A day in an urban school
trials of an underprepared first year teacher
Today is starting pretty slow. Temperatures dropped into the thirties last night, so the kids come into the classroom instead of waiting on the blacktop. My 8th graders and I have a fairly good rapport, 3 months into the school year. I sit up front, casually maintaining expectations, reminding kids in my calmest most playful voice that they are seated and quiet. The only goal: start the day without conflict
“Where my CAND-YYY”, Davon, my mellowest student, yells out.
Germaine, a high-energy kid who prefers stroking books instead of reading them (as is reflected in his grades), yells back across the classroom, “No, no not in the morning, you’re too hype already”.
My perch works for the most part, and I sit in nervous anticipation of 7th grade.
The verdict is out on the benefits of alternative certification teaching programs like Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, and the Urban Teaching Center. For purposes of anonymity, I am an alt-cert route first year teacher at a Public Charter School in Washington DC. Any further identifying information is purely coincidental, and all names have been modified.
Currently, the big push in education centers around “Common Core State Standards” and the newly developed “Next Generation Science Standards” sweeping across classrooms and rapidly modifying instructional practices. New standards focus more deeply on content and shrink the range of topics covered. They aim to bring American scholars to a level where they can compete in an increasingly global economy. Urban schools across America are being dismantled, restructured, and put together as the test-labs of new standards. Their pupils take the role of the lab rats.
New teachers carry reform on their backs, and students bear that burden more than others. Despite the honorable aims, no initiative changes the climate of these schools. Our schools have exceptionally high teacher turnover, measly cultural competency in a largely white young teaching staff, and inconsistent, unsafe culture. Students are pushed into charter schools with longer school days and more and more benchmark assessments squeezed into the school year. Through it all, the achievement gap persists.
According to the NCES report card, the nationwide gap in mathematics between black and white students is at 26 percent in 4th grade, and 31 percent in 8th grade. Reading gaps hover around 25 percent between Black and White scholars in both 4th and 8th grade. On average, an African American male in the 12th grade reads at the level of a white 8th grader.
These gaps are reflected in incarceration rates, high school graduation, and in the perpetuation of urban poverty.
But those are the facts, the numbers, the dismal reality; this is an image of the day to day. Here I explain why there is burnout, and why I am daily starting to doubt my ability to be the exception and give my students something more than a burnt-out alt-cert teacher who tries for a year and quits.
“You’re disrespectful. Its disgusting really. You’re disrespectful to each other, you’re disrespectful to teachers. Really, I don’t understand.” The social studies teacher lectures my scholars as I sit in the back and prep. Daily, they hear this maybe 20-30 times. Constantly they are told they are disrespectful; teachers voices raise and they are spoken to in stern tones; they are accused. I’m ashamed knowing I do this too.
She’s back at it after two minutes of instruction, “Do you really want to go through life like this, wasting your time. Because you sure aren’t going to get into high school like this.”
Another few minutes pass then, “Seriously, how do you expect to survive when you get to high school”. The relevance of these digs are lost on me. I take a mental note to keep my frustration in during class today in all ways possible. Perhaps I’m focusing too much on the negatives, there is instruction hidden in here somewhere.
It got really crazy round about when my 7th grader sprained his ankle at the end of the day.
“Ms. Ryland! I’m doing legs what can I do for legs? Time me! Time me!” Tayveon yelled out as he barreled toward me, his barrel chested body looking that of a teenager but his short frame still befitting of his 12 year old self.
For the 7th grade lab performance task, the students selected a muscle group & two exercises working those muscle groups, and then measured their pulse before and after performing the exercises. They were supposed to use the data to explain how the cardiovascular system uses a CO2 feedback loop to maintain homeostasis during exercise. Of course, to most scholars, the major takeaway was that your heart rate goes up when you exercise.
Convinced that ‘running’ was the best exercise to work his quadriceps after I pleaded that he consider doing squats or lunges for the benefit of his grade, Tayveon measured his starting pulse and started running in circles while I timed his one minute.
Pretty quickly I found myself bowled over laughing as he ran around a 10 foot diameter circle. His absurd enthusiasm reminding more of the mice I used to study running in exercise wheels than his languid peers rolling their eyes at the thought of a pushup. Not so dismal as the lab rat that he is to the American education reform movement. His unbridaled joy in the perpetuity of his circular movement was innocent and admirable.
Then, he was gone. No more laughing.
Whipping my neck around, teacher anxiety rose, and I saw my student flat, grey sweats from head to toe, face-down on cement. I took a deep breath, and prepared for disaster.
Five minutes later he finally got words to come out between the tears. “Yes, its my ankle. No, I’m not bleeding. No, I cannot walk”. We hauled him into the building, got his foot up, and called his mom.
In this moments of normalcy, I forget where the true gap lies. Its not in a parents lack of love for their child, but in the lack of resources.
Had I fallen in gym class and sprained my ankle seriously, my mother would have been up in that school in 30 seconds. But her job let her do that, her lifestyle allowed her to appear on a dime to support her child.
Instead, we spent the next thirty minutes finding a person to take the child home, a neighbor who could commit to helping him in the house, and a relative who would try to get him to the ER for an X-Ray.
Yesterday we had trash can arson, today we had a sprained ankle. Every day in a school is a battle that lacks resources, support, and proper training, no matter where you are as a first year teacher. But at day’s end, I’m sticking with the smile on his face the second before he fell to the ground.
“Someday, Ms. Ryland, I can write in my Veterinarian School applications that I cared so much about science class when I was young, I broke my ankle just finishing your lab.”
Yep, Tayveon, I have never hoped for anything more in my life.
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