3-Minute Story of How I Became an Educator - Guided By Questions

My friends and I in Taiwan.  I'm on the far right.

(Originally prepared for my leadership class at Harvard Graduate School of Education)

I have always been guided by questions, not answers.  The question the jumpstarted my career was a very noble one: How do I impress this one girl? 

In college, I dated a girl who grew up in South Korea; her parents were teachers at an international school.  She would always say that when she graduated she would become an overseas teacher, and I vowed to join her because I was, frankly, infatuated.  In essence, I became a teacher to impress her.  Long story short, we broke up, and she got engaged to another.  But I was still determined impress her, so I moved to Taiwan to become an ESL teacher.

Taiwan was my Damascus road experience.  It was the first time I was a minority, and that was a transformative experience.  I couldn’t read the signs on street corners, couldn’t read food menus in restaurants, and my skin color and culture were radically different from the people who surrounded me.   

It was in Taiwan that I was reminded of an important question my professor once asked me, “How would your life be different if you were a minority?”  I grew up in suburban, white, middle-class, evangelical Christian America, and my whole life was characteristically homogenous.  Even in college, I went to a nearly all white middle-class, evangelical, Christian university in Kentucky.  To say we lacked diversity would be a tragic understatement.  However, this one professor wanted to push me out of the box, into a world characterized by difference.

Determined to discover the answer to my professor’s question, I continued putting myself in situations where I was the minority.  I worked in an urban high school in Memphis, Tennessee and then in an urban middle school in a large city in North Carolina.  In both cities, most of my students were African-American and Latino, and most of my colleagues were not of the same race as I.  I was learning what it meant to be wholly different.  The outsider.

 When I think back on these two questions that have guided the past 8 years of my life, I’m perplexed because I didn’t answer either of them.  I never figured out how to impress that girl, and I never figured out what it truly meant to be a minority.  However, along the way I began to ask myself new questions about my life.  How did I end up marrying somehow as wonderful as Kendra?  Why do I love my dog so much?  How do I create a school where all kids can learn?  How do I make school feel a lot less like school?  In essence, what I learned is that questions guide me, not answers.  In fact, I rarely find the answers to my questions, but the questions I ask beget more questions.  And each successive question brings me a little bit closer to what I want to become.

The Problem with Teacher Training

According to Deborah Ball—Dean of the Education School at the University of Michigan— one of the reasons the teaching profession lacks the respect that other professions have (such as doctors, lawyers, architects, and others) is that the verb teaching is used ubiquitously.  In other words, anyone can be a teacher.  In America, we use the word “teacher” to describe the person who leads a Saturday ACT prep course in much the same way we use the word to describe an Elementary school teacher with a Masters Degree from Columbia.  We do not label everyone who slaps Neosporin on a cut a doctor; however, we often label everyone who teaches something—no matter how nebulous—a teacher. 

In her keynote address to Vanderbilt University, Deborah Ball argues that there is a dire need for initial and continuing teacher education programs that change the way we teach teaching.  As a result, she suggests that the profession of teaching will be elevated and that the quality of teachers will improve.  She argues that a model teacher education program pairs experience teachers with first year teachers, places them in classrooms together, and provides a constant feedback loop for teaching, evaluating teaching, re-teaching, and observing.  Additionally, she suggests, much like Harvard Professor Richard Elmore in School Reform From the Inside Out, that teachers need to take courses that address the 3 areas that lead to teacher effectiveness: one, content knowledge; two, general pedagogical knowledge; and three, subject specific pedagogical knowledge. 

In contrast to Deborah Ball’s hypothesized ideal teacher training program, most teacher education programs that currently exist have nothing to do with the actual practice of teaching.  Deborah Ball addresses this point when she says that most teacher training programs are boring and totally separate from experiences in classrooms.  The education of teachers takes place in University classrooms, far away from real teaching.  This is comparable to a surgeon reading books and listening to lectures on surgery but never performing or observing the actual act of surgery.  I would feel bad for this surgeon’s first patient.  Nevertheless, this is the reality for the majority of teacher training/certification programs.

