I wrote a "thank you" note to an eighth grade teacher on the
morning of the last day of school this week. The teacher's a bit of a
wise-ass; he cracks a lot of jokes, most of them, I gather, funny. Is
he everyone's idea of an excellent teacher? It's hard to say. But he's
smart, funny, actually teaches students to write five-paragraph essays
on Humanities topics, and when my own child was finding herself lost (in
a large, "gifted and talented" school which overall disappointed, in
ways that could have been avoided) this highly intelligent teacher
noticed and cared.
High intelligence and caring may sound like minimum basic requirements for teachers, but in even the best New York City schools, these qualities are all too scarce.
My children recoil in horror when I tell them I used to assign the occasional D+ or B++ to students on essays. Why not give the C- or the A-, they asked? More than not I rounded up.
But when my daughter presented me with her final middle-school report card, she found the grade the aforementioned teacher (whom I thanked) assigned a bit low. I thought it was a perfect grade. The teacher knew my girl was uncommonly able -- and I know she'd been dining out on aptitude for way to long. I was glad to see the teacher assign a grade designed to send a message -- a grade which is code for "We both know you could have gotten an A+ if you had tried even just a little." He cared.
A guy who lives a few blocks away from me pretty much won a congressional seat last night in New York local primary elections in Brooklyn, New York. He trounced his opponent, a pol I've been disliking from afar for years. I was not able to vote for my candidate of choice in this race, earlier this week because I live outside of his district, but I voted for Hakeem Jeffries once, several years ago when I lived where I could and I confess I did so with a mist in my eyes.
When Michael Bloomberg appointed Cathie Black two years ago, Jeffries, a black man educated in public secondary schools and undergraduate college, who went on to study become a Juris Doctor after studying at Georgetown and New York University, protested. Jeffries threw down with the teachers' union and opposed Bloomberg appointment of Black on the grounds that she was not an educator. I disagreed.
I liked the Cathie Black appointment, at first. I liked that Cathie Black was an outsider. I still think the Cathie Black appointment was a good one insofar as it shined a harsh light on what the work cut out for us was, vis á vis making the public schools work. The Cathy Black blunder led us to see that the schools were so deeply damaged by cronyism, racism, bureaucracy, anti-intellectualism and the malaise of mediocrity run amok that those in charge (the mayor et al) saw no other way out -- but to sell the soul of the schools to the devil of corporate interests under the pretext of (a misnomer if ever I heard one) "choice."
I liked that Cathie Black appointment didn't have an education degree. As an educator who sends two of my three children to public schools, I believe that the way teachers are trained and certified is the second-worst problem facing the schools, the first being the systematic institutional racism that permeates and compromises it at almost every turn. I viewed Cathie Black's lack of education credentials as a plus.
That was two years ago.
My thinking on the Bloomberg plan to "improve" schools has shifted. Thinking evolves. If it stays where it starts, it's not thinking.
I was standing on a corner a few nights talking with a fellow mom I've gotten to know through our work with under-educated students in under-served public schools. She articulated a question that's been rattling 'round my head for years; "Do the schools need 'reform'? Or to have the whole thing pulled up from the roots?" A couple of nights earlier, I'd enjoyed another conversation on the matter of education with a man who has worked the NYC DOE (and before that the NYC Board of Education) for many years. For the first time ever, I heard someone from inside the DOE worry aloud and fervently about how "choice" is ramping up institutional racism in the schools. He and I didn't agree on everything educational, but I think we agreed that we cared about the problem of educational reformers and complacent lifers not caring.
The truth is that educational partisanship is counterproductive. When it comes to education, imaginative solutions are the only way to go. One of Bloomberg's biggest mistakes is that he threw money at problems when he should have been throwing intelligence at them. Hakeem Jeffries, for whom I cannot currently vote, is a proponent of charter schools at present. This disappoints me. But people who care, self-correct.
