An interesting thing is happening on the Satellite Academy High School NYC Facebook page. Graduates are posting their dates of attendance and which of the four sites they went to.
Some do it matter-of-factly – years, then site. But many take the opportunity to shout out their advisory group or “Strat,” as the “best ever.” Some single out their advisory teachers, or list a group of favorite teachers.
Not only do I remember many of these people well, but I even recall some of them in the intake interviews before they became Satellite students. Invariably they were nervous at this high-stakes moment in their young lives, and that anxiety took a variety of forms. The kids who became incommunicative or belligerent were sometimes the ones who didn’t pass the interviews, usually because one of the students on the panel insisted they would be a bad fit for the school.
As the teacher representative on those committees, I would then ask them to remember when they were in that chair. “Were you nervous? How did it make you feel, answering questions from four strangers, three of whom were your age?”
Sometimes they’d cut the kid a break, or I would, and sometimes they wouldn’t, or I wouldn’t. When we did, sometimes the kid worked out well, and sometimes they didn’t.
There’s a powerful book to be written on my experience as a teacher. I really am humbled by how blessed I was to teach where I taught, and to do it for so many years.
As I read the posts of my former students, now adults with children of their own, I wonder how different, if at all, their lives would have turned out had they never found our school. Perhaps it’s hubris to think we “saved” them. The thing to remember about young people growing up in poverty, as many of our students did, is that it creates an extremely thick skin. My students were, and are, resilient people. I am certain many would have landed on their feet, with or without me/us.
As I work with school after school, trying to help them help their students, my stories of Satellite Academy, advisory class, skills-based teaching, and portfolio assessment sound like extravagant tales from a distant land. It’s as if I’m describing a dragon I slayed, or a Holy Grail I discovered.
Testing has its place – as a way to help a student know what he has learned and what he still needs to master. I do thank NCLB for “outing” the achievement gap in this country. Being who I am (a firm believer in the “positive pre-supposition”), I have to believe the original intent of the legislation was to help public schools and the children in them. What seems to be happening instead is a full-on attack, with the suggestion that schools, and the teachers in them, are to blame for the very inequities, instead of a society that has denied its caste system and institutional racism since its beginnings. The testing and textbook industries have created a round hole into which they are trying to shove “pegs” of all shapes and sizes. We do the same things semester after semester, year after year, forgetting the old dictum about insanity (the expectation that you’ll get a different result by doing the same thing) and wondering all the while why nothing changes.
Ask a former Satellite Academy student; they might surprise you with their answers.
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