Back to School

With Flo in Malibu

A year ago, I stopped working in schools.

Since then, I have spent a lot of time investigating succulent plants with my daughter, Florence; organizing the chaos of markers, play-dough, construction paper, and colorful glues; planning trips to Minnesota, Malibu, Death Valley; talking to the park moms about juice and Jiu Jitsu camps; talking to the nannies about the lives they have made for their own children, and the lives they left behind.

Last Wednesday, Flo started school, going to the same public charter as her brother. Kindergarten is an incredible boon to the homemaker. On weekdays, I now have about seven hours to myself.

Today, I used them to visit a middle school in South LA.

I had been invited to observe the teachers, and give some feedback to their coaches. That’s what I spent much of my time doing before last year. Folding myself into the little pocket of learning each person makes. Asking students, “What are you working on?” Listening to them read. Watching them attack a problem about ratios. I make little notes in my book, circle the ones that recur to me.

I joined a 7th grade reading class. They were reading The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, a lovely, lyrical book about a girl, Esperanza, growing up in Chicago. (Incidentally, this was the first book I taught to my first class of students in the Bronx, in 2003; how I wish I could go back and try it again, now that I know what I’m doing).

Her story is told in short vignettes. When I visited, the class was reading one of the most difficult ones, a description of a garden that had become overgrown, sprouting not just thistles and Hollyhocks, but junked cars. I saw that the teacher had printed out color images of the plants mentioned; it helped me as well as the students.

There were no dead lulls in the class; we moved between a short vocabulary lesson, to individual, silent reading, to a discussion of those weeds and plants, to partner reading and an introduction to theme. How wonderful to be in the learning space created by such a teacher, someone who is serious and prepared, knows what they want students to understand, doesn’t pollute the space with “um,” or sarcasm, unhelpful digressions.

Amid this good activity, I noticed a student in the back of the room waving to me. He was standing, the only one doing so, and wore a red knit hat on his head, turned inside-out, even though it was, at the start of September, the hottest time of year in Los Angeles.

I walked back to him, stepping as quietly as possible.

“What is it?” I whispered to the boy.

“That was on your shoulder,” he whispered back, and pointed to the ground. I looked down and saw a tiny green worm.

“Oh my goodness, thank you,” I said. “Gross!” The boy nodded, went back to reading with his partner.

I participated a few minutes longer, and then left without speaking to the teacher; I knew she wouldn’t want to be interrupted.

Driving home up Arlington Avenue, I passed a derelict house. Among the weeds in the yard, a dull, dirty cream, and parked on such a steep incline that it seemed to lie on its side: the unmistakeable body of a stretch limousine.

Now Flo has her unknowable day, and I have mine.

News

Will students really get off cellphones? California’s Phone-Free Schools Act, explained

Getting cell phones out of school may be the last truly bi-partisan initiative we have in education. It has been remarkable to watch the consensus build. Having taught in schools that adopted such a policy, I am for it. The best method, in my opinion, is the same one used for controversial stand-up comedy: you keep your phone, but it goes in a special bag that locks until it’s time to leave.

I saw this at a middle school in South LA. Students would tap their bagged phone against a big metal disc on the wall outside, and the bag would open. Magic.

This kind of policy requires good politicking from principals and superintendents. There are a dozen ways to mess it up. But we all know the power of the phone, whose presence we can probably sense right now, wherever we are. It is too powerful a wand.

2 Students, 2 Teachers Killed in Georgia High School Shooting

I don’t think I have anything novel to contribute to our understanding of these terrible actions. To myself, I say: remember that this is still extremely rare; that access to guns is unlikely to change in the U.S.; that it is probably a mistake to look for meaning in the phenomenon, as it may well be more like a meme, or a virus; and that one action we can take is to address the old, accepted culture of bullying in schools.

The only other thing that puts me at ease is participating, actively, in my children’s school.

LAUSD Struggling with Chronic Absenteeism Years After the Pandemic

Many publications are addressing chronic absenteeism in their back-to-school coverage. This is a technical term; it usually means being absent for 10% or more instructional days. It’s not a new problem, but it really is worse than it was before the pandemic.

There is not one intervention that will fix this; you need a multi-pronged approach. But the coverage of it reminds me of the fall of 2022, when the schools in our district starting battling the problem more directly. I remember noticing that one of our schools was able to reduce the problem to single digits; I set up a Zoom with the principal to ask how they did it.

I remember his answer because it was so boring. He showed me a spreadsheet. On it, daily attendance would appear for every student in the school. He had asked a staff member who was good with excel to make any absent student’s name turn bright red, and for those names to gather on a separate tab. Followed by each name, there were three other red cells that would turn yellow or green. They were for tracking the school’s communication with the parent or student. If I remember correctly, yellow was for if someone called or texted or emailed but didn’t get a response. Green was for if they did. There might have been another color, maybe a milder green, for responses that were noncommittal. All this color-coding was necessary because no single person in the office had time to do all the communicating; it had to be a team effort. The system had to be very simple and clear.

There was a cell for notes, obstacles like housing instability, or the need for transportation, and it was expected that teachers and counselors would follow up on these notes, (there was another color-coded cell to track this). Finally, there was a clear protocol for next steps, escalating to home visits and meetings with school staff (with, you guessed-it, color-coded cells to track whether they were completed).

“Have you told anyone about this system?” I asked him. In the window of my laptop, I saw his shoulders shrug.

“Nobody’s asked me.”

Highly Satisfactory

The best grade you could get in Mrs. Bogie’s Kindergarten class.

Mike Rose reminds me of my grandmother, Rosemary. He was of Italian heritage, like her. Like her, grew up poor, loved language, became a teacher. And like her, I didn’t fully appreciate his contributions until he was gone.

Over the summer, I read what is probably his most well-known book, Lives on the Boundary, published in 1989. It was wonderful to read about a childhood, and the start of an educator’s career, set in Los Angeles. But it was also wonderful to see the mechanics of both teaching and learning depicted so well.

Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance. You didn’t just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk. You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water. Maybe nothing was “intrinsically interesting.” Knowledge gained its meaning, at least initially, through a touch on the shoulder […]” (p. 102).

You don’t see this kind of memoir any more. It’s too literary, too lacking in clear enemies, devoid of any savior. Reading the book, I found his approach to learning, and to life, to be both comforting and intellectually stimulating.

In that regard, too, he reminds me of her.