On Education and Having One's Back Against the Wall

I love calling home.  Whenever someone rings me up or I give them a call, I feel as if I were tapping into a city many miles away.  Whether it is my brother, friends, or parents on the other side of the call, I get a glimpse into what is happening, what I have missed.  My grandfather used to drive around my home town making stops in a circuit which he called “taking the pulse of the city.”  With these calls, I try to take the pulse of my friends, family, and the city in general.

What I have heard increasingly, and saw a bit of when I was in Dearborn over Labor Day weekend, is a resigned sense of desperation.  There are too many people who financially don’t have the option to miss an opportunity to work, no matter when that call comes or how they are feeling.  People with college degrees and people without degrees struggling to maintain a job and some of those who do have a job are still barely able to make ends meet.  Something is missing if people who put this much effort in see this little return. 

Detroit is a special case with the fall of the Big Three American auto makers, the effects of which are still felt by many families.  There is a supposed sense of great hope in Detroit propagated by the media which paints Detroit as a hotbed for social innovation and a developer of solutions.  This is wonderful and that sense of hope is a spirit necessary to move Detroit forward.  However, I have seen more unemployed people.  I have seen more desperation and then hope.  I have seen more people grown accustomed to earning less and complacent with unemployment. 

It is glimpses such as this which speak to the importance of my work as a teacher.  Without a high school diploma, the unemployment percentage is nearly 15% as of 2010 (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm).  There is a $9,000 difference in average yearly earnings between people who have completed high school and those who have not.  But that is the bare necessity, graduating from high school.  After graduating with a  bachelor’s degree, a person earns $19,000 more per year than their peers with a high school diploma. 

It is not just shuttling the youth through an expedited system to graduate “functional illiterates” as Robert Balfanz calls students who graduate from what he calls “dropout factories,” because their functionality will not be very great.  Students need not only know the content, they also need the soft skills to better prepare them for an every evolving world and market.  Some of these necessary soft skills are problem-solving, determination, organization, financial skills, and other job readiness skills.  My challenge will be to develop these skills while teaching ELA and literature to middle school students who will need them next year in high school, and afterwards if they are to be competitive.  Any suggestions on implement strategies of encouraging these skills in my classroom?

Shadowing the Dean

This week I left my class and co-teacher to begin shadowing members of the school staff.  We are shadowing as many members of the school staff so as to get a complete view of how the many different roles at a school work together to create one (or in NAF and NAF Prep's case, two) fully functioning schools.  The first person I provided a shadow for was Mr. Blackman.

Mr. Blackman has had many titles ranging from Behavior Dean to Parent/Student and School Liaison.  He knows how to check misbehavior, he knows how to work with parents and guardians, and he knows Baltimore.  Or in his own words he is the "problem-solver."  Oh and he was Barksdale's bodyguard in The Wire http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1737054/

I was fortunate enough to sit in on a meeting with a student and his guardian while shadowing Mr. Blackman.  One of the most important ideas I took away from this meeting was the idea of respect.  The guardian expressed an animated concern for the student not to be bullied.  Understandable.  But it seemed to boil down to respect, she would not have her boy disrespected at school; would not have him disrespected by boys or even girls in class. 

This rings true for me.  When working in an after school program, respect was my quickest default for a student who was misbehaving or off task.  The student who was off task and being blatantly disrespectful stopped in their tracks when I asked why she was disrespecting me after I had shown her nothing but respect. 

I believe much of this is true in Baltimore as well.  Respect, along with effort and taking a chance, is one of the three requirements in Ms. Karree's class.  I will continue to have a respectful approach (easier said than done) and leverage that when and if students believe they can return my respect with their own disrespect.

First Day at NAF

These first weeks in the Baltimore City Public School System (or BCPSS) have been a blur.  Coupled with class and the holiday weekend, I have left my reflection and this blog for too long.  I have gathered my notes, thoughts, and some time and will be uploading a few posts chronicling my introduction to National Academy Foundation (or NAF) and NAF Prep as a school and community of practitioners, my first week in class, and the second week which ended on Thursday.

For this post, I will focus on my first day meeting the school staff at NAF.  On August 22, the teachers, administrators, school staff, my fellow interns, and I met for the first time at NAF, in a large, old building formerly part of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and directly across from the Johns Hopkins Hospital.  We were some of the first in the room and this gave me enough time to separate myself from the rest of the interns, so as to integrate myself with the staff as much as possible, grab some of the food kitchen staff made for us (one of NAF’s academies is the Academy of Hospitality and Tourism), and ready myself to meet teachers and staff who after today would be my colleagues. 

Then they all began to pour into the room.  After all the chatting stopped (during which I heard about the amazing reading groups from the sixth grade English teacher), we went through the room doing introductions.  I had a moment to think about this while the all of the teachers, deans, assistant principals, and principal introduced themselves.  I don’t know how they do it at other schools, but it was amazing to get a small sense of who every teacher was, what subject they taught, how long they had been a teacher, and usually a bit about their personality.

