Hey There-- You With the Stars in Your Eyes
The title comes from "The Pajama Game"-- a new musical revival to which my generous, theater-loving father took us on Wednesday. Broadway is everything real life isn't: clever, perfectly arranged, equal parts hilarity and poignancy, choreographed and in beautiful attire. The next morning as I shuffled down the urine-soaked steps of my favorite Bronx train station, the contrast was intense.
This is a NYC teaching fellow blog, and for the benefit of prospective fellows I've decided to try to flesh out my observations from rants into more detailed anecdotes. But this week was Regents week, so I had little to report in terms of students, as mine were all busy sleeping in and playing on their new PS2s and watching American Idol.
But I do still have several stories from the week that are amusing/insight-bringing:
*I proctored a regents for IEP students, for whom I had to read the ENTIRE test out loud. The strain on my voice was nothing compared to the strain the kids were evidencing trying to muck through the long, boring, forest of words (including the phrase "arduous novitiate").
*When I saw how upset my AP was with the difficulty of the passages I saw the hidden idealism that must have brought him into this field years ago. In fact, everyone was incredibly kind this week, and the love for the students was strangley enough far more evident without students to stress us out.
*There was a serious feud between the "grade inflaters" and the "we're tough-ass graders" when we were grading the ELA regents. I will elaborate upon this further some other time, but suffice it to say that the arguments on one side were "Let's give some of these seniors help graduating" and on the other side were "we are going to grade BY THE BOOK because we are so much smarter than these kids." Maybe my bias is showing... hope it's not ugly. My feeling about it all is simply that wealthy white kids get SO many boost in life-- tutors, college counselors, parents with money and connections. By looking at certain kids' essays with a kind eye, we're barely making a dent in the inequality.
So much for my promise of no rants...
Til next time
/fellow-ette
This is a NYC teaching fellow blog, and for the benefit of prospective fellows I've decided to try to flesh out my observations from rants into more detailed anecdotes. But this week was Regents week, so I had little to report in terms of students, as mine were all busy sleeping in and playing on their new PS2s and watching American Idol.
But I do still have several stories from the week that are amusing/insight-bringing:
*I proctored a regents for IEP students, for whom I had to read the ENTIRE test out loud. The strain on my voice was nothing compared to the strain the kids were evidencing trying to muck through the long, boring, forest of words (including the phrase "arduous novitiate").
*When I saw how upset my AP was with the difficulty of the passages I saw the hidden idealism that must have brought him into this field years ago. In fact, everyone was incredibly kind this week, and the love for the students was strangley enough far more evident without students to stress us out.
*There was a serious feud between the "grade inflaters" and the "we're tough-ass graders" when we were grading the ELA regents. I will elaborate upon this further some other time, but suffice it to say that the arguments on one side were "Let's give some of these seniors help graduating" and on the other side were "we are going to grade BY THE BOOK because we are so much smarter than these kids." Maybe my bias is showing... hope it's not ugly. My feeling about it all is simply that wealthy white kids get SO many boost in life-- tutors, college counselors, parents with money and connections. By looking at certain kids' essays with a kind eye, we're barely making a dent in the inequality.
So much for my promise of no rants...
Til next time
/fellow-ette
posted by SarahMarian at 7:47 PM
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