stories

Every day I am learning more about why the achievement gap exists. This story isn't even mine, but it requires sharing. My roommate is teaching 8th grade English at a NYC public school in the Bronx. Over the past three weeks she has faced immense challenges in classroom management; students fighting, swearing at each other, not participating. But she has been strong, stronger than I have needed to be. She has waited a full eight minutes without speaking while a student sat in silence in stubborn refusal to participate. Today I enforced the law for the very first time, interrupting a fun, whole-class activity because my students were on the brink of mayhem and demanding that they sit in their seats and complete an independent assignment instead. It was my toughest moment thus far, and still it was nothing. I came home proudly with my story, but by comparison it isn't even worth sharing. My roommate today had a lengthy talk with a particular student who was not doing well in her class. She was patient and understanding but tough, working out a deal with the student through which she could increase her participation scores through helping the teacher with tasks in class. While this student was distributing materials in class, my roommate saw her showing a tiny bottle to another girl in class and laughing. After class, she demanded to see the bottle and the girl told her it was nothing, just lotion.

"If it is lotion than you can show it to me," she responded. When the student finally turned over the bottle she found that it was a small bottle of liquor. My roommate told the student she had no choice but to turn it in to the principal and the girl was truly upset. For the first time, my roommate said, she wasn't grinning.

Later, the principal said that she needed to be expelled from summer school, so they might as well just pass her to the 9th grade. The reason this student was in summer school in the first place was because she needed remediation before she could be promoted. Now that she brought a bottle of alcohol to school, she was told to discontinue her summer school and just go to 9th grade. For her punishment, the school gave up on her and sent her to high school unprepared. Thus the achievement gap continues.

excitement

Today I heard from my principal that I will be teaching the 2nd grade! I feel like this will be wonderful, it is better than I even hoped for. Yay!

another window

something worth working towards

As the days get longer and the weight of learning gets heavier I am finding that all else slips my mind. This painful tiredness however is not from misery or unhappiness with my work, I love what I am learning and I love standing in the front of the classroom knowing that what I am teaching my students is actually helping them move to high school and then college. But it takes a lot of work to get to that moment. By Thursday of this week my mind and body was so exhausted that I think my students could tell I had no energy for them. Usually they are quiet as church mice, so pleased to simply hear me praise them, but this day I barely had it in me to form the words. Children can sense this and the chit chat rose and I heard mysterious humming permeating the room. I had no choice but to whip out my teacher stare, which is meek at best. The effects were minor and I ended up with four other teachers and a student in the principal's office. I was very impressed with her strength among such a large crowd and it turned out to be just as much of a learning experience for me as (hopefully) for the student. To watch such an experienced principal lead the student to owning up to her unacceptable attitude in the classroom was like watching a magician pull an elephant out of a top hat, and Friday she was a different student. Mr. Hasty and I knew that the students were losing energy, they had taken three mid-term exams and we needed a plan to bring them back up to the level where we knew they could be before they had a chance to sink lower. We needed a plan because as we have learned...if you don't have a plan for your students, they will have a plan for you. So five minutes before the end of math on Friday afternoon, as Mr. Hasty was reviewing the problems from the daily quiz with the students, I quietly opened iTunes in the back of the room. When Mr. Hasty heard the slightest bit of chit chat, he tossed his wet-erase marker harshly on top of the overhead projector and said, "Really? I am trying to help you learn something right now and you can't even listen to me. If this is seriously how you are going to treat me then I am going to have to go and find someone who you will listen to! Ms. Hahn, please watch the class while I am gone." And he stormed out. The children looked mortified. I tried not to fall over with laughter as I walked to the front of the room. The students were even more shocked to see me with a disappointed grimace as they have never seen me upset before. Positive reinforcement is my personal code of conduct.

"I am so disappointed in you, " I began. "Mr. Hasty is trying to teach you something so valuable and you won't even show him the respect he deserves. Honestly, we only have two weeks left. We are half way there!" And then I hit the play button.

Bon Jovi came blasting through the laptop speakers as Mr. Hasty kicked his way through the doorway singing "Ooohh we're half way there, oohh oh livin' on a prayer! Take my hand---we'll make it I swear, oohh oh! We're half way there!'

We sang and danced around the room as the students' faces slowly changed from horror to confused to mildly amused and then to a few laughs.

"Wait so you were kidding?" We heard a student ask.

"Yes!" Mr. Hasty began another round of 'Take my hand---we'll make it I swear," and reached out for the hands of students in the front row, and this time I couldn't contain my laughter as they all coiled away from his touch and looked disgusted by the thought of touching the hand of their teacher.

