uh oh

I hear it all the time. The sixties are over. We have a black president, how can you possibly still be talking about segregated schools, this is America! We've come a long way. Racism only exists in the South. It's all just because people want to live in different neighborhoods. Etc. Etc. Etc.

People seem to think that racism is "dead" or at least only visible in tiny pockets, somewhere in the deep south. This is a nice idea, but racism has a new face and people in the northeast love to ignore it. In the interest of offering another point of view, I offer the following story...(the names are fake because I don't want to get in trouble).

On Tuesday of this week a student threw a big rock at another student and shoved a teacher, hard, in the chest. He is a very nice young man, this student, but he also has a learning disability that makes it very difficult for him to adjust to new situations. Since he was on a field trip that day, and suddenly things didn't go as planned, he freaked out. He was taken home and suspended for one day. The teacher wrote it up, filed it, and we haven't said much about it since. This particular student has made terrific progress over the years, and these incidents are pretty rare. Let's call this student "Frank".

Another student has a mouth like a sailor and a bad attitude. I, of course, love him to pieces. He is constantly threatening to kill me, sue me, smash my windshield, and it is a joke and I know it. It's his own socially inept way it's a show of affection. I guess we have a similar sense of humor. (I realize these statements sound awful, but in context and with the right tone of voice, telling your English teacher, "I'm going to slash your tires if you assign homework tonight" can be really funny). Let's call this student "Ignatius".

Another student, new to us this fall, also has a mouth. He is incredibly impulsive and energetic and constantly getting in arguments with one of his classmates. He makes verbal threats in a menacing tone of voice and then laughs hysterically, which several of his classmates find very funny and a few others do not. He is constantly moving and has one of the worst cases of ADHD I've ever seen. He and a few other boys have gotten into scuffles but nothing serious and he has yet to be suspended. Let's call this student "Homer".

For the past few weeks, a teacher, we'll call him "Geoffrey", has been pulling teachers aside and complaining about Homer's behavior. He says things like, "He is going to be a behavior problem, I can see it coming" and "We need to get him out now before we're in a legal mess" and "He doesn't belong here" and "We can't handle this here" and the like. He has spoken at length to several faculty members about how worried he is about Homer and how concerned he is for the other students.

Oddly, Geoffrey hasn't ever mentioned that Ignatius and Frank ought to leave, even though their behaviors are very similar, and in Frank's case distinctly worse. So...what gives?

Homer is black.

Now, is it Geoffrey's malicious intent to kick the only student of color out of our school? Probably not. Is it the result of an implicit bias that Geoffrey has not had the occasion to reflect upon? Probably. Is anyone going to react well if I bring this up at faculty meeting? Definitely not.

What would you do...?

stuff that happens

Hey I have a blog! Neat!

As it turns out, teaching takes a lot of one's personal time. In addition to that, when one does get some personal time, it's kind of like being removed from a giant washing machine, all wrung out and disoriented. By the time one reaches a place in which blogging is a physical, mental and emotional possibility it's time for class again.

That said, I was at faculty meeting today relaying a story from earlier and realized that there are so many things to blog about and it's a shame to let them go unshared with the internet. For example, when one of my favorite students turned into the Tasmanian Devil this morning, attacked another student, screamed and cried at the top of her lungs while running through every classroom in the school and, when cornered, wriggled out of the library window. Then, when another student caught her as she was coming out of the window she shoved him and screamed, "don't fucking touch me! don't fucking come near me! he's touching me!" and attempted to turn the wrath of the administration upon this young man who did not speak then or for several hours after the incident.

I work in a different sort of school.

Actually, I get up every morning happy to go to work. I hate to believe this, but I think loving a job is pretty rare. I know I've had many that I certainly didn't love. Yet, in spite of children flailing and screaming and occasionally being referred to psych wards, I enjoy the hell out of teaching at my school.

Here's the thing, it takes about 80 hours of my week. So, blog, I am terribly sorry about all the neglect. I am hereby pledging to make a sincere effort to relay a teaching story here and there, because some stuff should be recorded. Like today, when, before the madness, one of my students set up an elaborate arrangement of mirrors and one beam of light so that anyone entering the girl's bathroom, upon looking in the mirror, looked like the target of a sniper. THAT is just plain funny.

things that happen at the end of the semester

It's Friday and you've had about 9 hours of sleep since Tuesday. You meet with students all throughout the actual lunch period. By the time 3 o'clock arrives you are starving. Since you are lactose intolerant and your lunch is just a block of cheese and crackers (you haven't really had time to make food this week) you dig through your bag for some pills that will let you eat dairy.

You dig. And dig. And dig. You are out of dairy pills. You know damn well you are out because you ate the last one the night before at the parents' night in which you avoided awkward conversation by eating fistfuls of havarti.

You accept an orange from a coworker. By four o'clock your stomach is making terrible noises. People are staring. You register a weak but definite synapse firing...a lost dairy pill..somewhere. Yes! Earlier in the semester you dropped one in the car and ignored it, grabbing another from the container.

Do you leave the staff meeting to dig through your car?

...growl growl grumble...

Yes. Yes you do. You dig under the diet pepsi cans and muddied newspapers and CVS receipts to find that lost dairy pill. It takes about five minutes.

You return to staff meeting, pop it in your mouth, and eat that cheese like it was the last block of cheese on Earth.

The Department of Redundancy Department

During my time as a graduate student, there was a case in North Carolina regarding the rape of a stripper and several Duke rugby players.  Perhaps you remember it too.  Some insensitive prick wrote an article in the Harvard Crimson immediately following the incident, and I wrote a blog about it.  Said blog prompted my father, lifetime editor of my writing, to say, "You know...you are good at writing about things that make you mad...but...um...you are terrible at writing WHEN you're mad."

All that to say, it is inadvisable to write this blog about the Department of Education at this very moment.  Excuse me.  All that to say, it is inadvisable to write this blog about the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education at this very moment.

But those fuckers have earned themselves what promises to be an incoherent, disorganized blog.  Actually, they have earned this honor in partnership with the Office of Educator Licensure at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Together, they form the Department of Redundancy Department.

Ahem.  Let's start at the beginning.  Or, rather, let's start at the end of undergraduate studies.  A distant moon ago, I completed my bachelor's degree and took a job as a paraprofessional in a local school.  While working at that job, I decided to pursue a career in education.  This decision necessitated a Master's degree, which I got.  Following that, I took the required state exams for teacher licensure in my subject, passed both of them without a single question wrong thankyouverymuch, and got the bottom rung license one can get, assuming I would move up the license ladder as I got more experience teaching.  

The above paragraph took 7 years and cost approximately 127,000 dollars.   (And yes, shaping young minds is priceless.)

Since earning this teaching license, I have been teaching for a tad under three years.  Now, with two years left on my "bottom rung" license, I need to think about beefing that sucker up.  Enter the Dept. of Red. Dept.  

I call.  I ask.  They say, "With a Master's you should be able to get the next level just by applying."

Gee, that's simple.  It must be a lie...

And, indeed, it is.  I apply for said license (earning the Dept. of Red. Dept. 147 dollars) and promptly get a rejection.  The stated reason: my institution does not endorse this license as I did not complete a Teacher Education Program Approved by the State of Massachusetts.  Duh, I knew that.  I completed a sort of policy meets poetry writing meets teacher training program.  BUT I had lots of Teacher Education Program folks in my classes.  In fact, aside from one or two required courses and an internship, I completed the very same program they did.  Some of those credits must transfer...mayhaps I could take a few more classes and be done with it??

