Stubborn Hope: Memoir of an Urban Teacher

By Carole Marshall

Stubborn Hope: Memoir of an Urban Teacher is a unique portrait of two decades of teaching in an urban high school, and an inside look at the effects of the new reforms on urban education. Sometimes humorously, sometimes painfully, the author describes the struggles and achievements of some exceptional young people. Interspersed with the portraits are lessons learned about teaching in an urban environment: class management; homework and literacy; the art, not science, of teaching. Finally, the author describes the route her school has taken over the last two decades of changing reforms. In the era of small learning communities, the huge, old school rises from chaos to success. Then, with the onset of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, it plunges into a morass as bad or worse than the situation she encountered twenty years before. What worked in the past is being replaced by a system that punishes and betrays students. It's happening across the country. The book concludes with a warning: before any more damage is done, we Americans need to return to the values that created public education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carole Marshall
• Release date: Dec 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311603982

Carole Marshall

Carole Marshall is a writer, a journalist, and a teacher. She taught high school English in an urban school in Providence, Rhode Island for two decades. Prior to that, she worked for a number of leading newspapers in the United States and Europe and co-wrote two books on women’s health. She has a Masters in Teaching from Brown University and a Masters in Communication from the City University of New York. She retired from teaching last year to return to her first love: writing.

Book preview

Lots of people send me books to read. Usually I toss them. I read yours and loved it. Diane Ravitch

STUBBORN HOPE:

MEMOIR OF AN URBAN TEACHER

Carole Marshall

Copyright 2013 Carole Marshall

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Smashwords Edition

Cover design by Bob Bianchini

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Table of Contents

Why I Taught in an Urban School

And What I Loved About It

A Brief History

Juanita

Homework and Literacy

Tiana

Classroom Management

Tony

The Art of Teaching

Terrence

The Miracles

Milagros

Maria

The Twins,

Change

Problems and Problem-solvers

I Become Involved

The End

But it’s Not Over

Afterword

Why I Taught in an Urban High School

I taught high school English for two decades in a school called Hope, on a street called Hope, in a state whose motto, state seal and flag all display one word only: Hope. Does that seem like a bit of overkill to you, dear reader? Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude said it best when she said, The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Yet hope was what kept me going for the roughly twenty years I taught there. It was one of those schools that everyone despairs over: old and broken, often in the news for all the wrong reasons, a place people tend to avoid. The most common response to introducing myself as one of its faculty was a shocked, Oh dear, God bless you, as if I were some sort of Mother Teresa.

It would be hard to explain the attraction to the casual listener. It would take hours. I’d want to tell story after story about students that year, and prior-year students I’d heard from, and cool things I was doing in class, plans I had for other cool things, and the crises of that day. For years, I sat in the midst of whatever gathering I was at, telling myself not to get started, not to shanghai the conversation, because once I got going, it was almost impossible to stop me.

Teaching had become a passion; I hoped fervently to make a difference in the lives of my students. I believe I did for many. But I also believe that, at least in the urban schools, teachers are up against overwhelming odds and, increasingly, the challenges have become more than teachers can handle. The urban schools have always had to limp along with fewer resources. Over decades, they have come to serve mostly the poor and that population has very little power to secure for its children’s needs. Nevertheless, a school with a stable faculty and responsive leaders could, with much hard work, counteract some of the damage done by poverty.

That is no longer the case. The practice of non-stop, high-stakes testing that has gripped the nation over the past decade is destroying education for millions of students, especially in urban schools. Among other results, it inevitably leads to the reluctant exit of experienced and dedicated teachers from urban schools.

I would like you to get to know some of my students and to think about what a good education for them would consist of, because when we consider the millions of students in urban schools as a population to be feared, or forgotten, we are making a mistake. We need to see the potential, the humanity, and the strength that all too often goes to waste because we as a society aren’t willing to invest.

And What I Loved About It: A List

Reading what they wrote about their lives, their passions, their problems.

Watching them become better writers and better thinkers.

Their pride in their accomplishments as writers.

Seeing their faces when they suddenly realized that those dreaded great books are filled with sex, violence, and pain as well as strength and wisdom, in other words exactly what they cared about.

Their reading journals, where they put down their responses to the books they chose to read individually, as those responses moved from automatic to astute.

The process every year whereby a bunch of rowdy, apathetic and testing students became sufficiently convinced that I was serious about teaching and became serious about learning.

The point in the year when reluctantly following my rules tipped into following the rules because that made it possible to become a learning community.

Feeling the electrical amazement that presented itself when disadvantaged students were out of their impoverished environments, experiencing for the first time such wonders of the world as museums, theaters and beaches.

Looking around my classroom at the end of the year, with its scarred walls, faulty heating, cracked windows, and old furniture, and knowing that this room had come to represent intellectual excitement for many of the students who entered it each day.

Knowing that every day, I had gathered my courage and stood up to all the adolescent testing, and that had let students know that, one, they were safe in my class and, two, that I wasn’t afraid of urban students.

A Brief History

When I turned 35 and was raising a toddler, I made a transition from my original career as a reporter to something I thought would be easier and less time consuming. I secured a job at the state university where I taught the Introduction to Reporting classes. Most of the students were white and middle class, and I soon learned that the majority were more committed to the parties on the beach than they were to their future.

There was a sprinkling of African American students who caught buses down to the campus from neighborhoods in and around Providence. Those students were a clear, uncomfortable minority, but fortunately for me since I had no teacher training, the classes were in a computer lab. My job was less about creating community and more about coaching reporting and writing skills.

As the class progressed, it went from basic reporting exercises to more ambitious projects where I asked students to choose a newsworthy situation close to home and report on it. A curious phenomenon unfolded. I started getting a lot of resistance from suburban students who didn’t want to have to come up with an idea themselves.

On the other hand, I was getting riveting accounts from the African American students of drug addiction, prostitution and racism in their neighborhoods. Those stories were told with spot-on timing and in voices that were vividly authentic. It was very exciting for me to discover their skills and their potential.

But…and this is a big but…. although they could tell a great story, the students coming from the big urban high schools couldn’t write a correct sentence. Capital letters and ending punctuation were virtually unknown. Paragraph structure didn’t exist. I wondered how they’d gotten through all their years of school without learning it and I wondered how their professors in other classes were reacting to it. I personally had never expected to face this problem at the college level.

It eventually occurred to me that this was a situation where I could make a real difference. I could teach writing in an urban school at the high school level. I envisioned classes of students with important stories to tell, students with the potential to tell their stories well. In that vision, I would be the teacher who could motivate them and guide them along the path to the requisite skills, skills they needed to fill out applications correctly, write business letters, write papers, graduate from good colleges, and generally succeed in life.

To my surprise, I had found a purpose in life. During the next couple of years I attended the Masters program in Teaching at Brown University and started applying for jobs. Jobs were hard to come by and fiercely protected in the urban schools, but eventually I’d jumped through enough hoops. I was hired by the Providence School System and my career as a high school teacher began. I had little idea at the time of the roller coaster course I’d embarked on.

I was hired a month before school started in the summer of 1995. The English chair at the one high school in the city where students need to pass an exam to attend, was taking a sabbatical and I would fill in for a term. I met with the former chair and took notes on his goals for the students, made copies of his curriculum and all his hand-outs, bought the texts he used and read them all feverishly. The month was a time of eager anticipation and frenzied preparation.

Then, a day before school started, I received a call from the Department of Human Resources informing me that I would not