Dave's Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Four: First Quarter
"You're going to be an example we'll use in the future for someone who is flexible," a Teach For America employee told me. This was after she informed me that I was finally placed at Northeast Middle School #049, after being previously told I would be at Fallstaff Middle School and then Dr. Roland Patterson Academy. Every time they changed my assignment, the new school was closer to my home, so I didn't mind. My roommates and I settled into our house in Fells Point, a neighborhood that seemed to be gorgeous on one block and boarded up on the next. My room, the "football field room," stretched back deep into the house and gave me plenty of room for musical instruments and gear. It also had a door leading to a rooftop deck, a place where I'd eventually spend a lot of my nights watching the ships on the water and the airplanes coming to and from BWI Airport. I became much closer with my roommates. Nick and Tammer being great chefs and Mike owning a George Foreman Grill, we always had dinner together. Our stories and arguments were always something to look forward to.
Northeast held a new teachers' meeting a few weeks before school started, so I drove over and pulled up my plastic orange cafeteria chair into a group of about 12 other teachers. Mrs. Jones, our principal, led the meeting. This too was her first year as a principal, but she was energetic and excited about the newfound responsibility. The "Supreme Team" (as she dubbed it) of herself and the two assistant principals was going to make Northeast a "blue-ribbon school." It eased my nervousness and made me anxious to start decorating my classroom. After the meeting, Mrs. Jones opened up the supply room and pretty much said the equivalent of "go nuts." A world of construction paper, yarn, chalk, staplers, folders, tape and markers appeared on endless metal racks, and like the proverbial kid in the candy store, I grabbed anything and everything. For someone who has always loved art, it felt like I was looting a craft store to get these huge baskets of materials. Mrs. Freeman, the 6th grade assistant principal, gave me my schedule: Classes 704, 604 and 608 for 90 minutes everyday. It was one seventh grade class and two sixth grade classes, so she informed me that I would be teaching in two different rooms. When we walked upstairs, I found out that these weren't rooms; these were open-space.
From what I've heard, open-space was an idea from someone's college thesis that said schools shouldn't have walls or doors. The idea was, if a student in one class wasn't paying attention, maybe he or she would listen to and learn from the adjacent classes. Maybe it sounds good on paper, but it creates a cacophony in reality. Most teachers at Northeast taught in classrooms - the seven other TFA teachers at my school did - but each grade subschool had a large open space that was divided into three rooms by several partitions and dividers showing the perimeter. Mrs. Freeman showed me my rooms, which in both grades were sandwiched in the middle of the three open-space rooms. Luckily, I ran into my mentor, a woman whose job it was to help new teachers through out our first year. She convinced Mrs. Freeman to just let me have the room in the 6th grade wing so I wouldn't have to switch or decorate two classrooms.
And decorate I did. When I did Summer Day Care at Kiddie Country, we always had theme weeks where we would decorate the classroom. My perennial favorite was the outdoors week, where I turned the classroom into a jungle. So that's what I did here too. About 30 huge green construction paper palm fronds hung from the ceiling with green yarn vines strewn about. A cartoon monkey and a snake were hidden behind some leaves. Then I took a huge slab of cardboard from our house's Ikea purchases and created a sign that said "Welcome to the Language Arts Adventure...with your tour guide, Mr. Werner." Apparently word got around TFA quickly because a lot of corps members said they had heard about the jungle classroom. I had learned over the summer how important creating a positive classroom environment was to teaching, so I probably went a little overboard. But this was my room, my office, my domain. I loved it. I also took an old Bruce Lee college poster from Enter The Dragon and drew him a book and a "#1 Harry Potter Fan" tee-shirt. "Reading...it's a kick!" It was so corny and yet simultaneously so awesome.
Before the school year started, I began to learn about the paperwork outside of the classroom. This is the part that most people don't see. You needed to write a lesson plan every day following a specific format, with a learning objective written in a "know / by" format, like The student will know how to identify an adjective by completing several workbook exercises and participating in a group activity. Good planning equals good instruction, so I had no problems with that. Grade books, attendance books, a lesson plan book; still no problems. Then there was the DSA portfolio (DSA stands for something important, I'm sure), supposedly one of the items that would determine my evaluation rating at the end of the year. It had to consist of student samples, parent phone call logs, documentation of everything and show improvement over the course of the year. There were also writing folders, where students had to follow a cookie-cutter essay writing format and record and store all of their writing for the year. There was a list of content standards to follow (so if you're teaching prepositions, they need to follow standard 6.12.3.a, and that should be documented in your lesson plan). Individually, these all seem like good ideas. Together, they become roadblocks to actually teaching something meaningful. The state gave me a curriculum, told me what textbook stories my kids had to read and what skills they had to know, but didn't say how.
