In your meeting with Halee Sage we discussed a Public School she worked at for two years in Baltimore. She was working in a very small class room trying to teach 30 or so 5th graders. She spent the first portion of her time in the class room simply teaching the kids how to navigate the small space. How to say sorry when you bump into someone instead of starting a fight. There were two other teachers working with her in 5th grade each assigned a group of thirty kids like a homeroom. When she got there, one teacher declared that they would teach math and the other English. This left Halee Sage teaching all the other classes such as science, social studies and health. Once every other week the class would be scheduled to have PE and art but often those teachers wouldn’t be able to make it and the kids would just go without that class.

Some days the classes would rotate throughout the day but some days they would stay the same. On days the classes didn’t rotate the class whose main teacher was the one who had deemed himself the math teacher would teach that class math all day long with the occasional break for possibly a read aloud after their 20min lunch period. When the classes would switch, kids would go from math, to english, to heath and so on. The decision of whether or not the classes would switch was one made at the very last minute

Just because there is a teacher that cares doesn’t automatically mean success. There are other factors that alter a child’s learning. Community was not an issue for these kids because there was a strong community in inner city Baltimore. Things beyond a teachers control such as sleep, food, supervision and other such things could effect how a child is able learn throughout the day. Halee Sage said “I think it was the hardest work I’ve ever done.”

I learned so much talking to Halee Sage which surprised me. I wouldn’t believe that some kids would be taught math for the whole day just because their teacher decided thats what he wanted to do. I also think it is horrible that the kids are kept in such small spaces for so long with no recess or PE unless you’re are in Halee Sage’s class where recess was sometimes used as a reward to make the kids focus. I think that because parents are so uninvolved in the schooling process, there are no expectations from their families about how they do in school.