Topic: Education, schools, learning, teaching, kids

I recently went out with a very intelligent girl who is looking to pursue her PhD in neurobiology, and wants to study how the brain comprehends math.  She went to a highly regarded university and said she was highly motivated and successful there.  This is the example of the school system working its magic.  Student goes to class, gets work, read, listens, does projects, studies, explores, grows, matures, understands, questions.

The problem with the school system is that many people do not have this experience.  Their schooling does not light a spark of learning.  This includes students who do well in school, as well as those who drop out.  Right now, in some ways I am fortunate in that I work in a school where many schools are struggling readers, no little about history or science, struggle with math, and have negative impressions about school.  I say I am fortunate because here it is clear that a unique brand of schooling is necessary to help reach these kids dormant sparks of intellectual curiosity and ability.  In a school where there is discipline, order, and the appearance of scholarship, it is difficult to see if some of these students are silently indifferent to their educations.

One thing evident to me is the way students are asked to write papers, and how the focus is on the process to get to a finished piece by months end.  There’s a proscribed way to outline, to write a rought draft and organize information, and due dates to meet.  Then when you look up from all this work, and see some of the nearly finished pieces, you realize what step was left out.  It’s like baking a bake.  All this time was spent measuring, and mixing, and baking, that we forgot to find out what the individual likes to eat.  So you get kids with brussel sprouts and liverworst, and they don’t even know what those things are.  It’s a mess, and it’s no good for students or teachers.  We need to make sure students are engaged in what they are writing, that they’re passionate about their topic, and that their topic can be given depth with the aid of teachers.

Topic: A deep philosophical, psychological, neurobiological question

When something good happens (our sports team wins, a girl/guy calls, you get the job), you feel happy.  The question I have is…do you feel happy because the good thing happened, and then serotonin and other happy chemicals flood the brain, or do these chemicals flood the brain and then we feel happy?  Or put another way, what causes our happiness, events or chemicals, or some combination of the two?

I’m wondering because in reading a children’s book about a little boy who gets frustrated often, I’m wondering if a bad event triggers unhappiness which triggers depressive chemicals, or does the event trigger the chemicals first which causes the unhappiness.

Finally, the fact that certain events result in feeling happy or sad, has to do with some internal logic of what is good or bad for a person.  To what extent can people learn to alter their logic, versus to what extent is our logic wired. 

For example, if a close relative gets sick, we feel pain.  How did this come to be?  Could bad experiences be associated with positive chemicals, and vice-versa?

I have never considered myself a photographer or a writer, although I do and love both.  I’ve never considered myself an artist, although I’m constantly creating things.  It’s only now that I’m beginning to consciously think more about what it means to be these things, and what it is that I do.  Right now, I want to focus on being a writer.
    As a teacher of reading and writing, it’s become imperitive that I myself write, and that I consider myself a writer.  As I’m reading about writing, I’m developing a philosophy that a teacher needs to model the work and beliefs of a writer.  So, in that spirit, I’m re-thinking the value of this blog as my creative outlet for writing to a wide-ranging anonymous audience.  I am also writing daily reflection, learnings, and observations in a personal journal, and trying to collect academic learning in another journal that I may use for furutre articles/professional type writing, which leaves this xanga site as an outlet for everything and everything. 

Weekend agenda:

-watch Arsenal v. Newcastle
-several hours of reading….
        Golda Meir’s autobiography,
        Samuel Freedman’s book “Small Victories,” – the NYT guy who included me in his article sent me a book he wrote about 1st year teacher’s in NYC – ,
        In The Middle – a book on teaching reading and writing
-prepare a lesson on reading comprehension strategies – having students practice saying outloud what they are thinking when reading, so they are aware of their metacognition, their thoughts as they read
-2 good runs/workouts
-research and write a 5 paragraph essay about how water pollution or how draughts cause large numbers of deaths in Africa each year
-weekly room cleaning
-journaling and ending the evening with reading
-creating and checking off to-do lists

I have about 7 students who I am supporting for 6th gr. English…I’m working on developing goals and instruction for these students:

#1: Often truant, especially during english.  This was believed to be because of literacy issues, but he actually reads at a fairly high level.  Loves cars and street racing, and when put on the internet, spends all his time on car pages downloading photos of cars.  I am trying to create with this student a list of things he wants to know about cars, which he has begun to come up with.  This will drive his own learning, and culminate with some sort of demonstration of learning.  If done right, this student will read many articles and books, write about his learning, and delve into math/physics, history, and other academic subjects.

#2: Quiet, a non-self starting student.  Often needs things read to him, although he can read.  Appears to have low-self esteem and a history of not doing work, likely the result of being bullied in younger grades.  Has only expressed interest in video games, but only in playing them.  Answers many questions with, “I don’t know,” either because he doesn’t, or he’s not motivated.  Trying to engage this student often, reading to him, presenting him with ideas on readings.

#3: Strong imagination, strong in logic activities like chess.  Acts childish at times and often has difficult interacting with his peers.  Need to assess his reading more.

