Bop Till You Drop

Download the Ramones Greatest Hits for three bucks.

Why Does NYC Keep Walmart Out?

Oh yeah, because of stuff like this. To be fair, they do issue refunds when you find dead frogs in your salad.

The Vision Thing

Another mayoral election has come and gone, and Mayor-for-life Bloomberg has once again prevailed, buying the election fair and square. Mayor Mike pulled a hundred million bucks out of his sizable pockets, blanketed the metropolitan area with vomit-inducing commercials and persuaded 5% more voters than Thompson did. To accomplish that, he spent 14 times as much as Thompson.

In my discussions with UFT reps, they explained it was prudent to withhold an endorsement. Why? First of all, a Thompson endorsement would mean an immediate halt to contract negotiations. The incredible corruption evident in that assertion, in my view, ought to have been enough to pull out all the stops against this character. More importantly, depending on whom you asked, the UFT endorsement would only be able to turn 3 to 5% of the voters. Well, if you buy that, we'd have won.

Now if you're one of the folks who'd made the awful decision to sit this one out, and you're reading this, you might say, "But NYC Educator, didn't Thompson say publicly we couldn't afford to give UFT members the 4 and 4 in the pattern?" Now I admit that's a good point. Why would anyone vote for a mayor who'd deny us a relatively decent pattern, after so many mayors held us to crap ones?

I'd have to respond, "True, but he only said that after the UFT publicly declined to endorse him. He'd never have made that statement if we'd done the right thing."

For a beleaguered union, timidity is not an option. We just learned that the hard way.

Yet another time.

One Day. One Test. One Score... (The 2009 Edition)

If you've been following my blog, you know that the Specialized High School Admissions Test has been a pet peeve of mine from the blog's earliest days. It bothers me that lazy, half-interested kids who happen to be good at taking tests get invited to the specialized schools while some kids who bust their butts and love learning don't because they don't ace the test. It bothers me that some kids feel that schools which are very excellent and rigorous are "second best" because they don't carry the "specialized" label. I have no idea what kind of message it sends to our kids that "one day, one test, one score" determines four years of one's life. College doesn't work that way. Jobs don't work that way. Yet here we are, deciding four very crucial, formative years on the basis of one test.

Well, here it goes again. This is my last chance to post here at NYC Educator before the test (this weekend!), so I'm going to use the rather bigger stage this blog gives me to talk about this year's gang of darlings and the SHSAT.

As usual, a few of my kids will probably get into a specialized school. I'm usually pretty good, though not perfect, at predicting which ones. As usual, a few more of them will probably come very close. Of those, one or two will have total meltdowns over it. Some of them won't get in and won't much care.

I want to tell them that it doesn't matter as much as they think it does, while simultaneously telling them to do their very best on the test. I can tell them about friends of mine who went to unfamous high schools and colleges in the middle of nowhere and are now doctors, lawyers, and nuclear submarine commanders. (I really do have a friend who commands a nuclear submarine. I can't think of a job that's much more kick-ass than that.) I can tell them about friends who went to very prestigious, exclusive colleges and now make even less money than I do (yes, it's possible). So much of life is a crapshoot. So much of what happens is unexpected. Someday, I want to tell them, you will meet people who have never heard of Stuyvesant High School and wouldn't care about it if they had. Someday you will meet people who didn't have to "apply" to high school; in fact, most people you will meet didn't have to. It's so hard to understand that when you're thirteen and so much is being made of this test and the high school process, and I don't even know if I should tell them that.

(Maybe not until after the test.)

So I'll remind you all, if you teach eighth grade or if you know eighth graders, be extra nice to them for the next few days. Maybe for the next ten days or so, because the TACHS is next weekend. If you teach them, give them the weekend off from homework. Give them some nice, quiet, easy seatwork on Monday after you give them a chance to vent. They're still children. And then tell them, nicely, helpfully, in your own way, that one day, one test, and one score does not, in the grand scheme of things, mean so very much.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

by special guest contest-meister Schoolgal

With the contents of our new contract being held in a secret vault below UFT headquarters until the mayor's coronation, I found the photo at left quite telling.

So NYC Educator and I came up with a fun idea. We would like the readers to create a caption for this photo. The winner will receive a possible early retirement incentive in the form of a NY Lottery ticket.

Good luck!!!