Again, the Dept. of Red. Dept.:

"It is up to your school.  Call them and they can tell you what classes you still need to change your license, and you can probably use your current job as a teacher for the practicum."

Okay now this makes sense, sort of.   I call my school's office of Teacher Licensure - they have one because the Dept. of Red. Dept.'s policies are so convoluted and confusing that it takes a full-time employee 40 hours a week to understand them.  The secretary answers.  This office has its own assistant.  Please digest this...

It takes two full-time employees a total of 80 hours per week to explain the Dept. of Red. Dept's policies to Harvard students.  

I get the boss.  This woman is a fucking peach.  Granted, I would be too if it were my job to understand the D. of. Red. D.    We get to a point in the conversation in which she says:

"Are you writing this down?  I am giving you the facts.  These are the facts.  This office cannot tell you what you need to do.  Only the Dept. of Red. Dept. can decide whether or not you need specific classes or internships.  This school has no say in the matter.  I am going to say it again, slowly, so you understand."

At this point I am trying not to smash things, so I just hang up.

I call the Dept. of Red. Dept. 

My call was potentially monitored for quality and training purposes.  I find this especially entertaining.

"Hello?"

"Hello this is [bureaucrat] how can I help you?" 

"I just called, and I'm calling again.  I was told that in order to change my license I needed to call my school and they would tell me what else I needed to take in order to get their endorsement.  Correct?"

"This is correct."

"They said only you could decide that."

"We have no power to decide that.  Only the school can decide what qualifies."

Rather than bother with Harvard again, I call another school, and explain the problem.  Will they look at my transcripts, my current teaching job, a portfolio, and tell me what classes I need to take in order to change my license??

Yes, sort of.  They (UMass Boston) have a certificate program for people with Master's degrees.  I will have to apply to their graduate school, earn 24 credits, and I can use my current job in lieu of an internship placement so that I can continue to work.  (Harvard doesn't understand that people work at jobs for a reason; they have always struggled with that concept.)  

Great!  So I can take night classes, for which my school will pay, and somebody will come watch me teach once and a while, and at the end of it all I can get what I need for nearly zero dollars and I don't have to quit my job.  Super.

Ohhhh hold on a second there cowgirl.  That sounds a bit easy, now doesn't it?  I had better make sure the Dept. of Red. Dept. accepts this kind of route.

Dept. of Red. Dept.

"What are you currently teaching?"

"English."

"At a public high school?"

[with immense guilt] "No...it's...a private school."

[real or imagined disdain?] "I see.  And it is a particular kind of school?  A special education school or parochial perhaps?"

"It's a special ed school."

"Hmm.  So you'll need your special education license and your English."

[I don't mention the history classes.]

"I just spoke with Umass Boston and they claim that I can take a post-graduate certificate course of study and upgrade my English license that way.  I could go back for my special education certification after that, right?"

"How would you be completing the practicum?"

"At my school, Umass said they let you use your current job as placement."

"You can't use a special education classroom for an english practicum."

I won't bother you with the rest of this conversation.  The facts are as follows:

In order to do my current job for more than two years, I need to-- 1. quit my job and get an internship somewhere else for  a semester where I teach English to non special ed students 2. get another master's degree and certification in special education 3. not teach history anymore

It is IMPOSSIBLE to teach English while also teaching special ed, is the message I am getting here.  

---------------

deep breath

---------------

Here's the thing that gets me.  Well, it all gets me.  But the thing that gets me the worst is that I spend every awake second of my day doing my job.  There isn't a second I'm not thinking about how to do what I do better than I'm already doing it.  At the gym, I'm on the treadmill thinking about how the day went and where I went wrong.  Making dinner, I'm thinking about a new way to approach that one kid who keeps giving me trouble.  Falling asleep, I'm worrying about the kid who missed three days in a row.  Brushing my teeth, I am wondering if what I planned for the day is going to work.  I spend my evenings and my weekends grading papers, and I think and think and think about every sentence, from every kid, every time.  And I can't help being immensely pissed off by the thought that these people who keep me on hold all day only to read stock answers from info sheets posted on the sides of their cubicles spend exactly 35 hours per week and not a second more thinking about what's best for kids in schools.  I know it's an old, tired thing to be pissed off about, but it feels fresh to me.  

When I first got to my current school, I asked for a description of what I would be teaching.  

My principal said, "Humans."

Now, the message from the Dept. of Red. Dept. is that in two years, I won't know how to do that.  The real truth is, nobody fucking knows how to do that.  

Eric Holder, Attorney General and also Mister Awesomely Right On (subtitle: how to kinda sorta talk about race in white suburbs)

I was worried for a minute there. I spent lots of time at my last job figuring out how to make a classroom talk about race in a safe, meaningful, real way. I stopped and processed every racially charged statement I heard (over many moans and groans). I didn't allow the n-word in my classroom (or its shortened "friendly" counterpart which ends in an "a" rather than an "er" and is just as much of a problem). My argument was that by using it amongst friends you are keeping the word in the lexicon of your enemies. Why not just eliminate it from the American vocabulary altogether? I did a lot of arguing, and listening. I didn't even know what the goal was, really, except to be able to bring it up in conversation when it came up, rather than avoid it (which is what I usually wanted to do, if you want the truth.)

Anyway, I was worried because I still think the hardest conversations to have are usually the most important and I wasn't sure how they were going to happen at my new school. At my last school, with statements like "I'm gonna put her Puerto Rican hood rat ass back where it belongs" floating around the hallways, there were plenty of opportunities to say..."Um...can we talk about what you just said?"

But rich white folks' kids don't usually say stuff like that. They do this:

Last week, in Literature class with the youngest students, we were reading a story. The story's narrator is born and raised in Harlem, and talks, thinks, and acts like a person few if any of these kids have ever met. He hangs out at a barber shop and has tense relations with the police and thinks 18,000 dollars is the most money he's ever even heard of, never mind actually possessed. After reading the story, I asked the kids to point out some things they noticed.

"They are in New York."
"They are weird."
"They talk weird."
"They are, well he is...you know, everyone in the story is Afr- Bl-"

This poor girl fell all over herself trying to figure out how to say that the characters in this story were black. She wanted to use whatever the most politically correct polite words she could, but she had a very hard time figuring out what those were.

As far as I am concerned, this kind of freaking out while trying to talk about a person whose skin color is different from your own warrants a conversation as desperately as shouting racial slurs in the hallway. This is the problem our amazingly awesome Attorney General was talking about last week. We can't get past this if we can't talk about it.

Of course, it's not always easy knowing what to say. So I said two things:

"Are you trying to say that the characters are black?"

She said that yes, she was trying to say that but "she felt bad."

So I asked her why she thought that made her feel bad.

She couldn't really figure that out. But that's okay, at least she started thinking about it. I also tried to get from the kid who said everyone was "weird" why he thought that, but he didn't really know what to say either.

