Possibly my all-time favorite piece of symphonic music is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. No, not because it was in Disney’s Fantasia — I knew it before I ever watched that film. Perhaps that’s why I love it so much: it’s one of my first musical memories.
Glenn Gould also recorded it, but as usual, when he plays Beethoven, he slows everything down radically.
Last year, we didn’t conduct the end-of-year, state-mandated, federally-mandated, all-but-teacher-student-mandated testing because of the blossoming pandemic. This year, we’re having it.
But that presents a new problem: how to keep kids who are facing each other in plexiglass pods from cheating? (Do many of these kids really have an interest in cheating? I find that hard to believe. This test has no immediate effect on their lives, and the only time I see cheating is when a grade that will land in the grade book and affect the report card is at stake.)
The solution: the district bought thousands of sheets of poster board and even more clips so that we can attach blinders to the plexiglass.
The result: pockets of invisibility throughout the classroom. In fact, as the proctor, I won’t be able to see most of the kids at all at any given moment.
If kids are interested in cheating, the powers that be just made it a whole lot easier for them.
I was out Friday so I could run all the errands and such K would normally run so she could try to rest some and get well. The kids at school took to heart the cliche about cats being away, but they did so in such a way as exceptionally clever kids with good senses of humor would do:
While at the book fair, they bought me a poster of a Korean boyband and hung it in my room. When I came back Friday, I asked them who was responsible. They admitted it with giggles immediately. “I’ll keep it up under one condition,” I said. “You all have to sign it.”
I love the fact that
It’s a silly, silly gesture, but a touching one nonetheless.
In the evening, when K, E, and I were walking to CVS to pick up a prescription (and L was at sand volleyball practice), it appeared that the Boy had had a bike wreck. He was some distance away, so it wasn’t really clear what was going on. But the bike was clearly down, and there was little to no movement.
I began jogging down the hill toward him. I wasn’t terribly worried because there were no sounds of wailing or pain. But there was no movement.
“I was just waiting for you guys,” he explained with complete nonchalance.
It’s one thirty, and I’ve returned with the dziennik to the teachers’ room. It’s been snowing all day, and there’s a soft glow in the room as the light filters through the snow-covered windows in the roof. The hustle of the morning — teachers swallowing one last gulp of tea before calling out, “Who has the dziennik for 1c? I’m looking for 1c,” before heading out to class — has given way to a virtually empty room with one teacher working on the computer in the corner and a couple more sitting at the table chatting.
I sit down to write my day’s lesson topic in the given space, initial it, and then slide the dziennik into its slot.
One teacher stands and walks over, absentmindedly asking, “Which did you have?”
“3b,” I reply.
“Oh. I need 1d.” She finds it and heads out. I pack up my satchel, and head down to the cafeteria for lunch.
Including both a soup and a main course, this is my main meal of the day. Dinner will be a sandwich probably, but lunch is the hot meal. There’s a cooking school in our high school, so there’s always a wide variety of food throughout the week. It’s all traditional Polish food, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
I go to the small window, put down a few zloty — it’s a school, so the price just covers the materials, about four zloty — and try some small talk. None of the cafeteria workers/culinary teachers has much time or interest most days, but I might get a small chat in about the weather.
“Can you believe it’s snowing?” I ask as the lady take my money.
“Snow and more snow,” she laughs, turning to get my bowl of soup. I hurry to take my satchel to a seat and return for the soup.
“It’s sure beautiful though,” I say. She says nothing but smiles in response.
I sit down to my soup, take out a book, and begin unwinding from the day.
It rained all day yesterday, and that was probably for the best: we all stayed home and took care of K, who has been sick for several days now. Today, though, it was finally clear and sunny, so we went for a little walk while K took a nap.
We were likely trespassing, but since there’s no sign posted and no one has lived on the property in ages…
And these days, what I get when I tell the kids, “Come here — I want to take a picture” produces visual representations of the nature of their relationship.
Image from 2004.
We’re nearing the end-of-year testing that will measure students against a static, inflexible standard. Growth doesn’t matter as much as a set level of proficiency. It’s always been a frustration to me that the American education system fixates on proficiency instead of growth. If a student improves his reading level by three grades in one year but still is performing below the eighth-grade level, that is somehow counted as a failure when it’s anything but.
