Why one teacher asks his students to respect and love each other enough to wait to have sex until they're ready.

Sometimes when I'm feeling tired, stressed, or just plain lazy, I will use a planning period to meander down to the school counselor’s office, plop down on her couch, and demand that she fix what ails me. A few weeks ago, I was in there thumbing through one of her books about teenage sexuality. It said that in a 2008 a survey of ninth to 12th grade teens, 45 percent reported having had sex. When they restricted the question to just seniors, 75 percent said they had had sex.

This really wasn’t that much of a revelation for me. Two years ago, a friend loaned me Jeremy Iversen's book, High School Confidential, which chronicles a semester spent as an undercover high school student in California. Iversen’s tale divested me of a lot of sexual naiveté, the result of attending a tiny school in Peru.

I knew from that experience that prohibitions against teenage sexuality are as much a cultural convention as anything, but I had also come to believe that in the elongated adolescence that American culture promotes, teenage hanky-panky is a very bad idea. As a teacher, I found the extent of my student’s sexual activity disturbing and wanted to do something about it. I began to wonder, though, what I could possibly say to them that they hadn't already heard a million times before.

In the end, I gave up on figuring out how to boss them into behaving, and instead started trying to share honestly (and appropriately) from my own experience. I also took every opportunity to affirm them, and tried to encourage them with my words and actions to respect and love each other enough to wait on sex until they're ready.

As is typical in my line of work, I generally felt that I was talking to the back wall of the classroom.

Today at lunch, however, I glimpsed a ray of hope. One of my former students, Mary, came bounding into my room towing John, a quiet chap new to my class this year, and Liz, a bubbly blond. Mary did the cha-cha slide over to my desk, slapped her palms down on the projector stand next to it and said, “Mr. Barkey, we want to talk to you about sex.”

“Um, okay,” I said. “What about sex do you want to discuss?”

“Why shouldn’t we have sex?” she replied.

I thought for a moment. “Well,” I began, “I’m not gonna sit here and tell you I’ve got it all figured out. And I’m sure not going to judge you. You know I’m as messed as the next guy, but here's what I think."

Then, as Liz, John and Mary sat at the long desk in front of mine and began to eat their lunches, I gingerly picked up the gift of trust they had given me and started to talk about sex. I told them I understood what it was like to be afraid to be unloved—how since my wife had left me a year ago I, too, had wanted a quick-fix, feel-good experience. I told them how I knew I wasn’t ready yet for the trust and intimacy that a healthy sexual relationship required, and how I hoped I would be wise enough to wait for the right time. Then I shared the reasons why I believed the time was not right for them, either, and how they were worth more than that.

As I talked, I wondered again if I was being heard as yet another droning adult voice, telling them to behave. They seemed engaged, though. They asked questions and made comments and when I finished, Liz tilted her head to one side and said: “I never thought about it like that before.”

“Well, how did you think about it?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she said, “I guess I just kind of  thought I shouldn’t have sex because if I did I would die.”

We had a good laugh over that, and as I talked a bit more about how fear was a terrible motivation for any course of action, I thought again about how great it was to be a teacher—to be able to meet these young men and women where they were: to love them, and maybe even show them how to love each other.

The year before, I had sat in that same classroom and had much the same conversation with Mary, who scrunched up her face, made imploring claws of both her hands and said, “But Mr. Barkey, I’m 15 and I have neeeeeeds.”

I do not expect, as one blathering art teacher, to end teen pregnancy in America. But maybe, I can help a few students to make wiser decisions.

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

A teacher helps his students make fewer mistakes in their own lives by sharing with them some of his own.

“Mr. Barkey, will you give me a ‘D’?”

Kristen stood by my desk, palms pressed together in supplication and a look of earnest pleading on her face. I actually thought she might cry.

“Ahhh, what?” I asked, and she repeated the question and then added, “If I don’t turn in anything for the rest of the quarter, will that get me a ‘D’?”

Kristen is part of a triad of cute, bubbly, talkative tenth grade girls that I refer to in class
as “jabberwockies” and “giggle-monkey-whisper-fairies.” They talk a lot, but they do (eventually) finish their work and can be counted on to hand in their assignments.

We had only two weeks left in the first quarter of this school year and Kristen had an “A” in my class, so I told her that a “D” was pretty much impossible for the next report card.

Her shoulders dropped an inch and then she perked up and said, “Well, couldn’t you just give me a ‘D’ anyway?”

“Of all the questions I could have anticipated being asked today,” I replied, “that was not one of them. Now, why in the heck do you want a ‘D’ so bad?”

“I can’t tell you,” she replied, “or you won’t give it to me.”

“Well now, that sure motivates me to change your grade,” I answered, laughing. “Look, Kristen, even if I wanted to, your grades aren’t something I can just go in and muck around with just for fun. It’s not possible.”

At that point, her pleading got really desperate and I was beginning to wonder if she was going to cry for real. As much as the rest of the class was enjoying our little interchange, I didn't want it to get out of hand, so I told her to go sit down and get back to work. She complied, but proceeded to beg and badger me until finally it occurred to me what the real problem was.

“Do you play a sport?” I asked, and there was an audible sigh and several snickers from the rest of the class as the bone-headed teacher finally figured out what was going on. Kristen ran track. Kristen hated running track but was not willing to quit in the last two weeks of the season, hoping to avoid a confrontation with either her coach or her parents. So, clever girl that she is, Kristen figured out that if she received a "D," as dictated by school policy, she'd be ineligible to run. 

Fortunately, I have some experience with quitting, having quit a few things in my day and having talked at least a half a dozen people (including myself) out of quitting back when I was working as a tree-planting crew leader.

I did not try to talk Kristen out of quitting. Instead, I advised her to face the decisions of her life and to avoid at all costs a misdirected attempt to resolve the problem. I babbled at her for about 10 minutes. I was feeling like I was repeating myself but was encouraged by her occasional, slight nods.

“You know what,” I finished, “I spent the better part of my relationship with my ex-wife passively hoping things would fix themselves, and we all know how well that turned out. Passivity is an illusion. Own your decisions.” She pursed her lips but nodded one last time and went back to her work.

I don’t know why I hadn't advised her to stick out the track season, and later that day wondered if maybe I should have. But the next morning when she sat down in class, Kristen said, “Mr. Barkey, I want you to know that I decided to stick it out for the rest of the season.”

I did a quick fist pump, pointed at her and, grinning, said, “Awesome. Now, quit yer yappin’ and get back to work.”

This is why I love teaching, and on the days when I become painfully aware of my own limitations and inadequacies—during the times when I am aware that I’ve missed another moment to connect or have failed to succeed in creating as positive, productive a classroom experience as I would have liked—on those days I remember students like Kristen who maybe, just maybe, will make a few less mistakes because I showed up and shared honestly from my own.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Spree2010

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

A teacher is reminded that the lessons that really stick are rarely a part of the official course material.

The best part about growing up in the Amazon was the people, and when I was a kid, one of my absolute favorite people was Jungle Man Danny Fast. Like me, Danny was raised by missionaries. But unlike me, he had spent a lot of his childhood in the deep jungle of Peru with an indigenous people called the Achuar.

Danny had widow's-peaked brown hair, the strong, ripcord muscles of jungle living, and flat feet and toes from a life spent walking around barefoot. When most of his friends had graduated high school and moved back to their home countries of Canada, the United States, and (in Danny’s case) Germany, Danny had stayed in the jungle to live with the people he had come to love. I guess you could say that to a jungle boy like me—living in dread of the day I would have to leave the muggy, vine-draped land of my childhood—Danny offered up vision of Never-Never Land.

But the real parrot-feather in his battered cap—the thing that pushed him over the top and into “uber-cool-hero-worship-land”—was that Danny had actually been on television, acting as a guide and interpreter for a 1987 National Geographic special on the Achuar people and their use of medicinal plants. As a fluent English, Spanish, and Achuar speaker, he was pretty much the only human being on the face of the planet with the ability, time, and inclination for the job. As a result, he got his 15 minutes and became a bit of a celebrity within our little community.

