Educators That Rock!: Miss Brave
Miss Brave is an anonymous blogger and second-grade teacher in the New York City School District. A quick look at the “Labels” section on the right of her blog, miss brave teaches nyc, reveals that she’s had some pretty rough days: breakdowns (22), infinite wisdom of the DOE (14) and school politics (24). But tucked among these categories you’ll also find happy thoughts (32) and kid quotes (35). Every morning she manages to start fresh, because “every day is a new opportunity to recover.”
In an e-mail interview with findingEducation, Miss Brave explained a mantra that she adopted from one of her colleagues: “‘Close the door and teach.’ If I want to sing Sesame Street’s ‘The People in Your Neighborhood’ during social studies, or skip word work one day in order to read the class a book about volcanoes, I’ll close the door and teach.”
fE: What made you choose to become a teacher?
MB: My high school required its students to complete community service in order to graduate, and to complete my hours I volunteered as an assistant at my temple’s religious school. At the time, I had never been around small children before and was terrified of them! But over time, I came to enjoy myself and decided to get my teaching certificate in college.
fE: At one point you jokingly called yourself a “Trained Teacher Monkey” because the administration made it difficult for you to have any control over your own teaching methods and plans. What strategies have you developed for dealing with an administration that can be unreasonable?
MB: I’ve adopted a mantra I stole from another teacher: “Close the door and teach.” If I want to sing Sesame Street’s “The People in Your Neighborhood” during social studies, or skip word work one day in order to read the class a book about volcanoes, I’ll close the door and teach. If I need to take 15 minutes out of reading to make sure everyone organizes their book baggies correctly, I’ll close the door and teach.
I know that there are teacher-bloggers out there who consider their administrators incompetent; I do not. I have no doubt that my administration is made up of talented, intelligent individuals, but the longer I’m at my school the more I start to realize that they have no idea what actually goes on in any of our classrooms or even how to teach the lessons that we teach. If they did, they wouldn’t expect us to do half the things we do and still live to teach another day!
fE: Your play-by-play of the escaped lizard in your classroom seems to be one of your readers’ favorite stories. Can you describe how you transformed this incident into a teaching moment?
MB: Teachers typically strive to make their regular days as routine as possible; it’s why we say the same things to our students every morning and why we use the same language over and over when we talk to them. So any break in the routine is always an exciting opportunity to shake things up.
Just minutes after we recovered the lizard, another teacher came to my classroom to pick up a student and when we told her what had just transpired, her immediate reaction was, “You HAVE to write a story about that!” We titled it “Lizard on the Loose: A true story by Miss Brave’s class.” That story is still hanging on our classroom door, and to this day a few of my students write “A true story” underneath the title of their “small moment” stories.
fE: It seems like you have an arsenal of crisis prevention strategies. For example, the time you arrived early for a field trip and were trapped on the bus for a half-hour with your students—no blackboard, no lesson plan, nothing. Can you share with us some of the ways you cope when things don’t go according to plan?
MB: Just this morning I said to my class (as school aides were arriving to check their heads for lice while we were supposed to be having a math test), “There’s going to be a lot going on this period, so we’re all going to have to work together and roll with it.” In a situation like the one on the bus, I just try to be creative about any kind of mental games we can play to keep ourselves occupied. Sometimes, when a lesson isn’t working, I’ll switch things up in the middle (shhh, don’t tell my AP!). But I never let on to the kids that I’m revising our plans; I just act like this is what was supposed to happen the whole time.
There have been times when inwardly I may have been FREAKING OUT but outwardly I was all, “It’s cool.” I have pretended that everything from urine to blood to vomit was no big deal in my classroom just because, if you freak out, then the kids will definitely freak out.
fE: These are your words from a blog post describing one extraordinarily bad day: “Crying in class? Check. Screaming so loud at misbehaving kid that good kid next to him jumps back in fear, while misbehaving kid continues to not care? Check. Resisting urge to actually physically harm misbehaving kid? Check.” How do you step back into the classroom after a nightmare day like this one?
MB: I’m not going to lie: There was Xanax involved. I have a poster hanging in my classroom that says,“You can always be a better person today than the one you were yesterday.” I put it there to motivate my students, but I hold myself to the same standard. Even on my worst days with the particular students who caused that meltdown, I always kept in perspective that every day had the potential to be a fresh start. Every day is a new opportunity to recover.
fE: When you know your students’ have difficult home lives, how do you treat them with understanding, without letting them control you?
MB: I think it’s important to recognize what my students and I have control over and what we don’t. One of my hardest working students shows up 30 to 45 minutes late every morning. Unfortunately, that’s not her fault, and I’m not going to waste time admonishing her for not being on time when she has no control over the fact that for whatever reason, her parents can’t get her to school on time. But she does have control over the fact that when she does get to school, she needs to unpack herself as quickly as she can and get right into the lesson (which she does). I’ve tried very hard to stress to my students that our classroom is a community, and that we are all important members of our classroom community—that no matter what else we may be carrying into the classroom, we always treat each other with caring and respect.
fE: Do you have any advice on how to reach out to parents whose kids aren’t performing as well as they could in class?
MB: I have to confess that I’m not as good at this as I could be, especially when I have students whose parents don’t speak English. Sending notes and newsletters home is always a little tricky because I’m never sure of the extent to which parents actually read them. Face-to-face communication is always the most effective, but it’s difficult to find the time to meet with parents outside of our regular parent-teacher conference schedule… I guess my best advice would be to translate the information into action—not “your child isn’t meeting standards” but “here are some things you can do to help your child meet standards.”
[For example,] I’ve had parents tell me it’s difficult to monitor their child’s comprehension because they’re not proficient in English, and I always tell them, “You can talk about the book in Spanish, as long as you’re talking about it.”
fE: Two of your students were removed from the class because they needed special attention. Now that they’ve left, do you feel your other students are finally getting the attention they need? Have you noticed a change in their behavior?
MB: 100%, absolutely, positively, YES, to both of those questions. For the first two months of the school year, I felt as though the only two students I interacted with were the two students who were having problems behaviorally. Now I’ve gotten to know the other 25 students in my class much better, and now that they don’t have to fight for my attention, the mood in the entire class has calmed down considerably.
fE: Have you met a lot of teachers through your blog? Do you find the comments of other teacher-readers helpful?
MB: Teaching sometimes feels like being in a bubble; there are days when I feel like I don’t get any interaction with the outside world. So my blog has definitely helped me form a connection with other teachers. What’s really interesting is reading the comments of teachers in other areas of the country.
fE: Do you have any suggestions for incorporating the Web into your classroom?
MB: Alas, my classroom doesn’t have a SmartBoard, so I’m stuck using a tiny laptop and having 27 children attempt to crowd in around the screen! I’ve used the Internet with limited success in my room.
One day I took my students into our computer lab (they don’t have computers as one of the specials on their schedule), and we visited our science curriculum’s Web site and built roller coasters online to wrap up our balance and motion unit. They LOVED it. I had just gotten a new student that morning who seemed completely shy and reserved, and five minutes into the activity she was yelling my name to get me to come over and see her roller coaster.
Miss Brave’s Favorite Sites:
Gothamist
Improv Everywhere
Peace in the classroom
GothamSchools
Really Good Stuff
A to Z Teacher Stuff
