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Postcards from the Houston Institute

June 20, 2007 - Has anyone seen my first name? I seem to have lost it. For the past three days I have gone from thinking my mom had walked into the classroom to realizing that "Yo, Ms. Devlin" was actually directed at me.

Postcards from the Houston Institute

By Bridget Devlin (S. Louisiana '07)

June 20, 2007
Has anyone seen my first name? I seem to have lost it. For the past three days I have gone from thinking my mom had walked into the classroom to realizing that “Yo, Ms. Devlin” was actually directed at me.

I am currently teaching sixth grade math, and I have the biggest class in the school. These kids will not move on to seventh grade if they do not meet certain objectives this summer
. . . . The lesson I gave yesterday worked really well; the lesson I gave today totally backfired. When I gave them their post-test, they only got 27 percent of the answers right. It would be frustrating to have any lesson go astray, but I was up till 3:30 a.m. working on this one.

June 25, 2007
Today was such a good day! The students are really starting to feel like a close-knit group, and they are acting like mature adults for the most part. Today we worked on word-problem strategies, and I set them up in centers. I decided while hopped up on caffeine at 3 a.m. that I was up for the challenge. And it worked!

I gave them their individual growth goals today, which was super-exciting! Every single one of them has a long way to go, but I am confident that if they show up and work hard I can get them there. We just need three more weeks of todays.

July 1, 2007
Friday the TAKS scores came out. The TAKS is the Texas math and reading standardized test that students take every year to pass on to the next grade. Only 4 of my 25 students passed. Students were crying; they were outraged. I tried to remind them that if they did well on my test in two weeks they could still go to seventh grade. . . . I have never seen a group of kids this upset. The four kids who did pass sat quietly, sad for their friends and wondering if they would ever be able to celebrate their successes.

July 9, 2007
Well, it was bound to happen. The kids are calling me Ms. Devil.

I spent the Fourth of July in a Starbucks, lesson planning and making a worksheet on measuring angles. I have to turn in grades for each of the students on Wednesday, which will play heavily in the decision of whether they get to advance to seventh grade. The other major part of the decision is how they do on the test I give on Thursday. My biggest fear is failure, and—for the first time in my life—it is up to other people whether or not I fail.

July 13, 2007
My kids rocked it. All 23 of my sixth graders will be starting seventh grade in the fall. We decided not to tell them together but call them all out into the hall one by one. The smile/look of disbelief would cross their face, and I knew getting eight hours of sleep a week was worth it. A 16-year-old boy who found out today that he is going to seventh grade next year instead of repeating sixth grade for the third time could not hold back tears. Another boy asked if he could borrow my cell phone to call his dad immediately. One by one they walked back into the classroom, curiously eyeing each other, trying to figure out who passed. When the last girl walked through the door smiling, I asked them to raise their hand if they were going to seventh grade. Every hand shot up, and every mouth shot open. No fancy hand signals, no clapping strategies or chants could have quieted down my classroom that afternoon, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Bridget Devlin is a 2007 South Louisiana corps member who trained at the Houston institute.