Month: January 2010 (page 2 of 3)

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Not everything about living in New York city was rosy.  Failure in the NYC schools was systemic.  It seemed that at all levels the system just didn’t work.  I spent nearly 3 months waiting for my first paycheck because it took that long to process all the new teachers each year.  There was the option for emergency checks, but these had to be paid off from your first paycheck.  So I remember getting an emergency check so I could buy some clothes and food, and then a week later getting $0 on my first paycheck.  I was not impressed.  A couple of years later, I would count myself lucky, another teacher who arrived in the system waited 6 months for his first paycheck.

I also had to pass these exams for certification in New York.  I had two years to do the exams, but I had heard that they were "super hard" and that I might need to do them a couple of times, so I signed up for an exam as soon as I could.  The first exam I took was the Liberal Arts and Science exam, which as I wrote it, seemed to me to be a glorified reading test.  I finished it in an hour and a quarter and walked out of the four exam feeling a bit bewildered.  When I got my results a few weeks later, it turned out I had earned a perfect score.  I decided to wait a year for the other two exams I would have to take to qualify as a New York state teacher, confident I would pass them on my first try.

Our school had serious organizational problems as well.  One year, all of the 11th grade schedules had to be redone.  In another year, we lost 3 of 5 administrators.  During the 3 years I worked in my school, I had 4 different Principals, and 8 different Assistant Principals.  Each year saw 3 or 4 teachers quit in the first month, and our final year saw a greater than 50% staff exodus from the school.

Just getting supplies was difficult.  Every request for every pencil and piece of paper had to go through a man named Mr. Santiago.  After a couple of months in the school, we copied the other teachers who just called him Santiago, having dropped the honoriam out of a lack of respect.  Some examples.  We used legal sized paper in the school, not because we needed the extra 3 inches at the bottom of the sheet which made everything we printed or photocopied look amateurish, but because apparently legal sized paper is cheaper.  We had pens for use on our exams which didn’t work at all, or ran out immediately, until I discovered that you could fold the top of the pen over once, and "kick-start" the ink in the pen.  Incidently, this discovery rescued our exams at the end of our year when we had 5 boxes of pens carefully dolled out to us to use for the exams, none of which worked until my fix.

Attendance had to be done by pencil on bubble sheets at the beginning of every 3rd period of the day.  We waited until then to do attendance because it kept our numbers up as many of the students were chronically late.  We were a title 1 school, with 90% of our students eligible for the free crappy school lunches.  Every year I was there we also saw no suspensions at the school until some magical day in November when our allotment was calculated only because the suspensions counted against our allotment.  One day in January I remember 2 out 17 of my students showing up for class, and the following day, not a single student came.

Our school had very prescribed lesson plan structure.  I had to have an "AIM" written on the top left hand corner of the board, and my name and the date in the top right hand corner.  Every class was supposed to start with a discussion of the homework, and end with the assignment of more homework for the following day.  If I didn’t do these things, then I would receive an "Unsatisfactory" (or U in teacher slang) rating for my lesson, regardless of the success or failure of my teaching. 

My first U came in my first lesson.  I started the lesson with having students complete their presentations from the previous class (with the aforementioned information visible on the board already) and then when they finished after 10 minutes or so, got up and taught a short mini-lesson and assigned some exercises to do.  When I got my report back from my Assistant Principal, who incidentally didn’t work at my school but was actually covering two schools, he claimed that I had "started class" 10 minutes later than I had.  I pointed this out, he said that the presentations didn’t count.  He didn’t even include anything about the presentations at all in his write-up of my lesson.  It was a hatchet job, pure and simple, with no way to win.

That was one of the lessons I learned well while teaching in NYC.  There was no way to win, the problem was too big, and it was always someone else’s problem.  It still sickens me that people who do not care about the children of NYC are allowed to manage its schools, patrol its hallways and teach in its classrooms.  The people who really cared spent everyday being beaten down by the system and encouraged to quit or move on by mindless bureaucracy and rules.

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My first day of teaching I felt even less prepared for the experience than when I started student teaching.  I was very nervous as I waited for the students to trickle in.  Almost all of my students were on time though, and my 9th grade class started smoothly.  I remembered to introduce myself, set a good tone for classroom management for the semester and managed to get through my discussion with Brittaney whose name I still cannot say with the right accent.  Anyway, I was feeling pretty good and was pleased with my progress.

My M$AA class also went reasonably smoothly, but I had hardly any students.  Of the 17 students on my roster, only 10 or so showed up, which really should have been an immediate warning sign for me.  There were some hiccups.  I remember one of the students saying something to me and I had NO idea what he was trying to say, I wasn’t even sure it was English.  I later thought it might have been in Creole (when I learned later that student was bilingual), but whatever it was, the rest of the class cracked up.

After lunch, my M$C class started poorly.  I made a huge blunder.  The teacher across the hall was late returning from lunch, so I ushered his students into my classroom to safeguard them until he arrived which I thought was standard procedure.  It took 20 minutes, 2 security guards and an Assistant Principal to extract the M$AA students from the room so I could get back to teaching my grade 10 students.  Actually teaching is the wrong word to use.  Talking to a room full of people who paid me NO attention at all is much more accurate.  My M$AA class was difficult but at least I had good days with them.  With my 10th grade students, I didn’t actually get their attention at all (except from four dedicated souls sitting in the front, THANK YOU!) until near the end of November.

At the end of my first day of teaching I was feeling a little low, but I got some advice from one of the new teachers who actually had a fair bit of teaching experience from previous years.  She said, "Don’t try to make every day perfect just keep plugging away.  You’ll find that at first about 1 in 5 of your lessons works, and those are the lesson plans you should keep.  Throw the rest away."

The rest of the week, which in this case was two more days, went by pretty much the same as the first day.  9th grade class was okay, 10th grade and mixed class were pretty difficult. I felt like a failure a lot in those first few weeks, and at the time what kept me going was the fact that there were 12 other teachers going through exactly the same thing, and that every once in a while, I would connect with the kids.  These moments made me really happy and each of us who was experiencing the same horror story would share both our failures and successes during our Friday afternoon unwinding sessions.

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