Critics of Deborah Hall’s theory would point to research that suggests no difference in quality between teachers who go through University training programs and those who go through alternative certification programs, like Teach For America or NYC Teaching Fellows program (Kane, Rockoff, Staiger, 2007).  They argue that traditional 4 year University programs actually do put students in classrooms for student teaching and thus fulfill the requirements for Deborah Hall’s proposed teacher training.  However, this is a misconception.  Although traditional University programs do put students in classrooms, there is extreme variability in the quality of experience in student teaching placements.  For instance, some student teachers are little more than a warm body sitting in the back of a class, watching an experienced teacher.  There is value in observation, but teachers learn to do the work by actually doing the work, receiving feedback on the work from an experienced teacher, and doing the work again.  Hence, the student teacher that spends 6 months observing a practitioner, who may or may not be competent, gains little from the experience. 

In short, there is a lot educator training programs can learn from other professions training regiments, as Deborah Ball points out.  One suggestion I would make is to have a common body of knowledge that all educators could share.  As it stands, the curriculum of teacher education programs is tremendously variable.  No one is alike.  Teachers would benefit from a teachers-theatre course, where students watch experienced educators teach a lesson with voice over, whereby the teacher explains why he/she is saying or doing something.  Such a class would allow students to see how a teacher thinks in the actual moments of teaching.  

Ball, Deborah.  The Work of Teaching and the Challenge of Teacher Education.  Invited Address at Vanderbilt University, September, 2008

Kane, T., Rockoff, J., & Staiger, D. (2007). Photo Finish: Teacher Certification Doesn’t Guarantee a Winner. Education Next, 7(1) 61-67. http://educationnext.org/photo-finish/

The Best Assignment a Teacher Assigns...

This is a paper I turned in for my instructional leadership class taught by Dr. Richard Elmore.  I learned more about teaching from spending 2 months in his class than in 2 years on the job.  A principal in Boston said it best, "Elmore's class is worth the price of admission alone."  This is my theory of the ideal instructional task a teacher can assign.  Let me know if you have questions...

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In a cognitive development seminar in Milwaukee (2009), Dr. Geoff Norman of McMaster University stated: “What we learn is so strongly influenced by the meaning that we can put on it…[learning] involves an interaction between existing knowledge and new information.”  Thus, teaching does not always produce learning and learning does not necessitate teaching, since learning requires active participation from the student, whereby the student places meaning upon what is being taught.  In other words, there exists a false notion that learning always happens when teaching happens.  For example, pretend a student takes an anatomy class and learns about organs for the first time.  If a teachers stands is in the front of this make-believe biology classroom and dictates the purpose of various organs and a student sits passively at his or her desk placing no meaning on the ideas being taught, then no learning occurs.  Therefore, there can be teaching with no learning, and learning for no teaching.  So how then does a teacher ensure that a student learns?  What type of instructional task should a teacher assign in order to guarantee – or at least optimize - learning?

I was a teacher for five years.  I taught in two countries and in three states.  In addition to my own experience, I have participated in countless classroom observations.  Based on these experiences, it seems that the majority of teaching that occurs in the United States is teacher-centric - meaning that there is significant empirical evidence that the teacher learns but very little evidence that students do.  University of Michigan Education professor David Cohen (1988) suggests that much of what takes place in American and many European schools is, for the student, a “passive process of accumulation.”  Moreover, research done by professors at Harvard Graduate School of Education (City, Fiarman, Elmore, Teitel, 2009) supports the idea that the “…culture of American schools, in its deep structure, is very teacher-centric.”  In other words, the teacher is doing the brunt of the learning in classrooms, since the teacher is the one thinking and controlling while students sit passively, not placing meaning on what is being taught.  This is a concern, since students learn best when they are heuristically involved with the content.  In Maria Montessori’s article The Revelation of the Natural Order in Children, we find evidence for the aforementioned claim when Montessori describes a group of children who were given large cut out letters and heuristically erupted into an “explosion of writing”, whereby they, “covered the floor and walls with their unrestrainable writing” (Montessori, 1974).

The instructional core model shows a symbiotic relationship between what David Hawkins (2003) calls the “I, Thou, and the It” (ie. the student, teacher, and content).  In the ideal classroom, therefore, the teacher links prior knowledge to the content, and facilitates an environment where students create links between what they already know and what they are learning.  Furthermore, the teacher needs to have a sophisticated knowledge of the content, and the teacher should create the optimal instructional task for the student to engage in with the new content.  The optimal task is not an elaborate twenty-minute teacher-centric presentation about the content whereby docile students sit in rows and listen.  In this scenario it is nearly impossible to find any evidence that learning takes place, since there is no visible evidence that the student is interacting with and placing meaning upon what is being taught.  We only have evidence that the teacher was engaged in a task and that the students listened, and in some instances students are able to reproduce their learning on a test.  Nevertheless, the locus of control is with the teacher.  In contrast, a student-centric task shifts the locus of control to the student; the teacher should spend a small portion of class time explaining new content and students should spend the majority of class time problem solving and determining the linking principle between problems.  “The instructional task is at the center of the instructional core,” and students need to be the ones completing the instructional task (City, Fiarman, Elmore, Teitel, 2009). 

