I'm posting here again and am probably going to change the name of the blog, but wanted to get started and at least make an effort this time to jot down as many of the varied happenings in my world as a DC Charter School ELL Coordinator.
This past summer was an interesting exercise in how one gets what they want from a current employer.  After writing up a proposal requested by the upper administration of the school at the end of the year, for what my ideas were on a new role in the department, the proposal went nowhere.  I dealt with the stress initially by grinding my teeth and complaining, but it gradually began to take its toll and I slipped into a booze fueled introspection universe that really did me no good at all.  In the midst of it all I went down to Florida and drank and snorted coke for about 48 hours staright before crashing into my motel room bed for a 20 hour nap.
When I awoke I realized I had a conference call with the head of schools to discuss my postion ideas, so after 10 cigs and a debate about whether I should drink before hand I had the chat and worked out the details of the job.  The reality is that the only reason this all came to fruition was that another school had recruited me to work with them when they heard I was unhappy with my current situation.  It proved to me that although I got what I want out of CAPCS, they were prepared to shit on me and let me do the work of 3 people before the threat of me leaving was out there.  The good is they want me around. The bad is they are fucking mismanaged idiots.
So that said, I'm back at CAPCS in a coordinators role.  My director is still the same emotional wreck as she has been for years, oscillating between bitchy self righteousness and a crying I'm the victim mindset.  We have just completed two weeks of meetings which have been slightly productive but also a sad reminder of what happens when you hire your fucking family to run your business and put them in skill positions that they have no training in.  From what I understand the operations director, who happens to be the founders step-son, has botched the budget so badly that we won't be funded as a school until we can prove we can handle the money.  And also the director of assessment, who has no experience in assessment and doesn't really understand numbers and how they work, overshot the enrollment projections (or probably more to the truth told the founder what he wanted to hear) and now we have hundereds of books too many.  For many schools this sounds like a good thing, but for us, with our limited finances, it means we fire the maintenance staff then offer them jobs at half the wage with no benefits.  And start firing teachers and aids.  Through all of this, the assessment director is still fine and operations director is in Hawaii for a couple of weeks. T

Cocktail Party Chatter

I got myself into trouble on Facebook again last week by posting mean, personal attacks to a forum about education.  You see, my buddy, with his high end degrees and many acronyms following his signature posed a question. The question was "Are smaller class sizes better for education purposes?" Are smaller class sizes better? Really? Here's the answer: yes.  End of conversation.  This is not something that's debatable and is a fucking waste of time to discuss.
This is part of the problem with education today.  We, as adults, find it fun to bat around what we think are big policy ideas when it comes to systems and implementation.  We speak in a longuage that only those who have been educated in the the same way we have undertstand and can speak.  And in the end we lose the point of the whole fucking thing;  thinking and theorizing is the smallest piece of the education puzzle.  It's more of a blue collar job where you're working on a project and in small pieces pull together the final project.  It's not about grouping kids based on research projects its about finding out what works for individuals.  Yes, testing is important to establish baselines and to see where a student has strengths and weaknesses, but the incessant discussions about Piagets theories and the like miss the point completely: as we make ourselves feel good by discussing conceptual learning practices, the kids spend another day unable to read.
I began my first round of testing this week and one thing has become clear; kids in my school in the younger grades are basically illiterate.  Are they smart? Absolutely. Probably smarter than me certainly at that age when all I could talk about was recess and the dumb shit suburban kids of my generation talked about at that stage.  These urban kids have been exposed to a whole hell of a lot more than I was ever exposed to and have learned how to manage adult issues at a young age.  Also, with they're inability to read and write, they have figured out how to problem solve based on what they can do such as learning to talk things out to show that they understand.  This is of course enough in a general education classroom for them to at least get by without being singled out by the teacher.  The problems come when they have to move beyond simple speaking teasks.  For example, in one part of the test I show them a picture of a park with a bunch of people doing a bunch of things in it.  Following that are a bunch of questions about the park.  If students are read the questions they can point out the right answer.  If they have to read the question, however, they push into a whole other mode.  They start to try to figure out, based on the answers, what the question might say.  If the answer choices are either a picture of a ball, a boy, and a bike, they will insert those words into the question even if they aren't.  The question might be " Who is playing on the swings" And the student will start the questions as "The ball...." then look to me to see if they are on the right track.
One of the big theories these days is the need for visual aids.  I agree with it in certain situations.  When I worked with 8th graders in San Francisco who were at 1st and 2nd grade reading levels and expected to analyze and understand "To Kill a Mockingbird" visual aids were a huge help.  We could watch the film version of the story first, to introduce characters and scenes, then go to the book with a general understanding of what was going on.  Did this cut down on the kids ability to imagine what is going on from the words? Yes absolutely.  Is that a problem? If you ask me....absolutely.  However, it again is a sign of us, as adults, getting caught up in what we think "should be happening" versus what is actually happening. When a kid is 13 and at a 2nd grade reading level do you just plop a book in front of them at a level they "should" be at and begin to ask them about plot themes and story archs or do you introduce the material in a way they may be more interested in initially? Visual aids can be also be a crutch and I'm seeing that as the testing progresses.  Kids can easily do matching problems with the word ball and a picture of a ball but have no idea what the concept of a ball is is a sentences.  I mean, people, especially boys may use "ball" as a verb in a few different ways, but its really not.  And reading is not all about picture matching and pointing.

