...and the week that followed

The candlelight vigil was yesterday after school. Originally we had heard that it would be maybe at her home, which would have left me a little more apprehensive of going. It was nice to be able to go, but a few things in particular were very sad. First of all, except for about two or three students, it seemed as though the only attendees were our black students, which reminded me still how far we are from having a diverse student body in the sense that everyone gets along. Racial issues are still strong, and cliques at school leave rifts between Latino and African-American students. Secondly, it is very clear that a lot of our male students don't have a positive male role model in their adolescent lives just based on the fact that no one has properly taught them the correct way to express their emotions. So many of the boys at this vigil were incapable of sitting in silence and we downright disrespectful simply because they don't understand that it is okay for them to be visibly affected by the death of their friend.

That is the story of this week though - I have a handful of students that are acting out in ways that make me feel like it's the beginning of the year again. It's horrible to say, but I hope that these behavior problems can be attributed to their response to this week of madness, and aren't instead some freak coincidental development that I will have to deal with for the next month. I'm already at wits end at this point and I am counting down the days until spring break. It's hard not to be a little fed up with school when you have to wrap your head around the fact that somehow your administration is STILL moving new kids into your classes with only two and a half school weeks left until the state test. Oh yeah, and they were failing their other math class, so I'm so very glad that I have now inherited their sure-to-be-amazing test scores.

Still no word on when the funeral will be; the family is trying to raise money right now so that they can even have one. So sad.

Before I began my two years, I wondered what the odds were of this happening.

One of my students died yesterday morning.

Apparently Lakeya was with her boyfriend late Thursday night, and all the news articles say that her boyfriend accidentally shot her in the stomach with a gun. But let me lay out the events of Friday to you. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to burden you with all the sad details, but rather I am trying to write it all down so that I can just plain get it out.

Literally two minutes before 1st period started, a student of mine runs into the room and tells me that the teacher across the hall is crying and they don't know what to do. When I went to go see what was up, she told me that apparently many kids had heard the same rumor that Lakeya had shot and killed herself. Dumbfounded and in shock, I ran to the office to get our assistant principal to cover her class and then ran back to mine where I proceeded to give out the unit test as normal. I was only able to think about the situation when I took attendance and marked Lakeya absent. But even then, shitty rumors like this have plagued our school before, and I have even written about them in this blog. I decided I was not about to have an emotional train wreck given the slight possibility that somebody thinks this is a hilarious April Fool's joke. Because honestly, if there was one girl at school with a screwed up enough sense of humor for that, it would be Lakeya.

By third period, it was becoming pretty clear that mentally, my students weren't all there, and I knew this test was almost a waste of time, because who the hell cares about systems of equations and inequalities when your classmate just died? Luckily or unluckily, all of us in third period were distracted a little while longer from thinking about it when a mouse literally ran across the floor of the classroom. This sounds way too much like a cartoon, but I swear to you, we all first saw it because a hat was moving on the ground all by itself, and then it must have gotten scared because it bolted for the space between the closet and the wall. It is still a mystery to me where that hat came from, because nobody claimed it even after I threw it in the trash can. I can't blame them though; I would never wear a hat again after a mouse (rat, really) had been wearing it first. Right now, I am debating whether or not I should even grade those tests.

During my free fourth period, Lakeya's resource specialist, also TFA, came in to confirm that she had died, but that her boyfriend shot her. At this moment I realized that part of the reason why I didn't believe it in the first place was because I just knew that there was no way that she would commit suicide. In fact, I should mention that she was one of my top students in first period, always participating and finishing homework on time (one of the few). For some reason it has always been my first thought that when something awful like this happens that they were probably not a very good student. That is probably very unfair to assume and apparently very wrong. Come to think of it, on Thursday after school, I had to run to get site supervisors to break up a fight that was about to happen between my top A+++ student and some other girl, so maybe the opposite is true. It would make sense, after all, because the students with the best grades are the ones that try really hard with the intention of changing the path of their own life. Those incredible students are usually the ones with the most incredibly heartbreaking stories. I would say that Lakeya fell into that category; she was the youngest of many siblings consumed by gangs and violence, but you could tell that she was really trying to get somewhere in life to hopefully leave it all behind. She had her own anger problems, but it was built up from years upon years of experiences that you or I will never have to endure. Two weeks ago she was suspended for five days for threatening the English teacher across the hall in the middle of class, but she acknowledged her anger problem and signed up to be trained in restorative justice at school. At a school like Richmond, bad attitudes in students usually come from something that has absolutely nothing to do with the teacher, so I will just remember her as a student with a lot of life and someone that actually enjoyed my class (which is rare in 9th grade Algebra).

