For the price of $65.00, starting in January, you will now be able to take a Los Angeles Gang Tour for Tourists. No joke… check out this article about it in the Los Angeles Times.

My first reaction was, these people are sick. And they are crazy. And they are looking to exploit inner city L.A. for profit.

And if they do that, it seems inevitable that this is going to end badly. And violently. And fast.

But after reading the article, and seeing how the founder of this enterprise wants to paint this as a human rights issue — and seeks to try and funnel whatever profits that may be had into the community in an attempt to revitalize some aspect of a sector of Los Angeles that is grossly suffering from dire economic hardship, I am not as skeptical.

I mean I am still skeptical, don’t get me wrong. Just not as skeptical.

But think about it for a moment, what is this tour exactly going to be? Is it a bunch of rich white folks who want to go slumming for an afternoon? Is it the international crowd, say a horde of Japanese or Argentinians who get picked up from a hotel in Beverly Hills and are then chauffeured in an air-conditioned gang bus past downtown to the southeast right through cities like Lynwood where I teach? (By the way, if I ever take the tour myself and see a student I know from my high school, am I supposed to wave, duck, or boast to all the other people on the bus, “Hey, I know that kid. He’s in my third period class!”)

Boy, wouldn’t I be the stud of the bus then?

Maybe the clientele is a a bunch of effete Frenchmen who once watched the movie Colors and like to play the hard beats of NWA over their Renault’s car stereo systems?

BTW, are gangs really going to grant “safe passage” through the hood for a brightly colored bus filled with tourists? I mean, isn’t one of the easiest criminal marks a crook could ever hope to target a tourist? Think about it, they don’t know their way around, some don’t even know the language, and they always travel with cash and expensive goodies because they have to pay for things like hotels, meals, and bus rides through inner-city gangland?

Oh yeah, am I the only troubled by the voyeuristic dehumanization aspect of this tour we might potentially be seeing here?

And for sixty-five bucks, what do I get? I mean is my driver packin’ heat? Like if they start shooting at us is someone on my bus gonna be shooting back at them?

Are there pit stops so that I can experience what it’s like to score drugs off the street?

Will I have the opportunity to write my name in graffiti on the side of a public building so that I can learn how to “tag”?

If I see a cop, should I flip him off, run, or drop to my knees and thank God that someone is about to save me from the Jurassic Park aspect of this stupid tour?

And if I don’t see any menacing looking homies who mad dogg me and make me think they are going to rip off my head and kill every member of my family, will there be some sort of refund? Like I wanna feel like I am going to die — but I am also hoping that the bus will serve lemonade, too… because as a tourist, it’s nice to have lemonade.

Oh yeah, can I get a tattoo to show that I am down for the hood? Just a henna though, please. My mom would kill me if she found out I used real ink.

For years I have said that while our attention is focused on an international war, our urban communities have been mired in a domestic war that is costing our citizens more of their lives, safety and sense of prosperity than anything going on in the middle east right now.

Truly, scores of kids die each year in urban America as a result of gang violence. As a teacher in L.A. and the author of the YA novel Homeboyz, I kinda feel I know what I am talking about to a small extent.

And now, you too can see what it’s like to live on the hard streets of gangland U.S.A. Don’t forget your camera — the trip promises lots of special photo opportunities.

Especially when you see the chalk outlines of 14 year olds. Those make for great stories once you get home and share your photo album with all your friends while sipping hot chocolate by the fireplace.

I tell ya, if it was white kids dying in America at the same rate of black and brown kids, lots of people would be singing a different tune about gangs in America.

And about tours that offer the chance to gawk.

Is there such a thing as an English class that doesn’t read a single, real, whole book over the course of the year? I mean I know there is. Some places — WAY TOO MANY in fact — have the The Lords of District Oversight that Ban the Reading of Novels in English Class

That’s right, they mandate that NO NOVELS be taught.

It’s all excerpts, pieces taken from anthologies, worksheets, scripted programming and… biggest of all, practice tests to prepare for the real tests.

Am I the only one who thinks this is nuts?

