At Risk Students And Risk Taking Teachers

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bandar ceme 99My wife and I met in a Sociology of Religion class taught at UConn. The most interesting thing the professor said was that “religion is what happens when the charisma dies.” During my eighteen years in education I have often thought of that phrase. It seems that many good teaching practices become fossilized because some direktur or legislator somewhere decides to formalize and mandate someone’s good idea. Once that idea is institutionalized, it loses its effectiveness. Bye-bye charisma; hello dogma.

Several years ago, the high school where I worked went through NEASC reaccredidation. I chaired the Mission Statement Committee and my wife served on the Steering Committee. One of the recommendations from the NEASC review committee was the implementation of an advisory jadwal in which groups of students were assigned to teachers and met weekly to discuss topical issues. The folks from NEASC cited several studies which show that students with positive extracurricular relationships with at least one teacher perform better, are more likely to stay in school, and are less likely to get into trouble than students who lack such a relationship with a teacher. The faculty actually voted against a formal advisory jadwal because most of the teachers questioned the effectiveness of a system that creates artificial relationships between teachers and students, but NEASC gave the school a demerit for lack of an advisory program, and so one exists now.

In the last few weeks there have been several news stories about teachers having inappropriate relationships with students, three involving sexual relationships and one involving alcohol. Cases like these spring up from time to time that make teachers and the teaching profession look bad, and make teachers reluctant to have relationships with students outside the classroom or beyond the curriculum. Teachers can fear personal questions, chaperoning dances or travel, and certainly physical contact, even something as simple as a hug when a student is crying or has gotten into the college of his or her choice. A fear arises that you might be accused of or even witness to something inappropriate. Better to just avoid any personal contact. If this attitude dominates the profession, then it is no wonder that advisory programs are forced upon schools.

Last weekend my wife and I went out to dinner with two other couples. The others teach fifth grade, sixth grade, high school, and college. One couple was teasing my wife and me because their babysitter was a high school girl we sometimes use, and from there we got to talking about the girl in question. To avoid detail, I’ll just say that her home life is less than ideal. She’s a senior waiting to hear from colleges. She’s already been accepted to one and offered a good financial aid package, but she’d prefer UConn because it would allow her to stay close to home, which would enable her to look out for her four-year-old sister, who’s more like a daughter to her. The girl will be the first in her family to attend college. We’re all concerned for her that family pressure or finances will keep her from attending or finishing college. The other couple mentioned that they were considering having her live with them if it becomes necessary, but they already angered the girl’s mother once by inviting her to a holiday dinner when they found out the girl’s family was not going to get together.

The other couple chimed in to voice their support for the idea. They should know; they have a seventeen-year-old girl from the wife’s school living in their basement. She drives to school with our friend, and provides some childcare in exchange for a safe place to stay. Last year the girl and another girl used to spend a lot of time at our friends’ house in the afternoons and evenings and on weekends, but the home situation has worsened, and so now it’s necessary to live with her teacher on a more permanent basis.

Amy and I, too, have had students live with us. We’re close to several former students who have endured very difficult family situations like divorce, disease, and abuse. Somehow, we collect at risk students, or they find us. They call at all hours or show up at our door or in my office. We loaned one a car for a summer so she could work to save money for school. One year we hired two girls to babysit together, not because we needed two sitters, but to get them out of their homes and give them a chance to spend time with each other and with us, as if they were sisters and we their parents. Certainly we and our two set of friends are not the only teachers who have gone to these lengths.

Recently I got a friend request in facebook from a former student. She had dropped out of school after losing credit her freshman year. Her brother had also been my student, and he’d not only dropped out but wound up in prison. She’s doing all right now. She got her diploma, and now has a four-year-old son and manages a dry cleaning business in Manchester. Her brother, too, got his GED and now is an assistant manager of a motorcycle shop in Manchester. I really liked both kids and fought hard with them and for them to try to keep them in school. The brother I even took rock climbing once. I don’t know what part my efforts played, but I’m glad to hear they both found some stability and success in life.

I don’t know why some teachers abrogate their trust and harm students, or why some educators believe that institutionalized solutions will fix at risk students. I condemn the former and have little faith in the latter. Maybe having students live with us is a big risk, but somewhere between betrayed trust and mandated relationships lie countless students who need teachers to risk being human and humane.

I'd love to hear some of your stories of taking risks for students.

