Yesterday at lunchtime, I found myself in a baseball hat, apron, and plastic gloves, wielding a ladle and surrounded by people admonishing me to stay away from a meatball that I had dropped on the floor. This is the story of how it happened.
I am involved in a lot of the discussions in Delaware regarding improving our public schools, and I was proud to help draft and pass the major school reform legislation that the legislature enacted in June. But I’m not an educator by trade or training—the one time I tried teaching, during a program that sent idealistic law students like me into the public schools of New Haven as student teachers once a week, the results were disastrous.
Anyway, I quickly realized when I took office in January that I needed to spend a lot of time in our schools if I was going to be a knowledgeable participant in the discussions about improving them. I had read much of what there is to read, but being there is different. So I visited schools up and down the state early this year—all three counties, traditional and charter, elementary through high school. Those visits were incredibly useful—I got to meet with administrators, teachers, and some students, and I learned a lot. I am going to keep up those visits.
But we also realized in my office during the summer that there is a dimension to what goes on in our schools that you can only see if you are immersed in it. So we came up with the idea to have me actually spend a couple of hours a day for ten days in October working at different jobs in our public schools, so I would get an even better sense of what goes on there and the challenges our schools face. We also planned to have me finish up each of the visits by dropping in on some of our teachers to get their input on what we need to be doing. My team loved the idea because it had all the components of what they consider to be a perfect plan: it would benefit Delaware children, give them something novel to work on, and hold out the real possibility of horribly embarrassing me.
On Tuesday, I was a substitute teacher at Laurel Middle School in Sussex County. After a bracing two hour commute from Newark, I was partnered with eighth grade English teacher Karen Aliff (she has a classroom with two teachers, one of whom was absent), and I helped her with a project where students were divided into groups and asked to work together on constructing proper paragraphs. Some of the challenges facing our teachers became quickly apparent: aside from the inherent difficulty of managing chatty eighth graders through a project where they are actually encouraged to talk to one another, the students are at very different places in terms of verbal ability, writing skills, and willingness to participate in class. Making sure that everyone got something out of the exercise was tough.
Wednesday I worked with maintenance guru Tom Roberts at Hodgson Vocational Technical School in Newark. When I say ‘worked with,’ what I mean by that is ‘watched him and occasionally held tools for him.’ One of our rules for this project is to follow the Star Trek credo of causing no harm to the native population, and having me tinkering with any mechanical devices would have been bad news for the good people of Hodgson. But spending a couple of hours with Tom gave me a good look at how hard it is to maintain the physical plant at our schools, especially the older ones, and it also gave me a real appreciation for the breakneck pace that a lot of the staff at our schools keep up.
Finally, I got to work yesterday alongside food services worker Brenda Wilson at the Lewis Dual Language Elementary School in Wilmington. My responsibilities: serving up pasta, meatballs, and salad for what seemed like approximately 800,000 hungry elementary school students. Meatballgate occurred when I dropped one on the floor and bent over to pick it up. At home when I drop food on the floor, I have a very simple procedure: pick it up, examine it, and if no dirt is visible give it to the dog. But that is not exactly textbook in terms of maintaining a germ-free environment (and, of course, there are no dogs in the kitchen at the school), so when I instinctively bent over to pick up the meatball, my colleagues backed me off like NYPD Blue detectives warning a perp off a loaded gun.
Let me tell you something: those folks work hard, and they love the kids. Walking through the school afterward with principal Myron Cornish was fascinating: Lewis operates an innovative program where students learn primary subjects in both English and Spanish. Making it work is daunting, but the teachers and staff there are incredibly committed.
The ultimate goal of all this is making our schools better, and I am confident that spending this time on the front lines with the teachers and staff in our schools is going to be a real asset as we work together to give our kids the education they need and deserve. Thanks again to the schools that are hosting me for giving me a chance to learn firsthand how they do their critically important work.
