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Our Own Trisha

Wednesday 12 September 2012 | 0 Comments

Every year, as we begin a unit on the Gary Paulsen novel Nightjohn, I read Patricia Polacco's Thank You, Mr. Falker. The story of a young dyslexic girl who was suffering the taunts of peers and the seeming neglect of teachers, the book emphasizes the life-changing nature of literacy. Trisha, the protagonist, spends the first four grades of school hiding her inability to read, feeling dumb for not being able to keep up with peers, and taking solace in her one skill, her exceptional artistic ability. It's such a touching story that even a room of rowdy eighth-graders ends up sitting in silence, visibly moved. Every now and then, a girl -- always a girl, for a boy will never show such a "vulnerability" -- sniffles in the back or wipes her eye occasionally as the story nears its conclusion.

"We have Trishas in this room, guaranteed," I tell the class this afternoon. "Someone here has felt stupid about something, been taunted for something out of her control, taken refuge in solitude and some seemingly non-academic talent that doesn't fit today's educational mold."

"We've probably all experienced it," says a boy who has never struck me as being particularly attuned to the pains and sufferings of others. I nod solemnly in agreement. And I think back to the quiet girl a couple of years ago who, leaving the classroom after that particular lesson, murmured, "I have a lot in common with Trisha."

Future Food

Sunday 09 September 2012 | 0 Comments

It must be boring to eat the same thing, meal after meal, day after day. I can't imagine I'd like it very much. K and I used to eat oatmeal most mornings for breakfast, and then it became an everyday thing. It soon became clear to me that I must stop eating so much oatmeal or I'd never be able to look at a Quaker Oat's box again without having a fit of some sort.

Yet that is precisely what E does, only it's not a question of X or Y for breakfast or lunch every day. It's a question of X for every meal, every single day.

Still, it won't last long. He's almost four months old. We've begun giving him rice cereal and grated apple. At the same time, it's mixed with milk, so it probably tastes just about the same as every other meal -- the consistency alone might be a little different.

But that doesn't keep him from dreaming of the not-too-distant future.

Hat Trick

Saturday 08 September 2012 | 0 Comments

When Pele was just over seventeen years old, he became the youngest player to achieve a hat trick — three goals in a match — in a World Cup match. In 1930, Guillermo Stabile scored a hat trick during his debut World Cup game.

What happens if you combine the two?

All I was hoping for was a successful first game, and I defined success simply enough: enough enjoyment to encourage the Girl to continue with her soccer adventure. Certainly, I wanted her team to win — winning always feels good. But more than that, I wanted the Girl to leave with an eagerness to return. And so among my great fears was the shut-out. “If L’s team doesn’t score a single goal, it might be frustrating to her,” I thought.

There were other concerns as well. L is not always the most aggressive person, especially in novel situations, and a first-time soccer game is about as novel as one can imagine.

Yet right from the start, the Girl is aggressive. Really aggressive. She charges the ball without concerning herself about the number of kids kicking wildly at the ball, and she often emerges from the pack with the ball.

And then she scores.

We’ve all seen the typical reactions among the pros — the wild celebrations, the leaping, the shirt front over the head. L seems completely oblivious to the significance of what has just happened. Countless games have finished one-nil, and the sole scorer is automatically the hero.

L, ignorant of all this, simply walks away from the goal calmly, a bit confused even. But my reaction and the coach’s reaction tell her something big has happened.

“It can’t be a more perfect first game,” I think. No matter what happens now, we have something to celebrate. Even if her team loses 5-1, we have that single moment to smile about. “Wasn’t that a great feeling to score?” I’ll be able to ask.

But the Girl has other things on her mind. She continues charging. She continues heading straight for the goal. She continues shooting.

And she misses. Once. Twice. And then more lightning: another goal.

And then a third. A hat trick, on her first time out. As she walks away from the goal the third time, her teammates celebrating, a small smile appears on her face. She knows what she’s done. She’s gotten a taste of athletic greatness. And she likes it.

Not content with having scored the only goals for either team, she proclaims with calm assurance as we walk back to the car, “Next game, I’m going to score five goals.”

Watch out Messi, here comes the Girl.

Dead Ends

Friday 07 September 2012 | 1 Comment

It’s really just how I would imagine his mug shot to be: head cocked at an angle to show that, while he was complying with the police officer, he still wanted it clear that he was his own person. It’s the defiance of the desperate: lacking any other meaningful way to express himself, he showed that he wasn’t going to face the camera straight on.

I met De’Andre (not his real name) while working with at-risk youth in North Carolina. For a year, I and others worked with him (and others) to provide instructions and practice in the basic social skills: accepting “no”; following instructions; managing anger; maintaining eye contact in conversations with authority figures; managing impulses. The things that so many of us learned without direct instruction; the things that make basic interactions in society possible; the things without which success is unthinkable. Some days were successful; others were not.

