Many people ask me if I love working at UConn more than working as a high school English teacher, and I tell them truthfully that there are things I like a lot better, like a flexible work schedule not determined by a bell system, but that there are things I really miss about teaching high school students. Namely, I miss the students.
At UConn, I am primarily an administrator with a teaching assignment. I only teach one class a semester and then the summer institute courses, so I typically only have about twenty students a semester. I know many of you are thinking that you’d love to only have twenty papers to grade at any given time. And I agree. I would have felt the same way back when I had 87 to 126 students (my smallest and largest loads, respectively, in twelve years in a high school classroom). But I truly missed students—well, perhaps not all of them but most of them.
But now that I am a few years into the position and have become the official advisor to the dual degree students in English and Education, I enjoy seeing a regular crew of students. At this point, I have around forty advisees, mostly future high school English teachers but also Special Education and Elementary Education students. I meet with them all at least once a semester, and many of them more often than that. And I have several students who have taken more than one course with me, not to mention the many interns, tutors, and graduate assistants that I get to work with in various capacities. I find working with all these students to be one of the most rewarding aspects of my job.
One day last week I had my graduate assistant, my intern, and two other students from my class hanging out in the CWP office talking, not to me, but to one another—talking about books, teaching, graduate school, and other related subjects. I was just in my office area answering emails and feeling proud that my office was a place where all these students felt comfortable hanging out and where students from all different areas of the major could get together to talk about the field of English.
A few days later, my intern and I had lunch together and talked about his work, the novel we are currently reading in my class, and his plans for graduate school next year. The following day having lunch by myself, a former student came by very excited. I had written her a letter of recommendation for an internship, and she wanted to thank me and share with me that she would be working for CPTV this spring, and the internship director had loved her writing sample, which she had written for my class.
The following day I met with another former student to talk about graduate school. This young woman had made a tremendous impression upon me in my Advanced Composition class, and I had written her a letter of recommendation for a tutoring position with the University Writing Center, which she got. She later was assigned to work with a graduate student to run the Writing Project-Writing Center collaboration and to organize a fall conference. She also parlayed this position into some grant work with EASTCONN. Now she was hoping for a letter of recommendation for graduate school. I emailed her about a week later to let her know I had a draft if she wanted to come by and let me know which schools she had decided upon.
So, one afternoon earlier this week I was talking with my graduate assistant about her career goals after she completes her MA. We talked about the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates and the Alternate Route to Certification, as well as teaching in the community colleges or as an adjunct. We took a break to go get coffee and bumped into the young woman who was inquiring about a letter for graduate school. Coincidentally, she had been headed to my office, so we all walked back together, and it was nice for the two young women to meet and talk because they have such similar interests.
Then, in my office, I let the young woman read a copy of the draft of the recommendation I had written, which she initially thought wasn’t permissible, but I assured her that it was my prerogative to share the letter with her. While she read, I talked with my graduate assistant about something, and when I turned around to see if the young woman was finished, she had tears in her eyes, and she said, “That’s the nicest letter anybody ever wrote about me.”
These are the things I love about my job. I love being around so many smart, interested, and interesting English majors and future teachers. I love being able to help students. I love to hear of their successes and to play even a small role in their accomplishments. They are always so thankful for the advice or the letters of recommendation, but of course they are the ones who write the papers and do the work that earns them my and everyone else’s good opinions, that earns them positions as interns, tutors, graduate assistants, and, ultimately, teachers. The day the young woman who got the position with CPTV came by, I was actually having a sort of crappy day, and her good news, enthusiasm, and sincere thanks lifted my spirits for the afternoon. I was perhaps as appreciative of her as she was of me that afternoon.
This Thursday morning, Jon Andersen, Monica Giglio, and I are leaving for the NWP Annual Meeting and NCTE Annual Convention in Philadelphia. We’re hoping for a great experience. It usually is. The following week the university is on break for Thanksgiving, so I will be taking a brief hiatus from this column till the first week of December. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and thanks for reading.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Veterans Day and War Literature
As Veterans Day approached, I found myself thinking about the many books we read in my American Literature course that deal with war and its consequences. Though Huck Finn does not deal directly with war, it’s difficult to study the work of Mark Twain and not discuss the Civil War or Twain’s anti-war and anti-imperialist writings. William Faulkner notoriously lied about his World War I service record but later became a goodwill ambassador for the State Department and won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 for A Fable, which chronicles a soldier’s unsuccessful attempt to end fighting in World War I. Hemingway is perhaps the only American author to win the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes as well as a Silver Medal and a Bronze Star. His early works, especially The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, chronicle the horrors of war and its aftermath. Even works like A Streetcar Named Desire or On the Road can be read through the lens of war. Stanley Kowalski, if you remember, served in Italy during World War II. One of my students wrote a paper that analyzed Stanley’s behavior as the result of hypermasculine trauma response, a transference of aggressive behavior that is necessary in combat to domestic situations that don’t require force. Jack Kerouac, himself a veteran of sorts, makes On the Road a post-war work when he writes toward the end of the novel that as the indigenous Mexican Indians come to the side of the Pan-American highway to “hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, … they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.”
My maternal grandfather served in the Navy between the world wars, my father’s oldest brother Bobby served in Korea, and my father and his second oldest brother Gordy both served in Vietnam. When I was a boy, I was so in awe of the fact that my father had served in a war that I made him breakfast in bed every year, not on Fathers Day, but on Veterans Day. But for me this time of year is fraught with emotions. The seventh anniversary of Bobby’s death was the other day. He would have been 74. On December 26, my uncle Gordy would be 69, but he died a year and a half ago. And on December 18, it will be four years since I last saw my father. Bobby, Gordy, and my father were three of ten children, they were the only ones who served in wars, and they all suffered from alcoholism. War did not cause their alcoholism, my father’s disappearance, or the premature deaths of my uncles, but when I read about the prevalence among our veterans of alcoholism, domestic violence, and PTSD, I can’t help but see a correlation.
