Fourth confession: Part of the reason I didn't immediately fit in as an elementary school teacher was because 4th grade was the last time I was actually in an elementary school classroom, and I don't remember it all that well. I was about ready to teach 5th grade, and I never actually attended 5th grade. But more on that in a moment...
My start in Las Vegas, once I had completed Institute in LA, was by no means smooth. My son and I had an apartment to go to, but the moving company I'd hired to get all of my furniture and boxes from the storage unit in California to Nevada were much later than I'd expected. Thus, my son and I found ourselves sleeping on the floor of an empty apartment once we'd arrived, once and for all, in Las Vegas. Another TFA corps member was kind enough to lend me an air mattress, blankets, and pillows to get us through those first few nights, and I very much appreciated it.
The movers did finally arrive, though, and we began the process of moving in. We unloaded boxes, decorated walls, and set up Internet and cable access. Little by little, it began to feel like some rendition of "home."
There were still a few weeks before school started, but those few weeks were filled with events: First, there was TFA kick-off, the last meeting to feature the entire 2013 Las Vegas Valley corps, which would be a two-day meeting to help us transition from Institute to full-on teachers in our own classrooms. Also, I would be reporting to my school for a week-long introduction. During this time, I'd attend meetings and trainings specific to my school, and start setting up my classroom. Lastly, I would need to attend a three-day-long teacher initiation -- that all new teachers in Clark County had to attend -- at the Venetian. The week following that, we'd begin our journeys as teachers.
TFA kick-off was very similar to both Induction and Institute, filled with team-building games and teacher-building discussions, but there was also one major difference. During kick-off, we worked specifically with our MTLD (again, the leader who would work most closely with us during our first year as teachers and assist in our growth and development). Christy, my MTLD (again, not her real name) was a veteran teacher who had served as a TFA corps member many years prior. She would be working with a couple dozen of us corps members -- some from the 2013 corps, and some from the 2012 corps -- and, together, we would come to be known as "Christy's cohort." Each MTLD had a cohort of their own, but Christy's focused specifically on elementary school teachers from a variety of schools.
She would be our leader, our mentor, the person we went to with questions, the person we reported to ... for all intents and purposes, she was our TFA "boss." We had to answer to our school administration and the district, but we also had to answer to Christy.
Christy, I'll point out here, was very passionate about her work, but she also carried with her an inner weariness that I wouldn't fully understand for some time. I would come to develop very conflicted feelings for Christy -- conflicted because she was a sincerely good person who cared about the people in her cohort (she, for example, took my cats in and watched them when, at a point during Institute I had nowhere else to take them), but she also tended to embody some the aspects of TFA that I would grow to despise, and also tended to play right into the negative experiences that eventually tore me apart and left me wanting to quit.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Back to my confession. My mother, despite having meant well, was a very controlling person who was so smothering -- and that's not even a strong enough word; she was so asphyxiating, suffocating, and quenching -- in her parenting that I think it bordered on abuse. I was not allowed to walk across the street to a friend's house -- she had to walk me. I wasn't allowed to ride bikes or go anyplace with friends if she was not there. I was not, even as a teenager, allowed to go someplace with a friend if that friend's parent wanted to drive us anywhere (she'd only let me go if she could drive me to a place and pick me up from that specific place, and that was even as a teenager). I wasn't allowed to go on school field trips unless she was allowed to go (if, heaven forbid, another parent was chosen to go instead of her, she'd keep me home that day). I had arguments with her about my lack of freedom, and her response was that was, as soon as I could demonstrate that I could escape a bear hug from my large father, she'd let me have more freedom. Even at 19 -- 19, for fuck's sake -- she sat outside a cast party I was attending and barged in to get me once she thought I'd been in there too long. She sabotaged a study abroad program I'd been accepted into in college, as well as a Disney college program I'd been accepted into, because she was absolutely sure that I wasn't ready to be on my own so far away from home, and she convinced me of such.
You get the idea.
So, anyway, when I was in grammar school my mother got tired of dealing with issues pertaining to the school (what, specifically, those issues were, I don't remember anymore, though I do know it had something to do with a spat between her and my 4th grade teacher), and so she decided to pull my younger sister and I out and home school us. Now, my mother had no college degree and no teacher training at all, but she began to act as my teacher during my 5th grade year. And she was, mind you, entirely negligent in how she went about "educating" us, but that's another story that shall be told another time.
Anyway, during kick-off Christy divided her cohort into grade levels, and then asked each grade level to write things that they remembered about that year in their own lives. What was the teacher like? What did we learn? How did we learn it? During that moment, I felt embarrassed and not quite able to write, "I stayed at home, my mom was my teacher, and she gave me teacher books to study from and then had me grade my own tests." So, instead, I made up a concoction of things that happened during my 3rd grade year and my 4th grade year and presented it as what my 5th grade year was like. It was mostly a lie, or not actually relevant to what Christy was trying to do, but it's what I had in the moment.
I'm not sure how things might have been different if I'd been honest at that point. I remember approaching Christy during a break on that day and relaying to her just how scared I was about entering my own classroom. "I'm not really sure what I'm doing," I remember telling her, thinking about the state standards that I had yet to learn, as well as the teaching methods and curricula and materials that I had yet to grasp.
She'd smiled at me. "Kate, plenty of people have taught 5th grade before." She said it in such a way as though to suggest that it wasn't really that hard, and that I'd be fine. How I was feeling, though, was that she may as well have told me, "Kate, plenty of people have changed the oil in a car before," and then left me to find the tools and instructions to do so.
As I said, kick-off lasted for a couple of days, and then I headed to my school for initiation and training.
Principal Lilian Lawrence (so not her real name) presided over new teacher meetings and school-wide expectation meetings. She introduced Amy (fellow new TFA teacher) and I to Ruby and Jordan, also TFA teachers. It's important to note here that Ruby and Jordan were known as star TFA teachers. Ruby had actually come from another state, a state in which she had gone through traditional teacher training and had been recognized with teaching awards in that state. She joined TFA simply because she believed in its mission to end educational inequity. She was an awesome teacher, and brought that to our school. The previous year, she'd been assigned to teach 2nd grade, but this year she had been "promoted" to 4th grade (and my son, an incoming 4th grader, would be in her class). Jordan, too, was being "promoted," going from a 3rd grade teacher the previous year to not only a 5th grade teacher, but the 5th grade lead teacher (and unlike Ruby, as a 2012 corps member Jordan really was only in his second year of teaching).
I thought this idea of "promotion," from a lower grade to a higher grade, was strange. We were all elementary school teachers, after all, and we were all paid based on our experience and education level -- not on what grade level we taught. Why was moving from a lower grade up to 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade deemed a "promotion?" And further, why was moving down, from 3rd, 4th or 5th grade to Kinder, 1st, or 2nd, deemed a demotion?
And it was, too. I met a 3rd grade teacher named Ken Witty (that is his real name, because I know he won't mind if I use it), who had actually been a 5th grade teacher the year before (in my classroom, no less). He didn't get along with Principal Lawrence at all, though, and she'd moved him down to 3rd grade as a result of that. I found out that if you were not well liked, or else did not perform up to expectations, you were moved down grade levels. At our school, it was common knowledge that moving up grade levels was a "promotion," and moving down grade levels was a "demotion," and it didn't take long to figure that out, either. As a 5th grade teacher, I was at the top of the proverbial food chain at that school, and it seemed so strange to me that that was the case.
I told Amy as much. During a conversation one day, I told her how I thought that it was really weird how upper grades were really treated as more important at this school, especially since fundamentals are taught in the lower grades -- fundamentals that are crucial to success in the higher grades. I asked her why she thought this was the case.
"Testing grades," she told me, without thinking about it too much. "The upper grades are the testing grades, so that's why some people think they matter more."
During that first week at school, I learned a whole lot about tests, and just how important they were. I heard about the data we'd be collecting throughout the year (Aimsweb data, Discovery Education data, Accelerated Reader data, math facts data, and Core Phonics data), and how we'd use them to prepare our students for the be-all-end-all, most-important-test-of-all-tests, the CRT (Criterion Reference Test). The CRT, taken at the end of the year, would apparently produce scores that would affect our school's star rating and, therefore, my principal's reputation. To Principal Lawrence, the CRT was everything, and tracking preparatory data until the day of that test was almost as important.
During some of the meetings that week, we discussed data collection, but I still had no idea what Aimsweb, DE, AR, math facts, Core Phonics, or any of it looked like. The strategists leading the meetings seemed to think that we all knew what they were talking about, though, and questions regarding what these were or how they were administered were met with wide eyes and gaping expressions, as though they couldn't quite believe that any qualified teacher wouldn't know what these things were already. Such expressions were immediately followed, usually, by a brief (and unhelpful, at least for me) run-through of these data-collecting systems before quickly moving on to something new. I learned to keep my mouth shut about not understanding a thing, but this also caused my anxiety levels to reach peak highs.
The data tracking was to be done damn near everywhere in the school. The bulletin board that first greeted teachers as they entered the building (near our principal's office) was reserved for teacher data, and it displayed the phrase "Data Drives Instruction" across the top. The bulletin boards that lined the halls wouldn't be reserved for student work -- they were to display data (the boards that corresponded to our classrooms were supposed to show AR data, and the other boards would show test data by grade level). And within my classroom, one of the boards needed to be devoted to data tracking as well. I had no idea how to do this, as I had no idea exactly what I was tracking or how I was going to track it.
I did my best, though. I had decided to use a Harry Potter theme in my classroom (I even bought Hogwarts House banners to hang in the classroom, and set up my desks in long rows beneath them so that I could "sort" the students on the first day of school). So, for my data tracker, I set up a a board that was vertically lined with numbers (0 - 50, in increments of 10, which was arbitrary at the time since I didn't know what I was actually tracking or how to track it), and created little silhouette witches on broomsticks to represent the students.
When Principal Lawrence came in to see how my room was coming along, she stared at the data board for a while. I don't think she was quite sure what to make of it. She really did believe in me as a new TFA teacher, though, so she didn't question it. She just looked at it. Then she turned and began to leave almost as abruptly as she'd come in, stopping to briefly comment on a stack of leveled books that sat atop my classroom bookshelf: "Oh, I'm glad you have these. You can go through them and use them for your reading groups and RTI."
I nodded enthusiastically, even though I wasn't quite sure what she meant. Luckily, she turned and brisked out of the room.
At that moment, I felt a small surge of panic. Reading groups? RTI? I knew, though experience with my son's education, that such things involved the use of centers -- which I thought were pretty standard in elementary school classrooms. But I'd asked Michaela (my CMA from Institute, remember?) about centers and how to implement them back when I was at Institute. I'd hoped for either information about a training in centers, or else that Michaela would help me out one-on-one with them. They seemed to me to involve a lot of planning and management skill, and the idea seemed overwhelming, so I wanted help with them.
But Michaela had told me, "Oh, don't worry about that. Centers are a pretty advanced classroom strategy. I wouldn't worry about using them during your first year."
Yeah. No centers during my first year, according to Michaela (who actually taught in Clark County, no less). And yet, here I was, about ready to embark as a teacher, facing the requirement that I would need to use centers so that I could implement small reading groups.
And then, along with that, was the RTI requirement. RTI stands for Response To Intervention, and the idea behind it (which I wouldn't actually learn until I took my special education class over the summer), is to provide intense reading intervention for extremely low students before referring them to the special education team for testing. It's like, if a child might qualify for special education, you've got to try to intervene first (and collect loads of data and documentation on that intervention). Classroom teachers, in Clark County, anyway, are supposed to perform this intervention for 30 minutes on a daily basis. And at my school, the process of choosing students for this intervention had nothing to do with whether they might qualify for special education; rather, we would use one specific piece of reading data, choose our six lowest kids, and form a special, 30-minute reading group that served as our "intervention" of the day.
But, again, this was something I kind of learned along the way. I had no idea what RTI was, or how to teach it (hell, I didn't even know the first thing about teaching a small reading group) at first.
I learned more about Clark County's reading framework (something I would hear about again and again and again down the road) once I attended teacher orientation at the Venetian. There were hundreds of new teachers there, all recruited to help pull Clark County out of the educational quagmire it was in, and all of us were separated for individual sessions by grade level. Over the course of the 3-day event, what I remember most was being introduced to that framework. In the framework, we were required as classroom teachers to make sure that our reading block was a certain length: About 30 minutes of whole group reading instruction, about an hour of small group instruction (complete with literacy centers), and 30 minutes of RTI. There was a specific time frame for language arts and writing, too. There were also 80 required minutes of math, and a teacher was supposed to fit science and social studies in where they could. We were taught to "integrate" those subjects -- that is, to focus specifically on reading and math, and to "teach" social studies and science within those subjects by, like, making sure our assigned readings were science-y or social studies-ish.
Aside from reading groups and RTI, I also learned what my specific school requirements would be regarding lesson plans. Each lesson had to be linked to a standard, and needed to contain all of the following: 1) the standard being addressed, 2) the daily objective, 3) the materials that would be used, 4) the "essential big question," 5) the vocabulary being taught, 6) the procedure that would be used, 7) how I would close the lesson, and 8) how I would assess the lesson. I needed all of this for each subject -- for my reading lesson, my math lesson, my language arts lesson, and my writing lesson. Further, I needed this for each of the reading group lessons I would be teaching (about 3 a day), for the RTI lesson I would be teaching, and I also needed to be explicit about my centers, and which literacy standard(s) each center was aligned to. Also, I needed to make sure that my lessons outlined which other standards (science, social studies, speaking and listening) were being addressed in these lessons.
I keep using the word "overwhelmed." It's really an understatement in terms of how I was feeling. I used Jordan's lesson plans as a template, but it helped only slightly. I didn't know yet about the resources (such as Teachers Pay Teachers) that would eventually make my life much easier.
The weeks in Vegas leading up to the first day of school culminated on our last Friday before the start of the year. In CCSD, this Friday is designated, district-wide, as a kind of "back to school" day, in which parents and families come to school to meet their teachers and see their rooms. I had spent a lot of time making my room very Harry Potter-esque, and I put on a witch's hat and played Harry Potter music in the background, but despite all of the dazzle I put into making this day a good one, I was very anxious to meet my students and their families.
In essence, I was terrified that they were going to take one step into my classroom and realize that I was not a real teacher. Part of the reason I felt this way was because I didn't feel like a real teacher, and I was not overly prepared. I greeted everyone warmly throughout the afternoon, though, and did my best to answer questions and show the students around the room. Some parents wanted to know where their child's seat was, and I patiently explained, each time, that they would be "sorted" into Houses on the first day. They looked at me skeptically, but didn't ask further about it.
One set of parents had a very high-achieving daughter, a GATE student whom they were very concerned about regarding her education (they were the parents who wanted to make sure that their child was receiving a high-quality education at all times). Though my stomach sank at this, I referred confidently to my data board and made a very bold statement: "Most of my students exceed expectations by the end of the year, so you have nothing to worry about." They left happy, of course, but this left me feeling guilty and anxiety-torn.
Other parents approached me out of concern for different reasons. Some parents confided to me that their child was very "low" academically, and wanted to know whether I could help them. I assured them that I could -- that I would approach each student individually and give her or him whatever it was they needed. Others expressed concern that their child's behavior in class -- whether they were known to be talkative or any number of things -- might keep them from excelling. I communicated confidence that I could reach each student, again, as individuals and make sure their learning environment was what it needed to be to ensure success.
Lie after lie after lie. It's not that I didn't believe in what I said, or that I didn't hope to do everything I could for my students. I just wasn't at all confident that I actually could do the things I said I would do. But it was hard enough not believing in myself -- I didn't need to start the year with parents not believing in me, either.
Chapter 8: First Days
The night before the first day of school, I could barely sleep. My stomach was a twisted mess of knots. How on earth was I going to go to school the next morning and live up to the expectation that I would be a high-quality teacher who, as superintendent Pat Skorkowsky demanded, reached "100% of students 100% of the time, without exception, without excuses," and who, as TFA demanded, provided "all students access to an excellent education?"
Regardless of how prepared I was (or, more accurately, was not), the morning arrived like a relentless, unstoppable bulldozer, and I braced myself for its impact as I downed three cups of coffee. I'd gotten up extremely early that day, so as to take time on my appearance and complete the 30-minute drive up to the school while still arriving early enough to adequately prepare for the morning. The sun hadn't even risen as my son and I piled into the car.
