First Socratic Seminar
Month: August 2023
Fire
This year I’m trying a new starter: Write Into the Day. Basically, it’s a short writing exercise that is intended to get their minds in a literary space. I’ve tinkered with it, changed a few things, altered how we share, but so far, I’ve left the core idea alone: write a few sentences about a given prompt.
Last week, one of the prompts was this: “What lights that fire in you to give it your all?” When I was reading the responses this weekend, I found this one:
Mr Scott because he wants me to be my best in school so everytime he talks to me in the hallway about how much brain cells I have. After we finish talking in the hallway and when I go to my class I’m ready to learn so He always fires me up every time in class so Mr scott fires me and I give it all I have.
These kids kill me: it takes the smallest thing sometimes. This boy was telling me early in the year that he couldn’t do any better because he “only has two brain cells.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve got something like 120 billion brain cells, and they all work just fine as far as I can tell.”
The next day I saw him, I’d done some calculations, and I told him, “You know if all your brain cells were one second each, you’d have 3,800 years worth of seconds!”
“Really?!” He couldn’t believe it.
The smallest things…
Canceled
Some locals weren’t too happy about the fact that the Swedish band Ghost was going to perform locally at an amphitheater. A band whose gimmick is lyrics that openly profess love for the devil is not going to be too welcome in the Bible Belt.
So they started praying — Jeania was praying for a lightning storm and posted about it on the venue’s social media feed.
And wouldn’t you know it — a rainstorm came through and washed the concert away. Jeania will forever see this as an answer to her prayers and proof of God’s greatness. She will talk about it at church this Sunday. They might even have a hallelujah moment about it.
Meanwhile, there were many Christians posting in response: “We are Christian fans of the band.” “We recognize performance/entertainment when we see it and don’t feel threatened by it.”
Getting to Know You
Relationships are what teaching is all about. Once you have a good relationship with the kiddos, almost anything is possible. The incorrigible become a little more compliant. The withdrawn start to speak out a little more. The insecure grow a little more self-confident. It’s a wonderful thing to see.
In the past, I’ve concentrated on getting to know my students without really worrying about letting them get to know me all that well. Sure, they know a lot about me: they know I love dad jokes because I try to tell them one every day; they know I like to cycle because I ride to school occasionally; they know I love Poland because they see it in the pictures I hang all around my room and the customs I share with them during the year. But beyond that? Not too much.
So I hit on an idea and a challenge for myself: make a playlist on Spotify of songs that have I’ve loved over the years. The catch: I will never repeat an artist.
I’ve got a list made out already — up to 96 songs, and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten started…
Hoodie
I don’t think I will ever understand the fashion of wearing hoodies — with the hood pulled firmly over the head — in the heat of summer. One of our neighbor’s sons was doing yard work the other day wearing a hoodie. It was ninety degrees; it was a full, thick hoodie and not one of those fashionable cooling hoodies that have come on the market in the last few years. A long-sleeve, thick hoodie in ninety-degree weather.
I have students who, when they can’t wear hoodies (dress code violation), wear sweatshirts in class. When my air conditioning in the classroom was out the first week of school, they complained about how hot it was. While wearing sweatshirts.
Journal
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First Day of Soccer
The Boy played his first two games today: tied the first one.
And in the meantime, two idiots proved themselves to be such.
Planning
Church
Revisiting Krakow Shot
Caesars Head
On the way to look at lots Sunday, we stopped briefly at Caesars Head. I didn’t get a decent shot of it because of the haze, but I tried cleaning it up with Lightroom…
Start of the 2023 Season
Tonight was the start of the 2023 volleyball season. As defending state champions, the girls have a lot of expectations on them: from the coach, from other teams, from parents, from fellow Mauldin High students, and from themselves. Each component of that list has different levels of expectations for the girls, but the most significant component is the girls themselves.
I guess it’s a little inevitable that the girls put pressure on themselves. All athletes do that to some degree or another. There are likely some students putting pressure on them inadvertently with calls to bring another state trophy back to Mauldin. Some parents might be doing the same. And the other schools in the area? They’re probably rooting for them to have a less-than-perfect season.
What are K and I doing? Making sure L knows we love her, we love watching her play, and we want her, above all, to enjoy what she’s doing. I don’t know if that will help with the stress she’s probably putting on herself, but we can hope.
The Lot
We went looking at lots in North Carolina. We found one. Boy, did we find one…
August Saturday
The whole day in the yard — every bush or shrub that could be trimmed was. For example, I turned this
into this
The day started calmly,
But soon, I was turning this
into this
bringing everything I cut off of every bush (and every blade of grass I trimmed) to the community dump pile across the street.
Not Sure
Saw this on Twitter the other day:
I’m not even sure what this means. “The earth was created some 5000 years ago,” this person suggests, but at “some point God fast-forwarded time to the end of the world and then reversed earth’s time billions of years to the beginning of the universe.” How does that work? God moved us to the end of the world — does that mean after Jesus returned and set up shop a second time and punished all the pro-science/anti-god baddies? And then reversed time?! And then the purpose of all this is so “God’s enemies [can] choose ‘science’ over Him”? This god is doing some kind of time-travel trickery to fool people so they’ll end up in hell?! What?!
When you believe in a literal story about a talking snake convincing a woman to eat something to initiate some kind of fruit-based curse that dooms humanity for all eternity until — well, when you just start with that as your basis for knowledge, you end up vulnerable to believing all kinds of craziness. And it doesn’t even have to make sense…
Fight
The Boy told me about it the moment I walked into the house. “There was a fight at school today. A big fight.” Apparently, two boys got into it during lunch, and it happened right in front of the Boy.
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“Yes!” he replied without hesitation or self-awareness of the fact that such a response would definitely mark him at some schools among some kids. One of those involved was someone E knows, and he was a little worried about what was happening to his friend and a little worried about what might happen him.
“I’m definitely in middle school now,” he concluded.
Views of Nowy Targ
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…
19
She’s put up with me for 19 years. I deserve none of her perfection but am grateful for every moment she’s been with me.
Sunday
