Coal Hill Review

by Publius

Mr. Eagleton is scheduling his classes according to the National Weather Service. He’s not from here. So he comes into my room, and asks me about “the rainy season”. He doesn’t have any shades on his windows, so his plans to show movies on days when it’s overcast.

Depending on where you are in the building today, there’s either a cold snap or a heat wave. Some rooms actually have frost on the inside of their windows. In others, it’s a bit more like the Mekong Delta on a balmy day.

No one’s schedule is fixed, even though students will be here on Monday. I think I’m going to be teaching Freshman English and Junior English, but I could be teaching history. Or astrophysics, for all I know. I’ll likely have about 150 students. But, if all my nightmares align themselves with Jupiter and Mars, I could have 250.

Since the Social Studies Department is short two teachers, those students are being dumped into other classes. Given that, Mr. North is looking into the possibility of using the auditorium for his classes.

We’ve got professional development planned for all day tomorrow. Tomorrow’s subject? How to write the lesson plan. There’s a new form. Actually it’s the old form, but now it’s online, and has electronic links which, when I looked it up, don’t work. Which is OK, because nobody reads this stuff anyway. A lot of folks turn in the exact same lesson plan all year, and just change the date.

Speaking of which, I had to apologize to my buddies. We were emailed explicit instructions to, “at a minimum”, write in the correct year and correct school for our professional development plans. I’ve been turning in the same one for almost ten years now. I just now realized that my form was dated 2001-2002, and was from my old school. My bad, my bad …

And it’s only 9 AM.

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by Publius

Although the high school where I teach was locked down for an afternoon,  it turns out we were never in much danger.   They caught the right guy, the actual guy who shot the cop, a couple of miles north of here.   When they cordoned-off this neighborhood, they surrounded the house of the wrong guy.   He saw a bunch of cops, so he ran home.   In this neighborhood, being black and running is probable cause.   They surrounded his house, and cut off the whole neighborhood for blocks around.   There were literally 100 cops telling this guy to “Come out with your hands up so we can shoot you.”   He was a little hesitant.   Armored cars, SWAT. snipers, loud speakers blasting…  I figured they were going to do the opposite of a Manuel Noriega, like, instead of torturing him with hours of rock and hip-hop, they’d play hours of Tammy Wynette.   Finally, he surrendered, and they saw that they had the wrong guy.   But they charged him anyway with five counts of fucking folks up, two counts of being Black and 25, and one count of looking like everyone else in the neighborhood.   He’s sentenced to twenty-two years of community service, to wit he needs to show-up at the 7th District police station once a week and help the police with their beat-down techniques.

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by Publius

I am in awe of how little I actually exaggerate in these stories.   I tend to edit for continuity, so I will, for example, put two different events on the same day, and say they happened to just one teacher.   I’ll change a name and such for the sake of anonymity.   But, in truth, I invent nothing.   And I stand in awe of that fact. 

I’m really glad to have the opportunity to do this.   How many times, over the years, has someone said, “God, someone just has to publish this!”?   I think inner city teachers feel isolated.   Everyone thinks he or she knows something about teaching because everyone has been to school.   But I have to admit that even I, a teacher for at the time twenty-five years, had little clarity about the life of teachers fifteen minutes from my home until, ten years ago, I went to work in the city.   As just one example – 

Being the only black person in a room full of white people is a fairly common experience for black folks.   Being the only white person in a room full of blacks is an extraordinary experience for a white person.   Except, of course, if you’re an inner city teacher.   In which case, it’s just called work.   

Over the years, I’ve developed a number of defenses for the moment when a kid says, “Hey, man, this is slavery conditions.   I mean, look at this.   What does this remind you of?   A white guy giving orders to a bunch of black folks!”   To which I reply, ‘I don’t believe in slavery, but let me explain to you indentured servitude.   It’s the difference between having your butt forever, and having your butt till June.’ 

Well, my kids are doing a final, and I’ve got to act mean for a minute.

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by Publius

Yesterday, the last day of classes, we get a “Faith Based Initiative”.   Some preacher from the neighborhood decides to take all the kids who have been suspended a bunch, and give them a barbeque over in the football field.   The end result is that all the nice kids are in class doing various onerous tasks, while all the troublemakers are across the street, eating -que, tossing a football, shagging flies.   We can smell -que in my room.   One sweet little girl looks wistfully out the window.   She sniffs and says to no one in particular, “You think if I kick the principal in the balls that I can get a couple of wings and a drumstick?”

Today, in the middle of a final, I get called by a district pooh-bah.   I’m asked if I have any students who haven’t as yet taken this standardized reading test.

‘I’m giving a final examination.’

“Perhaps you can send down the ones who finish early?”

‘No.   Nobody will finish early.   That’s the way I design the test.   Did I mention that this test is a final?’

“Perhaps I can come to your room, and explain the results to the ones who did finish the test?”

‘No.   I’m giving a final exam.’

So the district pooh-bah comes up to my room anyway, and tells me that I should explain the results to the students, and give them their individual scores.   “When you have the time.”   Then she hands me the results for the entire school.   Almost a thousand scores with all manner of line and column, and I’m supposed to find my thirty kids in this ream of paper.   This is in the last thirty minutes of class, the reading portion of my exam.