Eight months ago, when I'd first heard about my acceptance into Teach For America, I had wept with joy. I had felt excitement and happiness on a level that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. Now that the proverbial "dream" was about to come true, though, I felt buried beneath the overwhelming weight of high expectations and ill preparedness. I wished I felt more ready. Was that something that would eventually come to me, the more I taught? Did I miss something at Institute, something necessary that would have prevented this feeling?
I consoled myself with the knowledge that, since it was the first week of school, I would be spending the majority of my time getting to know my students. At Institute, we'd learned lots of ice-breaking games and activities. I knew I could pull these off, and maybe after I got to know my students a bit I would feel better about my time in the classroom with them. Other teachers (such as Michaela) had told me that they spent the first two weeks doing these activities; other teachers (such as Jordan) told me that they spent no more than two days on them. I'd decided, personally, to spend one week.
This first week, then, would be devoted to that, as well as to establishing rules and procedures. At first, I'd been looking forward to using the same "stoplight" behavior management system that had worked at Flo-Jo, but I was a bit thwarted in that because my school had its own behavior management system that all teachers were expected to use. It was a version of the "stoplight" system ... but a bit different.
Honestly, it was kind of weird. Instead of the straightforward green = good, yellow = yield, and red = stop, my school insisted on a clip chart that used seven different colors. At the top, students started on "perfect pink." From there, they moved down to "blue blue" and got a first warning. After that, they moved down to "rowdy red" and got a second warning. If misbehavior continued, a student then moved down to "panic purple" and received the loss of a privilege. Then, a student moved down to "yucky yellow," which meant a phone call or parent conference, and then down to "grotesque green," which meant a time out of some sort (I think ... as I'm thinking about it now, the lower colors and their consequences are a bit hard to remember in full detail). Lastly, students were moved down to "outrageous orange," which meant that they had to visit the principal.
I personally had a desk set up at the back of the room and called it Azkaban. I planned on sending students to sit in Azkaban if need be as a form of time out. I wasn't sure that I was actually going to incorporate two warnings, loss of a privilege, and a parent conference before doing so, either.
But we'd see. Having never taught in my own classroom before, it was hard to gauge exactly how I would respond to any one thing.
Preparation that morning consisted of making sure that my sorting hat was ready to go, that my shelves and desks were neat and clean, and going over the activities and games in my lesson plan. It was kind of like rehearsing for a play -- I knew everything I needed to do and say, but there was still some anxiety over the possibility that I'd draw a blank and fail in front of my audience (in this case, my students). But I told myself that as long as I made it look like I was in control at all times, they'd believe that I was.
My son stayed in my classroom with me, helping me prepare and set up, until an all-call was made for a staff meeting before the first day of school. I thought that having him in my room in the mornings, and also having him sit quietly (he was a well-behaved nine-year-old, after all) with a book during meetings would be fine. Otherwise, if he couldn't attend meetings, surely he could stay in my classroom until it was time to line up for the day. This is what I assumed, anyway.
Turns out, it's what I assumed wrongly. Mrs. Lawrence launched a tirade, halfway between irritation and frustration, on me about how I needed to have my son in Safekey in the mornings. For those who don't know, Safekey is a babysitting service that takes place at schools. It allows parents to drop their kids off early and pick them up late at school if they need to. It is not a free service, mind you -- it's around $20 per week for mornings, and more for afternoons, which can add up quickly if you're not a wealthy person.
Needless to say, I'm not a wealthy person, and I was certainly nowhere close to wealthy at that point. I hadn't even received my first paycheck yet, and was recovering from the very expensive move I'd just completed (and was also battling new debt, as TFA provided a loan to help me get through that process). The Safekey program at my school had no discounts for teachers, either, so I was a little put out that I was essentially being forced to spend nearly $100 a month on unnecessary babysitting.
I thought it would be a reasonable option to let Brendan sit in my classroom with me while I prepared for the morning.
But Mrs. Lawrence insisted that wasn't an option. I absolutely had to register him for Safekey and take him to the cafeteria every morning to be looked after by strangers, regardless of the fact that I was in the same building. She said it wouldn't be fair to other teachers to have a child in the halls or classrooms before school.
I could have had my child at a different school. He didn't have to be there with me, but I'd thought the experience might be good for both of us. Mrs. Lawrence didn't really give a shit whether I kept Brendan at the school or not, though (until she found out that he's a stellar test taker, anyway, which came later), so she was not at all interested in negotiating her Safekey policy with me. I was decidedly unhappy about this.
But anyway, back to that first day. I met my students for the first time as they lined up outside for breakfast. At the school I taught at, each student was entitled to a free breakfast, which was to be eaten in the classroom. So the daily procedure started with meeting our students outside.
Let me preface the daily morning procedure with a few facts. First, this was to be Principal Lawrence's second year at our school. She'd been brought in to take it from a low performing school and transform it into a high performing one. One of the first changes she made was that, when students arrived in the mornings, they were not allowed to play on the playground (they used to be able to do this, under the previous principal). Instead, they were to go straight to the classroom "dot" to line up for the day. So there was a 10 to 15 minute time frame from which the gates opened and students filed in to get in line to when we started leading them inside for breakfast. During that time, students were expected to stand their classroom lines.
Breakfast was set up with two lines into the cafeteria. Students would go through the line and grab one of everything (it was all pre-packaged foods such as cinnamon rolls, coffee cakes, or little boxes of cereal) before going to class. We'd then lead our class through the halls and to the classrooms, where students would sit down, eat breakfast, and then throw their trash away in giant trash bins located in the pods. Right around finishing time, the school counselor would come on the loudspeaker to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and lead 30 seconds of silence (both required by Nevada state law), give morning announcements, and reveal the day's lunch menu. After all of this, we could begin our academic day.
My first day centered around getting to know my students. I sorted them into their Harry Potter Houses first, and only after this had been completed did I realize that it wasn't the smartest move I'd ever made. I knew nothing about these kids, and randomly assigning them to a House from which they'd likely not want to be moved before getting to know them presented a few challenges. First, somehow or another, a group of about six girls (who all happened to be friends) all wound up in Hufflepuff together. Next, a group of about five boys (who all happened to be very loud and talkative) all wound up in Gryffindor together. And so on. I continued with this original plan, though, assuring myself that, as I got to know the students more I could move them around as needed.
The second thing that I did that morning, after sorting the students, was introduce myself and attempt to learn names and something about each student. I did this by moving all of the desks out of the way and sitting in a circle on the floor. I told the students that we were going to play a name game which would involve using an adjective to describe themselves -- but the adjective had to start with the same letter as their first name.
"My name is Ms. Sirls," I began, to lead by example. "Since Ms. starts with an "m," I'm going to pick an adjective that starts with that letter. So I'll introduce myself as Musical Ms. Sirls because I like to sing and listen to music, and musicals are my favorite type of show."
While I was counting on some issues, such as shy students who didn't want to talk, I did not count on my 5th graders not knowing what an adjective was. This proved to be a major problem.
"An adjective," I tried to explain, "is a word that describes something. So you have to pick a word that describes you and use it in your introduction."
Even when they seemed to grasp, in a way, what an adjective was, there were still issues surrounding following the rules of the game. "I don't know," some of them said. "I can't think of a word that describes me." And for some of them, it took a good five minutes of gentle prodding and questioning to get them to come up with a word that described them. Some of them never did come up with a word.
Others, still, came up with a word but ignored the direction about having it start with the first letter of their first name. "I'm Nice Maria," they'd say, for example, or "I'm Cool Brian" (I didn't have any students named Maria or Brian; those were just examples of what the kids said).
After a while, I stopped trying to correct them. It didn't matter. I was getting their names and one-word descriptions of themselves, which was what was important to me.
We then played a different name game, in which a person says their name, and the person next to them says their name and the name of the person before them, and the next person then says their name and the names of the two people before them ... and so on. It gets really difficult, obviously, the further down the line you are, but I promised that I would be able to say everyone's name by the end of the game -- that I would go last and go around the entire circle and correctly state everyone's name.
I did, too. In all honesty, I surprised even myself at my ability to correctly name 30 students after only a small time in the classroom.
The day continued on this way until it was time for me to take my students to lunch. I had a 30 minute lunch break every day, and the students also had 30 minutes for lunch. But for them (again, another implementation from Principal Lawrence), they had about 25 minutes to eat (if they ate faster, they sat quietly), and then 5 minutes or so (sometimes it was closer to 7 minutes) to play outside. So, here in this elementary school environment, the students had, thus far, received 5-7 minutes of play time outside, and there was no more scheduled throughout the day.
5-7 minutes. To Principal Lawrence, play time for children was not important, not when that time could be used to teach standards and prepare for state tests. And to top it off, she was so afraid that the 5th graders would fight all recess long that she scheduled 5th grade lunches all at different times to make sure that they weren't all interacting during their one, small break a day. This upset a number of my students, as they wanted to play with their friends from other classes. I encouraged them to create a petition to take to the principal about moving 5th grade lunches so that they all occurred simultaneously. They did write a petition, too. My high-achieving GATE student drafted it and the entire class signed it. I agreed to take it to the principal, but it was to no avail. She felt very sure that allowing large numbers of 5th graders to interact on a daily basis was a very bad idea.
So things stayed the way they were in regards to lunch and recess. I usually chose to eat lunch (or not -- I didn't always eat during lunchtime) in my classroom, away from other people. As an introvert, constant interaction is particularly draining for me mentally, emotionally, and even physically, so lunch on my own was a small breath of fresh air for me every day. I'm sure that other teachers must have thought that my avoidance of the lunch room was because I was a snob of some sort (or something -- it's not unusual for there to be divides on campuses between TFA teachers and traditionally trained ones, though it's not always the case), but it was necessary for me.
My prep period -- the 50 minutes of time during which I could plan, grade, or do whatever I needed to while my students attended music, P.E., art, or library -- occurred directly after lunch. So I'd finish my lunch period and make it outside to pick up my students after their small recess period. Then I'd march them inside to whatever "special" (as we referred to the previously mentioned classes) they had that day. The students went to music, art, and library once per week, and to P.E. twice a week.
Most days, I tried to spend my prep period completing the arduous task of completing lesson plans, but there were times when I was required to attend meetings, too. There were a whole lot of meetings to attend that first year at my school. Every week, everyone was required to attend a PLC meeting in the morning (the 5th grade PLC was on Wednesdays, I think), during which we'd discuss strategies, data, new curricula, or whatever else our strategists thought we needed to discuss. These PLC meetings took the place of staff meetings, which we never had. Then, we were also required to have grade level meetings once a week (led by our team leader, Jordan), and these usually happened during prep. In the beginning, these were designed to assist us in staying on track with teaching the same standards at the same time, creating homework, analyzing data, and other such things; later on in the year, however, they turned into much-needed venting sessions.
But that came later. My first week at school seemed to be inundated with meetings, never ending lists of data I needed to produce and analyze, groups I needed to make, information I needed to gather and share, and on and on and on. I think I survived it only because I wasn't teaching any real academics that week. Balancing a heavy workload and a steady stream of increasing demands that you don't even fully understand is easier to do, I think, when you're spending class time playing games and learning names and such.
After that first week, though, things became more difficult as I tried to incorporate academic standards into my lesson plans and my classroom. I would sit up for hours analyzing the standards and figuring out how I could present them. Where would I fit language or writing into this day, or where would I fit speaking and listening standards in anywhere? Organizing my lesson plans around such questions proved daunting, and more than a few gray hairs grew from trying.
Throughout that first week, I felt like I was drowning and wouldn't ever figure "it" out. As I progressed into my second week and beyond, the waves above me became so crushing that I wasn't sure I'd ever resurface again.
Regardless of how prepared I was (or, more accurately, was not), the morning arrived like a relentless, unstoppable bulldozer, and I braced myself for its impact as I downed three cups of coffee. I'd gotten up extremely early that day, so as to take time on my appearance and complete the 30-minute drive up to the school while still arriving early enough to adequately prepare for the morning. The sun hadn't even risen as my son and I piled into the car.
Eight months ago, when I'd first heard about my acceptance into Teach For America, I had wept with joy. I had felt excitement and happiness on a level that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. Now that the proverbial "dream" was about to come true, though, I felt buried beneath the overwhelming weight of high expectations and ill preparedness. I wished I felt more ready. Was that something that would eventually come to me, the more I taught? Did I miss something at Institute, something necessary that would have prevented this feeling?
I consoled myself with the knowledge that, since it was the first week of school, I would be spending the majority of my time getting to know my students. At Institute, we'd learned lots of ice-breaking games and activities. I knew I could pull these off, and maybe after I got to know my students a bit I would feel better about my time in the classroom with them. Other teachers (such as Michaela) had told me that they spent the first two weeks doing these activities; other teachers (such as Jordan) told me that they spent no more than two days on them. I'd decided, personally, to spend one week.
This first week, then, would be devoted to that, as well as to establishing rules and procedures. At first, I'd been looking forward to using the same "stoplight" behavior management system that had worked at Flo-Jo, but I was a bit thwarted in that because my school had its own behavior management system that all teachers were expected to use. It was a version of the "stoplight" system ... but a bit different.
Honestly, it was kind of weird. Instead of the straightforward green = good, yellow = yield, and red = stop, my school insisted on a clip chart that used seven different colors. At the top, students started on "perfect pink." From there, they moved down to "blue blue" and got a first warning. After that, they moved down to "rowdy red" and got a second warning. If misbehavior continued, a student then moved down to "panic purple" and received the loss of a privilege. Then, a student moved down to "yucky yellow," which meant a phone call or parent conference, and then down to "grotesque green," which meant a time out of some sort (I think ... as I'm thinking about it now, the lower colors and their consequences are a bit hard to remember in full detail). Lastly, students were moved down to "outrageous orange," which meant that they had to visit the principal.
I personally had a desk set up at the back of the room and called it Azkaban. I planned on sending students to sit in Azkaban if need be as a form of time out. I wasn't sure that I was actually going to incorporate two warnings, loss of a privilege, and a parent conference before doing so, either.
But we'd see. Having never taught in my own classroom before, it was hard to gauge exactly how I would respond to any one thing.
Preparation that morning consisted of making sure that my sorting hat was ready to go, that my shelves and desks were neat and clean, and going over the activities and games in my lesson plan. It was kind of like rehearsing for a play -- I knew everything I needed to do and say, but there was still some anxiety over the possibility that I'd draw a blank and fail in front of my audience (in this case, my students). But I told myself that as long as I made it look like I was in control at all times, they'd believe that I was.
My son stayed in my classroom with me, helping me prepare and set up, until an all-call was made for a staff meeting before the first day of school. I thought that having him in my room in the mornings, and also having him sit quietly (he was a well-behaved nine-year-old, after all) with a book during meetings would be fine. Otherwise, if he couldn't attend meetings, surely he could stay in my classroom until it was time to line up for the day. This is what I assumed, anyway.
Turns out, it's what I assumed wrongly. Mrs. Lawrence launched a tirade, halfway between irritation and frustration, on me about how I needed to have my son in Safekey in the mornings. For those who don't know, Safekey is a babysitting service that takes place at schools. It allows parents to drop their kids off early and pick them up late at school if they need to. It is not a free service, mind you -- it's around $20 per week for mornings, and more for afternoons, which can add up quickly if you're not a wealthy person.
Needless to say, I'm not a wealthy person, and I was certainly nowhere close to wealthy at that point. I hadn't even received my first paycheck yet, and was recovering from the very expensive move I'd just completed (and was also battling new debt, as TFA provided a loan to help me get through that process). The Safekey program at my school had no discounts for teachers, either, so I was a little put out that I was essentially being forced to spend nearly $100 a month on unnecessary babysitting.
I thought it would be a reasonable option to let Brendan sit in my classroom with me while I prepared for the morning.
But Mrs. Lawrence insisted that wasn't an option. I absolutely had to register him for Safekey and take him to the cafeteria every morning to be looked after by strangers, regardless of the fact that I was in the same building. She said it wouldn't be fair to other teachers to have a child in the halls or classrooms before school.
