Jennifer Lauren’s blog

As faculty, if I worked at a school that closed in fear of the pandemic of the swine flu, I would find it to be an overreaction. I would be upset to have to stretch out the school year at the behest of city officials and decision-makers who are oversensitive to “moral panics” – those outbreaks of terror catalyzed by the press, but hardly validated by numbers or magnitude.

After reading about the school in Alabama that closed everything down for 51,000 students because of two cases of flu, I believe that, rather than preventing infection, long school closure would simply spread panic. The NYC Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sees right through the irrationality of the panic. His comment that the eight cases confirmed at a city school were mild – and only a small fraction of the 100-some students who thought they had swine flu actually did – further buttresses my stance that school closure is unnecessary and unwise in this instance.

The tone and language of the SCUCISD press release – “The state health department is urging that the district’s staff, faculty, students and their household members to avoid contact with others” – is overly fearful. Add to the dictin of the edict the extent of time schools will be closed: until May 8^th or 11^th? What arbitrary reasons do the decision makers have for prolonging closure to that late date?! Decisions like these only contribute to the general brokenness of school systems. What students need is stability in times of uncertainty. Sick students, or any students whowent to Mexico recently, ought to be sent home, not everybody.

 

 

 

As I heard Savannah from Arizona tell about how one day at school brought on stomach ulcers, her reluctance to return to school for months, and the loss of her friends because they were embarrassed of her, I couldn’t help but think of my own soft-spoken, sweet, honor-role female students. Imagining any one of these female students of mine getting strip-searched because of an administrator’s alleged probable cause darkens my view of schools as pro-social institutions. No matter how strong a school official’s belief that a student had drugs on her and posed a threat to the student body as a distributor, there is no situation in which dehumanization and “traumatization” should be seen as appropriate protocol.

 

Institutions are adulterated when bureaucratic terms like “from a policy stand-point” permit such practices. A drug-free environment should not come at the cost of dehumanization. The injustice done to Savannah is two-fold: the stigma that is attached to a student in an incident like this is penultimate to the violation of a young person’s body. What I mean by that is, schools should never be in the business of turning a good, decent youth into a delinquent based on mere suspicion. Whether the student really does behave like a delinquent, or merely her self-concept is turned upside-down by such an event, has a profound impact on her identity and immediate future.

 

The impacts of such physical invasion and humiliation on a teen would alter his or her trajectory with curriculum and instruction because, as Savannah did, they would be inclined to become a truant. After all, the school sees them as a criminal already; why go to a place where the adults do not approve of you, and your peers have turned from you? Indeed, this one strip-search, one gloomy morning or afternoon, had a life-altering effect on Savannah.

 

A better practice would be to hold the student in the office and require her to be sent home. I suppose the school would rather have the incriminating evidence to brandish over the parents, instead of vehement parents defending their children’s innocence. If school administrators aren’t trained in the dangers of pharmaceuticals, as the district spokesperson defended, then they shouldn’t get so over-involved. Let me reiterate myself: it is not the job of a school to turn a youth, who needs all the protective factors she can get against adolescent risks, into a delinquent. Schools ought to administer corrective punishments, rather than punishments that cripple youth. Of course, chronic suspension is an instance of this that gets iffy for a teacher who cannot teach anytime that unruly child is in the room. But in this instance, we are speaking of those wallflower students, who may indeed pose some threat to the student body by being involved with drugs, but who need an education as bad as – or worse than – their peers.

 

I actually can think of a student in a situation like Savannah’s. J.R. was actually once my student of the month. His classwork was oh-so-meticulous. He was respectful and calm-spirited. Last term, the administrators nailed him with a 9-day suspension for having found large sums of cash on his person. J.R. returned to school with the wind totally knocked out of him. He was depressed and I could literally see the ruin and approaching disaster in his face. “They think I’m so bad,” he said. He stopped coming to school for two months. Then he either withdrew or dropped out. I never saw the boy again. This is a instance in which his culpability and involvement in drugs is more blatant than Savannah’s ever was, and I still believe the school did him wrong. My heart breaks that the “system” – this institution intended to equip, enable, educate – removed his last chances, his few remaining protective factors. He’s been left to the hands of risk, when a good punishment ought to eliminate risks of an offender to re-offend. That would be true restorative justice.