So, on Veterans Day, I find myself mourning the loss of my uncles and the virtual loss of my father. And I find myself frustrated with what I fear is happening to Veterans Day. Maybe this began in 1954 when the day was changed from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, from a focus on the day war ended to a more generalized focus on service. But it seems to me that the day has become less sacred. Just as Christmas has become about making enough retail sales to end the year in the black, and Labor Day is about back to school sales, and Presidents Day is all about car sales to get rid of all that back stock dealers will otherwise have to pay taxes on, Veterans Day has become a commercial celebration. A quick Google search of “veterans day sales 2009” produces 18,000,000 hits, the first of which is for a site called CouponConnector.com/veterans-day. Certainly veterans and their families aren’t at fault for this state of affairs, and it would be easy just to blame businesses and marketers, but the military shares blame in this, too. In an era when military policies prohibit journalists from distributing photos of combat, death, or even coffins, military recruiters flood television and magazines with ads that portray war as a video game or an extreme sport. All I can think when I see these ads is that my father and his brothers did not have fun in war, and they didn’t serve so we could all have a day off to go shopping.
In Book XI of The Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and praises him as a great warrior, “strongest of all” and almost immortal in life. To this Achilles responds that he would rather be a slave on earth than king of all the dead. In Book II of The Iliad, the Greeks soldiers are struggling, so Agamemnon attempts reverse psychology on the men, telling them it is time to go home. He expects them to say no and rally themselves for the fight. Instead, the men rush for the ships, and the chiefs have to beat them back. But then Thersites, the only foot soldier named in The Iliad, steps forward and condemns Agamemnon, Achilles, and the other chiefs for hording the spoils of war while leading the sons of their homeland to the slaughter. In response, Odysseus beats him down.
This scene always reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s letters to his mother. In letter 480, from January 1917, Owen describes trench warfare in graphic detail. As one of my former professors once said, Owen’s letters show how a generation of British boys raised on romanticized notions of war gleaned from The Iliad and other works believed as they sailed for Europe that they were to be the next Agamemnon or Achilles. The realities of war disabused them of such ideas, and soon they knew that they were Thersites.
My maternal grandfather served in the Navy between the world wars, my father’s oldest brother Bobby served in Korea, and my father and his second oldest brother Gordy both served in Vietnam. When I was a boy, I was so in awe of the fact that my father had served in a war that I made him breakfast in bed every year, not on Fathers Day, but on Veterans Day. But for me this time of year is fraught with emotions. The seventh anniversary of Bobby’s death was the other day. He would have been 74. On December 26, my uncle Gordy would be 69, but he died a year and a half ago. And on December 18, it will be four years since I last saw my father. Bobby, Gordy, and my father were three of ten children, they were the only ones who served in wars, and they all suffered from alcoholism. War did not cause their alcoholism, my father’s disappearance, or the premature deaths of my uncles, but when I read about the prevalence among our veterans of alcoholism, domestic violence, and PTSD, I can’t help but see a correlation.
So, on Veterans Day, I find myself mourning the loss of my uncles and the virtual loss of my father. And I find myself frustrated with what I fear is happening to Veterans Day. Maybe this began in 1954 when the day was changed from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, from a focus on the day war ended to a more generalized focus on service. But it seems to me that the day has become less sacred. Just as Christmas has become about making enough retail sales to end the year in the black, and Labor Day is about back to school sales, and Presidents Day is all about car sales to get rid of all that back stock dealers will otherwise have to pay taxes on, Veterans Day has become a commercial celebration. A quick Google search of “veterans day sales 2009” produces 18,000,000 hits, the first of which is for a site called CouponConnector.com/veterans-day. Certainly veterans and their families aren’t at fault for this state of affairs, and it would be easy just to blame businesses and marketers, but the military shares blame in this, too. In an era when military policies prohibit journalists from distributing photos of combat, death, or even coffins, military recruiters flood television and magazines with ads that portray war as a video game or an extreme sport. All I can think when I see these ads is that my father and his brothers did not have fun in war, and they didn’t serve so we could all have a day off to go shopping.
In Book XI of The Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and praises him as a great warrior, “strongest of all” and almost immortal in life. To this Achilles responds that he would rather be a slave on earth than king of all the dead. In Book II of The Iliad, the Greeks soldiers are struggling, so Agamemnon attempts reverse psychology on the men, telling them it is time to go home. He expects them to say no and rally themselves for the fight. Instead, the men rush for the ships, and the chiefs have to beat them back. But then Thersites, the only foot soldier named in The Iliad, steps forward and condemns Agamemnon, Achilles, and the other chiefs for hording the spoils of war while leading the sons of their homeland to the slaughter. In response, Odysseus beats him down.
This scene always reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s letters to his mother. In letter 480, from January 1917, Owen describes trench warfare in graphic detail. As one of my former professors once said, Owen’s letters show how a generation of British boys raised on romanticized notions of war gleaned from The Iliad and other works believed as they sailed for Europe that they were to be the next Agamemnon or Achilles. The realities of war disabused them of such ideas, and soon they knew that they were Thersites.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
A Wonderfully Unproductive Day
On Halloween we had friends come over for dinner before trick-or-treating. Kim and Tom have three little girls around the same age as our kids. We had a nice night that ended with the five kids sitting on the floor of our living room in their disarrayed costumes, eating their candy, and watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I should point out that my six-year-old son shares with his mother a certain Scandinavian, existentialist perspective on life. They like rainy days and Mumintroll books; they loved the new Where the Wild Things Are movie with all its emphasis on the search for a shield to keep away life’s sadness and loneliness. So, as you can imagine, Cormac loves Charlie Brown and feels sincere heartache over every slight that Charlie Brown endures. Cormac also has a strong sense of justice, and expresses strong opinions about what to do to mean people, such as tie them up or lock them in a closet. Watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Cormac continuously expressed his anger at the mistreatment Charlie Brown receives, and at one point said, “Why is everyone so mean to Charlie Brown? Do you know what I would do if I were Charlie Brown? I’d take all those rocks everyone kept giving me and I’d hit people on the head with them when they were mean to me.” All the adults looked at one another, and then my wife said, “You know, for thirty-nine years I have been watching this film, and it has never occurred to me that Charlie Brown is armed with an arsenal of weapons provided by the very people who persecute him. That’s quite an insight, Cormac.”
