Navigation | BadgerFems
She was a local TV news anchor here and is now challenging incumbent William Jefferson, whose campaign for re-election despite his pending bribery case epitomizes Louisiana politics. I don’t really have much respect for campaign tactics like this. It confuses people who don’t know how to think about feminism. People whose comprehension we desperately need.
Filed by Mitra at August 19th, 2008 under Other
No comments on this post yet
I am currently co-teaching at another alternative school while my school finishes construction.
1. DCA. It matters.
“What time it is?!”
This is the question out of many of my kids’ mouths. Many dismiss poorly spoken English as a “cultural thing” here. It’s not. No other cultures speak that way. The line between ebonics and bad English is very blurry. I have been struggling with the line between embracing different cultures and enforcing general academic standards. In some instances, enforcing standards is just obvious. Sometimes at Institute the kids would turn in written assignments with text-speak instead of full words and sentences, e.g. “I luv 2 argu n form opinions b/c it’s more exiting than facts.” But when it comes to interacting 1-on-1 with the kids, it’s a whole different ballgame. I watched 3 white teachers today testily try to corral a group of 12 attitudinal girls - all black - and they did NOT take them seriously. It was painful. Then the executive director of my school (black, imposing, bald-headed man) walked into the classroom and just threw down. Quote to keep: “If y’all think it’s cool to join your homegirl in the hallway cause she talkin’ and laughin’ in class, and if where y’all are from folks is hot wit dat, I won’t be takin’ that personally, but I’ma tell you right now - that’s not what I’m about.” Silence. Complete silence. For 10 minutes while he talked. You can’t fake talking like that to try and “reach out” to the kids.
DCA. It matters.
2. Girls are worse than boys.
When the behavior specialists pull a boy out of a classroom and ask why he’s messing around, he gets kind of angry in the hallway, usually stomps around a little, and then after some talking-to in a low voice and straight-up directives about school norms, there is an exchange of pats on the back and he is sent back into the classroom. When a girl gets pulled out of class, she 1) slams her chair into her desk after she pulls herself out of her seat, 2) stomps out of the classroom, often with a remark like “I only said like 1 word”, and 3) comes back into the classroom 5-7 minutes later with a huge grudge against the teacher. We talk about “reads” among the staff at my school, as in getting “reads” on students to gage how to interact with them. The behavior specialists get some crazy reads on some of the kids here, sometimes after only being around them for a mere 20 minutes. They pulled out 2 girls in one of my classes today because - what did they want? - older male attention.
The girls are harder to control than the boys. The girls hate you more than the boys. The girls are generally more emotionally intelligent than the boys. The girls are more likely to verbally and viciously disrespect you than the boys.
The girls are worse than the boys.
3. Educators all have different philosophies on teaching. Pick your battles.
We got in some heated discussions today about whether to give up on kids or not, whether to assume certain things about their lives or not, and to what extent as an educator it is your job to invest kids in their own success and education. I remember my high school teacher telling me, when I told him about this next chapter in my life, that “teaching is one of those things you just have to do and do your way, and to hell with what everybody else thinks.” Obviously, best practices and standards-driven curricula still apply. But to the extent that teaching is a function of your personality, you just have to own that. On some issues, nobody else in your school is going to agree with you. Everyone handles conflict differently.
For instance, one teacher at my school said he would assign problematic kids in his class “detention” with him, which would consist of him taking them out on a Saturday morning to shoot hoops for an hour or two. After that, he would take them out to breakfast and have a friendly conversation with them about what’s “going on” with them in his class and why they won’t behave. This is completely inconsistent with my personality, and I would never do it - but it works for him.
After my sexual harassment tirade, a veteran teacher pulled me aside and said, “You have a lot of fire in you, but you’re going to burn out if you don’t pick your battles.” She is correct. Put your kids first. If what you’re doing works with your kids, think carefully about whether you want to invest time trying to convince another teacher that what they’re doing isn’t working with the same kids. Success is often just a function of the particular rapport you have with the students.
