matching tracksuits

A client at the day treatment program I used to work at asked me an odd question one day.

“Is it true that people are going to have computer chips implanted in them at some time?” the boy asked, “Because my foster mom said that that was going to happen.”

“Ah,” I thought, “you just told me an awful lot about your foster mom.”

What I actually said was somewhat more toned down: “Nah, John, that’s not necessarily going to happen, and even if it does, it probably won’t mean what your foster mom seems to think it will mean.”

And immediately I thought that perhaps I’d said more than I should have, for it seems to be a theological/religious statement I made. I did qualify it: “not necessarily” and “probably.” Still, I’m sensitive about discussing anything having to do with religion with students.

When student teaching, I had an interesting exchange with a student about this. He was concerned that I had crossed some line by explaining the Christianization of Britain. I differentiated teaching and proselytizing. “If we’d been discussing the Turkish empire, I would have discussed Islam. If we’d been talking about the partition of India, I would have discussed Hinduism and Islam.”

After all, who am I to make judgments about whether or not the Beast is rising? Who am I to say that chip implants will not necessarily be a sign that the Beast?

I wonder if I didn’t overstep some boundary with that…

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I’m starting my related arts class this quarter. I was scheduled to teach “Study Skills,” but after looking at my roster and talking to folks in guidance, I switched. I’m teaching “Self-Advocacy,” which I’m interpreting as socials skills (i.e., learn the skills to deal with problematic situations and come out positively).

And some of these students really need social skills.

Yesterday, while talking to the new students, I asked one of them her name. She mumbled something, and at the same moment, someone in the front of the class said her name as well. I really didn’t catch either one, so I asked her again.

“She already told you. Why do I gotta tell you again?” she responded, with — as the students would say — attitude.

If I were teaching anything other than social skills, I don’t know that I could have kept my cool as well as I did. I simply turned it into a teachable moment when I had a one-on-one moment with her.

But it’s that kind of response that just floors me. “What in the world are you hoping to accomplish by responding to an innocuous question like that with such disrespect?” I thought.

Another example today: I was handing out note cards. “What are these for?” one young man asked — a young man who has a reputation in the school as one who would talk back to a brick wall. I didn’t say anything immediately and he looked at the note card, looked at me, smacked his teeth, and asked again, “What are these for?!“

Again: “What in the world are you hoping to accomplish by responding that way?”

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One of the problems of teaching to No Child Left Behind standards is the risk of teachers becoming nothing more than their students’ test scores.

Via Eduwonk.com I found one such teacher’s story:

I teach in an inner city school where inequity is apparent. The neighborhood has a high poverty level. Violence and poor housing conditions tuck my students in at night!

Underemployment, unemployment, lack of health insurance is the norm. It has only been of late that a “real” grocery store was available for residents to purchase fresh foods.

We are locked into teaching reading practices that are driven by federal government�s bad research. I witness a lack of all that made school a joy for my students. Literally the things that helped to build community and self-respect and self-esteem for children have disappeared. In their place is rigid schedules and long periods of disjointed phonics, and disjointed language practices.

One of the reasons many teachers are not fans of NCLB is that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. That “one-size” is often, as this teacher comments, “disjointed.”

This teacher writes of her students’ lack of satisfactory achievement according to the NCLB-mandated state testing.

My Unsatisfactory “grade” was followed by the comment:”This teacher�s students made minimal growth in her classroom this year.”

Most of my children are reading on or above grade level. The amount of “progress/growth” made this year by most of my children was no where near minimal.

I asked my principal if she believed that statement that appeared on my evaluation. She said “Yes, I do, based on your DIBELS scores!”

Her statement hurt me because I know the amount of work I did this year with my precious students. The amount of growth the children had in all areas was in no way “minimal.” I mentioned that the reading levels of some of my first-graders were equal to the end of second grade. She said the district didn�t recognize non-standardized test scores. (susanohanian.org)

Having worked with at-risk kids, I can understand (to a degree) what this teacher is going through.

