Last Bell

Every year, on the last day of school, I start humming, “School’s Out for the Summer." After 20 years of being a student and eight teaching , I can’t help it. By the end of the day, I’m singing all out, throwing my head back as I drive away from whatever building I’m working in that year. It’s a wonderful feeling to be on vacation, and I’m usually no less elated at hearing the last bell on the last day now than I was as a teenager. This year, however, the song didn’t fill me with the usual sense of joyous release. When I got to, “School’s out forever,” I felt sad. After all these years of classrooms, lunchrooms, and grades, it might be actually be.

I know eight years isn’t long, and I hadn’t planned to “retire” so early, but I’m going home to be with my kids, Milo (16 mos.) and Isaiah (almost four years old), while they’re still little. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. Dividing up my materials – poetry unit to Mr. J., classroom library to Jackie, easel and tablets to Ms. Dowling – felt very much like giving away baby clothes. I got the same physical sensation of being torn in two, even though I know, in both cases, that what I see as artifacts are better off in new homes rather than the depths of my garage. I joke that I know where to find my colleagues if I ever need the stuff back, but the truth is, I don’t know if I ever am going back. Things have changed so much since I decided I wanted to become a teacher. Things in my personal life, first and foremost, but also in the landscape of the profession, as well as the way I view that landscape. It’s sort of like I boarded a train to go north, and, looking out the window at last, found I was somewhere near the equator. Very confusing.

I knew the journey wasn’t going to be easy from the very first day. I didn’t expect it to be, and was prepared – I thought -- to travel way outside of my comfort zone. On the eve of my first day as a substitute teacher in Oakland I woke up in the middle of the night thinking, “What are you doing? You have no idea how to teach!” And from the beginning, I faced conflicts with students who, like students anywhere, saw my presence as an excuse to play. The pain of being a sub was mitigated by the fact that I worked at only one school, so I was at least a familiar face and began forming relationships with both students and teachers before long. At first I bounced around from sixth grade ELA to eighth grade Social Studies, even to P.E. – but then I landed in a sixth grade Resource Room class as a long-term sub.

The Resource Room was, as they often are, housed in the portables at the back end of the school. Here was where the students who had difficulty with things like basic reading, reading comprehension, or auditory processing came to get their education. Walking up the stairs and entering that room was a lot like entering a train car. It was long and narrow, and there was room for about ten desks and a table. It wasn’t particularly bright, but I was so excited about having my own class and about the potential of the students that I forged ahead without complaint. The first thing I did was clean up the piles of worksheets the previous teacher had stacked around the room on every surface. I resolved that the students would be reading actual stories and books, and actually writing while I was there. And we did those things, but that’s really not what I remember most about that first year.

I remember Otis standing on a desk, threatening the principal not to try to get him down “or else.” I remember Anthony not being able to sit still for a minute, always defiant, always resistant. Kelvin asking, one day when I was particularly frustrated with him and his friend, “What happened to the old Michael, and the old Kelvin, and the old Ms. Bar-nath?” My lunch group – five or so girls from the class next door who would hang out with me every day and listen to the radio in my room. “Y’all gonna make me lose my mind, up in here, up in here,” was my anthem that year. If you’ve ever taught sixth grade, you’ll probably agree they still need recess at that age. The first year was tough. It is for most teachers.

Lunches with my colleagues, eating free canned corn and tater tots in the teachers’ cafeteria, were always interesting. The majority of the staff sat together in one room and talked about students, the school, and politics in general. I usually just listened, feeling so new and inexperienced, unqualified to comment on much. One day in a discussion of a mutual student, the science teacher told me the boy was a “lost cause.” I never looked at him with respect again.

Another time, a fellow long-term sub, an older African American gentleman from the community, told me, “You know, these kids are told at home that whatever problem they have, down to the weather, is the white man’s fault.” I laughed; he was grinning and obviously was overstating the case. But that year I had my first glimpse of the insides of the homes and lives of my students, all of whom were African American or Latino, living in poverty in apartments that were small, cramped, furnishings and effects often appearing as if their owners didn’t expect them to be there for long. These homes were so different from the homes I had spent time in growing up, even the ones in the low-income neighborhood I lived in for two years as a child in Colorado. I can’t count how many times over the years my students asked if I was rich. I dressed modestly, didn’t drive a fancy car. It may not be entirely the white man’s fault, and statistics show that the number (but not percentage) of white Americans in poverty exceeds that of any other group, but I could see how some might think that white people might be responsible for people of color often having so little when the disparity is right in front of them.

A favorite past-time of some of the teachers at my first school seemed to be complaining about policies and management there. I very much respected the principal and, at that time, took the attitude that it was better to roll with the punches rather than get flustered and complain. It made you look thin-skinned, I thought.