Important note from contest-meister Schoolgal:
DUE TO THE RESULTS OF THE MAYORAL ELECTION, THIS CONTEST WILL END AT MIDNIGHT, FRIDAY THE 13TH.

Snowflake Syndrome

I know that many of my colleagues and readers have had (or currently have) the problem of parents who are, shall we say, too involved in the education of their children, and by this mean involved to the actual detriment of their children. I have not faced this problem to a great degree until this academic year, but I thought I would share a few anecdotes on what seems to be becoming a bigger and bigger issue in education.

One of my darlings recently gave a substitute teacher quite the hard time when I was out for some professional development. I try to be the kind of teacher who shows subs support and appreciation, so when I reported this incident to Little Darling's mother, she explained that her child is the kind of child who needs to "express himself" and "explain himself" frequently. I, as his teacher, do not give him this opportunity frequently enough.

"Well," I said to Little Darling's mother, "you're right. When he is not doing what he is supposed to be doing, I don't really want an explanation or an 'expression' or an excuse. I want him to stop doing the wrong thing and start doing the right thing." This, apparently, is quite the imposition on Little Darling's "self-expression."

Another parent complained that I gave her snowflake a zero for a homework assignment that a.) I didn't give Snowflake a zero on and b.) was not done properly and therefore received only partial credit. Snowflake neglected to explain either of these things to her mother despite the fact that I had explained both of these things to Snowflake when I checked her homework.

Yet another parent was displeased that Precious did not receive credit for a homework assignment that she didn't put her name on. Precious is in MIDDLE SCHOOL, mind you. I think that middle school is a good time to expect children to be able to write their names on things, and also to learn that they are about to go to high school where most teachers teach 100+ children and don't have the time or the inclination for handwriting analysis.

Perhaps I'm dating myself, but when I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing at school, I got in trouble. Never once would my parents have suggested that the teacher was somehow in the wrong or a poor teacher. It was my job to get along with the teacher and please him/her, not the other way around. And, looking back on my education, I can see that my parents were right. Maybe once was the teacher truly not very good. Most of the time, I was simply being inattentive or lazy, or, later in life, I had simply reached the end of my intellectual capacity for a subject (by this I mean math).

And misbehavior? Forget it. That was on me. My parents would have laughed loud and long if I claimed that a teacher wasn't allowing me to "express myself." They would have invited me to express myself to my heart's desire in my bedroom, away from the ears of any adult who would have to be subjected to my whining.

At least these little snowflakes' parents are involved in their education, I suppose.

Stressed Out?

Maybe you're in the wrong line of work. CNN states that high school teachers have one of the most stressful and poorly paid jobs anywhere. That's certainly not encouraging. It makes you think you aren't half as smart as you thought you were.

Personally, I don't see it that way. Of course the job is stressful. There are constant demands from administration, both on-site and from the anti-union, anti-labor psychos at Tweed. And dealing with the demands of 170 teenagers on a daily basis can be harrowing. But those of us who've toughed out the first few years have found ways--we've learned from experience.

Don't believe the teacher-bashers who say we don't get better after 3 years. They just don't want to pay you. They want disposable McTeachers who will never mature enough to stand up for themselves or the kids they teach. It's fairly easy for them to sit around in air-conditioned offices and criticize us. In fact, that's because they themselves have a very low-stress occupation. They can't do what we do.

In fact, it's fairly easy for me to sit behind this laptop and condemn them. I could do a much more thorough job of it if I weren't hampered with having to show up to work each day and help kids. Now I don't mind doing that, and with 25 years, I'm confident I'm the best teacher I've ever been. I've dealt with hundreds of situations and I've learned from results, both good and bad.

In both lessons and social situations, I've got a wealth of experience to draw from. It's sad that our titular leaders would just as soon toss me into the Absent Teacher Reserve as look at me, and that their protégés, like Michelle Rhee, will disregard convention and break laws just to get rid of teachers like me.

Make no mistake that given his druthers, Chancellor Klein would do exactly the same thing. We always hope that age brings wisdom. It's pathetic that our top-dog educational leaders would not only ignore that, but do everything they can to deprive our children of it--just to save a few bucks.

And that's what stresses me out.

