freedom OF or FROM religion

Victoria loves Christmas, and even more than that, she loves decorating for Christmas. I've never been one for the Christmas decorating per se, but I do love decorating for other holidays (Valentine's Day is a personal favorite). So, as often happens when the two of us get excited about something, we went crazy buying and collecting various forms of holiday decorations for our office. We ended up with tinsel and ornaments, personalized stockings and holidays cards, a mini christmas tree (with ornaments!), a light up Menorah, dreidels, gelt, and a holiday themed table cloth to tie it all together. We were set.

As we showed off our decorations, Mitch (aka the Grinch, for this story at least) mentioned that it might not really be allowed for us to display religious icons such as the Menorah in our office in a public school. Concerned about what was permitted of us, we held off on the set up and sent an e-mail to our supervisor to get the go ahead.

We weren't quite patient enough and did some decorating without hearing the final verdict. The outcome is pictured below, a perfect scene of coexistence, if you ask me:

Ultimately, however, we were informed by our supervisor that according to the higher ups in our organization it was alright for us to display ornaments, tinsel, and winter themed decorations like snow flakes and snowmen, but anything that could be interpreted as a religious symbol was out. This meant no more Menorah and no more Christmas tree for us, sad day. (Don't be too sad for us, though, the office is still quite festive, pictures to come tomorrow)

Being the Religion major that I am, I couldn't help but start to think of the greater implications of this "ruling." To me it seems to boil down to the difference between freedom of religion and freedom from religion. As employees of a government funded organization based out of a public school do those we serve (and we in turn) have the right to the freedom of religion- that is, the ability to practice whatever religion we want however we want- or freedom from religion, the right to have no semblance of religion in one's vicinity.

These are two very different things. If I have the freedom of religion then it should be no problem for me to display my Menorah in my work space just like my student can take time during session to pray or another teacher in the school can wear a cross necklace- so long as none of us are imposing our beliefs on others or trying to convert anyone. But, if it is freedom from religion that we are truly granting then pretty much none of that should be allowed.

I understand why my organization made this ruling- it's safer and keeps anyone from potentially getting in trouble or misinterpreted. But, I wonder when being 'safe' in this way is going too far. When does prohibiting religious displays in an office turn into prohibiting displays of religion on one's body (I can't help but think of France and the headscarf fiasco)? And, how far of a leap is it from 'freedom from religion' to 'freedom from culture'- discouraging people from displaying anything related to their heritage or cultural upbringing? Most importantly, in my opinion, how many teaching and learning opportunities are lost when we silence or hide religion instead of allowing students to see and question it?

The Kinds of People We Were in High School

Today, one of my students, let's call him Lil Insane, came by to do a make up session. He's a hilarious kid who's smart, but you wouldn't know it by his ACT scores. As we were talking about essay writing, he mentioned how people never guess he's a good student who is on the honor roll based on his physical appearance (he's a tall African American kid who wears slouchy pants and always listens to his ipod).

Somehow we moved onto a discussion about how he would judge us based on our appearances. The conversation went as follows:

"Well, Victoria would be that party girl who's the life of the party and Abigail would be her friend who's always like 'No! Don't go with him'. "

So then we asked about Mitch and Colin:

"Colin's that cool guy, everyone thinks he's cool. Mitch was probably in Math club or something. Colin probably went to all of the parties but Mitch had lots of girlfriends."

This definitely made my day.

It has been too long

Greetings from Atlanta, Georgia! I am here for the holiday weekend and will hopefully post a few times this weekend from here if time allows.

I haven't posted in about a week and a half, which I worry starts to become a dangerous length of time for a new blogger, so it's time to play catch up.

Things that we've been up to while not blogging:

- New Students: Victoria and I accepted 2 new students each into our cohorts from the incredibly long wait list. This brings my group to 41 students (now surpassing the number in my graduating high school class) and Victoria's to 40. This has required not only tracking them down in class but also administering baseline ACT exams to them after school. All of our new students are boys and one of mine happens to be one of my student's boyfriend- whoops, hope that turns out ok- for right now it's great, she makes sure he shows up everywhere and does everything that he has to. Let's just hope they don't break up for another year and a half at the earliest.

