First I will give you an overview of my life since Girls Camp. Becky Jorgenson came out and visited. We had fun running around and seeing all of New York. We even did a few things that I had never done before including going to the top of the Empire State Building and watching the sunrise from the Brooklyn Bridge. Becky and I haven’t hung out much since we were little kids so it was really interesting. I think she is awesome and it she is just incredibly easy to be around. I don’t know whether to attribute that to the fact that she is a Californian or the product of Proctor genes.
I have been doing a lot and keeping really busy but all the other activities seem secondary to the rather monumental entrance into the wild and weird world of New York City Public education. I teach at a middle school in a neighborhood called Washington Heights. The neighborhood is quite sketchy despite the fact that it lies in the shadows of the world famous Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and Research Center. My school is on the third and fourth floors of an old four-story building with no air conditioning; the first and second floors are used by another middle school. I teach ESL so I work mainly with immigrant kids but there are a few kids in there who were born into Spanish speaking homes in the US and for one reason or another, have not learned English during their 7 plus years of American public school education. Often that reason is that they need special education but their parents are unwilling to accept that label. About 98% of my students are from the Dominican Republic and then I have one from El Salvador and about three from Mexico. I teach a 6th grade, a 7th grade and an 8th grade class. These are called the bilingual classes, which means they get math, science and social studies in Spanish, they have a Spanish literature class and they get an ESL class. This is the class that all new students get sent to and left there until they learn sufficient English to move on. Problem: they have NO motivation to learn English. They come from a Spanish speaking home in a Spanish speaking community and go to a classroom full of Spanish speaking students with a Spanish speaking teacher. Their exposure to English is….me, three times a week. The result, they see English as a foreign language and have very little interest in learning it. That said, there are a few AWESOME students who really put in a lot of effort and if they try, they can move to a proficient enough level in a year or a little more.
Behavior: So most of my summer training was focused on classroom management because inner-city schools are notorious for being unruly and in an unruly classroom, it doesn’t matter how great the material is, the students learn nothing. One of my professors told us in his thick Long Island Jewish accent, “Neva let the lunatics have time to organize, if ya do, you are two minutes away from bein fired out the winda.” He also advised us to make the students believe that we were always on the brink of killing one of them. That element of fear might keep them in their seat long enough to learn something. Armed with that advice I tried to take control of a classroom. The problem is this, in the DR school is voluntary and is only about 4 hours a day. So, many of these kids have very limited formal schooling. They only attended school when and if they wanted. They are not used to having to sit still for this long and they certainly resent the fact that they are forced to go to school. If they acted up in their old schools they got kicked out of school. So we have lots of kids who are not only behavior problems, but also lack several years of schooling so they are illiterate in Spanish. I find that for the first few months the students are fairly respectful, and quiet. Then they start to realize that they will not be kicked out or beaten if they act up. They start to realize the powerlessness of their teachers. The ultimate punishment for any crazy thing they choose to do is one hour of detention. Where they sit in a classroom with all the other hooligans and talk and make fun of each other and the teacher. When they realize that nobody can do anything to them and nobody can force them to do anything they go nuts. They test all their limits. You give them detention and they just walk out because they realize you can’t physically restrain them. Their parents are not educated and don’t really care about their kid’s education. They see school as a holding cell. You call a parent and say, “Your child is out of control” and they usually say, “Yeah I know, I can’t control them either, they are just bad. You can keep them for detention as long as you want.”
That being said, I do believe that I can make a difference by giving those kids who want something more than welfare and projects in their futures the opportunity to make that decision for themselves and it is this thought and hope that makes me enjoy my job, that makes me get up and get to work with a smile on my face. Despite the difficulties (and I have only told you a very small fraction of them) I like being a teacher still, although I reserve the right to change my mind.
