A Morning Person's Observations #5: The summer's colors

The birds sit on top of this tree

This is one of the first times in Seattle I've been really excited when the summer was ending. The overcast sky, the slightly cooler temperatures, the shorter days. I'm loving it all. Mostly because it's all signally that it's time for the school year to start, and I'm really excited to be teaching again.

The p patch is full of dark greens. I went out this morning to sit on the bench and take in the world and it was actually wet for the first time in months. A light morning rain had made the whole garden smell earthy. There were some birds on top of the Douglas Fir, they were robin-sized but their silhouettes showed skinnier beaks.

Before I get swept away in the excitement and beauty of this fall in Seattle, I want to take a moment to reflect on my gratitude for this summer. The p patch gave some amazing colorful moments and helped me relax. I went from a stressful anxious time to a positive, relaxed attitude thanks to many things, one of them being mornings in the p patch with the plots of summer colors.

I wandered lonely as a cloud...

These remind me of the Lupine Lady

And this makes me think Tom Sawyer and friends were here

"The summer sun will set," she said, "if you leave it up there long."

Maybe someone else likes drinking coffee in the p patch :)

That floats on high o'er hill and vales

These flowers lasted through the first April rain, then turned to summer snow!

Rosemary!

David thought these were centipedes when we walked out to the p patch at night!

The squirrels love these chestnuts!

Another alleyside, same old dinosaurs :)

Can you spot the snail?

Dark days

I don't know what to say about what happened at work. I'm still in shock over how fast things deteriorated there. I don't want to hurt the folks still at the center with my words, but before every interview this summer I've found myself pacing around and spiraling over negative thoughts. I can't get out the door on time, or get myself to have a positive attitude. I feel stuck, doomed to fail, sure that things will not go well. I know this comes from the fact that I'm carrying a lot of pain I need to find a way to put down, and writing it out might help.

The most important takeaway I want people to know is that it has nothing to do with the youth, the participants, the students. Teaching there was my dream job, and I loved working with all of the students that came through the doors. I really miss that classroom.

In talking with one of my former co-workers about how much to share our story with the public at large, he pointed out his reason for hesitating. He told me everyone he had talked to about the center acted like it was a crazy idea to have a bottom-up, grassroots center run by homeless youth. He felt all they would take was that a flawed idea had failed, that there was no way a center like that could ever succeed anyway.

Upon hearing that, I've become incredibly grateful that I don't have to worry about that in my community. While talking about the center to friends and family, folks seemed incredibly excited by the philosophy of having the participants who were affected by services be the ones that get a voice in what those services should look like. I saw everyone reach out in their own individual way, and as an institution, to provide funds, space for events, conversations and relationships over dinner. And when things started to crumble, I went to my community again, this time in distress, asking for help and support. The message I got whole-heartedly was that everything given to the center in the last year and a half to build relationships was worthwhile and there were no regrets, and now that energy will be re-directed because what is happening here isn't ok.

I haven't felt as truly rooted in Seattle as I did when I was going through that crisis. So many people offered a listening ear, advice, support, and affirmation that we weren't out of line and things were not ok. When going through the organizational outlets for expressing concern and distress are blocked one after the other, and you are told to not use words that describe your situation like "safety", "retaliation", and "staff splitting", asked to take care of your employer's feelings while they cause you harm and their unsafe behavior toward you is escalating, you start to feel like you're the one not currently checked in with reality. It was gas lighting in my opinion, what was happening to the line staff, and it was beyond frustrating. I don't know how I would have held myself together if there weren't good people around me keeping me grounded. Assuring me one after another, "This is not ok, and we respect you standing up for yourself."

One of the most powerful times that happened was when it came from the participants. They had a lot of questions for us about what was going on, and they weren't happy with some of our choices. I know how it looked, and can only imagine how it felt, when the people with keys (literally) to services refuse to show up and open the doors. But when they heard us explain ourselves as best we could, there were tough questions and statements, and then there was the message: "How can we support you?" And again as I was leaving, "I'm sorry if we didn't do enough to support you." That sentiment meant so much coming from the youth, who were caught in the middle of the internal dysfunction that they didn't cause but was affecting them the most. So I have nothing but good thoughts about the youth there, and hope they either find a way to take back their center, or find new places to offer them community.

