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A Person, Living, in a Place

Wess — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:54:10 +0100

FINE, I guess I'll have my fourth root beer float in two days. If I must. And while I drink it, I'll think about how crazy it is that I'm actually, seriously considering teaching next year. How weird it is to realize that might be what I want to do. So weird, in fact, that I'm not even sure if these are rational thoughts or whether some alien has planted them in my brain. Rational Thoughts: Teaching sucked me dry, ripped me apart, left me desiccated but still gushing. I walked away with such finality, and was so happy to be free! I was never good enough at it to actually get results--I have literally zero evidence of improved student achievement. Which was the worst thing ever because that's what I was There To Do. There was just no TIME, and the kids were so far behind, it was like climbing an impossible mountain from the very moment I started. I continuously ached for the end of the day/week/grading period/school year. And my kids were mean! And my school was drama! And Everything Was Bad! Alien Thoughts: Elementary kids aren't as mean. In fact, most of them really like their teachers. And they're cuter and by definition, they just can't be as far behind. And the whole way I think has changed, especially about what teaching and teachers Should Be. There are two completely different things: teaching because you're going to try it for two years on the one hand, and teaching because you think you might want to do it for a really long time on the other hand. Permanence is important, and I'm moving toward permanence. Living for a long time in a place, teaching for a long time in the place that you live, means slow-but-steady can start to be satisfying. Putting down roots means "building relationships" isn't just something you do because Results, but something you do because you're a person, living, in a place. The tension, the struggle of putting humanness into the weird beast of American Education is something that can take place over a long time. Urgency can be about not hesitating to put the next foot forward, not about getting anxious because you're Not There Yet. Thing is, though... when I was teaching, it was teaching that was the villain. Not the school, or the kids, or anything else. It was the JOB. the 'profession.' I know there will always be drama and frustration. Yipes, can I be a teacher and have all that drama and frustration and still have a happy life? Can I start teaching and want to keep at it for another five years after that? I feel like my alien brain has already decided.

24 more days...

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:38:26 +0100

Yes, I'm counting the days until the end of the year. Yes, I am all countdown/tested/retesting'd out. The kids are checked out as well. We need to get through the next week and we're home free. We'll get to finish our dinosaur unit and start on our physics unit. The kids are looking forward to it, and I'll just be glad to get back to some creative teaching instead of all this test prep. On another note, one of my students might have gotten a girl pregnant. As of yesterday, it was just a rumor, but he came in today and stated something along the lines of "I'm going to be a father." I didn't pay much attention to him as we were in the throes of test prep, but he mentioned it in passing several times. I am going to ask him what's going on tomorrow. Did I mention he's not even 13 yet? Yeah....

Watching Myself Quit

Wess — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:50:28 +0100

Somehow, I made it through two years of teaching without quitting. But I think I just watched a version of my past self actually do it. By that I mean I identified strongly with the difficulties one of our after-school employees was having, but couldn't keep her from quitting. (Not sure if I wanted to?) I mostly knew of this girl's struggles through her supervisor, but when I spoke with her personally I felt like I was talking to my first-year-teacher self. She wasn't making any sense, but it made perfect sense to me: She would express frustration with the other staff members, then backtrack and say it was all her fault. She would say she was totally at a loss and hitting a wall, then say she knew exactly what needed to be done. She would spout humility and self-loathing, then insinuate that the rest of the team wasn't pulling their weight. And throughout, I could just see this constant tension between how she felt like this was her life's calling and how she felt like she couldn't do one more day. As I talked with her, I remembered conversations with administrators, veteran teachers, and TFA staff--remembered the look on their faces and the things they would all say--and realized I had the same look on my face, was saying the same things. It would have been an interesting experience even if it had ended there. In the end, though, I decided I was in a position to make things a bit clearer and easier for her and improve the program at the same time, and so I scheduled a staff meeting for the site. By the end of that meeting, though, she'd given up. She had also gotten into a heady confrontation with the site supervisor and revealed a lot of what she really thought about the school, its staff, and why the kids were so far behind. She was careful never to say it, and in fact said a lot of self-deprecating things instead, but I could tell that in her opinion, there was one simple problem: the school, and the rest of the after school staff, were not as hard-working as her, not as smart as her, and had low expectations for behavior. I don't even think she knew that's what was coming through in what she was saying. So I went from identifying with her in an empathetic, "ohhh honey" way to identifying with her in an "oh crap was I just like her?" way. And on some bad days, I think the answer would have been yes. For the most part, maybe with rose-colored hindsight, I think the sane part of me knew that my problems stemmed from my own lack of experience and inability to cope. But I definitely was not always thinking/saying the most 'asset-based' things about my school or coworkers, either. I'm so glad I was able to be there for that, and learn from my mistakes in such a visual way. Because I can feel now how absurdly wrong she was about that staff, and how ridiculous she looked pointing fingers when she could have been learning from them.

