(16) *!@#$%

To curb "cussing" in the classroom, I improvised a drama exercise. Please do not attempt to do the same with your students as it will upset your principal and you will get written up. Luckily for me, my principal only visited my class once a year. Since we were on the second floor, his secretary would call Mrs. Prentiss and give her a heads up when he was on his way.

The exercise went something like this:

1) Students sat in a large circle or smushed together on the floor.
2) I introduced the idea that words can have different meanings depending on how they are expressed. For example, we all got a chance to say the phrase, "I love gorillas" using a range of voices (angry, sad, irritated, softly...).
3) After practicing with a few different phrases, I picked one with a curse word for my students to repeat in a happy voice.
4) Not one student wanted to participate, and they seemed stunned to hear "I f****** love french fries!" come out of their teacher's mouth.

This led to an in-depth discussion about our words and our intentions. It was normal for some of my students to curse as a part of everyday conversation like a kind of punctuation to sentences, but things would sometimes go terribly wrong. There was always someone who took it to the next level and crossed the line with a classmate. This would usually escalate into a fight.

We then created another classroom agreement by doing two things 1) analyzing why we curse - something that is just part of our learned language or copying how our peers talk, and 2) discussing why it might be good to curb cursing in the classroom - we're stuck together for the entire day and we will eventually get on each others' nerves, possibly leading to a fight.

We didn't always stick to our agreement a hundred percent of the time, I slipped once (in three years), but it did encourage students to be more open to talking about their feelings instead of going straight to the @#!@&* shortcut.

Any other ideas for limiting cursing?

(17) The Big Easy's Big Secret

This post gives readers a brief, historic context for understanding Calliope School beginning with the US Supreme Court ruling on the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.

While the historic decision ended segregation, the Supreme Court never specified a timeline for implementation, only that the law should take effect, "with all deliberate speed." When we fast forward forty-two years (to 1996) and take a look at demographic make-up of New Orleans public schools by ethnicity, we find that desegregation never really happened, at least not in the spirit of the law.

After the Brown decision, white parents in New Orleans who had the financial means, steadily abandoned the public school system and enrolled their children in private or parochial schools. It's also important to note that black parents who could afford private tuition (while fewer in numbers), also sent their children to non-public schools. In a city whose total population was a black majority (60%), the student population in public schools in 1996 was disproportionately African American (94%).

Essentially, New Orleans schools operated under a system of de facto segregation, said another way, segregation still occurred in a different form despite the law.

A report by Tulane University's Cowan Center, linked the challenges that urban districts faced to "white and middle-class flight, a predominantly high-needs population of students, and decreasing public investment in education." We'll look at why these contributing factors struck such a blow to the school system by talking about social capital in the next post.

(18) Social Capital

There were a few public schools in New Orleans that functioned well. They were usually located in middle to upper middle class neighborhoods, and some were magnet schools that had more rigorous academic requirements for entrance. Student populations of these "good" schools were more diverse and academic achievement was significantly higher. What students had in common wasn't necessarily parents who had more money or higher education levels. It was that parents who sent their children to these public schools were more in the know. They banded together and played a greater role in how the schools and district were run. Their ability to know and work the education system for their children's benefit made all the difference, regardless of their ethnicity. This social currency is called "social capital".

My students and their families also had wealth of social capital, but in a different form. In order to maneuver the complicated life-and-death landscape of the Calliope, residents needed to be able to develop complex networks and establish credibility in the community (a.k.a. "street cred."). My students and their families were able to breeze through social interactions and synthesize complex information in order to be safe and lead fulfilling lives. As an outsider, I was at a disadvantage. Social capital like currency isn't always transferable outside of your community. To use money as an example, you can't use American dollars in Australia.

Even though my students' families desperately wanted their children to succeed in school and had earnest intentions, many of them expressed to me that they either did not understand the system or were intimidated by teachers and administrators (some of the teachers had been their own teachers growing up). There was also an underlying parent sentiment that teachers were the professionals and it was disrespectful to argue with them. As a result of the important parent advocacy piece missing, more often than not, school staff and district officials would take advantage of parents and make decisions that were self-serving rather than student-centered.

*Would anyone be willing to share situations where you have had to advocate for your child's educational needs and the outcome?