On The Death Of A Student

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play bandarqIn last week’s column I wrote about a brother and a sister who had dropped out of school but had managed to return, get their diplomas, and get their lives on track. A few days later I learned that a boy from my former school had just committed suicide. It was approximately the anniversary of a fatal car accident the boy had been in that took the life of one of his friends.

When I began teaching high school, we seemed to lose one student a year to a tragic accident. Sometimes these were the so-called good kids, honors students and athletes who never got into any trouble, and the talk would be about what an injustice it was that such a nice young man or woman had lost his or her life so tragically. As teachers, I think we feel an acute sense of tragedy when one of these kids dies. But often these accidents take the lives of kids who were not good students and model citizens. And that is perhaps even more tragic. These kids’ lives seem to have been mired in misfortune, only to end prematurely and violently. Such seems to be the case with the young man who just took his life.

My wife and I both knew him. Amy had him as a student and I had him in advisory. He was not an easy kid to like. He had moved to Connecticut from the south. Although he had friends, he never seemed to truly fit in. Prejudicial things were said to him because he was a Southerner, and in his youthfulness he seemed to embrace a stereotype of what it means to be from the South. He flaunted a degree of prejudice that I suspect he did not truly possess, and he assumed an adversarial role toward teachers, toward school, and toward authority in general. He insulted his classmates and sparred with his teachers because being disruptive gave him perhaps some of the only feelings of power or notoriety he ever enjoyed. I know I threw him out of advisory on more than one occasion for being disrespectful, and when I did he would smile and tip his confederate flag cap to the class as he walked out the door. The other kids usually weren’t sorry to see him leave, and the couple of friends he had were entertained.

One afternoon I was taking a walk around the grounds of the school during my prep period when I saw him on the athletic track. It was a warm day in early Spring during the young man’s ingusan year. He was jogging in sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt. I walked over to him. I’m sure he expected me to say something to him or to get him in trouble. There’s no way he had permission to be outdoors on the track by himself during the school day. He had to have been skipping someone’s class, or maybe he’d been thrown out of one once again. As I walked over to him, he slowed down to meet me. I don’t recall who spoke first, but we just chatted about the weather and how nice it was to feel the sun on our skin after a long winter. The whole time we spoke, his demeanor was calm and his tone was friendly. Maybe he was being deferential to me to avoid getting written up, but, knowing how little he cared for authority, I suspect not. I felt I was seeing a more sincere side of him once he was away from the students and teachers he felt compelled to perform for. He seemed like a nice young man that afternoon.

I got around to asking him what he was doing, and he told me he was trying to get in shape because he planned to go out for the football team when they held tryouts later in the spring. I was surprised but pleased. I thought it might be nice for him to be involved in school in a positive way, and to be a part of something which gave him a reason to maintain his grades. We didn’t talk much longer. I told him I had to get back inside to teach my next class. I wished him luck with tryouts. I never wrote him up or told him to get back to class. I never reported him to the office or tried to find out where he was supposed to be. When I left him he had returned to jogging around the track in his jeans.

I don’t think he ever followed through and tried out for the football team. If he did, he didn’t make the cut. He managed to get through senior year despite the car accident that took his friend’s life. He graduated this past June. I never kept track of him after that day. I have no idea what he’d been doing with himself since graduation. After the suicide, the school prepared for the aftermath, identifying areas of refuge and offering grief counseling, but there wasn’t much disruption to the community on the first day back to school. Very few students or teachers seemed particularly sad, other than a handful of kids that may have known him. He just wasn’t popular enough or well liked enough for that kind of a reaction.

In the poem “On the Death of a Student Hopelessly Failing My Course,” George Cuomo writes that the dead boy’s parents were left saying, “‘He could have made it, poor boy!’” But in fact this was a boy who simply had not found a way to make it in life. Cuomo writes, “Poor boy, he/Could not. How little he could do in life!/He lacked whole galaxies of talents, lacked/Quickness of hand or foot or eye or mind,/lacked will and ambition, lacked height and strength,/lacked even hope.” To me, this seems to have been the case with my former student. And that may be the biggest tragedy of all.

“No More Pencils No More Books … Out For Summer Out Till Fall We Might Not Come Back At All”

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bandarqI’m not talking about Alice Cooper or the movement toward digital literacy here. No, I’m talking about Governor Rell’s announcement that she is freezing “all nonessential state purchases for the next four months—including pens [and] paper.”

