The Wrong Minority

One of my favorite cartoons on how secular vs. religious see others

In the course of my recent battles with TFA over kosher food, I said a nasty thing: “I guess I’m just the wrong minority for TFA.” For an organization focused on diversity and difference, that was like slamming them in the gut. (But it worked; starting today I have food again! If you like me or my blog, you’ll be pleased to hear I’ll be eating the last two weeks of Institute. If you find my blog tedious, you can petition TFA Tulsa to cut me off).

The truth is, in so many ways I am the wrong minority for TFA. Religious minorities don’t fit well into the Institute model. It’s not something that gets discussed in diversity sessions, and TFA isn’t out to explicitly fight religious prejudice in the schools as it is to fight racism and sex-oriented bullying (gender also gets left by the wayside, fyi). Also, in Institute, TFA attempts to micromanage every aspect of our lives. The problem is, my life is already micromanaged by my Judaism. It’s not that I’m not passionately in favor of backwards-planned lessons, it’s that right now I can’t pay attention because I have to daven mincha. TFA wants me to adopt it as a religion, and I already have one.

A Fulbrighter friend in Norway with me was on a kind of spiritual search, and when I checked back in with her upon returning to the States she said that she felt really satisfied with her community that was struggling against educational inequity. She’d done TFA previous to the Fulbright, and plugged back in to that community to fill her need for meaning. Which is why TFA is clashing so much with my Judaism; it wants to fill a space that’s already filled.

I need to be with people who find this hilarious

My Muslim friend was commiserating with me about finding time to pray. He says he smushes all the prayers into the end of the day on some kind of traveling heter. I told him I smush myself into a corner of the school where I think the least people will pass me. On Tuesday, everyone was hyper-concerned about me because I was trembling—I don’t fast well. On Wednesday, three staff members caught me exiting the bathroom mumbling asher yatzer and gave me enormous blank stares. When I explained, the stares just got blanker. And that’s beside my furious battles for nutritious kosher food in Institute.

Friday morning all of the religious Othering came to a head. Somehow one of the most awesome CMAs who totally exemplifies withitness to scary extremes caught wind of the musical prohibition during the three weeks. She sent the curriculum specialist who runs most sessions (also awesome) to speak to me, and I, at some point or another, used the word “freak” to him while trying to explain myself. Then I found the secular Israeli from Boston, and burst into tears in a gabble of Hebrew comfort. I needed to speak to a person who knew the right derogatory slur for me, who would call me “dosi” instead of “freak” in her mind, who perhaps doesn’t do any of the things I do but can say so in Hebrew and give me a hug and gets it.

The first and my own CMA caught up to me later in the day. They were displeased that I’d called myself, and religious people in general, freaks. And the truth is I’ve never felt one before. But having to fight to eat, and explain asher yatzer and shivasar b’tammuz and hide myself in corners to say shmoneh esrai and over and over shrug when people ask what I’ll be doing this weekend and spending the diversity dialogues checked out or passively listening has taken its toll. With regard to Teach for America, I am a freak. 

P.S. Best part of my day Friday was during word study with my advanced kids. I give them roots of words to play with, and today they were forming new words with them. They neologized “selfarchy,” which I loved, and “intertext,” which floored me for a solid twenty seconds before I realized they weren’t sixth grade Julia Kristevas but talking about two people texting each other on phones.

How to Survive Institute

Our CMA's modeling the behavior management cycle:
I see Sara nightmaring about lesson plans, I see
Brian breaking down in tears, I see Alexis chewing her
own cheek off...

We’re halfway through the teaching part of Institute, and I’m beginning to feel like I’ve got it. Oh, I don’t mean to say I know how to teach. They threw us in the water to watch us sink or swim while they behavior-narrate our flailing, and when I say I’ve got it down I mean that I have a solid doggy paddle.

