This past week, I had the unique experience to see one of my Delta hypotheses proven correct. This is a rather long story, so grab a snack and let this tale unfold.
I was in Memphis last Friday retrieving my brother from the airport for a weekend visit, and as luck or fate would have it, this was the exact moment that my car started to act up for the first time since moving to Mississippi. Apparently a common problem in Saturns, my ignition cylinder was faulty, and I found that I could not turn off my car. Perplexing problem, right? I called a fix-it man in Clarksdale, who put me in touch with a mechanic, who told me that in order to get the car to stop, I would have to pull some fuses. Exciting start to my brother’s visit!
We drove back to Clarksdale without incident, and my brother pulled some fuses to stop the car. We discovered that when we turned the car back on, it would not accelerate, jerked terribly when shifting from first to second, and generally acted rebelliously. Saturday morning we took the car to a repair shop down the road, but they sent us on to another shop across town. With a car barely running, this was an adventure for my brother’s driving prowess! At this second shop, they asked me to leave the car until someone could look at it on Monday. It wasn’t much use to us at the time anyway, so we just bummed rides and loaner vehicles for the rest of the weekend, and I rode with fellow teachers to and from work.
On Monday, the repair shop informed me that the problem could only be addressed at a Saturn dealership, which in my case is 90 miles away on the northeastern corner of Memphis. The car could not possibly make such a journey on its own, so I was obliged to hire a tow truck, which was discouragingly expensive. I rightly suspected I was at the start of a rather costly repair job.
By Tuesday evening, my car had arrived in Memphis, and the dealership hit me with an estimate, which only covered the cost to replace the ignition cylinder and housing. If the driving problems persisted, who knew what kind of nightmare would ensue! However, this is a tale of merely inconvenience and not highway robbery, so the expenses ended there, thank God.
Wednesday was a half-day at school, which seemed to me the perfect opportunity; my car was fixed and ready to go by noon and I had an afternoon free of teaching. On a regular day, I could never make it to the dealership before they closed at 5:30, and I loathed the idea of leaving my students with a substitute (read: babysitter) while I trekked to Memphis. I found out my co-teacher had a doctor’s appointment in Germantown (just south of the dealership) that afternoon, so I could just tag along and get my car! Everything was lining up perfectly.
I approached my principal with my solid plan, explaining that I would miss nothing but my professional development session, which did not promise to be very helpful this late in the school year anyway. Besides, I had never missed any sessions, so I had a reliable track record behind me, and I was positive the administration at the central office would be accommodating.
THIS is where my tale of vehicular adventures turns into a shocking nightmare: my principal told me that she would rather that my co-teacher and I missed a day of school than for us to miss an afternoon of professional development. After all, the state education department would theoretically be checking to see that our school’s teachers attended PD and NOT that we were missing school. In short, my principal would rather cover her own a** than have me in school teaching! She preferred to pay money for a substitute—IF she managed to do that; I had taken a scheduled day of vacation the previous Friday, and she left my co-teacher with all 54 students for the ENTIRE day, even though she had plenty of advance notice to hire a substitute! I knew that if I wasn’t at school, the whole day would be wasted for my students. And apparently unlike my principal, my first priority is my students’ education!
So I bummed one more ride to Kirkpatrick Elementary, where I was scheduled to attend a fourth training session on my Shurley English curriculum (seriously?!). Then guess what! After 45 minutes of doing NOTHING, the facilitator sent us home, expressing her apologies for our district’s misguided request for her services, saying that she knew our teaching priorities rested with the state tests and NOT in her already-covered training. Unbelievable!
As I walked home from Kirkpatrick, I realized I had a choice: I could either take my free afternoon—and boil with anger at this twist of incompetence—OR I could scramble to find a ride to Memphis! I called another teacher I knew had no PD sessions to attend (lucky bastard) and who happened to owe me a favor. At 3:15, he picked me up and we headed off to Memphis for the start of even more adventures.
I should tell you that 3:15 is the time my school day usually ends, so this would be a grand experiment in my original premise—that I could not make it to the Saturn dealership before it closed. But I had high hopes: this guy is roughly my age, and my generation is a culture of speeders, and he drives a sporty little Honda. But nope, he happens to be the one red-blooded American male who religiously observes the speed limit. Luck had turned against me again! And as we sat in deadlock rush-hour traffic, I was seething with dread, especially after I called Saturn Mikey and he told me, “Either get here by 5:30 or you are out of luck.” What grown man calls himself Mikey anyway??