Wednesday’s Hartford Courant reported that Governor Rell has frozen spending on everything from cleaning products for restrooms and service contracts for office machines to pens, paper, and paperclips. This freeze will remain for the next four months, or until the end of the fiscal and school year. This ban includes the University of Connecticut. We can use whatever office supplies we currently possess, but once they are gone we cannot replace them till July 1. Because this decree is new, it is unclear whether the CWP or any other university aktivitas can use grant, endowment, or discretionary funds for supplies. I suspect we will learn that we are permitted to do so within certain parameters and only with administrative permission.

After Governor Rell banned the use of state funds for out of state travel, the university responded by placing strict limits on the use of grants, endowments, and discretionary funds to make up for the loss. The CWP receives state funding through the English Department, but we also receive a core grant of federal funds from the NWP, we generate our own discretionary funds from professional development, and we have access to funding from the Aetna Chair of Writing that is at the discretion of the Aetna Advisory Board. At first, it seemed that we would simply have to rely on these sources for out of state travel, but now if we want to use those funds we have to receive written permission from the English department head, the CLAS dean, and in some cases one of the provosts, as well. This permission is ostensibly to ensure that such travel is essential, but realistically it appears to have much to do with public relations.

What this means for the CWP is that if we want to use NWP funds or our own PD revenue to travel later this month to the New England Writing Projects Conference in Northampton, Massachusetts, or in early April to the NWP’s Spring Meeting in Washington, DC to lobby for reauthorization of funding for the NWP, we have to get permission from three levels of university administration. Ironically, the permission form has not been made available online, so everyone who wants to get permission to use non-state funds to travel outside of Connecticut has to inundate the offices of the deans and provosts with written forms that we may no longer be allowed to use state money to purchase the paper on which to print the forms! We may even find ourselves in a situation where we have to complete written forms to request permission to use federal grant money to purchase the paper to print the forms. Got it? That’s exactly how it has felt lately.

I’m being facetious, of course. I understand the complexity of the current situation, and sincerely believe that the deans and provosts generally are well intentioned, even when I disagree. (Although I don’t think I can express the same generosity of spirit toward the governor’s office). Part of the perkara in Connecticut is an ideological split between the Democratic and Republican responses to the economic crisis. On the one hand, we have a Democratic administration in Washington responding to the crisis by spending money to stimulate the economy, and on the other hand we have a Republican administration in Hartford responding to the crisis by rescinding money and freezing expenditures to tame the economy. The other factor in Connecticut is the Balanced Budget Law, which has been in place since 1992. This law amended the state constitution to require that “general budget expenditures authorized for any fiscal year shall not exceed the estimated amount of revenue for such fiscal year.” So even if Governor Rell were an economic liberal, it could be argued that she’d be violating the state constitution if she authorized spending that exceeds revenue. Now if I’m reading the law correctly, the governor and legislature would not actually be violating the constitution by allowing the state to go into deficit this year, as the authorized spending was based on estimated revenue. Where we’d be in trouble, however, would be next year when the estimated revenues would be much less and the budget would have to enact dramatic cuts in expenditures. It could be argued that Rell sees her current rescissions and freezes as preparation for that likelihood.

However, it seems to me that many of the orders that come down from on high seem short-sighted and ill-considered. I know wasteful spending exists and some cuts have to be made, but what is gained by making us fill out forms to get permission to use non-state funds to travel? Those funds already have limits placed on them. In the case of the NWP funds, there is an Office of Sponsored Programs and a grant manager who regulate these limits. This form just becomes a waste of state funds as we all spend time on the forms when we could and should be doing other things—like teaching. And what is the wisdom of freezing expenditures on things like service contracts or cleaning products? This way, when the copier breaks we’ll have to buy a new one, and when the bathrooms become disgusting after four months without proper cleaning we’ll be in violation of OSHA regulations!

OK, I know I’m just starting to rant. These are difficult times and everyone in an administrative position has had to make tough decisions, the CWP included, but we have to put a little more thought and creativity into how to save money, rather than just make sweeping decrees like across the board cuts and complete freezes, or implement cosmetic and inefficient responses like triplicate forms. There’s just got to be a better way.

