Every Student Deserves Representation and Safety

I believe teachers' responses near and far to both yesterday's SCOTUS decision and recent news that increased awareness of transgender issues will be the ultimate litmus tests for many in the profession, stretching the patience and tolerance of those with whom they work. Some might consider it the height of professionalism to "leave well enough alone" or "keep your mouth shut," but student advocacy, not just instruction, is part of our responsibility.  In the search for age-appropriate books to add to my class library, I came across a thread on social media where veteran teachers were asserting how they weren't going to read "filth"/"this material" to their students, such as storybooks that include characters who dress in gender-opposite clothing or have two mothers, even if there is a student (or students) in their classroom who has same-sex parents or demonstrates gender fluidity (like many do in kindergarten). 

If "this material," meaning storybooks that illustrate the diversity represented by families, doesn't belong in the classroom and in the hands of our youngest learners who are likely to witness, if not experience these and many other social changes firsthand, then how will students learn to adapt, behave, interpret, and hopefully positively impact the world around them?  How are they to feel safe within their classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods? How are children from more traditional family arrangements supposed to learn about and practice respectful behaviors if they can't ask the questions they're bound to want to every time they encounter something new to them?  Some teachers in the post I stumbled across were advocating for a return to the "good ol' days" of reading, writing and arithmetic, and ignoring "the sick behavior" they find so disgusting.  These folks are oblivious to the fact that change and diversity are the rules on this planet, NOT the exceptions.  Are we to deny our students access to literature portraying biracial or bicultural families, or media that includes images of those suffering from handicapping conditions, or the death of a family member because a teacher thinks they're icky or the topic makes them uncomfortable?  Do we have the right to deny each student supportive representation and the feeling of belonging?  Teachers should not contribute to the idea that some children are less deserving or less human because of the decisions that their parents, in whatever arrangement they're presented make, or because of which gender each child might identify with.  Teachers should commit to the emotional and physical safety of our students and their families without thinking that our opinion regarding issues OTHER than abuse and neglect are in any way our business.  The love and care between parents and children and teachers and classmates has nothing to do with promoting sexuality.  I weep for the children who have to face a "trusted adult" in the classroom who looks at them or their families with an expression of disgust.

It's imperative for those who have chosen to work in the arena of public education to remember who they serve: the public, not just select members of that neighborhood or community. If your upbringing, belief system, sense of entitlement, or even gag reflex prevent you from giving each and every student your best, consider a change in venue. Find support and employment in a like-minded private school, or open your own. You'll be doing yourself, and many children a favor.

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I found the following books on Amazon.com- do you know of any others?  Link me up in the comments.

Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress

The Family Book

Who's in My Family?

Red: A Crayon's Story

... and Tango Makes Three

Getting back into the teaching mode...

Getting back into the mode...
I've moved, unpacked, settled, and explored, and after once again having the time and inclination to visit the blogs and websites of teachers I admire, I feel myself getting back into the teaching mode.

After visiting Doug's blog Borderland, I read Shauna's latest blog entry concerning her apprehension with her son starting preschool. I visited the Sylvan Learning Center website, entertaining the possibility of shaking up my own professional development paradigm by working at one of the centers this school year, and then checked out an article at NEA Today that had some fascinating responses to the question: what does the future hold for public education?

After 1) reading the responses, so many of them reaffirming my own opinions on the politics of education versus the reality of education, 2) being reminded of parental concerns thanks to Shauna's thoughts, 3) perusing a website where education really is a business, and 4) hearing Doug's teacher-thoughts echoing in my mind, I tried to determine where my own personal interest and focus falls each July or August as I prepare to meet another group of young learners. With the boost of an afternoon cup of coffee, my mind came up with a question instead of an answer:

Is a child's/student's intrinsic motivation to explore, learn, risk, and try being damaged or otherwise thwarted by the poor teaching practices of parents, teachers, and other education "professionals" as a partial result of NCLB's Test, Test, Test, Punish, Punish, Punish design?

Without gory details or my usual ramblings and recounting of classroom horror stories, I would have to respond, "yes, very often." It's a question I'll be trying to answer with more precise responses over time in the future, since I've been feeling for the last few years that I've been a good teacher in spite of NCLB, and not because of it. Until then, I'll share some quotes from notable responders to the NEA inquiry (while wishing that there had been some responses from "plain ol' parents" too):

Deborah Meier
Education Activist and Author "We will see a return to celebrating childhood, enjoying those immensely useful childlike qualities instead of squashing them. Instead of making 3-year-olds do "academic" worksheets, I imagine K–12th grade will look more like the kinder (children's) gardens of yesteryear, with everyone involved in serious activities. Playfulness, after all, is at the core of what strong intellectual work is all about."

