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Absent

If any of my colleagues ever suggested — or simply thought (then how would I know?) — that they were more productive a given day because I wasn’t there, I would feel such shame that it might be difficult to show my face again among those folks. I would reflect on my behavior, on what I’d always considered my contributions, and I would likely realize that I shouldn’t have simply been second-guessing myself; I would realize I’d had a completely false self-image.

Today, several students were absent, with most of them were suspended. The types that are likely to get suspended are the types that are likely to disrupt class, and so today, two classes that generally leave me wondering about my decision to stay in education were absolute pleasures. They were productive, polite, focused. They were unlike they’d been in a long time, if ever. (Is it really only September? Are we really only in the second half of the first quarter?! I feel so tired of it all that everything in me screams that it must be March.)

What if I tell these students that? How would that conversation go? I think we all know: they would be indifferent. At least one of the students admitted openly that he is disruptive because he knows it annoys other students, and he likes to annoy other students.

Several of them will be back tomorrow — will it be business as usual? No. I’ve seen what we can accomplish: if they are unwilling to cooperate, I will do what is necessary to protect the education of all the other students.

Tuesday School Thoughts

On the one hand, I’m responsible for teaching them to read and write better. That’s my bottom-line assignment at work. Traditionally, that’s all a teacher has ever been expected to do: teach the course material.

Yet some of my students fall under the rubric “at-risk” in one form or another. They can’t stay focused for more than five minutes (at best) or five seconds (literally, at worst). They can’t keep up with their materials until the next day (at best) or the next minute (at worst). They can’t accept “no” as an answer, and they take everything personally and turn things into battles that have no business being fights to begin with. They come in without materials — no pencil, no paper, no nothing.

These are the kids whose behavior, quite honestly, disrupts the learning of anyone and everyone else in the room. They are black holes for attention: their every second is a new event horizon to resist. Interactions with them can be quicksand, pulling everyone in and restricting movement completely. Working with them for five minutes can be utterly exhausting; working with them for a whole class period can have one questioning one’s sanity.

Yet what option do we have as teachers? No one else is teaching these kids (only a few — perhaps 7-10%, and not even that many who are so demanding and high-maintenance) these skills. At least it seems no one else is teaching them the skills. And someone has to teach these kids the basics of how to interact successfully with the world.

But it’s so exhausting…

Socratic Seminar

They’re tough classes at times, filled with a mix of students with mixed motivations and mixed ability levels. And all of this manifests itself in students’ behavior: several students are focused and hardworking while a few are determined to gain attention by any means necessary, with the vast majority simply there, engaged sometimes, bored and checked out others.

But there’s one activity that always gets good results: Socratic Seminars.

If I could have these on a biweekly basis, I think I could have a serious motivator for the students. So why don’t I do it? That’s a very good question, indeed. I shall be working them into plans one way or another on a much more regular basis based on how well students engaged in their first seminar of the year.

And I haven’t even done one with my honors students yet…

Perception

We have an epidemic of NHIs in the eighth grade. NHI is the code we enter for a graded assignment the student failed to turn in. Not Handed In.

I had a talk with my classes about the issue. On Thursday, I had students in each class guess the number of NHIs in their class for English. There were three options:

  • Fewer than 15
  • Between 15 and 25
  • More than 25

The two English I classes were certain they had between 15 and 25 per class. The two English 8 classes were certain they had fewer than 15.

The results for all classes were the exact opposite of what they expected.

The English 8 students refer to the English I (high school English) classes as “the smart kids’ class.”

“They’re not the smart kids class,” I always reply, but Friday, when I revealed the results, I added, “They’re simply the do-the-work kids class.”

Fluke?

I was so excited about how well things went with my toughest class yesterday: we did such good and focused work, though, that I should have expected today. Frustrating all around.

During the bell ringer, when we were going over some of their work, trying to get a student to say that the highest value on the Y axis of a graph (we’re reading a cross-curricular text about deception in graphing) was 70. Even when I pointed to it. Even when I said, “The first number is seven.” Even when I added, “The second number is zero.” Even when I said “70.” Even when I said, “Say ’70.'”

My Promethean Board pen was acting up…

Later in the lesson, when we were going over how to do something, I did the first half of the work for them — for all intents and purposes — in the name of modeling, even though we should be past modeling now. Be all that as it may, some of the kids didn’t even make use of the modeling — and really all they had to do is copy what we came up with as a class.

Every class has tough days, I guess. But they’re even tougher when the happen on the heels of a great day.

K pretending to drown this weekend

Mindfulness

I tried something today, sort of spur of the moment, with one of my more struggling classes. It’s filled with impulsive students who are generally very sweet (at least toward me) but can be very chatty. Very focused on other things than the work at hand. So before we started our main part of the day’s lesson, I had the kids do a little mindfulness work.

“Close your eyes,” I told them.

“Did they trust you enough to close their eyes?” my principal asked when I was telling him about the experience later in the day.

“Yes, they did,” I replied, thinking of what his question suggested about the relationship I have with the kids already.

“Close your eyes,” I said, a few times. There were some stragglers. Some were still focused on something else. “Just close your eyes and breath slowly for a moment.” I led them through some slow breathing, then had them visualize the work we were about to do, seeing themselves working in a focused manner and meeting success instead of frustration.

They opened their eyes, we began the main part of today’s lesson, and they had the most successful day we’ve had so far.

Growth

It’s that time of year: my students are writing their letters to next year’s students. The English 8 kids wrote them last Friday; English I will be writing them in a couple of weeks.