I hesitate using the word "fitting," but sometimes things seem all too coincidental at RHS. In English class, Lakeya had just finished typing an essay about what it means to lose one's humanity. Their class had been reading Night by Elie Wiesel, and so everyone had to decide if the main character had or had not lost his humanity based on the things he did and said near the end of the book. I hate to compare our school to a Nazi extermination camp this way, but seriously when you look around at how the kids deal with something like this happening, you begin to wonder where the line is for keeping one's humanity. The students are like sponges, and so much of the sponge is already filled with so many other traumas that there is no room left to appropriately deal with this one. For instance, the English teacher across the hall was told the news by one of Lakeya's close friends: "Ms. Price, did you hear about Lakeya?" "No, what happened?" "She's dead." She said it bluntly with an awkward smile on her face, which sounds awful and heartless, but consider this: I think that it is a fair assumption that we have all experienced at least once a time when even though laughing is the least acceptable thing you could be doing, you can't help but to laugh. It's emotional overload for sure, but is it losing your humanity?

Have you lost your humanity if you know that you feel sad - or should feel sad - but you just can't cry at all? I am not very good at getting myself to cry by myself; I usually use a sad movie or something and the visual stimulus of someone else crying about the same thing as I am experiencing is usually what works. So, in fourth period when I walked over to the grief counseling area and saw the only student out of 20 actually outwardly expressing her emotions and crying, I was finally able to cry a little. I would have cried more if I had known that Lakeya was this student's cousin, and was the third family member that would be buried THIS WEEK. I found this out later when some other teachers and I went on a walk and discussed how violence has gotten worse in Richmond since spring began.

In fact, with Lakeya's family history involvement with gangs and violence, us teachers still feel like something is up and that it wasn't just an accident. I suppose this is probably a normal reaction to deaths like this, but it just feels like things don't quite add up, and as much as I loved this student and want to pay my respects at her funeral or at a vigil for her, I don't think I feel safe going, because events this year have proven that there is no safe place against drive-by shootings. I don't remember if I wrote about it, but less than a year ago a man walked into a church during a funeral in Richmond and opened fire. This is the first time that I really personally feel the effect of violence and safety concerns in the community in which I teach, and that makes this experience that much worse.

The next hardship will be how I handle class on Monday. If this had happened earlier in the week, I would be in a very different place right now because I wouldn't have had time to appropriately deal with it, and based on my being a zombie through fifth and sixth period yesterday, I am thankful that I have time to mentally prepare my plan of attack for first period on Monday. But here's the thing: I was trained as a teacher and not as a therapist. It's not that I don't want to help these kids through a tough time, but more that I am terrified of getting into a situation where I have absolutely nothing to say. When you start to talk these kids about real emotional things and begin to uncover the true emotional responses, you get to realize how much shit these kids have suppressed over the years, and how many of those experiences they think is normal. What I really want to explain to my class is that the reason why I try so hard in my job is because I want to give my students the opportunity to see life outside of Richmond. I want them to have the proper resources to make it in life somewhere safer and happier. I want them to live in a place where they don't have to reserve half their mind for traumatic experiences, because if I had to blame one thing, THAT is the reason why success in education is challenging at our school. I want them to be able to redefine their vision of "normal" life. At the very least, I hope that they can see that it is not normal to lose one of your classmates in 9th grade.

Believe it or not, despite all this, I'm actually doing okay. Yesterday involved a lot of tears, some alcohol-induced, but I feel like I got it all out and it's not building up inside of me like last year's traumatic event did. I think that talking with my kids on Monday about the elephant in the room will help as well, and I can only hope for the best for next week. I have no idea how I will ever get these kids ready for the state test in the beginning of May, but, hey, those feelings aren't new :)

Save Great Teachers

Fortunately my job is safe for next year, but my roommate's is in question. Here's Michelle Rhee's new video to the public on how dumb the "last in, first out" policy is in our districts. Not too long, worth a watch:

http://studentsfirst.org/video-save-teachers

Things I Learned in the Past 24 Hours

1) The Teach For America organization is more ridiculous than I thought - in a good way I suppose.

