Rock Star Hour

I did this thing in January called the 30 Day Challenge. It was about getting organized and evaluating your priorities and taking charge of your life, one step at a time. I got really into it. It helped motivate me to get things done and stay organized and not freak out.

I wrote out steps to achieving our goals -- finishing my application to grad school being number one. I did it. I also mapped out all the steps I saw us needing to cross off in order to get to California.

I finished my application, and interviewed with both a professor from my program, and the fieldwork coordinator (the guy that would have helped me find my full-time teaching job). When I thought it was all done, they suggested I spend some time in classrooms before they make a decision. They wanted to make sure I was sure.

I was so sure.

Yesterday, I spent the day at Aldine High School. It is a school of 99.9% minorities, most of which are living in poverty. My friend, the Assistant Principal, set me up for a full day of seven classes. He purposely gave me a chance to see three good teachers, one really bad teacher, one that was just okay, and a couple that were struggling.

It was a full day.

First period, U.S. history: The teacher was one of the "good" teachers. My friend had told me about some things to look for when I was observing, so I was prepared. I noted how the room was set up. I noted the teacher's traffic around the room -- he said the teachers were supposed to walk by every student, and that their rooms were supposed to be set up to accommodate that. He said they checked the rooms at the beginning of every semester, but that the teachers would change them afterward. He also had said he and the other administrators have been pushing to encourage critical thinking. They've been telling the teachers to ask questions. To not only ask questions, but to question the students' answers. They've also been trying to encourage the teachers to seek out more than one answer before moving forward with the material. I did not see these things. I saw the same three students answering questions. I saw just as many sleeping. I saw the teacher either answering yes or no questions a lot, or asking questions where the answer was directly in front on her PowerPoints. It was a review from the day before, but the students weren't really expected to remember anything. Toward the end of class, she asked a student to help her pass out some booklets. Barely looking up, he said matter-of-factly, coldly, "No, I don't want to help you."

"Seriously?" one of the students who had been answering questions asked -- taking the word right out of my head.

"Oh, yes, he's definitely serious," the teacher said, still holding the books, and the student who had been answering the questions got up out of his chair, and volunteered to pass the books out.

Second period, sophomore English: Although this class turned out to have my favorite teacher from the day, it was far from impressive. The class was junior English, and the kids were about to start reading The Crucible. The teacher seemed young. He talked to me about UH some at the beginning of the class, so I think he was an alum. When he got up to lecture, the class seemed interested. He was relaxed, and he cracked jokes now and then. He asked open-ended questions, and the students answered. Two things didn't sit well with me, though. One was that a couple students were asleep, and by the end of class, about six were, and the teacher did nothing to remedy the situation. The other thing though was how dumbed-down the lecture was. He was spending the hour giving them a context of what the times were like in the setting of The Crucible. He also referenced the time when it was written, and explained to them the connection between the witch hunt in the story and the real-life Red Scare that Arthur Miller was experiencing. Bu the PowerPoints were borrowed from some poorly designed Web site, and all they contained were replications of old British paintings of witches being persecuted and convicted. He was asking the students what was happening in the pictures, and what they thought about them. It all seemed very elementary to me for a class that was just a little over a year from going out into the grown-up world, possibly to college.

Third period, English IV: By the end of third period, my heart was broken. The senior English teacher was a veteran of 36 years in the classroom, and is retiring in May. She's done. She's so done that she talked to me for ten minutes after the bell rang before even starting her class, beginning with a greeting at the door: "Are you sure you want to do this?" She's so done that she passed out a reading assignment -- "Lamb to the Slaughter" by Roald Dahl, three pages front and back, plus one half-page, double-spaced -- and came back and talked to me. She talked a lot. She had a lot to get off her chest I guess, and I was willing to listen. I had decided to use the opportunity for what the staff at USF wanted me to do -- to really get a feel for things and decide if teaching was right for me. She talked for a long time, stopping once to project some questions the students needed to answer about the story on the wall, and stopping once more to scroll the questions down for the one person who was working. In the entire class, I didn't see anyone reading. I didn't see anyone writing. I did see someone sleeping; she told me he had failed the previous semester from being out most of the time, and sleeping the rest, but he will probably graduate.

