November 12, 2008
This blog link was broken for a while and I couldn’t get in. Assuming the site died, I started a new one at www.badgerfem.wordpress.com. If you’re trying to keep up with my Teach For America experience in New Orleans, you should change your bookmarks/blog routine/whatever it is you do to that address.
Thankfully, this site will presumably remain up for posterity as a record of what went down in my first few months in New Orleans and my life at Institute. I’m archiving all of the old posts anyway in case this one bites the dust again.
Filed by Mitra at November 12th, 2008 under Site Updates, TFA
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September 21, 2008
We are finally in our new building, as we have been teaching out of an office building for the past 3-4 weeks. I literally taught class in the back of another class last week - sitting against the back wall, 4 students sitting a foot away from me with their desks facing the back wall, trying not to speak too loudly so that the other class could continue uninterrupted. You probably expected this, but even with the new building, all the signs of inequality are there. We don’t have whiteboards, Prometheum boards (the special technology that all the other schools in the Recovery School District got - they are like “smartboards” that are used for overhead projection and other newfangled technological methods of instruction), copy machine, internet, textbooks, pencils, paper, or chalk. Our school is only halfway painted. It was also built in 1925, so it’s really old and a lot of the window frames are chipped and peeling, walls look like crap in places, etc. And to top it off, the building doesn’t have power in certain places. We are supposed to come in “casual dress” tomorrow since the building is obviously not school-ready, and I think it’s bullshit because culture-building starts from DAY 1. Not when you want it to - on Day 1. If we show up sloppy tomorrow, the kids aren’t going to take it seriously. How are they supposed to take it seriously if we can’t even take it seriously?
I had to dig through a mountain of 50-pound boxes today to get to my textbooks, climbing 6 feet above the ground at times to try and unearth class sets from within the pile. The mountain was placed in a classroom, such that it was no longer a classroom. The movers came and just dumped them all haphazardly in a room for us to deal with. I don’t know if it’s because they’re lazy or because they just fail to realize this is a SCHOOL and children need to have these resources available for their learning within the next 12 hours. There is just this general lack of a sense of urgency to everything that gets done in education here. We don’t have basic supplies, our school is officially “starting” over a month late from the RSD start date, the paperwork for our special ed kids (aka like half our kids) isn’t maintained or accessible right now so we don’t know which kids need what accommodations and which kids we are supposed to give a 3-foot radius to at all times.
I have spent a lot of my own money already on school supplies because I don’t trust anyone to do their job here and get them for me. It makes me angry, because I guess you could argue I’m not really spending that money on anything else right now and it’s a worthy investment, but it’s not like every teacher can do that. Lots of the teachers have families and lives to pay for. This is all really esoteric and gripey, but I feel like people from back home need to get a picture of what the state of education is really like in low-functioning systems. The level of disarray is probably illegal.
As I was precariously finding my footing among the rising bluffs of algebra textbooks and half-empty cardboard boxes that were ankle sprains waiting to happen, I wondered if the movers just didn’t give a damn because our kids are the alternative school kids and everybody thinks they’re criminals and not worth the standard effort. I have wondered a lot lately if nobody tries for our school because they think all our kids are criminals. For some of my students, I have no idea what they’re even doing at my school. I know from disclosure that some of the kids are in on drug charges or group fights - even those kids seem to have just made one bad decision at the wrong time. They love learning about power struggles, so Civics always goes well for me, and their insights leave me floored sometimes. I feel myself becoming attached to them already and keep telling myself I have to stop, but with some of them, I can’t help it. I just get some of the kids. Darrius is ridiculously smart, but can’t write to save his life. He’s quiet in class and on-task, jumps ahead of me on the worksheets because he’s impatient for knowledge, and is never afraid to speak his mind; but when somebody rubs him the wrong way, he just flips out. He can’t handle his anger. He just. Freaks. Out. I feel so bad for him when I see him getting thrown around by the behavior specialists because he did something unacceptable again. I know who Darrius could be. I know what it feels like to just want someone to get OUT of your face. I know what Darrius needs to learn is how to deal with his emotions. For some of these kids, I understand their pain acutely; I remember growing through the violence of my own emotions, the tumult of those times. I get him. It hurts to get him, but I get him and I’m a better teacher for him because of it.
