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Experiment

Saturday 31 January 2015

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. Who doesn’t, I guess. I mixed this and that, sometimes with permission, sometimes surreptitiously. At one point, I even determined that I could certainly make my own alcohol, so set some potato peelings to ferment, and not knowing really about the distillation process, created what could only be called later a foul mess.

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Today, L was less ambitious. She wanted, appropriately enough for her interests and gifts, to create paint. She mixed various food colorings together, taking careful notes about proportions.

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In the end, they all wound up in the sink, I believe. She couldn’t figure out a way to thicken the mixture into a paint that didn’t involve some idea like mixing yogurt into it. We’re more than happy to let her play, let her experiment, let her explore, but everything has a certain limit.

Dance The Night Away

Friday 30 January 2015

Few things remind me of how glad I am to be an adult as well as chaperoning a middle school dance.

Teaching to the Test

Wednesday 28 January 2015

I’ve heard about it from three different sources now: our principal, our department chair, and a colleague. We’ve all in the English department heard about it, and we’re all more than a bit nervous about the new test students will be taking in late April. It’s meant to replace a state-created test that measures progress for No Child Left Behind (still haunting us), but it even has the kids running scared. Even the most apathetic students responded the same as the teachers: “Are you kidding?”

The test — the ACT-Aspire, created by the same company that makes the ACT — porports to measure students’ ability to create an essay, and all the various elements of that process: generating ideas, developing ideas, organizing ideas, and proofreading said ideas. My students, eighth graders, will be be required to write a persuasive/argumentative essay, and they will be judged on four things: the argument, the development, the organization, and the language use. For a perfect score in the argument strand of the rubric, they are to accomplish the following:

The response critically engages with the task, and presents a skillful argument driven by insightful reasons. The response critically addresses implications, complications, and/or counterarguments. There is skillful movement between specific and generalized ideas.

This is all fine and well: I have plenty of students who could write a paper that addresses the implications, complications, and counterarguments in an insightful way. Not a big big deal.

For development, a perfect paper would look like this:

Ideas are effectively explained and supported, with skillful use of reasoning and/or detailed examples. The writer’s claims and specific support are well integrated.

Again, not that big of a deal. Certainly a challenge for some less-accomplished students, but again, this is for the absolute top score.

Organization looks like this:

The response exhibits a skillful organizational strategy. A logical progression of ideas increases the effectiveness of the writer’s argument. Transitions between and within paragraphs strengthen the relationships among ideas.

Good organization is difficult for fourteen-year-olds, and in some ways I’m most worried about this one. Organization takes time, takes thought, and fourteen-year-olds tend to be a bit impulsive. But its a solvable problem.

Finally, there’s language use:

The response demonstrates the ability to effectively convey meaning with clarity. Word choice is precise. Sentence structures are varied and clear. Voice and tone are appropriate for the persuasive purpose and are maintained throughout the response. While a few errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics may be present, they do not impede understanding.

For some of my students, I’m not even tackling the voice and tone issue. Not many fourteen-year-olds have a firm understanding of voice even with a lot of direct instruction. A lot of adults don’t.

All in all, a decent but challenging rubric. Until you consider one thing I’ve left out: its a timed test. And the time limit for this? What do the test creators consider a reasonable amount of time for students (and the time is universal for all grades) to create an essay on which so much depends? Two hours? Three? Ninety minutes? How about thirty minutes.

That’s right: one half hour to conceive, plan, organize, write, and proof an essay.

“Are they crazy?” we teachers all said almost on cue.

“Are they crazy?” all the students replied.

I have plenty of students for whom this would be a tremendous challenge if give two hours to accomplish, but thirty minutes seems laughable. It sounds as if all the decision-makers in the fine organization that creates the test got high on every possible drug and then decided on the time limit.

“I got it! I’ve got it” laughs a young executive who’s just sniffed three lines of coke, shot up some heroin, taken a few Vicodin, smoked an enormous joint, and done an Irish Car Bomb. “I’ve got it! Just for the fun of it, just for kicks and giggles,” and breaks into fifteen minutes of giggles before continuing, “Let’s give them half an hour!”

Howls in the boardroom.

Howls in the classroom.

Not the same howls. Not even close.

I’m not even sure what such a ridiculously short time limit is supposed to accomplish. Raise the stress level of students? Ensure as many short essays that are so bad that they’re easily gradable as possible?

I’ve a feeling when the state results are published, the howls won’t just be in the boardroom and the classroom anymore.

“Today Is Going To Be A Great Day”

Monday 26 January 2015

I have a colleague who inevitably says every morning as she walks down the eighth-grade hallway by my door, “Today’s going to be a great day!” Sometimes she’s sarcastic, but most of the time, she’s very much in earnest. It’s an easy enough trick, I suppose, this power of positive thinking, but it then throws you for a loop when the same lady, after saying “Today’s going to be a great day” passes by you and says, “Today is going to suck.”

One of the many challenges with teaching is that we enter a room in which we have the whole range of thoughts from “Today is going to be a great day!” to “Today is going to suck.” Those conflicting expectations result in conflicting behaviors, which results in a conflicted teacher. When is a kid being a pain in the butt just because he feels like being a pain in the butt — i.e., the natural function of being an eighth-grader — and when is it the function of something bigger, something direr? The response to those two different motivations is shaded differently.

Boys’ Afternoon

Sunday 25 January 2015

It was just too sunny, too warm. It’s the last Sunday of the month, which means Polish Mass Sunday, which means a free morning as Mass doesn’t begin until three in the afternoon. But when E woke up from his nap, it was just too sunny, too warm to haul him off sit inside. Granted, there are spiritual benefits, but there are spiritual benefits of just hanging out together, father and son, as well. “Besides,” I reasoned, “I have to go to confession anyway. Might as well have something more to confess.”