#4-7: Still getting to know

I’m just now reaping the benefits of all these course packets I purchased about literacy.  It’s reminding me of the big picture, and certainly I can help student immediately in finding books that are at their level and of their interest.  That is one of the most important parts of being an English teacher, simply getting kids to do sustained reading and writing everyday. 

One-Woman Show Holds Up a Mirror to Teachers’ Lives

Six rows from the stage, Dan Lilienthal took his seat,
placing his messenger’s satchel carefully between his feet. It
contained his weekly planner, a couple of novels he was reading with
his sixth graders, and a textbook from the graduate-school class he was
taking. The bag went everywhere with him, even to the theater on
Saturday night, when some people thought teachers didn’t work.

In Mr. Lilienthal’s family,
they knew otherwise. For nearly four generations, from his grandmother
to his younger cousins, his relatives have been teachers, eight in all.
Even now, he was sitting next to his sister Dana, who taught at a
junior high on Long Island. They had both heard their mother say so
many times: “This is a noble profession. Hard, but noble.”

Around
them, the lights dimmed and then rose in the Barrow Street Theater in
Greenwich Village, and Nilaja Sun went into her one-woman show, “No
Child.” She played every part in the story of a drama teacher, not
unlike herself, trying to coax, cajole and inspire a Bronx class to
perform a play.

And then came this one particular scene. One of
the students had stopped going to school, just days before he was
supposed to be in the class play. Ms. Sun kept calling the boy’s home,
leaving messages, all unanswered. Finally, reaching a grandmother who
spoke only Spanish, she teased out the explanation: the student’s
brother had been killed by a gang.

For Mr. Lilienthal, looking
on, the membrane between fact and fiction dissolved. He thought of that
boy in his sixth-grade class who was 13, and still reading at
second-grade level. One day he started shouting, kicking over chairs
and climbing onto a tabletop. Mr. Lilienthal took him out of the
classroom and to a computer lab, and told him to write about what was
bothering him.

When Mr. Lilienthal checked on the boy later in
the period, he saw on the computer screen the letters “R.I.P.” and the
words “sunrise” and “sunset,” each followed by a date. The boy asked
him how to spell “remembering.” His cousin, 20 years old, had just
died. That loss, Mr. Lilienthal realized, was what the day’s outburst
had been all about.

Now, on a Saturday night in an Off Broadway
theater, Ms. Sun and “No Child” were reassuring Mr. Lilienthal that he
was not alone. The struggles he felt were not just a function of being
a first-year teacher in a tough neighborhood like Brooklyn’s Red Hook.
They went with the work he had chosen.

“Just to realize how
common it is,” he said a few days later, ruminating on the play. “So
many teachers in a city school have a kid who’s lost somebody. When a
kid’s acting out, you learn it’s because of something severe. So you
need to be extra compassionate and extra persistent. You need to be
there even if the student doesn’t come seeking you out.”

In six
months and 170 performances, “No Child” has served this confirming and
cathartic role for thousands of teachers. While the show has been
lavishly praised by drama critics, these educators are the ultimate
experts. The symphony of murmurs and sighs one hears from them during
the show, the raucous laughter at jokes that elude the general public,
attest to just how accurately Ms. Sun has held her mirror to their
lives.

It is her own life, too, for “No Child” grew out of the
eight years she spent as a guest artist in New York’s public schools.
During the last two — divided between Martin Luther King Jr.
High School in Manhattan and the Bronx High School for Writing and
Communication Arts — the state arts council and the Epic Theater Center
underwrote Ms. Sun with the goal of developing a one-woman show.

“When
I wrote the piece, I thought I’d be doing it for three weeks for the
standard theatergoing audience,” Ms. Sun recalled. “But by the third
preview, I started to get this sense of teachers enveloping this show.”

She has performed “No Child” for several hundred teachers at events in Rochester and at Hofstra University
on Long Island. The teachers’ union in New York City had her do the
show at a training session for new teachers. The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein,
attended one night. More typically, teachers in small groups find their
way to Barrow Street, drawn both by word-of-mouth and $20 last-minute
tickets for educators.

After one performance, a teacher
approached Ms. Sun to confide, “I have kids who are doing great things
and I have kids who are in jail for murder and I don’t know how to help
them.” Another time, a mother introduced her son to Ms. Sun and said,
“My child is one of the ones left behind.”

MS. SUN knows the
teachers are out there by the sound. She hears the knowing laughter
when, in the role of the principal, she says, “We need all these kids
to pass five Regents in the next two months.” It happens again when the
class revolts against doing the play and the principal retaliates by
threatening to ban them from the school trip to Great Adventure.

For
all its humor, though, “No Child” is no palliative. At one point in the
show, Ms. Sun as the drama teacher tries to resign. “I came to teaching
to touch lives and educate and be this enchanting artist in the
classroom,” she says, “and I have done nothing but lose 10 pounds in a
month and develop a disgusting smoking habit. These kids need something
much greater than anything I can give them. They need a miracle — and
they need a miracle like every day.”

