High School Progress Reports Released
Not good.
1. What do they measure?
I really don’t get why the whole world’s not insistently asking this question. I guess that the A, B, C, D, F is so familiar, that we assume that the reports are measuring how good the schools are. But pretty clearly, they are not.
The scores are an ugly, unjustified mix of the Learning Environment scores (themselves never fully explained or justified), graduation rates, credit accumulation rates, attendance rates, regents pass rates… Each school is measured against the City as a whole, and against a select group of comparable schools – the “peer horizon.” In some categories, kids have extra value/weighting if they are in the lowest third of the school, if they are poor (?), if they are in Special Education, if they are ELLs. With the extra weightings, it looks like the scores go from an arbitrary minimum to an arbitrary maximum (roughly 30 to 105). There is no justification for which numbers correspond to which letter, although they comment that they changed the cuts. Why? Arbitrary.
45% of the high schools got As. What does that mean? It means they set the minimum score for A at 45%. Nothing more.
They claim to be measuring progress towards on-time graduation. I do not think they are actually measuring anything.
2. What effect do these reports have?
High score? Principal gets a bonus.
B, C, D or F? Quality Review (a sort of colonoscopy for the school, but the “doctors” don’t have licenses, and no anaesthesia)
Lousy grade? They threaten to break up or close down or shake up or replace a school. But they only shut what they want to shut. Schools with bad grades stay open. Schools with good grades are closed.
3. What effect do the effects have?
Nervousness. The threats against schools with poor grades make teachers, parents, admins all nervous. That’s Bloomberg’s style – he ran his business this way.
Cheating. Saraceno from Lehman HS got caught, but only because her own staff turned her in. But the massive pressure on credit accumulation, and the massive wink (wink!) towards credit recovery has led some principals to give away massive amounts of credit, to boost progress report scores. Don’t ask, don’t tell, the DoE knows this is happening and chooses not to look. Wink wink. The academic lowest third of your school counts double. At 9 credits the kid counts against you, at 10 they count for you. For you can mean a bonus (at least $7k), against you can mean anything from DoE hassles to getting shut. Which principal, of those not already handing out credits like candy, isn’t thinking about it?
4. Increasing graduation rates
The “accountability” system that includes Progress Reports might raise graduation rates – but not by improving achievement. They might just get principals to award so many bogus and half-bogus credits that kids who are not ready to be graduated from high school are handed meaningless diplomas.
5. Who?
This project is so far removed from the schools and the reality in the schools, you have to wonder who’s running the show. I’m guessing non-educators are central to this Sabremetric stew. But the educators who’ve survived Bloomberg/Klein are, at the top, an ethically unimpressive bunch; I wouldn’t be shocked if former educators had some involvement. I would be shocked if it turned out that any current educator played a role.
6. Typo
I go to nysed.gov to get information from the New York State Education Department. Our DoE got the name wrong on the front page of every single progress report.
New York City Department of Education
New York State Education Department
They got it wrong last year, too.
That’s zero progress.
How does the Negotiating Committee work?
The United Federation of Teachers is negotiating with New York City and its Department of Education for a new contract.
The union negotiators work with a larger group of union members. There is a committee of 300, and then a smaller group of 30 that sits in on negotiations. A member of that smaller committee explains what the process looks like on the New Action website.
Neighborhood schools
Why don’t we have neighborhood high schools in the Bronx? Why no zoned high schools?
School choice in Manhattan often (not always) means good choice. But school choice in the Bronx is mostly a joke.
Why is nobody responsible for providing each kid for a reasonable default option, if they just want to go to a regular high school?
“Community Schools” are an interesting idea, but shouldn’t we have neighborhood schools first?
More Puzzle Extension: Expressing n as the sum of consecutive integers
This is a puzzle for you, and a description of what I actually did with some kids.
How many ways can n be expressed as the sum of consecutive integers?
The descriptions will come from actual classroom experiences from this Fall. The class is an elective “Combinatorics” with mostly seniors. Almost half are enrolled in calculus, some in precalculus, a few in trig, and some are not taking other math and are using this elective as their last math credit. The text I use is Mathematics of Choice by Ivan Niven. It’s from the MAA’s New Mathematical Library series (mid-1960’s) which includes about 30 titles, including Yaglom’s 3-part Geometry, which wonderful puzzler Tanya Khovanova blogged about last month.
