New Terrain

As an eduholic, I obsess over education and I'm angry about the achievement gap. And when I'm obsessed over something I'm angry about (imagine ex-boyfriends, people who don't use their turn signals, and the achievement gap) I tend to become more emotional and less logical. (Imagine vengeful emails, excessive honking, and getting angry at anyone who isn't a teacher .)

There was a time (and sometimes there still is) when I feel holier than thou and act as if anyone who doesn't dedicate their life and paycheck to closing the education gap only makes it wider. It's easy to feel all alone in this big, wide capitalistic reality. There have been times when I felt a tinge of martyrdom for my decision to work in education when my friends have chosen more lucrative careers as i-bankers, lawyers and doctors. Can you believe it? Doctors save lives and I dare feel like a martyr?!

As an obsessive and angry person when it comes to the achievement gap, I've learned to check my biases frequently so I don't say stupid things like above. But more importantly, I've learned to check my biases about people not in the business of education because getting them in on this mission is the only way the achievement gap can close on such a broad scale. I know that great classroom teaching is the cornerstone to closing the gap, but I also know that every single person in the village has a responsibility and the tools to close the gap, whether they're a teacher, a nurse or an i-banker. The bad news is that a whole lot of people still don't believe that it's their problem or that all children can learn or that they as non-traditional educators can do anything to help. The good news is that I am confident we all know people out there who are already doing it.

Need proof or just a pick-me-up to counteract your obsessiveness and anger over the state of society? Poets, editors and playwrights in New York City are closing the gap outside of schools by doubling as mentors to girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to help develop them as writers and leaders.

In the after-school scene at a Florida high school where "just graduate" is more heavily emphasized than "go to college," a group of students are changing their futures by designing a prep course and teaching each other. The founder of this after-school group? Sixteen-year-old junior William Scott who didn't allow his age and lack of teacher training keep him from having a hand in closing the achievement gap.

And let's not forget about the people who are closing the gap by getting kids to school safely to even start learning. After 32 school-age children in Chicago were killed last year in their own neighborhoods, Deverra Beverly, a community activist, pulled together parents and community leaders to form an escort service to help protect kids crossing gang territory as they went to and from school. Ms. Beverly and the others are most likely not teachers in the traditional sense, but they're making sure we're not alone in closing the achievement gap.

Posted by Jessica Shyu at 2:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

'Tis the season for state testing once again, and Texas is no exception. The next wave of TAKS exams are coming up in another week and a half, and my teachers are scrambling, and their students are scrambling, so therefore, I am scrambling along with them. My apologies for not posting earlier.

Over the past few weeks, I noticed a number of comments, some accusatory, other curious, about why I (and others) left the classroom to take on other roles in the field. This is a perennial question with no right answer. While I found myself tired of being asked, the more I pondered about it driving from school to school to meet teachers, the more deeply I felt about my personal decision to leave room B-2 on the Navajo Nation after two years of working as a special educator.

It breaks my heart to field phone calls from former students considering dropping out, and it's a bittersweet feeling when 16-year-olds write me letters using the exact sentence construction techniques we had worked for months on. If I stayed for another year, another decade, imagine all the children I would have had an impact on (hopefully positive). Imagine the years of reading growth, writing rubric improvement, and social skills development. Imagine what it would have been like if I could have been one "outsider" teacher who didn't leave the kids after a year or two.

These were all things I considered, but didn't truly feel, when I made my decision to take on the position as a program director helping develop new teachers in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. I cried and I said my good-byes and I mailed math homework over the summer. But it wasn't until I got a phone call in November from a former colleague who mentioned in passing that one of my most severely disabled students, both physically and mentally, wasn't getting any educational services because the new teacher hadn't figured out how to fit him in her schedule. Last year, he learned to count money, grew by three levels of comprehension and could read over 25 life skills words-- after starting from zero with each thing.

I was enraged. I called the school, sent resources to the teacher, he's getting classes now, but mostly, I questioned my decision to leave. I was tempted to quit my job right then, which I felt like I was lousy at anyway. And I felt guilty. I felt guilty, guilty, guilty about dipping out of the front lines and taking a "cushy administrative position" instead.

Well, the "cushy administrative" notion gave me a quick laugh since I was logging an average of 90-hours a week and spending most of that time working directly with teachers or on teacher stuff (imagine a dean of instruction whose job is to entirely to take care of getting their 30 teachers to teach better-- that's my job.)

But the guilt stayed. It faded from time to time as I saw my teachers grow and improve, and as I grew to enjoy my work, but a bit of it stayed. It stayed because part of me always wondered if I'd have been better for education in general if I, and so many of my colleagues who've left the classroom, stayed.

One Saturday morning after meeting with one of my teachers, I casually mentioned this guilt I always feel. And she looked at me in amusement and awe. "In the time that it took you to show me how to write my lesson plans this way, you just helped improve my teaching," she said. "And that's going to have an effect on 150 kids. Multiply that by 30 teachers. That's 4,500 kids you're helping. Why are you feeling guilty again??"