After everyone had introduced themselves, Principal Webber-Ndour ran through the history of NAF, its successes, challenges, and the goals for the 2011-2012 year.  The school began in 2002 and used to be housed in the Digital Harbor High School from 2004-2009 and moved to its current location in 2009.  With that change came the challenges of moving to a new location, especially to Dunbar’s campus.  Dunbar has dealt with behavior issues and severely low attendance and test scores.  Since the move to the current location, NAF and NAF Prep have focused on diversity, behavior, carrying staff and students from their old location, various building problems.  This year, with everything else having already set up, test scores improvement will be the focus. 

As an intern, this is a really exciting time to join the school.  An eager and highly capable staff will welcome a student body mostly accustomed to how the school runs.  Now with all these positive systems set up we can teach effectively to a (hopefully) receptive audience.  One of the greatest thoughts Mr. Kerr expressed during this first day was “we will take care of the ridiculous behavior issues so you can do what you do best – teach.”  This struck me because it was completely in line with the schools dedication to a teacher-led facility.  The staff has assumed a role of background supporters of what goes on in the classroom, which I find compelling as I step into the classroom for the third year, but this time with the most planning and support I have ever had.

Finally, I met my mentor teacher, Julie Karree, the eighth grade English teacher and a Teach for America alumni.  Equipped with a wall of over 2000 books, I look forward to learning from her and through my own experience.  Here we go!

Team Building

Today my cohort, our advisers, and I spent the morning team building with a group called Outdoor Pursuits. This group highlights not only gaining skills, such as mountain climbing or kayaking, but also soft skills including problem-solving, leadership, and team work. Instead of going out to the woods for ten days, we went to the campus gym and spent three hours doing team building activities. Coming from a non-profit in which team building was heavily used to join a large group of individuals who would spend at least ten hours together daily, I had some idea of the place to put myself mentally and emotionally.

We started easy enough with some opening games in which the goal was simply to get us introducing ourselves (to fellow cohort members whom we had met earlier this summer) moving, talking, and playing. Then, came the more challenging activities which we were meant to draw deeper concepts from. Finally, we debriefed our day, our experiences, what we thought of it, and how we saw what we did today fitting into our personal and professional lives as teachers. Personally, my highly distractible mind always seeks connections between various experiences. Thus I relate the outline which I have just laid out for the today’s team building as a lesson plan or even expand it to relate to a school year. Both begin easy with some sort of introduction, next comes the content which the student is supposed to draw meaning from, finally the assessment to gage how much the student has gleaned. But that is just the broad strokes.

Starting out was easy enough. We played a “who did this in their life game” in which we had to get people to sign off on experiences they had had (examples: “has been to a national park” or “has lived in a foreign country”). This I didn’t put much effort into because I didn’t see the point of team building with classmates. In my opinion, these would be colleagues who would challenge thoughts I had regarding readings and graduate courses, not teammates whom I would need the benefits of team building to work with. I was called out, and rightly so, for not having many signatures. I had been too resigned in the first activity. How would my classroom function if my students didn’t put themselves in an uncomfortable place for them to grow?

In the next few exercises I tried to spark the J-factor from Doug Lemov's book, Teach Like a Champion in myself and, as much as I could, in those I would spend a year with. I wasn't to learn about the term until later when the cohort and our advisers debriefed, but I found this factor as one of the key reasons to teach or do anything else, the joy that it brings one. This is the source of the name of this blog. If you, my reader, would like to hear one teacher's journey through part of a year refining her teaching skills by reading this book and implementing its skills click these underlined words.

The day progressed and we finally got to the last lengthy activity I will refer to as Hazardous Materials. The object was to move a bucket full of balls and water through a gym, then a hallway, and finally down some stairs. There were three roles for this activity: Laborers (4) individuals who could manipulate the bucket who were blindfolded, Project Managers (2) directors of laborers, and a Safety Adviser (1) made sure rules were being followed but could not advise other than that. There were other constraints, aren't there always, which I won't go into. I was the Safety Adviser and only interacted in a very few times. However, just as we were advised in the beginning, I had a birds eye view of everyone else, an non-participatory observer; being non-participatory goes very much against my nature, which is why I choose this role. For me, these roles related very much to a school setting. The laborers, project managers, and safety adviser became students, teachers, and administrators or other observers.

I hated not being able to interact or give feedback. In much the same way, I want to grow as a teacher as quickly as possible. This being my third year in a classroom, but the first in which my role shifts much more towards the front of the room, I would like to skip those first years of a new teacher's life which are pretty awful. To help further this cause, please leave comments or give me feedback in as many ways as you can. Help me skip the mess of a teacher too green behind the ears and help me become the teacher I need to be for the students who need the most attention. Thank you for reading.