My life is all I have

Ok so check it out. Detention is bullshit. For how progressive and liberal my school is (or claim to be), they (that’s messed up how I refer to MY school as THEY when it comes to this! Lol).. Let me back it up. The school that I’m at holds on to detention like drinking water from a water fountain. You can get detention for anything: for breathing when you weren’t supposed to, for smiling when you were supposed to be screw faced, for enjoying life- or rather singing too loud during lunch when you were supposed to be calm, orderly, and ‘appropriate’. Well, some of those things I exaggerated with, but you catch my drift.

So like my schedule isn’t full enough, I had to give up my lunch break (my only ‘prep’ on Fridays) to be the detention room overseer supervisor. So when the period before lunch let out, I popped in my stuffed chicken in the microwave and headed down to the cafeteria to pick up the criminals students. I got the Jena 6 middle school 8 but on the way back to my room, I had to make two stops: I had to get my chicken (lol), and I had to get the mandatory detention forms from the office that the students need to fill out once they finish their lunch. As we are all walking back to my room, I’m reading the student detention form. WHAT? Write an essay about Abraham Lincoln….????? What???? I get to my room and the first thing I do is set down my chicken, then I take the sheets and toss them in the trash. I tell the kids that they have ten minutes to eat their lunch and then we have work to do.

After each student finishes, I tell them that they need to come up to my desk and tell me why they have detention. One student says because he was chewing gum in the hallway. Another student became teary eyed and told me that she has detention because her mother decided to make her breakfast because today is her birthday. It was the first time her mother had ever made her breakfast before school. On top of that she lives an hour and 30 minutes away by train and she arrived to school 8 minutes late. Two best friends were in detention because the day before, they didn’t come inside immediately after the bell rang.

All of these offenses seemed extremely minor. So minor that I felt like not only was this a waste of my time, but also of theirs. So to turn a major negative into a positive I had them write poetry, starting with the line from one of pharoahe monch’s rap songs, My Life. The first line is: My life is all I have. I told the kids I wanted them to write a poem, a rap, or a song starting with that line. They got to work. Pens skated across their pages. They were into it. It was relevant. It was self-reflective. Isn’t that the point of detention? To get the students to think about their actions and their lives? I felt like I circumvented the unnecessary BS about good ol Abe Lincoln by throwing in some relevant stuff. They want differentiation right? Well here you go.

When it came down to ten minutes left, the kids were still heavy into their work. Out of nowhere, I delivered mine:

my life is all I have
like a KING I am free at last!
for our lives im scared cuz even Brooklyn has Baghdad blasts

my life is all I have!

no phones or gold, degrees or clothes
my life… so controlled yet free
sometimes even I forget it belongs to me
sometimes I forget to just, be

so i.. ‘do’ instead of ‘be’ black
i act wack
i gum smack and talk back
i walk back and arrive late
i have good intentions but it was my mother that made me…
breakfast
and I wanted to go in, but on the yard we had a friendship session

but next week is new…
and this life is too…
and its mine, forever

I saw the eyes that make teaching worth it. I saw the eyes of students that want to control their destiny, their minds, their education. I saw eyes of re-focusing, re-determination, re-mind(ers) of why we are here, our purpose. And it was reflected in their poetry that I asked them to share before heading back to their class after lunch.

Mission accomplished.

I had to write them all passes for being a few minutes late to their next class. Surely I didn’t want to be the cause of yet another detention!

Advocacy

I was trying. I was trying hard. One thing that stood out to me the most during my pre-service classes at my university was the necessity for special education teachers to accept their role as an advocate for their students. We spent almost two or three sessions on advocacy.

A reoccurring theme that I was starting to notice was that with special education students, many times the train leaves them at the station, so to say. Nobody pushes for them, nobody fights for them. And there are many factors for this. Parents often times do not activate their power as the primary advocate for their child for two main reasons- either they do not have time to navigate and learn the bureaucratic machine called the Department of Education (DOE). To know this machine requires knowledge of its language (similar to a foreign language!), the way it’s organized, and patience! Or the parents simply just do not know of the parental powers of which they have.