The sermon in church today was about how the Lord will provide. Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish. The disciples didn’t believe he could do it, but he made it happen. I feel like five thousand people are waiting for me to feed them tomorrow. I did whatever it took today to get my stuff in order and help other teachers find their textbooks and supplies - I stayed at school for a good 5-6 hours on a Sunday to set up my classroom, set up other classrooms, clean up the school, dismantle the mountain of textbooks. I feel like I have no choice now but to trust that He will provide, now that I’ve done everything within my power to make it happen.
Filed by Mitra at September 21st, 2008 under TFA
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September 18, 2008
3 words that describe my life right now. I’m not even going to plan tonight - I’m just going to flop on my bed and catch my 7 hours (if I’m lucky). I don’t dip below 5 because 2 things happen: 1) your skin gets thinner, so when that emotionally disturbed special ed kid throws your papers on the floor, you are less likely to handle it gracefully in front of your class; 2) your response time lengthens, so when that non-emotionally-disturbed kid violates your norms in any way, it takes you about a second longer to dispense consequences or reprimand them. You just get slower. I can’t afford to be slower. I have to remind myself every morning to get into the habit of coming to school in full force. I can’t just show up and be shuttled around like a pinball. I have to be on it, every day, vigilant for the slightest signs of disrespect or disobedience. I am finally forming a rapport with the kids, but you still can’t really give them an inch. As soon as things get loose, productivity grinds to a halt. I try to keep it tight every day, but it’s exhausting.
I got the biggest unintended compliment from one of my students the other day. For the umpteenth time, some staff member came into my class and did something unprofessional that was out of line, e.g. yell at me for misplacing books I didn’t know were hers in front of my class; I said, “I don’t know the answer to that right now, but we can talk about this later”, in a level voice, and went on with my lesson. My student stopped me with a question. “Are you a psychiatrist?”
“What?” I said.
“Are you a psychiatrist. You don’t never get upset at nothing.”
I gave him a wry smile, but inside I felt an immense gratitude. Somebody had unintentionally acknowledged me for the fact that I was successfully holding it in all day - the frustration with the staff, the things a couple students said that I took personally, the disorganization at my school right now, the rattled feeling I got that day I saw a kid get taken down and pinned to the floor in the cafeteria by behavior specialists. The million things a day that set me on edge. As hard as it is, I do my best in school to never, ever lose it - and so far, I haven’t. I’ve had a kid come into my class and say, “Fuck you”, to the special ed teacher; I’ve had a kid tell me to shut up; I’ve had kids freaking out at other kids because they hate each other and I have to sit them in opposite corners of the room. I just do my best to keep it calm, make sure it doesn’t get emotional. It’s impossible not to take it personally sometimes, but you can almost never let that show. You have to be a glassy, dismissive front that only breaks, and breaks violently, at strategic times. I think back on all the times my parents were really, really angry with me, and the scariest moments were when they approached me with a look of almost murderous intent in their eyes and spoke to me in a low, dangerous voice. They didn’t have to yell. I knew they meant business.
A new kid showed up in my class today; he had tattoos all down his forearms and sat there sullenly, unresponsive to the special ed teacher in the room who was trying to orient him to class while I was teaching. With my back to the class, I heard a derisive inflection in his voice towards her from his corner of the room where they were talking. I abruptly stopped speaking to the class, turned from the whiteboard where I was busily drawing a bar on my bar graph, and strode quickly and purposefully towards him. With the pressure of all the eyes in the room following me now on him, I came to his desk, leaned forward slightly so my eyes were level with his, and dropped my voice to ask only just loudly enough so that everyone else’s straining ears could barely hear:
“You good?”
I made sure he saw in my eyes that it wasn’t a question. “… Yeah,” he pouted shortly.
“Put your name and date at the top. We’re on page 2,” I said, handing him a pencil and the guided notes packet I’d made for everyone else. He backed off the special ed teacher. When I turned around again from the front of the class, he was copying down my bar graph.
