Initial+Feelings+about+Teaching

Jeremy Chao

When I interviewed for the New York City Teaching Fellows, I remember being asked why I wanted to be a teacher. A fairly obvious question. I began by telling the interviewer that I had no self-delusions that I would step into the classroom and immediately change lives a la Michelle Pfeiffer in //Dangerous Minds//. I thought that by affecting a position of realistic expectations, of not being the starry-eyed dreamer stepping into the classroom, I would appear to be more level headed than my fellow prospective teachers.

Deep down, I thought that maybe it could be true. Maybe I could have an immediate impact. Maybe I could inspire students to quote Wilde and create witty bon mots. Maybe I watched //Dead Poets Society// too many times.

I believed that students would respect me as an unquestioned source of authority. They would think of me as the ultimate arbiter on all things educational and emotional. I would lecture and my students would dutifully hang on my every word. My example as a reader and writer would inspire my students to find their own voices. Naturally.

The schools I went to growing up were a bit of an exception to the normal rule. No one was ever suspended; in fact, disciplinary action of any kind was nearly unheard of. Every single child brought in their homework. And, most importantly, we all wanted to be at school. How could it be otherwise?

**From California to a New York City Classroom: A Reflection**


 * Dylan Houle**

Several years back, I was living in suburban California with my parents. I had graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in English over the winter and was enjoying the lazy life. I started dating a girl and got a retail job in the local factory outlets. I spent the summer nights riding bikes with the few high school buddies who had stuck around, and then getting drinks with them downtown. But the lazy life became the boring life, so come August, after seven months, I bought a one-way ticket to New York City and left behind my parents and, in many ways, my past.

In New York I was a complete stranger with no friends and no family, no job, no plan, no key. After a year living in Spanish Harlem waiting tables and interning at a now-defunct online magazine, and my dad asking me, “What are you //doing// out there?” I decided I’d get a real job. At that time, I’d been out of college going on two years and hadn’t put my degree (or any aspect of my higher education, really) to use. //So what do I want to do?// I’d ask myself. //What// can //I do?//

In high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Become a Teacher,” and I gave it the college try by tutoring in San Francisco’s public high schools, but I was ambivalent about the experience. Now, here in the City, I’d seen the ads for the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) on the subways and streets, and had even dated a girl who had been through the program. I applied at the same time I applied to an editing workshop in Denver, CO, and was accepted to both. I wrote the pro’s and con’s of each and, while I can’t recall the specifics, I know that I never listed “closing the achievement gap” or “making a difference” or “giving back to the community” under the pro’s for teaching. Instead, I wrote “salary” and “benefits” and “master’s degree.” Teaching, I’ve realized since, is altruism manifested, and my motivations for becoming a teacher were entirely selfish. Still, NYCTF won out and in June of 2008 I attended my first class at Fordham University.

Meeting the other members of my cohort was exciting, yes, but also intimidating. Some of them seemed like me, aimless wanderers who had stumbled into the career. Others were switching careers, and some were fresh from college with unquenchable zeal to teach Salinger and symbolism. Most were young, white and from the suburbs. We spent the summer loading our brains with educational theory and adolescent psychology and pouring over old and new young adult novels. After class we’d go to the local bar and I’d listen to them have long stimulating and idealistic conversations about the high standards they’d set and never compromise and the differences they’d make and how they’d never be like that one teacher they had in middle school that everyone hated. It was, quite frankly, exhausting surrounding myself with such auspicious people, but inspiring, too.

Mid-summer we were given various summer school assignments, at which we’d be working with 1 or 2 other fellows and a mentor teacher. My assignment was in Washington Heights, a Dominican neighborhood that I’d heretofore had no reason to spend much time in. Naturally, I was nervous. After all, the NYCTF stresses the fact that you’ll be working in high needs schools. To me, that meant badass children a la //Dangerous Minds// or //Stand and Deliver//. But, to my very pleasant surprise, the students were behaved, my mentor teacher was disciplined and organized, and my co-fellow, Mr. Twhigg, was supportive and friendly. The NYCTF specialist sent to advise us praised my classroom management skills and lesson plans. At the end of the summer training, I thought, //I can do this. This is// easy //.//