"Ugghhhh, Mr. Hasty your voice is so bad!" They started shouting and covering their ears, but I could see the failed attempts at hiding the smiles on their faces. Though I got to be a part of this action, I can take credit for none of it. The entire routine was scripted and choreographed by Mr. Hasty who, though we all have no idea what we are doing, manages to let his personality shine through so that his students know he is a real person who is simply there to help them. It is an important skill that we all must learn from him. Classroom management is one of the most difficult and taxing aspects of learning to teach, and it is tempting to become someone you are not, but they say to not try to contradict your own personality or the students will see right through you. The students felt a connection with Mr. Hasty after he made a fool (to put it lightly) out of himself for their own enjoyment. He left me with no choice but to give them Red Vines so they would return to liking me more.

Tomorrow is the start of a brand new week, only two weeks left in my institute experience. I can say with complete honesty that I have never learned so much in such a short period of time about such a wide variety of topics. I have learned about the lives of my students, about my own life and what it will entail, I have learned about the lives of my fellow teachers. I have learned how to teach, though I still have so much more knowledge and skill to gain. I have learned how to manage a classroom, though it still is not perfect. I have learned how to channel every feeling I have into my work, which I am not sure is a good thing. And I am just beginning to learn how to see this place as my home, even though much of it still feels like the hardest vacation of my life. It has helped to see learning in action, to see significant gains in two weeks, to have made new friends, found a new roommate, perhaps an apartment, relaxed in Central Park, gone on a date. Much of it is still so difficult. Many people see teaching as a fall back career for people who can't do anything else. To them, I would say that they should try it out for just one day. For many of the corps members, this is the first time in their lives that they have not been good at something. The people here are intimidatingly amazing and it can be overwhelming at times, particularly when all I want to do is talk about Gossip Girl. Though it is of course not the first time I have not been automatically good at something (I remember my devastation at 12 when I wanted to be a gymnast and got placed in the 8 year old class), I still feel the effects. I wanted to be so good, the best, and I thought I would have a leg up because of my studies in elementary education, but I have discovered that there is so far to go that my two steps ahead have made no difference. My minor in education is like accidentally starting a nanosecond before the gunshot in the New York Marathon when I am up against the greatest athletes in the world. Without meaning to sound haughty, it has been difficult for all of us to suddenly realize how much we have to learn to be good after growing accustomed to feeling special and honored because we were accepted to Teach for America. Friday afternoon we were handed a piece of paper, a teaching report card, that displayed a series of letters and plus signs telling us how we were doing as a teacher. It discouraged many people, revealing for them in black and white exactly where they were falling short of success after four weeks of long, difficult work. My problems with this method aside, it took strength from all of us to view it not as a message of failure but as an indicator for areas of growth. They told us that humility was a category on the acceptance rubric and I now understand why. Basically, we still suck. But we cannot focus on the "I suck," and must force ourselves to focus on the "I suck, but how can I get better?"

I feel guilty often because I worry that I am failing my students in some ways. This is their education, it cannot be taken back, and they are my guinea pigs. I practice my skills on them each day, using them as my testing audience. But I try to remind myself that I may not be perfect, but I am in some small way still improving their future prospects by teaching them scientific notation. And we have seen the concrete results. TFA, an organization that relies heavily on data and self reflection to continuously improve its effectiveness, administered a diagnostic math assessment to our students on the first day of school. The average score was a 39%. Mr. Hasty and I administered a test based upon the same math standards this Thursday as a mid-term assessment and our average was a 66%. It is certainly a step in the right direction, but there is always room to improve.

On occasion, the failure of our educational system upon these students is shocking. They are so smart, they are the same students as those living just down the street who have gotten the opportunity to go to a better school, and yet some of them have never even been taught to add. We have moved into a unit on subtracting negative and positive integers. This concept can be confusing, particularly when subtracting large negative numbers from large negative numbers like -67 - (-36), so I began simple. I began with a question 14 - (-4). After following the 'add its opposite' method, I sat down with a student and said, "So we converted our subtraction sign to addition and our negative 4 to a positive 4. Now we can rewrite it as what?"

"14 + 4," she replied.

"Excellent, which equals what?"

"17," she answered repeatedly. How is it that our system as allowed this? And why?

I understand that this job is challenging on so many levels, particularly when your classroom is filled with students struggling with things you cannot possibly understand and people everywhere are passing judgements about them and their ability to learn. I have seen and heard these assumptions being made by people that I know, and I myself have made them. It is important to realize that an assumption is an assumption so that one has the opportunity to consciously make the decision to reject it. I experienced this feeling of self-realization after I attempted to call the parents of my students during the first week of school. I was to call half of our students' parents, and out of 7 numbers I got 4 disconnected phone lines. After the voice of the operator told me that the line was no longer in service, I felt myself immediately feeling sorry for the student, assuming that they couldn't pay the phone bill. Although this may be the case, it is remains an assumption, and that is dangerous. I pushed it out of my mind.

