6 ms·

Wow, funny to see this on the front page of HN, as someone who once taught high school math there. That two-year stint was the most challenging experience of my

Wow, funny to see this on the front page of HN, as someone who once taught high school math there. That two-year stint was the most challenging experience of my life, by far. I was the founding math teacher at a brand new turnaround school with a rookie principal. I had 5 weeks of training, and my job my first year was to prepare my students for the very same state test mentioned in this article. To connect that with the typical HN world, I was literally a day 1 employee at a startup meant to replace an institution that had failed in more or less the exact same situation. Despite the intensity of the experience, it was deeply transformative for me. To briefly react to this article, I am not surprised. Baltimore is a poor and segregated city. But that socioeconomic stratum has many layers. There are many ways to end up at a better school. Some are selective, others are high demand and have a lottery, still others you simply sign up for. So you need to have good academic performance or have someone looking out with you with even just the modicum of savvy required to simply opt for a better school. If you have neither of those things, you end up going to your default neighborhood school (e.g. any of those 6 mentioned in the article), which is certain to be completely swamped with students coming from deep poverty and social dislocation. These are schools that tend to have the same number of 9th graders as 10th, 11th, and 12th combined, due drop outs and transfers. I'd be happy to answer any questions. ---- I journaled my experience here: https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc. Another Teach For America Baltimore alumnus wrote a book on her experience. I found it to echo many of my own reflections, almost eerily so: https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-America/dp/0826219861 https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-A.... One of the schools mentioned, Fredrick Douglass High, has a deep history, and its modern day woes were profiled about a decade ago in the HBO documentary Hard Times At Douglass High: http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high-no-child-left-behind http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high....

chillydawg 9y ago
In your view, what would one of those failing schools require to improve performance to an acceptable level?
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  Nothing. Not sure if you're a sports person, but imagine if the NBA had a franchise that was never to participate in the draft at all, and everyone kept asking why they never made the playoffs. Joking aside, I believe the answer is to reframe the question and ask what society can do. The core problem is that nearly all of our efforts to fight poverty are designed in such a way that the less poor you are, the more you're able to benefit. I believe we need to shift our methods to prioritize the people with the deepest need, at every level. In such a society, schools like these, which catch by far the most challenging demographics, would be by far the best resourced. The goal would be to rehabilitate these most challenged students to decreasing levels of intervention over time.
  - ianai 9y ago
    I think society itself must change. It needs to be more inclusive and forgiving. Having a test implies a success/failure context. That alone is enough for certain psyches to give up. If they perceive their "life as a failure" they won't even try for yet another test. Get rid of the tests. Maybe ask kids what they want to study? We all know you get further with carrots than sticks. As for income, who knows. Surely in a world where CEOs make in hours what average people make in a year there are compensation issues.
    - appleflaxen 9y ago
      everybody fails at something in life (if you don't, then you aren't reaching high enough). to teach (or demonstrate to) kids that the risk of failure means you should choose a different path is a terrible lesson.
      - ianai 9y ago
        I agree.
    - pavlov 9y ago
      Those Scandinavian school systems that have demonstrated good results (e.g. Finland in the PISA comparisons) have spent decades gradually de-emphasizing tests and grades. So I think you're right that the American system should seek to have less tests and especially less standardized tests, instead relying more on the pedagogical expertise of teachers. That will be hard to accomplish because it would require somehow implementing another element of the Scandinavian system: teachers have both high competency requirements and high motivation for the field.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
madengr 9y ago
So was it like the cop turned math teacher in season 4 of The Wire?
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  If all the most intense moments of my brief teaching career were compressed into like 2 weeks: that's what Season 4 is like. So in one sense, it's truthful. But it's also a bit misleading. The real day-to-day experience was much more mundane and psychologically draining over the long grind of the school year, punctuated by sporadic crises and constant minor disruptions. It's an unbelievable amount of work to buy supplies, plan lessons, physically maintain your classroom, perform your material, engage those students, respond to the dynamism of hormonal teenagers, resolve conflicts, grade work, help administer the school, coach, conference with your colleagues, and follow-up with parents. Somewhere in there, you maybe get attend to your own physical needs. And no matter how badly you fuck up, you wake up at 6am to do it all again the next day, and the next. The challenges you face are manifold. I had a student arrive that spoke zero English. I had students who were refugees from Iraq, one of whom survived a school bombing. I had multiple students return after stints in the justice system. I had one student who lost his cousin, aunt, and grandma all in one day in a fire. I had a 14 year who had never learned subtraction. I had students with deep psychological issues, including one I believe (unprofessional) to be a sociopath. I had one student quietly stay after class to ask me if he could have one of my soups for lunch, since he hadn't eaten all weekend. I had to report one student's account of sexual abuse. I had students in rival gangs, and far worse, students who were gang wannabes. This is just what I remember off the top of my head, year's later. Put 25 or so students of these students in a room, and you never know what's going to happen in a given class period. The class, like a sports team, succeeds or fails as a unit. Many of these students come from home lives and neighborhoods where the idea of education lifting them out of poverty is demonstrably a total myth. You need to convince them that their whole experience is false, and get them to buy into the idea that solving for x is worth a damn. That's what it's like.