The more I look at the charter school movement, the more I see wrong with it. On the other hand I was desperate enough to put my own child in a lottery for a charter school last fall, as a "just in case" measure. My own house isn't entirely clean on the charter issue; no one's house is. That might be the point. We all long to cut corners where the well-being of children is concerned.
The deeper I go in my investigation of schools, the more I realize that the politics and art of education are not like anything else, because children are the beneficiaries and the unwitting benefactors of "the system." People of principle go the extra distance for children. People of principle should cross lines they wouldn't otherwise cross in order to do right by children. Education is mysterious, like art, and political, too; so the bedfellows are often strange.
One constant is that all roads of "educational malpractice" always lead back to a lack of genuine concern for all of the children in the system.
The corporations that will only fund new schools sufficiently enrolled with white students, the educrat principal who's more interested in pension or building tenure than in students, the dumbed-down teacher education programs that certify teachers -- all have in common their lack of concern for students.
Much of my thinking about public education was shaped by working (for a brief time) in Board of Education schools in Brooklyn in the 1980's. Once I left off teaching children and began to teach young adults in New York City's public college system, I saw all too well what passes for readiness in graduates of city high schools (at least in areas of reading and writing).
In academic year 1985 -1986, I taught (honors and general) English at what was, at the time, one of the best high schools in the NYC system. Early on in the course of the school year, I realized that the students in my general English classes were, for the most part, no less intelligent than those in my honors sections. They were just less prepared, more forgotten and blacker.
I had over 1,500 students in the 15 years I worked as classroom teacher, but the minute I saw his name on campaign literature, I remembered all sorts of things about my former student, Hakeem Jeffries. I remembered him as a reserved and dignified guy with small handwriting and was one of the few in about a hundred who came up with something when I asked students to write a parody of a Renaissance poem at he end of the school year. The elephant in the room of my remembering, however, was that Hakeem was one of the few black students in an almost entirely white honors program. (Children in honors classes were admitted by a screening process, whereas the others were enrolled by zone.) I remembered wondering how that was was for 16 year-old Brooklyn kid, how it must have been a thing to finesse. I used to come home to my new husband in those days waxing prosaic about being torn -- by the ecstasy of having such strong students, and the agony of working in what I sometimes called a "segregated" school.
Even if I hadn't experienced that thrill of pulling the lever for a kid to whom I'd taught Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, I'd be watching Jeffries now, because he's a politician to watch. I venture this variation on a political cliché as I note that, at 15, Hakeem struck me as a mensch.
As I folded laundry and watched the primary election results come in early this week on NY's local Channel 1 on the eve of the last day of (NYCDOE) school, I found myself reflecting on my first year as a teacher with a NYC Board of Ed file number. I had about 125 students, five sections, and taught three different classes. I marked 110 compositions every weekend. I was a 26 year old pedagogical hot mess, no doubt. But students like Hakeem received regular quizzes on reading, learned a little grammar, wrote 20 formal essays in a year with lots of drafts, got pages of editorial feedback on writing, kept journals, read a few major literary works, learned some rhetoric and logic for writers, and how to make an argument with a pen.
I bumped into one of Hakeem's classmates, an attorney, on the street several years ago. She claimed that what she'd learned in our studies at Midwood helped her write for law school. It was a thrilling moment for many reasons, not the least of which was that one of my kids, then quite young, turned to me after, and said "So you really were a teacher! But I didn't do nearly enough for the 125 plus students I had at that school. The classes were way too large. The paperwork was way too voluminous, and the clerical tasks often compromised instruction.
The one time I voted for Hakeem, I got a little misty I pulling the lever. When it comes to former students, I'm a sap, but there there was more it than sentiment. As I left the Brooklyn Museum, where I had voted, I met Hakeem's mom. I introduced myself, and shook her hand. I was the mom of three young children at the time who understood, as a mother, why she was so proud. But I was proud too. Why?
