Ready

The evening before the first day of school, I had an important realization.

I was ready to start school.

A year ago, I was most definitely not ready.  Last year, my school was moving and nearly doubling in size.  We weren't even able to get into the building until a few days before school began.  When we got in, our rooms were empty.  The auditorium was strewn with old, broken furniture.  The gymnasium was a forest of stacks of boxes, and trash.  I didn't have shelves for my classroom, and had to scavenge for tables. I spent hours picking out unfinished shelves, getting them painted, and then going back three times to pick them up because they were never ready when they said they would be.  It was draining and infuriating and nerve wracking.

Last year, I spent days unpacking and trying to decide where things should go.  I didn't know my way around our enormous school building, which is about the size of a small city.  When I look back at my To-Do list from the days before school started last year, it is full of things like "Talk to the cafeteria lady about how we will get our lunches."  "Go look at the cafeteria to see where we will sit." "Decide with the K-2 teachers how to do bathrooms."  "Find out where dance class happens."  More than half of my time was taken up with things that this year, I didn't have to do.

Last year, no one at school was ready for the year to begin.  We didn't know how to run a big school: how to do dismissal with 550 kids; how to operate a huge cafeteria with kids of all ages, from 4 to 15; how to manage that many students in the hallways; how to prepare so many new teachers for the hard work ahead. If we, the teachers, wanted something organized or planned or clarified, we had to do it ourselves, because no one else had time.  When would we have our weekly K-2 assemblies?  Where would each class sit during assemblies?  How should we run recess, and where? Which bathrooms would each class use?  We had to figure it all out.

This year, I was ready, and we, as a school, were ready.  We learned a lot of lessons last year, mostly the hard way.  We have systems and schedules now.  We have rules and expectations, for adults and children.  It feels less unsettling, less overwhelming and scary, and less exhausting.  It is less isolating and less sad.

In the past two weeks, I had lots of time to get my classroom ready.  Everything found a place.  (Last year, there were a few piles I didn't figure out what to do with before school started, and they were right in the same place on the last day of school.)  It is hard to feel settled if your classroom isn't really ready.  Having those hours to putter around, to do small things like clean out the filing cabinet and make labels for every small container, helps me feel ready, excited, and in control.  A teacher needs to feel in control of her domain, or else watch out.

When I thought back to a year ago, I realized, it's no wonder I didn't like my job last year, or my students.  Those poor kids, they were lost before they even set foot in my classroom. I wasn't ready for them!  I needed more time; I really didn't want them to come.  So when they did come (and, let's be honest, when they turned out not to be an easy bunch), my heart was set against them.  Not only that, but they were following on the footsteps of two years with my best and easiest class.  They didn't have a chance.

The last few weeks, my biggest fear was that this year I would go back to school and not like it again.  Not like my students, not build relationships with their families, and not want to be a teacher.  If last year was an anomaly, that would be okay.  But if it had become the new reality, that would be heart-breaking.  Being a teacher is so much a part of who I am.  How would I adjust to changing that part of my identity?  I'm only a few days in, so there's no answer yet.  But already, this year feels a million times better than last year.  This year, my heart is in it again.

Adjustments

On top of the move and all the changes it has implied, from a more demanding schedule to a lonelier space to a lot of extra work, I am mourning my old class, and having a hard time adjusting to my new one. I had the joy of teaching the same 21 students for the past two years, from the time they were brand-new first graders until they were ready for 3rd grade. They were a group like few others. Sure, they made me want to tear my hair out on a regular basis, and yes, I am romanticizing them now. But oh, how I miss them. I miss how well we knew each other, how we could make each other laugh just with a glance, how we had so many shared stories. I miss how much autonomy I could give them, because they knew what I expected and were mature enough to do it. I miss the fact that, as I used to say, if you sliced some of them open right through the middle, you would find only goodness all the way to the very core.

This year’s class is a whole new ballgame. I have always hated the beginning of the school year, the part where you have to teach all the routines and your expectations and break them in. It makes me feel like a drill sergeant. Last year, it was with great joy that I realized that my students already knew all of that, and I already knew them, and their families felt like old friends. This year, it is back to the beginning, and more so. My students are a tough bunch. They are more like mid-first graders than second-graders, academically, socially, and emotionally. It is very lucky that I taught first grade for 7 years, because I am calling on all those skills this year.

I am teaching them how to line up – oh, how often I am teaching them how to line up. (Every day when it is time to line up, I sigh a deep sigh and give myself a pep talk.) I am teaching small lessons, most days, on how to be nice to your partner, how to solve conflicts, how to help your classmates remember the rules without shouting across the room, “Malik, STOP it!” or running to the teacher to announce, with a whine, “Kalia just hit me!” when all she did was bump you by mistake.

Not only that, but I am teaching lessons on what the short vowels are, tens and ones, and how to sound out very basic words, skills I did not have to teach in second grade last year. This makes me anxious as I think about what these students are supposed to be able to do by the end of this year.