I think maybe she felt bad because if we had been reading a story narrated by a white person we probably never would have said, "Well I noticed that the narrator is white." Because isn't that the norm that we measure against? When a Christian pro-life wacko shoots an abortion doctor, he isn't a Christian extremist, but when a Muslim shoots someone, what do you think he's called? When Sarah Palin talks to a crowd of all white hockey moms, she's just talkin' to regular Americans, but when Barack Obama talks to an all black church group in Chicago he's playing to a special interest, right?

All this to say, I'm no longer worried about having big, scary, important conversations at my new school. Like everyone else, these kids see the world from where they are standing. And like everyone else, it would probably do them some good to look at it from different shoes once and a while.

Camelot?

Plenty of we the graduates of master's programs in education have spent oodles of time picturing utopia: the school. We know what its teachers are like, what's on the walls, what the classes sound like, what the students feel like every day, and a million other things. I have spent time building this school in my mind in idle daydreams like many girls do their weddings. For two years, I have been trying to shape my school into this place. At every turn, I met resistance. In part, since I did have many victories, this made the job rather satisfying. In other ways, it made it exhausting. Exhausting in the way beating your head against a brick wall is exhausting - you bleed, the wall doesn't.

The students, though, I loved. I love things that are as tough as they are delicate. I don't think I'll ever meet a group of young people more resilient, who went through so much and still somehow figured out how to laugh and trust and learn.

This is why I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt, everyday, for taking my new job. It is an incredible place. So many parts of it are living models of my dreamed-up school. It's uncanny, at times. The art on the walls. The laughter in the classrooms. The passion of the staff. And, in so many other ways, it fulfills all of the selfish needs my other job did not. Money. Vacation. Health care. Better coffee. The list of perks, significant and otherwise, adds up to a situation marvelously sweeter than the last. But...but....

It's a private school. It is the exact racial and economic inverse of my last school.

Can this be utopia?! If a teacher wants to quit her night job, get decent benefits, and teach in a place where art and music aren't subjects of controversy but rather are central to the school itself...does she really, still, in 2009, have to teach only upper middle class white students?

I've been there one month. For the drama session, in which the entire school does nothing but put on a musical. For 2009: Camelot. I tell you, in spite of the magic of this place (and it is magical) neither side of segregation can be Camelot.

snowed

The best thing about being a teacher in New England is not the proximity to so many great institutions of higher learning where you may build your content knowledge and wear tweed. Nor is it the apple picking field trip, the general lack of environmental disasters, the ability to spew left wing rhetoric at your students without a single complaint.... no no. It is your governor on the radio, a full evening ahead of you, telling you to sit back, have a glass of wine, and just forget about going to work tomorrow.

The bliss ends there.

I hate to break this to all of you who are currently enjoying your reproductive rights, but the Bush administration has dealt a final blow to gender equality, human rights, etc. He hates that stuff!

I got this in the mail from my buddy Cecile Richards:

Minutes ago, President Bush's rule limiting the rights of patients to receive complete and accurate reproductive health information when they visit a federally funded health care provider was made official. And, unfortunately, it will take a great deal of work to reverse it — starting today. Please help.

We knew this was coming, of course. With your help, we've been fighting it for months. The rule is clearly a parting gift from Bush to the anti-choice fringe that supported him all these years.

Now, anti-choice medical staff can withhold information about abortion, birth control, and sex education from their patients. Facilities that receive family planning funding, like Planned Parenthood, will have to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control. For example, a doctor who opposes pre-marital sex could refuse to provide a prescription or even information about emergency contraception to an unmarried woman.

This is the most frightening thing I've heard in a long time. As if unwanted pregnancies weren't enough of a problem, it's going to get a hell of a lot harder for women to prevent them. Nay, it's going to get a hell of a lot harder to even get INFORMATION about BIRTH CONTROL. What?! Beyond that, this will disproportionately affect women with limited access to information (poor women, English language learners, you know, the vulnerable people who Bush loves to shit on.)

I debate this issue with my students all the time. Many of these girls have been, as it were, totally snowed. They learned to believe, at some point very early in their lives, that getting pregnant is a sacred gift from god and...well I'll put this in their words:

"If you open your legs, you have to pay the price."

Three things:

1. How sad to be the child whose entire life is payment for something the mother eternally regrets.

2. How much sadder to be the girl who has been so beaten down by society that she actually believes not only that she is powerless, but that she should be.

3. Okay, so you believe "life is sacred" - but should you really advocate for those beliefs to be legislated? Because the people who are stirring this pot you're in don't give a flying poop about life being sacred (or at least not military prisoners or Iraqi citizens or death row inmates...those lives aren't sacred). They want to keep power in the hands of men, and taking decision making power out of the hands of women is the quickest way to do that. The life is sacred thing is just a convenient slogan these power mongers capitalize on to advance their anti-woman, anti-parenting, anti-medical ethics, anti-American agenda.

What a great trick you've pulled, you murdering sexist bigot war criminal. I wish that shoe hit you right in the fucking smirk.

"what do you mean 'we?'"

Well it finally happened. It was the weirdest thing. I knew, eventually, this would happen. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would react, how I would deal with it, whether it should be the type of thing one "reacted" to. But how could I not?

For the past two years, I have been the only white person in my classroom (except during staff meetings). We talk about race all the time in my class. And I've taken quite a few light-hearted jokes directed at white people, which thus far have been part of a healthy conversation. I have been very careful in my pursuit of a space in which talking about race is safe, appropriate, and expected. I never purport to know what I'm doing in this regard, and my students are always very helpful when it comes to telling me what to do.

This month, I welcomed a new student into my class. He is

The. White. Kid.

in the inner city alternative school.

And all the shit I was afraid to deal with has already started to happen. Case in point:

We're studying the American Revolution. One of my personal favorite things to teach. It is a sensitive subject, what with the tendency of old lame-ass text books to glorify the brave colonists and paint them as champions of liberty who fought for their freedom and secured us all a Great American Future. Fortunately, my school can't afford text books so it's up to me to put together my own photocopied collections of readings.

All this being beyond the point. The point is, we were having a conversation, as a class, regarding why the English, rather than the Spanish or the French, ended up putting the "winning" group of colonizers on North America. This usually sparks a conversation regarding why it is ANY European colonizing bastard felt he had the right to be there in the first place.

But here's what happened. The new kid says, "We had more independence from our crown in the first place, so it was easier for us to break away and really make the new colony our own."

And I, without thinking, engage this conversation, the entire time using the pronoun "we."

And after three minutes of engaging this kid in conversation I look around, and I had lost everyone else. So I try to back up.

"Let me just check in here, what do WE mean when we say 'we?'"

And one kid pipes up and says, rather pointedly, "Yeah, what DO you mean we?"

What did I mean? Am I the teacher I read about in all those articles in grad school? The one who, regardless of all her efforts, engaged the student of her own race in conversation more readily than those of a different race? The one who used words carelessly without considering the points of view of all her students?

All of this, of course, calls into question all the work I've done so far. Did I really create a safe space for tough conversations...or did I create a precariously safe space that's easily thrown by a change in group dynamics?

Jeez. Teaching is hard. They should pay us more. Goodnight.

Crap! Is it August?!

Besides being a reminder that I’m one of the several hundred thousand Bostonians about to move on good ole September 1^st, the arrival of August is always moderately depressing. One begins to reevaluate one’s summer. There have been exactly zero trips to the beach, days off, picnics, one nasty tan line from a day of biking but otherwise still Scottishly pale… And of course every new month delivers the sinking, cold realization that I have criminally neglected my blog yet again.