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There was of course swinging. What would a trip down to the lower part of the backyard — the only flat part other than the area immediately around the house — be without some swinging?

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There was of course some playing in the water. More than a little. It was a pole for the afternoon, that and the swing. Swing a little, play with a stick in the water a little. Repeat.

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Each time we returned to the swing, the shadows were a bit longer, the air a bit chillier, and my initial excitement somewhat dampened. After all, what is swinging for the pusher? Now that the Boy can carry on long conversations, it’s so much more than it used to be, but it’s still a little monotonous. Especially when the Boy gets hooked on a conversational topic, like this afternoon, when he was talking constantly about his blue snake.

“Mama loves my blue snake. L loves my blue snake. Papa loves my blue snake. Nana loves my blue snake.”

“No, no, I assure you, Nana does not in any way care for your blue snake?”

“She doesn’t like my blue snake?” he asked incredulously.

“She doesn’t like any snake, regardless of the color or the owner.”

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But what was this blue snake? It was in the water, he claimed, in the trees he pointed out later. It was everywhere — including in the swing when E hissed at me and then giggled — everywhere and nowhere.

We went down to the water’s edge at a new spot, more overgrown than the places we normally approach the drainage ditch we call the river when we’re playing. It was there we saw the blue snake yet again, a bit of vine trailing into the water, swaying with the current. Decidedly not blue, but somewhat like a snake.

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“There’s my blue snake!”

But shortly after that, it was back in the yard before it mysteriously made its way back to his room.

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As we explored, we saw that the wind and rain of earlier this week had knocked down some fairly substantial branches, and so we gathered them into a pile — wood for our fire pit or, if the quality is there, for smoking some chunk of meat.

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“I’m helping you!” the Boy exclaimed as he usually does, and this time, he was right. Though his help often ends up only causing more work, this time he indeed helped.

“Soon you’ll help by mowing the lawn, cleaning up all of the branches, turning the compost — lots of help” I could have said, but he would have only answered as he always does, repeating what I just said with his mildly incredulous tone: “I’ll help you mow?”

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By then it was time to head back down to the swing, though. The shadows were noticeably longer, and E put his hands in his jacket pocket, a real indication that it’s about time to go in.

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There was reticence, as always, but the promise of being able to do it all again tomorrow has more and more of an effect the older he gets.

Saturday Ritual

Saturday 24 January 2015

Humans love rituals, and we’re no exception. You could just about tell the time of day on an average Saturday by what we’re doing. The first activity naturally is one that can’t be photographed: sleeping past six in the morning. Since K has become a stay-at-home mother, we don’t have as frantic weekday mornings as we used to, but they’re still weekday mornings, with all the unavoidable stress included, just lessened. Lunches to make, hair to brush, mouths to feed. But Saturday mornings, the only alarm clock is the Boy, which can sometimes sleep mercifully until almost eight sometimes.

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Babcia always follows sleep. Put the coffee on, get the kids eating, then call Babcia on Skype. In the past, that involved the big computer. Then the laptop. Now we even sometimes use the little seven-inch Nexus, which means E can eat breakfast and show Babcia his new toys simultaneously. Yet within that little slice of Saturday we have mini-rituals, like standing with E at the refrigerator as he decides which yogurt he wants for breakfast.

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Then there’s play. The Boy, still thrilled with his new toys, plays with Mater and Lightning McQueen on a daily basis, and Saturdays are no different. Even in his play, though, his polite personality shines: his toys always ask “please” of each other and respond with “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” The Boy hasn’t yet figured out how to do Mater’s southern accent, but give him time.

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Mid-morning brings Polish lessons. Babcia has sent the Boy some coloring books, so he joins in the Polish lessons as well. He’s much more enthusiastic, but that probably has a lot to do with the difficult of his lessons compared to the Girl’s. She’s learning to read in Polish, and that’s a struggle for her. It’s not so much that the reading is difficult. She’s an excellent reader in English, and I think her frustration comes from that contrast. She often complains about doing “baby work” when K asks her to sound out a new long word.

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The newest Saturday morning ritual: bread. “It’s a good hobby to have,” a friend commented, and indeed it is. But like L’s view of Polish, it’s a little harder than it looks.

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“It’s a real art,” K says every time she bakes a loaf.

Two Exchanges

Friday 23 January 2015

Two exchanges from school to show how radically different a day can be.

First, I was passing out report cards and a young lady declared, jokingly, “I’m going to cry!” She’s a sweet student who usually does her best, but occasionally she gets a little lazy. And that’s what happened this quarter: she didn’t turn in a major assignment, so her grade suffered for it. She didn’t fail, but it was a high D. So I played along with the joke. “You probably will when you see the grade for this class.” And a few moments after I gave her her report card, she was indeed crying. I felt awful, apologized profusely, and then pointed out the obvious: “It hurts, but look at the good side of this: you realize what you did, you’re upset about it, and you’ll be able to change. Not all students react that way such grades.”

The second exchange came at the end of another class when a young man who has struggled through the year with behavior and grades approached me to tell me about a fundraiser his community basketball team is having. He didn’t quite know how to invite me, so he just ended up telling me about it. But the fact that he shared with me something from his personal life — this is a kid I’ve butted heads with a time or two, and other teachers have absolutely struggled with. He can be a challenge but not yesterday. And for me, not recently.

Two exchanges, both haunting in their own way.