CHARTER SCHOOL DATA

Reprinted from GEM New York

"Grassroots Education Movement (NYC)" - 1 new article
The Truth about Charter Schools
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The Truth about Charter Schools
A study on charter schools released on June 15, 2009 by Stanford University (sponsored by PRO-CHARTER groups: Walton Family and Susan Dell Foundation) studying 15 states and District of Columbia found that:
• 80 % of charter schools performed the same or worse than traditional public schools: (37% that did significantly worse and 46% that performed the same). • African American and Hispanic students were found to do worse in charter schools in math and reading scores. • In Florida, the leading state with charters (389 schools), “Black students, bottom-tier students and top-tier students in Florida charter schools all perform "significantly worse" in reading and math than their peers in other public schools. A study released on August 22, 2006 by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found:
• Students in charter schools performed several points lower on reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress Test (the gold standard). A report by the United States Department of Education (under George W. Bush) in 2003 found:
• Charter schools in all five case-study states were less likely than traditional public schools to meet performance standards even after controlling for several school characteristics. • More than half of authorizers (of Charter schools) report difficulty closing a school that is having problems - a key responsibility of authorizers in this educational reform.”
• The reality is that only 36 percent of authorizers had a charter school office, or staff in 2001-02, suggesting limited capacity to address charter school oversight. • Only four percent of authorizers had NOT renewed a school’s charter and six percent had revoked a charter as of 2001-02. (Bad charters keep on going).
• Charter schools are more likely to serve minority and low income students but less likely to serve students in special education. • According to the 1999-2000 SASS, 79 percent of teachers in charter schools held certification, compared with 92 percent of teachers in traditional public schools.
A study by Arizona State University (EPAA) in August 2002 finds:
• charters in economically depressed areas may receive more funding than the traditional public schools that surround them, placing traditional public schools at a funding disadvantage. • In the case of DC charter schools, private funding was found to have accounted for $780 per pupil and, combined with a higher level of public funding (mostly due to non-district funding), resulted in considerably higher funding for charters than comparable public schools. We at GEM (Grassroots Education Movement) believe: The invasion of charter schools is an issue of race. If white affluent public schools have low teacher-to-student ratios and access to top notch academic building and programs, why is a lottery system the only means by which urban minority students can access these equitable conditions. A lottery system of winners and losers, is abandoning the conversation that ALL students, regardless of race and socio-economic backround deserve the greatest of educational opportunities. Charter schools, like those in Harlem, vastly under-serve English Language Learners and Special Education Students. Due to the self selection process of lottery systems, not only are Charter schools creaming off the top of various student sub-groups, their lack of programs for Special Education and ELL students dissuade those parents from seeking their children’s enrollment. Charter schools are a political and corporate tool used by those favoring privatization to access the 800 billion dollars spent yearly in public education. If public education goes the way of the current health care model, a vast number of students will get education on the cheap. Profit not education, and shortcuts not support, will be the guiding principle. The funding gap and resource gap will become even more stark than it is now. The current limited success of a few charter schools bedazzled by huge corporate sponsored budgets can not be replicated on a system wide basis. For example, the budget of Harlem Promise Schools requires a yearly 36 million in private funding alone. If Harlem Promise Schools have shown anything, it is that lowering class size, providing the best supporting services and resources, should be the goal for every student in the inner city – not just those that win a lottery. We are abandoning the goals of an equitable public education, which although never fully realized, have made significant gains since Brown vs the Board of Education. Charter schools are in essence legitimizing the two tiered system of education for the lucky versus those left behind. Furthermore, charter schools open the door for skirting a fine line between church and state. Recent controversies pertaining to Hebrew Language Charter Schools, Arabic Language Charters, Hellenistic Language Charter Schools, and the conversion of Catholic private schools into charter schools, may provide loopholes that may further segregate rather than hold the public school ideals of democratic multiculturalism.

Living in New York City

The voice on the radio was over 40 and old school. He sounded about as comfortable mouthing the words of the Rap song he just played as I felt hearing it billowing in through the screens on my windows. It was embarassing to hear his intro and his reference to the artist whom he was pretending to understand. Since I've faked understanding Rap and been caught, I know the sound, the affectation, very well.

Now I listen to more Rap than I used to so I can stay in touch with what my students are listening to. And I like a lot of it.

There is no need to blast this OR ANY OTHER MUSIC in front of building on a residential street in mid-evening on a weekday night. There is no reason to blast any music ANYWHERE at ANY TIME.

Why do people do this? If I drove by in a car and blasted Jussi Bjoerling people would become irate. People are intimidated by Rap music. I hate that part of it. I should sit outside with my speakers and my computer and play the entire Ring Cycle. Now that will intimidate anyone. Why don't I do that? It's wrong, that's why.

Someday, I will find a way to convince people NOT to invade each others' spaces. We live in a city, one atop the other, ceilings and walls caving in further every night. We pay for our little bit of privacy. Why do we think we can abuse others by stepping on theirs?

I live in Brooklyn, in a section between Boro Park, Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge and Chinatown. Muslim and Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian -- we have every religion and multiple ethnicites and nationalities represented here. All of us get along -- this is a very, very low crime neighborhood. So much so that the police COME when you call about people disturbing the peace. I just wish I didn't have to make that call.

So, I ask as if my neighbors could hear me, "Was that necessary? Did you have to crack the air like plastic and trap me with what you felt you needed to say? If you came to this blog it was because you wanted to do so -- I don't throw my words, my website, my voice or anything with volume. Why are you so cruel to me and others?" And it's cruelty, no twoways about it, whether I like it or whether it sounds fake and designed to catch you with a commercial edge.

The Children of Willy Loman Updated

This is the second draft of a post I will work on for a while, but I'm putting it up in case anyone has any comments along the way.

All my life, I have struggled with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The language feels sifted of any ethnic connection, yet it only makes sense to me within the context of being Jewish in Brooklyn in the 1940's. That other cultures have been able to adapt it doesn't take away the feeling for me that to thoroughly understand it, you have to imagine it from my mother's point of view.

Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949, when my mother was nine year's old. One year earlier, she had lost her 38 year old father to a heart attack precipitated by pneumonia and a life working as many hours as possible and filling what remained with whatever it took to become an accountant. On the wall, next to the dinner table was a black and white photograph of an entire generation of Greenbergs who had been recently slaughtered, each one with a story more gruesome of how his/her death took place. One had her baby tossed in the air and shot before her own throat was slit, another starved to death and some of the rest followed the now familiar last walk into a gas chamber. At eight years old, my mother had accompanied her mother to her father's funeral because she was expected by that age to understand death and be ready. For all she knew, the Nazis were still waiting around the corner to grab her by the neck and march her into a pile of bodies. The sense of expectation that your life could be ripped away from you by evil forces -- and that little would stand in their way -- took hold of children in the 1940's the same way it did Miller's Willy Loman. He held onto the idea of being "Well-liked" as his last armament against a city which had gone from being lush with space to one literally closing in on him.

Industry had made it nearly impossible for him to do more than scratch out a living at a job he committed to because it held more practical promise, say, than being a carpenter or a bricklayer at the turn of the century. For that reason, he also dreamed repeatedly of his brother Ben's magificent and seemingly luck-driven landing in riches. The "America" my grandmother knew when she came here in 1922 was a place you called, "charming," "enthusiastic," and "gay," and "full of opportunity." Whether you were 14 year old Benny Goodman playing with major Jazz bands or you sold paper or fur coats, you could put together a living and eventually you could rise in stature enough to have some kind of savings. The 30's took away the opportunity, but not initially, the promise it might be back. Benny Goodman's father never got to see his son perform because he did not want to be seen in shabby clothes (and he was hit by a car and killed early in his son's career.) In that refusal, lay the belief that there would be a time in which he would have the right clothes. I don't know if it was the rise of Hitler or the mercilessness of unchecked capitalism or both which gave Americans, especially new immigrants, their first sense of themselves as corpses.

Perhaps it was this sense that helped The New Deal to be passed and allowed the government to just create jobs in an economy which had been eager for cheap and disposable labor. Some of the audience who heard Willy Loman's famous complaint, "A man is not a piece of fruit!" had memories of a time, place and government which didn't tolerate the abuse Loman railed against. The children, however, grew up with the tension that remained around the frailty of the government created jobs at which their parents worked. This combined with growingly vivid pictures of mass genocide was part of their normal day. For the baby-boomers, things were not the same. Their parents were coming home after a conquest and were eager to make things safe and pleasant and better for their children. A friend told me that the baby boomers were the first group of teenagers to be targetted as a specific market.