So when a situation came up which I figured could use some beginner’s advocacy assistance from my end for one of my students, I jumped to the occasion. However, I realized only later that I was going up against a monster, even though it appeared at first to only be a molehill.

Bus service.

One of my students has bus service per his I.E.P. This means that the DOE provides door-to-door service to him at no cost. Bus service for general ed students stops at 5th grade, so it is really only special education students that have this type of service. I became aware of this particular problem while calling “Mike’s” family in the days before school started. I decided to call all of my students’ families to 1) introduce myself to them, and 2) to see if they had any pressing issues or concerns before the start of school. Mike’s Mother told me that everything was fine except that information about Mike’s bus service hadn’t arrived. Ok bet. I told her that I would look into it and I would call her back. Surely I could have told her that she needed to call the Office of Pupil Transportation (OPT) to ask why the information hadn’t been arrived. But naw yo, ‘I got this! Let me try out my roll as an advocate,’ I thought to myself.

So I called OPT. I waited on hold to speak to someone for 27 minutes. Come to find out, Mike’s NYC DOE ID number was not even in the system so the lady on the phone couldn’t help me whatsoever. Ok bet. No problem- let me call the DOE. After holding for 46 minutes, the lady who picked up the phone was ready to help me until I told her that Mike is a special ed student. She cut me off mid sentence and in a matter of fact way (I don’t blame her, she was probably tired), she told me that the DOE does not deal with services as it relates to special education students. Ok, let me try the Office of Special Education Services- surely they would be able to help us because after all, it is on their very own paperwork (IEP) that grants Mike this service!

They were able to locate Mike. They saw that he in fact has bus service, but the destination school was incorrect!! The destination was for PS XXX, the elementary school that he graduated from. I repeat- the school he graduated from last spring.

I’ve spent over a week calling what seemed like the entire NYC DOE and I have had very little luck making progress. There really is no positive end to this story. Mike still doesn’t have bus service to the correct school, and his mother daily calls me wanting an update. I asked my principal if she could help to resolve this problem, and she has been working on it for a few days.

My work as an advocate is clearly going to be a difficult task- no matter how big or small the battle is that I attempt to resolve.

Beginning of my NYC teaching career

My first week and a half of teaching in New York City has been possibly the most amazing ten days of my life. The energy of my students, their chaotic passion for learning, their promise to be scholars now and collegiate scholars later, have all been very inspiring for me as teacher, an advocate, and a person.

Let me back it up a few weeks….

August 24th at 9 AM.
It’s the last day of professional development week at my school. In about a week, the hallways will be filled not with empty boxes that once carried brand new text books, staples, paper, and chairs, but will be capacitated with bouncing and rambunctious middle school students- eager to show off their new fits, talk about their summers, and grow into their slightly larger frames than the school-year before.

So there I am- standing and about to speak to the entire staff- my hands wet with nervousness, my documents neatly in piles waiting for distribution. On the program for the day, the first section was listed as “Special Education Workshop.” Special Education is new to this school, being that it has only been open for two years. Whoa. I have barely finished my first set of graduate level classes and I just completed a crazy summer of student teaching, and all of a sudden I was leading a content workshop to my staff on Special Education and Collaborative Team Teaching. Since when did I become a special education specialist?! I was up late the previous nights preparing for this workshop.

Just three days prior, I had been emailing my professors from the summer to try to figure out what I can possibly say to my colleagues, some of whom had been teaching for over ten years. I was also nervous about my abilities to teach about disability for other reasons. Over the summer in my formal introduction to education through university coursework, differentiation was presented as an educational strategy to be implemented within the realm of special education. Interestingly enough, our entire week of professional development had an emphasis on differentiation. It became very clear that differentiation was not just a crucial teaching method for special ed students, but really just means “good teaching” in a general sense.

