Yours truly, Helpless in Harlem

As a Zankel Fellow, I have to post a blog entry to a group blog page fortnightly (I jump on any excuse to use this word) about my experiences. To give you an idea of some of the issues I'm grappling with there, as well as to save myself time typing something up about it later, here's what I posted today:

"Teaching reading is hard enough, but when the task is compounded by environmental hurdles like the ones at Heritage High School, it seems nearly impossible to be successful. Some cases are extreme: the bipolar girl who doesn't get the therapy she needs, the mother all the teachers are afraid to call because of how badly she'll beat her child for his bad behavior, the twins whose father refuses to allow them to be placed into the special education classes for which they so clearly qualify. Luckily, kids in these sorts of situations are in the minority at Heritage. Still, it's safe to say that education is not a priority for the vast majority of the student body. They demonstrate this by ignoring their teachers, texting or listening to music in class, coming to school late, and being chronically absent. They're clearly not a priority in some homes either; today, a girl's mother called her daughter during class and refused to wait until after class to talk to her. The girl sighed and took the phone into the hallway, her serene expression as she returned proving that this hadn't been any sort of emergency. As I observe Ms. P. administer the day's lesson, I wrack my brain for ways the reading curriculum could be improved. It's hard to concentrate, though; all I can think about are the constant discipline issues that plague just about every moment. I'm getting a taste of what it must feel like to be a motivated student in this classroom, really wanting to accomplish something but unable to concentrate.

"Interestingly, the tasks the students seem most to enjoy are also the most drudgerous. I would predict that worksheets onto which they regurgitate the few scraps of information they manage to hear over the din would be enough to make them give up on school completely. Yet the stimulating conversations Ms. P. tries to have with her classes cause them to tune out, and they stay that way until yet another dull worksheet has them hooked. Ms. P. says it's because the worksheets are easy and they like being right. Is participating in a discussion really all that difficult? Perhaps it is. I remember leading my students at a similar high school in what I'd think was a really meaningful discussion, only to have an absent student reappear the next day and be told that the class did "nothing" the day before. Ouch. We discussed this issue at length in one of the undergraduate education courses I took, and my professor pointed out the similarity between mindless schoolwork given in remedial classes and the low-level jobs graduates of those classes usually secure for themselves. It really is a chicken-and-egg question: does one really cause the other? Ms. P. said that kids who are taking reading classes in high school are pretty likely to be the ones with menial jobs down the road. The realist in me sees her point, while the idealist in me is outraged by comments like that."