R.E.S.P.E.C.T

A week after moving to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to take up a teaching post, I visited the Sunday night Walking Street Market. The market bisects the ancient city with vendors peddling everything from brilliant red Thai silk scarves to knitted bumblebee-colored dog sweaters to egg-parceled Pad Thai.  As a young teacher with meager pocket change I attempted to haggle with the merchants: “A little bit less please, I am a teacher, I don’t have much money.” They shook their heads and laughed in disbelief that a teacher could claim to be poor. 

And then, they nodded with gratitude.

To be a teacher in Thailand is to be respected and, comparatively speaking, well paid.  As it is in much of Asia, teacher is an honored title.  My very first week in Thailand coincided with Wai Kru – the national Teacher’s Day, when students and families put on elaborate performances to honor their teachers. I found myself on a stage along with the rest of the English department before hundreds of students who had prepared speeches and elaborate flower offerings in our honor.

A year later, when I returned to the US, I entered a very different kind of school system.

“Oh you teach 6^th grade?!”  “That’s a really tough age.” “I wouldn’t be able to do that.”  “We need more young people like you.”  These are the kinds of responses I receive on telling people I teach inner-city middle school.  They are impressed, and often disbelieving that I would take such a job.

Fifty years ago it was fashionable for young Americans to enter the Peace Corp, packing their bags for the dusty cities of Tanzania and the rural slopes of Chile, giving up creature comforts to devote two years to spreading democracy and education.

Today, teaching has become a domestic Peace Corps.  Last year more than 50,000 recent college graduates applied to Teach For America (TFA), Citizen Schools and other similar programs. More than 8,000 are chosen.  They pack their bags not for international hubs, but for the inner cities of New York and Baltimore and Boston, or the rural river towns along the Mississippi Delta, ready, like their predecessors, to devote two years of service.

My friends and I, in cities across the country, have exchanged college parties for late nights grading papers and planning lessons.  We balance small checkbooks and, to make ends meet, some of my colleagues rely on food stamps. We arrive at school early to proctor exams and devote time on the weekends to calling students’ parents.

In educational organizations, teaching is described in the language of service.  In the 2010 documentary “Waiting For Superman”, director Davis Guggenheim likens classrooms to trenches in a war. Teaching is akin to military service.

The attitude is commendable. But the situation is not sustainable.

Looking just at TFA, a recent study showed that 50% leave the classrooms as soon as their two-year fellowship concludes.  By year three, 80% have left for other jobs, other professions. 

These statistics do not phase organizations like TFA, whose stated goal is not necessarily to train a teacher corps, but rather a cohort of young professionals who will carry lessons learned in the public schools to the power worlds of Wall Street and politics.

But when teaching is marketed to college graduates as community service and an honorable sacrifice, does teaching cease to be considered a respectable career profession?

While we as a nation respect the sacrifice college graduates are making by devoting two years in the classroom, our nation’s prevailing policies, budgets and support systems do not send the message that teaching should be considered a respected profession worth devoting a life to.

Once last year, when returning through Thai customs in Bangkok, the agent stamping my passport discovered that I was a teacher.  As he handed me back my passport, he thanked me for being a teacher. 

In Thailand teachers are not only respected for their service.  The profession itself is considered a respected and prestigious choice for a life-long career.  

As a recent college graduate myself, I see friends accept Wall Street consulting positions, secure places at law schools and medical schools in the country.  And even though I am secure in my desire to continue a career in education, a tiny voice remains: “Is teaching enough? Should I be striving for a more powerful, a more esteemed profession?”

Last year my Thai students asked me to teach them a bit about America. So, I slipped in – between units on grammar and pronunciation – a lesson on American city slang.  

Two weeks ago, as the school year in Boston came to a close, I taught my middle schoolers a little about the Kingdom of Thailand.  We discussed the monarchy (including that the Thai King was born in Cambridge). We talked about Thai food and learned a few words of the Thai language. I then decided to teach my students how to bow: a half bow to friends, thumb to the chin for teachers, thumb to the nose for the principal. 