I’m not sure how, exactly, Danny and I became friends. Perhaps it was our shared love of fishing or the fact that he, like me, was an avid reader. Whatever it was, whenever Danny happened to pop in to visit his parents and stock up before returning to his life in the jungle, he and I always ended up spending a lot of time together. A consummate storyteller, as we fished and paddled around the nearby lake he kept me spellbound with jungle tales, into which were woven lessons about life, indigenous culture, natural history—you name it.

As time passed, our visits tended to revolve less around shared jungle adventures and more around the deeper stuff of life. We often sat up late into the evening, just talking. He would tell me his stories and we would chat about philosophy, science, and religion.

Then I graduated and moved away. Unlike Danny, I had no real place of my own. It was never my mission, so when my borrowed time expired, I hopped on one plane after another, ending up at university during one of the coldest British Columbia winters in decades.

You can take the boy out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the boy. I spent hours wandering campus sidewalks in the mist and drizzle of the night, wishing that I, like Danny, could have stayed in a place where everything—even the smell of the air—wasn’t so strange.

But Danny was with me, too. See, without realizing what was happening, I had absorbed him into my way of thinking. My perspective had been drastically shaped by a man who lived, by choice, at a pace and with a simplicity unthinkable to the average North American. He was, in short, my teacher. His way of thinking had become a part of me, and I have worked his teachings into my life as I have spent the past 13 years in this foreign culture, gradually learning to make it my own. He was a missionary kid of American and German descent, destined to return to a life of “civilized” wealth, living out his “potential” as an educated, Caucasian male. He became the Jungle Man.

Two years ago, when I moved from British Columbia to North Carolina in order to be closer to family and a few childhood friends, this Jungle Man was there as well. His mother, long since a widow, had fallen ill and needed constant care. So Dan (as he had come to be known) put his dream of helping the Achuar develop a local, sustainable industry and protein source on hold and moved to America to care for his mother.

I see him most weeks now. We sit in his book-lined loft and talk, as before, about loftier things. He tells me his stories, and with them continues to teach me about life. In a culture obsessed with the self and personal advancement, he stands for me as a reminder of selfless familial devotion. He teaches me how to live.

Teaching is a privilege that happens when we least expect it. As a professional educator, it's easy to forget that the lessons that stick are often not a part of the official course material. It's easy to get bogged down in the daily grind of lessons and evaluation—to forget that sometimes, by just being me, I can really change a life. 

Photographs used by permission of the author. 

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

When a teacher spends his free time becoming a better artist he also becomes a better teacher.

There is an oft-repeated saying that those who cannot do, teach—and that (as Woody Allen adds) “those who can’t teach, teach gym.” Although like many clichés this one persists by containing within it a kernel of truth, it nonetheless ignores the ages-old tradition wherein many exceptional practitioners of many a discipline have taught their way through some very productive years. It is hard to say whether their original motivation for teaching was love or money, but it is nonetheless obvious that countless inquisitive young minds have benefited by time spent under the tutelage of such masters.

This gives me hope. Although I hesitate to think of myself as master of anything, I nonetheless spend most of the limited free time I have when not teaching questing after the elusive grail of artistic perfection—working, in short, to be an artist. In the past, this search has led me in a hap-hazard way towards paint and canvas and brushes; but this last year my most driving passion has become the artful arrangements of words—most specifically into scripts for film.

When I first moved to North Carolina, I met an actor and filmmaker named Austin Herring, who fanned to flame the fire that had been kindled by time spent working on film sets as an extra back home in British Columbia. I had putzed around in the background of TV shows and somewhere between a staredown with Anne Hathaway and watching Jennifer Garner bat her eyes in slow motion and order an Earl Grey tea on the set of Juno, I fell in love. All that vicarious thrilling nurtured my fascination with the power and creative possibilities of the medium, so when Austin loaned me his screenwriting textbooks, I worked hard to acquire the tools to begin to make my own creative contribution.

Last winter, I ended up helping Austin with a short film he was directing called “Home.” Later, after helping him with some final changes to the script for his brilliant current project called “Unemployment,” he invited me to come on board as an associate producer. This gave me the opportunity to work on a professional-caliber, Sundance-bound (crossing fingers) film. I also gained invaluable hands-on insight as I had the chance to interact with a number of the local film professionals who will likely be working as well on the Cannes-bound (running out of fingers to cross, here) short called “Fork” that I wrote and that we will be shooting as soon as post-production wraps up on “Unemployment.” Screenwriters generally toil in obscurity for years before getting anyone to even look at their work, so although the actual act of writing is nothing new for me, it is heady and exciting to have the opportunity to see one of my early scripts jump right off the page and onto the screen.

It has been painful, therefore, to rip myself away from the set to dive once again into the familiar, somewhat less glamorous world of pre-school meetings. Unfortunately, there have been scheduling conflicts between film and school. If the conflict is irreconcilable I will always choose teaching, which is my bread and butter and as such my first priority—but that does not mean it is always an easy choice to make.

Last weekend, I set the lesson plans aside to go back and mill around the set. I feel guilty when this sort of thing happens—when I use my free time to become a better artist. I wonder if perhaps my students will suffer from what I perceive to be my lack of whole-hearted dedication to what goes on between the bells. And yet, just when I feel as though I ought to put my pen, paper, and storyboards down, I remember that whether or not I ever do create anything of note as a screenwriter (or painter, or poet, or memoirist, or ukulele virtuoso), it is this very passion that lights me up for teaching.

Although I cannot prove it, I believe that when my students see the spark burning in my eyes as I convey to them my own love of creation, the spark travels, spreads, and finally ignites them as well. There is nothing more inspiring for my own work than to be surrounded by young minds alive and ablaze at the chance to dance within the indescribable wonder of creative activity. I find myself inspired all over again, and the joy enriches both my teaching and my art.

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

I fell through 12 jobs before finally landing on teaching, but the one that prepared me most for what I now consider to be a vocation was Canadian tree-planting. Not tree-planting like “middle-aged Arbor Day ladies in sun-bonnets and flowered gloves,” but rather commercial reforestation—a tree-planting of blood, sweat, and more than a few tears. This sort of tree-planting is almost a rite of passage for Canadian college students. And as the half-Canadian relative of several cousins and a brother who paid their way through school by bending over and poking seedlings into the ground, I guess it was inevitable that I would end up doing much the same.

I was the rookiest rookie you ever did see: At 18-years-old I weighed in at a buck-twenty and thought “manual labor” was an hour spent weeding a garden. Therefore, it was quite shocking when the summer break after my freshman year I found myself in what is considered to be one of the hardest jobs in North America, a grind in which to make a decent amount of money you have to plant not hundreds but thousands of trees each day.

Studies have shown that tree-planters burn the caloric equivalent of running a half-marathon every single work day, and they do it in conditions ranging from blistering heat to hail or even snow—sometimes in the very same day. They do it on marshes and mountainsides, crawling over mounds of logging debris and through clouds of bugs. It is painful work that demands every last ounce of strength, intellect, and psychological resilience you can throw at it. Needless to say, I was ill-prepared.

Somehow, though, I managed to survive and, eventually, to prosper. After four summers spent suffering in the woods, I was what those in the industry call a “highballer,” one of the top producers and wage earners in my company. Although that was how I had planned to retire—at the top of my game—I was then offered a foreman position that I felt I could not refuse. At the age of 21, I was given the responsibility of finding, hiring, training, motivating, and mollycoddling a crew of eight college students through the hardest experience of their young lives.

I was equally unprepared to be a foreman. My only prior leadership experience was as 10th grade class president, and I had done such a rotten job engendering across-the-aisle cooperation that one of the more strong-willed girls in our class ended up usurping my power halfway through the year. Nonetheless, I was determined to succeed as a foreman. I studied every leadership book I could get my hands on and worked really, really hard. As a result, my crews dominated and I ended up writing “The Guide to Leading a Killer Crew,” which was a leadership pamphlet that was widely adopted in our four-hundred-planter company.

