How hard is it to play a drug user? Ok, fine a Lotus-eater. But, really in my show, it all amounts to the same thing. But you should see these guys. They are so low energy, which, ok, it might be accurate, but it makes for some pretty bad drama. Not that I would really know, as I have YET to have a rehearsal where the ENTIRE cast is in school. Not possible, I've decided. In fact, most days, I can't even manage to get all of the cast members for a single scene. Ah, the joys of high school drama. Especially in a school where attendance is such a problem. So and so is sick or is dropping out or has a cousin who needed something or a parent who wanted something else or, sigh. There are about 15 rehearsals left and I have yet to see one of the classes even make it through the end of the show. There might not BE an ending if these guys can't get it together. But they are not exactly the motivated ones. My second period class I'm pretty sure is actually made up of zombies. The children were eaten somewhere after December. I wonder, when exactly do I make the decision to cut pieces out?

Downloading a giant screaming, sheep bleating and the crash of thunder. Who do you know who does this on the job? Some days, I love my job! I've been burning cds for the sound cues, buying fabric for costumes while juggling the testing schedule for the seniors who haven't passed the ELA Regents. It's this sort of odd head game that appeals to me about my job. On the other hand, I've done NOTHING outside of work today. I met up with a friend I suppose, but that too was to help with an interview project that he's working on related to the small school culture. So, it's a bit all encompassing at the moment. But I hope it will be worth it. The kids sure seem excited. They can't wait to get back to the auditorium.

Meanwhile, some of my students will have their orignial plays read by professional actors in mid-town tomorrow night.

On May 8, some of my students will be reading at BAM CAFE. It's an ARTS month and that makes me happy as one of the people fighting the good fight in a science and math school. Ok, fine, a science and math school with a marine twist. Not an arts school anyway.

Oh yeah, and 15 of my kids will sit for the AP English exam next Thursday. I am not expecting miracles, but it is a first step.

Teenage poetry. The only way to capture the category is to recite some of the poems. But I don't have any of them on me. All I can say is that without understanding what a cliche is, my students manage to create every single one of them. But worse, they think that the phrases are profound and soul felt. We are doing a ten week spoken word unit on Mondays that is run by BAM. It includes a highly motivating show which inspired us all. We left feeling so wound up. But it hasn't inspired revision, or dedication or hard work. It hasn't even inspired a willingness to look through the poems and take out some of the "ands" or "thes". We are back to the idea that a poem must rhyme. That the total sum of poetry is rhyme. That it needs a beat beneath it or it is "wack." Two steps up and four steps back. What happened to my lovely sonnets? Or I am just too old fashioned and too white? The best part of it all I guess is that the kids are excited to read their poems at the BAM Cafe next week. I have a huge line up of kids waiting to rehearse and read. It will be a fun trip. As an after school trip, most of the pressure to coordinate with other teachers is off. All I have to do is invite them and not be surprised when no one shows up. There will be brownies to help absorb the mediocre metaphors and the sleepy similes.

Central casting here. As students read various roles from the adaptation of the Odyssey, there was a crackling of pimply excitement in the auditorium. The rhymes were apparently "wack," but even though any of them could "smoke those rhymes," they decided that, well, overall it was "a'ight." Enough so that at the end of the day, many were "chillin'" in the halls waiting to see what part they'd received. The big stoner asked me if he had to "audition" for the lead or if he would just get it. I told him, that, well, he would need to come to school more often and less high if he wanted to even get a speaking line. Kind of amazed me that he thought he might get the lead. Meanwhile, one of the big ol' bloods read so well. He was perfect. Nice typecasting on my part, but, well, it works.

There was a lot of chatter about the costumes and the music. Overall, they are pumped. Expectations are high. Now if only, if only, we could get a little discipline in between all those egos. Sheesh. We didn't even make it through the cold read. Took nearly 20 minutes to decide how a script might be different than a poem.

Oh well. Three days until vacation. Not that I'm counting or anything...

