Being a teacher...

Being a teacher is hard, and only sometimes rewarding. I contemplate being a professor, but all my friends tell me, "What are you going to do with an English degree?" I guess my answer is simple : teach.

OGT week is upon us, and I must take time to observe the rituals and regulations that go with it. Students are already the children of routine, and OGT week is the pinnacle of that daily rhythm. Students entire, they enjoy a hectic and shortened class time, and then they are shuffled off to begin the hours-long test that their career so dearly depends on.

Standardized testing is on my mind; the first thing being obvious was the chaos it caused. Teachers had just a few minutes for each class period; just enough to make it more than a lazy homeroom, but never enough for a serious class discussion. The class I will be teaching, 4th period intervention reading, for example, was theoretically set up to work on a very basic critical thinking exercise as part of its daily routine. However, the class was essentially abandoned; the students were too wily, the time too short, and the other tasks of the day, like explaining the OGTs once again and answering questions, took up the rest of the time.

What few minutes remained were essentially chaos as several of the more talkative students violently monopolized conversation. I am unsure that I would have been able to do anything about it even if I was more experienced and in full control of the classroom. Proximity had no effect on them, trying to get the rest of the class to help me calm them did nothing; classroom management remains a priority for me.

On the theme of classroom management, I did get the chance to work with another student who is also placed at Glass City Academy, and managed to view the school’s training series on disruptive students and how to deal with misbehavior. I found it to be very insightful and very helpful; the strategies ranged from a codification of simple ones, like ‘planned ignoring’ of problem repetetive behaviors, to other interesting but harder-to-implement strategies, like methods for assigning a particularly fitting punishment to a particular troublemaker. I hope that I can use these strategies in the near future. What still remains a behavioral concern for me is managing several students (or even the entire class!) at once. When this does occur - and so far I find that it occurs frequently-  I am at a loss for what to do. The internet doesn’t offer much in the way of easy solutions, so the only tactic I have adopted from Ms. Ellis is simply to ‘wait it out,’ and wait for the classroom to become calm enough for me to intervene with an individual student. The students chant, sing, rant, and laugh, and although they eventually return to some modicum of attention, I feel powerless while waiting. I plan on doing further searching to find more strategies to deal with large groups of disruptive students.

Returning to contemplating OGTs, I can certainly understand the need and desire for a comprehensive standardized test, even if the execution leaves something to be desired. One professor suggested alternatives, ranging from a comprehensive one-on-one discussion (interesting, but infeasible) to comprehensive final projects instead (which would give students greater flexibility in showing what skills they have learned.) Learning about alternatives to the oft-derided standardized test is something that merits exploring and needs further examining.

Sometimes it can be difficult to properly express my feelings about the students I teach. It’s easy to slip into anecdote and complaint, but I feel that they deserve better. However, I do see how great the problems outside of school can be and how critically they exacerbate the problems inside school. The facts were simple; we spoke albeit briefly about the relationship between a father and a son in a text for OGT test prep.

Within seconds, the students were whooping and yelling like Viking warriors, loudly proclaiming their children and their heritage. The women held one universal constant – they had one or more children, or they were pregnant, or they expected to be pregnant again. It was horrifying; rather than teen mothers being the exception, it was the near-universal rule.

I am unsure what to make of this revelation. I can extrapoplate a few facts; first of all, the sheer amount of work that goes into raising a child no doubt makes doing schoolwork or performing well in class a distant priority far in the back. Furthermore, I was somewhat curious to learn that the students’ behavior changed little before and after having a child, and that often times their newborns were being raised by their parents. I wondered to myself how frequently this was an issue in previous generations.

How many children had they had? What was it like? They seemed to take it so lightly, as if having a child was more of an inconvenience than a life event. We couldn’t get them back on topic, no matter how hard we tried. Perhaps I was actually misreading the situation; perhaps I had become jaded and was refusing to allow the diversity surrounding me to impact me. Was it perhaps possible that instead of proving to be uncouth and uncaring in the face of that most grave of legacies, one’s child, the students were actually expressing pride in their own way? I did not have time to inquire as to this subject but I do hope to again at some point in the future.

Which brings me back to my original point; I echo advice that one exasperated teacher gave to me, solemnly, soberly, and without any pretense: “You can’t really bring yourself down to their level, but you CAN show them that you understand that they have things going on outside of class.”

The exposure to the students’ children was a good start.

One of the many things that particularly caught my attention while teaching this week was that the children are missing out on so many core concepts. I knew I had to be prepared for this going into any classroom. I think that this semester, much moreso than last semester, has made me into an angrier, surlier and much less idealistic teacher. I think that is probably for the better. By the time that I had walked into Rossford Junior High School, my teachers had drilled it into my head that the children would be an unteachable mess, my cooperating teacher would be a cruel stickler for surreal rules and codes of conduct, and that the administration existed purely to siphon funds from the endless bureaucratic byzantine web that is the public school system. So far, not all of these conceptions of mine have been challenged.

The students at Glass City Academy are severely lacking in many basic skills. My cooperating teacher, Lisa Ellis, explained to me that they suffer from a pattern that has recurred for decades and really has no way of stopping. Students grow up in poorer neighborhoods, or just as bad, in non-diverse neighborhoods. But 4th grade, they are beginning to show signs of disobedience and behavioral problems. By the time that they reach 5th grade, they are being sent to the guidance councilor and their grades are dropping. Throughout middle school, this is exacerbated – and the student is no longer really picking up on much in the way of knowledge. By the time that high school comes around, the student is several years behind in every conceivable way and every relevant subject, from emotional maturity to penmanship to mathematic core concepts to reading level. Students at this point drop out.

And, as Lisa Ellis explained, they either wander aimessly without so much as a high school degree, becoming the problems of society as well as educators, or attempt to regain some of that momentum they lost many years ago. Though I applaud any attempt to better oneself, I recognize the enormity of the task at hand. Glass City Academy is a dropout recover school serving students ages 14-22. Many of the students are as old as me or as big (if not bigger) than me, and have experiences that I can never comprehend or relate to. However, they are reading, writing, and comprehending scholastic concepts at a grade level more akin to an elementary school student. This is coupled with behavioral problems, academic apathy, and a culture that is biased against academic success. The result is a maelstrom, a nexus of negative activity, behavioral problems, and attempts at success, all centered on a charter school that exists for no other purpose than to get students to graduate.

I think that the best I can do for these students is exactly what the charter school wants me to do; help them pass their OGT, help them along their way towards graduation. After graduation, their lives are in their own hands. They will likely forget everything I taught them, though hopefully the basic concepts and schema have been imparted (Don’t believe everything you read, there are two sides to every story, etc). After high school, I can only hope that they can find gainful employment and a fulfilling, self-actualized lifestyle that, again, at least occasionally utilizes things I have taught them.

Though not the fault of the students in any way, this experience is helping to remove the veil from my eyes. I am horrified, outraged, and terrified of the fact that not only is this my current career choice, but that this is one that I have chosen for myself. Every moment I spend helping a student work their way through a sentence designed for 6th graders brings me a modicum of joy as I provide a key to understand some concept; and that joy is instantly diluted, liquefied and drained away with the dawning horror that I have subscribed myself to spending 8 hours a day in a classroom, 4 hours a day doing preparation and homework, and then more hours stressing over a job that pays poorly and is beset by internal disputes and external meddling, all while trying to pound lofty concepts like Shakespearean tragedy into an apathetic student body.