This begs the question, what is the ideal instructional task for students to perform?  Should they identify concepts?  Memorize facts?  Apply new content knowledge to word problems?  In Geoff Nomrman’s presentation on Cognitive development (2009), he tells a story of a student who memorized all parts of human anatomy and passed the exam with flying colors, but was unable to apply anatomical knowledge when placed in a clerkship.  Why was this student unable to transfer the information he or she learned in class to the clerkship?  Dr. Norman suggests the student was unable to do so for two reasons: one, the student did not engage in the task of analyzing anatomical concepts via multiple real life principle-and-example problems; two, the student was never engaged in anatomical analysis in the form of an everyday analogy.  In other words, the ideal instructional task presents students with multiple principle-and-example problems as well as everyday analogy problems.  This kind of task allows students to organize information into meaningful ‘clusters’ and gain long-term retention of concepts (Norman, 2009).   What are principle-and-example problems and why is it important to problem solve multiple ones?  Dr. Norman (2009) describes principle-and-example problem tasks as problems that share a similar underlying principle.  For instance, let’s use the subject of anatomy as an example.  To complete a principle-and-example task for anatomy, a teacher could introduce the principle that air pollution and smoke atrophy lungs.  The teacher could assign multiple problems to solve.  One problem asks students to predict which organ needs medical attention for a man who has been smoking for years and has a cough, and the students would have to explain their diagnosis.  Another problem could describe a rural town in China that has seen a dramatic increase in used scooters with clunky exhaust systems.  Then the students would be asked to predict which organs need medical attention for a population of workers in this town.  In both scenarios, the root principle is ‘smoke pollution atrophy lungs’, and anatomy students could form a diagnosis for both problems based on this principle.  Moreover, these problems are analogous to real issues that medical and science professionals face.   In other words, there is a likeness between these problems and everyday tasks.  Asking an anatomy student to memorize causes of lung atrophy is not an everyday analogy assignment.  This task is only used in formal education, and has minimal applicability to a real world problem.  That is not to say there is no use for rote memorization tasks in education.  There could be instances where memorizing information is necessary for foundational understanding of principles.  Namely, some students might benefit from memorization exercises before they are asked to apply the knowledge they memorized.  However, the ideal instructional task involves applying a principle to multiple real-life example problems and solving.  And it is important for educators to remind themselves of this ideal as they design curriculum.

The Teacher is The Preacher

I find it notable that Montessori suggests that Calvinist and Protestant theology, in turn, affected the pedagogy and methodology of early educators (Montessori, 40).  David Cohen, in his article Teaching Practice: Plus Que Ca Change, draws attention to a similar relationship (Cohen, 42).  In short, both authors argue that theology precedes methodology.  In other words, Calvinist and Protestant Christian doctrines boil down to an idea that man/woman is inherently flawed and in need of redemption.  Therefore, man/woman needs to beat the soul into holy submission, until the evil desires of the sinful heart are controlled by pious discipline.  Needless to say, this theology is inherent in the pedagological architecture of the early school of the 17^th and 18^th century, whereby one teacher (who holds the sword of truth) passes down knowledge and discipline upon his/her students.  It seems that many teachers bought into the idea that kids are inherently flawed creatures, prone to clumsiness and silliness unless the will of discipline is thrust upon them.  Therefore, early schools were a mirror to the major religious movement sweeping the country. 

Montessori, in contrast, seems to have developed her pedagogy from Rousseau’s romanticism ideology.  On page 40 of his book, he quotes a popular Rousseauism, “in man all is good, but everything is spoilt in contact with society.”  In this quote we find the heart of Montessori’s pedagogy – that all children are inherently good, and they learn when they come in contact with the natural order of the world. 

