I Begin

As the product of parochial (Episcopalian and Catholic) and private schools, I have never set foot inside a public school.  Until last Friday when I went to visit my cooperating teacher in her classroom at Edison (a pseudonym) Middle School.  A few immediate reactions:
    I have read in one my many philosophy of education readings about the smell of an american public school, and I recall thinking at the time that it wasn't possible for all schools to smell the same.  And I still have my doubt.  But when I walked in the door to the school (or, rather, when I walked out of the front office and into the long, perilous, central hallway) I smelled it: chemical, vaguely threatening, the smell of floor buffer fluids and newish paint.
    The school was empty: save for Mindy, the receptionist, the principle and assistant principle (who I did not see), a few other office staff, the maintenance crew (who appeared quite busy) and a few teachers, Laura among them, who had come in to prepare for the new year.
    If you have taught, then you know perhaps what an empty school feels like.  It is hard to describe the eeriness of a school without children, but I will give it a go.  School's are built on fairly large scales, even small schools like the one I'm most familiar with.  Edison is a large Middle School, home to 500 children in 6th through 8th grade.  The central hallway runs down the middle of the school like a wide river, with lockers and smaller tributary hallways on its sides.  It's probably 10 feet across.  Walking it by myself, navigating my way towards Laura's classroom, I felt aswim in something larger than myself.  It was echoey, harsh.  But there were lots of windows, so the hall was bright with natural light, and I must say it was a fairly cheerful hallway, though the only things I saw on the walls was a poster about sanitizing and washing hands to prevent the spread of germs and a kind of mantra: "Be safe, be productive, be responsible," which seemed like the kinds of generic principled we give to young people when we don't really know what to say to them.
    Anyway, what I felt walking down that long, empty hallway was a sense of a vast waste of space.  That is, at its core, what it felt like: that all of this wood and brick and drywall and metal and paint and glass was somehow being wasted becuase, at this point, it was not filled with kids.
    It is perhaps of note that the first two rooms I passed on my way to Laura's classroom were the orchestra room and the art center, and seeing these two rooms first gave me a sense of hope.  At least the kids at Edison (which is not, by any means, a wealthy school) will have the chance to learn some music and art before they move on.

    I walked into Laura's classroom.  My first reaction: the room is bright, sparsely decorated (again that silly mantra: "Be Safe; Be Productive; Be Responsible"), with many windows.  My eyes were drawn to the number of desks: there were 40 of them, in little pairs, in rows.  This was a different world than I was used to.  In a few weeks 40 6th and 7th graders would be jockeying for space in this room, but for now it was just Laura and me, talking about what was to come.
    I immediately like Laura.  She's in her fifties, is a devout equestrian and lapsed Catholic, a lifelong Oregonian who believes that anything above 75 degrees counts as a heat wave.  Though she said at one point that she "didn't like middle schoolers", its pretty clear by the way she talks about them that this isn't entirely true.  She has five section of 6th and 7th graders, with around 40 kids per section; Laura will teach 200 hundred children this year.  I taught about 70 kids during my busiest year teaching in a private school.
    She's done a little research on me.  She has hosted quite a few student teachers in the past, and told the program coordinator that she was blowing up her writing curriculum this year, that her class was probably going to be a real mess, and that she probably shouldnm't subject a beginning teacher to that.  The placement coordinator told her that she had "just the guy for you."  Laura looked at my resume and said: "Oh yeah.  He'll do."
    At one point she confessed that she loved having student teachers becuase she "learned a lot from them" but also because they "did a lot of work for her."
    She talked about the classes.  She seemed obsessed with helping her kids conquer their "writing problems."  When I asked her what those problems looked like she started to give a canned response, the kind of response I imagine her giving a principal or superintendent, and then she stopped, and said: "You know, I don't know where the issues come from.  But I have lots of student work that we can look at."
   
    She sent me home with two pieces of curriculum that the school had purchased, and her hope was to steal and pillage from the best of each.  It was reading one of these pieces of curricula that reminded me to go write about my experience at Edison.  I will have more to say about the experience reading the writing curriculum, but I will say this: it made me very, very angry, mostly because the writer of the curriculum thought that the teacher who would be reading was either idiotic or incompetent or both.  And I have grown so tired with the assumption that students need to be protected from their teachers.