Yesterday I attended the First Annual TFA Bay Area Benefit Dinner as one of many corps member guests. We had to apply to do this and give a little blurb about why we joined and what we thought of TFA - which I imagine was for the staff to pick the corps members whose stories and perspectives were "acceptable" to publicize to very influential people and potential donors. You may not have read about it yet, but TFA can seem very corporate sometimes in their impersonal characteristics or "canned" feel, and that is one of the reasons why I've felt that I've sometimes avoided drinking the TFA Kool-Aid. I don't feel supported or listened to when things become super robotic and uber-data-driven.

Anyway, the dinner brought guests like Condoleeza Rice (who walked by me two feet away) and MC Hammer (who actually introduces himself as MC Hammer), so it was intimidating to say the least. The ballroom in the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco was full of CEOs of major corporations like Visa, the San Francisco Giants, and Bank of America, and countless other Heads of Whatever. I was not aware of how deep these peoples' pockets were until the first live auction item was sold for $75,000. It was the purchase of a 16-person suite at AT&T Park and the experience to throw the first pitch at a Giants game. I imagine that it will turn out to be some kid's most expensive birthday present ever. The lady that bought that also bought some Summer Olympics trip thing for $27,000 as well, making her a donor of over $100,000 in a matter of 10 minutes. I got her business card and was not surprised that goes by only a first name: Trish. No more, no less. Fitting I think for some crazy lady with a shit-ton of money. Even after the live auction was over the auctioneer just got people to raise their paddles to to straight-up donate $10,000 at a time to TFA. I would say that the night raked in $500,000 for TFA in the bay, but I was amazed to find out that the purchases of seats at the dinner alone brought in $1 million. Here we are, the government on the brink of eliminating TFA funding, and the organization pulls a stunt like this. Holy crap. And yes, this is only the FIRST annual event. There has been so much untapped wealth until now!

2) According to our vice principal at Richmond, I am the best math teacher we have.

This means two things: she thinks way higher of me than I thought, and she thinks way lower of everyone else than I thought. I heard this little tidbit from another staff member, but the asterisk to the statement is that it was said with an angle for me to stay teaching in the 9th grade. There have been plans for me to teach more higher level classes, but our vice principal in charge of scheduling thinks that "we should keep our best math teacher in the 9th grade, otherwise the students will never make it to upper level math." I hate that I know the flattery will get me to stay teaching 9th grade.

3) Girls are valuable gang members because they can stash weapons and/or drugs on their person and bank on the fact that the police do a less-than-thorough pat down since the younger, newer officers are afraid of getting the attention of a lawsuit for touching them inappropriately. We had a presentation given today after school about gangs in Richmond, and I thought this was interesting.

4) Never bet a student that you had a worse night sleep than them. It unearths a story that you probably didn't want to or shouldn't hear.

That is all. Aren't you supposed to learn seven new things every day?

Changing Education Paradigms

There is no better way to spend 12 minutes of spare time than to watch this video. It's engaging, informative, and really makes you wonder about the future of education. It makes a part of me wish I studied education in college. Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

I will not let school consume my life. I will not let school consume my life. I will not let school consume my life.

It's easy for me to remind myself that there are other things in my life besides school, and often happier things at that. But, rereading blogs past, I often realize that it is just as important to remind the internet abyss that 1) I am often much happier than the text suggests, and 2) there is more to my life than my job. So I thought I'd do a brief update:

I'm still playing soccer, but the sports of choice these days are skiing and mountain biking due to the fact that I just purchased my very own skis and mountain bike. Needless to say, last weekend was my most expensive weekend to date, and I have not had the opportunity to use either pieces of new equipment yet. My next phase of time management self-improvement is to make time to go biking after school some time. A couple TFA friends of mine also have bikes, so ideally we can head to the hills in the afternoon. And then pretty soon Jackie and I will be planning out our potential hike of the John Muir Trail for this summer. We hope that 214 miles in California will seem like a walk in the park compared to the 275 miles in Washington last summer. After all, we are both a year older and wiser.

I'll be honest, I thought my "brief update" would be a little longer, but I suppose there's only so much you can fit in between teaching and planning for three different classes. It's funny; one of my former students from last year comes every so often for tutoring and he always leaves telling me that I need to teach Algebra II so I can be his teacher next year, as if it would be no big deal to teach a 4th set of curriculum standards. When I tried today to explain to him the difficulties as it is with teaching three different classes, he replied with, "Well at least you get paid more for it." I think my laughing in his face made clear two things: one, that teaching three classes leaves me a little delirious each day, and two, that our salary has nothing to do with the amount of different curricula we teach. Although that certainly should be the way we get paid, because I guarantee I do exponentially more planning than the teacher who teaches five of the same class every day. Then I could have bought my skis and mountain bike sooner.