#65: What standardized tests do not measure

mches — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 17:43:41 +0100

The Texas House of Representatives just voted to reduce the number of end-of-credit exams required for graduation from a record 15 (five each year from freshman to junior year) to just five. The push to scale back our testing regime came from all corners of the state and enjoyed near-unanimous support from both parties. The bill, if it passes the Senate, would also create different pathways to graduation, including tracks for the humanities, STEM, and a vocationally-oriented path. It's interesting that Texas, whose test-based accountability model would serve as the blueprint for No Child Left Behind, would experience such a vocal backlash to its testing blitzkrieg, not to mention that it would cave to public pressure so quickly. The problems with this volume of testing are legion, but chief among them is the absolute hatchet job it would do to elective coursework. With so many kids struggling to pass five tests every year, the amount of remediation needed on annual basis would necessarily squeeze out the classes that frankly make going to school worth it for many students. Critics of corporate reform will typically bemoan the limited utility of standardized tests, only to hear as response "But how will you know that kids are learning anything?" How, indeed? ----- It might come as a total shock to you, but I was editor of my school newspaper when I was a senior(1) in high school. The year prior to that, I was editor of the opinion section(2). Prior to that, I was a scrub staff writer. And as a wee freshman, I was sitting in a Journalism 1 classroom learning the basics. If you're keeping track, that's four years learning to report, interview, do page layouts, edit the writing of others, meet deadlines, sell advertisements, and occasionally meet with school administration regarding the content of your paper. On top of that, I spent two years in creative writing, the last of which I was also the prose editor of the student literary magazine. The list of competencies needed for the newspaper went double for the lit mag as well on top of needing to evaluate the creativity of others' writing (as well as one's own). There is no multiple choice test that adequately assesses the skills necessary to put together a newspaper or literary magazine. The publication itself is the assessment. It's an unquantifiable metric of success which data-driven fanatics hate. On top of that, a lot of the work for these things is extracurricular which is something only privileged kids do because they do not have an achievement gap which must be addressed at all times! I don't know how to put it in a chart for you. I don't know how to say "If you invest x number of dollars into this student newspaper, you will close y number of years in the achievement gap." I don't know to what degree it really "works" in that sense. What I do know is how critical it is to have multiple avenues for student-led academic pursuits in order to make students care about school and care about getting better at a craft. ----- My early high school memories were not positive ones. I was depressed and had a difficult time making meaningful friendships. I felt like an outcast at my school. I felt unattractive in large part because I was over 60 pounds heavier than I am today. I had enormous social anxieties. I was suicidal at times. I remember coming home and crying a lot. I was a smart kid, but I don't remember feeling "successful." In fact, sophomore year was the first time I ever got an F on my report card(3). Therapy helped. Meds did, too. So did losing a bunch of weight over the summer. But I think finding writing as a creative and expressive outlet was equally important to keeping my depressive tendencies at arm's length. And it was the years of practice and collaboration in these extracurricular/elective courses that fueled me to write all the time for fun and develop a voice(4). It was the crucible of many enduring friendships and lasting memories(5). My creative writing teacher eventually became my senior English teacher. I have kept in touch with him with varying degrees of regularity for the nearly nine years since I graduated high school. This weekend, I discovered an e-mail he sent me the summer after I graduated and it was like discovering a long-lost family heirloom. In it, he told me this:

"If I have never told you before, I have never been more proud of a student than I was of you. To have known you at the beginning of your junior year and to see where you were able to go... I've never had a student who I liked so much be as successful and mature as I wanted him to be.