My mother found dolls like Ken and Barbie very frivolous. For her, the 60's were not a time to blossom and dream big, but a time to corner a piece of the stock market in male form and to guard your every posession in plastic or moth balls. The many elegant services of silverware remained in the closet. She said they were supposedly for me, but I knew intuititively that no one, not even I would use them. They remained as possible barter for hard times. Though she dyed her hair and she wore the full "Jackie-O" make-up, she could not and cannot to this day smile convincingly. Most of her life was spent with a simple cloth or vinyl hat on her head, a "car coat," and bags and bags of food in her arms, on her hips and stomach. We stored food in our house in permanent fear of the inevitable day of either joblessness or homelessness or what we would now call, "the haters" appearing at our doorstep. "You can't trust anybody," and "Nobody will appreciate you," were two of the mantras in the tiny apartment across from the Belt Parkway, in which we lived.

As though it were expected of her, my mother effectively killed the part of her that wanted joy, improvement, education, sex, physical activity -- any part of young life. At 8 years old, she'd been prepped for the life of Willy Loman. She worked a job in the civil service -- the one place left you couldn't be disposed of when you hit a certain age or lack of production. And she was forced to retire at 55, anyway, because the mindlessness of the job contributed to the overall destruction of her mind that a life without pleasure induced. She had no hope of pleasure, except in prurient gasps -- in cheating. In taking me out of school to go to the theater (it was okay because it would be educational for me, so it wasn't just a joyride.). In looking too closely at the teeth or the legs of someone nearby. She clobbered through her days and her muscles stretched the skin around her broad cheekbones to their limits. No rouge could make her look anything less than a heavyweight boxer, too thick to move quickly enough to win, but strong enough to make people afraid and give her dominion over the tiny space within our apartment which was hers.

IT IS TRUE, AS SHARON PEARCE POINTS OUT, that what my mother (and her generation or her clique within it) could've learned from the baby-boomers' was, simply, to fight back. As a rule, the Lomans expect to be treated fairly for mostly playing by the rules -- or not deviating anymore than anyone else. And they didn't "make waves." Even in the 1970's, my Hebrew school was still teaching us "Don't break away from the group," -- don't be strange, don't protest, don't act up. An entire generation's impulse against this hadn't made an impact on the lower-middle class Jewish community in Brooklyn in which I grew up. I didn't get a full sense of the power of civil disobedience until college when I was taught by professors who had participated within the civil rights movement.

The boomers were asked to do two completely hideous things -- to continue to repress civil rights even as African-Americans laid down their lives for basic freedoms and to fight in Vietnam. And mostly they refused. My unde went for the Loman reasons -- "America is this great country and I thought I should give something back." I don't disparage those reasons. They are the response of grateful immigrants who tried to be everything they thought that this country wanted them to be. I don't know what gave the boomers the power to protest, except for the heinous and un-American nature of what was being asked of them. I guess, also, having not been inundated with WWII and the Holocaust, they didn't have the sense that you can't stop a gigantic hate machine. At least, that's where I get that feeling from. That and my mother's insistence, "you can't fight City Hall." The fervor left from her unqueched passion went into the chaotic raising of me -- the second generation of Lomans. I, too, became a civil servant. I've never expected to travel, own a car or a house. I snatch pleasure in the quick and cheap --- chocolate soy milk, soy pudding, etc. My fervor goes into my cats whose lives are built on simple pleasures, too. My education was carefully planned as Jews didn't let go of that trope within The American Dream publicly. Sure, we knew imbeciles who opened delicatessens and made fortunes, but the pristine nature of the intellect has not yet been fouled by the cruelties of industrialization. Look who beat Willy Loman? Bernard, the nerdy kid next door who went on to defend cases in The Supreme Court. How had he done so? By avoiding the "evil eye" of talking about what you do before you do it. And Miller maintains a belief that academic achievement will help an individual survive in the corporate world, which I don't think people share commonly today.

Never forget, however, how nervous Bernard is for Biff -- he sees the edge of doom coming toward him in the same way that Willy does. But, he never gave up his end of the bargain with Biff, either -- he was always assisting him in the hopes that his athletic efforts would pull him out of high school and safely to a career, after all. I wonder, if when Willy Loman talked about being "well-liked," and not being "a piece of fruit," if there weren't people in the audience who never expected that he would be treated so badly. True, he's not perfect. But, one year earlier Harry Truman had just won the presidency. Describing his campaign, David McCullough writes
No president ever campaigned so hard or so far. Truman was sixty-four years old. Younger men who were with him through it all would describe the time on the train as one of the worst ordeals of their lives. The roadbed was rough and Truman would get the train up to 80 miles an hour at night. The food was awful, the work unrelenting. One of them told me, "It's one thing to work that hard and to stay the course when you think you're going to win, but it's quite another thing when you know you're going to lose." The only reason they were there, they all said, was Harry Truman. For Truman, I think, it was an act of faith--a heroic, memorable American act of faith. The poll takers, the political reporters, the pundits, all the sundry prognosticators, and professional politicians--it didn't matter what they said, what they thought. Only the people decide, Truman was reminding the country. "Here I am, here's what I stand for--here's what I'm going to do if you keep me in the job. You decide." (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/character/essays/truman.html)

The country had just voted, essentially for Willy Loman. All the more reason that Linda Loman is so shocked that the businessworld has shown such disrespect for her husband, when they are even debt free. Why is it, now, it is so hard to feel that same disgust and how did Miller know we would become such traitors to ourselves? It isn't Biff that's right, Bernard that's right -- but in fact, the country agreed with Willy Loman at the time. You rewarded people for steadfastness and you permitted them faults. However terrible a salesman (and I'll take the fifth on arguments that technology would've helped him to be better as some articles say, missing the whole point of the play) Willy had been loyal, mostly hard-working and had trudged down those roads on an act of faith, just like Harry Truman had come to the White House. He deserved better, and though it was clear he wasn't going to get it, I think the audience would've been much more outraged at the end of the play than we usually believe. Maybe they wouldn't have protested or "made waves," but they would've expected more from the people they worked with -- or hoped for more, against their best instincts and fears. Just as people didn't leave New York City for Wyoming at that time, I think no one expected anyone to be put out on the street after long years of service. It wasn't supposed to be done. My grandmother would've been disgusted with the company. My mother would've hoped for better, but not been surprised. I grew up learning that Biff had the right idea and that Loman's tragedy was his own failure to see his own flaws. That never made complete sense to me, I think because I was raised to expect the worst from my mother -- but to know it was "the worst" -- that it was treacherous. If we are supposed to feel horror about Willy then why not stop the play after we find out he cheats on his wife? Why not kill him off there? The horror is to see this Everyman be treated so miserably by his company -- yes, he should've seen it coming, like his children did, but there was no way he could've. Abandoning someone to the streets was unheard of -- there had been a New Deal and even my grandmother's family moved into the new government sponsored housing projects built after World War Two. My mother clinged to hope against hope and she practically made it, small pension and insurance and all. What Willy wanted was NOT unheard of, and it really shouldn't ever be.

Got a job!

Won't say where yet until September or so....fear of all sorts of budgetary craziness. But, so far so good!

Flower growing out of stones

The stones did not stop it from finding roots nor keep it from growing.

Chairman of the Board and Divine Divan Man

Why Tony Avella must win for Mayor

This is right off his webpage. Link to his Homepage http://www.tonyavellaformayor.com/

Take Back Our Schools
Tony Avella's record shows his commitment to creating an education system that works for all New Yorkers. As a City Council member, he worked closely with Parent Teacher Associations in Northeast Queens to make his school districts the best in the five boroughs. And when the Mayor failed to provide money for classroom technology, Tony secured the funding to acquire state-of-the-art computer labs and to install Internet wiring in schools. As Mayor, the first thing Tony will do is fire Joel Klein and replace him with an experienced educator. He'll also allocate funds so that we're investing in our kids, not in bloated bureaucracies or corporate testing systems. Tony believes no one understands education better than the teachers, principals, and parents. He'll make sure these stakeholders have a voice and a seat at the table when planning the future of our schools. As Mayor, Tony will:
Fire Joel Klein as the head of the Department of Education and replace him with an experienced educator
Open up the Department of Education to the parents and teachers who know our schools best
Stop teaching to the test so that our kids can enjoy learning again
Ensure that every school and every child has access to the latest technology and computers
Begin the process of reinstating free tuition at the CUNY colleges

for Mary Pearce, her family and friends

John Donne


Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness

Since I am coming to that holy room,

Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,I shall be made thy music;

as I comeI tune the instrument here at the door,

And what I must do then, think here before.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown

Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie

Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown

That this is my south-west discovery,

Per fretum febris, by these straits to die,

I joy, that in these straits I see my west;

For, though their currents yield return to none,

What shall my west hurt me?

