The Right Book: We Got This

 The Right Book

Imagine - it's your first year teaching, and you've just completed the Teach for America program - or a program of similar quality - and you've been promised that you can make a difference with the children who need the most care and love. You've been told that you can help them survive (Love, 2019). As a first-year teacher with minimal teaching experience, you figure you'll be set up for success, right? That is, after all, what you were promised. Anything less would be less than fair.

Fairness. This is not something that I have seen in our schools lately.

As a special-education teacher (the highest need in all districts in the United States), you've received minimal training and have been told that you'll be placed with an experienced co-teacher. Reality is quite different; you are placed with a co-teacher, but you teach resource classes most of the time. With the most vulnerable students in your care - also some of the most challenging because of the way that we treat behavior in our schools and often equate behavior with ability and thus stack our resource classrooms with students who have been identified as a challenge (Ferguson, 2000) - you are stuffed in a closet-sized room with 16 students. You are teaching a disproportionate number of boys - Black boys - and almost entirely students of color. With little to no training on how to accomplish your mission, you now have a sign hanging above your door with your last name. You're a teacher - congratulations.

With technological problems, endless meetings, bureaucratic hurdles, a million tools and resources you are expected to just "come up to speed on," all the while trying to get your feet under you - it's truly impossible. These challenges exist without considering the personal challenges of your own identity in the classroom. These challenges can be as simple (or as hard) as learning how to use a grade book, navigate the learning management software, how to use Microsoft Teams or even the hardware in the classroom. While large portions of the specifics are covered in training sessions lasting for hours, the practical application piece is often missing until the new teacher has to figure it out on the first day of class. This is a live performance in front of students. 

New teachers today face challenges that come from participating in schools that harm students with consistent neoliberal policies such as standardized testing and a testing culture that disproportionately harms students of color (Behrent, 2016; Croft et al., 2015), a growing literal police state (Ferguson, 2000; Martin et al., 2020; Monahan, 2009), the school to prison pipe-line (Ferguson, 2020), and other issues of racial justice.

I have never had a co-teacher with such an honest, open heart. She believes in kids - she listens. She tries to connect every day and never seems to lose hope. She works to meet each child where they are and then works to help them grow. I am so very blessed to have her on the trying journey this year - we work together in the shared cramped space that is our classroom. At our largest, we had 43 students for weeks.

I have spent the year feeling overmatched and so bogged down that I have been unable to support her like I'd want to. If I could, I'd work with her every day, even if for just a few minutes. I'd do daily check-ins and connections. I'd work with her in selecting texts, building lessons, and help her with scaffolding for her resource students. I'd help her with every hurdle she faced. I'd be her mentor. Instead, I'm barely floating myself. Most days, I feel like I'm in the middle of a hurricane of expectations and responsibilities. I can't seem to move beyond the threshold of my own classroom, teaching, and planning.

Fairness. This is not something that I have seen in our schools lately.

Today, during our student reading time, I noticed that my co-teacher was reading. In her hands, she held Cornelius Minor's We Got This: Equity, access, and the quest to be who our students need us to be (Minor, 2019). She was nodding as I watched her, sitting at a student desk, closest to the students who were most likely to get off task. She'd redirect them every few minutes and then get back to her book. Reading with students is essential, and I'll defend it all day.

I had given her this book when we first started working together, back in August. After two months, I can't tell if she feels more or less confident about her future career as a teacher - why would anyone right now? I hope she stays. I see her making a difference every day with our students and in ways that I am not always sure she can see just yet. She is irreplaceable. All teachers are irreplaceable.

I have to have hope.

Behrent, M. (2016). More Than a Score: Neoliberalism, Testing, & Teacher Evaluations. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 50-62. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=eue&AN=114643119&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=gsu1 

Croft, S. J., Roberts, M. A., & Stenhouse, V. L. (2015). The perfect storm of education reform: High-stakes testing and teacher evaluation. Social Justice, 42(1), 70-92. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=a9h&AN=111363325&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=gsu1 

Ferguson, A. A. (2000). Bad boys: public schools in the making of Black masculinity. University of Michigan Press. Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/umich051/99006950.html 

Fisher-Ari, T., Kavanagh, K. M., & Martin, A. (2017). Sisyphean neoliberal reforms: The intractable mythology of student growth and achievement master narratives within the testing and TFA era. Journal of Education Policy, 32(3), 255-280. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1247466 

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press. 

Martin, A. E., Fisher-Ari, T. R., & Kavanagh, K. M. (2020). "Our schools turned into literal police states.": Disciplinary power and novice teachers enduring a cheating scandal. Educational Studies, 56(3), 306-329. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2020.1745809 

Minor, C. (2019). We got this.: Equity, access, and the quest to be who our students need us to be. Heinemann. 

Monahan, T. (2009). The surveillance curriculum: Risk management and social control in the Neoliberal School. In A. Darder, M. P. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 123-134). Routledge.