Before Institute they sent us email after email on how to survive Institute. How to remain a healthy person and get all our work done. How to give ourselves alone time but also attend every workshop. They made it sound very, very difficult. Today, after two hours of reading Romola, I want to reassure all you would-be-TFAers. And to offer my own minute-by-minute play of how to survive your average day at Institute without any wasted time.

Wake up 20 minutes before the buses leave. There is no hairdo worth the extra hour of banging around the bathroom I hear my fellow corps members engage in every morning. Just put it in a bun and be done. Take five minutes to dress, five minutes to eat breakfast, five minutes to check that you have everything you need to teach your kiddies, and head busward.

In the morning, bus time is for sleeping, meditation, or lesson-review. DO NOT talk. You may think this is a good time to meet fellow corps members. It is not.

The morning fluff session is when you start planning your lesson plan due for next week. Get the key points down in this bit while they’re running the summer camp part of the day, handing out yeehaws and little gold boot statues that you cannot for the life of you figure out why your fellow corps members crave. As soon as they dismiss, run for your classroom and get it ready for your kids’ new day: update achievement tracker posters, pre-distribute returned tests and homework on their desks, and write everything on the board ahead of time. Then go greet your kids.

We're all in the "Survival" setting

Breakfast is key student relationship time. Take kids aside to teach them things they didn’t quite get the day before. Sit with every table and ask them how their afternoon was before; does any kid look sleepy or sick? Are any upset or have spectacular news to share? This, and waiting with the kids for pick-up, is the most fun part of the day. It’s true what they say about kids. They say the darndest stuff. And it is endlessly entertaining.

We start the day with AIH. That’s Academic Intervention Hour, for all you non-cult members. My biggest advice for AIH is that you demand that someone show you the curriculum for it. I only discovered there was one today, and am a bit disgruntled. A whole bunch of people were shocked when I told them about it.

For AIH, each member of a collab group (a collab is typically 3, sometimes 4, sometimes 2 if an unlucky collab has a dropout) gets a section of the class, based on ability, for ten minutes of vocab and a half hour of reading. I’m doing something unorthodox, and running three sections at once: advanced, intervention, and dear-god-what-am-I-doing curse-my-brains out frustrational. The advanced are my little bit of gleeful play in the midst of a day teaching math; I get to cavort with them through the text and watch them light up as they figure out the stuff I’m getting them to think about. I haven’t yet told them that I’m pulling from AP curriculum levels. The intervention kids are the cutest couple you will ever see. When I set them to a game where they have to race to identify characters and setting in the books they’re reading, they tackle it with such earnestness and gusto, the other groups stop in their tracks to watch them. And then there’s my frustration kid. The resource room doesn’t stock books low enough for his testing level, and so he’s bashing his brains out against books double his ability. I’ll say this for him—the kid may have a learning disability, and he may be antsy and get antagonistic when he’s frustrated, but he works like the devil when he knows what he’s supposed to do and can do it. The difficulty is in getting him to stop simply copying words onto worksheets, and getting him to read. Because he knows it’s going to be hard. All I can say to you: don’t give up.

If you’re teaching first block, do your thing. Teach. Love those kids. Figure out how to shave down the 70 minute lesson plans TFA gives you for the first week into half hour segments, and how to cram all the prereqs of multiplication and long division your students missed their first five years of education into a half hour. Give them, in that half hour, the full fervor of your excitement about their learning. Spread the hunger for knowledge. Reward them for hard work, for curiosity, for cooperation and competition both. Teach them how to win at school, because that you can do every day, regardless of what’s meant to be passed on in those thirty minutes of madness. Then feed them and high-five ‘em out the door, shake hands with the parents and tell them with smiles how great their kids are and how much you wish you spoke their language to share the specifics.