Like De’Andre, Clearance had great difficulty with even the most basic social skills. He had a short temper that could quickly grow violent and a mischievousness that could quickly cross all boundaries of acceptability.

For both these young men, life had been a series of dead ends. Clearance’s one bit of pride came from his success in fourth grade as a football player. De’Andre had even less he would express pride about. They lived moment to moment, second to second, without any hope of making it to anything but the next meal. They shuffled in and out every day, unsure what would happen the moment they crossed the threshold, and quite honestly, unconcerned as well.

What can we do with young men — and there are thousands of them in America today — who are so very fatalistic that their probable response to seeing their own mug shots on the internet would be, “Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later?” What do we do to help young men from seeing their lives as a dead end?

It is here that I remain left-leaning with right-leaning motivations. This is not to say that I see these men as victims. They might have been victims as children — and from what I know of the personal histories of individuals like this, they certainly were victims of various forms of abuse — but the only thing they’re victims of now is their own fatalistic thinking and the habits they’ve formed over the years. Their mug shots are now on the internet because of choices they made, pure and simple.

But my left-leaning tendencies emerge when I think of their experience in school. It’s clear that they had no one in their homes to teach them these skills; it’s clear that they had no one in their lives to model these skills. That is the sense in which they are now victims of their neglected childhood. And as a teacher, I wonder if we can’t do something while such young men are children to help them develop the skills they need.

These deficiencies are as clear in early life as reading problems. In fact, they’re more clearly evident. What are the current options in such situations? There are few, if any. The classroom teacher is responsible for the academic instruction of thirty young children; she has little to no time to instruct little De’Andre or Clearance in the basic skills they seem so clearly to lack. So they get called down, sent to time out, removed from activities, and generally shunned. Instead of learning these skills, they become resentful of those who have the skills and meet with success in school. Indeed, they don’t even recognize that there are different skills successful students are using. “Those kids are just kiss-ups” is the common response.

What do we do with this students are they grow older and more intractable, more incorrigible? We do the logical thing: we suspend them. Talk back to the teacher? Get three days out of school. Fight with a student? Get five days out of school. Initiate a fight that is particularly brutal? Get ten days out of school. And this helps these students how? Giving students who don’t want to be in school because they’ve only met with failure in school a chance to get out of school advances their education how?

What’s in place for habitual offenders — alternative school — seems less than effective. Indeed, De’Andre and Clearance had already been to alternatives school, and they’d met with as much success there as they had in regular school.

I would imagine it’s the same success they’ve met everywhere else in life. And it seems to me that when people aren’t meeting success through the normal channels of life, they begin looking for it in other ways. Or, perhaps as in the cases of these boys’ lives, they apply the techniques that bring them relative success on the streets to institutional situations, where those same methods will bring not success but condemnation. Or even eventual incarceration.

And every day I see flickers of such futures in this or that student. I see reactions that I think, “Young man, that will get you fired in ten years.” And it occurs to me that perhaps the best thing I can do for such young men and women is provide an environment where they experience at least some success without resorting to a thug attitude.

Errors and Mistakes

Thursday 06 September 2012 | 0 Comments

In the midst of the process, it becomes obvious to me that the road these students are on will not lead to the results they want. They're working hard learning a new framework for planning and writing formal essays, but there are so many larger and smaller steps -- I couldn't have covered them all the first time through. Yet I sit and wonder whether or not I've made a mistake. Instead of essays, many of them are going to wind up with three body paragraphs that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

I'm left wondering what to do. Do I stop everyone and make a group course correction? That's likely only to confuse some. And besides, it's the process I'm teaching. I'm not worried as much about the finished product at this point as I am the steps the kids are taking to create that final product.

Then it occurs to me: sometimes the teachable moment is not in the moment. Sometimes it's best to let them stumble -- knowingly, even anticipating it -- so that their misstep will show them rather than tell them where they were on the wrong track.

"Mr. Scott," I envision one young lady beginning quizzically, "This essay we wrote -- it don't make sense."

"How so? What doesn't make sense?" I will reply, hoping that she will see then what I already clearly see now.

"I don't know. It's just," she might continue, pausing to look for the right way to express herself. "These paragraphs. They just don't go together somehow."

And I will smile and say, "I know, and I'm so very glad you've noticed that."

Advice

Wednesday 05 September 2012 | 0 Comments

Though it seems to be largely ignored regarding our particular school, the web site ratemyteachers.com offers a method for evaluating teachers that includes a somewhat-disturbing metric: easiness. I'm not quite sure what they mean by this, for the other metrics seem fairly acceptable. One would hope teachers would be helpful, clear, and knowledgeable, and the notion of strictness might be initially off-putting for some teachers, but I take that to be an evaluation of whether the teacher is authoritarian, authoritative, or permissive. (I try to be the second of those three options.)