The course meets 4 days each week, one of which I reserve for games or contests. Of the teaching part, it is a mix of lecture (which always includes some dialogue with the students) and “problem solving” in which I pose a problem that I believe will take a while (“while” being loosely defined) and the students work in small groups.
I introduced ‘Polya-style’ problem solving … Read more…
Second New Action leader makes statement on negotiations
David Kaufman, co-chair of New Action, discusses fish, contracts, and holidays on the New Action website.
Over the next days and weeks we will be working to bring you more current content.
Earlier this week the other co-chair of New Action, Mike Shulman, also discussed the contract. And in the wake of the vote in the House, we reprinted the UFT’s September healthcare resolution, with commentary.
Way to go, Ariel
The MSM loves when teachers attack teachers unions and other teachers … and I hate it.
The Daily News ran an anti-union opinion piece by a teacher (Matt Polazzo) a week and a half ago. (Maintaining their recent pattern of good education reporting and awful, anti-teacher, anti-experience editorials and opinions)
And Gotham Schools, steeped in anti-experience, pro-charter bias, reran a blog post by Ariel Sacks, in which she seemed to disparage ATRs who had been assigned to her school.
Sacks is a middle school teacher in Brooklyn. She is part of the Teachers Leaders Network. And she writes about work. Lots of progressive education, which readers here know I have some issues with it. I neither embrace nor totally reject that kind of teaching. But keeping the middle ground does mean I dispute some of its premises. Some of the classroom stuff I am more interested in. And things like merit pay, no.
They could have been fair questions, if we were not facing down a Mayor and Chancellor who are looking to undermine experienced teachers, to break tenure, to destroy seniority, etc, etc. But context matters, and in the current political climate, the questions she asked about the senior teachers involuntarily assigned to sub in her school could easily be used those interested in attacking the union overall and experienced teachers in particular. Could be used. And were used. By Gotham Schools.
Unlike the original post, which had a handful of relatively thoughtful comments (though I disagree with most), the repost on Gotham Schools generated over 100 comments, many by anti-teacher, anti-senior teacher ideologues. The storm continues even today, over three weeks since Ariel posted and almost three weeks since Gotham Schools reprinted.
But something happened that I didn’t expect. Sacks noticed what was happening, and clarified. She didn’t back down from what she had said, but she recognized the context: her remarks, designed to ask hard questions, were being used to bash teachers.
Her follow-up post, What should due process look like? addresses related issues, and I think she still gets the questions more wrong than right, but she frames them in a way that they cannot be used by teacher bashers.
Responsible discussion, responsible disagreement, even among teachers, is often too much to ask. But not this time. Credit where it is due.
New Action leader makes statement on negotiations
Mike Shulman, co-chair of New Action, discusses money, givebacks and ATRs on the New Action blog.
We’ll be working over the next days and weeks to bring more current content to the website.
One to one, domain, onto, codomain, and that sort of stuff
(Scroll to the bottom of this post for my math questions for you.)
There is an interesting discussion on the NYS Math Teachers listserve about “onto.”
It’s interesting to read. Some teachers are shakier on “onto” and some are quite confident. Some have set ways of teaching the concept to kids, and some are looking for ideas. I like, big time, teachers talking to teachers.
The discussion is animated by a brand new New York State Regents exam: Integrated Algebra II and Trigonometry. We’re not really sure what will be on the exam. And we’re nervous. Some of us about teaching things we haven’t taught before. Others about deciding which topics to teach (some, and here I criticize, want to teach exactly what is on the exam. More on that, a bit later). Some are even shaky on a topic or two.
The exam will cover far too much material from Algebra II, Trigonometry, Statistics, Probability, even some traditionally precalc topics (eg series and sequences). Teach with some depth? You’ll run out of time. Teach the full gamut? They will have a grand tour of many topics, without sufficient time devoted to many of them. And forget creating a coherent course.
You can see the only sample test we’ve seen here. You can see some discussion on the listserve, and some careful criticism at Kate(t). Not too easy, not too hard, but awful. Scattered to too many topics. Too many procedural questions. Too many push-calculator-keys but no-understanding-necessary questions. Too many unnecessarily tricky questions.