Such “teaching” turns both students and teachers into little more than cogs in some great bureaucratic machinery. No one is working toward “learning” in any real sense here, and as far as teaching critical thinking, it’s probably non-existent.

Very often, kids coming from such backgrounds need so much more than simple reading and writing instruction. They step into school with huge disadvantages to begin with, and to some degree, reading and writing alone will not help them. They need work with social skills and an understanding of the social framework that exists outside the inner city.

This is not to say that I am advocating a sixties-style “go where the students take us” type of teaching, and I am not suggesting that all standards are a bad thing. However, NCLB’s cookie-cutter approach seems to do little for many students and teachers.

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When teaching English as a Foreign Language, I often wondered whether I would work in an educational setting that provided such clear evidence of progress. When you take a first year class that speaks no English and help turn it into a group of kids almost all of whom pass the English language exit exam with good marks, there’s a definite sense of achievement.

Then I spent seven months working with autistic children.

A couple of the students finished the year as completely different children than when they started. Gains in reading ability, social interaction, verbal expression, math skills, and general life skills left me simply astounded, and understandably proud that I had something to do with it. (Seven Months)

Now, working with at-risk kids, I get a third example.

A young man came up to me the other day to tell me something.

When he first arrived, he spoke to me only when he absolutely had to, he cussed me out on a fairly regular basis, and he never, in any circumstances, looked me in the eye. He had trouble getting along with other kids, and if you judged him just from that, you’d come away thinking he was a fairly unpleasant person.

This time, his eyes wide with a big smile, he said, “I done something good today, but you didn’t see it.” He then told me about how he’d managed to keep his temper under control with another kid in the program whom he finds irritating.

It was the first time I’d ever seen pride in his face.

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Almost all of the kids in the program in which I teach have one thing in common: a hatred of reading. If I have them read a couple of paragraphs (say, 200 words total), they immediately begin complaining about how long that is.

“Man, that’s too long!” is a common refrain in the classroom.

When I have them read something to me aloud, it becomes clear fairly quickly why they’re not fans of reading: they’re not very good at it. They stumble on very basic words, and don’t recognize words they themselves use every day. And like most activities, the only way to improve reading is to practice — to do it. But many of the kids in the program come from demographics — low education and low income — in which reading is not particularly popular, probably for the very same reason.

And so for them, the dilemma of the 21st century is intensified: how do we teachers, in a world of video games, YouTube, and music videos successfully encourage reading?

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A kid who has gone from completely ignoring authority figures to complying but with a huff and a puff and an expression of disgust has still come a long way. A kid who has gone from cussing out staff when upset to merely walking away while being spoken to has begun developing coping skills.

I worry that some of our kids, despite the tremendous progress they made, will encounter less-than-perfect people in the world that will see their shortcomings and nothing else. They’ll be completely unaware of how far he/she has come and punish him/her in some way for lack of perfect social skills.

This possibility arises from the fact that the skills we’re teaching the kids are so basic that we don’t even notice when an adolescent uses them: eye contact; maturely disagreeing; accepting no. It’s the societal norm, the baseline. These socials skills are to normal life what reading is to majoring in English.

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Some days at work, things are so hectic, so zoo-like, that I used to think, “There is no way I can survive another day at this place.” Kids get wound up and call you everything you can possibly imagine–and several things you probably can’t. Sticks and stones and all that, but there’s only so many times a person can be called “f****** herpes-a** b****” by a fifteen-year-old before it starts to grate.

Today, someone literally screamed at me, “I don’t have a problem with my voice tone!” It’s hard to keep a straight face at times like that…

What a change a successful interview can make. Today, I was positively aglow, I’m sure. And though I shouldn’t have, at least once I laughed when a kid started gnawing on my last emotional nerve. I thought, “I won’t have to hear this for much longer.”