- The Study: I don't think that I've mentioned the study yet on this blog but it has in some ways been the bane of our existence. While the organization that I work with has had many success stories and incredible statistics for the students we serve, we have no actual data on how our students do compared to their counterparts who do not participate in our program. Thus, this year, the organization has commissioned a researcher from Harvard to complete a study about the effectiveness of our program. If the results are what we expect that they will be, it will mean really great things for the organization and open a lot of doors for funding and expansion. This all sounds fine and dandy, right? Right! But, the problem comes with the administration of said study. For the study to be effective it needs a control group- a group of students we can compare our students to. For the most useful results, these students must be pretty equivalent to our students, the only difference being that they are not in our program. So, a randomly selected group of our wait list students were chosen for the task and we, the junior and senior coaches at each school participating, were given the task of tracking down and asking the students to participate in the study. Don't get me wrong, I definitely see the benefit in this study, but it has been incredibly uncomfortable to approach students on our wait list not with the news that they were accepted into the program but instead that they were selected as participants in a study that will hopefully show how much better their lives would have turned out if they had been in the program... It feels kind if wrong. More on that in another post, perhaps. Back to the point, we spent parts of last week in a final attempt to track down students who have so far been unresponsive about their willingness to participate in the study.

- Kaplan Training: Most of mine and Victoria's roles this year is to help our students prepare for the ACT. In order to be qualified and prepared to do this we are being trained by Kaplan, the test prep organization. Every friday for the next few weeks we will be spending 4 hours at Kaplan practice teaching and going through their ACT prep curriculum page by page. Coming up in a future post: opinions/responses to Kaplan training and particularly the Kaplan Method for our students.

- College! This point really has nothing to do with how I've been too busy to blog, but it's still an awesome point to end this post on: the first of Mitch's students got accepted into college! We're all really excited for him and it's really awesome to see all of the organization's hard work paying off.

Happy early hours of Thanksgiving all!

Birthday!

Turning 22 in the office looks like:

Victoria is wonderful and decorated my desk area and made me cupcakes! Also- now you can see my incredibly neat (lies) desk area.

Public School Compared to my Expectations

As Colin so artfully pointed out during a team outing to Sonic for lunch (I know you're jealous)- I had never spent a full day in a public high school before starting this job. It's true, I spent most of my childhood enrolled in Jewish Day Schools and high school at a private all-girls school where I wore a kilt every day, true story. Times spent in public high schools included taking the SAT back when I was in high school... and that's about it.

So I began to think about how this 'urban' public school compares to my idea of a public school and how working in an urban public school compares to my expectations. I'll reveal some of my thoughts in list form:

-. First, this school does not feel incredibly urban to me, despite being described as such. Perhaps this is because in the Midwest, at least, the term "urban" is a little more lenient. When I think urban, I think inner city Baltimore where the schools take up city blocks and are surrounded by row houses and other urban buildings. This school is a sprawling one story building surrounded by sports fields nestled in an ordered yet relatively spacious neighborhood of modest single family homes. I feel more like I am in a suburb than a city when I drive to work every day.

- Safety: I don't feel unsafe when I'm at school. I'm aware that this is a gross generalization about 'urban schools' that really unfortunately stereotypes the student population that we work with- but I won't pretend that I wasn't worried about it at first. In fact, my mom strongly discouraged me from working at a job that would place me in an urban school because she didn't think that I could handle it. Can you blame her, though, with headlines in Baltimore like "Teacher ‘petrified’ after being attacked by student: Baltimore educator says she cannot bring herself to return to work now" (for the rest of the story see here: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/24047456/)? Fortunately, I am not at all worried that any of my students would attack me and think, instead, that they would probably come to my defense if necessary. There are also no metal detectors or anything of the sort here, like I might have expected. And, unlike other schools that our organization works with, I've witnessed no fights, though I've heard that they do happen.

