Cleaning out my room this week, it has been interesting to look at my accumulated papers from the past year one last time as I throw them in the recycling bin. Glancing at all of the informational papers I received from my administration during the first week of school brings back the feeling of looking at them for the first time, not comprehending their meaning, and then depositing them into my desk drawer, where many of them would stay for the next 9 months.

I remember being completely overloaded with information on school policy and procedures and pretty much pushing it all out of mind to be able to dedicate all of my focus on the physical process of teaching—the actual process standing up in front of the class and delivering a message or lesson. In the beginning, this, in and of itself, was a huge challenge for me. It’s a lot harder than delivering a speech, because in addition to remembering what you want to say and how you want to deliver it, there is the whole aspect of actively monitoring and managing the classroom at the same time. For the first couple of months, all of this took a lot of conscious effort, and I remember that it slowed my speech to a crawl.

I also get the dubious pleasure of seeing the horrible lesson plans and materials that I saved from September, none of which is even remotely close to being worthy of keeping. I used to hand out individual, unstapled sheets for each of the activities we’d do in class, and then hopelessly try to collect them for grading, with no real plan for organizing them myself or for having the students organize them. It was absolutely insane.

Looking at my anecdotal records, individual conduct sheets, and class monitoring sheets brings back memories of how chaotic my room was at the beginning of the year (at still to a pretty great extent up until spring break). I’m reminded of what it was like to have the dreaded 901 class for 30 minutes for homeroom, 110 minutes for math, and 60 minutes for intervention, all in one day, especially when back in October when it was stacked with some of our most dysfunctional students. We didn’t lose a whole lot of students this year, but the majority of them were at one point or another in my homeroom.

I’ll be hanging on to my folder of observations from throughout the course of the year, although I’ll likely never have the desire to read them again. Some of my worst afternoons were those when I sat down to read observation reports, which were rarely flattering, and often downright discouraging.

Leaving this room, I’ll cherish memories like teaching 110 minute classes in 90 degree heat, and when my water bottle froze because it was 25 degrees in my room.

It’s been a mostly gloomy year, but there have been some good moments. It was rare this year that I was the teacher I wanted to be, or that my students were achieving on absolute levels that I could be proud of. That’s not to say that I feel entirely negative toward the year. It’s just that the real positivity comes from remembering what it was really like in the beginning and reflecting on how much my students have matured academically and socially and how much I have improved in my job as a teacher. My students aren’t on grade level, but a lot of them have moved within reach. I’m especially proud of how far they have come in terms of their maturity.

I know am by no means a fantastic teacher, but at least I don’t still feel like the worst teacher ever. It was very validating getting a flattering end of the year review. I know I’ve still got work to do to feel as though I’ve earned it. In the end, my first year’s in the bank, and it’s one of my proudest accomplishments. I’m actually looking forward to having a much better, more productive, and more enjoyable second year.

Although my year is for most purposes over (thank God!), due to extremely weird district policy, I technically have a week of school remaining. It’s really bizarre; the kids have already taken their finals. My grades are due in Wednesday morning. And yet, the students are still technically supposed to be in class until Friday. You might wonder, why doesn’t the district just move finals until the last day of school? That’s a fantastic question. No one seems to know.

In any case, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the state of urban education, inspired by the fact that it is the end of my first year, there have been some pretty significant happenings in my district, and I have been reading a lot about urban education. Here’s what I wrote on my Teach For America end of year survey, which pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Urban education takes a focus on developing children in a very holistic way. When students come to my Algebra I class, they are often severely lacking not only in math preparation, but also in social skills and effective work habits. It is necessary to teach so many things that I took for granted that I expected of the typical 9th grader. In many ways, it’s necessary to be an extra parent.

Many of my students are not used to being held to a rigorous standard of academic work, and it has been a major challenge finding the right level of expectations for a diverse class. I have also learned that along with high expectations, I as a teacher need to provide I high level of support in order for my students to achieve.

The vast majority of my students really want to achieve, but that most of them are unaware of how much rigor and discipline success requires. I feel like this is probably the single most important thing I can teach my students, because with discipline, they can achieve in any subject.

The sad thing is that although pushing my students to a much level of achievement would be a major accomplishment, so many students graduate high schools in Baltimore only to be woefully unprepared for college level work. Very few of these students are going on to four-year colleges, and even fewer are finishing their degrees in five years or less. The book A Hope In The Unseen by Ron Suskind is a great illustration of this issue.