I’ll go ahead and sum up all that I missed in…

Top Five Things I Totally Meant to Blog About Last Month

Or

My Summer Thus Far

#5 PROOF that my asshole coworker actually is an asshole

Oh most desired gift at last you’ve arrived. For the entirety of my employment I have known that this woman (referred to in previous blogs as Jabba the Hut) is an asshole. Like the worst kind of asshole, she manages somehow to evade what should be a companywide intervention based on the universal consensus that she is so egregiously awful that it is a violation of state safety regulations to force other employees to work anywhere near her. Rather, she manages to win the favor of certain administrators who, uh, clearly find their asses and elbows indistinguishable from one another.

What she does is the following:

We’re in community meeting, a weekly gathering of all students and staff wherein all may make announcements to the entire school and student leadership may put various things to a vote and blah blah blah. At this particular meeting one student, who had not attended the graduation ceremony, was receiving an award that came with a small scholarship. She was sitting with her case manager (our school has counselors assigned to each student) and both ladies were jokingly grabbing the scholarship check back and forth from one another during the rest of the meeting. Jabba the Hut notices this playful act and bellows, to a roomful of people who HADN’T necessarily noticed what was going on, “Whoops! Hang on to that check, you gotta watch these Puerto Ricans every second!”

Pause. Digest.

Now, if a student had yelled some racially charged statement like that in the middle of a meeting, I would stop everything and process the statement with everyone. I am constantly doing the work of getting the students to reflect on their own racialized statements and beliefs so that, someday, we might be in a place where those kinds of statements aren’t even thought, let alone screamed at the top of one’s lungs.

But what was I to do when a staff member did it?

Apparently I was to drop the dry erase marker I had in my hand, and say, “I can’t believe you just said that.”

Everyone tittered awkwardly and things moved right along. How the hell are we going to get the kids to start reevaluating their beliefs about race if the teachers make these kinds of statements?!

Silver lining: now everyone knows she’s an asshole.

#4 Culture Clash: Bikes v. Cars

I’ll admit right away that I used to loathe bikers. Those idiots weaving in and out of lanes wearing pants three sizes too small and flipping everyone off. But now having seen Boston drivers from behind the handle bars, I would flip everyone off too if I wasn’t so scared of riding without holding on… Car drivers’ sense of superiority and imagined entitlement to the entire road is at worst dangerous and at best really fucking irritating.

I had a run-in with just such a gas guzzling enemy of the planet mid-July while on a leisurely bike ride through Watertown. I don’t know how many of my several thousand dedicated readers are familiar with Watertown, but it’s a pretty mellow place with many residential areas. My boyfriend and I were taking a left off one residential street onto another, waiting in the middle of the road for oncoming cars to pass, just as a motor vehicle would have done. The car behind us begins laying on horn, yelling, “Get out of the road!”

This poor soul thought that only cars had the right to use the roads that all we taxpayers pay for. As I often do, I responded to potential conflict with grace and respect for another point of view…

OR

I screamed a string of obscenities in the direction of the speeding car as it headed toward a red light one hundred feet away. My better half responded the way a person as level headed as I never would, and chased after the car. The following interaction ensued:

My better half (MBH): Hey you really didn’t need to yell at us

Patty Petroleum (chewing French fries): Get out of the road

MBH: You get out of the road; I have just as much right to be on it as you do

PP: You have the sidewalk

MBH: Sidewalks indicate their purpose in their name and bikes aren’t allowed on the sidewalks anyway

PP: Whatever

MBH: So it’s okay for you to scream at people, but it’s not okay for me to-

Light turns green. Petroleum Patty wields her enormous arm to form a familiar gesture with its sausage fingers and yells the following brilliant statement out the window:

PP: GET A CAR!!!!!

Well we hadn’t thought of that! Thanks, Patty Petroleum! I mean, it’s really hard to eat all my meals out of a Styrofoam box while riding my bike! I could just GET A CAR! It’s been such a drag being able to park right next to my destination rather than patronize my friendly neighborhood garage three blocks away! I should buy a CAR! I really hate fitting into the same jeans I’ve worn since my early twenties, I need to gain weight so I can rationalize buying new clothes. I’ll get a CAR!

….of course, I do own a car. But I’m nice about it. Eat me, Petroleum Patty!!!

#3 JUST IN CASE YOU STILL DON’T THINK MY COWORKER IS AN ASSHOLE

Oh boy is this one priceless. We are in a staff meeting, headed by our boss who is African American. Jabba the Hut is taking the notes, and says…

“How do you spell your name again?”

Our boss, who has worked with us for three months now, replies.

Jabba says, “Oh that must be one of those made up black names.”

… … …

I’m just going to leave that hanging…but trust that it did not make it into the meeting minutes.

#2 Dante’s Sixth Circle of Hell

Otherwise known as the Boston Children’s Museum. A cesspool of diapers, whining, snotty sleeves, untied shoelaces, frantic parents, disobedient little persons darting around with no regard for passers by. When I face my ultimate comeuppance, it will be there I am sent.

During summer school we take the students on field trips every Friday. Since most of our students have children themselves, we take one trip on which students may bring their families. The amount of hatred I harbor for this annual event cannot be properly expressed in words. See, a group of teenagers gathered together, regardless of whether they are playing the role of parent or student, behaves like a group of teenagers. So when you combine a group of teenagers with a group of sub-3 year olds plus cell phones plus all the social pressures and conflicts and norms of school you get:

“Oh hell no she won’t. I am not playin’ with that ho- ”

“Don’t say ho in front of my kid.”

“Why hasn’t he met his momma?”

“Bitch I am not PLAYING with you.”

“Baby get out of the ROAD get out of the fucking road get the fuck out of the road.”

“Yo your baby is mad cute!”

“I’m at school. I don’t know a museum. I told you don’t be chirpin’ me at school….hello? Motherfucker I KNOW you didn’t hang up on me.”

“Hello? Did you just-”

“HellOOOO?”

“Where the bathrooms at?!”

“Where’d Miss Kelly go?”

Miss Kelly went straight to the museum shop, where she sat and read a book for the entire day.*

*Conscience alert: If I were a different blogger, I might have talked about observing my students in their roles as parents and how a palpable sense of community made the chaperons smile as the students encouraged their kids to play together. And I might have also mentioned the moments of unguarded, unselfconscious curiosity and wonder while they learned with their kids at various exhibits…but we can’t have that messing up my reputation.

#1 Unprotected Sex

Second only to the Children’s Museum as a reaffirmation of my decision to barricade these baby tubes with two coils of steel, this delightful endeavor is ill-advised for most of you poor saps but gee golly if it isn’t making fine and dandy my vacationless summer vacation. High five!

Retreat! Retreat!

According to the dictionary, retreat means: 1 a (1): an act or process of withdrawing especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable

According to my boss it means disguising a team building marathon as a mini work vacation. The main mode of disguise is location. Meetings aren't meetings when they happen in some OTHER conference room!

Thus, the gaggle of overweight pale grouchy non-profit employees in second hand clothes and comfortable shoes gathered in the early morning sun at a dock in the Boston Harbor, bound for trust falls and ice breakers. The teaching staff was especially attractive, the ancients in their sun hats, I in the same skort and sneakers I wear every day all summer long, and the bipolar chain smoking bad poetry writing weird ass new girl in some kind of hemp outfit. Our boss waddled up to the dock dead last, laden with the giant Post-it easel pad and a copy of The Complete Idiots Guide to Team Building.