So what time do you think we made it to Saturn of Memphis? At 5:30 on the dot. Thank God a salesman was “working” a customer, otherwise who knows! Best part: the receptionist gathered all the paperwork, and then forgot to make me pay. THAT in itself tells you I was there past 5:30. (Don’t worry. I did actually pay.)
As I rolled up to school the following morning in my own car (for the first time in five days!), I was already highly strung with pent-up frustration at my principal. I welcomed the opportunity to call her out on her misplaced priorities and to point out the fact that I was even there, rather than on my way to Memphis to get my car. But I imagine it is very much for the best that that confrontation never took place. I am just so happy that I have my car back and I did not have to miss a single minute of school to take care of it!
And that is why I Teach for America.
Whew.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Landing Right Side Up
When I first started writing updates, I remember I kept saying that I would continue to work towards some conclusions about the curiosities I experience here in the Delta. After eight months of teaching and learning, I feel that I have finally embraced some concrete ideas. So here it goes.
TFA is not the solution to the challenges I am seeing in the Delta. It is great that we are trying to get rid of—or at least diminish—the evils of the achievement gap in this country, but I think the achievement gap in the Delta is merely a surface issue masking a more significant problem. Without addressing the deeper ills, we are never going to make any progress in education.
The problem is the role of education in this society: I am simply a glorified babysitter. As long as my kids are not bullied by other kids, and as long as they manage to not fail, then the parents are happy. They get frustrated when they feel that their kids have been somehow victimized, at which point the teacher becomes accountable for not better protecting the children. Academically, I have been taken to task for failing a child and the parent thinks it is my fault. Whenever I give a parent lower-than-expected grade summaries, I am immediately fearful for myself rather than for the student. Sure, the child is going to get his/her “tail whooped,” but the wrath will also fall to me. I will be challenged by parents who, if I am going to be brutally honest, are ignorant, self-entitled, and self-righteous. They are not interested in academic achievement; they just want me to pass the kids on and get out of the way. They see any below-average grade as my attempt to hinder their children, rather than a reflection of what the kids have honestly earned.
A parent once accosted me for not telling her that her daughter was failing. In truth, I had warned her constantly, but she was more concerned about behavior. What weapon could I wield against such selective, obstinate memory? But here is something even more interesting: my co-teacher insisted on significantly inflating this child’s grades in order to protect both the child and ourselves from this crazy parent. To an extent, fair enough. But she inflated them so much that this child ended up on honor roll. And when the mother found out at conferences this week, she screamed, hollered, and carried on like a full-grown third-grader. No words to describe the whole encounter, except: WOW.
As I write this, my school has been threatened with a lawsuit by a mother whose daughter is failing the first grade. The mother is suing the first-grade teachers and the principal for I-don’t-even-know. When the first-grade teacher told me, I was confused by what legal leg this woman has to take the school to court. It baffles me even now. But this is not the first parent—and certainly will not be the last—who seems to expect something different out of a school than her child’s education.
The point is this: though there are exceptions, many of my parents teeter on the verge of confrontation at all times. They are waiting to pick a fight because the children are getting into fights, because I am academically demanding, or because I refuse to inflate grades. I have to justify everything I do. I understand this accountability to an extent, but I really believe there has to be a limit. I also believe that these confrontations are the parents’ way of shifting the sphere of responsibility from themselves to someone else. Let’s face it: most of my parents were children when they started having children, and many of them remain mentally frozen in immaturity and recklessness. They unfoundedly expect so much of me because they still have not grown up, and I am the perceived adult and authority figure. How else do you explain parents asking ME, a 23-year-old novice in family, in education, and in life, for advice?? The important difference is that these reckless adolescents do not hesitate to pull the victim card and dream up a scenario of inequality, prejudice, and injustice.
Paradoxically, many of my problems in the classroom come from the fact that my students insist on “acting grown;” they chastise each other for behavior and seek to punish one another just as they do at home to their younger siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc. They want to take on childish problems with “adult” attitude, “adult” consequences, and “adult” vocabulary. They get carried away and then refuse to submit to my legitimately adult intervention.
So we have children having children because they think they are ready for adult roles, and then they pass off those children to the care of other children (younger siblings, relatives, and even neighbors) so that they can continue their irresponsible and childish pastimes. Kids grow up already knowing how to physically take care of other kids, but everyone remains trapped in an adolescent mentality.
I can’t even get my head all the way around that phenomenon!
