Matching Tracksuits

Month: June 2010

Trust and Teaching

Tuesday 8 June 2010

Christmas break has disappeared behind a pile of compare/contrast essays, journals, and persuasive essays. The school year has resumed, and the consequence of my inability to keep on schedule means I have in one weekend a pile of grading that I was intending to spend two weekends and the intervening week plowing through.

Plowing through — as if this were a drudgery. It’s the amount, not the work.

This week has forced me to reevaluate my career choice. Most would expect a paragraph that begins like that to end bemoaning the decision to go into education. My thoughts led to quite the opposite conclusion. Every now and then it occurs to me how fortunate I am to be doing what I love most: working with kids. Teaching is a privilege, an honor.

Most significantly, it is a position built around trust. Perhaps it’s not voluntary trust, and maybe it’s not trust in me personally, but public education is built on trust. One parent said told me, “You’re raising my child; you see him more than I do,” Parents hand their children over to me daily, believing that I will do my best to help their children grow — intellectually and even emotionally. I feel a surge of pride and honor every time I think of the role these parents trust me to play in their children’s life, and that’s why the piles of paperwork this weekend don’t phase me.

Ideally, there should be another relationship of trust in education: between teacher and student. If there is mutual trust, there must be mutual respect: it’s hard to trust someone you don’t respect, and vice versa.

I must have faith that, all variables being made equal, my students all want to learn. Some days it’s more difficult than others: those variables — parental support, presence of adult role models, family educational history (i.e., socioeconomic status) — have a resiliency that can be frustrating. But if I didn’t believe all students wanted to learn (not necessarily what I’m teaching, but simply learn), how could I go to work in the morning? It would be the ultimate Sisyphean task.

The trust my students must have in me is much more multi-faceted. If they’ve had several bad experiences with adults, I start already behind. If they’ve had less-than-effective teachers in the past, I start even further behind. So many ways to gain and lose their trust.

When working with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, it’s a thin line of trust. They can have such a heightened sense of “fair,” and they often confuse fairness and equality.

How many of my students would say they trust me? Certainly not one hundred percent: it’s not a perfect world, and I’m not a perfect teacher. I can honestly say, though, that a good number trust me to keep their best interests in the forefront of all we do. Even in moments of classroom management crisis (e.g., acting out),

The End

Thursday 3 June 2010

The school year ended today. It was as I predicted: lots of joy, fair amounts of crying. I told one tearful girl, “It gets less painful every time you reach the end of something like this.” Did I lie? She seemed to think, at the very least, that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Why is it nostalgia is so much more potent when we’re young? Perhaps it’s simply our general lack of experience, and we’re often thinking, “It can’t get any better than this was,” and so we’re melancholy. Maybe it’s part of the naivete of youth, but this too is a result of being inexperienced in the cycles of contemporary life.

Of course, there were as many not tearful as there were with glistening cheeks. Perhaps they’re not as sentimental as the rest of us. Perhaps they have more experience in their fourteen years that has taught them the transience of most things. Sadly, it might be that they learned about temporariness from the love, attention, and affection they’ve received.

I have at least one such student every year. I always feel like I let him down. I always look back at the year and see countless opportunities to do more, to be more, for such students.

It leaves me wondering, once again, about the marks of a successful year. Testing-wise, I was very successful: I met my MAP score goals, and my E1H EOC grades average was just where I thought it should be. Yet what use are acronyms in determining a successful year? It seems a relatively shallow metric.

The truth is, I became a teacher because I simply love working with kids. Perhaps a selfish reason: I do get a certain high when I connect with a kid and feel I’ve somehow helped him. It’s hardly altruism, especially considering the times I’m doing the opposite: the moments when the urge to take a ridiculous behavior personally and become viscous becomes overwhelming. So maybe it’s not surprising that I have the depressive phases to go along with the manic moments.

This is all to explain why I’m feeling down even though it’s the end of the year.

Another kid left today that I find myself thinking, “I’d like to have another shot with him.” I’d like to have him in my classroom another year and manage to get myself out of the way and see what he needs and give it to him. His needs were not to be met by following the curriculum or making him play by all the admittedly arbitrary rules of the classroom. There was more going on in his life than iPods and texting friends, and I’ve a suspicion a large amount of it was negative. My class might have been one of the few bright spots in his day, but looking back over the year, I doubt it. I communicated to him all the things I swore I never would express through body language and tone to a student.