I learned from her that everything wrong with American education today, everything in the books I've read, and the newspapers, and the blogs, everything I would have imagined I would hate about it, is true. No Child Left Behind ruined everything. It furthered the dumbing down of America. The kids don't listen. Don't have any respect. High school seniors and they don't even bring pencils to class. Since they don't even bring in the most basic supplies, guess who buys them? Not the district. She said she couldn't imagine, didn't even want to think about, what she'd spent on supplies over 36 years. Not only that, she said they don't read books. The school doesn't even make them. They don't usually assign stories more than one page long. The kids don't write; they can't. I saw on the assignment on the board that she had written that points would be taken off for incorrect grammar. I asked her if any of her students turned in anything not needing help with grammar. She said no. She said that in their gangster neighborhoods, they have invented their own language, and they put it in their papers. I asked if she had seen short-hand that is used in text messages. She said, "All the time." I asked if she had many non-native English speakers. She said not really, but that English was a foreign language to all of them. She talked about the schools she went to growing up. And college. She talked about what kind of teacher she used to be, what kind she is now. She was very aware of herself and everything. She was a lot like me, except all these things I had thought about and considered, she had actually lived. I told her about what I had seen at UH, that this didn't stop at the high school, that they were going to college. She said that college isn't for everyone. There are people going to college now that don't need to be in college. I agreed. We have students at UH that can't read at the college-level or write well. We have students that just like in that school, want you to give them the answer to everything. I deal with them at work, and in my last couple years of school especially, I had them in my classes. The ones that would constantly ask if something was going to be on the test, and didn't care otherwise. The ones that weren't really there to learn, that just wanted to do what they needed to do to get by, because they'd always gotten by. The sad thing is it catches up to them eventually, in the corporate world; but it won't always. Eventually everyone will be stupid and ignorant and uneducated, and no one will know the difference. At the end of the class, she invited me back anytime. She wished me luck, and she gave me a hug.

Fourth period, junior English: I wanted to cry. Lunch was approaching, and I had completely lost my appetite. This class wasn't a "bad" teacher, just a "struggling" one. This class was finishing the first act of The Crucible and beginning the second. The teacher assigned parts to the students to read, all five of them who cared. The rest were mostly either heads down or staring out into space, with their books closed. One kid in particular, was in a desk diagonal and in front of me to my left. For the first 25 minutes of class, he sat there, with his backpack on the desk, with this vacant look on his face, and did nothing. Then he put his head down and went to sleep. About 40 minutes into class, the teacher came over, gave him a tap, and made him sit up. "Page 151," he said. "Open your book." The kid opened his book, and the teacher walked away, and the student put his face down in the book to go back to sleep. That was the end of that conversation. About ten minutes later, that same student was called to the office. "What'd you do this time?" the teacher asked as if he were making a joke. Nobody laughed. During the class, the students read about ten pages of the double-spaced play out loud. Ten pages. They read aloud like third-graders. They mistook some words for others, and the teacher never corrected them. They read without expression, like they were just trying to get through the sentences -- kind of like me reading aloud to the class in first-year Italian. The student came back, and class ended.

Lunch: After fourth, it was time for lunch. I was holding the tears back now. I felt like I was hyperventilating. I needed air like I used to need smokes. I weeded through the crowded hallways, walked as fast as I could to the nearest exit I could find. I drank the coffee I'd been carrying around all day, ate half of a Balance Bar from my purse, and took a walk. I came back in with thirty minutes to spare. I figured I'd go to the administrators' office, see if my friend was around. He was. I had a long talk with him. I told him what I had seen and heard. I told him how many students had been asleep. He said that it is the week after spring break. They had 90% attendance this week (which I couldn't believe; there were too many empty seats in the classes I attended), and the teachers were having a hard time keeping the students awake. He said at first they were sending all the sleepers to the office; but that they had gotten so many it became ridiculous. They told the teachers to be more engaging, to deal with it. I guess letting them sleep was the chosen way to "engage" them.

