Four NYU grad students came to instruct our faculty in cultural sensitivity in a day long training last week. Fortunately, none of the faculty had much to do since it was the end of the year. Just kidding. But one of the grad students, Tanya Leslie, was excellent, and she was the one I got to work with in our group of 25 teachers, and so it was a good training, if you can believe that.
One of the points Tanya made was that our students at Lincoln fell into a category that was very bad in terms of reaching our kids academically – fully half of our kids are undocumented, most from Mexico. One of the points made was that if a child has a very high level of vulnerabalility (for whatever reason), and yet has a very low level of support, it is a serious problem for everyone and trumps the idea of school as we know it.
We have five AP’s for 2000 kids and a ton of other support, but it is far from enough, and our building is those kids’ biggest support by far, at least for many of them. So when a student population is at such a high level of risk, obviously our teacher population has to be trained in their own expectations of what to ask from the kids in the classroom.
That point made me reflect on our “we don’t know what they are going through” thread here about five weeks ago. I think we all learned from that, to not necessarily lower our expectations of them, but to be sensitive to that fact and not take it personally when they seem less than interested in our work (QTIP) than we would like them to be.
I did make one point during this discussion that raised a few eyebrows and stimulated some discussion about the in-building experience of the teachers at Lincoln. I said that when teachers are under a data microscope that, in our own CO Leap Document, has literally hundreds of checkpoints/behaviors that we are going to be evaluated on officially starting next year, then that makes the teachers very vulnerable with low support, just like the kids we were talking about.
So here were we teachers being trained to understand what the students are experiencing in their actual daily lives at school and to respond accordingly, but we ourselves, also highly vulberable, are not the beneficiaries of similar training for administrators – in fact, far from it – with the result that at any moment one of these untrained administrators (usually backed up by traditional WL department chairs and teachers in our ends of the building) can then put a fork in our careers, all our hard work, all our passion to be good teachers, and they can do that in a few weeks of forming an opinion about us.
Shouldn’t administrators get some sensitivity training as well? A badge can walk into our classrooms at any time, on a really bad day for us, when we are dealing with a Pig Kid and a thousand other crappy things that are impacting the quality of our instruction, plus stuff going on at home, and ding us for not doing something like failing to post our content and learning objectives that day.
There are now many highly data driven, kind of soul-less, administrators – superintendents and principals – who are infiltrating our schools at a very fast rate right now. Many are under 40 years old, with little to no empathy in their professional demeanor, and their fixation with technology makes me honestly wonder if our world really is being attacked by clones, machines in human skin, just like in so many of those sci-fi movies like T-2.
How are we to serve our students properly, to be culturally aware of the deep pressures on their poor minds (brown skin, heavy English accents, beloved family in Mexico) and bodies (hunger – they really are hungry, for real – I see it every day), when we ourselves are in a similar position of vulbnerability ourselves? That was the point I was trying to make with my group in this training.
I receive enough private emails on this topic, by the way, from teachers all over the country, who are in some fairly deep professional shit right now (losing jobs, quitting jobs, generally feeling depressed and vulnerable without any support), that I know that we are into something new in education, something being brought in not just by corporate greed, but also by those metallic souled administrators and superintendents, the new attacking clones.