We've only just begun

Well, after 5 months of waiting and attempting to enjoy a "vacation" which consisted of returning back to the US after two years and moving to a new unfamiliar city I'm finally back at work.  I have to say that besides the general sense of being overwhelmed from all the new information it feels good to be back at it.
First impression from this initial two weeks has been about a 7 on a scale of 1-10.  The school founder is a pretty inspirational guy who is one of those people who, after you hear his life story, makes you realize that you haven't really done shit in yours.  But hey, a little humility is good sometimes. Plus he's been at this for almost 20 years, so it makes me feel like there is some security job wise as I gradually watch the workers my age lose everything they'd earned and been promised in the shit storm that is the US economy right now.  One of the annoying things that drops my initial impressions down from a 10 is peoples sense of time.  On the first day of orientation we were all told in no uncertain terms that being "on time" meant being late and being early meant being on time.  OK, fair enough.  I get the concept and live by it anyway.  Then the next day, when everything is supposed to start at 8:45, it starts at 9:10.  I mean, come on dude. The next day? I understand the concept that the people at the top of the pyramid can decide to live by the rules they dictate for others or not.  However, when setting the tone for a group of brand new employees, some of which are just starting their first structured employment experience, I think it's important to set the tone at the top.  Especially as a teacher.  We're in the business of modeling and setting examples, That's 80% of the gig.
So after a few days of "professional development" which even though I enterred it with fairly low expectations ended up being certainly the best I had participated in to this stage we broke off into our respective schools.  I assumed there would be about 80 teachers where i work but it ends up being only about 25.  The interesting part of it is that out of those 25, 8 have something to do with with student behavior or specialization.  There's a social worker, a psychologist, a counselor, a behavior specialist, 3 special ed teachers  and me, the ESL guy. That is a whole hell of a lot of specialization for a small group.  from what I understand there were more classes last year like art, music and languages, but the kids went bonkers and started doing things like smearing feces on the walls and punching the crap out of each other so a decision was made to push resources into more student management areas. The PE teacher keeps fucking with me telling me it's "fucking crazy" on the 3rd floor where I am, but I can;t imagine it's any worse then 9C at Sarasas last year.   I mean they weren't wiping feces on the walls but their outright disdain for me and anything spoken in English was palpable. And they were huge.  The oldest kids this year are grade 4-5.  Maybe annoying but they're at least small and in general, understand basic English.
I intially thought that being in a distinct minority group (there are overall 3 males and 2 white people on staff) might feel funny, but it's really been a non issue.  It's makes me feel good that even if people have their prejudices they are coming at things with an open mind.  The fucking yahoo idiots currently screaming about a community center possibly being built by a moderate muslim cleric in NYC near "ground zero" would be smart to take notice of how to deal with people you don't share total common ground with.
All signs point to me being left to my own devises this year.  That puts me in the good position that I can set things up the way I want to without really being bothered by anybody.  It looks like I'm already charming my way into the hearts of a few of the higher ups, so that's always a good thing.  I have high hopes at this stage, but next week will certainly give a me a little bit more of a true taste of whats to come.  

the Border

My friend Tom went crazy.  It seems to have happened overnight, but as information leaks out it's pretty obvious it was a long time coming and not the first time.  He's currently hospitalized until he stabilizes and is sent on to wherever the authorities decide to send him.
The signs were there all along although no one seems to want to deal with that.  He always had this "hey man, don't get so intense about it" attitude anytime the conversation got serious, which drove me to fucking distraction.  The problem was, his true self betrayed him, and in his various moments of weakness he showed that he was wound tighter internally than anyone.
I understand the complex nature of protecting ones inner-self with rough exteriors; I've spent the greater part of my life doing the same thing.  But I've gradually found in recent years the ability to let my guard down and show the soft underbelly that lies beneath what was once an impenetrable shell.  Although I'm not quite there, just showing a glimmer of something that's been hidden for so long, even from myself, has been and continues to be truly freeing.
For Tom, the depths of the facade are what in the end brought him down. The caricature he drew of himself for the public and for himself became so far removed from his true self,  that his mind could no longer keep the two in coexistence.  Like a rubber band, the distance between his outward expression of self and his inner, true self finally got stretched too far and snapped, sending him spiraling out into a land of internal confusion and even more troubling, into a public with no idea how to handle it. May this be a cautionary tale for all of us who play loose and fast with what we project onto the world.  Liars and charlatans, if not discovered by the world that surrounds them, will in time be discovered by their inner self. And the inner-self is in the end the true judge of who we are.