I teach in the high school wing, and we hold it down pretty well. The middle school wing, though, is a mess. Just a complete mess. I walked down there to make copies today and in my first 2 seconds down the hall saw a student cursing out a teacher for asking him to tuck his shirt in. It rattles me to walk past that, their curse words falling harshly on my ears and shattering, violating all the norms that I abide by. It always makes my heart rate spike. In the first few weeks, you have to break all the kids. You have to break them all down to nothing, and then you have to build them back up. Some days it just feels like a never-ending battle of wills. It is hard, too, to bear the brunt of all these kids’ emotional issues over Katrina, or just a life in a neighborhood routinely shattered by gunshots. You have to remember that they are not the ones who ultimately judge you.
My high schoolers are coming around. I have to keep it tight with them, or else they’ll think it’s all a lark, but they know that I’m not there to make their lives worse. I’ve been called mean already, but as much as the kids all bitch about how much I make them write or how I use too many big words, they all love it. They hate it so much more when they’ve got nothing to do.
We had some professionals come speak to us as a corps tonight, and one of them mentioned the concept of vicarious trauma, which is the process by which an emphathetic person is continually exposed to the trauma of other people’s lives and begins to suffer from the effects of that trauma themselves by absorption. It put words to some of the feelings that I have had to stave off at school sometimes. Above all things, though, the kids need you to be strong. You can’t just love their problems away. You have to help them help themselves. I am learning quickly that the best way to make sure your kids like you is to make it clear you don’t care if they like you.
I am still working through the whiplash of my steep, first-year-teacher learning curve, but I feel grateful for this week. I felt like quitting on Monday. It was the scariest feeling ever. I basically sat down with my principal and told her I wasn’t going to teach as many classes as she piled on me - she told me that I was, in fact, the only teacher in the building with that kind of classload, and she gave me a break. I felt guilty saying no, because it made me look weak, and it also just felt like I was copping out when really everyone at my school’s got something that’s making their life hell - but I can’t work from 6-11 every day, and have 1 day off on weekends because Sunday is a planning day. Now that I’m not spread so thin, it’s working out.
Tomorrow is a dress-down day for staff, and my students told me they want me to wear Converse All-Stars. My roommate has some. I’ll see what I can do.
Filed by Mitra at September 18th, 2008 under Other
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September 15, 2008
Upon explaining to my kids the difference between a democracy, an aristocracy, and an autocracy:
“I AIN’T NO ARISTOCRACY, I BE BRINGIN’ THAT DEMOCRACY!!” -Student in a rapping voice
Filed by Mitra at September 15th, 2008 under TFA
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September 10, 2008
(My students’ take on class today)
Unresponsive systems are what extinguishes the fires inside of people. Schools with bad administrations or working in broken communities gradually come to exist in a constant state of death, because people are screaming and nobody is responding. Eventually they stop screaming, because they’ve been taught that it won’t change things, that government won’t rescue them, that people can’t be trusted, and that nobody cares about their needs. Everyone suffers in silence.
We have a homeless kid whose girlfriend has a baby on the way. He carries around the Ultrasound of the kid in his pocket. He sleeps through school all day, openly disrespects staff and teachers, is verbally abusive, has a horrible attitude, and is generally my least favorite student. He has a lot of pull with the staff because they all feel bad for him. I feel bad for him because he’s homeless, but I’m not having it when he whips out his little Ultrasound picture and looks at it during class when he’s supposed to be doing his assignment. Not going to work on me. Not only is he not pregnant, but he shouldn’t have had sex in the first place if he knew he couldn’t support a child. And I know that’s completely irrelevant at this point, but if it’s the child that’s at the forefront of his interests, looking at a picture of it when he’s supposed to be taking responsibility for his education isn’t going to help him or her. Everyone is in love with his story; it is good that he’s showing up to school, but beyond that, I don’t give him much room. On one level, I feel completely unsympathetic to his situation, because I come to school to teach and students come to school to learn, and in my mind that’s all there is to it. That’s the work that needs to be done. I don’t have time to put up with his crap when we have so much work to do. On another level, I feel despair when I think about his situation, because he’s told me that he’s given up on school, even though he’s showing up. He’s rude to me, rude to everyone, doesn’t pay attention, and just straight-up doesn’t care. And to be honest, I don’t really blame him, because he probably thinks an education has nothing to do with whether or not he’ll make it in life. The system and the people around him have all taught him the contrary. In his immediate waking life, there is no rational reason for him to try.