As west and eastIn all flat maps (and I am one) are one,

So death doth touch the resurrection.

Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are

The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,

All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,

Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.

We think that Paradise and Calvary,

Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;

Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;

As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,

May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord;

By these his thorns, give me his other crown;

And as to others' souls I preach'd thy word,

Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:

"Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down." John Donne

Iron Maiden: In memory of Mary Pearce

Iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.
--Proverbs 27:17, King James Bible

Whenever I describe Mary Pearce to anyone, the first thing I say is that "she has a core of iron," for, except for her daughter, Sharon, I have never met anyone more strong-willed. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being this way -- as Proverbs teaches us, we become "sharpened" by our strong friends. And Mary Pearce was an incredible friend to me, as well as a substitute parent.

What made Mary Pearce so tough, in fact, was her ability to accept people and ideas. She never gave up on anyone, even if the person was so contrary that he/she -- usually me -- made her head spin. Not that she didn't give me a very strong argument back, not that she would give in to my argument, either, no matter how loud or intense I became. But, she was always willing to understand the perspectives of others. In time, we grew to agree more on things, most recently Barack Obama. It's possible that Sharon and I are now both more conservative than Mary was -- she saw a lot of possibility in this young administration, just as she saw a lot of promise in me and some of Sharon's other crazy friends. She reserved her greatest acceptance and belief for Sharon, who, like she did when she was young, moved thousands of miles away and did what people call "God's work" -- teach. It is very easy for me to imagine Mary captivating kindergartners with trees magically made from paper, her fine intelligence and her beautiful nature. People don't realize that small children are as hard to teach as teenagers -- and I think harder because they don't know what to be afraid of, yet. Children, however, do respond to the kind of love that is both truthful and encouraging -- and Mary Pearce was one of the few people in the world who could be both.

Because she recognized the potential, the sincerity and the spirit in me and in everyone she met, Mary Pearce made all of us feel more hopeful about our futures than we did.
And she changed us -- made us wiser, better and more honest. In doing so, she will also never leave us.

Gritting it out

I'm going to hold on until I either

1) Get a permanent position I want

or

2) Am placed somewhere

I am NOT GOING TO PANIC.

The ATR job market...same time, this year

So far, incentives and hiring freezes aside, all the experienced teachers I know over 40 seem to be getting the same cold shoulders they did last year. Teachers with 25 years of experience who are bilingual and can teach music and other things out of license are being asked, "Why should I hire you?"

I know one person with experience who was hired and he is 34.

I am "Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's" hopeful about one school which I adore and to which I hope I can be of use. Two more interviews loom at two other schools in which I'd gladly work and I plan to make big, cheerful presentations, full of aspirations, some student work, and concretely designed ideas. If my heart will not be sunk by the usual fear and sense of doom which comes from some of the continued grim realities of things, I should be able to do what I aim to do. It's amazing -- I can feel an influx of warm oil over the nerves and my brain sinks like a sponge full of jello. That's what it feels like when I think too much about the odds or the horrors my colleagues and I have experienced in downright disrespectful situations. None yet for me this year, and I hope (and I blow a full balloon inside my chest when I say that word) none too soon.

But, I know the removal of music and arts programs at certain schools is part of an effort to de-stabilize them so they can be closed. This ATR pattern is not going away.

If, in the end, 85 percent of the ATR's are not hired by finding their own jobs, but are sent by the DOE to be interviewed and eventually find work that way, why not start now? Klein initially called ATR's "undesireables" -- not many of the new principals have enough experience with older teachers to lose that first impression no matter how many times Klein now calls us worthy. Why not just place us now? Does Bloomberg think that in an election year he can negotiate a contract in which the UFT gives up job security? What would the UFT do, then, effectively? The 3020a process would dissipate as people could be excessed and then let go. Could they really justify their salaries just for a medical and dental plan (the latter of which I have spent my life avoiding using thanks to my uncle being a dentist. Since he retired, my teeth have been living in fear.) Would they just negotiate another raise? Would it just be about money? Then we would definitely be abandoning the children. No amount of money can replace acceptable working conditions. By acceptable, I mean ones in which the students and you feel secure enough to invest in the school in which you can be adventurous, challenging and creative.

I LOVE THIS GUY

He has talent and he hustles....tonight he said, "I just kept running. I heard the screaming and I just kept running." He never looked back. As Joe Girardi said, "We won this game because of Mark Teixeira's hustle."

The Summer Knows

I'm not sure of the season or the year because I've mostly blocked out everything that happened before graduate school. Out of an obsession with the movie, Summer of '42 which I still probably don't completely understand, but which haunts me, I'll choose it's eponymous season. The block in my memory is an almost conscious division of "Before my mother" and "After my mother." No, she didn't die, but the person who came back from graduate school wasn't as easily influenced by her. The person who came home from graduate school was remarkably self-confident and shrewd and took a friend's mention of a theater company that she had put in the back of her mind and worked it into a really interesting theatrical piece.

Summer of 1991 was before graduate school. Like I feel this morning, I traveled continually with an ashy, clammy fullness in my stomach. Worse than fear, it's a kind of death of spirit. I'd been addicted to a lot of bad habits and drawn a lot of people into them with me. The way some kids grew up playing "Cops and Robbers" I grew up playing "It's you and me against the world," with my mother and when she wasn't there, friends filled her place. It was a bad game, and some of my friends hated it so much they turned it simply into them vs. me -- which is also what my mother disintegrated to. When you can't pull off miracles, the singular army against the fates begins to curse its one footsoldier and soothsayer. There is no hope, not even pyrrhic victories in this kind of war. It's just about despair that luck continues to elude you and, again, as the messenger/diviner, I usually got a physical or emotional beating in the process. In other words: I desperately needed to get away. And I did.

Later on some of the people whom I got away from also got away. And that was good.

But, we're none of us are any different when we combine even now. And I am, at this period of my life, less confident than ever. It's silly, really. There's the shock of loss and being alone and not having a secure position for the first time since I was 22. And then there's the inability to wrap my mind around any of what happened on Sept 2, 2005. When all the facts have been re-assessed, it still makes no sense. It made no sense at that moment in Karen's or my life. And for once, I felt like not only she didn't, but I didn't deserve it. I finally had been and was doing what I was supposed to do. Always. And I got screwed anyway. (I know, me and a million other people, but like all of them, I say to my mirror, "I was supposed to be different. I was THE RESPONSIBLE one.") It would be hard for people who knew me back in 1991 to know just how RESPONSIBLE I had become. I was for a long, long time, not late, not without my research, not without the protoccols, not without the concerns, the questions, the answers and even the manners and I was able to leap small puddles with single bounds. I was no hero, but I had applied to the "Mensch" club and was awaiting membership. I had all the sponsors. Then a plane crashed with Karen B. Hunter in it and I kind of lost track of time. When I ran out of tasks -- closing up the office, etc., is when it got worse and when I really started to spin. There was something about having things to do for Karen that kept me okay. I still have photographs to print. I'm afraid to let that go.

In the three years which have past, I've lost all the drive that made me a "Mensch" and I never got my membership, as a result.

Back in 1991, there were no drugs involved and no alcohol and there aren't any now. Just that dangerous human frailty called judgement. Shortly after she died, someone once told me I was the perfect friend for Karen because I didn't judge her. I didn't like to judge people then and I still don't. It's not heroism and it's not cowardice. It's an awareness that everything that people do IS the best that they could do in those moments, and if you want to help them, the best thing to do is help them change the moments or how they see them. The only things I can't abide are acts of malice. But those are few and far between.

