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There’s only one Bernard, but every teacher has a Bernard. He epitomizes everything we loathe about teaching adolescents, everything we love about teaching adolescents, and everything we loved about being (and still love about being) adolescents. He loves to argue and will pick fights with you about almost anything — but it’s all because he’s asking for limits. Once you give them to him, firmly and with clear explanations, you’ve earned his trust. Depending on my own energy level, I can handle conflicts with this student in one of two ways: one that enforces his perception, and or one that patiently and gently guides it into a strong sense of justice and a keen understanding of how to advocate respectfully and effectively for himself.

I’d like to share an example of the latter, not just because I’m proud of it but because I think conflict resolution with authority figures is one of the most important skills we can teach young people — particularly young people of color who are so often the victims of harassment and unjust targeting. I hope others will share strategies for addressing the Bernards in their lives.

Bernard arrived late to my classroom yesterday (as usual). Unbeknowst to me, he had accidentally brought his phone to school with him and (miraculously) it had not been detected by the scanners through which every student must pass. When he realized it was there, he panicked. He couldn’t let a teacher see it, or it would get confiscated. But the pocket he’d kept it in — a mesh pocket on the outside of his backpack — was too obvious. He didn’t want to keep it in a pocket of his backpack, lest someone steal it. He apparently walked into my room completely preoccupied with what to do about this situation.

Students were writing essay, and one girl had asked to type on my laptop. I’d let her sit in Bernard’s front row seat so the computer cord could reach the outlet. Bernard, despite being late, was furious and refused to sit anywhere except his seat. Exasperated and worried about losing time, I asked Bernard to step into the hallway and planned to negotiate with him in a moment when I was finished getting the other students working. (more…)

One major problem behind the Teacher Data Reports and other forms of test-based teacher evaluations is that they put all of the onus of student performance on teachers.In reality, struggles in school are most often the result of domestic tumult or of any number of poverty-related woes — poor nutrition, unstable housing, or lack of family support. Trouble at home is trouble at home, and it will bring your grades down whether you’re living in the ghetto or the wealthy suburbs. But there’s another universal issue high schools must deal with that is mentioned even less often when education reformers talk about teacher evaluation: Adolescents.

Teenagers are freethinking citizens of the United States who are discovering their growing ability to argue, to think for themselves. If they are not given the opportunity to face the consequences of their own choices, these citizens will not grow up to be the responsible adults we need them to be. Unfortunately, sometimes the consequences include low scores.

I recently witnessed a scene in my school’s main office that reminded me how powerful and necessary it is for the adults in a young person’s life to put the burden of academic responsibility on his shoulders. This scene needs to be shared as badly as any TDR data, lest the notion of the teacher who doesn’t check in with parents — not to mention the stereotype of the parent who doesn’t check on his child — go unchallenged in our city.

As a public school, Kurt Hahn lacks the personnel and after-school hours (let alone the legal prerogative) to truly require anything from parents beyond an emergency contact card. Yet our parents know they are welcome in our doors at any time, and I’ve seen teachers repeatedly drop their prep materials to have the essential conversation with students and parents that puts everyone on the same page about academic progress. This is how I witnessed a student’s freshman year forever change — for better or for worse, of course, is still up to him. (more…)

It’s cold out now, but my thoughts have lately taken me to last summer, when I lounged in Madison Square Park with my class’s first-trimester novel and thought big about the upcoming year. Summer-Hilary organized with Grassroots Education Movement and the New Teacher Underground to remind herself of the political reasons she’s in education. She slept and ate well. She spent plenty of time with the family and friends who keep her well-fed emotionally. Fueled by all that self-care, I was able to imagine the highest possible expectations for my students and use those expectations as my only compass and my only ceiling.

The unit plan I made last summer was far from perfect, but it was a beautiful reflection of the perceptions of Kurt Hahn students—subtle and profound — that I have assimilated over the last two years, of what I’ve come to love about them as individuals and as a collective. It’s a reflection, too, of my best self: the teacher I dream myself to be when I am fully energized and fully focused on my students’ literary and literacy progress.