We are making progress. Once in a while, I like one or two of these kids. Once in a while, we have fun as a class, or they are mesmerized by a story, or excited by geology. Not like last year – it is much harder to engage them in a lesson than it was with last year’s class. They are less academic. But they are getting better at learning, they are practicing kind words, and they are looking more like a cohesive group. I am good at this job, and I know what to do with a group like this. It feels good to be a pro, and to see my skills paying off.

Now, if only my heart were in it.

Mourning

I am in mourning.

Over the past two weeks, this awareness has slowly arrived, the way the clouds steal across the sun until you look up and realize you are standing in a fog. I began this process of moving and expanding our school with a determination to make it work, to accept the additional strains and stresses, to take on additional leadership responsibilities, and to stay optimistic and cheerful in the name of The Work. (The Work, in this case, being our call to educate urban students not just with core academic skills, but also so they could grow up to fight for justice for themselves and others who have been left behind.)

I am not giving up on this work, or on my school and our students, of course. But I am allowing myself to mourn. In the process of realizing what I – what we – have lost, I am trying to remind myself of the things I have learned about teaching over the years, the things that have made my job at least somewhat sustainable and livable, and that I seem to have forgotten this year in this transition.

Here are the losses, the things I am missing so much that I can feel it in my stomach, the way you feel when you have lost what you thought was the love of your life.

We have left the small, sunny, colorful building where I learned to teach and worked for 8 years, longer than I have stayed in any one institution in my life. I miss the wood floors, the apple tree outside my classroom window, the crowded main office that was often too noisy, but where we all congregated to chat, laugh, and commiserate. I miss the open door to the principal’s office, where the Queen Mother would sit and we would hold meetings, trying to fit too many people around the table, or where I would lounge in the doorway, leaning against the door frame, telling her my favorite stories of the week or my worries about my students. I miss the creaky stairs, the musty closets, the storage rooms we turned into tiny offices.

Without a doubt, missing a space is mostly emblematic of other losses. We traded in our too-tiny, too-crowded building for a place as big as a city. It has wide, endless hallways, open, renovated classrooms, and an enormous gymnasium and auditorium and cafeteria. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from one side of the school to the other, and longer to find your way around it on the outside. The sun does not shine into my classroom. It is not (yet?) a building with a heart, a personality, a sense of who we are and how we fit together in this place.

Of course, it is beautiful in there. I have a bright new rug, instead of the dirt- and urine-stained one my students used to sit on; I have new furniture painted in blue, green, and purple; I have magnetic white boards, rainbow-colored hooks, and brand-new display boards for student work. When we first arrived, we were delighted with all of this. But now, all someone has to do is mention the front hallway of our old building, and I get a raw ache in my chest. Our old school was a home, a family, a place where it seemed that we all knew each other. Here, it is more like we work in an office building, or a hospital, with hundreds of people passing in the hallways, acknowledging each other perhaps with a nod.

It is not just that we are divided by space, that we don’t know many of the new staff members and students, or that the 4^th grade is twelve minutes away from my classroom. It is also that our schedule is different. Our school day is longer now – instead of teaching from 9:30 to 4, with students in the building until 4:30, head teachers work from 8:30 until 3:15, and the students are still there until 4:30. It is a longer day of work for administration, it is a longer day of learning for kids, and it is an earlier start for teachers. I used to have 2 hours every morning, from 7:15 until 9:15, to get ready for the day. I loved those quiet mornings in my classroom, alone with a cup of tea. If someone stopped by, or we met at the copier, we might stand and chat for 10 minutes. I had time to think about my day, to reflect on yesterday, to enjoy the silence.

Now, if I arrive at 7:15, I have at most one hour to be ready for the day. I need to move more quickly through my morning routines at home in order to be there by then – no more leisurely mornings at the breakfast table with the paper. At school, teachers walk by each other on our way to the copiers, but we don’t stop to chat. I can’t possibly do all my work in that hour, so I stay at 3:15 to get ready for the next day, but my kids are still there. It is not a quiet or reflective time.

On Fridays, we used to have an hour and a half between early dismissal and staff meetings, when we would eat lunch and possibly have a meeting, but a relaxed, chatty meeting. Now, we have half an hour between when the last students leave and our meetings start, so we run around heating up lunches and making copies, then sit down to rush through the order of business so we can leave at 3 for the weekend we are all desperately needing.

The sense of kinship is, plainly, what I have mostly lost. I grew up as a teacher, suffered hardships, learned important lessons, and experienced great successes, in a small community of professionals, families, and students. It was far from a perfect place. But I don’t think any of us knew what it would mean to go from 350 students to 575, to go from 35 staff members to nearly 100. We are lonely. We are isolated. We miss each other, a lot.

The feeling of our school is vastly different. We may grow into this new space and schedule and size, we may make our way back into a feeling of common purpose and community, but it will take us awhile, I think. And meanwhile, those of us who made the move are sad, missing so many things, and wondering if this is where we want to be.

September

It's September.

