Another student of mine came back from suspension today.

“Hey Zeke,” I asked. “Tell me, why’d you get suspended?”

“Fighting.”

Zeke is an A student in 1rst period, a good kid. Sure, he dressed like every other kid in California. Wore a hoodie sweatshirt, clothes with some giant brand names on them, baggy pants and an occasional baseball cap. But underneath the clothes (and who among us should ever be judged by our clothes?) was a solid student who wrote well, read all the books I’d assigned, possessed a good work ethic and had a nice, soft-spoken demeanor. Thus my next question.

“You got into a fight?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Right out in the hall at lunch.”

“Dude, you couldn’t just walk away? You’re smarter than that,” I said.

“Naw, Mr. Alan,” he answered. “See a dude was messin’ with me. Him and his friends. And the dude challenged me to go one-on-one right there.”

“Like I said, just walk away,” I repeated.

“Naw, that ain’t how it is, Mr. Alan. See his boyz said that if I didn’t go one-on-one right there then they’d all jump me.”

“Jump you? When?”

“Whenever they could catch me. In the halls. At lunch. After school. I didn’t have a choice.”

I paused. In a way, it’s true. He didn’t have a choice. I mean coming to an adult to “snitch” on a kid for threatening to beat you up isn’t how problems get solved in the real world for students in America’s schools today. Doing that just seems to make matters worse for kids, not better. Of course, I wish it wasn’t that way, but if Zeke had come to me, could I really protect him? Could security? Could the community? Nope. He knew it and I knew and we all know it. Zeke was a boy faced with a man’s decision: either stand up for yourself in the face of tyranny or live in fear with much worse consequences to be meted out later if ever you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Is it squashed?” I asked wondering if the one-on-one fight put an end to it.

“Yep,” he answered. “We went one-on-one, got busted by security, I got suspended, and now it’s over.”

Zeke was back in class working towards keeping up his grades. The other boys, I have no idea. And what did it all start over. I didn’t even ask because really, what did it matter. Some boys just like to fight and pick on the weak.

“All right, just try to keep safe, okay dude,” I said to Zeke.

And then he looked at me and we made eye contact. His face had a simple resolution to it, a resigned, matter of fact, this-is-the-way-it-is for kids like me look. And though he didn’t say it, I knew he was thinking it.

“What else could I have done?”

And when he walked back to his desk, I asked myself, “And what would you do, Mr. Alan, if the tables were turned?” Does a kid like Zeke really have a choice but to fight?

Just another day at the office, right?

So $100,000,000.00 was just spent (that’s right, 100 mill) and, as this article points out, virtually no positive results were reaped by the extra expenditure of cash-o-la invested in education by a fella with a pet education project named Randy Crew. Hmmm, what can we deduce?

*The Sticky Floor Theory is alive and well. (For those of you not familiar with the “sticky floor” theory in education it basically postulates that those who are down, once down, stay down — because the “floor” is sticky. Put another way, the thinking goes that once you sink into the combustible mix of poverty, sparse employment opportunity and low levels of education, there is a cultural sort of tar to this bottom-of-the-rung environment that seems to keep the feet of those who wish to climb up stuck to the ground levels. And upward mobility is plagued by there being an invisible yet formidable substance oppressing those who wish to rise. Essentally, it’s kind of an inverted cousin of the glass ceiling.)

*Money alone doesn’t solve problems. Without good ideas and intelligent practices, more money spent is not going to equate to higher results achieved. (Maybe this is why NCLB remains so under-funded? They know if they do fund some of this buffoonery it ain’t gonna make a spit of difference. Hey! I just realized something. George Bush was actually a fiscally prudent, insightful, almost prescient president. Whoo-dah-thunk-it?)

*More time in and of itself isn’t going to solve the problems. As you see the article mention, the kids were more fatigued from the extended hours, the teachers were more fatigued from the extended hours and yet there seems to be virutally no improvement from simply spending more time in class. (Might it be that quality supercedes quantity? However, I, for one, do believe that America’s kids need more time in class — not less, not the same but more. WAY MORE! Yet alone, this isn’t going to do anything.)

