During her journey in the D.C. and Maryland public schools

Her grandmother was a middle school teacher, and then a counselor, for about 30 years. Her Rosetta Stone outlet mother served as principal at a Dallas high school. "From my mother, I learned that you have to capture their hearts before you can capture their minds," she said. Powell tried to engage students based on their individual interests, whether it was a sport or a hopeful career path. But, after three years in the traditional public school system, she wants out. During her journey in the D.C. and Maryland public schools, she has endured many rough days. As a young 20-something woman working in an urban area school, she found herself out of her league. Although she came from a similar background, she found that all her pedagogical training had failed to brave her for the obstacles she now faced. Most of her challenges are extra-curricular. For example, "students curse at me, curse each other and some disputes came to physical blows." The students, especially high school freshmen, like to practice what they call joning. " It's a game to see who can come up with the best personal attack, like a Yo' Mama competition on MTV," she said. Veteran colleagues recommend sarcasm."If you remove a student from class for indiscipline, sometimes there is no punishment procedure," she says. "A school looks bad if they have Rosetta Stone Arabic a too many referrals on their record, and they can only have a certain number of suspensions without being criticized. Principals discourage referrals because it is a lot of work for the administration -- contacting parents, putting information in the database, figuring out what the consequence would be for the referral." Administration expects teachers to handle disciplinary problems in-house, in the classroom, Powell said. If the problem is severe, the child will have a parent contact, and in the worst case, they may be suspended or expelled. But none of these procedures are rehabilitative -- they don't make the child more apt to learn."I've gotten my iPod and cell phone stolen while teaching," Powell recalls. "There are security cameras in the hallways and sometimes teachers have to turn to them to find out who stole their money."While she is a dedicated instructor, Powell has found her classroom experience demoralizing. "When I first started, I spent 8-10 hours on lesson planning and then Rosetta Stone French a fight would break out in the classroom over name-calling." Other types of extra-curricular problems obstructed her teaching. "Some students are in the foster care system. One had AIDS and a daughter from a rape." The young woman with AIDS rarely attends class and her reading was significantly lower than what it should be at her grade level.Powell credits absence as the number one reason for the gap in student's learning. "In one of the schools where I taught in the past, attendance averaged at 66 percent and students tended not to come on Friday.""When half of them don't show up to class, how can we have the opportunity to teach them?" And though some truant students could barely meet the requirements to pass the class, it was difficult to fail them and [Rosetta Stone Software ] give them another opportunity to repeat the course."I feel that education is getting toward social promotion," Powell said. "In D.C., we have to meet with our principals to justify student data. We have to do a lot to show why we failed a child. We have show that we provided extra credit opportunities... It will look negatively on your evaluation if you have a lot of students failing."