 

 

Assessment in my classroom now has evolved to a good balance of authentic and traditional assessment. In the last term of this schoolyear, I have made a point to have equal amounts of each in my gradebook. For authentic assessment, I have done creative vocabulary card projects, and have led my students through the entire writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing on computer), and have put these in as test grades. I definitely believe that these two long-term projects qualify as what the video called “fun tests” that tests students’ abilities, because students can ask questions while they do them, and the quality and depth of input into the final product is wholly in their hands. Thus, these authentic assessments evidence the students’ determination to get it right, which traditional, multiple choice tests cannot possibly capture.

            As for the traditional tests in my classroom this year, they have been (as mandated by my administration) multiple choice followed by an essay portion. I design the multiple choice off of the SATP question style, but make sure that the language used in the questions comes strictly from either the novel we are reading in class or terminology we have reviewed in those weeks preceding (i.e., diction, oxymoron, author’s purpose, etc.). I like the multiple choice questions I give, but agree that authentic, live, original products measure a students’ capacity and illustrate his/her understanding better. As I see it, authentic assessment proves that a student has internalized the information, whereas traditional assessment can, at best, show that that knowledge has touched the surface of the students’ mind, but not necessarily penetrated or become permanently incorporated in it.

            Next year, for assessing my students, I hope to develop: (1) more precise and fitting scoring guides for performance-based tests; (2) a way to incorporate more presentation into the assessment, so that peers can learn from each other; (3) one-on-one, 5-minute book discussions with each student, as the Urban Academy in NYC does, assigning student to chat extemporaneously with a ‘perfect stranger’ about a book they’ve read independently); and (4) some way to build-up to more independent, self-driven, self-monitored work from August through May.

If I am going to get really ambitious in thinking about next year, I think it’d be amazing to bring in local experts, so that, as Gary Wiggins said in the video, high-quality, local assessment would play out before my students’ eyes. If geometry students can be evaluated by local architects, English students can be evaluated by local authors or poets… imagine the possibilities! I heartedly agree with Doug Reeves, author of the 90-90-90 studies (esteemed by Ron Sellers), that assessment should be ‘for’ something, not merely ‘of’ something. In this case, being evaluated by an expert would be for the purpose of “assist[ing] educators to improve instruction and advance student learning,” rather than merely to quantify how well students caught on to a concept (from Reeves’ “Forum on Assessment”). Assessment should assist, buttress, support instruction, not be its hated pest.

My hopes for assessment this summer are to transpose the composing-process project I did with my classes this year. I find that evaluating students’ writing step-by-step, and affording students individual instruction throughout, is a good approach to performance-based, authentic assessment. Students can control their achievement if they are determined to produce the best product possible over a period of time and work. This might be a good time to experiment with presentations, since class sizes will be low and manageable.

The main roadblock in reaching my assessment dreams will be me entrusting students’ progress into their own hands. Letting students do long-term projects requires that the teacher give student time and space to create an original product. But my inclination, based on experience, is to expect students to get off task and never come prepared with what they needed to scout out on their own. Maybe if I do part of the leg-work, such as pluck out a group of books for students to work from in their research instead of setting them free in a vast library, for instance, the prospect of allowing them the freedom to create on their own will be less frightening to me.

My vision for summer school 2009 builds off a few lucid points made in the article “Summer School: Unfulfilled Promise.” In light of the article’s sidebar “The Summer Slide,” and what sociologists David Stark and Annette Lareau have found, I concur that summer school is the best possible “alternative support program” available to struggling students. Seeing what enormous ground mandatory, fully-funded summer schools in Chicago and Delaware have gained gives me hope for what significant educational gains Holly Springs Summer School may one day equip its students with. I advocate for three major, new steps in particular for HSSS this summer: first, for the installment of a school-wide, cross-grade, cross-subject reading program embedded within the curriculum; second, for the summer to culminate in an official retake of the state test which was failed by the student to begin with; and third, for the extra-curriculars to culminate in an end-of-summer concert/showcase/performance. Whereas the first vision stems out of sociological research, the second springs from my belief that the bureaucratic management of student proficiency is too slow in Mississippi – and from inspiration at what states like IL and DE have done about that dilemma. 