These are very meaningful passages to me because I grew up in a Protestant home and attended a Protestant Liberal Arts University.  I have since walked away from many of my childhood religious beliefs, but the theology of my youth still influences my pedagogy, as much as I might try to hamper it.  As a practitioner working at KIPP, the bootcampish discipline embedded in the school culture seemed like second nature to me, since it mimicked the theology I grew up with.  Likewise, our principals encouraged us to follow the scholastic inheritance practice of teaching – a model best described as a teacher holding knowledge and passing it down to students through dictation.  This was the drug of choice.  I was not comfortable with this model.  As I taught, I felt pangs of occupational dissonance.  The way I was teaching didn’t align with my values.

 I know very little about the Montessori method.  I have never seen a Montessori classroom at work.  However, I do believe that a child is not a tabula rasa (blank slate) in need of discipline.  I believe a child’s mind is like a computer: functioning, and capable of discovering the order in life.  Yet, what I do not know is how to match my core beliefs with a teaching practice.  I have not seen it done. 

Montessori, M.  (1974).  Childhood education.  (J.A. Joosten, trans.)  Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company.  Part II, Chapter 1 (p.25-50). 

Cohen, D. (1988). Teaching practice: Plus que ça change. In P.W. Jackson (Ed.), Contributing to educational change (pp. 27-84). Berkeley, CA: McCrutcham Publishing Corporation.

Death of a Teacher: Part 4

The gripping conclusion to the Death of a Teacher series.  Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 before Part 4.  It makes more sense that way.

Death of a Teacher:  Part 4

Since KIPP Charlotte could not afford to hire substitutes, it was burdensome for a teacher to be absent, since an absent teacher’s workload fell on co-workers.  For that reason, Mr. Asaad made it a point to be at work, sick or not.  On the rare occasions he knew he would be absent, he planned it out weeks in advance and coordinated coverage for all his classes and duties.  Which is why everyone’s feathers were ruffled when he didn’t show up to work on May 17^th, 2011, the same day his students were taking the North Carolina state high-stakes Math test.

            It was quite a big deal for Mr. Asaad to be absent, and it being the day of his end of grade test made his vacancy all the more odd.  There was no message for the office workers and no message for either of the principles.  He was M.I.A.

            Mr. Plume sent me a text message mid morning.  “I’m surprised Mr. Asaad isn’t here today.  His kids are taking the Math EOG.” 

            “Agreed.  Weird.” I replied.

            “Not weird…spooky.” he texted back.

           

            The following morning, May 18^th, he did not show up again.  No one had heard from him.  Mr. Asaad and I were good friends, to the point to where I invited him to my wedding, so I sent him a text message thinking that if he would reply to anyone on staff he would reply to me, even if he were playing hooky.  Two hours after sending the message, and I still received no response. 

            Mr. B, one of the principals, and Mr. Brown, the sixth and seventh grade science teacher, decided to leave campus during their shared planning period and go to his apartment to scope it out.  Mr. B shared their findings during a whole staff meeting at the end of the day after the kids had left.

            The staff meeting was held in my room at 5:30, and everyone promptly gathered, huddled in anticipation, awaiting some answers as to the whereabouts of our beloved coworker. 

            Mr. B began, “Today Mr. Brown and I went over to Mr. Asaad’s apartment.  The first thing we noticed was his Dodge cruiser in the parking lot.  We walked to his door, knocked, but didn’t hear any answers.  At that point we called the police and waited for a while.  They came, and knocked on the door, hoping that were Mr. Asaad inside, he would respond to them.  But nobody answered.  So the police called the landlord and the landlord came over to open the apartment.  The police went inside, and Mr. Brown and I waited at the doorway.  What they discovered…well…there’s no easy way to say this…”

            I suppose we all knew what Mr. B was going to say.  But the weight of those words, when spoke, were so heavy. 

            “Mr. Asaad passed.”

            The room went catatonic.  I heard several subtle gasps heaved from teacher’s guts; eyes coiled; legs tingled; heads bowed. 

            Mr. Asaad passed. 

            Immediately, I thought of my grandfather.  He was sitting in the back yard of my parent’s house in Louisville when he died.  He came to visit us for my brother’s graduation from medical school.  While sitting on back porch, he had a heart attack, and fell face down against the iron-grated outdoor table.  My brother was the first person to see him lying there, and he tried to revive him, but it was too late.  Did Mr. Asaad die a similar death?  Did he have a heart attack in his bedroom?  Did his poodle Kenya lick his face and try to revive him as he lie on the floor?  Was he found face up or face down? 

