I, Who Can't, . .

Cast the first clog. . .

dansko, originally uploaded by celiathepoet.

    Another blogger points out how many teachers are leaving, undersocring the point I tried to make last Sunday. The official turnover rate is 14-15% annually. That doesn't include the teachers who choose to transfer to less challenging schools.
    I don't blame anyone for leaving, I just wish the boss would ask why?
    I'm not surprised at how many young teachers burn out so quickly. New York City does a great job of grinding all the hope out of the young, like a despair machine. But I don't think they hold all the blame. What about those Upper West Side liberals who roll their eyes at kids in big T-shirts, while they wear danskos? Aren't we all part of the comfort culture? It's the teachers who have to stand outside of this culture- consciously put ourselves into extreme states of discomfort for the possible good of our charges.
    I hope all my fellow teachers are enjoying the last days of school, and I hope you come back again in September. The machine needs your hope.

The other eighty percent

    Yesterday we were looking at the High School Regents test that (virtually) every High School student in New York State has to take and pass in order to graduate from High School. I hadn't seen this test since I was in High School. Back then one could still get a "local" diploma without taking the regents, but times have changed, and all teachers must know about the regents.
    A classmate, a product of new york city's progressive schools, was nearly reduced to tears by this activity.
    "Doesn't this test go against everything we are being taught?" she said, "There are schools that have fought against this and don't give this test."
    Someone responded that there are a negligible number of schools, and while they have a good point, most schools have to give the regents, including the very progressive school that this university runs downtown.
    Not surprsingly, I've heard the acronym, "NCLB" more often than the word, "children" at this school. That is not to say that my classmates are not concerned with children, or students, but, and this is possibly due to the admitted progressive, constructavist, anti-traditional bias of this school, that there is a lot of consternation about the way things are.
    This anger, however, is very different from what you read my fellow teachers' blogs.
    There are some schools that don't give the rengents test, they use portfolio assessment or some other alternative form. There are also many schools that are moving towards more autonomy. Klein has recenly inivted more schools, 20 percent of new york's schools, to join this autonomy zone. If successful, and there is no reason to assume this, that would mean that, next year,  1 out of 5 schools will suck less than they do this year. Bit what about the remaining eighty percent.
    When I asked the girl who almost cried over the regents about her experience in public schools, she said that there was a network of progressive schools in new york, who worked together to fight against NCLB and the attendant standardized tests. While this is the good fight, I was left wondering, again, what about the rest of the schools. Does this network reach out to failing schools, or talk amongst themselves. If the best fight against the inept, sometimes aggressively so, system, or against bad schools?
    What happened to trying to change the system as a whole? To make networks among all schools that are run like professional learning and sharing networks and not as franchises. I know that the word network is thrown around in schools as an organizational principal, but in pratice, teachers, do you feel like you're part of a network, or do you feel like you work in a flea market? Are you part of the lucky 20 or the sorry 80? And where would you want your kids to go?

They are all with me now

 

Where has my class gone?

    Good question. But let me proceed to write a little about my new situation.
    While my fellow teachers and teacher-bloggers are struggling through the end of the year, with its field trips, unairconditioned rooms, "clerical days" of redundant paperwork (I would have loved to blog about this- I mean, haven't they invented machines that hold this information?), the mandacity of assigning work after the final grades have been submitted, the endless hot days asking the question, "if a kid takes a test and no one knows what grade they earned, did they really take the test?" Yes, while they, perhaps you, are doing all these things, I am in the woods. Reading books. Writing papers. No, I'm not the unabomber, I am a college student. Oh did someone say, what's the difference? You're a very clever group. Sorry, I miss public speaking.
    Blogging just isn't the same.
    When I was in the school, I had a pretty good idea that no one who knew me, not even the two or three TFAs I told about this blog, ever read it. Isn't that the magic of the form? The anonymity? But now I go on and on about it. Regarding these blogs, (To paraphrase Fowler on split inifinitives) the faculty here seems divided into those who understand and don't care much, those who understand
and think they're the next big thing, and those who neither understand nor care.
    So in other words I have exposed myself. I have removed the magic of the blog. I don't expect that any of my classmates or teachers will take the chance to read this blog, but somehow the combination of exposure and change of subject (from being a teacher to being a student) has taken the wind out of my blog-ship's sails.
  But then again, I am still paying for this blog. I refuse to let this go the way of netflix- a pile of DVDs- not even opened- when am I ever going to watch these? And yet I can't bring myself to send them back. My advice, btw, is to send them back.
    So I don't know what my subject will be, but I will try to write occasionally. I imagine that in July most of these blogs will go dark. Are there any summer-school-blogs out there?