That made me realize the guilt I felt wasn't about leaving the classroom, it was about doing something instead that wasn't worth leaving all my Elroy's, Alvin's and Jenny's back in New Mexico. When cast in that light, I didn't feel an ounce of guilt-- the dramatic growth I've seen and had a hand in with so many of my teachers has made it all worth it. So, no, there is no "right" answer for why people leave the teaching profession. But there's also no guilt in it if it was worth it.

(Note: The argument that all good teachers should stay in the classroom is rather preposterous to me. Yes, it's sad to see a great classroom instructor leave the front of the room, but it seems silly to demand people stay in a role when they want to work in a different capacity. One can only hope it's still working toward the same goal of student achievement. Otherwise we'll just end up with a whole lot of professionally-dissatisfied good teachers! And I've always argued that I would prefer having a good and motivated teacher teach for just two years than a mediocre teacher teach for 20. Naive, perhaps, but this is what principals have told me time and time again.)

Posted by Jessica Shyu at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,"

It's no precise science, but I can usually pick out the students who sit in the back of the class, arms crossed, eyes glazed over, but quick with a defiant comeback. That's why I walked over to him this morning. He looked tough. He was slouched over at his desk, as close to the door as possible, his baggy shirt hanging over his thin frame and spiked hair gelled to the ends. I asked what he was working on and he explained that he was just starting the poem and was paraphrasing it.

I asked if he could show me one he had already finished, and he grinned and pulled out his paraphrasing of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing..." He told me that he didn't understand the poem at first, and, no, he had never read a poem before this. Then, in his soft-spoken voice accented with Spanish, he started reading it to me line by line, explaining the images and ideas each line conveyed. "Hope is like a bird, something delicate that sits really close to the heart, the soul, and it keeps telling you something, to keep on hoping, but it doesn't use words, but you just have to trust it, to get the feeling of what it's saying, and it never stops telling you to keep on hoping, no matter what."

At a school with a 52% graduating rate, hope is just the thing. But so is hard work. Great job, Mr. Salinas. =)

Posted by Jessica Shyu at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Anyone who's taught at an under-resourced school has heard at some point, from someone (quite possibly a colleague) that these kids can't learn. Sigh. Why should we spend our time even trying. Sigh.

This is why: The New York Times annual scholarship list came out and it sketched some of backgrounds of its recipients from this and previous years. The purpose of the scholarship is "to recognize New York City high school seniors who have created opportunities for themselves where few existed, and to reward them with money and other less tangible forms of aid."

Not only do these college-bound students receive $30,000 to go toward their schooling, a laptop, summer jobs at The Times, they also get the most invaluable piece of support of all: "counseling to help them navigate the often rocky transition from gritty urban high school to college."

I almost cried reading about these gritty, determined, focused and just simply amazing young people. According to The Times' article, these seniors have overcome more than what most face in a lifetime. "Ten years ago, Denise de las Nueces was a nerdy high school student from a poor Manhattan neighborhood, poring over astronomy books her father had picked out of the trash at the building where he worked as a doorman. Eight years ago, Letica Fox-Thomas was finishing up a childhood spent partly in the city’s homeless shelters while cramming for her Regents exams. Five years ago, Mansour Ourasanah was a new teenage immigrant from Togo, where he had learned firsthand about poverty and physical abuse but not how to speak or read English."

Yet I teared up because every teacher I know in these under-resourced schools has at least one superstar like those honored above. And each one of these teachers has at least a handful who need a bit of prodding and support, but has the potential to be a rock star as well. And for the rest of those kiddos, they deserve all the help and support from everywhere possible to be the best they can be. This is why we wake up each morning for work, right?

But as inspiring as it all is, not everyone who tries really hard gets to be a Times scholar. It's 12:01 AM right now and I'm crying as I write this at my kitchen table because my superstar, Jeremy, who is the most absolutely brilliant student I ever came across on the Navajo Nation, should be one of those students profiled one day by The Times. By the time we parted last spring, his reading comprehension was beyond the 12th grade level. The poverty and physical disability he faced in his short 14 years is enough to stump most folks, yet he was borrowing my dad's old books on C++ to figure out how to do programming on his own. I gave him what I could as his teacher for two years, but for the most part, the rest is up to him.

I haven't heard from him in a long time, and I'm rather worried. I'm worried he's going to get back in touch with me like some of my other former students who moved on to high school and tell me that they don't understand what they're learning, that their teachers weren't helping them, that they're trying to drop out. I can't help but feel disheartened when I hear this, because these were the kids who used to love coming to math class, who bragged about doing pre-algebra and who would sneak ahead in our reading. What could I have done? What were their current teachers doing? It's way too easy to get fired up, kick a table, and yell around the house about what the incompetent high school teachers are NOT doing for all my "Jeremies" out there. It's more productive to remember that is why I'm doing my job of improving teacher performance, even if it's far away from where Jeremy is right now. I'm also going to email Jeremy this article as well as a list of scholarship opportunities for him to remind him that he's still my superstar.

Posted by Jessica Shyu at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)