Charters Lag Behind Public Schools--Mayor Mike Demands More Charters

Mayor-for-life Michael Bloomberg sees privatization as the key to all our woes. After all, look how well it works in the health insurance field. Look what it's done for our national economy. It's kind of like watching the national GOP. In boom times, they say, we need to cut taxes for the wealthy. When times get tough, we need to cut taxes for the wealthy. When we're at war, we need to cut taxes for the wealthy.

So when Mayor-for-life Mike sees troubled public schools, he says we need more charters. When he sees good or improving public schools, he says we need more charters. When he sees inferior charters, he says we need more charters. You can't help but admire the man's consistency.

And Mayor Mike is putting your money where his mouth is, creating tens of thousands more charter seats in his never-ending administration. Your kids in public schools without seats can squeeze in and stand. They may as well get used to it, since their futures entail no unions, fewer benefits, longer hours, and being fired at will by the likes of Eva Moskowitz.

He's now spent more on his campaign than any other American has spent on a political campaign, and you must admit, the man's buying his way in fair and square. Every time the truth gets too loud, Mayor-for-life Bloomberg runs a commercial that's even louder, and everything is beautiful again.

Taking a Stand

There's always drama in the air when you're hanging around with a few dozen teenagers.  In my beginning ESL class I have a young man with a fairly wicked sense of humor, but alas, insufficient vocabulary to express it.  The class is in a semicircle.  I like it that way, but I didn't move the seats out of rows until I was confident I knew everyone's name.

One young woman keeps moving her chair back to the front of the room, where it was before I rearranged everything.  She likes it there.  And the boy who's always smiling keeps following her.  I can't say as I blame him.  But he's got a tendency to speak to her in their native language, strictly verboten in my class, and when I catch him I exile him back to his regular seat.

"But she sit over there," he protests.

I decide to pull out an old chestnut.  "Well, if she jumps off the Empire State Building, are you going to jump off too?"

"Yes," he says, nodding his head without hesitation.  "I jump."

Then he wanders back to his seat, but doesn't sit.  He stands, looking out the trailer window.

"Are you waiting for your girlfriend to walk by?"  I ask him.

"No," he says.  "I looking for new one."

And he stands there looking out the window.  Being the nasty teacher I am, I call on him to answer questions.

He gets each one right, and I let him keep standing there.

Our Apologies, Sadako

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is the touching, sad, beautiful story of a young Japanese girl who was dying of leukemia caused by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. She begins making paper cranes to pass her time in the hospital and hopes to make 1000, but she is only able to complete six hundred or so. Her classmates from school take over and finish the 1000, and the cranes are buried with her. The crane is a symbol of peace and healing not only in Japanese culture, but this simple and lovely image has spread to our own. If you go to St. Paul's Chapel in the Financial District, for example, you will see long chains of paper cranes sent there by Japanese schoolchildren for the rescue workers in the days after 9/11. People leave paper cranes in the Hiroshima Peace Park to this day to express hope for a world without nuclear weapons.

The book about Sadako is a popular one in elementary schools, not only for its historic value, but also to help children cope with the death of friends and classmates. Many children are familiar with it. My own students certainly are. I have a copy of it in my classroom library, as do most teachers in my school.

I mentioned that we'd be launching a new unit dealing with memoir writing soon. One of my students asked, "Oh, are we going to read about Sadako and the thousand paper planes?"

Perhaps, in her version of the book, Sadako was the class clown?

Yuck-O

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Tomorrow schools are serving Rachel Ray's chicken taco recipe, which has to beat the hell out of those hockey-puck burgers and plastic pizza we usually see. I'm going to give it a try. I always wondered what the stuff on Food Network tasted like, and I'm hoping it's not all appearances.

Feel free to come back here tomorrow and report your experiences, fellow intrepid taco-eaters.

Another True Story from the Darkest DoE

Ms. Warthergle was very religious. She did not, of course, like Mexicans. They were always going on about the Blessed Virgin, and that just wasn't the way she approached religion. But as an assistant principal, she always kept an eye on her teachers.

Ms. Mudd was having a bad year. She'd been sick various times. This caused her to be absent, once for weeks at a time. The worst thing, though, was that her one-year-old granddaughter had just died. Ms. Mudd had come to work, but was not quite herself today.