Egos on the back-burner. (This is much easier said than done, but a standard to be striven for.)
4. “I may not like this kid’s behavior, but I still like this kid.”
Repeat liberally to yourself and with feeling.
Filed by Mitra at August 18th, 2008 under TFA
No comments on this post yet
Read this if you haven’t already.
Filed by Mitra at August 17th, 2008 under TFA
No comments on this post yet
TFA has termed our diversity training Diversity, Community, and Achievement, or “DCA” for short, as corps members have come to call it. Whenever one of us experiences a situation in which class, race, gender, orientation, or other lines become starkly apparent and challenge our identities, we call this “a DCA moment”.
So here’s the deal. For my school-specific training, we got zero sexual harassment training. None. Not even a mention of the possibility of severe sexual harassment in the classroom, be that verbally, nonverbally, or in the traditional sense (groping, etc). Needless to say, this is a huge problem for me. I was put in touch with a fellow UW-Madison feminist/TFA corps member down here (”L”) who was heavily involved with trying to reform PAVE when she was on campus. Her stories so far have been invaluable to me in my preparation for teaching, as they impart information about possible issues Teach For America has not even gone near bringing up.
In one instance while teaching, my friend was bending down slightly over a desk to show a student how to write something. A male student of hers - a middle-schooler who was actually about 17 - stood up to walk to the pencil sharpener. Despite having ample space to walk by her without making contact, he stepped in close to her from behind, grazed her ass heavily and fully with his crotch, and continued walking to the pencil sharpener. She felt so dirty and repulsed by this student after this incident that she had severe difficulties teaching him and interacting with him from that point on.
In another instance, L was walking down the hall during the school day and passed another overage student, this one a high schooler. The following remark he made to her has been forever burned into my mind.
“I’m gonna make your ass quiver.”
Whirling on her heel, she got in his face and put her face up to his until she was barely an inch away from him.
“What did you just say to me?” she said, in a low, level, dangerous voice.
“Nothing miss, nothing,” the student stammered, lowering his eyes, turning his face away, refusing to make eye contact, cowed under her withering stare.
“You care to repeat that to me?”
“No miss, no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
She looked long and hard at him (he still wouldn’t look up) and then turned away from him to continue walking, resolving to document the incident once she got back to her classroom - she had an entire behavior log on this particular student because he would demand to touch other female students inappropriately, and when they said no, he would hit them.
As she turned to go, he grabbed her face and tried to kiss her. She seized him by the forearm and dragged him to the principal’s office.
Clearly, these kids have issues - some of what they say or do stems from deeply rooted psychological damage from having a traumatic young life. But there are also instances where a kid just fucking knows better. There are cultural problems here that enable behavior like this to continue. There are reasons beyond L’s experiences that mandate sexual harassment training for the Recovery School District, without exception.
I will admit freely here: I am terrified of potential sexual harassment at my school site. I don’t think a student would ever go so far as to try to actually assault me. It is all the casual things that aren’t as shocking or patently violative of decorum that people let slide - building a culture in which blatant disrespect and sexual degradation of women is acceptable. The leering, elevator eyes, and mental undressing. The hooting and cat calls. The “damn you fines” and purposely audible exchanges of “she cute” while the teacher’s back is turned to the class as she writes on the chalkboard. The low whistles of approval, the lip-licking, the singing of Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” obviously directed at female teachers present. To me, there is no faster or more effortless way to degrade somebody, to take them down a notch, than to sexualize them in a professional situation. I feel sick with fear when I think about the approaching school year, and it is almost entirely because of this issue. I am less afraid of a kid standing up, saying, “Fuck this shit”, flicking me off, and walking out of my classroom than I am of a kid publicly making sexually degrading remarks to me while standing with a group of his friends - and watching them all laugh.
Erica Jong once described this feeling - this feeling of gender-based discrimination, whether it be sexual or economic or any other form of it - as death by a thousand cuts. Every remark, every stare, every confrontation, every time a student commits a breach and the witnesses fail to defend the victimized teacher - psychologically, it is death by a thousand cuts.