Every good English teacher I know uses real books in the classroom. From Crime and Punishment to The Outsiders to The Skin I’m In to Old Yeller to Hatchet to The Great Gatsby to The Pearl to The Lord of the Flies to Animal Farm to To Kill a Mockingbird and on and on and on, real books are part of the fabric of what makes for, in my estimation, the essential, core constitution of a real and effective and meaningful ELA class.

When exactly did that stop? (Don’t worry, I know. It’s rhetorical.)

So the question is, forgetting even my own prejudice towards the use of real books (prejudice because 1) I love them and 2) years and years of experience tell me that they work as my BEST tool for accomplishing all the literacy goals both I and my school district have for our students) am I the only one who believes we need to re-double our efforts to start fighting for primary source authentic literature (i.e. real books) in the classroom?

Because real books are under assault from the bean/bubble counters.

Could you teach an entire year as an ELA educator without being able to use one real novel? And if so, do you think that by doing so this would be a methodology that best serve the needs of your kids?

The Lords of District Oversight that Ban the Reading of Novels in English Class are a menace to the very fabric of our discipline… and isn’t it time that someone stood up to them and explained how the emperor has no clothes?

And a tiny wanker, too.

Sorry, just had to get that last “little one” in. Get it? Little one?

For the first time ever, I got me some hate mail. It was in response to my blog post the other day about Alabama on October 12th and re-segregation.

I’d copy and paste the message here but I think protocol would dictate that I remove all the profanity — and if I remove all the profanity from the email, there really would be any message left to copy and paste.

Let’s just say it was elegant, simple, direct and remarkably blunt. Truth be told, it was a model of concise writing. Though only 7 words, the message about who I was and what I should go do with myself was unmistakably clear.

(Good to see that in the land of the almost hyper-politically correct America in which we now reside, this gentleman from Alabama didn’t seem too worried about being nuanced or opinionated. Bravo, I say. Though I must admit, I don’t think I am limber enough to actually perform the act he instructed me to perform on myself.)

I can’t say I am all-together shocked by getting a bit of push-back from a few folks in Alabama based on what I wrote. However, when I see that some new NAEP test scores have just come out and point to an obvious and troubling racial achievement gap I realize that even if I was a bit harsh on the folks down South, it’s not just me who finds some of the by-products of racial disparity troubling.

As this article says…

While 4th grade scores among the nation’s white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students all have improved since 1990, they remained flat from 2007 to 2009. The gap separating black and white students’ scores, and that between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, also stayed the same—a discrepancy that has not narrowed in recent testing cycles.

• Is gerry-mandering the school district zones going to help?
• Is America as a country better when certain racial groups out-perform other racial groups?
• Am I some sort of turncoat for raising the issue?

Students are apparently making some progress on the NAEP tests but, according to the folks who study this data, it’s not enough and the racial disparity is a troubling element which needs to be eradicated in order for our country to climb to the next level of scholastic achievement.

Yep, I got me some hate mail. All I can say is, though I tried to be fair, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

I had a school-wide faculty after-school meeting this week on Wednesday afternoon — one that we were not notified we’d be having until Tuesday afternoon. (As if we don’t have actual lives outside of this place.) And why?

Cause there was some really important stuff to go over. Like hall passes.

We literally spent 23 minutes discussing the proper implementation of granting hall passes. Which hall pass to assign. When they should be assigned. When they should not be assigned. How many of them can be assigned. How we are now supposed to keep track of who we are granting hall passes to so now, when a kid asks to use the restroom, we are supposed to stop everything we are doing, get out our “Accountability of the hall pass” sheet of paper, and note who took the pass so, in case someone absconds with the hall pass, we know who the last kid to have the hall pass was.

Because apparently, hall pass abduction is on the rise. And sophisticated classroom discussions on the theme of oppression throughout the ages as evidenced in a cross section of texts by international authors easily afford the opportunity to start-n-stop to do menial book-keeping like making sure that I note that Jenny took the hall pass because she is menstruating!!

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

(But at least she’s not pregnant… alas, I drift.)

Never mind the ditching on campus. Never mind the fire alarms being pulled. Never mind the graffiti, the truancy, the tardiness, the lack of homework, the immense need for more parental support, the fact that there’s always a 15 minute line to use the faculty photocopier (when it’s working) and on and on and on.

Hall passes are now a major concern and damn it, we are going to beat this problem… as a team!