// Of course, what I didn’t know and no one had bothered to tell me, is that neither teaching summer school nor learning pedagogy in the Ivory Tower is comparable to teaching from September to June. One can draw many analogies to teaching, but the one I’d use for my first year-and-a-half is //War. // At various times I’d felt at war with my school’s administration, the union, the Department of Education, Fordham University, and, not least, the students. Before I stepped into the classroom as an autonomous teacher, I’d very little idea how much is expected and required of one //in addition// to the simple act of teaching. But even that, the process of transmitting knowledge and helping students think for themselves, I continually found out, isn’t nearly that simple. It’s muddied and complicated by hundreds of start-stop initiatives, unfounded theories, financial woes, and ever changing best practices. // The Handbook for New Teachers that we’ve compiled is meant to provide you, the new teacher, with a clear and rational exploration of what has worked for us, and in addition give you an objective presentation of what will be expected of you. The most important expectations, though, are the students’. You truly do have the opportunity to make a difference, to shape the course of hundreds of lives. In fact, the students expect you to, want you to, and, in some cases, need you to. So ask yourself, as I should’ve done, //Why do I want to be a teacher?// And keep asking yourself year after year.


 * From Weehawken to a New York City Classroom: An Unoriginally-Titled Reflection**


 * Michael Robert**

I spent three weeks with the New York City Teaching Fellows Program before I began summer teaching in July 2008. I always knew I’d become a teacher, but believed that a person should get his hands dirty before he stands in the front of a classroom. After writing for several newspapers, running a business, and authoring test prep material, I felt that I had done enough of that and looked forward to working at an inner-city school.

I’ll never forget the first morning, that transition from the air-conditioned high-tech classrooms in Lincoln Center to the sweltering, filthy subway stations in the South Bronx. I was placed at a middle school near Simpson Street, but I was given the wrong address. After walking in circles, I found the school next door to a small shop that butchered live chickens. The sidewalk out front was covered with chicken shit and it stank. Soon after I went inside, I was sent to work on the fifth floor. There was no air-conditioning. The classroom was dim, disorganized, and loud and the teacher was fanning herself in the corner.

There were about ten students in our summer school class and they were all there because they had failed English, math, or both subjects. The teacher told me that she was only certified to teach English and she didn’t know anything about math. Here was the person who was chosen to provide me with all the practical knowledge I would need throughout my first year of teaching, and she didn’t know how to find a common denominator. It didn’t matter anyway. After three days, she told all of us that she wasn’t being paid enough to come all the way from Connecticut and that’s the last time I ever saw her. She was replaced by another teacher who was overseeing several classes at once. So, in effect, it was just me and the kids. Crash course.

Naturally, we struggled at first. I didn’t know where anything was. And we didn’t have any books anyway. I worked around it by finding materials at the library and on the internet. Looking back, it’s not unsurprising that my first real challenge had nothing to do with education at all. The biggest challenge I faced was figuring out how to take away cell phones and ipods without causing a revolt in the classroom.

Some of these students were difficult. At first, some adamantly refused to hand over their phones and ipods. Because I didn’t have anyone holding my hand, I was able to find out what worked and what didn’t work on my own (a word of advice- making demands to middle school students doesn’t work). What worked for me was being honest with my students. I didn’t threaten them with punitive measures and didn’t talk down to them. I bluntly told them what they were required to do to receive credit for the class and explained that listening to music instead of doing their work would keep them from receiving the credit that they needed. Then I allowed them to come up with a system to keep digital music players out of the classroom until after the lessons were over. This allowed them to take ownership of the situation and it worked. They decided to create a box to keep their phones and ipods in that would be locked at the beginning of class and unlocked at the end of class. Students wrote their names on the board and the key to the lock was rotated among the students. It was their system and they respected it. They even decorated the box.

These students were less than eager at the beginning of the summer, but they came to class on time and they did their work. Once the lousy commute, feculent neighborhood, and indifferent teacher were out of sight, I began to focus on what actually mattered and what I learned about teaching during summer school was crucial. All of my students were capable of learning, but it was going to be up to me to figure out how I was going to get through to them.

**Jane Airhead: A not uncommon story of a new teacher's disillusionment (in progress)**
By Ivelisse Ramos

I can say with complete honesty that, on my first day of teaching, all of my expectations for myself and my students, my perceptions of them, and my philosophy of teaching were all overshadowed by one overwhelming sentiment: anxiety. For the entire day, as I met each new batch of freshmen, introduced myself, and listened to them introduce themselves to me, I felt as though I could pass out at any moment. Because of my diminutive stature, I wanted my new students to think I was tough. I knew that I needed their respect in order to be effective in the classroom; and I was terrified that I would lose my opportunity to do this if I didn’t make them understand that I was no-nonsense from the very first day.