I finally caught on at the end of the year. (Why did it take so damn long? I knew — I had a similar student last year, and I swore I wouldn’t do what I did this year.) While other students were working on a final project, I realized the project might easily turn into yet another zero for him, and so I differentiated: I had him write an essay on three things he could do next year to meet with more success in the classroom. I gave him a pencil and a legal pad (he seldom had materials), and he always replaced the items on my desk at the end of the class.

What I read when he was done was a stinging condemnation, though he was polite in his tone and word choice. He didn’t even mean to condemn me. He just shared some feelings. Feelings of inadequacy that I fear I only heightened. Feelings of hopelessness that I worry I did nothing to assuage. Feelings of being trapped and only vaguely realizing it.

Real success in the classroom is not measured in completed assignments and MAP/ITBS/PASS scores. Success in the classroom is measured with a metric that, like black holes and dark matter, is hypothetical at best. We can infer it from a student’s smile, or a boy’s pride at walking into class having pencil and paper, or a girl’s wide eyes at getting a C on a test.

I forget this too often.

The school year ended today. It was as I predicted: lots of joy, fair amounts of crying. One girl said, “It’s not going to hit me until tonight. Then I’ll be sad.” And another student added, “And happy, cause we’re in high school.”

I know just how they feel. If only I can keep all this in mind until next August, when I’ll surely another Denny.

Unpacking Pakistan

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Pakistan is the most dangerous country on the planet. That’s old news. What isn’t old news — for me — is that it has been the most dangerous country for about twenty-five years. I learned this, amid a great deal of frustration, by reading Adrian Levy’s and Catherine Scott-Clark’s Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons,

Both Reagan and Bush 45 reported that Pakistan was not engaged in nuclear research and development even when there was ample intelligence to suggest — no, to prove — otherwise. Due to inter- and intra- department squabbling, the intelligence never made it to Congress.

Indeed, as some government agencies were trying to keep up with and report the nuclear development of Pakistan, other agencies slowed the investigations up — or worse. As some government agencies tried to shut down the Pakistanis’ purchase of equipment used in making centrifuges, the State Department was tipping off the various Pakistani purchasers. (167) Busts came to naught because the Pakistani purchasing agents never showed up or were long gone by the time authorities arrived.

In the meantime, Congress was pumping millions of dollars to Afghanistan through Pakistan, and providing additional direct aid to Pakistan. Significant portions of this aid was funneled to the Pakistani nuclear program. In other words, the US taxpayers financed Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Clinton was no better, and Bush 47 cozied up to the man who actively encouraged the creation of the Taliban and terrorist organizations. Bush repeatedly called Musharraf our friend and ally when he was anything but. However, Afghanistan once again trumped everything, and once again, we displayed a willful short-sightedness that is, especially in retrospect, ineffably stupid.

Just how bad was “Mush”? In 1988, Musharraf had a “tribal band of Pashtun and Sunni irregulars” reignite the Kashmir uprising. Rather than involve the army proper, Musharraf relied on the efforts of a mercenary named Osama bin Laden. Around the same time, Musharraf also had a plan to inject thousands of jihadis into Kashmir by graduates of the Markaz Dawa Al Irshad join the newly-formed Lashkar-e-Taiba. Twenty years later, Lashkar-e-Taiba would carry out an attack on Bombay, India that killed 173 people.

All the while, other intelligence agencies were warning us. Our first round of mujahideen funding in Afghanistan went so well that they eventually became the Taliban — we funded our own enemy. However, there were plenty of intelligence organs that saw this coming, and even warned America:

The joint intelligence committee in New Delhi […] presented a file of evidence to the US, warning that fundamentalist were being infiltrated into Kashmir and Musharraf was at the helm. They asked the US to consider where these fighters would go next, when they grew bored with the Kashmiri war or had been forced from the territory by the military reprisals that India was now planning. Naresh Chandra, India’s former ambassador to Washington, recalled: “The US was not interested. I was shouting and no one in the State Department or elsewhere could have cared less.”

The Clinton administration stood back. Pakistan escalated. The Islamic Republic’s strategy in Kashmir dovetailed with another of Musharraf’s policies, the promotion of the Taliban. (240)

Lastly, there’s Iraq and the question of proliferation. We went into Iraq for fear of WMDs and proliferation thereof. Supposedly, we had good intelligence. The problem is, we had better intelligence that Pakistan was proliferating like a rabbit:

  • Iran
  • Iraq (attempted; Saddam thought it was a set-up and didn’t buy it.)
  • North Korea
  • Libya
  • Syria

Pakistan was — and still is — the true danger. As the book concludes, if when there is a terrorist nuclear bombing of an American or European city, the know-how, materials, or even the device itself will be traced back to Pakistan.