I smile and say, ‘Of course.   Just leave the scores on my desk.’   Where they will remain undisturbed, and live happily for the rest of the summer.

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by Publius

             I have to interrupt a standardized test in order to give a standardized test.

             I am in the second week of giving a standardized test that isn’t a test, because nobody gives a wank about this test.   The only reason we’re giving this test is because the district paid millions for it.   We bought it, so we give it.   But everyone — kids, teachers, administrators — knows it doesn’t count, because, right after we bought it, the state mandated another test.   One that counts.

             The test that doesn’t count is thirty pages long, and contains four questions that demand full-length essays.

             When we finally finish the standardized test that doesn’t count, I’ve also been directed to have the kids grade their own essays.   This isn’t because The Central Office wants the kids to reflect and review.   It’s because Downtown doesn’t want to bother grading all the tests that don’t count.   So this will take us another day or maybe two.

             But today I’ve got to take the whole morning, interrupt the test doesn’t count, and give a test that’s really a test.   No Child Left A Dime, as my colleagues put it.   A serious standardized test, one that has actual consequences.   A test that’s really a test.   This is one of several such national tests I will proctor this semester.

             All this takes the best part of two weeks.   And what did I have to stop?   Reading Romeo And Juliet.   Writing literary criticism.

             Is this really what progressive education has come to?   That I should give a national standardized test, which interrupts a standardized test that doesn’t count, which in its turn interrupts reading Shakespeare and writing an essay?

             I work in a school district that was founded on the ideals of Friedrich Froebel and Johann Pestalozzi, a district that welcomed the philosophies of John Dewey and W. T. Harris.   And I mourn for those visionaries, for my colleagues, for my kids.    And for me.

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by Publius 

            I have a student teacher this year. Her name is Chloe.   I also have to give a standardized test this week.  

            So I’m stuck.   Do I give the test honestly?   Or do I do what I really do?

            As one administrator put it, “This test has no educational value.   Do as you will, as long as the scores improve.”   I need a ten point gain this quarter.   I’ve been a teacher for so long that I can get ten points by winking at kids at the right time.   Which is more or less what I do.  

            Once a kid asked me, “Why don’t you just give us the answers like the other teachers, instead of this half-cheating thing you do?”

            So Monday I’m torn.   Do I model the honest teacher?   Or do I show Chloe the world in which she will make her living?

            Before class, I begin by explaining to Chloe how, last year, the department had a long meeting, during which we agonized over the morality of standardized testing.   Is it moral to give the test at all?   If we give the test, is it ever moral to cheat?   How can teachers even evaluate the morality of testing we don’t value educationally?   And so I explained to Chloe this question and that one and on and on until – I was struck by another question.  

            When did teaching become morally ambiguous?

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by Publius

The kids are reading Romeo and Juliet.   So my student teacher is fishing for the answer “dramatic irony”.   She asks, “What do you call this, when Juliet is speaking on the balcony, and she doesn’t know Romeo is down below listening?’

 To which Marshay responds, “Stalking.”

And then yesterday as I’m walking out of the building with my buddy, Jim Midlord, our vice-principal, a real dingbat given to truly incomprehensible statements — I really mean that — says, “Mr. Midlord, when they show-up, you’ll be in charge of the Koreans.”   No context.   No explanation.   No background.   Just “you’ll be in charge of the Koreans.” 

To which Midlord just responds, “OK” and walks on.

He thinks she’ll just forget this.   She forgets a lot of stuff.  

 But the story has a trick ending.   It turns out that there are real Koreans.   The Central Office is going to send six of them, all at the same hour, same class, to learn how to teach grammar next Wednesday.   Except the vice-principal forgot that Midlord is teaching Beowulf at that hour.   And for this they came half-way around the world.

__________

by Publius

I recently went to a lecture on “data dysentery”, the countless reams of data we educators collect for, well, for what?

             To this data, I would like to add the following, a record of the sheer number of observations I’ve had in one semester only, this last semester.   These observations were done by three administrators and a consultant.  

             I hasten to add that these reports all say the same thing — they all say I’m a good teacher — and are done largely because the administrators need the sheer poundage of data.   Since we have several administrators, I sometimes record various times I’ve been inspected on the same day.   That said, the dates and times that I have been observed are:

                         9/11, 10:20 AM, 11:10 AM, 1:30 PM;  9/12;  9/15, 9:30 AM,

                        10:20 AM, 11:10 AM, 1:30 PM, and one with no time recorded; 

                        9/16;  9/22;  9/28;  10/7;  10/8;  10/21;  10/27, 1:10 PM and

                        1:25 PM;  10/29;  11/5;  11/10;  11/13;  11/24;  12/3;  12/8 and

                        12/16.

             It should be repeated that throughout the department, from one teacher to another, these observations differ little in content.   They are given in either an indifferent or occasionally complimentary manner.   There is no real expectation that they will be read or acted upon.

             Last year, one observer regularly fell asleep in my class.  