Then we have testing: the ultimate mark of so-called achievement in the public schools. But I think that such heavy reliance on tests as the solution to the Delta’s education inequity is missing the proverbial forest for the trees. Even if I manage to improve the test scores this year and next, that is a short-lived, short-term success. I mean, let’s be real here: I teach THIRD grade. Do any of us remember how we did on those state tests when we were eight-years-old? Or better yet, how many of us experienced long-lasting effects because of that third grade test? These tests only matter to the people in charge. It is important to the teachers, the principals, the superintendent, the state department of education. If you think about it, the state tests actually have VERY LITTLE to do with our students. It is a way to hold the adults accountable for how and what they teach kids. We judge children for a test they don’t understand or value, and then we punish the adults for how these children performed. The responsibility is inexplicably disfigured and distorted. We have warped the ladder of accountability so that the adults are responsible for all the prep work, the children ultimately have all the power over that test, and then we go back and execute educational justice on the adults. But who ultimately suffers? Exactly: the children. Please tell me how that is fair.
Perhaps instead of worrying so much about a damn test we should focus more energy on community development. We need to create a culture that values education by training parents to accept some responsibility for their children’s moral upbringing. As it stands, the Delta is mass producing citizens who think that the number one rule, when it comes to accountability on every level, is: "Cover your own ***, and don’t be afraid to lie, cheat, steal, or sell out your friends in order to do it." Simple example: I once had two best friends tell on each other and try to get the other in trouble. When my reaction was, “Are you seriously telling on your best friend?” the two girls were not nearly as mystified as me about the whole ordeal. Parents do not believe that they have any responsibility for their children’s education. They do not help with homework, and so many of them were confused when I asked them to take their children to the public library and get them a library card. Their role is not to help them or encourage them to read. That is my responsibility. If I fail in that, it’s my problem, and it better not affect their children’s grades.
So where does that leave me? It means that I spend more of my time thinking about how to reach my students outside the classroom than in it. I see many of my classroom efforts as me trying to stand still in a stampede; moving the opposite (read: correct) direction is simply impossible. That doesn’t mean there isn’t value in my day; each moment is an opportunity to gain some respect and approval. Despite what many parents might initially think, I am not the enemy (a perception inevitably based upon the accident of my race). I am actually here to offer support in every way I can.
I understand now that I can make a much bigger impact on my students by mentoring them for three hours after school than I ever could in the seven hours I see them during the day. What my kids need is a guide to show them humanity. They need an education in what it means to see value in themselves AND in others. They need someone to take them to the store and teach them the value of money. They need to go to a restaurant and practice proper manners. They need to experience and find pride in diversity. (I actually had a fourth-grader tell on another student because he called her a “white Puerto Rican.” I told her to be proud of her heritage and stop treating it like an insult.) They need to learn charity and hard work and humility. Most important, they need to be taken away from their negative influences. My stupid, irresponsible, abusive parents and the idiots, jailbirds, and pseudo-thugs they call friends are the ones who manage to undo all of my day’s work in a matter of minutes. If I could remove my kids from that, I cannot even fathom the individuals these children would become.
Remember the kid who brought the BB gun? On his good days, that kid absolutely adores me. He will follow me around and call me his mother. Another teacher even said it once: “Here comes Ms. Cook with her son!” My reply has always been, “If you were my kid, you would be a very different little boy.” My students love that comment, and I never thought they completely understood the layers of meaning or implications, but then one of them got it spot-on: “Ms. Cook, if we were your kids, we would be straight-A students, and we would never get in trouble. We would be completely different.” Maybe. Maybe not. But the important thing would be that I would teach them how to be a good human being. Or at least, I would give it a more concerted effort than I see happening around me.
This past week, the Mississippi Department of Education visited my school for three days. We are on an improvement plan because we did not make AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) in our math scores. On Monday I had an observation and interview, both of which went as well as I could expect. The interview was particularly interesting: the woman told me that Mississippi is divided into three regions: the hills, the coast, and the Delta. She did not hide her disdain for the Delta (she is from the hills) and she certainly acted as though we shared a special bond (called race) that made her more a friend than a scary authority figure. The sensation was that together, we are fighting the depravity of this black problem in the Delta. She indicated that I should consider moving to one of the other two regions in Mississippi if I plan to stay in teaching. I appreciated the compliment that she feels I am already a good teacher, and in time I will become truly great. (I wish I had gotten that on tape for my TFA program director). As she left, her parting words were, “I will be praying for you.” That interview, in a nutshell, sums up what I experience daily as a white woman and a Northerner in the Delta. Suspicion from the black community; willful ignorance and neglect from the white. Wow.