Me? My school? We’ll go a little too slow, much too deep. Some of the early skills will carry over, and we’ll make some of it up. It’s a possibility that is easier with our kids (very bright, but many lean towards the humanities) than at many other schools
Anyway, some observations and questions, based on the listserve discussion:
1. Do any of the higher math folks out there (John, Kibr, Susan, one of 360, who else? there’s lots of you!) have a strong feeling about “codomain?”
2. Puzzle (not for any of the above-mentioned people, either by name or not): Can you think of a function that is onto but not 1-1? Too easy? How about 1-1 but not onto?
3. Would anyone be annoyed if I mashed up the language, and called the “codomain” the “target set” and said that a function is “onto” a particular “target set” if it uses up all the values in that set? And used as my favorite example the step function (onto the integers, not onto the reals)
4. Why do we care whether or not a relation is a function? (I think I know, and I think I have just, as the books do always, asked the question backwards)
5. Kate(t) posted a pedagogical device for teaching these terms. Take a look. (I think it is ok for the first 3, but love the tears for “onto.”)
Is everything part of a sequence?
I wonder if there is a sequence 
(Nickh, a math blogger, found the solution to an old problem I posed. Turns out, the answers form a known sequence)
[edited to point to the correct Nick – the puzzler at qbyte.org]
Pension error – UFT Statement
Bank error to blame for withdrawn pension payments
Nov 6, 2009 5:57 PM
Some 64,000 retirees, including 53,000 UFT retirees, who rely on electronic pension payments had funds involuntarily withdrawn from their accounts on Nov. 6, causing all sorts of grief for those counting on the money. The Bank of New York Mellon, which is the transferring agent for the funds, erroneously reversed the October benefits payments to retirees paid through electronic fund transfer. The total came to almost $189 million, according to the City Comptroller’s Office.
“We’re outraged. This is unacceptable,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew. “We have been on top of this since the calls first started coming in early Friday morning and we will continue to work until all of our members have been made whole. Our first priority is to get all of the money back into our members’ accounts.”
The Bank of New York Mellon is now assuring the union and the Teachers’ Retirement System that retirees’ accounts will be corrected no later than Monday. Go here to read the bank’s full statement. The bank has agreed to reimburse the retirees for any costs they incur because of this problem.
“We want the bank to explain to us how this happened and to tell us the changes that it will put in place to make sure this never happens again,” said Mulgrew. “We are calling on the city and the state to begin an immediate investigation.”
If you are a retiree whose pension funds were transferred out of your account because of today’s banking error and you incurred any financial harm as a result, make sure you keep proof. That includes receipts and/or other paperwork that detail any overdraft fees or bounced check fees that occur.
The Bank of New York Mellon has set up two toll-fee hotlines for retirees with questions: 1-800-627-8000 and 1-800-242-9100.
When updated information is available, TRS will post it on its Web site. The UFT will also keep retirees updated via the Web site, its hotline and e-mail blasts.
(from UFT website)
Statement on Pension Error – PSC
foul-up on DEPOSIT OF trs PENSION CHECKS.
We learned on Friday morning, November 6, that pension checks issued to participants in the Teachers’ Retirement System of New York (TRS) and electronically deposited on November 2 were inadvertently withdrawn from retirees’ accounts. The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, which handles the electronic deposit of all TRS checks, has accepted responsibility for the error. The PSC, in concert with TRS, is doing everything we can to ensure that the funds are restored as quickly as possible. Along with the Comptroller and the Mayor’s Office, we are demanding that the accounts be made whole by the end of business on Friday.
“This is our members’ money,” said PSC president Barbara Bowen. “There is no excuse for a Wall Street bank to allow thousands of people to be denied access to their own funds. The PSC is calling for an investigation of how the error occurred and a procedure to ensure that it does not happen again.”
The Bank of New York has assured TRS that all accounts will be corrected no later than Monday, November 9. Facing intense pressure from the PSC and the UFT, The Bank of New York Mellon has now arranged for several major New York City banks to accept withdrawals over the weekend from accounts that were affected by the error. If you need to withdraw funds this weekend and do not have sufficient funds in your account due to the error, call Bank of New York Mellon to ascertain whether your bank will honor the withdrawal: 1-800-627-8000 or 1-800-242-9100. The lines will be staffed until midnight on Friday, and from 7:00 AM to midnight on Saturday and Sunday.