Naturally, Ms Warthergle was moved by her plight. As a religious person, there was only one thing she could do. She prayed. She exhorted Ms. Mudd to pray with her. Ms. Mudd was unwilling at first, but eventually relented. After a few minutes of praying, she actually felt better. Ms. Warthergle was delighted to have demonstrated the power of prayer. Ms. Mudd felt less terrible than she'd been feeling. It was a grand success.

Then, Ms. Warthergle handed Ms. Mudd her U rating for the year. Prayer was one thing, but dilly-dallying was quite another.

Playing Favorites

Serena is just about everything you could want in a student: she's bright, hardworking, pleasant, respectful, helpful. She comes from a wonderful family that supports her in every way. Most importantly, she's not one to complain gratuitously. So when she told me recently that she had a problem, I was inclined to take her seriously.

Serena explained to me that one of the other teachers at my school is exhibiting favoritism. She didn't say who it was and I didn't ask; we just had a chat about how we could address this. I suggested that the teacher might be paying more attention to a single student because the student is struggling and needs more help or attention right now, or that the teacher simply doesn't realize that he or she is doing it and may not have any particular feeling one way or the other. As is always the case if kids come to me about another teacher, I don't ever speculate negatively on the other teacher's motives, speech, or actions, and encourage the kid to address it directly with that teacher. Most of the people I work with are pretty reasonable and helpful, and if a kid brings up something one-on-one in a respectful way, they'll listen.

After a little brainstorming on this, Serena seemed to feel better and changed the subject. But the chat gave me something to think (and blog) about. I tend to think about some students more than others, for a variety of reasons. I worry about the kids who struggle; I thank the Lord or whoever for the ones who make me laugh and help me out; I stress about the kids who are defiant and lazy and uncooperative. There are certainly those kids who tend to fade into the background, and I've been trying to make a more conscious effort to pay particular attention to those kids this year. You know the ones: Neither especially sweet nor overtly disrespectful, not especially high-achieving but more or less competent. I've made a mental list of a half-dozen or so of these kids and checked their grades more often than others and made overtures towards conferencing with them more often, thinking about book recommendations for them, etc. Those kids get lost and I don't want them to feel lost.

And it's hard not to have favorites. The few kids I've blogged about here do tend to have special places in my heart for various reasons, and there are kids I taught several years ago that I still miss and think of often. I think that's just human nature. The key, I think, for us is to not play favorites, to consciously work against exhibiting or acting on those biases.

That brings me back to Serena's concern. It's possible that it's nothing, that it's a coincidence, or that the teacher has good reason to pay extra attention to this child. I don't know. But it's a good "check yourself" nonetheless--for me, for all of you, and maybe even for that individual teacher.

Each, Every and All

One of my pet trends is making a comeback in my building, at least according to one administrator I've spoken with. That, of course, is the favored method of addressing the kids. Apparently, if teenagers aren't listening to you, it's because you, the teacher, failed to use the proper language.

If you paleolithic pedagogues would just discard that archaic and useless "ladies and gentlemen," and begin addressing them as "each, every, and all," your young charges will immediately cease misbehaving. Also, they will do their homework religiously, stop texting during the "Do Now," and get perfect scores on standardized tests.

So first thing when you get into work today, get with the program.

"I want each of you to stop throwing chairs out the window."

"I want every one of you to stop throwing chairs out the window."

"I want all of you to stop throwing chairs out the window."

This should solve the problem immediately. Is your administration on your back for not getting high enough scores on a standardized test? Are you blaming it on things like poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, prostitution, or the kid being at Rikers? How is that going to earn merit pay for your principal? How is that going to improve the statistics of Mayor-for-life Bloomberg?

"I want each of you to pass this test."



"I want every one of you to pass this test."




"I want all of you to pass this test."

For goodness sake, get started immediately. And if the administration gives you a hard time, doling out meaningless instructions that add nothing but clutter, don't hesitate to address the issue.

"I want each of you to stop giving me a hard time and let me do my job."


"I want every one of you to stop giving me a hard time and let me do my job."


"I want all of you to stop giving me a hard time and let me do my job."