I think of it as pride plus admiration divided by hope. I was moved by what Hakeem has made of an imperfect public education. Maybe it was myself of whom I was proud, because I know that when the future congressman sat in (roughly) the middle row attending a lesson on Erich Maria Remarque's World War I masterpiece that taught the world what war in the modern age truly was, Hakeem had a teacher who did one thing right; she cared.
Follow Michele Somerville on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NYpoet
High intelligence and caring may sound like minimum basic requirements for teachers, but in even the best New York City schools, these qualities are all too scarce.
My children recoil in horror when I tell them I used to assign the occasional D+ or B++ to students on essays. Why not give the C- or the A-, they asked? More than not I rounded up.
But when my daughter presented me with her final middle-school report card, she found the grade the aforementioned teacher (whom I thanked) assigned a bit low. I thought it was a perfect grade. The teacher knew my girl was uncommonly able -- and I know she'd been dining out on aptitude for way to long. I was glad to see the teacher assign a grade designed to send a message -- a grade which is code for "We both know you could have gotten an A+ if you had tried even just a little." He cared.
A guy who lives a few blocks away from me pretty much won a congressional seat last night in New York local primary elections in Brooklyn, New York. He trounced his opponent, a pol I've been disliking from afar for years. I was not able to vote for my candidate of choice in this race, earlier this week because I live outside of his district, but I voted for Hakeem Jeffries once, several years ago when I lived where I could and I confess I did so with a mist in my eyes.
When Michael Bloomberg appointed Cathie Black two years ago, Jeffries, a black man educated in public secondary schools and undergraduate college, who went on to study become a Juris Doctor after studying at Georgetown and New York University, protested. Jeffries threw down with the teachers' union and opposed Bloomberg appointment of Black on the grounds that she was not an educator. I disagreed.
I liked the Cathie Black appointment, at first. I liked that Cathie Black was an outsider. I still think the Cathie Black appointment was a good one insofar as it shined a harsh light on what the work cut out for us was, vis á vis making the public schools work. The Cathy Black blunder led us to see that the schools were so deeply damaged by cronyism, racism, bureaucracy, anti-intellectualism and the malaise of mediocrity run amok that those in charge (the mayor et al) saw no other way out -- but to sell the soul of the schools to the devil of corporate interests under the pretext of (a misnomer if ever I heard one) "choice."
I liked that Cathie Black appointment didn't have an education degree. As an educator who sends two of my three children to public schools, I believe that the way teachers are trained and certified is the second-worst problem facing the schools, the first being the systematic institutional racism that permeates and compromises it at almost every turn. I viewed Cathie Black's lack of education credentials as a plus.
That was two years ago.
My thinking on the Bloomberg plan to "improve" schools has shifted. Thinking evolves. If it stays where it starts, it's not thinking.
I was standing on a corner a few nights talking with a fellow mom I've gotten to know through our work with under-educated students in under-served public schools. She articulated a question that's been rattling 'round my head for years; "Do the schools need 'reform'? Or to have the whole thing pulled up from the roots?" A couple of nights earlier, I'd enjoyed another conversation on the matter of education with a man who has worked the NYC DOE (and before that the NYC Board of Education) for many years. For the first time ever, I heard someone from inside the DOE worry aloud and fervently about how "choice" is ramping up institutional racism in the schools. He and I didn't agree on everything educational, but I think we agreed that we cared about the problem of educational reformers and complacent lifers not caring.
The truth is that educational partisanship is counterproductive. When it comes to education, imaginative solutions are the only way to go. One of Bloomberg's biggest mistakes is that he threw money at problems when he should have been throwing intelligence at them. Hakeem Jeffries, for whom I cannot currently vote, is a proponent of charter schools at present. This disappoints me. But people who care, self-correct.
The more I look at the charter school movement, the more I see wrong with it. On the other hand I was desperate enough to put my own child in a lottery for a charter school last fall, as a "just in case" measure. My own house isn't entirely clean on the charter issue; no one's house is. That might be the point. We all long to cut corners where the well-being of children is concerned.