In addition, bank fees imposed as a result of the withdrawal of funds will be reimbursed to retirees’ accounts.
We will post further information as soon as it becomes available. TRS is also posting updated information on its website and providing updates at their toll-free number: 888-8-NYC-TRS.
Posted 5:40 pm, 11/6/09
Anonymity
Tough one.
A Bronx Science teacher has been trying to identify me, here, in the comments section of one of the Bronx Science posts. Easy enough to block. But he’s written to a newspaper, with his guess about who I am.
I’m not too angry with him. Sad guy. [insensitive, intemperate remark redacted]
But the local paper, firm believers in the rights of the press, published the guess at my name without any thought for the effect on bloggers. Shame on the “progressive” Riverdale Press.
Did the UFT make a difference?
It is not pleasant to review mistakes, but the alternative is worse.
What miscalculations led the UFT to stay out of the mayoral race?
Anti-Bloomberg Video
Found at PO’ed Teacher:
Puzzle: How many factors does 72,000,000 have?
This puzzle has been posted here before. (although just as backdrop to a teacher mistake). But it is still fun.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, … and a whole bunch more.
Can you use this with kiddies? How much would you steer them?
And, for that matter, have you answered this one before? If not, give it a try.
Puzzle Extension – Consecutive Integers
Given an integer N, N ≠ 0, how many ways can N be written as the sum of consecutive integers?
“How many ways can 1000 be written as the sum of consecutive integers?” Nice puzzle posted here a few days ago. We had some nice discussion and partial and complete solutions in the comments. Nick linked back to a longer discussion on his blog, Divide by Zero.
But let’s extend and generalize this.
Assume you have a group of kids who brute forced a solution for N = 1000. Come back at them a week or two later with: Given an integer N, N ≠ 0, how many ways can N be written as the sum of consecutive integers?
What will they ask? How are you going to guide them? How are you going to keep them from quitting?
And, oh yeah, what’s the answer, and how did you get it?
Puzzle: Consecutive Integers
How many ways can 1000 be expressed as the sum of consecutive integers?
(Did I already ask this? Sorry)
Bronx Science Special Complaint Nears Conclusion
Article from the 10/7/2009 Riverdale Press:
Math teachers’ complaint adds up to arbitration
By Kate Pastor
When kids fight, they’re sent to the principal’s office. When teachers fight with principals, they’re off to arbitration.
The next meeting set up to resolve a special complaint filed with the Department of Education by the United Federation of Teachers in May 2008, and signed by 20 out of the 22 teachers in the math department, is set for Wednesday, Oct. 14.
Special complaints are made by the UFT when members are “intimidated” or “harassed” at work and the principal or other supervisor has failed to adequately address the situation, according to article 23 of the teacher’s contract posted on the UFT Web site.
A letter that was the basis of the complaint accuses Rosemarie Jahoda, the assistant principal overseeing the Mathematics Department, of intimidating, yelling at and verbally abusing teachers, while discouraging union activity. The letter was posted online by a former student.
According to the UFT, special complaints go through fact-finding, nonbinding arbitration. Arbitrators then hear both sides and recommend a settlement, which can be accepted or rejected by the city’s school chancellor once it is sent to his office.
Ms. Jahoda unfairly requires untenured teachers to supply lesson plans in advance, insists upon unusual grading systems and clamps down on new teachers, according to the contents of the letter.
More than a year has passed since that complaint was filed, and in the time it has taken the Department of Education to make a decision on it, some teachers say administrators are further harassing the letter’s signers, who are then leaving in droves.
Over the past two academic years, about half the teachers who left the school were from the math department, according to numbers provided by Principal Valerie Reidy. However, she said, while 20 teachers left the school last spring and 14 left the year before, those numbers do not differ much from years past. Additionally, she said, teachers in the math department tend to be older than in other departments. Several of them retired, she said.
“The mobility of the workforce has increased. Certainly that is what’s happening at Bronx Science,” she said.
