I've been missing the forest for the trees. The everyday hustle and bustle spreads out its branches in every direction. Children swing from them like monkeys. I trip over the knotted roots as I run from class to class, making photocopies, caring for the sick and the merely hypochondriac (the stomachache that appears faithfully each day at English-reading-time and disappears miraculously for recess and computer period).
But today I'll slow down to assess the forest. There is no other way to put it: the school has undergone a miraculous change over the past year. My only regret is that I didn't test any of the children when I first arrived, because I would love to clearly quantify what I now can only express in somewhat vague terms. But at that time I had no idea of what was possible or that I would stay for longer than a year.
This is what I found in June 2010.
No one had ever heard of phonics. Children spelled the word before reading it: C-A-T is cat, D-O-G is dog. But all too often, you heard: D-O-G is cat. The children were simply memorizing the words and had no concept of letter sounds. Fifth-graders didn't know what sound the letter "b" made.
Children had very limited access to books. We had one child out of 180 who read chapter books for pleasure. Most children had never read a book all the way through. Our older children read perhaps four years below grade level.
I walked into fourth grade on my first day here and found the children working on single-digit addition. I thought that I must be in the wrong room. Was it first grade? The (new and fabulous) teacher informed me that, no, I was in the right place. It just happened that no one seemed to have been taught anything in about two years in math.
Some of the teachers were hitting the kids. One teacher hit Joseph so hard that he bled on his head. Another teacher was making the kids hit each other as a punishment for giving a wrong answer.
Some of the third-graders couldn't read anything, but no one seemed to know this. There were so many problems that it took me a while to figure it out myself. The teacher merely lectured (sat in her chair and shouted above the rest of the cacophony). I don't think she had the foggiest notion about who could or couldn't read. One child could only read "the" and "and."
Oh yeah, all the teachers sat while teaching. Try teaching second grade while leaning back in your plastic chair.
While a first-grade teacher was away on maternity leave, a housemother with no skills was covering the class. Her students spent most of the day coloring the floor with sidewalk chalk.
The Social Science teacher didn't understand key concepts in the book. He asked a 9th-grader what "feudalism" meant. The best definition the class could come up with was "the king and his people." When I asked the teacher to explain it again, he replied, "Ma'am, I do it tomorrow." I reminded him that the following day was Saturday. "Yes, ma'am, I do it Monday."
Did I mention that the English teachers didn't speak English?
To be continued with: where we are now
