 Inner-city teacher struggles for control
By Holly Yettick News Staff Writer The math tiles are Legos. The math tiles are projectiles. Just about the only thing the math tiles in Erin O'Grady's third-grade class are not being used for this autumn afternoon is math. Usually she is patient. Usually she is calm. But eight weeks into the first school year of her teaching career, O'Grady is getting fed up. With uncharacteristic sharpness, she announces — "We have been doing this for 20 minutes. And some of you have nothing done." The class is eerily silent. "Nothing done," O'Grady repeats. The inspiration for the perfect punishment arrives in a flash. It comes not from DU classes. Not from the nearly 100 days of classroom experience she logged at Cory Elementary. It comes straight from her imagination. And based on the class's reaction, it works. "Guess what we're going to do right now instead of doing math? Each of you is going to write me a letter. It has to say 'Honestly, Ms. O'Grady, I spent none of the time doing math. I spent some of the time doing math. I spent most of the time doing math.' If you did some or none," O'Grady continues, "I want you to tell me what you were doing instead." Silently, the monitor passes out paper. Silently, the chastened pupils write about what they were doing instead of solving equations using their colorful, plastic math pieces. The result is exactly what O'Grady wants: insightful explanations about how they have been misbehaving and why. At schools throughout the nation, similar scenes play out each fall as novice teachers struggle to gain control of their first classes. "New teachers' biggest problem is classroom management," said 15-year teaching veteran Jill Forshay, who runs O'Grady's mandatory monthly support class for new teachers. Other teachers agree. Sixty percent of 900 teachers surveyed last year by the New York nonprofit group Public Agenda said most new teachers take over classrooms they lack the experience to manage. Why? More than half say colleges poorly prepare educators to handle discipline. Ebert Elementary Principal Joan Wamsley says O'Grady handles classroom management as well as, or better than, other first-year teachers she's supervised. And O'Grady was rated proficient at classroom management standards outlined by Senate Bill 154, Colorado's 1999 education reform package. Often, she successfully employs classroom management methods learned at DU. But O'Grady still believes DU could have done a better job. "Classroom management is a huge challenge," she said. "I'm still struggling with it." DU did offer a mandatory seminar that addressed classroom experiences including discipline. But O'Grady believes what she really needed was more time in an elementary classroom. She wishes she had started sooner than her senior year. She also wishes she had experienced an inner-city school such as Ebert before being hired there. DU teacher education director Jennifer Whitcomb says the seminar addressing discipline has been expanded this year from two to three quarters. And she says its curriculum has been revamped to focus more closely on classroom management. It would have been difficult for any DU undergrad to have entered the classroom sooner. That's because DU's education school is an intensive, nine-month program targeting mid-career professionals who already have college degrees. Each year, the program admits five to 10 DU seniors as a "courtesy," Whitcomb said. The undergrads must get all of their other requirements out of their way by the end of their junior year so they can meet the same standards as their graduate student peers. These standards changed dramatically during O'Grady's senior year as DU redesigned its program to meet Senate Bill 154's standards. "Our metaphor last year was that we were flying the airplane while we were building it," Whitcomb said. Among the changes — raising student teaching and observation time from the 650 hours required in pre-Senate Bill 154 days to the current 800-hour requirement that O'Grady came within a hair of meeting. In the first half of the program, students meet these hours by observing at urban schools. Cory Elementary in the DPS district, said Whitcomb, was considered an "urban placement." But Cory and Ebert are worlds apart. More than 80 percent of Cory students are Anglo. Only 13.2 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, a measure of poverty. Required by DU to write about a serious problem she experienced at Cory, O'Grady described attempts to handle a dad so involved with the school that he had alienated teachers. In contrast, 7 percent of Ebert students are Anglo and 97 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Three months into the school year, O'Grady has a hard time even defining what has been her most serious problem yet. Suspending five third-graders? Fielding two suicide threats? Teaching a class in which 20 of 21 students are reading below grade level? At Ebert, dealing with discipline eats away at teaching time that at Cory was largely sacrosanct. O'Grady pauses her lessons to wake a little girl who snoozes through many a school day. She pauses to reprimand her only monolingual Spanish speaker, who fidgets and squirms through lessons she doesn't