I used to be one of those young teachers -- back in the Summer of 1991, certainly, who thought that some people cared, some didn't, some people tried and some didn't. I've since learned that everybody cares and everybody tries. I've seen teachers beg kids to stay with them an extra minute to get it right -- teachers who kids say all sorts of mean-spirited things about. The truth is we are all so angry with each other because we all care very much. Colleagues who might retire in ten days are absolutely livid. I've been taught more about concern and diligence from people who are fiercely tough than those who seem more amiable.

The scary thing about being an ATR is you are rootless and you feel just like you did -- or I did-- when you started teaching. There's no sense of where you will go, although you've spent the better part of a lifetime working with at-risk youth, etc. It's like, for a moment, my past was washed away, and with it, the part of me that knows how to be cautious -- the part of me that left that summer never to call some people again, and to be hours away from others. The part of me that was quite sure of who I was and wanted to be. It wasn't to have an acronym that, on funny moments, reminds me of the Russian Tea Room (RTR). That was never a great restaurant, by the way. All atmosphere and some great waiters. Nick, you out there? My mother was the blonde with the attitude who was either too stingy or too generous. If that doesn't jar your memory, this will: she sent back drinks. Who does that? I am so sorry.

Nick I hope is somewhere in Florida. But, I'm in limbo. Karen is dead. And, no, I'm STILL not taking it well.

To find my boundaries again, is the goal of summer 2009.

Sleepy Bernie

Apros pos of fear of government power

NY Daily News * June 3rd, 2009

Juan Gonzalez

They are calling it the invasion of the charter schools.
It seems to work this way:
Parents at a neighborhood public school suddenly learn Chancellor Joel Klein has decreed they must surrender scarce classroom space in their building for a new charter school.
No parent or faculty meeting to gauge whether anyone wants the new school.
No official vote of the local Community Education Council.
Some young bureaucrat from the city Education Department's Office of Portfolio Development arrives one day with a bunch of maps under his arm and promptly orders a new allocation of rooms.
Boom. Done. All part of Klein's rush to create 100,000 new charter school seats over the next few years.
Well, yesterday afternoon at Public School 123 in Harlem, a bunch of angry parents staged a noisy protest against the charter invasion.
"Ours is not a failing school," Antoinette Hargrove, president of the parents association, said. "Our test scores are going up. If ain't broke, don't fix it." Hargrove said the Education Department wants to cap the growth of PS 123 even though the agency previously approved its expansion into middle school. At the same time, Klein wants to double the size of a new charter school in the same building. That school is Harlem Success Academy II, which former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz launched in September with 180 pupils. She wants to increase enrollment to 360 this fall. Klein often notes that thousands of parents have applied to get their kids into the four schools Moskowitz runs.
He never mentions the well-financed marketing campaign Moskowitz has fashioned to drum up those applications. Nor does he mention that the Education Department has sponsored thousands of automated phone calls to parents in Harlem to get them to apply to Harlem Success schools - something it does for no other public schools.
Hargrove and her parents association at PS 123 organized their own recruitment campaign this year with no money and no assistance from Klein. They held four open houses for the community and persuaded 644 parents to apply to their new middle school.
"We followed all the guidelines they told us to and now they're capping the number of new students," parent Rodney Askins said.
Even worse, half the current fifth-graders at PS 123 have been reassigned to other schools in the neighborhood for September, Hargrove said - all to make room for the expansion of the Moskowitz charter school.
Education Department spokeswoman Melody Meyer confirmed that many of those fifth-graders have been reassigned to other schools, but she denies the transfers were involuntary.
Some parents simply cited a preference for another middle school, Meyer said.
"It is the Department of Education and not me who determines the siting and space allocation for the Harlem Success Academies," Moskowitz said in a letter to parents of PS 123.
The Harlem fight is being repeated all over town. In Co-op City in the Bronx, parents at PS 106 are battling the Education Department's attempt to ram a new charter school into the building. In Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, hundreds of parents packed a neighborhood meeting a few days ago and forced the Education Department to cancel plans for a new Hebrew Language Charter School at Intermediate School 278. In Sunset Park, residents who fought for 20 years to build a new neighborhood high school are furious that the Education Department has slated a charter school for children from Park Slope to share the facility.
If Klein wants all these new charter schools, they say, let him build new sites for them. In no suburban school system in the state would parent concerns be so flagrantly disregarded.
Sadly, Bloomberg's style of mayoral control has become more like a dictatorship with velvet gloves.

Glorious Larry

Climbing Larry

Growing Old With You

We spent a lot of time just reading together, Karen and I. One time we read this article in The Financial Times about the fact that some people like Zurich, boring as it is, because it is quiet and clean...and boring. She tried to explain to me that she was one of those people. So am I, it turns out. I'd like a more intellectual set of people around me, but it's okay if all we do is talk at cafes or at the grocery store. It is a little hard for me to be surrounded by houses, though.
The last neighborhood Karen lived in, Dumbo, was kind of a combination of industrial, hip places and Zurich-like calm.

I have a colleague who has some of Karen's features and is the same age she would've been. Today I looked over at her face and mused about how pleasant it would be to have seen Karen grow old. The creases in the face outlining the stellar mouth, the reading glasses pulling you toward the eyes. The comfort of knowing not to be that anxious, most of the time. Just reading the newspaper and giggling about stories which seem far-fetched. Settling into a routine and still finding each other beautiful in a different way. The shoulders, like sandstone, carved and weightless. Confident hands, neat as pearls, both of us finally having figured out how to keep our nails clean and short. We were always digging, if only into our own fingers and that made for messy paws.

Most of all, we would have had the pleasure of not wanting to rush. Her apartment felt like a beach house and we could have just drifted into the waves while reading the morning paper.
I could have slept on her shoulders and she on mine, breezy with the day.

Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent - Show 1

Hope she has a career despite not winning.

Interview #1 of this round.

Okay folks: I had a discussion with my fellow candidates about how to consider blending a focus on the environment with ELA standard #2 -- understanding literary techniques. The discussion was watched by the hiring committee. Then we were each given the opportunity to say what we particularly brought to the school. The whole thing lasted about 25 minutes.

Yup. That was it. I talked to the other two candidates and they to me. Fortunately, they were nice people. We had a very polite talk -- like one you would have over tea.


*************************************
They liked me! I got a nice response to my thank you note.

We Need A Little Christmas - Broadway's Back!

One of those moments you just love

Running to you

I became part of the wind and seized you, weightless and all heartbeat.

Song of a broken heart with explanation

I couldn't remember a day or a minute without her and I didn't have to because there weren't too many while we knew each other and then ...

We actually DID used to just look at each other and be amazed we'd found each other...So it does make me feel accursed that my days are without her being here yet I never stop thinking about her. I would never want to stop thinking about her. I just hate the abyss I feel when I realize she's gone over and over.

Not a Day Goes By Lyrics:(stephen sondheim)
Not a day goes by
Not a single day
But you’re somewhere a part of my life
And it looks like you’ll stay
As the days go by
I keep thinking when does it end
Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting
But I just go on thinking and sweating
And cursing and crying
And turning and reaching
And waking and dying
And no, not a day goes by
Not a blessed day
But you’re still somehow part of my life
And you won’t go away
So there’s hell to pay
And until I die
I’ll die day after day after day
After day
After day after day after day
Til the days go by
Til the days go by
Til the days go by

What I felt when I saw her

So beautiful you feel wet flower petals against your skin
as she walks by. The water flashes at you gracefully.

Cat Lineage

Every so once in a while, I look at breeds of cats for possible links to Larry, Henry and Bernie. Since Larry and Henry were littermates, I had to find a breed which had their exact faces and body types and also their differences. For Bernie, I had to find a match for that TRIPLE PURR he has which also rings. I found it. Yesterday, I mis-remembered it as the Norwegian Forest Cat. Actually, it's the Siberian Cat who also likes water, has that purr and likes to greet people at the door. I've even seen pictures of ones with the characteristic chocolate chip cookie dough moustasche. The Turkish Van has Larry's unmistakable and very hard to match red -- a kind of strawberry/gold. It also has the sweetness, the love of water and the intelligence. Both cats are considered extremely bright and people friendly to the point of being dog-like. That's my guys all right.