I surveyed the halls that day and in the days to follow. I looked at the faces and read the names; and I thought that everything I had expected about what my students would be like was true. I thought they were just like me. Ninety five percent of my students last year were female (it’s not much different this year); about half were Hispanic; most lived in Morrisania--the South Bronx neighborhood surrounding the school. I am Latino; I am female; I spent much of my childhood in a neighborhood whose landscape and demographic is almost identical to Morrisania. Everything seemed all too familiar for me.

Because I saw so much of myself in my students, I assumed that I could draw heavily from my own experiences as an adolescent student. If I taught them how I was taught, held them to the same standards that I was held to, used the same texts that I was taught and loved at their age, then I would be a good teacher. I was warned by my colleagues that my vision was idealistic; but I thought that my enthusiasm could overcome the apathy that everyone told me I would surely face from my students. I figured I'd prove them all wrong by having my kids reading //Jane Eyre by// January.

It didn’t take very long for me to realize that my endeavor to recreate my own experience was a failure. Now, each time I even think to utter the words, “When I was in high school…,” I hear the voice of one of the best educators I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. “Never rely on autobiography,” Rick Levine said to me once. Levine served as the first of three acting-interim principals in my school following the removal (last March) of the principal that hired me. Because I saw that he was a man of integrity who truly cared about our kids, I trusted that he was speaking from experience--and it truly changed my experience as an educator and member of a school family.


 * Keep on Keepin' On: A Reflection**


 * David Brooks**

I quickly erased “F*** this school!” from the chalkboard upon entering the classroom I had been assigned to for the day. It was summer school in the South Bronx and it was my first day of student teaching as an NYC Teaching Fellow. I distinctly remember journaling before I left the classroom. I described the dirt and grit peripherally apparent in the classroom, the broken air conditioner, the stacks of test-prep books, and the fact that in the first conversation with my cooperating teacher, she had said “I don’t want to be here just as much as these kids don’t.” I also reflected on the paradox of how I felt. I was eager, yet felt a sense of foreboding. I was confident, yet intuitively knew I could barely know what I was up against. Just being inside that classroom was enough to tell me how systematically awry the NYC school district had become. But I had some of my own momentum on my side. I was motivated to learn how to become a great teacher, my sleeves were rolled up at my elbows, and I had all the energy in the world.

I knew being a Fellow would mean two years of working extremely hard. I knew I had a natural talent for being an example and leader for kids. I knew I believed every student had a right to learn and that an educated public meant a better democracy. I had a solid work ethic and a good attitude, yet of course the future remained vague and undifferentiated – until I started my first year teaching sixth grade ELA at a high-needs middle school in the South Bronx.

In the first three months of the school year I felt like I was moving in water. Everything took so much effort, it felt like I was always moving against the current, and at times I was in need of air to breathe. I followed the balanced literacy curriculum my school had required, spent Sundays and every weeknight planning (Friday nights spent passed out after dinner!). I tried my best to adopt my school’s strict discipline approach, spent three lunches a week and various times after school allowing my energy to be absorbed by meaningless detentions. I walked into meetings with giant bags under my eyes and a spinning head only to be yelled at (yelled at!) as part of the ELA department (all rookies) for not having enough student work and sticky notes up on bulletin boards. At first I internalized some failures harshly. Then I started to realize that I could only do so much, that some of my administrators were not only incompetent, they were unstable, and that much of the disruptive student behavior stemmed from myriad causes I was not going to completely alleviate. Yet I kept working so hard, and knew my fellow Fellows were going through much of the same. We’d show up to class on Thursday night haggard, angry, exhausted, and cynical. Cantankerously resigned to figuring out what coursework actually served a purpose. And most of us all just kept on keeping on. That’s what you do in your first year teaching – not to mention your first year teaching in a program where you are a full-time teacher taking graduate classes. That’s just what you do, you survive.**

Rocco Napoli


 * There were always whispers during my childhood. I tried to ignore them, but they would not dissipate. Everywhere I went I heard, "He's going to be a teacher when he grows up." The biggest problem was that I did not want to be a teacher. I wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, or even that ubiquitous childhood dream job, a firefighter. As I grew and gained experience, however, I recognized that the skills and talents I had supported the notion that I might actually succeed as a professional educator. Therefore, knowing this I did what what any prudent clear-minded person would do, I went to law school.

Needless, to say that career choice did not work pan out for me. I decided to hone in on my skills and talents and make a bold career changing move: I joined the NYCTF. I was ecstatic when I received the position. I could hardly wait to impart my knowledge and experience on young minds. As I endured the training, I felt empowered and that the whispering voices I had heard as a child were right. Then I entered the classroom.

