"I would have so many girls' numbers by now if I went here..."

In hindsight, stressing the incredible importance of the California Standards Test to my kids was a double-edged sword: while the majority of them took the test honestly and seriously, that same majority right now sees little point to learning anything more this school year. Quite frankly, their agony each day is understandable, considering the fact that only maybe 50% of my Algebra students will be ready to pass on to the next math class. By now, the kids have a pretty good idea in their mind of whether they will be passing or retaking their math class, regardless of the daily elements of trickery that I employ to get them to pick up their pencil and do something. To put it simply, it is no surprise to me that my lowest students have zero desire to learn about simplifying rational expressions when they will begin again next year back at adding and subtracting negative numbers. Who can blame them? It's the higher-end students whose whining really gets to me. It's hard to point out to them in a politically correct way that the reason why they didn't do as well as they could on the CST is because we have been held back all year by their classmates who still count on their fingers, possibly being the same students that misbehave when they don't want to draw attention to the fact that they don't get it. But the thing is that no matter how much I try to tell them, these higher-level students don't quite feel the urgency that I am trying to convey because RHS is the only education they know right now, and based on the standards set by the school and their peers, they are doing just fine. I'd say this is the sole reason that my Precalculus class has been a rude awakening to many a successful student.

Anyway, my meeting in the middle philosophy has landed me at the conclusion to show a video every Friday until the end of school. Please take note - I tell this to my students too - that I said a VIDEO, not a MOVIE. While I am fully aware that they would much rather pass the time with Finding Nemo, I've decided to show them some PBS: NOVA shows that are actually pretty engaging. The frustrating part is convincing the students to give the show a chance and actually pay attention so that they will find elements of math to be interesting. I compare it to my childhood eating habits: if the food looks like I won't like it, then why eat it? It's much easier to push to the side of the plate and act like it's not there. Either that, or spread it around the plate evenly so it just looks like random scraps that were left unfinished. My students would much prefer to shove mathematics to the side of their dinner plate and pretend like it doesn't exist, like peppers or onions or mushrooms in meal when I was seven years old, ignoring the fact that maybe the meal would not have tasted the same without those ingredients. They just are missing the link between math and real-world applications, but every time I try to fill in that void with what I believe to be interesting and engaging things, I can barely get their full attention to even get their brains moving on the subject. Maybe I should use the food metaphor in class.

I have introduced you to my complaints only to give some background to see how sometimes I come home with the attitude that these kids SUCK. And I only feel comfortable admitting that because we went on a field trip today to Sonoma State University and was struck by the fact that these kids are AWESOME. When you only see another person for an hour a day - during which you are trying to get them to perform in the one subject they absolutely despise - your vision of the human being is slightly skewed. It was clear to me today that sometimes these kids really just need to physically get out of Richmond so that they can do two things: for one, it gives them the opportunity to play like they are little kids, because their home community forces them to grow up too fast, making them deal with issues that are too emotionally big for them to properly handle at their age. Secondly, it helps them really think about what they can do with their lives. Something about Richmond makes these kids feel like they will always be in Richmond; but watching the kids get excited about the facilities offered at a college - and the enthusiasm with the idea of living on their own in their own dorm or apartment - made me really happy. I have never heard as many students as today say that they really and truly want to go to college. The cool thing was that I knew it was real because they kept telling me that they wanted to go to THIS college, which I know is because it's the first college they have ever been to, aside from maybe UC Berkeley, which is just ridiculously overwhelming for the average RHS student. Part of me is really sad that in one month I will be giving out way too many D and F grades that will keep these students one more step away from what they may have decided today is what they want to do with their life after high school. It makes me realize that teaching would be a hard profession to leave if I taught the same group of kids each year as they progress through high school, and it also makes me wish a little bit that I could reteach a lot of my D and F students again next year to give them and myself another chance.

One of my students commented to me that everyone he saw was pretty much white, and I told him that most colleges are that way, and that's exactly the thing that the nation is trying to change. It was definitely the first time I felt that a student completely understood the idea of the achievement gap and the mission to close it. Nevermind the fact that this was immediately followed by a conversation about how many girls' phone numbers he would have had by now if he went to school there.

Today was a good day.

Testing

Yes, it's been a while since my last post, and right along with it has been a painful week and a half of prepping for the state test that was altogether too long and too short. In retrospect, I believe the most bang for my buck in prepping my students was the hours I spent reminding them that all I wanted from them on CST day is just for them to focus for the entire testing period. I told them that it didn't bother me if they did not know a single answer as long as they read every question and made educated choices by eliminating incorrect answers. My new angle for this year was to honestly tell them multiple times that it will be the hardest test they have taken all year, and maybe even ever.

It was easier this year to flesh out a game plan for how CST prep would go, knowing that I would actually be in the room with 27 of my own students as they take it. Last year, I had a full class of kids I'd never met, making the teacher-to-student motivation less than effective. Luckily for us, this year our admin made sure to make it such that the staff would set up the best testing atmospheres for our students based on the small learning communities in which they were already organized. Of course, being the martyrs that we are, the English teacher across the hall and I decided to let the two other teachers from our freshman House have first pick to create their ideal class... and did they ever. My pick gave me 18 boys and 9 girls, with the process involving sports-like trades. Some students left on the list were clearly more "valuable" than others and thus could be traded for more students. Often one of us had to take one for the team and set the agreement that if I take _______, then you HAVE to take _______. I almost feel like we should earn badges for some of the things we have to do in this job.

