Grad School and My Health

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Kiersten Greene

As we come up to the end of yet another school year, and I begin to think about transitioning to becoming a full-time professor, I can’t help but reflect on the last eight years of schooling, and how I’ve “mediated” my experience with my body. While I’ve encountered many highlights and benchmarks and celebrations, disappointments and frustrations and discouragements over the years — and everything in between — my mind begins to wander, without fail, to all of the ways in which I’ve carried the stress of schooling around in my body.

While I have been lucky enough to cover most of my schooling expenses over the last near-decade through fellowships, building websites, tutoring, taking on part-time teaching gigs when available, making and selling knitwear, and agreeing to odd jobs for cash whenever possible, my body feels like it’s been battered along the way. I wonder to what extent this has been due to having to work around the clock just in order to go to school. Let’s take a look back:

2005-2006: During my first year as a PhD student, I worked as a literacy coach in at an elementary school while going to school full time. I had chronic sinus infections all year, and had to have my tonsils taken out in April.

2006-2007: I decided to resign from my my job as a full-time teacher, in order to be able to accept a graduate teaching fellowship through CUNY — which would, theoretically, provide more time to devote to my studies. The fellowship, which paid me an annual salary of $13,000, required me to teach two college courses per semester. The pay was taxed, and though I was given tuition remission, I had to purchase my own healthcare. In order to make up for the cost, I took on a second job as a proofreader at a marketing firm, and a third job as a tutor.

2007-2009: I joined the fight for adjunct and student healthcare at the CUNY Graduate Center. I initially couldn’t understand why more people weren’t involved, and later realized that it’s probably because they’re too busy. I kept my teaching fellowship, as well as my tutoring and proofreading jobs, and begged my grandmother for extra cash.

2009-2011: I received a CUNY Writing Fellowship at a still-unacceptably-low-but-almost-liveable wage. The salary was about $30,000, and came (finally) with healthcare benefits. I continued to tutor, and took on a part-time literacy teaching job at an elementary school. I also initiated a knitwear company, and began making knitwear to sell.

2011-2012: I gratefully received an Instructional Technology Fellowship, which, like the Writing Fellowship, came with a salary of about $30,000 plus healthcare benefits. I continued to tutor and knit for additional money, and started building websites for pay as well.

2012-2013: I received a university sponsored Dissertation Fellowship of $22,000, with no healthcare benefits. I was forced to make the choice between 1) accepting this distinction, which would afford me the time I desperately needed to complete my dissertation, and 2) continuing on as an Instructional Technology Fellow for a second year, with a decent salary and benefits. I opted for the Dissertation Fellowship, and have paid $225 per month for the student healthcare cobra option. I continued to tutor, knit, and build websites for cash.

I am not totally complaining. Not completely. I am proud of the work I have done, and believe I received a stellar education at the CUNY Graduate Center. I also realize that many, many people face far more challenging, economically crushing circumstances. However, the fact remains that had I not worked three and four jobs for the majority of my time as a graduate student, I would, like many of my friends and colleagues, be facing an even larger mountain of crippling educational debt.

So then, what is the point of being a full-time student if you can’t actually go to school full time!? What are the actual expectations of being a full-time student these days? How does the rhetoric of doing something “full-time” match up with reality?

I started out this post thinking about all of my injuries and mysterious illnesses over the last eight years:  I have broken a bone, torn both meniscuses, suffered countless migraines, sprained my ankle at least twice, jammed my coccyx, had an extended bout with vestibular neuritis, contended with back spasms, and most recently was diagnosed with a labral tear in my hip. But as I started to write, it quickly became clear that the problem was larger than just my health — the problem all along has really been money.

It has been more than difficult as a student to make sure I’ve had enough at the end of each month to pay for rent, food, and healthcare coverage. And while I admit that there have been plenty of other factors at play, I can’t help but wonder at how the stress of having to work so many jobs just in order to go to school has prevented me from staying healthy while being a PhD student.

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Data

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Kiersten Greene

I’ve been silent for a while. After spending the balance of the summer recovering from a mysterious virus that had lodged itself in my inner ear, I dove head-first into my data collection and analysis this fall for my dissertation, The New York City Teacher Voice Project. So in the last five months, that’s where I’ve been: collecting, analyzing, aggregating, and wrestling with my data. And I couldn’t be more excited about writing up my findings.

