It’s the third week of October. The traditional school calendar began after Labor Day, so this makes the beginning of the Seventh week of school?? The new school campus in South LA where I was “placed” this year has been experiencing some intense birth pains. That’s putting things lightly. I credit the problems to poor planning and simple naïveté.
It concerns me that the many displaced teachers there, as well as the new ones, seem to fall in line and accept the prevailing district dogma that continues to be touted. The problem, so it is told, with the poor, underperforming children is that they’ve had bad teachers and suffered under bad teaching practice. “Bell to bell standardized based instruction” – I heard that line several times from the glorified new administrators at my new school. The implication is that the kids are ready, willing, and set for 80-minute block periods of direct instruction. They starve for good standards based lessons and their previous teachers have been too lazy to do right by them. It’s the corporate line that our board majority and our charter school operators love to use, and it betrays an ignorance of urban reality. I’m hoping for simmering resentment from the teachers with genuine experience, but I don’t know if I’ll last long enough at this place to see it.
One long term substitute – we have several of them (they’re usually friends with someone higher up in ranks) – commented to me that on all of the new campuses in LAUSD the overwhelming, most prevalent issue is student behavior. It’s painfully true for us as well. Freshmen run around campus willy-nilly. Tagging is happening. They’re hanging out of windows. They defy. They run down the halls and scream. They do whatever they please with relative impunity. The long term sub credited the situation to the desire for new school campuses to keep as much ADA as possible. A “Time-out” room, like the one we had at HPHS, would solve many issues. You must have some kind of negative, immediate consequence to put a halt to dangerous behavior. “Counseling” doesn’t cut it with 14 year olds.
I credit the behavior problem to a leadership that just didn’t anticipate behavior to be a serious issue. They trusted the district’s judgment when it dropped its great “positive behavior” program into their laps without actually polling the various campuses that have tried to follow our Beaudry Ave. pie-in-the-sky approach with its complicated referral slips and “steps” in discipline which do nothing more than indulge adolescents and put a leash on teachers trying to establish some order in their rooms. Remove the teeth from teachers and then blame them for not using their teeth – this appears to be a national trend in pedagogy. LAUSD is at the forefront of detrimental national trends. “Positive behavior support” is another example of it.
We are understaffed at this new school. We cannot succeed without adequate classified personnel. It’s ridiculous to expect counselors to be doing campus supervisory jobs. It’s ridiculous to have so few supervisors and only two campus police when one of them must be gone most of the day whenever an arrest has been made. Secretaries are over-worked and asked to problem-solve on their own. We need more teachers. Teachers are asked to do extra work (yes, it’s a pilot school), but are also required to teach SIX 80 minute classes of 35-45 students each. This happens on a rotating block schedule. Beaudry Ave. is going to implement radical reform, or so it claims, by whipping its lower level employees, like the disposable teaching staff, with longer hours and unreasonable demands. Yes, that’s a recipe for academic growth if I ever heard one.
Teachers cannot be trusted with keys and are only given restroom keys, and keys to their own classroom doors at school. Only very recently have the benevolent powers graciously offered to give teachers keys to the buildings where their rooms are located.
There was talk at the beginning of the school year about syllabi for each class. Teachers should submit syllabi. I guess that notion fell apart when textbooks didn’t arrive until a month after school began. I have my own materials that I can use, but I’m wondering what other teachers did during the month of September.
I was told that I was going to teach two classes of Journalism. I began doing exactly that. I gave journalism notes on power point to the 10th graders. I’ve taught Journalism before. Then, the rug was pulled out from under me. It’s not journalism. It’s “Academic Literacy.” Huh? So is there a plan for this class? No, there isn’t a textbook either. I’m glad for my own black line master materials and for no limitations on photocopies. What would I have done otherwise?
Shifting policies and last minute decisions plague the campus. There are a few of us at this place with decades of experience under our belts, but we’re just teachers, so no one really talks to us about how our experiences might shed some light on the situation.
The campus is divided up into four “Yolie-Flores sponsored” small schools with separate location code numbers. Our on-line attendance (ISIS) was not picking up all of our students in our classes for several weeks. We attributed this to the constant rearranging of students into different classes – annoying in itself. No, that wasn’t it. The problem was the separate location codes. We had kids from different “Yolie-Flores sponsored” small schools in our classes. Now, they’ve remedied the situation by forcing us to log in FOUR times and take attendance FOUR times for each “Yolie-Flores sponsored” small school, and this is done for each and every class. A few administrators and secretaries still have the gall to whine that we don’t take attendance within the first 15 minutes of class. Get a clue people.
Wasn’t the point of the “Yolie-sponsored” small school that it might offer more individualized instruction? Right. That’s really going to happen with 35-45 kids in each class. Where is that woman anyway? Oh yes, she did her damage and then moved on to enjoy a six figure salary from the Gates Foundation. Oh, bless her little boot straps as she pulls herself up by them.
Kids are getting the message loud and clear that there are no consequences for much of anything. Behavior is on an irrevocable downward spiral. Tomorrow is Tuesday. On Tuesdays we begin the day with an hour and a half of “fix-the-teacher” professional development time while the kids get high and come to class later on, pumped up with energy and chutzpah. Few adults smile.
I have found one friend at this place who regales me with stories of incorrigible middle schools in South LA where he has been unfortunate enough to do long term subbing. One place refused to come to his aid in a classroom full of young cholos – “We’re under lock down son. See to it yourself.” He said he wandered around the room glaring at the little guys, hoping that someone would hit him and award him some LAUSD money. Our latest inside joke concerns the possibility of having a gun put to your temple and then having the school administration say, “well what did you do to the child to make him do this?”
I’ve been informed of possible avenues out of my predicament by way of Human Resources on the 15th floor of Beaudry. The people there have been obliging. Wait for further installments of the saga in the near future.
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