I am not telling you all this to toot my own horn (well, maybe I am, just a little), but rather to provide some background and credibility for myself when I say that in my six years in that position—eventually becoming supervisor of a camp of five different crews—I learned what it takes to be a great leader. Great teachers must be great leaders, so I would like to offer any aspiring teacher-leaders out there a list of some of the most important lessons I learned in the wilds of British Columbia and Alberta. Most I read in books, but not one of them became real to me until I saw how quickly things degenerated when either my fellow foremen or myself chose to ignore them.

1. Your planters/students are your greatest asset. They are intelligent, wonderful, gifted people who are desperate for someone to believe in them and treat them as human beings. Your administration and colleagues will groan and bemoan some of your troubled young charges—but don’t you believe it! If you stick with your students, you will be amazed at what they will achieve.

2. Your students will only jump as high as you set the bar. So set it higher than you believe they can jump—and watch what happens.

3. Your students will look to you for inspiration. And the only way to ignite their passion is to demonstrate your own. So learn to love your subject matter and get excited about learning! You are a leader of the youth. You no longer have the luxury of hating your job. If you hate it, either stop hating it or quit.

4. You are there for your students, not vice versa. Be a servant, but remember: service is not a grudging chore—it is an immense privilege with equally immense benefits. Take advantage.

5. “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in.” I know it is hard and I know there are days when you just want to kill the little weasels, but there is nothing so powerful as a determined leader who actually leads. So stop whining, start believing, and join the ranks of Churchill, Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Mandela, and Mr. Gesch—my own high school English teacher, who first taught me to love the artful arrangement of words.

Photograph used by permission of the author.

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

A few years ago, I taught a low-income, first-generation college student who didn’t initially come across as particularly diverse. While Martin was from the rural Midwest, or, as he put it, “Nascar people,” he dressed in the uniform of the modern college student—skinny jeans, a V-neck T-shirt, and a hoodie.

Martin wouldn’t have stood out except for the fact that he was the only white student in my 10 a.m. class—that, and his aloof demeanor made me keep a very close watch over him, figuring he was trouble. Rail-thin, he walked slowly with almost comic intentionality, as if placing his feet in invisible foot-sized squares. He wore hipster glasses that gave him an air of intellectual superiority, and he spoke with such sarcasm that no student dared to oppose anything he said.

His was the natural voice of a critic: As long as he was tearing something down, he was happy. While I let him write his first two essays in this manner, helping him even out his tone and consider whether or not he was alienating his audience, I still wasn’t satisfied. I asked him to come to office hours, sat him down, and didn't say anything until the silence finally became uncomfortable. I gently prodded: “You’re clearly a brilliant guy. But what you’re doing is easy—it’s not hard to point out how everyone else is wrong. What’s easy can become arrogance. You might want to see if you can actually say something that isn’t just critical. I can’t make you do it, but I do think you might have something to say, if you tried to find something that mattered to you.”

He sat and sat and said nothing. I thought I might have laid it on a bit thick. Then he nodded, left with his careful, shuffling steps, and that was all; he was less aggressively sarcastic in class, had read carefully, and I saw him sometimes even nodding in agreement with what others had to say. For his last paper, on identity, he wrote of writer Andre Dubus’s essay “Witness,” about coping with an accident that took the author’s legs, and on Zora Neale Hurston’s essay about refusing to be limited by being African-American. 

Martin wrote of Dubus’s tragic case first—how he had been recognized as a genius, living a happy and successful life with a family and wife and career when one night he stopped on a highway to help a woman in distress and was hit by a speeding driver. He lost the use of his legs, and was left in persistent pain, confined permanently to a wheelchair. Worse, his wife divorced him and took his daughters away to a house that wasn’t wheelchair accessible, so that he was unable to ever see the rooms where they lived. Dubus’s essay was about the need to face squarely what he’d lost the night he was hit, but Martin focused on the aftermath, asserting: “Although Mr. Dubus lost something which he cherished—the ability to walk—he allowed the accident to hurt him even more than it initially had. He allowed the accident to consume him, and the other things in his life were swept away by his grief.”

Then, in a strange and sophisticated contrast, Martin turned his attention to Zora Neale Hurston’s essay about the role of race in her life. In that controversial essay, she described growing up in an all-black township in Eatonville, Florida, and what changed at thirteen, when her mother passed away and her family moved to Jacksonville. Martin was impressed with the bravery of her position, the way she insisted that she wouldn’t let her blackness make a difference. Martin focused on her fate: she died working as a maid, broke and alone, buried in an unmarked grave. “She was a perfect example of someone who tried not to let the world change who she was, as best she could…but she was finally made a victim. The truth is that no matter how hard we try, we are unable to go through life unaffected by the world around us…society pulls people to one another, sometimes benignly, sometimes tragically, and human suffering makes no difference to fate.”

I was amazed at the depth of reflection. Here, finally, was what I’d asked: for Martin to engage fully. Then he exceeded the assignment entirely: “I can still remember when I got back from the first surgery. My memories of the surgery itself are vague—I was a fourth grade boy under heavy sedation—but I remember what happened when I got back to school: all the kids saw my crutches, and it was a wonderful thing. We were too young to associate them with weakness or disability. That first year, I wasn’t embarrassed to have them, not like later; the other kids were as excited as I was to use them, to see who could go fastest in them, and I raced joyfully up and down the halls, innocent of all that was ahead of me.”

Fourth grade was the last time Martin was able to consider his condition a blessing. Martin has persistent, incurable PVNS (pigmented villonodular synovitis). His careful walk was a matter of bone grinding on bone, each step excruciating. The doctors have made clear that whatever progress he might make, by his mid-twenties his foot would fuse to his shin and he would become wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life. Staying off it was suggested, and so he suffered constant anxiety about trying not to work it too hard, but he refused to give in:

“Society would tell me I am not as strong as everyone else. I disagree. I prove I can participate, I choose the pain, and it does not rule me or define me. It has humbled me, but it has given me the will to do better… Losing ourselves in self-loathing or pretending that the world around us have no impact on us isn’t healthy; there must be something between Dubus and Hurston. I know I must take my condition into account, but I’m not going to let it stop me from becoming who I want to be.”

I had asked a great deal of Martin; he had given me more still, had faced without flinching the reality of his condition and his pain, the uncertainty of his future. He taught me a lesson in humility. 

I sent Martin an email after the quarter telling him how much I appreciated his essay and his courage. He sent back a succinct, "Sure. Thanks." It could be read any number of ways. I like to think that sincere might even be one of them.

Image: Frerieke, Creative Commons

Michael Copperman is a writer and novelist who teaches at the University of Oregon. He regularly writes for GOOD.

As usual, Jatavia was the first to arrive exactly at 7:30 a.m. Normally a quiet student who's eager to complete the morning grammar and history work that’s displayed on the blackboard, this morning she didn’t go immediately to her desk. Instead, she gingerly shuffled my direction. I could tell that something wasn’t right so I inquired, “Is everything okay, Jatavia?”

“Mr. Friedland, you promise not to tell the other students?” she finally whispered.

“Of course Jatavia, what’s on your mind?” 

She hesitated, but she eventually explained that the previous night she had a nightmare about life in middle school. In her dream she was an outcast; the girls made fun of her intelligence and weight, while the boys called her ugly and were eager to throw things at her in class. It got so bad (she explained at this point with tears streaming down her face) that she trapped herself in the bathroom so that she could avoid the harassment of her peers.

It was no coincidence that Jatavia was having this sort of dream. The previous day with the high pitched squeals of middle school cheerleaders, and an off-key rendition of the Black Eyed Peas's  “I Gotta Feeling” played by the band, the fifth graders (teachers included) were welcomed to their future middle school during a half-day transition orientation.

While the faculty and many of the students put their best foot forward in an attempt to show the school in a positive, productive, and principled light, it was apparent that disorder was the norm. The tour ended in the cafeteria where my wide-eyed students had lunch with the sixth graders. Afterwards, we boarded the bus and returned to school.  

