Yo Mista!

I've decided to quit teaching. After six grueling years teaching high school math to New York City's most at-risk students, I've become jaded. Not because of the young people. They were the most compelling reason  against  leaving.  It's everything else.  When I first started teaching, I walked into the classroom absolutely on fire about everything. I was twenty-four years old and cocky: coming off a high from people telling me how impressed they were that I'd decided to forego a career in investment banking to pursue teaching. Like any first-year teacher, my life revolved around my profession: plan, create, assess, grade, adjust, repeat. I was an animal and it certainly didn't hurt that I was coming from an industry where people averaged working over ninety hours a week. For the next few years, I grew very comfortable being "Yo Mista" in the classroom. I'd had my share of run-ins with district/school politics and bureaucracy, but I still fel...

Two years ago, two brothers enrolled at the alternative school where I worked. Colin and Ken, at 16 and 15 years old respectively, had just come back from spending two years in the Dominican Republic. They were now living in a foster home in the Bronx away from their birth parents. During the years they spent in the Dominican Republic, Colin and Ken were in and out of school, but mostly out, working on their family's farm as free labor. Beyond the trauma of separation  from  their birth parents, Colin and Ken experienced a significant amount of trauma  with  their birth parents. They were two teenagers who had already lived a lifetime. Silent with a dark sense of humor, Colin kept quiet during the school day during most of his first year. His entrance test scores placed him in classes at about (or slightly under) grade level. In those classes, Colin excelled. During his first year in this alternative school, Colin accumulated credits, earned rewards based on academ...

Proctoring school-wide exams is by far the most unproductive activity for teachers. For alternative school students who previously haven't been successful in school, we tend to make testing worse by being overly strict during these sessions. No talking. No music. No walking in the hallway. No food. No drinks. No gum. No smiling. No personalities. And no thinking. Oh, but do your best. Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks! When I'm proctoring an exam, I do play some music on low to fill the silence in the testing room. My students do not like silence. They're not used to it, and so it unsettles them. If we as educators want them to succeed, we should test our students on their terms since it's content we think  is important. They don't have a choice in what they get to learn in this country, so let's meet halfway. A little bit of Ray Charles isn't going to hurt anybody. It might actually keep the student who finishes early from distracting others. Or it might keep the ...

It's about thirty minutes into the period and I'm circulating around the classroom while my students work on practice problems. To the untrained ear, it sounds like chaos. It's not: it's just at-risk teenagers working. They may be cussing, throwing things, and loud, but they're working. They're struggling, but they're working. "Yo Mista!" "Mista! I need you for a sec." "Mista, can you come here?" "Yo Mista, I called you like ten minutes ago!" I spin move around a desk and get to Brandy, who I think  called out "Yo Mista!" first. I get to Brandy and sit down next to her. She shows me her paper and points at the problem she's working on. She doesn't ask anything. She doesn't ask to clarify something. She just points. You're not going to get me kid. I know this trick. "So?" I ask her. Brandy, like most of my students, is trying to gauge my reaction to her work. She's try...

"They're calling this the Bible of effective instruction!" my former principal excitedly announced four years ago in front of his entire teaching staff at the beginning of the school year. He was talking about Doug Lemov's book,  Teach Like a  Champion .  In my five years of teaching, four have always started with school leadership enthusiastically distributing copies of this book . In short,  Teach Like a Champion  outlines 49  techniques  for inexperienced teachers to become "master teachers." Before I take a shit on the movement this book has created, I'll say this: Teach Like a Champion does aptly summarize what any teacher should do at the minimum . It's by no means a recipe for championship teaching, but rather a list of tools all teachers should be comfortable using when appropriate. The "championship" teaching happens when those 49 techniques are coupled with passion, personality, grit, intuition, and improvisation skills.  My ...

After Tuesday's epic-polar- vortex -snow-storm-pacalyse, NYC schools stayed open on Wednesday only to post the worst attendance numbers ( 47% ) this school year. Luckily my school's network decided it'd be best to close Wednesday, so you can only imagine how incredibly lucky I felt. The following morning, I basked in all the glory of a snow day by sleeping in a full two hours (crazy I know). Before fully waking up, I rolled over and grabbed my phone to check Facebook (shut up, you do the same). My feed was mostly dominated by teachers' angry posts about Mayor DeBlasio's decision to keep schools open. Those s uckers , I thought. Here's a snapshot of my teacher friends' social media posts from Tuesday night/Wednesday morning: Mayor DeBlasio, are you kidding me????? I knew it. NYC schools will be open tomorrow. Where is my Taun Taun? Mayor Dibloombergsio says that ny public is open. Not sure how I'm going to drive to work tomorrow, let alone get...