More than ever, I am committed in my mission to help these children. I am revitalized by a deeper understanding of the problem and thus the solution. I can better visualize my purpose and my potential impact. I work with students four nights a week, and I can’t wait to work with my kids this summer. I already know what I need to do to improve for next year. Even though each day still has its own challenge, I feel better equipped to handle it, and I can see the progress we have made together.
I have also decided to track my daily answer to a simple but also hugely significant question: Stay for a third year?
TFA is not the solution to the challenges I am seeing in the Delta. It is great that we are trying to get rid of—or at least diminish—the evils of the achievement gap in this country, but I think the achievement gap in the Delta is merely a surface issue masking a more significant problem. Without addressing the deeper ills, we are never going to make any progress in education.
The problem is the role of education in this society: I am simply a glorified babysitter. As long as my kids are not bullied by other kids, and as long as they manage to not fail, then the parents are happy. They get frustrated when they feel that their kids have been somehow victimized, at which point the teacher becomes accountable for not better protecting the children. Academically, I have been taken to task for failing a child and the parent thinks it is my fault. Whenever I give a parent lower-than-expected grade summaries, I am immediately fearful for myself rather than for the student. Sure, the child is going to get his/her “tail whooped,” but the wrath will also fall to me. I will be challenged by parents who, if I am going to be brutally honest, are ignorant, self-entitled, and self-righteous. They are not interested in academic achievement; they just want me to pass the kids on and get out of the way. They see any below-average grade as my attempt to hinder their children, rather than a reflection of what the kids have honestly earned.
A parent once accosted me for not telling her that her daughter was failing. In truth, I had warned her constantly, but she was more concerned about behavior. What weapon could I wield against such selective, obstinate memory? But here is something even more interesting: my co-teacher insisted on significantly inflating this child’s grades in order to protect both the child and ourselves from this crazy parent. To an extent, fair enough. But she inflated them so much that this child ended up on honor roll. And when the mother found out at conferences this week, she screamed, hollered, and carried on like a full-grown third-grader. No words to describe the whole encounter, except: WOW.
As I write this, my school has been threatened with a lawsuit by a mother whose daughter is failing the first grade. The mother is suing the first-grade teachers and the principal for I-don’t-even-know. When the first-grade teacher told me, I was confused by what legal leg this woman has to take the school to court. It baffles me even now. But this is not the first parent—and certainly will not be the last—who seems to expect something different out of a school than her child’s education.
The point is this: though there are exceptions, many of my parents teeter on the verge of confrontation at all times. They are waiting to pick a fight because the children are getting into fights, because I am academically demanding, or because I refuse to inflate grades. I have to justify everything I do. I understand this accountability to an extent, but I really believe there has to be a limit. I also believe that these confrontations are the parents’ way of shifting the sphere of responsibility from themselves to someone else. Let’s face it: most of my parents were children when they started having children, and many of them remain mentally frozen in immaturity and recklessness. They unfoundedly expect so much of me because they still have not grown up, and I am the perceived adult and authority figure. How else do you explain parents asking ME, a 23-year-old novice in family, in education, and in life, for advice?? The important difference is that these reckless adolescents do not hesitate to pull the victim card and dream up a scenario of inequality, prejudice, and injustice.
Paradoxically, many of my problems in the classroom come from the fact that my students insist on “acting grown;” they chastise each other for behavior and seek to punish one another just as they do at home to their younger siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc. They want to take on childish problems with “adult” attitude, “adult” consequences, and “adult” vocabulary. They get carried away and then refuse to submit to my legitimately adult intervention.
So we have children having children because they think they are ready for adult roles, and then they pass off those children to the care of other children (younger siblings, relatives, and even neighbors) so that they can continue their irresponsible and childish pastimes. Kids grow up already knowing how to physically take care of other kids, but everyone remains trapped in an adolescent mentality.
I can’t even get my head all the way around that phenomenon!
Then we have testing: the ultimate mark of so-called achievement in the public schools. But I think that such heavy reliance on tests as the solution to the Delta’s education inequity is missing the proverbial forest for the trees. Even if I manage to improve the test scores this year and next, that is a short-lived, short-term success. I mean, let’s be real here: I teach THIRD grade. Do any of us remember how we did on those state tests when we were eight-years-old? Or better yet, how many of us experienced long-lasting effects because of that third grade test? These tests only matter to the people in charge. It is important to the teachers, the principals, the superintendent, the state department of education. If you think about it, the state tests actually have VERY LITTLE to do with our students. It is a way to hold the adults accountable for how and what they teach kids. We judge children for a test they don’t understand or value, and then we punish the adults for how these children performed. The responsibility is inexplicably disfigured and distorted. We have warped the ladder of accountability so that the adults are responsible for all the prep work, the children ultimately have all the power over that test, and then we go back and execute educational justice on the adults. But who ultimately suffers? Exactly: the children. Please tell me how that is fair.
