My First Shooting

Today the school day had scarcely started when an unusual announcement came over the PA system.  "Attention teachers and students.  The school is now on lockdown.  Teachers make sure that all doors into their classrooms are locked.  Everyone get down on the floor, under tables and desks, and away from doors and windows."

We assumed it was a drill.  But after 20 minutes or so the lockdown had lasted longer than a drill would have lasted.  Something else was going on.

We stayed under tables and desks for about a half hour.  Then the classroom door was unlocked from outside and twenty more students, about half a dozen parents, and several teachers were ushered into the room and the door was locked again.  We were on lockdown for almost an hour until the announcement that the emergency had ended and we could all resume our normal activities.

What had happened was that two cars had been speeding on the major avenue right next to the school, with men in one car shooting at the other, and had crashed into three cars on school property.  The police had arrived very quickly, and who the shooters were was never told to us.  But several of my students had been right out there on the street when all this had happened.

One of the students, a very small kid, later began crying.  He had been right out in the thick of the event, and one of the shooters had been very close to him and had looked him straight in the face.  He had other issues in his background, too, that made him more frightened -- losing two family members recently.  Like almost all the students in the school he is Mexican.  The other student, an African-American sixth-grader seemed to take it all in stride, as though he had already seen such things often.

Many of the classes for the rest of the day had "circles" in which the students arrange chairs in a big circle and one by one express their feelings about what they had experienced and how they felt about what had happened.

By coincidence, we had had a potluck meal to teachers and staff scheduled to be held right after the end of the school day.  The entire school staff -- about 30 persons -- gathered, enjoyed a great meal, and then held a circle of their own.

Some of the teachers had actually seen the incident, and described what they had seen.  A lady who lives right next to the school had come out of her house, snatched up several students who were arriving at school, and rushed them to safety in her own home.  The owner of a small store down the street had grabbed some students and pulled them to safety into his little store, then locked the door.  Later, he walked them to school to make sure they felt safe.  Another neighbor grabbed a kid or two and had them lie down on the ground behind some bushes.

Of the staff, two of the persons who were most traumatized by the incident were the school secretary and also one of the senior administrators, a lady whose car was hit head on and demolished  by the shooters' car.  This school is in a dangerous part of the city, and the kids have seen and experienced a lot.  The school secretary, for instance, described something that had happened to her and her sister was New Year's eve.  They always went out on New Year's eve.  They didn't want to stay at home because, as she said, "there are too many bullets."

One time her sister was crossing the street had a bullet had hit her in the arm.

Looking back on all this, I have to say that I was never at all afraid.  Probably this is for two reasons.  1)  I am too old and stupid to be afraid; and 2)  In traveling all through remote areas, I have never been fearful, though other people have asked me about certain experiences and wondered if I ever had been.

I was proud of the efficiency with which the school staff reacted to all this.  The lockdown was immediate and very smoothly accomplished.  Nobody got in a panic. In the discussion teachers had at the potluck, when it was my turn to speak, what I mentioned was that we as teachers have two main function, and the students probably only think we have one.  They see us as teachers only.  They do not realize that an even more important concern that we all share is that of keeping the students safe.  Never mind the kid who constantly acts up in class and cannot seem to stay in his assigned seat, or the young lady who behaves like a princess, or the kid who just refuses to do any work -- they all have to be kept safe.  That is our most important job.

I have the good fortunate to be paired off in the first period with an extraordinary teacher -- more about him at another time -- and we both discussed what we were thinking.  He has a golf club and he was thinking that it would be a handy weapon should anyone break into the classroom.  I was thinking of a large pair of scissors that would make a useful weapon and also of breaking a chair over an intruder's head.

You never know what the day will bring.  The tamales at the teachers' potluck were awfully good.  

Short Days

[This entry was written some months back, before I started as an "Intervention Specialist," but I think it is worth including even now.  Some day perhaps I'll have enough of these descriptions to publish a small book.]

This past week we had final exams, so the class schedule was a little different than usual. We had two two-hour period in the morning, and school let out at 12:45. I subbed for a teacher who was ill, and who had already given her students their final the week before. I had nothing to give them to do, so I let them do whatever they wanted to, as long as they were orderly and reasonably quiet. I put a suggested list of activities on the board: Finish any work they still had for this class, do homework for other classes, read, talk, listen to their ipods. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I had two classes each day, all of them different students from the others.

As for the fact that the students had all been given their finals the week before, I can only conclude that the teacher had planned to take this time off and wasn't really ill. Maybe I am wrong, but I think much of the time the students spent in these classes was a waste.

However, my impression of this teacher, even without meeting her, is quite favorable. As a substitute teacher, one can walk into any regular teacher's classroom and tell what kind of teacher they are.

In this room, there were a large number of posters made up with various scientific data and information on them that students would need for problem-solving. There was a large poster telling the students that they were expected to aim at a goal of 80% correct MINIMUM. But most important, there was a lot of material on the walls and shelves that made it clear she held her students accountable.