But easiness? Do we really want easy teachers? Do we really learn anything by doing easy work? Do athletes improve by completing easy workouts?

I would professionally take this as an insult if I were rated "Great" in the easiness category. I want to be challenging; I want to hear students complain, "Mr. S., this is hard." Indeed, if I could write my own dream end-of-the-year evaluation, it would read, "This is an extremely hard class, but it's worth the effort because I learned a lot."

Every year I get a view of how close I've come to this goal when I have students write letters to the next year's students. Some highlights from what my current students read last week from the class of 2012:

English one honors in the eighth grade with Mr. Scott is the hardest class I personally have taken so far. Mr. Scott will set expectations so high that you don’t feel like you can actually reach them but don’t worry to much, Mr. Scott will never leave you out high and dry.
By the end of this [first] class you will be scared out of your bananas!
With Mr. Scott as your teacher, I am positive that this year in this class will not be any easy one. What he has you do, is only for your benefit. By the end of the year, you will see much improvement in you English work. You will eventually thank him for all the hard assignments he had given you, well most likely you will.
This class will be about one of the hardest classes you have taken from kindergarten through seventh grade. [...] This year you will have to work your butt off and you can’t procrastinate if you want a decent grade.
This was by far the hardest class I completed all year. You will have homework every night so I hope you enjoyed last night. Don’t stress too much because Mr. Scott is a great teacher and he will prepare you for all the challenges that are yet to come.
Mr. Scott’s class is a fun yet serious class.
English I Honors, more technically known as Genre Analysis, is the most abhorred, despicable, positively terrifying course you will take yet, with gigantic papers over 1500 words (3+ pages, if you’re wondering), your thoughts of writing completely overturned, colossal, complicated tales, and most of all, a dash of creativity and thinking outside the box. Are you sure you’re ready?
This year will be a great one because you are on top of the middle school food chain and you will have at least one class that you will look forward too. Mr. Scott is a nice guy and is very funny.
You will learn many critical things in this class that you need to take with you after you leave Hughes.
At first the class seems intimidating, but when you get to the end of the year you feel like you have made a lot of progress.
You know that extremely nervous feeling you’re having right now? Yeah, you’ll get used to it in about three months… Maybe.
You’re not going to be able to just walk in and expect it to be an easy A, because it’ll probably be the hardest class you’ve ever taken. Although it may be demanding at times, if you pay attention, listen, and take my advice, you should do just fine.
I hope you are ready for one of the toughest classes of you life. You will be learning a lot of new things that are very difficult to understand. It will be very helpful but also very hard. [...] If you thought you had a hard class before, just wait until this year.
Mr. Scott’s class is a very difficult class with many challenges. Â He is a wonderful teacher. He always keeps you entertained while you are in class. Â I have learned so many things this year that were very challenging, but I learned that he will always help you if you need it.
You are about to enter the hardest class of your life. Good luck. Do you have a social life? Well, not anymore. Be prepared for late nights of studying, long reading assignments, and well, you might lose some of your hair, but don’t worry… throughout the year it won’t get any easier.
Mr. Scott is a very demanding and rigorous teacher that loves to watch his students suffer as they struggle to meet his requirements.
You are about to have one of the most challenging years of your life. It will be difficult but it will help you tremendously. [...] Mr. Scott is the hardest teacher I have ever had, but he is also one of the best.
This class requires time and energy, more than you have I suppose. One way to avoid the 100 lashes earned from a late assignment is to stop procrastinating.
I hope you’re ready for a really great year. This year, you will learn tons of new things, from improved writing skills to reading plays. Prepare yourself for hard work, because this class is definitely not easy. Don’t expect to breeze through the year, but as long as you study, pay attention, and try your hardest, you should be fine. This year definitely won’t be easy, but it won’t be unmanageable. Mr. Scott isn’t that bad!
English 1 Honors is one of the hardest classes that I’ve taken in the years that I’ve been in school.
You may get mad at him for giving you so much work, but think first. Â The assignments you have to do are sometimes nothing compared to how much he as to read and grade. Â So multiple your work by fifty six and you will know how he feels.
If you’re nervous about taking this class you shouldn’t be. If you do your work and you complete all assignments then it should be fun!
Mr. Scotts English One class will be very challenging.
Welcome to the hardest class of your life! Be prepared to study like never before, work harder than you ever have, and be ready to learn a lot. All my life English has been a class I’ve never had to try in. But this year I have worked more for this class than all my other classes combined. Mr. Scott has taught me so many things and I feel ready for high school and at the end of this year, you will too.
This will potentially be one of the most difficult classes you will take this year.