I could have had my child at a different school. He didn't have to be there with me, but I'd thought the experience might be good for both of us. Mrs. Lawrence didn't really give a shit whether I kept Brendan at the school or not, though (until she found out that he's a stellar test taker, anyway, which came later), so she was not at all interested in negotiating her Safekey policy with me. I was decidedly unhappy about this.
But anyway, back to that first day. I met my students for the first time as they lined up outside for breakfast. At the school I taught at, each student was entitled to a free breakfast, which was to be eaten in the classroom. So the daily procedure started with meeting our students outside.
Let me preface the daily morning procedure with a few facts. First, this was to be Principal Lawrence's second year at our school. She'd been brought in to take it from a low performing school and transform it into a high performing one. One of the first changes she made was that, when students arrived in the mornings, they were not allowed to play on the playground (they used to be able to do this, under the previous principal). Instead, they were to go straight to the classroom "dot" to line up for the day. So there was a 10 to 15 minute time frame from which the gates opened and students filed in to get in line to when we started leading them inside for breakfast. During that time, students were expected to stand their classroom lines.
Breakfast was set up with two lines into the cafeteria. Students would go through the line and grab one of everything (it was all pre-packaged foods such as cinnamon rolls, coffee cakes, or little boxes of cereal) before going to class. We'd then lead our class through the halls and to the classrooms, where students would sit down, eat breakfast, and then throw their trash away in giant trash bins located in the pods. Right around finishing time, the school counselor would come on the loudspeaker to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and lead 30 seconds of silence (both required by Nevada state law), give morning announcements, and reveal the day's lunch menu. After all of this, we could begin our academic day.
My first day centered around getting to know my students. I sorted them into their Harry Potter Houses first, and only after this had been completed did I realize that it wasn't the smartest move I'd ever made. I knew nothing about these kids, and randomly assigning them to a House from which they'd likely not want to be moved before getting to know them presented a few challenges. First, somehow or another, a group of about six girls (who all happened to be friends) all wound up in Hufflepuff together. Next, a group of about five boys (who all happened to be very loud and talkative) all wound up in Gryffindor together. And so on. I continued with this original plan, though, assuring myself that, as I got to know the students more I could move them around as needed.
The second thing that I did that morning, after sorting the students, was introduce myself and attempt to learn names and something about each student. I did this by moving all of the desks out of the way and sitting in a circle on the floor. I told the students that we were going to play a name game which would involve using an adjective to describe themselves -- but the adjective had to start with the same letter as their first name.
"My name is Ms. Sirls," I began, to lead by example. "Since Ms. starts with an "m," I'm going to pick an adjective that starts with that letter. So I'll introduce myself as Musical Ms. Sirls because I like to sing and listen to music, and musicals are my favorite type of show."
While I was counting on some issues, such as shy students who didn't want to talk, I did not count on my 5th graders not knowing what an adjective was. This proved to be a major problem.
"An adjective," I tried to explain, "is a word that describes something. So you have to pick a word that describes you and use it in your introduction."
Even when they seemed to grasp, in a way, what an adjective was, there were still issues surrounding following the rules of the game. "I don't know," some of them said. "I can't think of a word that describes me." And for some of them, it took a good five minutes of gentle prodding and questioning to get them to come up with a word that described them. Some of them never did come up with a word.
Others, still, came up with a word but ignored the direction about having it start with the first letter of their first name. "I'm Nice Maria," they'd say, for example, or "I'm Cool Brian" (I didn't have any students named Maria or Brian; those were just examples of what the kids said).
After a while, I stopped trying to correct them. It didn't matter. I was getting their names and one-word descriptions of themselves, which was what was important to me.
We then played a different name game, in which a person says their name, and the person next to them says their name and the name of the person before them, and the next person then says their name and the names of the two people before them ... and so on. It gets really difficult, obviously, the further down the line you are, but I promised that I would be able to say everyone's name by the end of the game -- that I would go last and go around the entire circle and correctly state everyone's name.
I did, too. In all honesty, I surprised even myself at my ability to correctly name 30 students after only a small time in the classroom.
The day continued on this way until it was time for me to take my students to lunch. I had a 30 minute lunch break every day, and the students also had 30 minutes for lunch. But for them (again, another implementation from Principal Lawrence), they had about 25 minutes to eat (if they ate faster, they sat quietly), and then 5 minutes or so (sometimes it was closer to 7 minutes) to play outside. So, here in this elementary school environment, the students had, thus far, received 5-7 minutes of play time outside, and there was no more scheduled throughout the day.
5-7 minutes. To Principal Lawrence, play time for children was not important, not when that time could be used to teach standards and prepare for state tests. And to top it off, she was so afraid that the 5th graders would fight all recess long that she scheduled 5th grade lunches all at different times to make sure that they weren't all interacting during their one, small break a day. This upset a number of my students, as they wanted to play with their friends from other classes. I encouraged them to create a petition to take to the principal about moving 5th grade lunches so that they all occurred simultaneously. They did write a petition, too. My high-achieving GATE student drafted it and the entire class signed it. I agreed to take it to the principal, but it was to no avail. She felt very sure that allowing large numbers of 5th graders to interact on a daily basis was a very bad idea.
So things stayed the way they were in regards to lunch and recess. I usually chose to eat lunch (or not -- I didn't always eat during lunchtime) in my classroom, away from other people. As an introvert, constant interaction is particularly draining for me mentally, emotionally, and even physically, so lunch on my own was a small breath of fresh air for me every day. I'm sure that other teachers must have thought that my avoidance of the lunch room was because I was a snob of some sort (or something -- it's not unusual for there to be divides on campuses between TFA teachers and traditionally trained ones, though it's not always the case), but it was necessary for me.
My prep period -- the 50 minutes of time during which I could plan, grade, or do whatever I needed to while my students attended music, P.E., art, or library -- occurred directly after lunch. So I'd finish my lunch period and make it outside to pick up my students after their small recess period. Then I'd march them inside to whatever "special" (as we referred to the previously mentioned classes) they had that day. The students went to music, art, and library once per week, and to P.E. twice a week.
Most days, I tried to spend my prep period completing the arduous task of completing lesson plans, but there were times when I was required to attend meetings, too. There were a whole lot of meetings to attend that first year at my school. Every week, everyone was required to attend a PLC meeting in the morning (the 5th grade PLC was on Wednesdays, I think), during which we'd discuss strategies, data, new curricula, or whatever else our strategists thought we needed to discuss. These PLC meetings took the place of staff meetings, which we never had. Then, we were also required to have grade level meetings once a week (led by our team leader, Jordan), and these usually happened during prep. In the beginning, these were designed to assist us in staying on track with teaching the same standards at the same time, creating homework, analyzing data, and other such things; later on in the year, however, they turned into much-needed venting sessions.
But that came later. My first week at school seemed to be inundated with meetings, never ending lists of data I needed to produce and analyze, groups I needed to make, information I needed to gather and share, and on and on and on. I think I survived it only because I wasn't teaching any real academics that week. Balancing a heavy workload and a steady stream of increasing demands that you don't even fully understand is easier to do, I think, when you're spending class time playing games and learning names and such.
After that first week, though, things became more difficult as I tried to incorporate academic standards into my lesson plans and my classroom. I would sit up for hours analyzing the standards and figuring out how I could present them. Where would I fit language or writing into this day, or where would I fit speaking and listening standards in anywhere? Organizing my lesson plans around such questions proved daunting, and more than a few gray hairs grew from trying.
Throughout that first week, I felt like I was drowning and wouldn't ever figure "it" out. As I progressed into my second week and beyond, the waves above me became so crushing that I wasn't sure I'd ever resurface again.
Chapter 9: Survival
Principal Lawrence rarely smiled. During that first year, I don't think I ever heard her laugh. She didn't appear to know student names, nor did she care to. The one thing she did seem to care about was data, and it's one of the only things I ever heard her talk about. Even at the start of the year, when she showed us an inspirational scene from the movie Here Comes the Boom, she centered it around the importance of improving student test scores, around being those kinds of teachers who could ensure that 100% of students passed 100% of their tests 100% of the time (or at least something close to that).
There were rare times when she appeared to be lighthearted, but most of the time she presented a rather intimidating demeanor, full of frenzied anxiety, all her own and yet ready to pass on to teachers, that caused me to want to avoid her at all costs. I didn't feel comfortable around her, and most of the time felt a deep sense of anxiety when I talked to her -- anxiety that never allowed me to be myself in her presence.
Perhaps it was me. Considering, however, that other teachers felt the same anxiety and our first assistant principal left after mere weeks at the school, I don't think it was all me. I found out later (years later, when I actually talked to her about it) that our original assistant principal chose to leave shortly after the start of the school year because working with Principal Lawrence, and the associated environment, was simply too much to handle. They had very different ideas about how to run a school, how to treat teachers and students, and even how to motivate teachers and students. This assistant principal told me many stories about her few weeks at the school, but said her final straw was when she left briefly to grab a coffee from the McDonalds down the street, only to return and be written up by Mrs. Lawrence because she hadn't signed out of the building. We're talking about an educational professional here, only a few years away from retirement, written up by a younger principal for not signing out when she went to get a coffee.
So we received a new assistant principal, but she also left after a month or so. For a while, we had a couple of interim assistant principals who were kind of "subbing" in the position until a permanent one could be hired.
The office clerk (who was accused of, and later absolved of, stealing money from the school) didn't enjoy working for her. Even the night janitor used to vent to some of us teachers about her. So, although my issues with Mrs. Lawrence as a boss and leader could have had something to do with me, it would be wholly unfair and insufficient to suggest it was all to do with me. But more on that -- and her -- later.
My struggles during those first few months of teaching did not end with Mrs. Lawrence. I still struggled with understanding and covering all of the standards I was supposed to teach that year, and I struggled with preparing lesson plans that centered around them. We were required to post all lesson plans to a drive that was specific to our school (this drive was available for the school to view, and checked regularly by admin). I struggled to keep up with my grade level, who consisted of three other teachers (Jordan, of course, and also Aisha Walker, who was about to begin her first year of teaching, and Donn Gallon, who was formerly with the military and beginning a new career as a teacher). I always felt like these three had it "together" far more than I did, and I struggled to, as Christy put it, "fake it 'till you make it" so that I at least appeared that I had it "together," too.
One of the first pieces of data that we teachers needed to gather was Discovery Education data, or DE, as we called it. I didn't understand it at first, but it didn't take too long to catch on. DE was a test that students took on computers, online. Computer lab times were scheduled so that teachers could have their entire class take the test at the same time (since each of our classrooms had about four computers to share among our 30 or so students), so that data could be produced quickly and accurately. I didn't realize, as my students took it for the first time, how important this data would be. Mrs. Lawrence, and our school in general, considered DE data predictive of how our students would score on the CRT (our huge, end-of-year standardized test).
After the DE test, therefore, admin and school strategists accessed the scores and posted the data by grade level. Our 5th grade data board, then, was soon full of our DE scores. Bar graphs showed that Jordan and Aisha's classes both scored over 60% proficient, and mine and Donn's classes both scored just over 40% proficient. I looked at those scores and my heart dropped.
Jordan, though, assured me that my scores were fine. "I would almost prefer having lower scores right now," he told me. "There's more room to grow for the later tests."
It made sense, but his reasoning didn't make me feel any better. It did make me, however, more determined to make sure that our next round of DE tests showed tremendous growth from my class -- despite being the lowest percent proficient now, I vowed to be the highest by the end of the year. (And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how "teaching to the test" begins.)
There was another standardized test that we gave our students early on. It was called Aimsweb and, like DE, measured a student's level in both reading and math. There were two sections in reading -- RCBM and MAZE -- that students had to complete, and two sections in math -- MCOMP and MCAP. The RCBM test required students to read a passage for one minute, and their fluency was scored based on how far they were able to get (with minimal mistakes) during that one minute period of time. The MAZE test featured a passage with missing words, and students had three minutes to circle the appropriate word for each blank in order to demonstrate comprehension. For math, the MCOMP was an eight-minute test in which students had to demonstrate understanding of basic math operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). The MCAP was another eight minute test designed to assess students' knowledge in other mathematical areas, such as data and measurement, fractions, and elapsed time.
We were supposed to use Aimsweb data to assign our students reading groups, and we were also supposed to use it to decide which students would be a part of our RTI group. Now, RTI was a huge deal at my school, and there was a lot of paperwork involved -- in fact, we had an entire staff development day (designated days taken by the entire district, in which students stayed home and staff came in, so that teachers could be trained in various areas) dedicated to the development of our RTI groups. RTI stands for Response to Intervention, and is supposed to be used as intensive instruction before a student is referred to special education testing.
The criteria for selecting an RTI group at our school, as I mentioned before, involved only choosing our six "lowest" scoring students on the RCBM test. After that, we were supposed to use their scores to calculate goals, and we had to set up an entire folder for each student. The folder would contain their Aimsweb data, parental consent (which needed to be sent home and returned as soon as possible) for participation in the RTI group, various other forms filled out by the parent and the teacher, and then, later, a daily log of what was taught each day during the RTI session and how the student responded to the intervention.
It was a lot to handle for someone who'd never even heard the term "RTI" before. I still, years later, don't entirely understand the dynamics of how it's often used -- there's an interesting article that explores how RTI as a requirement has fallen short of the promised results, and has not helped students in the ways it was supposed to. Looking back on my own school during my time with TFA, it always seemed as though RTI was less about intervening on behalf of low-level readers, and more about maintaining shitloads of data on students so that we could remain "compliant" with the state of Nevada's RTI requirements.
But anyway, back to my initial issues with RTI. After perusing my Aimsweb data I approached one of our strategists with the knowledge that my reading scores actually seemed pretty good, whereas my math scores were very, very low. She took a close look at the data with me, and replied that it might be a good idea to provide a math intervention group instead of a reading one. She wasn't sure if this would be all right with Mrs. Lawrence, though, so she said she would check with her and get back to me.
She never did get back to me, but in the interim I put my intervention group on hold. This proved to be detrimental later on, as I was supposed to present my RTI folders to show what I'd done about halfway through the year and, of course, I didn't have anything to show. I tried to defend the fact that this strategist had essentially told me to keep the RTI group on hold until she found out whether I could provide math instead of reading, but in response to this the strategist threw me under the bus and denied such a thing had happened. So I wound up in hot water over having no RTI data a few months into the year and shouldered it on my own.
I did start attempting to provide RTI lessons, but the truth was that I had no idea what I was doing. So some days I would gather my students around the kidney table and we would do a reader's theater script. Or, on other days, we would take turns reading from a leveled book. But I didn't know the first thing about what the group was supposed to look like and basically did the best I could.
A few months into the school year, however, I did start to learn a bit more about how reading groups and such were structured, as Mrs. Lawrence decided to send a number of us to Reading Academy. This course, which occurred once a week for about six weeks, taught us the ins and outs of literacy instruction, and it was actually helpful. It took me from a place of knowing absolutely nothing in regards to what I was doing (in terms of reading instruction, anyway) to a place of knowing at least the basics of teaching differentiated reading. During this time, however, I had to get a substitute once a week (I think I went to Reading Academy every Wednesday), which kind of staggered my week in a way that was either detrimental to my classroom or else good for my mental health (and I couldn't decide which was more likely to be true).
So, as the weeks went on and Reading Academy continued, I returned to my classroom feeling only slightly, rather than utterly hopeless when it came to reading groups and RTI. I left Reading Academy each week with great ideas, but I still struggled to utilize them in the classroom. Despite the fact that I tried, it was hard to decide which of my students needed which of the 5 main "pillars" of reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension -- as 5th graders, most of my students needed fluency and comprehension, and as English language learners [ELLs for short], many of them needed vocabulary, too). It was also hard to decide how to teach those things to my students, and also how to break up groups so that each student was getting exactly what he or she needed (this is what's called "differentiation," and it's required of all teachers, since classes these days are usually comprised of around 30 students who all fall on different areas along the ability spectrum). I had students with high school reading levels who needed literature circles; I had students on grade level who needed grade level material; I had students far below grade level who still needed to be exposed, according to the district, to grade level material, but with extra assistance; and I had students who were not on grade level due to a disability and needed different types of instruction and intervention. Just because I was, technically, a 5th grade teacher did not mean that I was simply teaching 5th grade -- the levels of differentiation needed in order to assure that all students were able to access the 5th grade material presented to them meant that my 5th grade curriculum needed to extend well beyond what is considered to be "5th grade material" on a daily basis.