            All these questions.  Rushed my mind.  Then came the flood.

            We all sat together in my room – possibly seconds, possibly minutes – until someone began to cry, someone who was sitting close to me.  It was Mr. Khosravi, whose classroom was directly across the hall from Mr. Asaad’s.  Mr. Khosravi used to send kids to Mr. Asaad’s room when they were disruptive in his English class.  Now, where would he send them?

            Mr. Khosravi melted against the wall, blubbering, pushing out pain in silky tears.  He was the first to openly weep.  Then Ms. Meyers, the seventh grade Grade Level Chair began to cry too.  Her tears were soft, curdling, falling onto the fingertips of teacher’s who sat beside her, rubbing her back to comfort.  After that, the floodgate opened, and nearly all eyes were wet.  Everyone deals with loss in different ways, but even I was teary eyed; I who had been given the ‘Ice Award’ several months early for my constant poker face composure.  I lifted my glasses every minute or so to wipe away the tears before I lost it.

            I sat in silence, looking around at my co-workers, wondering when Mr. B was going to say something more.  He hadn’t really spoken since he released those painful words, Mr… Asaad… passed.  Or if he had, I hadn’t noticed.  Eventually, Mr. B was the first to leave the room.  He got up out of his seat and walked out the door, leaving all of us alone in that heavy heavy room.  Mr. B would later tell me that it was the worst meeting he ever had to conduct.

            After he left, no one else got up.  We all just sat there for a very long time, many teachers holding one another; others just sitting, staring into themselves, arms crossed, wiping there eyes every so often.  Then eventually, we all began to trickle out.  I stayed for a while, not wanting to leave, knowing that when I did, the water works would come. 

            At about 6:30, I tossed my laptop and binders into my carrying case, and walked as quickly as I could to my car.  In the parking lot, a parent spotted me.  She yelled, “Goodnight Mr. Stich!” with a smile.  Neither the students nor the parents had been notified at that point, and I didn’t want them to see the puffiness under my eyes and cause alarm.  I quickly waved back, conjured up a fake smile, and continued to my car, whereupon I flung on my sunglasses as fast as possibly could, and drove home.

            When I got home, the good cry I had anticipated came to pass.  Thankfully, Kendra wasn’t around.  I don’t like crying in front of anyone, even my wife.  However, my dog Kima was there, and she looked at me curiously, cocking her head sideways, not understanding the sounds the odd human creature was making.  Not understanding that I was crying for the guy who had indirectly taught her to piss in the house. 

            Thinking about that made me cry all the more, and laugh a little.

           

            The next day was the hardest because we, the teachers, knew we had to tell the students.  As a precautionary, the administration brought in several grief counselors.  We wanted to be ready for all varieties of mourning, to make Mr. Asaad’s passing as easy as possible on the kids.  We waited until the very end of the day, got the entire seventh grade together in Ms. Meyer’s room, and got the entire eighth grade together in my room.  It was decided that the fifth and sixth graders would be notified by mail since Mr. Asaad had not taught any of them directly.  The seventh and eighth graders, however, were Mr. Asaad’ students, and they would be hit hardest be the news.  The principals met with the seventh graders first, and when they broke the news the seventh graders didn’t believe them.  One boy even yelled out, “You’re joking, right?”

            Before long it was our turn.  Mr. B and his co-principal entered the eighth grade group meeting and solemnly told the students everything they had told the teachers the day before. 

            The room was silent. 

            In two years of teaching those same kids, I never saw them as quiet as they were that afternoon.  Much like the teachers, the kids reacted in different ways.  Some shut down, while others openly burst into tears.  Mr. Plume said to the whole group, “Some of you are going to want to cry, for others it may not hit you for several days, some of you may even laugh at first.  I just ask that we all withhold judgment.  Everyone is going to deal with this on their own time and in their own way.” 

            I was glad he said that.  Many of the kids had already experienced loss and were all too acquainted with it’s turbulence, but for others, this was the first time, and they were having trouble understanding the complex emotions involved.  I recall one particularly troublesome student name Neko reacting in a very unusual way.  This kid had been suspended at least three times for slapping students across the face for no particular reason.  He was impervious and unmoved by the school’s attempt at discipline, and seemed rather emotionless altogether.  However, I saw a new side of Neko that day.  After our group meeting, he went to the back of the classroom, and wrote a eulogy to Mr. Asaad that read:

           

            I don’t normally feel much emotion, but today I’m stricken.  I cannot believe you are gone.  You, who whipped me into shape more times than I can count, are no longer with us.  I feel I will cry when I get home. 

