Anyway, it was defeated Wednesday when it only got 52 of the 60 votes needed to proceed with debates in the senate. For shame, all the senators who voted against this. Please explain to my fourteen year old star math student how she should return to Ecuador (to live with whom, I wonder, since her family is here) rather than attend college here where she has worked hard and achieved real academic successes.

Here’s the article from the times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/washington/25immig.html?ex=1351051200&en=7b4a0e20f0aced7f&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

I’m also including an editorial by Lawrence Downes about the word “illegal” and how pernicious it is in the context of immigration debates. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/opinion/28sun4.html?ex=1351224000&en=f410db8004fe520b&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

I would really like to get one of these t-shirts for “dress down” days at my school, my one-woman response to those STOP SNITCHING t-shirts that were everywhere two years back.

Every dress down there were a couple of students wearing on of these:

But apparently it’s a nation wide phenomenon. Here is a stop snitching sign from Seattle. But is this ironic stop snitching? How can we know?

And in case you were still debating whether or not to continue snitching, this shirt might clear things up for you.

I mention this phenomenon as a follow up to what I was talking about in my last post; about losing authority via deans or administrators. I’ve had several students to tell me (and other teachers at my school) to stop snitching over the past few years, which, to me, says that they know what the score is. They know who wields the big guns. It’s frustrating because that’s the moment you know that they don’t see you as the authority figure (discipline wise) that perhaps you want to be seen as. Or perhaps you don’t?

You can order the DVD here: http://www.chalkthefilm.com/#/dvd/

I actually caught myself saying, “That’s highly inappropriate!” the other day, while listening to another teacher unload about his day.

“I mean, I wrote him up!” Seeing those words spoken in that trailer really reminds me how futile the “write up” is, at least at my school. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to teach at a school that had meaningful consequences. Suspension just doesn’t work for students who would rather be at home anyway, who feel like they don’t have anything to lose by getting suspended.

I really resent all the times my faculty have been told, “When you need to have an administrator handle your discipline problems for you, you’ve lost authority in your classroom.” Another good one is, “You should not be relying on a dean to do your job for you!” As hard as it is for the school to create meaningful consequences, it is even harder for the classroom teacher, who, through whatever breakdown in communication between the “write up” and the astronomically overworked dean (of discipline) , doesn’t even have suspension as a last resort, to establish meaningful consequences and use them effectively. That snarky piece of wisdom is not what a first year teacher needs to hear, especially not in response to a cry for help in the emotionally exhausting (and often generally baffling) realm of classroom discipline.

However, there is absolutely truth in that statement. It means something totally different to send a piece of paper off to an office (where the time it takes to file and process makes any resulting punishment) than it does to call a parent yourself (if you have the time), or even just speak to the student after class. I’m often amazed at how effective this is. It’s like I forget. In fact, I do forget. I forget to ask Back Talking Student to stay for a moment at the end of class because at the end of class I am frantically trying to make sure all the students get the homework, or she slips out the back while I am making sure all the calculators have not been robbed of their batteries before class is dismissed and before I think to call her back.

But when I remember, it feels really good. I’m not saying it works. I’m not saying the student will behave, but it does something. On Thursday I asked Spitfire McBacktalk herself to stay after. She was reluctant at first, but ultimately stayed, and I just asked her, “What the heck happened today?” (It was a rhetorical question: we had gotten into a very loud–on her part–tiff when I asked her and several other students to quiet down, but she only heard her own name being called… because she had been talking too loudly to hear me say the other students’ names.) She gave me an embarrassed look, the look I’m sure parents wish they could receive after their three year old has finished his temper tantrum in the aisle of the grocery store, and we had a little moment. On the one hand, oh, whatever, she came in the next day out of dress code and threw another temper tantrum about how she wasn’t going to put her shirt on. But on the other hand, that conversation was six times more effective than another sheet of paper in a folder in the dean’s office would be. (Not to say the sheet of paper won’ t end up their too, but now it’s just follow up, not the great white hope for discipline.) And on that same hand, we were on peaceful terms when she left the classroom, which, call me a hippie, is better than the alternative.