Duncan Shoots a Brick

by special guest blogger Michael Fiorillo

So Arne Duncan, whose qualifications to be Secretary of Education include a brief stint as "CEO" of the public schools in Chicago, President Obama's pick-up basketball pal, and part-time tutor at his mommy's after-school program, is now going after the ed programs at the colleges and universities. He is insisting that they be part of the same test mania and junk data pipeline that the public schools are being forced to swallow. In the perverse cause-and-effect logic of corporate education deform, the teacher training programs are to be held responsible for the "outcomes" of their graduates, just as public school teachers are held responsible for the "outcomes" of students whose infinite needs are largely ignored by the politicians and corporate overseers who dominate our looted, outsourced society. Exactly how many degrees of separation are we talking about here? No matter, it's the teacher's fault.

He was also there to plug the special program Teacher's College has opportunistically set up to train teachers at publicly-funded private school chains such as KIPP and Green Dot, which are being pushed as the replacement for traditional neighborhood public schools.

I came to teaching late, after knocking around the world of work and performing a wide variety of jobs. I also read and studied eclectically. I feel that all of these factors have made me a better teacher. It also meant that I had a fairly wide range of life experience and content knowledge before I went to get my certification. I always saw the certification classes as little more than a means to the end of working in the classroom.

Education programs are mostly bad, and for many reasons. There's the old saw about TC and Columbia, and how "120th Street is the widest street in the world." When I went to grad school in TESOL at NYU, it was appalling, but not for the reasons given by most ed deformers. It was awful largely because, of the twelve classes I took, all but two were taught by part-time TAs who ranged from OK to dreadful. And this was grad school! God only knows what it's like for the undergrads. It was a clear indication of the university's disrespect for teaching, and it was obvious that the ed school was little more than a profit center for them.

Why was this? Sorry, ed deformers, you can't blame this one on the union. The program was academically impoverished, despite its exorbitant cost, because of the revenue-intensifying labor relations policies of the university, which valued the hiring of cheap part-timers instead of full-time tenured faculty. It's also testimony to the fact that, as I've written elsewhere, NYU is a real estate holding and development company with a higher ed subsidiary.

So, yes, education programs are pretty bad. But that's not what Duncan's offensive against them is about. No, this is about the fact that the college education programs, despite their many shortcomings, are still holdouts, where the values of teaching humanistically and teaching the whole child still control some physical and ideological space. The ed schools have not yet joined the New World Order in education, have not fully gotten with the program or embraced the market, and must be brought on line and on message. Money aside, this is also a reason why senior teachers are targeted, since they are less likely to be entranced by the Magic of the Marketplace in education.

Sure, corporate education deform is about current and future profits/ compensation, but its also about control and the social engineering that education inevitably involves. The schools are there to replicate the kind of society the overclass wants, one filled with alienation, tedium, stress, insecurity, overwork, and under perpetual monitoring and surveillance by its managers. This is also the society where they reap most of the benefits. The kids are being socialized and prepped to endure the same conditions their parents face, if they're lucky enough to have a job, and the schools and teachers are on a forced march to take them there.

By the way, Arne, while we're busy blaming schools and teachers for the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, where's the outrage at the MBA programs, which have trained the looters and sociopaths who have cannibalized the US economy and brought it to its knees? But then again, as I look offstage while you do your cheap soft shoe routine, I see many of the same people suiting up in the wings to cannibalize the public schools.

Between a Bloomberg and a Thompson

Mayoral candidate Bill Thompson just publicly announced that teachers shouldn't get the pattern raise other unions got. Why the hell shouldn't he say that? After all, the UFT, in its convoluted dance with Bloomberg, has declined to endorse our buddy Bill. Thompson had been supportive of UFT goals, and UFT's leadership left him swinging in the wind.

DC37 endorsed Thompson, and Mayor-for-life Bloomberg retaliated by firing 500 DC37 members. The UFT says if it were to endorse Thompson, contract talks would cease.

It's remarkable that our union leaders can speak openly of such blatant corruption and not call it for what it is. Who is this man, who will not even negotiate with teachers if they dare to support his opponent? Who is this man, who rattles on about jobs and endeavors to leave 500 low-paid working people jobless in the worst economic downturn in my living memory?

The UFT took zeroes during the dot-com boom, based on a fraudulent election that sent DC37's leaders to the hoosegow. Personally, I don't care who's mayor come contract time. For 25 years, I've watched the city impose the pattern on us, and in 2005, it got away with murder, extracting a mountain of givebacks for a compensation increase that didn't even meet cost of living.

The city can't find the money?

Let them sell Manhattan Island.