Today I had an odd day of poorly timed appointments. I had a late morning doctor’s appointment in Norwich, a make-up following a cancelation on a day my daughter stayed home sick. Then I had to be in Hartford in the middle of the afternoon. I kept finding myself with odd chunks of time between things, spaces of twenty or thirty minutes, too little time to be productive and get anything done, but too much time to fritter away. It was also one of those cool, grey November days that Cormac and my wife love, and I found myself indulging in some of their Nordic pensiveness.
After I got back from the doctor’s office, I had some lunch and threw on some more professional attire for my afternoon meeting, but as I got ready to get into my car I realized that I was leaving way too early. My first instinct was to hurry inside and try to work on something, but instead I walked across my backyard to the stone wall that separates our yard from a large meadow owned by my neighbor. In her field is the remnant of an orchard, a handful of apple trees and one or two peach trees. No one has tended them in years, but they still bear small fruit that’s good for pies or apple sauce. Most of the trees had lost their leaves and stood like solitary sentinels against a wall of larger, darker trees beyond. But one small apple tree still retained its leaves. They were mostly deep red, then orange, then yellow, and still some green at the bottom nearest me, and against the grey-brown distant woods and the yellow grass, the colors of this one tree struck me as beautiful. I sat down on one of the large rocks along the wall and just watched the tree. Autumn birds flitted and sang everywhere as they gathered seeds and chased one another across the steely sky. I sat there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes at most, and just let my thoughts drift rather than obsess about the work to be done today and tomorrow and next week.
At the top of the hour I returned to my car and left for Hartford. The traffic was light, and I arrived there early, with some twenty minutes before my scheduled meeting. So I walked away from the building and out of the parking lot. I walked along Farmington Avenue and admired the architectural detail of the old buildings still standing, and tried to imagine what the neighborhood looked like when it was still residential and the Park River still flowed above ground through the West End. I wandered into a neighborhood I have driven by a thousand times and that I lived near for close to a year right after I moved back to Connecticut from California upon completing graduate school. And I noticed that many of the buildings were marked with National Register of Historic Places faceplates, though I have no idea why these buildings have such significance.
As I spent such a significant amount of my day being wonderfully unproductive, I found myself thinking about the meeting I was at last week for the new Humanities school that will be in Bulkeley High, and how I had written on my draft of the mission statement something to the effect that the Humanities teach us how to be human. But in fact for all my time immersed in language and literature, I get so caught up in all the administrative tasks of my job that I find or make little (or at least insufficient) time for such meaningfulness—like contemplating a beautiful tree, listening to birds singing, or admiring the architectural beauty of an historic neighborhood.
After I was done with my meeting, rather than rush back to my office, I took myself for a cup of coffee at Tisane, up near Prospect Street, and to my pleasant surprise bumped into a friend and colleague who had been at a poetry reading at Saint Joseph College. I was glad to have a reason to sit and talk over coffee rather than just rush off and gulp it down as I drove. I went and got my daughter after that, a little before my time, and thankful for this odd day.
Today I had an odd day of poorly timed appointments. I had a late morning doctor’s appointment in Norwich, a make-up following a cancelation on a day my daughter stayed home sick. Then I had to be in Hartford in the middle of the afternoon. I kept finding myself with odd chunks of time between things, spaces of twenty or thirty minutes, too little time to be productive and get anything done, but too much time to fritter away. It was also one of those cool, grey November days that Cormac and my wife love, and I found myself indulging in some of their Nordic pensiveness.
After I got back from the doctor’s office, I had some lunch and threw on some more professional attire for my afternoon meeting, but as I got ready to get into my car I realized that I was leaving way too early. My first instinct was to hurry inside and try to work on something, but instead I walked across my backyard to the stone wall that separates our yard from a large meadow owned by my neighbor. In her field is the remnant of an orchard, a handful of apple trees and one or two peach trees. No one has tended them in years, but they still bear small fruit that’s good for pies or apple sauce. Most of the trees had lost their leaves and stood like solitary sentinels against a wall of larger, darker trees beyond. But one small apple tree still retained its leaves. They were mostly deep red, then orange, then yellow, and still some green at the bottom nearest me, and against the grey-brown distant woods and the yellow grass, the colors of this one tree struck me as beautiful. I sat down on one of the large rocks along the wall and just watched the tree. Autumn birds flitted and sang everywhere as they gathered seeds and chased one another across the steely sky. I sat there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes at most, and just let my thoughts drift rather than obsess about the work to be done today and tomorrow and next week.
At the top of the hour I returned to my car and left for Hartford. The traffic was light, and I arrived there early, with some twenty minutes before my scheduled meeting. So I walked away from the building and out of the parking lot. I walked along Farmington Avenue and admired the architectural detail of the old buildings still standing, and tried to imagine what the neighborhood looked like when it was still residential and the Park River still flowed above ground through the West End. I wandered into a neighborhood I have driven by a thousand times and that I lived near for close to a year right after I moved back to Connecticut from California upon completing graduate school. And I noticed that many of the buildings were marked with National Register of Historic Places faceplates, though I have no idea why these buildings have such significance.
As I spent such a significant amount of my day being wonderfully unproductive, I found myself thinking about the meeting I was at last week for the new Humanities school that will be in Bulkeley High, and how I had written on my draft of the mission statement something to the effect that the Humanities teach us how to be human. But in fact for all my time immersed in language and literature, I get so caught up in all the administrative tasks of my job that I find or make little (or at least insufficient) time for such meaningfulness—like contemplating a beautiful tree, listening to birds singing, or admiring the architectural beauty of an historic neighborhood.