I began to plan for the year and quickly realized the immense challenge of making these things interesting for the students. Matthew Henson, among the first people to reach the North Pole and a prominent African-American explorer, had a 15-page biography that started out our year with a resounding booooooring. Someone falls in the ice and dies, but the excitement of finding the North Pole on page 14 wasn't going to wow these students. The worksheets and teacher's edition we were given continued the stale instructional trend. So I began making my own worksheets, following a lot of the same principals I used with the comic strip that I drew in college. Cameron and Ashley were joined by Marlon and Jasmine, and their cartoon faces appeared on all our work and their names were in all of our examples. I also hid a star on each worksheet and gave the kids an extra point if they circled it...anything to grab their attention.
The first day of school arrived with much anticipation and preparation. I did the standard "here are the rules and emergency contact information" routine while wearing a fedora hat and giving a tour of the classroom with an attempt at an Australian accent. We went around the room and the students introduced themselves too - everyone, in all of my classes, except for Paul. Paul didn't want to say his name or anything about himself. I accounted it to shyness and let it slide, but told him I'd be talking to his mother soon about classroom participation. It was a great first day, and some students were already winning my heart over. The biggest surprise was the roster for 604: they had 44 students on roll. Marshall and a few other kids had to sit on a stack of newspapers in the back of the classroom when we ran out of desks, but they didn't seem to mind too much. 44 students squeezed together in a middle open-space classroom made things tight, but we managed.
704, my 7th grade class, was first period every day. They had their share of talkers and attitudes, but I loved them. For the most part, they were a well-behaved class with mostly polite and intelligent students. I guess every teacher has that one kid who latches on; that one kid who comes after school to help you put chairs up or wash the boards. It only took about a week to figure out that Sierra from 704 was going to be that student. I saw Sierra just about every day before, during, and after school. I walked Sierra and another student home one late day after school and remember the thrill in going down the "shortcut" through the woods that all the kids used to get to school. 604 and 608 were just getting adjusted to middle school and needed a little more growth in terms of behavior and language arts skills.
Over that first month, things quickly began to change. Students began to cut classes and roam the halls, running and yelling during my instruction. With no door, and "walls" that could be pushed over, nothing was stopping these children from entering my room and saying and doing whatever they wanted. Security, in the form of two guys with walkie-talkies, couldn't possibly handle the exponentially-growing swarms of roaming students. The fire alarms went off at least twice a day, and soon everyone learned to just ignore them. The kids knew how to turn on and off the hall lights and I was soon flicking my lights back on over 25 times a day (but sometimes just giving up and resorting to teaching in the dark). I was extremely self-conscious of how loud my classes were getting, especially when I had to respect the teachers and classes on either side of me. And some of these classes didn't get along and liked to throw things over the dividers. I remember one instance when the class next door threw crumpled paper balls and an all-out war almost erupted, with almost every student standing up to represent 604 with flying textbooks and pencils.
Management always was my weakest point in the classroom, and my discipline and consequences never seemed to work. Written apology letters didn't work. Students didn't show up for detention and my administration didn't seem to have strict consequences for skipping - in fact, we weren't allowed to keep students for detention without a day's notice. Taking points off grades only affected a handful of students. The last resort, parent phone calls, were a mixed bag. Some days I would talk to 10 grandmothers, moms and dads and see immediate behavioral changes in their children the next day. But one day in particular I remember calling 32 parents and not feeling any difference during class the next day. Regardless, I kept it up. Parental interaction was always something I tried to stick with, even if it meant calling some students' houses every day. A lot of the emergency contact numbers were wrong or disconnected, which led to a cell phone or work number search that usually left me empty-handed.
By my nature, discipline was hard. I consider myself extremely patient, laid back and generally optimistic, but I was being pushed in another direction. Politeness had run its course. It started to get to the point where I felt I had very little power in my classroom; I would be teaching something and feel like not a single student was paying attention to me no matter what exciting worksheet I had created. Most were talking to each other, yelling across the classroom or asking to get a pencil. Using a technique from the summer institute, students had to trade me one of their shoes if they wanted to borrow a pencil. That way, I always knew I would get my pencil back at the end of class. These students never took responsibility for their own actions; it was always someone else's fault. They liked to talk back and start arguments about why they weren't sitting down. They're just sixth and seventh graders, I kept reminding myself.