Motivated by my experience as a 5th-grade public school teacher in New York City, my dissertation takes up questions around policy and practice in public schooling and investigates the local knowledge teachers share in their blog posts. As a teacher, my colleagues and I confronted obstacles to our work as teachers on a daily basis — there was a revolving door of schedule changes, too few materials, generally insufficient resources and training, etc. — and found ways to adapt to or resist the circumstances in the name of consistency. And we went through the motions largely on our own. But as online spaces to communicate grew, teachers began blogging about their experiences. It is one assertion of my dissertation that policymakers have something to learn from what is shared in these blogs.

I was thinking the other day about why my work as an educational researcher is so closely tied to my experience. I’ve always been attracted to stories. I majored in anthropology as an undergraduate student, and worked on an oral history project during an internship the summer after I graduated from college. Ethnography, or some digital version of it, was an obvious choice for my work as a doctoral student, and I’m drawn in by the narratives shared by teachers who blog about their daily work in the classroom. The experiences they write about are so similar to mine — from a lack of stall doors in the girls’ bathroom and broken copy machines to insect infestations and faulty internet access — and I’m in the process of weaving together their experiences in a sort of kaleidoscopic word quilt.

So onward with the writing. Day in and day out till it’s done. In the meantime, I spent time before the holiday break printing out my data. Don’t laugh. Until I did this, I had no sense — and no tangible way of sharing — how “much” data I had. I’ve got quite a bit to work with. And this is the one and only time I’ll every have to do this. Now I have a sense of what a stack of roughly 400 blog posts looks like in the real world.

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Privacy, Footprints, and Cyberbullying

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

I went dark for a few days earlier this summer — unsure of whether or not that was the right thing to do. Here was my dilemma:

It had come to my attention that my digital identity had been reworked and redistributed for an audience of people I barely know via manipulated screenshots, spliced email correspondences, and false representations of my words, politics, and intentions. As a colleague put it, I had officially been cyberbullied.

This isn’t the first time my identity has been stolen or manipulated, nor is it the first time it has caused unnecessary waves in my personal life. (And something tells me it won’t be the last.) But after considering my options (most of which would include drastically reducing my digital footprint), I concluded that I shouldn’t change anything about how I tweet, blog, or communicate. As an instructional technology educator, academic researcher of blogs, and fiber artist who relies heavily on digital media and communication to share my ideas and work, I can’t — and more importantly, shouldn’t – hide from cyberbullies/stalkers/harassers.

Alhough people who have been the target of cyberbullying, cyberstalking, or cyberharassment have little legal recourse (it turns out that very few states have laws in effect to address digital forms of harassment), I was glad to hear of landmark legislation that went into effect on July 1st. The Dignity for All Students Act addresses bullying and harassment at the K-12 level on school grounds in New York State, and is an important step in acknowledging the fact that bullying, stalking, harassment, and violations of privacy — whether digitally or in real-time — are not to be tolerated in any form.

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Don’t Know Much About History

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

As I push forward with data collection for my dissertation, I keep returning to the idea that history can repeat itself. And indeed, there is something repetitive — or even static –about the way the New York City public school system implements new reforms and policies.

I taught 5th grade from 2002-2006, during which a new standardized curriculum requiring a teaching method called the workshop model (defined by the the NYCDOE here) took elementary and middle school classrooms throughout New York City by storm. For some, the idea was not new and had either been introduced at an earlier time in their career or taught in a teacher education program; for others, it was an unfamiliar concept. But regardless of familiarity, many of us — particularly those of us teaching in schools with a lack of appropriate resources to do our jobs as required — the workshop model created the necessity to adapt behind closed doors.

As an example, there was the rug issue. Part of implementing the workshop model required a space in the classroom for students and teacher(s) to gather for a lesson, and creating a space with a rug for students to sit on made sense. In many schools it was compulsory. However, rugs were not provided by the school; nor was their cleanliness routinely maintained, which sometimes resulted in ongoing bouts of ringworm or infestations of lice, bed bugs, or other vermin.

In response to this expensive (and at times unsanitary) quandary, teachers were forced to adapt. Some had students gather chairs in a makeshift meeting area without a rug, or had them drag desks around in a way that created a sense of a meeting space, or, less desirably (especially for the watchful eyes of administrators), they eliminated the meeting portion of the workshop model altogether. Oftentimes, these adaptations resulted in reprimand and/or placing blame squarely on the teacher’s shoulders when test scores did not rise.

