Pink Panties and the Urban Classroom

While professionals from all walks of life continue to criticize and demonize those who are working with young people in urban settings, the challenges we face as Educators continue to impact the daily rhythm of our schools and classrooms.  This country is full of adults who believe the ridiculous adage, “Those who can’t, teach.”  What that adage does not say is that teaching in the urban classroom is always MUCH MORE than the mere dissemination of information.  The task, in this setting, also requires the teacher to teach lessons that traditionally have been taught in the home.

Imagine this:  My students were reading Lorraine Hansberry’s classic drama, A Raisin in the Sun.  While I usually enjoyed teaching this text, over the past several years, it had become more and more difficult to get students to comprehend all of the themes and concepts found within the play.  As a result of their comprehension challenges, I was spending a good deal of time interrupting the reading to chastise students who chose to entertain their peers rather than wrestle with information that challenged them intellectually and personally.

On this particular morning, two young ladies walked into their English class 24 minutes into a 55 minute time period.  Their tardiness alone was a distraction but the verbal exchange that took place as they entered the room would have challenged any adult, from a trained Teacher to a Neurosurgeon.  As the first young lady walked past a female student on her way to her desk, the student who was already seated suggested, “Pull up your pants.”  When I heard the command, I looked up to be greeted by the site of bright pink panties.  A young man, who also had taken a gander yelled, “I can see your crack.”  The young lady, who did not seem to be embarrassed at all, shot back, “You can’t see my crack.  You can only see my panties.”

I am not writing a skit.  I am not writing fiction.  This exchange, in all of its glorious sadness, is but one example of where young people ARE NOT.  How in the world can any teacher be expected to teach young people about the literary classics that unite many Americans if they are constantly confronted with what is a normalization of ignorance?  Why are many good teachers being judged as a bad, less than, and an unprepared professional when so much of what teachers do depends on the quality of the student enrolled in their class?  When will parents be called to the carpet for their lack of parenting skills?  When will the lack of morals and respect cease to be tolerated by parents and other adults in the community?  When is this country going to begin to ask better questions that can lead to a shift in the current discourse about all that is wrong with those who teach in public education?  I can think of no better time than NOW!!!

This blog contains comments from EDUCATORS who find themselves on the front lines of a war that has been waged against public education across this nation since the landmark decision  in 1954 of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka.  Herein are the thoughts of Educators who serve young people across America today. While the daily challenges to increase student achievement have been discussed in circles across this nation, few of those voices include those who are the true soldiers in this battle to educate young people.

The experiences of students, present and past, and their reactions to those experiences, can serve as a mini-lesson for those adults who are responsible for raising children.  We are particularly concerned with those students who are being raised in one of the many poor and segregated urban centers across this nation.  This blog serves as an authentic assessment of the educational and social experiences of urban teens and further discusses where our young people are in relation to what is expected of them.  This blog will enable the reader to visit the urban classroom to gain insight into....THE CHRONICLES OF AN URBAN EDUCATOR...

There are No Niggas Here

It's true.  Well-prepared, disciplined, thoughtful Teachers often deviate from their lesson plans when opportunities arise to teach to the heart of their students.  Adolescents attending high schools bring with them more than their intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Teenagers arrive in the classroom immersed in a world that often results in a variety of behaviors that are distractions to the learning environment necessary for them to have a chance at academic success.  

As an English teacher, it is vitally important that my students understand the power of language.  I listen to my students more than they know. What is deeply disheartening are the actual sounds coming out of many of their mouths.  I have taught in urban high schools every year for the past twelve years and the word “Nigga” is used more than any other word in the often under-developed vocabularies of my students.  The first five or six times I hear it, I emphatically assert that, “the N word may not be used ever in this classroom!”  Without exception, students continue to catch themselves and their peers using the word.

As a historian, I often utilize my knowledge of the history of African Americans in the United States in an attempt to help my students embrace the responsibility they have to themselves and their family and community. I also relied on that same knowledge to demand that my students understand my mantra that, “There are no Niggers here!”  The lesson started with me leading a classroom discussion about the definition and various interpretations about the word “Sanctuary.”  I asked students to consider what it meant to be without sanctuary. 

I then opened to the inside cover of the text, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.  The image seemed to make all of my students sit-up.  I walked up and down the aisles turning page after page and, in some cases, forcing students to look at those who were unwillingly referred to as “Niggers.”  I purposefully made them uncomfortable and explained to them that it was the same discomfort I experienced each and every time they referred to each other using that term.

I went on to explain that each of us is responsible for every word we speak and write and that we must do so responsibly; all of the time.  And once my students understood the moral of the lesson, I was able to implement the lesson plan I had actually written for that day. 

Does America really know what it means to be a Teacher?

Epilepsy and A Raisin in the Sun??

This blog contains comments from EDUCATORS who find themselves on the front lines of a war that has been waged against public education across this nation since the landmark decision  in 1954 of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka.  Herein are the thoughts of Educators who serve young people across America today. While the daily challenges to increase student achievement have been discussed in circles across this nation, few of those voices include those who are the true soldiers in this battle to educate young people.

