Hey, blogosphere! How Long's It Been?

You can all stop refreshing your pages incessantly. Yes, the wait is over, and Crawfish, Chalkboards, and Politics is officially returning from its one-month hiatus. It's amazing how quickly this month has passed, and equally amazing that, as I sit down to write this, I feel as if I have nothing to report. So, per usual, I'm just going to start writing and hope that eventually something substantive boils up. Hang on, team. It's going to be a wild ride to the end of this post.

There seem to be two main developments on which you are all probably starving for information. First, you're likely asking yourselves, how did Institute, which spawned so many charming stories of huggable seventh graders and teachable moments, finish up? Next, whatchu doing now, Mr. Glasser---er, Brad?

When we last spoke, I was in the ATL trying to reach these kids with mixed results. You may recall the notable example wherein one of the aforementioned students resisted my attempts to reach her by throwing a chair toward and around my face. This experience with the charming and ladylike Ciarra was, I thought, likely predictive of my next two years. I thought I was going to get better at teaching kids, but I'd really hone my expertise around dodging verbal and physical projectiles. In the waning days of Atlanta's Public Schools' summer school program, the inmates-running-the-asylum phenomenon was increasingly palpable. Students had discovered that we had very little recourse to manage their behavior. By very little, I mean that students would be referred to the main office for an outburst or disruption (or fight or threat), only to be sent back to class with a pocketful of candy and a pat on the back from the creepily and indomitably smiley principal. My faculty advisor, the woman who acted as the certified teacher in the room, began calling parents to tell them that summer school had ended early and that students should not attend the last week. Some parents revolted, saying that they just weren't ready to have their kids home yet. In fact, some of my students reported that they struck a deal with their parents: you don't have to go to school, so you can't stay here. The result was a seemingly out-of-place and ever-growing group of middle schoolers who lingered around our building until their friends got out of school. Why didn't they just go to school, you ask? Yeah. Me, too. But certainly the decision by these 13 year-olds to just, you know, not go to school, contributed to the feeling that they were actually running the show in Atlanta.

Underlying the Tahrir Square-esque sense of mass revolt was a major report issued by Governor Nathan Deal's office on July 5 detailing the widespread Atlanta cheating scandal. 178 teachers were implicated in the scandal, in which principals and administrators were accused of forcing classroom teachers to erase answers, correct students responses, and counsel students towards correct answers. It may have been a while since we all played the standardized test game, but these tactics are pretty widely accepted as against the rules. Illegal, you might say. So, as we packed up our modest classroom, the feeling of "holy crap, I think I just got kicked in the face for five weeks" was very apparent and even more widespread. Not only were students disengaged and very much over the monotony of summer school, but it felt as if the system that governed their lives and educations was being run by the Joker from the bowels of Gotham City's City Hall. (Batman references seem appropriate, since my native Burgh is the newest Gotham City.) Rather than leaving with a sense of renewed energy for our united purpose of education, I finished my time in Atlanta wondering how these poor kids could possibly stand a chance of breaking this oppressive cycle.

And I obviously didn't hide my frustration well: In one particular OMG moment, I calmly told the students in my class that they were really "F*cking up" their chances at a surprise. I was so far from cool-headed at the time, that I didn't even know I had said it until my co-teacher told me later. Note to self: Don't swear at kids. Further note to self: If you're going to swear at kids, choose a word other than the queen mother of all swear words. But seriously, don't swear.

But, as is always the case, glimmers of hope abounded. One student in my class was far behind in reading, and therefore in every other subject. As the last week of summer school began, he called my cell phone.

"Mr. Glasser?" I heard over the chaos of a living room that was far too animated for 10 PM on a Sunday.

"Hey, buddy, everything okay?" I asked, concerned that the chaos might be a situation.

"Well...my mom said there's no school tomorrow. But you said there was school tomorrow. What's going on?" His tone here was almost exasperated, as if to say, "Jeez, I'm trying to learn, here. Work with me, people!"

"There's definitely school tomorrow. Go ahead and show up all this week, and we'll have a great time."

DeAnthony was one of two students to show up that week. To reward his loyalty and dedication, I bought him a couple of books that I thought he would like.

Fast forward three weeks: I received the following text: "Mr. G. why'd you buy me this book about robots. I read the whole thing before I figured out they already made a movie! It has Will Smith"

 To be fair, this kid had no business reading Asimov's I, Robot, since he was reading at a 5th grade level. But he did it, and he called me, and we talked about it. And he got it. I hear from Deanthony basically everyday, and he graces me with nuggets of wisdom, like "Whatchu doing?" or "It's hot in Atlanta" or "I like going to church but I get sleepy." When I don't respond immediately, he casually resends the message until I appropriately prioritize his response.

So one girl threw a chair in my face. But another student read a book this summer. That's some solace.

Loyal readers may recall the student's parent who commented that she liked my hair. I hear from her every now and then also. For better or for worse, she's even more forceful than DeAnthony when I don't respond. #takewhatyoucanget?

The end of Institute in Atlanta was also notable for me since I traveled through, over, or across something like 98 US states in a week. Beginning in Atlanta, I hopped up to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to join the fam and to remember what sub-volcancic temperatures felt like (although the Universe had a nice little laugh as it imposed the hottest week of the year on the Wyoming town just in time for my arrival). Having spent the 4th up north and over yonder, I scampered back to the ATL to put in my last few days. NB: Travelling from Atlanta to Wyoming too quickly might put you in culture shock. You've been warned. See above.

