jetaway

Tomorrow’s my last ATDP class, and being the last, I’m going to kick back and let my students do the work: first, a metacognitive piece of writing, second, group presentations, and third, “author’s chair” (when each student reads a piece of their own writing from the summer), and if time allows, a little frisbee! Just one more set of final essays to grade, final grades to calculate, and the rest of these narrative evaluations… I’ve complained a lot about this summer, but as I sit here and write my evaluation of each student, I see that despite my reluctance, they have won me over. Don’t get me wrong: I still prefer my school in Oakland and an older group of students, but when it comes down to it, there’s something about being in on the learning process that is really exciting! I have actually seen some growth and change in my students, even if as minor as one of my students finally getting that she needs to use commas instead of dashes in most cases!

A brief pause, before I dash off —-

Today should be a momentous day!

I was officially offered a position at Life Academy in Oakland over Memorial Day weekend. This position is, quite frankly, the perfect teaching position for me and I feel incredibly fortunate to have landed it as my first real position on this side of my teacher preparation program. For the last five years since I graduated college, I have been queen of not committing to jobs. Let’s see if I can count how many jobs I’ve held since college: teaching assistant, two-week Applebees whore, fine dining waitress, youth hostel assistant, verizon wireless telesales bitch, 1-day voice actor, travelling english teacher, shipping department gopher, freelance writer, substitute teacher at two different districts with different assignments every single day, Upward Bound instructor, private tutor, pollster, SAT proctor, and hiking boot fitter for REI. I’m exhausted just thinking about the turn-over in my life. I’ve been through half as many moves, too. So many that it when my year anniversary at my current residence came up last month I found myself scanning the want-ads and putting feelers out even though I live in the nicest place I’ve ever lived and probably will ever live. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so unsettled and why I had the urge to start packing books into boxes. Then I realized, I was itching to move because it’d been a year! Heaven forbid I do anything for more than a year.

This must be why the idea of being wed to an academic calendar is pleasing to me. I like the seasonal turn-over, the constant change, the fresh faces and new perspectives. I’ve finally found a profession where settling into the doldrums of “been there done that” is not acceptable. I’m going to be a teacher and that is momentous. That I am willing to say to a group of 32 teenagers, “I’m here with your for the next nine months, your rock,” is momentous, is either maturity or exhaustion from immaturity. I don’t know which.

Either way, today was supposed to be momentous. I was thinking trumpet horns accompanying a thousand pounds of dollar bills flitting through the air. I was dead wrong.

This is Oakland after all. This is not Marin (I turned that job down). This is not high-flying corporate life. This is public school.

Today I signed my contract!

What you don’t know yet is that I turned in all vital paperwork and a vial of blood (kidding on the last part) in early June. My paperwork was lost. The woman I’d handed it over to had left the district. Suddenly I was faced with having to track down all of my transcripts again, get TB tested again, get a money order again. Then they found my paperwork, miraculously. I went today expecting something to be missing and another delay, but all was in order.

And yet it did not feel momentous. I was lucky to be there with a friend from my program at Cal and another former classmate, so at least I didn’t feel all alone in the understatement of my career. There were no trumpets. No red carpets. Not even, “Welcome to Oakland!”

Instead, there was the harsh reality of how expensive it is to be a teacher, as if I wasn’t sure of that already. I’ve paid in tears and sleepless nights. I’ve paid a chunk of my heart, a corner of my soul. I am losing to the relationship that overshadows everything else, the avalanche of committment, and I wonder how to be a good role model for my students when I can hardly do it for myself. I feel buried under the weight of having nothing. No money. Teaching is expensive.

Today I found out there will be no paycheck until the last day of September, a whole six weeks after I officially begin working, though my work has been ongoing this summer. I’ve been teaching for ATDP for weeks without a single cent coming my way. Why is it in education, as in no other fields that I’m aware of, it’s acceptable to pay employees AFTER all of the work is completed and rounded into a month?

And did you know that teachers get ten paid sick days every year? Sounds good, right? You are thinking, “Teachers get summer and all this sick leave, why are they complaining?” I bet you didn’t know that when a teacher stays home sick, he/she has to PAY the substitute to take over. That’s right, a teacher pays to be sick!