It was practically a surreal experience for me, sitting through this hall pass certification training process. But trumping the fact that our admins were spending our precious planning/professional/life time so ludicrously was the shocking sight of seeing so many teachers with their hands up waiting to ask questions about hall passes once the admins had concluded their section of the day’s preposterousness.

Will we be getting special hall passes for the nurse?
Are the library hall passes good for more than one student?
Can we color code the hall passes so that we know which department issued the hall pass?

Every time I think the admins are acting foolishly I look out to my peers and think, Aw Geesh, please put your hand down.

Am I the only one who knows that the golden rule of long, silly staff meeting is to NEVER raise your hand to ask a question because it only prolongs the pain?

BTW, school started six weeks ago, I have about 10,000 hours of work to do in terms of grading and lesson planning and trying to bring in a new unit on Body Language to tie to some oral presentations I want to have my students give later this month and we’re talking about freakin’ hall passes for 23 minutes well after 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon after I’ve been at school since before the light of day?

My Freakin’ School is Wastin’ My Freakin’ Time!!!

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

According to a new report by the Center for Disease Control, 9 out of every 10 teens are not eating enough of their recommended fruits and veggies.

You mean Hot Cheetos aren’t a vegetable?

Am I the only one that has kids walk in at 7 a.m. in the morning gulping down processed sugar? I mean we are talking about a breakfast that consists of a frosted Pop Tart, lunch that is a bag of salty chips and a soda, and then an after school snack of cupcakes or cookies — or more chips until dinner (which is so often, fast food). That’s the average teen diet these days.

As teachers, we see this every day. Thing is though, if you check the bottom left hand drawer of most desks (of teachers) you are probably going to find a Snickers Bar or a mini-bag of Chips Ahoy. It’s not just the students that are eating poorly — it’s the educators as well.

Me, of course I try to eat my fruits and veggies. Try, that is. Yet it seems as though I have to actively choose a pear while my hands just naturally gravitate towards peanut M&M’s without any real effort on my own behalf at all (peanut M&M’s cause they don’t make my keyboard too sticky when I blather on as a blogger, of course).

The fact is, the quickest way to get our ELA staff to buy into being engaged for an entire department meeting begins with good ol’ fashioned chocolate. Forget erudite discussions of Kafka, Orwell and Dickens. You want to get an our English department fired up, put out a tray filled with Oreos or Keebler Fudge Stix!! Then we’ll talk dis-aggragated data and methodologies to differentiate and accommodate for all sorts of learning styles in the classroom til the cows come home.

Fudge cake is the engine that drives a good meeting and really, I am not sure why more people don’t recognize this about teachers. We don’t really care about merit pay… but we all respond to homemade brownies.

Look, if we’re gonna nag kids about the junk food they eat, we’re pretty much the pot calling the kettle black. And if kids can smell anything, it’s the words of a hypocrite.

For anyone who says that class size does not matter, I say to them…

Well, this is a civil conversation so I’ll bite my tongue. But come on, in the rush to hoist the notion of “teacher quality” to the top of the educational flagpole, we are allowing ourselves to pretend truthful things are not really truths.

And one truthful thing is that class size does matter. A lot.

Here’s an article from the Los Angeles Times about how some classes at Fairfax High School have 50 students crammed into classrooms built for 30. When kids sit on the floor, on filing cabinets, and the such, is anyone really going to say that “teacher quality” trumps all other factors when it comes to successfully educating students? My second period class this year has 43 kids while I only have 34 desks. (I do have some chairs however and right now, no one is sitting on the floor.) But am I the same teacher I am in my 8th period class where there are only 29 students on the roster?

The answer is, I try to be but no, it saddens me that I am not. I believe I am a better teacher in the class where there are less students.

Why? (Like you have to ask.) Because at a certain point the volume becomes unmanageable to individualize and attend to the unique needs of all students. With 29 it’s hard. With 35 it’s threshold. With 43, it’s approaching ludicrous. I get spread too thin and they get less and less and less of me. And with 50, as they cite in the article mentioned above where kids are sitting on the floor, let’s be honest, those kids are being short-changed.

And so is the teacher. And so is the school. And so is the community. And so is our country. Do kids have to sit on the floor for us to recognize that we are heading towards rock bottom?