It is always a challenge to balance the logistics of privacy and honesty, particularly when you are writing about a community of children. There are a few things I can tell you about me and my school.
I am, like most people, a person with a lot of words that could try to capture my identity. Some might raise a few eyebrows. Most would be pretty boring. But for the purpose of this blog, I am a teacher. More specifically, I am a teacher of small children. This year they are in first grade.
I came in to teaching in an around about way. I took a long time to decide that I wanted to “grow up” (perhaps that is why I choose to hang out with first graders.) I played around in the queer/”punk”/DIY communities in the Northwest without really ever becoming a part of them in a serious way. I studied Political Science, and later did a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing. If you have need of a sonnet, I’m your girl. After realizing, rather harshly, that there are not a lot of jobs that interested me available in the field of sonnet writing, I wandered into a KinderCare with a resume and was handed a class of 14 2 year olds.
That single action helped lead me to a career that I genuinely love and am highly critical of. After leaving KinderCare, I traveled through several daycare centers, Head Start Programs, and parent co-ops. I found what I considered the kindest, most child-friendly co-op in Portland and settled there for a time. But I found that I was bored and felt detached from the kind of political and cultural change I had always felt compelled to seek.
So, I googled teaching programs looking for a good scholarship that would help me make the leap to “big kid” school. I was thinking Teach For America, but found this weird little program on the East Coast that would allow me to work full time as a teacher while I got my tuition-free Master’s.
And so it began. I was assigned to a primary class in a neighborhood elementary school. I was told it was a good school and I was lucky to be placed there. Every day. Like a brainwashing tape. I had not been in an elementary school since I was a student in one. I knew a lot of fun songs and games from daycare and just enough child development to understand that I was being forced into choices that were not good for kids and hamstrung by my own lack of knowing what to do. I stayed for five years.
The school I teach in now is a special place. In the blog I refer to it as Wonderful Charter School. (Sometimes it is not-so-Wonderful Charter School, but more about that later.) It is a public charter school that serves a population of mostly African American, mostly poor inner city kids that live within the boundaries of a neighborhood that has been fairly severely drug blighted.
The school itself is very small, with only 12-15 kids per grade level, starting at PK3 and moving up to 8th grade. We use a curriculum philosophy called Expeditionary Learning. It tends to be very hands-on, constructivist, and focused on developing the whole child.
The blog is about me wanting to think and talk about school and kids and pedagogy without driving everyone around me insane. My one-track mind needs more of an outlet than my relationship and my friendships can always provide. I think that the people I love might like to talk about something else once in a while.
It’s also about me wanting to have many interesting conversations about teaching and learning and community and kids. So please comment.
I think there is a time when honesty and privacy actually support each other. Because I teach in a small school and a small educational community, I ask that if you know (or figure out) who I am, please take care not to identify me in any of your comments online. Of course, all names are not really the names of the people involved.
Happy reading.
LINKS I LOVE:
Mimi’s funny teacher blog about elementary school.
High school teacher talks about teaching in the inner city.
Watch this space for more…
