Minnesota Teacher of the Year

Congratulations to Amber Damm, Minnesota’s newly selected 2009 Teacher of the Year! Amber was chosen out of a field of eleven finalists this weekend to become the 45th Minnesota Teacher of the Year. Amber teaches English and Language Arts to seventh and eighth graders at Clara Barton Open School in Minneapolis. She is a tireless teacher who never gives up on her students, a model practitioner for fostering parental involvement in education, and passionate believer in the power of reading. Amber will start a whirlwind media tour on Monday, with numerous TV and radio appearances throughout the day.

As a footnote to this story, my last official duty as the 2007 Minnesota Teacher of the Year is to sit on the selection committee for choosing the 2009 Minnesota Teacher of the Year. As part of that duty, I got a chance to witness all eleven of the finalists’ interviews this weekend. It’s a remarkable opportunity to hear such talented and dedicated teachers talk about their educational beliefs and classroom practices. Choosing one teacher from the eleven finalists is a daunting task, as any of the finalists would make an outstanding representative for teachers.

Congratulations, Amber!

Congratulations to all the finalists for the Minnesota Teacher of the Year award for 2009. This weekend, May 1 through May 3, the finalists are gathering for a series of interviews and events that will culminate with the selection of the 2009 Minnesota Teacher of the Year on Sunday, May 3.

Good luck to all the finalists in their interviews. For me, this will be the last official function I participate in as the 2007 Minnesota Teacher of the Year. I look forward to meeting and getting to know all the finalists.

The official press release can be read on the Education Minnesota website.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the individual “Why I Teach” videos that each of the 2008 Teachers of the Year created in New York City in late September. Recently, the Pearson Foundation took those videos and had a compilation done with some segments from about half the videos.

You can watch the video here. Enjoy.

MinnPost, the Twin Cities’ respected and growing online news site, is running a five-part series this week on segregation in Minnesota’s schools. It’s great to see MinnPost bring education to the forefront of their news coverage. With the economy, energy, the election, and foreign policy dominating news coverage of late, it seems that there has been a dearth of educational coverage.

The MinnPost articles are well written and thought provoking. I’m going to hold off on commenting until I’ve read all five pieces, but they are well worth the time. Here are links to the articles:

Monday: Twin Cities-area schools more segregated than ever

Tuesday: Minority populations in suburbs rise…

Wednesday: The rise of voluntarily segregated schools…

Thursday: State and educators can’t agree…

Friday: A better way to integrate schools…

“I can’t believe it passed!” If I’ve heard this comment once, I’ve heard it a dozen times this week from teachers at Robbinsdale Armstrong High School, where I teach in the mornings. This Tuesday, while most districts saw requests for increased funding get denied, residents in the Robbinsdale school district approved not one, but two school levy referendums to increase funding for schools in the district. The first referendum on the ballot will provide over $7.6 million dollars in critically needed funding for school programs. The second will provide an additional $1.8 million. The funding will allow the district to rehire teachers who lost their jobs last year, restore some of the after-school programs that were eliminated last year, and reduce class sizes from their overflowing levels.

To be honest, I was skeptical leading up to the vote. It was a general election year, meaning that voter turnout would be high. Conventional wisdom says it’s much harder to pass a referendum in such years, as the average voter is reluctant to vote to raise their own taxes. On top of this, it’s easy to imagine how worried voters are about their finances given the economic turmoil of the past two months, with its plummeting stock market, falling house values, and threatening recession. And if that isn’t enough, the district is home to a small yet underhanded “Say No!” movement. Last year this group hired a consultant whose goal is to eliminate public schooling in the United States, they peppered the district with a mailing that included egregiously false information on the day before the 2007 vote, and they even sued the state of Minnesota over its statute that bans factual distortions relating to school referendums. So yes, I had my doubts that passing even one of the referendum questions would be possible.