One of the hallmarks of the end of the year is the scramble we’re all making to cover last-minute items. For example, I’d neglected the active/passive distinction, so I’m hurriedly going over it with students, along with verb mood.
“Why are we learning this?” one might ask.
“Because it’s on the test,” is the tempting answer.
In the evening, soccer practice. E made the winning shot on a game the kids were playing and his teammates mob him. It’s a good way to end the day.
I sometimes feel guilty when E asks to spend some time with me, and all I end up doing is sitting and directing him. Today, for example, he wanted to work on a little project he devised some time ago. He’s got it in his head that he can dig a pool in our backyard like he has seen done on YouTube by those Filipinos who carve magnificent structures in the hard clay of their country. He settled on merely making it deep enough to soak one’s feet, and he decided that he wanted to line the sides and bottom with bamboo.
Yesterday in the time I had between coming home from school and heading back to school to photograph the girls’ soccer game, the boys’ soccer game, and the boys’ baseball game, almost all simultaneously, we went out to the woods behind our house cut down one cane of bamboo and brought it back.
Today, he wanted to split it down the middle. His first idea was to partially bury it in order to stabilize it and then use the saws-all to cut it in half. Knowing that wouldn’t work, I suggested that we use clamps to clamp it to something to stabilize it, and he readily agreed to that. Yet everything we tried initially failed. I say everything “we tried,” but the truth of the matter is he did all the work and I simply sat and directed him.
And this is where my dilemma comes in. I was giving him suggestions, photographing him occasionally as he worked. I could’ve just as easily worked with him. Apparently, I saw more value in him having a little practice following instructions and working things out for himself. Or was this just me making excuses for my laziness?
The year is winding down. The kids and I are accustomed to each others’ old habits, and I, at least, view them more-or-less surprise-free, known entities. I know what each of them is likely to do on a given assignment; I know how each of them is likely to act in a given engagement; I know how each of them is likely to respond to a given question.
And then I see them playing sports, and every assumption I had about them goes out the window. The small, quiet, thoughtful girl erupts onto the field with an aggression that is unimaginable in her. The somewhat goofy boy plays with such a serious intensity that he’s almost unrecognizable.
Happy birthday, Papa!
The kids wrote another TDA today. I’ll be giving them feedback over the next couple of weeks regarding this as we near the final, actual TDA portion of the state-mandated year-end testing.
Since it was a testing schedule, we only had a few minutes in each class. As they’d already been writing for two hours in the morning, students got a chance to relax a bit and watch 20 minutes or so of the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. I let them choose from a few scenes:
Most classes chose “The Attempted Lynching” and “Bob Ewell’s Revenge.” Every class was surprised about the number of men there trying to lynch Tom Robinson.
“I thought there were only four or five,” one student said, to which almost everyone else nodded in agreement.
We talked for a while about the effect being in a mob has on human behavior. They all suggested good reasons (not getting caught, getting pulled into the emotion of it all, the sheer force and power of numbers), but no one really thought of the anonymity that a mob provides and the way people tend use that anonymity to cloak their on complicity and to hide their own guilt.
We touched on recent events: “I’m not really doing anything. It’s the mob. I just walked into this open building.”
Today, students participated in what is always one of the highlights of the year: Mr. Jim Bannister of the Bannister, Wyatt & Stalvey law firm discusses with students the Tom Robinson trial from the perspective of a trained and experienced criminal defense lawyer who has experience representing individuals facing a wide variety of charges. He leads students through an examination of the case to see where Atticus could have done a better job.
Most students, after the presentation, have a new understanding of Atticus’s performance as a criminal defense lawyer.
A casual reading from a non-trained eye leaves the impression that Atticus did a fine job of representing Tom; after the session with Mr. Bannister, students see that Atticus, while he had a good heart and did the best he could, was more of a family law attorney (after all, Miss Maudie brags that Atticus can make a will that stands up to any legal challenge), he was certainly not a criminal lawyer. (Recall, too, that in the opening pages we read that Atticus’s first two clients were the last two executed in Maycomb, and that this was the cause of his “profound distaste” for criminal law.)
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