Bud the Teacher

Last week, I received a review copy of Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America.  Thought it was worth taking a minute or two to say that I’m definitely a fan of the book.  I’m impressed with the way the author, Donna Foote, has captured the different teachers, students,  administrators, and classrooms and painted them as actual human beings dealing with complex issues and feelings as opposed to one-dimensional cogs in the educational machine.

While the book’s set in Los Angeles, I recognize many of the folks, or at least the types, she’s written about.  Kids who disappear.  Teachers who will do anything to see their kids do well.  Teachers who burnout.  Administrators who try too hard - and aren’t successful.  The folks who show up because they’re supposed to, but who’ve given up.  I appreciate the portrait.  It’s real and honest and captivating and certainly not pretty.  A fine example, one with which I’m more familiar than I’d like to be, is this paragraph, a stream of consciousness from one teacher struggling to figure out how to help a student he noticed was cutting herself:

Who am I kidding?  I don’t know what I’m doing.  The fact that it’s left to me to identify a girl who is on the verge of killing herself is ridiculous.  You can fake the teaching, but when it comes to this stuff, you can’t.  How can it be that I’m the one diagnosing or even realizing that this girl is in trouble?  I don’t even know who her guidance counselor is.  If something happens, I could be held liable.  I don’t know who to go to.  And if I don’t write it on my hand, I won’t remember to even report it.  It’s crazy.  Oh God, I hope she’s okay.

I’ve been there.  Ignore the TFA aspect of this book - it’s an eye-opening account of what it means to be a teacher in a dysfunctional school in the United States.  Or maybe in any school in the United States.

As for TFA - any alumni out there want to comment on the program?  While I dig their goals, it doesn’t seem to me like the program is necessarily going to result in systemic education reform.  Although, I might be getting cynical on the whole idea of education reform - small group of committed citizens, right?   And perhaps TFA, as only a 20-ish year old organization, isn’t mature enough yet.  Foote, in this interview with U.S. News & World Report, talks about the “two-pronged” approach of TFA as a reform group:

TFA has a two-pronged theory of change. In the short term, it will send smart, energetic, committed young people into these terrible schools. But the longer-term vision, and the one that is most likely to bear fruit, is the idea that, because TFA has culled so carefully for leaders and because these young teachers will be so informed by this unbelievable experience of teaching in underperforming schools, they will go out and make big changes.

Now that the early corps members are approaching their early 40s, we’re starting to see signs that these leaders that have been embedded in society are starting to rise up. If you troll the education reform movements, the big nonprofits, and philanthropies, you’ll see TFA alum[s] in their ranks. I think a real marker was laid down last spring when TFA alum Michelle Rhee was named chancellor of the D.C. schools.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone with TFA experience.  And I’m looking forward to the rest of the book.  Not because I suspect the ending’s a positive one - but because I so appreciate the humanity of the story.

    Happy New Year! (Better late than never, right?) 
    I’m returning to the blog after a pleasant break from most of the online world.   Very pleasant break.  There was lots of snow to remove from driveways and sidewalks, and plenty of good friends and family to visit.
    Tomorrow begins our third quarter of the year, and I’m pleased to report that I’ll be beginning the quarter with a new colleague in my classroom as I’ve got a student teacher for the spring.
    Supposedly, I’m to teach him how to teach — but so far, I think I’m doing most of the learning.  A fresh pair of eyes is really handy to have in the classroom, and I’m looking forward to learning a great deal as I basically reexamine my practice through another’s eyes in the midst of honest questions.
    This idea of learning through questioning actually helps me to connect back to my last post, one that has spawned an awful lot of conversation that I haven’t quite been able to process properly.   Seems as if I touched a nerve or two.  It wasn’t my intention to put anyone’s back against a wall, but it seems to have happened. 
    When I want to better understand something, I ask questions about it.  Asking questions, in and of itself, is important to do.  When we don’t question ourselves and our motives from time to time, we fall into bad patterns and we quit thinking constructively critically.  Karl said it better than I can:

Yet another quote from Deborah Meier’s book:

Expecting
teachers to take responsibility for the success of the whole school
requires that they begin to accept responsibility for both their own
and their colleagues’ teaching.