In the cafeteria the next day I was waylaid by a group of my students.  “Ms. Lander, Ms. Lander” Hands together, thumbs at their chin they all bowed.  Smiling, I put my own hands together and bowed back at them in return. 

Training Wheels

Sixth grade is a transitional year. 

Our students enter in September with fifth-grade enthusiasm and baby fat still rounding their cheeks.  At the cafeteria tables talk is subdued, friendships yet to be established.  Our classes that first month have a honeymoon quality, as students adjust to new classrooms, new teachers, new expectations, new friends. 

By midyear – December leading into January – our students grow comfortable, and then uncomfortable as they start pushing boundaries, talking back.  They try on and discard personas – the nerd, the day-dreamer, the punk, the cool girl, the trouble maker, the class clown. 

My classroom is on same floor as the seventh and eighth grade. When we walk up to class through the scrum of older students, it is hard to remember that my students are only just a year younger.  The older students are tall, sometimes by a foot or more.  They are loud: they bang on doors in passing and walk in packs, with arms linked across shoulders.   My students watch these giants with keen interest, and slowly they begin to mimic.

By April an epidemic of puberty has broken out. Suddenly the cafeteria is all gossip and sixth-grade flirtation.

May slumps in amidst the shadows of multi-hour MCAS tests, and my students want nothing more to do with classes and work.  They talk of summer or boys, and they poke each other or steal one another’s pencils in our muggy top-floor classroom.

By the time we reach June everyone is exhausted.

I had completely lost track of my students’ younger selves until I began selecting pictures for our class yearbook and came across photos taken way back in September.

This Friday, the last Friday of the school year, we took half of our sixth-graders roller-skating: a hundred kids in all.

We unloaded en masse into a dark and less-than-promising skating rink in Mattapan.  The air was soggy with mildew and the lights flickered dimly as students rushed to exchange backpacks for fraying leather roller skates.

And then they were on the rink. It was as if time had been rewound.

Our students became kids again.  They were no longer proto-teenagers, mini-adults.  They were unsteady on their feet, they were falling over, they were hesitant.  A few zipped around the rink in grand concentric circles, but most started the afternoon clutching the side rails or scooting tentatively across the wood flooring.  School attitudes, social cliques, affected aloofness, all were abandoned with the sneakers and sandals under the sideline benches. When a student fell, which was often, multiple hands reached out to help them back up.  Divisions that often crop up between mainstream students, Chinese SEI (Sheltered English Immersion) students, Spanish SEI students and Special Ed students dissipated – everyone was skating, laughing, and, yes, falling down with everyone else.

My sideline observations were interrupted when one of the boys from a Special Ed class asked if I had skated before.  “Not for ten years at least,” I admitted.  “That’s ok, I’ll help you.” And with that, he took my hand and led me out onto the rink. 

It quickly became apparent that he was no more confident than I when it came to roller-skating, and a minute later we ended up on the floor in a heap, whereupon another student, unsure on stopping procedures, bowled into us.

I noticed that, whatever their skill level, skating gave students the confidence to become teachers.  One boy, an experienced hockey player, took me under his wing and set me to doing drills.  “So are you right handed or left handed?  Ok right, that’s what I thought. You should try this. Lean more with your left foot.  Cut with the side of the skate. Try it again. Nope, one more time.”  

There are few opportunities in the classroom that allow for such an authentic and empowering role reversal.

Skating also allowed students to discard their school personas.  While some became confident teachers (and a few, show-offs), many who were less comfortable with the gliding motion eagerly reached out to us for support.  They clutched our hands and nervously let go of the rail.  We formed wobbly chains of novice skaters. 

But, because the learning curve is shallow, I had the pleasure of seeing many of these same students – only ten minutes later – skating confidently past me on their own.

