Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for April 23, 2006 FAST TIMES AT REGNEF HIGH

Well...when teacher bit student, it was news.

Now, another teacher has apparently proven that the modern-day pen - i.e. the computer keyboard - is mightier than the teeth!

From the Chicago Tribune...

Fenger High chaos target of postings

By Tracy Dell'Angela
Tribune staff reporter

Typing rambling screeds in an anonymous blog he called "Fast Times at Regnef High," a Fenger High School teacher unleashed his frustration over the chaos he saw around him.

He labeled his students "criminals," saying they stole from teachers, dealt drugs in the hallways, had sex in the stairwells, flaunted their pregnant bellies and tossed books out windows. He dismissed their parents as unemployed "project" dwellers who subsist on food stamps, refuse to support their "baby mommas" and bad-mouth teachers because their no-show teens are flunking.

He took swipes at his colleagues, too--"union-minimum" teachers, literacy specialists who "decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda," and security officers whose "loyalty is to the hood, not the school."

In his blog, the teacher did not identify himself or his students, the exact name of his school or the city where he taught. But like most bloggers, he wanted an audience, so he wrote in his blog that he had leaked news of his site to a few co-workers. Soon enough, the 30-year-old teacher's name was the talk of the school.

This week, after returning from spring break, the students read how they were depicted and flamed the blog with profane threats and righteous indignation toward the teacher.

By Thursday, the reaction grew so vitriolic that the blogger took down his site from Blogger.com. Also that day, a Fenger High teacher e-mailed his principal that he wasn't coming to school because he "feared for his safety." The teacher was the same one widely believed to have authored the blog because he told two colleagues that it was his, Fenger Principal William Johnson said.

Johnson said he doesn't know whether the teacher has resigned. The teacher hasn't returned Johnson's phone calls or replied to an e-mail asking to meet with him. The teacher did not acknowledge to the principal that it was his blog, but Johnson said he has no doubt, based on the writing style and his disappearance after the students named him in their postings. When he started the blog in February, he wrote as if he were the "brick and mortar" building named "Regnef,"--Fenger spelled backward--but then switched his voice and revealed he was a teacher.

In his final posting Thursday, the teacher said he intentionally leaked his blog site to people he knew would "tell the world" because he wanted it to be read, but he didn't explain how he expected to remain anonymous.

Johnson believes it will be difficult for the teacher to return to Fenger, given the controversy. Because the teacher is untenured, the principal can fire him without cause at the end of the school year or after 10 workdays if he doesn't return.

"He's lost his credibility," Johnson said. "He lost the faith and trust of his students."

The animosity stirred up by the blog fueled even more chaos in this beleaguered all-black school in Roseland on the city's Far South Side, among Chicago's worst performing. But the principal said the episode has galvanized the school in a way he had not thought possible--and is encouraging staff and students to talk openly about the problems and how to fix them.

"There is a silver lining," he said. "It brought Fenger together." Johnson said he plans to hold student forums next week to discuss the blog, both the antagonism it revealed and the challenges that need to be fixed.

"He was painting a picture of desperation, and I had a problem with the generalizations he made," Johnson said. "But some of it was true, and that was the tragedy. If he had gone about it in a different way, it could have been a great forum."

Students also were outraged by the characterizations in the blog, even while acknowledging many problems the teacher detailed.

Latasha Ivy, 17, senior class vice president, found out about the blog last week and read it with her mom. They were both angry about the crude stereotypes and didn't understand why the teacher stayed if he was so miserable, she said.

"These are things that happen at Fenger--fights, drug-dealing, gangs--it happens here like it does at other high schools. I already feel bad when I tell people I go to Fenger, because they go, `Ooooh, that's a bad school.' But there are still people here trying to do something with their lives," said Ivy, who has been accepted at the University of Illinois this fall and plans to study biology.

Gerald Rogers, 17, said the blog was a "big topic everywhere." He was struck by how many students read the site and posted comments. But he still found the teacher's observations "racist and derogatory."

"If he felt that way, why didn't he come up with any solutions to the problems?" said Rogers, the junior class president.

The teacher compared his suffering to Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and he suggested that many others who worked and studied in the building shared his opinions.

"Do you not realize that many people go home and CRY to their loved ones about what they experience here? Do you have any idea the psychological and emotional trauma that is inflicted on those who suffer because of the daily injustices and wrongdoings here? To fear for your own safety? To know that you will likely be unemployed, hated, spit on, punched, and have property destroyed? This is not a one person blog. This is a building speaking for the suffering it sees every day."

One Fenger teacher publicly challenged this view, both in a signed posting and in numerous conversations with her English classes.

"Although many of our students adopt tough facades and insist they are grown, they are still children: sensitive children who still crave guidance, encouraging words and positive reinforcement," wrote teacher Gina Miski. "Was the author present when students, having read the blog, dejectedly hung their heads with pained, angry tears stinging their eyes?"