When we got back to our comparatively innocent and orderly classroom, the body language of the class was split in two. Half of my students were bursting with excitement, while the other half was sheepish and quiet. I opened the room for discussion by simply asking: “So, what did you think? Are you ready to go to middle school?” I wanted to get an idea of what they were thinking so I asked each student to write down what came to mind when I mentioned middle school. I told them that their writings were a great way to reflect on the orientation and were completely confidential.

Their reactions ranged the gamut from being excited to switch between classes to being intimidated and worried about all the unknowns. As I was sitting at my desk that afternoon, reading these responses, I also couldn’t help but reflect on the idea of middle school. In my mind, the middle school years can be the toughest years for a child. When I talk to other people that are also in education, I start to get the feeling that for many, middle school has the potential to be the lost years of a child’s education. Students can arrive at middle school with skills on or near grade level, but because of a tornado of variables that may include pitiful school organization, lack of quality teachers, and adolescence, a child’s education has a distinct possibility of treading firmly in place.

I suddenly got a nervous feeling when thinking about my students’ futures. For students like Jatavia, who were intimidated and nervous about entering a new phase in life, I had to reassure them (without being dishonest) that everything was going to be okay. This was challenging because Jatavia’s concerns of sticking out are legitimate, and no matter how well behaved she acts and protected she is by school policy, she will still have to dive into the shark tank that is middle school and ultimately fend for herself.

When I said goodbye to my students at the start of summer, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. With some, I realize that their maturity level is not the highest, their support network is not the strongest, and, at 11 years old, asking them to stay on a path of academic progress that is riddled with social pressures may be too much. However, I am hopeful that with the constant messages about life choices, responsibility, and diligence that were hammered into their heads throughout the year, that the majority of my students will persevere and ultimately seek a productive path for themselves.

Image: John Steven Fernandez, from Creative Commons

Randy Friedland teaches fifth grade at an elementary school in Atlanta.

The private high school where I teach begins each school year with a trip to a retreat center in the mountains. At the start of this past year, on the very day we returned from that retreat, my wife moved out. She had announced her intention to divorce me after the year of separation legally mandated by the state of North Carolina.

My colleagues and supervisors were amazing. They regularly reached out to support me in any way they could. In one such conversation with the principal, I mentioned my intention to live my experience openly with my students, hoping that my willingness to be honest and vulnerable with them would help us to connect as human beings. I felt that this was not only a healthier choice for everyone involved, but would also encourage in them the sort of honesty and vulnerability that is absolutely essential if real, gutsy art-making is to occur. After asking that we “remain in dialogue” about what sorts of details I would be sharing, he gave me his blessing and I proceeded to open my life to the student body.

On the first day, I started out each class by telling a mini-autobiography. Then, at our first gender-divided student assembly, I told all the young men a longer, more gritty version. These experiences produced the most silent, attentive audiences I had ever spoken to, and allowed me to engage with my students in often heart-wrenching new ways. The teacher/student/friend lines began to blur as my students, encouraged  by my openness, began to share their own, often less-than-pristine stories.

Then I went even further. I started to write a memoir chronicling the steps I had been taking my entire life towards the failure of my marriage. I entitled it “Anatomy of an Effup,” and serialized it on my blog as I wrote it. While I did not tell the students how to find it, I did mention that I was doing it—so a few quick Google searches later, I had myself a number of devoted student readers.

Now, in theory, that wouldn't be a bad thing. I work as hard to remain honest in my writing as I do in my classroom, so the end result is sometimes a bit, well, raw. For example, when profanity was necessary, I didn't both writing in asterisks and pound signs—*#@^ it!!—I typed out the words, letter for letter.

It is very likely that that is what ended up getting me into trouble. Shortly thereafter a pair of protective parents found out that their son had been reading my posts and after a little investigation, they pulled him from my class and forbade him to have any contact with me. I found myself back in the principal's office, trying to respectfully defend my words.

By that time, I had completed the rough draft of my memoir and had removed it from the internet to begin the laborious process of rewriting until my forehead bled. The administration stood by me but, sadly, the student in question was withdrawn from the school and I was left with a melancholic taste in my mouth and a whole lot of questions in my mind: Did I do the right thing, posting such an intimate, personal story on a public forum my students could access? Could/should I have done more to keep them from finding it? When I knew that they were reading it, should I have changed the content, or even taken it offline?

I don't know. It has been a struggle, all this year, to search for the balance between honesty and professionalism. While I feel that the students crave reality and that it is my obligation as an art teacher and a human to try and give it to them, I understand that I am a representative of my employers both in and out of the school building. In a private institution such as the one where I teach, I do not believe I have the right to say and do whatever I darn well please when I walk out the doors at the end of the day.

It is a difficult sand-line to draw, but this I know to be true: despite the regrettable example of that one student, I was able to speak into many students' lives this year in a way that I do not believe would have otherwise been possible. And they, in turn, spoke into mine—are in fact a major part of the community effort that has helped me to thrive and grow in a difficult time.

Image via. 

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

The year I turned 22, I went to the Mississippi Delta as a Teach for America corps member. I was idealistic and principled, full of conviction untempered by experience. I had absolute faith in the power of education, believed in its promise of by-the-bootstraps uplift and opportunity. I thought that through sheer force of will, I could right injustice, overcome poverty. Save a child from the life they were born into.

Success in a fourth-grade classroom depended on many things, and I lacked many qualities necessary to realize it. Early on, my class was a study in chaos. Few accepted my authority: “What makes you think we gone listen to you, Chinaman?” One little girl stood on her desk the third day of school and rapped to her cheering classmates, shimmying her shoulders with so glorious a defiance that it now brings a smile to my face. But the smile quickly fades when I remember that today that same little girl is incarcerated. 

In the Delta, where children spoke dialect, my words had no weight. “What all that you been said?” my 13-year-old fourth grader, Tyredious, asked after I’d spoke to the class for 10 minutes about the importance of education, how anyone could rise up with enough hard work. I found my limits on those sunbaked streets. And while I learned how to teach, finally reaching many students, I realized I wasn't meant to be a fourth grade teacher. So I made my way home, wanting to do better. 

In Eugene, Oregon, the town where I was born and raised, I had words. I was the product of an excellent public school system that sent me to an elite university. By teaching writing at the University of Oregon, I decided I could have an impact. I took on three classes each quarter that were comprised of low-income, at-risk students of color—the ones who’d kept their heads down and their legs closed and beat the odds. “If put in the effort, you will succeed in this class and at this university. If you speak clearly, your voice will be heard,” I told them, believing it like gospel. In four years, hundreds of students have made good on that promise.

All spring quarter, I struggled with a Native American student—a quiet, good-natured kid with dark, furtive eyes. The sort of poverty he came from was the sort I knew from the Delta: rusting roofs on shotgun shacks, piles of beer cans in packed-dirt yards, everyone on welfare, endemic alcoholism, and drug use. He was doing fine at first, received a solid grade on his first paper, and then he received his "18 money," or $5,000 from the government's Native American reparations. He told me proudly that he was different from his friends, who would get their money, buy a car in town, and get drunk and crash it on the way home.

“What did you do with it?” I asked.

“I spent it all,” he declared proudly. “And I still got everything.”

I imagined what everything might mean to an 18-year-old who’d never had money before: an iPod, a television, spinning rims on a truck, more alcohol than he and his friends could drink. He blew the money just as he was already blowing his education: his GPA had been awful his first two quarters, and now he was failing all of his classes, including mine, for lack of attendance. I begged him to consider otherwise. He told me I couldn’t imagine the Reservation, the bleak of it, the bind. He told me I didn’t understand. At the seventh week he stopped coming altogether. “He wants back on the Rez,” his friend told me. “Back to what he knows.”

The last day of class he showed up in my office, his face expectant, as if I would surely grant him some reprieve. He’d done less than half of the coursework. Standing there, I entertained for a moment the thought of cutting some deal, creating some nonsense incomplete. But that was about my desire to help him, not about what was possible. “I’m sorry,” I finally said. “You’ve made a choice.”