I wanted someone to tell me what I should be prepared for at my school site, give me the right words to say and effective ways to conduct myself in that moment when I want to tear a student’s head off. I sat through our “Handle With Care” training session at my school site with the sinking feeling that the “sexual harassment” portion wasn’t to come, nor was it to even be brought up. When the facilitator got to the end and asked, “Any questions?” I began calmly - but it didn’t end that way.
“I am deeply disconcerted that our extreme scenarios classroom management training didn’t even MENTION the possibility of sexual harassment,” I began. As I went on about how I was disappointed and concerned and all various other manner of post-feminist hand-holding, a quiet, growing rage began to build inside of me - at the palpable anger filling the room for bringing up this issue, at the silence on the matter throughout the entire week of training, at the knowledge that the more I talked about it the less seriously they took me, at the group of ladies sitting at the table in the back laughing while looking over at me as the “new teacher”. It blew my mind that the staff knew what we were getting into and weren’t even going to give us a heads-up, let alone training. The angrier I got, the louder I spoke. By the end, I was yelling. I was straight-up yelling at the behavior specialists, the Camelot staff, the teachers all around me - for not even making mention of this issue, for failing to prioritize it in the training, for looking at me like I was crazy - by the end, even if my words were all about the training and the people in that room, I felt like I was yelling at everything and everyone. I have never really publicly “lost it” like this over a “feminist” issue. But - and I’m not saying I was right to act this way, but it happened - I really, really lost it this time. All I could think about was the failed Hillary Clinton campaign, the dozens of people I know who masquerade as feminists but then laid into her for failing to be a feminist enough candidate when we should have just sucked it up and rallied behind her, the people who claim to love all those “sexually empowered” girls who hand out condoms on the UW campus but can’t stand it when they get their ass handed to them by a girl in an argument, the friends I had at UW who opened up to me about how sexual assault destroyed their lives, and the possibly assaulted teachers in that room that might not have even said anything otherwise and thus gone into their placement and had something happen to them that triggered all the dehumanizing misery that comes from sexual trauma. In that moment, I truly lost it. I had my very first postfeminist mental breakdown.
The kicker came when I fired off my final remark to the behavior specialists - huge black men with psych or social work degrees who act as trained support for us in the hallways because of our criminal student population. “And if you want to talk about diversity, I expect and demand that each and every one of you, as black male role models, make it EXPLICITLY CLEAR that we do NOT put up with that SHIT.
If you want to talk about culture-building, that’s all this is - that’s the culture that I’m asking you to build right here in our school.”
The “black male role models” remark shattered over everyone in the room. It was like there was a recoil when the words left my lips. There were a series of tut-tuts and many black female teachers (they were, notably, all the ones who were sitting at the table in the back of the room laughing while I was talking) refused to look at me or talk to me the rest of the day. I knew exactly what point I was making when I chose my words, and I wasn’t about to issue a fucking disclaimer after the administration dropped this ball. There are reasons we have “behavior specialists” who happen to be huge, black, male, and certified in social work, psychology, or any related field. One of the reasons is obviously because no student, no matter how violent, is going to mess with them - the behavior specialists hold it down for us in the hallways and act as our back-up. In that way, they are highly valuable support staff. The other reason we have them is because the students can relate to them and look up to them. My inadequate school training is a microcosm of the real world. My demand to the male staff - ALL male staff, white or black, teachers or behavior specialists - my demand to the male staff that they proactively and explicitly make clear that women are NOT to be harassed or disrespected under ANY circumstance in our school is born of my deep-seated belief that, by this point, feminism is not moving forward until men start buying in. Until men start self-enforcing norms among themselves. Until men stop fucking laughing and patting each other on the back for getting away with cheating on their girlfriends and sleeping with dozens of girls they don’t care about, until men start publicly recognizing women for their contributions and worth as individuals, until men start defending their sisters and mothers and girlfriends and wives and daughters, until men start pulling their weight as culture-builders, we will not move forward as a society. The women have railed against their state enough. 50% of the population has remained silent and failed to act.