I also think there might be some Abyssinian in Larry and Henry because Larry didn't get Henry's poofiness and he has this dry wit that is very much his own no matter where he got it from. I've seen better matches than the Abyssinian pictured, but it's close. The Abyssinian and the Turkish Van are top. The relative of Bernie's is the one with the ribbon. If the cat is a relative of Bernie's then behind that expression is the thought "Oh dear. This is going to take a bit to tear up."

I didn't go

I helped Derek Sacerdote feed and care for a colleague's turtle and guinea pigs. You can learn more about Derek and how well he would care for the 46th District in Brooklyn at http://www.dereksacerdote4citycouncil.blogspot.com/

I think feeding the pets of a sick colleague is important, and downright neighborly.

Children won't listen.

I told myself I never wanted to be one of those peppy, overweight English/Theater teachers who sings songs like Sondheim's "Children will listen," at assemblies. Obviously, the overweight isn't what bothers me as I've grown accustomed to my girth. It's the cloying sentimentality which I distrust probably because I was raised to and do respond to it. It has just enough of Mr. Rogers' gentle scolding and the rumbly sound of ocean which resonates within the litany of women's literature about failure and suicide. (Ah, the hate emails should be pouring in. FYI: I don't mean Virginia Woolf. I mean Kate Chopin and any story which talks about wallpaper.)

If we wanted to make assemblies in which students would listen, we'd invite students to be part of the process. And I'm sure a lot of teachers and administrators would like to do that. Why don't they? When the temperature reads "standardized tests" the emotional range within the school usually is pushed to within about .005 of a degree. We become apologetically automatic in the name of seeming fair. But what could be less fair:

You pour a group of students into a large echoing chamber with no real sound system and poor sightlines. There's also no breeze, but lots of dust of every kind. Just from lack of use, the auditorium has the feel of an envelope sitting in the back of the desk drawer for fifty years.
Then you ask the teachers to tell the students to be quiet. You don't necessarily tell them why. The best they can create is a kind of homage to the feeling of loss that one might get before throwing the envelope away. And even the cheapest of you would throw it away as it is so coarse and moldy -- dry and moldy --something mushroom-like has definitely left spores.

Okay, so the kids are down to silent talking and shifting and then the adults are up there deciding whose idea the assembly was and why it's being held. This is not a particularity of any one school. It's par for the course everywhere. At Brooklyn Comprehensive, we tried never to have these things at all.

Then somebody speaks and whatever he/she might've said gets translated along distance and volume....

We haven't had an assembly where I work, but the feel of the place is one of having been be-labored with busywork, memoranda, emails and the re-definition of what used to be called a grade book into "DATA." I am a few minutes away from a meeting now in which I will be asked not really for my opinion, but to listen for what I am going to be told to do. Can you imagine anything, besides an assembly being this insane:

You pour a group of teachers into a hot room at the end of the day. They can see the dust spinning in the rays of sunshine. You talk to them about a test which they have been concerned about for much of their teaching lives and which they, by now, know how to handle. But, you take away all their power to handle it. And you want them to be quiet. They wait while the administrators draw straws outside about who is going to tell this year's bad news. We already know that we have no room in our current curriculum for test-prep -- in the English classes, anyway. We already know EXACTLY WHO is failing, what their scores were two test sessions ago, etc. We will be told that this is NOT DATA. Data is not found among actual results. It must be specifically collected, the way we note what pages our students are on in their independent readings. We are actively measuring their reading. If we just looked at, oh, how many books they could read in a marking period, it wouldn't be the same because that would be marking period information. There wasn't a scientific process or anything. I mean, you might've assessed the students on different days of the week. With slightly different forms....

Somebody comes into the room and starts talking and it is translated quietly in looks and very silent body language. One idiot talks too much and that's usually me. But, not today. My colleagues are all excellent teachers. They should be listened to. When they get their say, I'll wait my turn and then say mine.

Nobody starts their career wanting to be pushed into oblivion. Nobody.

The weekend guys

Larry doing the happy bicycle dance and Bernie sporting his "Scott Baio" look.

Larry the Lovebug

Here's Looking at Bernie

Klein: Low cost incompetency? Great deal!

In the middle of discussions which aim at firing the certified, qualified and highly experienced teachers left without jobs after their schools closed, Klein goes to Albany TO BEG TO HIRE/RETAIN 14,000 teachers who had failed basic competency tests? So, basically, he's given principals the ok to hire cheap, possibly TRULY incompetent teachers instead of paying for certified educators who have tried and true records.

Why doesn't the public know this? So, you're kids are being taught by someone who can't pass qualifying tests rather than someone who can do that and more all because the former is cheaper? We need one of those bank commercials: A snickers bar, 75 cents. A good education: Priceless.

I found this at http://nyceducator.com/2009/04/ms-weingarten-takes-firm-stand.html

I'm scrambling -- Toss a coin for me, lend advice...

Feel free to vote, though Anonymous votes will be erased.

Should I:
Get a special ed license on the theory there's always a need, even if at private schools and the pay is bound to be better than data entry.

Just consider my teaching career dead and train as a paralegal so I have an immediate job I can work over 40 hours a week at and almost make ends meet. I will have completed the training roughly when our contract runs out in October. THEN--Dig in and go to Law School hopefully while I still have a teaching job to pay for part of it--Get myself a whopping good tutor and take the nine exams to become an Actuary on the theory that I did pass the Stuyvesant test once...This will also assume I'm making enough money to pay rent.

Sit tight and ride out this ATR business as the UFT swears they won't let us go. So far they haven't and they could have.

Abandon all hope. The undercurrent behind all of my choices is a feeling of "it wont work".

Honestly I've been so sick this vacation

That going back tomorrow is a welcome change.

A WORTHY EVENT

TUESDAY, APRIL 28th @7:30pNYU Kimmel Center, KC 802 Shorin
60 Washington Sq South FREE
Gaza & Beyond: A Feminist PerspectiveA discussion with 2 Israeli women, one Jewish, one Palestinian. Nisreen Mazzawi & Dalia Sachs are members of the Coalition of Women for Peace, which mobilized a protest by more than 1,500 women and men within a few hours after the brutal attack on Gaza began.Join us for an exploration of the relationship between war, gender & security. Co-sponsored by: the Anatolian Club of NYU, CODEPINK Women for Peace, and Women in Black Union Square

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM BERNIE AND LARRY. Remember, it's all about snuggling and not smuggling or aerial bombing. Everyone wants to come home for a peaceful meal.

To print or not to print

It's 3:26am, and the last thing I want to do is print material for a class I'm covering. I don't know why I now wait until the last two free hours of my morning. There's something about not wanting the intrusion, combined with a never-ending resentment over using my ink for school. Ink. It drives me crazy. I have to go to Staples to get it because I have a portable printer and it's also expensive.

I should bring the printer with me to school and I did once but I had nothing to print that day. I begged a colleague to let me print something she was handwriting just to feel like I hadn't carried the little toy in vain.

There isn't any hope of good faith anymore. Used to be, you did a job and you felt good about it and, at least, you'd earned your right to it under your union contract. Since my status is defined as indefinite, it's hard for me to want to do anything until I have to do so -- just in case I'm replaced in a few hours.

When Magical Thinking is Difficult

Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, describes very accurately what mourning has been for me. I live in the world where objects hold not only memories, but possibilities. Clothing still waits to be worn. Emails wait to be sent. Like in the movie, Tell No One, I expect to get an email which shows a cryptic video of Karen shopping in Taiwan.

It is unfathomable to me that all of a miracle can be reduced to pulp -- I think this is what Shakespeare meant by "instant putrefaction" in Troilus and Cressida. When someone dies instantly by being crushed, if you must look, and I only have the coroner's report, the body is all bruise. So, plaintive and so mundane. She'd just been hit too hard. In these days of miracle medicine, it's so hard to reckon with the idea that death can't, at least, be forestalled. People talk about the blessing of things being quick and painless, which, of course, we have no idea is really true. The person has entered a world which is byzantine, and like some monestary run by an ancient order, untresspassable.

The stoic insanity of it has been my excuse for partially not believing in it. People disappear in my life, but they don't usually REALLY evaporate, flatten...go. I've found people on Facebook I haven't seen in twenty years. There are a million Karen Hunters, and one of them is even a gay priest who has written a book about being married. God loves to tease me.

I can less and less call out her name and expect an answer that doesn't come from inside me, however that may be. It's time to get all of the photographs developed to the sizes she wanted and to finish what I know needs to be done. All of this will take a while and each one will push me further behind the firmament--these are part of my gallery, like every work of literature or art worth reading, they depict the strongest yearnings of a beautiful soul.