For instance, there was a bookshelf containing good quality loose-leaf notebooks, one for each students, containing every quiz and test the student had taken. I was forced to compare this with a collection of notebooks I found in another teacher's classroom last year where the notebooks were all torn and dirty, and where some students had entered a few of their assignments and others had done a more comprehensive job of the same. Particularly interesting this past week were wall charts with every student's name and every test and quiz, and with a colored star next to each quiz, except for a few that the students had not taken. This was visible evidence of how the student was doing, something they could see to remind them of the quality of their efforts. When I discussed the classroom with a friend who knows the teacher, I was told that this was typical of her conscientious approach. She wanted everything from the students she expected of them, and she made sure she got it.

I also got the impression from the students that most were quite bright. One student said 80% were intelligent, and there was an element of about 20% who didn't care about their grades.

All in all, I could see that this teacher was doing an excellent job, even if she wasn't there for a few days.

I encountered three interesting students in her classes, and I'll describe them for you.

Since the beginning of 2012, I have been what is called an "intervention specialist."  I have worked with severely disabled students, usually in a classroom setting that includes one main teacher and several assistants like myself, trying to teach students basic skills that will help them survive as independently as possible when they grow older.  Most of the time this has been with middle school -- junior high school -- students.  They are junior high school aged students only because of their age, not because of their abilities.

For instance, with one student I spent a lot of time trying to teach one particular student how to count from one to ten.  We often went over and over the sequence of numbers.  For reasons I cannot explain, the student had one through seven just fine, but could never add eight to it.  Instead, he always went "seven . . .nine."

In the school system where I have been working, there seem to be three main types of people working daily all day long in the classroom.

First, there is a fully credentialed teacher, a specialist in teaching this type of student.  From what I have seen of these teachers, they have certain personality traits in common: great attention to detail, enormous patience,  great enthusiasm, and general unflappability.  These teachers are especially trained, and are very good at what they do.

The second type of person in these classrooms are the "intervention specialists," a job title given to someone who has a college degree and who does what I have been doing.  The intervention specialist's job is simply to assist the teacher -- in other words, to take directions from the teacher and do various things that need to be done.  This may include taking a student to a "mainstream" class somewhere outside their normal classroom.  Or it may include sitting next to a student and helping them read a simple text.  Or it may include working with a students on math problems, getting the student to focus and work on the problems in front of him instead of paying attention to other things going on in the classroom.  Sometimes it may include sitting with a student in the cafeteria and literally feeding them.

The third type of adult in these classrooms are known as "aides."  For some reason, aides, who do the same thing as "intervention specialists," are paid several dollars an hour less than "intervention specialists."  Some of these aides are incredibly skilled, certainly far more skilled than myself.

I think, for instance, of a student named Charlie, who was so severely handicapped that he could not speak, and spent a lot of his time simply sitting in his chair and compulsively jumping up and down.  Sometimes he made little noises as he did this.  Charlie's ability level was extremely low.  He could take a toy suitable for a very young child and fit different shapes into slots that matched the different shapes.  If one held a book open in front of him, sometimes he would look at the pictures quietly for a minute or two.  But when he came to the classroom he couldn't do much more.

One of the things these children are taught is to keep clean by washing their hands after going to the toilet and before meals.  One particular aide in that classroom, Ralph, is someone whom I really regard as a miracle worker.  He is a middle-aged African-American man who at times seemed quite stern, but who successfully worked very hard to teach Charlie a few basic skills.  For instance, he took Charlie from a state in which he had to be led to the sink and have water turned on and off for him so he could wash his hands to the point where he could be told to wash his hands by himself.  Charlie became able to get up, go to the sink, turn the water on (which he had not been able to do previously), push a liquid soap dispenser for soap, wash his hands, turn the water off, dry his hands with a paper towel, and then return to his seat, all by himself.

Some parents with severely disabled children (the politically correct term these days, I think, is "challenged") work very hard to improve their children's skills and enrich their lives.  Others, when the child gets home, just park their kid in front of a TV set and ignore them unless it is time to feed them or put them to bed.  Charlie's mother gave a good show of being concerned about her child.  For instance, she wanted something most teachers do not provide, a written summary of how Charlie did every day in his school activities.  I began keeping a special notebook with daily entries because the classroom teacher in charge didn't have time to do this.  Charlie's mother, however, did almost nothing to help Charlie once he was at home.

I don't think she was even aware of the miracle that Ralph had achieved with her kid.

Four or five times I have walked into a classroom, have started a class and have been told by a student  -- usually a young female -- right off the bat and without provocation, "You know, we hate substitute teachers."  This is part of high school culture.  It has evidently been part of high school culture for many years because when I've told middle-aged friends that I have been substitute teaching, most of the time they comment that when they were in school they used to give their substitute teachers a hard time.  My usual response when confronted this way is to say as casually as possible, "I didn't come here for love.  If I wanted love, I would get a dog."

Illiteracy After Four Years

I encountered a student several years ago who had a B average, listened in class, and actually seemed as though he wanted to learn. When he graduated, I was there to see him get his diploma. He applied to a college, was accepted, and now attends it. He has just started his second year.