Recycling Redux

“The recycling battle will commence on May 3^rd! Paper only! No candy, no bottles, only paper! The homeroom that wins gets a pizza party!” announced hand-drawn posters in the hallways of our school.

In the cafeteria, bins of recycled paper begat bragging rights.  “Our homeroom has recycled seven bins of paper!” “Ours has recycled ten!” Fellow teachers tell me that, when they attempt to recycle paper, hands shoot up as students beg to relieve them of the sheets so they can recycle it in their particular homerooms.

Eight weeks earlier, while planning a ten-week curriculum on social entrepreneurship, I decided that environmental stewardship should be our focus.  

I am just as guilty as the next teacher: Most days I printed out extra math packets and English worksheets.  I’d bring home some paper each night to recycle, but still the school’s trash bins were heavy with reams.

Every year our school buys approximately 300 boxes of printing paper.  That is 2,400 reams, or 1.2 million sheets of paper a year – the raw materials for tests, reading packets, mathematical worksheets and writing prompts.

This was my second semester co-teaching a class together with Youth Venture, a youth-focused organization-arm of the global non-profit Ashoka.  Youth Venture focuses on supporting student lead social initiatives.

It was my hope that we might get a recycling initiative started.

Five years ago, Mayor Menino supported a Boston Public School system-wide paper recycling competition.  Dubbed “RecycleMania,” the contest challenged schools to recycle paper over the course of three months.  Almost four hundred thousand pounds of paper were recycled (the weight of sixteen bull elephants) in twelve weeks – a two hundred-fold increase from the previous year.

The contest was lauded as a huge success and the Boston School Superintendent optimistically declared, “The momentum generated by this contest will help us as we continue to accelerate our efforts to reduce waste and increase school-based recycling.”

But, by the next year, the private recycling company that had partnered with the program stopped its collection, and no alternative company was found to step in.  The green and yellow dumpsters distributed to the schools were converted into canvases for graffiti artists and laboratories for teenage pyrotechnic experiments. The citywide effort has yet to be repeated.

Our school has attempted paper-recycling programs twice.  Both efforts were quickly trashed. The first program, part of the original ill-fated citywide effort, disintegrated under arguments about where to place the large dumpsters to satisfy both the collecting trucks and the neighbors.  A second attempt saw students ferrying boxes of paper to a neighboring school six blocks away. The effort expired from impracticality.

From the outset we sent the students out into the school to question their classmates and their teachers:  “In what ways is the school not green?” “How could the school be more eco-friendly?”  Reading over the responses the following week, recycling, or the lack thereof, was the dominant theme.  So, our students set out to create a recycling program.

In the classroom, our students counted how much paper on average fit in a classroom-recycling bin.  With calculators and equations they determined the total quantity of paper it would take to save a tree (8,000 sheets or twelve classroom sized bins).

Our students set a goal of saving four trees in three weeks.

On an overcast afternoon we walked to the shipping yards near our school to learn how our paper was recycled. We took a tour with the founder of the local recycling plant, the same company that had agreed to pick up our school’s paper.

Back at school, with hand-decorated bins in each 6^th grade classroom and colorful posters in the halls, we began the competition.

Three weeks later our fourteen students stood on stage in front of their peers, their teachers and a few parents to present their results:

In just three weeks, with our 6^th grade recyclers led the school to recycle 186 classroom-sized bins worth of paper.  By my students reckoning, that’s roughly 135,000 sheets of paper, or about fifteen trees saved.

In the audience, unbeknownst to our students, was a special guest. She came on behalf of the City of Boston. Her role is to revitalize the city’s commitment to greening the Public School system.

At the end of our students’ presentation, she jumped on stage with a certificate in hand.  She explained how she was leading the City’s renewed efforts to bring recycling into the public schools.  With family, teachers and peers watching, she dubbed the class “Recycling Leaders of Boston”.

