The Jose Vilson

Stand Up On The Train

2013-05-14T13:07:50-07:00

She’s got auburn hair, a blue cottony zip-up sweater, and navy blue uniform pants. She gets on the train searching left and right, for a face perhaps. She’s slightly jolted when the blonde woman in the velvet-black suit jacket and sharp black heels.

She’s standing there, exasperated, but looking straight ahead. At what, I’m not sure. No one else notices because everyone on this train looks outward, but in no particular direction. The looks of nothingness last as long as the train ride does. IPods and smartphones light hands and eyes up, headphones tangled around their heads, and passengers try to avoid each others’ shoulders.

The young woman continues to look straight ahead. This time, I do too. But this was different.

She was directly in front of me now, unable to hug the pole directly in front of her fully. She doesn’t have enough room in front of her.

Her stomach shook a bit even as the train stood still, and whether I realized it or not, my fatherly instincts kicked in.

Something told me “Stand up.” I did. I saw the young lady mouth “Thank you” as my earphones blared Kendrick Lamar.

She rubbed her belly, hoping to tuck it in before she went to school. Bellies don’t often cooperate with our intentions. She looked left and right, searching for something. What, I’m not sure.

As I stood, I had questions that weren’t any of my business. I just settled for standing with my coffee for two long stops. My burdens aren’t as heavy as my blessings.

I’m hoping she realizes that, too.

Jose, who’s not quite back yet …

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Please, Keep Writing and Teaching [Kick More Ass]

2013-04-30T18:06:46-07:00

Iron Man 3

Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you’re a blogger writing about education and a whole mess of other stuff that permeates the experiences you have as an educator looking inward and outward, trying to seek solutions to complex and amorphous situations.

Let’s say you decided to look at the landscape of writing about education through this lens. You see messages and e-mails asking you why you put your name out there, no pseudonym, in a land where central district offices want to block and fire teachers with dissenting opinions, follow and interrogate teachers who pose hard questions on Twitter, or only highlight the teachers who please corporate sponsors and / or proffer ed-tech solutions. While the rhetoric sounds supportive of the “best” teachers, the policies themselves call worsening working (and learning) conditions. Congress and the White House continue to bundle the social safety net of America and prepare it on a cutting board, directly affecting the works of educators for everyone except the most privileged.

Your last message asks you if the person should keep her blog around in an environment like this. Your answer is hell yes.

As writers in the education field, we have a right, a privilege, and for many of us, a responsibility to tell the truth about our professions. The “best” of us can do it through anecdote or diatribe, but these finely honed skills matter none if we don’t use them to affect and effect social change. Speaking up and out about our daily struggles, the way we approach our craft, and the passion with which we inspire may prompt the next educator to look at their classrooms a little differently the next morning.

As writers who sun-light as teachers, we have an extra responsibility to the students we serve, and to do so in a way that encourages others to see themselves as teachers, as not alone, as not naive for having stayed when the best rewards are called “small victories.” With kids stuck in little cubicles in front of computers getting programmed like The Matrix in pilot programs, high-stakes standardized assessments stripping time from children who need as much time as possible to learn, and “non-profit” lobbies pegging teachers, parents, and students against each other in the name of kids (who didn’t ask their help, mind you), teacher-writers have the insight necessary in a dialogue bereft of voices from the classroom.

Indeed, you might have grander inspirations. You might have a manuscript in need of someone to believe in its marketability. You might have a few unfinished lesson plans and web sites you signed up to finish. You might be traveling to a few places along the way, but hoping your family doesn’t resent you for finding your Personal Legend.

You have a job. You’re tired. The school year is almost over. You’re tired of the nonsense. Something’s gotta g ive. You don’t want to stop because you know someone’s reading semi-religiously. You have to stop because you’re going at a blinding speed. Your heart hurts. So does your back. Your teeth hurt not from smiling, but from gnawing and snickering.

You’ll never get your voice out like this. You take a step back, and stand there for a minute. Your kids matter. You need this step back so you can run forward. Don’t stop blogging. Just hope that the next time you do, it inspires someone to kick more ass.

Jose

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The NFL Draft Has Lots To Teach Administrators [Edutopia]

2013-04-29T18:44:06-07:00

Tyrann Mathieu at the NFL Scouting Combine

Here’s my recent article comparing the way the NFL recruits players in their scouting combine to what public education currently does.