Regarding the centrality of reading during the summer: Reading belongs in the limelight of summer school because it is the centerpiece around which the student’s future performance will hinge. Sociologist David Stark writes in his textbook for undergraduate sociology, and sociologist Annette Lareau in her study “Unequal Childhoods” has chimed in, that summer is the key time when achievement gaps between privileged and underprivileged students widen – especially in the area of reading levels. The reading program should incorporate intensive reading skills tutoring by teachers to students whose fluency and comprehension are lagging.

Regarding what HSSS can do to compensate for the MDE’s lethargy in giving timely feedback on standardized tests: Other states manage to get their test results back to students in a timely manner, within a time frame in which the results are still meaningful and relevant. Since HSSS cannot control state-level functions, the next-best thing it can do is equip its students for the state exam. That is why each state-tested subject should have a full-length state test as its final. If there were any way to make this test official, I believe that would highly motivate our students to “get ‘er done” during the summer, and be on-track with their peers come August.

Even so, the survey points out that only a minority (4%) of summer schools exist only to help students pass a particular test (p. 8). There must be more of a heart to the program for it to be appealing to students. We should ask ourselves as HSSS teachers whether extra-curriculars might be the trick to providing the summer curriculum with the flexibility, innovation and creativity its students need, since implicit in re-teaching is the implication that the students “need help that goes beyond simply re-teaching the same material in the same way” (p. 15).Therefore, keeping extra-curriculars as an exciting and rewarding part of the summer school day will be important. This is an outlet through which subjects can be extended into realms which actually appeal to students in ways that English and history class can’t – in drama club, for example, where students may find themselves almost accidentally enjoying what they learn about characterization and historical time periods.

As I see it, success for my summer school students in English I/II will be their demonstrated aptitude to pass the English II state exam. We gave this exam to our students at the end of summer school last year, and few passed. My expectations, or at least hopes, are higher this year. The evidence I will need to see to identify their overall success is 80% mastery among our students after each weekly exam. If 80% do not pass our teacher-made exams, then success is not being reached. I also believe that success is being reached if returning students – either ours from last summer or the middle school teachers’ students – demonstrate higher reading comprehension and composition levels than they did before. Fostering autonomy in our students, expressed in the self-monitoring they need to know when and how to ask for help and to be self-starters, will be a goal I bring to our class this summer. Thus, a secondary indicator of success will be the visible proof that the students can work more independently by the end of the summer than they were able to do at the beginning.

To ensure this success, I will encourage our team (the Sophomoric Studs) to implement individual, regular tutoring for the students (since we are fortunate to find ourselves in the luxurious, multiple-teacher set-up) and also to embed mini-lessons within our lessons on how to study and how to be a successful student – and hopefully not in the form of a corny, ineffective lecture, as I recall getting in middle school.

The recommendations on page 18 strike me as agreeably attuned to instituting greater equality into our public schools. I heartedly agree that summer schools should be provided free of charge to students who need the reinforcement and greater attention. Many of these students, I am sure, got to this point because other students (through their distractions and poor conduct in classrooms during the traditional year) robbed them of attention from their teacher, who is overburdened with discipline and other tasks at that time, to give the quiet strugglers the attention they need. So it is still owed to them. So long as summer schools enforce extremely strict conduct expectations, that indebted attention for those students can be protected. Timely catch up, instead of overdue remediation, IS an integral part of the schooling process that rests on the state’s shoulders to deliver. Overdue remediation is about as effective as creek water on an open wound. Though the idea of having state-mandated standards for summer schools at first rubbed me the wrong way (recommendation #4), but in fact, that might be the key to (a) enforcing strict discipline standards at summer school (low tolerance for chronically disruptive students) and (b) ensuring that summer school is intensive, rigorous and tight, and not merely an impotent, aimless, sloppy attempt at overdue remediation.

Recommendations 5 through 7 are great – requiring highly qualified faculty, the call for rigorous evaluation of the program and providing students with innovative alternative teaching styles – but implementing them will require ample professional development and support from state resources. This can be done; the resources simply need to be delivered to the schools themselves (i.e., state evaluators and curriculum specialists from the state ought to do school visits with the mission of helping and equipping teachers). I think these are the most problematic to institute because of the sluggishness that bureaucracy brings whenever delivery of human resources is involved.