It's an affirmative moment to read things like that about you. Then again, there's always the question of kissing up...

Floating on More than Survival

Tuesday 04 September 2012 | 0 Comments

male sparrows putting on a show. by Will at Morro

The students sit during the Silent Sustained Reading with which we now conclude each day in our new schedule. We've begun the year reading the same book, a Pearl Buck short novella called The Big Wave, keeping a reader's journal as we read. We're all almost literally on the same page, which simplifies some of the logistics of the year-long project.

"Once you finish this book," I tell the kids, "You can read whatever you want." And so when I finish the book, I pick up a poetry collection and encounter R. T. Smith's amazing poem (source):

Hardware Sparrows

Out for a deadbolt, light bulbs
and two-by-fours, I find a flock
of sparrows safe from hawks

and weather under the roof
of Lowe's amazing discount
store. They skitter from the racks

of stockpiled posts and hoses
to a spill of winter birdseed
on the concrete floor. How

they know to forage here,
I can't guess, but the automatic
door is close enough,

and we've had a week
of storms. They are, after all,
ubiquitous, though poor,

their only song an irritating
noise, and yet they soar
to offer, amid hardware, rope

and handyman brochures,
some relief, as if a flurry
of notes from Mozart swirled

from seed to ceiling, entreating
us to set aside our evening
chores and take grace where

we find it, saying it is possible,
even in this month of flood,
blackout and frustration,

to float once more on sheer
survival and the shadowy
bliss we exist to explore.

I think of all the linguistic hoops most of my students would have to jump through even to understand the poem let alone to find themselves floating themselves when they reach the final line. Then there is all the cultural knowledge they would need -- chiefly, at least a rudimentary knowledge of the and familiarity with the music of Mozart. And the general motivation.

It's at times like that that I understand just what it means to teach literature and writing in 2012 to fourteen-year-olds.

Flying and Dancing

Monday 03 September 2012 | 0 Comments

They’re not sisters, but they often act like they are, and occasionally they look like it, as well.

Of the three of them, L and T are certainly the most similar. Full of energy, always on the move, ever chattering, constantly seeking some kind of little bit of excitement.

L is a little weary to try something new until she sees someone else do it — like leaping from someone’s shoulders as they explode (as much as my tired legs can make them explode)Â from the water. She leaps prematurely at first.

Then, after watching T do it a few more times, she gets the hang of it. Timing the jump is critical, and she flies into the air so high that I suddenly worry that perhaps it’s too high. Sure enough, it’s a touch too high once, and she lands on her belly — her first belly flop, and she comes up howling.

Soon enough, though, it’s all giggles and laughs again.

And as suddenly as it started, it stops, as a heavy, sudden shower chases from the pool. But why? There’s no thunder, no threat. The youngest girls, realizing this, understand the implication.

“We can play in the rain!”

Why not? They’ll learn to see the rain as inconvenient soon enough.

Drop In

Sunday 02 September 2012 | 2 Comments

Old friends dropped by on their way home from the beach.

A trio of giggles and silliness ensued.

And as the two girls ended up spending the night,

story for all four girls in the house.

I wonder when they'll actually get to sleep...

A Nearly-Perfect Saturday

Saturday 01 September 2012 | 0 Comments

The Boy was merciful to us -- kind, even -- this morning, willing to trade another hour's or so sleep for a spot in our bed. L, too, enjoyed a pleasantly late morning, so the sun was bright by the time I was grinding coffee and K giving the Boy his breakfast.

With a start like that, what else is left to do to make the perfect morning but go for a walk. The Girl picked out a dress -- always a dress -- and the three of us took off, leaving K behind to have some ever-rare alone time. "She'll probably just spend it doing chores," I thought as we strolled down the driveway and onto our quiet street, but then I recalled how some chores give K a certain domestic peace. It must be the Polish blood.

Our route took us by the once-proud, neglected home in our neighborhood that once set itself as the envy of all. The brick work around the place alone cost a fortune, and the addition brought the square footage probably over 4k mark. Now its brick privacy walls, overgrown with everything imaginable, are crumbling and yellow "Condemned" stickers decorate the doors like sad wreaths.

I walk by this house often. It gives me a bit of comfort. Something of a nemesis, something of an inspiration, something of a warning, it teaches me to be content with what I have by reminding me that more stuff only amounts eventually to moreÂ dilapidation.

Today, however, it just reminded me of the amount of yard work that awaited me at home. As fall approaches and the sun lowers, the yard work always becomes more pleasant. There's a different feel to the air, even if the temperature reaches the low 90s like today.

After I'd mowed, trimmed, carted, raked, and disposed, there was only one logical conclusion to the day: the pool.