What angels sound like.
RIP
“Tata, we’ve got to let the ants go,” L said tearfully. I’d noticed earlier that the ant farm was looking fairly harsh, with dirty sand and lethargic ants. Who knew ants required so much care? We let them go in the backyard, but I knew that, absent a queen, theirs was a doomed future.
During evening prayers, L concluded, “I pray that the ants don’t go into a fire ant hill and kill themselves, and I pray they make their own home.”
Tag Team Discussion
Getting middle school kids really discussing a given topic is an art. I’ve tried at least a hundred different strategies from dozens of books — well, that might be a bit hyperbolic, but I’ve tried so many things I can’t even remember them all. Some are flops; others are moderate success. But nothing prepared me for today’s success, a highly modified version of the Socratic Seminar engagement: kids actively engaged in discussing — of all topics — the degree to which a given story’s conflict is dependent on the story’s setting.
Tonight’s homework:
Answer the following question about today’s Socratic Seminar by leaving a comment on this post. What did you think of today’s discussion activity? What were two things you thought were effective about it? What was one thing you would like to have changed?
Selected responses:
- I thought today’s activity was somewhat challenging, but it was very enjoyable.
- I think today’s activity was really fun.
- I thought today’s discussion activity was a new, different way to make us think.
- Today’s activity was fun and very helpful.
- Wow, good stuff; arguments are always fun, aren’t they?
- I love our activity and I would love to do it again sometime.
- Overall I loved class today and I hope we get to do more things like that in the future.
- What we did in class really helped me get closer to being able to analyze the context easily.
- This activity was very exiting.
Needless to say, I will be using this activity again.
Watching Somebody Love Something
Donald Miller begins his memoir Blue Like Jazz with an “Author’s Note” that reads, in part,
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I never really liked dance until I watched my daughter dance rapturously. Any type of music will get her moving, including the pre-programmed light jazz numbers saved in the memory of the small digital piano we bought a few years ago. She shows me the new steps she has to learn in her new jazz dance class, explaining that she’s doing them very carefully now but will eventually have to get them much faster.
Then she begins improvising, a mix of the ballet and jazz she’s learned mixed with some of the Polish Highlander style her mother continually shows her and some of her own imaginative moves.
It’s a skill I hope she keeps for the rest of her life, this ability to mix classical training (of a sort) with regional traditions and her own imagination — expanding it beyond dance, there’s no telling what she could accomplish.
Your Mean Face
I was talking with a student, joking that she is so kind to everyone that she probably doesn't even have a mean face.
"Let me see your mean face," I say with a smile.
"I don't have one!" she insisted.
To elicit some kind of reaction that might lead to a "mean face," I suggest to her a cruel scenario: "Imagine you're walking down the street and you see some kid kick a dog. Show me the mean face you'd give the kid."
She thought about it a moment, then responded, "I would probably go help the puppy first."
If only I had more students like that...
Thinking Critically about the Common Core
Charles Blow writes in a recent article about the Common Core standards,
Our educational system is not keeping up with that of many other industrialized countries, even as the job market becomes more global and international competition for jobs becomes steeper.
We have gone from the leader to a laggard.
The latest attempt to solve this problem is the Common Core standards, a group of national educational standards that is supposed to encourage the teaching of critical thinking and problem solving. The standards I use are available here.
Yet they're not universally accepted. Conservatives tend to bristle at anything they see as Federal mandates from above for national standards of just about anything. Liberals, in support with unions, don't like the idea of using testing as a measure of teacher effectiveness. (The New York Times also had an article on growing opposition to the standards.)
Yet I wonder about what it says now that we must go to great lengths to teach critical thinking in school. I don't recall many activities in high school that seemed geared to practicing critical thinking, and I don't remember any direct instruction in critical thinking, yet somehow I became a critical thinker. Take for example the skill of inferring. I go to great lengths to teach my students what inferring is and what it isn't, to differentiate between merely observing and inferring, and to apply the skill to texts. Yet I don't remember anyone teaching me that. It just seemed like something I picked up along the way as I read increasingly complex texts.
Another new feature of the Common Core standards is an increased emphasis on what the Common Core Consortium calls "informational texts." We just called it non-fiction. The Consortium points out that in the traditional educational progression, students spend all of high school reading literature and then they're suddenly required to read informational texts in college. It's as if reading the one has no influence on reading the other. I don't really recall having to read or to analyze much more than literature in high school, yet I somehow didn't have any problem making the switch to the "informational texts" of my college career. In the meantime, this push for greater emphasis on "informational texts" means that an entire generation will be underexposed to literature, one of the prime makes of society and social consciousness. (Of course, that's really only true to any significant degree in in the pre-Internet world, I suppose.)
The big question of course is whether this whole enterprise will work. With states that originally adopted the Common Core standards increasingly backing out, it seems like it might just turn out to be yet another educational fad.
From the Ants
The ants arrived yesterday. The clear plastic ant farm has been ready well over a week, as has L: she has been waiting for them impatiently, checking daily, and consistently frustrated with the ant-free mailbox. We put them in the fridge yesterday to slow them down -- in accordance with the directions -- and found them to be mostly lethargic most of the day afterward.