My favorite recommendation was for incorporating summer school as a term that can be avoided by performing at proficient achievement levels during the three other quarters of the year. This strikes me as a fantastic motivator for our students to bring it upon themselves to strive. A puzzle piece perennially missing from our discourses on how to address low student motivation levels is what motivators we as educators can offer them, since those that exist for them already (the freedom and fun of college, instead of premature motherhood, for example) are often outside of their immediate vision.

Quality communication, curriculum renewal, coordination among the body of educators – all of these are the ideals teachers yearn for, and which Heidi Hayes Jacob believes are tenable when teachers commit to the when that is implicit in calendar-based curriculum mapping. What she says about the walls that exist between teachers who share one building, and the essential disjunction between primary and secondary schools, seems accurate to me. In my school, team teaching was suggested and adamantly opposed; if I survey my students’ long term curriculum map, it looks rather like a dilapidated old road to me (like Fortification Street here in Jackson, overrun with treacherous potholes and neglect).

Jacobs reaches for simplicity to resolve this unwieldy dilemma. Will a calendar prove to be the harmonious, flexible, welcoming endeavor she illustrates?  In my own school district, at my own campus, vertical mapping is completely nonexistent, while horizontal planning has gone up into flames. The two freshman English teachers resigned at Christmas break (before then, 9^th and 10^th grade English instructors haphazardly planned together); now  there is little budding in relationship to the new teachers, who have stepped into a chaotic world and are scrambling to just survive it. To be well-planned and coordinated with other levels and subjects? That’s what teachers do in heaven! they likely think.

In JPS, we have a district-created pacing guide. It has one column for dates, one for objectives to master, and one for suggested resources. It spreads the objectives (skills) out like tomato-paste on a pizza crust over the year, divided into neat two-week chunks. Indeed, I have always viewed this document as, as Jacobs articulates, “rigid and lock step …giving the impression that all is under control” (2).  It really does feel lie a “lifeless inventory of isolated skills,” whereas a calendar-based curriculum map should really be like a skeleton, giving structure and movement and strength to the “skill sets” we’re to deliver.

After reading Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, I became more convinced than ever that the unquestioning submission to the “objectives-tacked-to-a-date” (that is, pacing guide) approach to curriculum mapping knocks the joy out of learning for students. Kozol suggests that teachers post the objectives but keep teaching in a passionate way whatever it is that her students are ready for, regardless of the pacing guide’s lifeless strictures. He goes so far as to implore new teachers to withstand irrational insistence on following such a verbose bureaucratic document which complicates simple lessons children must learn: to read and to write. For Kozol, planning and mapping are just that simple – more simple than Jacobs’ calendar. And yet, I have trouble denying that he would discourage the intentional big-picture preparation that calendar mapping would hopefully produce.

 I think the pacing guide ought to be renamed the SATP calendar (state tested subject areas), which map out what students ought to be covering every year in the four core subjects, from 7^th-12^th grade. Currently, there is too much spontaneity and repetition in the solo approach to curriculum mapping (each teacher to her own). Without merging different subjects together, cantankerous departments that do not work well with each other split into solo-mode, at the cost of not just horizontal but also vertical mapping. If teachers across subjects could plan together, I believe less personality clashes between small departments would occur, thereby determining mapping failures.

My plan for planning the summer 2009 English I and II class is to adopt some of the strategies second-years last year used- i.e., one block per day devoted each to one of the three English competencies in the framework (literature, grammar and essay writing). But I would like to integrate the syllabus by centering it around a novel study, of Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street. I taught it this fall and it was effective for capturing such a large potion of the skills, and the students responded positively to it. Pitfalls I forsee is me being too domineering in having my way in the planning. I don’t want to force my co-teachers to teach a book they hate! And I know that I am setting mysef up for disappointment if I get too attached to a particular plan too early, without trying to align myself first. Also, I think it will be hard to get ourselves to vertically integrate with other subjects, or to connect to the lower and higher level English classes. It can be done, however; thus, it is now an ambition of mine, since Jacobs suggests that such exchanges breeds renewal in the (caliber and rigor of the) content, quality in teacher communication (especially integral in our cooperative –teaching/group planning approach at the MTC summer school!), and efficiency (synonym, productivity?) in scaffolding/building students’ skills.

Works Cited

Jacobs, Heidi Hayes. "The Need for Calendar-Based Curriculum Mapping." Mapping the Big Picture:Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K-12.

Kozol, Jonathan. Letters to a Young Teacher. New York: Random House, 2007.