Joan Alexander is one of those retirees. Though she says her decision to leave had nothing to do with Ms. Jahoda, the math teacher was a 32-year veteran at the school and says it is on a downward plunge.
“ … The last two years were so horrendous and so heart-wrenching to the senior staff that it was just a nightmare to be there,” Ms. Alexander said.
She said she and other senior teachers were concerned for younger teachers who, Ms. Alexander says, the new leadership tends push around in particular.
Retaliation?
She herself got her first “U,” or unsatisfactory rating for attendance, as she prepared to leave the school after more than three decades. Ms. Alexander said she felt it was in retaliation against her for signing the complaint.
“I never thought I would get a U,” she said, admitting that she had taken more than 10 sick days, which is enough to lead to such a rating, but that she had legitimate medical reasons for doing so and the unfavorable rating is given at the principal’s discretion.
She is fighting the blemish on her record and said the “polarized” environment she left was starkly different from the one she had come to love over the decades. She remembers teachers vying to stay at the school, not scrambling to leave.
“I had 30 out of 32 wonderful years,” she said.
They’re unhappy
Whether teachers leaving is part of the normal ebb and flow of modern workplaces or a sign of something troubling is open to interpretation. Whether a number of teachers are unhappy there, is not.
Seventy-five percent of Bronx Science teachers responded to the latest NYC School Survey, and 55 percent said school leaders let staff know what is expected of them, down from 71 percent the previous year. Twenty- five percent said school leaders invite teachers to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making decisions, down from 41 percent.
The grievances raised by the math department are easy to find in the blogosphere.
Why stop at “Tweed”?
Several years ago NYC billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg moved the Board of Education headquarters (Department of Education, I guess) to 52 Chambers Street. That building is named the “Tweed Courthouse.” I figured, most decent people figured, they’d just call it 52 Chambers. Afterall, Boss Tweed was the posterchild of NYC municipal corruption.
But I figured wrong. Not only do Bloomberg and his chancellor not run away from the symbolism of corruption, they actually emphasize it. Not the “Tweed Courthouse.” Just “Tweed.” Without a twinge of embarassment.
Why stop there? We could begin renaming schools.I don’t know if Keating 5 or Abscam would make good school names. Elliot Spitzer’s career is dead, but the man lives on, so no Spitzer, not yet (and imagine Hygiene class at Spitzer…). Nixon, Haldeman, Dean, Bill Casey…
But some people will object to losing honored names… Stuyvesant, Bowne, Cardozo, Lehman, Wagner, Francis Lewis… Maybe changing existing names is not so cool… (then again, Bloomberg has decimated or closed JFK, Columbus, Stevenson, Lafayette, etc, etc)
New names for nameless places?
Regional Operation Centers. ROCs. Integrated Service Centers. ISCs. Nameless. Faceless. Practically useless. Let’s jazz them up, Bloomberg-style.
Tweed is DoE headquarters? Try these in the boroughs:
Simon and Friedman ISC (in the Bronx)
Stanley Steingut ISC (in Brooklyn)
Donald Manes ISC (in Queens)
And why not just be done with it? In the spirit of Tweed, Michael Bloomberg ROC in Manhattan.
Where did September go?
This blog all but shut down for the last month and change. I will try to bring it back in October. I don’t know if I can match the pace of posting from last year.
I wish there were a good reason. I wish this were a protest against the DoE or the Mayor or the war in Afghanistan.
I wish I could chalk it up to a heavy programming load (nope, done early this year) or exhaustion from a rough first few weeks (not that).
I might blame the work putting my apartment back together after some renovations (lame, not responsible).
I wish I could point to deep contemplation of a new approach to the schools (nope) or teaching math (nope).
Perhaps I was closely examining myself and my choices and my future (did that, not in September).
I don’t know why I stopped blogging. And I am not sure why I am trying to restart. But I am.
Why I oppose the “Methods of Effective Teaching” project
A letter came to all UFT teachers a few days ago. It was from new President Michael Mulgrew, and asked if they would like to participate in a research project. Over the course of two years they would be videoed and observed (not for the purposes of rating) and their test scores would be looked at (ditto). Teachers would get a little money up front, more at the end, for a total of fifteen hundred.
