Students learn Shakespeare's Othello:Enter a teacher named Tasha Ferraro, hired for her first full-time public school job after teaching overseas in Japan and with the Peace Corps in Africa.
Aiming high
Caption: Books in hand, Roosevelt Middle School seventh-graders, left to right, Gaylynn DosSantos, Karim Fernandes and Larry Adams are following the progress of a filmed version of Shakespeare's "Othello." Photo: PETER PEREIRA/The Standard-Times
Roosevelt raises the bar, and students respond
A few years back,New Bedford's Roosevelt was ranked among the four worst schools in all of Massachusetts. Today, Roosevelt is teaching Shakespeare's Othello to seventh graders.
Roosevelt used to be a crumbling old ruin of a junior high, where graduation day was a gala celebration with parents jamming the auditorium to watch their children receive the only diploma many of them would ever hold in their hands.
Today, Roosevelt is a bright new middle school where 61 percent of the parents definitely believe their kids will go to college and another 25 percent say they think college is a real possibility.
Expectations are now so high at the new Roosevelt that it no longer has a graduation day. Instead, at the close of the school year, it quietly acknowledges the natural, and now expected, transition to ever higher academic levels.
Changing expectations like these are critical if New Bedford is ever to get out from under the crippling economic burden of a whopping high school dropout rate and a college graduation rate as low you'll find in Massachusetts.
It's no exaggeration to say that the fight for the city's future is being waged at the new Roosevelt, and if those expectations are allowed to come crashing down, likely falling with them will be the last best hope for this hard-pressed city by the sea to compete in a global economy.
It's also no exaggeration to say that those expectations are jeopardized every day a governor with the mindset of a Mitt Romney sits on Beacon Hill and brags about the state's prosperity while sapping the revenues needed to sustain the public schools.
But that's a column for another day. Let's get back to Othello and to the astonishing possibilities latent in the minds and hearts of ordinary New Bedford kids.
Enter a teacher named Tasha Ferraro, hired by principal Brian Abdallah for her first full-time public school job after teaching overseas in Japan and with the Peace Corps in Africa.
"I hire the best and let them work," said the man who took over Roosevelt at its low point five years ago and has presided over its resurgence.
"She is phenomenal," said Donna Parker, the curriculum supervisor who taught for 29 years in New Bedford classrooms before becoming a school manager just in time to help oversee the transition of Roosevelt from old junior high to new middle school. "Our seventh graders are reading Shakespeare and understanding it."
Ms. Ferraro, a born teacher, comfortable and in control of a classroom with fewer than 20 students, presides over a room that's bright and airy. The students, selected at random, as they are in all Roosevelt classes, sit in groups of three around small tables. Student illustrations from Shakespeare's tragic tale of jealousy, betrayal and death enliven walls and hang from lines strung above the students' heads. Photographs of the student actors in costume occupy a square of wall space. A big box stuffed with wigs, plastic swords and stage dress sits near the windows.
At the front of the class in the teacher's clear cursive script is written, as is standard practice at Roosevelt under Abdallah, the objectives for teaching, in this case, William Shakespeare's Othello.
According to the objectives, the kids will learn the plot, characters and themes of the play and how to express that understanding in a variety of performance formats -- from acting on stage to illustrating with art work, to creating story boards as if Othello were to be filmed as a motion picture. But this is not to be a surface exercise; students will continually demonstrate their understanding of the text by going back to specific lines from the play. All the while, they will be learning about literary and dramatic concepts within a comfortable classroom atmosphere where "performance and feedback occur in a climate of trust and support."
Is it working?
I asked Kevin Mello what he thought of the villain Iago, who plots the destruction of Othello by sowing the seeds of Othello's jealous rage. "Yeah, he's mean," he said. "But he knows how to get the job done."
How's that for a New Bedford answer.
Jessica Rosas, Kristina Sanders and Nasha Macedo sit together working up a story board. Kristina is in charge of the art, Nasha is responsible for pulling out appropriate quotations and Jessica is the caption writer. They admire the lovely but doomed Desdemona, and the way the class engages them.
"And we get to wear costumes," one girl says. Male and female roles are interchangeable. A girl can be Othello; a boy Desdemona. Do the boys resist?, I ask. "No, they think it's funny," a girl says. Do the girls tease the boys? "No," comes the answer. "Because we have to be respectful."
The respect the kids give is the respect shown them by the teacher, who never seems to talk down or leave the class uninvolved. Even her reprimands are carefully phrased.
A boy is talking loudly at one end of the room. Some teachers would order him to cool it or pipe down. In this case, the teacher firmly but quietly tells the boy, "You are talking too much." It's a statement of fact, not a challenge or an insult. He quiets right down. Respect is shown; respect gets returned.
Today, the class is focusing on a scene in act II.
"What's happening?," Ms. Ferraro asks.
"Cassio gets drunk," replies a student.
"And how does he act when he's drinking?
""He's violent," says another.
"Yes, he can lose it very easily," she says.
"And who walks in and sees all this?," she asks.
"Othello," comes the answer from around the room.
Ms. Ferraro became convinced in graduate school that Othello is a masterpiece that lends itself to middle school students in an urban setting and Roosevelt under Abdallah and Ms. Parker gave her the opportunity to introduce it. "The themes are relevant with all the crushes, betrayal and rumors; they match the themes of middle school life in many ways," she says.
A teacher who pushes her students hard, she seems to push herself harder. Expectations may be going up at Roosevelt, but she worries aloud about the consistency of effort being put into homework; she worries about what she calls "an overwhelming amount of apathy." A few days before, nine of her 17 kids didn't do their assignments, she tells Ms. Parker. It was when she was in the seventh grade, she recalls, that she first realized the seriousness and importance of schooling; she is clearly expecting the same life-altering recognition in her charges. It's unlikely she'll be satisfied until she sees that recognition reflected in the quality of homework and study effort.
"We were lucky to get her," Ms. Parker says of Ms. Ferraro, praising her and the other Roosevelt teachers who are getting kids to read as Roosevelt kids have never read before.
Roosevelt students come from some of the most dangerous streets in New Bedford. Reaching them and having them see the possibilities of the wider world their imagination can open before them takes top-notch teachers and a top-notch administrative staff. It's not a place for someone who wants to mail it in.
Some 200 jobs ranging from janitorial to supervisory positions have turned over in the five years Mr. Abdallah has been at Roosevelt. Some of the turnover is par for the course in education; some is a spillover from a cultural revolution.
"People who don't meet the standards stand out like a sore thumb," says Mr. Abdallah. "Either they get on the bandwagon or they go somewhere else."
"We have been under intense scrutiny," he says, referring to Roosevelt's prior designation as an underperforming school. Now, the school no longer has to look over its shoulder at state examiners. Now, says Mr. Abdallah, it's free to do what it does best, which is teach, while steadily ratcheting up expectations. The climate at Roosevelt has indeed changed. "They (the teaching staff ) think they are the best and they want their colleagues to be the best. We work the hardest and we expect our kids to be successful."
Back in Ms. Ferraro's class, she is driving her kids to complete the day's objective: a story board with three panels from each table with an illustration, a quote and a caption.
"I have some great writers in here," she says, "some great artists. But, you have to have this done by the end of the period today. So get to work and you don't have to create the Mona Lisa."
The kids got it done.
"We have a lot of great teachers in this school who believe in the kids," says Ms. Parker. "If you have high expectations for the children, they will reach for the stars."
Let's hope next year with all the totally unnecessary budget cuts brought on by political ambition, ideology and greed, those Roosevelt kids still can.
Ken Hartnett is editor emeritus of The Standard-Times.