I do think though, that this is not the worst job to be consumed by. At least there's so much going on in the school world each day and each week that things are always unique. Disheartening? Sometimes, but boring? Never. From the classroom to the national debate on education, there's always something going on. I hesitate calling it "exciting" because that's not quite the word to describe my roommate receiving a pink slip in the mail from Oakland Unified School District. Due to crazy budget problems, they sent out these potential layoff notices to nearly 50% of the employees in the district, creating a perfect real-life demonstration of the last-in-first-out philosophy in the teaching world. In the corporate world, when money gets tight, a company forces its older, higher-salaried workers to retire to leave room and funds for younger and cheaper employees. In the teaching world, there is not a significant enough difference in salaries between older and younger teachers to make a difference financially in who gets laid off, and a pension system would not work quite as well as in corporate businesses if there's no money to use.

I don't know if I've said it before, but all the ridiculousness at RHS is due to the fact that a positive school learning culture is relatively new to our school, and the district for that matter, so it is taking a long transition for certain teachers and students to understand the seriousness of expectations for them. In fact, we have one of the strongest administration staff in the district, and despite the union rules of seniority and such, they somehow end up getting new TFA teachers every year, even in such bad hiring conditions. There's some loophole they've found or some breaking of rules that is going on, but least it feels like they're doing everything in their power to improve the school, because let's face it: you may have no idea if a TFA teacher will be successful or not at Richmond, but at least you can be 95% positive that TFAers will believe that things can be turned around for the better. We have too many teachers who plainly suck because they can't be convinced that their students can in fact succeed if they are only provided the right environment and guidance. With the union, our admin has had to approach this bad teacher situation from a creative direction, so it seems that instead of trying to fire the teachers, they will bug them until they decide to leave on their own. This involves many classroom observations and asking the teachers to teach a subject that the admin knows they are not prepared for. There is certainly some gambling involved. For instance, a handful of these bad apple teachers are teaching English Language Development classes, and frankly are hiding in the classes with scripted curricula and students whose parents don't speak English. You don't hear much complaining about how much they stink simply because the parents don't know to be concerned. Technically these teachers are credentialed for English classes, so according to rumor, the plan is to ask these teachers to teach mainstream English classes where you actually have to plan your own lessons and there are actually parents who will try to get you fired if you don't teach a damn thing. With this as their only option, the teachers will choose to get placed elsewhere, and it would be foolproof except for the fact that while RHS sends these teachers to another school, we will be receiving replacements that are likely not much better because other schools do the same thing. The downside to not being able to fire them is that you can't get the disease out of the district. It's like trading lung cancer for pancreatic cancer. It's gonna kill you one way or another.

Speaking of which, I found out last week that one of my students from last year has leukemia. How awful is that? I have said before that there seems to be an unusual amount of health problems in the area, and Richmond is not exactly sitting in the most ideal of locations, surrounded by two freeways to the east and south, a major rail route to the west, and Chevron refineries to the north. It's hard to explain delicately to your students that their goal should be to get out of Richmond. For many reasons. But then at the same time you want to educate its citizens such that they have the tools to tackle their own community's problems. For anyone with a Netflix account, you absolutely NEED to watch "Brick City," a documentary about Newark, New Jersey, and the steps its mayor and citizens take to improve their situation. It's crazy how much Newark and Richmond/Oakland are alike.

Okay I'm done. I will not let school consume my life.

Math is hard.

I don't know if this is a trend at all schools, but it's pretty common nature at RHS for every teacher to act like theirs is the hardest job. As in, "Oh yeah? Well guess what I have to deal with..." Maybe not in so many words, but the point gets made time and time again, and it's a hard urge to fight. After all, math IS the hardest subject to teach at this school. See? I can't help it.

But seriously, here's how it all sums up from my perspective. Math is hard because pretty much from the first course to the last course you ever take, everything is cumulative and builds on itself. I would compare it to constructing a building, where you cannot build the second floor until the framework for the first floor is complete. Because of this, I have to think daily about the best way to approach a new concept for students who lack the confidence or skills from the fundamental math concepts. To use the same metaphor, everyday I am brainstorming ways to build the second floor before the first floor is completed. Certainly not impossible, but tricky indeed.

English is hard to teach at Richmond because so many of the students are English Language Learners. That's not to say that the students have a hard time communicating in the English language, but if you took a day to walk the halls of RHS, you would realize that English speaking and English reading and writing are just about two completely different languages to learn. The community vernacular totally interferes with the ability to string together complete sentences in a meaningful way.