I went to the biggest time waster of a professional development on classroom management two summers ago, and the nugget that I took from those many hours surrounded by other teachers with bad classroom management was that it doesn’t matter what that you can never give up. You may not have to power to suspend. Hell, you may not even be able to remove a student who is out of control and cursing at you or threatening you because there is some bigger crisis going on somewhere else in the school at the same time. But you can’t let it go. You have to do something. If a student refuses to stay after class, track them down during your next free period and pull them out of their class for two minutes. Even if they roll their eyes the whole time, and even if it is clear that they really don’t give a rat’s ass what you are saying, at least you demonstrated that SOMETHING happened as a result of their bad behavior, that you cared enough not to let it go.

The rest of this excerpt explains the context in which these lies are being told.

Top Military Recruitment Lies

By Aimee Allison and David Solnit, Seven Stories Press
Posted on September 20, 2007, Printed on September 24, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62945/

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War and Build a Better World published by Seven Stories Press, August 2007. Reprinted here by permission of publisher. Copyright © 2007 Aimee Allison and David Solnit

Top military recruitment facts

1. Recruiters lie. According the New York Times, nearly one of five United States Army recruiters was under investigation in 2004 for offenses varying from “threats and coercion to false promises that applicants would not be sent to Iraq.” One veteran recruiter told a reporter for the Albany Times Union, “I’ve been recruiting for years, and I don’t know one recruiter who wasn’t dishonest about it. I did it myself.”

2. The military contract guarantees nothing. The Department of Defense’s own enlistment/re-enlistment document states, “Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay allowances, benefits and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces REGARDLESS of the provisions of this enlistment/re-enlistment document” (DD Form4/1, 1998, Sec.9.5b).

3. Advertised signing bonuses are bogus. Bonuses are often thought of as gifts, but they’re not. They’re like loans: If an enlistee leaves the military before his or her agreed term of service, he or she will be forced to repay the bonus. Besides, Army data shows that the top bonus of $20,000 was given to only 6 percent of the 47,7272 enlistees who signed up for active duty.

4. The military won’t make you financially secure. Military members are no strangers to financial strain: 48 percent report having financial difficulty, approximately 33 percent of homeless men in the United States are veterans, and nearly 200,000 veterans are homeless on any given night.

5. Money for college ($71,424 in the bank?). If you expect the military to pay for college, better read the fine print. Among recruits who sign up for the Montgomery GI Bill, 65 percent receive no money for college, and only 15 percent ever receive a college degree. The maximum Montgomery GI Bill benefit is $37,224, and even this 37K is hard to get: To join, you must first put in a nonrefundable $1,200 deposit that has to be paid to the military during the first year of service. To receive the $37K, you must also be an active-duty member who has completed at least a three-year service agreement and is attending a four-year college full time. Benefits are significantly lower if you are going to school part-time or attending a two-year college. If you receive a less than honorable discharge (as one in four do), leave the military early (as one in three do), or later decide not to go to college, the military will keep your deposit and give you nothing. Note: The $71,424 advertised by the Army and $86,000 by the Navy includes benefits from the Amy or Navy College Fund, respectively. Fewer than 10 percent of all recruits earn money from the Army College Fund, which is specifically designed to lure recruits into hard-to-fill positions.

6. Job training. Vice President Dick Cheney once said, “The military is not a social welfare agency; it’s not a jobs program.” If you enlist, the military does not have to place you in your chosen career field or give you the specific training requested. Even if enlistees do receive training, it is often to develop skills that will not transfer to the civilian job market. (There aren’t many jobs for M240 machine-gunners stateside.)

