Introduction

Broken

I am an octagonal peg trying to fit into a round hole.

I am not square;

there are more sides to me than that.

Too many sides for my own good.

So when they hit me on the head, I go in a little.

I am still mostly octagonal, except for my bottom, which is now closer to round.

Sixteen sides, jagged and rough and sharp.

But above the hole I am still myself.

So they hit me down again.

 And soon I will be within their circle, with my original dimensions doubled and rough,

trying to make sense of my new broken self.

At which point they will make the hole smaller,

doubling my sides again.

Breaking every corner because they don't like things that are edgy.

They will take the integral of my shape until I become the circle they originally intended.

It is important to beat me because they are frightened by math and poetry

and I can do both at once.

Re-Imagining the Classroom

My everyday struggles as a public school teacher.

This is a blog about my personal struggle to keep creativity and critical thinking alive in my classroom, in the midst of a system that attempts, in ways both planned and inadvertent, to beat both of these things out of teachers and students.  It is not meant to be a criticism of any particular school, but of an entire system that is failing because it is being used for a purpose for which it was not designed.  As such, although my goal is to illustrate this failing system with anecdotes about the daily happenings in the classrooms and schools in which I currently and have previously worked, it is very important to me to preserve the anonymity of these schools and the people in them.  Therefore, I will never mention locations by name and all people mentioned in the stories have had their names changed and, in some cases, identities merged and details slightly altered to preserve their privacy.  My intention is not to tell the exact truth, but to communicate the essence of what happens in our public schools.

I will be telling stories that have taken place in the five educational settings in which I have worked:  an environmental education non-profit, hereafter referred to as TES; a small 7-12 charter school, SCS; a juvenile detention center, JDC; a large urban public high school, LHS; and a tiny rural K-12 school, TRS.  I tell these stories in no order other than the importance they have in my own mind at any particular moment.  All stories will be told in the present tense, regardless of the order in which they happened.

After each story, I will re-imagine what school could be.