Boredom. Today, the cyclops was defleshing some of Odysseus's buddies, you would think that this would be somewhat interesting to a bunch of violence-loving teenagers, right? It was, for the boys. But the girls had their heads down on the desks or shuddered in obvious disgust. I either get the boys or I get the girls. Romeo and Juliet gave me them both, but only briefly. Sure, I try to have them mime out what they read, draw pictures of what they see, take turns reading the voices of the characters, stop to discuss the action or the questions of character, but they are still bored, bored, bored. What can I do? How can I compete? I do not have a science lab where they get to create experiments and blow things up. Nor do I have simple right or wrong answers as they receive in math. Worse still I am asking them to read and think about what they read. And refer to the text to prove that what they read supports their opinions. I am the evil dictator. And I'm miserable. I feel like a complete failure. Nothing I do seems to generate anything other than resentment or pleas for trips to the bathroom. How many times can you go to the bathroom in one forty minute period anyway? Sure, I can enrich with media or comics and other kinds of text but at the end of the day and English class will always involve reading and writing, two tasks which my students dread.

The like it if it isn't challenging. If it doesn't push them to be creative or to question or to make an effort. But if it does, forget it. And that is enough to make me just want to crawl under my desk and cry. I loved my English classes in high school and I had a lot of teachers who did nothing except say take out your books and turn to page 226 and read. That's it! I was hooked. But nothing, absolutely NOTHING that I do encourages these guys to savor a sentence, or chew on a phrase.

HELP ME OB1 HELP ME.

One of the other teachers in our school has been playing the flour baby game. You know the one. Students walk around carrying a sack of flour for the week. The kids dress the flour up and bring it to their classes. They can pretend to be married to other students or to be single parents. Of course this simulation is about as realistic as say practicing swimming in a desert, but the kids certainly enjoy it and love to disrupt classes with the various baby comments. I try to do my best to play along, shouting out that so-and-so's baby is crying but apparently today a student was suspended because she "murdered someone's flour baby." HA! Real consequences for imagined responsibility. How likely is the suspended student to come and get her homework after school?

On the radio on the way into school this morning, I was listening to NPR and some "liberal" churches in the West are starting to offer a course that encourages abstinence but exposes kids to preventive measures such as condoms and birth control. The conservative groups found these church programs to be radical and insist that they send mixed messages.

Meanwhile, we have several spring pregnancies and an abundance of STDs, HIV-positive and who knows what we have that's undetected or unknown.

Most states insist on abstinence as the only discussion a teacher may have with a student. Most students meanwhile are sexually active by about 14. It's so frustrating to live in a country that creates policies that hurt the population they intend to serve. Is it intentional?

Psst! Hey, kid, want some credit candy? Just don't tell anyone who gave it to you.

It's bad enough that kids who previously did nothing for a year can come to school for a week to "recover" their credits. I thought I was keeping my hands clean by having nothing to do with it. I thought I could just turn my back and say, well, at least I'm not the one letting Johnny out when he can't write a simple paragraph.

Well, it's not that simple. It turns out to be much more sinister and underhanded than I could have possibly imagined. The guidance counselor is altering the transcript from the failing grade to read "CR" and so the official records imply that the very teacher who failed little Johnny has now miraculously passed him.

That's right. Our names are listed as the teachers who passed the same students we failed.

This all came up in a meeting where we finally shared our objections to these proceedings. We had to "insert" the item onto the agenda because information about this whole process has been kept very quiet.

One teacher brought up the important point that these students coming in for a week of credit were not sitting for the legal number of hours required to obtain credit in an academic subject area.

To which the response was something like, "well, they did the chair time the first time around."

But that's not really true. Many of these kids failed BECAUSE they didn't show up, or rarely showed up. But who is going to actually go back and check the attendance records of these students?

I feel sick.

Recently, I asked one of the top students how he felt about one of his friends who suddenly is on time to graduate. I asked him, "does it bother you that this guy has done nothing and that you've worked your tail off and yet you are both getting the same diploma and graduating on the same day?"

He said it did a little, because it didn't seem fair, but that he also understood that his friend was never going to go to college and so they weren't really in the same competitive pool.

I am so impressed that my students are more mature than I am.

But I am still sick.

I know that the bosses are being pressured from above. Still, I'm having trouble making eye contact. I feel a little dirty.

It's all I can do not to say to the kids, "Ya know what? Who cares about Shakespeare. Let's watch movies and play video games all year, and then, I'll come in for one week in April and we'll do a packet. What do you say. kids?"

