When Tenuous Feelings of Hope Start Slipping Away

Today is one of those day in which the weather perfectly matches my mood. It's cold and rainy and the heater in my NYC apartment has yet to be turned on. I'd rather crawl back under my down blanket. I feel hopeless, like staying in my pajamas and hiding from the world outside. The only thing I'm feeling hopeful about is that my relationship with my grumpy roommate is improving. He made extra coffee this morning and offered me some. Sounds little, but it matters. It's a measure of hope. We're informally starting to take turns make each other coffee in the mornings and it's helping, cup by cup, little by little. It's hope and it's human.

At the beginning of this school year, I felt some simple little moments of hope with colleagues. I found unexpected common ground and even professional friendship with an entirely new grade level team. I had some fun co-planning and curriculum sharing time with departmental colleagues. I began feeling like we could deepen our work together and I'd have interested folks with whom to share ideas with and create curriculum with. Last year the two colleagues I'd worked most closely with left my school and I'd been really unsure about how things would be without them. They were my sounding boards, they were the ones with whom I had real, deep conversations about teaching and learning. When they left, I feared that I'd be alone in terms of that deep learning that helps me grow as an educator.

I was wrong. I'm not alone. In fact, I have brilliant colleagues who love students as much as I do and are full of great ideas. From a distance last year, I thought the person who just became my team leader was a cold fish. Looking a little more closely, I found that he's warm, funny, compassionate and, really, one of the most thoughtful and effective teachers I've ever worked with, not to mention one of the most organized. A new addition to our school, my CTT (collaborative team teaching) colleague has reflected with me about my overall curriculum planning and helped me build some pretty exciting classroom habits that support our students even more. My grade-level teammate in the Math Dept, also new, is incredibly generous and committed to community-building in productive, exciting ways. I could learn a lot from/with these teachers and, on a personal level, I really like them. I shouldn't be glum, but I am.

There are two hours each week set aside for me to talk with the brilliant folks on my grade-level team and another two hours set aside for me to reflect with my equally wise, innovative and kind departmental team. So why I am I so glum? Partly because our meetings are stifled by protocols and procedures we were handed that don't at all reflect what we think we need to be doing/working on. Our meetings are structured for us and must be thoroughly documented with meeting notes emailed out to all participants and all three administrators. It's also not uncommon to have one or all of these administrators stop by to "check up" on our progress on their goals. Last time I checked this isn't how teachers learn.

Furthermore, this year, I've been told exactly how my room should be set up (particular labels for everything on the walls), how my class periods should be structured, and I must have each one of my learning goals approved by an administrator who is ideologically in a very different space than I am. I have someone in my room at least weekly, sometimes more, toting a clipboard and rating my teaching with a checklist that includes such pedagogical criteria as "System for Addressing Late Students," "Clean Up," and "Orderly Dismissal." What I'm really learning: how to turn my kids into robots, to structure things the same way every day so that they know exactly what to do if an outsider walks in. I agree that there's something to "classroom rituals and routines" that I believe can be effective, but this is a bureaucratic twist on the teacher knowledge, expertise and autonomy that usually drives effective classroom routines. These are not my or our "rituals and routines;" they're mechanical structures from on high. It's the factory model and I'm wondering why no one has handed me a hard hat. It's possible to get everyone doing the same thing at the same time; Ford Auto has assembly line workers do it all the time, but it makes me feel more than a little uneasy for teachers and students to be put in this position, particularly with a lack of pedagogical conversation and innovation.

Couple this with learning a new, clunky online grading program that is supposed to be "empowering to students" but feels a lot like "big brother" and I'm feeling tired, hopeless, and alone. I'm getting "Proficient" evaluations on the classroom checklist for my little student robots and informational wall decor, but I got my hands slapped for not translating my paper-based grade book into the online system according to the calendar outlined in one of the 20 or so bureaucratic emails I get every week. I'm exhausted, harried, and demoralized. It's October and I'm starving for a real teaching and learning conversation. I'm also anxious and full of fear about whether I'm meeting all of the "accountability" protocols dropped off by school leaders.

Even given all of this frustration, I don't for a moment doubt that my school leaders are doing the best that they can, that all of these protocols and procedures and new systems come from with the best of intentions. Frankly, they're terrified of all of the city and state-based accountability measures put on their heads and the anxiety is getting disseminated like handouts warm off the photocopier. My school is preparing for it's annual School Quality Review (SQR) and those tend to cause everyone worry and strife--principals and teachers alike. One of the teachers in my school is hosting a Halloween-themed "SQR Stress Relief" party at her home, where she lives with two teachers from other schools, who are also feeling suffocated by dramatic accountability measures being implemented in their schools. What I write about above is happening all over NYC and, I suspect, NY state and the US at large.