This is the kind of thing that comes with practice, but during the first part of that first year, it was beyond hard. On many days, I felt like I was attempting an almost impossible task.
And that was just reading -- math wasn't any easier. Because of the way my day was set up -- three hours of teaching in the morning, then back-to-back lunch and prep for 80 minutes, and then a nearly two hour block of teaching in the afternoon -- I taught ELA (English and Language Arts) in the morning and math in the afternoon. My problems teaching math were very similar to the ones I faced teaching ELA; that is, I didn't know how to interpret the standards all the time or how to teach them well (this was before I had a decent grasp on how to use Curriculum Engine, and a year before it became the truly useful resource it is now).
So I often found myself using lunch and prep periods to plan for my math lesson. I would try to plan well in my lesson plans, but I always wound up panicking right before the lesson anyway, trying to figure out how to teach a specific standard.
For example, 5th grade math standard 5.NBT.B.5 (NBT standing for Numbers and Operations in Base 10) states that students will "fluently multiply multi-digit whole numbers using the standard algorithm." On the day I was to teach this standard, I would think, All right, I can do this. I know the standard algorithm!" And I would then stand in front of the class and use the standard algorithm to solve a long multiplication problem. Again and again. I'd ask various students what my next step should be and allow them to guide me, and then I'd release them to do problems in their textbook.
Later, I'd learn that appropriate elementary school instruction involves manipulatives, collaborative work among student groups, multiple avenues to the same answer, videos and music, interactive notebooks, and a number of other strategies and resources that make learning interesting and accessible to young people. During the first part of that first year, I knew none of this -- I only knew that I was to teach certain things, and my only experience teaching (in a college classroom) involved a lot of lecturing and in-depth discussion (in other words, things not always suitable for 5th graders).
Mrs. Lawrence told me this, too. After observing a science lesson in which I used a PowerPoint to introduce students to Newton's laws of motion, she commented, during our post-observation conference, that I couldn't lecture and use PowerPoint presentations the same way I did when I taught college. "The students need to talk to each other," she told me. "You need to get them working together and talking more, and you need to talk less."
The principal wasn't the only one in my classroom offering advice. The strategists -- we had three of them at our school -- were constantly in there as well, to either model a lesson or to just sit and watch, to offer me advice in terms of keeping Mrs. Lawrence happy. "Make sure you write your standards and objectives on the board," they told me. "Don't forget to re-address the standard in your closing. Make sure students know why they're learning what they're learning."
Christy popped into my classroom quite often as well, and although her first few visits consisted of watching my lessons and leaving positive sticky notes on my desk, I soon began to realize that these "visits" were more like observations. She'd come in, assess my lesson plans, talk to students (she'd ask them what they were doing, whether they knew how to do it, why they were doing it, and so forth). She'd tell me that, according to the TAL Rubric used by TFA (that I mentioned in a previous post), my students were "unruly and/or apathetic." There were too many students off-task, she said; too many of them were bored or confused, or didn't even know what the hell was going on in the lesson. I knew that I was struggling, but I honestly didn't think my classroom was that bad.
It became difficult just to get through each day. Each day that I dragged myself to work, the only thought that kept me going was the understanding that, in eight hours or so, I'd get to go home and watch Netflix with my son and drink wine. On most days, though, even that didn't happen because of how much time I spent at school trying to stay above water. I arrived at that building before the sun came up, and often didn't leave until after the sun had gone down. And all the while, I was feeling like a fake teacher, like I sucked and my students deserved so much more; I felt like, no matter how hard I tried and how much effort I put in, I was sincerely bad at what I did. I felt constantly beat down by everyone with the power to lift me up and like I just had to get out because it's hard to feel beaten and broken down every day.
My life became a cycle of drowning, then coming up for air with some great ideas in mind. These ideas would refresh me for a day or so, but I'd soon find myself sinking yet again. With 5 weeks of training, I was simply unprepared to manage my own classroom. I'd spend hours on my lesson plans, trying to figure out how to teach lessons (as I mentioned above), but also how to fit everything into each day. I had to figure out how to meaningfully assess my students. I needed weekly grades for reading, language arts, math, science, social studies, and speaking and listening, all while planning six small reading lessons for my reading groups, making sure I had meaningful centers for my other students to be working on during those small groups, and an intensive RTI lesson. It was so much -- too much -- and I had no idea how to juggle it. Despite trying, my proverbial balls kept dropping, and it became harder and harder to pick them back up again. Most days, I felt like I was failing at everything. Further, because TFA sets itself up on the idea that their teachers are all superstars, I felt like an isolated failure. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. Was I not smart enough, not adamant enough, not persistent enough, or did I not work hard enough? The waves swallowing me were laden with guilt, shame, and extreme burnout.
And in the midst of all of this, I was also a full time graduate student at UNLV. TFA, as I've mentioned before, sets its corps members up with a local university so that each person is earning a master's degree in education while they're completing their two years of teaching with the corps. This first semester, as I was beginning teaching, I had a class in literacy assessment and a class in TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language). This, of course, made it even harder to keep up and stay afloat, as any tiny bit of free time I managed to find went straight to my graduate coursework. I attended classes twice a week, and they began at 4:30. Since work at my school ended at 3:30, I would often have to drive straight from work (with my son, no less) in heavy traffic to the university, where I would spend the next few hours in class before returning home and collapsing in exhaustion.
But my never ending exhaustion wasn't just due to admin and strategists and TFA and teaching and planning and grading and grad school and whatnot ... it was, at times, the students as well. My class was filled to the brim with various personalities, some of which I meshed with naturally, and others I did not. I cared about each of my students as individuals, but some of them were certainly more challenging than others, and for different reasons. Some of them would shut down on most days because of personal issues, and would not talk or respond to me. Others lived in poverty and dealt with hunger, or their electricity had been turned off, or they wore the same outfit all week long or, as in the case of one boy, would fall asleep in class because his brothers stole the covers on their shared mattress all night long. Others, still, did not know how to handle anger, and they'd explode in class.
For example, one boy responded to a disagreement with another student by breaking a pencil, and when I quickly enforced that breaking items was never appropriate, he responded by calling me a stupid bitch.
Not fun. Not easy.
I did consider quitting. It's possible, I think, that I considered quitting at some point at least every day. At one point, however, I drove by a branch of the bank that I'd worked for in California, and I immediately felt a newfound sense of determination that kept me going despite my inner turmoil. I might have been miserable each day in my new work -- I might have been completely overwhelmed and broken down all the time -- but at least I was miserable with a salary, I reasoned. At least I was miserable with a dependable paycheck. At least I was miserable with benefits that covered my insulin and thyroid medication. At least I was miserable with a set schedule that granted me weekends and holidays off (basically, the same schedule as my son, which was no small thing). No matter what was going on, I told myself, I was better off now than I had been before.
As much as I told myself this, I started to grow more depressed by the day. I retreated into myself and became quiet during meetings and such, hoping not to be noticed or asked questions or talked to. I noticed negative changes in my health, too -- my glucose levels (I am a Type 1 diabetic) were consistently high, and this led to extreme lethargy (which, I'm sure, led to even poorer attempts at teaching). I had consistent urinary tract infections, too, which were so uncomfortable that it was difficult for me to stand let alone teach.
I began to wonder if I'd ever make it to winter break, the two weeks of pure bliss that I would have off of work at the end of December. I'd enjoyed Halloween with my students (we had a costume party in the classroom, complete with cupcakes that had previously been forbidden by Mrs. Lawrence), and we'd made fun crafts for Thanksgiving (I spent most of a day letting my students complete those due to a urinary tract infection that kept me off of my feet), but it was the winter holidays that I was looking forward to the most -- and it was mostly because of those two weeks off.
Somehow, winter break arrived. On the last day of school before the break, I felt so excited to leave that building I could hardly contain myself. I knew that I would have to do some work over winter break -- there was lots of planning and grading to do, and I needed to work on organizing my reading groups -- but in that moment I had two weeks ahead of me to worry about it, and I knew that I could take at least the next few days to simply relax. Jordan was excited, too; as well as he hid it during the school year, I could tell that he was happy and relieved to have made it to winter break. I saw him after school and he wrapped me in a huge hug, lifting me off of the floor, proclaiming, "We did it!"
We had done it, I realized. I'd made it through my first few months of teaching, my first semester at UNLV, and the first segment of my Teach For America commitment. And, although the thought of returning in January was enough to cause mild panic attacks, all that was on my mind that particular afternoon were the two weeks ahead of me ... two weeks, I thought, to regroup and hopefully gain some of my sanity back.
There were rare times when she appeared to be lighthearted, but most of the time she presented a rather intimidating demeanor, full of frenzied anxiety, all her own and yet ready to pass on to teachers, that caused me to want to avoid her at all costs. I didn't feel comfortable around her, and most of the time felt a deep sense of anxiety when I talked to her -- anxiety that never allowed me to be myself in her presence.
Perhaps it was me. Considering, however, that other teachers felt the same anxiety and our first assistant principal left after mere weeks at the school, I don't think it was all me. I found out later (years later, when I actually talked to her about it) that our original assistant principal chose to leave shortly after the start of the school year because working with Principal Lawrence, and the associated environment, was simply too much to handle. They had very different ideas about how to run a school, how to treat teachers and students, and even how to motivate teachers and students. This assistant principal told me many stories about her few weeks at the school, but said her final straw was when she left briefly to grab a coffee from the McDonalds down the street, only to return and be written up by Mrs. Lawrence because she hadn't signed out of the building. We're talking about an educational professional here, only a few years away from retirement, written up by a younger principal for not signing out when she went to get a coffee.
So we received a new assistant principal, but she also left after a month or so. For a while, we had a couple of interim assistant principals who were kind of "subbing" in the position until a permanent one could be hired.
The office clerk (who was accused of, and later absolved of, stealing money from the school) didn't enjoy working for her. Even the night janitor used to vent to some of us teachers about her. So, although my issues with Mrs. Lawrence as a boss and leader could have had something to do with me, it would be wholly unfair and insufficient to suggest it was all to do with me. But more on that -- and her -- later.
My struggles during those first few months of teaching did not end with Mrs. Lawrence. I still struggled with understanding and covering all of the standards I was supposed to teach that year, and I struggled with preparing lesson plans that centered around them. We were required to post all lesson plans to a drive that was specific to our school (this drive was available for the school to view, and checked regularly by admin). I struggled to keep up with my grade level, who consisted of three other teachers (Jordan, of course, and also Aisha Walker, who was about to begin her first year of teaching, and Donn Gallon, who was formerly with the military and beginning a new career as a teacher). I always felt like these three had it "together" far more than I did, and I struggled to, as Christy put it, "fake it 'till you make it" so that I at least appeared that I had it "together," too.
One of the first pieces of data that we teachers needed to gather was Discovery Education data, or DE, as we called it. I didn't understand it at first, but it didn't take too long to catch on. DE was a test that students took on computers, online. Computer lab times were scheduled so that teachers could have their entire class take the test at the same time (since each of our classrooms had about four computers to share among our 30 or so students), so that data could be produced quickly and accurately. I didn't realize, as my students took it for the first time, how important this data would be. Mrs. Lawrence, and our school in general, considered DE data predictive of how our students would score on the CRT (our huge, end-of-year standardized test).
After the DE test, therefore, admin and school strategists accessed the scores and posted the data by grade level. Our 5th grade data board, then, was soon full of our DE scores. Bar graphs showed that Jordan and Aisha's classes both scored over 60% proficient, and mine and Donn's classes both scored just over 40% proficient. I looked at those scores and my heart dropped.
Jordan, though, assured me that my scores were fine. "I would almost prefer having lower scores right now," he told me. "There's more room to grow for the later tests."
It made sense, but his reasoning didn't make me feel any better. It did make me, however, more determined to make sure that our next round of DE tests showed tremendous growth from my class -- despite being the lowest percent proficient now, I vowed to be the highest by the end of the year. (And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how "teaching to the test" begins.)
There was another standardized test that we gave our students early on. It was called Aimsweb and, like DE, measured a student's level in both reading and math. There were two sections in reading -- RCBM and MAZE -- that students had to complete, and two sections in math -- MCOMP and MCAP. The RCBM test required students to read a passage for one minute, and their fluency was scored based on how far they were able to get (with minimal mistakes) during that one minute period of time. The MAZE test featured a passage with missing words, and students had three minutes to circle the appropriate word for each blank in order to demonstrate comprehension. For math, the MCOMP was an eight-minute test in which students had to demonstrate understanding of basic math operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). The MCAP was another eight minute test designed to assess students' knowledge in other mathematical areas, such as data and measurement, fractions, and elapsed time.
We were supposed to use Aimsweb data to assign our students reading groups, and we were also supposed to use it to decide which students would be a part of our RTI group. Now, RTI was a huge deal at my school, and there was a lot of paperwork involved -- in fact, we had an entire staff development day (designated days taken by the entire district, in which students stayed home and staff came in, so that teachers could be trained in various areas) dedicated to the development of our RTI groups. RTI stands for Response to Intervention, and is supposed to be used as intensive instruction before a student is referred to special education testing.
The criteria for selecting an RTI group at our school, as I mentioned before, involved only choosing our six "lowest" scoring students on the RCBM test. After that, we were supposed to use their scores to calculate goals, and we had to set up an entire folder for each student. The folder would contain their Aimsweb data, parental consent (which needed to be sent home and returned as soon as possible) for participation in the RTI group, various other forms filled out by the parent and the teacher, and then, later, a daily log of what was taught each day during the RTI session and how the student responded to the intervention.
It was a lot to handle for someone who'd never even heard the term "RTI" before. I still, years later, don't entirely understand the dynamics of how it's often used -- there's an interesting article that explores how RTI as a requirement has fallen short of the promised results, and has not helped students in the ways it was supposed to. Looking back on my own school during my time with TFA, it always seemed as though RTI was less about intervening on behalf of low-level readers, and more about maintaining shitloads of data on students so that we could remain "compliant" with the state of Nevada's RTI requirements.
But anyway, back to my initial issues with RTI. After perusing my Aimsweb data I approached one of our strategists with the knowledge that my reading scores actually seemed pretty good, whereas my math scores were very, very low. She took a close look at the data with me, and replied that it might be a good idea to provide a math intervention group instead of a reading one. She wasn't sure if this would be all right with Mrs. Lawrence, though, so she said she would check with her and get back to me.
She never did get back to me, but in the interim I put my intervention group on hold. This proved to be detrimental later on, as I was supposed to present my RTI folders to show what I'd done about halfway through the year and, of course, I didn't have anything to show. I tried to defend the fact that this strategist had essentially told me to keep the RTI group on hold until she found out whether I could provide math instead of reading, but in response to this the strategist threw me under the bus and denied such a thing had happened. So I wound up in hot water over having no RTI data a few months into the year and shouldered it on my own.
I did start attempting to provide RTI lessons, but the truth was that I had no idea what I was doing. So some days I would gather my students around the kidney table and we would do a reader's theater script. Or, on other days, we would take turns reading from a leveled book. But I didn't know the first thing about what the group was supposed to look like and basically did the best I could.
A few months into the school year, however, I did start to learn a bit more about how reading groups and such were structured, as Mrs. Lawrence decided to send a number of us to Reading Academy. This course, which occurred once a week for about six weeks, taught us the ins and outs of literacy instruction, and it was actually helpful. It took me from a place of knowing absolutely nothing in regards to what I was doing (in terms of reading instruction, anyway) to a place of knowing at least the basics of teaching differentiated reading. During this time, however, I had to get a substitute once a week (I think I went to Reading Academy every Wednesday), which kind of staggered my week in a way that was either detrimental to my classroom or else good for my mental health (and I couldn't decide which was more likely to be true).