This made me think
of something Ron used to say a lot - "Care enough to confront." He was
referring to students, but I think the same thing applies to our
colleagues. I think we need to respect our colleagues enough to ask
hard questions of them. That’s part of what I’m trying to do with this
staff development - ask hard questions of each of you (and myself) to
make sure we are doing all that we can to make our school a success. I
don’t think it’s okay anymore (if it ever was) to just say "I’m going
to close my door and do whatever I want." It’s not enough to be
successful as individual teachers, we need to be successful as a staff
if we want our school to be successful - and if we want our students to
be successful and achieve to their potential.

Of course there’s a
fine line between pushing our colleagues to do their best teaching and
conveying the impression that "my way is right, your way is wrong." But
I think that’s a line we need to walk. I think if we fail to approach
the education of our students as an entire staff - with a coherent
approach and clear goals for what we want to achieve - we will be
mediocre at best. And I guess I’m at the point in my career where I
refuse to be mediocre - or part of something that is.
If
we intend to dramatically improve the education of American kids,
teachers must be challenged to invent schools they would like to teach
and learn in, organized around the principles of learning that we know
matter.

    When I asked about groups, that was an honest question.  And I appreciate the honest answers.   I’m still thinking, too, about my questions.  I don’t know the answers.  Of course, that’s the whole point of the asking, isn’t it?
    A new read in my aggregator has been asking some wicked good questions lately, the kind that challenge the assumptions that I bring to the classroom.  I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, or his methods, but I really dig his questions and the motivation and solid writing behind them.  Here’s one, taken slightly out of context (read the original post):

If the point is to acclimate them to what will be the essential
publishing tools of their day (a cause I can get behind and push),
then, [expletive deleted], will Journalism and English please step up their
curriculum, pronto? Otherwise, will someone link up the post I’m
missing? Because until someone explains how wikis will increase
Instructional Value while decreasing Minutes Expended then I’m content
to play wallflower at this party.

    It’s a good question, passionately and honestly asked.  Lots of responses in the comments.  Good ones, the kind that help you clarify what you think, not flame-y or anything. 
    Ask good questions this year.  Especially the hard ones.   We all need them. 
      

    I’ve been following a group of preservice teachers as they begin to explore both blogging and teaching.  I wonder if you might be willing to hop over and give them a hearty welcome comment or two.  I think they’re beginning to ask some pretty interesting questions for a project they’re working on.  You can find the group via their teacher’s blog.  Look to the sidebar on the right side for the university students’ blogs.
    Sheryl has her preservice teachers’ blogs all glu’d up.  Alex Reid is blogging with preservice folks, too.  Any others? I like following new teachers’ thoughts and questions — both because of the New Voices column I edit for English Journal, and because I constantly fear falling into a rut of poor quality thinking.

    Last Wednesday, a student and I were invited to speak at the monthly meeting of CSU’s student affiliate group of NCTE.  We had a conversation for about an hour about alternative education and our experiences as teacher and student.  Lots of good questions and several laughs were shared.
    I didn’t intend to record the presentation, but some of their group wasn’t present, and was interested in a podcast version of the conversation.  I just happened to have my equipment. 
    Enjoy.  Oh, and the invitation to tour our school is open to y’all, too.  Just let me know if you’re interested.

    Via a response to a post I made here last week, I just discovered a collection of preservice teacher blogs.  Some pretty interesting reading, and the preservice teachers who become bloggers will have a big heads up when it comes to professional development once they’re in their own classrooms. 
    On a technical note — this Suprglu page is a great example of how you can aggregate several voices into one location for the purpose of having both a shared and an individual blog space for a course.  After the course is over, the individual blogs can still exist, independent of a course, until the next need for aggregation comes along.  Tools like Suprglu are going to be the essentials when students enter a new course with their own personal learning space.
    For example, when a student creates a school blog for her language arts class, the teacher can aggregate all of those blogs into a Suprglu page.  Then, when that student is done with language arts, and is now blogging in math class, she can keep her same blog, with all of her old posts, and the math teacher can aggregate the class blogs together in a similar fashion, so that students need only add one more feed into their aggregators.
    Now, does anyone know how to aggregate posts by category only, so that the student’s work in language arts can be pulled into one class page, and the student’s work in math can end up on the math page?