*The assessments are flawed. Ask any real teacher in a real Florida classroom about how much faith they put in the FCAT’s as an authentic measurement of student achievement — or as a tool that gives true insight as to the qualities of the educator — or as to the true aptitudes of the students and you’ll hear a boatload of complaints. Standardized testing, as it currently exists — and in my opinion — is a sham.

*The teachers charged with achieving the results sought were not properly prepared for the task. What was the PD prior to the expenditure of this money? Can we assume that this Zone experiment might have needed more prep time so that the people working in the Zone were properly readied for the task? Or, is it a case of the next item on the list…

*The teachers stunk. Unfair to say, but this certainly provides more artillery for those who want to fire every teacher in America and then hire a whole new work force. (As if people are beating down doors to go work in Miami’s lowest performing schools.) I mean, hey, we just spent 100 million for no improvement — it’s gotta be the teachers fault, doesn’t it?

*People will now be frightful of signing off on spending money towards, what seems to have been, an exceptionally ambitious and meritorious aim. I know very little about this guy Randy Crew. He was forced out with a six-figure buy-out according to this article but only the lord above knows what really happened in Miami. However, I salute the guy for going to bat for the poorest, lowest achieving schools and really trying to make a difference. I mean the man seems to have staked his career on this venture and he came up as the goat. So what, I say. He apparently took a swing of the bat and gave his best run for the money in an effort to help some of Florida’s least fortunate. (And if you know anything about Miami/Dade county, you know that when we’re talking about a textbook case of America’s severely disadvantaged.) Crew went to bat for these kids and for that I think he’s to be saluted. And I am not alone. As Board member Agustín Barrera said in the article, ”It was a well-thought-out plan that, unfortunately, did not bear the fruits we all thought it would. The mistake would have been not trying the zone, because then we would have failed the students by not trying something new.”

Was it a an attempt for personal glory — the article implies that, too — or a case of going to bat for the kids in a real and earnest and dramatic way? I really don’t know.

But it does seem that education reform for America’s lowest performing schools — not just in Miami, but all across our country — just took a Crew cut.

Now I know that I am a bit of a hot-blooded alarmist. Quick to fire off emotionally charged diatribes and even quicker to flame tomfoolery where it rears its ugly, almost omnipresent head in public education today.

However, this morning I read this line from an article in the Los Angeles Times in regards to re-making one of our city’s high schools. The line said — and this is a direct quote…

What is happening there reflects a near desperation for reform that is seizing many schools.

See, I know why I am so quick with a trigger to roast education-policy idiocy. Because I see firsthand how the foolishness negatively impacts real kids in real ways. I mean my students don’t have time for “committees” to meet so that self-evident issues can be “studied” in think tank halls that are politically influenced by re-election contributions and impacted by the nuances of allegiances that one must have with certain like-minded factions (i.e. cronies) in order to remain viable as a “player” in the elections of the future.

My kids need this off-course ship to be re-aligned now!!

This is why I sort of view my approach to this profession from a take-the-bull-by-the-horns mentality. If we don’t act — and act now — things simply will not get done and stuff will remain the same for years, with people looking back on this day and age with an, “Oh what a shame we didn’t do something a few years ago” mentality.

Well, these are the days that in a few years will be a few years ago! That’s why I am such a fire-alarm pulling flamethrower by nature.

Yet the line from the L.A. Times article uses this language: What is happening there reflects a near desperation for reform that is seizing many schools.

Thems is strong words! And so I wonder, does everyone else in this country work in a school that smacks of being in “near desperation for reform”?

Are there folks working at schools that simply sorta need mild change (because nothing’s perfect) but for the most part, scrapping the entire configuration of the school as it currently exists and then reinventing itself wholesale is not a best case thing to do because in reality, that would be overkill?

As the article points out, Birmingham High is talking about a wholesale re-imagination of itself, stemming from a sense of near desperation. Personally, I see scores and scores of schools that also fit this description. Elementary schools in this country seem to be functioning better than middle and secondary — that’s my own take on the matter — but at the higher levels I wonder whether we even have 10% of our nations middle and high schools not viewing themselves through a lens of being in “near desperation for reform”.