It is time for men to step up.
Feminism will never become universal until it is universally accepted.
Those who know me as both a feminist and a person know that I am morally conservative, that I think remedying the double standard doesn’t mean that we should all just sink to the lower standard of sexual immorality, that I am not placing all the blame on men and that I expect women to stop dating down, sleeping around, apologizing for a million things that aren’t their fault, taking the emphasis off their physical appearance, tap into their unrealized ambitions, and above all demonstrate self-respect. (How can you respect somebody who doesn’t respect themself?) But the male staff in my school wield a particular power to defend us and be culture-builders. We need them. I need to know they have our backs. I need to know it’s not just on paper. I need to know they’re good for it.
I call my “black male role models” remark my DCA moment because, understandably, everybody in the room got mad at me for implying that black young males have no role models. One, this wasn’t the point I was making. Two, I’m fairly confident if I had been black, people would have taken it differently, been more likely to assume I was on their side, and agreed with me about the cultural roots of the problem of sexual assault, particularly in New Orleans, which is the point I was actually making - and one that local New Orleanian staffers explicitly corroborated in the ensuing discussion. Three, even if I had meant my remark in the way they took offense to, this would have become my Obama-Jesse Jackson moment - Obama publicly addresses a problem that has basis in reality, and Jesse Jackson flips out at him for supposedly perpetuating negative stereotypes and whips out the blame game, when all Obama was saying was that people need to take responsibility.
I cleared the air today in the morning staff meeting. I read an article once about dealing with race-based issues that said, “If we continue to adopt the brashly thinking mindset of post-1968 politics, we will never be able to look honestly at real problems, and we will never be able to allow wounds to truly heal.” Last night, knowing I had crossed the line, I knew I had reopened some wounds among the staff when that was never my intention - wounds they suffer knowing that their black students will feel guilty for being smart, will battle the expectation that they’re destined for incarceration, will encounter racist police and be turned away from jobs they haven’t even gotten to interview for yet because of how their name sounds. In the sense that their students are held down by identities they never asked to embody, their wounds are the same as mine. And even if my cause weren’t bound up in theirs, I still think nobody deserves to feel that way. I explained today that my intention was solely to bring to light an issue that female instructional staff would need to be aware of in order to do their jobs better, that the issue was too close to me in some ways because of the women in my life I have supported through assault, that I was grateful for the space they gave me to discuss an issue I took so seriously, and that if they felt my actions would negatively affect our working relationship then they are urged to approach me so we could discuss it further. My remarks were greeted with applause, as a peace offering in return.
We left feeling a lot more healed. But I think the DCA moments will continue. I pray for the grace and wisdom to meet those challenges as they occur.
Filed by Mitra at August 15th, 2008 under TFA
3 persons have commented this post
Clearly, one of the first things I decided upon when I found out my TFA placement was that I was going to find “the” black Southern Baptist church and become part of its congregation. I asked some New Orleans folks and they told me: Franklin Avenue Baptist Church.
We entered the sanctuary on Sunday and it was just … massive. Two giant globe-shaped lanterns hung on either side of the room midway from the ceiling, and a flood of lights illuminated the area where the pastor spoke and the choir sat. Gleaming new wood was paneled everywhere, and searing mid-morning sunlight streamed in through windows that had to be a story high. My roomate and I were 2 of maybe 5 non-black people there that day.
In a booming voice, the pastor spoke about Katrina. “God pre-approves every test,” he said. Hands rose outstretched and trembling toward the ceiling to witness, and throughout the sermon choruses of “mm-hmm!” rippled around me. I felt a tremor growing within my body as he retold the story of Job, the man who lost everything overnight and simply said, “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away”.
