During a week already shortened by the Martin Luther King holiday, snow sent us to school two hours late on Tuesday and then home two hours after that, not to return at all until the next week.
This last Wednesday night, meanwhile, Sophie soloed the first movement of Vivaldi's A minor violin concerto. She played with the Oak Lake Strings Chamber Orchestra, an amateur group of adults, and Sophie delighted us all. Some poor video of the event is below.
After one semester past a life-nudging year in Hungary, I feel a need to reflect on my performance as your teacher and to articulate the victories and limits and therefore the needs and unanswered questions that result.
I have worked hard this semester, harder than is healthy, and still, far too many of my students have arrived at the end of term with a failing mark. There are several possible reasons for this. One is that I have not made the most efficient use of my working time. Another is that many students are stubbornly resistant to my expectations and overtures of support. A third is that my expectations are off-course or too high. A fourth is that the job is simply too large and the structures supporting it too few. Based on a national conversation on schooling and teachers— within which the dominant theme is that teachers lack accountability on one side and on the other that teachers are overworked and unfairly targeted—you might expect me, as a teacher, to lean towards the last possibility, that the job itself contains prohibitive barriers to success.
In large part, I do. And it’s probably the most important truth I’d want to convey to a voting public. I’m a well-qualified English Language Arts teacher—an English degree from Oberlin College with Phi Beta Kappa, Masters in teaching and curriculum from Harvard University, 16 years of experience and countless hours of professional development, and National Board certification—yet my roles as a teacher have often of late left me overwhelmed. Meanwhile, the learning outcomes I assess are based on common standards, and, in my ninth grade and Philosophy classes, grading is heavily weighted towards achievement therein: in ninth grade, students need only to pass two standards-based, thoroughly scaffolded and supported assignments to pass the class, and in Philosophy, students encounter only a very few important skills in the same writing assignment over and over. Despite a narrow focus, many don’t make it. Finally, my students are smart, respectful, well-intentioned kids who help each other and who almost always want to learn, and yet, as we stand here on the last day of the semester, 18 out of 147 them (12%) are failing. If the problem isn’t one of training, course assessments, or students, then there is a problem in the supports or expectations for the job itself. Indeed, I am confident that with fewer students and more institutional supports, such as tutoring or course readers or school week time set aside for conferencing or even one fewer teaching period a day for writing teachers and fewer initiatives and demands coming from Stanford Center, I could reach more kids and maintain high standards.
Still I suspect I could be prioritizing and making use of my work time better. But I know that I can’t plow more minutes of the day than I do now, because, as I’ve said in a blog post, my work week so often seems longer than my week week. So how do I maximize time to meet the weekly demands with the tools provided? That’s the difference, perhaps, between a teacher like me and a master teacher.
It comes to this: I am doing a pretty good job teaching your kids, though not a spectacular one. I feel my standards and expectations are demanding, worthwhile, and fair. I also believe I’m providing clear instruction, useful scaffolding of skills and challenging projects that engage high order reading, writing and thinking skills. I turn around work quickly, usually publishing scores the day I receive work. And I fully stock my Source page with information and tools, including detailed daily agendas and all scaffolding and rubrics for major assignments. But here’s what’s lost in my teaching this semester: I’m not tracking often enough who’s succeeding and who’s failing, and this means I’m also not conferencing with students and contacting homes the way I should. I’m not reflecting much during the week, and I’m not having many spontaneous moments of intellectual connection with your kids. I’m not providing the level of oral or written feedback I think students need, instead providing what guidance I can through maybe an essay a month and criteria-based scores for the rest, hoping that specifically channeled reflection and revision work can make up for the loss in feedback. I know how to be a better teacher to your children. It’s been maddening to fall short.
The job is not so different than the one I left for Hungary. There are slightly more students, slightly more directives from downtown, a new course to create in Advanced Placement Composition, and slightly more pressure to improve outcomes in slightly more ways. It adds up.
So how can I improve what I’m doing for your kids while restoring some balance to my life? And what can Roosevelt, or Seattle Public Schools, do to make its best goals manageable? I have many thoughts about the latter, and many feelings about the former.
I’ll leave these large questions for right now and get to one more immediately relevant to you: What does it mean for your child? Mostly, it means I’d like you to take advantage of how much information I put on the Source. If your child is missing an assignment, go to your kid and make a plan for how to fill the hole. Chances are the assignment is either attached or described on daily agendas on my Source page. If you have questions about an assignment that your kid can’t answer, your child (not you, please) should communicate with me. In other words, while I’m having trouble finding time to chase down students, I need your help monitoring and nagging.
And then, maybe, you can join me in addressing the largest questions of schooling.
I have had more activity through Fulbright this year than I had expected. I thought I'd take my year and that would be it. But within the five months of my return, I was flown to Denver to help guide incoming Fulbright exchange teachers from Europe (described here), I chaired an interview process for teachers wanting to exchange next year, and I received a grant, just over $4000, to bring three Hungarians from last year's school to Seattle. Below you can see pictures of three fourths of our interview committee for teachers seeking a Fulbright. We're in my livingroom. The computer on the chair represents the person interviewing, who we either saw through Skype or phoned through the computer because, I don't know what you'll think of this, but Stephanie and I haven't bothered hooking up long distance service since we're returned to the U.S., and neither do we have a cell phone.