To my surprise though, these kids were pretty amazing in that they really tried - reading every single question and answering the best they could. For as much faith as I have in the secret internal drive that everyone has to learn and succeed, I was admittedly talking to myself in the mirror the morning of the first test, giving a couple wake-up slaps to the face to be on my game for what was sure to be one of the most challenging days of the year. If getting 27 kids to stay quiet and seated for three hours of standardized testing isn't a test of your patience and determination, I don't know what is. As it turned out though, my metaphorical suit of armor didn't even see the battlefield, because these freshmen believe it or not actually wanted to give their best effort on the test. All I could think the entire testing period that first day was how diabolical it is that we succeeded in tricking these kids into doing exactly what we wanted. They love us too much.

Whether or not that is true is completely beside the point, but I was super happy with this new development that actually slightly changed my perception of my students. It had been slipping for a while, and I had begun to realize how powerful relationships really can be in the world of education. This inspired a short bout of happiness regardless of the fact that we got hardly anything accomplished in the shortened periods each day immediately after the morning testing. After all, it's not normal that we should expect these kids to be motivated to factor polynomials right after three hours of synonyms and reading comprehension. What I should have done is had a mini-lesson on all the ways that students at Richmond High get screwed in their education. Discussion point number 1: scheduling classes after CSTs so as to reach the quota of classroom hours while avoiding paying teachers additional money. The thing is, these students would not be surprised by this. I think the one way that these kids have a fuller education than anyone else is in the sense that they understand the difference between the way the world theoretically works and how it REALLY works. It's definitely one thing that I am glad I was able to see from having this job. Along this point it is no wonder I have so many kids who actually think that Osama bin Laden's death was a hoax. Quite the cynics for being only 15.

Anyway, I am sitting down to write all this because today we took the math exam and man oh man was it hard. I can definitely say that in class we haven't yet covered half of the material in the questions. It's so hard because the test is very much weighted towards the end of the year, and we begin the year way back in middle school objectives like adding and subtracting negative numbers. I was armed with two stacks of word searches for them finishing early (who the hell can take a math test for four hours?), but they were super squirrelly nonetheless. One of my students suggested that we sue somebody for them having to take a test that they are not prepared for, so to distract her from her own discomfort of not knowing half the test, I asked her to take a break and write out a letter to someone we could sue. It turned out to be more of a distraction than anything else, but hey, not all my creative ideas work. I was trying to pass the time just as much as them. In the end, I am just so impressed at the students' willingness to try their best (for me, really), and yet so discouraged by the thought that we will still have to sit through the same meeting at the beginning of next year to hear how far behind the math department still is of our goal. At the current time all I can think is how all I have done is in vain, but I know that at the bottom of this glass of wine I hold in my hand, I will be able to remind myself that there is so much more to education than a stupid standardized test.

But, since the wine has yet to be drunk, we will begin the countdown at 26. There are 26 school days left until the end of the school year.

Recovery

Spring break has been long overdue, but now that it is here, my lack of motivation is pathetic. I think my body is instead using this week to recover from months of long hours and early mornings. And since it's not been quite nice enough to force me to go do things outside, I've remained in my semi-comatose state until noon each day, at which point I move around the apartment and find very creative ways of not getting anything accomplished. Fortunately and unfortunately, the parking ticket I got this morning I think has served as a reminder that I cannot live this way, even on spring break.

When it comes to school, my brain and body feel fried; last week I missed a day of school for Lakeya's funeral, which was a unique experience to say the least. It was, in fact, my first church experience with a primarily black congregation, which put a unique spin on my mind's definition of what a funeral should be. Honestly, I thought it could have been a lot better, and a coworker who also went said that he thought it was the worst funeral he'd ever been to, but I can't imagine that the planning was very easy, having seen the impact of the week's events on Lakeya's mom and her family. Plus, it was clear that her humongous family was dealing with other issues even before these events. Sadly, the service spent a limited amount of time talking about the girl we all knew, and more time using the gathering as a way to bring people back to God. The whole thing was quite frustrating, but as I watched the impact that the service had on the kids in the room, I realized that maybe this is the only thing that helps the young people of the community to reach out for help. Everybody acts so "hard" in the Richmond community because they don't want to be seen as weak in any capacity.

This experience marked the first time that I have ever cried in front of students, but I believe that this was probably the most ideal time to do so; I hope that any one of my students who saw me realizes that it's okay to display your emotions. In fact, that's why a lot of things were left unsaid about Lakeya: too many people went up to speak, but had to leave the room because they could not handle their own emotions. It became so clear that these kids, and adults too, had bottled everything up inside so much that their reaction even surprised themselves. And when these community members were actually able to express their sadness outwardly, it was as though they were crying for not just Lakeya's death, but the tragedies of so many others that they knew. I have a feeling that this funeral was different from some of the others that many had been to in that this was an open-casket service for a very young child. I realized that the mind truly does not understand the concept of death until you are looking at it in the face. Especially when the face, dressed up for the funeral, looks nothing like the girl you once knew. At the end of the service, everyone walked by the open casket, and I would say that 1 in 5 community members burst into tears, and 1 in 10 sprinted to the back of the chapel at the sight. It was strange to think that what made the funeral so difficult for me was that it was almost as though these people were learning of Lakeya's death for the first time at that moment. At this point, I had almost made peace with the fact, and it was difficult being witness to so many devastating reactions all over again. Needless to say, I am more than grateful to have the opportunity to think about other things for a week.

On the brighter side of things, I broke in my new bike, and mountain biking has definitely become my new spring passion. I feel like I'm on an "if-not-now-then-when" kick, so the next thing on the list is to get a fitness club membership and actually try and reach a fitness goal or two. I'm pretty positive I'm going to do it; it makes it easier that I already play indoor soccer at the same facility. Once again I feel like I have this fictional idea of how much free time I'm going to have this summer to accomplish everything, but even though I realize this fact, I've decided that having too much to do is way better than doing nothing at all.

...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?