This “Methods of Effective Teaching” project would then look to develop “multiple measures” – using knowledge of “best practices,” subjective observation and test scores. It is bankrolled (in part or in full? I’m not sure) by the Gates Foundation.
And at Monday’s Exec Board, a resolution that the UFT support this project was put forward. And I said “nay.” Why?
1. Form. The letter to members had already gone out. And just days earlier. Why not get approval first?
2. Who. One day some Gates money might get put to good use in education. But damn straight, it makes me nervous. Especially after his last foray into New York City: breaking up large high schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn, causing disruption that persists 10 years later, with no sign of abating. They know the name is a problem, too. That’s why they have taken steps to use a name that does not include “Gates.”
3. What. Test scores to rate teachers. We have a system in place where this is not done. We have legislation in place (that apparently sunsets? but we should get it renewed) that protects us against them. We know, or we should know, what a mess they will make. We should doubt seriously that they can work better than good, professional observation.
They (DoE) needs better principals, principals who can look at a lesson, understand what they are seeing, and suggest things to do better. Principals who can work with, train, and improve teachers. But don’t blame teachers for the DoE hiring marginal principals.
When you go into a class, you get an immediate sense of what’s going on. With content expertise, even moreso. If principals were master teachers, as they should be, this would proceed fairly normally in 95+% of all cases.
The system we have can work. It should work. It is the DoE’s fault it doesn’t work. Don’t blame us.
And we have lots of reason to believe that the bad old DoE will abuse test scores. They already do (see Progress Reports). And that given extra chances to abuse teachers, they will. (See ATRs, New Teachers)
So I say no to rating teachers with test scores. And I voted no on “multiple measures” that include test scores. And I voted no on Gates. And I objected to voting on something that has already been adopted.
And we’re back…
Two weeks without posting – buried in programming and opening of school and union.
But programming wrapped up early. (Sunday, actually)
Regular posting will resume tonight – mathematics teaching, puzzles, New York City, education politics, UFT…
all from the point of view of a high school mathematics teacher and chapter leader – living and working in the Bronx.
Welcome to my lucky 13th year of teaching…
How many teachers are there?
In the US, as of five years ago, 6.2 million.
I ran into an old page, a summary of some census findings.
Overall, 83% white. 8% Black. 5% Hispanic (any country of origin). 3% Asian. One half of one per cent Alaskan Native or Pacific Islander.
It’s still women’s work: 71% female. And the lower the grade level, the smaller the proportion of men.
| level | women | men | % female |
| PreK/K | 430k | 8k | 98% |
| elementary/middle | 2.45M | 0.65M | 79% |
| secondary | 460k | 310k | 59% |
| post-secondary | 500k | 600k | 46% |
| special ed | 150k | 25k | 87% |
| other | 375k | 185k | 67% |
(lot’s of rounding and back-calculating – jd)
A walk in the Piney Woods
East Texas was for work. I volunteered, helped teachers. The last day got cut short, as we were asked to leave an event.
But then, a nice highlight. I got to experience some of East Texas’ natural beauty.
The previous Sunday I drove to Radcliff Lake in the Davey Crockett National Forest, poked around.
But Friday after lunch I went for a two hour hike in the Stephen F Austin Experimental Forest, southwest of Nacogdoches. It was gorgeous, breathtaking. We do not have forest in the northeast that looks like this. We don’t have forest that smells like this: a rich mix of sun-baked pine needles, dust, fresh needles, a touch of mud, with bits of dozens of other plants and flowers mixed in.
Click through to see the full-sized photos
The forest was thick, but not dark, as the sun penetrated all the way down, with just small patches of shade. The wind swayed the pines, I could see it, I could hear it, but I couldn’t feel it or taste it – the wind did not reach the forest floor.
At home, thick trees grow on and around hills – land that wasn’t worth keeping clear or building on? But the SFA forest was flat.
No, almost flat. It was crisscrossed with creeks, mostly dry, with steep banks. The one I stepped across (bridge was out) had just a trickle of dampness, but the bigger one seemed to have some water creeping. The banks were hardwoods, and what a variety! Cottonwood, chestnut, walnut, oak, elm, sycamore, ash, gum. They were all familiar, but not the same as we have at home. There was a little loop by the trail head, along and around a creek, with labeled trees. The sun there got through in shafts, and leaves floated downward, now lit, now in shade, gently settling on the ground.