chillydawg 9y ago

In your view, what would one of those failing schools require to improve performance to an acceptable level?

acjohnson55 9y ago
Nothing. Not sure if you're a sports person, but imagine if the NBA had a franchise that was never to participate in the draft at all, and everyone kept asking why they never made the playoffs. Joking aside, I believe the answer is to reframe the question and ask what society can do. The core problem is that nearly all of our efforts to fight poverty are designed in such a way that the less poor you are, the more you're able to benefit. I believe we need to shift our methods to prioritize the people with the deepest need, at every level. In such a society, schools like these, which catch by far the most challenging demographics, would be by far the best resourced. The goal would be to rehabilitate these most challenged students to decreasing levels of intervention over time.
- ianai 9y ago
  I think society itself must change. It needs to be more inclusive and forgiving. Having a test implies a success/failure context. That alone is enough for certain psyches to give up. If they perceive their "life as a failure" they won't even try for yet another test. Get rid of the tests. Maybe ask kids what they want to study? We all know you get further with carrots than sticks. As for income, who knows. Surely in a world where CEOs make in hours what average people make in a year there are compensation issues.
  - appleflaxen 9y ago
    everybody fails at something in life (if you don't, then you aren't reaching high enough). to teach (or demonstrate to) kids that the risk of failure means you should choose a different path is a terrible lesson.
    - ianai 9y ago
      I agree.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    Those Scandinavian school systems that have demonstrated good results (e.g. Finland in the PISA comparisons) have spent decades gradually de-emphasizing tests and grades. So I think you're right that the American system should seek to have less tests and especially less standardized tests, instead relying more on the pedagogical expertise of teachers. That will be hard to accomplish because it would require somehow implementing another element of the Scandinavian system: teachers have both high competency requirements and high motivation for the field.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

madengr 9y ago

So was it like the cop turned math teacher in season 4 of The Wire?

acjohnson55 9y ago
If all the most intense moments of my brief teaching career were compressed into like 2 weeks: that's what Season 4 is like. So in one sense, it's truthful. But it's also a bit misleading. The real day-to-day experience was much more mundane and psychologically draining over the long grind of the school year, punctuated by sporadic crises and constant minor disruptions. It's an unbelievable amount of work to buy supplies, plan lessons, physically maintain your classroom, perform your material, engage those students, respond to the dynamism of hormonal teenagers, resolve conflicts, grade work, help administer the school, coach, conference with your colleagues, and follow-up with parents. Somewhere in there, you maybe get attend to your own physical needs. And no matter how badly you fuck up, you wake up at 6am to do it all again the next day, and the next. The challenges you face are manifold. I had a student arrive that spoke zero English. I had students who were refugees from Iraq, one of whom survived a school bombing. I had multiple students return after stints in the justice system. I had one student who lost his cousin, aunt, and grandma all in one day in a fire. I had a 14 year who had never learned subtraction. I had students with deep psychological issues, including one I believe (unprofessional) to be a sociopath. I had one student quietly stay after class to ask me if he could have one of my soups for lunch, since he hadn't eaten all weekend. I had to report one student's account of sexual abuse. I had students in rival gangs, and far worse, students who were gang wannabes. This is just what I remember off the top of my head, year's later. Put 25 or so students of these students in a room, and you never know what's going to happen in a given class period. The class, like a sports team, succeeds or fails as a unit. Many of these students come from home lives and neighborhoods where the idea of education lifting them out of poverty is demonstrably a total myth. You need to convince them that their whole experience is false, and get them to buy into the idea that solving for x is worth a damn. That's what it's like.