The lessons taught to students, present and past and their reactions to various assignments, can serve as a mini-lesson for those adults who are responsible for raising children.  We are particularly concerned with those students who are being raised in one of the many poor and segregated urban centers across this nation.  This blog serves as an authentic assessment of where our young people are in relation to what is expected of them and it will enable the reader to visit the urban classroom to gain insight into....THE CHRONICLES OF AN URBAN EDUCATOR...

     

 According to my Lesson Plans, today was the day that my students were going to finish the last several pages of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic drama, A Raisin in the Sun.   Like many teachers in urban high schools, if what I wanted was an environment conducive to learning, it was necessary for me to spend the first several minutes of the hour insisting that the students who were in the hallway after the tardy bell “get to their first hour class.”  I entered my room and immediately heard a very spirited discussion led by one of my brightest male students.  I heard him assert that he was angry that a girl would “be bouncing all over the place over and over again and then have the nerve to almost throw up on me.”  A young lady, also a good student, quickly responded, “You are mean.  She wasn’t doing that on purpose.”  Recognizing this as a “teachable moment,” I asked both students to stop yelling at each other and to, instead, explain the incident to me.  As the students detailed the scenario, I listened intently, taking mental notes in preparation for a very necessary impromptu lesson that had to take place before the planned lesson could begin – otherwise my students would not have been the kind of focused an adolescent needs to be in order to comprehend information.

I began by explaining to my students that many people have challenges that cannot be seen by the human eye.  I detailed for them what the central nervous system was, how it worked, and how Epilepsy was a condition that people did not choose but one that they were afflicted with.  You see, when you teach English in an urban classroom, you are required to be knowledgeable and to teach about more than just English.  In order for me to move forward with the lesson that was scheduled that day, I had to quell a disturbance in my room.  My students were disturbed, in large part, because of a lack of information, a lack of understanding, and a lack of compassion for those, who like them, need so much.

Over a four year period, how many lessons do well prepared teachers really teach and how many of those lessons required the teacher to teach a lesson that had not been scheduled in the lesson plans?  And what does that mean for the urban student?  And how does No Child Left Behind address all that students don’t know?

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - A REALLY GOOD READ !!!!

J Rowley could not have written any of this any better than what you will read.  Information is Power!!!

   By DAVE EGGERS and NÍNIVE CLEMENTS CALEGARI                 Published: April 30, 2011                     Holly Gressley

Related in Opinion       Op-Ed Contributor: A New Measure for Classroom Quality (May 1, 2011)

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates. This will take some doing.

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. For Erik Benner, an award-winning history teacher in Keller, Tex., money has been a constant struggle. He has two children, and for 15 years has been unable to support them on his salary. Every weekday, he goes directly from Trinity Springs Middle School to drive a forklift at Floor and Décor. He works until 11 every night, then gets up and starts all over again. Does this look like “A Plan,” either on the state or federal level?

We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. They’re mowed down by the long hours, low pay, the lack of support and respect.

Imagine a novice teacher, thrown into an urban school, told to teach five classes a day, with up to 40 students each. At the year’s end, if test scores haven’t risen enough, he or she is called a bad teacher. For college graduates who have other options, this kind of pressure, for such low pay, doesn’t make much sense. So every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year. The turnover costs the United States $7.34 billion yearly. The effect within schools — especially those in urban communities where turnover is highest — is devastating.

But we can reverse course. In the next 10 years, over half of the nation’s nearly 3.2 million public school teachers will become eligible for retirement. Who will replace them? How do we attract and keep the best minds in the profession?

People talk about accountability, measurements, tenure, test scores and pay for performance. These questions are worthy of debate, but are secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly. There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America, but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don’t have a chance.

Can we do better? Can we generate “A Plan”? Of course.

The consulting firm McKinsey recently examined how we might attract and retain a talented teaching force. The study compared the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea.

Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.

And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it’s 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.

McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a maximum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari are founders of the 826 National tutoring centers and producers of the documentary “American Teacher.”

More than 40 hours a week.....

This blog contains comments from EDUCATORS who find themselves on the front lines of a war that has been waged against public education across this nation since the landmark decision  in 1954 of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka.  Herein are the thoughts of Educators who serve young people across America today. While the daily challenges to increase student achievement have been discussed in circles across this nation, few of those voices include those who are the true soldiers in this battle to educate young people.

The lessons taught to students, present and past and their reactions to various assignments, can serve as a mini-lesson for those adults who are responsible for raising children.  We are particularly concerned with those students who are being raised in one of the many poor and segregated urban centers across this nation.  This blog serves as an authentic assessment of where our young people are in relation to what is expected of them and it will enable the reader to visit the urban classroom to gain insight into....THE CHRONICLES OF AN URBAN EDUCATOR....

Teachers spend more than 40 hours a week preparing, implementing and evaluating lesson plans. We are consistently researching the best practices and thinking about what kind of lesson will not only motivate students, but will also be relevant to student lives in order to increase student learning.

