Today's post will be a bit of stream-of-consciousness reflecting on the last week and some of what I've started to think about regarding myself as a teacher. I've decided to give these ideas some categorization so it's not too confusing. You also have my sincere apologies for not posting more often. Despite being lighter than a normal course schedule, these summer classes really scaled up the workload for the last week of classes and that coincided with attending a big professional development conference all week. TC's Reading and Writing Project are surprisingly good and I'll mention my experiences in the Reading Institute below but if you are interested, check out their website. While it's probably not going to adequately explain everything, it's a good view into the kind of education I'm about to be involved in.
Honored to share this beautiful space & time with these middle school teachers for the week! @TCRWP pic.twitter.com/XN7iXOVWMb— Kathleen Schechter (@kat_schechter) June 29, 2017
Cameo!
New York City Commuting
Prior to this week, I was commuting into the city twice weekly for evening classes. It was nice. It was leisurely. It wasn't really commuting so much as a fun train ride.
This week I needed to be at Columbia by 8am every day which necessitated being on a train at 6am. I was squarely in the middle of peak rush hour and got to see the city as most commuters probably see it. My trip includes a train ride and then taking the subway from Penn Station up to the university so I see a decent chunk of the NYC commuting experience. Trains were rerouted due to "track conditions." Subway cars derailed (thankfully I was not on it at them time). The governor of New York declared a state of emergency for the entire transit system. (Also, can we talk about animals on the subway?)
It is amazing. I love it. Sure, delays and cancellations suck but this is very different than driving. You have redundancies built in. There are multiple train lines and multiple subway lines intersecting at numerous locations throughout the city. When one thing breaks, you have options. When my train was rerouted from Penn Station to the much further away Atlantic Terminal, I was able to hop off and change trains to get where I needed to go. Maybe it's my perspective as an Atlanta native but I felt the transit system was very flexible at responding to major problems. Perhaps it should have responded better. Perhaps the problems should never have occurred. Either way, I was able to move myself, on transit, to wherever I needed to go with a minimum of fuss or delay despite both of the transit lines I used daily being shut down. Even dysfunctional mass transit is a revelation for someone like me who is used to mass transit being nonexistent.
Being in New York City
Spending every day in the city from about 7:30am to about 9:30pm (Friday was shorter, but I'll claim it!) really made me feel closer to the city. Sure I have 4 hours of commuting, but I spent most of my time in the city. I took the time to walk around when I had breaks between classes to get a feel for the area around Columbia. It's really the southeast edge of Harlem and there's a lot on offer. Mostly food. I was able to eat from from a different ethnic tradition each day and I consider that a success in and of itself.
Walking through the area was painless and fun because I could observe the variety of people and businesses. It's amazing to me that it all works. There's so much density and so many people that you'd think little screw ups and failures would lead to big screw ups and failures and the whole place would quickly become dangerous and dysfunctional. By and large, it's not. I attribute a lot of that to New York City being so large that it creates it's own social and economic ecosystem. You could become a successful business just serving a need on a single block. You could become a millionaire serving a need on several blocks.
I also spent a lot of time outdoors. No, it's not the Great Outdoors of nature and national parks, but I wanted to be outside of buildings and in the urban environment. Sure, my tune would change if it rained, if it was a hundred degrees, or if it was snowing, but still, I spent a lot of time outside. In fact, I think I spend more time outside here than I did in Atlanta going through similar circumstances. I attribute much of that to using mass transit. Although the trains themselves are steel tubes, often underground, I would be walking to and from subway stops and train stations. Compared to walking to my car in a parking lot, this is probably more time spent outside. I would also prioritize some transit stops so I could enjoy the city more. For example, I'd hop off at 110th street instead of 116th street just so I could crest a hill at a particular spot and look all the way up and down Broadway Ave. for miles in both directions.
It's also more time spent with other people. Maybe I don't communicate with most of them but you don't exactly feel alone on a crowded subway car with someone's face in your armpit (sorry lady, it's just how it is.) I can see why migration to urban centers is typically a liberalizing force - in the classical sense of promoting individual rights and responsibilities, not the current American liberal traditions. When you're one in the crowd, you start to realize that your needs have to be advocated for or you're left out. This isn't some purely libertarian bend either. It's more of a realization that you all have needs, you all have to meet those needs, and we're all in that boat even if your needs differ from mine. While I know that in a technical sense, I think experiencing this kind of environment really helps you feel that connection. You're going to help the lady with the walker get through the subway turnstile because, dammit, we're all waiting here and helping her helps us all. Yes, I consider that liberalism, ha!