The look on his face expressed recognition—almost a satisfaction. He’d been true to his course. “Well, thank you so much for everything,” he said, flashing that brilliant grin, his gratitude sincere.

It struck me like a blow to the gut.

I have believed, first in the Delta and then in Oregon, that dedication will make a difference. Not for this young man. Sometimes, you can’t summon the right words because words are insufficient. Sometimes all you can do is put your hand to a good kid’s shoulder, and tell him you wish him the best, wherever he goes from here, and in whatever place he ends up.

Photo via.

Michael Copperman is a writer and novelist who teaches at the University of Oregon. He regularly writes for GOOD.

How one teacher does battle with the blue recycling bin.

Sometimes as a high school teacher, you feel as though you are instructing recycled brains. You feed students the information you want them to learn, expecting to get back something with at least a similar theme to it, only to find that some pre-existing program has garbled the lesson and that what comes out is unrelated gobbledygook.

Take, for example, environmental education. My students get a lot of it. The high school where I teach offers AP Environmental Science (affectionately dubbed, APES), and most of the seniors take it. Being the freewheeling art teacher that I am, I rant a lot about the ways our destructive, wasteful lifestyle has directly resulted in our current ecological nightmare.

All of which is to say that you would think that the dozens of seniors who have commandeered my classroom for lunch over the past two years would know the difference between a black trash can and a blue recycling bin. But despite all their supposed knowledge, I still somehow end up policing the garbage can every afternoon, trying to salvage another miniscule amount of reclaimable material, not to mention a few water bottles, as I mutter about the stupidity of paying good money for something you can get for free. It do not get it: Every year, the APES teacher does a blind test, comparing bottled water to water from the school drinking fountain. And every year, the students cannot tell the difference between the two. So why, oh why, do they keep buying the stuff and then throwing the plastic in the regular garbage can?

There are reasons, of course. Change is difficult and takes a long time, especially when dealing with people who have spent their lives being barraged by a marketing machine that constantly tells them how important their whims and convenience are—more important than, say, breathable air for their grandchildren—and recycling is itself only a barely effectual, usually inconsistently-practiced placebo that allows people to feel good about themselves while continuing their truly destructive consumption habits. Perhaps the students sense that, or perhaps they just don’t care.

Towards the end of this past school year I showed one class a short video clip about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” and two of the seniors in the class immediately started to shake their heads and argue derisively that it did not really exist. When met with reason and the protests of a number of their classmates, they then argued that while it may exist, it certainly wasn’t all that big, and when that argument fell apart, they resorted to crossing their arms and snorting that it did not really matter anyways—it was out in the middle of the freakin’ ocean, after all.

Nevertheless, some of the water bottles do go into the blue bin. And although selfish behavior is by far the norm, I have to remind myself that they are, after all, still in high school. Meanwhile, the momentum in my classroom has shifted significantly away from what it was even five short years ago. People who in years past were throwing fast food wrappers out the windows of their jacked-up trucks now eat organic protein shakes, drive hybrids, and deny the littering ever happened.

There has been a change, and I tend to believe that it has a lot to do with a steadily increasing tide of peer pressure coming from the country’s intellectuals and artisans. Since I am in the very business of making intellectual artisans (or, at least, inculcating in my students the capacity to appreciate their messages), I tend to believe that my job puts me right at the center of hope.

Although I know we’ve a long way to go before we are anywhere close to the ecological balance of yesteryear, I choose to see the blue recycling bin as half full. In the words of Bob the Builder: “Can we fix it? Yes! We can!”

The above rendering of Diego Velazquez's masterpiece, "The Water Carrier of Seville," was painted by the author.

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

For many second-year Teach For America corps members like myself, befuddlement became a way of life over these last two years. As we entered the education fray with little pedagogical training, we faced questions about content knowledge, instructional techniques, familial relations, union membership, health care plans, graduate school degrees—the list goes on. For many of us, the clouds of confusion never truly lifted. We learned to live in varying degrees of fog.

This spring, however, represented a whole new level of perplexity as many of us struggled with the additional question of what to do after our two-year commitment was up. From January until June, corps members dispensed with greetings upon meeting each other, instead cutting right to the chase: "Do you know what you’re doing next year?"

I agonized over this question. On one hand, I wanted to retreat to an area that I have some skill in and knowledge about—journalism and politics. Maybe more than that, I wanted my evenings and Sundays back—no more 80-hour work weeks and alarms going off at 5:30 a.m. Free me from the minutiae of grading and the agony of lesson planning and adolescent irrationality!

On the other hand, I love my kids. The last two years have carried with them some of the most joyous, magical, moving times of my life. This work gives me purpose, these kids give me energy, and the union gives me 10 weeks off each summer. I’ve gotten progressively better as a teacher—why not see if I can maximize my potential now that graduate school is finally over and I am starting to feel more confident?

I chewed over these questions for months and months. Back in August, I met with someone at Teach for America’s Alumni Affairs office. I was trying to be proactive, since the last thing I wanted was for my hand to be played for me and come back for a third year in the classroom for lack of another option.

Yet by mid-April, I’d made minimal progress. At grad school one day, I ran into a corps member I’d taught with during Institute a year and a half earlier. As the protocol went, we soon inquired about what each other was going to do after the commitment ended. He said he was going to Thailand to wring out the stress he’d incurred. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding, but the idea of fleeing the country was highly desirable. After all, when else would I get the opportunity to travel unfettered?

Part of me thought seriously about staying in the classroom—not out of a desire to teach (I didn’t really enjoy the day-to-day, frankly)—but a desire to serve my kids. My feelings were shared by many of my peers, who after similarly seeing educational inequity in the flesh, found it difficult to turn away. Further, after our underprivileged students had told us tales of woe and abandonment, how could we contribute to them?

With the help of a Teach for America event entitled "What’s Next?" I began to learn about the different means employed to reach the common end of parity in the public schools. I could leave my kids but not leave the cause.

While I pursued informational interviews at a nonprofit consulting firm and an international educational equity organization, both felt too removed from actual kids. I came quite close to taking an external affairs job at a charter school, but then withdrew myself from consideration because of my discomfort with charter schools in general.

Finally, I ended up right where I started—my school. I’ve come to believe most in the Harlem Children Zone/Promise Neighborhood model of linking schools with social services and community involvement. Here in New York City, the small-schools movement has chopped huge high schools into smaller, separate schools within the same building. To augment their resources, small schools partner with a community-building organizations.

Next year I will work as the director of a college prep program that operates in conjunction with (and within) my placement school. I have achieved my goals of having more autonomy, broader responsibilities, and a wider impact. My work-life balance will be healthier, or at least less unhealthy, and I’ll still be able to work with my kids.

The majority of second-year corps members I’ve spoken to are doing something similar. That’s right, TFA critics, whether it’s teaching at their placement school or a charter school, working for an education reform program like Teach For India, or a non-profit organization like mine, most corps members are realizing, after twisting and turning and hemming and hawing, that they want to stay in education, after all.

Brendan Lowe is a Teach for America corps member who just completed his second year of teaching high school in the South Bronx. His dispatch for GOOD appears on Fridays.

On Facebook, how classroom rules do and do not apply.

In real life, people don't just usually walk right up to you and ask you to be their friend. Little kids do, I guess, but adults generally see that sort of question as just plain weird. I think of this sometimes when my students friend me on Facebook—adding yet another layer of complexity to the question of how best to balance the teacher-student-friend relationship—a layer of complexity that just five years ago did not exist.

Many schools have responded to this new reality by creating official Facebook policies. But mine is a private high school that trusts its teachers to behave responsibly until, I suppose, someone doesn't. Nonetheless, in an effort to avoid potential controversy, I told all of my students at the start of the year that they could only be my friend on Facebook after they graduated. It just seemed easier that way. 

But my self-imposed policy fell apart earlier this year, thanks in part to a spunky gymnast named Tara Potts. Tara’s dad teaches American history across the hall from me, and despite her tendency to sleep through my class last year because of her grueling training schedule, Tara was always one of my favorites. This year, injuries and perhaps sanity pushed her to finally quit gymnastics, enabling her to come to class with a lot more energy—energy with which she proceeded to badger me every single day to let her be my friend on Facebook.