“God recommended Job for this test. God didn’t send David, because David would be tempted. He didn’t send Adam or Eve, because they would disobey. He didn’t send this person or that person that he knew was unworthy, because he knew they couldn’t handle it. No, God specially recommended to the Devil his servant Job - because God knew Job could handle anything the Devil would give him. The Devil always needs permission from God to tempt you - because God pre-approves every test.”
The story of Job blows me away because it is a story of suffering. The deepest, darkest, most desperate kind of suffering that might be created for one human to bear. In one day, Job lost his children, all of his belongings and his house, all of his money, was left by his wife, and became mysteriously covered in sores and wounds, losing his health. In one day, Job lost every earthly thing that a human could possibly live for. Job could have just laid down and quit life. Job could have offed himself to spare himself the pain. Job could have just broken down in despair and given up and cried out in his incomparable grief. The story of Job breaks my heart because that’s not what Job did at all. In his moment of deepest, darkest pain, Job put his utmost faith in the Lord and said, “I trust God and his plan for me”. In short, Job is nothing but incredible. God knew Job trusted Him so much that he could lose everything to Satan and still believe in his Creator. Job is the servant God chose for this test - because God knew Job could handle it.
Job is the person I think of when I feel like I can’t handle my pain. When I am feeling terrified about my placement, when I am reliving the darkest moments from my past, when I am hurting so deeply over the pain of my own betrayal and when I feel like I can’t forgive myself - in those moments, the only thing that I can do is trust, white-knuckled, for dear life. The only thing I can do is trust in the Creator’s plan for me; the only thing I can place hope in is the unseen purpose in my pain.
People cite earthly pain as a reason for the non-existence of God. C.S. Lewis said, “God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our desires, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” The presence of earthly pain is a direct testament to the existence of God. God puts us through hell on earth because he wants us to rely on him and follow his son so we can join him in eternity. He wants to make us, for lack of a better way to put this, harder, better, faster, and stronger. He wants to compress us into diamonds. In a deaf and fallen world, God rescues those who are crushed in spirit. People point to the persistent pattern of saved former addicts as evidence that Christianity speaks to a subset of the population who are of particularly vulnerable mental faculties; their successful reform is used to discredit the religion as evidence of the notion that it preys on the weak.
The truth is that Jesus saves people from a place of pain for which we have no name. People doubt God because he let his son die on the cross - but Jesus went through everything so that we could follow him. Jesus went through literally everything so that he would know what we were going through and so that we could relate to him.
I am not a fan of the phrase “born-again” and try to avoid it, because it has earned itself such a cultural stigma. But there is a reason they call it “saved”. It is because He reaches down into the darkest places of our hearts and pulls us out from places so hurtful, absolutely nothing and no one else can reach us there.
There is nothing else more powerful than that.
I shook in the pews on Sunday, reliving every moment that I ever felt heartbroken, walking once more in my head the long path of “tests” I didn’t realize were tests that had led me to that church that day. As the din of the congregation’s worship strained against the mighty walls of the sanctuary I shut my eyes and crowded out hot tears, bent over in my seat with my face in my hands and my hair falling around me, shielding me as I wept. “Praise Jesus,” twangy voices cried out all around me, voices that carried my heart somewhere high and dry - away from all my fears about Schwarz, my persistent worry that I won’t succeed as a teacher, my pain over my past and my mistakes, my lingering doubts that cripple my relationship with Christ. God prepares us for every test. In the past 4 years of my life, as I stumbled through darkness, God was preparing me for this test. I threw myself into that Camelot interview because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it without Him. I knew this was the next step in the maturation of my faith - to rely as heavily on God as Job was able to.
All around me on Sunday, people rose one by one - people who lost families, loved ones, belongings, entire homes in the embroiled waters of the swollen Mississippi. People forsaken by FEMA, their government, their country, people who got fucked over by their insurance companies and abandoned by the media and were left to drown in rotting attics and lost all faith in God. People rose one by one and said to one another jubilantly: “I passed the test.” Because God didn’t choose Los Angeles, or Houston, or Boston, or St. Paul, or New York City, or Atlanta, or any other fucking city in this nation upon which to bring down the full wrath of nature. No, God chose New Orleans. And he chose it because ultimately, God knew:
New Orleans could handle it.