One of my greatest reasons to accept the responsibilities of the committee was the possibility of being able to fly up a friend in Arizona, Emily, who perhaps you've seen in many other pictures in this blog, because she was living in Budapest last year. Below are pictures of Arizona Emily and Seattle Emily, who was also on a Fulbright last year, in the Czech Republic.
As for the latest Fulbright activity, it started out as a request for a grant from Fulbright so that I could, as I'd done with Emily, bring back a missed friend for a visit. The simple idea was for two weeks: one teacher and one student from Dráva Völgye Középiskola would come to Roosevelt. The teacher would stay at my house (the friend: several people I excitedly imagined coming!) and the student would stay with a Roosevelt kid. The U.S. State department accepted my proposal but said I should adjust my participants and budget upwards, which I gladly did.
Once I started telling Roosevelt students about the possibility, however, and once I started getting applications from DVK students and teachers, this became much bigger than me. Candidates put a tremendous amount of care and heart into their applications. Because costs are prohibitive, many students don't travel; and for this reason, the European Union has several programs that have helped fund various kinds of class trips around Europe. Even then, some of the students applying wrote that the only big city they've ever seen is Budapest. Students wrote of the cooking, dancing, singing and cultural and historical lessons they could bring, and much more. Above all, their eagerness was palpable. Roosevelt students, meanwhile, infused their own excitement into the process. They loved reading the applications, and over and over again, they said, I think this one should come, listen to this. Many Roosevelt gladly volunteered to host for two weeks also, and now that I have started telling parents that their kids have volunteered that they would house and feed and entertain a strange Hungarian for half a month, I have discovered that the parents are excited as well. My mentor last year, who was so generous and hard-working and kind, is coming in the beginning of April. She is accompanying Nándor -- a student I had in last year's 11th grade English class and one of the brightest kids in the school -- and Detti -- whom I substitute taught once but knew in part through her mother, in my adult English class. Detti has started a blog about the upcoming trip. It includes this video:
By the time I reached the end of Christmas holiday break, I felt any problem I had faced juggling duties at school was solvable; I was fat and rested and full of love, and though I did a great deal of work during the holiday too, I was on a track of remembering that said maybe the pressure I'd felt in the months before was just a phase I could get over. As such, my New Year's Resolution -- not surprisingly, to regain balance -- was something I was already achieving.
Perhaps because of the verb tense in this last paragraph, you are expecting a But Now. (And I'm writing this a week after a return to school, and maybe there is one.) But I'm not going to give it in this entry.
Stephanie's parents, Mickie and Bruce came and filled our house for two weeks, easy and loving house guests. We drove to Vancouver for a night and made gingerbread houses and played floor hockey in twelve feet of space with our good friends Rachel, Isabelle, and their kids Ben, Gabi and Thomas, then returned to have lunch with Marsha, my mother's one remaining cousin. We experienced two Hanukah parties, one tree decorating party, a great Christmas morning at our house with Karen, Dan, and our niece and nephew Nate and Anna, and New Years, with Vancouver friends and my good friend Aaron and my family too. There was music and food all the time, games and hopes and walks.
Lauren and Jeff hosted a Hanukah party at their house. Some of Maude's early steps are captured here on her way to Mickie.
In Vancouver, above, Rachel and Isabelle squeeze a lot of energy from our bodies in their small den. Below, Lauren and I met with our cousin Marsha who was in town for a sixtieth wedding anniversary. See Maude wiggle.
Amelia was a delightful, confidently fearful Mr. Tumnus in a winter break Narnia production.
And at another Hanukah party, we see that what started as a friendship between mothers in the maternity ward between my mother and Louise (foreground) has led to a giant harvest of babies in the my generation.
Christmas at our house was not lacking for music. Below see Anna with our girls, Stephanie, Karen, Dad and Wendy, and below that a picture that turns into a moving picture of an impromptu holiday concert in our living room.
Finally, the turn of the year, with more music, more games, and dancing. Aaron demonstrates grace in a failing attempt to bite the bag (no handed, one-legged jaw-grabbing bag lift), and below this, Lauren demonstrates what it means to play Trivial Pursuit without a trivia knowledge base.
It's a great moment so I take a picture with one hand while a guitar is in the other: Aaron, Dad, Isabelle, Rachel and Jeff singing.
When midnight breaks, we are gathered around a candle-lit table with our written resolutions. Amelia wrote 26 this year, including "Stretch my imagination" and "Learn at least 1,000 new things." Maisie resolved, among other things, "To eat more things I don't like" and "To wear an actual coat more often." Aaron said he would get his cat to walk on a leash. Tommy, far left, shared some too, like "I'll play with my truck."
And there was a dance party. The kids decorated the basement and organized the whole thing, making and posting a proliferating number of signs the longer the adults conversed without coming down.
