Another teacher is lost to No Child Left Behind

I composed the following commentary and sent it off to the Star Tribune which usually takes my writing, but Doug Tice, the editor, kindly told me it's old news. That's when I realized my sister's retirement is not news outside our family and her school. But I hate to bury a good piece of writing and a reasoned rant.

My sister is upset that I referred to her retirement as the second to the last stop on the train ride. She prefers to think of retirement as an opportunity for a new, free lifestyle. A lifestyle free of No Child Left Behind. She is a teacher and is retiring as early as possible because she can't stomach it anymore.

She is a wonderful teacher who has loved her job. Despite working through the summers because she is in a school district that has year-round school terms, despite the fact that her son's starting salary in software engineering exceeded her salary after thirty years of teaching, every year when the new fall term began, my sister looked forward to another year of teaching. She know how important a teacher is in the life of any child, but especially in the lives of the children at her school.

She teaches in a school with low scores, and she know why. Many of her second grade students come from families full of drugs, alcohol and inappropriate sexual behavior. many of her students leave home in the morning without breakfast or having their hair combed. Adults in the lives of these children sometimes exit with no goodbyes. My sister knows she is the reliable adult in their lives. She also knows how to teach these kids.

She has been giving No Child Left Behind her best efforts, but she has had years of following curriculum dictated solely by the need to pass tests. If students didn't do well on the tests curriculum were changed so students would do better on the next test. While change is a good thing, my sister explained to me, change across the board when parts of the curriculum are working is not good. Teaching only to pop up the scores of low and middle performing students is not good teaching because then gifted kids don't get anything because they're already helping the school's scores. As it it's the job of gifted kids to help a school's scores.

Furthermore, when teachers have t focus on test scores, they cannot help students develop their love of learning, nor can teachers consider what is developmentally appropriate for their students. My sister also asks why parent aren't being held responsible. Why isn't it a given that children will be put into bed at night at a decent time, will come to school unless they are sick, will get into trouble at home if they don't do their homework or if they misbehave at school?

So, this last school year when she had to set aside everything she had learned in thirty years of teaching to embrace a new system for teaching reading which she knows doesn't work, she decided to take her apple home for good.

My sister's retirement is a terrible loss to next year's second graders and their parents. It's a loss to all of us when teachers are the only party held responsible for the poor performance of other people's kids.

Is it unreasonable to expect parents to share responsibility for their kids' education? Is it too soft-hearted to provide breakfast at school for kids whose parents don't provide it at home? Is it too much like socialism to expect schools to be funded by taxes? My sister is getting off the train this June. Her students have a long ride ahead of them. As parents and a community, we need to do what we can to clear the train tracks so our kids can get to their destinations.

How organic must we be?

Last night I had dinner with my friend, Mark, and then he walked me back to my car. I wanted to show him sidewalk poetry, a wonderful St. Paul city project of embedding poetry in sidewalks. http://publicartstpaul.org/everydaysidewalk/poems02.html

Advice for Gardeners

Accept brevity.
Celebrate decay.
Emancipate failed growth, hope
it'll just keep living. Mulch
near odd places. Quit raking.
Sleep.
Tend unlimited variegated words.
Xerox your zucchini.

by Kate Lynn Hibbard -- thank you, Kate!

A rabbit ran across the sidewalk. Mark said, “I wish I had my air gun.”
I said, “What!” I was shocked by his violence. Then I asked, “Why?”
“Because they eat things I don’t want them to eat.” He looked annoyed, having had to explain the obvious, then paused. He knows me. “I’ve been peeing into a bottle.”
I said, “What?”
“Oh, I dilute it," he answered. "Sometimes.”
I stared at him, trying to get the picture out of my mind. I felt rather cross about it.
“Our landscaper told us to do it,” he explained. “Rabbits don’t like the smell of humans.”

I wonder if that landscaper knows how to use a jembe?

More poems and photos below:
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jembe, jembe

I have used my very efficient Kisii network and facebook - the Kisii network worked well long before facebook existed - and Monari says he can get me a jembe. Weeds, you will soon be gone! Great clods of hard-packed earth, likewise!

Mohammed in the garden

My Somali friend, Mohammed, lives nearby in an apartment and loves to garden. He came over after supper tonight to help me dig.
My wonderful garden is overgrown and worn out. The penny royal - which came from I don't know where - is nearly choking out the asparagus and the creeping thyme has overtaken the rest of the garden, including the stepping stones. Oh, the Joe Pye weed will do fine, and so will the yarrow and the rose bush. The monk's hood is robust, but so are the dandelions. Mohammed and I need space for tomatoes, hot peppers and snap peas, so there's a lot of clearing that needs to happen.

I brought out my tools, a garden fork and long-handled shovel. He tried out both but was dissatisfied. I brought out a rake. This was better, but what he really needed was a jembe. He raised his arms over his head, bringing an imaginary jembe down in the rampant penny royal. It would dig into the soil and cut off the weeds.

I saw people using jembes when I was in Kenya in 1995. Mohammed spent his teen years there. It's a most useful tool, a type of hoe, sturdier than what we use here. But I thought we might find one, so we climbed into Mohammed's truck and went off to Menard's in search of a jembe. After all, it's a hoe, surely Menard's garden center would have one.

Menard's had hoes and they looked okay to me, but I don't know my jembes, not even after a trip to Kenya. Mohammed inspected the hoes. They had dull edges; a jembe has a sharp edge, to cut the weeds. I suggested Gerten's Garden Center. Unlike Menard's which sells hoes along with toilets, hex wrenches, carpets, dog food and light fixtures, Gerten's is entirely for the garden.

At Gerten's, Mohammed was dazzled by baskets heaped with blooming flowers, small trees with roots bound in burlap, ceramic pots the size of bathtubs. But not a serious hoe to be found. In fact, they don't have many tools in stock and the hoes they sold all had the same dull edges. Even I could see the metal was cheap.

It was striking to me, the absence of a tool that is used to feed a family in the undeveloped countries; a tool so simple to make well, but unavailable in all the abundance found in two of our famous megastores.