My Fingerprints

I was at the Shasta County Sheriff's office this morning.

Teachers have to get fingerprinted.  We also have to get a Master's degree, and collect continuing education credits in order to make progress up the pay scale.  I have no problem with any of that.

I am concerned about teacher preparation generally in this country, and those concerns can start with my own experience of my Master's Degree program at the New School in New York City about 15 years ago.  I am so proud of the work that I have done over the last 14 years, but very little of that has to do (positively) with how I was prepared at the New School, I'm afraid.  This paragraph on page 93 of the National Council of Teacher Quality's Teacher Prep Review was particularly biting, and brought back unpleasant memories:

Teacher educators now view their job as forming the professional identities of teachers. They aim to confront and expunge the prejudices of teacher candidates, particularly those related to race, class, language and culture. This improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to real boy, is attempted as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and regular journal writing. Once freed of their errant assumptions, teachers can embark on a lifelong journey of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived by teacher educators as too fluid to be achievable and may even harden into bias. The goal is for each candidate to develop his or her own unique philosophy of teaching, no matter how thin the ground is underneath.

It seems so soft: because it was.  In a cohort of other master's degree students, we were assigned some inspirational and important readings, many of which have had a real impact on my approach to my work even still.  But, the discussions that took place, with little leadership from our professors,  were often demoralizing, overly emotional,  self-indulgently personal, and distracting from the task at hand.  I often worried about how such self-centeredness would impact this or that teacher's ability to teach children.  In my memory, several of my fellow grad students in that program had a chip on their shoulder that they wanted credit for, and a few voices dominated our class discussions in some combative, unconstructive ways.  I was often thinking, let's get to WORK! For the dubiously meaningful experience of listening to adults compare their often juvenile and self-aggrandizing attitudes about equity and social justice, I'm still paying on my original student loan of more than $20,000.00. Fifteen years later.

The real value of my teacher preparation came from my experience with my student teaching partner and our mentoring teacher, Julie Conason, at East Side Community High School.  If my student loan debt could be repaid to her and other faculty members at East Side Community, I'd write those checks more cheerfully.

I learned several years ago that The New School had dropped it's Teacher Preparation program. I'd love to know why (officially). 

I've also had the privilege of mentoring some student teachers in the past.  I have some ideas about how teacher preparation can be better.   

Teaching is not a "calling."  Teaching is a profession.  It requires effective communication and a serious minded approach to content and presentation and assessment and the management of young people's school days.  It is critically important to, as the report suggests, "confront and expunge the prejudices...particularly those related to race, class, language and culture," but it seems to me that that should be a criterion of acceptance into a teacher preparation program -- you can't get in unless you've demonstrated you've done good work on this count -- rather than the whole of the program itself.

Tuesday Happiness, A Poem with Mongolia

I don't work in July. Actually I haven't worked in about 8 months, but typically it's just the month of July that has a beginning, middle and end free of scheduled time.  I try to do a July project: a few years ago, I resolved to make a pizza every day in July.  I got a pizza stone, and a wooden flip, and several blobs of frozen dough from the Italian market around the corner.  I actually made only one pizza that July, but I did think about pizza most of the days in July.  Mostly about how I was not making one and should.  It's possible that I did make a couple more, but they weren't at my house, so they didn't really count for my project.
Last July my project was just to enjoy my last month of staying at home with my son before getting back to work.  

This July, I'm going to blog about my new life in California.

To help focus my new July project, I've made this tentative schedule:

Tuesday: Something that Makes Me Happy
Wednesday: Teaching
Thursday: My Kid
Friday: The Natural World
Saturday: Wildcard
Sunday: Gratitude, Certainty, and Questions


TUESDAY HAPPY THING
One thing that makes me happy is getting The New Yorker.  I'm so glad it's a weekly.  I often skim the letters and see that people are exercised about this or that article in a previous issue that I didn't read.  However, I do almost always read the poems.  Thankfully there are just two.  I try to read them aloud to my son, who is 20 months old.

The June 3rd issue has a great poem by Anna McDonald called "Almost February."

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2013/06/03/130603po_poem_mcdonald

This is a wonderful poem to read aloud, even to a toddler.  A toddler is a great audience for a poem, he can recognize and enjoy the rhythm and meter and the pleasing tumble of language.  Toddlers just by existing give us many opportunities to read poetry aloud.  It doesn't have to be children's poetry.

One of the reasons I love this poem is because she mentions Mongolia on the second line.  I have this spirit-place interest in Mongolia, and have since I was a child. My mother encouraged me to enter an essay contest in World magazine about what it would be like to live in a yurt, for a chance to win a visit to Mongolia.  I loved the idea of visiting a yurt and being in a place where people relied so much on horses.  I was in first grade.  I didn't write the essay, and have regretted it for 35 years.  I remember vividly the mailbox and the way it felt to get my World magazine from it.  The mail lady drove her personal car and leaned way over from the driver's seat to deliver the mail.  At that time and place you could put a letter and a few coins into the mailbox, and the mail lady would apply the stamp for you.

I like this poem also because it has long lines like sentences, and it isn't about lost and yearning love, and it has some funny parts.  How a baby makes things different, even if you don't like the baby's parents.  In the poem there are coffees saved in the refrigerator, which I do sometimes.  The internet also figures into the poem, which makes it timely and accessible, even if you've never been to Mongolia, or Timbuktu, or have never been interested in going to those places.

She also mentions strangers, though in a more generous way than I've been feeling about them lately.  I'm surrounded by strangers here in California, though I often mistakenly think I recognize someone at the grocery or in traffic or walking around the loop of my neighborhood.  I've been trying very hard to make friends out of strangers, and it comes slowly most of the time.  Mistakes can be made.

The last line of the poem is "Nobody recognized me as the Buddha."  It's hard to recognize this in most people.  One of the things I love about my son's birth is that he came at 5:20 am.  Buddha, too, achieved enlightenment at 5:00 in the morning, in a deer park.  I learned this in Miyajima in Japan.  Deer are there, everywhere, eating cookies you can buy especially to feed them, and eating the corners of your maps if you aren't paying attention.  I've experienced it.