As some of you know, I had an assignment in which we wanted to make 1 million stars and fill up the wall with that many stars. I set up the project by reading the book How Much Is a Million by David Schwartz and Steven Kellogg, and telling them that we’d be attempting to do as one of the facts stated: fill up seventy pages worth of stars, which I calculated to around 12,500 stars a student. I explicitly stated in the aforementioned post that I knew the kids wouldn’t get that far, but just to believe that they could really encourages them to do so. (Eventually, we’ll make it to 1 million, but they don’t know it yet.)

One month later, we have almost 60+ pages full of stars from the kids, and they’re really nice. But of course, as the latest trend has been, certain people want to squash even the sweetest of fruits just to say that they could. I won’t go into specifics, but let’s just say that we still have this pervasive theme of discouraging imagination and creativity in favor of rigid indoctrination. We shouldn’t have higher-ups coming in my room in front of the kids and basically crushing all the encouragement I’ve been giving the kids about their accomplishment, especially when it was my idea and I never got any assistance for said project.

And even when there’s the slightest hint of creativity from the higher-ups, it’s not done to achieve anything but as a facade to look ingenious. I look at what we did, and not only did it really pump up the kids, but it actually helped with a few of the math state standards, so I was essentially preparing them for the test without teaching to it. On the other side, we have people trying to emulate popular game shows on their computers but it has little to no relevance to preparing them for the test, and it’s taking away from our common planning, where we can be … planning in common … or whatever that was supposed to say. Y’all get the drift. I was also able to tie this in to Penny Harvest, and if all goes well, we’ll be able to observe what a 100 million pennies looks like in Rockerfeller Center.

But it’s just another footnote on how even within our own communities and people who share certain commonalities with their students can still be myopic enough to crush kids’ hopes with a lack of courtesy and encouragement. You can have all these slogans for student success, get great remarks from outside officials through your quality review, and get a great letter grade from NYC’s khan himself, but until we can effectively change the thinking our children have about their school environment and how they perceive their world, we’ll continue the endless cycle of mental and emotional abuse many inner-city children continue to endure and feed into.

According to the estimations of Schwartz and Kellogg, it would take approximately 23 days non-stop for someone to feasibly count to 1 million. Sounds like a little, but it apparently takes a lot longer to get our kids to believe that that’s possible. And even longer for everyone else to believe that those kids can believe that.

Thoughts?

jose, who has an issue with the institution and not the individuals who crushed the fruit to begin with …

Believe it or not, I’m a peaceful guy. I have some rather strong opinions and people believe that’s belligerence, but it’s really not. It’s just the honest truth. Yet I’ve always found myself thinking much the way a war strategist does. I detach myself from my own feelings about a certain situation and put myself into the mind frame of the other person. It’s a survival technique I’ve learned to hone since I started my second year of teaching.

I think the master mentality came right after I had an issue with a certain administrator regarding bulletin boards. I got frustrated, mad, tired, angered, bitter, pissed, and not so good at all once. It’s something that every teacher who’s got an ounce of rebellion in them has to go through, so I calmed down a bit. Some people turn to a poem, a quote, or some advice from an elder teacher. I turned to Robert Greene.

Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power (one of my favorite books ever) helped me hone in on the issues within and outside of my classroom. I read it before for leisure, but in the context of the conflict I was having with said administrator, I took down every law of power that I thought would get me through my day. Some of them, I apply rather often, and some I need to remind myself to do.

On the back of my grade book, I have this sheet with the following laws:

Daily Laws of Power (In The Classroom)

Law 3: Conceal your Intentions
Law 4: Always Say Less than Necessary
Law 5: So Much Depends on Reputation – Guard it with your Life
Law 9: Win through your Actions, Never through Argument
Law 13: When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude
Law 17: Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability
Law 27: Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following
Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness
Law 29: Plan All the Way to the End
Law 30: Make your Accomplishments Seem Effortless
Law 31: Control the Options: Get Others to Play with the Cards you Deal
Law 34: Be Royal in your Own Fashion: Act like a King to be treated like one
Law 35: Master the Art of Timing
Law 36: Disdain Things You Cannot Have; Ignoring Them Is The Best Revenge
Law 44: Disarm and Infuriate with the Mirror Effect

The ones I already did on a daily basis:

#3, 4, 9, 27, 30, 33

The other ones I didn’t do as well on, and I felt I needed to work on. A lot of these seem rather callous, but if looked at in the proper perspective, they can be rather useful in a classroom setting, especially dealing with peers. For instance, #34 is exactly what we’re told to do from day 1. Teachers have no business acting like the kids’ friends or their equal for at least 7-8 months, if ever. When a teacher does that, they’re often the ones with the craziest classroom. #35 is the “workshop model” (i.e. we have to beware of the timing in our lesson plans, but also in our responses to our kids).