Based on the already solidified emphasis on differentiation at my school, I asked one of my professors how can I possibly be in a position to teach my colleagues what good teaching should look like? I was given encouragement. He said, “you know more than you think you do- your experiences both inside and outside of the classroom will be extremely helpful to your colleagues.” And it was. We did powerful simulation exercises on dysgraphia and dyslexia, I described and modeled the different methods of collaborative team teaching. I also discussed some of the realities and strategies of some of my students’ needs, as well as going through the information on some of my students IEPS. The workshop was about an hour and a half, and almost all of the teachers commended me on the quality of the workshop.


Fast-forward- September 4, 2007: The first day of school.
A day I will always remember. I had my fresh cut ‘Fro-Hawk,” I sported my Dashiki that I got in South Africa, and I had the confidence of a seasoned teacher. I kept thinking about why I’m doing this: I’m here because my heart said so… my heart told me so. I’m here because if it’s not the streets it’s the prisons that are getting our youth. And if it’s not the prisons, it’s the army. I am here because I don’t just want to encourage my students to go to college, but I want to prepare them- academically, mentally, and crucially for LIFE. This year, my 6th graders will be preparing for the rest of their lives- so of their lives, they can THRIVE, not just SURVIVE.

These past two weeks have been very very busy- so busy that I have not played much basketball or written much poetry- two great passions of mine. Needless to say, I have definitely not been able to write on this blog- lol. But, I am getting into a routine, and I am looking forward to continuing my passion of playing sports and writing, and I am also looking forward to re-joining this blog community.

Big respect,
eh Mista! (as they call me- lol)

Follow up to "On meeting Fellows who just finished their first year"

I appreciate all of the responses to the post, "On meeting Fellows who just finished their first year.” I would say that I probably came off as a little harsh in my assessment of the Fellows who came to speak with our class. However, I should make it clear- I didn't mean to, nor am I knocking the 2nd yr TFs who visited my class or am I knocking their efforts. And like ‘subtext’ implied in his comment, we need to embrace and support new teachers in their journeys.

I was simply saying that I was frustrated that the stories of Teaching Fellows who have THRIVED, instead of those who simply SURVIVED were not represented. Last weeks Village Voice article, “Your Own Personal Blackboard Jungle” similarly only portrayed one type of experience of new teachers, and it was the same ol tired story.

I know for a fact that there are teachers and TFs that had a great 1st year, found success, and would be able to speak about their experience. I think this vantage point would be invaluable. We need to know what works!! We already know, or at least I know, how difficult and challenging teaching will be.

Or maybe the Fellows that came to my class actually did find success, but wanted to show us 'tough love', and use scare tactics to prepare us for the realities of the program. But in all honesty, that route is not very helpful. Tell me something new!!

On meeting Fellows who just finished their first year

I was disappointed. 8 or 9 Fellows who just finished their 1st year teaching came as guests to the last class of one of my university courses. I don’t know if I was disappointed in our guests, in the program, or in the Professor for bringing in these particular Fellows. Each of the Fellows used words like, 'miserable,' 'painful,' and phrases like, 'it was the worst year of my life' to describe the year. What?? This was supposed to be an encouraging end of the summer celebration! And what went down was a series of sad stories and melodramas that definitely killed any sense of optimism or confidence that most of the teachers-to-be had.

One Fellow talked about how her 1st year experience forced her to drink every night alone in her apartment. Similarly, a Fellow talked about crying every day after school on her train ride home. What?!? I didn’t want to hear any more of these pathetic sob stories.

Only time will tell, but I guarantee that after my 1st year, I will not be reporting that my 1st year of teaching in New York City was horrible. And for sure, I will not have to drink away the pain! Never that. I will make it work. Know that.

Why?

Maybe I have a leg up. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I didn’t grow very different than most of my students. Maybe it has everything to do with the fact that I was once labeled special ed, and I know the horrors and pains as well as what worked for me as a special ed student. Maybe it is the fact that I don’t look much different than most of my students. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen and been at the bottom of the barrel, and I teach not because I want to, but because I have to. I’m here because a community- my community is dying and suffering, left behind and lost. I teach because so many young people, especially young African American boys do not have any positive male role models. And I’m teaching because I know that until we all make it, none of us have.

