I Got A Job!

I got a job! Yeah!!! As you can tell, I am very excited. I have been trying to balance my student teaching and my other 4 jobs while searching for a full time job next fall. It has been stressful and physically and emotionally draining. Now, I can stop stressing.

Although I won't name the school on this "public" blog that no one other than the person who normally responds to my blogs reads, I will describe it. It is a charter school (yeah!) in SF. It has about 450 students enrolled; students seem to very diverse. If you know me at all, you know that I am passionate about youth empowerment and social justice -- things that this school is also committed to. The stafff seem great and very self-critical in their approach to education. I am very excited to work there.

Interviewing for this job, and others was nerve wracking. After the initial interview, I was invited to do a model lesson in front of a group of students. This was very intimidating. I get nervous when my University Supervisor comes out to observe and evaluate. It's even worse when it is a strange group of students, their normal teacher, and the principal of the school.

The teacher asked me to do a background lesson on the Vietnam War. Students were midway through a book on the war but had learned little about the war outside of the book. I was excited to do it, but also scared bc I had never studied the war. I was able to talk to the teacher in person and ask her questions about the class. I asked her how many students were in the class, whether students attended regularly, whether students worked well in groups, whether students liked to talk in class. I appreciated the opportunity to discuss these issues, because in my student teaching experience, a great lesson can go terribly wrong if it is not the right lesson for the class.

I did some library research and spent way too much time planning the lesson. But since this was for a job, I figured it made sense to go all out. I turned the classroom into a Vietnam War museum. I had 6 exhibits: 1) African Americans and the War; 2) Guerilla Warfare; 3) the My Lai Massacre; 4) Anti-War protest; 5) Guerilla Warfare; and 6) Personal Artifacts (my father is a Vietnam War Vet). I brought in a Marvin Gaye Song, a Clip from the movie Forrest Gump, pictures, a power point slide show on the massacre, letters, poetry, facts, and some of my dad's old war stuff. It turned out to be a great lesson. Students were really engaged, and said that they learned a lot. I was very pleased. I walked away feeling that even though I spent way too much time on this lesson, it might be good to spend way too much time on a lesson every now and again. Students really liked it. It was interactive, multi-media, appealed to different learning styles, and out of the box. (I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I'm proud of it). Seeing their reaction and their reflections showed me that the time spent was well worth it. I even had fun creating the lesson and learning about a war I knew virtually nothing about.

My other model teaching lesson at the other school was horrible. It was an example of a good lesson gone bad because it was not right for the class dynamics. Although to my credit, I knew nothing about the classroom dynamics before going in. I tried to ask the questions above, but after telling me they would get back to me with that information, I never heard back. They also scheduled the interview the day before, so I had less time to prepare. Since I had no idea what they were learning before the day of my interview, my lesson was also a random lesson. In sum, the lesson was painful. I wanted to disappear. I left,however, knowing that I did not want to work at that school because I felt they (the principal and the teacher) were inconsiderate and lacked good communication skills.

I am happy that I do not have to do anymore model lessons in front of complete strangers.

Rantings of an Educator

Rantings of an Educator:

Schools in urban ghettos
Are not set up to educate or habilitate
Children with brown skin or thin pockets
They help circulate brown bodies
Onto dirty streets where cold steel waits
To meet red hearts that stopped hoping long ago.

Nobody knows what to do.
How will we care for students who don’t want to be there?
How do we motivate students who have been nurtured
By hate?
Students who aint concerned with teachers
Tellin em aint aint a word
When little grammatical blurbs cannot reason
With a student that sees no reason
to care about him or herself?

How do we convince young women
Who quote lil Kim like the Bible,
That sex is not a religion?
That livin to get a man, or rather a boy
Imitatin a man,
Aint really livin.
That when you have children at 14
It becomes more likely that
Dreams of happily ever after remain just dreams
That fade soon after that after sex glow
she probably doesn’t even know
Because that boy is only concerned with his ejaculation.

We are educating a nation of children
Who will grow and never know their history
about our ancestors who were kings and queens in Africa
Before they were snatched and attacked
And packed like sardines on a ship
Where half of them died
And the half that made it cried out to God
To intervene and end death
So they could live in heaven.

Our children never know
that their parents
And grandparents have dreams
Of seeing their children own nice things
Because their parents spend all their time in fields
Trying to sow those dreams
In soil that grows
Food that never seems to reach the table.

Our children do not realize
that they are victims of viscous lies
that tell them they are inferior.
We give them standardized tests
That tell them they are substandard and subhuman.
Testers do not acknowledge that discrepancies exist
Because there is no standard.
Because testers want to maintain
Their standard of living
For themselves and their kids.
Because students scoring low
Live in sub-standard houses
Where there is no heat for the heart
And no food for thought.
Because the status quo should never fall below
shades of white on pie graphs
that show what black
Brown
and Red students do not know;
and hides the lies that schools are fixed to lift
those who are rich
and white
and some brown tokens
who were let through to prove
what gatekeepers have been saying all along –
that anybody can succeed
if they try.

Sometimes I sit and cry
Because I don’t know why life is like this
For little kids who deserve the world.
I want to teach little girls
that they have pearls and gems in their minds.
I want to teach little boys
That guns are not toys
And that life is precious.
I want my students to learn
Their stories
Not his - story
About how he discovered and conquered a land of savages
And how his hand crafted a plan
That expands freedom to all men
Who were created and treated equal.

I cannot teach these lies
To children who know equal is a sugar
To sweeten the bitterness of reality.
Teachers have to stop
Perpetuating untruth to our youth
We must unveil and correct discrepancies
So that children can have
Positive mentalities
And see their fantasies of other people’s realities come true.