The Real Master Calendar

It may seem, looking in from the outside, that the schedules chosen by the public schools of America are pretty obvious: most often semesters, trimesters, or quarters. There are long holidays (Winter [no, not Christmas or Hanukah] and Spring), there are two-day holidays (Thanksgiving and the State Teachers Convention) and one-day holidays that are never numerous enough.

All these dates, along with assemblies, sports events, the National Honor Society meetings and staff development are written in a Rosetta-Stone like document called the Master Calendar, that spells out the exact sequence of the school year. It’s all organized, perfectly sorted out, up on a giant white board in a back hallway of the main office.

This perception, of course, could not be more incorrect. Within the walls and halls of the school, teachers and students alike know the real master calendar is unwritten, and follows no state or district guidelines. The real master calendar? It goes something like this.

Honeymoon/Recon (Day 1 to about mid Week 2.)

After running around frantically setting up the classroom, sitting in meetings and making copies and powerpoints, you greet students, lead them in engaging community building games, and hand out textbooks. The students usually do everything you ask, and you think, “This is looking pretty good. I have some good groups this year.”

That’s because The Class, the one that varies each year, but which by mid-October you will be calling “my ____ Period” (sometimes with @$! added) has not yet revealed itself. No, they are watching you, scoping out the weaknesses in your classroom management like Ukrainian hackers looking for backdoors into bank accounts. They are looking for cracks in the system, the cross-currents in the classroom that show in no lesson plan. They are looking for opportunity. Will he lend out pencils? How many times? What about the nurse? Can I go whenever I want? Does he have Teacher Ear, so he can hear whatever we say from the front of the class? How hard will he push if we don’t finish something? What happens to kids who misbehave?

The Class sits. They watch. They wait. Their patience, especially compared to how it manifests itself in mid-February, is endless. Then, it begins.

True Colors/Run Up To Halloween (Week 2 to Week 7)
This is point when things settle down, and both teachers and students suddenly realize, Oh My God, were are here, all together and with very few breaks, for the next 170 days. In six, roughly hour-long chunks of time will we move, all together, slowly sliding across the Ocean of Time like an iceberg blown by a gentle wind. No Exit, with No 2 pencils.

The Class, knowing somehow on a cellular level that the time has come, begins to bubble up. First sporadic episodes of stubborn resistance to a single task, then group resistance. Then hallway drama brought in from the breakfast line or lunchroom that explodes in a thermo-biological nuclear blast 15 minutes into the period after lunch just as you were going over the sequence of star evolution. A daily walk through Valley of the Shadow. At the same time, all the other classes seem to give a collective sigh, settle in, and begin to run like a well-oiled machine. And so you are left with one period each day that defines your day. I will be fine until/after Period ___.

In the school as a whole, leaders emerge, hand-written posters announce student government elections, the first sports teams are chosen, and the newest grade to the building stops getting lost all the time. The great voyage is underway, and things are going fine.

Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas: The Golden Times (Week 7 to Week 18)

And thus, except for Period ___, and unraveling the mysterious demands of the latest pedagogical initiative (there will usually be one, requiring professional development sessions with a visiting expert, often a poster or other papers you have to hang on the wall, usually certain things you have to say and do), things are good, most of it useful. You enjoy the day-in, day-out joy of just plain teaching, the rush of kids learning things, the spark of discovering a new way to do something that works, the flow of it all.

The seasons change, Halloween comes and goes, Thanksgiving runs smoothly into the holiday season, the first grades are out--there is still time for kids struggling to do better, and you get to know you kids and how they learn. Maybe you learn a little about their lives, and they, as you tell stories that tie in to whatever you are teaching, get to know you. Still, every day, Period ____ lasts ten thousand years and leaves you with a headache, but that’s only once, for less than an hour. Holiday (Christmahankwanzahkah) Break comes, and you enjoy your time with the family. If only, if only, this was the end of the school year. But no.

The Long Abyss (Week 18 to Infinity)

Sometime in early January, students and staff return to face the grim reality of weeks and weeks with no holiday, classes when you feel like you need a taser to wake people up, and the feeling that it will go on forever, world without end. In some places it snows. In others it rains. Everywhere, hours pass like years. Days, mysteriously, pass like seconds. You begin to get to the bottom of your bag of teacher tricks. You begin to think that, in fact, none of them will work. And yet, minute by minute, the weeks pass, and suddenly, it change is on the horizon.

Spring Break (Week 30?)

Heavy drinking, and travel if you’re lucky. Heavy drinking and gardening if you are on a budget.

Fire in the Hole: Standardized Testing Time (Week 32-33)

Back mid-February or so, uneasy sleep begins for administrators and district officials. On the horizon, looming like the stormclouds of an incipient war, the standardized tests. Dreamed up by pyschometricans determined to create a perfect core sample of the academic skills of middle-class white kids, but, oddly, taken by everyone else also, these tests are an excellent predictor of future success. Not necessarily academically or professionally (SAT scores of famous people [Craig Vetter, Nobel laureate biologist 550 math, 500 reading]), but for the ability to endure boredom and pain. Like a root canal. Or a five hour presentation on your company’s new sales commission structure.