7. War, combat, and your contract. First off, if it’s your first time enlisting, you’re signing up for eight years. On top of that, the military can, without your consent, extend active-duty obligations during times of conflict, “national emergency,” or when directed by the president. This means that even if an enlistee has two weeks left on his/ her contract (yes, even Guard/Reserve) or has already served in combat, she/he can still be sent to war. More than a dozen U.S. soldiers have challenged “stop-loss” measures like these in court so far, but people continue to be shipped off involuntarily. The military has called thousands up from Inactive Ready Reserve — soldiers who have served, some for as long as a decade, and been discharged. The numbers: twice as many troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan per year as during the Vietnam War. One-third of the troops who have gone to Iraq have gone more than once. The highest rate of first- time deployments belongs to the Marine Corps Reserve: almost 90 percent have fought.

Counterrecruitment for a better world

Ready to create a truly grassroots, people powered movement? Anti-war activism is changing. The familiar sights and sounds of large protests are giving way to quieter, but far more resonating, one-on-one work in classrooms, career centers, and communities. Whenever you hear people decry the lack of large-scale protest in the United States, even as the latest polls show more than 60 percent of people are opposed to the current war in Iraq, remember that the model for effectively challenging war is taking a different shape.

People from all walks of life are finding inspiration and success in working locally to educate students and mobilize against military recruitment where it happens. We can see counterrecruitment asserting itself as a viable movement as independently organized actions in Seattle, Austin and Los Angeles contribute to a national context in which public schools around the country limit military recruiter access, a huge success by any measure. Schools and communities are now considering deeper questions about the increasing militarization of our culture and recognizing the need for schools to teach and weave peace into the minds and aspirations of our children. We believe that 100,000 marching one day every six months is not as effective as 1,000 people talking to students every day.

In January 2006 the National Security Advisory Group, which includes former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, issued a report entitled “The U.S. Military: Under Strain and at Risk.” The report predicted a major recruiting crisis, pointing out that fewer than needed recruits, as well as first-time enlistees, could result in a “hollowing” and imbalance in the Army.

The fact is, at the end of 2005, the active Army fell 6,627 recruits short of its annual goal of 80,000. In addition, the Army Reserve fell 16 percent behind its recruiting target for the year, and the National Guard 20 percent short of its annual goal. Today approximately 9,000 soldiers are not permitted to leave the service because of “stop-loss” orders, which retain soldiers on active duty involuntarily after their period of enlistment is complete. Another 2,000 soldiers have been involuntarily recalled after leaving active Army service.

Despite this compulsory service, the Army Reserve has trouble achieving its target numbers. After the 2005 recruiting disaster, the military pulled out all stops in an effort to “make quota” in 2006. Army brass replaced the Army Recruiting Command’s top officer in October 2005 with Stanford-educated Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick. “A lot of concerns, I think, that the parents and applicants have are about Iraq and Afghanistan,” Bostick told the Tampa Tribune in October 2006. They also replaced Leo Burnett, their lead public relations agency, who created the “Army of One” campaign, with McCann-Erickson, who after a $200 million contract and year of research came up with “Army Strong” as the new recruiting slogan.

In their comprehensive new strategy, the military added 1,200 new recruiters and spent millions on a public relations blitz that included TV ads, video games, websites, cell phone text messages, helicopter simulators in the back of 18-wheelers, internet chat rooms, sports and public event sponsorships, and even ads on the ticket envelopes for Greyhound Bus lines (“This ticket will take you to where you are going, but the National Guard will take you to where you want to be”).

The Army also increased its relationship with NASCAR, the National Hot Rod Association and the Professional Bull Riders Association. The plan calls for recruiters to visit schools and malls a few days before an event, offering free tickets and the chance to meet famous drivers or bull riders.