Maybe you don't feel particularly successful, but you are."

I mean, is it any wonder I went into college wanting to major in English and be an English teacher? Is it any wonder that I eventually became a teacher and that this is the career I have chosen as my life's work? If I can be for my students what Mr. Goodyear was for me and countless other classmates, then I know I will have been of service to them. ----- As an exercise, ask yourself these questions about your state's standardized exams: Do you think the STAAR test will ever inspire a child to teach? To think creatively? To produce little chapbooks of their own writing, or to write inflammatory editorials, or to produce anything of their own and be able to judge its worthiness for public consumption? Will the STAAR reveal Mark Twain's genius to a child for the first time? Will the STAAR teach you to be a part of a large-scale project over the course of a year, and encourage you to negotiate social relationships to ensure its successful completion? If a child is taught just enough to pass the STAAR test, are they more or less likely to read for pleasure as an adult? Are they more or less likely to read to their children in the future? When there is such emphasis on the outcomes of these tests, I'm less interested in what they purport to measure and more so in what they don't. What standardized tests measure is a debasement of what schools are capable of producing, in fact what they ought to produce and we ought to fight for. Had I gone to a school in constant fear of state intervention due to low-test scores, I would not have the same opportunities to really grow up, to develop an adult brain. It is the students in low-income schools that are most vulnerable to losing these opportunities because of the shortsightedness of our policymakers who believe these kinds of programs(6) to be inessential to learning the three R's or becoming the workforce of the 21st century or whatever(7). It is why we as teachers ought to continue to push back against the utterly destructive and regressive test-based accountability regime of the last two decades. NOTES (1) Technically co-editor in chief. Allie would be mad if I didn't mention that. (2) Well, I never! Me, with opinions about stuff? (3) In AP Computer Science. It was because I never did anything in that class but play Flash games which in 2002 could not have been that fun. (4) Of course my English teachers made me a better writer, helped me appreciate and understand literature, helped me better understand myself and the perspective of others. I'm sure their input helped me pass the TAAS test, not that they ever stressed about it because this was pre-NCLB. That was before teachers were held accountable for student performance so, you know, they were probably doing a pretty awful job since there was no test to measure what they were doing. (5) My most cherished high school memories probably came from the student publications trip to Washington DC, so the yearbook, newspaper, and lit mag staffs were all there. We did touristy stuff, we went to some student publications conference, we got to meet then-Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- our school's namesake -- who was totally phoning in her appearance because some of the things she was telling us was verbatim from a video clip of her and the other justices somewhere else playing the background. I remember one outing walking back to the hotel by myself when I got separated from our group and I didn't have a cell phone at the time to tell them I was leaving and that I got there okay. When they came back, they were upset. Some friends got in some hijiinx that, as a teacher now, would cause me eternal worry or rage. We shared a lot of inside jokes due to the lack of direct adult supervision and hotel cohabitation. I don't think I appreciated how much fun it was until years later. And I have not appreciated how much trouble that must have been for the teachers until now. (6) You can include in this list UIL, Academic Decathlon, student publications, forensics, or any other academic pursuit that doesn't take place with 30 kids and a teacher in a room with desks and a projector. (7) Or at least does not consider them worth the expense because we should value efficiency above all else, after all.

#64: "Feeling Unprepared To Teach?" Maybe it's because you only spent a few hours in ...

mches — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 20:20:14 +0100

I got an e-mail from TFA linking to a blog post on Teacherpop(1) entitled "Feel Unprepared To Teach? You're Not Alone." Based on the headline, I thought that this pertained to my interests. The author, citing the Gates and Walton-funded National Council on Teacher Quality's State Teacher Policy Yearbook report for 2012, begins by showing the summary of the report's findings on a national level. The NCTQ measured five categories as means of grading states and the nation as a whole:

Delivering well-prepared teachers to the classroom - D
Identifying effective teachers - D+
Retaining effective teachers - C-
Exiting ineffective teachers (author's emphasis added) - D+
Expanding the pool of teachers - C-