understand based on the 45-minutes-per-day of English tutoring she gets. She pauses to send one child to the discipline room and another to the corner for time out while a third erupts in anger, kicking chairs and desks. Cory days seem worlds away. Whitcomb notes it was O'Grady's choice to student-teach at Cory. "If that's where she really wanted to work, why didn't she student-teach in an environment that had a closer correlation?" she asked, referring to Ebert. But O'Grady never dreamed she'd end up here. At least not so soon. She had always wanted to be a suburban teacher. Just like her hero, Lori Conrad, who yanked her out of her shell in the second grade at Acres Green Elementary, taught her to read and inspired her to teach. Then, she spent two weeks living and working in inner-city Portland, Ore., between her junior and senior years, through the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. There, she "grew a heart" for working with the poor. But first, she wanted a more familiar environment where she could get the teaching part down pat. In the professional development plan she prepared during her senior year at DU, O'Grady wrote that teaching in a "setting highly impacted by poverty" was a long-term goal. The "long term" loomed large late last spring when DPS had offered her only a contract, not an assignment to a specific school. By the time she attended a DPS career fair in June, O'Grady was panicking. The Corys of DPS had finished hiring. Only the Eberts were left. O'Grady stood in line at a booth for Barrett Elementary in central Denver for no other reason than that someone she knew once taught there. The candidate in front of her, a Teacher in Residence student with no certificate, snapped up the last job. Discouraged, O'Grady joined a crowd waiting to apply at Greenwood Elementary in far northeast Denver, a good 40-minute drive from her DU-area apartment. Suddenly she heard a friendly voice. "Where do you live?" Ebert Principal Joan Wamsley asked. O'Grady had never heard of Ebert, but the principal assured her it was much closer to home. O'Grady was hired on the spot. This year, three of 23 Ebert teachers are novices. Two years ago, there were nine. Statewide, teachers have an average of eight years of experience in elementaries such as Ebert that are rated unsatisfactory — which are almost all inner-city schools with high poverty rates. In contrast, teachers have an average of 11 years' experience at elementaries rated excellent — most of which serve suburban or well-heeled urban student bodies with low poverty rates. "We end up giving our first-year teachers the most difficult classes," said Barnett Berry, senior consultant for the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. "If you are a poor kid or a kid of color in this country, you may be eight to 10 times more likely not to get a qualified teacher. The numbers go higher if you mix in unqualified and inexperienced. It is the strongest predictor of whether a kid will meet academic standards." Whitcomb says this is a systemic problem teacher ed programs cannot address unless school districts help by stopping the practice of putting novice teachers in classrooms that would challenge veterans. "A teacher-preparation program can only expect to prepare someone to be a highly competent beginning teacher," she said. Perched on a stool one warm afternoon, Jill Forshay offers her New Teachers Network class a tip about classroom management: The better you know the children, the better you can manage them. "What you do for one will not work for the other three," she says. "It unnerves me when teachers have to have a one-on-one with a kid and they say, 'I don't have the time.' " Conspicuously missing is O'Grady. She is taking advantage of the one absence allowed from the course. She is busy doing exactly what Forshay is trying to teach. She is having mixed success. On the one hand is the boy who was out of his seat and out of control until O'Grady discovered his love of computers. She made a big deal of it, calling upon him as her special helper when the class PCs broke. These days, he's known to grab a "refocus" form and send himself to the corner for a moment of reflection. At the other extreme is a child O'Grady has yet to figure out. The third-grader's behavior has been backpedaling since school started. Last month came a suicide threat, followed by an unsuccessful parent-teacher conference that left O'Grady feeling frustrated and attacked. These days, the child spends much of the day in the dreaded "Room 125" — where children are sent for mentoring and work when their behavior is too disruptive. The day of O'Grady's mentoring class, the child got into a fight with another child. O'Grady went to the office to suspend them both. While she was gone, another child turned to a classroom volunteer and sadly intoned, "I pray to God every day I'll die today." Suicide threat No. 2. O'Grady made the necessary contacts and reports. She reflected on another child in her class who had been suspended — for stealing $100 from a bus driver's purse. She went home numb. It took a day for the tears to finally come.
When they did, it was a flood. Contact Holly Yettick at (303) 892-5082 or yettickh@RockyMountainNews.com. |
Age: 23
