Monthly Archives: March 2018

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blessing the boats

Do you get the newsletter “Teach This Poem” from Poets.org? If not, you should definitely go sign up. I don’t always find time to implement each plan, but they are great for tucking away to fill in lesson plans at times. What I like about the plans is they incorporate other disciplines, such as art, history, or science. Students have a chance to discuss and write in each lesson.

Some time back, the lesson plan revolved around Lucille Clifton’s poem “blessing the boats.” Please check out the poem at Poets.org.I don’t want to reprint it here without permission. I have even set the link to open up in a new tab, so you don’t lose your place. Come back, because I have more to say.

I think Monday is an important day to teach this poem, and the final instruction in the lesson plan caught my eye:

In recent weeks, students around the country have become activists and are leading campaigns to change minds and laws. Ask your students to write about how this poem might relate to the context of student activism today. Ask for volunteers to read their writing to the class.

Yesterday, I joined student activists and their allies at the March for Our Lives in Boston. It was a powerful and meaningful event for me. I haven’t ever done something like that before, and that was one of the reasons I went. I feel strongly about the issue of safety and schools, and I have ever since I was in college, preparing to become a teacher, and we first started hearing about school shootings. The organizers asked that adults hang back and let the students start the march, which began at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Roxbury and ran mostly up Columbus Avenue, ending with a rally at the Boston Common. During the rally, speakers included Leonor and Beca Muñoz. Beca is an alumna of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who now attends college at Northeastern and her younger sister Leonor is a current MSD student who survived the shooting. Leslie Chiu, another MSD alumna who also attends Northeastern, spoke as well.  Harvard University student Reed Shafer-Ray lost a friend to suicide and spoke about a couple of bills before the Massachusetts legislature that might have helped save his friend’s life. Graciela Mohamedi, a teacher who was a former US Marine spoke on behalf of teachers, including highly trained teachers such as herself, who do not want a gun.  A former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of the Congo also spoke about escaping from violence—I regret I didn’t get his name, and it would seem none of the news outlets covering the event did either. If someone finds it, let me know in the comments, and I will update this post.

This was my view as I began marching.

It was heartening to see so many people coming out to support our young people. These adults were, as Clifton describes in her poem, “blessing the boats.” This is not going to be an easy fight for them, but based on what I’ve seen, they have got this one. There were volunteers registering people to vote at the rally. I can remember being in college and being fired up to act politically for what I believed in. There is a lot of energy in these young people. There is some energy in their allies, too.

I could barely keep up with this guy, who started out right in front of me at the march but outstripped me somewhere along the route.

Some of the signs were really clever, and there were a few I wish I’d been able to capture. One, for instance, had a great drawing of Angela Davis along with her comment, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”

The English teacher in me was happy to see literary references.

There were definitely a lot of teachers there. I was behind three teachers talking about Paulo Freire near the beginning of the march.

I’ve been criticized before for being political on this blog. I’m supposed to shut up and share lesson ideas, I guess. Freire says, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” I’m not going to side with the powerful against my students. Freire also says, “This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.” As far as I’m concerned, I’m with the kids. I’m just here to bless their boats.

Issues, Reflection

We Have a College Admissions Problem

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college photo

I follow many of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. on Twitter. I don’t think anyone who has followed my Twitter feed or even this blog for any amount of time is unaware of how I feel about the MSD students and their stand against gun violence. I was surprised to see this tweet from one of the MSD students who has been most vocal in his advocacy for change:

If someone as articulate as David Hogg has demonstrated himself to be—time and time again over the last month—is not accepted into the colleges to which he’s applied, we have a college admissions problem. To my way of thinking, colleges should be clamoring to admit David Hogg and his peers. The fact that he has received several rejections boggles the mind. What, exactly, are these schools looking for if he doesn’t have it?

I wasn’t going to write about my personal experience here. I’m not embarrassed about what happened, but it’s not something I thought I’d talk about publicly. A doctoral program I spent about a half a year preparing to apply to and another three months waiting to hear from rejected me. I took the GRE, and given how long it has been since I had taken mathematics at the level the GRE tests, I was pretty proud of my average score on the math component of the test. Behind that average score was months of hard work practicing math using Khan Academy and GRE practice books. Aside from that, my verbal and writing schools would be difficult to beat: 168 (out of 170) on the verbal and a perfect score of 6/6 on the writing. I honestly thought it was a sign when one of my essays prompted me to write about the very subject I’d like to study in graduate school.

My college transcripts for both my bachelor’s and master’s reveal a hardworking student. I graduated magna cum laude from UGA, and my master’s GPA was a 3.9. My recommendations couldn’t have been stronger. I wrote something like seven or eight different drafts of my statement of purpose. Was it the statement of purpose that sunk me? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell if you have hit or missed the mark by a wide margin with such things, even if you pore over the advice from admissions offices.

My résumé reveals someone who publishes (including this blog for over a decade), often presents at a variety of conferences, and regularly engages in professional learning. I’m honestly the kind of lifelong learner for which I should think a doctoral program is looking. I have a certain humility, but I am proud of my desire to learn. You will never hear me say I know everything there is to know about a subject.