In addition, the military dramatically lowered its educational and test standards and other qualifications. The U.S. Army recruited more than 2,600 soldiers under new, lower-aptitude test standards in 2006. They allowed neck and hand tattoos, increased the allowable age to 42, increased the enlistment bonus up to $40,000 and offered $1,000 to soldiers who persuaded friends to sign up. They have granted an unprecedented number of “moral character” waivers; around 17 percent of the first-time recruits, or about 13,600, were accepted under waivers for various medical, moral or criminal problems, including misdemeanor arrests and drunk driving. But even that was not enough to “meet quota.”

So, they also lied. From 2004 to 2005 the Govern ment Accounting Office found 6,600 allegations of recruiter crimes. Incidents included concealing medical information that would disqualify a recruit; making false promises and helping recruits get around test requirements. In 2006 the pressure was even greater, and seen in an ABC television investigation from Nov. 2, 2006, that sent undercover students into ten recruiters’offices in New York and New Jersey.

The program reported that more than half of the recruiters were “stretching the truth or even worse, lying.” They found “nearly half of the recruiters who talked to our under-cover students compared everyday risks here at home to being in Iraq.” A Patchogue recruiter was caught saying. “You have a 10 times greater chance of dying out here on the roads than you do dying in Iraq.”

It also reported that “some recruiters told our students if they enlisted, there was little chance they’d go to war. One recruiter told a student his chances of going to war were “slim to none.”

After all this, the military claims to have met its 2005-2006 goals of recruiting 80,000 people to fill its ranks. It has provided no independent verification of its alleged statistics, but it has launched a major public relations effort to counter the bleak news from the year before.

The Armed Forces Journal reported in March 2006 that recruiters “face an increasingly reluctant pool of potential recruits, opposition from anti-war protesters and perennial bureaucratic inefficiency in the recruitment system.” Scrambling in all of these ways to meet their numbers, the Army, more than ever before, needs fresh blood — recruits straight out of high school.

Is counterrecruitment just a way to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Counterrecruitment is not simply a tactic to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a broad-based, strategic approach to challenging the roots of unending war and militarization. The full potential of a progressive peace and justice movement will only be realized when there is an observable link between efforts to stop war and efforts to address inequality in class, race, ethnicity, immigration status and other socioeconomic factors that determine who ends up being sacrificed in our government’s wars.

As recent statistics demonstrate, there are limits to how far Bush and the neocons can go with their plan for global hegemony when the resources for it are running dangerously low. Fortunately, the peace movement is in a position to further diminish those resources. If we apply ourselves to countering military recruitment, it is in our power to both limit the government’s capacity to wage new wars and build a stronger base to challenge the nation’s spending priorities. Simply put, counterrecruitment is a strategic and effective way to challenge the pro-war, anti-education priorities of our government.

War and empire

As U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler put it in 1933, “There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.”

Racket is one term, empire is another to describe why the U.S. government spends $441 billion a year on a military of over two and a half million soldiers (2,685,713 with reserves), and why it has more than 700 military bases spread across 130 countries with another 6,000 bases in the United States and its “territories.”

Understanding what military recruits are used for in the world, understanding war, and creating viable alternatives to both are essential if we want to break out of the deadlock of militarism. Since the collapse of the “other superpower,” the Soviet Union, “empire” has become a common term among both critics and advocates referring to the unparalleled U.S. system of economic, political, cultural, and military domination of the world. The New York Times Magazine ran a 2003 cover story titled “The American Empire (Get Used to It.)” describing the United States as a reluctant but benevolent global empire. While Bush claimed in his 2004 State of the Union speech, “We have no ambitions of empire,” months later Karl Rove snapped at a New York Times reporter: “‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Some see the start of American empire in the wake of Second World War or after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Others trace it back to the invasion and conquest of numerous indigenous nations in North America from the 17th century onward, the development of a slave economy with tentacles reaching into Africa, and the 1848 seizure of Mexico’s northern half, which is now the Southwest. Another wave of aggression abroad began in the 20th century.