            When his Dad came to pick him up, Neko took the letter and thumb tacked it to the wall in the hallway.

            After a few minutes together, we broke off into smaller groups, so the kids could have some space and grieve in a more intimate environment.  I went with the all boys group across the hall to Ms. Leslie’s class.  In that room was Keyshawn, Langston and Jacory.  Their shock was transparent.  Langston sat slumped in his chair, staring aimlessly at the floor.  Jacory silently cried to himself: never weeping, but tears dripping from his eyes no less.  Keyshawn cried for a bit too, then got up from his seat and went into the bathroom.  Mr. Plume went in to check on him, and found that he had written something on the boy’s bathroom mirror with an Expo marker, “R.I.P Mr. Asaad.” 

            Other kids from other classrooms followed Keshawn’s lead and took Expo markers and wrote Mr. Asaadisms and little notes to him all over the modular unit on white boards, bathroom stalls, and windows, to the point where nearly all the glossy surfaces had something written on it.  The phrase that appeared most: What’s your major malfunction?

            Back in the boys group, we sat soundlessly for a while, until I broke the silence by suggesting we do something constructive with our grief.  I asked the guys to share stories about Mr. Asaad. 

            Kahari was the first to speak up, “Once, last year in Math class, I was failing at the end of first quarter.  Mr. Asaad pulled me aside after class, told me I could do better, told me that he was disappointed in me.  He said it would be one thing if I had tried my hardest and gotten that grade, but he said he could tell I didn’t.  I was settling.  From then on, I tried harder, and he really pushed me.  I ended up with a much better grade because of that.”

            Then another boy named Tony spoke up, “You know, I know this is sad, and we’re all not feeling good right now because we’re missing Mr. Asaad.  But I don’t think we should be really sad about him.  I mean, I don’t think Mr. Asaad would want that.  He would want us to be happy, kind of celebrate his life and move on.  So we should be kind of happy.”

            Just then, one of the boys yelled, “Give me one!” and in unison, the rest of them banged their desks, boom boom clap boom. 

            “Give me two!” 

            The kids responded, boom boom clap clap boom boom clap boom. 

            “Give me three!” 

            Boom boom clap clap boom boom clap clap boom boom clap boom. 

            Then the boys threw their fists up in the air and yelled “Whoo!”  It was a cinematic moment, something that – dare I say – seemed to come straight out of a Hollywood movie about an inner-city teacher who made a tremendous impact on this lives of his students.

           

            A week later, after students, parents, and school stakeholders had been informed of Mr. Asaad’s abrupt death, we held a memorial service after school in his honor; the purpose being to celebrate his life and dedication to the field of teaching.  Mr. Asaad’s family had flown in from Barbados and bumped back their flights to depart on Friday so they could attend the Thursday evening memorial.  Before the service began, an African-American woman who looked vaguely familiar approached me.  She was dressed in all white, had a hoop nose ring, and a pearl colored cloth wrapped around her hair.  She was Mr. Asaad’s fiancé.  She handed me an envelope.  I thanked her for whatever it was and expressed condolences for her loss.  She said, “It happened so suddenly.  Thank you.” and she walked away smiling.

            I was curious to see what was inside, but I waited until after the ceremony.  On the way home, while stopped at a stoplight, I opened it.  Inside was a picture of Mr. Asaad: his head shaved, dressed in karate uniform, posing for the camera.  The back of the photograph read:

            Stich!  You were his best friend.  The only one he had at that place.

            I had no idea I was his best friend.   

           

            A month after his passing, I had a dream where I was sitting in a large, orange and yellow cafeteria.  It was filled with people.  I sat down to eat, and I saw Mr. Asaad a few seats down from me, talking with people I had never seen before.  When he saw me, he turned and smiled his great white smile.  I told him that he had everyone fooled, because everyone in Charlotte thought he was dead.  He laughed.  It was his plan all along, to fake his death to miss the last week of school.  We both thought that was pretty funny. 

            Then I woke up.

 

Death of a Teacher: Part 3

Part 3 of a four part series.  If you haven't read Part 1 or Part 2 yet, here are the links.

This is a true story about a unconventional teacher who left us too early.  R.I.P Mr. Asaad.