After teaching comes sessions. What you must know about these is that the key to succeeding in Institute is the same as the key to succeeding in middle school; both involve completing your homework under your desk while your teacher drones on. Sessions are the name for the informational sessions that can range from diversity dialogues to behavior management 101’s. They’re the perfect time to grade, enter data, create worksheets (four different versions for each handout for the advanced, average, ELL, and LD students in your classroom), finesse lesson plans, and google creative ideas on classroom setup. If the staff gets huffy that you’re not paying attention, completely ignore their rebuke and immediately engage them on the topic at hand—they will always take the bait of getting on task and forget they were meant to reprimand you. Also, it shows you didn’t lose by multitasking. Basically, any time you’re not with your kids is time to prep for when you’re with your kids. And it means that by the end of the school day at 4:30, you’ll have finished everything for the next day (and the lp for a week ahead). You can board the bus with the rest of the day ahead to brood about what to teach your frustrated reading kid. Or to share bitch sessions with your regional corps. Or delve into your kindergarten art skills and make posters for your classroom while creeping on your resource room crush. Or go for a jog-and-faint routine through the hot summer sun. Or, sometimes, if you’re ahead of the game enough, you can read George Eliot.

Oh Well, What the Hell

When more than three people are
observing my classroom

There’s a limit to the number of people allowed in the classroom to observe us at any one time: four. Only four people can squish into the back of the room, distracting your students and somehow getting in between you and your words, their expressions effectively wiping out every bit of memory of the lesson plan that you had. Really, it’s not so bad.

Today my collab advisor observed me, sitting in the back of the class with my faculty advisor, who is always present. The collab advisor is a former corps member who acts as my most immediate advisor on all things TFA, while the faculty advisor is a current teacher who gives advice about what I should be doing to improve my teaching.

The class was modeling decimals through drawings and blocks, and the kids rocked it. They filled in their worksheets assiduously (a word I’ve taught them and reuse in every class while narrating their behavior), watched me model it and then enthusiastically gave a volunteer directions on how to do it, and then worked in groups as I challenged them to race and see who could fill in the most squares on their worksheets. Every single group got it; the nature of the work was such that everyone took a turn and everyone helped each other when they didn’t understand. A happy buzz of the directed chaos that I like filled the classroom as they hustled to arrange their blocks and fill in the handouts. When the first group finished they all stood with both hands in the air, grins on their faces. They got Cooper Cowboy Coupons.

As I gave the assessment, I moved about the classroom, pretty confident that all my students would do well. My collab advisor was smiling. She gave me a thumbs up.

I collected the assessments, turned the class over to my collab co-teacher, and sat down at my computer to enter the scores. I had an email. My faculty advisor had already sent her feedback. She complimented the high engagement, my use of manipulatives, my presence in the classroom, the energy in the class. But, she commented, I’d taught the wrong thing. The modeling we’d done was the slightly wrong concept. If I were more familiar with 6^th grade math, I’d have known that. Later, she and my CMA (collab advisor) came over to laugh. They told me I’d done a fantastic job. My teaching was wonderful. The kids really got a difficult concept. Only, it would have been better if I’d taught the right thing. A McWatt-styled shrug is in order: oh well, what the hell. 

Attempting An Anti-Racist Classroom

Today was the first day my students scored respectably on their end-of-day assessments. We were learning to compare and order integers, and though on the diagnostic test they’d scored at about 50%, by the end of today, they were scoring around 80%. By now they know they’re expected to follow along taking notes on their notetaker packets, and giving them number lines to model the integers along helped immensely. I was confident in my lesson plan as I walked around the classroom, cold-calling and group calling and standing next to the potential trouble spots with just a finger rested on their desk to get them back into line. Best of all was walking around and being able to control the number of people who needed help; for the most part, the students got it, and having them work in explicit partners really helped. At the end of the day I posted the names of everyone who got 80 and above on a tracker board; they got to file past and see their names up there if they’d done well enough. I was a bit uneasy about publicizing the names of the 80’s and up, because everyone could see who had a blank beside their name, but my FA told me it was good incentive to work harder. I’m still considering how I feel about this.

During reading group, my three intervention students read a book titled In the Barrio. The one who read the title read it hesitantly. Then he looked up at me.

“Barrio?” he asked.

