Honestly, I bought the book The Flat World and Education by Linda Darling-Hammond only because it was a reading requirement for the Innovative Learning course I had signed up for. I don't even remember when Amazon delivered it. It sat untouched in my home office for several weeks because I was too busy enjoying my lazy summer days, lounging on my sunny porch, drinking mint lemonade and reading a much better book (For those of you inquiring minds, it was Cocoa Beach by Beatriz Williams).
As July turned into August, I sadly finished Cocoa Beach and reluctantly went in search of The Flat World. After the glamour and intrigue of Cocoa Beach, The Flat World and Education seemed like it was going to be an excruciatingly painful and dull reading experience. I sat down on my lovely porch with my mint lemonade, a bag of Peanut M&Ms and Ms. Darling-Hammond's opus. Like a Martin Scorsese film, Linda Darling-Hammond grabbed me by the throat at the very beginning. As I read paragraph after paragraph, forgotten memories hidden within the past 25 years of my career in public education crashed over me like relentless tidal waves. I was shocked that I was having such an emotional reaction to what I was reading. I was very angry. Mostly, at myself. My first teaching job was back in 1993. I taught English Literature and Creative Writing at the same high school I attended back in the late 1980s. It is located in an established upper-middle class neighborhood. To this day, it is an amazing high school. It continuously produces the most Ivy League graduates in the great state of Texas. We had a state of the art Library and Media Center. Now, this was the early 90s, we didn't have a laptop for every student, but we had shiny, new computers in our Media Center that were available for all of them. Our library and media center did not close before 6:00 pm, so students had plenty of time to work on assignments. We had two credentialed, tech-savvy librarians available to help and guide. In 1994, I moved up to an even better technologically equipt high school. This high school was located across the Briargate Estates, a very affluent neighborhood in my hometown. This particular high school was only about three years old. Everything in it was new. Soon after the Fall semester began, new Mac computers were being installed in every classroom. Not only did we have a huge, fancy Media Center, our classrooms were mini-technology labs with printers and computers. Our students were encouraged to use technology in all of their subjects. The summer of 1996, I was asked to teach English Literature at one of our sister high schools located in the Downtown area. I was told that the students enrolled in this "special" class were taking the course as a last effort to graduate with their class the following Spring. If they did not pass my course, they would not be able to graduate. I was warned that these students were lazy and unmotivated. I was supposed to teach the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. The final project required that each student write original sonnets and plays in Shakespeare's style. The first day of summer school, I arrived bright and early so that I could touch base with the principal in charge of the summer program. She was no where to be found. When she did arrive, she informed me that she was actually an employee of the YWCA and a local Methodist Church who was sponsoring the summer program. She did not have any high school administrative or teaching experience. She did not have any teaching materials for me except for a beaten up Student Workbook. No copies of Mr. Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, no books, no pencils, no paper, definitely no computers. Nothing. The library was off limits, and unfortunately, the school did not have a computer lab. What it did have was barbed razor wire looped on the chain link fence around the parking lot. There were bars on the windows. Prisons look less like prisons than this school did. As the only teacher on campus, I was told to leave immediately after class because the local gangs used the parking lot for fights. Then after giving me the keys to the school, "the principal" left the campus. Around 9:00 am, forty-two poor Mexican-American teenage boys and three pregnant teen girls from the Downtown Barrio area slowly arrived. Some only spoke Spanish. Those who could speak some broken English, could not read beyond a third grade lexile. Now for the most infuriating fact, the majority of those 45 teenagers had been in our school system since kindergarten. They were not recent immigrants. They were first generation Americans of Mexican decent. I did not teach Shakespeare that summer. I threw the workbook away. I taught my students how to fill out a job application, how to write a resume, how to apply for food stamps and WIC. Skills that the majority needed when they eventually dropped out of school. "The new mission of schools is to prepare students to work at jobs that do not exist, creating ideas and solutions for products and problems that have not yet been identified, using technologies that have not yet been invented. (Darling-Hammond, 2) Is our society ready to take on this challenge? Or will we be waylaid by our long-standing tradition of unequal education coupled with our inability, thus far, to move from factory model approach to education designed at the end of the 19th century to one that is pointed clearly and unambiguously at the demands of the 21st? (Darling-Hammond, 2) It's been 22 years. I wonder what kind of lives we prepared those 45 students for. What happened to them? Where did they go? Did they survive?
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Tess Giner
This is my 25th year as a public school teacher. I've taught every grade between Kindergarten and 12th grade. I hope to encourage my students to love writing and reading as much as I do. Archives
July 2019
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