Now, in preparation for the next challenge in becoming a master teacher, I turn back to these laws, and get back into that perspective. Some in my field might call it ridiculous, but I choose to call it avant-garde. Much of the relationships we have in the educational setting have scary similarities to politics, corporate or otherwise. With the direction schools have headed in for the last 15-20 years of (at least) my lifetime, understanding these laws might even help teachers survive this concrete jungle.

jose, who has more on rebellion soon

Today, after class, I saw one of my girls from my school. She’s the one that gave me the “Man of the Year” award, which I more than appreciated. We had a nice long conversation about everything from why the hell I would even put that out on the Web to the boy she’s dating (a kid who I consider a son, so it’s fine). When I saw her coming up, I tried to maintain my teacher face, but inside I was gushing. I was really happy to see her, and that’s something that’s missing these days. I remember …

… when it was OK to hug your teacher and tell them that they were the greatest without some sort of sexual allegation pressed against them. I mean, seriously. I understand that there are necessary precautions a school has to take against sexual predators who’ve infiltrated the co-ed fraternity that is teaching. However, these people tend to be the very small exception than the rule. Many of the teachers who I consider colleagues and friends and who’ve had distinctive success in the classroom make themselves accessible not just academically, but socially and emotionally. It’s a way of investment that takes a fair level of understanding. It’s something I was brought up with and something that’s missing because of our lawsuit culture.

For that matter,

… when teachers would retire when they wanted to, but when they were scared their contract would screw over their pension, seniority rights, and tenure. (NYCEducator does a good job of highlighting many of these issues). I fear that, if I stay in this profession for decades on end, I’ll have to stay in the profession even longer than my predecessors do because our contract was divested of all these privileges. In the direction that NYC is going, it’s either that NYC teachers won’t even be in the classroom for longer than 5-6 years or they’ll have to work the hallways until they’re 70. Let’s hope neither of these happen.

… when it was important to have teachers who knew what they were doing, instead of this youth culture that values freshness rather than experience. There’s a sense in many of the observations I’ve made that leadership is getting younger, and less experienced. They’re trying to demonstrate to teachers who are usually more experienced than them how to teach. That’s their “job,” yet because of that lack of experience, the more experienced teachers become frustrated with that leadership.

… when people didn’t have to blog anonymously to get their points across.

… how proud I felt about the schools I attended. I went through a good series of public and private schools that, despite the negative aspects, really prepared me for the world I face now.

… when losing my pencil or pen was the worst thing that could happen for that entire week. The loss of a pencil to someone who thinks a quarter’s a big deal; now I lose one and it’s just another reminder to drop by Staples.

… when kids had a break in the middle of class just to chill out, write rhymes, talk about the latest trends, run out into the playground and play, read The Source, and talk about girls we thought we “type cute.” What many people don’t understand is that kids don’t think about school as a business. It’s their socialization vehicle, and because of our business model for school nowadays, we’re missing great opportunities to engage them in becoming better citizens. It’s no wonder why so many of our schools have classroom management problems; if I had to sit on my ass for hours on end and listen to someone talk at me for 6 hours and 20 minutes, I’d be too mad.

Now, off to sleep before I start liking that new McDonald’s commercial. Ketchup and mayo, ketchup and mayo …

jose

p.s. - I’m moving to a different school! :-p

Today, I could start off with an anecdote about a kid whose own inner complexities make her sensitive and bossy, sweet yet callous enough to steal and discard without remorse, mature on one end of the spectrum, yet too involved in her own sense of power over meeker beings to understand how she negatively affects others.

Then, that means I’d have to go into the frustrations I feel as a teacher towards these constant contradictions, and their negative effects on the classroom. More so, I’d have to get into her own rather suspect relationships with friends, family members, and former sexual partners. Then, I’d also have to go into how she and the educational system continue to fail each other on so many levels. All these events tie into how this girl is at a crossroads of her life where someone can more easily and readily help her see another way of living or she could become another negative statistic about Latina women in this country.

These and many more narratives explain why my job becomes more than just an 8-3. If we took an honest look at the teaching profession (unlike the current administration for NYC), we would see that it takes more than a master’s degree to make a classroom work. A real worker in any field is hard to come by, when, even in education, one can bypass the practically necessary prerequisites of true field experience and earned credentials through nepotism and a quasi-oligarchic system reminiscent of an all-boys club.

There aren’t any rubrics for how to tell a kid who’s getting abused at home to be quiet and do their work. There isn’t a bulletin board in the world that helps these kids learn how to cope with their constant social pressures. There aren’t many lesson plans that have an objective that states, “We will be able to increase the population of Black and Latino youth in higher levels of education” or at the very least ” … become better citizens in our community.”

Any real teacher can tell you what positions belong on their resumes:

Teacher
Parent
Brother / Sister
Friend
Disciplinarian
Strategist
Secretary
Babysitter
Counselor
Activist
Inspirational Speaker
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When the scribes write the books about teachers, though, they might use the word teacher derisively, and may use the adjectives, “greedy,” “self-serving,” “pompous,” and “ungrateful.” When people ask those very scribes to go into the classroom themselves, they go back to their quills and caves and continue bashing teachers with these same adjectives.

jose, who believes instruction and classroom management belong on the top part of the educational priority list and that bulletin boards belong somewhere next to whether a kid should go to the bathroom or whether there’s enough chalk for that day’s lesson