All but one of our guests were women, and mostly Caucasian. I have no doubt that anybody can make a difference while teaching students who come from mainly African American and Latino communities. However, I do believe that being an African American and a male will help to reduce some of the cultural friction, as well as increase some of the trust that my students will have of me.

I am in this for the long haul- student by student, community by community.

"I DON’T GIVE A FUCK IF I CAN’T READ"

This excerpt if from a paper I wrote this summer for one of my graduate classes.

"James" is a 14-year old boy in my 6th grade self-contained class this summer. While reading in a remedial language arts class, James got stuck on the word ‘that’. “Th… ha… thi…” And then finally, he stopped. His eyes became empty and the room fell silent. "Ms. B.," the cooperating teacher, walked into the soundless room and became very upset: “What is going on in here? James, why aren’t you reading? If you don’t want to read, you don’t have to. Just know that you will turn out like those dumb dudes (points out of the window to the young men in front of the Projects across the street) who do nothing but drink and smoke all day. It’s your choice James. It’s your choice.”

Tears flooded down his face as James stormed out of the classroom. As he reached the door at the threshold, it appeared as if James had an epiphany and an internal conflict- Should I ditch this, flee my fears, and decide to leave, or should I continue to feel stupid, reinforced by a teacher who knows me, but doesn’t know me. He looked the teacher dead in her eyes and venomously roared, “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK IF I CAN’T READ. BUT I BET YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO READ EITHER WHEN YOU ARE DEAD, BITCH.” Needless to say, James left the classroom, and never returned to school. Maybe to this day, he is hanging out on the block, which was suggested by his very own teacher.

Maybe Ms. B. never read the article, “Understanding and Addressing Oppositional and Defiant Classroom Behaviors.” In this document, authors Spencer J. Salend and Shawna Sylvestre critically look at this behavior like the one James exhibited, and have put together a list of ways in which oppositional and defiant classroom behaviors can be reduced to promote learning for all. According to the article, characteristics of Oppositional and Defiant Behaviors are when students exhibit the following:
• Losing their temper
• Being easily angered, frustrated and annoyed
• Cursing and using inappropriate language
• Having low self-esteem (p. 32)
Ms. B.’s denial of the real problem with James, which has in part to do with the fact that he needs appropriate help, love, and someone who cares for his well being is not being addressed.

This article would be very helpful for Ms. B. Salend and Sylvestre list 14 suggestions for ways to effectively deal with students who participate in the listed characteristics of this behavior. The 7th suggestion is to “build relationships with students” (p. 33). This seems key. It was clear that James has very little respect for his teacher. Perhaps, this is because it is also quite evident that Ms. B. has very little respect for him. Another suggestion that the authors offer is to “give students choices” (p. 33). This is another key point. Life is about choices. However, choice should never be presented like this: if one doesn’t (or isn’t able to) read a single word, than he can choose to reject school, hang out on the block and do nothing. That is not choice. This way of thinking is negative and can potentially produce self-prophetic realities (like that of James) in which a child chooses the streets because he or she thinks “[the teacher] hates me” (Bolitzer, 32).

Allow me to re-introduce myself...

I am a 25 year old African American male, and I have made the decision to continue my journey in life as a New York City Teaching Fellow. I got a job working at a Junior High school working within the realm of Special Education.

I have decided to write this blog because I am looking to be a part of a community where I can share some of the beauties, joys, and pains of teaching and being part of NYC Teaching Fellows. I have just completed the 7 week pre-service training, which in essence was a crash course to becoming a teacher. Teaching Fellows are required to successfully complete a combination of two graduate classes at our assigned university, as well as participating in a course taught by a "veteran" teaching fellow, as well as student teaching in the morning.

I am looking forward to reflecting on and in my journey as a new teacher in New York City. Stay tuned...