As schools work to demonstrate that they have good systems, the really good stuff, the reason we all do this, slips away, right along with the feelings of hope I so desperately want to have for public education. It's getting harder and harder for me to imagine how we're going to sit down over coffee and have a real conversation about what teachers think they need to make schools better.

PSAT Proctoring

I sit here proctoring an exam. Twenty-one young people--all about fifteen years old--sit before me utterly silent, calculators and #2 pencils in hand, bubbling in empty holes on their PSAT answer sheets. Many of them were particularly exuberant and playful when they walked into the school early this morning--teasing and joking with one another, gently pushing and slugging, scowling and name-calling, smiling and laughing at one another. I'm chalking it up to anxiety--right alongside the handful of headaches and tummy aches--because I never see them so rowdy this early in the day. After they'd all found their room assignments and the handful of little test-takers under my charge had sauntered in from the hallways and settled in to the classroom a minute or two beyond the 9:00am start time, I passed out the 39-page test booklets and fold-over, purple printed answer/info. sheets. I then stood at the front of the room deconstructing how to bubble the 2 full pages of info. sheets right along with them, puzzling through the questions that were at times utterly confusing even to me--a seasoned test bubbler.

As we worked together completing this form for 40 mins, students grumbled, sighed and got confused but stuck with it, figuring it out right along with me. They asked the usual, "Do I have to mark my race? Can I mark more than one?" And, of course, cried out in exasperation over forgotten social security numbers and zip codes. As we worked through the blanks, my mind raced through all the high-stakes, stardardized tests I've taken--this one--the PSAT, the real SAT, the ACT, the GRE--a couple of times, the GRE English,three teacher certification exams in Missouri and, when I moved, three more teacher certification exams in NYC. As I recall all of these exams that were requirements of my career in one way or another, it does not escape me that I'm teaching students a valuable skill as we work our way through the seemingly endless circles with our #2 pencils--that impersonal, computer-assessed exams will be part and parcel of the rest of their academic existence. From the SATs they will sit for--likely more than once, the Scantron exams they'll take in over-sized psychology and science courses at large public universities where they'll be number 787 on the quiz clicker to the myriad of professional certification exams they'll take for their respective fields.

I never really feel good on these standardized exam days. I feel like we've all gotten short-changed. And I think we have. This isn't what education is supposed to be, but it's also what education has become. If my students want to move on to careers where their talent, intellect, and innovation is truly valued, they have to learn to bubble effectively, erase completely, and read and understand directions that sometimes confound this teacher.

At the end of the each of the 5 sections, which I logged on the white board up front, I wrote silly things like, "Woot, woot! Wer're over half way done. :)" and then, "We're 80% thru! Yay! Hip Hip Horray." They rolled their eyes and shook their heads at me as they stifled smiles. When the test was through, I was the dragon lady teacher. I checked over each answer sheet and helped them correct errors. They sorta wanted to bludgeon me, because their friends from other classrooms were already in the hallways whooping it up. Yet, instead of letting them enter the mayhem of the hallways without reflecting on what they'd just accomplished, I quieted them down once again and quite simply said, "Congratulations, you've taken your first step to going to college. You should be very proud." As they filed out of the classroom, bumping into one another, pushing to get out of testing zone relatively unscathed and into freedom, I patted them on the backs, smiled, and congratulated them again. Then, I went and sat at my desk and let a few tears fall for the pride I feel for these children I'm growing to love and frustration at yet another injustice of our educational system.

I think for a moment about the dissertation I'm writing on literacy and technology in education and dream of all the wonderfully creative design projects we'll do this year with laptops on our desks, all the books we'll read and share with one another sitting on our bean bags, and all the interesting topics we'll discuss and probably even heatedly debate. Alongside these exciting valuable learning activities, I also resolve not to forget to teach my students the code too--to teach them to be good little test bubblers so that they have access to the really good stuff in the world of education. I can wish these tests didn't matter, don't have real consequences, but they do and kids need to know how to be good little test-takers right along side being designers, composers, and dreamers of new worlds. Perhaps it will be their over-tested generation that creates the new way of doing things that we so desperately need.