There is something evil-feeling in being the one left with the artist's estate. The danger is to become too much a curator. I'm not sure what I mean, but I don't want to become one of those people who sees the weaknesses of works....stop. I've spent my life being that kind of person. To indulge in an artistic act I believe to be beautiful and to commit to it without reservation is beyond me or has been except for when I was with Karen. Flying is that kind of an act. Listening and selecting music is another. Being with someone in the music, another. Fact is, I've never done anything beautiful alone, and usually I am the "voice of reason," who wonders if the metaphors are enough.

Perhaps I can think explain it best by saying I start to feel further away from the sky.

High Anxiety

I think I heard that Gary Sheffield is on the disabled list because of anxiety.

As an ATR unable to navigate a new place with no real roots or space of my own, I believe I understand how debilitating anxiety can be. Every night, before I go to bed, I plot out a "plan of attack" on the school building. I'll spend the morning in the programming office between classes and the afternoon in the students' cafeteria when I'm not "pushing in" to someone else's class. As for those teachers who don't seem to enjoy my presence, simple: I won't go. There are other teachers who would like me instead. None of the haters will report me as they don't want me back and none of the lovers will squeal as they want me to be able to come back unobtrusively.
No way any AP who happens to be watching members of either group (because there are objecters to the hideous curriculum we employ on both sides) is going to catch me (perhaps one of the most outspoken critics of said lessons.)

Needless to say, it's an exhausting enough prospect that after two sleeping pills, plus melatonin, I doze off for about four hours before waking up in the complete realization that THIS WILL NEVER WORK. The prospect of going back into the teachers' lounge and sit and be ignored, "whatever-ed," "dismissed," or accorded so much fear that my colleague's mouth dries and she legitimately reaches for sound along the vein-color pallor of her lips, makes me want to feel my worst symptoms of my most difficult ailments, just a little more intensely.

And simply put, I can't sleep until I over-sleep.

The big sleep

Want to see some kids who can't read listening to a book being read to them which they don't understand....

Honesty

I was given the AP class in my school to teach while the teacher who normally teaches it is ill.

I feel guilty. Yes, I asked to cover the class -- the teacher's entire schedule about a week ago. I didn't do it with the idea in my head of whether I deserved it or not. I just did it because I wanted to do it. I didn't get the rest of the schedule, but I got the AP Class. I sort of get why -- I never got the Ramp-Up training so maybe I don't know enough to lead a class in it. I've taught AP English before, though not with a class as good as this one. I was mediocre at it. I'd've been better had my students done homework.

However, I feel like the senior teachers should be teaching AP English and I shouldn't be. I don't know why I care, or why it bothers me when I have a shopping cart full of books waiting to "Proceed to Checkout" which I want to buy to help me with the class and I'm up now to work on my lessons. It's not that I don't like teaching it. I do. Clearly, I do. I'm spouting off as much as I can remember ever learning and I'm thinking about reading Oedipus Rex aloud in my passable Greek.

It's wrong, though. Much as my outburst last week was wrong. I don't have the right to outrage or preferences. These people have been here for twenty years. I'm just part of the Occupation.

It's not just politically correct politics. It feels god-awful.

So, I'm going to send an email to my chair and the principal expressing the wish that a senior faculty member take the class and I'm going to talk to my union rep as well. My colleagues are all teaching this hideous Ramp-Up curriculum and it's killing them. Plus, they've earned this in this place and I haven't. I believe that.

I don't even mind if my colleagues feel schadenfreud if one of them takes the class away from me. They deserve to feel it. I am feeling self-conscious and miserable in too many ways. Plus, I know I can teach this class some other time in some other place. This isn't my school. It never will be. Even though I also have a Tilden baseball cap in one of my many "Wish Lists" on-line. For me that's fashion, whereas for the other folks at this school it's history.

The trouble is, I don't know if my saying anything will do anything positive, but I'll try. No one at my school reads this blog so they'll never know what I felt. That's okay, too. I write this as one of many ATR's and teachers-who-also-write-and-do-art-in-their-other-lives.

When the war is over, someone buy me new toys

There is no doubt Bloomberg and Klein are fighting a war against teachers. You need look no further than the insanity of my weekly experience. Perhaps the most hilarious moment yet was our professional development on Monday. We were introduced to "Mimio" technology, which is all well in good if we weren't working in a school with a shrinking budget about to be closed. And, the curriculum we are mandated to use in English and Social Studies specfically forbids the use of streaming video and the internet which makes the use of Mimio no more than a blackboard trick, certainly not one worth over 500 dollars to start.

Why keep teachers in a professional development in which you teach them about a technology they can't use and you can't afford to buy anyway? To frustrate them and make them feel obsolete, that's why.

How much did it cost for the demonstration? One of the teachers who attended a workshop for this product was given a t-shirt by the saleslady. Couldn't we, at least, have all had t-shirts? How about backpacks for the students with the logo? No?

Why can't you behave?

Ten minutes after I talked to a kid, trying to make a deal that if he behaved he could earn a prize of some kind, he did nothing.....

Can you hear me? No, I mean, really.

A few days ago I called a parent about her son's lack of focus. I knew her son was deaf, but since he gets to work with a hearing teacher twice a week, I thought his services were in order. Plus, as I am continually reminded, I am the NON-SPECIAL-ED LICENCE-HOLDING person in the room. In the early part of my conversation with the parent, which spanned all three main floors of the building, the mother asks, "Is he wearing his earpiece?" "What earpiece?" "His teachers are supposed to wear this halo which is connected directly to his earpiece." This would've sounded very odd except that as a college counselor I went to conferences were I learned about all the fantastic devices out there to make college possible despite disability, one of these being a device which the teacher wears which does look kind of like a halo around your head and connects back to an earpiece and microphone on the student. I walk my phone over to special ed deptand ask the question about this. "I've got to find it," remarks the woman temporarily in charge of the dept while our chair nurses her newborn. My suspicion is it was lost long before her temporary tenure began. She tells me go down to the principal and ask. I take my cell phone, parent on the other end down to the principal's office. No, he won't just come on the cell phone. She has to call and see if her call is worthy with the principal's secretary first. I tell him what it's about and that the parent is more than concerned. He says she should call the Guidance Counselor for Special Education who is not in that day and with whom I have not had a lot of excellent experience. I find it laughable that he called me on being "not in compliance" when I took a few special ed students out of our classroom to work with separately because they were faster and more rambunctious than the other half of the class. Did he know that WE WERE ALL not in compliances as far as this young man's hearing headgear? I mean, basically, he's deaf as a post. And he sits through the same class he has with us in the period before he works with us -- so he is inundated with aural blur of the same kind for 100 minutes. We wonder why he goes to sleep?
My colleague in the class with the Special-Ed license says that she hasn't ever worked with this device on this young man and she has taught him for most of this year. No one told her a thing about it. That it was once, then that it was lost, etc. As she is meticulous, I believe her. In fact, from the conversation in the special ed office it seems that it was assumed the student would just go without this earpiece and they saw no reason to mention it.
But, I wasn't in compliance working with this kid one - to - four at one table where he could definitely hear me. I am sure that he hears my colleague and much of what goes on in her class because she is clear, but he has other classes which are chaotic and large and not so artfully run. He has often brought up points from the book we are reading which he says he has heard in his other class -- the very same English class taught by another teacher with three times as many students. The points don't seem familiar and I suspect he has half-heard them.

Sticky Notes

If I ever, ever, ever again make a form to teach students how to use Post-It's, someone please shoot me in the hip, immediately.

What depravity will I engage in next?

Knowing when to speak out, gaining perspective and losing my job

Of course, if I had to name the top anxiety I feel since being an ATR, it's the last item in the title of this posting. Norm Scott notes in Ednotesonline.com that only 16 ATR's have been hired since the union and the DOE made the "agreement" not to force anyone to hire us, but to provide financial support for some principals who hire some of us.

In the surrealist festival which is my day job, I sometimes take too seriously my inifinitessimal role in the school and don't realize how much everyone else does.

A great depression builds over me for I have done no good in a long time and I have not learned that it doesn't matter if I personally do good, at all.

Curriculum Guide

Since I've become an ATR, I've become even less politically astute than before. Didn't think it was possible.

