Why I don't give up

Several well-meaning friends have asked me why I don't just give up. Why don't I find a job tutoring and stick with that? Or volunteer, or do something completely different?

First of all, I started all this because I wanted a meaningful way to be active, and I felt that I could help fill up a tiny gap in the need for math and science teachers. I love math, and thought that I could extend my love to inspire students to enjoy it as well.

Then there is the resources aspect to not giving up. I've invested a lot of money, time, effort, interest and even passion - in my graduate school education, as well as numerous other courses, seminars and conventions. I've bought - and read - almost every book the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics offers on Reasoning and Sense-making and other topics I deemed useful for the subjects I've been teaching.

I read great blogs about teaching, not least Coach G's Teaching Tips on the Education Week Teacher website. There I just found another blog posting that inspired me: How Teachers Can Build Emotional Resilience by Elena Aguilar. She lists a number of ways that teachers become emotionally resilient:

1. Have personal values that guide their decision-making. They often feel they were "called" to this profession and a commitment to social justice keeps them in the classroom.
2. Place a high value on professional development and actively seek it out.
3. Mentor others.
4. Take charge and solve problems.
5. Stay focused on children and their learning.
6. Do whatever it takes to help children be successful.
7. Have friends and colleagues who support their work emotionally and intellectually.
8. Are not wedded to one best way of teaching and are interested in exploring new ideas.
9. Know when to get involved and when to let go.

I think I do all of these things (except maybe realizing when to let go!) I am particularly flexible about #8, ready and willing to try many different methods (except "drill and kill," which one adviser insisted was the only way to get kids to learn.) Furthermore, Ms. Aguilar says, principals can help their teachers become emotionally resilient.

Trust has been called "the connective tissue that holds improving schools together." Organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley has written beautifully on the impact that having meaningful conversations and listening to each other can have in changing environments. Principals can ensure that these conversations happen. We can’t support each other intellectually (or create Professional Learning Communities) if we don’t trust each other.

At my previous position, we math teachers had no preparation period, and no common time where we could get together to help each other (different lunch breaks.) And the principal was quick to fire rather than support teachers. (The teacher before me managed to find another job and quit before the principal dismissed her - he had already announced her position as open. He also let most of last year's math teachers go since school scores on the state math tests were ridiculously low - more likely because the school expected most learning to happen through projects, where math was ancillary to other projects, than because of the teachers' competence.)

Doing the impossible is harder than I imagined!

I stopped writing here because this thing about getting a credential has become much more difficult than it was when I got the idea to do so. Neither the school I have studied at Claremont Graduate University, or EncorpsTeachers, who have also been supporting me through all of this past year with workshops, study guides, and good advice, had imagined what school administrators already suspected, that they would be hiring very few teachers. In many districts, classes are being filled up to 40 students, even in Middle School, eliminating the need to hire a new teacher, and making life difficult for both teachers and students at the same time. That means that secondary teachers have to get to know 200 students (and their families) and that classrooms built for 25 have desks squeezed in, with no space for separate activity areas, or a way to even access the walls of the classroom.

In the meantime, however, I have completed all the coursework expected of me, except for one course I'll take this Fall (in Statistics) and a concluding course next summer -- if I manage to find a job to complete the Internship training this year. I am hoping that the new government money will open up a job here or there, which may provide me a job (as well as this year's interns) and make classes a little smaller, so that it will be easier to use more creative methods for students to learn as well.

I also took a series of courses at UC Riverside Extension this summer on Science Education to supplement the Teaching Skills tests in Science (CSET) I've been taking this year to expand what I can teach.

So far I've applied for over 30 jobs this spring. I'm hoping that all the credentialed candidates have landed a position by now, as school is starting, and that schools will be more open to taking an Intern as they discover a need for just one more teacher.

Please wish me luck!

Resilience

In between finishing off all the writing assignments for my course, I am reading a book that I think will provide me with very useful insight into the minds of our African American students in our classrooms: Through Ebony Eyes: What Teachers Need to Know But Are Afraid to Ask About African American Students, by Gail L. Thompson.

One of the topics she writes about, using her own autobiography, is Resilience. How do some children, with every imaginable condition against them, manage to pull through and get where even a lot of people with "ordinary" backgrounds get.

The LA Times ran an article today about just such a person: She finally has a home: Harvard. The young woman in the story had been homeless most of her life, but she knew she was smart, because she'd tested as a "gifted child" and her mother encouraged her.

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.

By high school she knew that her gift would help get her out of the squalor she'd grown up in, so she found good mentors, and even a home where she could live the last few years to complete her schooling. And she is already in Cambridge, participating in a special program to help her adjust to the Harvard culture.

I am looking forward to reading another story in the LA Times (in paper format, I hope!) in four years, celebrating her graduation from Harvard. She's just beginning, and it will be extremely hard. But I think Harvard will supply her with all the mentors she needs to get there. I wish her well!