Smedley Butler describes the U.S. military’s role in this emerging empire: “I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

The modern-day version of “war as a racket” and gangsterism for capitalism can be seen in the occupation of Iraq. Critics call the U.S. war in Iraq a failure, but behind the scenes, it has established several permanent U.S. military bases, allowed corporations like Halliburton to make billions from unfulfilled contracts to reconstruct war-destroyed schools, hospitals, power systems and infrastructure, and is in the final process of turning control of Iraq’s vast oil resources over to war profiteers such as Chevron.

The U.S. occupation’s “Provisional Authority” under Paul Bremer also laid the legal groundwork for much of the Iraqi economy to be privatized and then taken over by U.S.-based corporations. Thus Butler’s racket and its toll abroad. What does it cost us at home?

The price of two and a half million soldiers, aircraft carriers and military bases across the planet, and a massive array of weapons of mass destruction is high. It saps resources for healthcare, education and housing. It also requires keeping the domestic population in check through propaganda and the corrosion of civil liberties and human rights. Stifling domestic dissent, criminalizing immigrants, and torturing and illegally imprisoning citizens of other nations have all been stepped up under the guise of the so-called War on Terror.

In his book The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, Ivan Eland writes, “Intervention overseas is not needed for security against other nation-states and only leads to blowback from the one threat that is difficult to deter — terrorism.

In short, the U.S. empire lessens American prosperity, power, security and moral standing. It also erodes the founding principles of the American Constitution.” As we write this book (late 2006) nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers and over 200 soldiers from other occupying countries have been killed in Iraq, at least 20,895 U.S. troops have been wounded, and a new Johns Hopkins report puts the number of violent Iraqi civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion at more than 600,000.

War’s side effects are bleak for the environment and human society; its direct and intended effect is mass death. Down the current road of imperial dominance and warfare at will, the use of weapons of mass destruction is nearly inevitable, with apocalyptic consequences.

But there are alternatives to the expense of maintaining a military and the atrocity that is war. One that has been developed over the last 50 years is called social defense. Brian Martin, Australian scholar and author of Social Defense: Social Change, describes social defense as unarmed “community resistance to aggression as an alternative to military defense. It is based on widespread protest, persuasion, noncooperation and intervention in order to oppose military aggression or political repression. There have been numerous nonviolent actions, to be sure, some of them quite spectacular, such as the Czechoslovak resistance to the 1968 Soviet invasion, the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in 1986, the Palestinian Intifada from 1987 to 1993 and the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989.”

Imagine if even a fraction of the resources put into military defense were available for the general population to organize social defense.

Replacing global empire with domestic democracy and well-being requires redefining democracy — pursuing ways to shift decision making and power from corporations and government to “we the people.” It’s not enough just to oppose something.

We need to envision, educate about, and then actually organize alternatives to the system of empire and war, to corporations, and to the lack of democratic participation in decisions that shape our lives and communities. What begin as pragmatic actions, like keeping youth from joining the military, are most effective when they have as their end the transformation of the root causes of war, undemocratic governance, and injustice. Every immediate action, when understood and explained as part of a bigger picture, can be another step toward this longer-term goal of getting to the roots of our problems and building a better world.

Today’s movement

Arlene Inouye, who began her activism during Vietnam, continues her work today in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she founded the Coalition Against Militarism in our Schools (CAMS). Her support of a bright, young student named Sal illustrates how counterrecruitment works simultaneously to resist war and build alternatives.

Arlene says, “Sal is a bright JROTC student who lacked support for success in school and beyond. His father was deported to Mexico about two years ago, and he was told by the military recruiter that if Sal enlisted, his father could come back to the United States. His father begged him to enlist after high school. Sal later learned that the military was lying and that he couldn’t help his father come home.”

During the spring of 2006 there were student walkouts and marches supporting immigrant rights throughout Los Angeles. Arlene explains, “The activism around immigrant rights helped Sal to see the hypocrisy of fighting in a military that is being sent to the border and has been reported to shoot down undocumented people who try to cross.