“Yep,” I told him.

“I know what that is,” he beamed. I grinned. That’s why I had chosen it. I wanted him to stumble across a few words he would know well.

“He’s Spanish,” said the little boy beside him, who most definitely shares his ethnicity. The first boy was nodding.

“Excellent, you’ll have a lot to tell us, then,” I told him. And he did. We read about chili peppers, mariachi bands and enchiladas, and he was super-enthused to share with us. Then, as we moved on and I asked what else the boys had seen in the book, the one white child in the group spoke up.

“Mexicans. Lots and lots of Mexicans. There’s too many Mexicans in America, they’re taking over,” he said. I checked;  the others looked immersed in their books.

“We do NOT say that,” I told him. “America is full of immigrants, of Irish and Poles and Italians, and it’s immigrants that make America great. We do NOT say that anyone is unwelcome,” I waited for him to think about it.

“But they took my mom’s job. And there’s so many of them,” he told me.

“You can’t blame a whole group for taking one job. And we’re glad of people who come to America to help work,” I told him, and then brought the group back together, wondering what his mother will say when he tells her what he learned in school today.

I’m struggling with my advanced students. They do the work excellently when they’re on their own, but asking them to share and discuss is like pulling teeth. The second I move away to the intervention group, they’re back to reading silently and writing down their answers on the worksheet. Today they were meant to come up with certain kinds of questions and answer them together, but they resisted speaking until I coaxed and coaxed. I need some incentive to get them talking.

When it came time to line the kids up to walk them to the car load area to wait for their parents, there was some confusion amongst us teachers. I’d been doing it previously; I love the extra time to chat with the kids. But I thought I ought not to hog all the time, so today a different teacher walked them out. As the decision was announced, groans went up. Groans that I immediately disciplined but secretly cherished. There is nothing that can make you feel as loved as a bunch of rude middle schoolers.

Starving in Tulsa

Lies. All lies.

 Let me tell you about my class. My 6^th graders are earnest, devoted little scholars, some of whom jumped up and down when they heard they were going to be in my reading group, and wave their hands wildly in the air to answer a question. Some are shy, some are garrulous. The few who were thinking about misbehaving are bewildered to be treated as though they’re model students, and even more bewildered to find themselves acting like it. The troublemaker backed down after I pulled him aside for a little chat—now he just needs occasional focus reminders to work well. And best of all, I’ve got them all helping each other. They know they get rewards when their partner can explain something they were stuck on the first time I came around. Group work for the win.

The fact that I’m teaching 6^th grade math threw me for a loop at first, but it’s a solid fake-it-till-you-make-it situation, and I’ve got it under control. Eventually my brain is going to catch up and switch off intuition, and help me figure out how it actually processes these math basics. My students like math more than reading, which makes my heart cry but which I have to pretend to be excited about since I’m teaching math. I’ve never stood in front of a class and lied before, and occasionally I trip over my words as I wonder what the hell one does next when converting decimals to fractions on something besides an instantaneous level, but nobody notices except the antsy voice inside of me screaming, “let me out so I can teach them something that sings to my soul!”

We have a reading intervention hour in the morning, and I got both the four most advanced students and the three needing the most intervention. I’ve got a good set going where I start the advanced kids off on high-school level discussion about the book they’re reading, and then tag back to the intervention kids who know to test each other with flash cards while I’m talking to the other group. The first day I had them learn about characters in books (they’re on a first grade reading level) by reading out loud, and snatching the colored chip in the middle of the table every time they came across a character. They were adorably energetic about it, and now I’m their pet teacher—I think they’ve adopted me somewhat. I don’t mind being adopted.

The form of my lesson plans change every day. As I grapple with the short lesson periods, the immense range of my students, and the difficulty of teaching without the certainty my kids know the prereqs, I shift the lesson around. Now I check their understanding at the start of the lesson, give out three different worksheets for each level of student, arrange them into partners for work and have cancelled bathroom breaks. Monday I’m breaking out new manipulatives. In only a month, I have to try everything I can, so pretty much every day I change something up. My students are responding more and more as I hone my skills on them.