- PDA: There are a lot of teenagers making out around school. I think that's actually less of an urban thing or even a public school thing and more of a co-ed school thing. Still, it's awkward. That would not have been/ was not tolerated at my high school, and believe me, there were relationships going on. Our motto is usually 'look away and walk away quickly'... I don't need to see any of my students doing that.

- Sweepers, and I don't mean the kinds with brooms: There are people at this school who are HIRED and PAID to sit in the hallways and force the students to go to class. They watch down the hallways suspiciously and demand passes from students. Seriously? I can think of many many more effective ways to spend a school's budget. Perhaps a better college prep program? Maybe ensuring that we don't fail to meet AYP AGAIN this year...? Funny fact: On more than one occasion, Victoria and I have been 'swept' and I saw a sweeper eyeing us today... pathetic.

Is a 4-year degree program right for every student?

One of the primary goals of the organization that I work for is to get all of our students accepted to and enrolled in 4-year degree programs. The idea behind this is that graduates of 4-year program make more money over their lifetimes than graduates of 2-year programs or those who do not go to college. Additionally, students who go to a 4-year school are more likely to stay in school than those in other programs. Lastly, more often than not 4-year programs have a greater emphasis on the Liberal Arts than two year programs which usually focus on specific occupations, thus 4-year programs are considered simply better or more intellectual.

So, sitting here with my Liberal Arts school degree in Religion, in a job I adore but which is in no way financially supportive, with the knowledge that if I decide to finally get a "real job" I'm going to have to go back to school to get a degree in something actually useful- I find myself wondering if a 4-year degree really is the right thing for every student.

Is getting a liberal arts degree specifically and a 4-year degree generally more of a privilege than a necessity? Is forcing our students into 4-year programs only setting them up for failure?

When talking about this with Mitch yesterday after session he mentioned the cases of a few of his students who he is not sure should be going to 4-year schools. Some, he worries, are simply not ready for college- they rarely show up for session, they have poor writing skills, or they have a very difficult time verbally communicating in English. He worries that these students, even if they get into 4-year schools, will end up dropping out because they will be too discouraged and not receive the support they need. Or, there's the student who has a child and very little motivation. Could a 2-year program be a quicker path to a career for this student so that he could start truly providing for his family? Then there's the student who is dead set on being an auto mechanic- there are a few 4-year programs that do exist in that area, but the majority are definitely two year programs. Should that student be forced into a 4-year program simply because that's what the organization has decided is the best place for him regardless of the incredible additional expense and potential time wasted by choosing that program over a 2-year program in the same area?

Then I think of some of my students who are in similar situations. One of them, who wants to be called AMP in this blog (she'll be mentioned again, so I guess it's good for her to have a fake name) really wants to be an orthotist or a prosthetist- aka someone who designs and makes orthotics and prosthetics. When she approached colleges at the mini college fair held at our school all of the representatives told her about pre-med programs and how she would need to go to medical school for that degree. In reality, its a 2-year program at most. Or, there's my student who wants to be a pastry chef and would love to go to the Culinary Institute of America or Le Cordon Bleu. However, both of these schools are considered for-profit institutions that we are supposed to steer our students away from because of their less than stellar retention and graduation rates. I understand the concern, especially with for profit schools that are not specialized, but I also have no interest in sending my students to schools where they cannot study what they want.

So I wonder, then, if our emphasis on 4-year degree program is really motivated by theories of social mobility. Education is widely considered one of the primary sources of social mobility. All of our students are low income and I'm sure that parts of the unspoken goals of the organization is to help them move up in the socioeconomic class ladder. Is it then classist of me to believe that some of our students would be in some ways better off to do shorter programs that would land them in jobs faster rather than enrolling in longer term, less career specific, more expensive programs? Or, is that a good suggestion that would help our students more gradually change their social class standings: instead of jumping from low income, potentially non-educated groups to over educated liberal arts minded groups- taking a brief stop at the educated, hard working class that would actually allow them to support their families and communities?