When I return to it now — halfway through the school year — that airy summer musing already feels light-years away. I have had to adjust the pace and the sheer multitude of work I assign, not because of my students’ capacity but because of my own. The rigorous assignments I came up with require twice the rigor from me: I have to complete models and rubrics of each so that I can demonstrate to students what I’m looking for. I have to be ready to grade and hand back drafts at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, I have to keep up with the not-technically-contractual-but-crucial-for-everything-else-to-work responsibilities of my small school: an 11th-grade advisory who are starting to think about what they’ll need to graduate on time, collaboration with a first-year global studies teacher, the small writing workshop I launched to help students meet the Common Core standards.

I could do all of this if I were, you know, one of those teachers: the kind I always envision making the cut for Teach for America or one of the leading charters, who can pull full days of teaching and full nights of work, who don’t need much sleep or can function without it until a free weekend comes along. I can give maybe one-week of high intensity, dawn-to-dusk work, and then I crash. (more…)

As a first year teacher in 2009, I’d tried to discuss themes of oppression and internalized oppression through short stories about teenagers in inner-city Manhattan and Brooklyn. My students’ discomfort was palpable and, at times, explicit. What I was doing, unintentionally, was setting them up to either defend or attack the issues in their own communities. While I wanted desperately to put aside my whiteness, it was my whiteness that made working meaningfully through the political implications of these texts impossibly uncomfortable for my students. I took a break from these issues for a year. In that time, I attended an “Undoing Racism” workshop and engaging in dialogue with several different groups of anti-racist educators.  I also realized might just have to pick a different text.

Last month, my classes read “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian,” a graphic novel by Sherman Alexie mostly based on his own experience growing up on the impoverished Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State. I chose the book because I hoped it would prompt discussions of racial issues that drew on my students’ cultural backgrounds without having to focus on those backgrounds in a negative light. Moreover, I love the sophisticated issues the book subtly brings to light — not just racism, but racism in its most insidious form: internalized racism, and the low expectations that youth set for themselves when they are too young to “undo” it.

The author, like his protagonist, left at an early age because he recognized the low likelihood of receiving quality education and support for professional goals if he stayed on “the rez.” His autobiographical character pays for his aspirations by being teased heartily by his fellow Spokanes, particularly being called an “apple” — red on the outside, white on the inside. There are similar words, Alexie points out, in other cultures: the oreo, the banana. It’s considered “white,” these taunts suggest, to be smart. To be successful. To have ambitions. Alexie makes this comparison in an interview we watched  while prparing to read the book. Students laughed at Alexie’s likeness to the dude from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” but the Oreo reference resonated. I know, from the chuckling in the room, that students knew the sneering sentiment of that term. I also knew better, in my third year of teaching, than to inquire about it. To do so would be to force them to unair something unsavory about their own culture, and they needed to do that if and when they were ready to trust me.

The first few pages of Alexie’s novel boast a comic strip of what the protagonist feels is parents would have looked like had someone “listened to their dreams.” He draws his mother as a well-dressed professor and his father as a cool musician. My student Sera, upon reading through these descriptions, commented, “They don’t look successful, they just look white.”  Immediately, she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh,” she said, “I just said something wrong.” (more…)

For presidential hopefuls, 2011 is the year of campaigning. In the New York teaching world, thanks to the new Common Core standards, 2011 is the official Year of the English Teacher.

That’s right, it’s all about reading to identify flaws in others’ argument and writing airtight arguments of one’s own. Instead of the onus of literacy living principally in the English department, now all subjects at my school are expected to work together toward more coherent development of ideas in our students’ writing. Walk into any classroom in my school over the next couple of weeks, and chances are you will be hearing about paragraph structure, thesis statements, the use of evidence, or the difference between fact and opinion.

While it’s edifying to iron out my learning objectives with colleagues across the disciplines, the critical value of the Common Core Standards came to my attention while watching the Republican presidential last week. Rick Perry was asked to speak about his position on immigration, and he did. Kind of. After taking a hard line against anyone who would usurp America’s resources without due contribution, he went onto emphasize his pride in his own immigrant roots. He talked about how hard his Italian grandfather and father had worked to give him the opportunities he’s had in his life. He talked about how vital immigrants are to America’s prosperity. He closed with a sanguine (but apparently unmemorable) relish meant to further inspire American pride in anyone who hadn’t yet been swept away by his passion.