When a participant came to the center and said that the people there were their chosen family, I could understand where that feeling came from. Organizing and uniting with the other staff members made me feel like we were becoming a chosen family together.

But then, hearing those same words from the management that had the power (and used it) to let go of some of these co-workers feels...different. I got invited to a "Family Dinner and Picture" by a member of the management who had refused to meet with the staff when we said we had to leave the center we felt so unsafe with our employer. To be frank, it pissed me off. I felt like I had been tricked into connecting with my co-workers and the participants by hearing the higher-ups refer to us all as a family, and then I was continuously reminded who could take that all away from me. You don't fire or 86 someone from your family, so if you have the responsibility or power to do that at the center, stop using that word. I'm fortunate to have a positive relationship with my given family, but for my co-workers and the youth who don't have that same privilege, it feels even more unfair to know that folks who have the power to select who gets to be a part of this community would still try to sell that this is a "family."

I'm not doing well with this. It still anxiously haunts my dreams every few nights. I run into these members of management and feel completely shut down.

But I know I'll also be ok. I don't get migraines at 6:00 p.m. anymore. My mental, physical, and emotional health has improved a lot. During interviews this summer, I've usually said phrases like, "I work very well on a team with other positive folks bouncing ideas off one another. What are the dynamics like between the staff here?"

At the current program where I'll be teaching, when I asked that, they told me, "We really don't like for people to go into their own offices. We like working together as a team. Oh, and if you have any discipline problems, we don't want you to deal with that. We're the directors, that's what we're here for. You should send those students to us. But you won't have many. Every quarter we ask our students to give us hard feedback so we can improve our teaching, and they're always just so nice and grateful, they never tell us anything mean." I tried to remind myself that this was a professional interview so I needed to hold back my tears.

I was blessed to go on lots of low budget trips this summer. A week at the cabin, a weekend at IslandWood, time with folks in North Carolina. I tell folks the story over and over. Sometimes I feel farther away and lighter, sometimes I feel I'm carrying it worse than ever. Time and space keep doing their work while I try to do mine. Every morning there's something new to see in the pea patch, something new blossoming and opening. And writing it out, even ambiguously, does feel like it helped.

A Morning Person's Observations #4

The New Sit Spot

The first morning in my new apartment, I sat on the steps on my patio thinking this would be my new sit spot.  Goodness am I excited about that patio, but it would not be a nice place to drink coffee each morning (apparently I'm a coffee drinker now).  There is nothing but wood and concrete, and I heard some birds, but didn't see a single one fly overhead on the day I sat on the terrace.  There are some empty pots for a garden underneath the staircase, so I figured if the landlady didn't mind I could create some greenery to watch each morning.

Then I went to throw out the trash and explored a little in the alley behind my building.  To the right there was the sign of a garden plot.  As I got closer I saw it was actually a ppatch!  There was a bench leaning against the wall, with the perfect spot to sit and watch the ppatch as someone sips on their morning tea, er, coffee.

Spring sunlight in the ppatch

There's a sign with a number to call if you want a patch.  I'm sure the waiting list is enormously long, but I got on the interest list anyway.  However, if I only spending a year in this apartment, never get a ppatch, but still sit and enjoy the setting every morning with my cup of coffee, that will be enough, that will be perfect.

It's Lent and I'm feeling lost.  Since the GED changed, everything at work feels like a different moving part, moving away from the rest of the puzzle instead of coming together.  I'm trying so hard to figure it out, to give the students concrete steps forward with their education, but everything I say sounds like a broken promise.  "No we don't have the practice tests yet," "No you don't have enough credits," "No your old scores aren't saved anywhere."  All of this is out of my control, but it's so frustrating and trying to navigate the pieces has burnt me out.