I go home at night and think about how I’m going to interact with him the next day. I don’t like him, but I haven’t written him off, and I don’t really believe in writing kids off. It’s just the easy, selfish thing to do. I can understand why teachers do it - expel kids from their schools that just constantly disrupt the students that are trying and care about learning - because it isn’t fair to any of those kids. But in my placement, where these kids are literally 1 stop from prison or the street, writing them off to me is just not an option. A lot of my internal dialogues about the education philosophy of my school feel like anti-death penalty rhetoric. I work with the kids that nobody in the world wants to deal with. It’s not just because they’re hard to love. It’s because lots of them can be dangerous. Last year, a student at Schwarz walked out of school, stole a car, and was pulled over later 2 blocks from school by police. He had 3 guns in the car and was coming to kill a teacher.
Why save them, right? They had their chance. Like that scene from Dark Knight. I’m not saying my whole heart is in this. But my whole heart is definitely in not giving up.
Ray Bakke is my inspiration lately.
One thing I have learned is that if we take the stained glass off the text, it will speak to the issues of the city. What is Christmas? Christmas is about an Asian-born baby, born in a borrowed barn, who became almost immediately an African refugee, an intercontinental migrant - who came back eventually to be buried in a borrowed grave. All the boys in his town died for him before he died for them on the cross. If anybody understands the pain of crack babies, fetal-alcohol damaged children, HIV-infected kids, Jesus would understand. His whole village died for him before he died for them. That’s the Christmas story - Matthew 1:2.
Jesus, born in Palestine, the African refugee, understands the problems of the people who come to our cities.
Filed by Mitra at September 10th, 2008 under TFA
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September 7, 2008
I haven’t written because I like to give due justice to each topic that comes my way as I travel this journey, but there are too many topics and not enough time or energy after a 9-hour day at school to devote to all of them. That’s an excuse - the excuse mainly being “my life” - and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the first 3-4 weeks that I’ve been officially been working in the public education system, it’s that I hate excuses. I hate them. Italics-worthy hatred. They are the reason for everything wrong in the world.
Ever.
I have been battling through a major cultural struggle lately that has been at the forefront of my thoughts. The staff at my school are becoming increasingly self-segregated into 2 groups: “from here” New Orleans teachers and paras and “not from here” TFA teachers. Being the type of person who speaks out problems, I have been very vocal about problems at my school site in staff meetings: class schedules not running on time or being non-existent, teachers not being provided access to students’ IEPs, teachers playing good-cop/bad-cop and dividing staff in front of the students in order to achieve temporary peace with students who chronically misbehave, teachers not having basic classroom supplies like textbook sets, and behavior specialists coming into classrooms and treating teachers like their inferiors as opposed to their co-workers in front of students, just to name a few. This has earned me the silent treatment and/or vocal contempt of many of the from-here teachers and staff, as well as the pleadings of some TFA teachers that I please keep my mouth shut, keep a low profile, and just do my job and roll with the punches so as not to exacerbate the staff segregation situation. (One from-here teacher told me I had “an attitude problem”.)
But the regional segregation problem at my school has its roots in class tensions - not race tensions, as TFA’s diversity training would have you believe. In come these northern reformers and outsiders, with lots of ideas and little experience, to tell you in their college essay words that your school system is broken and rife with incompetence and that “this” is what needs to be done to fix it. Never mind that they’ve been living in this city all of 3 weeks. Clearly, they know better.