There was no connection, however, between his nostalgia and his original point: that we need to limit the number of immigrants entering our country without documentation, or make sure that those who do enter are properly taxed. In a national debate, the governor of Texas had just earned himself a 50 percent on one of my 10th-grade writing assignments. (more…)

I know “summer” should be synonymous with things like “lying in an inner tube on a lazy river,” and I’m getting get my fair share of that. But there is just too much going on in education politics for me to close my eyes for longer than a few seconds — and too much going on in the world of teacher activism to want to.

Despite budget cuts, New York is valiantly scrounging together the money to pay for additional testing — now in the arts. I won’t bother asking whether these tests or anyone can actually assess the effects of art education on young people. I won’t even argue against tests themselves: Assessment is a precious way for a teacher to gauge what her students have learned and what she needs to teach differently.

But when we make these tests “high-stakes” for teachers — i.e., tell them that their careers depend on test scores — we give more power to a piece of paper than to the power of the human social and academic intellect. When school becomes a matter of overcoming a hurdle, a student’s learning needs become impediments to be resented, quashed, and expelled. Teachers, who among us has entered the field of education in order to expose the success of gifted students and sweep under the rug students with emotional, physical, and language needs?  Whoever you are, congratulations to you — you’re going to have a very successful career in the era of high-stakes testing.

In response to the mushrooming consequences attached to test results, the Grassroots Education Movement is in the early stages of putting together a new campaign, tentatively titled the “Change the Stakes” Campaign. (more…)

Commencement is meant to celebrate student achievements, but for me it was an opportunity to recognize the privileged place of a teacher. For me, it underscored the opportunity that small school faculty have to make a profound difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.

Last Monday, the Kurt Hahn School graduated its first class of seniors. It was an emotional day for everyone present to celebrate the accomplishments of these individual students and of our school. My principal’s commencement address mentioned students who had won film contests, had made tremendous academic gains despite linguistic or ability setbacks, or had initiated one of the increasing number of student groups springing up each year. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he remarked, if these triumphs — not mere test scores and teacher performance ratings — were the headlines in our local papers? We can link these accomplishments to our school’s particular attention to character development, but there are countless sets of values we could have chosen and gotten the same results. What makes a small school any different from a big school is the combination of personal attention and cohesion that the adults working there are willing to maintain.

The city’s push to open small schools over the last decade, in large part with funds from the Gates Foundation, was intended to provide students with more opportunity for individualized attention and the opportunity to be truly “known” by a teacher. Having seen this initiative in other cities, I’ve always been especially fond of it here in New York. (more…)

Last month I wrote about how readily some of my students will link their disruptive or disrespectful behavior to their race or the race of their teacher. One student, Joseph, called me courageous for, as a white teacher, “coming in to teach us black kids every day.” When I inquired as to what he meant by this, he explained that he didn’t mean to say the word “black”; he essentially used his race to describe a constellation of disruptive, irresponsible, and disrespectful behaviors that both he and his classmates often exhibited when they were bored or otherwise unmotivated in class. (My post elicited numerous recommendations from educators to develop a lesson around internalized oppression, which I have done.)

Now I want to delve deeper into my students’ attitudes toward race and teaching, which have implications that reach far beyond my students’ behavior to some of the most important education policy debates going on in New York City today.

A few days after my conversation with Joseph, the class was still working on the assignment that had inspired his comment: an essay about someone they know who demonstrates courage. A Yemeni student, chin in hand, was at a loss for a subject.

“Don’t you know anyone who shows courage?” I asked her. This particular student has a great sense of irony and its delivery; she peered to one side and the other, looked at me, and pointed at my nose. (more…)

Classroom management decisions are all about timing, and time waits for no one — not even a white teacher striving to capture the sophisticated racial commentary her students are never shy to espouse. I am often forced to choose between my established parameters — learning objectives and the rules of my classroom — and a teachable moment that, if done right, my students will remember long after those parameters have stopped mattering.

