Assembly

"Are we, as the adults in the building, comfortable with how yesterday's assembly turned out?"

That is the text of an email I wrote to my colleagues after a particularly difficult school-wide assembly the other day. I did not send it. This week we gathered together the student body to view the telecast of a major announcement regarding scholarships. Without going into details, it was likely the biggest announcement they will ever hear in an assembly. Very few of the students heard the announcement. There were many reasons that no one listened. The announcement was a telecast of a photo op/ press conference, thus it was geared to a political purpose as opposed to an educational one. The students were seated by year, rather than by class, thus drastically diminishing the possibility that their teachers could sit with them and monitor their behavior. But mostly, the students paid very little attention because teachers and administrators allowed them to.

During the assembly, I was patrolling the aisles of the auditorium with a few of my more intrepid colleagues. Our presence tended to cause conversations to diminish, cell-phones to go away, and some attention to be paid. In spite of this I still saw people texting, doing homework, writing notes, reading, playing on their laptops, and chatting at full volume with their friends. And those were just the teachers. I can't imagine how we expect the students to behave themselves when we can't be bothered to. While I am usually hesitant to quote George W. Bush, this is clearly a case of the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.

My larger and more immediate concern however is not whether or not the students who were present understood what was being said to them, but rather, what are the larger implications for a school that can't or won't ask a group of teenagers to listen when someone is offering them thousands upon thousands of dollars. It seems to me that there are a few very specific educational implications, and some very real professional ones.

My educational concerns are two-fold. First, any loss of authority on the part of the school is also a loss of authority for me as a teacher. When students see teachers making no effort to act like adults in the room, it diminishes their opinion of all teachers, and rather than sowing respect for the profession, it sows rebellion. Thus the bar for holding a student's attention ticks ever so slightly higher, and I have to work ever so slightly harder to win it. This makes it particularly difficult to convince my students to suffer through a complex reading or problem without a large quantity of song and dance. Each teacher ends up responsible for demonstrating on their own that what they are doing is worthwhile, because otherwise the students will disregard the material. More over, teachers have to earn the benefit of the doubt where students are concerned, and start from a place of disrespect.

This spiral into disrespect is compounded by another educational ramification of this kind of educational culture, the constant reminder that nothing at all needs to be heard, or remembered based on the first time it was said. After this assembly each student was given a packet, and the teachers trained in answering the students' questions about the scholarship program. Thus the students will get 4 or 5 chances to ask about the program, and come to understand it. It only takes a little imagination to see how this could play out in the classroom. I give instructions, then I am obliged to put them on the board, then I am obliged to repeat them 4 or 5 times, eating up precious moments of time repeating myself. (Naturally anyone who has met a teenager expects to repeat themselves, as I do, but to give up even trying to convince them to listen the first time is the epitome of lowering expectations).

But then again the educational ramifications of this assembly are not my biggest problem, though they are quite troubling. My biggest issue with this assembly was professional in nature. Namely, I have no way of initiating a real conversation with my colleagues (the vast majority of whom are committed to improving the quality of our school) that I think they could have done a much better job in that assembly. I can't figure out a way to have this conversation without appearing to scold (though I heartily think that any teacher who loudly converses through an assembly is deserving of some sort of scolding). In reality the teachers were doing what they were told. The administration merely said to show up, instituting no policies to ensure our help, and making no arrangements to allow us to help. But I have a hard time blaming it on them either.

This is a communal problem. This is a problem of the culture of the school that can only be fixed by the school community. I am trying to get that ball rolling, but the adults get defensive and the kids don't want things to get tougher on them. I am left feeling like I am shouting at the top of my lungs at two trains heading toward each other on the same track. A crash will occur, and knowing its coming still doesn't give me any power over the situation.

Getting Better

In the wake of our evaluation, I had no fewer than 8 conversations with teachers at my school, in which I was asked to provide reasons to continue working at our school. Such was the state of our malaise. It was difficult to decide what to tell these people. I have a great deal of faith in my school, and my colleagues, but I am not well suited to dealing with talk of abandoning ship.

Thankfully, this week things are starting to improve. We had a staff meeting yesterday, and spent the day today in "Professional Development" (which mostly boiled down to a discussion of implementing highernorder thinking), and for the first time in a long time we used distict mandated pd time to do something useful. We had the chance to discuss our teaching strategies, and to begin the process of working building more collaborative lessons. There were opportunities to feel validated, and to talk about what we do in our classrooms. For the most part, these meetings served the desired purpose of shifting the conversation away from how badly we did, and towards the improvement of instructional practices.

While progress was made in terms of our attitudes, time will tell whether or not this conversation translates into action. Much of the staff still feels as if the visitting committee did something to us, and if indeed we taught as well as we talked today, we would be a model school. more over there seems to be a substantial disconnect between the teachers who err on the side of accountability and those who err on the side of accommodation. Without some sort of reconciliation between the two sides, I fear our progress will stall.