Work hard. Be nice. : how two inspired teachers created the most promising schools in America by Mathews Jay 1945-

Author:Mathews, Jay, 1945-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: http://www.archive.org/details/workhardbeniceho00math

Starting Again in Houston

Bus transportation from the Gulfton homes of Feinberg’s students to their new school at Askew Elementary was a problem. District policy was to punch in students’ addresses on the computer and choose street corners that served most of them. Many still had long walks to bus stops. Feinberg thought that could kill his program. It would be dark those mornings. His school was starting so early. He had promised his parents that the buses would be convenient.

He knew the building on McCarty Drive where the school district bus schedulers had their offices. He showed up one morning with breakfast taquitos for the entire staff and offered to help them get the new KIPP bus stop locations just right. “Could we put the computer on manual override?” he asked. “I would like to punch in my own times and locations.” The man in front of the computer, munching on his taquito, told Feinberg to go right ahead.

Askew was a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school. The two-story brick building was fifty-six years old, with a dozen yellowish brown modular buildings clumped together in back. KIPP would use three of the modulars — a large one with space for two classrooms, a smaller one with space for one class, and a third with a two-hundred-square-foot storage room, which would serve as Feinberg’s office. Piles of broken furniture, old books, and cleaning equipment filled most of that space, but Feinberg managed to push them to one side. He had a desk and chair.

Unlike Levin in New York, Feinberg had gotten permission to

I

conduct a summer session. It was shorter than he wanted, just two weeks. It finished a week before the regular school year began. He still needed to arrange for lunches and a hundred other details. He pushed the FileMaker program on his Mac to the limit getting the paperwork ready for opening day. He wrote schedules and homeroom lists and letters to parents. His teachers tried to remove, or rearrange, the piles of debris in the previously occupied modulars. There was not much time for pedagogical debates or detailed lesson plans. Feinberg told his team to focus on essentials: “Get your classrooms ready, get your materials ready, tell me what you need, start doing your planning for what you are going to do when the kids get here. Those first couple of days we’re going to have them all together, and don’t worry about it. I am going to take care of everything.”

As his teachers discovered, Feinberg’s idea of taking care of everything sometimes meant doing things they thought they had already done. Each night, after they went home exhausted, Feinberg slipped into their classrooms and made changes. Some of their posters were not, in his view, properly hung or well chosen. Some of the lettering on their bulletin boards was crooked. Feinberg knew he was going too far, but he could not control himself. He blamed Levin for his fixation on classroom arrangements. His friend demanded the best possible displays, as Ball had done.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.