Back at school, the students proudly passed around the certificate and discussed challenges to continuing our recycling program.

We needed more recycling bins for the 7^th and 8^th grade.  We needed more posters. We needed to teach the incoming class of 6^th graders what to and not to recycle.  Our students drafted letters to the principal, letters to the teachers with step-by step guides to recycling.  They rewrote their letters to make them neat and centered, and they passed them around so the entire class could sign their name. 

When the bell rang at the end of the day, the students gathered up their books and their pencils and their bags. And, they gathered up their first drafts and, while walking out the door, quietly tossed them in the blue recycling bins.

Sources: 
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/news/mayor-menino-announces-boston-public-schools-recyclemania-contest-winners

You've Got Mail

With eight weeks left in the school year, I sat down to write letters to my students.

I wanted the letters to demonstrate to my students how much I respected them.  I wanted the letters to remind my students of times during the year where they had thrived, taken a risk, acted mature.  I wanted the letters to galvanize my students to try especially hard in the final two months of school.

The process was more difficult than I had originally calculated. 

Over my weeklong, spring break holiday, I thought back over seven months of stories.  The time when we discussed Joseph Kony for an entire class period, or when my students had a pencil-tapping competition in the cafeteria, or when we “mummified” students during a Halloween-themed game day, or when we discussed the secrets of Pascal’s Triangle.   

A few of the letters came quickly.  There were my star students, whose letters consisted of a list of praises – how well they worked with others, how they were always on task, how they were always looking for ways to help. 

But then there were the letters to my more challenging students.

It can be easy to type-cast difficult students – the troublemaker, the checked-out child, the girl with too much attitude.   Their disruptive behavior is loud and attention-getting – both in the classroom and in my memory.

But, thinking back over the year, I began to tease out for those students their moments of real maturity.

The time when Michael, who usually can’t sit without talking for more than five minutes, silently wrote a thoughtful two-page response to a story we read.

The time when Robert, usually checked out in math, sat up straight, raised his hand, answered questions, and smiled when he got long-division problems right.

The time when Alisha, after being sent out of the classroom four days in a row for disruptive behavior, came up to me at snack and told me she wanted to change, wanted to be superb in class, and then was.

The time when Daniel, who has a tendency to bully other students when he gets bored, worked with me to turn around his behavior by agreeing to work on extra math packets in the back of the classroom rather than distract other students.

In my letters, I recorded these and other moments of grace.

When class convened after spring break, I distributed these letters to the class. 

I passed out markers, envelopes and lined paper and asked them to write me letters in return.  The following thirty minutes were the most silent and most focused I have ever seen my students. 

There were no funny noises, no pencil-tapping, no absurd half-dance moves, no humming, no turning in seats to talk to friends. Sixteen heads bent over paper, and sixteen hands writing, pausing, and writing again. I pulled out my phone and filmed, attempting to capture the palpable concentration.  Not a single student noticed.

Late that same night I read each of their reply letters.  I admit that I did not remain dry-eyed.  My students wrote about times where they struggled in class, with a particular concept, with a friendship.  They wrote about times where they had tried harder and succeeded.

For me, the most poignant letters were from my most difficult students.  They might not be star students all the time, or even most of the time, but in reading their letters I was reminded of how much they want to succeed.

Emily's letter to me was bright with pink hearts and purple stars.  In a corner of a page, written in blue ballpoint pen and wreathed in smiley faces, I found the following: “Next thing you’ll know I’m in 7^th grade all mature!” 

Through Fuchsia-Rimmed Glasses

“Everyday Anna comes home and wants to tell me all of the things she can see now!”  I heard this from the mother of one of my 6^th grade students, the week her daughter finally got her first pair of glasses.

I had first noticed Anna squinting to see the whiteboard in September.  I pulled her aside and ran an impromptu eye test, pointing at classroom posters at varying distances.  I decided to call home.

