The End

I am sitting in the library right now, and there are a bunch of kids here doing their last round of easy CBM testing.  I just looked across the room at a girl with light brown skin and lots of pimples who is staring absently at the dull glow of the computer monitor, and she sort of looks like one of those kids from the scene in Ferris Bueler’s Day Off, listening to boring old Ben Stein lecture about voodoo economics.  She looked extremely bored.  Mrs. Regan, the art teacher, is yelling at the kids to get started on their testing.  I just witnessed her blowing up at the office aid on the phone because the office aid (who is a seventh grader in one of my classes) had failed to send the all-page to the entire school pulling the 30 or so kids out of their regular scheduled classes (last two days, I might add) to go finish their last round of tests.

A boy in the class was having trouble logging on to the website, so he kept moving from machine to machine, trying to find one that worked.  He was getting frustrated, and he was expressing that frustration to the people around him.  This made Mrs. Regan angry.  She asked him twice to stop talking and login, but she wasn’t able to sit with him and help him because she had 28 other kids she was trying to get logged in--and silent.  At one point she swung around and snapped at him:

“If I have to send you to the office, you will be sent home.  This is testing and you have to take it seriously.”

At that point I knew the child wouldn’t last long.  Mrs. Regan was mad about something else before the kids even got there, but this child, who was having technical difficulties--and who knows what had happened to him before he came into the room--would be the recipient of whatever anger she was experiencing.

He clicked on the wrong name, and got booted out of the system.  In frustration he half-heartedly slammed his mouse down on the table, at which point Mrs. Regan threw him out.  The child was (perhaps understandably) upset, and talked back, and got angry, and said: “Are you kidding me, how do I get in trouble for clicking on the wrong name?”

And she said: “It’s not that, it’s your mouth.”

And as he stormed out, he said: “Goddamnit.”

And just like that the child was gone.  And as a result the child will not be able to meet the state mandated testing benchmark and will not be allowed to go on the end of the school trip.  I do not know what will happen as a result of his not meeting the benchmark.

**

I have learned a lot during my time here at Edison.  I have seen miraculous children do miraculous things.  I have seen cruelty the likes of which I never saw at the small independent school where I taught--and where I will be teaching again next year.  I have sat in a staff room and listened to teachers griping about students in the most stereotypical way possible.  I have seen truly terrible teaching.  I have seen truly inspired counseling.  I have felt the frustration of having too many children in a room at one time, and, from time to time, I have been amazed at how, even in such overcrowded, humiliating conditions, the kids can say and do and think such interesting, surprising things.

I spent a few minutes at lunch today with a student named Brian, who is perhaps the neediest child I have ever worked with.  Brian is stick figure thin, regularly has drawings and doodles scribble all over his arms, and, I suspect, goes hungry most days.  (I have stood next to him and heard his stomach growling.)  He wanted me to show him how to use google earth because he really wanted to look at pictures of his old house in Pennsylvania.  So I spent a few minutes with him at lunch, and he zoomed in and showed me the road he used to live on, and he told me the story of everyone who lived in his old neighborhood, the old lady who planted a garden and the woods where he and his brother’s used to hunt squirrels and the how he had a girlfriend who lived up the road, and how much he missed the little river (he doesn’t know the word “creek” but he has had a girlfriend and knows the bitterness of transcontinental dislocation!) that ran through the woods behind his house.  And I was so glad to have been able to help him see, through google orbiting spy eyes, the familiar road and the roof of his old loved house.

I do not watch the news, nor do I read the paper.  From time to time, when I do read “articles” about education, I hear this shrill outcry from all across the education spectrum, that standards are too low or two high, that kids are too coddled or not coddled enough, that teachers are too strict or too permissive, that there are too many tests or not enough.  And of course depending on the day all of those statements are true--but they are also irrelevant.  I had great moments during my time here at “Edison”; I think the time I spent today with Brian was one of those moments--and I a few others come to mind.  Schools based on population control and on standardization cannot, by definition, produce many such moments.  And as a result the lives of both children and adults are lessened.

I hesitate to say much more about the “problems” of education as I saw them play out here.  The two most essential difficulties of teaching here were numerical and cultural; there were two many kids, and the teaching culture was rigid and teacher-centered.  I will miss these kids--and a few of the adults.  I hope to remember as many of the human moments I had as possible--though I know that even their names will start to slip out of my brain pretty soon.  And for these kids’ sake I hope this school district gets its act together and hires more teachers.  A mediocre teacher with 25 students will do much, much more than the most gifted teacher will do with 40.

From “Edison” Middle school, this is Gil, signing off.