The central office people send out posters that ask the kids to Show What They Know, hand out mints, and encourage all the kids to do their best. The subtext remains unspoken (Please, Please Pretty Please so they don’t put our school on the List and we get torn apart.)

The kids take hours and hours of tests, leaving them simultaneously groggy and belligerent for the better part of two weeks. Then, with a few weeks left of school, we all struggle with an odd feeling. Having been immersed in messages designed to make students and staff believe in the importance of the Tests, we then feel like this: So, I guess we’re done then, since none of the rest of the stuff we are doing will be tested.

Of course, there are many weeks yet to go.

Field Trip and Award Ceremony Season (Week 35-38)

This is the part of year when your lesson planning internal dialog sounds like this: “OK, Monday I want to start Chapter 15. Let’s see, but that’s College Fair, so I’ll be missing half the kids, so I can start, Tuesday is OK, but Wednesday is a half day because of African-American Community Assembly, and so half the guys will be gone, Thursday is an Early Release Day, so there will be a dance, and Friday I’ll have a quiz. So I’ve got about a day and a half.”

Then, there are the small field trips. The bell rings, you walk in from the hallway to get rolling and you have maybe three students out of 22. You ask, “Where is everyone?” The kids tell you it’s Cinco De Mayo, so some kids are there, it’s also the Service Learning picnic day so that’s some other kids are gone, six kids from the Mentor Program went to see a baseball game, the Student Council people are electing their officers for next year, all the girls went to the Girl Power assembly and two guys are suspended since they are so sick of school they threw food all over the cafeteria and got two days. So you have the three pull up their desks and go, “So, remember when I said we could talk about the possibility of Life On Other Planets some other time? I think now is good.”

Hand over the Candle/Let My People Go (Week 38 till the Last Day)

How long O Lord how long? Not few enough days to release the Gulag-like grip you have on the students. Suddenly, with the end in sight, students and teachers develop a rush of good feeling. Kids who used to tell you daily that they hate you and the school, and would greet your questions with “Shut up talking to me!” are now hugging everyone and greeting you with a big smile and “What up?” In the last three days you convince yourself that movies and pizza parties, are, in fact, pedagogically sound.

And then, suddenly, they are gone, the building is quiet, and you find yourself strangely moved. I can’t believe it, you think. I really will miss them. And then, you do something even more inexplicable. You start planning.

Thinking Time

So that is the last part of the Real Master Calendar: No much in June, but more and more in July and August, as you drive your kids to soccer or summer camp, you find yourself mulling over new ideas. Maybe next year I’ll do that lab differently, maybe I'll…until, it all begins again.

I am Drowning in the Funding Streams

In the center of any classroom, under the desks, and surrounded by dropped pencils, bits of torn-off spiral notebook paper, Jolly Rancher wrappers and, in the case of middle school, random bits of makeup application equipment, there is an invisible drain. Into this drain flows, as we say in the business, the funding stream.

You see, the kids in the classroom have their education paid for by different budgets. All are paid for (at least theoretically and if the winds of politics allow) by the state. All are also paid for (hopefully) by the school district budget. But then it gets weird. Some, who are learning English, have an additional funding stream. Others, who have qualified through testing and a due process designed to be sure they have a disability and not just a learning struggle of some kind, have additional support paid for by a special education funding stream. The equipment in the room, from smart boards (partnership grant from large technology corporation), laptops and LCD projectors (paid for by ARRA funds), and even people (one aide with a salary paid for by ELL, another paid for by Special Ed), visiting tutors paid for by another grant, and sometimes down to little plastic bits used to teach math (grant from large local company).

Having worked in corporate America, I understand the concept of the silo. People fight over whose budget is paying for who to do what, and whose project is being funded by who, but it never gets down to that degree of granularity. I can’t remember ever going to the supply cabinet to get a roll of tape marked Training Department. And the really weird thing is that I can’t ever remember anyone, either in the publishing world or the software world, ever watching over budgets the way that schools are looked over. Sometimes, when you spend grant money, you have to account for every dime and show how it is all used. You have to show outcomes, and measure metrics, as though you can’t really be trusted with large (?) sums, although people are more than willing to entrust you with their children for seven hours.

But where this really plays out is in the way teachers use technology. Say a teacher has a group of computers in a corner, on which they use a piece of software designed to help students write more accurately, with longer, more complex sentences. The teacher is getting great results. Then spring break comes, and over the break, the standard software load for the district’s computers is changed. The teacher returns, and the writing program is gone. They ask the building tech to put the program back on, but the tech doesn’t have a copy, and also is not allowed to install non-standard programs. (Different funding stream).

They ask someone (from the grant initiative funding stream) to come out and reinstall the software. It doesn’t work. By coincidence, the same writing program is also being funded by another initiative, this one designed to help English Language learners. The teacher has learned this for a colleague next door. The other initiative’s tech (another funding stream) comes out and is able to make it work.