We had a meeting regarding the new curriculum we are using this term. Well, technically it's not really knew as it was used on these same kids when they were in 9th grade. But, new curriculum guides were purchased and even new copies of the same banal book the kids read years ago. There ARE some books worth re-reading at different points in your educational life. Usually, books designed specifically to meet the needs of a particular grade level -- in this case, middle school -- are not one of them. The students don't read at HS level, by and large, but assigning them a book geared to JHS kids was not a good idea. The themes are beneath them and don't merit revisiting. What they needed was something geared to HS kids written at a lower reading level. Or, they needed a book worth reading twice, which is not this book.

During our meeting about this curriculum, I found myself talking. That alone was a mistake. I know that I should keep my mouth shut, but for whatever reason, I needed to pretend to be empowered. When you are an ATR, I think, you want to do as much as possible and to try to connect with the center of the school. What you don't realize is how rotten things are at core and what influences whom because you're new to an already tainted environment and you're not given enough stake in it to get into the kinds of political battles which help you to learn what's worth fighting for. The lessons which go with this book are very amorphous and I've held back from completely suggeting a new structure with accompanying handouts. I said enough, however, to get the administration to use me to create items to make themselves look good -- rubrics for grading. As if there was really material here from which to differentiate.... However, my skills in education b.s. exceed theirs because I am good at creating meaning in activities and evaluations in and of themselves. Part of this comes from watching a colleague design rubrics for grading English essays which were harder than the English Regents, but used the same basic formula. Part of this comes from living in a world in which what the students do in the lesson is the meat of the lesson. It's been years since I've ever seen teachers asked to actually SAY what they are working on without an accompanying action. The phrase, "speak it into existence" has never been so wrongly used. It's not the teachers' fault and its probably not the administrators' fault either. We are all forced to make use of a product.

Indeed, at one point, one person referred to the "decisions" of "America's Choice," the for-profit organization who designed our curriculum. I thought, "that's the name of a company. They're not Harvard, for god's sake. What gives them academic credibility? Next you'll be selling me a curriculum by Fisher Price and speaking of them as if they were run by descendants of Moses."

My biggest mistake, however, was offering to create the enabling materials to make this business look less half-baked than it is. I don't want to seem like I am betraying my colleagues in doing this and I won't do it again, I think. The problem is that we are going to have bigger and bigger problems trying to engage students with this material as it only gets more amorphous and unbound to form as it continues. There's no build of skills upon the other -- there's a reference to a collection of habits students are supposed to develop. I've found that good habits need to be taught thoroughly and sometimes in stages. You can't just say you're teaching them even if you model them. Students need to know, "How." I'll give you an example of the kind of absurdist practice my colleagues and I are forced to perform.

One element of this curriculum is the use of "Sticky Notes," to mark important passages in a book. As a fan of the pen, highlighter and bookmark, I've never actually employed a Post-It to this end. When the students were told to do just that next to an image which they could envision, they were baffled.
First, where to put it: above, below, adjacent? Next: Do I really see what the author says or do I just kind of? If the latter, well does it get a note? Third: Should I put the page number on the note in case it falls out? Wouldn't it just be easier to mark it in my notes?

Since most students don't get the same book again to work with, they might never see this Sticky Note again. Even if they do, they were so busy trying to figure out the logistics that they fell behind in the text which was being read aloud by the teacher. So, they became even more frustrated.

I suggested that the students put their notes on a separate sheet of paper with spaces for each note, page number and, is turns out as I draft it, circling whether it's a description of a place, character or feeling. I didn't get into whether the student can fully visualize the image or not. When I read, I don't necessarily see things immediately, but the overall feeling of the language reaches me. Then, in discussion or re-reading, I see it more fully. Let's not forget that a lot of writing lends itself to synasthaesia. Too bad we're not reading Rememberance of Things Past.

So I found myself defining a real skill and method to cover for an unfinished idea. Students should take note of extensive descriptions as usually they are in place for a reason. I'm not sure that they don't do this already, but they don't generally take notes. The problem is, that in order to distinguish between what's worth noting or not, you have to understand its connection to the plot and themes as a whole. Probably, I'll have to put that in the worksheet. Now, I don't want students not to see things outside of the larger themes -- or necessarily think these are the only themes. Ideally, people would underscore what moves them. However, you usually aren't moved by abstraction that is not connected to something you seek. Since the book isn't really the sort that touches upon universal yearnings, it's good to get them to define what ideas it does have....inasmuch as it does.

Now, the final rub is it will take a long time to do this exercise if I create it right --- and we have been criticized for going over the appointed time for the curriculum. This was explained in this meeting as not meant to limit how much time we take, but that we should make sure that "teaching and learning is taking place" if we do go over. There's concrete for you. Not.

Next time, best to bring and eat cookies.

Arrau in Boston. Beethoven: Sonata

Still wondering where Randi Rhodes is....

Pour la premiere fois qui je vis, mon cour fait froid

For some reason, the angrier I get, the more French I remember. Most of what I know of languages is buried deep in the archives of my brain and taken out very rarely, usually just to define a word and not to speak it. On the way home yesterday, I found myself putting together the phrase above. For the first time in my life, my heart is cold.

My principal has taught me the greatest lesson about being an ATR: not only are you expendible, but anything you have been assigned is, at best, temporary. You fill a gap until you have done it well enough not to be there. Then you just sub again until something needs you.

Maybe this is a good way to live?

To expect nothing every day.

Now if a suggestion is made to me about what I should do, my response will be: je m'en moque!

I don't care. When I cared, my feelings seem to have been opposed. Perhaps if I do not indicate what I want, my luck will improve.

Je m'en moque!

Thought

There is no saint without a past and no sinner without a future. Praise everyone. If you cannot praise someone, let them out of your life.

Shri Babaji, 1984

Fear

I had written several postings that were critical of something to do with something but now I am afraid that my career will be reduced to nothing, so I'll send out that information privately.

Isn't fear grand?

The Jupiter Symphony

An astrologer friend told me that the past few days have been my "Jupiter Time" -- which is supposed to indicate good fortune, at the very least in friendships, I think. I was skeptical and things came late, but for the first time in years, I have finally got a collegial bond with members of the department in which I work. Some of it is shared perspectives on the new curriculum we teach, but a lot of it is very sweet, mutual respect. I'm especially lucky because I wouldn't have earned this by a long shot, but by accident of fate I ended up working with a small group of really good veteran teachers. BCNHS was a collective of such folks, but it's been a while since we were a unified group and, once it was announced that we were closing, people were sent to different schools on very short notice and our department dwindled to just one or two. Of course, my colleagues are experiencing THAT feeling -- the feeling of tremendous loss of a host of old friends. I'm in the unique position in which making a new friend makes some sense, although I still feel like a refugee from BCNHS. I don't feel like I work at Tilden, still, but I do work with these colleagues and I do understand a little more of the politics which they face. You see, we Aspies can be empathetic, we just are so through our brains and then our central nervous systems.

Anyway, it's just faintly glorious to have people whom I respect and am friendly with at work again.

Beethoven Piano Sonata No.17

Need some passionate music at times of great stress....

Progeny

It's impossible to completely understand me without a story...

Once upon a time there was a vivacious, astonishingly smart and funny woman in her thirties. She could climb mountains in four inch wedgie sandals and navigate her way through the Negev in French. My mother played the part of the dumb blond just up to the point at which she had men and women by the throat and then turned her wits on them as if she were tossing a ball and sweeping up all the jacks on the floor. That's the only way I can explain how we found French tourists in all parts of Israel because my mother spoke no Hebrew and her Yiddish wasn't sufficing, probably because it was handed down from my grandmother who had stopped being in the presence of other speakers of that language when she was about 14. English was my grandmother's best language, followed by Latin, Polish, a smattering of Yiddish and German. French still is my mother's strong suit. But, her body is now made of styrofoam peanuts instead of bones, as arthritis has shelled her skeleton. Long ago, her mind became riddled with paranoid schizophrenia and the odd remarks about what a person might be thinking gave way to full blown theories about "those who listen in the walls".