So, as the weeks went on and Reading Academy continued, I returned to my classroom feeling only slightly, rather than utterly hopeless when it came to reading groups and RTI. I left Reading Academy each week with great ideas, but I still struggled to utilize them in the classroom. Despite the fact that I tried, it was hard to decide which of my students needed which of the 5 main "pillars" of reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension -- as 5th graders, most of my students needed fluency and comprehension, and as English language learners [ELLs for short], many of them needed vocabulary, too). It was also hard to decide how to teach those things to my students, and also how to break up groups so that each student was getting exactly what he or she needed (this is what's called "differentiation," and it's required of all teachers, since classes these days are usually comprised of around 30 students who all fall on different areas along the ability spectrum). I had students with high school reading levels who needed literature circles; I had students on grade level who needed grade level material; I had students far below grade level who still needed to be exposed, according to the district, to grade level material, but with extra assistance; and I had students who were not on grade level due to a disability and needed different types of instruction and intervention. Just because I was, technically, a 5th grade teacher did not mean that I was simply teaching 5th grade -- the levels of differentiation needed in order to assure that all students were able to access the 5th grade material presented to them meant that my 5th grade curriculum needed to extend well beyond what is considered to be "5th grade material" on a daily basis.
This is the kind of thing that comes with practice, but during the first part of that first year, it was beyond hard. On many days, I felt like I was attempting an almost impossible task.
And that was just reading -- math wasn't any easier. Because of the way my day was set up -- three hours of teaching in the morning, then back-to-back lunch and prep for 80 minutes, and then a nearly two hour block of teaching in the afternoon -- I taught ELA (English and Language Arts) in the morning and math in the afternoon. My problems teaching math were very similar to the ones I faced teaching ELA; that is, I didn't know how to interpret the standards all the time or how to teach them well (this was before I had a decent grasp on how to use Curriculum Engine, and a year before it became the truly useful resource it is now).
So I often found myself using lunch and prep periods to plan for my math lesson. I would try to plan well in my lesson plans, but I always wound up panicking right before the lesson anyway, trying to figure out how to teach a specific standard.
For example, 5th grade math standard 5.NBT.B.5 (NBT standing for Numbers and Operations in Base 10) states that students will "fluently multiply multi-digit whole numbers using the standard algorithm." On the day I was to teach this standard, I would think, All right, I can do this. I know the standard algorithm!" And I would then stand in front of the class and use the standard algorithm to solve a long multiplication problem. Again and again. I'd ask various students what my next step should be and allow them to guide me, and then I'd release them to do problems in their textbook.
Later, I'd learn that appropriate elementary school instruction involves manipulatives, collaborative work among student groups, multiple avenues to the same answer, videos and music, interactive notebooks, and a number of other strategies and resources that make learning interesting and accessible to young people. During the first part of that first year, I knew none of this -- I only knew that I was to teach certain things, and my only experience teaching (in a college classroom) involved a lot of lecturing and in-depth discussion (in other words, things not always suitable for 5th graders).
Mrs. Lawrence told me this, too. After observing a science lesson in which I used a PowerPoint to introduce students to Newton's laws of motion, she commented, during our post-observation conference, that I couldn't lecture and use PowerPoint presentations the same way I did when I taught college. "The students need to talk to each other," she told me. "You need to get them working together and talking more, and you need to talk less."
The principal wasn't the only one in my classroom offering advice. The strategists -- we had three of them at our school -- were constantly in there as well, to either model a lesson or to just sit and watch, to offer me advice in terms of keeping Mrs. Lawrence happy. "Make sure you write your standards and objectives on the board," they told me. "Don't forget to re-address the standard in your closing. Make sure students know why they're learning what they're learning."
Christy popped into my classroom quite often as well, and although her first few visits consisted of watching my lessons and leaving positive sticky notes on my desk, I soon began to realize that these "visits" were more like observations. She'd come in, assess my lesson plans, talk to students (she'd ask them what they were doing, whether they knew how to do it, why they were doing it, and so forth). She'd tell me that, according to the TAL Rubric used by TFA (that I mentioned in a previous post), my students were "unruly and/or apathetic." There were too many students off-task, she said; too many of them were bored or confused, or didn't even know what the hell was going on in the lesson. I knew that I was struggling, but I honestly didn't think my classroom was that bad.
It became difficult just to get through each day. Each day that I dragged myself to work, the only thought that kept me going was the understanding that, in eight hours or so, I'd get to go home and watch Netflix with my son and drink wine. On most days, though, even that didn't happen because of how much time I spent at school trying to stay above water. I arrived at that building before the sun came up, and often didn't leave until after the sun had gone down. And all the while, I was feeling like a fake teacher, like I sucked and my students deserved so much more; I felt like, no matter how hard I tried and how much effort I put in, I was sincerely bad at what I did. I felt constantly beat down by everyone with the power to lift me up and like I just had to get out because it's hard to feel beaten and broken down every day.
My life became a cycle of drowning, then coming up for air with some great ideas in mind. These ideas would refresh me for a day or so, but I'd soon find myself sinking yet again. With 5 weeks of training, I was simply unprepared to manage my own classroom. I'd spend hours on my lesson plans, trying to figure out how to teach lessons (as I mentioned above), but also how to fit everything into each day. I had to figure out how to meaningfully assess my students. I needed weekly grades for reading, language arts, math, science, social studies, and speaking and listening, all while planning six small reading lessons for my reading groups, making sure I had meaningful centers for my other students to be working on during those small groups, and an intensive RTI lesson. It was so much -- too much -- and I had no idea how to juggle it. Despite trying, my proverbial balls kept dropping, and it became harder and harder to pick them back up again. Most days, I felt like I was failing at everything. Further, because TFA sets itself up on the idea that their teachers are all superstars, I felt like an isolated failure. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. Was I not smart enough, not adamant enough, not persistent enough, or did I not work hard enough? The waves swallowing me were laden with guilt, shame, and extreme burnout.
And in the midst of all of this, I was also a full time graduate student at UNLV. TFA, as I've mentioned before, sets its corps members up with a local university so that each person is earning a master's degree in education while they're completing their two years of teaching with the corps. This first semester, as I was beginning teaching, I had a class in literacy assessment and a class in TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language). This, of course, made it even harder to keep up and stay afloat, as any tiny bit of free time I managed to find went straight to my graduate coursework. I attended classes twice a week, and they began at 4:30. Since work at my school ended at 3:30, I would often have to drive straight from work (with my son, no less) in heavy traffic to the university, where I would spend the next few hours in class before returning home and collapsing in exhaustion.
But my never ending exhaustion wasn't just due to admin and strategists and TFA and teaching and planning and grading and grad school and whatnot ... it was, at times, the students as well. My class was filled to the brim with various personalities, some of which I meshed with naturally, and others I did not. I cared about each of my students as individuals, but some of them were certainly more challenging than others, and for different reasons. Some of them would shut down on most days because of personal issues, and would not talk or respond to me. Others lived in poverty and dealt with hunger, or their electricity had been turned off, or they wore the same outfit all week long or, as in the case of one boy, would fall asleep in class because his brothers stole the covers on their shared mattress all night long. Others, still, did not know how to handle anger, and they'd explode in class.
For example, one boy responded to a disagreement with another student by breaking a pencil, and when I quickly enforced that breaking items was never appropriate, he responded by calling me a stupid bitch.
Not fun. Not easy.
I did consider quitting. It's possible, I think, that I considered quitting at some point at least every day. At one point, however, I drove by a branch of the bank that I'd worked for in California, and I immediately felt a newfound sense of determination that kept me going despite my inner turmoil. I might have been miserable each day in my new work -- I might have been completely overwhelmed and broken down all the time -- but at least I was miserable with a salary, I reasoned. At least I was miserable with a dependable paycheck. At least I was miserable with benefits that covered my insulin and thyroid medication. At least I was miserable with a set schedule that granted me weekends and holidays off (basically, the same schedule as my son, which was no small thing). No matter what was going on, I told myself, I was better off now than I had been before.
As much as I told myself this, I started to grow more depressed by the day. I retreated into myself and became quiet during meetings and such, hoping not to be noticed or asked questions or talked to. I noticed negative changes in my health, too -- my glucose levels (I am a Type 1 diabetic) were consistently high, and this led to extreme lethargy (which, I'm sure, led to even poorer attempts at teaching). I had consistent urinary tract infections, too, which were so uncomfortable that it was difficult for me to stand let alone teach.
I began to wonder if I'd ever make it to winter break, the two weeks of pure bliss that I would have off of work at the end of December. I'd enjoyed Halloween with my students (we had a costume party in the classroom, complete with cupcakes that had previously been forbidden by Mrs. Lawrence), and we'd made fun crafts for Thanksgiving (I spent most of a day letting my students complete those due to a urinary tract infection that kept me off of my feet), but it was the winter holidays that I was looking forward to the most -- and it was mostly because of those two weeks off.
Somehow, winter break arrived. On the last day of school before the break, I felt so excited to leave that building I could hardly contain myself. I knew that I would have to do some work over winter break -- there was lots of planning and grading to do, and I needed to work on organizing my reading groups -- but in that moment I had two weeks ahead of me to worry about it, and I knew that I could take at least the next few days to simply relax. Jordan was excited, too; as well as he hid it during the school year, I could tell that he was happy and relieved to have made it to winter break. I saw him after school and he wrapped me in a huge hug, lifting me off of the floor, proclaiming, "We did it!"
We had done it, I realized. I'd made it through my first few months of teaching, my first semester at UNLV, and the first segment of my Teach For America commitment. And, although the thought of returning in January was enough to cause mild panic attacks, all that was on my mind that particular afternoon were the two weeks ahead of me ... two weeks, I thought, to regroup and hopefully gain some of my sanity back.
Chapter 10: When I (Actually, For Real) Almost Quit
Winter break was equal parts blissful, stressful, and fast.
It was blissful because I slept in most days and had nowhere I absolutely had to be, giving me ample time to rest and engage in my favorite hobbies (such as writing and singing). Also, Christmas happened, which is my favorite time of the year, and I got to share all of it with my son. It was stressful, though, because there was still so much to do. I had piles of grading to get through, lots of planning, and a huge amount of organization for my reading groups to sort out. I actually met with Kristin Stowe, my amazing Reading Academy instructor, at a Starbucks over the break so that she could help me work through ideas in terms of reading groups, and also work out a better behavior management plan (one that still incorporated my school's "rainbow" system, of course). I also caught a flu during winter break, so I slept quite a bit, which added to the stress of things I hadn't yet completed.
Mostly, though, winter break was fast. Seeing as how my weeks at work dragged so much and felt so long, I thought that winter break would feel equally long -- just in a much more satisfying way. Rational people, however, realize that this isn't the way time perception works (usually, by the time we're in first grade or so, we realize that an hour at the dentist feels much longer than an hour at Disneyland), but even my rational side didn't want to admit that winter break was going to fly by until I was hit over the head with that fact and could no longer ignore it -- meaning, of course, that the final Sunday of winter break came and I sat around, depressed, wondering where my break had gone.
I almost dragged myself back to school the next morning. Amy, too, was feeling the same kind of back-to-school depression, and we spent much of the morning in her classroom talking about it.
As low as I felt that morning, I figured that I could try to make the day a good one by taking it slowly with team-building activities and such, incorporating academics as the day went on. I thought it was probable that many teachers began the second part of the year that way. And after all, it wasn't like I needed to worry about getting observed right after winter break, so some time spent re-establishing our classroom culture was likely a good idea.
I was wrong about not being observed, though. Mrs. Lawrence came in to do a pop-in observation first thing that morning, the Monday right after winter break. I'm pretty sure my thought process at seeing her there was, Are you fucking kidding me?
After that first day, however, my instruction began to pick up. Kristin Stowe visited my classroom to model more small group lessons, and my new organized reading groups actually started working out better than I had originally thought they would. My classroom management wasn't good enough at this point to actually facilitate quality reading groups while other students were busy working hard within well-structured centers, but I had at least a shadow of success happening in my room.
Christy, though, didn't see as much success as she wanted to. "It's better," she told me, acknowledging that I'd improved at least somewhat. "But I'm still not seeing your vision come to life in your classroom."
My vision. Right. I had no real clue what, exactly, my "vision" entailed, other than getting through each day. And, thus, I was a Teach For America failure because my students were not passionate and urgent and eager to be in class learning the wonderful things that I had so painstakingly planned for them. I was not making permanent changes to the trajectories of these kids' lives, and I was therefore not doing my job.
Teach For America, you see, is heavily involved with a current trend ("current" meaning the year I began teaching, in 2013) of promoting the idea of "super teachers." Many schools are picking up on this trend, too, and so people hear much more about it these days. Clark County School District even began recruiting teachers as "superheroes," and it was a huge theme during the 2014-2015 school year. The idea is that a teacher should have the capacity to change the lives and forever impact the academic growth of every student, every day. The burden of whether a student passes or fails, whether they graduate or drop out, whether they become eager to learn or apathetic, falls directly on the teacher. This mantra fosters the idea that a teacher can transcend all other aspects of students' lives to ensure that each one is successful.
And, at times, those expectations are absolutely crushing. Because, as everyone knows, teachers are not superheroes -- we are human beings, only capable of so much. Do we try our best to make sure that each of our students achieves success? Of course we do, and we often spend a great deal of time figuring out ways to try and do just that. But we are not superheroes with super powers, capable of super-human tasks. But the cult of the "super teacher" would have you believe otherwise, and teachers everywhere are now getting very mixed messages. On the one hand, we're supposed to be super human and take sole responsibility for the very lives of each of our students. On the other hand, we still deal with communities, legislators, superintendents, and even entire districts that treat us as glorified babysitters, entirely untrustworthy non-professionals that don't even deserve a living wage. The cognitive dissonance that happens trying to balance the two messages can be intense.
And yet, many teachers try to live up to the "super teacher" standards set before them (I was one of them, as I don't like not being the best at what I do). Some teachers go to work hours early and leave hours after students leave, go to work on weekends and holidays, spend remaining free time in professional developments, go out of their way to be on a very personal level with each of their students' families -- they literally pour their entire lives into the pursuit of becoming a "super teacher." Teach For America thrives on this mentality, which is why they actively look for young, determined people who are willing to work themselves into the ground every day of their lives for two years. And they celebrate the ones who do.
America as a whole, actually, celebrates the ones who do. Movies such as Freedom Writers are all about celebrating teachers like this. That particular movie (based on a true story) follows a first-year teacher who worked her ass off to create what was, quite literally, a super classroom. It's an emotional story that makes people tear up at the thought of a teacher so good, so supportive, that she's able to change lives so dramatically. More importantly, it makes teachers determined to be that teacher. As a society, we celebrate the idea of super teachers and have begun to believe that every classroom can be a super classroom like the one in the movie. What's often ignored, though, is what happened to the teacher herself in that movie. She wore herself out, becoming depressed as her life began to unravel around her. She spent money she didn't have on supplies and books and trips. Her marriage ended partly due to her obsession with her class even when she wasn't at work. To create what she did in her classroom, she literally had to give everything, every part of herself, to her job.
It is not sustainable, and it is not reasonable to expect that of anyone. Teach For America (and, increasingly, schools across America) do, though. And it does not take long to feel the crushing weight of that kind of pressure weighing down on you. I felt it very early on.
But I still pulled myself out of bed every morning, determined to try again with each new day. I dragged myself through work, dragged myself to UNLV twice a week (this semester, I had classes in how to teach elementary math and science), and dragged myself to Teach For America meetings (the big ones, held about 5 times a year, were called All Corps; others were smaller and tailored to the specific needs of corps members). As much as I thought about quitting, I knew that I wasn't really going to. I couldn't -- quitting would mean giving up my income and benefits, and that would throw me back into the dire situation I'd only recently escaped from. So I knew that, as much as I wanted to quit teaching, I really couldn't. This article, interestingly, explores the fact that there are many teachers who actually do want to quit but don't, or else can't, and likens the profession to an abusive relationship. Like many, many other teachers, I wanted out, but knew that my options were limited, and I could not quit.
Until the time when I actually almost did.
About halfway through January, I got invited to San Francisco to read some of my work at a live event. This was something I really did not want to miss, and so I began working on the necessary arrangements to be there. I planned to fly out on Thursday night after work, go to the reading event on Friday, and then fly home on Sunday. I could return to work the following Monday. That meant that I would only miss one day of work (the Friday), and I put in for a substitute teacher about a month in advance.