 

Now would be the time for me to practice what I preach – that is, how to write with the purpose of persuading an audience. I teach my students how to do this mode of writing. Now I shall “utilize” it myself. Shall I defer to ethos (an appeal to ethics), logos (an appeal to logic) or pathos (an appeal to emotions) in my reasons to join MTC? How about one of each:

 

Ethos- I look to my hero, Jonathan Kozol, to articulate why one who is considering teaching to seriously consider teaching through MTC:

 

“But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child. […]

Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs. […]

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.  […]

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. […]

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.”

 

Logos- If you are a person who loves to sink her teeth into hard work, to drink in the satisfaction that comes when you invest in someone, and to apply her love of school and learning to the work-a-day world, then you are a person who ought to join Teacher Corps. If you desire to make a contribution through your job, to find endless outlets for creative ability in your daily job requirements, to discover the joy of getting through to even just a few youths, then you should be processing the possibility of travelling here and taking root here for two years to do so. If you have long watered bright hopes of having a classroom and students to call your own, and if you want to see your dreams (if they resemble these I have written about) become reality please, begin the online application.

 

Pathos- The more I reflect on it, the more I realize that my deepest dream ever has been to be a teacher. I was raised by a born teacher, my father, and have, since third grade, drank (have drunk?) in lessons and the chance to be creative in school like a feeble little leaguer slurps up water. There is no place that makes me feel more alive than a classroom. I gravitate toward schoolwork and it returns every minute I put into it with this inexplicable reward of internal growth. School, learning, and relationships with my former teachers have always been a great basis of my happiness. As a Christian, I follow the words of the greatest Teacher, Jesus. In my life as a worker and in my life as a believer, I find joy and energy in the act of learning.

 

The point I am making here is, my very heart beats today because of the education I have pursued and been blessed with. I continually find my passions in the classroom. Why on earth would I let this marvelous miracle end?! For those who enjoy school, there really is no more natural bridge than right back into a school when emerging from college. Today, I am proud to call a school my work environment. Being in my classroom makes me feel more like me than almost any other activity I choose to do. At my very core, I am a student. Being a teacher allows me to keep up that identity, except to an even deeper degree now. Now others count on my sound understanding of concepts and on my own curiosity to deliver them the clarity of facts and abundance of internal resources they need to succeed.

 

My community, Belhaven, is like a Wendy's Frosty: delightful, energizing, and my first pick. Every morning, its pleasant residential streets and heart-calming autumn air (that smells faintly of fireplaces, yawning their last sighs from burning through the night to take the chill off -- or so my poetic mind imagines) greet me as I go for an early-morning run. It's then that I am stunned with gratitude that I get to live in this place. "She's wierd," you're thinking. Maybe so. "You're happy anywhere," my quasi-mother (family friend) tells me on long-distance phone calls.

I love living here. I feel like I have settled in and have discovered my niche; now it's a matter of carving it out, day-by-day, by connecting with my church family and by loving my MTC family better than I do now (I am guilty of neglecting them--even my own roomies sometimes, b/c I get so caught up in Ms. Nelson-universe.).  My efforts to contribute to and get involved in my community can be summed-up through church. It is my outlet to connect.

I have befriended two teachers at my church who have been enormously supportive. I joined a Presbyterian church in the neighborhood, and go to functions there once per week (last night it was to prepare for the Fall festival), a family's house in my neighborhood twice per month for Bible study, and also service and Sunday school. Last night I met a college student, Lindsay, who goes to Blehaven College (as do about 20% of my church's members!) It felt so good to talk to a peer and reminsce on what being a college senior is like, and the different world of responsibility that stage of life carries. She hit it off immediately.

I also look forward to seeing Cassie at church. We became acquainted about one month ago. She used to teach middle school English in North Carolina and is so generous to provide resources and the time and patience to listen to my lesson-planning queries. The family who hosts Bible study and dinner is a light to me as well. They have reached out and made be feel like I am family and have extended an open invitation to me for dinner/visits. The father is a teacher at a private high school, and the mother, like Mrs. Wilson, is an inspiration to me. I want to be a mother like her one day: witty and intelligent and capable and still pretty. When I think I've got a lot to do, then I think about teachers who have spouses and multiple children on top of that (actually, before that).