In my second period 10th-grade world literature class, which tends to be the most precocious and defiant of my three classes, a restless energy fills the air. We are concluding a human rights unit in which students focused on how survivors of human rights violations demonstrated courage, and I’m trying to psych them up to write the final project: an essay about someone they know who demonstrates great courage. As we are brainstorming potential people we could interview, a student named Joseph blurts out, “I want to interview you, Ms. Lustick! You got the courage to come in and teach us black kids every day.” I wait a beat, for a burst of laughter or some other response, but rest of the class waits silently for my reply.

When a student calls out, two sides of a teacher’s brain light up. The content-driven side of my brain gets excited: wow! That student made a fascinating point! I’d really like to hear more! I bet other people do too!  Listen to the content-driven side of your brain and students will learn very quickly how easy it is to get you off track. So a teacher quickly learns to beef up the management-driven side of her brain. The management-driven side of my brain can hear a student call out just about anything and it will compel me to do one of two things: repeat, flatly, that I’m only calling on students with their hands raised, or show this by flat-out ignoring the comment in favor of a student whose hand is up. It’s usually this latter strategy that I employ. It’s less disruptive to the lesson, while sending the same message: I will take your comment as soon as you raise your hand. I always feel it’s the more impartial and professional of the two strategies. It says, “I don’t discriminate against specific students or their opinions; I simply only acknowledge those with their hands raised.”

But there’s a layer to this particular comment that complicates that. (more…)

As a closeted high school student in Pennsylvania during the late 1990s, I couldn’t stand hearing James, a classmate in my English class, suggest “because he’s a queer,” “because he’s a big homo,” or “because he likes other men” as the answer to open-ended questions about Jim’s motivations in “The Glass Menagerie.” But it wasn’t James that I was really angry at; on some level, I understood that he had poor impulse control, was bored, hadn’t done the reading, and was looking for some kind of attention. Instead, I was angry with my teacher, who would stand waiting for someone to offer a “real” answer without addressing James’s mocking use of sexual identity terms. Sometimes she would say “James,” in a flat and wearily annoyed tone. But she would still be looking around the room and waiting for someone else’s voice to move us forward. Not only did she fail to acknowledge the unsafe space James’s answers created for students who wanted to contribute real ideas, she also failed to address the homophobic language and tone of his jokes.

In New York City in 2011, slurs against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are considered hate speech and grounds for suspension. We’ve come a long way. Yet this rule does not ensure respect for sexual and gender diversity among my students. In a society where it’s acceptable to laugh at stereotypically gay behavior, my students continue to make the same kind of knee-jerk comments that my classmate James did — but I find my trying to turn these remarks into important lessons about diversity. But because these lessons are so subtle, I never know how to measure their impact, how to reflect on them, or how to do better next time.

Take the topic of small-group work, for instance. Just those words together are enough to turn the stomachs of my students into blocks of ice: Without very explicit instruction from their teacher, students will be afraid to enter into authentic academic discussion in small groups. So before we get to work, I open with a low-risk skit activity designed to help us label the exact behaviors we do and do not want to be a part of our group discussions. I choose low risk topics, such as restaurant and movie preferences, and pick two sets of volunteers: one to act out a “disrespectful conversation,” and the other to act out its counterpart.

For purposes of engagement, the disrespectful conversation has to go first. Students forget any concern that it’s uncool to name disrespectful behaviors in the sheer hilarity of watching students, at the instruction of their teacher, make fun of each others’ mothers, gesticulate as if they were going to slap each other, and interrupt each other loudly in their debates over Burger King versus McDonalds or which movies they think are worth seeing in the theater. Subsequent brainstorms easily elicit a perceptive list of these behaviors. When we exhaust that brainstorm, I motion to the other pair — Aaron and Ella — students waiting patiently on the other side of the room to act out a “respectful conversation.” And this is where what started as a lesson in respect must also become a lesson in sensitivity to diversity. (more…)