If you bother reading beyond the report card summary, you will find in the national and state reports in-depth only on the first category: "Delivering well-prepared teachers to the classroom." In citing the mediocre grades of this report, the author is hoping to prove that it does not matter what preparation route you go through, that both traditional and alternate routes have their warts so there is no use fretting over the merits or faults of one pathway or the other. However, a deeper investigation of the NCTQ report raises more questions for me than it settles. First, let's examine what this report says. The NCTQ has a checklist of priorities it looks for as it makes its grades in this category:

Raise admission standards - The NCTQ wants states to require teaching candidates to pass a basic math, writing, and reading test as a means for admission into teacher preparation programs and they want that test to be standardized and "normed to the general college-bound population."
Align teacher preparation with Common Core State Standards - Their three criterion in this category deal with elementary teachers. Namely, they seek for all elementary teacher coursework and subject-testing to be aligned with Common Core, all teachers should pass a rigorous assessment on reading instruction, and that elementary teachers be provided content on math instruction specifically for elementary.
Improve clinical preparation - Cooperating teachers must demonstrate effectiveness as measured by "student learning."(2) The NCTQ also would like all teachers to complete at least 10 weeks of full-time student teaching. Interesting idea, that.
Raise licensing standards - This subcategory seeks the elimination of the K-8 Generalist credential and the requirement for subject-matter testing for all middle and high school subject areas.
Don't lower the bar for special education teachers - In other words, you need subject-specific testing on top of a special education credential.
Hold teacher preparation programs accountable - In short, collect data on student standardized test scores, tie them to the preparation programs, set a minimum standard, and grade the programs accordingly.

Of these six subcategories, four are at least someway related to the tests that teachers take to gain certification. The other two have criterion tied to student performance on standardized tests. The one thing I liked from this is the demand that there be a minimum of 10 weeks of full-time student teaching. Other than that, the NCTQ is preoccupied with the myths that traditionally-certified teachers are often a bunch of dummies that need to be weeded out and that we can only measure a teacher's effectiveness by student standardized test scores. So, we have a report fraught with problematic assumptions about what a teacher preparation ought to prioritize (testing and more testing) being used to defend TFA's woefully inadequate teacher preparation requirements: "All across the country, TFA corps members experience a backlash from policy makers and other educators who insist that Teach for America’s alternative path to the classroom is the main pipeline pushing horribly unprepared teachers into schools. But it actually turns out that underpreparing teachers is a national problem, including most traditional undergraduate and graduate education programs." This false equivocation provides fleeting comfort for the underprepared and overwhelmed corps member. But this misses the overarching complaint with TFA. Not only are teachers coming through TFA underprepared, but they are recruited and cultivated with the explicit purpose of doing something else in a few years thus ensuring a cycle of undertrained novices in perpetuity and thus denying low-income students the opportunity to have experienced educators dedicated to teaching as a career and not as a stepping stone to some other preferred career path. In a pique of self-pity, the author continues:

But corps members are still experiencing harsh words from colleagues, administration, and the media insisting that TFA teachers aren’t as qualified to work in schools…aren’t trained to work in high-needs communities…the list goes on. It’s an issue that many of us have grappled with at some point. I had more than my share of tense encounters that kept me awake at night and tied my stomach up in knots. I knew I was putting in the late-night hours, jumping through the same administrative and state-mandated hoops that my colleagues were, and sacrificing my weekend freedom to construct innovative lessons for my students. But instead of feeling supported and encouraged in my work, I was flooded with continuous self-doubt. And in the eyes of my critics, I would forever be a second-rate teacher because of the way I’d gotten my teaching certificate, regardless of the quality of my work.