I could pretend that having a lot to do in very 
little time is hard. But the truth is, I love it.

TFA has proven immensely helpful in some of their pedagogy sessions. My CMA (advisor) is a wealth of ideas for math lesson plans, and we walk through execution clinics and behavior management sessions brimming with new knowledge. Some of what they do is merely to waste our time and up the ante on time management, but I have no qualms about lesson planning right in front of a lecturer when they’re blabbing—if they’re bold enough to talk about student engagement, they’d better appreciate the irony if they fail to keep our attention.

The parts of Institute that are supposed to be hellish—the time crunch, the students’ behavior, the discrepancy between what our students are supposed to already know and what they actually know—is quite manageable. Perhaps because it’s expected. But what nobody talks about in those useful email blasts on “how to survive Institute” is how to handle being micromanaged. Simply spending 12 hours a day in other people’s company is quite difficult. And there’s one other thing that’s been my own personal hell.

Last week TFA decided to cancel the debit cards they’d been giving me to buy my food. Because of kashrut, I can’t eat in the dining hall, and had been grocery shopping for cereal and milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, nuts, sandwich materials, and raw fruits and vegetables. I was doing really well—eating healthily and contentedly. They put a fridge in my room, and upon occasion I bought a double-wrapped meal from chabad. However, on Thursday they decided that all my meals –breakfast, lunch, and dinner—will come from chabad. This theoretically makes my life much easier. I no longer have to go shopping or keep track of receipts. However, my diet of dairy, nuts, and raw fruits and vegetables has been transformed into half-warmed micro-nuked plates of mushy carbs. Protein and vitamins are out. I attempted to explain this to the TFA dining director even before I saw what I was to be given. She had, like an ace, completely ignored the fact that the other kosher corps member in Tulsa institute has been starving on salad for the past week and a half. Anyhow, I’m now blitzing her with an email for every meal I eat—if I’m expected to survive on white bread, almond milk (alas, chalev yisrael! All of my protein is now nuts), and boiled tomatoes, she can expect to hear about it each time I have to eat it. TFA for the fail on sensitivity to religious needs.

 

The funniest part of the week? When my roommate came back from the grocery store with a bottle of Manischewitz. She was really proud of herself. I still haven’t told her how cloying the stuff is. Maybe we’ll open it tonight.

P.S. If you’d like to send me food, email me for my address. If you’d like to mail TFA a nasty letter about feeding their corps members, email me as well.

What TFA should call me

Haven't time to blog properly, but these are all hilarious and so true:

What should TFA call me

Keeping us laughing.

Don't Drink the Kool-Aid

So far there’s been a wearisome battology of terms: transparency, check-ins, shoutouts, and applause for vulnerability. The repetitive praise and fluff-language makes me question TFA’s sincerity. I get that we’re being taught strategies to manipulate (yes, I chose that word intentionally) our students into believing that our classroom goals are their classroom goals. But don’t you think that then trying to use those strategies on us might not work as well? Or perhaps everyone isn’t as non-compliant as myself.

Just the thought of this is repugnant to me. All my typos are authentic.

TFA typos are driving me CRAAAAZY! I’m so sick of reading that my basic tenants where good and will help me in my vision from my classroom.  You people are teachers. Teachers! Your students are going to copy what you model. So model well. Be professional enough to proofread. Please. Or else I’m going to invest in a giant sharpie and start doing it for you.

