I, Who Can't, . .

The Real Value

This morning, as my class shuffled into homeroom, my assistant principal told me that I'd be visiting a nearby elementary school second period.
    "What about my class?"
    "It'll be taken care of." I thought he meant that someone would cover my class. He meant that the entire sixth grade would be taken out into the yard to run around for three periods while their teachers walked around an empty school (field trip) and took notes on bulletin boards and "print-rich environments." But it wasn't a waste of time. No!
    We noticed a huge difference between this school and our own as soon as we walked into  the main office. On one wall there was a huge calendar listing field trips and other school effecting events. Then on the counter we saw a weekly newsletter that was. . . up to date! And then, before we could revive Ms. Apple (not her real name), we saw a daily information sheet. No need to ask, "Who's out today? Who's suspended? Which classes are on a  field trip?" at this school.
    Walking down the hall our guide,  the AP, showed us a "leveled" book room that- gasp!- was left not only unlocked but with a sign-out sheet for the books that teachers borrowed on the "honor-system."
    I thought there was no honor among teachers.
    Before I could sign out a class set of Ramona Quimby, we were whisked up to the fifth grade floor, to view tidy, organized rooms, some with kitchens, and one with a sign on the door, clearly identifying it as a "SAFE" room. Some schools take it for granted that an ISS room exists for disruptive students, but in my school we have not had such a room for three or four years. Our current principal doesn't think we need one, although less than a month ago a detention room was hastily thrown together (eerily coinciding with a "learning walk" from the "people from the region." ) which involved my homeroom class losing their math teacher for a few days. The AP was visibily suprised when we told him about our lack of a SAFE room.
    After a short chat we returned to our home school. A younger teacher, a second year TFA who is still rising the fence over whether to return or not began to make plans for the school calendar next year. "Why can't we do what they do?" She asked.
    The school across the street doesn't have any more money than we do. They service the same community that we do. But they have something that is the real value- good ideas. I'm glad I walked across the street today, I wish I had done it earlier. I also wish that the recommendations that we made today are taken seriously. So many of the problems that exist in schools cannot be solved with money or longer school hours, they can be solved only by identifying and adopting the practices that work in other schools. That is the real value.
     Later in the day I overheard the young TFA teacher telling our AP about the elementary school's book room. "They have a sign-out sheet and it's always open!" She said.
    "Oh, Ms.- you know that our room is always open. All you have to do is find me and I'll open the room for you at any time."
    "No, but the door is open! All the time! Really open!"
    Some people may not be ready.

American Football

American Football, originally uploaded by Where-Bluebirds-Fly.

It Takes A Lot To Laugh

    I know that, in general, you're not supposed to point at and laught at a student. But. . .
    I've had that one foot out the door feeling this week. In June I'm going to begin graduate school upstate, so I'll have to leave before the end of the school year. My class will be split up, four of five kids added to the, admittedly small, remaining classes. This plan did not make me the the #1 most popular teacher on the first floor when it was announced at the grade meeting on Monday. But what can I do? If I don't get a master's degree I will lose my license.
    Today we went on a field trip to Central Park and the Museum of Natural History. Half of my class chose to stay home, and a handful of others were not allowed to join us- by my choice or another teacher's. One kid brought in his permission slip, asked how much we would be walking, and then made a game-time decision to stay at school.
    We had a 1pm appointment for the Butterfly Conservatory (Am I the only person a little creeped out by that densely humid stainless steel bunker filled with flying insects? Am I?) so we decided to go to the park first. Better not to try to make a day-long museum visit. I find the kids can deal with two hours TOPS of bones, phallic statues, naked people, beads, and statues with prominent phalluses ("This museum if like torture for dudes," to quote one student) before they go into catastrophic meltdown. So we found a nice spot with some sun, some shade, and a big empty lawn.
    The kids ran to the benches, leaving the lawn in it's pristine state.
    After lunch I brought out the "Peyton Manning Special Edition" nerf football I keep handy for park visits. A few kids threw the ball around, then a game broke out. When the tag game evolved into tackle I stepped in a called for the ball. A kid threw it to me.
    Female teachers might not realize this, in fact, male teachers who grew up playing team sports might not either, but kids will stop and pay attention when a ball is thrown to a teacher. Will he catch it? What will he do with the ball? Will he know what to do?
    I caught it. I had their attention.
    "No tackle. Too many rocks around here. I don't want any of you breaking your head open. I see tackle and the games over," I announced.
    And then I let loose a short pass to the nearest kid. A tall, thin student of mine interceded, calling out, "YO N-B-A!!!!!!!" And knocked the ball off course. "Haha! Mr-"
    It fell clumsily in the grass, incomplete. A boy ran off to retrieve it.
    My brief moment with the ball didn't go as well as planned. I was thwarted in a most demeaning way. Respect was being lost. A female student of mine crowed, "Yo! Mr. - You waaaa-"
    And smack. The returning ball hit the side of her head, cutting her off.
    I pointed and laughed and laughed. Hey, everybody was laughing.

