Thank You John Legend!

Maybe this blog post should be titled "The Power of Celebrity Endorsements," but I think it will be even more powerful to publicly post my thank you letter to John Legend for joining Teach For America's Board of Directors and performing last night at the TFA 20th Anniversary summit with KIPP NYC's orchestra in front of 11,000 people. So here it goes...

Dear John Legend,

Your performance last night brought tears to many peoples eyes, and it was not solely because you are an amazing artist, or because the music you were singing was so powerful. Instead I believe that it was because you truly took time to understand the movement that is TFA and the impact that the organization has the potential to have. For this, I thank you. In order to make long term change in America's public schools every single person in America must feel the same understanding that you showed last night. You powerfully addressed the notion that we are doing an injustice to our children by offering so few opportunities to children in poverty. I think that Waiting For Superman was a small foot in the door in introducing this national issue to the public, but with endorsements and understandings like yours from yourself and other celebrities we could really begin to make transformational change. Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA, speaks about the importance of Transformational Leadership. People who are transformational leaders, not only lead people in a direction towards positive change, they mobilize people, they are innovative and they start the ripple of change simply by being an empowered leader. The story you have to tell about your own education, and journey towards stardom is a powerful one, and I believe that with your support great changes can be made. The conference yesterday consisted of 11,000 people who are all working towards a common goal, or who at least believe in that goal. Some of them, however, have been working towards this goal for 20 years! With your help, and the help of national figures in spreading the importance of the movement, we CAN make a difference with a greater sense of urgency. So thank you John Legend, from the bottom of my heart, for helping a cause that I think is one of the most important of our time.

On Silence

TFA tells us that October and November is a time of deep hardship for a first year teacher. There is data that says on the continuum of stress for a first year teacher this is the pinnacle of that stress. I admittedly tried very hard to resist this, but I must admit they are right. Since my last post I have worked harder than I ever did before, and I am still working to keep my student's spirits alive.

In order to find some solace this weekend I decided to go back to my roots and attend Quaker meeting in Charlotte. In Quaker meeting silence is very important. As I was sitting in meeting I was reflecting on being silent, and the peace I felt when the only things that I could hear were small movements in the room. I realized that as a teacher I place a high value on silence as well. When I am able to finally get all eyes in my classroom back on me, and mouths shut I feel like I just completed a marathon. So on Sunday I thought to myself, why is this so important to me in class. I can completely justify its importance in my religious life, but in class it's really just about control.

I decided this week to let go of some of this control. We are working in literature cirlces this week and rotating through working on the computers to respond on a wiki site. This means that students are leading each other through reading comprehension, and using their own opinions to talk to me online. We started on Friday and it has been anything but silent in my classroom since then. I think that despite my loss of peaceful silence my students are learning. It is really exciting to see them using the wiki (I am using edmodo.com), and most of the students are doing an excellent job working together to read.

Although October and November are proving to be challenging (just like TFA said they would be) I am learning to find moments in my classroom even when it's noisy that bring me the same joy as sitting in a meeting house in silence. It is my goal to be better about posting, so I should be back to at least once a week very soon!

If you are a mentor, I am sorry that the emails have been infrequent; my students have been busy starting the new book and have not had a lot of computer time. Please look out for some more emails coming really soon. If you never got an email your student is probably struggling with their email so please contact me and I will make sure they send you an email this week.

Waiting For...

This Friday Waiting for Superman opened in Charlotte. It was playing in a small art house movie theater in a swanky neighborhood. Teach For America got us tickets to go and see it with the rest of our peers. When I first saw the previews for the movie this past spring it brought tears to my eyes. My heart swelled with joy at the prospect of a movie that could really ignite national change in the education system. My expectation was that it would expose people to alarming realities that they were previously unaware of, and that suddenly American society would be united in a movement to end educational inequity.

To say the least I was underwhelmed. I was hoping to have the same feeling when I left the movie theater as I had when I watched Michael Moore's Sicko, the feeling of outrage at the state of our nation. In Teach For America there is a term "transformational leadership," and this is a term that I frequently share with other people because it is something that I feel is very important. I look to this term to help me describe what this movie was not, because I believe it was informational not transformational.

I listened to an NPR review of the movie this morning, and they had a lot of the same sentiments as me. One of the things they pointed out is that the only solution that the movie really came to was charter schools. While I believe that charter schools are an amazing development in the educational movement I know that charter schools are not a reality for all of our students as we saw in the movie. The ultimate message was that much of education is left up to chance for children. Although this is greatly upsetting, for some reason the way this was delivered did not leave me with the combined feeling of outrage and inspiration that I was hoping to leave with. I shared this with a colleague and she said, "well at least it starts a conversation," and all I could think to myself was well does it? I don't know that it does. After you watched it did you feel charged to join the movement to end educational inequity? I think that this movie had a ton of potential to shine light on the injustice that many of our children face in public schools, but instead it tip toed around the heaviest issues, interviewed some politicians, and brought charter schools to the forefront of everyone's mind. So all I felt when I left this was that I was waiting for something too, and that is some public image of the achievement gap that will transform Americans' thinking about the education system in our country.

Please share your thoughts on the movie! I would love to hear other perspectives.

Inspiration

First of all I would like to thank you all for your responses to my blog post and emails! Please wait patiently while I figure out all of the details. I did announce to the students today about this project and the excitement in the room was palpable. I used a few students as examples, because I've already found good matches for them and their faces lit up.

I find daily inspiration in my students, and I hope that as you all email and chat with them you will feel the same. As the southerners say, "I get chill bumps just thinking about it." This morning I downloaded Obama's back to school speech and listened to it on the way to work. I was moved to tears as I was driving for a few reasons: firstly because it took place at Masterman in Philadelphia so it really seemed like it was close to my life and second of all because it was all about goal setting just like we are doing in our classroom. He told the students of America that "the future is in your hands." So of course I wrote that on my board today and as I introduced our objective mastery tracking binder I made a direct relation to this quote (this is a little too complicated to explain through blog post, but of course email or call with questions).

In addition to feeling inspired by my students' goals and aspirations today I was also impressed with their reading. TFA has us do all of these reflections that answer the question, "when you look forward to May on the last day of school what do you want your students to say to you, and how do you want it to feel?" I always talk about how my dream is that my students will all love reading and will feel that they have the tools they need to succeed in academics and life. Today my students loved reading. We read aloud by color (more on this later or email me for the strategy) and as we were reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and really getting into it I looked up at the clock and saw it was time to go. When I stopped the students in the middle of our read aloud I got responses such as awww man, and noooo it was just getting good. They love the book!!!!! I couldn't be more happy about this, especially since we have to get through all 200 pgs of it, and it is not easy for my little 6th graders. I hope this feeling will carry on throughout. Keep checking back because our classroom blog should be up and running soon!!!