What we do

So I just realized that despite having this blog now for about 2 weeks, I've never completely described what I actually do in this job. All four of us have cohorts of about 40 students. These students applied and interviewed and were accepted into the program because they had above a 2.0 gpa, are interested in attending a 4 year college or university, and meet certain income requirements (they either qualify for free or reduced price lunch or they don't but face other serious financial setbacks).

I lead two sessions a week six different times. In other words, I teach the same lesson monday afternoon, monday early evening, and tuesday afternoon then I teach a second lesson on wednesday afternoon, wednesday early evening, and thursday afternoon. Sessions are two hours each. My students only attend two sessions per week, one in the beginning of the week and one at the end. During the day Victoria and I lesson plan, do make up sessions with students, harass Mitch and Colin, and blog (today we also got into a lively discussion and research session about whether and for how long humans could survive on celery, oranges, or watermelon). On fridays we gather with all of the other members of our organization and do staff development type activities as well as even more lesson planning.

As far as the content of our lessons, in the Junior year the focus is mainly on ACT prep as well as a splattering of general college prep activities like going on college websites, creating a resumes, and learning about bank accounts (splattering was the appropriate term, no?). Senior year is very focused on preparing college and scholarship applications and involves a lot of workshop time where the coaches work individually with their students as they navigate the college application process. Right now Victoria and I work anywhere between 36-42 or so hours/week depending on weekend events and such. Mitch and Colin are putting in a lot more hours these days because of all of the letters of recommendation/support they have to write and the ridiculous amount of essays they read through and edit.

So, that's what we do! If you have any questions about anything at all, leave a comment! I'd love to hear that I'm not just writing into cyberspace... and that I'm making some sort of sense while I do so.

IB

Our school offers a number of IB (International Baccalaureate) courses which are meant to be honors courses that are held to an international standard. From my experience working in college admissions, IB courses are considered on par with AP courses, signifying a particularly challenging or intense choice that a student could make in his or her schedule if he/she was qualified to take the course.

What's interesting about IB courses at our school is that students do not have to apply or especially qualify to take them. In fact, the school encourages every student to take at least one IB course before they graduate. IB courses are meant to come from a global perspective with the goal of educating children towards a mindset of world peace. The IB organization appears to pride itself on providing a higher level of education that could and should be recognized as advanced in colleges and universities worldwide.

When I noticed that I had a couple of students who were full IB diploma candidates (meaning that they are taking/have taken courses in all of the areas of study and are going to be writing a big final paper to culminate their studies), I assumed that they would be my highest achievers. However, these students still scored between 12-15 on their baseline ACTs, got 5-7s on their ACT essays, and, for at least one, will have to retake the GRAD reading and writing tests in order to graduate.

I found myself wondering: how does this happen? How do students make it all the way to IB courses without developing strong reading and writing skills? How can they be expected to write a "Senior Thesis"-esq paper if they cannot manage the ACT essay or their GRAD writing exam?

Through this whole discussion, these are my main concerns: 1. That my school merely implemented an IB program to pad the student's resumes with no ability to actually run the program in an advanced or correct way, 2. That these tests- the ACT and the GRAD tests are in no way able to measure these student's abilities, 3. That the emphasis on the IB program is just another form of world competition rhetoric that has completely infected our educational system.

More on all of these topics at some point.

MinnPost - 'Waiting for Superman' forum elicits diverse reactions, universal concern

MinnPost - 'Waiting for Superman' forum elicits diverse reactions, universal concern

Colin is mentioned in this article- and it's a perfect description of him.

More to come soon!

After two serious posts, here's a fun one:

I stole this right from the e-mail that we sent out to our coworkers:

Preface: our students think that Colin is a hunk of burnin' love.

A few weeks ago our check in question was "If you were stranded on a desert island what two items would you bring?"

An unidentified female student answers without hesitation "Colin, no guitar necessary."

That same student, in session yesterday, also picked colin for the question: "What person, living or dead, fictional or real, would you want to have dinner with."

This crush is getting a little creepy, no?

Tough Topics

In the past few sessions some difficult topics have come up unintentionally. At these points the scholar and sociologist in me comes out, and I'm not quite sure that my students appreciate or understand my interest.