But as the K-Mart posters of my youth used to say: “People who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” An active group of concerned residents of School District 281 refused to give in to the impossible. Continue Reading »

In early October, the Pearson Foundation brought all the 2008 National State Teachers of the Year to New York City to make two-minute videos titled “Why We Teach”. Each Teacher of the Year created a short speech and brought some photos to a Manhattan studio. We spent an afternoon making our videos with the help of members from the Mobile Learning Institute.

All the finished Teacher of the Year videos recently went on the Pearson Foundation’s website. You can see them here. Mine is on the page as well, but here’s a direct link.

The project was great fun, as was the entire stay in New York City. I’d like to publicly thank the Pearson Foundation for their generous support and hospitality while we were in New York. They gave us first class treatment the whole way: treated us to dinner and a Broadway play (Spamalot was awesome!); gave us a handy Flip video camera and other goodies; and covered all the costs associated with our New York stay. Thank you!

The quality of a school system directly impacts home values and overall community quality, and after-school programs are one of the many reasons. Every year I see the difference that sports, music, and arts programs can make in kids. Occasionally I hear opponents of the upcoming school referendums in Minnesota say that we don’t need these extra activities, that Minnesota schools should concentrate on teaching in classrooms. When the alternative is nothing, these opinions are dead wrong.

In seventh grade, I had nothing to do after school so I started hanging out with neighborhood friends on the suburban streets of Quincy, Massachusetts, where I grew up. I was on the cusp of that fragile age when your parents are no longer cool and your peer group is your world. Left to the streets, we had little direction and no guidance, but we craved excitement and found ways to get it. We started by running down streets and snapping antennas off parked cars. We graduated into breaking windows in neighborhood houses. Over the course of the year, one thing led to another, and before long beer, then marijuana, found its way into our group. I remember parties getting raided by police, and me running, always running. I remember arguing with my parents over everything and well, nothing. I had less energy for classes, and cared less about homework. I was thirteen years old, and my life was heading in all the wrong directions.

The next August, shortly before eighth grade started, I got a phone call from a classmate at school. He told me that he had signed up for the football team. The coach said the team needed players, and since I was big for my age, my classmate called me to see if I wanted to play. I had never played organized football, but with nothing else to do, I went ahead and signed up.

Every life has turning points. That moment was perhaps my biggest. I no longer had “nothing to do” after school. I had practices or games every day of the week. Most important, I had excitement of the good sort, and I could earn peers’ respect in a way that didn’t involve vandalizing neighborhood property. I had a place to go and good supervision. I made friends with other kids on the team, and I quickly found that I didn’t have time to hang out on the street with my old friends and do “nothing”.

I liked organized sports so much that I went on to play football and baseball in high school, then football, cross-country skiing, and baseball in college. I never ran from the police again. My seventh-grade friends? Many of them got arrested before they graduated from high school. Some of them never graduated.
_______

Early one morning this September, I was waiting at the school bus stop with my young children. We share the same stop with a few other kids, one of whom is Peter, a friendly twelve-year-old boy. As he walked to the bus stop, I noticed that he wasn’t carrying his tennis racket. I knew he had played tennis every day last fall, and I had seen him with his racket at least once already this school year.

“Hi Peter, where’s your racket?”
“Oh, we don’t have tennis every day now. The school doesn’t have any money to pay coaches. We just get to practice twice a week.”
“What will you do after school then, when you don’t have tennis?”
“I don’t know.”
He pauses.
“Nothing, I guess.”
_____

This Tuesday, November 4, residents in 42 school districts across Minnesota will go to the polls to vote on local school district referendums. With state funding lacking, districts have no choice but to ask voters for help. In addition to the threat of larger classes and more teachers losing their jobs, failed referendums will mean many districts will be forced to make even deeper cuts into after school programs.

I ask you a favor: Please vote yes. Let’s get rid of nothing, before it’s too late.

Photo Credit: Chad Davis, JFK Hoop.