Teachers are pretty fond of joking that it's often easier to go to work sick than setting up for a sub. Much of the time, this is true. Substitutes often need detailed plans for every second of the day, plus backup work in case they finish early. I usually spent a lot of time on mine. I was, therefore, running behind on that Thursday afternoon. It was only a few hours before I needed to be at the airport, and I was rushing to complete the plans. As I was frantically doing this, making sure that nothing was missing or out of place so that I could have a peaceful getaway to California, one of the strategists came into my room.
"I need a copy of your lesson plans for next week," she told me. She needed them in order to plan a small lesson she wanted to teach in my class. It wasn't a ridiculous request, as we were all required to have our lesson plans complete, and, ideally, on the drive, the Friday before we would be using them. My lesson plans for the following week were not yet done, however; I'd planned on finishing them on the plane and then submitting them to the drive on Monday morning when I arrived back at school.
I told her, "I don't have those lesson plans finished yet. I'm going to do them on the plane, and then I can e-mail them to you -- is that all right?"
She looked annoyed. "Don't worry about it. I'll just pull them off the drive."
"They won't be on the drive until Monday, when I get back into town," I pointed out. There were lesson plans in the drive already for the coming week, but they were only partially complete. Most of the plans were old plans, a template plan that I used to construct all new ones. If she pulled the plans now, they would not reflect the lessons I planned to teach the following week and that, of course, would be a problem.
"I need them by tomorrow," she told me.
"Then I can e-mail you."
This frustrating back and forth seemed to go on for far too long ... but when she finally left the room, I was under the distinct impression that she would wait for my e-mail. She, as I would learn later, must have been under a very different impression (or else, as I have long suspected but never vocalized to her, she decided to play "spy" for Mrs. Lawrence and pulled my old lesson plans knowing in advance that they were old -- but I'll get to that in a moment).
I finished my lesson plans on the plane (as I'd planned to do) and then started making revisions to the piece I'd be presenting later that weekend. Once I'd landed in San Francisco, I took the BART train to meet the friends I'd be staying with, and then proceeded to enjoy an evening of wine and talking. That night included much laughter, which I desperately needed at that point.
The next day, as promised, I sent my lesson plans to the strategist who needed them. I thought that would be the end of that. I received an e-mail from her, though, saying that she hadn't received my lesson plans, and that she'd just go into the drive and get them. Of course, the lesson plans in the drive were not the ones she needed, so I tried e-mailing the plans to her once again. I didn't hear back, but I did get an email from another strategist, informing me that one of my students was being moved from my class.
The e-mail was also addressed to Mrs. Lawrence and Mr. Gallon and went something like this: "This is to inform you that, after meeting with [name of student]'s parent, [name of student] will be removed from Ms. Sirls' class and into Mr. Gallon's class, effective as of Monday, February [I don't remember the exact date, but it was either the 1st or 2nd, I think]."
That was all. I found out, through an e-mail, that I was losing a student. There was no explanation as to why this was happening (though this did happen to be the same student who had called me a stupid bitch some months earlier). The principal hadn't even bothered to e-mail me herself about it. I hadn't been involved in any meetings regarding this student, had not been asked about how he was doing in my classroom, or for my input on the matter. I felt completely blindsided.
And to top it off, I never did know whether the first strategist had received my lesson plans or not.
I tried to forget about it so that I could have a nice weekend filled with wine, great conversation, episodes of The Spoils of Babylon, walks along the San Francisco beach with my friends, and morning walks to the coffee shop.
I returned to school that Monday, and shit hit the proverbial fan. Everything I'd been worried about all weekend suddenly became a blinding reality in ways I'd never expected.
I was in the middle of teaching a math lesson when one of the strategists (the one who had informed me over e-mail about my loss of a student -- something that admin never did attempt to discuss with me) came into my room and told me, abruptly and curtly, that Mrs. Lawrence needed to see me immediately. So immediately, in fact, that the strategist would look after my class while I went, right then and there, to her office.
My stomach dipped. It couldn't be good that Mrs. Lawrence would pull me from my class, right in the middle of the day, rather than schedule a meeting with me. Whatever it was must be urgent. I told myself that urgent didn't necessarily mean bad, and kept my cool as I left my classroom. I entered the principal's office with an anxious smile on my face.
"You wanted to see me?" I asked.
She looked up at me with the serious expression I'd grown so accustomed to seeing on her and told me to sit down.
What proceeded thereafter can only be expressed as an emotional flogging in two parts. First, she began by ripping me apart for a math lesson she'd observed just prior to my trip to California. The lesson had featured a team building activity (building towers out of dry spaghetti, marshmallows, and tape), and then using data from the activity to practice our math standard of the day. Mrs. Lawrence was very upset that she was unable to link my lesson to the standard I was teaching, and even more upset that this had happened during Intense Week.
Intense Week happened once every 3-4 weeks or so. When Mrs. Lawrence assigned an "intense week," she wanted all classroom teachers to "intensely" teach multiple standards at one time -- because, you know, cramming students' heads full of information during a short, one week period totally increases understanding and retention. Or something. But if Mrs. Lawrence liked one word even more than "data," it might have been "rigor" -- whatever you happened to be teaching, during intense week or not, it had better meet her interpretation of rigorous. My lesson was apparently not nearly intense or rigorous enough.
I think it's always a good thing for people to understand their shortcomings and where they happen to go wrong in certain places, learn from them, and strive to be better next time. There were times when Mrs. Lawrence offered me this kind of guidance. Today was not one of those days, however. Mrs. Lawrence verbally cut me open over my horrible, non-rigorous, non-relevant lesson, her tone and volume continually rising to a shrill crescendo. I sat before her, partly frozen and partly trying to defend myself against what obviously couldn't be defended to her. The more she continued, the more it felt like her words were ripping me apart to confirm with aching clarity what I'd felt for so long now -- I was a horrible teacher.
The second half of this verbal beating began with an accusation that I wasn't keeping my lesson planning up to date. She claimed that she'd printed my weekly plans that morning, and that they were copies of old lesson plans, not new ones. I insisted that, although I had uploaded the new plans that morning when I'd arrived at school, they were definitely completed and fresh. I knew for a fact that I had done that, too, as I'd arrived especially early just to make sure I had time to -- I remembered doing it very clearly, and thus couldn't figure out where this accusation was coming from. I tried to explain that I used the old ones as a template, but filled in new plans.
"Are you sure you uploaded the new ones this morning?" I asked, suspecting that she'd received old lesson plans from a certain strategist prior to my morning upload.
Mrs. Lawrence insisted that she had, and challenged my denial of her accusation by turning to her computer and attempting to upload the lesson plans right then and there. I suppose she thought that by pulling them up while I was sitting there would catch me like a toddler with a hand in the cookie jar, and I'd have nothing left to say about it. When she tried to open the document, though, it wouldn't come up. I could see the fury building inside of her, as she automatically assumed that her inability to access my plans meant that the document was open in my room already. With rage blazing in her eyes, she demanded, "You're working on your plans right now, aren't you?"
I maintained that I wasn't, that they were done and uploaded, just like I'd said. So Mrs. Lawrence picked up the phone and dialed the assistant principal, whom she then asked to print out my lesson plans so she could see them. At this point, I was feeling pretty shaken -- obviously, this woman thought that I'd not only planned nothing for the week, but then proceeded to get caught in the act and then lie about it. And rather than investigate a possible misunderstanding, she seemed determined to prove that she'd caught me in an unprofessional display of non-compliance.
A moment later, the assistant principal arrived with my lesson plans and handed them over. Triumphantly, Mrs. Lawrence looked them over and then handed them to me. To my dismay, they were old lesson plans. For a moment, I sat dumbfounded, because I clearly remembered uploading the new ones that morning.
"I do have new plans," I told her, my voice shaking. "I uploaded them to the computer this morning. The only thing I can think of is that I forgot to load them to the actual drive, and that's why you're seeing the old ones." Feeling somewhat desperate now, I continued to relay that morning's events, and how I'd definitely brought new plans in. "I know that, at least, they're on the computer that I uploaded them to this morning. Can I run back to the classroom and print them off from there? I'll be right back, and then you can see that I do have new ones, but just forgot to load them."
Mrs. Lawrence, instead, decided to investigate herself. She walked me to the assistant principal's office and made me wait with her, to be babysat while she looked through my room on her own. I don't know exactly what she was looking for or what she expected to find. I don't know if she thought that I was planning on running back to my room to complete my supposedly non-existent lesson plans in the span of a few seconds. All I do know is that she went to my room without me, with my students still there (although I'd asked her to please wait to search my room until after my students had left for the day), while I stared, teary-eyed, at the wall of the assistant principal's office.
Aside from the strategist who had taken over the classroom while I went to meet with Mrs. Lawrence, the special education aid was also there that day to assist some of his sped students. Although I don't know exactly what happened in my classroom or what was said, the following day he brought me a small gift and asked if I was all right. I wasn't, but the gesture helped.
When she returned to pick me up from my mini incarceration in the assistant principal's office, she had new plans in her hands.
"These are what I found on the computer," she announced as we returned to her room.
They were the right plans. And I showed her that, too. I showed her how the plans didn't match the ones she'd previously shown me. I showed her how the lessons were obviously different, and how I'd obviously written fresh plans for the week. It didn't matter, though. She just put the plans down and ignored them, continuing to berate me for not being in compliance with the lesson plan rule (even though I was, and could now prove it).
I asked to be excused to the restroom, only because I couldn't control my tears at this point. She told me, quite exasperatedly, not to cry. She did, however, allow me to go to the restroom to clean myself up. And then I did my best to maintain my composure as I returned to class.
In all of the jobs I've ever worked, and through all of the bosses I've ever had, I can't pinpoint a time when I've ever been treated as unprofessionally and poorly as I was on that day. That day, I lost my will to keep teaching. My job wasn't about teaching anymore; rather, it was becoming about making sure that every single aspect of every single expectation was in place and just so, so that nobody could claim that I wasn't doing my job. The microscope had descended on me, and my work environment had become a mess of anxiety, intimidation, and fear.
My health began to suffer. My glucose levels began to skyrocket because of the stress, and I had a few trips to the emergency room to help get them under control. One morning, I arrived at school only to discover that my glucose was well over 300 (and I hadn't even eaten anything that day). I decided, with the help of Kristin Stowe, that I needed to leave and get my health under control before I could do anything else. I went to the front office to explain my situation, but, because I didn't have a substitute in place, Mrs. Lawrence didn't want me to leave.
I left anyway. And I left with the internal knowledge that I wouldn't be returning.
I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew I couldn't continue on the way I was. Something had to change. I began to brainstorm all of the things I could possibly do to make money if I quit my teaching job. I knew I'd likely have to go back to minimum wage positions for a while, at least until I figured something out. I felt between a rock and a hard place, and had no idea how to proceed.
I met with Christy to tell her about what was going on, and why I had sunk so low. Although I was hoping for some sympathy and direction, she all but blamed me for the situation I'd found myself in. It was my fault, and maybe if I'd just tried harder with Mrs. Lawrence, then she wouldn't have treated me so badly. It was typical TFA spiel when addressing a distraught corps member's depression: You're not trying hard enough, working hard enough, doing enough. Needless to say, that conversation did not help, and I left Christy with the subtle message that I would be quitting in the near future.
She could sense it, too. It was during this meeting that she asked me, as she did many times when I expressed frustration, "Why are you here, Kate? Why did you accept your offer from TFA?"
I responded, as was typical of me, that I wanted to end educational inequity. The real reason, of course, was that I accepted the offer because I was in desperate need of a profession and, more importantly, a steady paycheck. Now that I had one, leaving was difficult. Still, though, I felt I needed to leave, which brought us to the crux of Christy's question: If I'd truly wanted to end educational inequity, how could I leave? How could that possibly help my students? However badly I was doing, wasn't it at least better than the long-term substitute they were likely to get if I walked out of their lives forever?
Despite this, I was fairly certain that I still wanted to quit.
I found out later that Christy was fairly certain, too. She'd even, at one point, called her own boss to let her know that she was losing a corps member. It seemed pretty set in stone, among my TFA leaders and also various people at my school, that I was leaving.
In all honesty, I tried to. I looked into other areas of employment, but could not find good leads that paid enough to justify quitting. I thought about continuing to teach, just not for Teach For America (after all, I had a three-year alternate license with CCSD, and it would be easier to change schools if TFA wasn't there preventing me from doing it). I wasn't sure if I'd be allowed to keep teaching if I quit CCSD, but I thought about trying.
The truth of the matter, though, as I mentioned earlier, was that I couldn't quit. As much as I wanted to, and as much as I thought about it, I couldn't really quit TFA. They'd given me a loan to help cover the costs of relocating to Las Vegas, and I was on a repayment plan that worked well for me. The rule, however, was that if I quit the program, I would be required to pay the entire loan back in a lump sum, otherwise TFA would sue me for the money. I did not have the money to pay them back. Further, if I quit I would not be eligible for the AmeriCorps grant that was going to cover the student loans I took out for the masters program that TFA required of us. So if I quit, I would be left with these loans, plus a lump sum to TFA that I wouldn't even come close to being able to cover.
In part, I didn't quit because I couldn't quit. I was, in a way, an indentured servant to Teach For America. I also knew I wouldn't make a good living working at bank again, or in retail. But being a single mother with Type 1 diabetes didn't grant me the time necessary to truly seek out a better position for myself. I felt trapped.
But something else happened, too. During the few days I took off to get my health under control, I called my dad. My dad makes a (very good) living as a coach and motivational speaker, so I was hoping he might have some advice for my future. My dad gave me a speech about all of the horrible bosses he'd ever had, and about how I was letting other people control me (and if there's one thing that gets to me, it's the thought of other people controlling me). He spoke to me about how, no matter how my principal had treated me, I was letting her "win" if I quit. He told me to brush it off and walk back in with my head held high, and to do my job the best way I knew how. I don't remember his exact words, but they were powerful.
And so I went back to work with a mixture of despondency and optimism. With my dad's words (and the lyrics to the then-popular Let It Go) in my head, I took his advice. I walked into school with a carefully created smile and my head held high.
I told Mrs. Lawrence I wanted to meet with her, partly because Christy told me I needed to get things sorted out with her. (Christy was rather unhappy with me during this time due to the fact I'd tried to go over her head to get my school site changed after she'd told me it wouldn't happen, but she attended this meeting with me as a supposed support person.) I think that Mrs. Lawrence expected me to be somewhat hostile during that meeting, because I could literally see the surprise light her eyes when I sat down and explained calmly that I wanted to talk about the best ways to move forward together for the sake of our school and our students.
I think Christy was surprised, too. She'd known that I wanted to discuss my ill-treatment with Mrs. Lawrence, and had been expecting me to do that during this meeting. I didn't, though, and Christy was very emphatic afterwards that she thought I'd done the right thing.
This was my situation, and it wasn't going to change. I knew that, and so did everyone else at this point. I would do with it what I could, and do my very best to fall under the proverbial radar while I worked on being the best teacher I could ... by this time, though, I was quite doubtful that there was any chance I'd ever be a decent teacher.
But I could try.
It was blissful because I slept in most days and had nowhere I absolutely had to be, giving me ample time to rest and engage in my favorite hobbies (such as writing and singing). Also, Christmas happened, which is my favorite time of the year, and I got to share all of it with my son. It was stressful, though, because there was still so much to do. I had piles of grading to get through, lots of planning, and a huge amount of organization for my reading groups to sort out. I actually met with Kristin Stowe, my amazing Reading Academy instructor, at a Starbucks over the break so that she could help me work through ideas in terms of reading groups, and also work out a better behavior management plan (one that still incorporated my school's "rainbow" system, of course). I also caught a flu during winter break, so I slept quite a bit, which added to the stress of things I hadn't yet completed.
Mostly, though, winter break was fast. Seeing as how my weeks at work dragged so much and felt so long, I thought that winter break would feel equally long -- just in a much more satisfying way. Rational people, however, realize that this isn't the way time perception works (usually, by the time we're in first grade or so, we realize that an hour at the dentist feels much longer than an hour at Disneyland), but even my rational side didn't want to admit that winter break was going to fly by until I was hit over the head with that fact and could no longer ignore it -- meaning, of course, that the final Sunday of winter break came and I sat around, depressed, wondering where my break had gone.