3 years later, the doors of Franklin Avenue Baptist church were thrown open. Throngs of chattering, uplifted black folks, one stoic Presbyterian, and one very shaken Asian girl streamed out into sunlight.
Filed by Mitra at August 11th, 2008 under Other
No comments on this post yet
The only eyewitness available refused to identify Jamal Fletcher before a grand jury. He was cleared for murder on July 10th, after spending 4 months in jail awaiting a verdict. According to Fletcher’s attorney, he fears for his life in New Orleans after the publicity surrounding the trial and is seeking an early termination of his remaining probation so he can move to Texas with his mother.
Fletcher’s attorney contends he was set up and that an alternative suspect has been suggested but not named.
Called “Homicide 37: Seeking Justice for Lance”, the 8-chapter series crafted by the Times-Picayune reads like a piece of bad film noir. Framing the accused as guilty, the whole narrative set up Fletcher’s case to run afoul of the seemingly now-forgotten Sheppard v. Maxwell decision had the court not reached a favorable verdict. Fletcher has received multiple death threats in the wake of the Times-Picayune’s coverage, and a recent report put out by the TP shows that murder suspects in New Orleans stand a better chance of being killed than of being convicted at trial.
I won’t be seeing Jamal in the fall if he ends up moving to Texas. In an e-mail to me, a TFA friend of mine very aptly wrote:
“In many ways, even at the junior high level, I think alt schools have a lot of kids in them who are grappling much more outwardly with the decision of what kind of young adults they’re going to be, not just academically but from a broader point of identity-development.“
Jamal is probably not the only one of the alternative school students who has seen the inside of a prison. I haven’t told my parents the full truth about where I’m working yet because I feel like 1) they won’t support me and 2) they will just worry needlessly when, whether they like it or not, I’m going ahead with this commitment. It is so easy to say people like Jamal “had their chance” (he has a criminal record despite being cleared of the recent murder charges). It is so easy to write kids off as thugs when they’re really just kids - terrified, violent, unstable, insecure kids. I don’t know where “the line” is when it comes to holding kids accountable, because they’re obviously not fully-functional adults yet with sophisticated decision-making abilities. (Not that there’s a magic number of age, or that most adults are). It just hurts me to think about the future for these students.
Teach For America frequently uses a statistic about states using abysmal student achievement rates as predictors for the number of new prisons to build in the future. As a new teacher at Schwarz, I already feel like that school-prison fork in the road is no longer just a public relations gimmick for me.
As somebody slated to teach in a rehabilitation-focused environment, that choice for my students has suddenly become a very imminent reality.
Filed by Mitra at August 3rd, 2008 under TFA
No comments on this post yet
Jamal Fletcher, 15, and a student at Schwarz Alternative School, is accused of the murder of a student at Frederick Douglass High School in New Orleans.
The local news has pulled out all the stops for this. See the 8 “chapter” feature here. To see the accused, click on “The People” and navigate to him.
15 years old.
My school.
Filed by Mitra at August 1st, 2008 under TFA
No comments on this post yet
Schwarz Alternative Middle School is on the West Bank of the Mississippi, the river that followed me from my childhood in Minnesota down to my post-college foray into public education. We visited our school site today and a cop outside who saw us taking pictures told us we weren’t allowed to photograph anything inside. Naturally, I lied and got inside the building anyway to snap a few more shots after touring the grounds. She definitely didn’t believe that we were teachers visiting our workplace, but given that I look 17, I wouldn’t believe me either.
Schwarz Middle School was built in 1925. The building is gorgeous, and falling apart. The only Google hit I got when I found out I was going to be teaching here was a snapshot from some internal city committee report on eventual building replacement; under “Noteworthy Historical or Design Significance” it simply said, ” Has had major termite problems”. Thus, today’s independent investigation was my second attempt at gathering more information about where I would be working for all of next year. The school information doesn’t show up in any news clippings, any public school records, any user-generated databases - it’s like nowhere, with an address.