Schools
I'm four years out of the classroom and I'm starting to feel it. Technology is everywhere but maybe not as widespread in the ways I was worried about. Teachers have access to many many many more tools than I had access to despite being in a fairly affluent school district. I think that's largely a byproduct of both the slow acquisition process for a large district and that I was teaching in a very transitional moment in education. Almost every teacher I spoke with this week had access to droves and droves of technological teaching aids and their students did too. Many had one-to-one programs in their districts. None lived in the top-down-algorithmic-learning dystopia I am terrified of. In fact, most just use tech as a tool but relied heavily on physical media too. The Institute and its partnered schools use numerous physical books. I found myself jotting down all sorts of websites, apps, and other tech things which would make my life easier once I landed back in classrooms.
I've also started to reconsider my thinking about what schools look like. Obviously my only in-classroom contexts are drawn from the pair of Georgia districts I was in as a teacher and student teacher. While tutoring gave me a window into some classes, I don't know a lot about the schools. That also means I can't assume the schools function similarly to what I remember. Indeed, they don't. One example would be the role of professional development. In my school, I taught a professional development session. Now, as a 2nd year teacher I didn't have a whole lot to offer but I wasn't expected to offer anything. Professional development was basically the principal picking teachers at random and telling them to teach a session on the next teacher workday about, well, anything. In other words, there was no expectation that anyone would learn anything and we were merely doing this to meet some PD requirement.
Here, professional development is typically a school or district-wide initiative. Often they partner with schools of education who send advisors to many classrooms (or probably all of them, if possible) for weeks on end. Observations are done. Data is taken. Scores are evaluated. And at the end of it, those developers stick around for months to help improve and change curriculum, the school environment, or whatever else they're brought on board to change. It's collaborative and done to support the teachers and schools. I had no idea this kind of thing even existed.
The Reading and Writing Institute is basically the professional development arm of the MA program I'm in. My professors and dozens of development staff have been embedded in schools nationwide, sometimes for years, working on improving reading and writing. A number of the attendees I met this week weren't ELA or reading teachers, they were professional development staff and administration for districts in Seattle, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis. They came to the Institute to evaluate its practice and methods to see if they were a good fit for their districts. They would likely go back and recommend hiring developers from the Institute to come work with their elementary or middle schools to improve reading and writing instruction. I just couldn't fathom a district that would bring in any outside help to revamp and improve their schools. It'd be tantamount to admitting you'd been fucking up kids all these years. I think it's a major cultural difference that's at the root of this problem.
How is this a thing? How is it not a joke played on teachers? It's really exploded my idea of what a career in education could look like.
I found myself struggling to answer questions asked by my peers:
What kind of grading did your school do? Uh... the kind where you uh... give grades. It turns out there's a kind of standards based grading that's very intriguing to me but I never considered that there were numerous methodologies to grading. Also, I think I may have been mostly grading things for compliance, especially in my general ed classrooms.
What was your district's literacy plan? Did we even have one? Maybe I don't know that because high schools don't teach literacy.
How did your school approach ESL and ELL students after they exited their ESL/ELL programs? Umm, we didn't?
How have you used students' prior test scores to plan and improve your instruction? Well, see, we weren't actually allowed to see their scores. We instead got a score report which summarized their overall performance in Math/Reading/Writing. I also remarked that the tests scored each standard on a 1-4 scale but the reports used a 1-3 scale to report overall performance. We didn't see what the breakdown on each standard was. It may have actually been illegal...
Me In Schools
Since I was attending the Institute for course credit, I also spent time working with some of the university faculty and planning out my upcoming school placement options. I think it revealed a lot of the shortcomings I had in recognizing that there are a lot of ways to do school. I couldn't adequately explain to them what I was looking for in a placement school because I didn't really know what a school with a reading teacher looked like. I ended up babbling something about how I was okay with being placed in a difficult school because I had experience in a Title I school and with students with behavioral problems. This was to Lucy Calkins, the woman running my MA program and the institute. She's one of those people who answers emails in three separate emails, each kind of staccato, and then admits she was writing them at stop lights while driving home from work. You know the kind of person I mean.
Lucy looked at me for a minute and asked what that meant. Again, I struggled. I meant that it was okay if you placed me in a school that faced a lot of challenges stemming from race, poverty, urban blight, whatever. I'm a cool guy. I want to save the world. Throw anything at me. I can handle it. My mentor teacher skipped town for the first three weeks of my student teaching. I was in that class alone with different substitutes each day. I could handle whatever the school would thrown at me.
I'll paraphrase her response. I think part of the impact comes from the way she said it so think of a person talking very quickly and in a tone somewhere between scolding and pity.
James, why is that your concern? Why do you think we are placing our students in schools that don't promote training our students? Do you want to be in a school which isn't going to help you learn about teaching reading and writing? I think you need to ask yourself why you think two things: why don't you expect to be placed in schools for your benefit and why don't you advocate for being placed in schools for your benefit? They're related and you need to think about how you see yourself in schools.
Fuck, she's right.
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