September, for teachers, usually involves a lot of shopping at the dreaded big box stores, a lot of cutting and gluing and laminating, a lot of making charts and lists and labels. And that's all before the kids even arrive, when the real work begins.

This year, September promises to be different for a lot of kids and a lot of teachers at my school. We have moved, and expanded, going from 350 students to about 575 in one year. The city closed a "failing" middle school and moved our "successful" pre-K - 8th grade school into their building. In addition to their space, we inherit their students: about 150 7th and 8th graders who have been learning, or approximating learning, in a school that was more like a prison than a garden. "Pre-prison" is what my principal called it when she visited last year: a school that's getting kids ready to fail, in the best-case scenario, or to be locked up or killed, in the worst.

Moving and expanding presents some challenges, to put it mildly. Doubling the size of our middle school, which was already the newest part of our program and probably the shakiest, seemed like a somewhat crazy idea. Taking on these students, whose reputation precedes them, sounded somewhat like professional suicide.

Don't get me wrong. These middle schoolers are not a different population of kids than those we've been teaching for years. But students at my school have been treated with respect, nurtured, and taught well for years. Our new charges have been in a failing school. If the rumors are correct, it was a chaotic, unsafe, and miserable place to be. High percentages of the students were placed in special education classes, wholly separated from the regular education students (a practice my school does not believe in, but which we will have to continue for at least the first year or two). These kids have been treated as if they aren't smart and can't learn and won't amount to anything. So, they've been acting as if they aren't smart, can't learn, and won't amount to anything. Go figure.

[I want to take a minute to be clear here that I don't imagine any of this was exactly the fault of the teachers or administration at the old school. I bet if you talked to those teachers and administrators, you would find a lot of committed, hard-working people who cared about kids. You would also find professionals struggling in an atmosphere of intimidation and fear in this world of test scores and standards, where we are expected to force students to learn and meet arbitrary goals, but with no support and few resources. You would find teachers who felt disrespected and oppressed by the school department and the administration, and administrators whose hands were tied. Surely you would also find some deadbeats, who should have been moved out years before. But many of them would have become teachers for the right reasons, even if now, years later, they were disillusioned, exhausted, and helpless.]

Our school works hard to build relationships with children and families. So we've been trying to start making positive connections before the school year begins. (Instead of starting out by calling home Week 2 to say "Your son was disrespectful today"). Many of the new students and their families got home visits from current families of our school last spring. Over the summer, middle school advisers paid home visits to their advisees' families. Last week, they came back to tell us stories of these visits at a staff meeting. They talked about teenagers who wouldn't turn off the TV or put down their Game Boy, who had no interest in talking to this new teacher from this new school who had come to their house to get to know them before school starts. (Normal teenage behavior, no?)

But gradually, advisers found a way to connect with many of the students. They asked for stories about the old school, and found out that most of the students had experienced bullying by other students or disrespect from teachers. One girl told how some kids took her shoes and ran off down the hall with them and no one, not even the teachers, could stop them as they raced through the building. Another student talked about being yelled at by teachers, talked down to, publicly shamed. Kids dreaded coming to school.

The advisers told these students, "That will not happen this year. No one is allowed to make anyone feel unsafe at our school. It is our job to make sure that doesn't happen, and we will do our job."

Advisers connected with families because they spoke the same language (Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean, Spanish), because their families were from the same neighborhoods, or because they loved the same foods. If they didn't speak the language of the family they were visiting, they brought someone else from school who did. They asked questions, expressed interest, and shared stories about themselves. And the students and families who were supposedly checked out, out of control, and unable to learn started to check back in.

Some of the inherited students have been coming into the building to visit over the past few days. Their school has been transformed over the summer. Where once there were peeling walls, broken furniture, and doors hung askew, there is now fresh paint, spotless bulletin and white boards, and untouched furniture. There are brand new science labs, and motion sensor lights in the bathrooms. It looks beautiful. ("This is like a private school!" one teacher whispered to me in the sun-filled library lined with antique wooden cabinets.) It looks like a school, where people are expected to teach and learn, and where those teachers and learners are valued. Two middle school boys came in my room the other day to introduce themselves. They were delighted by the changes, and amazed. They barely recognized their old school. They were warm and friendly and excited.

School hasn't started yet, and I'm sure that it will not all be smooth sailing. (It never used to be last year, so why would it be any different now?) But these kids, about whom we have been hearing rumors for a year, seem just like any other kids, if you treat them with high expectations, respect, and humanity.

On the one hand, this is not surprising at all. It is something we know and believe in, which is why we treat students and families with warmth and an expectation of partnership. On the other hand, it makes me scratch my head and wonder what the hell other schools are doing. This isn't rocket science. It's not easy, but you don't have to be a genius to figure it out. It's common sense: treat students like you know they will learn, and they will. Treat teachers like you trust their professional judgment, and they will work hard and have good judgment. Create a building that feels like a learning environment, and it will become one. It's not nearly this simple, of course, but these are pretty good places to begin.