And yet — there’s always an “and yet”…

I finally feel I’ve got the hang of this, and I do feel that my work has helped these kids. Sure, they call me all sorts of things; they yell and scream sometimes; they threaten; they defy; they deny — but they’ve been doing it with decreasing frequency lately. Proof that something has been working.

Still, I am looking forward to the change. As is K — she’s already looking for houses…

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For many of the young people in the program where I work, one of the formal goals that forms part of the forest of paperwork about them is “Learn to say “�Okay.’”� What that means in practical terms is fairly simple: many of them are unable to accept criticism � broadly defined as anything even apparently critical of them or their actions � of any kind from adults.

A scenario from not so long ago illustrates how many things are going on that can make it difficult for someone just to say, “Okay.”�

Two boys, in class, are doing something disruptive. Fidgeting with something, throwing it back and forth (maybe a jacket?) or something. I couldn’t see clearly what it was, but it caught my attention and I deemed it a distraction.

“Hey, guys, stop doing that, please.”�

“Doing what?”� one asks simultaneously with the other’s plea of innocence: “I wasn’t doin’ nothin’!”�

Now it really doesn’t matter what they were doing. It really doesn’t matter if they were doing anything at all. The best response to bring the whole exchange to an end, to prevent it from escalating into something more serious, to ensure not getting into trouble, is to say, “Okay.”�

“If you have a problem with that,”� we tell them, “you can talk to the teacher afterwards. If you don’t know exactly what the teacher is asking you to do, you can ask for clarification after saying “�Okay.’ But getting defensive, taking it personally, exaggerating it into a personal affront will only make the situation worse.”�

And so going back to the above scenario, I reminding the boys that one of the skills they’re working on is simply saying “Okay”� and moving on.

“I ain’t sayin’ “�Okay’ to something I didn’t do!”� one replied indignantly.

“Why not?”� I asked. “In saying “�okay’ you’re not admitting to guilt. You’re not doing anything other than acknowledging that you heard and understood what the person in authority � be it a teacher or not � is saying.”�

“But I didn’t do nothin’!”� he protested.

“But that doesn’t matter.”� I responded. “In protesting it, particularly in the manner you’re doing now, you’re not doing anything to help your situation.”�

“Are you telling me that if someone accused you of doing something”�”�

“Whoa, wait � I’m not accusing you of doing anything. I simply asked you both to stop. If you weren’t doing anything, then clearly I wasn’t talking to you. Even if I was addressing you alone and said “Stop doing that”� and you were behaving perfectly, the best response is to say, “�Okay’ and move on.”�

“Move on?! You’re the one making an issue of this”� he said, voice pitching upward into a virtual screech, eyebrows raised just enough to say � inadvertently or purposely � “You’re an idiot for saying that.

“No, I’m using this moment to remind you of a skill you’re working on and to try to get you to practice it.”�

The boy couldn’t accept that saying “Okay”� even if you’re completely innocent is anything more than an admission of guilt. And to prove his point, he brings up a most fascinating example: “So you’re sayin’ that if you walking down a street and cops come up to you and say, “�You look like this guy who just robbed a bank,’ and arrested you, that you’d just say, “�Okay.’”�

The discussion is starting to get less and less productive as we range farther and farther off topic. Or are we off topic? Is this how the boy equates all these things? I decide to play along.

“Yes, I would. Or at least I hope I’d have a cool enough head to say that.”�

“But you didn’t do it. Are you saying that if they said, “�You robbed this bank,’ that you’d just say nothing, that you wouldn’t tell them you’re innocent? They’ll take you to jail and what � you’ll end up spending ten years in jail for something you didn’t do?!”�

Right here, though I suspected it moments earlier, I realize the young man didn’t have a firm grasp on the workings of our criminal justice system. And another thing begins dawning � we’re really getting off track. Does this help the young man understand the situation? Is he just trying, like so many of the boys do, to get me so wrapped up in a discussion argument exchange that it’s just a matter of whoosh! blink! and the whole class is over? I decide, somewhat against my better judgment, to continue.