I almost dragged myself back to school the next morning. Amy, too, was feeling the same kind of back-to-school depression, and we spent much of the morning in her classroom talking about it.
As low as I felt that morning, I figured that I could try to make the day a good one by taking it slowly with team-building activities and such, incorporating academics as the day went on. I thought it was probable that many teachers began the second part of the year that way. And after all, it wasn't like I needed to worry about getting observed right after winter break, so some time spent re-establishing our classroom culture was likely a good idea.
I was wrong about not being observed, though. Mrs. Lawrence came in to do a pop-in observation first thing that morning, the Monday right after winter break. I'm pretty sure my thought process at seeing her there was, Are you fucking kidding me?
After that first day, however, my instruction began to pick up. Kristin Stowe visited my classroom to model more small group lessons, and my new organized reading groups actually started working out better than I had originally thought they would. My classroom management wasn't good enough at this point to actually facilitate quality reading groups while other students were busy working hard within well-structured centers, but I had at least a shadow of success happening in my room.
Christy, though, didn't see as much success as she wanted to. "It's better," she told me, acknowledging that I'd improved at least somewhat. "But I'm still not seeing your vision come to life in your classroom."
My vision. Right. I had no real clue what, exactly, my "vision" entailed, other than getting through each day. And, thus, I was a Teach For America failure because my students were not passionate and urgent and eager to be in class learning the wonderful things that I had so painstakingly planned for them. I was not making permanent changes to the trajectories of these kids' lives, and I was therefore not doing my job.
Teach For America, you see, is heavily involved with a current trend ("current" meaning the year I began teaching, in 2013) of promoting the idea of "super teachers." Many schools are picking up on this trend, too, and so people hear much more about it these days. Clark County School District even began recruiting teachers as "superheroes," and it was a huge theme during the 2014-2015 school year. The idea is that a teacher should have the capacity to change the lives and forever impact the academic growth of every student, every day. The burden of whether a student passes or fails, whether they graduate or drop out, whether they become eager to learn or apathetic, falls directly on the teacher. This mantra fosters the idea that a teacher can transcend all other aspects of students' lives to ensure that each one is successful.
And, at times, those expectations are absolutely crushing. Because, as everyone knows, teachers are not superheroes -- we are human beings, only capable of so much. Do we try our best to make sure that each of our students achieves success? Of course we do, and we often spend a great deal of time figuring out ways to try and do just that. But we are not superheroes with super powers, capable of super-human tasks. But the cult of the "super teacher" would have you believe otherwise, and teachers everywhere are now getting very mixed messages. On the one hand, we're supposed to be super human and take sole responsibility for the very lives of each of our students. On the other hand, we still deal with communities, legislators, superintendents, and even entire districts that treat us as glorified babysitters, entirely untrustworthy non-professionals that don't even deserve a living wage. The cognitive dissonance that happens trying to balance the two messages can be intense.
And yet, many teachers try to live up to the "super teacher" standards set before them (I was one of them, as I don't like not being the best at what I do). Some teachers go to work hours early and leave hours after students leave, go to work on weekends and holidays, spend remaining free time in professional developments, go out of their way to be on a very personal level with each of their students' families -- they literally pour their entire lives into the pursuit of becoming a "super teacher." Teach For America thrives on this mentality, which is why they actively look for young, determined people who are willing to work themselves into the ground every day of their lives for two years. And they celebrate the ones who do.
America as a whole, actually, celebrates the ones who do. Movies such as Freedom Writers are all about celebrating teachers like this. That particular movie (based on a true story) follows a first-year teacher who worked her ass off to create what was, quite literally, a super classroom. It's an emotional story that makes people tear up at the thought of a teacher so good, so supportive, that she's able to change lives so dramatically. More importantly, it makes teachers determined to be that teacher. As a society, we celebrate the idea of super teachers and have begun to believe that every classroom can be a super classroom like the one in the movie. What's often ignored, though, is what happened to the teacher herself in that movie. She wore herself out, becoming depressed as her life began to unravel around her. She spent money she didn't have on supplies and books and trips. Her marriage ended partly due to her obsession with her class even when she wasn't at work. To create what she did in her classroom, she literally had to give everything, every part of herself, to her job.
It is not sustainable, and it is not reasonable to expect that of anyone. Teach For America (and, increasingly, schools across America) do, though. And it does not take long to feel the crushing weight of that kind of pressure weighing down on you. I felt it very early on.
But I still pulled myself out of bed every morning, determined to try again with each new day. I dragged myself through work, dragged myself to UNLV twice a week (this semester, I had classes in how to teach elementary math and science), and dragged myself to Teach For America meetings (the big ones, held about 5 times a year, were called All Corps; others were smaller and tailored to the specific needs of corps members). As much as I thought about quitting, I knew that I wasn't really going to. I couldn't -- quitting would mean giving up my income and benefits, and that would throw me back into the dire situation I'd only recently escaped from. So I knew that, as much as I wanted to quit teaching, I really couldn't. This article, interestingly, explores the fact that there are many teachers who actually do want to quit but don't, or else can't, and likens the profession to an abusive relationship. Like many, many other teachers, I wanted out, but knew that my options were limited, and I could not quit.
Until the time when I actually almost did.
About halfway through January, I got invited to San Francisco to read some of my work at a live event. This was something I really did not want to miss, and so I began working on the necessary arrangements to be there. I planned to fly out on Thursday night after work, go to the reading event on Friday, and then fly home on Sunday. I could return to work the following Monday. That meant that I would only miss one day of work (the Friday), and I put in for a substitute teacher about a month in advance.
Teachers are pretty fond of joking that it's often easier to go to work sick than setting up for a sub. Much of the time, this is true. Substitutes often need detailed plans for every second of the day, plus backup work in case they finish early. I usually spent a lot of time on mine. I was, therefore, running behind on that Thursday afternoon. It was only a few hours before I needed to be at the airport, and I was rushing to complete the plans. As I was frantically doing this, making sure that nothing was missing or out of place so that I could have a peaceful getaway to California, one of the strategists came into my room.
"I need a copy of your lesson plans for next week," she told me. She needed them in order to plan a small lesson she wanted to teach in my class. It wasn't a ridiculous request, as we were all required to have our lesson plans complete, and, ideally, on the drive, the Friday before we would be using them. My lesson plans for the following week were not yet done, however; I'd planned on finishing them on the plane and then submitting them to the drive on Monday morning when I arrived back at school.
I told her, "I don't have those lesson plans finished yet. I'm going to do them on the plane, and then I can e-mail them to you -- is that all right?"
She looked annoyed. "Don't worry about it. I'll just pull them off the drive."
"They won't be on the drive until Monday, when I get back into town," I pointed out. There were lesson plans in the drive already for the coming week, but they were only partially complete. Most of the plans were old plans, a template plan that I used to construct all new ones. If she pulled the plans now, they would not reflect the lessons I planned to teach the following week and that, of course, would be a problem.
"I need them by tomorrow," she told me.
"Then I can e-mail you."
This frustrating back and forth seemed to go on for far too long ... but when she finally left the room, I was under the distinct impression that she would wait for my e-mail. She, as I would learn later, must have been under a very different impression (or else, as I have long suspected but never vocalized to her, she decided to play "spy" for Mrs. Lawrence and pulled my old lesson plans knowing in advance that they were old -- but I'll get to that in a moment).
I finished my lesson plans on the plane (as I'd planned to do) and then started making revisions to the piece I'd be presenting later that weekend. Once I'd landed in San Francisco, I took the BART train to meet the friends I'd be staying with, and then proceeded to enjoy an evening of wine and talking. That night included much laughter, which I desperately needed at that point.
The next day, as promised, I sent my lesson plans to the strategist who needed them. I thought that would be the end of that. I received an e-mail from her, though, saying that she hadn't received my lesson plans, and that she'd just go into the drive and get them. Of course, the lesson plans in the drive were not the ones she needed, so I tried e-mailing the plans to her once again. I didn't hear back, but I did get an email from another strategist, informing me that one of my students was being moved from my class.
The e-mail was also addressed to Mrs. Lawrence and Mr. Gallon and went something like this: "This is to inform you that, after meeting with [name of student]'s parent, [name of student] will be removed from Ms. Sirls' class and into Mr. Gallon's class, effective as of Monday, February [I don't remember the exact date, but it was either the 1st or 2nd, I think]."
That was all. I found out, through an e-mail, that I was losing a student. There was no explanation as to why this was happening (though this did happen to be the same student who had called me a stupid bitch some months earlier). The principal hadn't even bothered to e-mail me herself about it. I hadn't been involved in any meetings regarding this student, had not been asked about how he was doing in my classroom, or for my input on the matter. I felt completely blindsided.
And to top it off, I never did know whether the first strategist had received my lesson plans or not.
I tried to forget about it so that I could have a nice weekend filled with wine, great conversation, episodes of The Spoils of Babylon, walks along the San Francisco beach with my friends, and morning walks to the coffee shop.
I returned to school that Monday, and shit hit the proverbial fan. Everything I'd been worried about all weekend suddenly became a blinding reality in ways I'd never expected.
I was in the middle of teaching a math lesson when one of the strategists (the one who had informed me over e-mail about my loss of a student -- something that admin never did attempt to discuss with me) came into my room and told me, abruptly and curtly, that Mrs. Lawrence needed to see me immediately. So immediately, in fact, that the strategist would look after my class while I went, right then and there, to her office.
My stomach dipped. It couldn't be good that Mrs. Lawrence would pull me from my class, right in the middle of the day, rather than schedule a meeting with me. Whatever it was must be urgent. I told myself that urgent didn't necessarily mean bad, and kept my cool as I left my classroom. I entered the principal's office with an anxious smile on my face.
"You wanted to see me?" I asked.
She looked up at me with the serious expression I'd grown so accustomed to seeing on her and told me to sit down.
What proceeded thereafter can only be expressed as an emotional flogging in two parts. First, she began by ripping me apart for a math lesson she'd observed just prior to my trip to California. The lesson had featured a team building activity (building towers out of dry spaghetti, marshmallows, and tape), and then using data from the activity to practice our math standard of the day. Mrs. Lawrence was very upset that she was unable to link my lesson to the standard I was teaching, and even more upset that this had happened during Intense Week.
Intense Week happened once every 3-4 weeks or so. When Mrs. Lawrence assigned an "intense week," she wanted all classroom teachers to "intensely" teach multiple standards at one time -- because, you know, cramming students' heads full of information during a short, one week period totally increases understanding and retention. Or something. But if Mrs. Lawrence liked one word even more than "data," it might have been "rigor" -- whatever you happened to be teaching, during intense week or not, it had better meet her interpretation of rigorous. My lesson was apparently not nearly intense or rigorous enough.
I think it's always a good thing for people to understand their shortcomings and where they happen to go wrong in certain places, learn from them, and strive to be better next time. There were times when Mrs. Lawrence offered me this kind of guidance. Today was not one of those days, however. Mrs. Lawrence verbally cut me open over my horrible, non-rigorous, non-relevant lesson, her tone and volume continually rising to a shrill crescendo. I sat before her, partly frozen and partly trying to defend myself against what obviously couldn't be defended to her. The more she continued, the more it felt like her words were ripping me apart to confirm with aching clarity what I'd felt for so long now -- I was a horrible teacher.
The second half of this verbal beating began with an accusation that I wasn't keeping my lesson planning up to date. She claimed that she'd printed my weekly plans that morning, and that they were copies of old lesson plans, not new ones. I insisted that, although I had uploaded the new plans that morning when I'd arrived at school, they were definitely completed and fresh. I knew for a fact that I had done that, too, as I'd arrived especially early just to make sure I had time to -- I remembered doing it very clearly, and thus couldn't figure out where this accusation was coming from. I tried to explain that I used the old ones as a template, but filled in new plans.
"Are you sure you uploaded the new ones this morning?" I asked, suspecting that she'd received old lesson plans from a certain strategist prior to my morning upload.
Mrs. Lawrence insisted that she had, and challenged my denial of her accusation by turning to her computer and attempting to upload the lesson plans right then and there. I suppose she thought that by pulling them up while I was sitting there would catch me like a toddler with a hand in the cookie jar, and I'd have nothing left to say about it. When she tried to open the document, though, it wouldn't come up. I could see the fury building inside of her, as she automatically assumed that her inability to access my plans meant that the document was open in my room already. With rage blazing in her eyes, she demanded, "You're working on your plans right now, aren't you?"
I maintained that I wasn't, that they were done and uploaded, just like I'd said. So Mrs. Lawrence picked up the phone and dialed the assistant principal, whom she then asked to print out my lesson plans so she could see them. At this point, I was feeling pretty shaken -- obviously, this woman thought that I'd not only planned nothing for the week, but then proceeded to get caught in the act and then lie about it. And rather than investigate a possible misunderstanding, she seemed determined to prove that she'd caught me in an unprofessional display of non-compliance.
A moment later, the assistant principal arrived with my lesson plans and handed them over. Triumphantly, Mrs. Lawrence looked them over and then handed them to me. To my dismay, they were old lesson plans. For a moment, I sat dumbfounded, because I clearly remembered uploading the new ones that morning.
"I do have new plans," I told her, my voice shaking. "I uploaded them to the computer this morning. The only thing I can think of is that I forgot to load them to the actual drive, and that's why you're seeing the old ones." Feeling somewhat desperate now, I continued to relay that morning's events, and how I'd definitely brought new plans in. "I know that, at least, they're on the computer that I uploaded them to this morning. Can I run back to the classroom and print them off from there? I'll be right back, and then you can see that I do have new ones, but just forgot to load them."
Mrs. Lawrence, instead, decided to investigate herself. She walked me to the assistant principal's office and made me wait with her, to be babysat while she looked through my room on her own. I don't know exactly what she was looking for or what she expected to find. I don't know if she thought that I was planning on running back to my room to complete my supposedly non-existent lesson plans in the span of a few seconds. All I do know is that she went to my room without me, with my students still there (although I'd asked her to please wait to search my room until after my students had left for the day), while I stared, teary-eyed, at the wall of the assistant principal's office.
Aside from the strategist who had taken over the classroom while I went to meet with Mrs. Lawrence, the special education aid was also there that day to assist some of his sped students. Although I don't know exactly what happened in my classroom or what was said, the following day he brought me a small gift and asked if I was all right. I wasn't, but the gesture helped.
When she returned to pick me up from my mini incarceration in the assistant principal's office, she had new plans in her hands.
"These are what I found on the computer," she announced as we returned to her room.
They were the right plans. And I showed her that, too. I showed her how the plans didn't match the ones she'd previously shown me. I showed her how the lessons were obviously different, and how I'd obviously written fresh plans for the week. It didn't matter, though. She just put the plans down and ignored them, continuing to berate me for not being in compliance with the lesson plan rule (even though I was, and could now prove it).
I asked to be excused to the restroom, only because I couldn't control my tears at this point. She told me, quite exasperatedly, not to cry. She did, however, allow me to go to the restroom to clean myself up. And then I did my best to maintain my composure as I returned to class.
In all of the jobs I've ever worked, and through all of the bosses I've ever had, I can't pinpoint a time when I've ever been treated as unprofessionally and poorly as I was on that day. That day, I lost my will to keep teaching. My job wasn't about teaching anymore; rather, it was becoming about making sure that every single aspect of every single expectation was in place and just so, so that nobody could claim that I wasn't doing my job. The microscope had descended on me, and my work environment had become a mess of anxiety, intimidation, and fear.
My health began to suffer. My glucose levels began to skyrocket because of the stress, and I had a few trips to the emergency room to help get them under control. One morning, I arrived at school only to discover that my glucose was well over 300 (and I hadn't even eaten anything that day). I decided, with the help of Kristin Stowe, that I needed to leave and get my health under control before I could do anything else. I went to the front office to explain my situation, but, because I didn't have a substitute in place, Mrs. Lawrence didn't want me to leave.
I left anyway. And I left with the internal knowledge that I wouldn't be returning.
I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew I couldn't continue on the way I was. Something had to change. I began to brainstorm all of the things I could possibly do to make money if I quit my teaching job. I knew I'd likely have to go back to minimum wage positions for a while, at least until I figured something out. I felt between a rock and a hard place, and had no idea how to proceed.