After I was done with my meeting, rather than rush back to my office, I took myself for a cup of coffee at Tisane, up near Prospect Street, and to my pleasant surprise bumped into a friend and colleague who had been at a poetry reading at Saint Joseph College. I was glad to have a reason to sit and talk over coffee rather than just rush off and gulp it down as I drove. I went and got my daughter after that, a little before my time, and thankful for this odd day.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Those Who Can Do More, Teach
When I was in graduate school at Humboldt State University, I used to read a comic strip in the San Francisco Examiner called Luann. It takes place in a junior/senior high school, and one recurring storyline in the strip involves funny banter that takes place in the faculty room. In one strip, a bespectacled male history teacher named Mr. Fogarty is talking with a guidance counselor named Miss Phelps, and he says, “I wish I could quit teaching and go write a novel.” Miss Phelps replies, “Ah, yes, the ‘frustrated teacher syndrome.’ The art teacher wants to be a great painter, the science teacher wants to do research ….” Mr. Fogarty interrupts Miss Phelps and says, “What’s Mrs. Thorpe want to do?” Miss Phelps replies, “Thorpe? What’s she teach?” Mr. Fogarty responds, “Sex Education.”
In the Prologue to Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s third memoir, McCourt writes, “In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. My first book, Angela’s Ashes, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second, ‘Tis, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it was a wonder I could lift a pen at all. New friends of mine (recently acquired because of my ascension to the best-seller lists) had published books in their twenties. Striplings.
So, what took you so long?
I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools. … When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.”
Both the comic strip and Frank McCourt’s prologue address the aphorism we’re all familiar with: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. (Sometimes this is followed by, Those who can’t teach, administrate. I say this with all due respect for administrators—now that I am one). And certainly, while I am disinclined to give much credence to such a cliché, there is much truth to the old saying, though Frank McCourt’s observations put it into a more appropriate context. It’s not that teachers can’t, so much as that they can’t find the time or the energy. After all, we were good students once, who not only loved to read but also loved to write, and had at least some skill at the task. That interest and those skills didn’t just evaporate the day we first sat on the other side of the desk. What happened is that we began taking home 100 essays every few weeks and killing ourselves trying to get them read and graded with at least a modicum of helpful narrative response.
However, with all due respect to the recently deceased Frank McCourt, there are, in fact, many teachers who completely dispel this myth of the teacher who can’t, as well as who dispel the notion of the teacher who can’t find the time. There are those among us who toil with the hundreds of papers, who go home at night exhausted only to put in a couple more hours of grading, who go home weekends laden with bags of papers, projects, and quizzes to assess, who assign research papers to be due the Friday before a vacation so that we can spend our vacation grading, and yet who nonetheless still find the time for writing and scholarship.
This Thursday evening at UConn is the Aetna Awards Night, when we will be honoring writers who won contests sponsored and funded by the Aetna Chair of Writing. These include graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students taking UConn English, but it also includes Writing Project teachers who have completed this year’s Summer Institute and who have won awards for their poetry and prose. This year, the CWP Teacher-Consultant Writing Contest had over eighty submissions from almost thirty different teachers from all grade levels, kindergarten through college. We are publishing twenty-seven different pieces from twenty-three different teachers. Three are elementary school teachers, two are middle school teachers, fourteen are high school teachers, one is a graduate student at UConn, two are community college professors, and one is an adjunct professor. Five are former or current Teachers of the Year in their schools or districts. Three have published books of poetry. One has published a work of nonfiction. Five are currently writing novels. One received the PEN Discovery Award for Young Adult Literature in 2007. One had her fiction published in Best New American Voices 2006. One is a published playwright and poet. One is a Freedom Writer. One is a freelance journalist. One has published a half dozen scholarly articles within the last five years. And one received both a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in the last five years.
Looking over this impressive cast of teachers, I am made to think of a coffee mug given to me when I got my first job teaching high school English. It said, Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can Do More, Teach. That mug was lost years ago, but I’m thinking I should go online to see if I can order some to give out to my CWP colleagues. I’m gonna need a bunch.
* * *
I just began reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my son, our fourth Roald Dahl book. He loves it, as did I. I bumped into my friend Jon the other day, and he and I were trying to recall when we first read that book. For me, it was during the Blizzard of 1978, which occurred in early February. I would be nine that April. We lost power, and I spent two days reading the book by candlelight in my parents’ living room. A nice memory to have.
In the Prologue to Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s third memoir, McCourt writes, “In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. My first book, Angela’s Ashes, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second, ‘Tis, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it was a wonder I could lift a pen at all. New friends of mine (recently acquired because of my ascension to the best-seller lists) had published books in their twenties. Striplings.
So, what took you so long?
I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools. … When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.”
Both the comic strip and Frank McCourt’s prologue address the aphorism we’re all familiar with: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. (Sometimes this is followed by, Those who can’t teach, administrate. I say this with all due respect for administrators—now that I am one). And certainly, while I am disinclined to give much credence to such a cliché, there is much truth to the old saying, though Frank McCourt’s observations put it into a more appropriate context. It’s not that teachers can’t, so much as that they can’t find the time or the energy. After all, we were good students once, who not only loved to read but also loved to write, and had at least some skill at the task. That interest and those skills didn’t just evaporate the day we first sat on the other side of the desk. What happened is that we began taking home 100 essays every few weeks and killing ourselves trying to get them read and graded with at least a modicum of helpful narrative response.
However, with all due respect to the recently deceased Frank McCourt, there are, in fact, many teachers who completely dispel this myth of the teacher who can’t, as well as who dispel the notion of the teacher who can’t find the time. There are those among us who toil with the hundreds of papers, who go home at night exhausted only to put in a couple more hours of grading, who go home weekends laden with bags of papers, projects, and quizzes to assess, who assign research papers to be due the Friday before a vacation so that we can spend our vacation grading, and yet who nonetheless still find the time for writing and scholarship.
This Thursday evening at UConn is the Aetna Awards Night, when we will be honoring writers who won contests sponsored and funded by the Aetna Chair of Writing. These include graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students taking UConn English, but it also includes Writing Project teachers who have completed this year’s Summer Institute and who have won awards for their poetry and prose. This year, the CWP Teacher-Consultant Writing Contest had over eighty submissions from almost thirty different teachers from all grade levels, kindergarten through college. We are publishing twenty-seven different pieces from twenty-three different teachers. Three are elementary school teachers, two are middle school teachers, fourteen are high school teachers, one is a graduate student at UConn, two are community college professors, and one is an adjunct professor. Five are former or current Teachers of the Year in their schools or districts. Three have published books of poetry. One has published a work of nonfiction. Five are currently writing novels. One received the PEN Discovery Award for Young Adult Literature in 2007. One had her fiction published in Best New American Voices 2006. One is a published playwright and poet. One is a Freedom Writer. One is a freelance journalist. One has published a half dozen scholarly articles within the last five years. And one received both a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in the last five years.