This morning, we awoke to find they'd been busy overnight, digging a fresh, clean tunnel under the plastic divider, which theoretically divides the above ground from the below. They'd piled the food we'd given them high with sand and were busily making the tunnel even deeper.
We went about our normal Sunday: Mass, a nice lunch, some relaxation.
A late-afternoon trip to the pool ended quickly when L decided the water was entirely too cold. We spent some time at Nana's and Papa's place instead, with me falling asleep on the couch as usual.
Returning to a lovely sunselt, we found the ants had been busier than we all could have believed they would be. And suddenly, a famous passage made much more sense:
Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. (Proverbs 6:6-8)
Perhaps Solomon had an ant farm himself...
Surprise!
And she never saw it coming...
Searching
Learning to Lose, Still
First Day at School
L has been worried about starting school this year. New teacher; new students; new room in a new hall — new everything.
“I don’t want to be a first grader,” she lamented.
“I don’t want to go to that school,” she whined.
“I want to go back to Ms. B’s class,” she begged.
I recall being somewhat nervous about starting new grades. First grade for me too was tough: I was starting a new school, and the bathrooms we used were situated between first and second grade (it was an open classroom design). That meant every time I went to the restroom, I ran the risk of encountering an unimaginably large second grader. It was terrifying.
L had different worries, different concerns. Her first disappointment came when she learned that she would no longer be the first released to the car line. “Well, you’re not in kindergarten anymore,” I explained. Her first bit of pride came a little before that, though, as she was walking down the hall with her class and encountered a favorite teacher from last year.
“Did you say ‘Hi’?” K asked as we talked about it over dinner.
“No, Mama! We were walking down the hall. We couldn’t talk. We’re first graders! We can’t do that!”
The Boy, Goral
Sunday at the Ballpark
K saw her first baseball game this weekend. It's amazing how many rules one doesn't really think about until trying to explain the game to someone who knows only the goal of hitting a white ball with a wooden bat. Fly balls and tagging up? Still just a little confusing for her, I think. The guys trying to entertain the crowd, though -- easy-peasy lemon squeezy...
Welcome Back, Terrence
Dear Terrence,
Every year — every single year — I make the same promise to myself around the end of third quarter: “Next year I will start the year as an authoritarian jerk. I will rule my classroom with an iron cliche and only later loosen my grip.” It’s easier, after all, to loosen things than to tighten them up. And then by the beginning of the year, I begin second guessing myself. “Nobody likes a jerk,” I say, “and that would essentially would be acting like a jerk.”
It’s a delicate balance to achieve when you have a classroom filled with students of varying interest levels, social skills, intellectual abilities, cultures, races, economic realities, and a thousand other variables, and my job is to focus them all on one goal: improving their ability to read and to write. Some of them love school and are inherently interested in this common goal; some of them hate school and don’t care about anything I have to say; some of them love school but, being more mathematically inclined, are not inherently interested in what I have to teach; some of them don’t even seem to know what they’re doing in school; some of them have only one goal: attract as much attention as possible. And they’re all in my classroom.
This dilemma about how to open the year boils down to how to deal with one group of students: the disengaged, interest-lacking student who wants to pass most of the class period chatting. In other words, students like you, Terrence. Indeed, in every class — that is, in every on-level class — there is at least one Terrence who simply says what he thinks when he thinks it without any thought to the approriateness of the moment. I’ve literally had a student say, “If I think it, I say it.” If in that classroom, there are a few more students who, with that initial proding, will join into a conversation (in other words, they remain generally quiet until someone speaks to them), then we’re going to have little pockets of chaos throughout the classroom that add up to a disrupted and disruptive class. As the year develops and relationships grow, it seems like this might be easier to control, but the reality is often frustratingly the opposite. When you and your friends behave like this, Terrence, you rob others of an education, because I have to spend time dealing with your behavior rather than teaching.
To be a teacher, one has to be something of an idealist, somewhat naive regarding human nature. One has to look at these impulsive, often rude, sometimes cruel children — no more than two or three in a class — and think, “They must understand that their life can be better. They must want to change and simply not be able.” It’s easy to think of them even as victims — victims of neglect, of a shallow society, even of irresponsibile or possibly cruel parents. And so the second balancing act: to understand that they’re responsible for their own actions, but that they’re acting from habits formed in an environment not entirely of their choosing.
But naivete and idealism aren’t really necessary if I remember one thing: it’s all about the relationships. You and other students like you, Terrence, might have developed bad social habits because of a lack of positive adult relationships in your life, but I don’t have to be an additional, negative relationship simply in the name of “classroom management.” So at the beginning of this new school year, before I’ve even met you, I say to you what I say to every student. No matter what it feels like, no matter how harsh I seem to be, I am always on your side. It’s just that I’m on every student’s side, and when one student is taking from another her opportunity for an education, I am going to intervene and stop it. If that means coming down on you because your talking is disturbing others, then that’s what will happen; if that means coming down on others because their talking is disturbing you, then that’s what will happen. But no matter what, I am always on your side.
Regards,
Your Soon-To-Be Teacher