The rejection letter was a mere few sentences long. I didn’t think there would be a point in trying to figure out why I was rejected; most likely, I’d be told that the school didn’t have time to respond to those types of questions. Maybe a part of me didn’t want to know. So one of my dreams died. That’s okay, I consoled myself. I have other dreams. Maybe I should focus on achieving them instead.

So, aside from the fact that the program to which I applied is competitive, why was my application rejected? I was honestly a bit more stung by the fact that I didn’t even receive an interview request, which spoke of a whole other level of disinterest on the part of the school. I suppose I don’t understand why I didn’t even make it through the first hurdle of being asked to interview. The only reason I can think of is encapsulated into the word “fit.” That word covers a wide variety of potential reasons for rejection, some of them discriminatory, some of them not. It’s true I am a lot older than the average age of the student who studies in the program. I felt my experience would be an asset. It’s true also that I am a teacher, a practitioning educator, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my career researching. I want to be involved in education, not just study it and talk about it. For that reason, I admit, the program might not have been the best one for me. I have tried to decide if I am feeling bitter or if I’m being honest, and after much soul-searching, I concluded that the program honestly would not have been the best program for me. I was swayed by the cachet the name of the school would have offered me. Perhaps they just recognized it before I did, and if that’s case, maybe they did me a favor.

I went to two respected public universities—University of Georgia and Virginia Tech, and yet I have often felt, especially in New England, where I currently live and teach, that neither school is considered good enough. A former colleague shared he felt the same way. A doctorate from the college to which I applied would prove something. I’m not sure what.

I spent a couple of weeks feeling sad about it. I cried a few times. Then I thought long and hard. Did I still want to earn a doctorate? I concluded that I did. I applied to a different program. I am hoping for better results, but at the moment, my application remains incomplete until the school receives official transcripts and one more letter of recommendation. And honestly? The program I just applied to is much better suited to my needs and my current career as well as my future goals.

I do think we have a problem when applicants as strong as David Hogg receive multiple college rejections. I honestly think it’s a problem that my application went into what I imagine is an enormous slush pile. What exactly is it that colleges want in their applicants?

If applicants like David Hogg find college acceptance difficult, what does that mean for other students? Some might argue that college isn’t for everyone. It should be for everyone who wants to go, but I don’t agree that college should be required for everyone. In our economy, however, we demand college educations for jobs that don’t necessarily need one, and college graduates still find it hard to obtain work. However, despite recent arguments to the contrary, colleges do great work with students, and I remember my time at UGA in particular as a wondrous time filled with learning.

I don’t think I could have been better prepared to teach than I was as a student at UGA. Even to this day, their English Education faculty includes such luminaries in the field as Sara Kajder and Peter Smagorinsky. I applied to the school as a transfer student after a year at a community college. I was relatively new to Georgia, having moved there halfway through my junior year in high school. I had the most unhelpful college counseling you might imagine (as in it didn’t exist). The internet wasn’t available for me to research programs on my own. So, I went to community college for a year, so I could decide what to do. I saw a recruiting table for UGA’s College of Education at my community college. I spoke to the recruiter for a few minutes. I liked the look of the materials. I applied only to UGA. Later, I found out my SAT scores and probably my high school grades were not high enough to meet UGA’s threshold for freshman admittance. And yet, the entire time I studied at UGA, I earned A’s and B’s and, as I already mentioned, I graduated magna cum laude. UGA never asked for my high school transcripts or SAT scores when I applied as a transfer. I wonder if UGA would have given me a second look had I applied as a freshman rather than as a transfer, after I had proven I could excel in college studies.

Therein lies the problem. How many potentially great students are rejected for seemingly arbitrary reasons each year? I’m sure that college admissions offices have a tough job. How to distinguish one strong candidate from another on paper? How to determine who would be a good “fit”? Competition for a shrinking number of open student slots is fierce. I’m not sure how they should change, but I do know that if colleges are rejecting students like David Hogg, they’re getting it wrong. I’m concerned about issues of access for all if strong students like David Hogg are shut out.

Wish me luck as I wait to hear from the second doctoral program to which I’ve applied. I think I would not only be an excellent fit for the program but that it’s an excellent fit for me. If I’m rejected, however, I’m not sure I could try again with another program.

Update 3/19: I want to state for the record that David Hogg appears to be handling these rejections in stride. He is regrouping and discussing a gap year and internships as possibilities. He is in no way acting like his recent activism entitles him to college acceptance. I did not make that clear. It is also true I don’t know about his school record beyond what I have seen, but I am impressed with what I have seen. I think it speaks to the notion that he is a strong critical thinker and communicator.

Update 3/29: TMZ said yesterday that David Hogg’s GPA is a 4.2 and his SAT score is 1270, for those people wondering about his background and potential credentials. The SAT score puts him above the 80% percentile when compared to other SAT test-takers. He has been rejected from UCLA, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Irvine, which, incidentally, is a school I considered applying to before my family moved away from California in my junior year. Not sure I’d have been admitted, but it was my top choice until I moved. So, I think my argument that we have a college admissions problem is probably accurate.