At the Rainbows End

A written directive from my principal at the beginning of the 2008/09 school year spurred me to begin this blog. I was further inspired to begin Sunday Salons (basically jaw sessions) at my house (to vent) to reconsider education and learning. My muse was my principal, but not in any gentle creative sense. My momentum was gained with righteous anger and frustration. A myriad of moments like being forced to give the MEAP (Michigan Educational Assessment Profile) to students who had been IEPed out of their regular classroom setting due to a variety of learning issues had left me jaded. Every time I gave the MEAP to these at risk students I could not help but wonder what were the teachers’ of Nazi Germany thinking when a star segregated their students’. Was I not the perpetrator of a madness that did not uphold learning and would ultimately lead to education being privatized?

These assessments told us little about the passions, purpose and skills of students. Could they in fact be used as a tool to label schools failing and provide the data necessary to privatize education?

Blah, Blah you can hear the wheels of angst as they turn in my weary teacher head.

The directive stated “You are utilize only the purchased basals in your curriculum “(After 20 years of teaching Reading/Lang arts no one sought my input on best practice.) We had money for new books. Books were purchased thus that was our “best practice” Truly I wept. Not for me, I was literate. Self taught really by the light of the hallway under the covers trying to catch up with the big kids in the family. I wept for my students who in spite of their diverse skills, the common theme was print phobia. They had experienced so much failure that they balked at most academics, but particularly reading. All sorts of systems had been thrust upon them, but rarely any that accounted for their learning style or the unique wiring

No Caldicott’s, No Newberry’s. Use this cumbersome 813 page text with abridged versions of literature and all sorts of other curricular agendas that tended more to Social Studies and Science that, curriculum.

(Think on it. Who made you fall in love with reading? It was never a teacher. It was not a plot. But some character that leapt out of the pages and drew you into their world).

I a veteran teacher, a published author, a professional so passionate about her subject that I contract with children who view themselves as non-readers. The contract goes like this: “If you do not learn to read I will quit my job”

My special needs students as assessed by the PIAT(Peabody Individual Achievement Test) have skills scattered from first grade up to the twelfth. These students are in a day treatment for Emotionally Impaired individuals. They have already had much exposure and failure in traditional models of learning.

A written directive! I am pedantic and reactive to this event. I can carry on about the publishers being the Halliburton of education etc. I can provide anecdotal stories how I have found the holy grail of getting non-readers past their fear, jumping grade levels. I can tell you how after receiving the “directive” I circumspectly read the Caldecott winning ´The Invention of Hugo Cabret”as the students were so stirred by the introduction that they begged me for more.

This directive caused me to regress to my snarkiest teacher self. When the principal came into my class while my students were” lost in literature”, so absorbed in their self selected ten minute read of their chapter books that they neglected to be their reactive acting out “EI” selves, (tamed by prose). The principal entered my room a secret service energy to her demeanor trying to sniff out any breach of security and says to me, “We cannot have all this reading going on in here” I reply, “ You are so right, why we cannot have all this reading going on in school. “

“Only use the basal. I felt like a kid bouncing about. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! I am cast back to my own powerless childhood. Sr. Marie Irene floating about in a blue habit, her looming voice shaming us into the mastery of diagramming sentences. She swashed through the room, her four-foot teaching aide of a pointer seeming a weapon of sorts while flailing away at her lessons. Though terrorized I covertly hid under my desk Little Women so that I might read the next chapter to see if Jo might ever declare her love to Lurie.

Of course I followed the curricular directive but not without researching the prescribed system so that I might conceptually defend my every deed. My goal remained constant, to led them to the love of words, literature. (If they could trust their own voice they may come to esteem others)

My angst stirred a dormant volcano awakening the frustration I had experienced as a just out of college teacher. At the age of 22-pre tenure I was “officially verbally reprimanded.” Nothing in my file just a chastisement from my administrator for having defaced state property.

I was not a willful anarchist but a naïve idealistic new teacher.

The classroom for my 24 institutionalized “educable/trainable” students was in a 100year old building that was referred to as the chapel. This was the very same location where the Native Americans had been convened each week on the reservation for their Christianization. Prior to becoming the regional center for the “mentally impaired” the center had been a reservation for the indigenous people of the area.