I lost it one day, and only one day. I had class 604 settled and was going over a new discipline system with warnings and a specific chain of consequences for misbehaving. I finished my speech and asked for questions, and Terri raised her hand. She asked me why I treated Jared, a Special Ed kid, differently from the rest of the class. The day before, Jared had hit another student and all he got was a phone call home from me. What she didn't know, or did know but chose not to say, was that Blake and Shaheen were saying things about his mother that, as I'm sure you can imagine, were extremely cruel and graphic. When I tried to respond, Terri interrupted me and kept on talking. I asked her politely to be quiet. Twice. Three times. Four times. Seventeen times later, Terri was still talking louder than ever. I exploded. I yelled, grabbed her worksheet, ripped it in half, threw the scraps across the room and told her to get out of my classroom. This was something I never thought I would be capable of, something I never would have imagined resorting to. The principal, who was on the other side of the school, heard me from all the way over and made her way into my classroom. She gave a short lecture to the class about how hard Mr. Werner works to plan for you and how you need to treat Mr. Werner with respect and she should never have to hear Mr. Werner yell like that again. Terri was suspended and I got a grain of confidence back.
After a suggestion from my roommates, I started an after school drawing club. Sierra was always there, but for some reason, a lot of the so-called "bad kids" seemed to come too. These kids were absolutely horrible for me in the classroom but completely different in a small group setting in the library. Paul, the defiant student from the first day of school, showed up regularly. One day my group of about 7 stayed until 5:00, freestyling, learning the Harlem Shake (ask me to do it the next time you see me), drawing decorations for my classroom and playing tackle football outside. Another TFA teacher told me that I shouldn't let the bad kids stay after school until they changed their behavior in my class. It was a good suggestion and I probably should have followed it, but these kids were gasping for attention and my heart usually overpowered my mind. Tuesdays after school became the one thing that I always looked forward to.
In the continuing effort to improve my discipline, I attended a TFA workshop on setting the students up into groups. Groups were positively rewarded by buttons (or tickets) that could be cashed in for prizes at the end of the week. Group activities encouraged talking, but it was better to talk about a graded assignment than how you were going to fight someone during lunch. It gave me a new burst of inspiration and I tried it in my classroom. It worked for only three weeks, but those were some great three weeks. Every strategy I had seemed to work for a couple of weeks but then run out of steam.
And then "the state" came in. They remind me of the Agents in the Matrix movies. Men dressed in suits approach in groups of three, walk around your classroom while you're teaching, take notes on their clipboards, ask some students questions about what they're learning, and then they're gone. They're paid more than teachers and many of them are former teachers, so tensions tend to rise when they appear. Here's where that extra paperwork comes in. Here's where those writing folders, content learning standard 7.3.6.b and that DSA portfolio need to be in order. I will never forget a lesson where I was teaching the students about facts and opinions and had them going through newspapers to find examples of both. A woman from the area office came in, sat me down, and informed me that I should have taught these students "newspaper etiquette" before the assignment; specifically, what a "gutter" was (the white space in between columns). The sarcastic Dave inside me said "Oh crap! I can't believe that I didn't think ahead enough during my fact and opinion planning to teach kids the life-saving skill of identifying gutters, but I'll try harder next time." Instead, I smiled and nodded.
Many teachers began to murmur about their disapproval of the way the administration was handling things. The same kids were roaming the halls and talking back to teachers, and nothing was being done. Kids were being given second, third, fourth and seventy-eighth chances and maybe a scary lecture. I was having a hard enough time controlling my classroom, let alone the dozens of kids outside of it at any given time. Punch a kid, get suspended, right? Punch a teacher, get expelled, right? Cuss out a teacher, get suspended, right? Well, okay, at least get detention or an alternative classroom setting? There were several instances of each of these, and sometimes no consequences were given by the administration. The consequences that were given were lifted when Mom came to school to complain about the unjust treatment of her child. The teacher next door to me was moved to another school, as was another teacher because "the state" said they were surplus. Three teachers quit, two women in the office were laid off, and one of our two security guards was taken away.
Nine weeks seemed like nine years for first quarter. My perceptions of this job before school and my reality now were on completely different ends of the spectrum. Grading was a simple system: above a 70% was passing, below was failing. Most kids hovered dangerously close to that percentage, and over half my students failed first quarter. I hoped it would be a wake-up call. Second quarter was about to begin, and the staff had an after school meeting to address some new concerns, specifically class size and student behavior. The enormous sixth-grade classes were broken up and a new 611 class was created. Because of the decrease in staff, many teachers' schedules were changed to pick up new classes. A xeroxed schedule was placed in my hand, and I searched for my name. To my surprise, Mr. Werner would now be teaching 704, 705 and 706 - all seventh grade. First quarter ended and second quarter, the most challenging part of my year, was about to begin.
(Dave's TFA Chronicles are eight short stories about Dave's job as a Language Arts teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools from 2002 to 2003. Read the other chapters: one two three four five six seven eight)
Sunday, June 15 at 6:50 PM
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