Five

The kids in my class turned out to be rising first graders, which just means that they were really kindergartners who could benefit from summer school. I'd done half of my student teaching in first grade, and so I set up a routine like the one I knew. My class was mostly boys, all Latino and Black, but it was one of the three little girls, Cecilia, who challenged my authority on that first day.

I gathered the children in a circle on the carpet. "Welcome to first grade," I started.

Cecilia frowned and shook her head; then she looked me straight in the eye. "No, miss, we're in kindergarten," she corrected me. There were a few nods from the group assembled around me.

"Kindergarten's over," I said firmly. "You're first graders now. Let's get to work." And that's how it went for the next four weeks. If any students said they couldn't do what we were doing, I told them that they simply had no choice-- first grade demanded it from them.

And, whichever it was, a high tide of either confident inexperience or inexperienced confidence, fifteen little boats were raised a bit that summer. Even so, I cried as I carried my box of books and classroom supplies out to the car on the last day, because as great as summer school had been, it was August, and I still didn't have a teaching job.

Four

After the foundations course, my path diverged from Ruth's. With a resume as a professional actress, she was working toward being a high school drama teacher, and I was more interested in elementary, so we didn't have any more classes together. Then, before we had even finished our degree program, Ruth was hired mid-year to replace the drama teacher at the same middle school that she had attended. Meanwhile, once we graduated in December, I was taking any sub job that they called me for, working all over the county, trying to find a toe-hold in what was turning out to be a very tricky job market for me. In February, Ruth organized a dinner theater at her school, and as a favor, I did the cooking with a crew of middle school kids. After curtain call on the last evening, she introduced me to her principal, who shook my hand, complimented the spaghetti and meatballs, and promised to keep me in mind for any openings.

The school year ended, and I didn't have a teaching position. I was just about to take a summer job as a tourmobile guide, when I got a phone call offering me a summer school class-- four weeks of first grade language arts. On a hot day near the end of June, I walked into my first real classroom: 15 desks crammed into a tiny room off the library with bookshelves covered in brown paper. The place had a decidedly "pardon our mess" vibe, but I couldn't have cared less. There was a chalkboard and me, and students on the way.

Three

Q: What do you call the guy who graduates at the bottom of his med school class?

A: Doctor.

What does it take to be a teacher? The credentialing system that is currently in place requires a certain amount of course work and passing scores on some standardized tests. Neither of those things qualifies you to be a teacher, though. In theory, we act as if teaching is quantifiable, but in practice it is no such thing.

Teaching has been compared to herding cats, and that's not a bad analogy. In the name of skills and content, we try to impose a unified vision on a bunch of individuals who have little or no knowledge of those things. That's a lot of free will running around in a confined space for ten months or so-- somebody's bound to get hurt once in a while. Sometimes I think that teachers should swear the Hippocratic oath, first do no harm, because we have such ample opportunity to inflict injury, and in so many cases, we rely on the resiliency of the students to wash away our iniquities.

Neither Ruth nor I had children when we started our M.Ed, program, although she confided in me that she and her husband were trying to start a family. I guess she was thinking that being a teacher might be a good career when it came time to be a mom.

Two

The first thing I remember about Ruth is a shared eye-roll. Two weeks into the class, I was still in that same seat that I had chosen the first night, and she was sitting behind me. One of the younger people, or maybe it was one of the middle-aged women who always seemed to monopolize the class conversation, had said something silly, and I sighed and looked over my shoulder. She had the exact same expression that I imagined was on my face at the time, and we made eye contact and smiled. That was it, too; we were fast friends ever after.

That evening, instead of sitting hunched reading over my notes at break, I actually had a conversation. It turned out that Ruth and I were the same age with what seemed to be similar brands of... Sarcasm? Dry humor? Cynicism? It was hard to tell, but, whatever it was, we found each other very amusing. And even though I had liked the class before, now I really looked forward to going.