Alfie Kohn
Author "When I ask teachers what their long-term goals are for students, one response I hear almost everywhere is "lifelong learner." It's not just that we want them to know certain things but that we want them to keep wanting to know, not just that they're able to read but that they do read . . . and think, and question.

If we took this objective seriously, every educational practice and policy – from whether to assign homework to how to assess learning, from the size of classes and schools to the length of school days and years – would be evaluated primarily on the basis of how it affected kids' excitement about ideas. Higher achievement (let alone higher test scores) would never constitute a sufficient basis for doing something. If a proposal might well turn students off to a given topic, let alone to intellectual inquiry itself, it wouldn't stand a chance. And of course intrinsic motivation to learn would be the principal outcome variable used by educational researchers.

I believe that schools should and can make student interest their primary criterion, but I can't say whether they will. The likelihood of this transformation will depend on how willing we are to align our practices with our goals."

Linda Christensen
Educator/Rethinking Schools "Education is at a dangerous crossroads. While the federal government urges schools to close the achievement gap and work for equity, it endorses programs that teach compliance and rote answers. School districts write mission statements about creating citizens of the world, but more and more, they turn teachers into robotic hands to deliver education programs designed and shipped from sites outside of our classrooms.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation has pushed administrators to grab quick solutions to get a fast bump in their test scores. Instead of taking the time to build teacher capacity to improve instruction or creating schools as learning communities, more administrators opt for "boxed" professional development— from fill-in-the-blank writing curricula to stick-the-kid-on-the-computer reading and math programs.

But against this tide of top-down reform, a counter movement of resistance is surfacing. Many teachers are insisting that the real world must be at the heart of the curriculum, inspiring students to acquire the academic skills that help them understand self and society.

My vision for the future of education is that as teachers, as union members, we have the nerve, the audacity to struggle to nurture a curriculum that simultaneously responds to urgent social demands as well as the academic needs of our students."

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In my mind, everyplace is a school or classroom. We'll see how it goes this year.

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in...

Well okay, Kindergarten. Kindergarten in Texas as a child, kindergarten in Alaska, New Mexico, and now Kansas, as a teacher.

In Texas, I learned I was strong. At the age of four-and-a-half, **I** was the one who broke the pinata at Halloween. To this day, I still have the memory of being blindfolded, with a stick of some sort in my hand, hearing "hit it Mica, hit it!" Then the feeling of contact, and the sound of hard candies hitting the bare floor. "Get the candy, get the candy!" I couldn't. I was too busy holding the corner of the blindfold up away from my eyes, watching the swarm of kids at my feet grabbing for the candy I had released from the paper mache prison. I'm strong. God bless the teacher who probably held the pinata down still where I could hit it.

I endured, sometimes enjoyed, and in the end survived the next twelve years of school, and attended college hoping to be a Broadcast and Journalism major. One horribly inappropriate instructor and enough views of news reporters on television shoving microphones into the faces of families who just experienced some horror, and my mind was forever changed. Back to "what I knew," since it was easier to draw upon my life's experiences as a teacher's kid... freed me up to go out and socialize, meet people, learn the right ways, and several wrong ways of interacting with others. Ta da, six years later (darn that socializing), and I had a Bachelor's Degree in Education.

I was hired late into the school year as a kindergarten teacher. Frankly, it was the **last** grade I ever thought I'd want to teach. I cried. Yes, cried, the night before I was supposed to meet my new students. The next day, with stinging, puffy eyes, I survived my re-introduction to the kindergarten world, thanks to wonderful students, and two amazingly terrific teachers. While one would move on to a principalship in another town, the other would become not so much a mentor, but a role model (I tend to observe, think things through, try them out on my own, and gauge the result BEFORE I ask for help) and eventually, the treasured shoulders, ears, and insights of a true friend I respected not only as a teacher but a human being. She observed, fine-tuned, overhauled, and encouraged my successes, and occasionally was hit by the shrapnel resulting from my clueless lack of experience. When one of her own former student teachers was added to our kindergarten team, I had yet another wonderful teacher from whom to learn. Our colleagues, their families, and our school's neighborhood, children and all, imprinted upon me so many memories, so many opportunities to build my own opinions, so many experiences... I had no idea how they would help me when I had to leave a decade later.