As we motored through the harbor, flanked by rows of rusting freight cars and floating plastic bottles, I leaned over the railing and stared at the water. There is a certain mindless peace that comes only on a boat. I had my own twenty minute retreat, which was interrupted by the question, "Hey which Gilligan's Island characters would we all be?!"

I. Would. Rather. Drown.

The new girl was mystified by her nomination to the Gilligan role, proof of a casting job well done. My role was decided as follows:

"Kelly's the professor."

"No she's Ginger."

"Ginger??"

A glance in my direction.

"The movie star? The one that dresses up all the time?"

"Yeah, but wasn't Ginger really self absorbed?"

"Oh, yeah. Okay Kelly's Ginger, so who's the professor?"

And the team building just kept on rolling, all day long.

the best thing i have done as a science teacher

I rearranged my room the other day, and moved my model of the solar system to a new location. Now, it sits atop a tall file cabinet, right over the oft-visited pencil sharpener, which also got moved. So now, I've gotten to have the following interaction approximately sixteen times:

Student: Hey, where's the sharpener?
Kelly: It's right under Uranus.

It's definitely June.

Perseverance Award

Every year, at graduation, my school gives out the "Perseverance Award" to a student who isn't graduating that day, but who has worked to overcome amazing barriers. They get a small scholarship which they can use toward college tuition when they do graduate. The last two recipients include one girl who battled her way through several homeless shelters with her daughter in tow and came to school as a 19 year old barely able to read, and a young man who was so afraid of being killed by the same gang members who killed his brother that we picked him up when he missed the bus so he wouldn't have to take the T. The world has been terribly unfair to some of these kids, but they are a resourceful group and we like to reward that. I was writing the text of the Award speech for graduation this year (because I was at work, on a holiday, because we aren't in a union and therefore get to show our "entrepreneurial spirit" by working every fucking vacation day) when my boss called this morning.

"Traffic is really bad, there are roads closed for the marathon. I can't figure out how to get around it. I think I'm just not going to come in today."

Way to be, fearless leader.

Believe to Achieve (Part Two)

So, the conference.

A project of the National Urban Alliance, this conference was billed as "The Most Important Educational Experience of 2008." The goal of the conference was noble: give educators the tools to close the achievement gap one classroom, or one district, at a time AND reaffirm that education is a fundamental civil right. The goal of me and my Education Action! buddies: meet as many passionate activists as possible and get them working on educational justice in their home communities. It seemed, on paper, that OUR goal and NUA's goals were going to dovetail nicely in gorgeous downtown Albany. We piled into the EdAction Mobile at 8 p.m. Friday night, bound for Achievement.


Saturday morning, very early, we entered the Crowne Plaza's lobby. A small crowd milled about. Everyone was sort of swaying in place, waiting for what we did not know. The whole scene had an underwater quality. The concierge informed us that everyone was waiting for a shuttle to the convention center, where the conference was ACTUALLY being held. Lugging our collection of recruitment materials, promotional materials, NCLB information, and general whatnot, we waited outside amid the flotsam and jetsam. We piled in the van. It took us approximately seven feet North to the convention center. We piled out. These things always have a funny way of making us realize what our students must feel like when we create inefficient systems for them to operate within.

The convention center is the weirdest building on earth. It is HUGE. Absolutely huge. The hallways are wide enough for three Hummers and a horse drawn carriage. Everything echos. Sporadically, in random corners, modern art appears, the sort of art that makes you wonder what distinguishes "art" from "nice try buddy." We walk through this building a longer distance than we traveled in the van, arriving at last in the center where registration tables are assembled.

The registration tables look like tic tacs sitting in a swimming pool. This place is a rough venue to generate conversation and build community. But we hang on to our optimism. This is the Most Important Place To Go All Year, remember?!

Fast forward. It is lunch time. Three people have passed our table. They did not stop. Those little golf cart things carrying maintenance workers and security guards whiz by like tumbleweed. This. Place. Is. Empty. We decide to split up the table-watching duties, and two of us head to a breakout session.



My session is concerned with reframing the idea of underachievement. The primary take away: it's all in our attitude. If we expect our students to underachieve, they will do just that. We find what we're looking for, every time. So, if we look for success, if we expect it, we'll get it. This is an important message. Too often, I sit in staff meetings addressing each student according to weaknesses. This is the language we speak: failures, risks of failures, weaknesses, challenges, etc. We almost never speak in positives.

At one point, the presenter asked us to share with our neighbors some positive words we felt described urban "underachievers." I am flanked by administrators. They are very encouraged to hear that I teach the homeless/teen parent/court involved population, which they had experience doing earlier in their careers. So we start thinking about generalizations, of the positive nature, that we can make about our students, past or present. I say, "Resourceful" which makes everyone nod. They say, "Persistent." One woman is writing down all of our suggestions, as was directed by our facilitator. I say, "Passionate." They cock their heads. Really? Passionate? They don't write it down, and move right along in the conversation.

When we come back together as a group, the four most common responses are put up on the powerpoint Family Feud style. Our group had written down all four. Passionate was not up there. My neighbors are very satisfied with themselves. They got the right answers.

That pretty much sums up my review of the conference right there. We want to address the achievement gap, and we do a lot of rephrasing terminology, looking at the results of expensive research projects, and fighting a system riddled with racism and sexism and classism and greed. We want our schools to be equitable and excellent and the education they provide to be a guaranteed civil right. But, when it comes down to it, we are up against ourselves. We are up against our own expectations for our schools and our students. We are up against administrators that don't think "passionate" is a valid adjective to describe a group of students. We are up against a culture that values getting answers more than really thinking about questions.

All weekend, we spoke to about six passionate advocates for change. Since then, we've been in contact with one of them. I want to say to these people: attending a conference for a weekend isn't making change. Writing one email to an activist organization about how much you believe in the cause and then never following up on it isn't making change. Getting the same answers as everyone else in your workshop on closing the achievement gap isn't making change. It's as if the standardized testing mentality, that many of us agree is detrimental to schools, has been ingrained into the minds of these well meaning educators. Reform efforts seem to fall into the same "just skim the surface and move on" trap as test-prep obsessed curricula. There seems to be this idea that never using the word "Underachiever" again is all one needs to do to eliminate underachievement. It's a valid step, sure, but creating an educational system that provides an equal education for all races and social classes is going to take more than vocabulary.

Get out there and DO something, people!

Believe to Achieve (Part One)

Normally, my weekends are rather joyful. I flee work on Friday like the building is on fire no later than 4:30 pm, and go straight to the gym (or, if there are warmer-than-tundra conditions by the river, head outside to run). Boxing, running, spinning class - whatever it is, I sweat a lot. Then I get to tumble into a big hug from a cute boy, and spend all weekend lolling about asking each other, "What do you want to do?" More times than not, the plot involves a lot of napping and a delightful martini or two. By Sunday night I am armed for battle again.

This weekend, however, I got to attend my first ever All Weekend Professional Conference. This is different from the All Day Conference, which I've already mastered. It is different because instead of missing a day of work you just work all fucking weekend. No lolling. No cute boy. No martinis. Just a three and a half hour drive to Albany.