“During a rally, Sal took off his JROTC uniform in front of the press, encouraging other students to resist war and drop out of JROTC. Unfortunately, most won’t because of concerns about their grades. This student who is articulate and smart is failing school and lacks the support he needs. I have mobilized help for him at the school and call him regularly. He just got back from a peace camp given by our partner organization, and that was a powerful experience for him.”

Creating a supportive community to enable Sal’s dissent, and help him forge an alternative path, is at the heart of counterrecruitment. As demonstrated by Sal’s example, the best movement is as much about envisioning and building a new world as it is about resisting the injustices of this one.

For more information on Army of None, visit the website.

Army veteran Aimee Allison has led school and community counterrecruitment activities over the last decade. David Solnit is the editor of Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. For more information on Army of None, visit the website.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/62945/

Although this case involves a university, it still seemed worth mentioning because it demonstrates how much the military industrial complex relies on educational systems at all levels, for both research and recruits.

I try to remain on the lookout for good mainstream articles about teaching and education, eager to find someone with new and interesting ideas about how to improve this broken system that we (the teachers, students, and even administrators) are all struggling within, but more often than not I’m left rolling my eyes, like I did repeatedly while reading this New York Times Op-Ed piece by Bob Herbert.

Let’s begin with an apocryphal anecdote, shall we? The author encountered a young man living in Washington D.C. who cannot name the current vice president. Yes, that is horrifying, and yes, I can trump that (but I won’t, because it’s tacky), and no, neither that anecdote nor any I could tell is a good place to start an article about what to do about education in this country. Hell, why not just quote one of those bits from the Tonight Show where Jay Leno asks people on the street to identify well known political figures and we laugh at them when they can’t?! God, Americans are so stupid!

(I heard Slavoj Zizek give a lecture once in which he scolded American film students who love to compare the base American cinema to the more artistically sophisticated films of the rest of the world. Although I forget the graphic details (which he, of course, did not spare us), Zizek informed us that the most popular film in Europe that summer had involved a lengthy segment involving scatological humor, that crappy American cinema cannot simply be compared to Bergman films. Europe makes a lot of garbage movies too.)

Of course, I am not defending Americans. We are stupid. We all know it. For God sake, we take pride in it. We think being smart is gay. But if you start an article on education reform with a cheap anecdote at which we can all cluck our tongues, you’re already losing me.

I think I’m just being petty, however, because I really wanted to like this article. Herbert makes some really important points. For example, he notes that in today’s global economy, “A one- or two-point gain in fourth grade test scores here or there is not meaningful in the face of that overarching 21st-century challenge. What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years.” Thank you! Yes. Well said.

He goes on:

It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

“Regrettably,” said Professor Kane, who has studied this issue extensively, “we’ve never taken that research fact seriously in our teacher policy. We’ve done just the opposite.”

Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.

Yes, I agree with you that there are good teachers and bad teachers, effective teachers and ineffective teachers. And, yes, I whole-heartedly agree that the credentials earned through bullshit, half-assed Masters of Education programs like I one I was in are not useful indicators of teacher quality. But you lose me here:

New forms of identifying good teachers and weeding out poor ones — by carefully assessing their on-the-job performance — have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.

This can be done without turning the traditional system of teacher tenure on its head. Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can usually be identified, if they are carefully observed in their first two or three years on the job — in other words, before tenure is granted.