My goal is to become more of a leader/contributor to the church, to find some capacity in which I can lead and apply my spiritual and/or practical gifts. What Dani said in her recent blog about how church involvement clears and refreshes the mind, is so, so, so very true.

For this blog, I dug up my classroom management plan from back in July, up from the depths of my summer-papers-drawer. It was no longer on my computer, because a virus recently forced me to wipe my computer clean. As I glance over my paper copy tonight,  I notice that I have made some minor adjustments to the plan, and have fallen short of my plan's goals in some major ways, now that I am actually in a live classroom:

1.)    Changes to my procedures: I have help pretty well to the no bathroom rule. Not too shabby.

2.)    Late policy: I am too generous on this. I need to start enforcing 70% top credit for late work (especially with binders!) I am too gracious! No wonder being late means nothing to these students.

3.)    Dismissal has become an absolute mess, probably because I am squeezing too much into the last part of class and so I miss a real closure in my lesson. The end of class is a stressful time, because I am worried students will walk off with my books, some students need passes from me, etc. Also, kids are more apt to get up out of their seat without reprimand from me at this time because I am engrossed in those aforementioned tasks. This created an even bigger problem, theft of my Promethean Board’s remote and pen, two weeks ago (which were thankfully and anonymously later returned). This is the change in my procedures as they have played out in real life that I hate the most. I really want to correct this and get back to my plan and how I did it in the first weeks: dismiss row by row. Right now, kids will leave against my directions.

4.)    Changes in the consequence ladder: I no longer call home before detention; I only call home at the point of detention. Even then, my show-up rate is about 50%. It takes forever to get them to come. So this is part of my CM plan that has not worked all that well so far. It’s exhausting and everyone – both implementer and receivers – hates it.

5.)    I DO NOT write troubling students’ names on the board. Boy, was that a disaster. They laughed and laughed. Now I have my own behavior chart (thanks, Cary!) that works as well as a brand-new car.

6.)    Changes in rewards: student of the Month, instead of week…phew! I was out of my mind when I wrote this plan! Also, I have yet to write encouragement or thank you notes to students who are doing a superb job and I have failed to post top test scorers’ names.

The parts of my plan that have worked wonders so far have been my rewards system, tickets (“how’d he get that candy bar?!” kids will still exclaim when their classmate cashes ‘em in.), my consequence system (which effectively removes tickets from them and which I keep up with fairly well – but which I should enact more often on more students), and my parent contact. My parent contact is fairly frequent and it is going well, even though I still dread nights when I go home and have to call a list of parents…

Given all these procedural and day-today changes, the more cerebral aspects of my plan have changed as well. My philosophy of classroom management has changed. First, let me say that I stick by part of my former philosophy, that CM should be driven by rewards. Tickets work pretty well: students want them, there is an undeniable buy-in. However, I have discovered that my Candide-like hope that CM would be something that required major effort up-front that would pay off in ease later, was completely wrong. I love the profession of teaching, and the opportunities for interaction and creativity it provides, but what gets me down about teaching is the constant-ness of it all. There is no rest day when I have nothing to do. It’s either grading, plans, calling parents about behavior or tardies or detentions, or graduate school work. All these things nag at me till I get them done.

Anyway, back to the question: I have discovered that my initial philosophy was naïve. CM takes just as much energy, if not more, now than it did then. Sure, maybe the expectations are routine now, and in that way doing my job is easier, but managing behavior is the same uphill struggle that it was back then.

Another part of my philosophy that I am not so sure about (see how my skepticism has grown and my inexperience is departing?) now is that my students really know what is expected of them and how to succeed in my class. How can it be that, 10 weeks into the school year, students STILL ask for pens at the beginning of class, or stand and walk around the room and look at me like I am crazy for that rule. Ms. Nelson: “Um, rule number one in my classroom from day one. What is it, Ryan?” Ryan: “Uh…” Ms.Nelson:  [growing impatient] “It says right there on the wall, ‘raise your hand to speak or stand.’”

As I reflect on this now, I imagine myself presenting my amended CM plan Power Point to the first years next summer. I wonder how my plan and philosophy will continue to change and evolve between now and then, even?

