She's a 10 (Not)

Wise men have said that regret is a wasted emotion, but I do regret not documenting my year in Boston more thoroughly than I did. The year was crazy fodder for something literary—an education memoir or the anonymous journal of an under-rested psychopath responsible for children—but I spent my slivers of spare time drinking Sam Adams seasonal ales (yearly documentation of a different variety) and ensuring clean underwear rather than getting wordy at Cambridge coffee shops. My ambitious goal of daily writing went unachieved, turning barely weekly because I was perma-exhausted from August to August. As such, written records documenting the year are hardly comprehensive: scribbled pages in notebooks that slant downward with sleep and oddly-named documents rife with typos, tucked quietly into the nether regions of my hard drive. That’s all I got.

While I was busy not documenting my life, my writing muscles softening from a suspended membership, my teacher-training program was documenting and analyzing it for me through numbers rather than words. Numbers aren’t supple like words; they don’t give. Historically, I do not deal well with numbers.

I took part in a fellowship in urban education that included an intensive teacher training component that is highly responsible for the way my life looks today; I mean that in the most grateful of terms. The program was residential (MTV considered picking up Real World: Teachers Edition but there wasn’t enough intra-fellow sex on account of lack of energy) and occupied 70 hours of my time, six days a week. The goal of the program is to train unusually effective first-year teachers by distilling the moves of classroom management into a quantitative, objective science that clears up space in the frontal lobe of the teacher brain to actually, well, teach.

We were taught the six moves of classroom management (sit up, hand down, get the hell outta my classroom, etc) and the numerical steps necessary to effectively teach inferences in literature. After passing through a “Gateway” teaching simulation in order to remain in the program, our cohort of wannabe teachers was judged harshly every week on a ten-point scale that encompassed instruction and management in the classroom. There were many, many rubrics. There were numbers and even decimals. It was cold and hard and fact and data. It was all the stuff I hate. All the stuff that clashes garishly with the inner workings of my non-teacher brain.

My emotions ran the gamut. At first, I was above it all—the cynic’s go-to stance on life. A quietly outraged naysayer, going through the moves while shooting back looks dripping with skepticism. How is it possible to grade something as subjective as teaching on a numerical scale? Teaching is about literature and people and engagement, not numbers and data and rankings. True objectivity looked impossible and the philosophies championed by the program clashed with everything I took to be true from West Coast Liberal Arts College (WCLAC). The whole thing required buy-in, and I wasn’t ready to cash in my Americorps salary.

But as the program challenged me on every imaginable level, it also forced me to reconsider snap judgments. There are lots of bad teachers out there who just keep on teaching. Keep on failing kids. Many smart people believe that the key to education reform is training damn good teachers. You can pump anything else you want into a school, but without good teachers, you’re still failing kids even if they have an Olympic-sized swimming pool and personal laptops. In order to train good teachers on any real, replicable scale, there needs to be some element of objective assessment and accountability. This is the assumption under which my program was working, and while it was highly imperfect, the numbers and data needed to be in place to hold us accountable and make us good. I realized this logic holds water and suddenly this English major was pro-number. By August, I had running numerical documentation of my skill as a teacher.

And so I trained, I simulated, I taught, I was observed, I was rated, I got a job at a sweet school in Brooklyn, I left Boston, drove a Uhaul to NYC in the middle of the night, started teaching 7^th grade reading, slept a little and ate some bagels. Checkity-check. The kicker to all this is that throughout our first year teaching, we were surprise-attack observed by Boston ed. reform types, all versed and normed and calibrated in our ten-point scale. They came to our schools and observed all first-year teachers without knowing which ones were alumni of our program. Then, of course, they rated us. If our numbers were higher than the other first-year teachers in our buildings, the program is—in theory—a success. This was a way to assess both the program and the teachers it was churning out.

Sometime during my first week of teaching—probably Monday morning or Monday afternoon—I totally forgot about ratings and numbers. The reality of teaching 70 kids to read goodly was daunting. The day to day had nothing to do with numbers. It was about maintaining sanity, laughing often, avoiding tears (mine and my students’) and teaching something in the interim. Months into the year, things were relatively calm, and I found myself remembering my moves, my rubrics, my numbers—the foundation of it all. As sanity was setting in the observers started coming in. I realized I wanted those numbers, the numerical validation that I was on the right track.

Then months passed and, characteristically, I forgot about the whole thing. Early last week, I got an email with my scores in it. I saw the subject line in my inbox and flinched with uncertainty. I knew I’d been improving all year, but that knowledge was based entirely on anecdotes, feelings and other wishy-washy indicators. As I hovered above my keyboard, it was hard to imagine reverting back to the harsh black and white of numbers. So, finally I took the plunge and there the scores were, staring me back in the face in all their numerical glory. They were fine. Good, even. But mostly I felt disinterested. In the summery, triumphant glory of the end of the year and the knowledge that I will never again be a first-year teacher, I found it hard to care how some random Boston smarty thinks I manage a classroom. While I recognize the importance of scoring, of objectivity and assessment, I also recognize that nothing I’ve done all year can be crammed into a ten-point-scale. So, I’m not sure where that leaves me—on which side of the tracks.

The personal takeway: I’m okay at teaching. I got some work to do, but I’m on the right track. Also, I can roll with digits.

The political takeaway: If we take seriously the notion that good teaching matters, there has to be a scaleable way to train good teachers. Teachers need to be assessed and held accountable, but this must be done with a grain of salt and humanity (and I think the people who ran my program know this). Teachers should be graded and rubrics should be used, but if it ever interferes with the real stuff that makes teaching a great profession, we know we’ve gone too far.