Stats and Equations vs. the Team as an Ecosystem

Trying to develop equations for player effectiveness doesn’t always work well. ESPN tried to develop its own quarterback equation, but found it wasn’t that simple. Each throw a quarterback made or run he scored on needed additional eyes to assure that the numbers accurately reflected his performance. While people may base salaries on individual statistics, the ones that matter most to executives and fans alike are whether the entire team wins.

Looking at teacher evaluation is a difficult prospect, especially since we’re often trying to measure the intangibles. Yet we have elements of the profession that we can include in a fair system for all. Characteristics like temperament, persistence and resilience matter more than test scores, especially in schools, because it’s here that collaboration, not competitiveness, reigns supreme. Developing schools that see themselves as an ecosystem from teacher all the way through superintendent or chancellor gives us as chance to replicate real success.

For more, read here. Click. Like. Share. Thanks!

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Short Notes: Disempowerment Is A Cooperative Act

2013-04-28T08:00:23-07:00

Sabrina Stevens at TEDxNYED, Brooklyn Tech

A few things:

The Atlantic’s John Tierney joins in the chorus of the annoyed in this essay about the Atlanta / Washington DC cheating scandals and its ramifications for education reform. [The Atlantic]
Michael Doyle makes a clear argument for the village raising the child. [BHS Doyle]
Florida’s investigating K-12 Inc. Hate to use the word evil about any person or group, but … [EdWeek]
For those in NYC, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will be speaking at the ELL Parent Conference. [NYC Schools]

Quote of the Week:

A current of love rushed from his heart, and the boy began to pray. It was a prayer that he had never said before, because it was a prayer without words or pleas. His prayer didn’t give thanks for his sheep having found new pastures; it didn’t ask that the boy be able to sell more crystal; and it didn’t beseech that the woman he had met continue to await his return. In the silence, the boy understood that the desert, the wind, and the sun were also trying to understand the signs written by the hand, and were seeking to follow their paths, and to understand what had been written on a single emerald. He saw that omens were scattered throughout the earth and in space, and that there was no reason or significance attached to their appearance; he could see that not the deserts, nor the winds, nor the sun, nor people knew why they had been created. But that the hand had a reason for all of this, and that only the hand could perform miracles, or transform the sea into a desert … or a man into the wind. Because only the hand understood that it was a larger design that had moved the universe to the point at which six days of creation had evolved into a Master Work.

The boy reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw that it was a part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul. And that he, a boy, could perform miracles.

- Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

*** title credit to Sabrina Stevens ***

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Born To Do This Shit [On Personal Legends and Teaching]

2013-04-25T19:16:12-07:00

The Alchemist

“You have 135 minutes left on this test. Are there any questions?”

After a quick pause, I said, “You may begin.”

As the students got to work on this section of the test, I began to reflect on my life as a teacher, and came to realize that, yes, I was born to be in a classroom, teaching.

The set of students in front of me, a gathering of opted-out English Language Learners from different classes including mine, had different experiences coming into that exam, yet already had an engrained respect for me before I even said my first words of the day. They might have seen me pass by in the hallway, covering a class, or heard rumors about me from different kids. They knew I didn’t laugh, at least not in front of them. They knew I cracked some jokes, and rarely wrote up students, preferring to talk them out of their unwise decisions.

They heard I love teaching students, and they can see it in my eyes.

A few years ago, I didn’t know how my body language (or my actual language) manifested in them thinking I hated my job, or at least that I should hate it. They confided in me that teachers in these environments work less like gurus, more like prison guards. They tell me that they couldn’t work “with these stupid kids” who “never want to do anything,” so becoming a teacher would be too hard for them. They don’t like the lack of respect teachers get generally, and wonder why someone like me actually wanted to teach, and not do anything else.

America as a whole has similar beliefs.

Yet, after reading The Alchemist, I realized just how close I am to reaching this “Personal Legend.” The students I reach in the classroom – I’m happy I reach the majority of them – have an appreciation for math now, and I hope I had a positive effect on that sentiment. The ones I don’t aren’t the “bad” kids, or the “most troubled” kids. It’s the kids who simply aren’t ready for me, or maybe not anyone, right now. I’ve learned that great teachers have plenty of students who simply weren’t ready to learn from them. Maybe I’m not ready to teach them, either, and I still have lots to learn about teaching them.

Learning isn’t linear, and neither are our lives.

In some meetings, we get the privilege to debrief with our colleagues with varying degrees of frustration, of pain, or annoyance. At the kids. At their superiors. At the system as a whole. This source of frustration, although warranted, can also cloud us from our objective. As I’ve heard a few of my colleagues say time and again, we don’t teach our subjects; we teach our students these subjects.