This is the impression many TFA teachers make in their first few weeks. I include myself among those TFA teachers. When another TFA teacher approached me gently after a particularly explosive staff meeting that ended with me crying out of sheer frustration (I hate that I cried - makes you look weak - but I got so angry I couldn’t handle it anymore), she said, “I know your intentions are coming from a good place in your heart. And ultimately, what you’re saying about these problems we’re having right now - you’re right. But you have to understand that when you open your mouth and say all these things that are meant to be constructive criticism, all these people hear are: I’m better than you, you’re from the South and I’m from the North and you’re dumb, I know best, and your way is wrong.”
It hurt to hear that. It hurt because it hurts to feel like you might have hurt people. It hurt because I was being judged. It hurt because I realized that nothing I say, no matter how well I say it, means nothing coming from me: a young, nothern, city newcomer, TFA, first-year teacher. I used to think if you just spoke the truth to people, it would sink into them, sink down into their heart and burn there while they sorted it out inwardly. They might hate you temporarily, but it’s only because they know it’s true, and to me that was always worth it if it meant a situation would change for the better. Yes, I thought that I could go out into the world armed with magic truth-sentences, and I would just say these magic truth-sentences to people, and they would change.
No. People don’t change. The part about it that infuriates me, though, is the excuses. “You don’t understand how things work here.” “This is just the way things are.” “You need to accommodate and be sensitive to these ‘cultural differences’ when going into your placement.” “Don’t be an idealist - just be a realist.” No. It is not “idealistic” to expect class block times to be respected and enforced - the lifeblood of a managed and productive school is an enforced class schedule. In no other job can you just show up consistently late to things and not get fired. It is not “judgmental” to call a bureaucratically waterlogged school district “incompetent” when they consistently pay you a week late or sometimes not at all, fail to keep inventory of expensive supplies like laptops and don’t provide books to classrooms by the start of a school year, and are performing dead last in a state that is performing in the bottom 5 nationwide. That is not a “cultural difference”. It is an “inequality”. Do your job. If expecting basic professionalism and for people to care about and take pride in their jobs is idealistic, it’s only going to get worse from here for the system and the children it was meant to serve.
Nothing ever changed from taking the attitude that “this is just the way things are”. Complacency is a gas chamber. The more you tolerate and accept mediocrity, the less you matter to the situation, because you no longer become a disruptive force within it - you just become a part of it. You have to learn to pick your battles, because if you fight everything every step of the way, you’ll kill yourself; some degree of prudent tolerance is required. But silence is dangerous. Silence is easy. Silence makes everybody feel better. Nothing to see here. Just keep on walking by.
The only thing that would make my diplomatic situation worse for me right now is if I were white.
It has been emotionally challenging beyond description for me to come to terms with this new massive cultural barrier to reform I face daily. I have to defend myself with surgical precision, because if I try to vet myself and my intentions, the backfire potential could be fatal. If I say, “I could have had a high-paying job, gone to law school, been doing a million other things with my life, but instead I graduated and came here to one of the shittiest school systems in the country to make a difference because maybe I give a damn,” it only affirms all the same judgments about me - that I think I’m “better” and that the teachers here don’t care - which isn’t true. I can’t in good conscience say that they are all as committed to education as I think educators ought to be, because some of them just unequivocally aren’t. But lots of them do care. And I don’t think I’m even imposing some kind of radical, northern educational philosophy on anybody here. I’ve literally asked for the minimum in terms of resources and expectations as a teacher - some of which is federally mandated and not enforced.