I found myself face-to-face with a room full of angry, confused adolescents who thought that school was meaningless in their lives. I felt that I could not relate to this classroom of African-American and Latino students and that they could not relate to me. We might as well have been raised on different planets. I did not know how to get the students to quiet down long enough for me to talk them let alone teach them anything significant. I tried all of the tools and strategies the NYCTF training program advises. Nothing worked. I felt lost and angry and hurt. I wanted to quit. I wanted my law office back. I wanted to return the screaming group of bitter kids for the stacks and stacks of paper that previously ruled my life.

In the beginning, there was only darkness. When I could not take it anymore; when I thought I was hindering the education of my students, I gave up. But this is where the story changes. I gave up the act. I gave up trying to be a teacher. I realized that I was just as lost as my students and that I was still a student. After this epiphany, I began to study my students. I took the time to get to know and to let them get to know a part of me. I gave them opportunities to be themselves. I gave them choices and power over their education. I stopped pushing and bent like a blade of grass in the wind. Everything changed.

__Be Prepared for the Long Haul__** //Anthony Jones//

When I first decided to become a teacher I would often fantasize about the magical moments that I thought were possible in the classroom—the moments when you have every student’s undivided attention and are able to both inspire and instruct them at will. Even before I stepped in a classroom, I knew that these kinds of moments were probably too good to be true, yet I still allowed myself to indulge because deep down I thought that I would be able to become //that// teacher—the one that students remember for the rest of their lives as the guy who changed everything for him.

Of course, in many ways that thought was hopelessly naïve. The events of typical school day are often mundane and endlessly repetitive. The classroom lacks the drama of a Hollywood film. There are great moments, but they are often stuck between weeks of student indifference and classroom monotony. The school year lasts over nine months, and it can be a long first year, especially if you’re constantly waiting for magic to spontaneously occur.

Looking back, that expectation was my greatest mistake during my first year of teaching. I did not understand that a teacher plans methodically for an entire year—achieving bit by bit until they are able to witness a small, measurable change at the end. Patience is crucial and I was incredibly impatient. This led to feelings of frustration and insecurity. I didn’t think that I was achieving anything with my students because I was not seeing immediate results. I wanted dramatic moments of student enlightenment—I didn’t want to go over class rules and I certainly didn’t want to grade papers.

However, after talking to veteran teachers and maturing over the course of the year, I realized that I had to change my approach. The magic in teaching is a direct result of patient planning and methodical execution. There are no short-term solutions or quick fixes—teachers must be ready for the grind of a very long year; they must be prepared for the long haul if they truly want to succeed. Now, after a year of making mistakes, I am ready to embrace this philosophy myself.


 * __Positives, Negatives, and the Space Between

Rob Pulwer__**

I went to college in New Orleans, where my life centered on studying subjects I found interesting, enjoying the New Orleans bar and music scene, and working as a radio DJ. It was a good life, busy but not packed, and I don’t recall feeling stressed or as though I wouldn’t have time to get through my to-do list.

Now, I have trouble striking the balance that I did in college. I work long hours, mostly at school but occasionally at home. I have a terrible commute, which I justified to myself by telling myself that it is the only time I get to read. On a daily basis, I deal with difficult people in very public situations. I have had to compromise my own once-ironclad principles, again often very publicly. I have had to sacrifice some part of every weekend since the school year started to grade, plan, and communicate with parents. My head is often spinning by the end of a workday with all of the stuff I still need to do.

And yet, I have mostly enjoyed it. I have made my students laugh, they have done impressions of me in front of the whole class, they have bested me at basketball, I have beaten them at baseball trivia, I have written with them, had poetry slams with them, taken them to museums, and seen their contrite faces and genuine attempts to change the day after a call home.

I remember waiting a lot for these moments to occur. That was my first mistake; I was pushing too hard. I don’t remember enjoying September, as all of the jargon that was crammed into my head during training was forgotten as I experienced for the first time the things only a classroom teacher can experience. The summer school aspect of training, when the students were quiet, tired, and just wanted to do what they had to do to get out, had ultimately had little to no utility. The graduate classes I was taking seemed to have no real point, little if any useful material in them.