Death of a Teacher: Part 3

Mr. Asaad’s unconventionality was not limited to parking lot duty; it spilled over into his classroom methods.

            In May of 2009 I flew to Charlotte to do a sample lesson and interview for the job at KIPP.  On that same day, Mr. Asaad flew to Charlotte from New York City with the same purpose.  As part of our interview, we had to observe each other teach, and formally assess one another’s pedagological methods.  I sat at the back of the room to observe his Math instruction, and from the minute he started to the minute he ended, he was badass.

            He taught a simple lesson on multiplying complex fractions, and he explained the steps so effortlessly and transparently that even the dumbest kid in the class understood how to do it.  After his mini-lesson and after working through a couple examples, he said to the class, “Now it’s your turn.”

            He wrote a problem on the board, then whipped around facing the kids.  He peered across the room, making eye contact with each and every student.  He slowly began to meander through the rows of desks, looking for his victim.  Finally, he stopped, and stood over to a girl with pigtails.  He swiped his open palm over her head like a preacher giving a blessing. 

            “Stand up.” He told the girl.

            He then asked the class, “Ok, I’m looking at this girl – what’s your name girl?”

            “Alexus.” She replied.

            “I’m looking at Alexus, and you know what I’m thinking?  I’m thinking that Alexus…she got this.  What do you all think?” he asked the rest of the class.  They nodded their heads in agreement, mesmerized by his pizzazz.  He then handed Alexus an Expo marker and asked her to approach the white board and solve the equation, which she did successfully.

            He smiled, “That’s good.  Very good.  In fact, I think that’s,” and here he broke into song, “Redddd hotttt, that girl is redddd hotttt, that girl is R-E-D, red, H-O-T, hot, once she starts she can’t be stopped.” he sang, clapped his hands, and bobbed with the rhythm. 

            Once he had finished the chant, he stared at the class, and said, “What is this girl?”  And he sang his little song again, this time the class chimed in as each student learned the words, “That girl is redddd hotttt, that girl is R-E-D, red, H-O-T, hot, once she starts she can’t be stopped.”  By the third time, everyone joined in.

            Then the song ended, and he approached the board and wrote another equation.           

            “Now, who wants to give this one a try?”

            All hands in the room shot up like bottle rockets; each student competing for the chance to be redddd hotttt.

            Unconventional, but totally talented.

            A karate-chop to the gut, then a thumb-twist hurling the victim sideways, followed by a forearm block, and top it off with an elbow strike to the incisors.  On more than a dozen occasions, I watched Mr. Asaad inflict this type punishment on KIPP Charlotte students.  He was a black belt, and he told me at least fifty times what brand of martial arts he mastered, but I could never remember exactly which type it was.  What I do remember, however, is keeping a running tab of his potential lawsuit bill as I saw him assault kid after kid. 

            Oh, Mr. Asaad just air chopped Jacory?  That’s a couple thousand. 

            A hammer fist to Tyler’s jugular for incorrectly answering a math question?  Another thousand and a half. 

            The roundhouse kick to Keshean’s shoulder?  That one did some damage.  Maybe three and a quarter? 

            A four knuckle strike to Langston’s forehead?  Langston had that coming; plus, Langston’s Mom, if anything, would thank Mr. Asaad for whipping her boy into shape.  He might actually make a buck or two back on that one. 

            He whacked kids, put them in headlocks, twisted their noses, and everything in between, but he never ever hurt them.  It was a ploy, like a puppy play fighting.  His physicality added life and toughness to a profession that is overrun with laws and bureaucracy that - although designed with student safety in mind - often stifles the bond between teacher and student.

            In addition to all the physical abuse he dispensed, he would verbally insult KIPP students as well: in an endearing sort of way.  At the end of our first year at KIPP, the principals threw an end of year banquet at a local Mexican restaurant.  As part of the event, each teacher had to randomly draw another teacher’s name out of a hat and make a paper plate award for that teacher.  Ms. Myers, my co-teacher, picked my name, and she awarded me the ‘Flava Flave’ award, since she had never seen a teacher use more clocks and timers in a classroom than myself.  I, ironically, picked the name of my confidant: Mr. Asaad.  I awarded him the ‘most-likely-to-get-arrested-for-saying-something-innappropriate-to-a-student’ award.  An award he would never fully live up to, but an award well earned no less.  I handed him the award, shook his hand, and snapped a picture to commemorate the event.