BeansOnToast

BeansOnToast, originally uploaded by The Earl of Steinway.

Does this make your mouth water? If so... (read the post and follow the link below)

Beans on Toast in a Can?

Is this proof that the English are even lazier than we cousins across the ocean?

Poetry

    Even though in my mind Kenneth Koch's book Rose Where Did You Get Your Red belongs on the shelf of discarded idealistic pedagogies in my heart I know how much it inspired me to teach when teaching was far from my mind. I think I'm man enough to admit that I love teaching poetry. The past two years, however, I have not loved reading the poetry that my students wrote. Last year I blamed it on a lack of inspiration. I introduced the poetry unit late in the year, when the kids were more focused on summer than simile. The poetry we read, a random selection culled from old textbooks, dog-eared paperbacks, internet lyric sites,  workbooks, and, perhapaps best of all, former students, somehow didn't inspire. After touching on the most vital sixth grade poetic concepts I quickly returned the class to prosody. I fet like Phillip Lopate when he wrote,

"...there is a great quantity or children's writing that is boring, shallow, unimaginative, unfelt. If one piece in five has vivacity, I feel grateful. Sometimes it is only a single line, or a surprising word, that momentarily leaps from a composition of distracted expediency. . .
. . . A noted authority assured his public, 'Children have a natural ability for poetry.' This flattery of childhood passes for love of children, instead of what it is, self-complacency. And it does harm by breeding an expectation, in parents and teacher, that their children are naturally gifted lyricists who have only to be touched lightly for sparkling verses to fall out. Then gulit ensues when this doesn't happen. Why not admit the truth? . . . To believe that every child is a natural poet is a from of democratic wishfulness gone awry."

    I felt guilt last year that none of my students wrote a single decent poem; I was hoping that this would not happen again. But after two weeks of reading cummings, Poe, Tupac and Erick B. and Rakim, I had still seen hardly one inspired line and I was beginning to despair. I became excited a few times, catching the scent of fluent words, but then realized, depressed, that I was reading the lyrics to a Beyonce song, or Pink. One kid even wrote, "Trey Song" on the page, not even thinking there was anything wrong with that. I had told them that a song is a poem is a rap, it's all forms of language, so why not write someone else's song, so what if they didn't write it? Didn't I ask them to write a poem? I neglected to specify whose poem.
    Then I read a poem written by a student three years ago, when my class had a bounty of inspiration.

    "My Neigborhood

    My Neighborhood is not silent
    People screaming, babies crying
    Guns shoot, trrra!
    Grown kids yelling like they're
    Crazy
    Can't get any sleep
    Hustlers fighting for their corner
    My neighborhood is not silent
    If you ask me
    My neighborhood is like an engine
    that never gets turned off."

    This girl's poem, despite the ghetto-life cliches, ends with such a great simile. And the sound, Trrra! It has the feel of her true voice. Why can't my students this year write poems like this? I read the poem to the class, explained that it was written by a sixth grade girl from this neigborhood, three years ago, sitting in this same room. I asked the kids to write about their own neigborhoods, to focus on the sense of sound, like she did. All three classes became quickly quiet. Pencils were moving.
    Despite a short speech on avoiding the same old, "drugs and gangs and people dying" stuff, I was handed page after page of "My neighborhood is mad gangsta everyone be killing people all day and night like crazy people running and shooting and screaming." And then I came to this, written by a quiet girl who doesn't know how smart she is,

"My neighborhood is silent sometimes
I hear screaming and sometimes
I hear cars passing by the
Streets at night and even
Sometimes I hear my baby
sister crying late at night.
I hear little pin drops
Falling on the sink."