So, I'm giving up doing too much work and taking on sitting in the ppatch.  I'm giving up going out and taking on cooking long, slow dinners at home.  I'm giving up spending my evenings glued to the computer screen, and taking on long, slow baths, reading more books, seeing more friends, playing more games, and longer nights of sleep.

The ppatch has already given me hopeful signs of spring, I think one bush must be the Indian plum, because it was buds when I first started sitting in February, and now its blossoms are the size of my hand.  They look like hands opening to the sky during meditation.  The chickadees and robins make frequent appearances, talking to one another as they pass through and check me out a little.  Two pigeons, darker than most, spent a flirtatious morning cooing and following each other around the adjoining balconies and gutters.  This is what I love, having a moment in the secret world that is always here, that I tune out when I'm focused on my human schedule.

This morning the crows came and sat on what Ann (a smoker and coffee drinker in the ppatch I met today) says is a chestnut tree.  One held a large twig, the other stared me down for a second, as if to challenge my place in the patch.  I didn't back down and took a sip of coffee without batting an eye.  Then the sun broke through the clouds and lit up the row patches, and the crow accepted me and took off.

The highlight was a month ago, creeping slowly and quietly into the ppatch, trying hard not to spill my tea (back when I still could get through a whole day on tea, sigh).  I looked to the top of the Doug Fir that is on the other side of the fence, but hangs generously over the ppatch.  Often on the bare branch sits a crow or sometimes a robin.  Today there was a hawk!  It had been making an alarm call that I mistook for a squirrel.  After I sat on the bench it stayed a little longer, scouting the situation.  It gave up, possibly thinking I'd scared away any prey.  As justice, it soared away calling out again, scaring away any prey for me.

My hawk identification is horrible.  It was tiny for a hawk, and almost all white on the underbelly.  My initial google research suggests it was a Short-tailed Hawk by the looks, but the International Union for Conservation of Nature says that hawk is keen to stay tropical, so back to square one.  Hope it shows up again and gives me a better look.

Why do students take the GED?

When I interviewed for my job at PSKS, one of the questions I had to answer was, "What does a GED mean to you?"

My answer was that while a GED was equivalent to a high school diploma for resume or college application purposes, to me it said more than that.  It said that the recipient chose an alternative path for their education than the conveyor belt that they started on.  When option one didn't work, they found a different way and earned it.  I tutored a high school graduate once who had special needs.  She told me that she felt pushed through classes because teachers didn't want to deal with her, and handed a diploma to get rid of her.  She felt jealous of GED students, because they had to work for their 450 passing grade.

I recently read an opinion piece by three guys from Department of Economics at the University of Chicago who very much disagree with me.

Their piece is about how the new GED is more difficult to better test the "scholastic ability" (Heckman, et al.) of students, but that both the old and new GED miss the picture by ignoring "a completely different set of skills that matter in high school and life."  As an educator who values authentic assessments, I actually agree with their main point, that the GED doesn't accurately measure a student's intelligence.  But as someone who is not in the field of Economics and actually works with GED students, I find their tactics for making their point heartless and short-sighted.

At one point they ask:

But why do GED recipients drop out of high school? The GED test — and achievement tests in general — miss skills like motivation, persistence, self-esteem, time management and self-control.

This is why they think GED students drop out?  Because they have low self-esteem?  Poor time management?  Because they are lazy?

Students who's families experience homelessness face many barriers when it comes to education.  The McKinney-Vento Act notes that homeless students are susceptible to enrollment delays (due to lack of records), likely to be segregated from non-homeless students, and struggle to find transportation to their "school of origin."  Therefore, homeless students often end up changing schools many times while their families move from shelter to shelter.  Each time a child changes schools, they fall behind as they struggle to adapt to new cultural norms combined with the stresses of living in poverty.

Other students drop out because they're running away from an abusive home life.  Some students come out to conservative parents, who then kick them out.  In these situations, the youth is usually not thinking about staying in high school at the moment, they are focused on survival.  I wouldn't say that they lack "motivation and persistence" though.