            When I looked at Mr. Asaad, I saw a dear friend (as well a legal liability to the school); however, when students, particularly the boys, looked at him, they saw someone they deeply admired.  Behind Mr. Asaad’s back, during lunchroom conversations, the boys at KIPP Charlotte would mock his timbre, yelling across the table at one another in their best attempts at a Caribbean accent, “What’s your major malfunction?”  On the playground, they mimicked his karate moves; yelping and kicking like a kung-fu parody.  Nonetheless, the same boys who lampooned him the most were the same boys who would spend hours after school with him on Saturdays, getting free martial arts instruction.  Deep down, they worshipped him.  Strong black role models were something of a commodity in the neighborhoods most of these kids were raised in, and Mr. Asaad was the archetype of a black role model: strong, domineering, eloquently opinionated (although brash at times), charming, educated, and a physical acme.  In short, there was a lot to for the kids to admire. 

            Mr. Asaad could get through to students who were to me a concrete slab of indifference.  If I had a dime for every time I asked Keshawn to stop talking during a mini-lesson and then he would throw his hands up in the air declaring, “It wasn’t me!” I could easily pay a respectable down payment on a Manhattan condo.  Yet to Mr. Asaad, Keshawn was a lemming, awaiting his command.  On one particularly muggy afternoon following Saturday school, I noticed Keshawn doing an exercise on an outdoor bench in front of the eighth grade building.  He thrust his leg up on the bench, fully extended it, achieved balance, and proceeded to kick with the other.  He repeated this arduous move over and over again while sweat dribbled down his face and formed a ring around his black Nike T-Shirt. 

            “Keshawn, what are you doing?”  I asked as I passed by him.

            Between huffs and puffs he said, “Martial arts training.” his eyes grimacing with exhaustion. 

            “What for?”
            “For Mr. Asaad.  He’s teaching me…huff…how to do…puff…Tae Kwon do.” 

            “Good deal.  Carry on.”  I said, as I walked away in veneration, just glad that someone was teaching Keshawn some discipline.

            Another student that Mr. Asaad got through to - more so than any other teacher at KIPP – was Jacory.  Jacory was a perpetually silly child, with a clownish incriminating disposition, that earned him a three-year rap sheet of tomfoolery at KIPP.  When I think of the epitome of a ‘class clown’, I immediately picture Jacory.  Not a single word of sincerity ever crossed his lips, unless, of course, you’re counting a sincere attempt at humor; in which case he was sincere to a fault.  At KIPP Charlotte we had something called ‘paychecks’, which are more or less behavioral markings teachers give students based on positive or negative behavior in class.  The kids start out the week with forty paycheck dollars, and each student moves up or down based on how well he or she follows or disobeys school rules.  Jacory, although never having been suspended and never having been in a fight, had the lowest paycheck out of all eighty-four students in the eighth grade.  He earned a fourteen-dollar weekly average by years end: solely due to his unbridled silliness.  Yet he too was no match for Mr. Asaad.

            At the beginning of his Math classes, Mr. Asaad would greet each student with “Good morning” as they entered his room.  When it was time for Jacory’s class to rotate to Math, Mr. Asaad would conduct his meet and greet with his right hand, while his left arm was wrapped around Jacory’s neck in a headlock. 

            There was a space in the back of Mr. Asaad’s room that he called ‘China’.  Mr. Asaad had a pre-industrial view of the country and considered it a decrepit state, a place of vagabonds and fascists.  I suppose he got this opinion of China from coming of age during the Cold War era.  If a student misbehaved in Mr. Asaad’s class, he would yell, “Go to China!” and the student would then get up and move to the corner seat, facing the wall.  Jacory spent so much of the year ‘in China’ that one would think he could speak Cantonese. 

            But for every ounce of army discipline and tough love that Mr. Asaad dished out, he provided an equal amount of paternal nurturing.  Towards the end of my first year at KIPP, Mr. Asaad would haul Jacory outside with him for parking lot duty, coach him to use the police hand signals he used to direct traffic in Phoenix, and asked Jacory to direct traffic on his own.  Jacory loved it.  By May, Jacory was a pro, directing cars into the appropriate lanes of traffic, effortlessly keeping the pick up lane moving.  All the while, Mr. Asaad would stand at his side, keeping at watchful eye on him, arms crossed, smiling at his apprentice.