Saturday, January 22, 2011

Room 228 - Target Practice

I suppose in any industry, any occupation, any school, any area, there is a percentage of people who always attempt to find the easiest way to do their job, get paid, go home, get on with life. My mom calls this, "get in, get on, get off, get out," and although she applies it to multiple circumstances, usually involving things that everyone hates that just need to be done (like the dentist), I think it applies particularly well to that section of educators that parents and the news tend to focus on and that burns a familiar reputation about teachers into the mindset of many noneducators.  Let the truth be known!  Guess what, there are educators that don't want to work hard or any harder than the cranky person that takes complaints all day over the phone at Comcast and gets to leave exactly at punch out time.  The news was right!  However, here is what most people who don't work in public schools don't realize:  many times, those people are not always and not just the teachers that work with their children every day.  There are so many people that work within a school to keep a building running and all the way from the top paid (administrators) to the bottom paid (janitorial and office staff) there are people who never really valued a "career" or a "calling."  Honestly, we can't expect everyone to.  There are people who are burnt out, and rightfully so.  There are people who feel like they have put in their time of "hard work" and are ready for the good life.  There are people who don't feel they have to sacrifice their personal lives in order to make money and have a valid and legitimate career.  And, most importantly, there are people who are workaholics, who are leaders, who spend their own money and time (unpaid) for the sake of the students who walk through the building.  Realistically, these people are not the same people all the time.  There are cycles.  People get motivated, inspired and then get tired.  People start out fresh and young and then get older and overworked.  People have trauma and suffering in their personal lives and careers have to take a backseat for a period of time.  People get sick, have babies, get married, get divorced, go to school.

This phenomenon alone is not the problem that we face in so many struggling schools, even though it seems to be the only one that is fixed.  The things that always seem to happen in failing schools are the following: new professional development comes along to help the teachers, more accountability is created so that teachers can't "get away" with not working so hard, parents come and complain about unfair practices, laziness, and absences, administrators start observing more and being more stringent, more teachers are written up and more are chastised.  What is so ironic about all of this is that the educators in these buildings end up being held more accountable than educators in "successful" schools, and yet they have less resources, less motivation, less commitment, and are given the benefit of the doubt MUCH less by administrators and leaders. In fact, one major premise of NCLB in its original form (No Child Left Behind) is that schools and children that are behind are going to be given less money.  More criticism, less money.  Don't get me wrong, there is much more to it than that - and throwing money at a problem is not a way to fix something. 

But here is the point:  When you create a desperate situation full of fear, lack of resources, and overwhelming obstacles, people will begin to turn on each other. The whole building becomes a field for target practice.  Typically, relating back to what I was saying, two factions develop - the people who consistently are overworking and the people who are consistently looking for the easiest way to do their job and go home; the overworkers and the underworkers; the people cleaning up messes and the people making them.  And they are all shooting at each other.  Friends become enemies, teams fall apart, collaboration is impossible, adversarial relationships between administration and staff develop, relationships between the varying pay levels disintegrate, no one shares, no one helps, no one cares about anyone else, everyone covers their butt, everyone points the finger, everyone calls people out on mistakes and incompetence, everything suffers. 

And we teach and raise children in this environment, every day in my building.

I can't begin to explain the pettiness that occurs as a result of this scenario.  Everything is so passive aggressive: an administrator "casually" copied in on a email here, a sly reminder that someone has failed to provide what they are legally required to document, a short comment to a parent on the practices of another teacher - the strategies and semantics that are involved are really quite extraordinary.  And it weighs on a person.  It holds a person down, causes that little patter of tension in your heart when you think of the underlying "confrontation" that will occur between-the-lines as you say "hello, did you get those books in yet?" to your principal in the morning on your way in.  It takes so much calculation and worry and hushed discussions between union reps and co-workers.  So many "Quick, close my door. I have to tell you something" moments that build these walls between the adults in the building.  And then we turn around, and we teach your children to be real, to communicate effectively, to form positive relationships with role models and to value things like honesty, integrity, and hard work.  It breaks a person's heart and spirit.  It makes a good person want to stick her finger through the fissure that has been created down her spine and pull those two parts of her body apart, step out, sit down cross-legged, close her eyes and just breathe clean air.

So what do we do?  We stand our ground, or we roll over.  We send that email and copy in one more person, or we just answer it.  We call people out on that mistake, or we ignore it.  We feel, or we're numb.  We see things, or we're blind.  We breathe in get ready, or we breathe out and forget.  We make decisions, or we are stagnant.  We overwork or we pass-the-buck.  We go home, or we stay late.  We overthink, or we go to sleep.  We do this, do it all, keep doing it for the kids regardless of the emotional and physical toll it takes on us...or...we don't.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

A word from the creators

Welcome to Memoirs from a failing urban school.  This blog has been created with two clear intentions: to show the undeniable and persistent spirit of the students who will become the future leaders of our country, and to expose/critique/commend the public school system that is currently struggling on a national level to service these children.  This blog is one attempt to convey the immensity and severity of the current educational situation that is going on in our country at this moment.  In many ways, education has not been a serious priority in comparison with other national issues, and this lack of attention has created a plethora of problems that are only tentatively being resolved.  The task that many of the students, teachers and staff are facing in schools across the country (urban schools in particular) is one that is so large, and yet the importance of this task is drastically overlooked by most citizens with the power to make the necessary change.  The people who walk through the buildings of our urban schools every day do nothing less than regularly create unpublicized miracles.  This blog is an attempt to record and share these miracles, as well as the multiple setbacks that occur beforehand, making these miracles all the more unbelievable and rewarding.  Unlike many other texts on urban schools, this blog will be multi-faceted in that posts will be written by a variety of members from these communities, in a variety of formats.  Ideally, this blog will function as a "collage" or "zine," bringing a rawness to the information available on urban schools by blending the funny, sad, trivial, momentous, fantastical, honest, intuitive, enlightening and regular occurrences that create the daily experience of working and attending a failing urban school.  It is my personal hope that someday the appeal of these words will be in their historical worth rather than their unfortunate (but inspiring) reality.