But then the building tech says that if anything else happens on the corner computers, officially speaking, he won’t be able to fix them, because they are no longer standard. The tech is not happy about this, but is getting directions from a central IT department, and that is where his job is paid from.

So the funding streams swirl around, keeping the kids from using the same program they had before the break. By the way, between each of the these events, at least three days passes, because with five classes a day and more than 100 students, fixing the computers is not the teacher’s main focus. In the end, the kids get to use the program again, at least until something happens. I don’t think this was anyone’s goal when they allotted all the different funds in the first place.

And so it goes. It seems like a warped sense of priorities. The accountability for the funds, and the use of the adult resources, is of more concern than the kids using the computers, and the writing software, to write better. No one is particularly happy about it: teachers, techs, or kids, but sometimes I guess teachers get a little dizzy, as the funding streams swirl them round and round.

The Image Problem

I had planned to start this blog with a vast manifesto about the macro-sized root causes of what appears to be a very real crisis in public education (the development of education in an agrarian society, the failure of the current funding model for public schools, etc,etc) but instead I think I will start this series of musings with a magazine cover and an overheard remark.

My wife was traveling, and in airport newsstand she was struck by a Newsweek cover that featured an image of a blackboard with the words, "We must fire bad teachers" written over and over again. She brought it back and I read the article: it was a barely informed one-sided diatribe about teachers holding on to an old ideal of lifetime protection and a cartoonish portrayal of national teacher's union leaders as resistant to reform and accountability, as brave district superintendents and reformers tried to buck the resistance of cliques of stibborn coffee-drinking, newspaper-reading teachers hidden in teacher's lounges vowing that they would pry tenure from cold dead fingers even when their kids can't pass the standarized tests.

Yeah, got it, well done in terms of cliche recycling. Not that I am, by any means, a blind teacher's union booster, but I worked in corporate America long enough to appreciate a contract. Compared to the lack of same. But I do think the unions have grown out of touch, or are at least not skilled enough in spinning their side of the story. Begs the question, though: Where do those images (which the article's writers only had to touch on briefly to evoke) come from?

Which leads to the second part of this post. Last night at Target Field, in a break right around the third inning (in which the Twins, down 0-2 to Baltimore, had left the bases loaded when Cuddyer flied out to center), one of those mid-inning, hunt down the unwitting fan and make them do something for the camera games was underway. A fan being filmed on a portable videocam was asked to guess what relief pitcher Jesse Crain would have done for a living if he hadn't made The Show.

The choices were History Teacher, Mechanic, and another job I can't remember. In a row down below and to the right of me in Section 324, a group of men in their mid-20s shouted out their guesses (mostly Mechanic!). They were in Twins gear, but a couple were wearing button down shirts and loosened ties. When Crain's video image stirred to life and he said he would have been a history teacher one of the men called out "Failure! Failure!" and a couple of the others echoed it. The others all laughed.

So here you have a situation where a group of people who, almost as a rule, have master's degrees (and typically further) graduate educations, who work in a system crumbling from within due to changing demographics and drying funding streams, with students who come to school carrying with them a myriad of challenges. Daily, they handle demands and imperatives from literally dozens of directions, and yet they manage to survive, through creativity, dedication, boundless optimism, and the courage of warriors. After 20 years of service, they might be paid about the same as a 24-year old trainee financial analyst. These are my colleagues, urban teachers, "failures."

This group of young guys may have had MBAs, but not necessarily, and were making more money than teachers ever will, to serve themselves first, their companies when possible and their clients last. They are worthy of respect. And teachers are failures.

This is the crux of the image problem. Is it the image of the tenure-grubbing teacher, unwilling to take responsibility for their failing students, that causes these perceptions? If so, as always, we can ask the question: who profits? Because images don't exist for no reason. They are propagated by actors, with agendas.

If you are not born into old wealth, education is the only way to change the pathway of your life. Generations of working people have pulled themselves into the middle class that way. The middle class has pulled itself into the upper-middle. It was education that opened the path for those young upper-middle-class white men to congratulate themselves on their ability to thrive in a school system designed for them, specifically, to prosper. So they are prospering. Surprise. I'm sure very few of them (some may have, but those hide their stories) came to school regularly worrying about their food, safety, housing or language barriers. But public education, at least as we have legislated it in the last 30 years, is supposed to provide the path for others--who are not English-speaking white males.

So, who are the failures? The teachers, who in every moment of six hours with students and many more each day besides, struggle to keep the path open, and yes, often fail? Or the people who have benefited from the path, who do not feel it is their responsibility to maintain for others?

And most of all, what will the Bad Teacher forces, if they create public education without tenure, teachers fired due to bad standardized test results, corporate styled profit and loss accountability, and the students still struggle? How deep is their commitment to the public path for students who are the newest Americans, the forgotten students of the inner city, students who are born different and struggle with disability? Who will they blame then?

Images are powerful. I think as teachers the first thing we need to do is tell the other side of the story. Police officers and firefighters put their lives on the line daily and are heroes. Teachers put their hearts on the line every day and are failures.

There's something wrong with that picture.