One issue was welfare, which came from our use of EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) Cards on a financial literacy vocabulary list. One of my most vocal and outgoing students began to talk about how his family has an EBT card- which, of course, was never asked. I didn't mind him sharing details about his financial situation if he felt comfortable, but the problems started when he began asking others about using EBT cards and claiming that it was only Black people who used them (not as bad as it could have been though, I suppose, since this student is Black). Now, the scholar in me thought "oh what an interesting moment to talk about the stereotypes of the Black community and ideas about poverty and government assistance!". The 'teacher' in me however was shocked and mortified about what this student had said and how uncomfortable he was potentially making the other students in class. We shut the discussion down pretty quickly, but I still wonder how I could effectively facilitate a discussion on this topic.

Today another issue surrounding race came up. Our school has an indoor ice rink attached but no ice hockey team. Supposedly, the school used to have an ice hockey team- but that was years ago. One student chalked it up to 'white flight'- which is actually probably true. I tried to turn that comment into a teaching moment- talking my students through the link between people who are wealthy (as my students perceived the participants in this 'white flight' to be) and the existence of a hockey team- discussing the cost of participating in hockey, buying equipment, etc. I worry, though, that instead of inspiring my students to think about the connections between income and various types of organized sports, I simply reinforced the stereotype that the White population is always wealthier than anyone else. oy.

The perils of facebook

Today we faced an issue I wasn't expecting: Our students wrote about their Baseline ACT scores in their facebook statuses. I think the most damaging post was the one from my high achiever who got a 28. Without him in the mix, my cohort's average is a 14.1-HALF of his score. He has every right to be excited about this baseline score- I'm sure that we can help him so much and that he can apply to some of the most competitive schools in the country with that score, but I cannot imagine being a student who scored an 11 and saw that status. What's even more surprising is that some of my students who scored between 13 and 15 also facebooked about their scores- something I'm not quite sure they should be proud of...

After a serious talk I think that all of my students have agreed not to post about their scores anymore, but it's interesting how much this shows that facebook is a huge part of my student's lives and they regularly share the most personal details of their lives on it.

Gotta Catch 'Em All!

or "Pokemans" according to Colin

So, Victoria and I decided that we should decide which pokemon character we would be. We don't know why and when we asked Colin where this idea came from he started telling us about the origins of the words that combine to make the word "Pokemon"... not our question, Linguistics!

So here are the results:



This is electrode who we've decided is Colin's character. Don't know why.

This it Ditto: aka Mitch's pokemon. We decided that this applies to Mitch because he is a twin and ditto signifies a duplicate... LIKE TWINS!! Also- Ditto looks friendly and Mitch is pretty friendly. Victoria adds that he suspects that Ditto makes weird noises, like Mitch. This is a giant image because it is that awesome, clearly.





This is Vulpix- Victoria's pokemon. Seems enthusiastic, fluffy and "probably enjoys a good pickle", says victoria.






Lastly, This is mine, Togepi... look it's so happy! And it dances kind of awkwardly just like me!



I swear that we actually do work some times.

Heard around the Office:

"Linguistics is a sub-topic in the English department- I'm offended!"

- Guess who

Realities

Today was a little bit heartbreaking because it was the first day that we shared our student's baseline ACT scores with them. In this organization we focus a lot on ACT prep in the junior year and we start off the year with a baseline ACT- a test where we tell them where to go and when but nothing else.

Our student's baseline scores ranged from 9-28 (the 28 was a major outlier... after this student no one had higher than a 20). To give some context: the national average is 21 and the state average is almost 23. A good portion of both mine and victoria's students fell in the bottom 1% of test takers.

This is incredibly disheartening. Our students are smart energetic students- yet the test in no way shows that. Our English Language Learners definitely struggle the most, being unable to come even close to finishing the reading section and getting a majority of those questions wrong.