The answer to all of these challenges is to remain focused on student achievement and student achievement. Got a bad teacher report card? Get better because you are focused on student achievement. Trouble reaching parents? Try harder because it will aid in student achievement. Tired? Find a way to be more efficient because you need energy to ensure student achievement. Personal selflessness can also be a challenge, but still the answer is student achievement. Friday my roommate called me and told me that she had gotten lice from one of her students. Got lice from one of your students? Buy pesticide shampoo because the students need you to in order to achieve. But now my head feels itchy, though I am sure it is all in my tired mind.

relentless pursuit

I am so tired. My body has now become so accustomed to living off four hours of sleep each night that when I tried to get in a full six hours hours last night, my body rejected the idea of 'before midnight' and I am even more tired today than usual. I am starting to understand teacher burn out; it is inevitable if your entire life revolves around your students because then your entire life is a struggle. Today I had a meeting with a student in the principal's office after she rolled her eyes at me several times and claimed to be attitude free, but it turned out to be just as much of a learning experience for me as for her. Tomorrow I'll be more apt to handle it myself. But for now, I need to have some fun. And once again I had a full audience during my lesson: Teach for America donors on the scene to see just exactly where their dollars were going, my advisor, and (the most critical of all) a video camera. There are so many stories but so little time or energy, my life now boiled down daily to the idea that the need is great and the time is short. The need is great for sleep, the time for work is short. So for tonight I have for you no words, but only a glimpse into the great need in the short time of 9 minutes.

Educational Celebrities

Friday was by far my worst day in the classroom. Worse than even my first day in the classroom. Perhaps I thought that after a week I was so experienced that I was ready to take risks that in reality, as I soon discovered, I was not. But my worst day yet makes for my best story yet:

My 6th grade math class is currently studying a unit on scientific notation. We have learned powers of ten with positive, negative, and zero exponents. We have learned to represent values in scientific notation and numbers written in scientific notation as their values. However for some of the students, this information is review, and I could feel that they were bored. If my students, students who are accustomed to being held to low circumstances because of their race and socioeconomic status, feel as though they are not being challenged and held to high expectations, then I am not doing my job. So, for those students who were bored stiff I attempted to increase the rigor of the lesson by incorporating two-step word problems that involved scientific notation. For example, "In the United States, there are approximately 91,000 species of insects. Ms. Hahn has been bitten by about 25,000 of them! How many species of insects has Ms. Hahn NOT been bitten by? Write your answer in scientific notation." and "Mr. Hasty owns 105,000 ties. If 18,000 of his ties are pink, how many of his ties are NOT pink? Write your answer in scientific notation." Well, it was a disaster.

The morning began with whisperings that Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach for America, an organization that she drafted at my age in her senior thesis, was going to be visiting our school for the day. When she arrived, I saw her standing in the hallway with a dark haired man and it was like I was seeing Oprah and Gayle all over again. She observed a few of our curriculum sessions and then disappeared. I breathed a sigh of relief because I had heard that she was going to be observing a few lessons and I was teaching next. I assumed she had left the building. Yet just as I was setting up my materials for the day, in marches Wendy Kopp and her dark-haired companion. I later found out that this man is the Executive Vice President for TFA Institutes all over the country. This man has power, yet lucky for me I had no idea who he was until he had already left. Trailing behind them was my advisor, my collaborative teacher Mr. Hasty, and my mentor teacher. It was quite the audience.

My lesson began smoothly, the students completing the Do Now that begins each day's lesson. Yet because the previous day's lesson had been so simple for so many of them, I attempted to make every aspect of this lesson more rigorous, but without much experience I was unable to find the balance between rigor and feasibility and I overshot. I got so many raised hands about the third question on my Do Now that I finally stopped the class and said, "I have been getting a lot of questions about number 3, so let's go ahead and do that one together on the overhead." I proceeded to begin the problem, and about two steps in I realized that I couldn't even solve it without a calculator. It also involved rounding off the last digit to make it a zero so that it could be converted into scientific notation, a skill which I have not yet taught them. My wet erase marker paused. I tried to keep my cool but in my head I was panicking. I couldn't solve my own math problem, my work was projected hugely on the whiteboard, and Wendy Kopp and company were in the room watching me! I paused and said, "You know what, this one is tricky and I think we should come back to it after we have completed today's lesson! I think even Ms. Hahn needs to practice her scientific notation!" Then I was so flustered that my thinking cap, yes a real thing (see photo below) fell to the ground. I snatched it up and had no time to waste before moving on to our partner work activity. All I could think was Wendy "Oprah" Kopp was in the room, watching me make fun of myself. Luckily my students are lovely and didn't seem to care that I was making such a fool of myself.