“Just because they arrest me doesn’t mean I’ll be spending ten years in jail. There’s a trial first, and in the meantime, I can be released on bail. But think of what they say, what you hear on TV, every time they arrest someone.”� Almost together we recite the Miranda warning. Then I continue, “Now if I’m an idiot, I’ll start blathering on about how I’m innoncent and how I didn’t do anything and then, in court, that will be used against me, because the irony is, it makes me look guilty. If I’m smart, I’ll shut my trap completely until I can get a lawyer.”�

“But if you didn’t do nothin’”�”�

“Especially if I hadn’t done anything,”� I replied.

Finally things are winding down, and a boy enters from the other group.

“Hey, Mr. Scott, let’s ask him if he’d just say “�okay.’ Eric, if someone framed you “�”�

And now everything is mixed up. Nothing is as it started. We’re no longer talking about whether or not saying “okay”� helps you in a situation even if the request is relatively arbitrary; we’re no longer talking about whether or not saying “okay”� is an admission of guilt � we’ve moved off into the netherworlds of arbitrary, six-sixty-degrees-of-separation tangents that suck up time and accomplish nothing.

Or is it simply that he doesn’t understand what I mean? Are all these scenarios that we’ve been bouncing off of each other identical to him?

In the end, he simply says, “Well, if that’s a skill, I guess it’s a skill I won’t use.”�

And I think, “Okay � we’ll try again tomorrow.”�

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I work at a day treatment facility for troubled youth. They wind up in our program either through long-term suspension or via adjudication.

It can be a tough bunch of kids.

Recently, I set up a blog for the whole program with the aim of using it as a way for students to write for an actual audience, instead of just writing for the teacher, as is often the case.

But for that, we need an audience.

That’s obvious enough.

Since I’m just trying to get the kids excited about the idea of writing on a regular basis, I’m not having them do much of any correction. Small steps”�

Read it with a smile. So I’m asking any willing readers to pop over to akacoolpeople.com and read what the kids have written so far, make a few comments (even if it’s “Hey, that sounds really great!”�) and — most importantly — to keep checking back from time to time to make comments. It’ll be slow for a while (right now, there are only a few posts — two of them mine), but I’m hoping that as kids get comments, it will encourage them to write more. (And obviously enough, I’m looking for comments to the kids’ posts, not my own!)

Additionally, if you yourself have a blog or web site and would be willing, give “aka cool people”� a mention and see if you can steer some more traffic our way.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Just before my senior year in college, I invested in a beautiful fountain pen: a Cross Townsend. I later learned that somehow I got the pen for almost half the actual price thought a pricing mistake or something. Now a new one costs roughly four times what I paid.

That pen accompanied me through Europe and was instrumental in recording thoughts about Strasbourg, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, and a number of other cities.

For twelve years, I’d never even misplaced it.

Today, at work, it was stolen. Or was it?

I had inadvertently left it by my computer, tucked in a notebook I’d been using for notes during a training session we’d had on Friday. After four of the lads had been using the computer, it was missing.

“Stealing is not beneath some of them,” I’d been told. Still, is that something one really wants to communicate to one’s students? “Alright, you jerks — I don’t trust any of you. Who stole my pen?!” Not the best way to build relationships with young men in need of help.

Instead, I gathered the lads together, told them that my pen was missing, and asked them if any of them saw it, to put it on my desk and then let me know it’s there.

A few minutes later, a boy came to ask me if I’d checked in all the desk drawers. “Maybe someone put it there — you know, like a joke.”

Sure enough, in the second drawer was the pen.

A prank? A bit of mercy? Misunderstanding or malice?

So much of our lives is inexplicable like that. Indefinable. Was this a reconsidered theft? Was it a joke? All I know is the pen was missing and then it wasn’t. Almost like I lost it…

Still, for safe measure, I unplugged my SanDisk memory stick and put it in my pocket.

I want to trust these boys, to give them the benefit of the doubt. But at what point does trust become naivety?

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