I had fifteen minutes to spare when he said it was time to do "roving." Roving is where you get on this topless golf cart thing and you cruise the school looking for trouble: Looking for kids violating dress code. Looking for kids not wearing their ID badges; looking for kids fighting or making out or doing drugs; looking for kids to send to jail or detention or SAC (the room where the bad kids go for the day or days or weeks). He was that guy: Yelling at them to put their collared shirts back on; to show him their hall passes; to tell him where they were going; to put that ID back on like he had asked them to do moments ago; to not talk to him that way or they were going to end up straight back in SAC. One lucky boy did find his way to SAC for that very thing. My friend used his radio to contact the principal; the principal said to send him there, and keep him there till 5:00. The kid said he couldn't stay till 5:00. We are all listening to the radio. My friend radios the office assistant to ask her to call the kid's parents to confirm the kid can't stay till 5:00. "You know what happened last time I called his parents," she says. When he asks what happened she says, "His father got very smart with me." We follow the kid to SAC and he goes in; we head down another hall, and in the background I can hear another admin doing the same thing -- yelling at some kid that he was going to SAC ... "Oh, yeah? Well, now you have two days in SAC, buddy ... Three! We can do this all day! We can just keep adding days. Try me!"

Later on after school, I asked my friend how it was possible for kids who have failed one semester to still be in the same class for the last half. He said because after their ninth absence (Ninth!) in a semester, the kid fails. Apparently, this happens a lot. The kids miss school a lot. And he started naming off reasons they miss school: illness, of course, but another, court. "Court?" I asked. He said yes, and said many of his students had to miss school to go to court. He also told me that for the time time they spend in detention and SAC, it actually cuts down on their absences. So, a kid gets in trouble for something, and gets sent to Saturday school, for example. That day of school actually somehow knocks off 28 hours of unexcused absence time. Doesn't that seem like a reward, rather than a punishment? That did not make sense to me. It didn't make sense to him either; a lot of the things there don't, but he doesn't make the rules -- he enforces them.

Fifth period, AP English: This class trickled in late, as the kids had to participate in their Fitnessgrams just before. Students and the teacher trailed in, and the kids picked up a half sheet of paper off a table upon entering. I later learn it has seven questions on the chapter of A Tail of Two Cities they read yesterday. The teacher quickly becomes frantic and confused when she realizes about ten of her students are missing -- good students, not the ones that would normally cut class. This is about ten minutes into class, and the teacher disappears for about another ten minutes to look for them. During this time a pretty young girl with long brown curls, small brown eyes, a pair of black Chucks, and a sweet smile, talks to me. She asks me where I go to school, what I want to teach, what I majored in, how old I am, and I tell her. A group of students nearby is working on the assignment. The teacher had told them to use context clues and the dictionary if they did not know what the words in the questions meant. They didn't do that; instead they asked each other, and I overheard them telling each other the wrong answers, confidently. The teacher comes back. The students are found. The crisis is over. They all take their seats, get the half-sheets of paper, and take out their books. She again tells everyone to work on the questions. A girl in a black hat (that I later find out she is not supposed to wear but the teacher thinks the rule is stupid and lets her anyway) and thick black-rimmed glasses sits in front of me. She is one of the latecomers and has a sandwich bag full of ice on her knee, which is very swollen. The ice is melting and is quickly creating a puddle on the floor. The girl to my left tells me she wants to be a nurse when she graduates. My friend had told me earlier that the school is broken up into three pre-vocational tracks, to set up the students for careers when they get out. She is in the medical track. No one in the medical track talks about being a doctor, though. The medical track is for nurses and other medical technicians. She says she has a close family and wants to go to college close to home. Another fifteen minutes have passed, and the teacher says it is time to start reading. The students turn to chapter two in their books, and the teacher stands in the middle of the room, and the teacher begins reading aloud to them while a few follow along. "I hate reading," the girl next to me says. "I hate it." She goes on to elaborate about how it takes a lot to get her attention, and she can never finish anything, and she could think of a million things to do other than reading. She says, "I don't even know why I am in AP English, just because I did well on the TAKS test (the TAKS is Texas's latest and greatest evaluation the kids are doing almost every other year now, a product of the glorious NCLB policy. The girl in the hat turns around and says, "You are in AP English because you are smart. You are so smart, but you are so lazy." At that moment I was reminded of a quote from this movie I saw one time, where a man asked rhetorically whether the true de-evolution of the human race was fear or laziness. I kept this to myself, but it remained on my mind for much of the day. The teacher continued reading, plowing through, in spite of the conversation the students and I were having, and another group of students in the corner; and one in the back who had been sleeping since he got there in the beginning. The girl next to me lets me know one more time how much she hates reading, closes her book, and puts her head down for a nap. The teacher says nothing.