(19) The Age of Accountability

This is another post to give you a bit more context for the times. I'll be back to writing about my class and school next time.

When I began my teaching career in 1996, the US was entering into a new era of educational reform. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was still a few more years in the making, the development of a "standards based education" was beginning to become established. To me, this was good thing and it helped begin to set academic expectations for teachers to consider at Calliope School.

Five years later, NCLB not only mandated that each state establish academic standards for each grade level, but required that students in underrepresented subgroups (limited English proficiency students, students with disabilities, students eligible for free and reduced price meals, and white, black, Asian Pacific Islander, American Indian, and Hispanic students) make sufficient growth to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). If growth wasn't made on annual assessments, schools and school districts faced punitive sanctions including being taken over by the state. The implementation of NCLB, its general approach,and lack of funding, have been the center of controversy since its inception and for valid reasons. However, it was (and is) important legislation for urban schools because it forced districts to focus attention on the most overlooked students.

Even though there has been a great deal of discussion over the many internal and external factors that cause a school to fail, I was curious to learn why, even in a low performing school, instruction varied so drastically from classroom to classroom. Why was it that students could be on grade level in one class, then move on to the next grade only to lose a lot of ground? One possible answer lied in the space between Mrs. Prentiss and Mrs. Williams.

More about Mrs. Williams next.

(20) Children "At-Promise"

Mrs. Williams was a kindergarten teacher at Calliope School. She was tall and thin, African American, and wore her hair short in large curls. She was not a snappy dresser. Her work wardrobe was very plain, almost nun-like, a collection of dark A-line skirts and light-colored button-down shirts. This simple fashion sense coupled with a raspy voice made her seem older than her actual age which was forty-seven years old when we met. But once you got to know Mrs. Williams, you realized that there was something very special about her that transcended her age, her clothes and the times. She was a master teacher and good teaching is timeless.

On the first day of school, kindergarten students came to class ready to learn. There was not a lot of fussing or crying at the door. The Calliope School community had a strong Head Start program, and the incoming kindergarten students had already become familiar with classroom routines through their preschool experiences. The majority of students were on grade level or were on developmentally appropriate paths to learning. The children were too young to know this, but their teacher would be the main factor that would determine the trajectory of their learning. Mrs. Williams met her students at the door on the first day of school and these kids had lucked out.

The general quality of instruction at Calliope School was hit or miss. While Mrs. Prentiss was an extreme example of bad teaching, there were other teachers who were perfectly kind and well meaning, but whose classroom instruction lacked academic rigor. If you were a student in one of these classrooms, you would not likely make much academic growth in a year. You might even lose the skills that you had once mastered. If you had the bad luck of being assigned to a series of poorly trained teachers over a period of a few years, it would be extremely difficult to make up lost ground. If on the other hand, you were able to work with a series of highly skilled teachers, the achievement gap became small or ceased to exist.

Mrs. Williams was one of those highly skilled teachers and her students often exceeded the academic benchmarks that were set for them. Her lessons were well planned, exciting and challenging. I would duck into her classroom during my periods off so I could learn how she taught.

Mrs. Williams "wore her students out" by engaging them in collaborative activities where they would work with their classmates as learning partners or in small groups. They learned by doing. She led them to form opinions about stories that were read to them and taught them how to ask good questions. She stretched their vocabulary and had them write and illustrate their work every single day. She made them love math by making it meaningful. It wasn't unusual to see her walk her class through the school grounds as they collected data for a question that they were wondering about.

What made Mrs. Williams a truly extraordinary teacher was that she brainwashed her students with her high expectations of them. She cultivated their imaginations, their confidence in themselves, and taught them how to be resilient when they got stuck on a problem. These traits not only made her students strong learners, but strong people. That said, elementary students spend most of the school day with one teacher, so children who are already overcoming challenges in their everyday lives need a Mrs. Williams in their classroom every school year. Unfortunately, this doesn't usually happen.

On a personal note, I would only know Mrs. Williams for a short while. She was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-nine and passed away a year later. I clearly remember her funeral service where I sat next to Mrs. Prentiss and in the company of hundreds of family, friends, colleagues and students who had packed into the small Baptist church to say good-bye.