Clearly it has been several months since the last time I sat down to write anything. Since March, many things have happened. First of all, I graduated. And secondly, I got a job teaching at SoBro, a small 6-12 grade in Mott Haven, New York.
Mott Haven is a notoriously difficult area in which to teach. The population which we serve is one of the poorest in the nation, heavily populated by immigrants, and comes along with all of the baggage associated with poverty: low academic ability, limited English proficiency, broken and/or dysfunctional homes etc. Our school has made a concerted effort to provide the children of this neighborhood with as rigorous and as challenging an education possible, with the stated goal of ensuring that our students enter and succeed in college.
The building in which our school is located used to belong to a particularly frightening high school, until this school was fazed out and replaced by two smaller schools. SoBro is the result of several years’ work in partnership with a national non-profit agency that tries to grow opportunities for college entrance. We have a small staff, and a small population of students which will allow us to provide much more focused attention to our students.
Today was the first day of new teacher staff development. The majority of the new teachers are young, between the ages of 22 and 28. However, there are a smattering of older teachers. While this has the potential to be a fairly frightening situation, the atmosphere provided by all the older teachers and the administrators has proven (so far) to be one of cooperation and kindness. From the moment we stepped into school, I felt comfortable.
In our staff development session, we focused on several key issues. The key idea which I learned today was the importance of protocol. This provides a framework in which we as teachers and as colleagues can create dialog and discussion without getting caught up in the swirling and twirling of circular jargon and BS.
Overall, today was a successful and enlightening experience. Hopefully tomorrow will prove similar
