Ms. Moffett's First Year

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Henceforth, these book reports will be a time-saving device. You need not read entire books anymore. Read these condensed versions instead. You'll have that much more time for your own blog.

Today I read, "Ms. Moffett's First Year", by Abby Goodnough. After reading the first few pages, I thought it was going to be an advertisement for the Fellowship Program run by the New York City public school system. But it actually turned out to be a detailed critique of it. There were many controversial education issues raised, ranging from special education to the curriculum, to the extent to which a teacher should have a relationship with the students.

The story focuses on one Fellow's trials and tribulations in her first year of teaching. It was also the first year of the Program (the 2000-2001 academic year). The Program offered a tuition-free master's degree (night school), with limitations and restrictions, of course, to people accepted to the Program. School administrators were resentful of this perk that new teachers got. Some were still paying off their student loans.

The 40-something Ms. Moffett quit her job as a legal secretary to seek fulfillment changing young lives as a Fellow. She was assigned a class of about 20 first graders at P.S. 92 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, a depressed immigrant neighborhood.

There had been federally mandated teaching reforms instituted that year. States received education grant money for buying into various teaching methods, such as "Success For All". New York liked that method because it had worked for other school districts, and it was tailored for inexperienced teachers. Success For All provided the teacher with a script she was to read verbatim, and the same textbooks for all the city's schools. The teacher had a pre-fabricated lesson she need not lift a finger planning for.

Throughout the year, several different school administrators observed Ms. Moffett teaching. Sometimes she was given contradictory information about what to do in certain situations. In one incident, one student had a strong urge to continue writing a composition when it was time for the teacher to start teaching a different subject. One administrator criticized Ms. Moffett for letting that student continue to write, and said she should force her to stop writing and join the rest of the class, doing the next lesson. It was important for Ms. Moffett to assert her authority over the students.

Another administrator told Ms. Moffett it was okay to allow the student to continue writing, as it was so difficult to get students to focus on a particular activity, and the student would learn more or accomplish more, and her self-esteem might be boosted, if she were allowed to finish her composition, even if she missed the following lesson.

Ms. Moffett often fell behind the strict schedule dictated by educrats, trying to get the students to behave. Unluckily, she was assigned more unruly students than was usual for a class such as hers. There were about 4 or 5 who could not sit still, had the attention span of flies, and could not learn.

For the first month of school, one student's parent had to stay in the classroom, lest the student throw a temper tantrum if the parent left her. A few of the kids truly needed special education. However, it was extremely expensive to create a special education class just for these students. Keeping them in a regular class was also expensive-- in terms of teaching time taken away from the other students because the teacher had to waste time disciplining these problem students. Ms. Moffett put in requests to have these students tested for learning disabilities, but her requests were ignored. Instead, by the middle of the year, the students had either moved away, or been transferred to other classes or other schools. Ms. Moffett then got three new students in exchange, who could learn and were well-behaved. This changed the whole dynamic of the classroom. The rest of the year was much improved as an environment in which to learn.

Ms. Moffett was supposed to spend a specific number of minutes on each different subject. But if the students were so focused on say, a certain social studies lesson that it exceeded the 20-minute allocation on it, she would go overtime, and sacrifice the math period. In previous years, the school system had emphasized reading and writing more than math, but scores on certain primary school standardized math tests had been so low, and there had been such sweeping education reforms of late, that math was becoming important again.

School administrators severely criticized Ms. Moffett's ways in their evaluations, fearing a cutoff of funding from the State Education Department if the school did not follow the standards and practices set by the Department. On the day Department inspectors were to visit P.S. 92, the administrators went into Ms. Moffett's classroom and pressured her to re-decorate the classroom bulletin boards with student work that would be acceptable to the inspectors. Sometimes teachers even doctored students' work to make it appear that the students were learning more than they really were.

Deprivation was a major feature of many of the students' home lives. They didn't get enough attention, enough to eat, enough care in general. Ms. Moffett, being an idealist, had a strong desire to help improve the quality of the children's lives. Ms. Moffett chose her favorite students, as teachers will. She befriended one particular student who had a difficult home life. She took her to a children's performance of "Cinderella" outside of school on a weekend. Ms. Moffett knew it was an extremely risky thing to do. She would be in big trouble if anyone at the school found out she had done this. There would have been a very costly public lawsuit if anything happened to the child. The school strongly advises against getting involved with students outside of school, not just because there are liability issues. It is unfair to favor one child like that, when so many others are just as needy of the same treatment and do not get it.

Epilogue

The Teaching Fellows Program has been growing, despite the painful changes that had to be made to accommodate the recently enacted education reforms.

Ms. Moffett survived her first year teaching. Despite all of the negative feedback she received from her evaluators, and all the stress she had to endure, she realized that teaching is fulfilling to her. She completed her master's degree in three years, and is still teaching in the same classroom.