REVIEW: "Adequate Yearly Progress" by Roxanna Elden
On my very first day as a teacher — at a newly opened, woefully under-resourced charter school — a polite and studious looking 5th grader raised his hand in the middle of class and asked me what it meant to masturbate.
And that was when I knew.
When I knew that all of the careful preparation hadn’t prepared me in the fucking least.
It would be nothing like I had imagined. I wouldn’t be spending my days festively covering bulletin boards in die-cut paper stars and guiding deep and meaningful discussions with students who had not only done the assigned reading but also developed an opinion about it.
No.
It would be just me.
In this room.
With this beat-up chalkboard.
Refusing to tell 5th graders what it meant to masturbate.
Every day.
Until I died.
It was probably because of my experience as a teacher — and my current work as a school administrator — that I could so easily put myself in the shoes of the characters that populated this Roxanna Elden novel.
Each fall, the dedicated — and not so dedicated — educators who make up the staff of Brae Hill Valley High head back to school. Though the name unceremoniously slapped on the bland brick building that houses this school certainly implies that it rests in some idyllic pasture, it actually sits on the squalid streets of a poorly maintained, lowly regarded, city in Texas.
And like nearly all schools that rest in urban centers, this one is populated not with bright-eyed, well-cared for, career-minded students, but instead with kids who are still on the fucking base block of Maslow’s hierarchy. (Here you go, non-educators).
All of the teachers who make up this collective staff are different.
Lena Wright relocated to Texas to teach English to the neediest of students, hoping that the fact that she has brown skin, like so many of her students, will induce them to trust her.
Science teacher Hernan Hernandez has turned his room into a veritable rainforest, exposing his students to the chlorophyll they so rarely experience in the cement jungle they call home.
Kaytee Mahoney is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and certain that she will make a difference, in only the way that a brand-spanking-new teacher can be.
And Maybelline Galang spends all of her time — on and off the clock — taking the deep dive into data that is so encouraged in contemporary education.
But despite their differences, their feelings are largely universal.
They are all beleaguered.
Overwhelmed.
Underappreciated.
Paralyzed by bureaucracy and penalized for divergence from the norm.
And, though they don’t know it yet, this year won’t be any better than the ones that came before it.
In fact, it will be worse.
Thanks to a legacy of academic failure, all eyes are on Brae Hill Valley this year. And, in education, that’s usually not a good thing.
To ensure that Brae Hill Valley High, and others of the same ilk, improve, a new superintendent has been installed. And not just any superintendent. Nick Wallabee, a man who, in education circles at least, is a bit of a celebrity.
But when Wallabee goes to work, rolling out initiative after initiative, mummifying the teachers in red tape, they all start to question their value, their purpose, and their ability to get anything done in an environment that is growing increasingly less conducive to education.
The primary strength of this novel was its almost painful realness and its relatability
From Kayee who was young and green and going to save the world, to Maybelline whose obsessive dedication to rule-following gave her something to which to cling, all of these archetypes were realistic and believable and reflective of colleagues that any teacher will likely have encountered.
And the challenges they faced — the turning-coal-into-a-diamond level of pressure they felt on the fucking daily — were ones with which any educator could easily relate.
Though inarguably a fiction novel, Adequate Yearly Progress was more than that, really.
It was a rallying cry of sorts.
An exercise in empathy.
A reminder that though the educators who take on the task of shaping the adults of tomorrow are, like the ones in Brae Valley, all different, we are all facing the same insurmountable pressures and experiencing the same indescribable setbacks.
Since finishing this novel, I've spent quite a bit of time mulling over how I would rate it.
The crux of the difficulty rests in deciding how heavily — if at all — I should factor the degree to which I agree with the arguments the author seems to be making about the education process into my rating.
And a point the author seemed to be making, again and again, is that the under-performance of the students in this school — when compared with suburban teens — was a direct result of the sheer quantity of challenges they were facing in their outside-of-school life.
And, obviously, she's not wrong.
A kid who’s hungry will be too busy worrying about filling his belly to pay any attention to an educator trying desperately to teach him how to properly compose a simile or find the circumference of a circle.
But, then, what is the answer?
How can we close — or at least reduce — the gap?
Is she suggesting, as it could be inferred, that we need to allow the Hernans and Lenas and even the Maybellines of the world — the good teachers — to have the freedom they need to teach?
But then, with too much freedom — a complete elimination of oversight — how would administration ever identify under-performing teachers? Because I don't ascribe to the notion that, as this book kinda suggests, it’s always obvious which teachers are closing their doors and just phoning it in.
Ultimately, though, the answers to these questions aren’t important to the assignment of a rating for this book.
What is important is that I keep pondering them.
Because, ultimately, the quality of a book isn't necessarily dependent on how much I agree with the suppositions it presents, but instead on how much said novel makes me think.
And this novel did.
As it would any educator — particularly an educator who has dedicated his or her career to the academic and social preparation of urban youth.
This novel, which managed to hurt my heart and tickle my funny bone in paradoxically equal measure, is an absolute must-read.
But not for pre-service teachers.
Instead for the battle-tested, conflict-scared teachers who daily load their bags with over-sized water bottles to keep themselves hydrated and scavenged bags of candy to us as learning incentives.
The ones who, like Lena, almost delight in spending a copious amount of time transforming a bland bulletin board into something educational and who, like Hernan, really do care if their students understand how the content they are learning applies to the real world.
Teachers need books like this.
Because when you’re standing in front of a room of 20-odd students, all looking at you with eyes newly alight with interest as they wait to hear how you are going to respond to the 10-year-old who just asked you about masturbation, it’s helpful to feel like you’re not alone.
This briskly realistic glimpse into the lives of urban educators earns 5 out of 5 cocktails.
I know for a fact that we have some teacher drink.read.repeaters out there. Would you ever want to be a teacher? Why or why not? Tell me about it in the comments, below.
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