Neither of us had any teaching experience, and so to us, everything that Dr. Y said was theoretical and hypothetical. In addition, I had come to the class with a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in English Literature, and while I appreciated the educational theory that we discussed, Dewey, Montessori, Piaget, and so forth, all that stuff about classroom management, and dealing with colleagues, parents, and administration, seemed, well, not very intellectual to me, and therefore, not very important.

Are you laughing, yet?

I Wanna Be a Teacher: Part 1

I was 29 when I started my masters in education and licensure program. The first required course was a nine hour class that met every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 6:30 to 9:30. It was taught by a kindly retired public school administrator in his early seventies and was called something like foundations of education. There were probably 35 people in there when it started, ranging in age from early 20's to mid-50's. There were experienced teachers who were trying to move up on the pay scale, and military people who were close to retirement and looking for a second career, and people like me, who just thought teaching might be a good idea. In retrospect, that's a pretty broad audience, and I don't know how I would spin a lecture for that group, but Dr. Y did a pretty good job-- at least I remember thinking so at the time.

The first night, I took a seat in one of those one-piece chair-desk combos that so many classrooms are furnished with. My place was one from the front, next to the wall that the door was on. The room was stuffy, but not unpleasant; it had that chalk and textbook smell, although the only books in there were a couple of cracked dictionaries. New notebooks were arranged just so on each desktop, and there was the chirp of pens clicking nervously, like crickets, underneath quiet small talk as we waited for our class to begin. A tiny woman with long black hair sat behind me, and being the introvert that I am, I ignored her; in fact the only reason I know she was there is because later she told me so.

No Bright Lines

I heard a story today about a teacher in our building who was so frustrated with one of his classes that he changed his seating chart so that all the disruptive kids were in the back. He told them why they were there-- they were obviously more interested in talking and socializing than in learning, and he was tired of competing with them. Therefore, the students who were serious about the subject were in front, where he could focus on them. The seat assignments were made strictly on class behavior, but the students complained to another adult in the school that all the black kids were in the back of the room, and sure enough, when that person went to check, that's how it was.

The teacher, who is white, said he never even noticed any racial component to the new seating arrangement, and the black students admitted that they were inappropriately talkative in his class. Obviously, this is a case where it might be easy to start tossing accusations back and forth, but it is also a situation that, to an educator, might seem easy to fix. Put the disruptive kids in front, we might suggest to the teacher. Pay more attention in class, we would say to the kids, followed by, Your education is important, you know.

I was a little appalled by this story, even though I empathized with the teacher's frustration. And it was that idea of frustration that reminded me of something that happened in one of my own classes just last week. Every Monday, my students have an assignment that involves answering some questions in writing about their independent reading book in order to prepare for a short small-group discussion. The groups are heterogeneous, because I think that each student has something of value to contribute. On this particular day, it seemed like there were a couple of students in each group who were really dragging their heels on getting the written part done, and so they were holding up the discussion. Impulsively, I decided to reorganize the groups to put all the slower-working kids together, so that the other students would have more time for their conversation.

In less than a minute, the kids had moved, and three groups were talking, and one was still writing. I went over there. They knew, as did the other students, that the reason I had re-organized everyone was because they weren't finished. Whatever I said to them was a mixture of encouragement and urgency, and for the most part, they responded, hurrying to get their work done so that they could begin their discussion and earn their points.

I went off to check on the other groups, but, keeping that teacher's eye on everybody, it wasn't long before I looked across the room at those students, and for the first time, I saw who they were: two boys who were going through the special ed referral process, a girl with obvious attention issues, another girl who was new to our school system and whom we were finding to have some big gaps in her skills and knowledge, and another girl whose dad is fighting Stage IV cancer. All were kids of color.

I don't know what it all means. As teachers, we group and regroup students all the time, based on many factors. It's called, "Best Practices". I do know this: both of these stories make me uncomfortable, and I'm going to keep thinking about them.