This idea makes me uneasy for two reasons. First, a lot of teachers don’t actually hit their stride until their third year. Give them a break. Even the best teachers probably ruined their first batch or two of students. Second, any nontenured New York City public school teacher can tell you what this means on the ground: teachers will be judged according to very narrow criteria that likely are not going to relate to how effective a teacher actually is in the classroom. It means more micromanagement. Does the teacher have a word wall? A “parking lot”? Is there a mini-lesson? Is the “AIM” written in the form of a question? Is it written in terms of an objective for what students will be able to demonstrate at the end of a lesson? No, not what they will know, what they will be able to demonstrate? Whatever “scientifically based research” (thanks, NCLB!) is hot at the moment is what administrators (who are likely as incompetent and inexperienced as the teachers they are trying to evaluate, as well as being out of touch with their own pedagogy) will be forced to use to micromanage teachers. Hell, even good ideas start to become meaningless when they are mandated. Does the teacher have a log of parent phone calls? Has the teacher kept a record of making a “good” call home for every two “bad” calls home? Has the teacher had a heart-to-heart with a student at least twice this week?

So, what is the solution to the bad teacher problem? How do we get rid of the guy who reads the paper at his desk instead of teaching the kids health? How do we make sure that the angry, screaming teacher or the teacher who shames the students, or the racist teacher has no place in the public school system? How do we prevent him from ever getting hired? How do we cut her off at the pass when she thinks, “Teaching: that sounds like the career for me”?

I don’t have the answers, but I’m sorry to say that it looks like Bob Herbert doesn’t either. Damn it. One can hope.

I arrived at 7:30 this morning, a half hour earlier than I usually arrive because I was not teaching today. No, instead I was proctoring the Advanced Placement Spanish Language exam, a favor, of sorts, asked of me by my school’s overworked, exhausted testing-coordinator. A sub was called into to cover all my classes, so that I wouldn’t have to proctor the four hour exam in the morning and then have to teach two classes in a row in the afternoon.

And thank goodness the sub was called, because I proctored that exam from 7:50 this morning until 2:40 this afternoon. No lunch, no break, no bathroom. Because we don’t have a language lab, our students could only record the speaking portion of the exam five at a time, on five tape-recorders, in five corners our “library” (a small, unmanned, classroom full of unread books to which students have limited access). For this reason, the speaking section of the exam, which should have taken 25 minutes, took two hours. And although the instructions told them to speak loudly and clearly, I had to tell them to murmur into the tape recorders so that their voiced would not be audible on each other’s tapes.

Miraculously, the only interruption during these near seven straight hours of testing was another teacher asking me if I could cover his co-teacher’s after-school class so that she could be available to participate in a special education student’s annual review. How could I say no to that? Because that’s the thing, it’s not just me: almost everyone at my school wears six different hats. Almost everyone at my school works more than they would have to at a larger school, a more established school, a school that served students with less urgent needs.

These particular challenges of working at a new, small school became all the more clear after the after-school class, when I sat with the hiring committee for three and a half hours, interviewing six candidates for various teaching positions that have opened up in our school for next year. As we interview candidates, especially strong candidates, we have to sell the school, to a certain extent. Come work at our school, where you will help build a school from scratch. Come work at our school, where you will be able to run with whatever good idea you have, because we need good ideas, as well as the hard work necessary to implement them. Come work at our school, where you will see how hard it really is to make things work the way you want them to, the way you would want them to work at your own children’s schools.

Tom Moore, in his 1/29/07 Op-Ed piece for the New York Times called “Classroom Distinctions,” criticizes the trope of the teacher/martyr that reappears in media representations of teaching professionals.

Moore writes, “While no one believes that hospitals are really like ”ER” or that doctors are anything like ”House,” no one blames doctors for the failure of the health care system. From No Child Left Behind to City Hall, teachers are accused of being incompetent and underqualified, while their appeals for better and safer workplaces are systematically ignored.

Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.”

What frustrates me is that it doesn’t have to be that way. I believe you can be a committed, effective, and passionate teacher without running yourself into the ground. Indeed, I believe we are better teachers when we are not forced to play the role of social worker, sexual-health educator, college-counselor, pseudo-administrator (a great deal of the responsibility, a small portion of the authority, none of the pay), testing coordinator, hall monitor, statistician, or pregnancy crisis counselor. Which is not to say that teachers don’t enjoy wearing all those different hats. Lord knows I do when I am able. I’m glad I’m able to help in different ways. What’s hard, however, is the sheer quantity of hats, the endless nature of the work that needs to be done. And there is money and infrastructure that could be in place to help us do our jobs.