Many people criticize TFA for not being the answer to the problem of urban education. They argue that most TFA teachers come in to the classroom, leave after 2 years, before they become truly proficient in the classroom, and move on to something “bigger and better”. And to a certain extent, I agree. All students do deserve great teachers, and no 1st or 2nd year teacher has possibly reached their potential. But I’ve come to believe that even if you could put an excellent teacher in every classroom a low-income student visits, that student would still be at a major disadvantage. The inequalities go way beyond the classroom. I think the organization realizes this, which is why they emphasize the two-year commitment. They hope that corps members will go on to career areas where they can hopefully lead in making the systematic changes these kids need. This seems to be the growing consensus. Projects like the Harlem Children’s Zone are proving it. Still, teachers are the people on the front lines, and good teachers will always be necessary. Consequently, the issues of teacher retention and the controversy of Teach For America are not likely to fade away.

Check out these articles for some recent press on TFA in Baltimore:

“City wants to expand ‘Teach for America’ program”
by Liz Bowie
Mon, May 25
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-md.teach25may25,0,1460323.story

Inside Ed
Sun Blog
Tues, May 26
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/education/blog/2009/05/teach_for_america_and_baltimor.html

Baltimore Sun
“City Funds sought for Teach For America”
Weds, May 27
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-md.briefs273may27,0,4909764.story

Baltimore Sun
“Teach For Baltimore” Editorial
Thurs, May 28
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bal-ed.teach28may28,0,1892836.story

WBAL/NBC
Mon, May 25 5:15 PM EDT
Video: Play Clip

WJZ/CBS
Eyewitness News at 5
Mon, May 25 05:34 PM EDT
Video: Play Clip
Web article: http://wjz.com/local/baltimore.teachers.teach.2.1018555.html

WBFF/FOX 45
Mon, May. 25, 11:04 PM EDT
Video: Play Clip
Web article: http://www.foxbaltimore.com/template/inews_wire/wires.regional.md/3fb92708-www.foxbaltimore.com.shtml

WMAR/ABC
ABC2 News Good Morning Maryland
Tues, May 26 6:52 AM EDT
Video: Play Clip
Web article:http://www.abc2news.com/news/local/story/Alonso-Wants-More-Teach-For-America-Candidates/xEzIbS3H7EC03RCs3JPgZQ.cspx

Well, HSA day came and went without much of a hitch, and I think it went reasonably well. The students in my homeroom, which is well known to be the rowdiest, generally took the test seriously, and without incident. This from the class where I once had to kick 9 kids out during an exam for acting like maniacs. I’m looking forward to seeing those scores!

They have definitely come a long way. Next year, I just need to get them there in half the time. But for now, I get to step out of the pressure cooker, breathe a little bit, and just try to finish these last couple weeks strong.

Incidentally, I attended a meeting the become a transition leader for some of the incoming 2009 Baltimore corps members. I guess the circle of life never ends!

At long last, Algebra I HSA Day has arrived. We’ve spent the last 2 days doing a Math Field Day, where instead of normal classes, the students competed in teams in math based competitions, designed around the topics they are going to be tested on. Planning for it took 2 solid weeks, and we enlisted the middle school math teachers to pull it off, and on the whole, it was a spectacular success. It was supposed to be a low-stress math review, and I think that mission is accomplished.

Today, my students get to show what they have learned. For some students, this will be the culmination of consistent hard work in class and tens of hours of extra practice at peer tutoring sessions and Saturday school For others, it might be their chance to show how far they have come from beginning the year completely unprepared. And for yet others, frankly, they will reap what they have sown. As much as I hope all of my students pass, I know that some really haven’t put in the effort. But for those who have, I hope it shows. The entire 9th grade team has burnt the candle at both ends to try and rectify the dismal performance on the Mock HSA. Almost every aspect of my class has been redesigned on the fly. I’m banking on a tremendous improvement.

Keep my students in your prayers!

This is an entry I have been meaning to write for about 2 weeks now.

While I was out on break, far away from the daily stress of school, recovering from an absolutely brutal February and March, it really began to dawn on me how much I was dreading another year of potential misery. I had left for break on a bad note, and returning, it got even worse. I really felt like I didn’t have a grip on anything that was going on professionally. After a really rough week back, which had only including 3 days of teaching, I started seriously considering leaving Teach For America at year’s end.

I spent the final two weeks of April fighting respiratory illness and struggling to make the decision of whether to come back or not. Even though next school year is still a long way away, the decision had to be made as early as possible, to give my school the time it would take to replace me, if necessary. Deep down, I wanted to finish my commitment and to apply the lessons I have learned this year, but I just could not shake the incredible feeling of terror I had about repeating the experience of this year. Because the thing is, the end of this year would be the only chance I’d get to get off the ride. The one thing I’ve sworn never to do is to quit during the middle of the year, putting my school in a bad spot, and even worse, abandoning my students. Summer was my chance to walk away and put it all behind me.