            One vice-principal used to observe us as she walked down the hall.   I mean she walked down the hall while she was writing the reports.   We used to call these “drive-bys”.   Once she did, in fact, look into my room, observe, and write a report.   I don’t think she was there thirty seconds.   The report was most satisfactory.   The whole time, I was tying my shoe.

by Publius

The coach has classes of sixty.   That’s OK, though, because some of our language classes, say Advanced Chinese, have four kids, so our average high school class size is 32, the exact state maximum.    The coach is holding down his end of the arithmetic average.   Anyway, three weeks ago the school closed the gym for renovations, so the coach and his kids are now housed down the hall in a classroom built for thirty with only twenty desks.   Needless to say, there’s no basketball court in that classroom.

So this morning, first thing Monday, I hear the coach say to another teacher that the district finally started the renovations in the gym.   “They did an hour’s worth of work last Friday, and have scheduled an hour’s worth of work once a week for the next fifteen weeks.”

Some days I come so close to asking …

My lunch gang has a jar where we save for our end of year party.   We charge a quarter each time someone asks a how or a why question.   Me and the art teacher just throw in a five now and again.

Which reminds me of the computer class without computers.   When I taught middle school near here, I noticed one day that all the kids are going around with cardboard boxes.   Big ones.   With one whole side cut-out, a big hole.   They mention that a computer class just started.   I don’t get it, but I know better than to ask.   Later, during my free period, I walk by the new computer class.   First I see the board, and there’s a very detailed assignment about going from one URL to another and like that.   Then a few steps more and I can see the kids.   There are no computers.   The kids are intently staring into the holes in the cardboard boxes set-up in from of them.   That’s the computer — the box with the hole.   The hole is like the screen.   They have cardboard mice with a string to the box, cardboard keypads, and they’re staring into the hole and typing and moving the mouse and the teacher is telling them, “Once you get to such and such a page, remain there.   There will be an icon marked Continue but do not, I repeat, do not …”

by Publius

There are a lot of reasons to quit this job.   Kate did.   I don’t blame her.   But of all the reasons to quit this job, the three best are depression, humiliation and rage.

A freshman turns in the homework.   I look at his t-shirt, and see a disarming photo of a nice looking young man.   Then the script below the photo reads –

R. I. P. Kooley

01/22/90 – 09/18/09

It’s depressing.   I read about this killing in the paper.   A drive-by.   Kids killing kids.   I ask.   The freshman tells me that Kooley was his cousin.   Then he changes the subject.   He looks at a picture of my wife and me, a picture on my desk.   I tell him how it’s a shot of a particularly pleasant memory.   He tells me how he’ll never get married.   “Too much drama.”   He changes the subject, but the topic is still sadness.

And this happens all the time.   So far, I’ve lost two students to drive-bys.

That’s one reason to quit.

Dan studied archeology.   At lunch, he regales us with exotic yarns of the Middle East.   He thought about continuing in that field, but wanted a family and time for a family.   “Kids instead of digs.”   Now, he’s got two little girls, but not much sleep.

Dan was publicly humiliated yesterday for the high crime of tardiness.   Five minutes late in the morning, he still had more than enough time until students arrived.   But, in front of several of us, he was mortified by the principal.   At lunch he tells how he’s again considering that doctorate he never got.   “Why should I put up with this?”

‘If not you,’ I say, ‘then who?’   People talk about reforming inner city schools.   But only a few are actually willing to work in them — and that’s all that really counts.   Reformers annoy us more than help us.  We’re aided neither by uplifting liberals nor condescending conservatives.

There are about 200 job openings in the district today.   We used to have 65 teachers in my school.   We’re down to 25 teachers, although we still have the same number of students, 800 and change.   Each of us teaches two extra classes, and gets one break once every other day.   There are many subjects we simply no longer teach.

Thus we come to Publius’ Rule # 57:  If you’re not depressed at times, if you’re not incensed at other times, then you’re not engaged.

Kate was rookie of the year last year.   Great start.   But she feels rage, because she’s bullied by the boss.   The boss writes her disciplinary letters, we call them “nasty-grams”, every morning for a week.   So yesterday she just says Fuck this! So I write -

teacher ed.

we haven’t said ‘pedagogy’ in decades

we’ve theories about seating charts

playground is a duty like lunch or hall

we’re hideous as dictionaries or yellow

shirts in fluorescent lights

near an intersection of broken glass we ride

an elevator that once smelled of the best of intentions

so when I heard you just said Fuck This! and walked

out just like that

I loosened my tie and graded a theme

and wrote Fuck An A, Kate! on a paper

by Publius

I’m having to give a standardized test over material none of us have covered.   The test is over the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and I’ve just covered Caesar Augustus.   What makes me sad — or one thing that makes me sad — is Miss Willis.

One kid says, “You hate this as much as we do.   So just give us the answers!”

To which Miss Willis says, “Don’t tell us.   Help us learn it.”   I just wanted to cry.   Really.

These kids want what any other kid wants, a decent education.   But, unlike some other kids, they know they’re getting cheated by, in this case, the state.