Today’s New York Times had a front page article on Bloomberg’s education reform policies.

Mostly, it shows that some of his reforms have worked, and other reforms have not. I can’t say I’m surprised. Part of the problem is the assumption that we can know what effects an educational reform has had after one year. I’d argue that you can see bad results quickly, but good results often take a longer time to emerge.

And that’s part of the problem with the politicization of education reform. The political timeline and educational timeline don’t really match up — especially when you are talking about progressive reform. How long did it take Beacon to get to a point where we felt like our graduation portfolio process to where it represented the best of students’ academic experiences at Beacon? We probably got there four or five years into my tenure at Beacon… but how long did it take to force us to totally change it in response to the new Regents? One year.

There’s more to say here… and I’ll continue it tomorrow, but for now, sleep beckons.

Time to do some reflection on what makes Beacon such an amazing place…

Friday night, Beacon had its "I Sing America" poetry festival. It’s something that we’ve been doing for five years now. Sam Laybourne used to teach 11th grade English. Essentially, he said Walt Whitman first sang America, and then Sherman Alexie – 100 years later – answered him, and now it was his students’ turn to sing their version of the American vision. So for the past five years, over 100 Beacon juniors have read hundreds of American poets, written thousands of poems, revised them, and then finally performed them in front of several hundred of their peers. The poems range from the brilliant to the less-than-brilliant, but one student summed up the moment when she said, “I’ve never been so proud of my grade as right now.” These kids have proven that they can both learn about Modernism and Post-Modernism, about couplets and rhyme schemes, but most importantly, they have shown us what they can do. And when the kids turn in the analytical papers that go along with the performance and creative writing components of this unit, it will be – if history is any indicator – as strong as anything they’ve written this year.

I was lucky enough to teach the ISA unit for two years before turning it over to Katie Balaschak who has taken over my 11th grade classes. Both years, it was the highlight of my year, as it really was the essence of what I think the spirit of Beacon’s educational philosophy is. We deconstructed dozens of poems, wrote even more and then the unit culminated with a performance that showed off the best of what we had learned. Was it easy? No… and certainly, I am sure that there were kids who performed who couldn’t wait to get off the stage, but also, I know that there were a lot of kids who found their voices on that stage, and I know that there are kids who took that performance with them long after the night was over. I saw it again Friday night in the faces of those poets on stage and in the energy the crowd gave back to them.

So, this is something that we see at Beacon sometimes, and from conversations I’ve had with other teachers, I don’t think it’s an isolated problem.

I call it "Hardest Working Teacher in the Buildin Syndrome," and it’s not a good thing. It’s what happens when teachers — often young teachers — forget that in any good school lots of people work hard. And it’s an easy trap to fall into, one I’ve fallen into myself.

It’s this: It’s never a good thing to think that you are the hardest working person in a school. One, it’s rarely true. Two, even if it is, it’s of questionable use to think of it that way. All good teachers work hard… and a lot of the average ones do too. When Hardest Working Teacher Syndrome hits, that’s when you forget to be polite to people because you are so convinced that you are just too busy. It’s when you stop recognizing the good work that everyone around you is doing, and it’s when kindness goes out the window because, really, who has time for kindness when you are just so busy.

Fortunately, it’s easily curable.
1) Get yourself into a colleague’s classroom. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you have enough time. Even if it’s just fifteen minutes, go remind yourself of the amazing things going on around you.

2) Go home on-time one day. It doesn’t matter how much you have to do. Go home. Go take a walk in a park or see a movie or get coffee with a non-school friend. Remind yourself of the rest of your life.

3) Be collegial. Say hello to your colleagues. Ask them how they are — and listen when they answer. It’s easy to close the door to our classrooms and stew in our own juices, but again, that’s rarely a good thing.

4) Go to an after-school event. See your students and your colleagues doing something they love.

Schools are tough places to work. We can never give enough to all the kids, and it’s easy to develop a martyr complex pretty quickly, but schools are healthy places when we all remember that the vast majority of folks in the building are working hard and pulling toward similar goals.