From time to time he has called me and wanted to talk -- perhaps as much because he comes from a one-parent family that consists of himself, his mother and several sisters and wants some time with an older father figure as to enjoy a cup of coffee. We jokingly call the coffee house "the office."

In the course of perhaps a dozen meetings with him that last for perhaps two hours each, I have discovered a great deal about the education he received at high school. He knows who Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are and has read some of their work. But in a recent conversation he did not recognize the names of Socrates, Sophocles, Homer, Oedipus, or many others whom we would consider to be essential to the knowledge of any educated man.

The immediate reason for the meeting was that at college he had taken a course with about 200 other students, but was called aside by the professor at the end of the course and told that the professor would have failed him, but passed him only because he liked the student. The reason was that the young man's writing was just slightly above the level of that of an illiterate.

How can a young man graduate from high school with a B average and still not know how to write. Obviously, nobody at the school took the time to read and correct his writing -- or perhaps because students were not assigned enough writing to do. Since writing is a way of examining and clarifying one's thoughts, what can the quality of this young man's thinking be ?

When I look at the level of political discourse these days (I am writing this on the 16th of January, 2012), it seems to me that one reason candidates can believe some of the things they believe is simply that in the course of their education they never taught critical thinking. Isn't teaching one of the main functions of education ?

This can only be accomplished when the student-teacher ratio is much smaller than it presently is in most public high schools. What is required is minute attention to the grammar and logic in a student's writing, the correction of these errors, and the assignment of enough writing to enable the student to learn from mistakes. When a teacher has 30 or more students in a class and five or more classes a day, how can he or she find enough time to even devote to reading, much lass correcting an appreciable amount of each and every student's work ?

Look, Ma, I'm an Intervention Specialist

It has been quite some time since I last posted, and many things have happened in my life that have caused this. I shall chronicle these things eventually in future posts, but I need to report on a significant change in my teaching activities. After a lengthy hiatus since last May, I decided that I was weary of trying to babysit classes of high school students who had little interest in learning anything, but a major interest in trying to play games on their substitute teacher. I decided to become what is known as an "intervention specialist." What this means is that I wanted to follow just one or two students around all day and try to teach them their lessons, leaving classroom discipline and most administrative matters to a teacher-in-charge at whatever classroom I found myself in.

I had heard that the school district needed "intervention specialists," so I decided to apply for the job.

The application process itself reveals a lot about the central administration of our school department. For instance, I attended a job fair where people could apply to be an intervention specialist -- there were only about six of us interested. There I was interviewed. Following the interview, I was accompanied by the head of the department herself, a very capable and overworked woman who must put in about 14 hours a day at her job. She stated that she wanted me to set up an appointment to be fingerprinted.

Mind you, I had already been fingerprinted by this school department. Believe me, that's another saga, too. I must check to see if I have already described that early in this blog. If not, I will get to it.

At any rate, I spoke to a young lady sitting behind a table who was supposed to be making appointments for fingerprinting. Two feet from her face, as she told me the date and the time, I wrote this information down right in front of her, repeating it verbally. The appointment was for about five days later.

When I arrived five days later in the morning to be fingerprinted, the folks in that office seemed mystified. "Oh, no, we don't do fingerprinting today. We'll set you up with an appointment in about two weeks." OK, wasted trip. Typical of that office in the school department. (I had had to be fingerprinted three times when I first applied to be a substitute teacher because the first two times they lost my fingerprints.) So finally I went down on the new appointed date and time and got fingerprinted.

In this room there seem to be two piles of folders or perhaps two filing cabinets, one each for these two different uses. One is for substitute teachers. The other is for intervention specialists. You would think that when one's fingerprints have been taken for one job,m and since they know you very well by name when they see you, that the workers in this room could make a copy of the fingerprints they already have of you that sit in one filing cabinet and carry this copy across the room and place the copy in the other filing cabinet.

But this is not possible. Another set of fingerprints must be taken. And these in turn must be processed by whoever processes them in the department and in Sacramento. Need I say that the duplication of effort is pointless and wasteful of the school department's already limited funds ?

And so I was fingerprinted and all my paperwork was put into a folder to be "processed."

Almost two months to the day, nothing had happened. I had visited the office about five weeks into this time period and was told that there was a slowdown because many of the staff members had been out "on training" and that when they got back to the office this meant that they had time to work on only two or three people's files. Then came Christmas and New Years, probably a dead period in which nobody in their office did much anyway.

So two months after being fingerprinted, I stopped by their office again to inquire about the situation. I was recognized immediately the lady at the desk nearest the counter reached over immediately to a pile of about half a dozen file folders, found mine (I think she knew exactly where it was), and began looking at it. I had to wait around for perhaps three-quarters of an hour while she entered various information from the folder into her computer, but at the end of that time I was handed an official permission to work as an intervention specialist.

Suddenly, I had become one. But I bet it would have taken another month or two to happen had I not stopped by and by my presence forced the issue.