You'd think that I would be totally overwhelmed with how low these students' math proficiency is, but by now, I am a pro at predicting what will and won't be confusing or what concepts will most certainly require a reteaching of the underlying fundamentals (the rule of thumb is to ALWAYS reteach the fundamentals haha). That being said, I don't think I could handle being an English teacher. For math, there is a clear goal in mind every day. To understand a concept means to be able to answer a set of problems correctly. And by the way, there is only one correct answer. In English, I don't understand how teachers could possibly divide up the curriculum in a satisfying way. For instance, one of my students asked me to help him with an essay that was a requirement to get into AP English next year. Many times I reminded him that I am not his English teacher, but he insisted. After a (very) rough draft, he asked me to "look over it." And let me just say that my favorite part of English was writing and grammar, because it all feels very structured and is the closest to black/white, right/wrong answers as you will ever get in English class. So, needless to say, I had to take a breath and think for a second about the appropriate amount of constructive criticism to dish out. In math, it is very easy to pinpoint the problem in addition to identifying all the correct steps. In dialog, "Okay, that's awesome that you did all these steps, but here is where we made a mistake." In English, how do you spin it? "Okay, that's awesome that you spelled all these other words correctly, but you actually forgot the B-E- on the front of the word 'BEcause.'" In my own education, I was drilled with the notion that your writing can always be improved, so where do I stop in correcting this kid's work? He has misspelled words, fragments, incorrect uses of commas and apostrophes (those make me cringe), bland word choice, little to no sentence variation, and some sentences that I asked him to read aloud to me because I just plain had no idea what they were saying. Thank goodness he already knew how to arrange it into paragraphs; I don't think I would have had the patience to deal with that. And I think it's safe to say that ending with a preposition will never ever be the most pressing issue in a student's essay, so forget mentioning that.

It's just so weird to me that these kids aren't able to translate spoken comprehensible ideas and thoughts into written comprehensible ideas and thoughts. How does that breakdown happen? I spoke to my students' English teacher about this and she said that feels like she is teaching five different things everyday, including things like vocabulary and just creativity in writing in general. And since reading is so difficult for them, they are able to pick up less in terms of vocab and writing styles from what they read. I certainly don't envy English teachers. I will say that often when a worksheet of mine asks my students to "explain" something that they are doing, I get a little window into what English class would be like, and I don't think I would like it. THAT would be my definition of being overwhelmed. Then again, less students have such strong negative feelings towards English than they do in math (I think), and our English test scores are nowhere near as dismal as our math scores, so who knows.

In terms of other classes, there's always the English language reading and writing barrier that limits what the students may gather from a textbook, but at least in things like science and history the concepts are completely new, so for the most part, success or failure has no predetermination. It pains me at the beginning of the year to check the state test scores for each individual student and to come to terms with the amount of reteaching that I really will have to do. I hope these teachers realize their incredible advantage when they begin the year with all their students on an (almost) equal playing field. All their students begin the year being 0% proficient in the material, and the state test scores that they receive at the end of the year are an accurate depiction of the effectiveness of the teacher. In math, you might say that some students begin the year with a negative proficiency in that they are ill-prepared from the last class, and this gaping hole in understanding must be addressed before any new learning can happen. Using my time to do this means less time to address all the curriculum content standards, and in the end leads to low scores on state tests. At the beginning of each school year, we look at the test results from the previous year, and frankly our math scores make it look like we are teaching them nothing. And I mean NOTHING. I can't speak for other math teachers (and probably shouldn't based on the things I've heard from students), but I often feel like so much of what I do goes unnoticed - all the sweeping up of previous years of problems in math really helps with my students' fundamentals, but certainly doesn't match up to the vigor of a state test to boost their preparedness.

Right now I am the furthest behind out of all Algebra teachers. When I write it like that it seems that it was a mistake and that I fell behind, but in fact I planned out my lessons in a slower pace than my colleagues. I think I'm getting more students to understand the material, but here's the problem: I'm pretty much committing to poor state test scores since I may not even make it to the last two entire units before the test is given. Or, who knows, maybe I'll get better scores since some of the students may get decent scores on the earlier material. Am I doing a service or disservice by moving at a pace more fitting to my students? It kills me to think about my handful of A+ students who are missing out on so much more of the curriculum because the other 30 students in their class can't keep up. I guess it will be a good experiment and maybe once and for all I will know what to do for next year.