Though it’s only been up and running for a few months now, this ning has already transformed my entire outlook on teaching, collaborating, communicating, learning, and sharing best practices.

No small feat, huh?

On one hand, I feel I have a sense of community, a place where I can turn to find thoughtfulness, camaraderie, and like-minded spirits. (Motley as some of you may be, that is.)

On the other hand I feel as if I have been offered a place to give and take, to listen and then share my voice in a manner that is entirely free. (Something not to be discounted in this day and age, for sure.) I mean, whatever “insights” — or out-n-out foolishness — I have to offer, it’s posted at no cost — and then lots of other folks, people I greatly respect, are making some very spectacular contributions as well — also at no cost. Add them all up and there’s a heck of a lot of value here on this ning which is, once again… free. How cool is that?

(BTW, if you’re keeping score at home, I’d say the foolishness might very well be leading the race over the insights right now by a quite a wide margin… but such is life, right?)

I also find myself thinking about this ning more often than I would have suspected as well. Not sure why. Obviously, I am a geek, the type of person who likes to put in a full day of work and then come home and spend more time thinking, talking, and reflecting on, yep, work.

But if you are reading this post right now, I suspect that means that I am not alone.

Actually, I have found that most “good” eduators are like this in a way. I mean we go to parties and what do we end up doing? Chatting in the kitchen talking about school, the kids, or the parents. Face it, anyone who loves education as much as we all do is a dork. I came to grips with this about myself a long time ago. But since I know the difference between the denotation of a word and the connotation of a word — and know that the owner of the word is permitted to apply their own subjective interpretation to the connotative definition, dork, as I use it in this context, is an admirable term, synonymous to what others less-in-the-know might think of a cape-sporting superhero.

(Oh yeah, please don’t ask me what “good” means. Just know that someone is going to define it for us pretty soon and our pay scales are going to reflect their interpretation. And my faith in them to perform this feat with a semblance of fairness and accuracy, BTW, is not what I would call unshakeable.)

And so this ning moves forward. And it does so with tutorials and videos, humor and tragedy, children who make us laugh and others that break our hearts. Yet, at the end of the day, here we are, participating in a variety of age-old dialogues in quite the newfound manner.

I gotta say, this ning thing is da bomb!

A court just ruled that police officers are entitled to be paid for the time it takes them to get ready for work, including getting dressed and undressed.

More power to our friends in blue! And I can’t wait for the courts to hear about the time I spend prepping for my day.

First of all, as a diligent professional, I do wear clothes to work. Cha-ching! That’s cash in my pocket.

Furthermore, I comb my hair, brush my teeth and wear deodorant. Cha-ching!
(Unfortunately, however, that might not get me some extra cash-o-la because not everyone in my profession does these things so it might be viewed by the courts as “non-essential” to effective preparation. Yet, the ruthless teasing an educator takes when they don’t do these things by the kids is not worth the battle. I mean I hear the names they call one another. Ain’t no way I want that kind of wrath aimed at me. Lived through it once already, ya know what I mean? NOT WORTH IT!)

I work Saturdays… have for years and years. Cha-ching!

I buy a bunch of my own supplies. I know, I know, I won’t be reimbursed for these supplies, but when the courts here my argument about time spent shopping for the supplies… Cha-ching!

Oh yeah, there’s all that reading I do to stay up to date with the latest and greatest teaching ideas. Cha-ching!

And then there’s all that reading of papers I do in order to, what’s the term… oh yeah, grade the work of my students. Cha-ching!

(And if you saw some of the sentences they are constructing-butchering-bludgeoning and concoct-o-figurating the courts would give me time-and-a-half. Cha-ching!

Time on the phone with peers discussing how to “handle issues”? Cha-ching!

Don’t get me started on this dang ning. That’s a double whopper. Cha-ching!Cha-ching!

All in all, by the court’s logic, I figure I am due, right. So pay-me, bay-bee!!

Just when testing is knocking at the classroom door and the point to all of your educational efforts seems completely lost on the powers-that-be in the corridors of state decision making, along will come something that will restore your faith in why you do what you do and trigger a sense of hope.