In time, if we let that little bubble of frustration grow, we get blinded, strayed from what we originally came to do. We see teaching as just a job, and not as both profession and passion. We see children as cogs to fit into a framework and not as people we’re giving tools to build. Some people are OK with that, and they’ll have their vision for what teaching should be, too. I just can’t allow that.

Maybe the kids respect me because I walk in like I was born to do this shit, and I want to take them along with me.

Jose, who can’t / won’t / shouldn’t talk about the test until tomorrow afternoon …

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Resolve

2013-04-23T18:44:14-07:00

This morning, after a few sips of my coffee and getting ready for class, a cold sweat developed in the palms of my hand. I rubbed my hands a few times before I put the marker to the whiteboard, hoping the few examples of problems I do today serve less as a lesson and more as a fine tuning. Pacing the room 30 minutes before class made my feet ache, but I didn’t realize it until a few hours after, when my first three periods of class would be done.

Besides, tomorrow starts the Big Test, and the deluge of multiple-choice questions and extended-response is one that even the most hopeful of teachers and brilliant of students feel a little anxious about. Did I cover enough material? Did the material I cover have anything to do with what’s actually on the test? Will the conceptual questions dominate or will there be an even mix of conceptual and procedural?

More importantly, will all my kids have a good breakfast?

Will the one kid I know actually get to school in time to take it? Will the other one stop trying to go to the bathroom every period? Will the next one stop trying to make little noises, sharpen their pencil too often, or annoy the proctor, whoever it is? Will they have a chance to look over complementary, supplementary, vertical, alternate interior / exterior, and corresponding angles, or at least remember that, in this case, if they’re not equal, they probably add up to 90° or 180°?

Will my one student stop playing his faux-war games in favor of brushing up on some math? Will the other one actually try their absolute best, or think whatever they do is just good enough?

Do they not understand how well I want them to do on this thing? What am I saying? Do I even care about this stupid test? Is it really a measure of what they’ve learned this year or what they wanted them to learn and not learn? What if they were only one digit off? Do they have to conform to the state’s thinking to be good students? Good learners? Good people?

How harshly will they get judged by their superiors? By their parents? By their future high schools? Will they still feel OK about themselves as students after everyone keeps predicting that everyone won’t do very well?

Resigned to the idea that I can’t do much else from here, I wait for the deluge of news about this test, the inevitable errors, the omissions, the consternation from parents, the collective shaking of heads up and down New York State, the news reports from experts and professors talking about what teachers ought to do or haven’t done or can’t do or won’t do, and the hope that everyone would just shut the fuck up.

I’m trying to teach math here. All this other nonsense makes things harder to resolve.

Jose

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When It Comes To Testing, Kids Get Labeled Failures First

2013-04-22T19:30:11-07:00

In my new co-blog The Collaborateurs, I wrote a little bit about testing and race. Here’s a bit:

What’s sometimes missing from this side of the argument is that the effects for students is much worse than for teachers. Obviously, the teaching profession has a long way to go before we have the right working conditions and respect from society to make this profession more … professional. On the other hand, a few of the people who replied to my thoughts said that it’s teachers, and not students, who get labeled failures when they don’t do well.

What?!

How can we say that children don’t get labeled failures? At least most of us have a degree to fall back on, if not an advanced degree, and perhaps another job they can take up in case this job fail. We don’t want to leave, but if we have to, we’ll be OK.

Read the rest here. Like. Share. Thank you!

Jose, who wishes Mr. Vilson the best this week …

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Short Notes: Pearson Makes Money, Whether You Like It Or Not

2013-04-21T14:30:51-07:00

Chris Rock as Rufus in Dogma on Ideas

A few notes:

William J. Reese lets the world know that none of this testing business is new. Good read. [New York Times]
Pearson apologized for errors on the gifted and talented test. They get a stern warning, and get to sit in the corner for millions of dollars. (Commentary mine.) [GothamSchools]
I was asked to write why Michelle Rhee isn’t going to face jail time, but Dr. Beverly Hall, former head honcho of Atlanta Public Schools, might. Jersey Jazzman said what I might right here. [Jersey Jazzman]
A heartwrenching story about living in the memory of Hadiya Pendleton. [Chicago Now]
Chloe Angyal reports on punishments and suspensions. Worth noting: Black girls with disabilities are suspended at a rate sixteen percent higher than white girls with disabilities. Goodness. [The Nation]

How did we in the teacher unions create MichelleRhee? We were too intransigent, says Merrow. If we only had gone along with the corporate agenda of charter schools, testing everything that breathes, linking student test scores to teacher performance evaluations and doing away with tenure and seniority then we wouldn’t have created MichelleRhee. The weird thing is that I think we did go along with all those things.