Looking over this impressive cast of teachers, I am made to think of a coffee mug given to me when I got my first job teaching high school English. It said, Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can Do More, Teach. That mug was lost years ago, but I’m thinking I should go online to see if I can order some to give out to my CWP colleagues. I’m gonna need a bunch.
* * *
I just began reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my son, our fourth Roald Dahl book. He loves it, as did I. I bumped into my friend Jon the other day, and he and I were trying to recall when we first read that book. For me, it was during the Blizzard of 1978, which occurred in early February. I would be nine that April. We lost power, and I spent two days reading the book by candlelight in my parents’ living room. A nice memory to have.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
"I teach students how to be human!"
We had a department meeting today, and one of the topics of discussion was the new rules put in place regarding travel. The details of these new rules aren’t important, but in discussing them our conversation touched upon how much more corporate the university has become. I suppose this is true everywhere. There’s so much paperwork to complete on every discrete aspect of our profession that we run the risk of losing sight of our obligations to teach students and produce research, scholarship, and art. Or maybe we keep those obligations in sight but we find our ability to meet them compromised by layers of bureaucracy and oversight.
The evening before, I was at Bulkeley High School. I have been invited to be a Higher Education Partner on the Partnerships and Co-curricular Programming Subcommittee for the new Hartford Humanities Studies School (this is not the exact name, as they have not yet officially named the school), part of the reorganization process for Hartford Public Schools. Sounds boring at face value, but I found our discussion really interesting. The idea is to have a school with a focus on the Humanities, with courses on Art and Culture, Foreign Language, History and Social Studies, and Literature and Language Arts. These categories follow those established by EDSITEment, which is an online resource for teachers, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The other committee members and I have the privilege of helping to name the school and shape the mission statement, including goals and objectives, and thus to influence curriculum design. I’m pretty excited about the venture and glad to have the opportunity to work with so many other professors, teachers from the school, community members, student representatives, people from the Urban League, and folks from private foundations like the Mark Twain House and Museum, the Hill-Stead Museum, and the Connecticut Historical Society.
I did find, however, that as we worked on the mission statement, some people began to focus on things like student discipline, which consumed a fair amount of discussion. Now I know student discipline is important, and if we were to frame it in terms of citizenship it might find a place in the document, but on the whole I found myself thinking that discipline and several other worthwhile subjects were just getting too far afield. Suddenly our discussion had less to do with a humanities education as it did with broader issues of running a school. Suddenly we found ourselves talking about bureaucratic procedures and ways to police the students. A few of us had to politely redirect the conversation onto the subject of what we wanted the students to study and learn in a humanities institute that would differ from a traditional high school or from one of the other new Academies. (At the high school level alone there are academies dedicated to Teacher Preparation, Culinary Arts, Insurance and Finance, Engineering and Green Technology, Law and Government, Nursing, Journalism and Media). And I thought to myself, how easily we all fall into this trap. It’s not that discipline policies are unimportant, but when we focus on those or make other bureaucratic issues our primary focus, we lose sight of larger issues.
I may have written about this before because I like the story so much, but I had a funny experience with a colleague from my department a couple years ago when we were invited to a luncheon hosted by two graduate students from the School of Education. The students were conducting some sort of study in which they were trying to gather data on higher education perceptions of secondary education. Basically, they wanted to know what we thought students lacked when they arrived at UConn so the School of Education would be better able to prepare its students to prepare their eventual high school students for college. Once again, a perfectly worthwhile aim, but the discussion began to focus more on assessment, standards, goals and objectives and the like, and less on the students and the content of their classes. Coincidentally, the other English faculty member at this luncheon is the only other professor besides me in our department of 68 (yes, 68, and that doesn’t include adjuncts or grad students) with significant secondary teaching experience. I think that’s relevant here. Anyway, I could see him getting increasingly frustrated by the direction of the discussion, and finally he could take it no more. He blurted out, “None of this is relevant! I teach English. English is a humanities field, and they call it the humanities for a reason. I teach students how to be human!”
So that was more or less what I wrote on my first line of my draft of a mission statement for this new school: “The mission of the humanities studies school is to teach students how to be human.” I liked that. I doubt if it will make it into the final draft, however. It’s too idealistic, or more likely it is too difficult to measure a student’s humanity with any sort of standardized assessment. Oh well.
Some of you may wonder why I did not write this week about the murder that took place on campus this past Saturday. I certainly thought about doing so. I mean, how can you ignore something like that? But I really didn’t know what to say about something so tragic. The following day I walked right by the site with my six-year-old son after seeing Harold and the Purple Crayon at Jorgensen, on our way to the Co-op to buy a book with a gift card from his birthday. Then I thought of something E. B. White once said when he was criticized during World War II for not writing often enough about the war. I am paraphrasing from memory here, but White said something to the effect of, “I write about life as it should be so that when war ends people will remember how life is supposed to be lived.”
The evening before, I was at Bulkeley High School. I have been invited to be a Higher Education Partner on the Partnerships and Co-curricular Programming Subcommittee for the new Hartford Humanities Studies School (this is not the exact name, as they have not yet officially named the school), part of the reorganization process for Hartford Public Schools. Sounds boring at face value, but I found our discussion really interesting. The idea is to have a school with a focus on the Humanities, with courses on Art and Culture, Foreign Language, History and Social Studies, and Literature and Language Arts. These categories follow those established by EDSITEment, which is an online resource for teachers, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The other committee members and I have the privilege of helping to name the school and shape the mission statement, including goals and objectives, and thus to influence curriculum design. I’m pretty excited about the venture and glad to have the opportunity to work with so many other professors, teachers from the school, community members, student representatives, people from the Urban League, and folks from private foundations like the Mark Twain House and Museum, the Hill-Stead Museum, and the Connecticut Historical Society.