On the other hand, when I signed up for TFA, I was serious about the mission and the two-year commitment. I never saw myself as a potential quitter. A big part of me wanted to hang around, although I wasn’t seeing how it could be feasible. And so, I spoke to nearly everyone who would listen, pretty much grasping for someone to say something inspiring or reassuring enough to get me to stay. I talked in depth to probably at least a dozen people over those two weeks, and I can distill the advice down to two main common threads: that A) my 2nd year would undoubtedly be much better than my first, and that B) I had to do what was right for me and my well-being. Well, the former piece of advice was nothing new to me, and the latter piece of advice was really leading me away from returning for year two. By the end of my two weeks, I had pretty much decided I was leaving. And then…

I don’t really know what changed–there wasn’t like a big Hollywood speech that changed my mind. But, I guess it could have been a couple things cumulatively. First off, during those 2 weeks, I feel like my 9th grade team and administration really stepped up to back me up. I got a whole bunch of equipment in my room and a lot of instructional support from our 9th grade English teacher that really helped reduce my stress. Also, our tutoring partnership with University of Maryland at Baltimore County kicked in, and I now usually have a couple tutors in my room at any given time. This has really freed my hands to do a lot more of the overall management of my class. And lastly, I’d started noticing since returning from break that I was was starting to get a lot more respect from that crucial middle demographic of the students that I teach. This contrasts with time periods where I’ve had upwards 80% of my class running rampant.

Any of these things could be a factor, but I think it was more a change in my outlook, internally. I can pinpoint the time it happened during the afternoon of Friday, May 1. All the sudden, mostly out of nowhere, it dawned on me on that if I just focus on the basics and work the kinks out of my routine, maybe I can survive the next year after all. This may seem like a “no duh” kind of revelation, but it really was a paradigm shift for me. It’s tough to overstate foreboding I had been feeling about the next year of my life.

And also, to make my life more livable, I decided I’d drop out of the Hopkins master’s degree program. After all, I’m only one class away from being fully certified, and I’m already on the master’s degree pay scale anyway. So although it would be nice to add some more credentials, it’s not worth it if it’s only to serve my own ego, at the cost of a not-insignificant amount of stress and time.

I took a weekend to think on it, and then I reported to my principal that I would indeed commit to returning for next year, and then spent some time with him discussing new ideas.

I guess, in the end, I joined TFA to make a difference in the lives of kids. I feel like I’ve done a pretty crappy job of it this year. If I leave now, then what have I really accomplished?

So the plan is to survive the remainder of the year, hopefully recover my physical and mental health this summer, and try to make next year a much more tolerable and successful year.

I’ve not done a good job of keeping up on my journal lately, although, there is plenty to write. I am so worn out after pushing these past couple months to get my students ready for the HSA, and it’s right around the corner, on May 20. My inability to keep my journal up to date is in keeping with my inability to keep my room clean, my clothes folded, and my classroom papers organized. I’m just so spent right now, physically and mentally.

There’s plenty I’d love to write about what’s going on in my classroom, some major personal decisions about teaching that I’ve made, and generally how everything is coming together for the test, but it’ll have to wait for another day I guess.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this job is far, far too big for one person. It definitely takes a village to teach math. Or to do it well, at least. I think it can be done by one person eventually maybe, but only building on the work of a whole bunch of other people. One person can’t build it from the ground up though, which has pretty much been my situation for most of the year. But when things have gotten crazy, a lot of people have gotten their hands dirty to help me out.

Thanks is definitely due to:

• the rest of the 9th grade team, who have each stepped in and sacrificed for my class in huge ways,
• my ever-supportive girlfriend, who is, herself, an excellent teacher and provides great advice,
• my Algebra-teaching comrade and Institute roomie, who has been the recipient of many freaked out, late night phone calls from me,
• my fearless Content Learning Team leader, who provided me incredible instructional materials far more useful than what my district provides, and
• the cadre of tutors who make effective instruction sooo much easier, and frankly, less lonely.

Under advice, I have decided to make the previous journal entry about my roommate’s school situation private, but suffice it to say that I am humbled by the fact that although my job has been a major personal struggle, at the very least I am blessed to work in an environment where I feel like every single adult has the best interests of the students at heart, first and foremost. It makes a huge difference in how I feel going to work on a daily basis, and on what we are able to do for our students.

Things are going nowhere near perfect with me lately, but one thing that has gone mostly very well for me is the new, altered schedule. As of today, we have now spent about two solid weeks with the new schedule, and I can safely say that although there are issues, it is far and away better than what I (and the students) dealt with before. As I’m sure I have mentioned earlier, there three main differences in the schedule from what it was like up until now:

1. My period length has decreased from 110 minutes to 75 minutes
2. All 4 of my classes meet every day, as opposed to on alternating days
3. The classes were re-rostered to group the kids more homogeneously

Changes 1 and 2 combine to mean a nominal increase in math instructional time from 275 minutes per week to 375. I am seeing a huge difference in the amount of material I can cover. In addition, I notice much less fatigue from my students over the period duration. And when I have a bad class period, 75 minutes of hell is a lot easier to tolerate than 110.