I tend to arrive to school earlier than most. Usually the only person to greet me at school in the morning is the school safety officer posted at the main entrance. I'll say good morning to him as I make my way down my school's (only) hallway towards my classroom. Even though I've still got about an hour or so until students start rolling in, sometimes there's a student who beats everyone (including me) to school: his name is Ross and I have absolutely no clue what to do with him. I mean academically I have no clue. In fact, I'm pretty sure the American education system as it stands right now doesn't know what to do with him. Ross is sixteen years old, but by his high school transcript, he's still considered a high school freshman. His family moved to New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was old enough to be enrolled in elementary school. His state standardized test scores would tell you that he's still in elementary school. It's ...

I'm back.  It's been nearly a year since I've last written on Yo Mista!  A lot has changed personally. Yet nothing has changed professionally. And I guess that's why I've been so uninspired to write.  Over the last year, my professional life took a backseat to my personal life. When the dust settled, I realized I didn't want to write  Yo Mista!  anymore. I still felt passionate about my work, but I was somehow uninspired. My day-to-day at school over the last year hasn't changed. I still teach over-age, at-risk students at an alternative high school. Everyday, crazy shit happens in my classroom. Everyday, a student either feels supremely connected to me and my content or feels without direction and completely out of touch with education. My students and I still keep each other on our toes. The only problem is, I'm getting jaded.  This is my fifth year of teaching at-risk youth and I'm getting tired of seeing students arrive to school hig...

Carlton is an Algebra student of mine who I have a hard time imagining as an "at-risk teenager." He's bright, incredibly sweet, and has a good heart. If he wasn't enrolled at an alternative high school like mine, I would've never believed he lived a tough life or made really bad decisions from time to time. Despite Carlton's past, he seems to have recommitted to school this year, although there are times when he will disappear off the face of the planet. His absence streaks last anywhere between two days to two weeks. When school resumed after winter break, I didn't see him for six consecutive school days. He wasn't traveling, nor was he in jail, he was just "buggin' out." Carlton takes my class very seriously when he's present, and as a result, usually avoids eye contact with me when he returns from his disappearing acts. "Carlton! Heyyyyyyy mannnnnnnn, how's it... how's it going, buddy?" I ask with a gigantic s...

Nikhil Goyal is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the education world. In the TED Talk below, Goyal calls for an education revolution. His beliefs and thoughts seem to echo with education reform activists Sir Ken Robinson, Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, etc.  So what's different about this guy vs. the others? We've all heard this "call to change the system as we know it" before. Well, consider this: Nikhil Goyal is a 17-year-old high school senior. We need more students like Goyal if we really want to transform the system. Question/conundrum: how do we effectively develop other students' critical thinking skills to Goyal's level and beyond with our current and outdated education system? 

Children react and cope with crisis in different ways. Some act out, others harm others, others harm themselves, the list goes on. From the onset, I coped by dreaming: I yearned to be a superhero and often fantasized (and still do) about having an alter-ego and going off to save strangers. I wanted to save people I didn't even know, probably because it was so much harder to save the people I already knew, like my dad. It was much easier to swoop in and swoop out. When I was younger, my disguise was perfect: nerdy, straight-A 2nd grader with parted-hair and black-rimmed glasses. I remember when my dad would go on his violent streaks, my mom and I would spend a lot of time together locked in my bedroom. She watched TV and guarded the door, and I played pretend with my Superman action figure after I finished my homework. The interesting thing was, when I played with that Superman action figure, I wasn't a spectator witnessing Superman's heroics. I was the action figure; it ...

A friend of mine shared this video with me; she said it reminded her of what I do. Take a look, it's pretty inspiring. Created by Tragedy and Hope , the video is narrated by the late philosopher Alan Watts. I might just show this to my students first thing Monday morning. You know, instead of test-prepping.

"One of these days, Karl is probably going to stab me outside of school," I admitted to a co-worker as we left for the day. My co-worker smiled, but looked concerned, as if she couldn't tell if I was being my usual comical self. "What do you mean?" she asked. "I don't know, with the kind of shit I say to kids sometimes, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already. These guys need tough love, so we have to play teacher and parent. A kid like Karl, for example, is not hearing what he needs to hear at home. For him, that means unfortunately he has to learn principles of life and algebra in the same classroom." We continued talking as we walked towards the subway station. Karl and a handful of other students suddenly stepped into view across the intersection and began approaching us. My co-worker stopped mid-conversation and gave me a concealed look of panic, which made sense since I'd just confessed I wouldn't be surprised if Karl ...