That Kid

You know RJ. You taught him. He was a reluctant reader, writer, worker. Heck, he was a reluctant everything, except talker. Remember? He would not shut up. All through your class he talked. He didn’t even care enough to bother being quiet or sneaky about it. The other kids eventually got as aggravated as you were. They actually preferred listening to you, over him. In fact, if you assigned him a seat near them, they often came up after class and requested a change. God forbid you put him in a group to work. Even the lowest performing students would complain bitterly to be saddled with Mr. Obnoxious, although he was a convenient scapegoat. How could you blame them for not getting the assignment done? They had RJ!

I taught RJ my first year. To begin with, rather than become annoyed, I tried the strategies I’d learned in school. First, I called home. I was certain that he was going to "get it" when I told his mom about his outrageous behavior. I felt a little bad about it, but, hey, I’d warned him. I had specifically told him that I was going to call his parents if he showed up once more without his homework, and he defied my edict. On the day of the call, I was a little surprised when he didn’t seem to care. I was irritated, too. We marched into the team room, and I picked up the phone. I handed it to him and told him to dial the number. He shrugged and punched the buttons. “Mom? It’s me. My teacher wants to talk to you.” He listened for a minute. “Nothing,” he said into the phone. “Okay.” He hung up and turned to me. “She’s too busy to talk right now.”

“What? Give me that phone!”

“She said she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

I rolled my eyes and dialed the number on the data sheet. It rang and rang. I kept the phone to my ear, glaring at RJ.

“I told you so,” he said.

A week later, after constant attempts, I despaired of ever speaking to RJ’s parents. I implemented Plan B: Proximity. There was one seat directly in front of my desk. That is where I put RJ. I intended to personally supervise his education from here on out. There was one little problem, though: RJ talked to whoever was nearby, and I am very distractible. Many times I would catch myself in mid-conversation with him, “I can NOT talk to you right now! I’m trying to give directions.”

One day, I put a journal prompt on the board. If you could make or change any law, what would it be and why? RJ opened his notebook and wrote nothing. He waited patiently for me to engage him.

“RJ,” I started, but he interrupted me.

“You know, there are some crazy laws out there.”

“Well, why don’t you write about one of them?” I suggested.

“I mean it. There are some CRAZY laws.”

“OK,” I said. “WRITE a-bout them,” I spoke slowly and loudly, and I leaned toward him with my head wagging. Some of the other students lifted their eyes toward us.

Undeterred, he continued, “Did you know that in Ohio you’re not allowed to go out on Sunday if you’re ugly?”

“I would love to read about that, IN YOUR JOURNAL,” I said.

“Really. Really! REALLY. It’s true. I should know, I used to live in Ohio,” he finished. He looked at me like, top that.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Well what’d you do all day on Sundays?” And then I laughed.

The silence was painful, but the “Ooooohh.” was worse. Not for RJ, though. His eyes narrowed, and his face froze for the briefest moment, but then he just changed the subject and moved on to some crazy law in Michigan. His knowledge really was kind of remarkable.

I felt triumphant at first; the other kids were still snickering about it when they left, and I heard a few repeating it to their friends even days later. I was the funny teacher who put that annoying kid RJ in his place.

Not long after the “Ohio incident” RJ moved. I was the last teacher to fill out his transfer slip. I looked at his grades. He was failing everything. I added one more F to the collection and signed my name. I looked up and handed him the paper. “Good luck,” I said.

Ten years later, I ran into a student from that class. We were catching up and reminiscing. “Remember that great skit you and Kristin did for your book project?” I asked her.

“No, not really,” she answered.

“Oh,” I replied, disappointed. “What about that poem…?”

“Mm-mm. You know what I do remember, though?” She said, laughing. “It’s illegal to go outside in Illinois if you’re ugly!”

“Ohio,” I corrected her, “but only on Sunday.”

“Whatever! That was hi-larious; I will never forget that.”

Still chuckling, she walked away, leaving me to wonder what RJ remembers about sixth grade.