The flatter parts were pine, and pine mix. The sun came through freely. The needles, too, fell. But they are heavier. Or less wing-like. Or. Or what? In any case they fell faster, and harder. Joined 2, 3, 4 at the end. They snagged on bushes, in trees, or just hit the ground.
Actually, I didn’t notice the falling needles. A colleague had, in cruel jest, sent me off with words to enjoy the forest – and be careful of rattlesnakes. In the pines I took a few careful steps, listening for a snake moving, watching out for holes that might contain a resting serpent, and then stopped to look up at the surroundings. Not much of a way to hike, and I must thank the first group of joined pine needles that landed, not with a thud, but with a touch, on my shoulder, for scaring the breath out of me. When I realized what had hit me, I regained myself, laughed at my idiocy, and resumed walking, normally…
The paths were wide, cleared, and partially overgrown. Instead of pavement there was a bed of pine needles. Instead of gravel – loose pine cones. And instead of the reek of oozing tar, the sun baked the needles, burning the smell into my memory. There were little holes (not snake holes), and patches of grass and ground cover. Every so often a bench had been planted, and signs too, directing me to Loblolly Hollow or Dogwood Gulch.
I was alone, absolutely alone, for almost two hours.Maybe it was too hot to be out? 95ish. The guest book had been signed once that morning; the previous entry was a few weeks old. Yeah, Texans must feel the heat, too.
My loop was just 2.1 miles, but I kept circling, trying different cut-offs, different combinations. It was absolutely magical. I was in no rush to leave. Finally, I heard a distant rumble – yet another thunder clap to the north that would not reach us. But that was the signal. I took out my phone, called my mother (it was her birthday) and quietly chatted (quiet, like in a library, like a loud voice would have been as polluting as a plastic bottle or a McDonalds wrapper) the fifteen minutes back to the car.
There was a breeze back at the trail head. And not another soul.
And that’ll be my last memory of East Texas!
the New York City teacher purges
This is not a post about today.
This is a post about a documentary.
The documentary is about the New York City Teachers Union, blacklisted and purged out of existence in 1964.
This documentary is also about individual teachers, victimized by McCarthyism.
This documentary is called dreamers and fighters.
The documentary is not yet complete. But there is a website. (The website was lost, taken by spammers, sorry – 12/2023)
You should go look. History, people, even current events. And production progress.
Here’s the text from the homepage:
Welcome to
Dreamers and Fighters
This is the website of the in-production documentary, Dreamers and Fighters: The NYC Teacher Purges.
This website is an attempt to further reach out — to those familiar with the impact of McCarthyism on a local level in New York City, and to those who would like the know more about it. Click your way through for a look at the History of the period, video clips from the Documentary, Multimedia from teachers, and for ongoing developments about the documentary and related Current Events. And don’t forget to join the conversation on the Message Board.
The documentary originated with Sophie-Louise Ullman as an effort to honor the members of the New York City Teachers Union. Her parents, and many other New York City teachers, were members.
The Teachers Union was founded in 1916, and forced out of existence in 1964, a victim, together with many of its members, of a blacklisting effort that paralleled the one conducted in Hollywood. Far less known than the show business red hunts of the McCarthy years, the effort by New York’s Board of Education to weed out teachers it considered politically unfit to teach the city’s children ultimately led to investigations of some 1,100 teachers. More than 400 were forced out of their jobs through forced resignations and retirements and outright dismissal.
The Teachers Union and its members sought, and fought, to improve the education and better the lives of the children in their classrooms. They fought for better pay and better working conditions for teachers. At no time in the two-decade campaign against them were any of them charged with bringing their politics into their lesson plans.
Dreamers and Fighters will tell their story, and the story of their union. And as this website develops, it will add information on what they went through and how they fought back. We welcome your participation in building it, and we welcome your stories and your memories of some very tough times.
On this website, Sophie-Louise Ullman for Dreamers and Fighters. Her daughter, Ginny Browne, will tell Sophie-Louise’s story and Lori Styler will talk about the story behind the documentary, Dreamers and Fighters: The NYC Teacher Purges.
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