I had coursed down a rabbit hole. A coat of paint on the faded peeling walls? From the school district then from the state I got robust chorus of “No’s”. I offered to paint it myself but there was a problem with the paint that the state mandated and its cost.

So after dutching up my courage and anger at a local watering hole my coworker and I let ourselves into the chapel with the state issued key. She was Sancho to my Don Quixote. We took the crayola paints and made a mural of rainbows and beanstalks reaching to some forever place. We were proactive. We created beauty. The next day Lonnie a student with severe cerebral palsy was so excited when he saw the mural that he managed to lift his atrophied neck muscles and head and in his very slurry speech exclaimed, “Wow!” He was awake to the classroom, so perhaps he would awaken to his own abilities and talents. Wow.

“You have defaced state property, please remove the paint at once.” We scrubbed away while awash with our own sorrow. It gave us hope though that in spite of much soap and elbow grease the colors glimmered in a dreamy way on the rough surface.

Wash the wall. Use the basals.Who says that that child needs OT services? So goes the cacophony of how my hopes for my students are restrained and contained by this power greater than myself. The man behind the curtain, in this surreal Land of Oz. My idealism stirs like the oceans tide, it reverberates and resonates. It is in the glimmer of all those eyes peering at me asking me to illumine the dark.

So when asked to participate in a retrogressive groove much like my grade school curriculum at the hands of Sr. Marie Irene decades ago, I recoiled. You must know Jo and Joey Pigza and you have to meet Hugo Cabret. So I took to the page and seized a pen and invited folks to gather, to live the truth of what I had been trying to instill in my students for years. “Trust you voice.” Speak. And this is how my nemesis became my muse and how the tsunami aftershocks of No Child Left Behind stirred me to take to my own beanstalk and to reach higher and to reiterate what it is that is my vision. No more the quiet…

The Lost Student

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By MICHELLE KUO

Published: September 25, 2009

Patrick was the sort of student who made a teacher curious. There was something capacious inside him. He preferred listening to speaking. Others rushed, jostled, to get to the front of the lunch line. Patrick hung back. Patrick’s grin was a half-grin — as if he’d once trained himself not to smile but had since abandoned the project.

I met him the year before I left the Mississippi Delta — my second year as a Teach for America member in Phillips County, Ark., one of the poorest counties in the country. Patrick had flunked eighth grade twice; that year was his third try. He simply wouldn’t show up. He had no reason to; nobody made him. After he disappeared for two weeks, I asked a friend of his how to get to his house. When Patrick saw me at his door, he said, very fast, “The bus didn’t come.” He looked away. “I missed the bus.” Then: “I’m sorry, Ms. Kuo.”

We sat on the porch, across from a burned-down house. I handed him a postcard I’d been saving. It showed a statue, Rodin’s “Thinker.” The statue reminded me of him. I’d written a note on the back. He looked at it carefully, holding the corner with his fingertips. “Thank you, Ms. Kuo,” he said. “Thank you.”

I told him I knew he could make it through eighth grade. I told him that I would work hard for him, but that he would need to work hard, too. It would take a lot of small steps. I told him I would be at the ceremony when he graduated from high school. At that, he grinned. He had a gap between his front teeth.

When I stood up, so did he. “It ain’t safe here,” he said. I realized he was escorting me to my car.

Patrick began coming to class. Like a matchmaker, I helped him find books he might like. When he read, he laughed out loud. And reading made him want to write. It was painful, at times, to watch Patrick write, because half of what he wrote he erased. Every word that let him down he viewed as a personal failure — he wrote like a writer. I took away his pencil and gave him a pen.

His progress made me happy. By the spring, Patrick’s reading had jumped two levels. At a school ceremony, he won the award for “Most Improved.” He looked surprised. Sheepishly, he walked up to the stage. He turned to the students, who were still clapping, and then, suddenly, he raised both arms up in the air: a victory pose. Everybody laughed.

It was some two and a half years later, when I was at law school in the Northeast, that I learned Patrick was arrested for stabbing and killing someone.

I flew back to Arkansas and made it to the county jail on a Saturday. As I neared the glass window, I almost expected that gap-toothed half-grin, a mixture of wry and pensive. But Patrick’s face had thinned, and his mouth turned downward. His prison garb was two sizes too big. He looked older — he was older. Just the day before, two days after being arrested, he turned 19.

I picked up the receiver from the wall.