This entry is in response to an issue that educators face on a daily basis. In a high school classroom, students were expected to pair up and complete an assignment. Each student was expected to turn in his or her assignment individually. Multiple students were sitting with their partners without paper or a writing utensil. "Johnny*, do you intend to do some work today?" I should mention that this is the month of April and students are still coming to class unprepared to take part in the learning experience.

How are educators to combat this blatant apathy to learning? How are educators to respond, after spending hours lesson planning, putting together a stimulating presentation/assignment in order to intentionally spark student interest?  When will the discussion about education include the responsibility the student has to their own education?

How much do students REALLY retain ??

This blog contains comments from EDUCATORS who find themselves on the front lines of a war that has been waged against public education across this nation since the landmark decision  in 1954 of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka.  Herein are the thoughts of Educators who serve young people across America today. While the daily challenges to increase student achievement have been discussed in circles across this nation, few of those voices include those who are the true soldiers in this battle to educate young people.

The lessons taught to students, present and past and their reactions to various assignments, can serve as a mini-lesson for those adults who are responsible for raising children.  We are particularly concerned with those students who are being raised in one of the many poor and segregated urban centers across this nation.  This blog serves as an authentic assessment of where our young people are in relation to what is expected of them and it will enable the reader to visit the urban classroom to gain insight into....THE CHRONICLES OF AN URBAN EDUCATOR....

My long-term goals are for my students to connect literature to life, but knowing how limited their experiences outside of the stereotypical urban drama are (crime, unemployment, lack of education), it becomes difficult for an educator to find positive connections for students to relate to.  However, I was determined to teach poetry, the use of rhyme schemes, stanzas, and sound devices.  Therefore, I decided to connect this with the music they are accustomed to listening to - rap and hip/ hop.  Many of my students only think of rap music as lyrics without poetic merit, yet some rappers (i.e. Eminem, Li’l Wayne, and a few others) are very crafty in weaving together (mostly non sense) with poetic structure. 

When I presented my students with an excerpt from “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe as an example of poetry that utilizes all of the elements I needed them to understand, I was literally staring into a sea of blank faces.  When I played a portion of “Lose Yourself” by Eminem, however, (had to use the CD because the children were not going to catch on by “reading” the lyrics) faces lit up like Christmas trees.  After another ten to fifteen minutes of explaining how both examples exemplified the lesson, the pistons started to fire and my students finally “got it.”

  In the past I have taken days even a week to teach a lesson on poetry, but this year, I decided to do the lesson in one day and chance the outcome.  The result?  Beautiful two stanza poems created by the students with rhyme scheme and the use of at least two sound devices.  “Ah- Ha”, right?  Wrong!  Because the problem with this is the student is learning by receiving quick bursts of information, and if they can’t retain what they have learned over the course of a fifty five minute period, how much do you think will be retained over the course of an entire school year?       

       Over the course of 4 years, how much do students really retain?

Cell phones AND education? Can you hear me now?

This blog contains comments from EDUCATORS who find themselves on the front lines of a war that has been waged against public education across this nation since the landmark decision  in 1954 of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka.  Herein are the thoughts of Educators who serve young people across America today. While the daily challenges to increase student achievement have been discussed in circles across this nation, few of those voices include those who are the true soldiers in this battle to educate young people.

The lessons taught to students, present and past and their reactions to various assignments, can serve as a mini-lesson for those adults who are responsible for raising children.  We are particularly concerned with those students who are being raised in one of the many poor and segregated urban centers across this nation.  This blog serves as an authentic assessment of where our young people are in relation to what is expected of them and it will enable the reader to visit the urban classroom to gain insight into....THE CHRONICLES OF AN URBAN EDUCATOR....

While my intent is not to pen a rant, this post will read like one I am sure. As a well-trained and highly prepared teacher, I am tired of the endless daily distractions and interruptions caused by cell phones.  When young people have cell phones, the adults in their lives lose all power to monitor who the child is talking to and what the child is talking about. When young people are allowed to have cell phones in school, the teacher is then engaged in a battle with the outside world and young people who rarely value education.

Forget the fact that I am educating young people, many of whom are not reading or writing at or near their grade level.  And never mind the fact that the vast majority of my students are growing up in abject poverty.  Despite the aforementioned realities, most of my students have a cell phone on their hip, in their purse, or somewhere in their book bag. While there are those who argue that young people today must be able to navigate technology, I, and many educators across this nation, see cell phones as an impediment to an educators’ ability to increase the intellect of students. 

My students come to my classroom with a host of academic, behavioral and social deficits.  My job includes but is not limited to nurturing and increasing intellect but that cannot happen in isolation.  Education is a process that necessarily requires the presence of a teacher AND a student.  Not just a physical presence but a mental presence free of distractions.  My students and adolescents all across America are not personally disciplined enough to complete and comprehend their lesson while tweeting, updating their Facebook statuses, or answering calls from Mom and other family members during instruction.

Over the course of 4 years, how positively or negatively will cell phones ultimately impact the quality of a students’ high school education? 

See what students think...http://www.pressherald.com/news/student-texting-elicits-_2011-03-20.html