Or how about if we just stay at home all year except for Credit Recovery Week where we show up with our trusty packets in hand and pass out the credits? Talk about easy money. If that's the end game, maybe I should rethink all this hard work.

Fire! There was a fire today because someone lit a bulletin board on fire. The whole school smelled of smoke and the poor board was charred to pieces, little remnants of border paper clinging to the edges of the frame, or drooping to the floor in a defeated sigh. They struck me suddenly as tragic, these brightly lit facades coating a dark place with pastel colors promoting hope where there is nothing but despair.

Ok, fine. It was "just a bulletin board," but it means someone was willing to set paper on fire and wasn't too worried about the rest of us in the building. It was real. And just a little creepy.

Fire alarms on the other hand, are as common as curse words and as such we have all learned to disregard them. I rarely notice the blinking lights or hear the glaring beeps. They go off at least twice a day, sometimes more. The danger with this "selective hearing" is of course the story of the boy who cried wolf. I was so sure that this fire alarm was just another kid pulling the lever and like everyone else, I told my class to keep working. It wasn't until security came around saying that it was real that I got the kids to calmly exit. We are four flights of stairs up and had the fire spread, our futures might not have looked so bright. Or they would have looked really bright for a few seconds and then...well, extinguished. Our evacuation time as a campus was abysmal because no one believed it was real.

Someday, there will be a serious fire and people will get killed but until that happens, procedures will continue as they did today with a little "reminder" from the administration on the importance of exiting the building, crossing the street to get out of the way of the fire trucks and to do the best to stick with your class of kids, count 'em, and walk them back inside when it is all over.

It's enough to make me want to teach in the 'burbs.

Dispensing credits to seniors like Pez on Halloween, this week, our fair school has decided to offer credit to any student who shows up on time for what is being labeled as "an intensive crash course." Most of the seniors who promise to be in attendance are multiple credits away from graduating this Spring. Well, they were until this recent "give away" week. Which leaves me wondering what I would do if I'd grown up in a system that passed me on year after year, believing that in the end, they'd pass me on and discovering that it's true. So, yeah, I guess I'd cut school and party too. As a teacher though, it makes me sick. Most of the kids are coming for English credits because they sat in class for a year without reading a single text or writing so much as a paragraph and now, for one week they will earn a year's worth of credit? I'm not sure that I can work in a system that touts this sort of program. Granted, what does a high school diploma mean these days? But if the plan is just to pass everyone after all, why all the pretense? Why all the staff meetings about high standards? What will a diploma mean to a kid who has done nothing and how angry will it make the kid who has worked her ass off?

It's Spirit Week at our school. This means watching as teachers run around desperately trying to impose a sense of pride where there is none. There is Twin Day, and Back in the Day Day, Mismatched Day (a day I truly can't comprehend) and Pajama Day (my personal favorite as I can meet the dressing requirement with little effort). For the students, it becomes an excuse to not wear their school-issued uniforms and promote gang colors and thug fashion. It's a week where enforcing no hats and colors is nearly impossible and I pretty much let anything go rather than argue. The successful part happens on Friday when the kids participate in a basketball game and the cheerleaders show off their skills--the only problem with it this year was that it fell on the same day as the start of our winter holiday so many staff members, myself included, had no desire to stick around and cheer. Apparently, this date was chosen so that photos could be taken to meet the yearbook deadline. These pictures are needed because the President of the Parents was "offended" by the previous yearbook as it did not prominently feature her child. According to this parent, the yearbook was "racist" because it only offered pictures of students in clubs or on the water and did not feature kids in the classroom. Had I been at the meeting where this opinion was voiced, I would have left the room. The woman who has worked on the yearbook for the past two years has given up most of her life to try and create memories single-handedly in a school where chaos and uncertainty reign. I've heard that this woman dispenses the word "racist" like Pez but I'd never imagined she'd taken it quite this far. Why she is encouraged to remain on the Parenting Committee is a feat that could only happen in Bushwick. We have no parent involvement or we have parent involvement from parents whose limited education and values require careful footing on very shaky ground. I try to stay away from those monthly meetings as they reek of foul play.