Sixth period, U.S. history: One of the coaches teaches this class. It is completely full of students. They all say hi to me when I come in, and he announces I will be observing. I find a seat and he goes over an assignment. This class is following the same material as the first period class I went to, only instead of lecturing on the '60s, he assigns for them to make a timeline. On the projector he has ten events that he talks about briefly. He says he would like for them to be put on a timeline, and for the students to also add two events of their own that they think are important or interesting. He passes out a paper with the events typed out on them. They do not contain dates; he wants the students to read the textbook and find them. The next thing I know, the students are paired up, and markers and large white pieces of paper, scissors, and glue are being passed out by the co-teacher. They begin working on their timelines. No one sleeps in this class, and they all seem to be working, but they are also talking about other things. The kid behind me and his partner were having a conversation when I first came and sat down. Every other word from him was a swear word and he wasn't being quiet about it. When I gave him a look, he stopped for awhile. They later spent the rest of the period conversing in Spanish. The coach sat behind his computer most of the class. He did come by at one point to check on the students, but he mostly kept to himself. I asked the students what they thought of the assignment, and they said they liked it. In fact, the room was decorated with poster-boards the students had decorated; each represented a different decade of American history. When I left the class, I thanked the teacher and asked him if he gave these assignments often. He said he did like to assign group work, and the kids seemed to like it, too. I'll admit it was nice to see the kids engaged; this was probably my second-favorite class. But just like the second-period, the lesson wasn't very challenging, didn't encourage critical thinking, or go into depth at all. On one hand it was uplifting to at least see that no one was sleeping; on the other, I couldn't help but feel they were doing busy work.

Seventh period, world history: Although I wasn't able to observe much in this class, it was just as productive for me as the others. The teacher was giving out a practice TAKS test. The test was multiple choice, and he was to give half of it that day, and the other half the following day. The teacher gave me a copy of the whole test, and I looked over the 52 questions, 26 of which the students were doing for the day. Most of them were pretty elementary stuff, like reading maps. There would be a map of Europe with all the countries labeled, and it would ask which countries were bordering another country, or which country had the longest border -- stuff fifth-graders should be able to do. The teacher came over with a packet of papers stapled together. It was the tenth-graders' test results from two years ago, when they were in eighth grade. The teacher said his plan was to compare these scores to the students' scores on the practice test, and from there figure out who needed tutoring. "What do they need to pass," I asked him. "An 80 or something." My jaw dropped to the floor when he pointed out a passing score on the spreadsheet: a 52%. The students only need to score 50% to pass. That's what No Child Left Behind did. This is what is so important? This is the goal that we are setting high for our nations' kids? The goals for the school were posted all over its walls, including on a large bulletin board in the front entrance. Big goals. Big dreams. Ninety to 95% in all areas -- history, English, etc. Because that's where our public schools have gone. If we can get 90% of our kids to know 50% of the material they are supposed to learn in school, if we can spend all year long teaching them just for that, just for those 52 history questions, for example -- multiple choice, no essays. If we can do that, then we are in the clear. We are flying high. We are making it happen.