Here’s something else you probably didn’t know… In Oakland if you’ve been teaching for 26 years AND you have a Ph.D., you will never make more than $66,680.00! That’s incredible. That should be illegal. Think about it this way: for one year of teacher preparation graduate school, I took out a loan of $34,000. I am not going to Stanford or Dominican but a STATE university. As a first year teacher in Oakland, I will make only $3,000 more (before taxes) than I took out to get my credential. Imagine multiplying that by the 5 or 6 years it takes to get a Ph.D. and you can see that the financial returns are pathetic.

Sure there are some financial assistance programs for teachers. Everyone likes to talk about the Governor’s loans and incentives, but they don’t realize that when we kicked Davis out and replaced him with Arnie, we also lost the incentives. Today, the only incentive is $2,000 a year towards loans for each year a teacher works in a low-income or low-performing school, and only up to five years of service. What this really means to me is that the “incentive programs” just might cover my interest, but certainly none of my principal.

Ah, but there’s a catch. If I were a science teacher or a math teacher, I’d be more valuable. The state would pay back an additional $10,000 of my loans. Oakland would offer me a $10,000 signing bonus. Math and science is $20,000 more valuable than being able to express yourself in writing?! I’m an English teacher and we are a dime a dozen, it seems.

It probably sounds like I regret my decision, but that’s not the case. I regret the decisions that the state government has made and we the people who have let those decisions go through. There is no legitimate and valid reason why we should ask our teachers to be professionals and not be willing to treat them as professionals, which includes a living and respectable wage. I have a theory that if the world tilted just right and somehow the education field suddenly held a majority of men, that salaries would increase by leaps and bounds. I know I am not alone in this theory.

But for now I am alone in making today momentous for myself because it is. Two years ago, I was sitting on a bus with my Upward Bound students and my supervisor Van. He said to me, “So, Jill what are you going to do next?”

I looked at him with distress in my eyes and said, “I’m screwed.”

“What?” he said in surprise.

“I LOVE teaching. I am screwed.”

He pressed me for more and I told him I didn’t want to be have the kind of rants you’ve read above, and I didn’t want to feel like my profession wasn’t valued. Then a smile opened up my heart, and I said, “But I love students, and I want to teach.”

He said to me then, “Find your venue, and if you can’t find it, create it.”

Today is momentous because I found that venue. Even after taking the traditional path of teacher preparation, I’ve landed a job in a public school that is the closest thing to Upward Bound, where I’ll teach Poetry Writing and Film Studies, take my students kayaking and backpacking, and struggle in the good fight. Maybe it’s unfair to ask for financial stability when I have so much.

So much for broadening the horizons of the sixteen students I’m teaching this summer. Our field trip to the Mission District nearly went off without a hitch. There was no BART strike. The weather was gorgeous and the ice cream man was out. Imagine thirteen kids at once shouting, “Ms. Thomas, can we get ice cream?” You better believe I said yes. The mango popsicle was the best I’ve ever had, and my Spanish came in handy for a split second to find out how much each treat cost. This was the closest I’ve come to feeling like an aunt, and it was good.

Not so good was the feeling in the pit of my stomach the next day when our director announced, “One of our classes went on a field trip to San Francisco yesterday and unfortunately, two students were mugged at the Powell Street station.” I had four students leave our group and travel home on their own since BART was the mode of transportation anyway. I’d called each of them when I got home to make sure they were okay, and yet I had the sensation that I’d forgotten something. The two students, it turned out, were much older and were taking digital film for their movie class. Fourteen older teenagers approached them and stole their laptop, but not physical flesh damage was done.

Not so good was the next day when I asked my students if they would tell their friends to take the mural tour. Their response: “No, the murals make the neighborhood look tacky,” and “It’s just vandalism.” Who are these kids?! And why are they in my class? I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that these are the kids I’m supposed to work with because my perspective is so different than theirs, but I say, give me Oakland!

In one hour, BART may announce a strike if negotiations are not successful. It just so happens that I’ve planned and organized a field trip for my student tomorrow to visit the Mission District of San Francisco and take a mural tour. Of course, I planned this trip over a month ago when I had no idea there might be a BART strike, let alone beginning on the day of our trip. The idea of taking sixteen 12 to 13 year olds on mass transit to the city at first seemed like a grand adventure, the kind of thing that’s been hatching in my brain for years. But suddenly, the idea of trying to get on a morning Transbay bus with hundreds of other commuters who would generally take the underground train, does not seem like the kind of adventure I signed up for. I can picture myself already fumbling to find the right amount of cash to pay for myself and my little ducklings in tow, missing our stop, or catching the 14x bus to Daly City instead of the 14 to the Mission as I did the night of the Zeitgeist gathering and the best tamales ever. But I should picture it as a success, so that it will be a success, of course. I will not worry about how to occupy my students at 24th and Harrison in the deep heart of the Mission as we have minutes to pass before our tour begins. Instead, I will ask them to imagine their lives in a colorful mural, larger than all of them head to toe and head to toe. The adventure will go as intended, but will it go as planned?