Note to new corps members: if you are not prepared to face an avalanche of criticism for being -- for all intents and purposes -- scab labor, then you need to find something else to do. The reason you will be considered a second-rate teacher is not just the path your chose for certification, but because you will probably not be a very good teacher until you've done this job for a few years. And fair or not, when you join Teach for America, the assumption is you will not stick around long enough to gain the experience needed to be a good teacher. You're guilty until proven innocent in many people's eyes. If you're secure enough to deal with that and are committed to becoming that experienced teacher anyway, you should be okay! Mostly. To be clear, I think traditional preparation programs ought to do more to prepare teaching candidates for the practical realities of the classroom, particularly in low-income schools. Nor is this an attempt to categorically declare one brand of first-year teachers superior to the other. There is no substitute for being a lead teacher in terms of experience. However, traditional certification programs have the most rigorous pre-service clinical experience requirements compared to alternate route programs, particularly in Texas where pre-service experience is virtually not required at all for alternatively-certified candidates. And since the explicit purpose of traditional certification programs is to produce career teachers, traditionally-certified teachers are more likely to have the confidence and desire to get through those difficult first few years and develop the acumen of an effective teacher over the course of a years-long career. The author concludes with this: "And maybe eventually, as a nation, we can stop arguing over which certification path put a dedicated teacher into a classroom, and instead build supportive networks, mentorship programs, and teaching communities to better train and support them once they get there." I disagree. We should be arguing about this a lot more given the clear evidence of higher attrition rates for alternatively-certified teachers and their increasing share of new teacher hires. We should argue about this because low-income schools bear the largest brunt of this revolving door of teachers, particularly alternatively-certified ones. If we are serious about improving low-income schools, we ought to be having discussions about how we can get the best-trained, most-experienced teachers to staff them and less about how we can make our temporary band-aids better. Or, are we to accept the future of teaching as an entry-level, temporary profession as unalterable and try to manage this dire reality as best we can? NOTES (1) In the interest of disclosure, I was approached about writing for Teacherpop a while back. I was kind of skeptical because a lot of the content seemed pretty fluffy. Plus, I think I was only asked because I had indicated in my application to TFA that I had been involved with student publications before. I told the editor that I blogged already and sent him some links to this page to see what he thought. I never heard back from them after that. (2) Read: "student standardized test performance" because that is what they actually mean. (3) I guess this depends on where you are placed. In an at-will state like Texas with a robust private-sector alternative certification market, many if not most of the teachers at low-income schools are alternatively-certified. In fact, many of them have even less training than TFA teachers do. This used to be reason enough for me to support TFA, as a lesser of two evils. Now I have learned that two wrongs don't make a right. Only took me 27 years.

Someday, maybe

Wess — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:19:36 +0100

On January 26th, I was riding the bus home from a professional development workshop and I accidentally let my mind wander into the teaching world. Not thinking about teachers in general, or thinking about schools or districts, but actually imagining myself in front of a classroom. Thing is, these imaginings were not accompanied by the usual feelings of oh-lord-never-again or thank-god-I'm-not-doing-that-anymore or just the general stomachache that's usually triggered. It was just my imagination, of course. Random wonderings about what kinds of procedures I'd have if I taught upper elementary. Curiosity about what the central school district is like in my new city. The visceral clues that used to tell me "this is not for you" were gone, though. It might be silliness, or selective memory, or it might just be a side-effect of, hey, almost having completed my masters of education. ...But someday, maybe.

#63: You can't spell "Family" without FMLA, but you can hardly take care of one with it

