The Complacency of Teaching: Introduction

One thing I think about a lot but don't discuss that often with other people is how to fix, or at least mess up in a different way, all of the things I see wrong with our appropriately maligned public education system. In the unlikely event that someone I don't know reads this, I should state here that I work as, let me get this right, a Russian Bilingual ELL Educational Assistant at Parkrose Middle School in outer NE Portland. I love my job because my coworkers in the ELL department and superiors are pretty awesome, driven and creative, and, especially, because the kids I work with are pretty damn cool. There are about 175 students at my school, 6th-8th grade, identified as ELL, which essentially means that they speak a language other than English at home, perhaps in addition to, perhaps exclusive to, English. Additionally their English skills and academic success must be at such a level to warrant support services. I work with kids from a huge variety of places - Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Moldova, Mexico, Haiti, Laos, Ukraine, Somalia - but I am primarily hired to work with, interpret, translate and advocate for the Russian-speaking community of the Parkrose School District, most of whom are not from Russia at all, but from Russian-speaking former Soviet States. Many of them speak a large number of languages beccause of the geopolitics of that region, but I just learned that one of my 7th-grade girls takes the prize, speaking (or at least understanding) 6 languages including: Russian, Ukrainian, English, Moldovan, Romanian, and something I've never heard of before called "Khlyatskii."

This ELL population makes up a pretty large percentage of the student body at our school. This was not always the case, but is the product of a huge influx of former Soviet Evangelicals (the majority of my 50ish Russian-speaking students are related to one another and are 7th Day Adventists), Spanish-speaking migrant workers, and Vietnames, Hmong and Mien communities whose roots I don't really understand. 10 years or so ago Parkrose, located close to the Portland Airport (which, incidentally, used to be called the Parkrose Airport, apparently) was a pretty middle class, white, Americanized, Italian neighborhood. The construction of apartment complexes and the development of inner portland changed the economic dynamics of the neighborhood, which now houses enough lower-income families to make it so that approximately 70% of the student body at Parkrose Middle School is below the poverty level. The convergence of students whose family situations make it likely that their parents have received rudimentary educations themselves, meaning that they often work multiple, low-paying jobs for long hours resulting in the kids largely parenting themselves, along with teachers who are used to dealing with more-or-less driven, certainly English-speaking, middle-class white kids brings a lot of the inadequacies of the whole system into stark relief.

I do believe that most of the teachers I work with have nothing but the best intentions for their students, and that they believe in their work, but it seems to me like a large number of systemic factors work to dull their passion for teaching their subjects in a relatively small amoun of time, and also breed an incredible territorialism for which I was totally unprepared when I started working at Parkrose just over a year ago.

I guess that's a bit of an introduction. Hopefully I'll get around to posting some, "What if instead of doing things x-ly, we tried doing them y-ly" ideas that I've been having.

In the meantime, I suppose I should return to lyric writing, which I am using to fill my day until Meri comes to visit tonight.

Also, I must mention that you should really check out the Jose Gonzalex record "Veneer" from last year. It's totally beatiful and slipped under my radar last year.