It would be nice to get paid to do the after-school program I do for two hours every week. Hey, maybe if my school paid teachers to run after school programs, my school would have more of them! Maybe if a second substitute teacher had been hired so that I could have eaten lunch today and gotten a rest before the hiring committee meeting, and the other teacher who was pulled out of her class to proctor could have had lunch, we’d both be better equipped to face the day tomorrow, better equipped to wear our other nine hats. There could be an actual, licensed social worker employed by our school. There could be sufficient para-professionals for the high quantities of special education students that we attempt to serve. There could be sufficient school safety agents and those safety agents could be under the jurisdiction of individual schools, rather than of the NYPD.

And, God forbid, there could be some fucking paper in the copy machine.

I do have a lot to say, and I do have a lot of stories to tell, but I have not, until now (and only tentatively at that), felt comfortable writing about teaching.

First of all, last year, my first year of teaching high school math at a high needs public high school in Brooklyn, was incredibly hard. Getting up every day and going to that place was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The adjectives I used most often when asked about my job were “brutal” and “soul-crushing.” I had no perspective, no emotional distance, none of the things I needed to do the kind of writing I like to do. I’ve never been the type to fill journals with pages of emotional prose poems after a break-up, and when I have it hasn’t been the type of writing I’m interested in other people seeing. Hell, last year I could barely talk to anyone who wasn’t a teacher. They just wouldn’t understand. The two people I dated last year were both other math teachers, one of whom taught at my school. Writing about teaching felt futile. I could never talk about what I did for a living without having to translate everything for non-teacher eyes and ears. And that made writing seem even more exhausting.

The other main reason I’ve hesitated to write about teaching is that most of the stories people might like to hear aren’t really my stories to tell. There is something very gross, and all too familiar, about a white woman telling stories about the young students of color that she works with. Why, they are just so COLORFUL, with their urban way of talking, their exotic names, their occasionally tragic lives.

In Six Degrees of Separation, Stockard Channing’s character realizes the injustice that she has been doing to this unfortunate young man who came into her life, simply by telling his story the way she has been, to entertain guests at dinner parties and the like.

And we turn him into an anecdote, to dine out on, like we’re doing right now. But it was an experience. I will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we keep what happens to us? How do we fit it into life without turning it into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punch line you’ll mouth over and over, years to come: “Oh, that reminds me of the time that impostor came into our lives. Oh, tell the one about that boy.” And we become these human jukeboxes, spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?

I fear very much turning my students lives into anecdotes for internet consumption. This can’t turn into a list of things I might say while sighing. “Oh, another one of my students is pregnant.” “There was another fight today. There was hair and blood on my floor afterwards.” These are statements that confirm common stereotypes about urban youth, tinged with just a smidgen of horror and pity. They are decontextualized, and displayed without purpose beyond an invitation to voyeurism into the lives of real young people. “A friend of mine works at a school where the most TERRIBLE things happen.” “I read a blog the other day that said the most DEPRESSING thing about inner city schools.” And I’m left in a bind because a lot of what I see as a teacher is terrible and is depressing. But to “anecdotalize” all of that, and to only focus on that, is really doing an injustice to the young people that I work with, allowing every reader of the anecdote to find a way to “touch” the realness of urban poverty among youth. My students’ stories are their stories, and although I am a math teacher and not an English teacher, I should be helping enable them to tell their own stories rather than telling them myself.

So, where does that leave me with this blog? I am waiting to find out. I’ve realized recently that I have a lot more to say now than I used to. I love my job. I love my students. So what makes it so hard to be a teacher? My goal is to write from my own experience, and to write honestly while keeping in mind all of the concerns I’ve talked about. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll stop.

Here goes.