Less Is More, Or The Big Paycheck

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judi bandarqI wrote a nostalgic piece last week, but I can’t do that two weeks in a row. Today, I have to comment on a conversation I had with a dishwasher repairman.

My dishwasher may be dying. It still washes the dishes and it isn’t spraying water across the kitchen floor (it did that once before and I had to change a filter), but it has been making this god-awful high-pitched screeching sound, which is why I have been doing dishes by hand all week. The repair guy was scheduled to come today, but like the cable guy, he gave me a four hour window of time during which he might come, and then he called with about twenty minutes left in that window to say he’d be arriving in thirty minutes, and then he arrived fifty-five minutes later—not that I’m bitter, as my colleague Gina would say.

OK, so Tim was a nice guy as appliance repairmen go, and while he tinkered around with my dishwasher he struck up conversation, and he asked me if I had to take the day off today to be there to meet him, and I said, “Sort of.” Now, I like the fact that my job allows me to be able to take a day like today for things like meeting a repairman coming to my house, but I hate being asked about it because I know what’s coming. It’s like when people ask teachers what they do and as soon as you say, “I’m a teacher,” they make some comment about all your time off and how nice and easy it must be to get out of work so early each day—yadda, yadda. You all know the conversation. Fact of the matter is, I rarely take days, and I only take days when I have things like repairmen who give me four hour windows of time and then arrive an hour late, or doctor’s appointments, weddings, funerals, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I’m a workaholic. I check my email in hotel lobbies on vacation. Heck, I’m writing this at 11 PM. So I know what he must be thinking, and I don’t want to get into it because I fear that I’ll sound like Hamlet’s mother, protesting too much. But then he surprises me by saying his mother was a first grade teacher, and I’m thinking, “All right. I can probably talk about education with this guy without the misperceptions and the innuendos.” But then he says, “Hey, can I ask you about something? What do you think of the dedication of teachers today? Is it the same as it was years ago?”

Well, I don’t know how to answer this question. I’m not THAT old, and I haven’t been teaching even twenty years quite yet (18 or 19 if you go back to student teaching), so I say something along the lines of how teacher preparation is much more rigorous than it once was, and the standards are higher, and the required content knowledge is greater. But he says, “No, I mean dedication to the field. Are they willing to do the things teachers used to do?” So I must be looking at him with a funny look, you know, my head tilted sideways like a dog does or something, and he proceeds to clarify that it was his opinion, gleaned from his mother, that teachers were more dedicated back in the day, and that these days they’re just in it for the paycheck. OK, now I don’t know where to begin responding. So I say, “Are you suggesting that in the good old days teachers worked harder because they were paid less?” And I’m thinking, Would you have gotten here about three hours earlier than you did if I paid you less? But I bite my tongue. He clarifies by saying no, not exactly, but that he thinks that when the pay was low only the truly dedicated went into the profession, and these days too many teachers just want the big paycheck. That’s what he said. The BIG PAYCHECK. He then proceeded to tell me a second-hand story about some student-teacher his mother had years ago who refused to do all sorts of unspecified things she was asked to do and how she just wanted the short hours, the vacation time, the pay. Et cetera.

Once again, I don’t know where to begin with this guy. For one, if the paycheck was so great and all, why do we have shortage areas in just about every area? At the secondary level, I believe Social Studies is the only non-shortage area. Two, why do so many teachers I know have second jobs tending bar, waiting tables, running a Christmas tree farm, or selling perfume in a department store? Don’t get me wrong. I know we’re paid well and that tenure, even though it is intended to ensure our professional rights, also functions to give us a great degree of job security. But most of the teachers I know work their asses off and usually spend their vacations (and weekends and evenings) grading and planning. If we got paid a decent hourly wage we’d make significantly more than our salaries. I’m sure everyone knows the old joke about getting five dollars an hour for babysitting your students. If you had 100 students and saw each one for an hour a day you’d gross $90,000 at the end of a 180 day school year. How many of you make that?

The New York Times ran an editorial today by Timothy Egan titled “Lesson Plans, 2009.” It’s a cynical piece that the Times staff chose to highlight with a box that says “It’s back to school with bad teachers, bored students, and baffling parents.” In it, teachers are accused of being overpaid, selfish, incompetent, insubordinate, lazy, and—to beat all—drunk. Nice. I finished reading the column and I thought to myself, “Well, maybe if they paid us all less …”