 

August 31, 2008

As a sociology major, I inhaled Payne’s book with exhilaration! She put several of the major social theories I’ve been chewing on and digesting for the past few years during undergrad into layman’s terms. My reflection on this book is going to be translating it from Payne’s terms into a sociologist’s terms, just because I love sociology so darn much. I believe Payne's representation of poverty and those who live in poverty is pretty accurate, with a few minor exceptions (one being her statement that most Hispanics in poverty have two-parent households). Because I think her representations are (overall) accurate, I will draw to the surface the evidence and theories (which, in good sociology, are linked) that support her seemingly over-broad, and sometimes outrageous, claims.

Chapter one and six were about what James Coleman calls “social capital.” As I learned in a college seminar, enthrallingly titled ‘American Youth Violence,’ all these various forms of non-monetary resources Payne lists (mental, spiritual, the ‘net’ of social support systems, etc.) form multiple layers of protection for at-risk youths which push them down a non-delinquent trajectory, or life-path.  If an at-risk youth can make it to the age of 16 or 17 without criminal offenses, research suggests that that youth has successfully dodged a life trajectory of delinquency. So preventing juvenile delinquency is about piling on the protective factors so teens can make it to that point.

Chapters 2, 3 and 8 reminded me of Peter Bourdieu and Anne Lareau’s work on “cultural capital” – that is, the internal, hidden knowledge a class has for communicating and surviving. One interesting point Payne failed to bring up in chapter two is the difference in how children from working class (as opposed to middle class) families hear a middle class teacher’s instructions. For example, these children are accustomed to directives from their parents, no polite question-form demands, i.e., “Otis, read page 5,” instead of “Otis, will you please read page 5?” Also, for children of the working class, imaginative play and asking questions is strongly discouraged at home, so they are at a disadvantage at school, where these things are expected and rewarded.

When Payne says, “hidden rules...are often the factors that keep an individual from moving upward in a career,” she is talking about the conflict perspective in sociology, espoused by Marx, Weber and Kozol (44). This perspective holds that the classes are always opposed to each other, and the upper class has both overt and covert ways of holding the lower class down where they are (preventing mobility). No wonder poor people “actively distrust organizations” (59)!

In the conclusion, when Payne talks about grieving the fact that adults in poverty seem to be left option-less, I was reminded of the strain theory in sociology, which states that structurally blocked opportunities literally slice away choices for an individual to avoid deviance or poverty.

I remember when I was being trained to be a mentor for a Hispanic girl when I was in college. The mentoring agency I did this through used Payne’s book in the mentor’s orientation meeting. The agency emphasized how those in poverty don’t know how to plan for the future (which Payne discusses in chapters 3 and 4), but rather emphasize their current feelings. I also remember being taken aback by Payne’s comment that people in poverty rely much more heavily on entertainment as a respite, and that they will dispose quickly of (much-needed!) income on DVDs, etc. I also recall that the agency said that the main resource a mentor gives a mentee is the lesson of positive and procedural self-talk, so that the mentee’s habit of impulsive decision making is revised.

I would definitely say that the book helped me understand my student population better, by enabling me to empathize with them (which is an important staple to keep intact when teaching, as draining and depressing as it can some days be); administering and reading my anonymous student surveys did the same thing. The book also gave concrete, practical tips and tools to implement better teacher-student rapport. What I like best about Payne’s book are the applications she lists in bullet-points at the end of each chapter. It really helps me simmer down to think of my students in terms of being products of their home environments, which are not necessarily bad environments, just environments with stresses of which I ought not be blind. If I can remember this this year, it will help me be a more compassionate teacher, who will groan, perhaps, at having to call a second time to reschedule a missed detention, instead of blowing a fuse over it. My favorite bullet-point motivated me to teach goal-setting and be an unwavering role-model to my students.  Chapter 8 also inspired me to set a new goal for myself as a teacher: to enhance my students’ ability to time-manage and use precise vocabulary to express themselves (I like the word maps on p. 100).

I also like the instances in which she tells real-life cases of how schools are addressing breakdowns in social support systems, like the middle school in TX with homework time and late buses built into the school day...how inspiring!

What I dislike most about Payne’s book is that she uses sources that are NOT academic. It’s an unpalatable mixture of good research and worthless subjective babble. Her goal to author a book that puts social phenomena within the layman’s reach is excellent; but I don’t like, for example, that she treats Steven Covey (a pop-, positive-psychology writer) and C. Wright Mills (an empirical social researcher) as equivalents in credibility and objectivity.