Didn’t we?

- Fred Klonsky, on John Merrow’s hypothesis that it was partly the unions’ fault Michelle Rhee became so big. As if.

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The Stakes Is High For Assessment [Collaborateurs]

2013-04-18T18:14:41-07:00

De La Soul’s Stakes Is High

In my latest post at the new Collaborateurs blog (formerly known as Future of Teaching), I bring up a small group of people (including Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, David Johns) to task about assessment:

It’s not that I disagreed with him per se. While the argument he made was generic enough that everyone could agree, I felt the general tenor of his argument made it seem like teachers aren’t “in” on what he’s talking about. His argument hinges on the idea that the resistance to the current political climate stems from teachers not wanting to assess children. It’s a weird argument since I don’t know of a teacher who doesn’t want to find out what their students can do and already know, whether the assessment is teacher-made or otherwise.

Read more here. Let them know what you think. Thank you.

Mr. Vilson, who’s got a few more days until his own high-stakes assessment …

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Freestyle Week: Just Getting To The Test Is A Challenge [Common CorrrUGH]

2013-04-17T18:29:30-07:00

This week, I’m writing blog posts based on people’s submissions to my Facebook page right here. My second one is based on online friend Theresa DeVore’s suggested title, “How can we keep our compassion in this era of high stakes accountability? When told to make sure test scores are raised but in the classroom students are not motivated. I have had to personally remind myself that I teach children and not to become frustrated or angry at them.” Let’s go …

On normal days, I teach my more difficult class starting at 8am sharp.

OK, that’s not exactly true. It’s more that I start telling them to sit down, take out a pencil or something to write with, open up a notebook, get them to start the “Do Now,” wait for the daily pledge of allegiance and morning announcements to finish, and THEN get started.

Yet, that’s what I’m doing. The first few students trickle in with shuffling feet, a few outbursts, and the unwrapping of a few sandwiches from the delis across the street. I’d rather not choose between them having breakfast in my class so they could function properly or not having breakfast so they could disrupt everyone else’s learning.

I didn’t sign up for this, either. At least not explicitly.

Today’s New York State ELA test broke from our traditional schedule, letting me proctor 18 English Language Learners, many of whom I teach or have known from different school activities. Unlike my usual mornings, the lack of sound is deafening to an 80s baby used to a little din in his ear. The ELA test hung over their nervous heads for the first twenty minutes of the period. A little after the morning announcements, some administrators came to reassure them.

They left. The students looked at me. I looked at them. One of them blurted, “Now I’m even MORE nervous.”

While I’m not at liberty to discuss the proceedings of the ELA test, I can tell you that, afterwards, kids wondered why the hell they even came to school. They got that it was an important part of their promotional criteria, and they remembered how to write so they didn’t blame their teachers in the slightest. They did, however, feel like they could have given a better shot at passing the test. A couple of people even brought the idea of a portfolio for a final evaluation.

A few nodded. Does this make kids smarter than the test makers?

Because, really, one might make the case that math depends on fluency, meaning getting it right and getting it quick, whatever “it” is. However, reading and writing don’t have the same limitations in real life. There might be “deadlines,” but nothing like the 135 or so minutes we give students to finish an essay in response to a speech or a piece of literature they’re given. How does anyone “get” anything they’ve read when only given a few minutes to read it?

Then again, on testing days, the attendance rate is almost perfect in a school where it’s already 94% and above on most days. The fact that some of our students even make it to school on time encourages me to put my best foot forward, even when it feels like they’d rather stay outside, away from the rules, the uniforms, the tests, and the grades that, to others, often become reflections of the student as a person instead of the student as an academic performer.

These thoughts run through my mind while pacing back and forth not as math teacher, but as proctor for an exam I otherwise can’t stand. Some finished. Some didn’t. All of them became kids again shortly after I took the last booklet from the students in front of me. The mix of angst and prayer remained during their stadium-loud discussion about how they felt they did on the test with each other. After this is all over, I’ll tell them this doesn’t mean a thing about how much they’re worth, but it might be too late for them.

I observed their discussions from the front of the room, thinking this Common Core stuff is a lot more complex than the A, B, C, D answer sheet they’re given.

Mr. Vilson, whose got more of these to go …

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