Heritage High School

As an Arthur Zankel Urban Fellow, I've been assigned to put in ten hours a week working at Heritage High School in east Harlem.

Heritage is exactly two miles away from my dorm. I can walk there in about 40 minutes, or I can take a bus which takes about 35, so I've been walking and will continue to as long as the weather holds out. I go through Morningside Park and then along the perimeter of Central Park for about 90% of the time, so it's quite nice (and I save $10 a week on bus fare). I work with the reading teacher there on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, arriving around 9:00 and knocking off at 2:00.

The school occupies only the third and fourth floors of this building. The enrollment is 300-something; quite small, although it feels huge when all the kids are in the halls between classes. I like the kids a lot. They remind me of my students at McGavock. Ms. P*, the reading teacher, has around 15 students per class, giving her about 75 per day. Of those, only two are white. The school is mostly populated by Latino and African American students. Some are recent immigrants. They come from mostly from nearby low-income housing. Almost all of them read below grade level.

My students at McGavock were far from compliant, but compared to the kids at Heritage, they seem like angels. Not that the kids themselves are different, but the discipline and expectations at the schools are like night and day. On Wednesday, I watched a security guard in uniform urging a group of girls to get to class; none of the girls so much as looked at her, despite her firm tone and shiny badge. I watched a teacher chase a student down the hall, calling his name, only to be ignored as well. I watched a teacher give dire warnings about the consequences of using a cell phone in class, only to have one of her students actually get up and walk into the hall five minutes later to take a phone call. He paid no attention to her scolding, pleading, or threats. My kids at McGavock did not always ask "How high?" when I told them to jump, but they certainly hopped to it when security told them to get moving; they'd have landed themselves in In-School Suspension if they hadn't. It's no wonder the students at Heritage don't seem to be learning much.

Ms. P. spends a lot of time talking over her classes instead of insisting on quiet. To my surprise on the first day, though, once she was finished giving them instructions and turned them loose to get to work, a hush fell over the room as they began. They're a very task-oriented bunch, the type that loves worksheets and probably can't handle a discussion to save their souls.

My job is mostly to observe, although I jump in to help out whenever I'm needed. I partnered up with a few kids for a reading exercise they did the other day, and I tested two girls in phoneme awareness, sight word reading, and spelling as well. I like the kids, and I'm looking forward to being more involved and getting to know them. So far, I've had to do no prep work or assessment - Ms. P. takes care of all that, thank goodness. I hope it stays that way, and I have a feeling it will.

I've been assigned my tutee for my first practicum as well. I'm going to call him Ricky, again because we've been threatened with crucifiction if we leak any information about these kids' real identities. His mother speaks a fair amount of English, although Spanish is her language of choice. He's in 4th grade, and I'm going to meet with him for the first time on Tuesday, first to assess his status and then to start working on his reading skills. I'll see him twice a week for 80-minute sessions in our on-campus reading clinic for the rest of the semester. (One of the things I really love about TC is how many connections they have to the community. Although this one-on-one tutoring can cost a lot, if families can demonstrate financial need, they'll pay as little as $5 a week for the service. Apparently the waiting list is about a mile long. The clinic, called CEPS which stands for...something, is just one of a myriad ways TC has us out there with our sleeves rolled up, putting to practice what we learn.) A lot of the girls in my program are pretty nervous about getting started, but I'm not especially, perhaps because I've done quite a lot of tutoring before, or perhaps because I just can't seem to be intimidated by a 9-year-old.

*To protect the innocent, I'm not going to use her real name, nor will I use any students' real names if I refer to them individually in future blogs. Normally, just for fun, I'd concoct outlandish pseudonyms for them, but since their real names are already pretty exotic, I'll have to call them things like Stuart and Mary.