Ultimately, I had to be realistic. Good moments happen, bad moments happen, mundane moments fill the space between. That space between is the grind; I still have a lot of it to get through. I find, however, that when Kevin and Moussa are at the front of the class doing a rollicking impersonation of my sweeping gesticulations or when Tatiana tells me my poetry unit inspired her to start her own book of poetry, that the grind becomes just another space and the good moments, the ones you actually want to remember, the ones every prospective classroom teacher dreams of having, come to the forefront and make my first August to June on the other side, as it were, a little more bearable.

I have tried to focus on those good moments, and while I maintain a healthy cynicism towards everything, especially public schools, I realize that teaching here can be negative enough without my help. Teaching has been better once I started trying to focus on the good. I’m not perfect at it, not even really good, but I’m getting better, and that incremental change is all anyone can ever really ask.

Part I I was a terrible teacher for a good part of my first year; partially because I had taught before. I had drifted through my undergraduate years (stretched out to seven), loading up on creative writing classes and taking just enough history to distract me, but not enough for even a minor. The southern city I lived in then tolerated, even encouraged such slackness, what with cheap rentals and a thriving hospitality industry. Back on Long Island one summer, 23 and still two years from graduation, I laughed when a family friend suggest I move back and teach. Writers created; English teachers were failed writers that had given up. Cut to 2001; I was working for a major law firm when the towers came down. A rather hasty re-assessment of my priorities was in order and after a few months of dithering, I applied to the Harlem Harvard: the City College of New York, CUNY’s flagship institution. As I hammed it up in my MFA classes, arguing about the role of Raymond Carver’s editor and whether or not a narrator should use the word “exquisite” when referring to a meal, I achieved what was until recently my greatest vocational success: teaching Freshman comp.

It was easy. Students wrote essays. I read them. I told them why there essays worked or why they didn’t. If they didn’t show progress or signs of regression, I sent them to the writing center. My former students thought I was great. I was, actually. They were biologists and physists and they were from all over the world. I let them resubmit drafts until they go it right and was always a sucker for a hard-luck story; and these were not just stories. I had students who had left Bosnia in the middle of the night, or couldn’t go back to Sri Lanka. One student missed three weeks of class; when he returned, he breezily described going back to Korea to deal with the draft board.

Nothing gold can stay: working as adjunct instructor (“No, no, students, I am not a professor: Call me //Mr.// Dawson) paid slightly more then three decent bar shifts. I couldn’t sustain the dream job and raise a family in a nation that lacks universal health care, so when a found out a classmate in yet another creative writing class was an NYCTF, I started to entertain the notion of teaching in the DOE (D’oh!) I sent off the applications, took out a trusty lesson on the passive and active voice until I could compete it in 4’30” and casually checked my email every 17 seconds, once I found out my wife was pregnant. The first summer was ok; the classes were decent, though with a baby, summer school, classes, Fellows Workshop, and a bartending gig that kept cash coming in, I was starting to get creaky. Summer school was okay; I felt that one of the veteran teachers was a little rude to label all the summer school students “failures”, and that my Co-operating teacher’s admonishments to let him run the class and keep out of the way was not the most helpful to me, and my subsequent Fellow observers complaints to me that I was not teaching enough were unfair, considering the co-teacher was the one making that decision. But the children were ok: I mean, their was only ten of them assigned, and there was at least one child out at least once a day.

But there were deeper problems brewing, and had I taken a little more responsibility for my education as teacher that summer, I may have not made as many mistakes that first year. I thought competent teaching was the direct result of superior content knowledge; my technique would be polished and refined over the years, but I had what I needed to start.

My students gave me about two weeks before teeing off on me. They were spoiled, high-strung, entitled, obnoxious; two should have been classified as ED but their parents refused to have them assessed. The administration at my school was woefully unprepared to deal with this class, and offered little support. they vandalized the room, they cursed each other out at top volume, cut class, insulted me. I would spend most of my time trying to just get them to shut up for a few minutes, to start the lesson, but the chatter would start; first a murmur that rose in volume to conversational levels, then a full out free for all with kids out of their seats, throwing paper, books, combs, trying to walk out of the room...disaster. That was my eighth grade class; the seventh graders were angles. They worked well with me listened, shared their ideas, contributed. I would like to say I was a great teacher, and the 8th graders just didn't appreciate it. But its not that simple. I worked very hard, sometimes getting kicked out by the janitors at 9:00 p.m. This didn't translate into success in class, because I could not figure out how to make them accountable. I knew what to teach them, but didn't know how to teach them. Somewhere in the middle of the year, I got so used to their overwhelming negativity, and the positive returns from my younger class, I just didn't care anymore if my 8th graders learned or not.