In April Anna proudly showed me her brand new fuchsia-rimmed glasses.

It took seven whole months of Anna's mother doing everything she could within the system to get her daughter glasses.  Anna's mother is one of the most pro-active of my students’ parents.  But she is also a young single mother with three children, who works multiple jobs and long hours to support her family.   Over the months following my initial suggestion, I learned of the catalogue of challenges: the complications of reaching an eye-specialist, of scheduling an appointment, of negotiating time off to meet the appointment, of determining what glasses insurance would cover.

I am now campaigning to get glasses for two additional girls.  I spotted one when I found the girl borrowing a boy’s glasses to read a class assignment.  The other girl approached me herself – asking if I would speak with her mom.  I have yet to succeed in either case. 

My medical consultations with parents go far beyond glasses.  For the headaches of one boy I worked out a strategy with his mom, where he carries kid’s Motrin in his bag at all times. In another case I started a conversation in October with one mother about investigating ADHD medication for her son.   Her son is one of my most rambunctious students; he is incredibly bright yet maintains miserable grades because of his inability to focus and his disruptive classroom behavior.  It is now early May and we are still exchanging calls about necessary doctors forms and teacher evaluations.

I am not naturally inclined towards medicating students.  I have read and cringed at reports documenting increases in ADHD proscriptions for middle school boys.  In most cases I believe there are better ways to focus the energy of middle school boys.

For some of my boys I have invented tracker systems – sheets that stay on a student’s desk and help them learn to regulate their behavior themselves. “Make a tick mark here every time you get out of your chair without asking, make a tick mark there each time you say something nice to another student.”  Each boy’s tracker is specialized.   I create incentive systems: for one bored Patrick, great behavior and participation earns him a starburst; for another boy, Daniel, I call home every week and report his behavior - both good and disruptive - to his mother.

Sometimes I layer strategies upon strategies. The systems work with varying success.

Daniel carefully tallies his behavior and asks for my comments and suggestions.  Michael originally ignored the tracker I placed daily next to his folder, but in recent weeks has claimed a corner of the whiteboard for a tracker system of his own devising (one orange mark for every time he taps, one purple for calling out.  Five marks gets him sent out of the room.) Joseph bought into the system for a week.  Now I find his tracker under his desk or knocked to the floor.  I pick it up and place it back on the corner of his desk. 

We are not just math teachers and English teachers.

Our students require more to succeed than help on a social studies assignment or an English report. 

Identifying the extra support our students need requires time to talk with them and calls home to talk with their parents.   It requires small classes – significantly smaller than those typical in a public school – so that teachers can ensure that not a single student slips through.  And, if a student does begin to slip, the teacher needs the time and the resources to investigate, to follow up, and to provide the necessary support.  It requires patience. 

But the reward can be immense. For when we succeed, sometimes after months, there is a student who can, for the first time, truly see.

Behind the Camera

What happens when you pass out hot fuchsia flip-cameras to eleven sixth graders with the plan to make a movie?

If you are in Room 313 you might see shots of bright yellow Jordans, impromptu rapping, or angled dance moves filmed covertly while a teacher is talking.  There will be close ups on a nose, or a blinking eye, and classroom whiteboards spun into vortices.

Having grown up assembling Marx Brother-esque shorts and PlayMobil stop-action epics, I jumped at the opportunity to co-teach an apprenticeship on documentary filmmaking.  Little did I know what I was getting into.

Our class of eleven was a middle-school microcosm.  There were the best friends and the loners.  There were the troublemakers and studious types. There were students so quiet it took minutes of cajoling to get them to share a thought and others who required constant reminders not to call out.  We had Spanish SEI (Sheltered English Immersion) students, Chinese SEI students who spoke limited or halting English, and one autistic boy who dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.

By week five I was dubious that any movie would result.  Class seemed to be more about juggling emotions and attitudes than an intense study of cinematography.  We finally settled on a fitting topic: what it was like to be a sixth grader.

