By Katrina Clark

Kids chatter. This is my life as a 9th and 10th grade teacher. They chatter incessantly. It drives me crazy. That’s who they are. So we move on.

But I’m not looking forward to this lockdown drill. I’m in another teacher’s classroom supporting and this group tends to be extra chatty. Now we have to block out the light, sit on the floor in the corner. Silently. I know this is impossible and I never feel good about having to do impossible tasks. It feels like a set up for failure. I also have no interest, not this time, of explaining why being silent is so important. That if someone sneaks into our school and is ready to attack we want the person to think there is no one in this room. This room is not being used right now. You should just keep on walking and shoot someone else. It is not worth your while to try and look for us here. Go shoot someone else. I am NOT dying today. No, sir.

This almost strikes me as amusing. In our tiny school. In this even tinier classroom, that was carved out of an actual classroom split into two there is no space that is not used. Anyone with a personal vendetta from our school knows that. We are fooling no one. And anyone from outside of our school family… Well, if they skipped us, then they would get somebody else. We are packed to the brim. Any bullet shot will hit someone. But our goal, at least at this moment, is to be so still and silent that the shooter does not recognize the existence of humanity in this room and moves on. Survival of the fittest. Or at least most silent . . .

It has been 42 days since a student of Stoneman Douglas High School walked into school with an AR-15, not seeing the humanity of his fellow students-- and my guess, of himself-- and shot 17 people dead. The school had no metal detectors. The school had a scared security guard. The school was not used to this type of violence. So 17 people, ages 14 to 49 lost their lives. And the students decided to speak up. They, in fact, got the attention of the world.

In Philadelphia, in our tiny school, students recognized their screams. They knew this pain, of losing life too young, of witnessing senseless violence and trying to make sense of it. They already had been writing poetry about loved ones lost, writing essays about gun control, conjuring images of dead bodies, lost to the long-term effects of slavery and capitalism. They had already screamed Black Lives Matter and watched more young, Black lives inked out repeatedly. They were ignored.

Yet, they chose to speak again. Parkland students called for a nationwide walkout on March 14th against gun violence. Our students recognized this call. They knew the words and feelings intimately. So they organized. As a teacher, I have witnessed the pain pouring from their pens and wanted so badly for them to take action. I have felt impotent at asking them to take action in the face of all they face daily. But this time was different. I gathered in the room as students had a lunch time meeting. Not to teach or lead, but as an ally to them and their cause. I listened as they summarized the messages they wanted to share. I took some notes while they spoke. I listened.

Days later I rolled our PA system out to the front of the school. My job was to charge it. I dropped the mic into one of their hands and saw their words float to heaven, a hundred angels soaring straight upward, gathering with a million other voices. I am not a religious person by any means. But I heard these words and they were nothing less than prayers and pleas for change. They sought out something within all of us--but especially within our nation’s leaders. I think they sought humanity in some of the darkest places I have had opportunity to witness, in the minds and hearts of politicians, of adult leaders, of us, those who have let them down, left them to die.

And the emotions I felt when their peers rose up from across the world and gathered together in Washington, D.C.--and Philadelphia and New York and San Francisco and London. I was filled to the brim and overflowing as Emma Gonzalez made us wait for 6 minutes and 20 seconds in silence, the amount of time it took to erase 17 lives. She made us feel every second with all of the embarrassment and fear and waiting, just waiting. Hearing gunshots ring out but just waiting. Watching lives drop from existence but just waiting. Having no way of knowing when this horror story would end, she made us wait.

And today I find myself waiting in a different kind of silence, with twelve 9th graders in a landlocked room, a window to the hallway blocked, door locked. They knew it was a drill and settled immediately. And all of these thoughts and feelings flooded to my mind, how we have taught them to be silent, taught them to be still. We have taught them to have the cool, calm, collectedness of a soldier prepared to die. I never reprimanded one student for chatting. Not one did. We waited.

As we could hear the counselor knocking on the door of each room to assure everyone that all was okay, that it was safe to come out of hiding, a young girl described her last lockdown drill in elementary school. “They didn’t just make us sit and wait. They had a man try to break into each door. He pulled and rattled at the doorknob. He screamed for us to let him in. But we wouldn’t. He was just screaming down the hallways.”

My heart dropped. We have prepared a generation of children to be silent, to wait out the chance that they will be killed by a gun, in their own schools, in their own communities. We, as a nation, refuse to change the conditions of their lives. We make them wait. We make them count the 15 years of Tyhir Barnes’ life until he dropped before us, another life taken. We make them count the 12 years of Tamir Rice’s life before he is shot in a park. We make them count. 1, 2, 3 . . . 629 teenagers killed or injured by guns in 2018 alone. We make them mask the presence of their humanity until the danger has passed.
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It never passes. It will not pass. Not until we decide to change. We cannot be the ostrich with its head buried in bloody money, pretending that we don’t see our children dying. But, if we decide to wait, let it be as painful as watching Emma Gonzales watching us, feeling the echoes of our babies dropping to the ground, hearing the bullets ricochet through a generation who is desperate to live and whom we are desperate to ignore.

By Kathleen Melville

On rainy days, the ceiling of my classroom leaks. My students and I know just how to rearrange the room and just where to place the bucket to accommodate the steady drip. It has been leaking for six months.

Last week, the handle of our classroom door fell off. After a few instances of near-panic, when we were momentarily locked in the room, I realized it won’t be fixed in the near future. I taped down the latch.

For over three years, the toilet in our girls’ bathroom was broken, wrapped in a trash bag. This year, someone on our staff finally broke down and hired a private plumber to repair it.

