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Righteous indignation isn’t a rare state for me, but I usually don’t do anything about it. I just don’t have time. But about a year ago, during a day off, I was watching “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and caught what I felt was an unfair attack on teachers and our unions. By the end of the day, I’d dashed off an angry response to the show. I never heard back; mine was probably one of many responses. Since then, I witnessed a few more attacks by the show’s hosts on teachers, thinly disguised as attacks on unions to the extent that I stopped watching the show.

And so when I saw a commercial for last Thursday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe,” featuring a forum on education, I wondered if the panel of experts would include any teachers. Although I haven’t seen the show in a while, I wished that I wouldn’t be commuting and working while it was airing. During my lunch period, I did a little reading about the event and learned that there most certainly were teachers present.

They were in the audience.

Audience members — that’s what we have become in this national debate about everything that’s wrong with our schools. (more…)

My first teaching job was in a pretty rough school. So imagine my surprise one day when one of my colleagues said, “This is a great school to work at.” I waited for him to elaborate and tried not to fall over. He added, “Because of the parking!” He was right about that. We had a small section of the street that was reserved for teachers, but there was also ample street parking. The issues at that school were too vast for me to consider staying, but I still miss the ease of parking there.

Being a perpetual early bird, I didn’t find it too difficult to park when I transferred to my current school 10 years ago, even though there was a lot less street parking that wasn’t reserved for the school. I had my placard and usually had no problems, save for the very rare occasion when there was an accident on the Cross Bronx Expressway and I arrived later.

Much as we loved the city, my husband and I decided to buy a house and were unable to afford the city. We decided to head north, to Putnam County, where our daughter could have a yard and a small-town childhood. Since I loved teaching in the city, and still do, I didn’t look for a new job. Once I’d left Queens, I found myself leaving earlier than ever, but I wanted to make sure I could get a parking spot. And I have always relied heavily on that hour before school to get myself mentally ready for the day and set up any materials I needed. I am also neurotic about punctuality and am almost never late.

This worked well for me until last fall, when Mayor Bloomberg decided to strip most of our parking passes, citing abuse and a desire to see more people using mass transit. (more…)

Even though it was just last month, I find myself feeling a little nostalgic for November. December features a much-needed vacation and one of my favorite holidays, but the students and I had an unexpected experience in November that taught me something important: Sometimes the best instruction is no instruction.

A few years ago I stumbled across NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month, a contest which challenges participants to crank out a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. Whenever that month approaches, I think about making an attempt myself but can never bring myself to commit. This year, looking at the site, I noticed that there was a branch of the contest for students. Although the goal for adults is 50,000 words, the goals for kids are more flexible. Specifically, kids were expected to write approximately a thousand words per grade, making my sixth graders’ goal 6,000 words. I ordered the free materials on the spot.

But then I began growing skeptical that my students would want to get involved. Getting my kids to write anything is usually a challenge. Sometimes I joked to my colleagues that “dentist” was a more accurate title for what I do, because getting the kids to write more than a couple paragraphs is often like pulling teeth. (more…)

I am wired for worrying. For this reason, and this reason alone, I dread taking my students on field trips. But I usually do it anyway. Last year, as much as my students’ behavior was difficult to manage, I was secretly relieved that whenever the topic of trips came up, I could point to the conduct issues as a valid reason for not leaving the building.

This year, I have no such excuse. We’ve already had one trip, which was arranged by an outside organization which arranged for a school bus to pick us up and drop us off. This small convenience erased most of my usual worry, because the one field-trip related detail that causes me the most stress is transportation. I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve taken a school bus on a field trip during the years I’ve taught in New York City; we almost always have to take the subway. And though I love to share that fact with non-city teachers, because the expressions of surprise, admiration and “you’re out of your mind” greatly amuse me, I dislike the actual experience of taking my students on the subway. (more…)

Twice in my teaching career, I’ve lived the cliché “familiarity breeds contempt.” In edu-speak terms, I’ve “looped” two times, spending three years teaching many of the same kids through sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Both times, I greatly enjoyed sixth and seventh grade, but a few months into eighth grade, well, to use another cliché, the bloom was off the rose. I can’t pinpoint exact reasons, but I think that they were tired of me, and I hate to admit that the feeling might have been mutual, just a little.

The last time I finished with eighth grade, I swore that I’d never loop again. The challenges with the students themselves were emotionally draining, but I also found that my teaching wasn’t improving as much as I wanted. (more…)

So far this year, I have something that teachers dream of having: well-behaved students who are interested in learning. They have done well on the assignments I’ve given. They do their homework. They are kind, to each other and to me. I have high hopes and I sense that they do too.

It hasn’t always been this way. I’ve just started my tenth year at MS 145 in the Bronx, with sixth graders. Prior to that, I spent three years at the now-defunct IS 147, also in the Bronx. Fortunately, I am not superstitious about the number thirteen. I love to read and write, so need I mention that I teach English? Ironically, I’d intended to teach at the high school level, but discovered that I loved working with middle school kids.

Maybe I shouldn’t even write about my good fortune for fear that one day very soon, I’ll find that it was all in my head. (more…)