A 25-year-old in charge of
conjuring those miracles, Mr. Lilienthal understood the emotion all too
well. So he took some sustenance from the fact that Ms. Sun did wind up
staying and putting on the class play.

“You come across this
resistance and it shatters your idealism,” he said. “You experience
this immediate frustration — how far below grade level the kids are and
the way they’re acting out. You start to wonder why you’re teaching.
You get so disillusioned. So just to know that Nilaja Sun was able to
bring her passion to the students, and that it worked. You have a
curriculum to teach, but you need to bring yourself.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia. His e-mail address is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.

Topic: Let’s do this

Patience, patience, sweating, and patience.  Still, be patient.  I don’t expect anything anymore, not from myself, not from this world, but, from patience and sweat comes the occassional swell of energy that there is something more in the world, and something more in myself.

I attribute today’s swell of energy to three events.  The first is a phone conversation with a close friend of mine who is purusing his MBA right now.  This person is driven to do good like no other person I know, dedicated to learning and doing as much as possible, so that he can improve the world in some way.  I’ve come to realize that these people don’t come around very often, I know good people, and smart people, but it’s a great feeling to come into contact with this type of person’s contagious energy.  A reminder that I need to proactively surround myself with the types of people who can bring out that side in me that wants to do, and wants to do good.

The second event was watching part of the New York City marathon, as it passed by Park Slope, Brooklyn, along 4th ave.  I had the opportunity to see the front group, the “elite” runners, as well as Lance Armstrong (although I didn’t realize it was Lance until he had passed by).  Thousands of ordinary people accomplishing an extraordinary feet, 26.2 miles around NYC.  I looked at these people and said to myself, “This is something I can do, this is something I’d like to do.”  Watching from the sidewalk, the only difference between myself and many of these runners was their decision to make the decision to train for and run this race.

The third event took place last night.  I went with my two sisters to see a play, “No Child,” at a theater on Barrow St. in the West Villiage.  It was a one-woman show about a theater teacher who tries to prepare a group of students at Malcolm X. High School in the Bronx to perform a play.  The actress played an incredible range of characters, including the theater teacher, the students regular and skittish first year teacher, the janitor, and a number of students.  I thouroughly enjoyed the play, laughing frequently at her portrayal of students, and paused often when issues surrounding teaching came to light…the student whose brother dies in a gang, the teacher who sees her idealism tarnished, the janitor who has seen it all before.

Highlighting this play, was an event that took place after.  As my sister and I were leaving the theater, a man asked us if we were teachers.  My oldest sister and I said we were, and the man introduced himself as Samuel Freedman, an education reporter for the New York Times!  He asked us a few questions about the show and how we may have related to it, as well as questions about our family.  I only occassionally have thought about the fact that there’s so many educators in my family, from my grandmother who passed away last year, to my mom a retired math teacher, my aunt who teachers art, my cousin who teachers art, my sister who teaches home and careers, and two speech pathologists in the mix.  Mr. Freedman called us tonight to continue the interview, and informed us we’d be included in his article this Wed., Nov. 8th! 

I’m a bit excited by this, although the cynic in me is expecting to see one line in a long article mentioning our names.  But still, it is quite exciting to have met this journalist, to have been interviewed, and to think more deeply myself about my thoughts on being a teacher.  I have begun to read much more since teaching has begun, and I have seen the connection between my teaching and my own learning.  In that spirit, I believe it’s important for me to begin writing more frequently, and to think more about my writing process, as I am teaching this to my students. 

On that note, I’d like to write a brief summation and reflection of the book I am currently reading, “My Life” by Golda Meir.  The book is an autobiography of the first Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir.  The story begins with her life in Russia at the turn of the 20th century.  Faced with poverty and pograms, or attacks on Jews, her father and eventually the whole family emigrated to Milwaukee, USA.  Golda’s sister, Sheyna, was a very political girl and frequently had people over discussing socialism, Zionism, and how to address the social and economic injustices of the world.  This exposure greatly influenced Golda, who spent her days in the USA becoming more educated and more fervent in her views that a Jewish state of Israel was the only solution to the anti-Semitism Jews faced throughout Europe. 

Many parts of Golda’s story I have been able to connect with.  First, she discusses how she often could not understand the conversations that her sister and company would be having, but knew there was something interesting to them.  That rings true for my own experience, often feelling disconnected from abstratct writing and obscure sounding writers, who are slowly becoming of interest to me.  Second, is her independence and focus towards her values.  She often goes against her parents wishes, speaking in public about politics and eventually leaving the US to help develop a Jewish state in Israel.  The third connection I have made is how normal a person Golda Meir is comes off as.  Her fame and achievements, like that of many of today’s marathon runners, are the result of both personal ambition, and chance.  It is inspiring to see how she develops in this way.

I need to return now to planning for my students.  Our students have been asked to pick a topic that they will research and write an essay on this month, and I have noticed how like reading, when it comes to writing, many students need a great deal of support and encouragement to find something they can really sink their teeth into.  In some ways, I feel like the king lion, going out hunting for something to bring back to my students to eat for their own development, until the time comes where they know how to hunt for themselves.