GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A first-year ESL teacher (she teaches English for students still learning the language) praises her supervisor:

Today we were talking about how I go about using and teaching academic language to my students and she says, “I hate (the way the school does) the word wall. You have my permission to tear it down. Get rid of it and use words that they will use. That are meaningful.”

How rockin’ is that?! Not only is she giving me permission to do something different but it’s something that requires me to be creative and do what I think is best.

Something has happened to the charter school teacher who blogs at Mildly Melancholy that almost never happens at traditional public schools: She has been forced to resign.

This teacher has been writing about her tough school year since September (without revealing the school’s name). At a non-charter school, her misery would probably have proceeded apace until June, mainly unchanged. If tensions with the administration escalated, she might have sought help from the union. But as it happened, Mildly Melancholy — who began teaching in September 2004 — got miserable and then was surprised to find she got fired. She plans to quit teaching altogether.

Her account:

I knew something bad was coming, but I didn’t want to think it was real, and I didn’t think it would happen so soon. This week has been really awful in my classroom (and across the entire grade, actually). I haven’t been a happy person at this job, and I haven’t been a very effective teacher. So it’s actually kind of a big relief.

I was pretty shaken by how fast it all happened; within an hour I finished teaching my last class, signed the letter, surrendered my laptop, and was packing up my belongings.

Here you can read her description of her first, much more optimistic days teaching, at a middle school in Queens.

Bronx 2020, a career-changer who wants nothing more than to become a New York City public school teacher, has applied to the city’s Teaching Fellows program. He has had an interview, and now he’s just waiting. Until when, he’s not sure. He writes:

I really have no firm date by which I’m suppose to hear back from NYC Teaching Fellows. I’ve gotten various answers back from different people. I’ve heard 5 weeks after the interview (which would be tomorrow). I’ve heard mid-January. I’ve heard late-January and even early-February. It’s like they’ve got a drunken monkey spinning a wheel-of-luck doo-hickey in their office deciding our fate.

Later, he notes that the Teaching Fellows Web site says the program will let applicants know within five to seven weeks after their interviews, so he should know by later this month whether he’ll be a teacher in September. And back in October, he worried about how the size reduction in the upcoming Teaching Fellows cohort would affect his chances of admission.

After four months of continuous test prep for January’s English Language Arts exam, her fifth graders refuse even to engage with the text anymore, reports They Call Me Teacher:

My students give up before the test prep reading is even handed to them. They already know what answer they are going to choose… without even reading the options (or the story). They have already mastered the fake reading… where they look blankly at the text and then, after a few moments, move on. No matter how many times we model, partner, attempt to hold students accountable with underlining and highlighting and written explanations of why the answer they chose are the best answer… it doesn’t follow through into testing. These students are completely capable of finding the most basic answers in the text, but they don’t care. It’s not important to them. … And WHO could blame them?

Via Edwize, second grade reading teacher Miss Brave explains why she has to record her students’ assessment data all over again:

This morning we had a meeting at which we were told we would have to re-enter each student’s individual results onto a class summary sheet. Had we, in fact, already done this? Yes! But when we asked what happened to the last summary sheet, we were dismissed with a curt, “I don’t know.”

Um… So, okay, let’s review. As part of my job, I did the following:

• Administered the assessment to each individual student.
• Graded the assessment of each individual student.
• Entered the assessment of each individual student onto a class composite summary sheet.
• Handed off the data to people who are supposed to be in charge of entering it into the computer.

And those people, as part of their jobs, did the following:

• Lost my data.

Guest-blogging at NYC Educator, teacher Yo, Miss! wonders if she should anonymously help this student’s family:

“When are you putting up your Christmas tree, Stacey?” Tiffany asked. (Not their real names.)

“Oh,” Stacey said softly, “um, I don’t know.”

“I thought we were late!” Tiffany exclaimed. “I guess you’ll probably be later than us.”

“It’s not that,” Stacey said. “My dad said we might not have a Christmas tree this year.”

“Why?” Tiffany asked.

“He says we can’t afford one,” Stacey said. “He only gets paid when he works, and he isn’t getting work, really, right now. Like, one or two days a week only, sometimes.”

And two teachers blogging at Daily Kos recently related stories of their students’ fears and realities as their families make tough choices.

First-year 7th grade teacher C in the City has just one wish for the holidays:

I caught myself praying as I was writing a self-checklist for my students to wrap up this persuasive unit. As a final check for their editorial, I’m going to ask students to go back to their rough drafts and count how many paragraphs they have and write the # in a space: ____ Then, in a moment of desperation and panic, I added next to the blank “<—-If this number isn’t 5, see me.”

And then, I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I realized what I had written was so absurd. I was thinking to myself, God, I hope it’s 5. Please don’t write 3 or 2 or 4. 5 paragraphs please. 5 is the magic number. That’s the only gift I could really appreciate from my kids. Something to affirm that I know what I’m doing slightly. I marvel that by the end of this week or Monday, all students will have written their first persuasive essay, and that I can say I moved 91 students to write a 5 paragraph essay.

New York City elementary school teacher Peace in the Classroom is dismayed that her school has been designated as under “corrective action” according to the No Child Left Behind law:

Just because we are a community school and we take EVERYONE who walks in the door, including children from a transitional shelter that is in our catchment area, we suffer the consequences of having low-performing students. It is not a reflection on the actual teaching or achievement of our “home grown” students, the ones we keep from Pre-K through 5th grade. What do they want schools to do? Shut their doors? Only let in a select few? I am proud of the fact that we educate everyone equally. I am proud to have over 80% ELLs in my class. The media always puts down these “underperforming” schools and it’s so sad that my school has been categorized this way.

After a talented co-worker left their “dysfuctional” Brooklyn public school to work at a charter school, he told Ariel Sacks:

I didn’t fully realize it before, but all the craziness that was constantly going on around me was clouding my teaching. With all of that gone, I can identify my weak points and improve on them.

Sacks ponders what that “craziness” looks like — computers that don’t work and no money to pay a technician, chronic absenteeism among students — and how it forces teachers to plan for unexpected obstacles. What does it mean to compare teacher effectiveness in such different environments, she asks:

Teachers at schools like mine get used the multitude of x factors. In fact, we stop expecting everything to be “just so” and start going out of our way to plan for all of the unexpected things that might happen. Does this make us less effective? Maybe it does, in a way. It is harder to address problems quickly and effectively, when new problems present themselves simultaneously. But is it fair to call us less effective? Is it actually fair to measure my effectiveness in the same way my former colleague’s teaching is now measured, when the playing field is not level? Is the job of teaching in these very disparate environments even the same?

If the quality of my teaching is measured by my students’ scores on the same test that Joe’s students also take, and soon, I am compensated based on this same determination, then tell me—why should I keep on working at a school that can’t provide me everything I need to reach my full potential as a teacher?

Yesterday was cold outside — but not in Mimi’s New York City elementary school classroom:

I was snuggled up to a little friend today, chatting about their writing, when I felt beads of sweat rolling down my back. And I thought to myself, “self, WTF, it’s December and you’re sweating through your SLEEVELESS SHIRT!” I then glanced at the radiator, which was pumping out heat at such an intense level that you could actually see it rising up in front of the windows. Four of which were open. Again, it is December and today it was only 38 degrees outside. …

So now, not only am I mourning my inability to wear my favorite winter wear, but I am also dealing with chronic bloody noses…, sleepy children and abandoned sweaters piled up in all corners of the classroom. In the last week alone I have said the phrase, “put your clothes back on” more times than I care to admit as children attempt to strip down to their undershirts.

Also, props to the commenter on Mimi’s blog who called this “Bikram teaching.”