Let me tell you something about Albany.

...something...something to say about Albany...

My search yields nothing. There are exactly zero things to say about this place except that Albany in March is like Worcester in December. A crappy, cold, not-quite-a-place. I'm getting ahead of myself. The drive:

We take the company car, possession of which I find hilarious given that we have, technically, three human staffers, two bunnies, and an empty bank account. My coworkers and I prepare like we would for any car trip longer than forty five minutes - pack a bag absolutely filled to the brim with snacks. Wasabi peas, crackers, gummy candy, peppermint patties, a grapefruit, beef jerky, cans of soda, three nalgene-fulls of water, salt and vinegar chips. Three minutes into the drive we stopped for coffee and a sandwich. (Just in case we got stranded!)

The three little piggies and their Fast Lane barreled onto the Mass Pike headed west, bound for the 2008 Believe To Achieve Conference. I mean, if we're going to close the achievement gap, we'd better not go in hungry.

Somewhere close to the New York border the world forgets that it is spring and begins to snow like a banshee. I am in a contemplative mood, arms crossed in the backseat, listening to Radiohead and staring out the window. The snow on the side of the road gets deeper and deeper. Somebody switches the CD. The Shins. I squish my forehead into the window and contemplate suicide, hand in the salt and vinegar chips.

We're on Route 87, in search of our Pricelined stay at the Regency just outside of Albany.

I judge my hotels across a complicated cross-section of criteria. I won't bore you with those here. Just know that this Regency fell, judging by that index, in between the first Motel 6 you hit after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into Tijuana, and the time I went camping in the bed of a Ford F150 with a capped bed.

The door bell drew a customer service representative who looked like a defendant in a domestic violence case. This gem of a beefcake, bedazzled beneath gold chains, sported a sweatshirt with a sewn on logo for the NYPD and an embroidered message: "Cops for Cops."

Either he had some internal digestion issue or he said hello, I couldn't tell. Nayad, who is like a pretty flower doused with honey wearing a cloak of sunshine and music, says: "Oh hello sir we are just checking in."

For fun, we hold hands.

Nayad says, "I'm so excited for our weekend, Pat."

We make kissy faces.

Cops for Cops is unamused.

Nayad says, "We have to be downtown tomorrow morning by 8 for a conference, what times does your shuttle run?"

Cops for Cops emits grunts that translate into, "We don't have a shuttle." Nayad, like a little wood sprite sprinkled in fairy dust and happiness flakes, informs Officer Congeniality that the website lists a shuttle to downtown as an amenity and this particular amenity figured prominently in our decision to book this room.

Cops for Cops hands Nayad her cards back to her and says, while walking back into his cubicle of manliness, "Shuttle only on weekdays." We can hear, as the door opens and closes, that he is watching a film. I can't resist. I walk over and peer in.

He's watching Phenomenon starring John Travolta. For those of you who haven't seen it, it ranks just above Steel Magnolias on the "Funniest Movies to Catch This Guy Watching" list.

We have trouble abandoning the shuttle issue, even though we can drive in just as easily. Luckily, we brought the printer. We print out the web page, and march back out to the lobby. Nayad may actually have been concerned about the issue at hand. I one hundred percent just wanted to screw with Cops for Cops. He hands us the list of amenities and the list goes like the following, asterisks are for the ones of whose existence we found zero proof:
Cable TV
Tennis Court*
Pool*
Continental Breakfast
Air Conditioning
Shuttle to Albany
Room Service

The last two, on every such card we found throughout our stay, were CROSSED OUT WITH A PEN.

Cops for Cops one. Us zero.

Since it was just about midnight at this point, we gave up and went to bed.

In Part Two I'll actually talk about the conference. Not to ruin it, but...we didn't do shit about the achievement gap. We didn't even get lunch.

test prep test schmep

This will be short. Remember that time I got demoted for being too "unfocused on testing" and "progressive to a fault?" You know, the time when they told me to do more test prep or they would fire me. Well I do. And since then our students have taken lots and lots of tests. Ohhh how we love tests.

Lo and fucking behold:

ONCE AGAIN, upon receiving the test results this morning, we can see that: the test scores in my subjects for my students were higher than every single other subject and every single other teacher.

Did I bend to the will of the test prep wackos? No, no I did not. In fact, in my childish stubborn manner that is both adorable and effective, I did approximately ZERO test prep this school year. You know what I did do? I loved the crap out of my kids and my job and I did not for one nano-second believe that any of them could fail. That's it.

Huzzah! Drill and kill this, bitches. Sniff...sniff...mmm...I love the smell of victory in the morning.

AWKWARD

Ok, I was blogging about teaching Hamlet. But I'll do that later because I cannot possibly allow this moment to pass without sharing it. It'd be like Horatio choosing to die at the end instead of promising to tell Hamlet's story. It is that serious.

I am at my desk. It is...let's see...4:30. School has been over for a long while now. The halls are silent. There are open rooms and offices in abundance. If you wanted to, I don't know, have a remarkarbly personal conversation or marital spat, there are ample spaces in the building.

I am sitting approximately four feet and seven inches from the desk at which my boss is sitting.

She is in here. Now.

You are thinking: "Kelly, shouldn't you stop typing and talk to your boss? I mean she's looking right at you?!"

No she isn't!! She is ON her CELL PHONE arguing IN SPANISH with her husband. I can hear him yelling from here. He is very very pissed off. So is she. She keeps trying to cut him off....

"Entonces...entonces...ENTONCES MI AMOR...mi amor...si, si...mi amor..."

I'm going to go ahead and file this under "Fucking awkward."

just like riding a bike

There's lots of stuff I don't like to admit. Like: I don't buy peanut butter anymore because I was consuming a jar a week. Or: I wept like a beaten child at the end of Ice Age 2*. Also: I have never seen any of the Godfather movies, and I probably never will. And of course: When I lived in Kentucky I watched Project Runway. A lot.



Up until recently I had one admission that didn't bother me so much. Said admission being that, other than the one time in France, I've never ridden a bike. I just never learned. And I've told people over and over again, always savoring a bit of satisfaction in their shock: "What?!" "Really?!" "Where the hell did you grow up?" "Can you swim?!"

I can swim.

Typically, this encounter involved me and one or two other people at a time. Yesterday, however, I was submerged into a world wholly unknown to me: the indoor bicycle race. Far be it from me to refuse an evening of beer and sweaty men in spandex. This is a world of people obsessed with bicycles and riding them and talking about them and fixing them and reading about them and bragging about crashing them. A world of uniform uniqueness just like good ol Emerson College. With their tattoos, hooded sweatshirts, "no one else here has ever seen this t-shirt" t-shirts, and tight pants. Also beards. They love beards.

I'm sitting in the middle of this bikefest like a dude with herpes on Spring Break. Do I tell them...?? Can they tell anyway...?

It is like any subculture, I guess, so the concept isn't new to me. Any gathering of runners is just as ridiculous in its obsessiveness. I have purchased my fair share of runner crap. I subscribe to Runner's World; I have a runner hero; I have run a race with a broken foot. I love talking about running, reading about running, looking over my running log, and of course actually running. But running can be painful, arduous...I can understand why someone would think that loving it is pure madness. In fact, at any of the bizillion running events I've been to, never have I heard anyone trying to convince a non-runner to run.