I've met a teenage mother who got kicked out when she had one credit left, the school didn't want to find a way to deal with her situation.  Another student got kicked out for the assumption that he was involved in gang activities.

And don't get me started on the amount of students I've met who dropped out because they were in Special Education classes, struggling more and more to confine themselves in a system that just doesn't fit with their learning style, until they finally get so frustrated (or break enough behavior contracts) that they leave.

Acknowledging the real reasons why students leave high school is imperative to creating a safe alternative for them.

My student Josh (student names are always changed for confidentiality purposes) has been a street youth for years.

Since the GED changed, I haven't gotten the new study guides and haven't been able to tell the students what the new test looks like, what passing grade you need, what materials you will need, etc.

Josh comes into my classroom last Friday, "Hey Teach," he says.  "I made a bet with someone that I could get my GED this week, so I've been taking the tests all week, and I should get my scores in the next 24 hours."

I didn't understand how he had even began to go about this.  The Testing Center closest to where Josh hangs out hasn't even started testing the new GED yet, so Josh had ridden the buses to three different community colleges in two opposite directions.  Once he signed up for the test online, he had to show up and take it or lose the money he had paid for that testing slot.

As a student under 19, Josh needs a form granting him permission to test from his home school district.  I start this with students the day I meet them, because it's a long, bureaucratic process.  Josh got the form filled out himself, but there was still trouble at the center with the administrators thinking it wasn't legitimate.  He asked to speak to a supervisor and advocated for himself to be able to test that day.

Then, Josh spent $120 and 7 hours labeling parts of an atom, writing an essay comparing historical articles, and doing algebra.  His scores came in that Friday, and he got his GED and passed two of his tests with honors.  Don't try to tell me this student dropped out because he lacked motivation, persistence, self-esteem, time management, or self-control.

I do still agree with the authors that students like Josh are missing out on some crucial parts of high school by getting a GED, but the experiences I value are different from the skills they advocate for.

When a student gets a GED, they might never have a chance to practice public speaking.  They might not get the holistic experience of trying out different electives: art, music, sports, and other clubs.  And they definitely miss out on the chance to maintain a few years in a more sheltered adolescence with a chance to just be a socializing teenager.

The opinion article started with:

In a 2011 study, the GED Testing Service found that within six years of earning a GED, about 40 percent of GED recipients enroll in college -- but most drop out within a year.  Only about 1 percent earns a bachelor's degree.

These numbers are interesting to me, compared to the fact that over 90% of the hundreds of College Success students with SEA (many who are GED recipients) are enrolled in higher education in good academic standing.  To me these numbers say that the GED test, like any test, can only measure a snapshot of a student.  There needs to be as much support for GED students as there are for middle class high school seniors pursuing higher education to expect both groups to be able to reach the same results.

Eventually the authors of the article finally conclude with the point that the GED needs to be supplemented.

Many GED recipients come from disadvantaged backgrounds and receive less support at early ages, but various interventions could help compensate for early disadvantage and improve life outcomes. Many have high rates of return and work primarily by building skills not captured by tests. Dropouts deserve a real second chance, something not assured by passing the GED test or any achievement test.

With this I agree, but they miss the part where this is happening.  This is exactly what my work with PSKS and SEA is about.  Which makes me sad to think that unless these Economic academics didn't do their homework, there might not be supportive programs for GED students in other cities.  That is a real problem that I'm glad the authors are aware of.  I just hope as they continue their work, they take the time to actually get to know some GED students.

Department of Education.  "McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youths Program."  Federal Register.  Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, 8 March 2002.  Web notice.  3 Feb 2014.

Heckman, James J., John Eric Humpries, and Tim Kautz.  "New GED test fails to measure skills that matter most."  Seattle Times: Education Lab Blog.  Caitlin Moran, 23 Jan 2014.  Web.  2 Feb 2014.