And now, on to more present material:

As quickly as we came to dominate Georgia Tech's campus, we vacated it en masse, leaving early Saturday morning for New Orleans. Saturday and Sunday were spent with my new roommates, who are incidentally awesome, trying to turbo-furnish our quaint new crib. Then, continuing the theme of "WAHHHHH I just got here and now I have so many things to do!" that has characterized the summer for me, I began work on Monday. While I'm sure that the week we spent on professional development did develop me professionally, the barrage of information proved to be both too robust and too unexciting to include here. But I'll give you some highlights.

• The school where I am currently working was the worst K-8 school in New Orleans two years ago, when it was part of New Orleans' Recovery School District.
• The school was taken over by ReNew Charter Management Organization, the organization by whom I am technically employed, at the start of last school year. The organization itself is only in its second year.
• Last year, it began with a state score of 15/200, a bottom of the barrel score it had earned for years. 
• By the end of the year, that score had increased fourfold, to 60/200. Still not good, but, you know, four times better than it had been. 
• At the beginning of the year last year, 15% of Batiste students could read on grade level. By June, 43% could. Our goal this year is to take that up to 75%. Check out this news story.
• Special Education and over-aged students are huge centers of focus, since many local schools skirt their legal obligations to serve these students. 
• The Charter organization cares students primarily, but does a pretty remarkable job demonstrating to its teachers that student success relies heavily on having teachers who have the tools to succeed. So our classrooms are technologied-out, we get support systems that would make my high school teachers break things out of envy, and our administration is a remarkably united front with a cohesive philosophy on our approach to education. 

Take a second to think back to your middle school years. Maybe it was just me, but my years were characterized by hormones, note passing, really explosive (and exciting) hallway fights, so much interpersonal drama, and other uniquely early teenage problems. When the bell rang at the end of a class, students immediately poured out of the classroom wearing a wide range of clothing. We then moved slowly through the halls, making sure we used each of our five free minutes to the best of our ability. 

Now imagine this: There are no bells. Students sit in the SLANT position during class (sitting up, listening, asking and answering questions, nodding their heads, and tracking the speaker). Students wear navy pants, shorts, or skirts with a gray polo that bears the school insignia. We move silently in a single-file line from 90-minute class to 90-minute class in a five-point check formation (feet forward, eyes front, mouths closed, hands at your side, ears open for directions). Students have one ten-minute block to use the restroom with their homeroom class. No student is ever in the hallway unattended. Ever. And a failure to uphold any of these standards results in a paycheck deduction. Obviously, the paycheck is virtual money, not real money, and the amount of the paycheck dictates whether the students are eligible for certain incentives. So, when it comes time for our Friday celebration, students can either attend if they have more than $80 on their checks, or not attend if they have less than $80. All of this is monitored and maintained by an online system that requires each infraction to be scanned alongside each student's individual bar code. Yep. Each student has a barcode. We scan that bar code as well as the bar code that corresponds to their infraction. Major takeways: If a military academy and the Tom Cruise film Minority Report had a baby, it might look a lot like Batiste Cultural Arts Academy. 

As someone who loved the independence of middle school, I had some concerns about the hyper-structured environment we were cultivating at BCAA. But the results are incredible. In the major sea of cluster nonsense that characterized Atlanta, I heard expletives almost exclusively from some students. That's not an exaggeration. Some students legitimately swore with a frequency that would make Ozzie Guillen and Ozzie Osbourne blush. At this school, it took eight days for me to hear a swear word from a student. 

That's not to say that the school doesn't have challenges. We're still serving a population of students who desperately need intervention to get to where they ought to be. We're still serving a population whose lives outside of school are by large volatile at best and dangerous at worst. We're still serving a population that has been turned away too many times to count and failed at every juncture of their education. And we're serving a population who lives in a city that is scarred and recovering from the worst series of events imaginable (Katrina, levees, oil spill to name a few). These are students who are crying out for some structure and routinization in life, in some cases literally doing so. So even when they push back against the structures we've created for them, they eventually internalize them and follow their classmates' example. Oh, also, school goes from July 18th until early June. So we're in it for the longest of  hauls. 

Another really exciting point of this next phase in my teaching career (an expression I still find to be a little cumbersome) is the fact that I am teaching social studies. While I can't say that latitude and longitude are really the reasons I came to love the topic, even the foundational skills we've been working on so far are enough to get me all fired up. 

Some other teacher-y lessons i've picked up along the way:

1. Turns out papering an adding borders to bulletin boards SUCKS. Seriously. Crazy amounts of props to my 3rd grade Mrs. Thompson who used to change those guys every two weeks and Ms. Zinger who took great pride in her bulletin boards. I need to lockdown an artsy significant other just to handle that for me. 
2. Machiavelli, I've got an answer for you: One isn't better than the other. If they fear you, they will learn to love you, too. 
3. Even kids have strong feelings about the Steelers. I've placed several bets with students already about which team, the Saints or the Steelers, will end the season with a better record. Truth be told, I made those bets before the lockout ended. So I'm really counting on a big year from the Black and Gold, or I'm going to need to find some kind of part-time employment. 
4. This teaching stuff is not as easy as teachers make it look. 

Here's to fakin' it till you make it.

Until next time y'all (did I pull that off?)