher they have ever had. And I don’t think that I can be that teacher just yet. I just can’t. That’s the reality.

I wish that I was more OCD and more dedicated and just stayed in my classroom til 8 every night organizing, preparing, envisioning. But I can only learn and develop at the level that I am at. I’m the biggest student in my own classroom.