But on Valentine's Day for the third year in a row, I organized a contest and had a reading. This year, the reading went really well. It was in the library and the poet shared the stage with the students. The students really enjoyed reading their poems, the hot chocolate simmered in my hot pot and the marshmallows made it have that wintery kid-like touch. Some students really let their spoken word skills out and the student pride factor was genuine. Sure, I offered extra credit to the kids who showed up and there were one or two kids who were there just for that, but most of them got roped in once they sat down and had some cupcakes. A few kids even read the sonnets that they had written for my English class and that made me swell with pride. The best part was that a few teachers got up and read poems, adding to the mix, and raising the level of sophistication somewhat. There were kids from all four years and several from multiple schools as well which really made it something special. I felt proud of the kids and the staff who showed up to be a part of it. I was grateful that it wasn't a total flop and that in fact lots of kids attended and asked for more.

When does a party become a bash? And when does a bash become a bashment? Well, I don't think this one did but I can't be sure as it is the first "winter bashment" party I've ever attended or more accurately, chaperoned. Friday night was indeed the Senior Bashment--an event held in the gym featuring "Seniortinis." "Mudslides" and other cleverly disguised sugary-non alcholic beverages designed to make the students feel that they were entering the world of adulthood without breaking the law. There were two dj's spinning off what in effect was a musical race war--hip hop or a lighter, twangy latino fare-neither audible at their preferred volume anyway. We ordered about thirty pizzas which we were unable to give away because we hadn't considered the typical teenager party behavior which meant that the pizza got cold and the dance floor was empty for the first hour and a half while the bleachers were warmed and everyone checked each other out. The cheerleaders ran around in their uniforms preparing for their half hour stunt show which came out oddly in the middle of the dance party. The boys walked around wearing sunglasses and posturing their chains and hats and baggies while the girls pranced by in tight clothes and decked out hair do's. Eventually the bumping and grinding began and let me just say that there were postures held and moves created that I would never even attempt in the privacy of my own home. The circle of girls "backing it up" became impossible to survey because they were walled in by the on-looking envious masses. Occasionally, one of the more veteran teachers would dance through the crowd touting her umbrella and poke a few bodies apart. I washed my hands compulsively, worked the bathroom shift once or twice and stuck it out at concessions. The seniors planned the event themselves and had decided to call the king and queen the frost pimp and his queen but after a bunch of angry teachers they changed those terms to something else. They forgot about nominating someone until the bitter end, and the one boy who came decked out in his fubu fab wore his tilted red-velvet crown gleefully on his head as he kissed the three remaining teachers on the cheeks and said goodnight. He is indeed a ghetto king and a heart breaker.
The raffling off a a sidekick was another highlight and the winner was the envy of all.
Still, there were more cops and security officers on hand than was neccessary and the party was anything but wild. Much tamer than suburban after prom parties if you ask me. Well, maybe not the dancing, but certainly the males. Mostly, I saw little gentlemen buying their dates sodas and politely taking their hand to the dance floor. And of course when the hip hop alternated to the merengue and salsa you could see the years of dancing at family gaherings pay off because some of our kids can reallly shake it. My white hips sure as hell can't move like that. The security guards were getting into the action--they couldn't help themselves and they are all pretty good dancers too. Somehow, the whole event felt innocent and sweet just as our students can reveal themselves to be underneath all the sadness and fear. Oh, yeah, I suppose that isn't totally true as a few of the spring pregnancies were there dancing in white. An odd, but somehow appropriate part of this high school picture.

"Oh, snap! Trotsky got shanked in his dome piece!"
This is the way one of my students rephrased my explanation about how Trotsky died. I share a room with a teacher who was in the midst of her Animal Farm introduction and I decided to throw in a little trivia. But I think I got the real lesson. He should get credit for that if he wrote it on a test. But I doubt he would.

Queen Mab was a hit--particularly when hinting that she could be the one to blame for those unseemly nocturnal emissions. I think I saw some relief on the faces of confused boys. At any rate, they certainly enjoy the sword and torch jokes and the girls seem to tune in now and then as well. Listening to professional actors read the parts is really helping the kids pick up on the subtext and the plot.

The new "mastery works" v. "practice and effort" seems to be working too. A few kids seem to actually be keeping up with maintaining their points and looking to see what has been assigned and what, if anything, they are missing. I like it because the turn-around time is so quick and as I glance over the work, I can see who is on the ball and who is not.