Uncle Sam decided to move my husband and thus, our family, to New Mexico, where I became employed in my second school district ever. Meeting my new colleagues, my new administrators, and my new students and families was quite the experience. No matter how diverse I had thought my decade teaching in Alaska had been, it turned out there was a great big world out there! Even in my own country, attitudes, biases, prejudices, beliefs and practices vary widely. Thankfully, I had taught long enough to recognize the social and professional choreography displayed at my new school. I was able to compare and contrast differences in office procedures, school routines, social cliques, curriculum, socio-economic boundaries, school culture, teaching styles, and school-wide discipline. Some practices, not many, were aligned with my own teaching philosophy and goals. Redundancies abounded, communication never made it completely around the loop, and in a predominantly Hispanic school district, I was asked several times WHY I had number and color words on my bulletin board in English AND in Spanish. On the upswing, my class size was limited to fifteen, and my students got along wonderfully with one another. They were happy, healthy, bright, eager, and kind, and their parents were extremely supportive and helpful. I had two wonderful practicum students who were more colleagues than pupils, and was able to build fun and supportive friendships with subs and parent volunteers. An occasional tray of homemade cookies left in the lounge always garnered thanks and smiles, so there weren't too many social obstacles for me to overcome.

Now, in my third state, and my third school, I'm still teaching kindergarten. Yet again, I've had to sit back, get the "lay of the land," and learn my steps in the new choreography. As I'm able to now compare and contrast practices between three schools, districts, and states, I feel comfortable that my experiences are adding up to help me pick and choose the best of all I have observed, been given, thought up on my own, and in some cases, endured, for the benefit of my students, their families, and my colleagues. My personal and professional philosophies have four supporters at this time: my husband, my kindergarten colleague, the speech therapist, and another teacher at work. Most everyone else with whom I've interacted has been taken aback, not quite sure of what they are observing. My discipline plan, my instructional practices, my vocabulary and tone with my students (and the students of other teachers), have all been questioned by support staff, colleagues, administrators and parents. My students' parents and the four supporters listed previously, seem to be the only adults who understand why I find it necessary to build relationships with my students, to help build relationships between my students, and work as much with the social skills as the academic. Relationship-building with colleagues who possess a similar amount of teaching experience or more has been awkward. I don't FIT. How I think, what I think, and what I do, are evaluated from a distance. My perspectives on discipline, developmentally appropriate practices, support for kindergarten teachers, relationship-building, and my regard for my students' emotional safety at school during this very special year are apparently perceived as odd, not the norm, perhaps even "off by a few bubbles." To feel so outnumbered by professionals who are consumed by what they themselves want from their students instead of what they want for their students is an odd position in which to find myself.

I recently attended a districtwide grade level meeting where most of the debate and discussions revolved around how to make the S.F.A. observers happy. How to get through the entire required curriculum when students wanted to spend more time on certain activities than others. How five year olds still weren't demonstrating perfect penmanship (we're only a month and a half into the school year as of this posting), and how teachers were thrilled their schools' "academic support" staff were allowed to take children into a back room of the building, and "put the fear of God into them" when they wouldn't comply. I was appalled, not only as a teacher, but as a mother. Only a small handful of teachers volunteered suggestions to help with curriculum issues, and our time at the meeting was limited to an hour. Feedback was requested which my grade level partner and I gladly provided, but I left the meeting feeling so outnumbered, and therefore not nearly as open to helping my fellow kindergarten teachers. While I have been providing feedback and hopefully supportive shoulders and ears like my very first role model did, I can't help but feel that without a public and high-enough-on-the-food-chain supporter and advocate, my hands are tied, and frankly, my philosophy is not a good match for this district.

Don't yell. Don't hurt peoples' feelings. Don't hit. Say "please" and "thank you." Eat a snack. Take a nap. Share. Walk with scissors. Don't eat glue. Remember to write your name on your paper, and share your books. Help your friends, smile at your teacher, at least be polite if you can't be nice. Life lessons taught in kindergarten don't often carry over into adulthood. And it's a shame. It's an even bigger shame when they don't carry over to the very people trusted to provide educational and emotional support to children for twelve or thirteen years.

We accommodate students, not the BRAND of the curriculum materials. Not the S.F.A. saleswoman or product support staff who come in and "spot observe" several times a year. I would never consider a doctor, lawyer, or mechanic truly qualified if they only came in to see me on their own schedule, on dates they chose as best for themselves. If they only did a looksie at my car without ever looking under the hood, smiled at me but didn't take my blood pressure and vitals, or only asked if I had a will or not, I wouldn't find them very helpful. Observers who only come in to see if each cutely named activity is being performed at the exact minute of the prescribed schedule... or to see if a poster is hung at the appropriate spot in my classroom , are completely missing out on what they should be there to observe: My students. Learning.

Other issues have had my attention in previous blog postings, and taking them into consideration with my latest observations, it's clear I have to go back to what I learned in kindergarten that October, thirty-two years ago: I'm strong. It's time to find a Master's Degree program, and then a Doctoral Program after that. Perhaps when I have enough letters of the alphabet after my name, my ideas won't seem alien, they'll seem revolutionary. And worth some contemplation and adoption.