Camelot schools is a private company that has taken over management of the RSD’s alternative schools. The United States’ so-called “alternative schools” are all founded for different reasons. Some are called “alternative” in reference to their non-traditional curricula. Others are called so because of their non-traditional student populations. Mine falls into the latter category. At Schwarz Alternative Middle School, the students are enrolled due to behavioral violations that got them expelled from the regular public schools. They are frequently older than they should be for their grade, and years behind in basic academic skills.
At my Camelot interview, the principal of Booker T. asked me about theory-practice interaction: the process by which you take what you learn as teaching theory in training seminars and apply it to actual practice in your classroom, and how those 2 concepts - theory and practice - interact in reality. “How has theory practice interaction played out in your teacher training experience thus far?” she queried.
“I’ve learned that there is no one-size-fits-all teacher approach, that teaching is humanistic and individual, and that what they tell you to do in seminars doesn’t always reflect what’s effective in the classroom,” I responded carefully.
“Right. That’s called ‘reality’,” she replied.
The point where theory and practice intersect. In Teach For America, they emphasize that academic goal-setting should be targeted at “the nexus of challenge and ability”. Perhaps theory-practice interaction is a parallel concept. Challenge (theory, possibility) can exist as a standard you strive to meet. But ability (learning through teaching and actual execution) is a very real limitation - one you don’t approach fatalistically, but certainly realistically.
Boiled down: You can sit through a “Classroom Management” session in which they tell you not to post class rules that use the words “don’t” or “do not”, and insist that you “positively discipline” students who misbehave by thanking them for “expressing their energy”, but that’s not how the real world operates. You absolutely have to hold and believe in those high expectations for your students - in an alternative school, my job will consist almost entirely of giving my students that second chance. A former WUD colleague once quoted, “If you treat people like people, they become people”, and it has sunk into my mind to resurface frequently now as I contemplate the year ahead of me. But there will also come a point in your teaching career when the theory just runs out. Ask my bff at Institute, whose student cut themself before her class the other day and almost had to be rushed to the hospital.
This is what we signed up for. See all shots of the school that no longer only exists on paper here.
Filed by Mitra at July 28th, 2008 under TFA
No comments on this post yet
A shotgun house is a style of housing typical of New Orleans and some other places in the South. It’s called a shotgun because the house doesn’t really have any hallways - the rooms are all just connected to one another, leading straight back through the house. Hence, the expression is derived from the idea that you could fire a shotgun right through the house and it wouldn’t hit anything. The curious configuration of the shotgun home is said to be a layover from the days when New Orleans property taxes were calculated by lot width. As for its proliferation, by 1810, the influx of Haitian blacks into the city and the low-cost construction possibilities of shotgun housing combined to create the housing boom that popularized the dwelling.
See my potential future shotgun home here.
Filed by Mitra at July 27th, 2008 under TFA
No comments on this post yet
I laughed when I saw this. Awkward.
I might get even more famous tomorrow because PBS is coming to interview random New Orleans people in TFA and they want to speak with ME (among other corps members). I’m not sure I am the best spokesperson for TFA after being deemed the Daria of Institute. I shall do my best to uphold my public relations burden.
We looked at a place today and New Orleans is ridiculous. You’ll drive 1 block away from a given place and encounter barbed wire fences and houses with exposed skeletons along their side and siding ripped off, then travel another block and find a string of adorable boutiques, then go another block and find gorgeous historic homes, and then another 2 blocks and it’s government projects. It’s also not like Madison because I can’t clearly tell where the center of everything is, so I feel constantly disoriented. There is no glorious white bastion of political power to orbit. I am a loose electron.
My roommate is small, white, Presbyterian, fierce, and Virginian. She has a steel-trap mind and is hilarious. Together, we are like two beta fish in the same bowl. I want our bowl to look like this.
I miss Jill.
Filed by Mitra at July 23rd, 2008 under TFA
No comments on this post yet