And, slowly, a movie emerged.

Students climbed onto chairs or lay, backs flat to the creaky wood floor, to capture the most interesting angled shots.  They fanned out silently to record daily life: homework help in the cafeteria, the step-dance team in the hallway and a range of apprenticeship lessons in the classrooms.

At the culmination of ten weeks, we presented our movie to students, parents and teachers.  All the elements were there: a storyline, interviews, b-roll, voiceovers, odd angles, even bloopers so as to include the yellow Jordans and the covert dance moves.  But more than that, the movie held together as a passionate and playful portrait of 6^th grade life.

What the audience did not see, however, was the ten-week transformation of the film crew who sat, bashfully, near the front of the stage during the premiere.

No, they weren’t suddenly all best friends. But over ten weeks I had witnessed subtle shifts in their attitudes and their assumptions of each other.  I saw mainstream students reach out to Chinese SEI students and take the time to listen and respond to their halting English.  I saw the shyer students improvise eloquent voice-overs when the talkers of the class grew hesitant.  And I watched as the autistic boy in our class, who struggled constantly to stay on task, walked purposefully and silently through the halls and classrooms of the school, camera in hand.

It is this still-unmade documentary I wish the audience could see. 

Let me count the ways

On the bus to work everyday I watch men and women with newspapers spread across their laps and pens in hand pondering sudoku problems.

Suduko is a logic puzzle. In each row, each column, and each box the numbers 1-9 must appear exactly once. The challenge is finding – through trial, error and numerous erasings – the singular solution. For serious Sudoku players there are entire books of puzzles to solve.

But for those who want a real challenge I would argue that the greatest Sudoku grid is a classroom-seating chart.

Consider:

Daniel cannot sit next to Maria, for when bored, he has a tendency to bully. Nor can Emily and Vanessa sit side-by-side for they are prone to dissolving into fits of giggles. Anna needs a desk at the front owing to her bad eyesight. Sara is self sufficient, easy to work with; she can successfully be placed anywhere. Michael is tricky. I have tried the edge: he zones off. I have tried the very front of the class, right up next to the board with mixed results: at times he is unnerving in his focus, and at times he slips into acting the class clown, front and center.

The list of seating-chart stipulations is unending.

When I read how the fifth grade teacher in Tracy Kidder’s book “Among School Children” agonized over seating charts – how she devoted much thought to which students when placed beside each other could draw out the best – I was incredulous. Clearly, she must be over-thinking the issue.

I was wrong.

I started off this year with a musical-chairs approach – new seats daily. I experimented with combinations. Could one of my best students focus one of my worst? What if I executed a 180 and put two trouble-makers together? Could they, like two negatives, result in a positive?

But with ever-changing rotations I found myself bombarded daily with my students’ seating desires. This semester each student has just one assigned seat. I hoped, after careful consideration and balancing, I had reached an equilibrium.

Daniel is in the back, slightly isolated to encourage focus. Andy is in the front, easy to watch and redirect. Joseph is also near the front so as to discourage excessive pencil tapping. I have deployed calmer and quieter students to occupy the center seats and arranged the most rambunctious around the periphery.

Yet despite all my careful calculations, in two months I see the lines fraying. Like a field general, I find myself having to re-arrange the troops, draw up treaties, form alliances. Students have begun negotiating with me. “If I’m really good this week can I sit in the back?” I extract promises, “If I let you sit together I have to see amazing focus.” Even my best students are starting to chafe from sitting to long next to the same peers. I catch them poking each other, purloining pens and pencils, and I know, I will have to go back to the drawing board soon.

There are twenty-five desks in my classroom and, if everyone is present, eighteen students. All told, I calculated that makes a bit more than 3x10²¹ possible seating charts. To try them all, at one a day, would take me about billion times the age of the Earth. Unfortunately there are only fifty days left in the school year to experiment.