School: too easy to give up on, too hard not to try and give your best yet again another day.

To wit, I cite this. It’s what the book report of the future will look like. (Heck, not the future — the book report of NOW!) Sent to me from Texas by a fan of one of my YA novels — a book report on Homeboyz.

Click here and turn up the volume.

Can you say, summer reading project? The sooner we start to blend text-to-world in a way that better connects text- to-technology, the sooner we are going to get more kids more actively engaged in their own educations. Truth is, the kids are eager and ready. It’s the adults in our school system who are holding the students back from doing this kind of stuff as book report.

The times they are a changin’.

Warning: This Ain’t Your Momma’s Summer Reading Project.

Just when state testing is knocking at the classroom door and the point to all of your educational efforts seems completely lost on the powers-that-be in the corridors of state decision making, along will come something that will restore your faith in why you do what you do and trigger a little chuckle.

School: too easy to give up on, to hard to not try again another day.

To wit, I cite this. It’s what the book report of the future will look like. (Heck, not the future — the book report of NOW!) Sent to me from Texas by a fan of one of my YA novels — a book report on Homeboyz.

Click here and turn up the volume.

Can you say, summer reading project? The sooner we start to blend text-to-world in a way that better connects text- to-technology, the sooner we are going to get more kids more actively engaged in their own educations. Truth is, the kids are eager and ready. It’s the adults in our school system who are holding the students back from doing this kind of stuff as book report.

The times they are a changin’.

So this is the letter I typed today in my 3rd period class to my principal:

Hi Mr. ___________ (name withheld — but easily googled I am sure),

Mr. Alan

A few things…

1) This is totally true.
2) Jose’s comment went over like an absolute lead balloon. The room went from one of comfort, learning and emotional safety to one of immediate tension and awkwardness. Everyone instantly became uncomfortable.
3) I was flummoxed. The comment was just so inappropriate, so out of left-field, so uncharacteristic of anything that goes on in my room I felt thrown. In my more than a decade of teaching, if I had to rank it, I’d say this was the most inappropriate classroom comment ever uttered in my room. And if you work with teens long enough, you know that you’ve heard some wildly inappropriate things.

The point of the activity was to examine words/phrases and to see if the denotations carry more weight than the connotations or vice versa. My examples on the board were about illuminating the difference between calling someone an “accounting manager” or a “bean counter”. (Similar denotations, wildly different connotations.) So then I had to ask myself, are students today this wildly desensitized to a sense of context, to gauging appropriateness? And in my small effort to try and cut Jose some slack by justifying his actions to myself (i.e.”Oh, Alan, maybe he just didn’t know.”) I realized, “Come on, who am I kidding? Jose was simply pushing the envelope, trying to test my limits. Don’t rationalize it. He was out of bounds.”

So I bounced him out of class with the above letter in hand and told him he wasn’t allowed to come back until the principal had answered his question for him. Such a thoughtful response, I said, required a higher authority on the matter.

Terror ran through the blood of all my other students when I sent Jose on his way. I actually had to lighten up the mood in class because kids mistakenly assumed I was furious with them as a result of something one of their peers did (I was not) — and the tension was simply too thick, a real pink elephant — so we talked about the denotation versus the connotation of the phrase “fly on the wall” and I briefly chatted about how much fun it would be to able to eavesdrop on the conversation Jose was going to have with the principal of our school about his classroom question.

Within a few minutes, things became more relaxed again.

You know, once a person graduates from high school, the days spent in our classrooms often blend into amorphous blobs of scattered recollections. For some reason though, I have a feeling Jose will always have one particular day in English class well-etched into his memory.

As we all know, you can’t be an effective teacher unless you have a line in the sand. And once it’s crossed, there must be consequences. My guess is that by lunchtime, all of my 9th graders will have heard this story, too. Gossip travels faster than a stolen teacher’s test with the answer key does around these parts.

And I expect very few behavior problems in 3rd period for quite some time. LOL!

Today I was mandated to participate in an hour and 15 minute “training session” designed to teach me how to administer the 25 hours worth of state tests next week I’ll be proctoring.

