Work Hard. Be Nice. by Jay Mathews

Author:Jay Mathews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

This is the room

That has the kids

Who want to learn

To read more books

To build a bet-ter

To-mor-row!

They liked the rhythm of the words, even though they were not in a classroom, but sitting in their white shirts and beige shorts on concrete blocks outside 250 East 156th Street in the Bronx.

Levin was having trouble keeping his spirits up. He had to be enthusiastic and energetic when he greeted his new class. The students had to see that KIPP had nothing of the ill-tempered listlessness that characterized many big-city classrooms. But he was having difficulty feeling it.

At least his P.S. 156 space was better than what Verdin had provided KIPP at Garcia. They had a double classroom on the second floor. He and Corcoran decorated it colorfully. They welcomed with smiles and happy words the children who appeared, as instructed, two days before school started. The fifth graders were subdued but made little trouble. They seemed pleased by what they had experienced in their abbreviated summer school. Some took an interest in the new games and chants and stories. Others looked on with apprehension and puzzlement, not sure what this was about.

Corcoran had no experience with the KIPP system, so he and Levin had been practicing, thinking, and talking of little else. Levin’s mother had found them a walk-up apartment on the third floor of a building on East Thirty-third Street. It was a pleasant neighborhood. By living together, Levin and Corcoran, like Levin and Feinberg the previous year, could spend their evenings planning for the next day and take turns answering telephone calls from students about the homework.

Their conversations the first few weeks were often about how hard it was to teach in the Bronx. The big KIPP idea that all students were going to college seemed to many of these children like one of those fairy tales they had been forced to read in fourth grade. Their quizzes came back full of mistakes and unanswered questions. Many resisted doing the homework. In contrast to KIPP’s first weeks in Houston, when Feinberg and Levin felt their class rising like a brightly colored balloon, the Bronx class often seemed glum and weighed down.

Levin thought of the situation in baseball terms. He was playing in a tougher league. The speed of the pitching was faster. The outfield fences were farther away. He had been hitting the ball out of the park in Houston, but in New York he was swinging and missing.

He tried to adjust. When KIPP was born, Levin and Feinberg, without much discussion, agreed that they would never be satisfied. They would change their model as they discovered parts that did not work or parts that worked better with some adjustments. That was how they had come up with the KIPP idea in the first place, trial and error. They had learned from Ball and Esquith, but they had to tailor their mentors’ methods to their own styles and circumstances.

Feinberg was still making changes as he started his Houston school. Levin and Corcoran had to do the same in the Bronx.

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