The Line

If the NAEP scores are the best uniform standardized assessment of learning we can come up with as a nation, why don’t we give the NAEP to everyone?

Right, so what would you do if you were handed a 2006 Hewlett-Packard printer by your technophile parents and told, “Could you use this?”

If you were you, which you are, no doubt you would have clutched it to your chest, cackling. You would have brought it into school, where you, as a seventh grade English teacher, would have finagled, with batted eyelashes and cookies, one of those cutie tech guys in your building into loading the district-unapproved printer software onto your laptop. You would have announced to your students in hushed, gleeful tones that you had acquired a secret printer and now, their word processing, editing, printing of research, and sharing of their writing would be that much easier and faster. You would have folded your arms smugly, having circumvented the opaque ridiculousness of your upper management of Computer Services taking printers out of classrooms– yes, you read that right, 21st century educators– in favor of one printer per hallway, nearly always located in a Special Ed room, where the buzzing and the clacking of your seven-page modified schedule testing packet drives every Asburger’s child in the room insane.

You would have done this. But if you were me, you would have dropped off the printer at the Salvation Army, congratulated yourself on being thoughtful and clever, and found yourself near crying, a month later, under the weight of your epiphany to the contrary today, as the student in front of you states innocently: “Man, I wish we had a printer in here.”

Man. So do I.

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Post-script. I’m not actually miserable. I’m starting a new reading journal weekly assignment with the kids that I am tickled pink about; not doubt I’ll be blogging about it shortly.

Your teacher pay check stub ever make you weep? Mine did yesterday, but not for the reason you might think.

I’m deeply aware– some might say obsessively so– about the moral dimension of teaching. Far more than irregular verbs or how to construct an engaging summative paragraph, I work to teach my students how literature can help ask and answer the questions that make living meaningful. And then I kind of kill myself trying to model such living in my own behavior, with varying degrees of success.

Why? Middle school kids notice. In fact, they have an eagle eye for justice that many adults lose. They notice when I slough something off, break a promise, or unintentionally flout my own rules, and have no compunction about calling me out. Some teachers call this disrespect, but I encourage and treasure it. The kids keep me sane and honest, especially when I feel the habit of rigor that they inspire, spilling– necessarily, I believe– into extracurricular areas. Ultimately, I can never forget that my integrity may be the only promise of consistency that some of these kids see. (Thanks, Kant. Some days I wish I never met you.)

So in this spirit, I committed personally to a strict adherence to contract regarding my paid leave use. This depleted my bank of personal days, while leaving a substantial bank of sick days untouched– and unusable for family emergencies. Imagine, then, my reaction yesterday to the fallout from the fact that I had to take nearly four days of unpaid leave in order to be with my dying parent.

(For you rule-mongers out there, The National Family Leave Act only legislates unpaid leave; and in my district, sick time may not be used in its place.)

I don’t publicize this as some kind of “how great I am” moment, or a snotty revenge against my HR department. I hold no grudges there; they’re just doing their jobs. Nor do I mean to whine about the lost money, although this is undeniably part of the steep price I am paying now.

Rather I remain reeling– as usual– in the moral realm; stunned at the message of a system that punishes me– never mind the folks not as luckily endowed with benefits– so swiftly and concretely, for doing the right thing.

And the first thing I wonder is, “How am I going to prepare my students for this inevitable disappointment? How will I ever begin to help them understand?” Because for some of them, an experience like this has the potential to knock them clean out of principled living forever, and make no mistake.

Anyone have some suggestions for pre-teen fiction where the protagonist is left at the end with only the satisfaction of a clear conscience?

“What is honesty worth?” my students ask. They ask this, explicitly and implicitly, every day. My answer today is tangible, secret, and unsatisfactory. It is not the touching and uselessly ephemeral Mastercard sentiment: “It’s priceless.” Today, honesty is worth a tired teacher, some tears, and eight hundred and thirty-nine dollars.

I’ve been out the past two weeks due to a death in my family– the longest I’ve ever been away from a classroom for which I am the mainstream teacher. I’ve been a wreck, to be frank; imagining parents with pitchforks, abusive substitutes, all the inadequacies I manage to paper over with my physical presence on display.

I start back on Monday, and slipped in today to try and unobtrusively grab my laptop for some weekend grading. Didn’t work; I was swarmed by kids who were obviously and genuinely glad to see me. It was lovely.

Then some of them starting dissing the sub, about six inches from the sub (yikes). I put a quick end to that. But I noted too that disciplinary actions due to kids in my class were way up– my team was handling them in house, bless their hearts, but my impression was that more referrals had been written in these two weeks than I had done all year.

I can’t be pleased about this. As Rafe Esquith puts it in his book Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire:

We’ve all seen this time and again: students do a terrific job with a fine teacher, but one day the teacher calls in sick or has to attend a meeting. A substitute takes over, and the classroom that had previously functioned so well turns into a scene from Animal House.

Sadly, I’ve actually encountered teachers who are proud of this. They think it shows what wonderful teachers they are– that they can control kids when others cannot. Recently, I heard a teacher brag, “My kids only watch films with me. They say it’s not good when I’m not around. ” This is a teacher who has forgotten that we may lead the class, but the students determine if a class is outstanding or mediocre.

I realize this is simply the other face to the same coin I’ve been struggling with my entire middle school career: my kids, with adults or peers, do not as a rule default to respect. This does not mean they are not inherently respectful, kind, or good children; overwhelmingly, they are. But it does mean that I fight daily against a confluence of culture, home life, and other nebulous factors that teach my children that self-absorption is OK; that sarcasm, flippancy and defiance is the norm; that everyone must earn civility, instead of being given it simply by dint of being alive; that you do what you can get away with, because you’re not getting anything else; that there is no high road.

I need to fix this, and no matter how well they learn their concepts or internalize their skills, my classes will remain mediocre until it is.