I did find, however, that as we worked on the mission statement, some people began to focus on things like student discipline, which consumed a fair amount of discussion. Now I know student discipline is important, and if we were to frame it in terms of citizenship it might find a place in the document, but on the whole I found myself thinking that discipline and several other worthwhile subjects were just getting too far afield. Suddenly our discussion had less to do with a humanities education as it did with broader issues of running a school. Suddenly we found ourselves talking about bureaucratic procedures and ways to police the students. A few of us had to politely redirect the conversation onto the subject of what we wanted the students to study and learn in a humanities institute that would differ from a traditional high school or from one of the other new Academies. (At the high school level alone there are academies dedicated to Teacher Preparation, Culinary Arts, Insurance and Finance, Engineering and Green Technology, Law and Government, Nursing, Journalism and Media). And I thought to myself, how easily we all fall into this trap. It’s not that discipline policies are unimportant, but when we focus on those or make other bureaucratic issues our primary focus, we lose sight of larger issues.
I may have written about this before because I like the story so much, but I had a funny experience with a colleague from my department a couple years ago when we were invited to a luncheon hosted by two graduate students from the School of Education. The students were conducting some sort of study in which they were trying to gather data on higher education perceptions of secondary education. Basically, they wanted to know what we thought students lacked when they arrived at UConn so the School of Education would be better able to prepare its students to prepare their eventual high school students for college. Once again, a perfectly worthwhile aim, but the discussion began to focus more on assessment, standards, goals and objectives and the like, and less on the students and the content of their classes. Coincidentally, the other English faculty member at this luncheon is the only other professor besides me in our department of 68 (yes, 68, and that doesn’t include adjuncts or grad students) with significant secondary teaching experience. I think that’s relevant here. Anyway, I could see him getting increasingly frustrated by the direction of the discussion, and finally he could take it no more. He blurted out, “None of this is relevant! I teach English. English is a humanities field, and they call it the humanities for a reason. I teach students how to be human!”
So that was more or less what I wrote on my first line of my draft of a mission statement for this new school: “The mission of the humanities studies school is to teach students how to be human.” I liked that. I doubt if it will make it into the final draft, however. It’s too idealistic, or more likely it is too difficult to measure a student’s humanity with any sort of standardized assessment. Oh well.
Some of you may wonder why I did not write this week about the murder that took place on campus this past Saturday. I certainly thought about doing so. I mean, how can you ignore something like that? But I really didn’t know what to say about something so tragic. The following day I walked right by the site with my six-year-old son after seeing Harold and the Purple Crayon at Jorgensen, on our way to the Co-op to buy a book with a gift card from his birthday. Then I thought of something E. B. White once said when he was criticized during World War II for not writing often enough about the war. I am paraphrasing from memory here, but White said something to the effect of, “I write about life as it should be so that when war ends people will remember how life is supposed to be lived.”
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Write Your Own Papers; Take Your Own Tests
Last week Ed White came to campus and met with writing faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Ed is semi-retired now but still works as a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. His most well known and critically acclaimed work deals with writing assessment, including Teaching and Assessing Writing: Understanding, Evaluating and Improving Student Performance, Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher's Guide, and Writing Assessment: Politics, Policies, Practices. Teachers from the CWP-Storrs might be most familiar with him from work he has co-edited with Lynn Bloom, including Composition in the 21st Century. Over three days Ed gave a few workshops and was feted one evening at Lynn Bloom’s lovely home, where I had the privilege of talking with him at some length. The following day I was his cross-campus escort, making sure he got to the Center for Undergraduate Education on time. The lunch-time workshop at the CUE building that day was well attended and interesting. There were actually people sitting in the hallway where they could hardly see but could still hear what Ed had to say. The discussion took one of its most interesting turns when Ed told the roomful of Freshman English instructors, Writing Center tutors, and Education graduate students that the best way to assess the value of an assignment was to complete it themselves. “Have you ever tried that?” asked Ed somewhat rhetorically and with a knowing smirk. Everyone looked at one another a little oddly, as if to confirm that they weren’t the only ones in the room who had never done that.
I think many if not most of the writing project folks write with their students, though I still wonder how many of us complete the larger writing assignments we give, like portfolios or term papers. I know I didn’t when I was in the high school classroom. Coincidentally, a few days later (this past Tuesday, to be exact) I was running a professional development workshop at Lyman Memorial High School for its English Department members and a few Special Education teachers who co-teach English classes. Ostensibly we were working on CAPT and how to improve CAPT scores, but more broadly we were looking at the research that had informed the original design proposal for what became the CAPT, and how to allow that research to inform our teaching practices. The original proposal included the short responses to a story that are familiar to all of us, but extended well beyond those four (originally six) written responses to include response groups, revision, teacher conferences, more revision, and ultimately the completion of a portfolio to be assessed. So what I had the teachers do in the latter half of our workshop was complete a full CAPT-style lesson. They read Colette’s “The Other Wife” and responded in writing to the four CAPT questions, but then they met in response groups of four and used Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff’s Ways of Responding guidelines from A Community of Writers to give one another feedback on their responses. After this, each teacher went back to his or her desk and spent a half hour crafting the short responses and peer feedback into a single, coherent essay. At their October 21 department meeting, the teachers are going to look at these and continue the process.
A great deal was learned from treating the written responses as drafts to workshop into a longer essay, but I think just as much was learned from actually taking a CAPT test. I know there were young teachers in the room (including one who had been my student in high school!) who had taken the CAPT themselves as high school sophomores, but none of the veteran teachers had ever taken a CAPT test before, and doing so was enlightening—though not necessarily in the most positive ways.