Pride is a sin, and I have been praying that the Lord will remove a lot of my pride and sharpen my communication skills so that I can work better with the staff to ultimately serve my students, which is the whole point of Teach For America. TFA shoots itself in the foot somewhat with its marketing strategy, which heavily emphasizes TFA as a “professional development” or “leadership” opportunity. It is - but when you get into that classroom, it is not about you. It is about your students. I believe many corps members get into the program and drop out because they forget that it’s not all about them and their leadership and their skills and their needs. It is about that 16-year-old kid who straight-up can’t read and acts out all the time to mask it, to the point where he goes so far as to try to strangle his teacher. This actually happened to a TFA teacher at Booker T. Washington, the school I helped out at for a week while Schwarz was preparing to open - kid got his hands around his neck before he was pulled off by behavior staff. Are you going to be able to love that kid? Are you going to be able to teach that kid, when it’s all about respect for you, praise for you, appreciation for you, affirmation for you, advancement for you? Are you going to be able to forgive the students who cuss you out, make racially charged remarks at you, don’t come to your class, walk out of your class, wear inappropriate clothes that gross you out, call you “boo” instead of Mr. or Ms. Whoever, can’t read and don’t care that they can’t read, harass other students that care that they can’t read and are trying to learn, humiliate you and disrespect you on a daily basis because all your formal education doesn’t mean shit to them because “you’re not from the streets”, as one student put it?
I watched one veteran teacher whom I particularly admire for her gentle mannerisms with the most unlovable students trying to corral her English class at Booker T. Washington back in mid-August. A student had insulted another student for some reason, and she said, “In this classroom, we do not do that here. Gentlemen, we are all in this together –”
A boy slouched in his chair cut her off. “Not where I’m from.”
She paused, taken aback. He continued, taking advantage of the silence that had opened up. “Hey T. In your hood, do people stick together?”
“No,” was the flat reply from the classmate he addressed across the room.
A deeply uncomfortable silence ensued. The teacher regained her footing and carried out the rest of her statement about the importance of working together as a team in the classroom to achieve academically. It felt deflated.
Class warfare. It’s real.
Filed by Mitra at September 7th, 2008 under TFA
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September 6, 2008
I’m back, and I’ve got my cross-hairs trained on Ike.
Filed by Mitra at September 6th, 2008 under Other
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September 1, 2008
I’ve heard the area we live in is OK. We’re just killing time now until we can go back. I have yet to see how my school building made out, and hopefully this has not set our on-site start date back by much - I hate teaching in our temp building. I watched Mississippi Burning today and it was terrifying. I watched Thank You For Smoking last night and it was gratifying. I also watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? and am about to watch The Good Shepherd. This is how we’ve been spending all our time. Good movies, but if I don’t go back soon, I’m going to start climbing the walls.
Filed by Mitra at September 1st, 2008 under TFA
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August 29, 2008
My roommate and I are driving to Jackson at 4AM. I seriously am bringing like, 75% of my stuff. Some people are riding it out here - TFA and non- but I don’t want to risk it. Insiders here are telling me the mayor’s going to call a mandatory evac a few hours after I’m scheduled to hit the road. Gustav is supposed to be a Cat 4 by the time it hits Louisiana. My friends and I were talking today after school and we are seriously preparing for alternatives should our schools to be gone by the time we come back. That might seem alarmist, but 1) it’s a hurricane and 2) my building was not only built in 1925, but it’s also under construction right now. We’ve been told the building has been “secured” but some people also came out and “secured” our temporary building today, which consisted of putting garbage bags over all the computers. What could go wrong?
Basically, my school building is likely going to be exposed to 100+mph winds coming through, and that means some plastic-lined window is likely to blow out, the side doors are likely to give, a draft is then going to rip through the whole ancient structure and the roof could implode.
I am praying that all my students either have outs or secure shelters. Please keep us in your thoughts this coming weekend and week. Gustav is supposed to touch down Monday, and school is canceled through Tuesday and possibly through Wednesday - and beyond if it’s that bad. I will be updating on our status as is necessary.
Filed by Mitra at August 29th, 2008 under Other
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August 27, 2008
My roommate and I are likely going to Jackson this weekend and I am packing all my irreplaceable things and most of my clothes. FEMA, the city, and the state seem a lot more prepared this time around, but it’s still every man for himself down here right now. There isn’t like, highly visible widespread panic, but it’s there - I see it when I pass gas stations on the way home and people are furiously filling up gas cans, or when I pass Wal-Marts and the parking lots are backed up and there are lines to get in and out of the place and people walking out with huge packs of bottled water. I am scared.
At least I know what the geography lesson is going to be on tomorrow!
Filed by Mitra at August 27th, 2008 under TFA
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