The deeper I go in my investigation of schools, the more I realize that the politics and art of education are not like anything else, because children are the beneficiaries and the unwitting benefactors of "the system." People of principle go the extra distance for children. People of principle should cross lines they wouldn't otherwise cross in order to do right by children. Education is mysterious, like art, and political, too; so the bedfellows are often strange.
One constant is that all roads of "educational malpractice" always lead back to a lack of genuine concern for all of the children in the system.
The corporations that will only fund new schools sufficiently enrolled with white students, the educrat principal who's more interested in pension or building tenure than in students, the dumbed-down teacher education programs that certify teachers -- all have in common their lack of concern for students.
Much of my thinking about public education was shaped by working (for a brief time) in Board of Education schools in Brooklyn in the 1980's. Once I left off teaching children and began to teach young adults in New York City's public college system, I saw all too well what passes for readiness in graduates of city high schools (at least in areas of reading and writing).
In academic year 1985 -1986, I taught (honors and general) English at what was, at the time, one of the best high schools in the NYC system. Early on in the course of the school year, I realized that the students in my general English classes were, for the most part, no less intelligent than those in my honors sections. They were just less prepared, more forgotten and blacker.
I had over 1,500 students in the 15 years I worked as classroom teacher, but the minute I saw his name on campaign literature, I remembered all sorts of things about my former student, Hakeem Jeffries. I remembered him as a reserved and dignified guy with small handwriting and was one of the few in about a hundred who came up with something when I asked students to write a parody of a Renaissance poem at he end of the school year. The elephant in the room of my remembering, however, was that Hakeem was one of the few black students in an almost entirely white honors program. (Children in honors classes were admitted by a screening process, whereas the others were enrolled by zone.) I remembered wondering how that was was for 16 year-old Brooklyn kid, how it must have been a thing to finesse. I used to come home to my new husband in those days waxing prosaic about being torn -- by the ecstasy of having such strong students, and the agony of working in what I sometimes called a "segregated" school.
Even if I hadn't experienced that thrill of pulling the lever for a kid to whom I'd taught Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, I'd be watching Jeffries now, because he's a politician to watch. I venture this variation on a political cliché as I note that, at 15, Hakeem struck me as a mensch.
As I folded laundry and watched the primary election results come in early this week on NY's local Channel 1 on the eve of the last day of (NYCDOE) school, I found myself reflecting on my first year as a teacher with a NYC Board of Ed file number. I had about 125 students, five sections, and taught three different classes. I marked 110 compositions every weekend. I was a 26 year old pedagogical hot mess, no doubt. But students like Hakeem received regular quizzes on reading, learned a little grammar, wrote 20 formal essays in a year with lots of drafts, got pages of editorial feedback on writing, kept journals, read a few major literary works, learned some rhetoric and logic for writers, and how to make an argument with a pen.
I bumped into one of Hakeem's classmates, an attorney, on the street several years ago. She claimed that what she'd learned in our studies at Midwood helped her write for law school. It was a thrilling moment for many reasons, not the least of which was that one of my kids, then quite young, turned to me after, and said "So you really were a teacher! But I didn't do nearly enough for the 125 plus students I had at that school. The classes were way too large. The paperwork was way too voluminous, and the clerical tasks often compromised instruction.
The one time I voted for Hakeem, I got a little misty I pulling the lever. When it comes to former students, I'm a sap, but there there was more it than sentiment. As I left the Brooklyn Museum, where I had voted, I met Hakeem's mom. I introduced myself, and shook her hand. I was the mom of three young children at the time who understood, as a mother, why she was so proud. But I was proud too. Why?
I think of it as pride plus admiration divided by hope. I was moved by what Hakeem has made of an imperfect public education. Maybe it was myself of whom I was proud, because I know that when the future congressman sat in (roughly) the middle row attending a lesson on Erich Maria Remarque's World War I masterpiece that taught the world what war in the modern age truly was, Hakeem had a teacher who did one thing right; she cared.
Follow Michele Somerville on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NYpoet
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