I've pretty much thought of my mother as deceased since she was 38 years old and woke up after electric shock treatments unable to remember that I had a tenth birthday party a year before. I don't know whether she ever recovered that, or other memories she lost. She became insufferable as quickly as she became incoherent, insisting that what she "heard" was gospel, that there were people coming to "clean" me (presumably of emotions from the context she gave) and that there were two or more versions of my uncle, one taller than the other. One night she was sitting in the bathroom and she called me over to tell me that she realized she was going to become overbearing and that I should run away. It was one of the few sane moments she had and I am always grateful for it, though it took me too long to take her advice.

My mother's face practically flexes -- her cheeks and her eyes wink in a forward and backward motion. It's a code she uses for "you're giving away a secret" or "how dare you cross that line." She accounts for everything she spends every day, making sure that she isn't missing any money. I've never understood that -- if you've lost a dollar, you've lost it. You can't get it back at two in the morning when you've realized it. Nights did extended tours in the apartment I grew up in and no one ever slept before 3am by the time I was in nineth grade. Occasionally, my mother would go to bed around 12:30 and I could start my homework then. Sometimes I could start earlier, but there would be the constant interruptions.

One interruption which drove me to overeat until I was numb was her violent rages about something she'd lost. A safety pin, a penny or a Monet earring and she would go on and on for hours -- at least four, but usually six and sometimes days. Endless screaming and ranting and twisting of the face. I used to put money in her purse so that would eliminate loss of money. She never questioned why she might be AHEAD a few dollars. If it was a thing I could replace, I would do it, but I was a kid and I didn't have the kind of resourcefulness to find "just the right store" until I was seventeen. You never could believe a person could talk about a thing so much. Any thing. Recently, I threw away a host of things from my mother's bedroom so she could manipulate her walker through it after surgery and because the hospital social worker insisted that, at least, one room be useable for physical therapy. As you might guess, my mother doesn't throw things away very often. Anyway, she sued me for 25,000 and we settled at 10,000. She had to know that doing this would mean I would NEVER speak with her again. It wasn't the money, but the fact that my mother would bring me to court, risk my job in doing it (and threaten to inform my job of things as she saw them which, these days could land me in the Rubber Room just for the excuse...the DOE will do anything to get rid of high salaried personnel.)
That my life meant nothing in the measure of her things...that ended it for us. I don't want to know when she dies or where she's buried. The threatening, malicious husk which inhabits her curved cadaver is of no interest to me.

Which is why except for my cats, my uncle and my friends, I don't guard anything. It makes me a bit difficult because when people lose things I don't really encourage them to get upset. Rather, I try to think of how it can be replaced and if its worth it. Sometimes, I replace it for them. It makes me happy to solve such a silly problem. I swore to myself at nine that no thing would ever mean that much to me. And luck and love have always kept me free from needing things although loss of people gets harder and harder on me.

Irreplaceable

The simplicity of my days and the way I wait for minutes until I have to leave for work, lose things time and time again, can't remember where I put things, all just point to who is missing, underscore the irreplaceable.

I've tried for months now to use the immersion of a new place and new resonances to reinvent myself and not shed the grief but embed it, be strengthened by it, and what has resulted is a preeminent weirdness. No one at Tilden quite knows my name.

Loveless

This past week was like experiencing what someone might call, "twister" therapy. That is, if there was a school of analysis which believed in holding your feelings up to a funhouse mirror and watching you do everything you can not to look. There are periods of the day in which I have to ask permission to put my foot to the left or to the right. All I'm trying to do is walk somewhere rather than sit at my computer. I've had about as much "reflection in tranquility" as I can take. It's never good for grief to get my full attention, which it does when I am not thoroughly occupied.

On Wednesday, I was abruptly asked to dance, but not in any way I know how. When I team taught with Jonathan Levy, the reverence I felt came later -- I had no idea what I was doing until I was doing it. Now that I look back on myself I want to slap me. Traditionally, I fear people that I either
a) think are smarter than I am
b) think are better at something than I am
c) happen to be better looking than I am (and despite the weight, I don't concede that easily)
d) are absolutely on a different wavelength of accomplishment than I am. Have reached a place I won't ever begin to know.

I didn't know this about Jonathan until I'd already opened my mouth once. So, the precedent had been set.

Here I am in a similar position, but....I know. I really know that I'm superfluous, that I'm out-classed and that the purpose for my being in the classroom is really silly. I've been placed in a class to be a kind of mellow mediator. Some students like me and don't lash out at me quite the way others do. That doesn't make me a good teacher. I have the kind of face that is very hard for people to get angry with, and the wild eyes of John Belushi. It's an accident of fate that some kids who are nasty ease up around me.

And I give in, a lot. I'm playful in the worst comedic style. Sometimes it works. Twice last week, it didn't. So, not only was I superfluous, but not even that.

A friend told me I should be happy to be put to use at all, and I agree. There's an enormous amount I have to learn, so it would be fantastic if I could actually grow in this process. What I fear is that I will be trying so hard to be able to help that I will make things worse. I think that has already happened.

I feel a combination of embarassment and fear even trying to talk to my colleague about the lessons of the week. It's not my place, yet it's where I am.

And I am desperate to love -- and the connection with the students isn't there. For whatever reason, the curriculum which we are using doesn't give me room to engage them the way I am used to doing. Just having to teach anything I didn't choose alienates me. I'm not personally connected and I don't believe in it. It's not much of a point of connection to my colleague either. We're both following a system, she far better than I. It's like being assigned to work with the late John Dexter but on a project in which he has little input and in a language in which you are not fluent. What do you do but follow, wait and watch. I try to think ahead, but all I can really do is outline what I think is going on. I feel as if the curriculum I am using is in Latin. I took Latin and was passable, but can't do anything without a dictionary and lots of time.

Teaching has always been the one area in which I plan and yet am allowed to be spontaneous -- to create mid-sentence. To create with my students. To help them to create and to present their ideas. There's nobody in this curriculum. It fosters independence, but it doesn't, as far as I can see, bring the group together. I've spent my whole career pulling groups together. Teaching students to be part of something and be themselves. From my experience, they are very good at isolating themselves on their own. If they do independent reading in my room, why not just go home?

For that matter, if I am not going to be supportive muscle for my colleague, but rather a distraction, I'd sooner not be there. Especially when its someone whose work is meticulous, I cannot stomach the sloppiness of my indecision. There's no mark for me to hit. I am literally grasping at the air. You think I'm much of a calming influence in this state? No.

It only worked once when my colleague had set up several marks to hit because the students were behind. So I was free to work within the framework she created. When I tried to lead the lesson myself, I blew up faster than anything I have ever seen. I was overwhelmed. I had no mark.

All of this creates a feeling of lovelessness. When I have no good to give, I despise myself. And I wish to be despised. I made a jackass of myself in a meeting because I didn't want to be liked anymore. There is nothing laudable about me. In my mind, that makes me unworthy in all respects.

Where your money is going

Would you spend of dollars on computer systems which allow teachers to share information when
1) Webspace is free and lessons could be posted by teachers themselves
2) Teachers could meet and share ideas for a lot less money

Here's the latest press release. According to Bloomberg, et al, our share of the stimulus package

...includes $650 million to provide funds to school districts that have made significant gains in closing the achievement gap to expand their work and to document and share their successful practices. These funds could help further implementation of the New York City Department of Education’s (DOE) computer system that allows teachers to share effective instructional strategies between schools.

650 Million to document and share? I want to know EXACTLY what we're documenting and how and why. Why can't teachers get blogspot addresses and the DOE direct other teachers to those addresses. We need MILLIONS of dollars to document? Are we talking about hiring film directors to shoot videos? You can buy a 99 dollar cheap video camera and have a teacher and students talk into it. I've seen those cameras used to film lessons.

650 Million dollars. I want a receipt.

Is there a law saying we can't buy equipment at B &H? Are these PENTAGON PRICES?

THIS is how Bloomberg LOST OUR MONEY.

Randi Rhodes calls into the Stephanie Miller Show

I'm in terrible withdrawal

Still BCNHS

Somehow, when you're an ATR at a school, you don't really feel part of it, and I very much feel as if I should remember that I am just a visitor on Planet Tilden. I made the mistake this week of getting very vocal, very vulnerable, and just generally too brash. People don't know me well enough and don't need to as they are concluding a story through which I am just a footnote.

So, I apologize for beginning to get comfortable when I have no right to be. I would feel angry if someone tried to know BCNHS from it's last two years.

So, the last place in which I taught was BCNHS. I'm a guest at Tilden. Not faculty. Just an accidental tourist.