I like the spring semester. It is filled with teaching artists and theater and fun stuff to read and do. The kids are more mature and trained (after a season on routines) and they seem to b responding well to all the positive feedback that I am coating them in. I am working very hard to stress the positive and ignore or at least respond much less to the poo-pooers of the class.

We're almost finished with act one. We're nearly on schedule. Woah.

and then there is ...frisco, a throw back to the seventies in striped green and yellow collared shirt (instead of his uniform) and matching sneakers (the new thing is to match them) who wanders the hallway with his fanny pack and pony tail telling me that he does want a high school diploma but yeah he is seventeen and has few credits. When I ask him when he might get serious and start turning up he says, "it's not that easy Miss, you think it's easy." I look at him and tell him, sincerely, that I know it is not but that it certainly won't get easier. He says, "I was working." To which I respond, "You might have to give that up if you really want the diploma," and he says, "I know. That's not easy either." We both know what he is telling me. Neither knows what to do about it.

Or Josh, who wants me to take him to a play, and I said, Ok, I will (I took him last year) if he comes to school for the whole month of February. "Too easy." He says. I doubt he will make it. I told him he only had to pretend to be awake. That got a smile.

Or Edny who I told to read Running With Scissors because he is gay and hates my hair and mocks me daily, and needs attention so badly. He is so proud to have the book and came to show me his organized binder, insisting that this was one of his "major goals" this semester.

Or Jonathan who wants to beat me up when I force him to remove his hat and insist that his colors are not acceptable on our floor. Other kids nod to him as though he were a celebrity. I chase him off the floor when I discover that he has no lunch. I admonish another boy who is trying to copy his mannerisms. He comes to my class off and on weekly and will never get credit for the year. He will eventually drop out as it is fairly clear he is not interested in school except as a place to sell.

All hail the sun. Nothing like eleven degree weather to encourage a bunch of teachers to start their internet engines revving in hopes of finding a cheap ticket to a sunny place far, far from the depths of the moaning, moody mass. But such searching and commitment leads to the sad reminder that those with whom we might travel are fellow teachers thus rendering the vacation obsolete. In many ways what we need to break from is one another.

My students are learning to thumb their noses and enjoying comparing sword lengths with one another so I suppose that means that Romeo and Juliet is somewhat successful thus far. A few complained of the boredom factor but several piped up with pride at understanding the basic message that a lonely teenage boy might want to crash a party in hopes of seeking out the girl of his dreams. They also seemed to perk up at the notion of Diana, Goddess of chastity and the whole concept of the nunnery (where’s a girl to go today)?

The AP brand child was knee deep today in Things Fall Apart, teaching one another the finer points of imperialism, cultural relativity and questioning the limits of Western Feminism. I was pleased that they are beginning to teach one another while I am merely a spectator of sorts—like a friend with privileges.

I taught them “Coyotes” and they laughed that they had howling sounds in their heads all days. It was an effective song to use as a guide to understanding archetypes and legends. I think.

We trudge on. The spring semester is so bearable comparably speaking. I can only hope that it feels this way in March and that I do make it somewhere sunny.

All hail the sun. Nothing like eleven degree weather to encourage a bunch of teachers to start their internet engines revving in hopes of finding a cheap ticket to a sunny place far, far from the depths of the moaning, moody mass. But such searching and commitment leads to the sad reminder that those with whom we might travel are fellow teachers thus rendering the vacation obsolete. In many ways what we need to break from is one another.

My students are learning to thumb their noses and enjoying comparing sword lengths with one another so I suppose that means that Romeo and Juliet is somewhat successful thus far. A few complained of the boredom factor but several piped up with pride at understanding the basic message that a lonely teenage boy might want to crash a party in hopes of seeking out the girl of his dreams. They also seemed to perk up at the notion of Diana, Goddess of chastity and the whole concept of the nunnery (where’s a girl to go today)?

The AP brand child was knee deep today in Things Fall Apart, teaching one another the finer points of imperialism, cultural relativity and questioning the limits of Western Feminism. I was pleased that they are beginning to teach one another while I am merely a spectator of sorts—like a friend with privileges.