San Francisco Sayonara

Back in 1990 I moved to San Francisco.  I loved the idea of the living in the hippy mecca, and although it ended up being more Kurt Cobain than Jerry Garcia, it still just felt like like home.  I spent the next year partying on the Haight, 16th street and SOMA, meeting like-minded crazy people, drinking whiskey, and snorting and popping whatever I could find. In other words it was exactly what this small town kid, who was looking to disappear into an urban "scene", wanted.
For the next 15 years, I spent time in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Vermont and New York City, but always returned to the city that had just the right balance of radical politics and blue collar sensibility with a sprinkling of old school glamour. It was my home and I bragged about it to anyone who would listen.
But in my final stint by the bay I started to feel the changes that had been percolating for years.  Though I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and I fell into faulty reasoning like "it's a young person's city now", I knew something was different.  Sure people my age were busy gentrifying the East Bay,  pushing out the original tenants there like we had the latinos in the mission decades before, but the change seemed deeper than that.
Besides my own evolution, I realized that the real change was a change in priorities.  Back in the day we lived in small dwellings and spent our money on good food, drink and going out with friends.  And understand that when I say "we",  I mean people of all ages, races and socioeconomic brackets.  Did some of us wish for more space? Sure. But as city dwellers we had made the choice that the convenience of a good steak, a nice cocktail or 10 or a night at the theatre outweighed those desires.  If we wanted space and quiet, we could always move to the suburbs.  Now the priorities of these "should be surburbanites" have been pushed into cities like San Francisco, where people constantly complain about noise, congestion and late night drinking.  Some may call it the evolution of the city but it's not.  It's bullshit.  If you think it's too noisy living in SOMA then guess what? There are plenty of places in the south bay for you to sleep at night. Take your fucking kids there and leave the nighttime fun to the cities.
As I pull up the stakes again, and as I know now it will be my last time in San Francisco I say thank you to my adopted home town.  I hope you can survive for decades to come.  Thanks for allowing me my 20 year social experiment.  I hope you find a way to return to your former glorious self.

Stranger

One of the most difficult things about moving back to the US is seeing how people lives have progressed do to their staying in one place vs mine from moving around.  I see friends building their own businesses, moving their ways up the whatever business and professional ladders they're involved with and it makes me feel like somehow I've missed something.  As I've been exploring outside the US I can't help but think sometimes that it has all been based on some type of escapist premise, and not the romantic vision that I let others believe it is.

Any regrets I've had for the life I've led to this point are few and far between.  I chose a less traveled road a long time ago and deal with the consequences of those decisions.  I do get caught up in my head at times with a minor self loathing for not being more responsible with my handling of my personal affairs; I spent years pushing people and opportunities away in often hurtful ways.  My misanthropic tendencies have been exposed and intensified with the assistance of mind-altering substances and rage.

On the other side, however much a piece of me wants to be able to live a more passive and singularly focused existence, I realize that that is probably not the life in store for me.  I have been hiding in the shadows for 20 years now.  I feel like a vessel that has been emptied of the past and is ready to fill up on act 2 of this life.

View from a jobs conference

Ah yes…the joy of finding work. 

American men make horrible shoe choices.  The suits are ok, but for god sakes, wearing payless shoes or those black “all sport” training shoes with a suit is unacceptable.  You look like the unibomber or that crazy Sociology professor I had in college who couldn’t make it through a 60 minute class without a smoke break.  And you’re 30 years old.  Please do not create the next generation of educators who students make fun of when they’re drunk and stoned at their weekend keg-parties. You are not just filling some pod that says you have to look like a complete dork to be an educator.

Women stress much more than men.  The women here look like they are going to start crying.  Especially the young ones. And, of course, they are continually scoping each other out and giving the old up and down to each other as they pass.  The woman next to me keeps taking deep breaths. She may not want to manage her stress with more coffee. What is that, cup 5 this hour honey. Really. Read the books. Caffeine and stress do not work. I have to give it to her though; it looks like she’s getting a lot of meetings set up. Hopefully she won’t run screaming into the streets before the first one.

Older women with teaching experience seem to think looking professional is all it takes. No wonder kids always hate school.  Where is your computer? Can you talk video games or do you just lecture kids on how bad they are and how good books are.  Sorry sport; 13 year olds don’t give a shit about pride and prejudice unless you can somehow tie it in to something they understand. And finger wagging doesn’t count.

Bow ties are still in? Christ, when I was in school, bow ties were a sign of pretentious asshole teachers to avoid.  Now it’s back to somehow being a sign of intelligence and style.  Come on: If you’re 30 years old or younger, please get rid of this shit once and forall.  If you want to be Andy Rooney then go work at the fucking Post or the Times.  When my child gets to school age, you’d better believe I’ll be checking the school to see if any teachers wears a bowtie. If so, forget it.

Young guys don’t give a shit.  The 20 somethings don’t even seem to care about this whole thing.  They talk about facebook and where they’re getting beers afterwards but nothing about jobs or interviews.  I hope for my sake that we’re interviewing at the same places because it won’t be close; unless the school is looking to hire single 25 year olds for 20,000/year who don’t mind living with 4 of their buddies or think it’s great to live in a dorm with 20 11^th grade lacrosse players.

Too much eye contact.  Dude, eye contact is important but too much is creepy.  It tells me that you’re not thinking about responses or what I’m saying; you’ve read some manual that says eye contact means that you are a “real” guy.  Stop it. It’s not a stare down contest and I’m not in middle school.