We began our whiteboard activity, in which the students work with their partners to solve a problem, write the final answer on their whiteboard, and hold it up into the sky. This was not as smooth as I had hoped with the stream of raised hands causing me to bounce around the room answering questions like, "I can't get the marker off," or "mine is dry." Thankfully during this time, Wendy Kopp and the Dark-Haired-Director left the room. Wendy Kopp even gave me a little nod! I can't ever take a shower again or I might lose her scent!

With only fifteen minutes left of class, I called out, "Ladies and gentleman it is time to move on to our independent work. Please pass your whiteboards to the left while I distribute the assign..." Where was my assignment? I rifled through my papers and found no stack of the assessment that I had spent so long perfecting the night before. I had no time to think or waste. I turned to the students and said, "Please take our your homework, you have five minutes to work on your homework silently while I look for your assessment." Where was my assessment?!?!?!?!?! I had made so many photocopies the night before I know I must have copied it. How could I have been so absent minded? Oh wait I remember how, I haven't slept in two weeks. But I am responsible for administering a daily assessment to track my students' progress. All hope was lost. Wendy was gone, but my advisor and my summer mentor teacher were still watching and typing away. My only friend in the room was Mr. Hasty, helping me search and typing no notes about my wild screw-up.

Sadly, the assessment was no where to be found. I told the confused faces of the students to put away their homework again and I gave them another blank sheet of paper. I threw back up extra practice word problems onto the over head and asked them to complete the problems on their papers. Hands shot into the air.

"Yes?" I asked, knowing this could not be anything good.

"I can't see!" replied one student. No students could even see the problems.

"I will read them aloud," I answered, knowing that this was beyond saving. I called a few students to the overhead to complete the problems, but they were as lost as my hope. There is no nice way to say it, this lesson had sucked. And Wendy Kopp was there. Watching. Me.

After the lesson, I walked over to my summer mentor teacher. "That was a disaster," I said. She told me not to worry, that it was my first week as a teacher and if the head of the organization had come to watch her she would have done the same thing. I realized I had two choices: I could cry or I could laugh. So I laughed, and now the whole experience seems quite amusing. I must remember that the thing about teaching is there will always be good days and bad days but there will also always be a tomorrow and a new chance to learn.

the fourth day

It is my fourth day in the classroom. My assertive tone is growing stronger but each moment of each lesson I am learning more. I love being in the classroom but after a week of four hours of sleep a night my brain is like an empty box that shuts down at 5 pm and I am constantly redirecting it towards the task at hand: learning how to be a better teacher. I need every day to be better than the day before because the need is great and time is short. I have three more weeks after tomorrow to teach 22 7th grade standards and I still have many short comings. My biggest priority currently is to learn how to test exactly what I am teaching without teaching to the test. Or should I teach to the test, knowing the reality is that the only way that my students will be able to create better lives for themselves is if they can pass state exams to graduate from high school? Numbers are the reality, so how can authentic teaching and the necessity to pass the New York Regents exam be reconciled? Especially if a student is grade levels behind and there is no time?

And there are still things I have not yet grown accustomed to, realities of the lives of my students. Mr. Hasty and I sent a personal interest survey home with each of our students and some of the answers had me roaring in laughter, though perhaps from delirium, and others were scary. Interests, hobbies, and activities were typical of a 6th grader, including, "texting a lot," and "rasing people when I no I can win," and it was incredibly fun to remember what my priorities consisted of when I was at that age. In response to the question, "What are three things you are considering doing after you graduate from high school?" the smallest boy in the classroom wrote simply, "Go to college, party, get a girl." Those certainly are three of the most important things in life. But some of the favorite activities still seemed unexpected, even after all I have learned over the past three weeks. My brightest math student, a student who responded enthusiastically today when I quietly asked her after class if she would like me to start assigning her more difficult homework, answered the prompt of 'What are your interests?' with "I like to kick my stepfather." How often will I hear statements like this? When will it become the norm? What is outside of my locus of control? Will I feel pity for this student and hold her to lower standards? I hope that when I learn this type of information, which I know that I often will, that it will lead me to hold even higher standards so that this student and many others are able to build better lives for themselves someday.

Here is another peek into the classroom of Mr. Hasty and Ms. Hahn:

My love of being in the classroom said, I am counting the hours until tomorrow evening, when I am allowed to sleep and breathe and wear jeans. But now I must work, tomorrow we continue our festival of scientific notation.