“Ms. Kuo, I didn’t mean to,” he blurted out. Again the words of a child who has done something wrong.

I asked him what happened. He’d gotten into a fight outside his house. It was with an older guy who was with his little sister. They looked high, he said. Patrick ended up taking a knife from the kitchen and stabbing him. Patrick shook his head: “Ms. Kuo, I don’t even know.”

We talked. He said he hadn’t been able to keep up at school. Just stopped going. He tried, he really did. He’d wanted to get a job in Little Rock. Or his G.E.D.

The officer came to get me. Time was up.

I haven’t been able to resist guilty feelings over Patrick. What if I’d stayed? And I’ve wondered if my sense of Patrick was faulty; whether I saw only the parts I wanted to see. But isn’t any teacher who tries to bring out the best in her students inclined to see them in the warmest light?

In my letters to Patrick, who is still awaiting trial, I tend to dwell on the past. His victory pose when he won the award; the way his classmates quieted when he read his writing. I want to remember those moments — those matters of the soul unrevealed by the public record.

One week in April when he was in my class, it rained every day. Water soaked through the roof, drenching my bookshelf. Christina fingered the swollen pages of “The Skin I’m In,” ready to cry. Cedric said, “We don’t got nothin’ down here, can’t even get a roof without a hole.” Patrick, from his desk, didn’t look up. “Stop cryin’, y’all,” he said. Then he stood up and walked out. A few minutes later, he returned with a bucket and a mop.

Michelle Kuo received a 2009 Skadden fellowship, given to law-school graduates. She is setting up a legal-aid clinic at a high school in Oakland, Calif.

Do You Think We’ll Ever Know…?

It was like any and all parties. Food scents wafting. People congregating and velcroing themselves to the people they know. Shop talk taking precedence over world events. I was cozying in to the corner trying to meld in with a group of mostly strangers. Upon hearing this snippet of conversation my I was intrigued.
“Do you think we’ll ever know if what we did made a difference?" She was intense in her delivery. Her wiry frame spastic with the subject of conversation. She became edgier, more furtive when I a stranger who had overheard this question interrupted her to ask “What did you do? “
Her eyes dart about. She scrutinizes me. Am I a friend or foe? Am I with the state?
She ignores my question, slip sliding away in another direction. But I am Agatha Christie now.
“Do you think they’ll ever know” is my body on the floor, inviting an investigation.
I thrust into the conversation, repeating the question. (“I need the facts, just the facts ma’am”) She looks about to see if there are any informants at this garden party.
She is almost inaudible in her reply, “We loved them.”
“We loved them to the best of our ability and I just wish I knew if this made any difference in their lives.”
We loved them! That is the big secret. This woman had been a Para professional at a suburban elementary school. The party was a retirement celebration for a highly regarded music teacher. Most all the guests were educators. This all furtive, almost paranoid teacher has said aloud to a stranger what all good teachers know. The secret ingredient to the curriculum is “love. “
We do not talk about it. There is no public discourse. No benchmarks in the GLECS (grade level educational curriculum standards). No section in the best practice guide. It just floats about like the colonels’ “secret ingredient” for KFC.
Love…so simple, yet so circumspect.
I looked at this woman, her brown eyes afire. “You loved them?”
She a child caught in a deceit gave up the whole story. She and her lead teacher frustrated with their “at risk” students failure to achieve and perform on standardized expectations or even to conform to classroom normative behavior began an experiment. They decide to shower and envelope their students with positive words and energy. They attended proactively to their relationships with these students making time to attend to their inner lives and world. Mirroring only what was best , great in them. (No child left to fail.)
“We loved them and I always wondered if this had any long term effect?” (Those Texas bookmakers cannot package this, test this and resells it back to us.)
She drifts back to her table….wondering if her holy grail of learning is indeed what makes a difference.
The highly esteemed Nobel laureate, Mother Theresa of India was celebrated for her efforts on behalf of the starving children of India. The poverty abysmal. She the boy with his finger in the dyke to hold back the sea. When asked about the futileness of her endeavors to stave off the hungers of these impoverished children. She retorted “Oh it is not my mission to feed them it is my intention to love them”
So it is. The essential ingredient to learning is regard and reverence towards these souls in our charge. Which I believe translates into love.