The management style we’re taught relies heavily upon Lee Cantor’s assertive discipline. I love his focus on fixing small problems before they become large problems, and his assertion that heavy teaching of procedures and rules at the start of the year will pay off for the rest of the year. One guy in my advisor group, a black diversity studies major, pointed out that he joined TFA to fight white supremacy and be actively anti-racist, and now he’s being taught by white teachers about how to subdue black students. It’s not entirely white teachers and our students this summer will be mostly Chicano, but I think he does have a point. He doesn’t want to order young black men around in the classroom, because they’re already dealing with a lot of undeserved authority pressure outside. Later, when a white corps member spoke about his discomfort with TFA’s diversity mission statement because it asserted the extra impact a person who shares the identity of their students can have and made him feel less powerful to help his students, this guy gave a wonderful response about the value of coalition-building. Still, I do agree that sharing identity is powerful in role-modeling.

The tornado siren went off at noon on Wednesday. We could see exactly who was from where: all us Midwesterners checked our watches while everyone else freaked out.

On Thursday we tackled diversity discussions. I sat at a table with my two collab partners (both black women) and two of my Charlotte friends (black woman and black man). A fifth woman sat at the table, as well. Chris, who is really outgoing and assertive, looked around at us and asked, “should we move to include more white people? I mean, three of us are black, and (gesturing to one of my collab partners) one of us is multiracial, and Hannah’s…”

“Jewish,” I supplied. Cheri, the Charlotte woman, looked surprised. Chris turned to the last woman at the table. “And you’re…” She shrugged. “Whatever,” repeated Chris. We all laughed. Turned out she was of Portuguese descent. Then we all told Chris he should stop making assumptions. We had plenty of diversity at our table.

Chris decided to take charge and open with religion: whether we had ever been oppressed because of our religions. My advisor was sitting with us, and immediately focused everyone on me: do I feel oppressed because I can’t do stuff with everyone on the weekend? No, I told her. My religion empowers me. It’s when people make jokes about greed that I feel uncomfortable. Amazingly (to me), some of them had never heard the word “kike” before. Chris said he’d never met a Jew before. So I reached across the table to shake his hand.

One of my collab buddies, asked how I felt in TFA as the only observant Jew in the Tulsa institute. I told the group that the thing that really makes me jealous was watching all the people of color head out together after a diversity session to debrief with people that get them, and having nobody with which to debrief about the most salient part of my identity. Chris suggested that I join the Charlotte African American table at the dining hall. I've sat at it before, but usually a white friend tags along and the table integrates. At dinner I happened to grab the last seat, completing the minority table setting. I felt as Othered as ever when they exclaimed at my cottage cheese and green pepper and made me explain kashrut again. Still, my induction roomie was there making me laugh (she was all hyped up on caffeine and extolling the value of reading her bible every morning), and a woman I’ve had nothing but interesting conversations with previously, and Cheri from my diversity discussion, so I felt part of it. There’s something empowering about being the only white kid at the black kids’ table.

The rest of that diversity session skittered through gender and then focused mainly on our reactions when our kids use the “n” word or “b” word. Some people thought the words were reclaimed, or appropriated as part of a culture, while others find them forever offensive. I think I’m going to withhold judgment and take the professional approach—don’t use those words in a professional setting. Anyhow, there was plenty of diversity in our little group. Afterwards, the diversity studies major and I traded recommendations on good diversity literature. The man’s a powerhouse of resources, and it’s fun to speak with someone who takes an intellectual approach as well as a practical one.

My collab group spent hours crafting our classroom management plan (all the logistical classroom stuff) and first day plan last night. We see our classroom for the first time today, and then will arrive Monday only an hour before our students. This weekend’s going to involve a lot of chart paper. Our theme is international, and each kid will get a “passport to success” in which we’ll reward their academic achievements with stickers (“stamps”) and good behavior with tickets. I’m hoping none of the kids, who are mostly Latino, will be discomfited if they lack documentation in real life. Every letter we send home MUST be written in both English and Spanish. After TFA made that announcement, I fully expected them to attempt to teach us Spanish in twenty minutes, but even their chutzpah doesn’t extend that far. Behavior management in a day, lesson planning in three hours, but a language lies beyond their capabilities.

I have a weekend (at Tulsa chabad for shabbat) to sleep and plan, and then… our students!

The Charlotte '13 Corps