I learned a valuable lesson this week, which I’m still trying to figure what to do with it. This is the way it is as a new teacher: so much data, so much information rubbing against or with the theory, but how to find time to make sense of it and recharge to try it a different way? I assigned my students an autobiographical incident essay. I won’t call it a total mistake, but pretty close. If I have to read another essay about opening up a Christmas or birthday gift to find inside an iPod, X-Box, or Bow Wow tickets, I might scream. How stupid of me to ask 12 and 13 year olds to be developmentally ahead of themselves just because their academic skills are miles ahead of them. Which reminds me that a few weeks ago I was having lunch with my grandmother. She told me that she was in the same grade as her younger sister because they were such good friends and wanted to be together. She said, “I was always a year behind myself.” We laughed until our abs felt like ripping right out of our skin. It is, in fact, impossible to be behind yourself. Is it possible to be ahead of yourself? Perhaps. My students can write the most sophisticated sentences and paragraphs, but despite their affluent upbringing, their lives are not equally sophisticated. They are still children. They still rejoice in expensive gifts (hell, I would rejoice with the gift of an expensive iPod; in fact, I did when my brother gifted me with the lil’ Shuffle a few months ago), and when I ask them if they have visions of what they will do with their lives, they roll their eyes at me, and I laugh. I was designed to teach high school students; I am sure of it. And yet, I have so much to learn right here where I am? How do I write assignments that do not reward shitty life experiences that make for good story-telling while punishing those who have stable upbringings and social blinders?

Can it be that it’s a Saturday night in the middle of the summer and I am working? Shouldn’t it be a crime to be held hostage by the autobiographical essays of twelve and thirteen year olds? My current students are good writers. They know how to punctuate diaglogue. They have sophisticaed vocabularies and acrobatic sentence variation. What they don’t have is experience, developmental depth, and reflective muscles. Which means there’s little for their writing to cling to. In some ways, it’s exciting to think how far they will go in only the next few years, developmentally. But in other ways, it makes it more depressing that I’m spending a Saturday night reading bones with no flesh. I want to fatten them up with life.

Perhaps our field trip next week will do just that when we go to the Mission for the walking mural tour. There is life there, life that my students and I know so little about. Maybe this will put meat on the bones. Coming home from San Francisco with dirt under the fingernails is always good for a writer’s soul.

This summer I’m teaching a course as part of UC Berkeley’s Academic Talent Development Program (ATDP). These kids are all here because they are “good students,” do well on standardized tests, have a least one teacher that adores them, and probably have pushy parents. I’m teaching the middle school section of a writing course, and I’m blown away by the intelligence and “worldliness” of these kids. Actually, I’m intimidated. First day of class yesterday I asked everyone to bring their favorite poem to share with the class and simply tell us why they liked it so much. After one student read a familiar Shel Silverstein poem, the next student read an old poem with “thees” and “thines.” She had the book in front of her, but very clearly she also had it memorized — all three or four pages of it. Afterwards she said she liked it because of “the way the author depicted the demoralization of modern society.” She went on the compare something in it to T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” When she was done, I tried to summarize so I could write a note on the blackboard as I was trying to generate a list of characterstics of poetry. I said, “So, you like the message, right?” About half the class recognized that I was lost and giggled. Yeah, I’m way over my head. This particular student is only 12 years old, going into seventh grade. She had her own subscription to the New York Times. I’m screwed! The challenge this summer will be challenging students to think in new ways and to open up to the personal. As I’ve already told this particular student who confessed to me that she hates to read writing about herself, “Then, your challenge this summer is take risks and put yourself on the line.” Looks like that’s exactly what I’ll be doing too.

It has been months since I’ve last posted (not that anyone is reading this). Apparently keeping a blog about teaching isn’t very interesting because as a teacher I don’t have time to write. Believe me, there are interesting things to say.