It is time for the public discourse to acknowledge that these students come to school with an interior self
That the child has a sense of purpose, of self that longs to connect to their own soul and hungers to be “seen and tended to” by those who steward them to adulthood and citizenship.


And given this definition of Love as defined by Dictionary.com: A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

Then is not our work to love them?

Way to go...place to go. We are on it.

Way to go...place to go. We are on it.

http://www.wearenotlosers.com/

Out the Schoolroom Window

Mom was dying. You could feel it the way one feels incense. It was unknowable but so present. It was understood but we never gave it a name. Perhaps as there is a word for death but no word for the in between. She had to live to the dying place. Mom had to traverse that path.
I was a frenzied dog whose work is to protect its master. But really my pack animal instinct had kicked in. The fearful beast intuiting that it would soon be alone .
I was spending nights on mothers fold out couch, to help spell the anxiety that the dark and her emphysemic breathing caused her. Our nights were spent watching Jeopardy and me learning how to make egg custard. Or relearning as I did not make it to mom’s specifications. “Do not let the milk boil it will scald.” (So many unearthed wisdom's go to the grave.)
In the mornings, I rose early to ready for my day at school. My routines were off and my commute longer from my night at mom’s.
As I rose she would be up, her cap of brown curls crowning her face. She would sit at the table with her cup of coffee saying her prayers.
The morning prior to Parent Teacher Conference at my school ( a day treatment for emotionally Impaired students) I had a restless night at her home. I would be working an 11 hour day. As usual she was at her morning ritual and I asked her to send some prayer off my way.
(It was always a comfort to me that when a student had a uniquely horrific event I could call on mom to be a prayer warrior in their behalf)
I arrived at work a bit off sorts, bumpy bed, bumpy night, unprepared for a long and intense day. The paper work all in order for conferences I escorted my students from their morning prep to the classroom. At our special ed facility each day began with a group therapy session. This event sacrosanct in efforts to steward these students through the inferno of their world and behaviors. The students were edgy as they had a half day of school. I sat upright, the queen mother hoping to calm her subjects during the air strikes.
The courtyard out my classroom windows November’s beauty was a balm to my own anxiety. The branches of the sugar maple waved a last golden leaf as if promising to return in the spring. I looked to my student’s eyes to measure whether the agitated flicker had abated, when a bird full force slammed its body into the window.
The students startled. “What’s that?” Their anxiety more provoked by flashbacks. I the queen mother calmly state “oh nothing, just a bird bumping into the windows glare.”
But now I am the quivering child. At that instant I knew the bird was dead and very soon my mom would be as well. The most fearsome thing for all young children is the death of a parent…a world without mom or dad. Terror? There is no word, it supersedes a horror show. As sat there in that class room, perseverating on what I was sure was a dead bird out my window; I was sitting on my hands trying to stifle myself from reacting.
Group ended with a traditional group chant of “I am having a good day” and the students blessedly went off to a special.
I pressed my nose to the window and there in patchy browned grass rested the corpse of a Robin Red Breast.
After dad had died Mary my sister declared, “Dad is a blue jay, whenever we see one its dad connecting to us from the other side”.
Mother then was a robin. She had perfected its warble and enchanted us with it. And she seemed to run her own rescue mission for bruised, battered or denested bids, having once nursed a bird with a broken wing back to health.
The dormant grass enshrouded the bird foreshadowing my mother’s death.
I sleepwalked through conference, dazed as if it was I who had hit the glass. When I had a break in the deluge of families looking for assurance that their special needs child would read and eventually soar… I tuned out the lights and sat in the dark looking at the illumined windows on the other side of the courtyard. I wept for the bird and I wept for the orphan I would soon be. Then I wept a bit for my students whose lives were frequently Dikensonian in their sorrows.
Mom died. Out here window during the in-between nether world of her transition we placed a potted evergreen decked out with twinkling Christmas lights., We sang soft carols of “ sleeping in heavenly peace.”
Her breathing laborious until it was no more. That spring in the little evergreen a mother robin birthed her brood of eight babies (mom had birthed eight little babies) .So my mother was a robin.
Broken birds. Broken boys. Broken hearts. Recently by chance I came upon a coworker at the roadside on my way home from work. She had her young daughters’ in the car. She stood in front of the school trying to decide what to do about a shrieking banshee of bird. It was wailing, hurt. The daughters wide eyed watched their mother. She had recently lost a sister when the car wrapped itself around a tree. She was on crusade against death. There had between much illness in her family and spent her workdays in soul defying efforts with her classroom of five and six year old emotionally impaired students. She, trying like a crusader to bring light to those who loomed yet in the dark.
I watched this mother teacher, her dark tangle of hair billowing about in the breeze giving her an other worldly look. Her features furrowed in concern…
What to do for the bird and what mind movie shall she make for her own children about life and endings of life? Like Francis of Assisi she scooped the trembling creature into her hand. Cupped him calmly and cooed softly to the creature. The bird silenced and settled. They drove off to nurse and care for the bird.
Good endings? There is much dissonance and cacophony. Soon I will leave this school where I taught for 17 years. The courtyard out my classroom window has been my worldview. I have watched the sugar maple grow to new heights. I have seen a families of ducks get born, raised and fly away. I have stared out the window and traveled to that dream place that only lovely visions can take us. The cloud formations seemed to energize me to persevere with the student. I will miss my window to the courtyard and the glimpses of beauty. I miss my mother. I will miss how the walls of this old place seem echo of the children with the broken wings who came about to mend so that they might fly.


