Why I'm Going To Grad School

At the end of my last post, I said I would write later in the week about why teachers leave teaching. I decided to write about why I'm not going to be a classroom teacher next year instead because:
1) I've been trying to remember that all summer.
2) I think there are lots of reasons why teachers leave teaching, but all I really know is why I'm leaving.

As I said farewell to my students and colleagues in June, it was hard for me to believe that it ever seemed like a good idea to leave them. My favorite part about teaching is the relationships I get to build with a group of people who, in many cases, come from very different places than me. All of my students are Latino, many of them were born in rural Mexico, and many of them are growing up in poverty. I am white, grew up in Kentucky, and come from a pretty affluent family. Yet here we are, thrown together for six hours a day, getting to know each other.

Each week I would have one of my students be the Star of the Week, and the Star would get to make a poster full of pictures of herself and her family, plus fill out a little questionnaire about her favorite things, her dreams for the future, etc. The Star got to share her poster with the class, we asked some questions about it, and then it stayed up for the rest of the week. I was often amazed by the pictures by students brought in, but one really stood out to me. This picture was of Joaquin, a quiet, brilliant, intense, athletic boy who came to the U.S. from Mexico in first grade and managed to score Proficient or Advanced on math standardized tests from second grade on, despite the fact that he knew no English when he came here and his parents had very limited education themselves. In this picture, a four-year old Joaquin walks barefoot down a dry, dusty, deserted path, lugging a huge, huge bundle of corn stalks over his shoulder, carrying them where they need to go. What a different world he knew before - of corn and cows and dirt paths. Of course, that world exists in the U.S., but it doesn't exist in the town where I taught. Joaquin lives in an urban apartment building now, crammed with other families from Mexico and all over the world, with graffiti and gangs and pigeons and pavement, pavement, pavement.

Joaquin and I both got to cross borders in our classroom. I got to know about his worlds and he got to know about mine. And we got to create one together. Those opportunities can be so rare in life, opportunities to really build relationships with people whose lives are unlike ours in important ways.

It makes me cry to think about Joaquin. Not because anything bad happened to him - though I do worry about him because he has a bad temper and likes to hang with the tough guys, so I'm afraid he'll get into fights. But as far as I know, he's fine. He got identified as gifted and got redesignated as Fluent English Proficient, and both of those things should help him get into good classes in middle and high school. I cry when I think about him because I want our school system and our society to serve him well, and I'm afraid they won't. I want his brilliance to be recognized, I want him to learn all the math he wants to learn, I want him to get the support and encouragement and financial help he needs to go to college, I want him to feel proud of his native language and his background, I want him to stay out of gangs, and I want him to have all the doors open to him that a white middle-class kid would have.

In the largest sense, I'm going to grad school because I want to have more power to make the educational system serve Joaquin and all my students better.

I know that I had a lot of power as a teacher. I got to inspire Joaquin and my other students, to teach them about long division and the civil rights movement and haiku and Judy Blume and Gary Soto and global warming and irregular verbs and what college is like and what engineers do. Sometimes, though, I felt powerless, like a cog in a wheel of a machine that was shoddily built.

An example: The past two years because of pressure from No Child Left Behind, we had to teach language arts using only our state-adopted language arts curriculum. That seems reasonable at first. But our Houghton-Mifflin materials, the publisher insists, are not designed for students reading more than two years below grade level or students who have English Proficiency Levels of 1 (beginning) or 2 (early intermediate). Ten of my thirty-one students fell into these two categories. That means our state-adopted materials were not designed for about a third of my class.

Our district's answer to this problem was to start a reading intervention class. This class was called REACH and was for students decoding at least two years below grade level. During our regular two-and-a-half hour language arts block, students who qualified for this intervention program got pulled out of the regular classroom and were taught the REACH curriculum by our Resource Specialist teacher. This may or may not have been a good idea and a good program; I don't know enough to say.

Students who had been in the U.S. for less than two years were automatically excluded from participation in REACH, though. It makes sense that students whose reading difficulties are caused by lack of English knowledge need a different curriculum than students who are fluent English speakers but who still struggle with decoding words. Our school could have had a separate intervention program for students who were decoding at least two years below grade level AND who had been in the country less than two years. This English Language Development intervention group would have been taught by an ELD Coach, I think, and would have used High Point materials. But only a handful of fourth and fifth graders - mostly from my class - fit this description, so no High Point group was created.

Three of my students qualified for REACH. This left me with seven students in my language arts class for whom the language arts materials I had to teach with were inappropriate. When I pointed out this contradiction to administrators, they basically told me that yes, our language arts program was not designed for these students, but yes, I had to use our language arts program and only our language arts program as my curriculum for all my students. This made me feel like I was banging my head against a brick wall! Why wasn't my school taking my students' needs seriously? Why was I not allowed to adapt and modify curriculum as I saw fit to help my students actually learn to read and write in English?

My student Wilfredo, who I've written a little about before, came to the U.S. in third grade. Was I really just going to hand him the Houghton-Mifflin fourth grade reading materials in English and pretend that that's teaching him to read? Of course not! Did administrators really want me to do that? No! But in this weird follow-the-script, accountability climate, that's what they had to tell me to do and that's what I had to pretend I was doing.

That's just not right. Wilfredo should be able to get an excellent, appropriate education, building both his English skills and his content knowledge while getting support in developing friendships in his new environment. For too many kids like Wilfredo and Joaquin, though, that doesn't happen. They sit in class, not understanding what's happening, not learning either English or content knowledge, feeling alienated and/or checking out. We can't afford to waste these students' potential! And that's why I'm going to grad school.