Mind you, I have been through this training many, many times in years past, but still, if I don’t get my name on the little “sign in sheet” and sit through a bore-me-to-tears power point presentation by a person who has already done 5 of these prior to my arrival (you can just tell she is juiced to do it again — actually, she is, because I am in the last group of the day and if you think I am watching the clock waiting for the dreariness to end, you should see the non-verbal clues being given off by the person leading this charge into the land of nonsense — she is dying to go home already) there will be bureaucratic hell to pay.

I want to be fair to the training session though. There were 4 minutes of total value embedded into the presentation. I learned the schedule for the week. I learned about the statistical value of breakfast before a big exam. (Apparently, there’s data on eggs.) I learned that Paris Hilton might be launching a new line of mascara. (Okay, sometimes we drift off topic.)

I also was informed that seniors, since they do not take these state tests, do not have to come to school. Yep, all seniors pretty much get the week off but teachers are supposed to have given them “assignments”. However, if we let them on campus during state testing we risk turning the quad into a social hour for hundreds of kids so the policy is, let’s just give them some take-home work and have them enrich their minds from home.

As I am sure you can imagine, the seniors really hate this. I can just see them now, a bowl of Fruit Loops in their hand, Judge Judy on the TV, and milk dripping down their chin repeating to themselves our educational mantra, “Must become a critical thinker. Must become a critical thinker.”

State tests have some benefits, though. For example, they are good for the economy (because when I see the truckload of materials that got hauled into our campus, I know someone is getting paid — and paid quite well — for this extravaganza). They are good for property values on the right side of the track (because real estate agents can tout those high API scores.) And they are good for the Christmas tree industry (because even though it’s only May, lots and lots of teens across the state are not only thinking about Christmas trees, they are applying their design to the test’s answer sheet).

I wonder which is more squandered this time of year, our funds or our time?

I am quite familiar with the way things work in many English classes across the country. But on this point, I am completely baffled.

Is my high school the only one that views English class as the administrative portal through which all the bilge should flow?

For example, today I was greeted with a gigantic informational survey as mandated by my district, an anonymous appraisal of a California teenagers “health”. By health they asked questions about exercise, eating and sleep. They also asked about drug, tobacco and alcohol use. They also asked about bullying, violence and emotional support systems both in the home and in school. It was bubble sheet format (of course) and there must have been 100 questions broken into a variety of sections. It took my kids 45 minutes to complete this thing — in each and every class — and, as was made quite clear to me, its administration wasn’t an option. I even had to sign a student confidentiality agreement promising I wouldn’t take a looksy at any of the answers provided by my kids so that as much veracity as could be gleaned about the “health” of our students could come to the fore.

All in all, I wasn’t really opposed to the survey since it seemed to be something they were going to be taking quite seriously. Plus, they asked a lot of pointed, hardcore questions. And when the results come my way in the year 2012 I’ll be riveted, I am sure.

But why do they administer this in English class?

When it comes to textbooks being handed out the first week of school, we always go through English class. When there are letters to be handed out to all the kids, they always go through English class. When anything needs to get from administration to the kids, they always go through English class.

Is it this way at other schools as well? At least once a month instructional minutes are sucked from my curriculum in the name of English being the prime gateway to all the kids of our school. If English were a narcotic, my department would be marijuana.

Now I know the answer is, at least at my school, that English is the only department that sees all the kids at every grade level. English 9, 10, 11 and 12 — every kid has at least one of these classes on their schedule. With Math, some 9th graders are in Algebra II and not in Algebra I or Geometry; with science, some seniors don’t have anything; we don’t even offer a history class for 9th graders on our campus and the idea of distributing anything but jock straps through PE seems preposterous.

(BTW, do people still use jock straps or was that a 1970′s thing? Personally, I think the modern underwear revolution which provides exceptional support without providing locker room awkwardness is one of the great unheralded advancements in the world of sports. Sorry, I am way off track.)

How come our English classes, one of the most admittedly “core” courses at a school, has its time so henpecked away? They treat my minutes so frivolously and yet they count on my instruction so exceptionally. What gives?

Maybe they read Hemmingway once upon a time and something just kinda stuck: The Bilge Flows Through Thee