Perhaps instead of worrying so much about a damn test we should focus more energy on community development. We need to create a culture that values education by training parents to accept some responsibility for their children’s moral upbringing. As it stands, the Delta is mass producing citizens who think that the number one rule, when it comes to accountability on every level, is: "Cover your own ***, and don’t be afraid to lie, cheat, steal, or sell out your friends in order to do it." Simple example: I once had two best friends tell on each other and try to get the other in trouble. When my reaction was, “Are you seriously telling on your best friend?” the two girls were not nearly as mystified as me about the whole ordeal. Parents do not believe that they have any responsibility for their children’s education. They do not help with homework, and so many of them were confused when I asked them to take their children to the public library and get them a library card. Their role is not to help them or encourage them to read. That is my responsibility. If I fail in that, it’s my problem, and it better not affect their children’s grades.
So where does that leave me? It means that I spend more of my time thinking about how to reach my students outside the classroom than in it. I see many of my classroom efforts as me trying to stand still in a stampede; moving the opposite (read: correct) direction is simply impossible. That doesn’t mean there isn’t value in my day; each moment is an opportunity to gain some respect and approval. Despite what many parents might initially think, I am not the enemy (a perception inevitably based upon the accident of my race). I am actually here to offer support in every way I can.
I understand now that I can make a much bigger impact on my students by mentoring them for three hours after school than I ever could in the seven hours I see them during the day. What my kids need is a guide to show them humanity. They need an education in what it means to see value in themselves AND in others. They need someone to take them to the store and teach them the value of money. They need to go to a restaurant and practice proper manners. They need to experience and find pride in diversity. (I actually had a fourth-grader tell on another student because he called her a “white Puerto Rican.” I told her to be proud of her heritage and stop treating it like an insult.) They need to learn charity and hard work and humility. Most important, they need to be taken away from their negative influences. My stupid, irresponsible, abusive parents and the idiots, jailbirds, and pseudo-thugs they call friends are the ones who manage to undo all of my day’s work in a matter of minutes. If I could remove my kids from that, I cannot even fathom the individuals these children would become.
Remember the kid who brought the BB gun? On his good days, that kid absolutely adores me. He will follow me around and call me his mother. Another teacher even said it once: “Here comes Ms. Cook with her son!” My reply has always been, “If you were my kid, you would be a very different little boy.” My students love that comment, and I never thought they completely understood the layers of meaning or implications, but then one of them got it spot-on: “Ms. Cook, if we were your kids, we would be straight-A students, and we would never get in trouble. We would be completely different.” Maybe. Maybe not. But the important thing would be that I would teach them how to be a good human being. Or at least, I would give it a more concerted effort than I see happening around me.
This past week, the Mississippi Department of Education visited my school for three days. We are on an improvement plan because we did not make AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) in our math scores. On Monday I had an observation and interview, both of which went as well as I could expect. The interview was particularly interesting: the woman told me that Mississippi is divided into three regions: the hills, the coast, and the Delta. She did not hide her disdain for the Delta (she is from the hills) and she certainly acted as though we shared a special bond (called race) that made her more a friend than a scary authority figure. The sensation was that together, we are fighting the depravity of this black problem in the Delta. She indicated that I should consider moving to one of the other two regions in Mississippi if I plan to stay in teaching. I appreciated the compliment that she feels I am already a good teacher, and in time I will become truly great. (I wish I had gotten that on tape for my TFA program director). As she left, her parting words were, “I will be praying for you.” That interview, in a nutshell, sums up what I experience daily as a white woman and a Northerner in the Delta. Suspicion from the black community; willful ignorance and neglect from the white. Wow.
More than ever, I am committed in my mission to help these children. I am revitalized by a deeper understanding of the problem and thus the solution. I can better visualize my purpose and my potential impact. I work with students four nights a week, and I can’t wait to work with my kids this summer. I already know what I need to do to improve for next year. Even though each day still has its own challenge, I feel better equipped to handle it, and I can see the progress we have made together.
I have also decided to track my daily answer to a simple but also hugely significant question: Stay for a third year?
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