Dear Mayor Bloomberg, 3.23.12

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

I wanted to tell you about what happened in our class this week. I'd have written sooner, but I was busy marking classwork from this past week, on my Saturday.

Late in the day on Thursday, a student in my class noticed bugs in another student's hair. At dismissal, the babysitter of the child with bugs in her hair was asked to notify the parents immediately so that the child could be treated for lice. The babysitter called the school later to get the child's mother's work number as the child's father, who arrived home first, had never seen or heard of lice, did not know what to do about the lice, and was unable to offer money to the babysitter to get supplies to treat the lice. The mother was not able to come to the phone and was not due home until 10pm.

Fearing that the mother would unwittingly send the child to school on Friday, untreated, and risk spreading the lice throughout out the class, I called the home at 7am the next day, hoping to prevent the child from coming to school. From the comfort of my own house and in my pajamas, I began to explain the treatment options available to her: coming the hair out twice a day and wrapping the head in butter to sleep and smother the lice at night, or calling a professional nitpicker to address the problem. I also assembled a collection of lice fighting materials: a nit comb ($30 value), Pantene conditioner (to aid in nit removal,) a bandana, and winter green oil (to apply to the scalp) just in case the mother needed to borrow any or all of these things.

Once at school, my co-teacher, at my suggestion, called another parent, also a professional nitpicker, to come in and check the heads of all of our students. Fortunately she was available and came in. She spent an hour combing through heads in the back of the classroom, one at a time, while other children did their school work. She found lice in four heads. The parents of those children were notified as well, and will hopefully treat their children this weekend. The we sent out a class-wide email requesting that every family check their children regularly for lice. As you may remember, we are going camping on Wednesday, and cannot take children to camp with lice in their heads.

Does your teacher evaluation system, noting whether or not a child's test scores increase, measure these kinds of responsibilities that we teachers take simply for the sake of our students and their families? I hope so, although it doesn't seem as though it possibly can.

I hope you will think about some of the things I have been telling you about and that you have a better sense of what our jobs are really like. My goal is that you will be motivated to look at teachers as caring and devoted people who work very, very hard, and who deserve to be evaluated on their performance by some measure that uses more than a number, or a change in numbers, derived from a questionable set of assessments given over six days for a few hours in the spring, and regards us with the kind of dignity that you certainly demand for yourself.

Jennifer Hardy,
Classroom Teacher

Dear Mayor Bloomberg, 3.3.12

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

The teacher ratings came out this week. It seems there are a lot of innacuracies. I imagine if an important report affected you they way these affect teachers who get unfavorable ratings, you would be upset. It seems that you don't care about that so much. Too bad.

I wanted to write to you and tell you about my weekend, and last weekend, and next weekend. The photo above shows my living room. You'll notice it is full of papers. These are piles of my students' work. I lug this stuff home so that I can read through it all again in order to complete my progress reports. We present progress reports at Parent/Teacher conferences which we have scheduled for four days after school over the next two weeks. In our school, in our grade, we meet with parents for 20 minutes conferences. As we have 29 students, that's 580 minutes of meetings after school. We are lucky that the UFT has allowed us to have one half day of school to have meetings, but most parents work during the day and need to come at night-more than we could see in one evening. So, in my class we schedule three or four additional evenings.

Some teachers fill out checklists to chart student progress. In my school, we use a grade appropriate standards based check list, but we attach a narrative evaluation of each student's performance in each of seven subject areas. In my grade, we write these narratives twice a year. I am lucky because I teach in an ICT class, and I only have to write 16 narratives each semester. My co-teacher has to write narratives for 13 students plus her annual IEP forms. (Actually, we have additional meetings for the IEP students as well, but those are during the day, usually during our prep periods.) The other teachers on my grade, Steve and Ilana, each must write 30 narratives! The narratives I write about my students' performance in school are quite intense. I'd post one here, but that would invade a student's privacy. I would never want to do that. The shortest narrative I've written today is about 1,200 words long. The longest is over 1,700 words. I try to give the parents a complete overview of their child's performance in my class. It takes me over two hours, sometimes longer, to write each report. Plus I have to fill out the checklist, add in the attendance and lateness data, and, we like to include a photo or a quote from each child. In addition, I gather a packet of work samples to show families at the conference. This takes additional time as well.

This weekend, I took about three hours off from writing time to do a load or two of laundry, to go for a run and to watch my son play soccer. Thankfully, although my husband is also a teacher, he teaches a cluster class, music, and doesn't have bi-annual reports to write. He was able to grocery shop, fix a broken appliance, make lunches for after the soccer game and cook us some dinner. He is a good husband, and a good teacher. I hope you and your politician friends give him a good rating.

I was wondering if my extra weekend work, which is crucial for my students and their families, for which I am not paid anything extra, ever, at all, will affect my rating. I know it's meaningful, I know it's important, I know it helps families understand their child's strengths and weaknesses and how they can support their children with school work much more than the test score they will receive in the summer or fall of this year. But what I don't know is how you can really know how hard I, and thousands of teachers across this city, work to ensure our students' success, based on a number from 1 through 4, that these 8 year old children will get as a result of three or four hours of testing in April.

That's why I write you these letters: so that you will know.

Sincerely, a NYC public school teacher,
Jennifer Hardy

Ohio University

Hi, this is Jennifer, Jenny's guest blogger, writing about my trip to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, with my daughter Rosa. Rosa is an aspiring photographer and we went to Ohio University to look specifically at two photography programs. Ohio offers photography majors in both their School of Visual Communications, which is part of the Scripps School of Journalism and offers majors in photojournalism and commercial photography; and in their School of Fine Arts where they offer a B.F.A. in photography.

Athens is located in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. It is a beautiful, although somewhat remote, area of Ohio. Ohio University is the oldest college/university in the old Northwest Territory. Founded in 1804, it is the reason for being of Athens and Athens is completely a college town. The campus is beautiful. There are lots of old trees and red brick buildings with lots of lovely old Victorian homes scattered around the campus serving as fraternity or sorority houses or campus offices. There is a business district adjacent to campus with bookstores, coffee shops, vegetarian and ethnic restaurants, a movie theater and,

naturally I suppose, a multitude of bars.

We spent a day and a half on campus and everyone we met was friendly and absolutely delighted to talk about the school. We spent considerable time with both of the department heads of the programs Rosa was interested in and they both were very willing to discuss her interest in photography and why she wants to pursue it at length. I have been on many college tours and it is rare to get that kind of personal attention.

Ohio University has about 20,000 undergraduate students. The student body is small enough so that there is a feeling of community, but large enough to offer a wide range of academic majors, loads of clubs and extracurricular activities, and lots of opportunities for internships and foreign study. The school is Division 1 in most sports and also has many club teams. There are three separate buildings for athletic activities: a new gym with a rock climbing wall and an indoor track, a natatorium with an Olympic size pool and an ice rink.

For the most academically advanced students, Ohio University offers the Honors Tutorial College which is based on the Oxford and Cambridge tutorial system. If students are admitted to this college they are basically free to design their own course of study and to pursue it with individual guidance from professors of their choice.

I loved Ohio University, but unfortunately my daughter did not. While she appreciated all of the individual attention she received, I think it is just too far away from home for her. I, however, think that it is a gem of a school.