mches — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 14:07:27 +0100

It's now been four weeks since I came back from a truncated paternity leave(1). It is killing me to go to work these days. Each morning I change his diaper and he's started to get infectiously smiley right when we wake up. I try to get my wife some breakfast and take our dogs out before I crawl into my car and go to school. Prior to the baby, I operated on razor-time margins. A day goes well when I get up by 5, get to school at 7, get my room ready for class while tutoring or chatting with early-bird students, getting copies made on one of our school's fickle and temperamental Xerox machines. My conference period is typically swallowed whole by UIL housekeeping, debate team, ARD Progress Reports, meeting with administrators to discuss benchmark data(2), attendance verification logs(3), meeting with or calling parents(4), or once in a blue moon if I'm feeling indulgent, going to the bathroom. If something fell through the cracks during the day, I'd always have after school or the following morning. Now that I'm operating on a shoestring time budget that has been reapportioned for a hefty domestic load, that razor-thin margin is utterly decimated. This has meant that my teaching practice suffered as the time I've used in the past to add language objectives or think more deliberately about modifications is gone. Now I'm lucky to get my copying done in time for 1st period on some days. While I'm at school, I have had what I can only describe as depressive episodes. I feel stranded at school, set adrift from my wife and son who need me as a caretaker. Being away from home 12 hours each weekday feels like a dereliction of my responsibilities as a father. And while I'm at school, I'm similarly drowning in obligations. I don't have the energy to tackle many of them. When I get home, it's time to get dinner on the table, change diapers, possibly do another load of laundry, feed the dogs, wash the dishes, give him a bath, take the dogs out again, change another diaper, carry him around and make motorboat noises while my wife finally has a chance to get cleaned up, change another diaper, change his clothes because he peed all over them while I was changing his diaper. On weekends, add grading to this for several hours. At some point we'll drift into the bedroom and I'll pass out next to my wife while he's feeding. If I'm lucky he'll sleep through the next 5 hours until I get up and do it all over again. This experience has confirmed for me the pitiful inadequacy(5) of this country's family leave policies. The Family Medical Leave Act entitles families to up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave in the case of select medical and baby-related reasons. This puts families in challenging positions: do you do what you think is best and stay home with your child as long as possible, knowing how important developing the bonding time is? Or, will you be too economically vulnerable to risk not getting paid for such an extended period of time? My wife has chosen to stay home until April but I know that if we had the option and the pay, we'd both be home for a lot longer than that. Instead, we'll need to put our son in day care in a couple of months until summertime when we'll both have the opportunity to be home(6). I've gained a new appreciation for stay-at-home parents. The work of raising a child is strenuous but infinitely rewarding. If I lived in Sweden, I'd take a year off in a second. Even still I've considered it. I've thought a lot about my students who have kids or having them soon. A couple had their baby girl about two weeks before ours. We talk about parenting and how our babies growing and how they're hitting their milestones and the endless comedy of getting peed on. They both seem to be handling the transition okay, but I know there are other family members helping to take care of her while they're at school. I think about how challenging this is as a grown, married man with a good job and health insurance. How stressful must this be when you're stil a child yourself, or when you're on the outs with the child's father, or when you're uninsured and getting hospital bills every week(7)? I can't imagine studying for an exam while my child is looking me dead in the eyes and screaming inconsolably. I can't imagine feeling anything but heart-wrenched having to be away from my child all day. Ideally, our policies would reflect the lip-service we pay towards the importance of family. Other than the child tax credit, though, there really isn't very much support for families as they're starting out. As is the case in many areas of public life, American citizens are very much on their own. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with the photos and videos my wife sends me while I'm at work, I just hope I don't miss too much while I'm out. PS - My wife read this and commented "Uh, this is really self-centered." Totally boneheaded on my part. Let me add that everything I do at home she does many times over each day in addition to nursing him all day and taking him to appointments and that my list of things to do is for a brief window in the evening and that she has this same list all day and did I mention that I basically think of her as superhuman? Because she is. I already thought she was an extraordinary person before, and now she is an extraordinary mother, too. NOTES (1) Read: saved-up personal days. (2) More on this in a future post, but suffice to say that the 10th grade teachers -- math in particular -- are feeling some substantial pressure for our kids to perform on the STAAR end-of-course exams since ours is the grade he state uses to determine a high school's accountability rankings. (3) Since schools lose money from low attendance, our school has been printing reams of attendance reports so that we can correct for any mismarked absences of students who had excuses or were actually tardy. Fortunately I keep a manual record of attendance in addition to the required online attendance, but this is nevertheless a time-intensive chore. (4) This has truly been one of my weak areas in my first year of general ed. I think I took for granted how easy it is by comparison to stay in touch 20-something families as a case manager when you have designated periods for such contact. Now I have 140-plus families and maybe 14 seconds to get ahold of them if need be. It's an adjustment for which I don't think I adequately prepared myself. (5) Money quote: "And the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that doesn't mandate that parents of newborns get paid leave." Not to mention the many developing countries that still ensure paid maternity leave. This feels so monumentally unfair I could scream. (6) For this I am so grateful that we both work in schools and have extended periods of time off to be home. (7) This has been a treat, really. God bless the market.

People Like Me Exist

Wess — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 04:19:16 +0100

My initial reaction to everything TFA was "it's too good to be true." Throughout the application process, induction, and institute, I remember consciously keeping an eye out for weaknesses in this organization that seemed to be such a perfect example of how to do a nonprofit right.