Not so for the bikers! They will make you sit on a bike, they will offer to teach you to ride a bike, they will offer to find you a bike, they will offer you a bike they have sitting in their basement. They will stop at nothing.

[I just need to interrupt myself here for a second to report live, from my desk, in the deserted basement o' learning: I just bought a bag of peanut m&ms from the vending machine upstairs. I am about 3/4 of the way through this sucker and I have to let it out: There are NO peanuts in this bag. They are just giant m&ms. Forgotten peanuts. What the fuck, Mars, Inc??]

Enter Wicked Mature Kelly. I ask you to envision the following conversation:

Me: I will not eat the broccoli.
Adult: Yes you will.
Me: No. I won't.
Adult: Eat the broccoli or you can't watch a movie after dinner.
Me: Fine.
Adult: Okay, no movies til you eat broccoli.
Me: I will never watch movies again.
Adult: Kelly, just eat the broccoli....


This might as well have happened when I was 25, because nothing has changed. My decision to NOT do something involuntarily cements itself at the exact moment I am told I should do the given thing. It's the eight year old reflex. I've got it big time.

In the midst of my internal resistance and surrounded by sweat and spandex, a tiny tiny microscopic portion of my stubborn constitution gave a little. Mentally, I revisited the sole instance of my bike ridership. The following conditions applied:
1. I was in France, and therefore all drunk on cheese
2. The bike path was entirely closed to traffic
3. The person with whom I took the ride had also never ridden a bike
4. The temptation for "it's just like riding a bike" jokes was just too strong

...What I didn't realize was that the distance between the bike path and the sheer rock face of the cliffs of insanity, a reassuring fifteen feet at the rental shop, narrowed to approximately three inches for the last several miles of the trip. That's another story entirely. It involves elevated blood pressure and walking.

Like most everything I see and do in the world, I relate this back to teaching. The conditions necessary for me to try a new thing (which is all that learning is) were:

• I was in a place that held no memories of previous failures. While I feared for my safety (and the safety of anyone biking near me) I didn't worry about being judged.



• The place was secluded from real or perceived dangers (at least initially, the dangers being cars. The cliffs of insanity kinda ruin this part of the analogy.)



• The person with whom I DID the learning was learning herself.

So, how do I make my classroom like a small fishing village in France? It seems like the work to be done first is twofold. One, getting students to abandon any negative associations with the classroom. Too often the simple act of sitting in a desk and looking at a white board immediately brings back negative feelings in students, especially those who have left the mainstream system. In my opinion this is best done by getting the hell out of the classroom. Field trips don't have to be elaborate, expensive, or rare. One of the best trips I've ever done was just a walk down the street to practice descriptive writing. They could have just as easily described the classroom, but the act of walking out of school and describing a neutral place brought out some great writing and some improved attitudes. And it was free! Two, making sure you are willing to be wrong in the classroom. Being fallible in the classroom helps build trust and makes students feel like they aren't being judged. This is my rationale for being wrong a lot, but I'm pretty attached to it at this point. Also, I have found that cheese and baguettes serve a person well in any situation.

*I am sorry, but when Queen Latifah and Ray Romano realize that they are not the last Woolly Mammoths on Earth, and that they do not have to stay together to save the species, but choose to stay together for LOVE, that shit is a tissue-fest and you know it.

Pall Thee in the Dunnest Smoke of Hell, Jerks!!!!

I have written before about my school's opposition to Shakespeare. When I tried previously to bring it into class, I was shot down for being unfair to students who "weren't ready" for that kind of material. Lord what fools these administrators be. But...Huzzah! Those crusty botches of nature that are the administrators allowed us, this fall, to incorporate electives into the schedule and eliminate "study hall" (formerly known as "myspace hour.")

Thus came the happy task of designing two semester's worth of electives. My first one was a community organizing/civic engagement jobby that had us writing letters and making phone calls and yelling a lot, which was a blast. And now it's time to register again! After February vacation we begin the next round of electives. We're pretty low-tech around here, so they register by signing up on pieces of paper posted in the main hallway. There's "How to Make Lunch," "Looking up Words in the Dictionary" "Stuff to do In Line at the Bank" and "Hamlet Will Kick Your Ass."

Six brave souls have elected to allow Hamlet an ass kicking, and not ONE peep has been thrown my way about deciding to teach it. I can't believe I'm being allowed such cruelty, asking inner city homeless kids to read Shakespeare, when we all know that kind of reading is reserved for the children of administrators. Have I no heart?!

According to the man himself: things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing. Mmmm...I don't know Bill, I sure as heck am enjoying the winning part.

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me....

MCAS...putting the ass in assessment

This was going to be a recap of the wonderful MCAS Reform Day at the State House yesterday. Between two and three hundred youth, teachers, parents, and activists showed up to ask for a more rational system of evaluation in our public schools. The kids were amazing. They created posters, postcards, plans of action, and delineated clearly the issues they felt MCAS unnecessarily brought to their schools. One group even created a book filled with young people's voices from all over the Boston area, outlining their academic struggles and what they thought their schools could do better. I for one am energized and relieved that our standardization factories haven't squished out every bit of the hopeful, creative juice that makes our kids so great.

Then, I read the Scot Lehigh's Op-Ed in the Globe:

Here, "reform" and "reforming" are artful and elusive terms. What they really mean is, weaken or water down. If the group, which counts the teachers unions as "significant contributors," according to director Marilyn Segal, has its way, high school students would no longer have to pass the MCAS to graduate....

What MCAS reform means, actually, is the opposite of watering it down. It means strengthening assessment to include all learning styles. It means creating a range of graduation requirements, rather than just one. Broadening the scope of an assessment is not weakening it; it is allowing that not every child demonstrates his learning in the same way. Reform also means taking the frenzy out of the test. High stakes environments are simply not conducive to learning. High stakes environments are great for performance, but we seem to want kids to perform well without creating a situation in which they can LEARN.

Mr. Lehigh also claims that the MCAS is not related to the dropout crisis:

Further, when the Department of Education surveyed superintendents several years ago about why students were leaving school, the MCAS exams weren't one of the major reasons cited.

Okay, deep breaths. There are two problems with this.

One: They asked the Superintendents?! They wanted to know why STUDENTS were dropping out so they asked...the Superintendents? That's like saying, "Hey, I want to know why 65% of women are unhappy in their marriage. Let's survey the...um...fathers-in-law. They'll know."

Two: If they HAD bothered to ask students why they left school, the majority of kids probably wouldn't have said the MCAS either. What they would have said was that they were bored or their teachers didn't care. Again, this goes back to what a test-obsessed system does to the culture of a school. If teachers are straightjacketed into a drill and kill curriculum and working under the constant threat of state takeover if those test scores don't go up, their demeanor might be less than caring. They might feel like quitting every single day. And if the curriculum is constant preparation for a test, well the boredom thing makes a lot of sense. So perhaps they didn't cite MCAS as the reason, but this is just a case of patients complaining about symptoms without naming the disease.

And then this guy:

"Someone should tell some of these people that the debate is over," says Senator Robert Antonioni, Senate chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on education.

Thank you, captain eloquent. And I apologize. Were we questioning the wisdom of determining everything a student has learned in his entire academic career by one measure? Did we dare to suggest that there might be a better way? You do not have the power to declare this debate over, Senator.