Her dad was already my real-life friend—the sort of jovial, laid-back kind of guy to whom I wrote good-natured notes on his daughter’s quarterly grade reports suggesting that he might improve her GPA with an upsurge in beatings—and eventually I figured, “What the heck? Why not?” One afternoon I caved and finally approved Tara’s friend request. As expected, the floodgates opened and my friend collection has now bloated to the point where I look like one of those shallow people who defines himself by his absurd number of acquaintances.

Have I, as a result of this, fallen into all sorts of inappropriate relationships with my students? Do they forward me dirty pictures and propose scandalous midnight rendezvous? No, of course not. My students receive plenty enough cues from me during the school day to know better than to expect me to tolerate any hanky-panky online. Teachers live their jobs more than most other professions, accountable for their behavior not only in and out of school—but now on Facebook, too.

While it does bother me that in only five short years Facebook has managed to single-handedly distort and degenerate what the term “friend” really means, it is a reality that is better faced than feared. As an educator, I am glad for yet another opportunity to engage my students. Teaching is a fabulous shortcut to learning, and Facebook is a wonderful learning tool—a gift, even.

I have often had cause this year to use Facebook as an easier, quicker form of communication—one that my students are 10 times more likely to check and actually respond to. With it, I have tracked down missing assignments, informed students of last-minute changes to after-school programs, and even kept in touch with a number of my favorite graduated seniors—who continue to make my other, non-school Facebook friends laugh by referring to me as "Mr. Barkey" on my wall.

This is not, however, the greatest benefit I have received from the relaxation of my Facebook principles. The internet (as you may have noticed) has started to fill up with really interesting, creative stuff. As a 30-year-old, who can still remember when the internet did not exist, I have trouble forcing myself to sit around staring at a computer screen all day, sifting through the garbage. Enter my students, who cast about with their hundreds of little pop-culture savvy eyes, snag the most interesting gems, and link them either to their Facebook pages or email them directly. I not only have nifty reading material and videos at my personal disposal, but also a whole lot of ways to ensure that what I'm teaching is not only purposeful but also relevant.

Does Facebook friending have the potential to be a really ugly thing in student-teacher relationships? Yes, of course it does. But we can either bemoan the dangers and whine and complain about the way Facebook breaks down traditional, hierarchical classroom structures, or we can be grateful for a creative new platform on which we can engage our students.

For the time being, I will continue approving my students' friend requests, with thanks to the pioneering, somersaulting Tara Potts.

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

Dear Class of 2010:

We had an inauspicious start two years ago—one of you stormed cursing and bellowing out of class on the second day of school after getting into an argument with a classmate. I felt like the world's most impotent teacher, and the next two years of my commitment to Teach for America felt like a jail sentence.

But we persevered. We worked hard, very hard, on everything from interpersonal relationships to literacy strategies to restaurant etiquette, and two years later you are set to graduate from high school. Some of you are the first in your family to do so—either way, you are deserving of much praise and celebration.

My message to you going forward is a simple one—while life is about to get much more difficult, you can handle it. And always remember our classroom motto: Anything is possible.

College is tough, and you'll encounter all sorts of challenges along the way—academically, socially, financially, even emotionally. By and large you haven't received the rigorous education that is necessary to immediately handle college-level work. This sad fact does not mean you will not be able to cut it in college, it just means you’ll need to wholeheartedly commit yourself to your studies.

When you have issues with the quality and quantity of work expected of you, seek help.  Your tuition covers a writing center, peer tutoring, or other types of academic services—utilize them! There's no need to be a hero, and when in doubt, group up with classmates and forge through these challenges together.

The real trick will be juggling this academic work with increased financial pressures in a new social environment, all the while living or commuting farther from home. Be proactive, steering clear of the factors in your community that stress you out, and candidly tell your support system that you are really going to need their help over the course of the next few years.

While the reality of the situation you face is grim, the sooner we confront it and talk about how to deal with it, the better. About 95 percent of you are going to community college in the city, schools that are part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Yet only 28 percent of students attending CUNY two-year schools graduate within six years, their associate's degree in hand.

My experiences with you over the last two years give me faith that you can meet and exceed the challenges you will soon confront. You have navigated your way through myriad obstacles to earn your high school diploma. Some of you have lost relatives along the way, been by your mother’s side when she passed away in the hospital, or watched as your brother got stabbed in your kitchen. You’ve watched friends and neighbors fall off the school track—more than 100 students were in your freshmen class four years ago, yet only 52 of you are graduating today.

And as the refrain of that Langston Hughes poem goes, you’re still here. I will never forget when you stood last year in Washington, D.C., a place most of you had viewed as distant and foreign, just months prior to watching President Obama’s inaugural address. At that moment, on what for some of you was your first foray out of New York City, as you stood on the spot where Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech and danced in front of the Capitol Building, you metaphorically screamed out: "You can’t hide us anymore—here we are, world!"

Whatever deficits you may have with some skills, you are enormously perceptive and expressive in other areas. Your social commentary has moved me. Your persistence has inspired me. You are an agent for change in this world, and you cannot let others—adults, most especially—inhibit you.

Most of you have faced an uphill battle since the day you were born. For better or worse, you are largely unaware of how severely the deck has been stacked against you. The world you are about to encounter is full of people trying to get theirs. You need to get yours, too, and you need to find allies along the way to help ensure that you do. 

I believe in you. Believe in yourself. Anything is possible.

Love,

Mr. Lowe

Brendan Lowe is a Teach for America corps member who is in his second year of teaching high school in the South Bronx.

An inner-city schoolteacher celebrates Mr. Burgos.

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” It may be ironic to begin a post about Father’s Day with a quote from Woody Allen, but as I thought about the role fathers play in my students’ lives, I kept coming back to it.

Applied to fatherhood, Allen’s standard sets a low bar, yet the majority of my students’ fathers cannot measure up. As Americans gather this Sunday to honor their dads, celebrations will be muted in many families where too many men are missing or absent.

Among this dearth of dads, however, are a handful of honorable fathers who play active roles in their children’s lives—men like Rafael Burgos, who has spent the past few decades juggling his work responsibilities with those of being a supportive parent to his three children. In this barren landscape of fathers, he is an oak tree. This Father’s Day is for him.

Mr. Burgos’s youngest daughter, Jada, is set to graduate from our high school in a week’s time. Her graduation will not only cap her rise from a deferential girl into a mature young woman who can assert now herself. It also represents a triumph for her mother and father.

After all, it's for Jada that Mr. Burgos rises at 5:00 a.m. each morning to begin his duties as a building superintendent. Eleven hours later, Mr. Burgos’s shift ends and he puts on his metaphorical Dad hat, checking in on his daughter’s homework assignments and social life, putting a smile on her face, and reminding her about what is necessary to reach her goals and aspirations.

While this balancing act is standard for many of my students’ mothers or grandmothers, I have not come across a more active, responsible father in my two years of teaching. At every parent-teacher conference, there is the gregarious Mr. Burgos with his bold handshake and broad-faced smile. Recently, at 4:15 in the morning on the day that Jada and others began our school's trip to New Orleans, there was Mr. Burgos driving her over and helping her with her luggage. At senior prom, there was Mr. Burgos again, snapping photos of Jada and her date outside the dance hall.

“My dad is always there for me when I need him,” Jada wrote in an email, “And that makes me feel happy since I have a person who will pick me up when I fall.”

While such paternal support is typical in some communities, only about a quarter of my students live with their biological fathers; the percentage who receive “wisdom” from their dad, as Jada says she does, is even lower. My students have talked with me about being raped by their father, of having their father stand by while a relative abused them, of waiting for hours as the time for their father to pick them up came and went.

Two weeks ago, I was talking with a student when I asked her what she was doing after school. She said she was going into Manhattan. I asked her why. She said it was to visit her father, who is in jail.