In the world of teaching at-risk teenagers, the odds of students achieving what we in 21st century America define as "success" are slim-to-none. For many of my students, college is simply not a realistic or relevant next step, although that's what educators like me are conditioned to believe students should be striving for. We hold these unrealistic and unfair expectations and are then shocked when year after year, familiar faces disappear and become names on paper. And eventually those names become statistics. Something is very wrong with this. In my first year of teaching, I couldn't believe teaching at-risk students was like investment banking: a numbers game. Teachers worked their asses off, giving 110% everyday, but ultimately we knew the return rate of success was slim. In banking, we'd pitch merger ideas to a plethora of clients, hoping one would bite. Eventually someone would like an idea, and all of of our hard work would transform into a lucrative dea...

When I left my iPhone in a cab on a Friday night, I wasn't just angry, I was disappointed. It wasn't just about the iPhone. It was also the idea that I could do something so stupid and forget something like that in the backseat of a cab. That's just not me. This depressing night actually started at a cocktail party in the Upper West Side of New York City. My wife and I arrived directly from work, so although we were dressed to impress, we had a lot of bags and things to carry. When we were ready to leave, it was really late. We hailed a cab and naturally, both of us passed in and out out of sleep in the backseat. After what seemed like forever, the driver yelled at me to wake up. I nudged my wife and asked her to go outside and open the apartment building door while I grabbed all of our bags. And that's where it all went wrong. My iPhone was resting unsecured in my dress pants pocket, and as I scooted across the backseat to get out, it must've slipped out. I not...

A colleague recently sent me this song (via this blog post), and I couldn't stop laughing. Enjoy.

In a recent report published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, where a student lives still determines where a student ends up, despite a decade's worth of "education reforms" in NYC. " The portfolio district model adopted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City is often held up as a national model  for high school 'choice,' touted as the best way to reduce pernicious race- and income-based achievement gaps. According to this model, student demographics are 'no excuse' for poor performance: teacher quality is the single most important determinant of student success. But this AISR study on college readiness shows that in spite of a decade of efforts in New York City to expand choice and ensure that the most disadvantaged students do not invariably attend the most disadvantaged schools, student demographics still stubbornly dictate destiny ." Gotham Schools posted this link yesterday that brilliantly maps this study'...

An old friend of mine recently shared this video with me on Facebook, which I thought was pretty hilarious. An inner city high school substitute teacher takes attendance at his new placement: an all-white suburban science classroom. While there are some obvious problems with the stereotypes this skit plays to, there are definitely some truths I could also appreciate. The substitute clearly didn't need any particular "strategy" to win over these students, who were all prepared and ready to go in the science classroom. The entire class is already seated by the time the bell rings. Some students even have their lab goggles on and many have a notebook open ready to begin writing. To me, that is hilarious - if I were in that situation, I would probably have so much free time at the end of my classes, who knows maybe I would teach two classes in one period!

I've lived in New York City for six years now and in that time, I've learned two very valuable lessons. The first is that there are people peeing everywhere, so turn corners with caution. This was a very important lesson that I actually still forget sometimes. Luckily, I am often retaught this lesson every once in a while at 5:30 AM in the subway. Life in the city has become a bit unnerving because now every time I see someone turned around against a wall, I automatically assume they're urinating. I suppose life could get a lot worse. The second lesson, which is equally as important, is former and current students are everywhere, so turn corners with caution. It's actually shocking how often I bump into former and current students in this city. Growing up in Chicago, I never bumped into my middle or high school teachers outside of school. I can't imagine what that would've been like, maybe awkward, but nothing more. I guess bumping into my teachers out of sc...

"I know Mista, I did really bad. Imma come during lunch to get help." I do a lot of legwork in the beginning of the year building relationships with my students. It's actually a tactic I learned in the finance world. As an investment banking analyst a.k.a. finance monkey, my day-to-day rarely comprised of human contact outside of my own colleagues. On most days and nights, I sat in my cubicle and built financial models, created presentations, and then made sure these materials were delivered on time to my managing director's Upper East Side condo before his black Lincoln Town Car came to drive him to the airport. Of course, I sent the materials to him using a separate company Town Car that would make the delivery and come back to the office. Simultaneously, I'd take another black Town Car back to my place on the company's dime for working into the wee hours of the night. What recession?.. It was rare for a low ranking monkey like me to travel. Sometimes I...