Sometimes the politics of the lunchroom moved into the light of day in staff meetings. In the spring, a group of researchers was in attendance at one particular meeting, and I listened passively as they explained the purpose of their study and passed out a 20-page questionnaire for the teachers. To me, a recent college graduate, it sounded kind of interesting. After their presentation, one of our social studies teachers stood up and blasted the team for expecting the teachers to participate in such a laborious process in order to get data that would help the researchers earn their PhD’s while doing absolutely nothing to help the problems they would identify at the school in their results. The team was dumbstruck, as was I. Was he right? Was he being unfair? Today, the students I had as sixth graders have (or should have) graduated from high school, and the only notable improvement at the school (and very notable it is) is the drastic improvement to the P.E. program and the number of students passing the Presidential Academic Fitness test. That change was brought about by a teacher, Kermit Bayless, who has been at the school for over ten years, not by a visiting team.

Mr. Bayless’ accomplishment is admirable, but in the landscape of today’s schools, a teacher or administrator raising test scores would trump his feat any day. This, despite the fact that he is providing his students with the lifelong benefits of physical fitness, rather than focusing on tests that measure isolated skills, and time and time again simply remind us that academic inequity has its roots in social and economic inequities. Now that I’ve been in the education profession for longer, I wish more people would get thicker skins and stand up, as that social studies teacher did, to point out that the data from these tests needs to be used for the benefit of the students, or not gathered – meaning students not tested -- at all. (And no, using the test scores to justify providing more after school programs does not help. After a long day at school with few elective offerings, a schedule packed with math and English classes in which the focus is often preparing to students to take a test that will prepare them for another test that will prepare them for the exit exam, as well as one or more test prep classes, our most challenged students do not want to stay after school for two more hours, and I don’t blame them. To borrow from an idea put forth by Mike Rose, would you like to spend your hours after work learning how to fix your T.V. or refrigerator?) Not everyone uses test prep to teach to the test, but nowadays, like it or not, we do have to teach to the test. It’s unfair to our students not to, because nowadays these tests make the difference between graduating or not. (In wealthier districts it makes the difference between parents sending their children to a school or not.)

Remember that train trip I mentioned? When I boarded, fresh from education classes that emphasized student voice in writing and active reader response, these tests were something on the horizon, and I was able to focus on engaging my students in conversations about great classic and contemporary literature. In the Boston Public Schools, this was absolutely the focus. Most of our professional development was geared towards teaching students to keep writers’ notebooks and engage in authentic writing tasks. We also spent time reflecting on student work and our own teaching. The last year I was there, though, when the MCAS as a graduation requirement was in its fourth year, the districts hired a group of people, which included Harvard graduates, to analyze test results. This group created a mini-test with several of the types of comprehension questions found on the MCAS ELA test. Wrong answers could be classified as to type of error, and the teacher could then focus instruction on fixing these errors in thinking or choosing the correct answer.

There were three problems I saw with this. The first was knowing that students often guess randomly if they are stumped, or are reading five grades below level. Why analyze the answers, in that case? Well, you could always interview the student to find out why they chose the answer. Indeed these types of interviews were carried out, even in my own classroom. The question then became, why do I want to have an instructional conversation about an isolated test item about a short passage, rather than having that conversation about a book the class is reading, or teaching that student some basic reading skills? The third problem was that the district was paying these very educated Harvard graduates to analyze tests rather than to actually work with students.

On a larger scale, government at every level continues to pay for tests given to students who, for example, may have spent the night in a garage prior to the first day of testing, or who have lived in three foster homes and attended three high schools in the ninth grade alone, or whose brother has just been shot and killed. (All of these are students I have known – and this is truly only the tip of the iceberg.) Ah well, we all know how standardized tests improve instruction because we can see what students need to learn. Hey look – there’s the equator! How did I end up here?

What students need goes so far beyond the skills we try to teach them in school. Schools can’t be expected to teach everything, of course. But while students are there why not focus on teaching them to think critically and creatively about authentic, real-life topics. Every school I’ve worked at says, in one way or another, that this is the goal, but then proceeds to focus on measurement tools that don’t register these very important things, and then says we are failing and need to improve.