Through diligence and dedication, Mr. Burgos has risen above his peers. And in so doing, he has not only served as a model to his son about what it means to be a man, but has taught his daughters an invaluable lesson about what they can expect from a partner. He is affectionate, compassionate, and hands-on. As a result, his children are mature, hard-working, and polite.

After completing high school in Puerto Rico, Mr. Burgos didn’t have enough money to attend college, where he had hoped to study psychology. He instead turned to work and parenting, imploring his children to make something of themselves. He advised them to choose a career based not how much it paid them but on how much passion it instilled in them.

This fall, after a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice, Mr. Burgos will send his eldest daughter, Jada, onto college, where she will begin her scholarship-supported studies of forensic psychology.

Happy Father’s Day, Mr. Burgos.

Brendan Lowe is a Teach for America corps member who is in his second year of teaching high school in the South Bronx. His dispatch for GOOD appears on Fridays.

For years, I have been haunted by the fate of Jacqueline Barnes, my best student during my second year teaching in the Mississippi Delta. She left my fourth grade classroom reading at the eleventh grade level, winning the school's reading contest by a wide margin. I allowed her to read as soon as she had completed the assignment at hand, let her take her book of choice to a corner, where she liked to barricade herself and escape into another world.

Jacqueline was pretty and quiet and had a halting, cautious manner, her eyes searching constantly about her for the next threat. Her classmates were the reason for her anxiety—they hated her for being poor, called her “Raggedy Jackie,” "Rags," and "Jac-nasty," their cruelty inexplicable to me in a community as severely impoverished as ours was.

Yet, in a way, they were right: Jacqueline’s poverty made theirs appear positively first-world. Her uniform was threadbare, her khakis were stained and holed. She reeked, a thick smell of unwashed clothes and body, for the water was often turned off at home, and her mother only did laundry once a month. I saw her mother some mornings as I drove to school down Percy Street, usually swaying on plastic heels, red-eyed, talking to herself, and gesturing wildly. As one of my children noted, "she do bad things for money.”

Each afternoon, once school was out, Jacqueline and her brother, Terence, stayed with me in the classroom, helping out with tasks, playing with the computer, or reading. Often I’d drive them home, to a tin-roofed shack with sagging walls and boarded windows set back in a dirt yard covered with a great pile of garbage. Jackie would seize Terence's hand and pull him past the reeking mountain, her front arm waving off the thick cloud of flies, and push him inside. Once at the door, sometimes she’d turn around and wave goodbye.

Despite her situation, she made tremendous gains in my classroom. I went to great lengths to protect her from the taunts of her classmates, told her again and again what a great reader and smart girl she was, promised her that if she applied herself in the classroom, she was assured of a better life. When I left the Delta to teach at a university, I used Jacqueline as my success story, even spoke at conferences about how the girl from the poorest family could achieve excellence.

Three years ago, I finally returned to the Delta and drove down Percy Street, past the familiar line of shot-gun shacks and trailers. I came upon the blackened shell of her house, nothing left but rubble and burnt scraps of tin and the open sky beyond. I sped to the school to ask my former principal what had happened. 

Nobody had died in the fire, she said, and that was all she knew. She hadn’t seen the girl around, not recently anyway. 

I stood there, unable to appreciate being back at a place where I’d invested so much. From the window of the office I could see the dark run of hallway, knowing beyond that was the classroom where I’d taught, where I’d told Jacqueline that if she only tried, a bright and easy future waited her. I’d distorted her story, imagined for my own sake that her success was guaranteed. I’d turned her into anecdote—and in so doing, forgotten her.

Then, two months ago, I received an email from another teacher who’d taught some of the same kids I had. It was a PDF of an article from the town newspaper. They’d published lists of the honors students from the local high school, and kids we had taught were on the list. I looked at the highest honor: Principal’s List for Straight A’s. There were only a few names and at the top of tenth grade was Jacqueline Barnes.

For a couple of days I told everyone what I’d found, how there couldn’t be two Jacqueline Barnes's—surely not, it had to be her, right? A friend suggested I Google her. No sooner was there a MySpace profile, a young woman with Jacqueline’s features, from the Delta. I set up an account and emailed her. I told her how proud I was of her making the list, told her how I’d seen the house and had been so worried.

A day later, there was a reply. My hand shook as I opened the message: “Mr. Copperman, so good to hear from you!!!” She was doing great, explained that after the fire, the state had stepped in and that for the past four years she had been living with her adopted mother and father. She still loved to read.

I wrote back, asking if she was planning on attending college. She said she sure was. I made her a promise: If she stayed after her studies, I would help her through the application process, help her write her entrance essay, and a letter of recommendation. She thought the offer generous—no doubt she doesn’t understand how much the chance to help her meant to me.

There is no guarantee that even the best efforts to help a student will pay off—impoverished children live precarious, vulnerable lives. Yet I take comfort in the unseen: while we may not know exactly who we’ve reached, while there may be no signs of success, our actions still resonate.    

This is how change happens: A teacher offers what they can. A child opens a book. And years later, a young woman is bound for college.

Photo via.

Editor's note: Names of students have been changed to protect their identity.

Michael Copperman is a writer and novelist who teaches at the University of Oregon. This is his third essay for GOOD.
 

How to encourage students to remain uncertain for just long enough.

Brandon is one of the brightest students to ever take my class. And while I'm pretty sure he didn't finish a single  piece of art all year, he certainly gyrated his way around the room enough times to make up for it. He is not a great dancer-most people would never think to call what he does "dancing" at all-but when the spirit leads, Brandon most certainly follows.

Brandon is a study in contradictions. Although he rarely seemed to be paying much attention, when we reviewed art history during the final quarter, for instance, he remembered the name of almost every piece of art and artist we had so much as glanced at. And while Brandon did not have a formal education of any kind until the fourth grade (his parents were content to let him run around in the woods until then), he still managed to get higher scores on more AP tests than any student in the history of our school. Brandon attributes most of his academic success to a steady intake of performance-enhancing drugs. But he quit taking those drugs this year and still managed to dominate the AP landscape. Next year, he is supposed to be attending an Ivy League school, where, alongside other young people just like him, he will learn to run this country.

So why is he so confused? Why did Brandon spend most of this year bouncing off the walls and agonizing over what would seem to be a pretty clearly-drawn path?

I am not really sure. But I think the mushrooms might have something to do with it.

I met Brandon two years ago, on my first day as a teacher. He came into my mentor's classroom and started to passionately expound on what it took to grow edible mushrooms. He seemed to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge about the things, and with wild gesticulations and a glint in his eye he poured piles of fungal facts all over this other teacher and me. As he was at last winding down, I asked: "Did you have to do this for a class over the summer?"

No," he replied, shaking his hands in front of himself and then pirouetting to make sure I got the point, "I'm just fascinated by mushrooms. They're so amazing!"

This year when Brandon walked into my classroom for the first time, I asked him about the mushrooms. He raised an eyebrow, paused, and then said, "No, I haven't been into mushrooms for a while." Then he proceeded to tell me about the six other hobbies he'd picked up and dropped in the interim.

I know what you are thinking. You're thinking that it wasn't just salad mushrooms that Brandon was busy growing-and you may well be right. I do not believe, however, that it was the mushrooms that caused Brandon's confusion. I think Brandon is confused because he is living in a confused world. Like most young people, Brandon is searching for a passion equal to the raging tornado of yearnings that perpetually spins inside him. Yet he knows that as a privileged member of a privileged class he is gifted with a lot of potential and wants some meaningful way to live it out, but what he sees with his razor-sharp mind is a collapsing house of cards. While I am glad he quit the drugs that were, in his own words, "taking him places he did not want to go," without them, Brandon is left wondering why he has bothered to conquer the academic mountain in the first place. He wants his life to matter, and is told that the way to do that is only to keep on climbing.

I found it hard, this year, to encourage him in this pursuit. Although I know that education is usually a path to more options (like, say, being a high school art teacher), for me, college was mostly an excuse to avoid growing up and taking on responsibility. Still, since it is my job, I told him to stay in school, work hard, and climb that ladder on up towards the warm, bland sunshine.