And I remember why I love teaching poetry.

You Blind?

    I was so happy to be finished with my day, my week, to be on the train reading the paper, sitting down, going home. A guy came on at 125th St. He wore dusty boots and jeans, phone on the belt, denim shirt. He looked like he just came off a work site. He strode down the train car purposefully, stepping on my feet, chewing a cigar the size of a roll of quarters. I was reading my newspaper, muttered excuse me; perhaps it was my fault, with my long legs.
    A moment later I heard a cane tapping and a guy walked down the train holding a cup, asking for donations. I didn't take a good look at him since I was deep into a review of Mission Impossible 3. Can anything be written about Tom Cruise that doesn't mention mental illness?
    The beggar sat down at one end of the train and asked a guy for the time. The guy had his headphones on. The beggar repeated his question but was ignored again. The dusty guy in the denim shirt walked over and asked, "Are you blind?"
    "Yeah," the beggar said. I looked up from my paper.
    Blind was the right answer. The cigar chomper put a bill in his cup. He turned to a woman sitting nearby. "Hey, I don't care!" He announced. "I just made two hundred dollars selling material."
      He put the wet end of the cigar back in his mouth.
    The beggar held the money between his hands like a tailor, rubbing it back and forth. "Is this a dollar?" he asked.
    "Yeah." The guy said. "How did you know?"
    "I guessed," was his answer.

You've Got Spelling!

akeelahbucks, originally uploaded by The Earl of Steinway.

    As anyone who has ever read my blog before knows, spelling and I get on like peanut butter and plastic, but I brought my class to see Akeelah and the Bee nevertheless.
    After the movie one of my kids said, "Hey look there'a a Starbucks!"
    I said, "Starbucks made that movie we just saw."
    Another kid asked, "Starbucks owns Lionsgate?"
    Who gave this kid a subscription to Variety?
    Yet another kid told me that Magic Johnson owns Starbucks. Which I don't think it true.
    So you might be waiting for me to tell you what I thought of this movie. Let me begin by reminding you that it was sponsored in part by Starbucks, a la "You've Got Mail," so it is part of the insidious corporatization and homogenouzation of American Culture. It also contains some really tired stereotypes of Koreans ("Yo I hated that Chinese kid!" my students told me later, although a girl corrected this kid by saying that it was the father who was evil, the father who spoke like a Korean grocer from a Spike Lee movie) and, strange for a movie about spelling bees, South Asians were almost totally missing. Did they take that year off?
    Last year I showed my sixth grade class the feel good documentary "Spellbound." The class was frustrated by the structure of the film, which told the story of five diffent kids before getting on to the big Spellathon in Capital City. By the third kid my class wwas yelling, "Get to DC already!" They knew what the makers of Akeelah and the Bee knew- the competetion is the thing.
Akeelah and the Bee is like Speelbound for tweens, which is like saying that winter is summer for agoraphobics. If you're afraid of documentaries but not cheesey cliched movies with a soupcon of racism, try Akeelah and the Bee. I couldn't help wondering how much more interesting the movie would have been if Akeelah's main competitor was a Buppie rather than an inscutable Asian. (You'd better be more familiar with the movie to undertand the rest of this paragraph) You could imagine the same scene where Dylan was scolded by his father, the robotic Korean tyrant, "How can you expect to win in the nationals if you almost lose a board game to a black girl" and then change, "black girl" to "ghetto girl." Am I the only one?
    That said, the kids liked it, it had some good performances for what it's worth. I think Angela Basset is great but damn! those biceps! How does a single mom find time to pump iron? Lary Fishburn as Mr. Forrester did fine, certainly bested Connery in the urban mentor role, but what a flakey movie that was. There'd much to recommend this movie for kids. I wish it didn't underestimate the audience's intelligence as much as Dylan's father did Akeelah's.

Abandoned Church, Morrisania

Abandoned Church, Morrisania, originally uploaded by The Earl of Steinway.

Bronx County Courthouse and Hupfel Brewery

Bronx County Courthouse and Hupfel Brewery, originally uploaded by The Earl of Steinway.