I think what affected me the most was how immune my students seemed to being in the bottom 30% or lower of test takers. Most of my students failed their GRAD tests in reading and/or writing and they are completely used to being below average. I guess this is better than being destroyed by this fact. I even had one student make a joke about it. He had a 10 or 11 and was in the bottom 1%, instead he remarked: "I'm in the top 1% of test takers!"... all I could do was look at him with a sad smile.

The ray of hope here is that we are basically guaranteed to raise our students' scores. Our organization averaged a 25% score increase last year. But, I don't really think 25% is enough for most of my students and sincerely hope it will be possible to improve their scores even more.

Overheard in the Office:

Mitch's student:

"I don't know how she does it, but somehow my mom always finds money for me when I need it."

suspicious.

Awkwardness:

AKA Every day at School.

We've been working in this school for about 7 weeks. Despite this- we always get mistaken for high school students and told to get to class or provide a pass.

Also- whenever we go into the teachers lounge to get a soda, or pop, if you will, no one talks to us. Awkward, as is my life.

Overheard in the Office:

"My barbie could have eaten that pickle"

This is Victoria's new favorite lunch time snack.

Meet the Office

Four of us work in the office:

There's me, Abigail , an East Coast transplant to the midwest who never spent a day in public school before starting this job. Dangerous combination? probably. I majored in religion in college but have no interest in becoming a professor... or a minister (well, Rabbi, actually) and I always thought I wanted to teach. Now I'm questioning whether or not I really want to do that- too much bureaucracy in the school system if you ask me, but that's for another post. I work with 40ish Juniors, and I'm worried that they think I'm too nice.

Disclaimer: I am writing these other introductions without the complete approval of my subjects. If they would like to introduce themselves they are free to do so.

Victoria- Victoria is my partner in crime, of sorts. She is the same position with me, and works with 40 other Juniors, though I don't worry that they think she's too nice (that's not to say that Victoria isn't a nice and wonderful person, which she is, just that she's much less of a pushover) . A little Type A, Victoria is always on top of things, usually with a lesson plan written before I even crack open the curriculum. Law school and lawyer-dom is Victoria's ultimate goal, but I think we've convinced her to put off that dream for another year and potentially come back to this job next year!

Colin, aka- Linguistics. In case this isn't painfully clear, Colin was a Linguistics major and, despite having graduated from college quite a few years ago, remains fascinated with the topic. Colin is our returner in the office- he knows the lingo at our school and the people to (and not to) talk to. Colin works with the 40ish students that he helped through their Junior year in their senior year as they begin to apply for college, financial aid, and tons of scholarships.

Mitch- Mitch has the same position as Colin, except that he didn't work with these students last year- which I think would make the job incredibly difficult. Three things to know about Mitch if you are going to continue reading this blog: 1. He's a twin, 2. He makes funny noises on occasion, and 3. HE'S GETTING MARRIED (more to come on all of these subjects, I'm sure). We also harass him the most... sad times for Mitch.

Introductions

Today I was facebook chatting with a friend from my alma mater. He’s interested in the work that I do and the organization that I work with and always asks me how its going. During this conversation, though, he had a brilliant idea: start a blog. Every day I come home from work full of stories- about my students, my lessons, and the inside jokes from the office. Usually I just bore my roommates with such stories, but hardly ever remember them day to day to tell the other important people in my life. That coupled with the fact that I’ve been listening to books on tape so much during my commute that I’ve started to narrate my own life as though my life is a book on tape, made the blog a perfect idea.

As I mentioned, I work for a college access program and I’m based in an urban high school. I think I’ll keep most everything and everyone anonymous for now, until I’m sure that I can’t get in huge amounts of trouble for naming anything. But, here are the basics: The school has a few thousand students- most of the students are minorities, specifically Hmong. All of my students are low income and most will be the first members of their family to go to college.

Our office is located in the library in a room about the size of my mom’s closet (which is actually a pretty nice size). One of our walls is a counter with a large open “hole” that faces into the library. There is a metal grate that rolls up and down, which is what makes me feel like I’m always behind the counter at a concession stand (any guesses how I got to the name of this blog?). Every once in a while I think it would be amusing to give away hot dogs to the students in the library, it would feel appropriate.