Reply to Your experience with a 40% FARMS rate Middle School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’ve taught in 5 MCPS MS schools by now and student taught in a sixth. I also have two kids who went through a seventh. So from the perspective of seven MS ranging from high income to low income, the similarities were surprising. And while the actual problems differed, the high income schools actually had a wider array of issues and many of the additional ones originated with entitled parents.

The lower income schools tended to have the same small set of issues:
1. Students with an acute poverty-related issue like no winter coat on a freezing day or limping with a bad sprain that hadn’t been seen by a medical professional. Those we can usually address pretty easily, but they do create a distraction in the first class of the day.
2. Students with chronic poverty-related needs. Like a kid who smells bad because his mom can’t afford the laundromat or one who is falling asleep in class because he lives with nine other people in a three bedroom apartment and it is loud until 3 am. Again, these are distracting but we can often work with families to ameliorate things.
3. Students who are suffering trauma. While MC and UNC kids can also face parental substance abuse, DV and CSA, poor kids are more likely to do so and also to deal with other traumas such as parental incarceration, eviction, etc. Traumatized kids are often unavailable for learning and may react strongly to perceived threats that untraunatized kids ignore. This is a problem that needs a whole school approach to handling. I can’t tell you how many times I calmed a kid down and got her back to work, only to have another teacher trigger an explosion the next period by trying to prove a point to the child.
4. Children can overcome poverty-based lags in skill development and we know that IQ is not fixed, but rather can be increased through intensive means. I see that all of my low income kids have gifts, including out of the box problem solving ideas and far more grit/resilience than the wealthier kids I have taught. I make my classroom a place where thinking and effort are rewarded, not just memorization and exposure to arbitrarily-valued cultural experiences. I agree a child should know the word waltz, but I can also use a different term in tandem while asking about the attitude of a character in the passage entering a room. That way, the student can answer the question “He acted like he didn’t care” AND learn that the waltz is a dance that appears effortless, so we use it to mean someone is doing something with a carefree attitude.[/quote]

This is a very interesting post. Can you speak to your observations of MC and UMC kids in these schools?  Also the interactions or no interactions between the groups?[/quote]

In one of the wealthier schools, there was virtually no meaningful interaction between the high and low SES students outside of PE class. The low income students were bus riders from an apartment complex and nearly all of the higher income students walked or carpooled. Placements were pretty much by student and parent request. The higher income parents always selected the advanced version although the courses were not taught substantively different. Advanced was really just a few additional activities that teachers sometimes often not to do in favor of a beloved movie. The lower income students chose regular. Because there were fewer regular courses, they traveled together all day long as a small group. It was like being in a school within a school.

The other wealthy schools I taught in did a better job of trying to avoid placing all of the lower income kids in de facto segregation. One school saw a lot of tensions rise after Trump was elected, but the other two were generally fine. They switched to all advanced to avoid pooling the kids. One year, the most popular eighth grade boy was Latino. I think lower SES girls had a harder time because middle school is brutal on girls anyway, but before I left there was a major effort to add afterschool clubs they asked for.

Here are my general observations about the UMC students I’ve taught:
1. Most lack resilience and resourcefulness. They are used to adults making the magic happen when the road to their goal gets rocky. One way I tried to address this was by establishing a budget ceiling of $5 for projects. I suggested using recyclables and required students to submit an itemized budget. Some parents thought this was about leveling the playing field for the FARMS students. It was really to push their kids to think outside the box and not rely on parents’ money to solve a problem.
2. Many were actually living surprisingly limited lives. For example, at one school, so many eighth graders had never been on the Metro despite having lived a mile from it their entire lives. These limitations shaped their views about the world and found their way into how they related to characters in texts, but also real life people. A few kids were resistant to new experiences, but the majority just never had the chance. Their parents had curated everything. I liked to mix things up by using culturally diverse texts. So if a character ate pupusas and my students didn’t know what pupusas were, I’d bring them in the next day and then talk about how MoCo came to have so many pupuserias and Salvadorans. It’s the mirror image of the waltzing thing for low SES kids. Both groups need more exposure. IMHO, even a higher income kid will encounter more opportunities to eat pupusas than to waltz. Why are we prizing one term over the other on assessments?
3. Entitled attitudes were the most common problem and led to students declaring a teacher must dislike them just because they were not allowed to do whatever they wanted. At times, it was such a caricature of spoiled kids in a tween tv show that it was hard to take it personally. However, there were moments when students caused big problems for themselves by refusing to accept no. [/quote]

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