And, then our fair Governor Patrick had this to say to Mr. Lehigh at the Globe:

"I came to the MCAS by talking to parents of poor kids who told me that before the MCAS, their kids were just promoted on without even being able to read . . . I start, because I personally stink at standardized tests, highly skeptical of standardized tests, but I got there by talking to these parents, I mean, all over the place, talking to these parents. So it would take a lot - it would take a whole lot - for me to reconsider that position."

First of all, kids are still being promoted without being able to read. This one gets me particularly upset because I work in a school for kids who have been forced out of the Boston Public School system. In our school, at present, we have two teenagers with second grade reading levels and one girl who cannot read at all. All three of these students left high school in the tenth grade. Hmmm. It looks like the MCAS didn't prevent these kids from being promoted without reading ability, but it just waited until tenth grade to force them out.

Second of all, the governor doesn't really want to make the call on MCAS. His readiness project is conveniently set up to decide all of that stuff for him. So our job now is to convince the various committees of the readiness project that MCAS reform is a priority, is necessary, and is the best thing to do for our kids. For more information on how to do that, please visit Citizens for Public Schools, and revel in their awesomeness.

What to Do When A Student Threatens Your Life

Ahhhhh youth. A time of blossoms and blooms. Sunrises and sparkling, shining, shimmering beacons of possibility. A time of exploration and continual redefinition. An energetic charge into the unknown and unknowable. Youth full of pleasance...youth like the summer morn...youth like summer brave. Blah blah blah.

I love my students. I do. They present about 1,000 joys and 1,000 challenges per second. But once and a while, I find the latter clouding over the former in a dark, foreboding, rain-heavy cumulonimbus of doom. Other times they say things like, "Miss Kelly, why don't you run for president? You'd be good at it." THOSE things make it totally worth it, even after encountering one or more of the following:

The 10:30 a.m. Verbal Abuse Break

Now, I have been a stepchild. And a stepsister. Therefore, I have been called lots of horrible things. There is something especially difficult, however, about being interrupted in the middle of a sentence by an adolescent who believes you must know, right that second, that you are hideous. I give you you the following example, from my time in Cambridge Public Schools (my lawyers want you to know that the names are fake and I in no way actually encourage anyone to behave in the manner I behave, although it is really fun...)

Gabriel: I'm not reading this book. It's stupid.

Kelly, Apotheosis of Patience: What is stupid about it?

Gabriel: Everything.

Kelly, AP: Any chance you'll be more specific? I can't help you find a new book if I don't know what's so stupid about this one...

Gabriel: (throws book at wall)

Kelly, AP: Okay. The book may or may not be stupid, but it certainly didn't do anything bad to you. Maybe we should-

Gabriel: I don't learn from ugly people!

Kelly, AP: Well, you are damned lucky I teach ugly people.

...This might be the worst thing I have ever said as a teacher. Except for the thing I said about the Pope that one time. That is so not going on the internet. Anyway, I'm sure if you're a teacher you can feel your classroom management skills improving already. I find that it helps to sink right down to whatever level the student is on, and just argue until the noise draws an administrator.

The Absolutely Unbelievably Ignorant Statement

As I have mentioned, my school has decided to combine History and Science. I'm no scientist, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor am I even remotely qualified to teach it. But I do have a strong sense of admiration for it, mostly due to its consistent opposition to stupid religious wackos. What I lack, and this applies to most things in my life, is tact. I can only identify bullshit; I don't have the science background to effectively fling a rebuttal against moronic statements that arise in science discussions. Or, at least, I feel unsure of myself in a way I wouldn't if the statement came up in a discussion about history or literature. So if someone said something idiotic, say, on the T, I would say, "That's fucking bullshit," and be confident that I was right, comfortable in the feeling that I had zero obligation to elaborate.

Alas, now I have to try presenting gentle, calmly stated, thought provoking questions that might get people to dig more deeply into the beliefs they've held all their lives.

Examples of statements that have challenged my "just scream bullshit" reflex--

"What?! Fuck that. I didn't come from no god damned ape."

"If god wanted gorillas to talk; they would talk."

"We are not animals, we're people. We can't eat people; we can eat animals."

"If dudes were supposed to whatever with dudes and girls were - I mean - we wouldn't be shaped the way we are. You know? It doesn't make sense."

"Babies are a miracle. I know people that been trying to have a baby and can't. And then other people just can have them. If god wanted people to get rid of babies, he would just not let them get pregnant."

"If we all don't have babies, people will die off."

And, my personal favorite:

"All this "earth" shit, I mean, that stuff, recycling, is for white people to worry about."

That last one sparked one of the best and most difficult conversations I've ever had, actually. What I've come to realize is that even though it's a different subject, all the same arguments and conversations come up again and again. Addressing someone who really believes that god made the world a certain way and there's no reason to think about it any more than that and addressing someone who asserts that the Holocaust could not have possibly happened require pretty much the same tactics, in my opinion. I'm just freaked out by the idea that I have to teach Science. When you're moving around in a subject that is totally foreign to you, it's amazing how much more difficult facilitating conversation becomes. This has me really thinking about the whole "which is more important: studying pedagogy or studying content area" debate...but this isn't that kind of blog. So...uh, back to frivolous sarcasm!

The Request to Aid and Abet

Last year, we were on a trip to the State House for a lobby day. We all had written letters to our representatives. The kids were informed, pissed, primed for civic engagement. Gathering at the entrance, making the requisite jokes because the gate is dedicated to General Hooker, we prepared to enter. One kids pulls me aside.

"I can't go."

"What? Why? Whatdya mean you can't go?"

"I forgot something."

"You forgot something you need, right now, to go in the State House?"

"No, I forgot to NOT take something."

Pause.

"You forgot to not take something that..."

"That won't make it past the metal detector."

You ever play that game Scruples? (Because what's a party without hypothetical moral predicaments?!) Anyway, I have. And I think it's good for teachers to occasionally glimpse into the out-of-school lives of their students. So I did that. Nothing generates a teachable moment like jogging around Beacon Hill, trying to look inconspicuous, while you hide a weapon.

Everybody's Favorite: The Death Threat

This is the one where a student is gripping the edge of a desk, white knuckled, screaming, "Don't make me fucking kill you I'll kill you don't make me fucking kill you." Here's how you handle it, if you're super awesome at difficult situations like me:

1. Look awkwardly at the other students and gesture, with your head (Garth Algar style) to run from the room.

2. Raise your eyebrows really high and fail to take the situation entirely seriously.

3. Ask the threat-maker if he would kindly stop threatening your life.

4. Say something snide like, "You know, I don't have a television, so if you go totally ape shit I won't even get to watch it on the news so really it's not even worth it."

5. Sit down, right across from him, and ask him what he's really mad about.

6. Try to not think about whether or not he's got a gun.

7. Stop blabbering, and just sit there til he talks to you.

Looking back on every day of teaching that has left me wanting whiskey or a cliff from which to leap, it's never really the kids who screwed up. It's me getting frustrated with my inability to explain something in the best possible way, or my lack of proper planning, or my momentary lapse in understanding that whenever somebody behaves badly in the classroom, it's most likely because he is struggling. No matter how I feel by six o'clock, though, I'd take hiding weapons in Beacon Hill over some lame brained office job any day.