Truly good education should enrich students' personal lives, as well as provide them with skills they need for college and the workplace. When students write, for example, no matter what their background is we see how rich their lives are, and, more importantly, they see it themselves. Arecelia’s poem, “I No Longer Hear Your Voice” about missing her grandfather in Puerto Rico was so rich with details -- I can picture them walking down to the riverside and dancing together at a family gathering even now– the imagery sticks with me as much as any I’ve encountered in the Norton Anthology. I assume that writing the poem helped her clarify what these experiences meant to her and to hold on to these memories, part of her heritage, as well. A poem by another of my Boston students, nicknamed “Rainbow”, was written in non-Standard English and sneaks up on the reader when it reveals, in the course of narrating his first day of school, that he is gay. Etta, the girl with the true poet’s heart, not to mention “flow”, could churn out verses worthy of a much larger stage than our small classroom.Why are these pieces so much more powerful than what we normally see in school? Because they went outside of the day-to-day tasks that make up the bulk of a school day and went inside the hearts of the students. Writing had real meaning for them.

Despite knowing that the real education was happening when my students wrote poems, personal essays, and opinion pieces, as well as when they took notes on a novel and came to discussion prepared to question, argue, and just notice, it was hard for me not to fall into a treadmill mentality at times. Working with students with special needs means you don’t have a lot of extra time for things that are considered “fun.” Although I always aimed to embed skills teaching in the teaching of things the kids were actually interested in, I couldn’t always do it. There were the constraints of preparing for those tests, of making sure that my students didn’t leave ninth grade not knowing how to write a standard literary response essay (since they would need to know it for tenth grade and the exit exam), and my own personal limits. There have been plenty of times where I felt like a fish out of water, and just couldn’t muster the creativity to reach across the cultural, generational, and educational gaps to present the material in a way that was accessible and engaging to my students.

This past year, the RSP students at my school were mainstreamed, so my position became more that of a liaison and coach. More than any other year, I felt the pressure to just get things done so that my students could pass their classes. If we just plod along and push through the pain, the treadmill thinking went, we will see progress! We will make it to the finish! Teenagers -- even those who struggle so much academically and could benefit from extra hard work -- don’t want to be stuck on a treadmill, though. They’d rather run on a rugged outdoor trail, and all the better if there are streams to jump and hills to careen down wildly.

Plenty of that careening is going on outside of the classroom, sometimes because of circumstances beyond their control, other times because the poor decision-making that can go along with adolescence, and sometimes because of students’ own demons pushing them down. My second year of teaching, I worked with students who were emotionally disturbed. One had thrown a chair at his teacher. Another kicked down a glass door after jumping up and knocking down the hanging exit sign in front of it. At this particular school, the students had the benefit of therapy a few times per week. The school employed four therapists for just 40 students. In contrast, the school I worked at for the past two years had two psychologists for close to 2,000 students. When the students at this school have a problem, whom do they talk to?

I learned at the ED school to let the therapists counsel the children, but back in the public schools, I opened myself up to listening to the students because I realized even though they weren’t emotionally disturbed, they needed someone to talk to about what was going on with them. Once in a while, I offered advice, sometimes I referred the students to someone more suited to help them (if a student feared she was pregnant, for example), but mostly I just listened. Often I wondered how the student was managing to come to school every day. And then I wondered whom they would have told if not their teacher. The boundaries I often enforced seemed selfish at these times.

What has become more and more clear to me over the past eight years, is that these boundaries extend outside of the schools and into our societal structure; the public school system is a mirror and often unwitting reinforcer of the inequities in our country. In the past, and in smaller communities, the teacher was not some distant figure who living two towns over. The teacher might attend the church with the student, see him or her at the market. Indeed, there are many teachers in city schools who do live where they work, but in many urban school districts, faculty drive in from far-flung places, and the result can be somewhat like a scrambled picture on a television set. This was true even in Boston where Pedro Noguera’s small schools model was in effect at all of the high schools. The gulf inside the school won’t be bridged unless it is bridged outside, too, and on a regular basis, not just for special events like Back-to-School night.

One of the things I hate about the last day of school is that I always have to scramble to get my classroom cleaned up, keys turned in, and paperwork finished, which means I don’t get to spend as much time with my students as I would like. It leaves me feeling like there are loose ends needing to be tied up. I like to tie them up with hugs signifying that even though I may have lectured and scolded at times, I appreciated my students and loved watching them grow over the course of the year. A few always rush out the door too quickly, though, and I feel like I didn’t get to say goodbye properly.

This year, I promised my students I would be back to visit them as tenth graders, and I gave out candy bars to anyone who helped me carry the seemingly endless boxes of files, lesson plans, supplies to those teachers I mentioned earlier. Then I got all the signatures I needed in order to be officially on vacation, or, in my case, done. I picked up my faithful book bag and gave one last look around my classroom before walking to the door. At the light switch, I raised my hand to turn it off, and then let it rest there on the plate. I knew the janitor would be by later that day. I locked the door, but left the lights shining.