March 27, 2008

My student and Army recruitment

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by Eric Blair @ 1:23 pm

[Editor’s Note: Eric Blair is the pseudonym for a first-year teacher of math in a Manhattan high school.]

I had never heard a student describe a set of ratio problems like this before, as being “just like the Army test.” It was a sophisticated way of broaching the subject, I suppose, of why Stephanie had not been in school on Monday. She had been at home with her mother, entertaining a visit from a US Army Recruiting Sergeant. It was a productive meeting from the Army’s point of view.

Stephanie is a senior this year, by her age and by a rag-tag band of credits that she’s scraped together, semester after semester. She’s somehow managed a passing score on every Regents exam she needs for a basic diploma, except for one. She’s failed the Math A Regents four times. This is why I meet one-on-one with Stephanie twice a week for a full period, coaching her to leap this one last hurdle separating her from a high school diploma.

Stephanie isn’t usually very academic, but today she taught me about yet another standardized test. “I have to get a 31 to get in,” she said, “I got an 11 on the practice test.” I asked her how many points there are in total. “90-something,” she said.

The Army accomplished in one home visit a goal that I had long since discarded: getting Stephanie not to rely on her calculator. Last week Stephanie reached for a calculator to multiply three by four. Today I sat with her while she struggled with two times nine, because on the Army test, “they say just bring paper.”

Stephanie’s new-found devotion to manual calculation was not accompanied by any sort of enthusiasm for the math in the New York State exam or the Army exam, or indeed by any sort of enthusiasm at all. Her eyes were tired and seemed softened by tears. I asked her several times how she felt about the decision to go into the military and heard several times about the views of her mother. It could have been a quote verbatim, the standard bit about taking a few years to “get some discipline.”

On a lark, I showed her the method of multiplying by nine with your fingers. You can see it for yourself in a movie called “Stand and Deliver.” It’s not calculus. It’s just sort of fun. Stephanie was not amused. She was a sad mix of innocence and cynicism.

As for me, I’m a credit-card-carrying member of USAA, entitled to this privilege because my grandfather served in the Navy. He’s proud to have served, and I’m proud of him. He flew blimps over the near Atlantic, discouraging unfriendly submarine visitors. Did you know that people died, flying slow-moving Navy blimps along our Eastern seaboard?

Patriotic or not, I feel like the Army is snatching my student away. College funding or not, I feel like the happy and prosperous life I wish for my students is somehow incompatible with conscription. Maybe it has something to do with the sentiment expressed by Kurt Vonnegut, who fought in the Second World War, that the US military today is “being treated, as [he] never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

I am well aware of how over-represented Stephanie’s several overlapping identities are in our armed forces. There’s an email in my inbox from the Conference on Math Education and Social Justice. It says teaching math in New York City helps create balance in an unjust world. It doesn’t know that it might actually send Stephanie into harm’s way.

I finished working with Stephanie in a kind of daze and took my contradictions to the faculty bathroom, breathing hard. Of course I’ve heard about first-year teachers brought to tears on the job. I never imagined anything that would do it to me. But then, I guess it is different things for different people.

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