Many of the teachers discovered that one or more of the questions were difficult to say anything insightful about. Just about everyone took too much time on the first question and left themselves little time to respond to the more sophisticated third and fourth questions. Some found that they just wanted to respond but weren’t sure which question their response conformed to, and so just randomly put it under one or another. Another teacher found he really wanted to jot down ideas and an outline but felt too pressed for time to do so to his satisfaction. Yet another teacher had an interesting experience for all of us to learn from because she based one response on a misreading of a line from the story (does everyone remember the now infamous story about the girl who was undergoing chemo treatments and the hundreds of students around the state who misunderstood what chemo was, thinking it was the dye she had used to turn her hair purple?) but then had a really profound insight into the story in her response to one of the other questions. How should that be scored? I don’t know if anyone walked out of the room that day with any certainty about how to better prepare students for the test, but at the very least everyone had greater empathy and insight to build upon when we meet again in January to continue planning.
On another note, I hope everyone saw the article on Ken Cormier in Tuesday’s Hartford Courant. Most recent CWP folks are certainly familiar with Ken. He’s a writer and a musician who is a PhD candidate in the English Department. He hosts a radio show on WHUS called The Lumberyard and in 2007 made audio recordings of the Summer Institute Fellows, some of which made it into an episode on his program. He’s run writing workshops for teachers at the 2008 Summer Institute, and was our keynote speaker at last year’s Student and Teacher Writing Conference. Anyway, Ken just released a new album, his third, called Nowhere Is Nowhere, and the Courant gave him a good review. Check it out.
I think many if not most of the writing project folks write with their students, though I still wonder how many of us complete the larger writing assignments we give, like portfolios or term papers. I know I didn’t when I was in the high school classroom. Coincidentally, a few days later (this past Tuesday, to be exact) I was running a professional development workshop at Lyman Memorial High School for its English Department members and a few Special Education teachers who co-teach English classes. Ostensibly we were working on CAPT and how to improve CAPT scores, but more broadly we were looking at the research that had informed the original design proposal for what became the CAPT, and how to allow that research to inform our teaching practices. The original proposal included the short responses to a story that are familiar to all of us, but extended well beyond those four (originally six) written responses to include response groups, revision, teacher conferences, more revision, and ultimately the completion of a portfolio to be assessed. So what I had the teachers do in the latter half of our workshop was complete a full CAPT-style lesson. They read Colette’s “The Other Wife” and responded in writing to the four CAPT questions, but then they met in response groups of four and used Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff’s Ways of Responding guidelines from A Community of Writers to give one another feedback on their responses. After this, each teacher went back to his or her desk and spent a half hour crafting the short responses and peer feedback into a single, coherent essay. At their October 21 department meeting, the teachers are going to look at these and continue the process.
A great deal was learned from treating the written responses as drafts to workshop into a longer essay, but I think just as much was learned from actually taking a CAPT test. I know there were young teachers in the room (including one who had been my student in high school!) who had taken the CAPT themselves as high school sophomores, but none of the veteran teachers had ever taken a CAPT test before, and doing so was enlightening—though not necessarily in the most positive ways.
Many of the teachers discovered that one or more of the questions were difficult to say anything insightful about. Just about everyone took too much time on the first question and left themselves little time to respond to the more sophisticated third and fourth questions. Some found that they just wanted to respond but weren’t sure which question their response conformed to, and so just randomly put it under one or another. Another teacher found he really wanted to jot down ideas and an outline but felt too pressed for time to do so to his satisfaction. Yet another teacher had an interesting experience for all of us to learn from because she based one response on a misreading of a line from the story (does everyone remember the now infamous story about the girl who was undergoing chemo treatments and the hundreds of students around the state who misunderstood what chemo was, thinking it was the dye she had used to turn her hair purple?) but then had a really profound insight into the story in her response to one of the other questions. How should that be scored? I don’t know if anyone walked out of the room that day with any certainty about how to better prepare students for the test, but at the very least everyone had greater empathy and insight to build upon when we meet again in January to continue planning.
On another note, I hope everyone saw the article on Ken Cormier in Tuesday’s Hartford Courant. Most recent CWP folks are certainly familiar with Ken. He’s a writer and a musician who is a PhD candidate in the English Department. He hosts a radio show on WHUS called The Lumberyard and in 2007 made audio recordings of the Summer Institute Fellows, some of which made it into an episode on his program. He’s run writing workshops for teachers at the 2008 Summer Institute, and was our keynote speaker at last year’s Student and Teacher Writing Conference. Anyway, Ken just released a new album, his third, called Nowhere Is Nowhere, and the Courant gave him a good review. Check it out.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
How Meritorious Are You?
The other day I was exchanging emails with my friend Jon, who like me was a high school English teacher for more than a decade before making a move to higher education. Both of us have school-age children and spouses in education. We were cynically commenting on President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Duncan’s Race to the Top program, which was announced this past July. According to its website (http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html), Race to the Top “provides competitive grants to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform; implementing ambitious plans in the four education reform areas described in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA); and achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and ensuring that students are prepared for success in college and careers.” Jon made the observation that the phrase “Race to the Top” “conjure[s] images of students scrambling up ladders, stepping on fingers, a few triumphantly cheering from the precarious high perch, others clinging for dear life midway, and many, many more having fallen off completely.” I suggested that we hold a competition for a renaming of the act. My suggestions were Mission Impossible; Operation Assessment Overload; Waiting for Merit; The Few, the Proud, the Adequate Yearly Progress; or Testing: Yes We Can! Jon suggested that I spend too much time thinking about these things, which is probably true.
The problem, of course, isn’t that the federal government is trying to improve public education nor is it the five billion dollars in available grant funds. It’s the strings that the government is attaching to those funds. Yesterday’s Hartford Courant ran an article by Grace Merrit that discusses the State Board of Education’s first meeting to begin grappling with Connecticut’s application for funds from the Race competition. Merrit’s article points out that “To be eligible for [funds], applicants must prove that performance assessments for teachers and school administrators are linked to student and school performance.” This will have to entail the evaluation of teachers, and this will most likely result in some form of merit pay for teachers tied directly to student performance, and we all know that such performance will be measured not by grades but by standardized test scores. The short-hand version is that, for schools to get federal funds, teachers will have to raise CAPT and CMT scores. Or, to paraphrase State Board Vice Chairwoman Janet Finneran, we will have to sell our souls and abandon our teaching philosophies.