And while the Sisyphean practice of chasing the intended implementation of new policies like the workshop model without the means to do so seemed brand-new to many of us at the time, educational historians teach us that adaptation in the face of unreasonable or unrealistic policy expectations is not a new phenomenon for teachers in New York City. In a discussion of the introduction of new, progressive-education-based policies in city schools between 1920 and 1940 (shockingly similar to those “introduced” with the workshop model), Larry Cuban writes, “For teachers, contradictions multiplied as they tried to resolve the tensions generated by partisans of progressive pedagogy and the daily realities they faced in their schools” (1993, p. 113), and concludes, “The results were classrooms where contradictory behaviors appeared in an uneasy, often fragile configuration” (1993, p. 114). His words could also describe my experience many years later.

As I climb deeper into my data, I find myself revisiting the four books pictured: Radical Possibilities by Jean Anyon, City Teachers by Kate Rousmaniere, How Teachers Taught by Larry Cuban, and The One Best System by David Tyack. Each of these volumes takes a slightly different approach to the history of teaching and the policies that surround education, and not all focus solely on New York City; however, each helps me illuminate the idea that the pendulum of education policy has a tendency to swing back and forth, creating a sense of running in place without addressing the root of the problem which, often, comes down to a lack of necessary funds and resources.

There have been constant reforms in New York City schools in the last 100+ years, and yet accounts of teachers’ work almost a century ago are, in my opinion, too similar to today’s. It is my hope that we can find a new path — one that doesn’t have us constantly spinning our wheels.

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From Journal to Blog 2: Enter James C. Scott

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

Looking at some of my teaching journals stacked up, I can’t help but think about how the chronicling of time, events, and thoughts has shifted. I’m also thinking about how the value/power/purpose of these thoughts changes if they remain hidden or become public. I no longer keep a journal in the traditional sense; instead, electronic conversations help me keep track. But there was something methodical about keeping a personal, private, handwritten journal, and as I mentioned in this earlier post, I intend to periodically revisit entries about teaching, since so much of my research is inspired by what’s contained in these well-worn tomes.

This entry from a few years back, when I was a new-ish graduate student and adjuncting at the Hunter College School of Education, led me to consider using James C. Scott’s theory of the hidden transcript as part of the theoretical framework for my dissertation. Something shifted for me that afternoon while sitting on the floor of a Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn and gazing up at the stacks of books. There was (and still is) something wrong with this picture.

March 11, 2008

I found myself at a Barnes & Noble in downtown Brooklyn today, and wandered toward the education section, per usual.  I sat down amid the stacks, and looked up at the books.  These titles stared back at me: Discipline Survival Kit, Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire, Classroom Teacher’s Survival Guide, Whatever It Takes, Not In My Classroom, How to Handle Difficult Parents, Failure is Not an Option, and Fires in the Bathroom.  My jaw literally dropped – how had I missed this before?

Almost every book title suggests how to survive in the classroom. They point the finger at unruly children, hard-to-handle parents, unreasonable administrators, unknowing policy makers, or teachers themselves (these were my particular favorites, suggesting hot baths and essential oils, eating out a few times a week, and seeking grants to defray the unbelievably high cost of teaching materials).

So maybe it’s not that teachers’ experiences need to be inserted into the public transcript – it’s not a secret that teaching in urban schools can be a challenge, and movies, books, and articles paint a vivid picture – rather, we need a new paradigm for looking at why.

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Bike Paths and the Policy-Practice Gap

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

I’ve been eager to get back on my bike, and have been carefully taking it out for a spin every now and again. I appreciate the time it gives me to think. And almost without fail my thoughts turn to my research and the internet. One morning last week, I stopped at a point on the Kent Avenue bike path along the East River in Brooklyn to look for a second. I remember the first time I’d stopped at the intersection, before there were bike paths or a waterfront to speak of, and couldn’t help but wonder, per usual, at how much has changed. I took a photo in each direction, and couldn’t stop thinking about the ‘policy’ of bike paths, and the enormous policy-practice gap when it comes to biking in New York City.

