Non-fiction Demo

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
You may think you know what's inside but you don't. You see the boxy buildings, brick or concrete flanked by lush green athletic fields. A primary colored playground or a crumbling black top spiked with rusted basketball hoops in front of which yellow buses grown exhaustive size before depositing or collecting lines of chattering. Backpack students look deeper, long locker lined corridors or tiled halls studded with bulletin boards, smelling of poster paint, cleaning products or perhaps faintly a feet funneling Children into classrooms at the trill of the bell. Teenagers watch rapidly as their science teacher demonstrates her favorite experiment, an unflappable para educator expertly sues an elementary school student behind the cubbies so the rest of the class can continue learning and disrupted. Look deeper. A school librarian is teaching technology, teaching an information literacy class, teaching animation, teaching other teachers. The gymnasium echoes the class's boisterous cheers as the pe teachers fists rise in triumph when the child on the spectrum sinks his first basket. A student is struck by the magical piece of recognition and relief. The moment they are introduced to a book featuring a character who is a lot like them. A teacher giddily hightails it back to her classroom after orchestrating a prank on a coworker to brighten his day. Look deeper, still marginalized students gather, finding acceptance solace and camaraderie during lunch time in the library, a teacher spends her planning period, then her lunch time subbing unpaid for a coworker's class for the third time in a week. A parent spews obscenities at staff members in a windowless conference room, teachers congregate in the lounge to console a colleague who has just found out that her father passed away. A music teacher gives his student the glove off his hands for the wintry walk home. A math teacher stays after school to provide extra support to a student before rushing home to her own ailing immunocompromised child. A kindergarten teacher meticulously creates sight word cards, laminating them with a machine she personally purchased to teach a certain child to read when others could not. English teachers grade essays, painstakingly refining adolescence, writing long after the sun has dipped below the tree tops in classrooms where the only sounds are the wonks from the clunky broken H VAC and the hum of outdated fluorescent lights. A veteran teacher with a master's degree calls a blood donation center desperate to pay the bills because her teaching salary and part time second job aren't enough to live on. You may think, you know what lies beneath a school's facade, how to interpret the bustle where the system's gone wrong. But unless you're an educator you don't look deeper here and learn.