Believe it or not, I actually had some great times with my students in those last few weeks. With "testing season" (and Mrs. Lawrence's fanaticism associated with it) behind us, I allowed myself to relax a bit and focus on projects that I considered to be fun and interesting.
We did an interactive project based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," which my soon-to-be 6th graders found to be gloriously disturbing and frightening. I created a reader's theatre performance with two student-friendly versions of Shakespearean productions (Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream) that my students got to perform. They took to the stage and performed for the other 5th grade classes, and then we had their parents come in to watch, too. We also had a great time during Field Day, the annual "play day" devoted to physical activity through games and sports and other such events.
After Field Day was supposed to have ended, a few other teachers and I sneaked our students outside to continue using the water slide, which made this day extra fun and special. It was lighthearted and fun, and my students even convinced me to go down the water slide once. (A parent captured this moment on video, and I've provided that below for your viewing pleasure. You're welcome.)
I'd had no idea. As far as I'd known, I was a not-so-great teacher just making it through each day.
This final day of school, though, proved otherwise. Regardless of test scores or the "vision" that TFA didn't see in my classroom, something had touched my students. We had all grown close, and many of my students took with them valuable information and a sense of community.
Test scores, however, did come back to haunt me.
More on that a bit later, though. After the final school day, I cleaned up my classroom and allowed myself to sink -- physically, mentally, and emotionally -- into the comforting embrace of summer break. It was early June, and I wouldn't need to be back at work until mid August. Although I did need to continue my schooling during the summer (if I didn't participate in summer classes, I'd have fallen behind schedule in attaining that second master's degree), the courses I took were online and not altogether difficult. Despite the classes, I actually had time to slow down. I had time to recharge, sleep, and, of course, consider what my classroom "vision" truly entailed.
I thought about my "vision" quite often during summer break. Not seeing my vision come to life in my classroom was one of the biggest reasons why Christy didn't view me as an overall successful teacher, the Teach For America "superstar" that she was hoping to cultivate in me. I knew that I needed a solid vision, and that it needed to be more explicit than last year. It needed to involve the students themselves so that they could be invested in it. I knew that it needed to connect my own passions to student achievement.
I discussed all of this at length with Christy right before I was due to return to school, though at that time I didn't fully know what my "vision" would look like or how I would incorporate it into the classroom. I didn't fully realize my vision until right at the start of the new school year.
I was shopping at Target when it happened. I was perusing the book section to allow my son to choose something new to read, and one book caught my eye.
It was a memoir titled I Am Malala, written by Malala Yousafzai, and it was written for young adults.
I knew who Malala Yousafzai was. Based on what I'd heard, she'd been a voice for education in Pakistan before being shot by the Taliban. I knew she'd survived being shot, too, and that she'd gone on to win the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of fourteen due to her commitment to women's rights and educational equity around the world.
Educational equity.
I picked up the book and began leafing through it. As I did so, I began to grow excited because I had just stumbled across the memoir of a girl who was so passionate about education and dedicated to ensuring a quality education for all young people that she stood in the face of terrorism to fight for it. Right there in my hands, and on the tip of my brain, I had a concoction of passion, dedication, and enthusiasm for education just waiting to be born.
I went home and read the book, and began doing more research on Malala. I watched her interviews and speeches. I read her quotes. And I used the passion that she sparked in me to build what would become a solid classroom vision (a vision I would continue to use in my classrooms for years to come).
My vision was that my students and I were a team, at school to fight many forms of inequality through the power of education. In my vision, students could be enthusiastic about learning (rather than apathetic, which I'd become used to seeing) because that would enable them to fight for "justice for all." In my mind, I'd use my classroom vision to teach about systemic inequalities and the best ways to fight against them through education; I'd spark in my students the understanding that when a group is marginalized, one of the first things taken from them is the right to an education, and therefore receiving an education is a step toward equality.
I would do this with the stories of those who had to fight for their right to an education, such as Ruby Bridges, the Little Rock Nine, and, of course, Malala Yousafzai.
I created a poster in my room featuring a quote from Malala: "When ... we were stopped from going to school, I realized that education is very important, and education is power for [us]. That's why the terrorists are afraid of education. They do not want [us] to get an education because then [we] would become more powerful."
In her actual quote, Malala was referring to women. In her country, it was girls who were being denied the right to a good education. In our country, not so long ago, it was people of color. The stories are endless, but they all boil down to one thing: education is power.
Why, I asked my students that year, would sexist leaders want to make sure Malala couldn't go to school? Why would racist leaders want to make sure people of color couldn't go to good schools? Why would these things happen, unless there was something powerful about becoming educated?
This topic, of course, is rather deep and multi-faceted, and so much can be said about the ways in which it affects our world even to this day. But I knew that on the surface, it was a wonderful start to a classroom vision that would drain so much of the apathy from my classroom throughout the coming year.
Each morning, I would choose speakers to read our classroom vision, our classroom goals, and Malala's quote. During reading time, I would read a chapter from Malala's memoir out loud, one chapter a day, until we completed it. We read about and discussed Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock Nine. We began to have real conversations about racism and sexism and inequality in America and around the world. I didn't say much during these discussions -- I allowed my students to lead the talks with insightful questions and comments, and slowly I began to see my vision come to life.