With regard to flying…It is significant to me that on those last days at this school my last week of school my friend finds this beat up bird… So as we move to a new chapter the ending of this is contained in our email correspondence, subject: About the Bird

Howdy.
Ok, so the bird survived about 3 hours before she expired in our back yard. There were tears. After all, we had given her a lovely little chicken wire hutch to live in, a Frisbee birdbath, birdseed, eyedroppers of water, etc. We had named her Chickadee, because a few cool chicks decided to rescue her. Hmm... the circle of life and all that. We're burying her and planting something lovely in her name. See you tomorrow.
Sherilee

Dear Sherilee,
My mother saved birds all the time...I could not tell you how she loved me... I got the impression that she did not. Yet she taught me so much about the sanctity of life with one little robin she rescued that I now through my moment of viewing you with the bird know she gave a masters course in love. Collette

And so this window to the courtyard has perhaps been “my prayer alter” where I witnessed the circle of life. And in this witnessing, we are stirred to carry on, to go forth.

June 12,2009

Whose teaching who?

I spent the evening with two students from USC. Think Rose Bowl champs, think Lucas/Spielberg as alumni. Think of the arduous admission criteria these young men had to meet to be accepted into this hollowed hall of higher education. By any measure they are very intelligent if not brilliant.
One will receive masters in technology (and is planning on seeking a PhD); the other is one of the 1 in 100 that manages to get admitted to the prestigious film school.
Each came to be at USC by a different course. One was schooled internationally going to private English schools in India. The other had a pastiche of Catholic and city/suburban public. I think he went to school where he could play the most hockey or play with video.
I had cause to stay in their home for several days. What is common ground when we are separated by decades and the entire generation x. What is there that binds the millennial’s and I?
We end up talking about their experiences at USC. One of the big ten, blazes red and gold. They spoke, both sets of brown eyes animated by a flint of frustration.
I hear a disconnect. They attend to the process. Go to class, fill curricular expectations, jumping through each professors hoop’ An Olympic event knowing they must satisfy some obtuse yet clear criteria to receive their degree.
They attend to their classes and criteria but they are engaged elsewhere, these attentions are just a smoke screen
The paradox is anachronistic. brilliant professor disseminate info but their eye is on their own hoop. Tenure, publishing collegial camaraderie and status haunt the professors. They must adopt this ruse “the roll of professor”
These young students are slick, savy at information, click, click information at their finger tips, wisdom in short supply.
Oh the bells ring hollow in the hallowed halls.

They young are hungry soul sat an all you can eat establishment in a historic setting. They have partaken of the sumptuous courses but feel a craving. They fell under nourished and ill prepared..
But then there are the rocks...oh those rocks that the geology professor had them visit. The earths warmth and the sense of connection from the Saturday excursion has the young student
animated. His eyes get a spark. It is organic and alive, not a goggled images or a Wikipedia blurb or regurgitation of info. It is tangible. This professor has sparked a fire. The rocks themselves seem to speak inviting the young USC learner to his own core.
Once the world was flat. Once Galileo was persecuted. Once the visionary were burned at the stake. We want to stay awake. Connect us