For anyone who has been a New Yorker for more than five years, the appearance of roads has changed dramatically. With the addition of many miles of bike paths throughout the five boroughs, bikers went from living dangerously at the very bottom of the transportation food chain (right next to rollerskating) to having a major (but marginally safer) road presence. As I gazed southward, and then northward, from my stopping point on the path, I wondered what policies determine the rules of the bike paths. Anyone who knows me as a cyclist knows I can’t stand it when another cyclist salmons (rides the wrong direction on a one-way path). Roads are already fairly narrow in New York, and adding an additional vehicle on a path that’s only wide enough for one bike just doesn’t seem smart. And yet it happens with regularity in New York City. (Don’t get me started about biking on the sidewalk.)

My curiosity led me to find this page on the Parks Department website. It clearly states that cyclists are never to ride on paths meant for pedestrians (i.e., sidewalks), and they are to ride in the direction of traffic. But we see the exact opposite all the time. It got me thinking: is there anything I can learn from comparing the policy-practice gaps that exist in education and cycling in New York?

Thinking about this reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague about my dissertation a few years ago. I hadn’t yet decided to research blogs, but I knew I wanted to look at the gap between policy and practice in classrooms — that space between the way a policy exists on paper and the way it exists in reality. While thinking out loud about this concept, my colleague asked so what? I remember being floored, and thinking, how can the ‘so what’ of my question be any more obvious? But the question stuck with me. My colleague’s point was, though it is often unfair and unjust, it isn’t rare in our society to have policies that aren’t abided by. Take comparable worth laws, for instance. Men and women are to be paid the same amount of money for the same amount of work; however, it is a well-known statistic that women still make roughly 70 cents to the man’s dollar.

Okay. So. We know policy isn’t always followed or enforced. How does this both resist and reproduce business as usual? Bikers may choose to take a dangerous route when riding the wrong way on a bike path to get somewhere more quickly (and may get a ticket or become injured as a result), but students who don’t have appropriate learning materials in their classrooms aren’t making a choice.

I’m not sure this comparison will go further than this blog post, but there’s something to be said for thinking about why we have so many policies that don’t match up with reality.

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Teachers for Trayvon

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

I joined countless other teachers today in wearing a hoodie for Trayvon Martin. We wore this symbolic item of clothing in solidarity against racism, against brutal misusage of power, against silence. It was another way to express the disgust and sadness that so many of us feel about Trayvon’s murder and what it represents, and, importantly, to continue to talk about it. And it reminded me of another time that I wore an item of clothing in solidarity with a group.

As an undergrad at Princeton University in the mid-90s, I remember participating in Gay Jeans Day — a day instituted on many university campuses to raise awareness about LGBTQ rights. It was simple: if you were in support of gay rights, you wore jeans; if you weren’t, you didn’t. I remember making sure that I wore jeans all week, so that my solidarity was never in question. I also remember being confused that not everyone was participating in such an important, yet simple, act of support.

While the contexts are different in many ways, they are also quite similar. There is something uncomfortable about standing up, about acknowledging that people can be so cruel to one another, about imagining that a tidal-wave-type shift in the status quo might actually be possible. But if we don’t use our voices — and, when necessary, our clothing — to push back at the injustices that so many of us face every day, then we are seriously missing the boat when it comes to dismantling racism, sexism, and bullying of any kind.

 

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Power Ball Ads: Hope Vs. Reality?

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

snapshot taken on a downtown Q train on 3/27/12

If you watch TV (online or otherwise), or ride the subway in New York, you’ve likely seen the recent Power Ball ads like this one, that implies if you win, you’ll have enough funds to do anything, anytime, anywhere.

I should first say that my relationship to the Lotto is not a familiar one — it’s one of those things that my grandmother participated in once a week for at least the latter part of her adult life, but I never really understood (because she never won). And looking at ads like this, or the Power Ball commercial where a woman reclines on a couch in her spacious living room and uses a remote to control what a live Cindy Lauper plays, makes a person wonder.

So why post about this on a blog that focuses on education and technology? At a time when tension in the country is only mounting around the economy (among other things), it’s not hard to explain to students at any instructional level that there are few circumstances that would ever allow for one car to travel, alone, through one of the busiest arteries in New York City while traffic builds up in the other tunnel — or, that hiring an ultra-famous band for personal use in one’s apartment is highly unlikely under most circumstances, but such logic goes agains the grain of images like these. I’ve obviously not researched this from an empirical standpoint, but as a New Yorker for more than 10 years, I can attest to being delayed on the subway, in traffic, or on foot, by closed streets for a variety of important-people-related reasons, but very few people actually have the funds to stop traffic as suggested by this ad — fewer, even, than the 1%.