Brandon, however, does not want the ladder. He wants to dance.

And despite the dictates of my job description, I want to join him. I, too, am tired of the coldly constructed educational approach that demands a clear answer to every question. I believe that before growth can happen there has to be a period of doubt and uncertainty. Certainty kills innovation, and while I need a degree of certainty in the surgeon poking around in my brain or the pilot flying my airplane, I also hope that somewhere along the line they have learned how to be creative. When problems develop for which they have been provided no textbook answer, I need them to be able to step back, take a breath, and lose themselves in the dance of the moment.

Someday, I believe, Brandon will find his certainty-a long-lasting passion to which he can apply his considerable gifts. For now, however, I hope he keeps on dancing, living in his moment of doubt long enough to find that someday, when he really finds his passion, he will remember the dance. 

Josh Barkey is a high school art teacher in North Carolina.

An inner-city schoolteacher attempts to dampen enthusiasm for standardized testing.

As I discussed a few weeks ago, it’s testing time here in New York City high schools. Since mid-May, many teachers of classes that culminate in Regents exams have been preparing for these high-stakes tests. I’ve been as intensively engaged in the work as any other teacher, yet as news continues to emerge on the unreliability of standardized testing, I’ve begun to feel as if I’m engaged in a fraudulent endeavor.  

There are problems with the questions being asked, the answers being graded, and the people who are involved. With teachers’ salaries and even jobs now being determined in part by standardized testing scores, these problems need to be urgently addressed.  

Many of these tests inquire about a world that is foreign to my students. Exams within the last two years have asked about organic food, horses, hay, and hang-gliding, none of which most of my students are very familiar with. The tests’ emphasis on topics many inner-city students are unaware of recently motivated one Harlem charter school to visit a farm. This wasn’t a field trip. Rather, an innovative form of test prep.  

As Eva Moskowitz, the schools’ founder, told The New York Times, “There were passages, literally, about milking, plowing—things that were pretty foreign to Harlem kids. It’s a little bit annoying that there are no passages about the subway, or how crowded the streets are.”

The problems in New York are so widespread even the top education officials in the state have lost confidence in them. As Sol Stern recently reported in City Journal, “Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch and education department commissioner David Steiner, recently concluded that the annual math and English tests for grades three through eight had become unreliable measures of children’s real academic achievement. They are trying to restructure the state’s assessments and recently ordered a study by [Harvard testing expert Daniel] Koretz to measure the extent of score inflation on the tests given in the past several years.”

Just today, the Times came out with a story about score inflation on standardized tests across the country. This news comes just a week after the New York Post published its own expose of bogus grading—for example, “A kid who answers that a two-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12.” Partial credit was also given for blank answers.  

Incentive systems that have stressed standardized testing to the detriment of other forms of assessment are partly to blame for such activity. Equally culpable, however, are nonsensical procedures like having teachers grade their own assessments, the very tests for which they can receive a pay raise—or get a pink slip.

On Tuesday afternoon, my students will take the Global History Regents exam. Wednesday morning, my colleagues and I will gather to grade those tests. While the state sends us a rubric to go by, their materials are not exhaustive and there is room for interpretation. That wiggle room, which the more liberal teachers at one school might exploit while more conservative teachers at a neighboring school might not—introduces incredible unreliability to the testing data.  

A colleague of mine recently asked New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, a huge proponent of standardized tests and chief cheerleader of the city’s rising scores, what he has done to reform the corrupt practice of teachers grading their own exams. Klein did not seem overly concerned, saying that it was a state issue, and he’s pressing state education leaders to address the system.  

For Klein and other education leaders across the country, the ends justify the means. But if the means become corrupt, the ends become invalid.  

I’m a huge proponent of teacher and student accountability, of measuring and tracking academic growth. However, the tools we use to accomplish such things are increasingly being exposed as not credible. Thus, the great disparity in state test scores, which teachers can methodically prepare their students for, and the less predictable federal National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.  

I support the reform movement’s effort to bring more accountability into the system, but the current practices are untenable. I still haven’t figured out what I’ll tell my students on Tuesday.

Brendan Lowe is a Teach for America corps member who is in his second year of teaching high school in the South Bronx. His dispatch for GOOD appears on Fridays.

An inner-city schoolteacher on the isolated nature of his profession.

In positions past, I spent a lot of time working in a cubicle, but I never grew comfortable with the arrangement—too open, too temporary, too Office Space. Now that I lead my own classroom, I’m experiencing the downsides of the other extreme—too closed, too isolated, too Castaway.

Call it naïveté, but I presumed teaching to be a team sport. Each teacher would play his/her position, collaborate on strategy and best practices, and help the team of students make significant academic gains. But partly because each teacher works in a separate space—a room in which the doors are often closed—this is not always the case.

What many of my teaching friends and I have found is an "every-man-for-himself"’ culture, in which teachers are expected to focus (and indeed they do only focus) on what happens within his or her four walls. You are the master of that domain, and for better or for worse, almost no one come to see what you're up to.

As a result, my school and many others do not inculcate collaboration. More perilously, less-than-proficient educators toil unchecked. Best practices aren’t shared because teachers are unaware of what each other is doing. Teachers have become possessive of their fiefdoms, and in such an environment new ideas or approaches are too often viewed with suspicion and resentment. Are you trying to make me look bad? This is my space. You do you, and I’ll do me.

It's not supposed to be like this. For one, an increasingly large pile of research suggests teachers are the key lever to dramatically increasing student achievement. From an administrator's perspective, letting teachers operate unchecked is like never making sure to see if the pilot is awake. Observing poor teachers can also lead to opportunities for professional development, whether an urgent intervention or even encouraging someone to find a new profession. Fom a teacher’s point of view, any of us can learn by observing our colleagues, regardless of how good or how bad.

My school is part of the small school movement, which broke up those mega, monolithic high schools into smaller, 300 to 400 student communities. This approach gave more attention to students, and ideally more attention would also be paid to teachers. My school has 13 classrooms—it’s not inconceivable to pop into each of them during a 60-minute period.

Yet closeness has not translated into collaboration. Most teachers I’ve talked to say their acceptance of the isolated nature of this craft is due to time constraints and skepticism about whether they could learn from a colleague.

The larger issue, however, seems to be that there is no incentive to observe other teachers’ classrooms and become a better teacher. With some 99 percent of teachers receiving satisfactory ratings and many receiving tenure after their third year in the classroom, teachers do not need to exert themselves to achieve job security. Compare that situation to some consulting firms, where new employees work relentlessly to grab performance bonuses and avoid the annual cut of the bottom 10 percent.

I don’t proclaim to be without fault here. I teach the second-year of a two-year global history course, and I interact on a daily basis with the woman who teachers the first year of that course. We’re very friendly, regularly e-mailing political jokes and working on extra-curricular activities together. Yet at almost no time throughout the year are we aware of what the other is teaching—only once or twice has either of us gone to watch the other actually teach. This situation exists despite the fact that we teach many of the same skills and concepts and all of our students could benefit from an increased connection between the courses.

Teaching doesn’t need to be this way. One of my colleagues began an Intervisitation Club this year, which involves teachers pairing up for six weeks at a time and observing each other every other week. We meet regularly over lunch to share notes. It's a great idea and initially about half the staff joined, yet in part because of aforementioned time constraints only six teachers, myself included, still participate.

My school also began learning walks this year in which teachers and administrators make pre-arranged visits to classrooms. So far, the quality of teaching is not as high as had been hoped. Regular, informal observations would have revealed such practices within short order.

Meanwhile many schools, charters in particular, follow an open-door policy in which anyone is free to enter the classroom at any time. Such a policy breeds accountability and transparency and is worthy of replication.

When Justice Louis Brandeis said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he was referring to transparency in government. Yet administrators and teachers literally opening the door to previously closed-off classrooms can be a small step forward for education. 

Brendan Lowe is a Teach for America corps member who is in his second year of teaching high school in the South Bronx. His dispatch for GOOD will appear on Fridays.