In the School District of Philadelphia, broken things do not get fixed. You can put in a work order, but except in the most dire situations, you’re better off inventing your own solution than waiting on the District to send out a maintenance worker.

Still, my school is one of the places where I am happiest. It’s where my work is. It’s where my students grow up—from nervous 9th graders to self-assured seniors—and where I have grown into the teacher I am today. It’s where I can count on warm greetings, tough challenges, and earnest support from just about everyone. And despite its hazards, it’s one of the safest places I know. It’s our home.

On my drive to school each morning, I pass the old West Philadelphia High School. The looming gothic building is gradually transforming from a historic school into luxury condos. I watch graffiti disappear from the walls and young trees appear in freshly poured sidewalks. The place buzzes with investment, with the anticipation of value, even on rainy days.
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In my neighborhood in South Philly, I sometimes pass by the old Bok High School. Another looming stone building, bereft of students, Bok closed in 2013, along with 22 other schools. My friends rave about the views from the new rooftop bar, but I am scared of the ghosts.

In both cases, private investors initiated major upgrades that the School District could never afford. With over thirty percent of Philly’s students now attending charter schools, the District does not have the funds to maintain its schools. So it has sold many of its older buildings, in order to pay the charter schools, which move into new buildings, often at outrageous cost, in order to attract more students from the District. Meanwhile, Bok Bar and West Lofts are enjoying excellent returns on investment. The cycle is maddeningly inefficient and financially disastrous, with private interests exploiting our teetering funding structure for public schools.
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I cannot imagine how this two-tiered system of schools will sustain itself. Instead, I hope that charter school teachers and public school teachers will begin to work together to demand more funding, transparency, and accountability of our leaders. We will certainly need to be organized in order to withstand the latest attack on our brick and mortar—cyber schools.

By Scott Storm

Many people binge on Netflix or mac and cheese as a way of experiencing a pleasurable and cozy sort of comfort.  I binge on those things too, but I am also a teacher who binges on education research conferences.  Some may groan at the thought of attending a research conference.  Many may critique these events for using inaccessible language and being soporific experiences.  However, I am drawn to these conferences because, like comfort food, they bring me joy. Sitting in a room where lots of thoughtful researchers are trying to puzzle out the fundamental tensions and problems of teaching is exhilarating.  It can feel as if you are right on the edge of solving some big issue in your classroom, your school, or your nation.  I have become addicted to making sure that I can hear--and be part of--the conversations that academics are having about our classrooms.  

My first conference was the National Council of Teachers of English annual convention nearly a decade ago. I went with two colleagues and at first we went to some really terrible sessions where presenters would get up and lecture for the entire time about a short story that they taught one time.  They would recount the plot of the story in tedious detail but never actually offer any ideas about pedagogy.  

But then we started going to sessions marked “research strand” or to see people who colleagues had recommended.  And the world opened up.  Suddenly, we could tell that there was a sustained conversation going on with a particular group of people about what English was and should be in high schools, about what audacious things students knew and were able to do with literacy, and about how social justice and systems of unequal power played into all of this.  Suddenly we felt awake.

I remember one of my colleagues asking, “why isn’t this room packed?  Why isn’t everyone here?” as we listen to a researcher unpack issues in students’ reading comprehension over time.  As we sat in this session, we were forced to think about the ways that our classroom talk before and after reading might build reader-identities in students and ultimately make our students more or less successful readers of school texts.  For example, starting the class saying “open the text to page 200 and read the first paragraph” could potentially have a very different effect than saying, “yesterday’s reading made us question what it meant to be an ethical person, and today we are going to get to explore this thorny issue even more deeply.”  The first way of opening the lesson assumed an ideology of compliance—the statement is a command and all personal pronouns are stripped away.  Further, there’s no guiding question or reason for reading embedded in the statement.  However, the second way of beginning the class uses pronouns like “we” and “us” to build the shared class community.  It employs words like “yesterday” and “today” which situates this lesson as a step in a larger arc.  And this opener ties the text to cognitively demanding and engaging tasks—puzzling out what constitutes an “ethical person” which is seen as a “thorny problem” without clear right/wrong answers.  It sets students up with a guiding purpose for reading and invites them to do intellectual work. 

Obviously, the way you frame a text before reading is not alone going to magically make everyone read perfectly.  We still need the scaffolds, graphic organizers, and other supports as we go through the reading process.  But listening to this talk at this conference made me forever shift the way that I teach reading.  It made me realize that the language of the lesson matters and that how you frame reading experiences set students up for success or failure before any eyes even glance at text.  Attending this session made me a better teacher and made me so excited to be thinking about my practice in this way.  I remember sitting in the audience and madly scribbly notes to the colleague next to me—notes filled with exclamation points and emojis. 
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Attending that session was such an enjoyable experience that I never stopped conference binging.  My colleagues and I go to several conferences each year and we still sit next to each other and wildly scribble notes and questions about our practice of teaching.  Sure, we end up in some bad sessions sometimes, but we have gotten better at knowing how to pick sessions that will temper our insatiable curiosities.  As time has gone on, we have more and more wanted to not just listen to the conversation that researchers are having about our classrooms, but to also be part of that conversation.  We have conducted our own research projects and been presenters ourselves at the conferences.  Unlike binging on mac and cheese or Netflix, which are primarily about consumption, conference binging has also become about production for us—as we actively try to help produce answers to some of the thorny questions and dilemmas of our professional practice.  And while some may still find conferences useless or boring, for us a conference always brings excitement, practical ways to improve our teaching practice, and unbridled intellectual joy.