So I guess that’s what is most significant to me about this image — that it harnesses, in some clever-yet-completely-false manner, the rhetoric of the Occupy movement (i.e., the 99% vs. the 1%). I’m sure it’s not the first time an ad for the Lotto has lied, but it’s the first time one has made me pause and wonder about how it’s playing off the current, public narrative around money (and by extension, class). Indeed, the very idea of ads is to sell, but where do we draw the line on hope vs. reality in a city where there are schools that don’t have the materials they need for basic instruction?

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In the News

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

A link to this article in the Daily News came through on multiple list serves this morning: “New York City Teaching Fellows call for overhaul of 12-year program as deadline for new batch of teachers nears.” I think Lisa Cunningham, a former New York City Teaching Fellow who was interviewed for the article by Corinne Lestch, sums up the gist well: “I just think we need to have a serious conversation as a city about the way we train and support our teachers” (full article here).

First of all, isn’t there a hiring freeze? That’s what I’ve heard from friends looking to get a teaching position at a New York City public school, anyway…

snapshot of my own (old and weathered) copy of the NYT article referenced

But more importantly, this isn’t the first time, and I doubt will be the last, that the effectiveness of alternative certification programs like the New York City Teaching Fellows has been questioned.

I was reminded of the start of the program — I’d wanted to apply, but missed the first deadline, and joined a year later with Cohort 3. How differently the program was painted then. I’m reminded of an article in The New York Times, “A Longer Shortcut to School,” in which I appeared with a colleague, that outlined a sort of day-in-the-life of two New York City Teaching Fellows. I’m described as “tall and animated,” and the author, Abby Goodnough, offers an account of my attempt to teach perimeter to third graders (which, years later, is a little horrifying to read). The tenor of the article is one of skepticism, though in contrast to today’s in The Daily News, far more hopeful about the program on the whole.

As I come up on the last year of graduate school, and begin to really consider what I want my job to look like as a full-time teacher educator, I am concerned about the disjointedness of teacher education, generally, and how programs like the New York City Teaching Fellows have confused the terms of what’s really going on in our city’s schools.

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Twitter, et. al.

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Kiersten Greene

I had lunch with a friend today who was is one of those people whose brain you want to pick: she’s brilliant, especially about the internet. She’s been on Twitter for almost as long as it’s been around, and our conversation at lunch got me thinking about my own history with the medium.

When it was initiated, I remember thinking Twitter was just another Facebook update, and that I certainly didn’t need another place to say more (I say plenty already). I remember wondering if there would ever be an end to updating. Clearly, no! Some networks will endure and others won’t, but for now, ‘updating’ those around you with your most recent thoughts, discoveries, questions, requests, etc., seems here to stay.

My relationship to Twitter today is not a consistent one. I tend to use it for knitting more than anything else, and I have two separate accounts to help me keep track of who I’m saying what to. My personal account is mostly used for questions and statements about education, and I used it a lot at demonstrations earlier this school year; I often look at it for updates and information, but tweet sporadically. I have a hard enough time keeping up with just email that there’s no chance of me becoming a regular on Twitter in the near future, but I’m fascinated by how it’s shifted the way we communicate and seek new knowledge.

I remember doing a mental list of all the social networking sites I was a part of a few years ago, and it wasn’t many: Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and I think that might have been it. Then, before too long, sites like Netflix, Hulu, and Google became networked for ‘updating’ via ratings, messages, likes, and comments, and I was suddenly a part of far more virtual networks than I ever thought possible. And then there’s Academia.edu, Reddit, Instagram, the CUNY Academic Commons, and so on. News is all interactive now — you can comment endlessly on just about any post or article. Even if we don’t participate in conversations online, people around us do, and we are a part of that dialogue whether we participate actively or not. It’s so different from how it used to be(!). I remember my mom would come home every day after school and read the newspaper. That’s never been part of my daily ritual (or at least not for a really long time). Is it awful that I get most of my news from links on Facebook and Twitter?

I think about the impact this has on education, considering that the internet promotes (both in concept and reality) collectivity, democracy, and symbiosis. Doesn’t that seem to go against the grain of the practice of striving to ‘be the best’ that so many of our classrooms foster? Hasn’t the internet taught us that we rely on each other, and therefore have to work together? There’s something about the idea of networking and how it’s transformed our society that’s got me thinking today, and wondering about what comes next.

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