Week 29

Schooooool's out out for summer! Schooooool's out for-ever! Well, maybe. Since our baby is due in September and Mike will be deploying for six to seven months, I'll be retiring as a teacher and assuming the role of stay-at-home mom, or, as I once heard it referred to as, domestic engineer. That has a nice ring to it. I say I'm retiring rather than taking a leave of absence because, when I do go back to work, I'm planning on taking up a different occupation. And, who knows? Maybe once I'm removed from teaching for a while, I'll decide otherwise, but for now, I'm thinking about getting my graduate degree in counseling. Although teaching can be very rewarding, I know that to be the kind of teacher I want to be would require round-the-clock time and attention. It's definitely not a job that can just be left at the door at 5:00. I'm not saying counseling would be an easy job by any means, it just wouldn't require the same type of energy and effort needed to manage large groups of students every day (and managing students in poverty requires a whole different kind of energy).

Poverty is its own animal within the education system and, speaking from experience, will drain every ounce of energy right out of a teacher. To give you a little bit of background on the school for which I worked, Terry Sanford, it's very unique in terms of demographics. Its location attracts some of the wealthiest students as well as the most poverty-stricken students, and very few in between. The wealthy students tend to end up in mostly honors and advanced placement (AP) classes, while the poor students tend to end up in standard classes.

Three of the five classes I taught were standard English 1 classes, and, at the end of the year, the demographics of the 66 students in those classes were as follows: 39 black (59%), 17 white (27%), 7 Hispanic (11%), 2 other (3%). The majority of those students had a family alert on file, which basically means they lived in either a one-parent household or with someone other than a parent (e.g. grandparent, aunt, brother, etc.), and lived in low-income environments. 7 of my 39 black students did not pass the end-of-course exam (2 of whom had learning disabilities), 1 of my 17 white students didn't pass (had a learning disability), and 3 of my 7 Hispanic students didn't pass (2 of whom were learning English as a second language, one of those two not having spoken a word of English at the beginning of the year). The diversity and varying learning capacities of these students make planning, preparation, and differentiation so critical in meeting their academic and emotional needs, which is overwhelming when they tend to require so much more individual attention than peers in healthy circumstances.

Poverty creates so many challenges in establishing an atmosphere for learning. Think how hard it can be for adolescents in healthy situations to focus. They've got boyfriends/girlfriends on the brain, Friday night's football/basketball game, after-school practice, gossip to share, etc. For the most part, though, they have adults at home who care about and are encouraging, vouching for, pushing for them to succeed. The adults in their at-home lives usually do everything in their power to help them be successful in high-school and post-secondary endeavors. Now, think about high-schoolers in poverty. Not only do they have normal adolescent issues like the ones listed above, they also may have very young, single or low-educational-level parents who face unemployment; they may face abuse and neglect, substance abuse, dangerous neighborhoods, homelessness, frequent mobility, and exposure to inadequate or inappropriate educational experiences. An awesome resource for the effects of poverty on teaching and learning is www.teach-nology.com.

One critical component of inadequate exposure to educational experiences these children face deals with vocabulary. Research from the U.S. Department of Education has shown that, by the age of three, high-income children hear an average of 30 million words, middle-income children hear an average of 20 million, and low-income children hear an average of 10 million (that's only 1/3 as many words as are heard in affluent households). When a student is unfamiliar with vocabulary, it makes comprehending academic texts much more difficult, and to get low-income students up to vocab-par with affluent students, it would require about 41 extra hours of out-of-home word exposure per week (www2.ed.gov).

Lots of public schools, including Terry Sanford, are making educational progress with these students, but schools that have done the best job have been those whose entire faculty dedicate round-the-clock attention to the student body. I watched a 60 Minutes piece on The SEED School of Maryland, a very successful urban public boarding school for disadvantaged students whose teachers are available until basically 10:00 every night for tutoring, whose students stay there in dormitory-like housing from 6th grade forward, and whose character-building curriculum focuses on eight specific values, including responsibility, respect, compassion, empathy, integrity, self-discipline, self-determination, and perseverence. 98% of the SEED's students are accepted to college. The school has proven that it's possible for disadvantaged children to succeed, but it definitely takes faculty who are willing to basically dedicate their entire livelihood to the students, and it requires removing the students from their home environments to completely refocus their set of values. The school's website is www.seedschoolmd.org.

I admire those teachers who are willing to dedicate that much time, but, at this point in my life, I definitely couldn't do it, especially with a baby. I do feel a little guilty about not sticking it out for just one more year because, when I was still in college working at 4 Olives Wine Bar, an older man who had taught in the heart of New York City's public school system (I think somewhere in the Bronx) sparked a conversation with me about teaching, specifically urban education. He made me promise to stick it out for at least three years. He said the stress of the job is extremely lessened after that. I think I would have stuck with it if Mike and I hadn't decided to start a family so soon, but I couldn't be happier with our decision and for the new experiences that will come with it. As I mentioned above, when I do go back to work, I think an occupation like counseling would give me a sense of contribution that would be more manageable in congruence with raising a family; it would also fit my personality more than teaching does. I'm definitely not naturally a super-extroverted entertainer, so teaching teenagers who really need that type of personality for motivation is extra draining for me. I'm much more comfortable with small-group or one-on-one guidance, and being a little removed from daily classroom behavioral management would give me more compassion as well. Being immersed in the classroom in the stressful culture of poverty definitely forces you to take a step back every day to remember the environment the kids face at home, or frustration can often overcome empathy. Hopefully with counseling, I'll be able to contribute even more in different ways!