I met with Christy to tell her about what was going on, and why I had sunk so low. Although I was hoping for some sympathy and direction, she all but blamed me for the situation I'd found myself in. It was my fault, and maybe if I'd just tried harder with Mrs. Lawrence, then she wouldn't have treated me so badly. It was typical TFA spiel when addressing a distraught corps member's depression: You're not trying hard enough, working hard enough, doing enough. Needless to say, that conversation did not help, and I left Christy with the subtle message that I would be quitting in the near future.
She could sense it, too. It was during this meeting that she asked me, as she did many times when I expressed frustration, "Why are you here, Kate? Why did you accept your offer from TFA?"
I responded, as was typical of me, that I wanted to end educational inequity. The real reason, of course, was that I accepted the offer because I was in desperate need of a profession and, more importantly, a steady paycheck. Now that I had one, leaving was difficult. Still, though, I felt I needed to leave, which brought us to the crux of Christy's question: If I'd truly wanted to end educational inequity, how could I leave? How could that possibly help my students? However badly I was doing, wasn't it at least better than the long-term substitute they were likely to get if I walked out of their lives forever?
Despite this, I was fairly certain that I still wanted to quit.
I found out later that Christy was fairly certain, too. She'd even, at one point, called her own boss to let her know that she was losing a corps member. It seemed pretty set in stone, among my TFA leaders and also various people at my school, that I was leaving.
In all honesty, I tried to. I looked into other areas of employment, but could not find good leads that paid enough to justify quitting. I thought about continuing to teach, just not for Teach For America (after all, I had a three-year alternate license with CCSD, and it would be easier to change schools if TFA wasn't there preventing me from doing it). I wasn't sure if I'd be allowed to keep teaching if I quit CCSD, but I thought about trying.
The truth of the matter, though, as I mentioned earlier, was that I couldn't quit. As much as I wanted to, and as much as I thought about it, I couldn't really quit TFA. They'd given me a loan to help cover the costs of relocating to Las Vegas, and I was on a repayment plan that worked well for me. The rule, however, was that if I quit the program, I would be required to pay the entire loan back in a lump sum, otherwise TFA would sue me for the money. I did not have the money to pay them back. Further, if I quit I would not be eligible for the AmeriCorps grant that was going to cover the student loans I took out for the masters program that TFA required of us. So if I quit, I would be left with these loans, plus a lump sum to TFA that I wouldn't even come close to being able to cover.
In part, I didn't quit because I couldn't quit. I was, in a way, an indentured servant to Teach For America. I also knew I wouldn't make a good living working at bank again, or in retail. But being a single mother with Type 1 diabetes didn't grant me the time necessary to truly seek out a better position for myself. I felt trapped.
But something else happened, too. During the few days I took off to get my health under control, I called my dad. My dad makes a (very good) living as a coach and motivational speaker, so I was hoping he might have some advice for my future. My dad gave me a speech about all of the horrible bosses he'd ever had, and about how I was letting other people control me (and if there's one thing that gets to me, it's the thought of other people controlling me). He spoke to me about how, no matter how my principal had treated me, I was letting her "win" if I quit. He told me to brush it off and walk back in with my head held high, and to do my job the best way I knew how. I don't remember his exact words, but they were powerful.
And so I went back to work with a mixture of despondency and optimism. With my dad's words (and the lyrics to the then-popular Let It Go) in my head, I took his advice. I walked into school with a carefully created smile and my head held high.
I told Mrs. Lawrence I wanted to meet with her, partly because Christy told me I needed to get things sorted out with her. (Christy was rather unhappy with me during this time due to the fact I'd tried to go over her head to get my school site changed after she'd told me it wouldn't happen, but she attended this meeting with me as a supposed support person.) I think that Mrs. Lawrence expected me to be somewhat hostile during that meeting, because I could literally see the surprise light her eyes when I sat down and explained calmly that I wanted to talk about the best ways to move forward together for the sake of our school and our students.
I think Christy was surprised, too. She'd known that I wanted to discuss my ill-treatment with Mrs. Lawrence, and had been expecting me to do that during this meeting. I didn't, though, and Christy was very emphatic afterwards that she thought I'd done the right thing.
This was my situation, and it wasn't going to change. I knew that, and so did everyone else at this point. I would do with it what I could, and do my very best to fall under the proverbial radar while I worked on being the best teacher I could ... by this time, though, I was quite doubtful that there was any chance I'd ever be a decent teacher.
But I could try.
Chapter 11: Data, Data, Data...
At one of the Teach For America All Corps (a meeting all corps members would attend together every few months) that first year, I was introduced to a panel titled, "Data is Not a Four-Letter Word." Most of us found it funny because, while obviously data is a four-letter word in the literal sense, we were being instructed in how to not hate it as a taboo word. Teach For America, in my experience, loved data collection, just as my principal and school district did. We heard so much about data -- data here, there, and everywhere -- that many of us had, indeed, grown to loathe the word.
Interestingly, Teach For America presents itself as a non-profit dedicated to systemic change within America's educational system, from the ground up; in practice, though, it actually fits right into that proverbial "system." Much of the disdain for today's system is related to the contemporary practice of testing kids into oblivion, and then using those tests to make sweeping decisions regarding the kids themselves, schools, districts, teachers, and curricula. Teachers, parents, and students alike lament that, while such data present a certain snapshot of a child's academic standing, it does not (and cannot) encompass a child's entire story, nor illustrate their exact needs. Further, these test scores are often used to justify ill treatment of teachers, the complete overhaul of schools, and the elimination of "non-testing" subjects, such as foreign languages, the arts, and extra-curricular programs. The time and money saved from cutting these subjects out is usually then put toward programs designed to increase instruction in reading and math (the two areas most often tested), and help scores in those areas increase.
Study after study after study suggest that centering curricula and instruction around the ultimate goal of passing a high-stakes test does no favors for teachers or students. The pressure to produce data that makes the school (and teachers and admin) look good -- pressure that is sometimes linked to funding, teacher pay, or even a student's ability to graduate -- can cause high levels of stress and a tendency to teach test-taking strategies in place of a balanced curriculum. In some cases, such as the infamous scandal in Atlanta that resulted in the arrest of some teachers and administrators, this pressure is met by cheating on the tests.
At my school, nobody knew of a specific curriculum that we were supposed to use. When questioned, Mrs. Lawrence insisted that "the standards" were our curriculum (meaning the Common Core standards, which were later changed to the very similar Nevada Academic Content Standards). In other words, we were supposed to teach those standards, but there wasn't really any direction in how to do that. Every day, we were supposed to address the standard being taught (and there are a lot of them, for each subject) and then teach it. The tough part is that many times the standards overlap, so trying to focus on and teach a specific standard on a specific day isn't always beneficial when you're trying to put together whole units.
Each of the grade levels at my school even had pacing calendars that showed which standards were being taught every single day of the year, and most of the time a single standard was spread out over the course of a week. So, for example, the calendar might show that 5th grade was teaching RL.5.2 every day for an entire week, and our instruction had to mirror that expectation. But when you're a new teacher perusing material created by older, more experienced teachers (which can be found on such lifesaving sites as Teachers Pay Teachers; Read, Write, Think; Better Lesson; Engage NY, and myriad others), it's quite clear that, typically, multiple standards are addressed throughout the course of a few weeks when you're engaging students with a well-crafted unit. You might be addressing both RL.5.2 and RL.5.5 on one day, and then only addressing RL.5.3 on another. But at my school, we were expected to stick to directly teaching a single standard over the course of, usually, one week.
Then, the students would be assessed three times a year with Discovery Education or Aimsweb tests that would highlight the specific standards that most students were "low" in, and we'd be required to have an Intense Week, in which those specific standards were drilled into students' heads. Intensely. (Let me stop for a minute, too, and let you know that if all of these terms are a bit confusing, I hear you -- I felt the same way when I was first introduced to them, which also happened to be the time I had to learn how to teach with them.)
Mrs. Lawrence's ultimate goal was to raise the star rating of the school. She cared about student achievement, but only as measured by data produced from tests. And she only cared about whether students were "green" (meaning proficient). Any students who scored "yellow" or "red" (meaning below grade level) were not recognized for any growth if they hadn't made it to "green" yet. This meant that if a student entered 5th grade at a 1st grade reading level, and then proceeded to show tremendous growth and demonstrate a 3rd grade reading level by mid-year (which is a huge feat, let me tell you), it did not matter at all. Such students were still seen as failing and bringing the school down (you can't raise a star rating with mediocre test scores), and the teachers were seen as not doing their jobs well enough.
And she thought the best way to make sure that teachers were producing students with outstanding test scores was to put tremendous pressure on us and instill a sense of competition over who had the best data. Throughout the school, our walls were decorated not with student work, but with test data pertaining to grade levels, and also to individual teachers. Mrs. Lawrence liked to display all of the data everywhere so that everybody knew whose classes were performing well and whose were not. Although the high-stakes, end-of-year CRT (Criterion Reference Test) wasn't used in this way, there were plenty of other tests, used as CRT predictors, that were.
Walking through the school, you could therefore see that so-and-so's class was 67% proficient in reading, but so-and-so's class, in the same grade level, was only 39% proficient. And then the judgement could begin. The former was obviously a "good" teacher and the latter a "bad" one, and a subtle divide between the "good" teachers and the "bad" teachers (otherwise known as the ones that Mrs. Lawrence did and did not like, respectively) began.
My data wasn't terrible. But it certainly wasn't the best. To be honest, at the start of the year I didn't care very much about test scores; I wanted, for example, to teach my students to be deep, critical thinkers and how to appreciate literature rather than how to respond to it on a standardized test (and I know that the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive -- I just didn't see why the tests were weighed so heavily). But once the sanctions began, and the microscope began descending on those whose data wasn't considered good enough, I changed my tune. If you were one of the teachers Mrs. Lawrence zoomed in on with said microscope, your world changed. Sometimes she'd send strategists into your room all the damn time to observe what you were doing. Sometimes she'd make your lesson plan expectations a million times more detailed than for another teacher who was producing proficient test scores. Sometimes she'd call you into her office and have a nice little chat like the one I described in my last chapter. No matter what specifically happened, though, work life wasn't fun if you were one of "those" teachers.
I began to focus more on how to get my students to pass these freaking tests. I would spend hours looking through old tests, trying to figure out the best way to teach my kids how to answer questions. I even signed up to teach during our school's 10-week "CRT boot camp," which was four hours of school every Saturday. The purpose of Saturday school was to teach test-taking strategies to increase test scores. The entire thing was infused with phrases such as "we'll do our best on the test," and we taught students how to crack tests in much the same fashion as The Princeton Review.
As a side note, I want to throw out there that Saturday school was an awful decision on my part. My first year of teaching through TFA was one of the most stressful, difficult times of my life (and I've had my share of those), and dipping into one of my two days off in order to earn more money and increase test scores was not conducive to my physical or mental health. My two-year-old cat even died during this time, meaning that I'd spent a few sleepless nights at the veterinary clinic and shelled out money I didn't have trying to save my pet who didn't wind up making it. I wasn't in any shape to spend Saturday mornings at work. But I endured it.
I hated the testing culture at our school and the competition that Mrs. Lawrence tried to bring out in teachers. Don't get me wrong -- I usually enjoy healthy competition and love working my way up to the top in whatever I do. But I really felt like teachers should come together and work together for the benefit of all students, rather than develop a hyper-focus on ensuring that their own class performed better on the tests than anyone else's. And the latter was exactly what I felt Mrs. Lawrence wanted for the culture at our school. Although I worked with some great people, there was no real camaraderie. I began to develop paranoia about dishonesty and gossip pervading the school (if you're part of the bully's group, you're at least not the one getting bullied), and I know I'm not the only one who felt that way.
High-stakes testing, and the use of test data to make all decisions regarding schools, teachers, and students, is usually defended by a need to assess whether students are learning, and a need to hold teachers accountable. I think there are some non-educators out there who envision us teachers as lazy parasites who would sip wine in the classroom while our students did whatever the hell they wanted all day, if only we could get away with it. If only it weren't for those pesky legislators and non-educators with opinions, insisting that we actually teach!
Of course, I jest. Some research, though, has suggested that high-stakes testing, and the accompanying obsession with test data, is not the best way to measure accountability or achievement, or to improve education. You can't simply pressure teachers and students into producing impressive test data. This model runs education like a business, treating test scores like sales made. Rather, it's been suggested (and I agree) that the key to improving education is attacking the injustices that create educational inequity in the first place -- school funding linked to property taxes, for example, which guarantees that the richest neighborhoods get the best schools. There are social policies that would alleviate some of the stress that children from poor families experience, which can also lead to decreased academic success. We can start trusting the professional teachers to do what they know is best for their students, instead of legislating them into robots who deliver material. We can treat teachers as professionals and pay them as such, making the profession desirable for high school graduates to pursue, rather than leaving it as the "fall back" profession it's become to so many. We can hold students and parents accountable, not just teachers, for what happens in a student's academic life, and help struggling families. There is so much that can be done to improve education, and that vast array does not begin and end with tests.
Interestingly, while Teach For America presents itself as a non-profit dedicated to ending educational inequity, it does not attempt to attack any of the aforementioned causes of said inequity. Many of its leaders agree that these things are the causes, and much time is even spent during Institute and All Corps discussing poverty and racial inequality and other social ills that tend to be precursors to a lack of academic success. Still, when it comes to actual practice, Teach For America, in my experience, showed the same obsession with test data as my school did.
When my cohort (which meant we were all elementary school teachers led by the same MTLD) got together for meetings with Christy, she would spend a great deal of time talking about data. All of us had to send her updated data every month or so, and then during meetings she'd share it with all of us. She'd present graph after graph detailing what percentage of us were proficient in our test data, what percentage of us were approaching proficient, and what percentages had grown or decreased in test performance.
I understand that data is used to assess certain areas of student performance, and that's useful some of the time. What killed me was that, just like my school, Teach For America used the test data to measure whether or not we were successful as teachers. Were we being those life-changing, system-crashing educators we'd heard so much about at Institute? Well, the data got to decide. There were times when our "classroom vision" (which I still hadn't perfected) was addressed, and we were also assessed on that, but at the end of the day data dominated the question of whether we were doing well (or not).
One time, I asked Christy about this. Why, I wanted to know, did Teach For America focus so much on testing and data when it professes to be about changing the system from the inside out? She told me that because the system is currently all about testing and data, they have to work with that. I still didn't understand how anyone was going to change anything by maintaining the status quo, especially when many of us believed that the hyper-focus on data was more damaging to our students than anything. But for all of the social justice hype that TFA sold us, once we were in our classrooms we were encouraged to shut up about the injustices we felt our students -- and ourselves -- were facing due to the data obsession, and to fall in line with assuming that high test data was the equivalent of student achievement.
It has been noted in recent years that, at the same time it touts itself as an instrumental force in attacking educational inequity, TFA has been accepting large donations from companies that have a decided interest in the destruction of public education, namely Wal Mart. In addition, TFA has been known to be heavily involved in the creation of more and more charter schools, particularly KIPP (Knowledge is Power) schools. Critics say that support of the charter movement is actually assisting in the defamation and destruction of public education, funneling federal money into schools that function like public institutions, but are run more like private ones. So the questions remain -- if TFA is really about making sure every student has access to a quality education, why do they submit to practices believed to harm public school morale, why are they supported by donors known to advocate for-profit schools over public ones, and why do they support the spread of charter schools in place of traditional public ones? Salon hosted an interesting piece on TFA being a "pro-corporate, union-busting" company back in 2014, when I was still a corps member (this isn't an academic piece, but it does point to some of the issues I mentioned above and it's well documented).
I'm not going to jump out onto the limb that professes TFA to be a well-disguised corporate infiltration of the education system. But I will say that I think they've made some choices that don't match up with their supposed agenda of ending educational inequity.
In my experience, one of those choices was the obsession with testing and data. It didn't take me long during my first year to understand, as I was getting to know around 30 unique, young individuals, that high test data does not necessarily equate with good teaching. It may be one facet among many, but it isn't everything.
Teach For America, as I experienced it, did not really believe that.
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