matching tracksuits

What is it that’s so difficult about walking in a line? Is there some genetic abnormality that appeared about the same time as public education that makes it all but impossible to walk in a single-file line 100 feet to the media center?

I have to preteach each and every class before heading down the hall to the library or to the computer lab, or anywhere for that matter, and of my four classes, only one manages to do it consistently well. Another manages most of the time. The other two are just disasters.

Time for Natural Consequences.

What is the natural consequence of people walking down the hallway disruptively? Kids in the classrooms they pass lose learning time. The cost is time; the consequence, then, should be time. And that’s why our sixth period spent some portion of the twenty minutes of pre-lunch outside time practicing walking in a straight line. But I really didn’t want to belabor the point, and as always, I didn’t want to make it seem vindictive. Time for classroom management technique number two: provide choices, not threats.

“So, folks, we have a choice before us: either we’re going to walk down the hall in a manner befitting mature eighth graders and then we’ll go outside, or we’ll continue to try it until we do get it right.”

Of course they nailed it the first time, which is for them both good and bad. It’s good because they got to go outside immediately; it’s “bad” because they’ve once again shown that they’re capable of it and that there’s no reason for them to do otherwise.

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The other day, in sixth period, a significant number of the boys decided it would be amusing if they started coughing when I turned my back. Not sick, tickle-in-the-throat type coughing, but that one single cough we’ve all given at one point or another to warn someone that some authority figure is coming.

Why? They’re eighth graders — there’s no logical answer to questions about eight graders’ motivation.

It was one of those moments that I stand there with a stern look to hide the fact (probably not too successfully) that I’m running through all the various classroom management tricks I can remember in an attempt find effective means of ending this nonsense. Running through my mind was something along these lines:

I’m not really sure who’s doing it. I don’t really think it’s a significant enough issue to devote a lot of time to it. I want to make sure it doesn’t come back. I want to keep those who are working from thinking it might be fun to join in. I don’t want to seem vindictive, because it’s really not a big deal — just disruptive.

And a phrase I’d read some time ago in a book about classroom management popped into my head: make the disruption part of the consequence.

Basically, I had them cough like that continuously for a few minutes. I told them, “You’re going to do this for the next five minutes because it’s so fun and I want you to have fun in my class,” but I had no intention of trying to force them to go the full five minutes. “Ninety seconds should do the trick,” I thought as I walked away from the boys. Sure enough, after a little while, one of the boys exclaimed, “Mr. Scott, this is stupid.”

“I agree. Maybe we can stop doing this stupidity and get back to work, huh?”

Not a single disruption from them for the rest of the period.

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The other day, right as we were in the middle of our starter, the principal walked into the room, strode purposefully to the back of the room, and sat down. A bit of a hush fell over the class at a time when I do not require complete silence—they’re doing pair work, after all. Still, everyone was especially quiet.

A principal observing a classroom is the perfect illustration of the bane of modern science: the inability to observe something without changing it in the process of observation.

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“For the first time in history we are preparing our students for a future we can not describe.”  (always learning)

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From the Sacramento Bee

The Bush administration plans to stop reimbursing states for school-based Medicaid activities, including transporting disabled students, a move that would cost California schools more than $100 million a year.

Read the rest of the story.

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Our education system is broken because so many families in America don’t have maps, and that’s why our education system is not helping South Africa as it should.

What is She Talking About? Miss Teen South Carolina - Video

Since we now live in SC, I’m particularly proud of this video…

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From Eduwonk.com:

Rather than invest in teachers, and capitalize on their knowledge, policymakers and administrators attempt to create systems that they hope will obviate the need for excellent teachers.” The Teacher Voice in Data-Driven Accountability

Fortunately, this is far from the situation in my new school…

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And so August arrives, and instead of thinking, “I start teaching next month” it’s a question of a few days. August 20 — kids return and I, for the first time since finishing college, will be doing the work I spent all that time preparing for while in college: teach English.

I have nine years of teaching behind me. Seven are teaching EFL: English as a Foreign Language. One I spent working with autistic children. One I spent trying to teach science and social studies to at-risk youth, and spent most of my time teaching social skills. Now, for the first time since student teaching, I’ll be teaching “The Most Dangerous Game” and gerunds and dangling modifiers and indirect modifiers and interpretative skills and how to avoid run-on sentences.

I’ve got some planning done,  bought a new domain name to have a class blog and to have a place to stick Moodle, and I’m starting to feel relaxed about it.  Excited, even…

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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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