The Antlers cover Pink Floyd

We new teachers are a little overwhelmed by everything involved with interviewing, hiring, and signing contracts — most especially the automatic enrollment in the union.  ”Here’s your salary schedule…it goes all the way out to 26 years’ experience.”

A friend who works in West Contra Costa (WCC) was telling me that a union representative was urging teachers to prepare as minimally as possible because they’re not getting paid for their few days of orientation/professional development before the year begins…doing so would send the “appropriate message” to the labor negotiators.  That’s the spirit, isn’t it?  I suppose the appropriate approach is to prepare lesson plans and simply not worry about things outside of my locus of control.  But this still disturbs me.  It’s all for the kids, right?

Like Dan Meyer, who gave this talk at a Ted conference.  He, like so many of us, shares a disdain for parading pictures of shapes in textbooks as “real-world application of math!”  Case in point:

Pythagorean bandana, c/o http://scottfarrar.com and http://blog.mrmeyer.com

Seriously, we don’t think students (no matter what age) can’t see right through that?  It’s not only insulting but counterproductive.  Where, then, is our credibility when we tell students that math actually has some applicability? Meyer’s point is that every problem and/or example has a “natural current” that can be associated with it.  Something like this dog is so unnatural it’s pathetic. His advice?

Don’t force it.

Stop using clip art and stock photography.

Find the natural current in some evocative photography or video.

The next guy that I stumbled upon is Dan Hess, an Oakland teacher, who in his blog laments the institutional curriculum, among other things.  His point?

Thinking back to fifth grade, I might not remember everything I learned that year, but I do vividly remember writing a state report, doing an experiment for the science fair, writing a book report, and going to outdoor science camp. I wasn’t the first student to experience those academic rites of passage but, thanks to NCLB’s nationalization of standards based drill and kill test prep for high stakes testing, perhaps I may be one of the last.

Stop asking students to remember a fact long enough to choose the right bubble on a yearly multiple-choice exam that has no effect on their class grade. Stop asking schools to turn into test prep academies devoid of any purpose other than meeting a national benchmark for funding. Start asking schools to create meaningful, student-centered, inquiry based academic rites of passage. The skills they take away from those activities will be remembered long after the graduation ceremony and long after any answer they rote memorized for a test disappears from their short-term memory.

That’s virtually impossible to argue with.  But right now I’m not even at day 1, and my advice from every direction is to backwards plan my assessments and lessons from the end-of-year California Standards Test (CST).  I couldn’t agree with these guys more, but I’m a (not even!) first-year teacher who already feels like I’m swimming in a massive freaking sea of standards, tests, documents, and federally- and state-mandated expectations.  Teach for America does a wonderful job of reminding us that we need that “qualitative” piece in our big goals—but stating “You will all be expert problem solvers!” or “My students will be scholars!” doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning when running parallel to these strictly standards-derived lessons as it would to truly innovate in the classroom.

I think I just need to get in the classroom. The anxiety is killing me.

First, the ethnic breakdown:

Twenty-eight percent white students compared to district-wide average of 6.8%….we are fairly familiar with the achievement gap occurring along racial lines.  Also, Montera’s 2009 API score was 798 (API ranges from 200-1000), placing it as one of the “better” schools in Oakland.  The campus is located in the Montclair area of Oakland, which has the feel of a wealthy mountain resort village.  I struggled quite a bit with, “Is this going to be too easy?  Am I not going to be able to make the difference that Teach for America essentially demands?

Then I talked to a teacher in Oakland who imparted me with the knowledge that “all schools in Oakland are f*cked up to some degree, some just less so than others.”

But THEN I stumbled upon this story in the excellent blog The Education Report, run by Katy Murphy of the Oakland Tribune.  The story was accompanied by this video.

Montera Middle School is located on a winding road lined with stately homes and towering trees. But only about 300 of its 875 students live within its local attendance boundaries.  In recent years, neighborhood support for the middle school has dwindled, parents say. Rumors of chaos and fighting circulated through the local elementary schools, and some families began looking into private schools.  Others became concerned about the glaring disparities in test scores and suspension rates between African-American students and their white counterparts.

In 2006, most of the eighth-graders who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch took general math, rather than algebra or geometry. Just 35 percent of the low-income eighth-graders and 37 percent of African-American students were deemed proficient in reading and writing, compared with 78 percent of their white peers.

The suspension data was startling. In 2006, between the start of school and Oct. 31, African-American students made up 41 percent of the student population — and 90 percent of the suspensions.

A ha! There’s the dysfunction.  So what did Principal Mesfun, the guy that hired me, do?  Well apparently he tightened up on the students taking their sweet time during the “passing period” in between classes and started bringing a rope for any and all boys who decided to sag their pants.  At the same time that he cracked a quick whip on gateway misbehaviors like bad language in the hallway, breaking the dress code, etc, he also became more visible and accessible to students.  Teachers followed suit, being omnipresent during passing periods.

As a future teacher at this school, I am thrilled to find out that the administration wants to standardize and strictly enforce discipline.  It’s certainly the first step toward success, and having the entire school on the same page will make high expectation levels the rule rather than the exception.  Check it out:

Notably, the “crackdown” at the beginning of the school year resulted in fewer than half of the suspensions imposed the previous fall and a less lopsided distribution. African-American children, who make up 43 percent of the student population, represented half of the school’s 16 suspensions this year. Last year, during the same time period, black students were suspended 35 times.

So the story seemed to be that things are getting better with the new principal at the helm.  But I did have communication with a former teacher at Montera to ask for any helpful information going into my first year at the school.  Her reply?

As for the administration, you’ll realize soon enough that there’s a lot of tension between them and the staff. But keep an open mind and be positive, everyone is very welcoming to new staff members.

This could present an entirely new set of challenges other than what I’m focused on–that is, the students themselves.  Either way, I’ll be stopping by my school as an official staff member for the first time tomorrow! I’m excited.  Regardless of where the school is in the grand scheme of the achievement gap, I’m ready to do my best for the kids I have.

Lost in the Trees, straight out of North Cack.

Hey, Bob Bolen is into Lost in the Trees, and NPR has the “new” album All Alone in an Empty House streaming! This is awesome! It’s great to see such a wonderful and hard-working NC band getting some national acclaim.  But…..first listen? Dude, it’s our 10,000th listen! This album came out on Trekky Records back in 2008!!!

In fact, WKNC has played “Walk Around the Lake” 66 times since September 2008, roughly once every 10 days for 2 years.  It’s sweet that they’re getting a national re-release, but man, it’d be nice to see a quicker turnaround for other people to start paying attention. Especially given all the other hard-working bands that deserve that attention….

Oh, and hey: remember when this happened?