The most important thing right now is that I’ve just returned from the much-anticipated School Board Meeting. We managed to move our item up on the agenda. Twenty-six people spoke out against the School District’s memo of mandate and authoritarian regime against the teaching staff in regards to the state-mandated scripted curriculum. I was one of those people; in fact, the first one called to the podium. Several of my classmates spoke, several of my students, my amazing mentors, and even an esteemed Cal professor. Even though we’d like to do away with Prentice Hall curriculum altogether, that’s just not a reality. Tonight was the next best thing: an option of utilizing the curriculum without making it the core item in the curriculum. I suspect this is not resolved entirely. The question of who decides which option individual teachers are allowed to choose was not discussed. One board member even had the audacity to ask all of the secondary teachers stand up. About 15 of us did. Then she asked all of the teachers who had less than five years experience to stand up. Only about five of us, including on woman who was clearly not a “young” teacher. Then she asked all of the veteran teachers to stand up. She never made an point about this, but we suspect she was trying to segregate those of us who have options from those of us who will not have options. I don’t know.

I may know more tomorrow. I have my official interview with the principal of my school, who has decidedly squirmed and admitted evasion during every conversation he and I have had about potential work. He was there tonight, heard my statement, and even made his own. His statement confirmed my belief that he does not support teachers as we should be supported. I am curious to see what will happen in our interview and what tack I will take with him. He clearly knows my position now and my politics, and I know his. We are probably not a good match. I can feel in my gut that I don’t want to work with him, but it may mean sacrificing students I love and possibly the chance to teach creative writing. For all I know, he will cancel the interview tomorrow. That would suit him as he seems to change the rules as he goes, without warning.

For now, I’ll go to sleep with a victory in my mind.

Yesterday, my first day of my “take over” of this 10th grade class where I’m student teaching was awesome. I couldn’t have asked for a better start. I was confident. The students were responsive. The discussion carried itself. I left the high school with a great feeling of accomplishment. Today I was reminded not to take so much credit for these successes because then I must equally own the lessons that don’t go as well. There was not catastrophic about today, not even close. No one yelled at me or threw spit wads. There were a couple rolling of eyes, but nothing more caustic than that. In fact, I would have invited a little bit of a challenge if only to liven things up. The energy in the classroom today was like flat soda. It just so happens that I prefer flat soda to the freshly carbonated and released kind, but I don’t like a flat classroom. The students were sleepy. One girl had her head on her desk after admittedly falling asleep in her book last night at 1:00 AM. Another girl had her head on her desk to ward off a migraine. I had to reel and pull in questions and responses. The period was only an hour today because of an assembly and halfway through the hour I realized how lucky I was that the normal ninety-minute period was not looming in front of me so quiet as the first half and hour. I guess this is just the way of teaching, some days go really well and others don’t. I recognize that nothing bad happened. Maybe there was even some learning in place today, but it was dull and sleepy, and dragging its feet. Which is frustrating when I spent much of my time trying to make it exciting and engaging. Just goes to show me that even the best lessons will lose on some days. As a teacher of teenagers I have to accept the ups and downs of teenage life as well. On this day I am grateful that my students are readers because with twenty minutes until being saved by the bell, I asked them to begin their reading for the night — the death of the sugar cane worker in Dominican Republic and the apparent clash of classes before the Haitian massacre — and they did, quietly, respectfully, and without protest. Why is this a small problem for me? Maybe it is all the months as a subsitute teacher. I am used to fights and stern voices, referrals to the office, and detention duty. I am not sure I’m ready for such peace…

This will undoubtedly be the most exciting debut of a weblog ever. I’m really just testing this bugger out because I have no idea if a weblog even appeals to me. I have writing posted on www.worldsurface.com already. I like it there. That writing has a definite purpose and audience. This venue seems a little strange. As if anyone, friendster or not, would really want to read ramblings I post on friendster. Most likely, I’m posting because I’m procrastinating. Friendster is a great time-sucker, as I’m sure y’all have noticed. Right now I’m supposed to doing my cool down stretches after the run I just took. It’s almost 7pm, the time right after my favorite time to run. Tonight was perfect because all of the Berkeley flowers are blooming, wisteria plucking itself off the vine for the first time this season. You can almost eat the air; it is so full of fragrance. I watched an enormous melon moon sink below the horizon of Mt. Tam. I really can’t complain. Except, I’ve been sucked into friendster when I should be cooling down, stretching out the calves, hamstrings, and abs, when I should be showering, cutting up veggies and tofu for a Thai stir fry and then settling into to grade student work, and begin my lesson plans for next week. If that doesn’t sound like an exciting Saturday night… but I’m content, and that’s the point. Test, complete.