Hello World,
So I sort of suck at this blogging thing and need to get on more of a routine. What lead me to tonight's post is a need to process and reflect on my new found line of work. I am still doing this Teach For America thing and I have been placed in the amazing Twin Cities working as a 6-12th grade science teacher. Thus far many things have happend and I am just beginning to find balance in my new role as an educator. (But things are still rocky and it has taken a lot emotionally, physically, and mentally to get where I am at.)
To give you a quick look into my classroom and current state of our education system as it relates to low income communities I will give you a quick profile of one of my students. One of my favorite students from day one has to be Abdirizak. He is a 6ft tall Somalian 7th grader who aspires to be the next greatest basketball and soccer star the world has ever seen. He arrived to America 5 years ago with his family who were fleeing conditions in Eastern Africa. Before arriving in America he spent a few months in a refugee camp where conditions were explained to me as unbearable. However for the most part Abdirizak is a well adjusted young teenage boy.
Abdirizak has been attending my school for 5 years and has made many friends. Senior staff explain him as a leader among his peers, for both good and bad behavior. He faced a few challenges with assimilating and adapting to a formalized education system and american culture in general as well as learning a new language that is not spoken at home. But needless to say Abdirizak's true potential is not being met by my school. After five years of instruction, he is still reading at a 1st grade level. He is doing math at a 3rd grade level. And when he took a national competency exam he scored in the bottom 1% in every category. Abdirizak struggles with even the simplest word problem simply because the words mean nothing to him, yet he can speak english very fluently. The most astonishing thing is I asked him how his grades have been in the past and he said he usually receives A's in most of his classes. If things were to continue Abdirizak would not be on track to graduate on grade level and would likely not attend college. My school, simply put, is a failure factory specifically catered to recent immigrant and refugee families that know no better. My families are falsely told that 100% of our school graduates go on to attend college. And due to housing shortages and the neighborhoods that have grown around this immigrant community, my families are comforted by the fact that approximately 90% of the school population is Somali, even if very few of the staff are.
In my short 9 weeks of teaching several senior staff teachers have quit because they wanted to work at a "better" school. It's ironic that the name of my school is Learning For Leadership because very little leadership exists within the administration of my school and even less learning is occurring. We are in stage one of not meeting our AYP goal. We are allowed to come up with our own plan of how we are going to fix the lack of student learning, if we do not see remarkable improvement the state will come in and basically fire or "restructure" all staff. (Meaning the few good and mostly sub par teachers will be hired at a different school, perpetuating the problem of low performing schools) Given such an ultimatum you think our school would tackle this challenge head on with full force and innovative ideas or even sticking to the fundamentals. Instead, we talked about how perhaps our students did show growth if you look at the data in a certain context, and the new standardized test was simply too hard. I don't know much about standardized tests other than the fact that they were a joke when I was a student and every student got above 90% in the school I went to. But I do know that when only 12% of a school population is on grade level and the remaining 88% scored below, there is a systemic flaw in how things are being done at our school.
Again, I am new to teaching and do not pretend to have the answers. I also think that the answer does not rest with one single thing. To quote "A Chance To Make History" I believe the answer lies in a hundred different 1% solutions." Simply put the current level of learning at my school is not enough to give these students a chance at being successful in a world where they already have so much working against them as poor, black, immigrant citizens, receiving an education that graduates them at an 8h grade level (or lower). I simply wish I could put all of these students on a bus and bring them to the school I attended.
As glim as some of this sounds, I do want to take a moment and talk about positive things I see happening every day. I will admit that my perceptions of the parents of my students before I started working at my school was not a positive one. I created a totally made up vision of what they might be like and I have found that I was unfair. My parents are amazing and truly do care about their students success. Sometimes even to a fault because they trust in our education so much to give their children a future much better than their own. It was so painful to tell many parents their student was failing because our school had neglected to give them the years of reading, writing, and math skills they need to be successful.
Another positive is my school has resource upon resource. In my room I have a full set of microscopes, an interactive white board, a school provided laptop, and so many other high tech widgets and gizmos. Yet I have a busted window, dirty bathrooms, floors, and toilets, and our buses can't seem to get our students to class until part way through third period some days. As great as the resources are I feel the money is poorly allocated and to be honest I think it is fiscally irresponsible for this school to be allowed to operate in the way that it does.
Finally, the students are amazing and have unbelievable capacity and potential to learn. simply given the exposure to science, which they did not receive years prior due to a teacher quitting, ignites a flame of learning. It can be slow going at times but they are learning and showing steady improvement. I don't know if my true talent rests with being a teacher but I enjoy seeing my students develop an appreciation for their own educational development. I give so much credit to my students, they are the smartest, strongest, most determined scholars I have ever met. They are slowing becoming world problem solving scientists. My experiences in the classroom are giving me the exposure to the types of social injustices that need to be fixed, and its exciting to see where this new and challenging path takes me.
That is all for tonight because I need to get some sleep for the start of another busy week of teaching. I hope to take some time each night to bring my story up to speed and keep writing about my educational and social philosophies as they are challenged and developed.
Peace,
KDFW