I taught them “Coyotes” and they laughed that they had howling sounds in their heads all days. It was an effective song to use as a guide to understanding archetypes and legends. I think.

We trudge on. The spring semester is so bearable comparably speaking. I can only hope that it feels this way in March and that I do make it somewhere sunny.

My students failed my semester exam...most of them could not identify more than one noun in a sentence.

I give up.

The instructions said to underline all of the nouns in the sentence
this is the same EXACT method we have used ALL FUCKING YEAR
in fact
it is the SAME TEST I gave them on nouns earlier in the year.

so....
The boy thinks that is a good idea

...they underlined boy but they left idea out
which means the whole fucking thing is wrong
which means that they fail
which means that I fail

I HATE MY JOB!!!!!!

End of the semester! The first semester is the long semester so I am pleased that it has finally come and gone. I put together a packet of the "best" sonnets of 2007 and stuck a copy in the principal's mailbox today. Sure, it felt a little self-promotional, but I am feeling that I have no choice if I am going to attempt to create a new position for myself. In looking over the number of students who completed the assignment, challenging though it was, I felt pleased because the completion rate was pretty high given the challenge--typically more give up and quit than actually try and muddle through. I was pleased by the outcome. Sharing the sonnets out loud was a real pleasure. By taking the names off of the work and distributing copies, the kids were all interested in trying to discover who had written the good ones. They were so attentive and gave wonderful and constructive feedback to the authors. Also, they really were proud of themselves for conquering something that they initially found so perplexing. My favorite ones mirrored Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 with a real urban school flavor--shall I compare thee to a pair of new Jordans? Or my love is like macaroni and cheese?

As a review for the final exam (which will take place tomorrow), we played Jeopardy today. I am always astounded by how competitive and excited the student become when we play these games. They bicker over the rules, they are sure that I am biased towards the opposite team, the points aren't fair or aren't elaborate enough... it's so funny. Meanwhile, I get a decent chance to look at what I think has been learned and what has been missed completely. It seems to me that the debate unit sunk into their brains as did the sonnet and poetry unit while the library skills and bibliography know-how seems to be lost by the wayside. Vocabulary and grammar are somewhere in between. As unbelievable as it may be, several groups of students STILL were not able to tell me that a noun is a person, place, thing or IDEA. I fear that the exam will be too long and too difficult for a great many of the kids but I also think it is a very fair assessment of the material that I've covered and will show me how much has been absorbed. I am pleased with it overall.

One of my students had a horrific meltdown this week. Her mother is in a coma from a car accident, her uncle was shot by a cop and her father recently had a leg amputated. It's hard to believe that this is true, but according to her advisor, it is indeed. No wonder she is not so keen on school. This is one of those reminders about just how irrelevant school can be for so many of these kids. They have so many other kinds of traumas and other responsibilities to contend with. Last Friday, one of my students was freaking out because she was going to be late to pick up her brother after school and it was snowing. Another student is struggling with a serious drug addiction while his father seems to be abusing him and is an alcoholic--the poor kid was already removed from living with his mother because she abused him too. Such disasters. It's hard for me to take any of the academics seriously when looking through this lens.

I told one set of parents who came up today that I thought their son was dangerous--he seemed indifferent when four teachers told tales of him nearly blinding students as he throws things across the room. He admitted to an anger problem but did not seem to want to do much about it. He is so manipulative. I felt sorry for his parents. Actually sorry for them because clearly this boy is not going to fulfill their hopes and dreams.

Ah, the sonnet. What could be better than watching my students clap their fingers together or stomp their feet trying to dicern where the accent falls in a word? What is more refreshing than watching students count syllables hoping that they will add up to ten? What better than watching as they smile when they finally figure out what ABAB CDCD EF EF GG means? Or wagging their fingers shouting "it's a rhyiming couplet," pleased as punch that they know what that means? Or giggling when I say, "thou must deposit thy gum in the receptacle." These are the days when I love my job. Kids love poetry, for some reason, they aren't turned off by it, they like the idea of it and they feel that they can do it. Sure, their poems are trite, but at least they are trying. How many adults sit down and write sonnets at night? Better still, I hear them in the hallways, correcting each other about the patterns, teasing each other about inept rhymes. I'm hooked. I even got a few to admit that Shakespeare was the original G. Now that's progress.