In my top two classes, behavior is much easier to manage. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems, because there definitely are. But when I need to get the class back under control, it takes far less time.

Of my lower two classes, one, Group B, is split in half between me and another teacher. This also makes management much easier. The only major problem is my other lower class, Group D. They have the tendency to fly completely off the hook, like they were on Tuesday. But all in all, I feel like at the very least, Groups A, B, and C are being far more effectively serviced.

Planning for classes and keeping track of what happens from day to day is a much easier task, now that I don’t have to worry about which groups to lead my lessons with, whether a lesson is going to straddle a weekend, or whether a field trip is going to throw the whole thing off. Continuity for me is smoother and I can see that it working better for the students as well.

I have huge appreciation for the people who accepted changes so that this could occur, it makes my teaching task imminently more doable. It might even be possible to finish this curriculum before the HSA after all (in one form or another).

Today, I returned to school from a very much needed spring break. From my jolting return from winter break, I knew to expect things to be bumpy coming back, and the students did not disappoint. However, I think I was better prepared this time around.

I can’t say that we accomplished a whole lot of any of my classes today, besides (hopefully) getting the kids focused on doing work again. I hit them with a quiz that they probably weren’t well prepared for, which generally is not a very good idea. However, I think most students actually took it fairly seriously, and I hope it was a bit of a wake up call to them that I’m not wasting any time getting them back to work.

Twenty-two instructional days remain before the HSA, and things are not looking particularly pretty. During quarter 3, I think I tightened up my routines a lot, but I still wasn’t seeing much, if any, gain in results. This last quarter, I need to try to change up my approach.

Some things are going to have to wait until next year. Speaking of which, my fellow TFA first year algebra teachers and I have started talking about some things we want to iron out over the summer so that hopefully we can avoid the debacle that this year has been for all of us. One of the toughest questions is how to approach the teaching of algebra as a subject, given the students we have and the way they are assessed by the HSA.

The HSA is actually a very rigorous test of students’ abilities to apply the skills of algebra and data analysis to real-world problems. Nowhere on the test do you see problems simply demanding the students to “solve for x”. Most of the questions require the students to analyze a word problem carefully to find out what it’s asking for, then to synthesize skills from different parts of the curriculum to answer that question.

The problem in preparing students to do this is two-fold. First of all, my average student is shaky on basic arithmetic and not at all comfortable with the concepts and skills he/she should have mastered in pre-algebra. Secondly, the curriculum provided by the City teaches the concepts in isolation. Whereas the HSA questions usually require several skill to be applied at once, the assessment questions I’m provided in the curriculum are usually very one-dimensional. Even more problematic is the fact that the materials provided by the curriculum are even more simplistic.

So my dilemma is that in my limited time, with little appropriate material provided, I’m supposed to be teaching the students to the complex process of assembling skills to solve problems, when the students struggle to perform each skill itself.

Faced with this situation, the holy grail is to be able to teach the students the concepts, from which the skills will follow. If a student truly understands equations and the rules of algebra, they don’t need to know the step-by-step process of solving an equation, that follows naturally from their own understanding. Teaching concepts is extremely hard, especially when faced with an extremely diverse set of very frustrated students, who aren’t used to being made to think critically. And so the temptation is to teach the skills one-by-one, because most students can follow a step-by-step process. But the eventual issue is that the students will never truly understand the why behind what they’re doing, and there’s simply no way to teach an algorithm for every single type of problem the student might happen to see on the HSA.

Teaching concepts directly is simply not realistic. I really believe that only the brightest math student have the abstract thinking capabilities to work that way. I think I’m a reasonably sharp mathematician, and even I struggled in high school math when it got too abstract, and I had fantastic math teacher my entire life.

What I’m looking to do is find a happy medium. I’m envisioning a curriculum that focuses on teaching students the “tools” of algebra. By tools, I mean the things we write on paper to solve algebraic problems–the expressions, the graphs, the patterns tables, and so on–and the rules for using them. Instead of focusing on the abstract theory of negative numbers or on specific methods of subtracting them, I want to show the students what a number line is and how to use it to see the difference between two numbers. I want to show them how two number lines form a graph, and how they can use that graph to see the relationships between two numbers. I’m hoping that by knowing the tools inside and out, the concepts will follow as the student sees how the different tools–function tables, graphs, and equations, for example–relate to each other and show the same underlying concept in different ways. And with that understanding of the tools, I’m hoping the students will have an easier time attacking these complex HSA problems and be much better prepared for higher math. We’ll see I guess, but pretty much anything’s better than what I’ve had going this year.