Part of my incredulity came from the fact that I never heard stories or reflections from anyone who seemed anything less than completely satisfied with their TFA experience. Every story had a happy ending or a positive spin; every alum glowed with it. Even with Mr. Rubinstein as an obvious example right here on Teach For Us, I remember wondering honestly how many corps members had ever completed their two years and felt anything but surging pride about their contribution to the movement. At the MLK march this morning, a fellow alum and I made friends with an enthusiastic Vista from Americorps, and we both had to stifle a laugh when she asked us "So what's your take on TFA, after going through it?" I avoided the question with an "I might not be the best person to ask" and let my friend give his own complicated answer. I've been thinking about it all day, though. As annoying as it is to be expected to have a sound-byte "stance" on TFA to satisfy every small-talker I run into, my experience essentially becomes invisible if I don't. Which leaves people without one more counter-example to the idea that every corps member who completed their two years feels just great about it. I don't know what my small-talk "take on TFA" is, but I know "great" isn't the word. If I were completely honest with myself, the biggest takeaway feeling I have is something a lot more apologetic. For so earnestly inserting myself into a community, and a profession, I knew nothing about and then neither "getting the hang of it" in two years, nor staying for a third. I am extremely proud of some parts of my two years--guilt definitely isn't my only feeling about my experience, by far--just the most salient and honest, at this point.

I don't feel guilty that I'm part of TFA--I do think I'll always be proud to be an alum--but I'm no teaching success story. I wouldn't call my two years a waste, and I might even do it again if I could go back--maybe--but I also wouldn't say I had a net positive effect on my school, or that the end of my two years was a happy ending. It all makes me want to walk up to new corps members, wave my arms, and say "people like me exist!!"

BUT I have a lot more time to use this experience to do things I do feel great about, making it feel less like something I should apologize for. Luckily, the end of my two years wasn't the ending.

#62: Ben

mches — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 05:05:07 +0100

On Friday, January 11 at 12:59 PM, my life was irreversibly changed. My son Ben -- all 10 pounds, 4 ounces, and 22 inches of him -- joined our family. I cannot describe the feeling of seeing him for the first time. And I cannot express enough the gratitude for my wife who carried him for over 40 weeks and labored for 20 hours to bring him here. I am eternally in her debt, and I will try -- pitifully -- to pay her back for th rest of my life. I still plan to update this blog, but understand that if I go a long time without saying anything, I'm joyfully preoccupied.

A Thing That Happened

Wess — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 03:01:46 +0100

Part of my new job is subbing every once in a while for the teachers of our after-school program, and today for the first time I subbed at a K-8 school on the side of town where I taught. I felt a filling bit of belonging, interacting with kids who could have been my students' younger brothers or sisters. And when it came time for kids to be picked up, it turns out that at least one of them was.

He smelled like cigarettes but looked like marijuana. When I caught his attention, he said "oh hey, miss!" but not much more. He waited while his mother signed his little sister out, not looking at me but not avoiding me, and then left quietly with them. I wanted to grab him, hug him, hold his head between my hands, make him stare me in the eyes.I'm sure the first thing he remembered was being kicked out of school for the second time, since that was the last time he saw me. All I could think of were what felt like thousands of days of trying to figure out how to teach with him in the room. And the half-relief, half-disappointment whenever he didn't show up. And the guilt for mentioning that he smelled like weed to an administrator walking by (tragically, he'd been sitting, focused, at the time).

Clicking around on Teach For Us, you can read so many wonderful but simple stories of tension and resolution, problem and solution, beginning and end. I could maybe write this as one of those stories, if I kind of bent it into an arc and twisted up the ends so they lay neatly; I've certainly done so on this blog before. Maybe writing that way is part of making sense of things, or part of the art of blogging, or maybe the art of manipulating stories so they fit in small boxes with one-word labels. Right now, though, I can't bring myself to bend or twist anything, shave off bits and add bits so this piece fits better. It's not a moral or a lesson learned or even much of a story. It's a thing that happened.

Maybe I need to make this a poetry blog.