Month: June 2017

Finding a Job Coach

by Stephen Danna, posted in Teaching, Uncategorized

What had I gotten myself into? Weeks before school started, the unorthodox teacher knew he needed help both from above and in the trenches. A growing sense of anxiety gnawed at his lack of teaching skills, knowledge, and experience. He had a Master’s Degree, but in Oceanography, not Education. His exposure to teaching was what he received as a student, and that didn’t always conjure up good memories. No, he needed a mentor, a confidant, a friend. Someone who would warn him of the common pitfalls new teachers make. A person who would happily share best ideas and practices, and be a phone call away to look over lesson plans or anything else used in the classroom. A master tactician who knew how to keep a potentially rambunctious group engaged, while maintaining good relations with parents. With but one week till classes at St. Mary’s Academy started, the unorthodox teacher had not found that much-needed mentor, and his sense of dread was approaching a calamitous level. And then he met Al.Screen Shot 2017-06-24 at 7.54.41 AM

Al was an older guy I met on the Saratoga Springs YMCA racquetball court. New to the area, and in my first week of school, I was hanging out at the courts hoping to find a game. In no time, I was invited to play doubles, and Al was my partner. I don’t remember whether we won or lost the game, but I knew I’d won a friend and mentor that afternoon when Al asked what I did for a living. Al was a veteran Advanced French teacher with 30+ years experience, and I felt a virtual arm drape across my shoulders when I told him I was a new teacher in my first week of teaching. Though 30+ years had elapsed since Al first started teaching, he understood my situation. Al and I would continue playing racquetball together, but we spent more time talking teaching. He was my lifeline. My mentor. My friend and confidant. He told me how to get students engaged in the lesson. The importance of having fun in class. Why relationships matter. How poor kids sometimes are disadvantaged. That not all students learn the same way. To forgive yourself for mistakes. To be honest and admit when you don’t know the answers. To play games embedded with content. To not take things students say or do personal. To enjoy the greatest career in the world.

Reflecting back 30 years, I remember my first mentor as if it were yesterday. The relationship and trust that developed between Al and me were indelible, and though I would find other mentors over the years, none were as that first new teacher-mentor experience. I would become a mentor myself, and do my best to cultivate what Al and I had. The New York State Education Department (NYSED) would eventually offer grant monies for districts to create mentor programs, responding to the tragically high attrition rate in teaching. I would participate as a professional developer in many of the NYSED funded mentoring programs, and would come to find the most successful programs were those that focused on relationships, trust, and coaching.  Programs that focused on finding the right mentor. A mentor skilled in his or her craft, and who cared deeply about students, colleagues, and learning. One who would become the trustworthy confidant a new teacher could lean on.  Al was such a person.

Finding My Way to Psychology

by Michael Homenick, posted in Poverty, Uncategorized

I wish I could say I had always wanted to be a Psychologist.  But in fact it wasn’t until I got to college and took a ‘Psych’ course by accident (It was the only elective which would fit in my schedule.) that I discovered Psychology. So I switched majors. Even then I had no idea what kind of Psychology I wanted to go into.  It wasn’t until I was graduating from college and trying to figure out ‘now what?’ that a friend who also was not sure what he wanted to do called me up and said “Let’s be teachers.”  “What?” I replied. Screen Shot 2017-06-17 at 7.51.26 AM

At the time the city of New York, where I was going to college, was desperate for teachers in the inner city areas.  To fill their open positions, they placed ads in the newspapers.  I had no, that’s zero, education courses or training. But the city was willing to accept my Psychology, and probably a bunch of other classes in lieu of Education credits.  All I had to do was pass the exams (two parts: written and oral).  The results said I passed by one point.  Really? Maybe I did. Maybe I was a good guesser. Maybe Attila the Hun would have passed if he had taken the test.

So I found my self certified to teach K-6 in New York City and in an elementary school in the South Bronx not too far from where ‘Fort Apache, The Bronx’ with Paul Newman was filmed in 1981. (Google it.)

Excited, I arrived in September with the notion that all people living in poverty needed was some well intended white middle class kid like me to show them how to get out of poverty by cleaning up their neighborhood, coming to school, paying attention, doing their homework, etc., etc., etc..

I was assigned to the school as an ‘above quota teacher’.  I had no classroom assignment. “What?” I asked. “When do I get a classroom?” There were 10 or 15 or us who were in that category.  (Probably all guys like me who had passed the exam by one point.) I was told that as openings came up we would be assigned. There were about 150 classroom teachers in this K-6 school.  

We didn’t have to wait long.  Teaching there was so stressful and difficult that teachers would quit and not come back the next day; a few walked out in the middle of the day.

Four years later I, too, left.  I was no longer the kid with some unrealistic notions about how easy it would be to change things.  Although still a kid in many ways, I at least had a clearer understanding of the complexity of what happens in a school. I saw how poverty and family life affect learning and above all how difficult it is for kids, who are pretty powerless in the system, to change things on their own.

A few years later, I was accepted into a School Psychology program and then after a few years working in the schools as a School Psychologist, I completed my doctorate and went into private practice working primarily with families and kids.