The guidelines are simple:

  1. Provide advice for rising eight-graders
  2. Show off how well you can write now.

To achieve the second goal, I only allow students one class period to write the letters. The results could theoretically be a little better for the English 8 students if I gave them more time, but part of the charm in the whole exercise is watching next year’s students’ shock when I tell them at the letters they’re reading are in fact first and only drafts.

One young lady’s letter demonstrated so wonderfully how much she’d grown as a person from the beginning of the year. J, at the start of the year, was one of the most worrying students: her behavior was often disruptive; she was often disrespectful when teachers called her on her behavior; she rarely did any work, and what she did was not turned in or handed in still incomplete.

Yet over the course of the school year, she’s calmed down, learned that butting heads with teachers is counterproductive, and begun doing her work (then doing her best). Her grade has gone from a 62 (just barely passing) to a 84, just six points shy of an A.

One paragraph of her letter reads:

How to stay out of trouble in the 8th grade? Staying out of trouble in the 8th grade is probably one of the most important things you can do. One thing you can do to prevent getting in trouble is to minimize your circle and stop posting things on social media. People take a lot of things to social media and the drama leads into school so now it’s the school’s problem and once you post something on social media there’s literally no going back. It’s there forever. Having a lot of friends can cause you to get into a lot of stuff because once one of your friends is beefing with one another they are going to bring you into it because they want you to choose one or the other. My advice to you as a 8th grader right now is to never trust a soul, follow the right path and take it slow, that’s how you can be successful in the 8th grade.

There’s a certain cynicism in that conclusion, but perhaps it’s not entirely awful advice.

Wednesday in Class

That fifth period can be a tough group of kids. They sometimes disregard what’s going on in class to have a little private conversation that is not at all private because of the number of participants and the volume of their voices. They sometimes ignore simple instructions. A few of them are capable of being truly disrespectful to other students, to me, and by proxy, to themselves.

Yet by and large, they’re a great group of kids. They’re just typical 14-year-olds, many of whom come from less-than-perfect situations and have developed less-than-perfect habits. In my teaching career, there have only been a handful of students that, as humans, I didn’t like, I just didn’t trust. In almost 25 years of teaching perhaps four or five such kids. There are no such kids in this group.

But they can be tiring.

These final weeks of school, we’re going through The Diary of Anne Frank. Why do such an important piece in the waning, testing-ladened final quarter of the year? That’s when the district requires it. It might be a good thing, though, because these kids are more engaged now than they’ve been all year: more focused, more involved, more eager in their participation.

Plopped down in the middle of this is L, a young man from Mexico who speaks not a word of English. Not a word. Well, no, that’s not true: he spoke not a word of English when he arrived last week. He’s already picked up quite a bit. And today, he was able to follow along with the play, even though he didn’t understand 95% of what the kids were saying.

“Where do you think we are?” I’d ask through my phone using Google Translate. He’d point to where we were — each time, dead on. “Great!” I’d say. His smile was ear to ear.

Left Behind

“Pick it up!” she yelled. We were at the end of class when A, who’s always a bit of an immature prankster, pushed K’s materials off her desk. K, who has issues with impulse control (i.e., she’s a chronic disrupter) doesn’t like when her world is disrupted, and she grows verbally violent when it happens. A was walking away smiling, which of course led to K feeling even more aggrieved. “I said,” she began, taking a deep breath, “pick it up!” He walked out the door. She walked out the door herself — not to accost him in the hallway, not to get help from an adult. No — she declared as she walked out, “Well, I ain’t pickin’ it up.” Bear in mind: these were her materials. She literally walked into her next class without her materials, thinking she was perfectly justified in doing so.

I picked her materials up and stowed them in my cabinet. Part of me was justifying it with the thought that it would teach her a little lesson; part of me did it, I think, just to irritate her further. That is, I’ll readily admit, somewhat childish, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking in terms of irritating her. I wanted her to go through the last two periods of the day without her materials to provide an object lesson to her: “Do you realize how many of your problems in school are of your own creation?” I’d planned on asking her when she got her materials back. “You had to go through two periods explaining why you didn’t have your materials, and I guarantee all your teachers responded the same way: ‘That’s your own fault.'”

Ten minutes into the next period, she was knocking at my door. A student let her in. She stormed back to her seat, and discovering her materials were missing, turned and yelled to the whole class, “Where’s my stuff!?!” She proceeded to rant for a while, completely disrupting what we were doing, but I just let her rant for a while. After about thirty seconds, I said, “K, I need you to go back to your class now.”

“But where’s my stuff?!?”

“I need you to go back to class now.”

“But I’ve got to get my stuff.”

“I need you to go back to class now.”

“I have to have my stuff. Where’s my stuff?”

“I need you to go back to class now.”

Her teacher came to the door, a puzzled look on his face.

“Mr. A says I need my stuff.”

“I need you to go back to class now.” I’ve found that the best way to deal with such situations is just to be a broken record, and as it always does, it worked: she huffed and started out of the room, then turned and walked over to a friend and started talking to her.

This is the kind of behavior teachers have to deal with every single day. Every almost single class. In some classes, every single minute.

Negotiation

Going over some words in class today that might be new to some students (it was my remedial class), I started asking kids questions about the words.

“What might you prioritize as a student?”

“Your work!” someone responded. If only, young man, if only.

“What might I make projections about as a teacher?”

“Grades.” Yes, and if only you knew the projections — no, you probably do.

“With whom might you negotiate?”

“Your parents.” Of course.

“I don’t negotiate with my parents,” says one boy. “I do what I want.”

Bravado or inadvertent succint social commentary?