I can’t help but think about merit at UConn. I know I have written about this before, and it’s dull to go into detail, but suffice to say that it is one of the most contentious subjects at our department meetings. Professors end up quibbling about whether or not administrative work (like running a writing program!) is equivalent to the publication of scholarship. They quibble over the relative merits of a poem compared to a scholarly essay. There is concern that the process is too subjective. And really, the money is paltry, maybe a few hundred dollars. It’s not that. It’s that people work hard and they get upset when a committee of their peers gives them a modest merit rating. It’s like the tale of the boy who writes an essay on his grandmother and gets a C+. He walks away not so much upset about the grade as he is upset about the fact that you just told him he has a C+ grandmother.
Well, the good news about this (and I am being completely sarcastic here) is that if you teach in the suburbs you’ll dodge the bullet, at least this time around. Your district won’t be getting any of that Race to the Top money the state receives and you won’t have to deal with teacher evaluations, either. The state is targeting twenty urban school districts for these funds (and the necessary teacher assessment component). They are Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester, Bloomfield, New Britain, Bristol, Middletown, Meriden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Danbury, Hamden, Naugatuck, New Haven, New London, Norwalk, Stamford, Waterbury, West Haven, Windham, and the Technical High School System. As I write the names of these towns I picture teachers I know from each district and their various reactions of fear, anger, disbelief, and resignation.
As I was processing my own emotional responses to this, I was thinking about how hard if not impossible it is to devise a fair and accurate assessment system for teachers. And I was thinking about another article I had read in the Courant a couple weeks before, by James Starr and Mayra Esquilin. They were writing about how successful Hartford’s schools have been in the wake of reorganization and reform efforts throughout the district. Starr and Esquilin point out that CMT scores have climbed by 25% since 2007, and graduation rates are up to 42%. (They don’t say it in the article, but graduation rates were below 30% just a few years ago). This is wonderful and encouraging news. But just two days later a letter to the editor ran that lambasted Hartford teachers and administrators for graduating only 42% of their students. Can you imagine the public outcry if those teachers and administrators received merit pay when only 42% of Hartford’s students were graduating? Conversely, can you imagine the discouragement and anger among teachers if after achieving such improvement they received no merit recognition?
It’s simply a Catch-22. And really, as much as we’d all like to be paid better, I suspect it wouldn’t really be about the money for the teachers. Honestly, once those federal funds trickled their way down to the teachers they’d never get much anyway. It’s about being recognized for our hard work. Most of us, I suspect, would be damn happy with a letter from our administration praising our good work, or a prominent article in the Courant or elsewhere reporting positively on our meritorious efforts.
The problem, of course, isn’t that the federal government is trying to improve public education nor is it the five billion dollars in available grant funds. It’s the strings that the government is attaching to those funds. Yesterday’s Hartford Courant ran an article by Grace Merrit that discusses the State Board of Education’s first meeting to begin grappling with Connecticut’s application for funds from the Race competition. Merrit’s article points out that “To be eligible for [funds], applicants must prove that performance assessments for teachers and school administrators are linked to student and school performance.” This will have to entail the evaluation of teachers, and this will most likely result in some form of merit pay for teachers tied directly to student performance, and we all know that such performance will be measured not by grades but by standardized test scores. The short-hand version is that, for schools to get federal funds, teachers will have to raise CAPT and CMT scores. Or, to paraphrase State Board Vice Chairwoman Janet Finneran, we will have to sell our souls and abandon our teaching philosophies.
I can’t help but think about merit at UConn. I know I have written about this before, and it’s dull to go into detail, but suffice to say that it is one of the most contentious subjects at our department meetings. Professors end up quibbling about whether or not administrative work (like running a writing program!) is equivalent to the publication of scholarship. They quibble over the relative merits of a poem compared to a scholarly essay. There is concern that the process is too subjective. And really, the money is paltry, maybe a few hundred dollars. It’s not that. It’s that people work hard and they get upset when a committee of their peers gives them a modest merit rating. It’s like the tale of the boy who writes an essay on his grandmother and gets a C+. He walks away not so much upset about the grade as he is upset about the fact that you just told him he has a C+ grandmother.
Well, the good news about this (and I am being completely sarcastic here) is that if you teach in the suburbs you’ll dodge the bullet, at least this time around. Your district won’t be getting any of that Race to the Top money the state receives and you won’t have to deal with teacher evaluations, either. The state is targeting twenty urban school districts for these funds (and the necessary teacher assessment component). They are Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester, Bloomfield, New Britain, Bristol, Middletown, Meriden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Danbury, Hamden, Naugatuck, New Haven, New London, Norwalk, Stamford, Waterbury, West Haven, Windham, and the Technical High School System. As I write the names of these towns I picture teachers I know from each district and their various reactions of fear, anger, disbelief, and resignation.
As I was processing my own emotional responses to this, I was thinking about how hard if not impossible it is to devise a fair and accurate assessment system for teachers. And I was thinking about another article I had read in the Courant a couple weeks before, by James Starr and Mayra Esquilin. They were writing about how successful Hartford’s schools have been in the wake of reorganization and reform efforts throughout the district. Starr and Esquilin point out that CMT scores have climbed by 25% since 2007, and graduation rates are up to 42%. (They don’t say it in the article, but graduation rates were below 30% just a few years ago). This is wonderful and encouraging news. But just two days later a letter to the editor ran that lambasted Hartford teachers and administrators for graduating only 42% of their students. Can you imagine the public outcry if those teachers and administrators received merit pay when only 42% of Hartford’s students were graduating? Conversely, can you imagine the discouragement and anger among teachers if after achieving such improvement they received no merit recognition?
It’s simply a Catch-22. And really, as much as we’d all like to be paid better, I suspect it wouldn’t really be about the money for the teachers. Honestly, once those federal funds trickled their way down to the teachers they’d never get much anyway. It’s about being recognized for our hard work. Most of us, I suspect, would be damn happy with a letter from our administration praising our good work, or a prominent article in the Courant or elsewhere reporting positively on our meritorious efforts.
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