There were a handful of students who were vigorously dedicated to our vision that year. They always wanted to be the ones to read Malala's quote, always wanted to lead our discussions, and always had something to add or say. These students were the ones who came to school excited, because they were eager to become more powerful through education. In all honesty, it was not my entire class -- never, in the entire course of my teaching career, have I had an entire classroom of students "joyful and passionate" about being there (which is what TFA wanted to see). But I had a handful. And it was a start.
This was only one way in which my second year of teaching was different from my first. I was also more familiar now with the 5th grade Common Core standards I was supposed to teach, and I now had a better arsenal of materials through which to build units and teach them. Rather than fumble around with disjointed lessons, as I had the previous year, I carefully created reading units that incorporated history and social studies; I put together math lessons that allowed students hands-on experiences; I made science lessons that featured actual experiments. And so on.
Don't get me wrong. There were still times when my lessons didn't go according to plan, still times when I was so tired I could barely deliver my lessons, and still times when I fumbled around with my materials in weak attempts at planning. I still did these things, and there were many things I still didn't understand.
But things were so much better.
I didn't dread going to work all the time. I didn't feel depressed all of the time. I mean, I did some of the time, but mostly I felt hopeful, which was more than I could say for the majority of my first year.
My hopeful feelings extended to my participation with TFA, too. This year, I was one of the "big kids," a second-year corps member who could now extend a helpful hand or word of advice to the first-year newbies (whom I honestly did not envy at all). I was halfway done with my TFA commitment, and not only did I know that I could make it through (if I could make it through that first year, I could definitely make it through my second), but I felt hopeful that maybe -- just maybe -- this year, I could be one of the star teachers I longed to be.
My confession here is that TFA "stardom," at least in my experience, was more about me and less about my students (which does not bode well in terms of a successful teaching experience). I absolutely wanted my students to do well and I wanted them to feel and live the vision I was so excited about. But mostly, I wanted to do well so that I wasn't under Mrs. Lawrence's microscope anymore. I didn't want to be met with constant criticism from TFA regarding my "apathetic and unruly" classroom anymore. I wanted to feel good about what I did, like I could actually be successful as a teacher, and not constantly beaten down for all that was going wrong. I wanted my test scores to rise gloriously all over the school walls, just like the other "superstar" teachers' scores did, because up until this point all I'd been led to believe was that a good teacher always produced good data.
But oh, yes, test scores -- the topic I promised at the start of this post to get back to later on. For all of the hope and promise this new year seemed to hold, there was the issue of test scores.
I received an e-mail from Mrs. Lawrence just as summer break was ending. She wanted to give me a heads up that at our first staff meeting of the year, which would be during the week right before students came back, she would be displaying everyone's CRT scores from the year before. They would be shown by grade level, though specific names would not be used. We'd then be able to discuss school-wide goals for the new year based on those scores.
Scores were broadcast to the entire staff in the cafeteria using an anonymous format. For each grade level, scores were presented next to Teacher A, Teacher B, and so forth. Nobody knew (even though everybody knew) whose scores were whose.
For the most part, the school showed a rather consistent 40-50% passage of the test in each class. You could see this consistency throughout most grade levels, but both 4th grade and 5th grade had a few inconsistencies.
In 4th grade, one teacher's passing percentage was about 38% proficient, while two of the others both had around 45% (or so). The grade level chair, however, had about an 88% passing percentage. There was a huge discrepancy, then, in how the different 4th grade classes fared on that exam. (Other teachers and I have discussed possible reasons why the grade level chair would produce scores nearly 200% greater than the rest of her team, but I won't go into that here.)
In 5th grade, almost the opposite was true. Three out of the four of us scored around 66% or 68%. The last of us scored about 46%.
I was that last score. The low score within 5th grade. I knew because Mrs. Lawrence had told me when she'd sent the e-mail about the meeting.
I don't know that anyone else, however, assumed that my class was the one that hadn't scored well. One of the other 5th grade teachers from the year before, Mr. Gallon, had been targeted and under the microscope even more than I had been the previous year, to the point that he wound up leaving for a better opportunity elsewhere. He went to Alaska, where he is still happily teaching, but because of the situation I think everyone assumed that it was his class that hadn't scored well.
It shouldn't have mattered. But it did. It mattered enough that I did not go out of my way to end any assumptions that my class hadn't been the lowest scoring one.
Standing at the front of the room near the projector, Mrs. Lawrence shook her head slowly and said, "Three out of four 5th grade teachers produced proficient classes. If only. If only."
She was the one person in the room who definitely knew that I was the one low performing teacher, and I knew her words were meant for me, and me alone.
Still, though, the dynamic between Mrs. Lawrence and I improved somewhat during that second year, mostly due to the fact that I tried to "lie low" and allow other teachers to pick up the brunt of her singling them out. My desire to be well-known as a superstar teacher came into conflict with the fact that I wanted to avoid Mrs. Lawrence's microscopic leadership at all costs, and so I tried very, very hard to stay under the proverbial radar. I kept to myself much of the time to avoid being singled out for anything. Managing to stay off of her shit list made a world of difference, and so I vowed to carry out the entire year in this way in order to stay sane.
What I did not know was that, in a matter of months, my working relationship with Mrs. Lawrence would cease to matter at all.
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