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Glimpse into Your Future?

Thursday 30 January 2014

As an eighth-grade teacher, I’ve sometimes found myself in a situation that is difficult to believe: a student, already in trouble, burrows herself even more deeply into the issue, verbal fangs and claws showing. “It’s surely a defensive mechanism,” I thought, wondering why this person was essentially standing in front of a wall banging her head mercilessly against the cinder blocks and growing more angry that the only result was pain for her with no visible effects to the wall. “Surely this is automated response,” I almost mused aloud.

Such situations have left me wondering what I could do to help such a student and frustrated that I didn’t handle the situation better at the time. In such cases, if the kid has been somewhat troubling through the year, it can be difficult to resist the temptation to poke at the situation a bit like a bloodied knee. What does it cost me? It only hurts the other person, and don’t she deserve it for all the nonsense I’ve put up with through this year? Yet I’m the adult in the situation, and thankfully I can say that I’ve generally resisted the temptation to provoke further in such situations.

“Surely it’s something they grow out of.” It’s the only hope sometimes. And then I saw this.

Up

Thursday 23 January 2014

Dear Terrence,

To see your excitement when you got your report card this afternoon was one of those moments that makes all the silliness I have to put up with as a teacher worth it. You're the type of kid who is simply used to having an F or two on your report card. The question for you, I think, has always been how many. And so when I told you "Not a single F" as I handed the report card to you, I would have loved to capture your expression. We could use it as a visual illustration of "pride."

Next goal: honor roll.

Smiling with you,
Your Teacher

Intent

Thursday 09 January 2014

Dear Terrence,

I'm really starting to wonder if you're not doing this on purpose. I mean, you just got back from a long out-of-school suspension today, and yet you didn't even make it through the whole day before you got into a fight. (When I wrote that, I dithered between "couldn't make it" and "didn't make it." I figured the former was too fatalistic.) You tell me you want to do well in school. We have the conversation about impulse control at least once or twice a week. I explain to you regularly the effect your reputation -- created from experience and rumor -- has on how teachers treat you. And yet you do it still: indeed, if you hadn't gotten into a fight today, you still likely would have been suspended, for I know a teacher wrote an administrative referral on you because of your completely disruptive behavior in class.

So I'm wondering what the deal is.

There are two options, both frightening, but one is positively terrifying. The first option is that all this is intentional, that you're trying to get into alternative school. Don't laugh -- it's not so far fetched. One of your colleagues just down the hall has expressed that intention openly. Still, you insist that's not what you're up to when I ask you about it. That leaves the second option. The terrifying option: you honestly don't have a clue how to control your impulses. You've built up such a habit of just going with whatever wild thought enters your head that that's your standard operating model now. What's terrifying about that? People like that usually don't meet with a lot of success in life. People like that usually end up bouncing in and out of jail, spending some time in prison, collection welfare while not incarcerated, completely unable to hold down a job, and if they happen to be male, leaving several fatherless children in their wake. (Yes, I know, it does take two to do that particular dance, but that simple fact does nothing to negate your responsibility.)

At its heart, your unwillingness to control your impulses is a kind of immaturity. Toddlers don't control impulses well, but with guidance from parents, teachers, and other adults, they learn how to curb those crazy compulsions. So your refusal -- and at this point, I'm not sure how else to describe it -- to reign in these urges is at heart a refusal to grow up. Sure, that's not fun in a way, but I would imagine it's a whole lot more fun than a lifetime of incarceration, joblessness, dependence, frustration, and anger.

I end reiterating what I've said to you many times: I'm here for you. You drive me absolutely nuts in class, but I'm still not giving up on you. Your decisions today, though, make me wonder if you've given up on yourself.

Sadly,
Your Teacher

Apologies

Monday 25 November 2013

Dear Teresa,

Two observations.

First, not all apologies begin with I’m sorry. In fact, some of the most graceful and moving apologies have ended with those words.

Second, and more significantly for you, not all utterances including “I’m sorry” are in fact apologies. For example, if you were to get in trouble with a teacher yet feel that you had done nothing, saying “I’m sorry you think that I…” only feels like an apology because it includes those sometimes-deceptive words. It is, in fact, an accusation.

Mildly amused and annoyed,
Your Teacher

M-Jezzy

Monday 14 October 2013

Dear Terrence,

Seven years ago, on 13 October 2006, I wrote this, I worked at a day treatment facility for kids who had been unable to find a path to success in school.

Yesterday, one of the boys in our program asked if he could use the computer for a little while. “No problem,” I said. He’s had a great week, and it was a slow morning.

The week was much improved over the past. We were both frustrated about how things were going in my class – he much more than I. At the end of the last six weeks, when we were working on science (now we’ve switched to social studies for the second six weeks), M-Jezzy (his nom de plume at our program’s blog) was trying to make up some missed work, and getting very frustrated about it.

“Man, I just hate science,” he exclaimed.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Not everyone likes science. What we can do, though, is use that as a way to make up some of your work.” I instructed him to log into our blog, akacoolpeople.com, and write about science and why he hates it. “Explain three reasons you don’t like it, and we’ll count that as one of your missed assignments.”

He wrote,

I do not like science at all. And i,ve got three reasons why. One reason is because it is so confusing. likewhe gives the homework out. I dont know what he is talking about beause. They would be so many things that he is talking about. An the other reason iswhen he gives the i want know what to do because. It will be so many things that you would have to look for an you would have to do so much research. And the last reason is the things that he teaches in class i dont know wat in the world that hebe talking about. Likewe was talking about an atom an what i have to study about it is so hard because. The atom has so many things in it. And you will get mixed up with all the parts of an atom. Beceause you will not know how to put them in oder. An if you get this and you are really feeling wat i am saying to you then mail me back M-JEZZY out. I hate science so bad i wish i did not have it at all. (science)

I read it and thought, “What an indictment of me. I obviously don’t explain things for him, and I can’t even make myself clear when assigning homework.”

Depressing.

But fixable.

I talked to the head teacher about it; I talked to the program director about it; I talked to the head counselor about it. The consensus: M-Jezzy does not deal with ambiguity well (as if anyone really does). Like most people, he wants to know where he’s going and what he’s going to have to do to get there.

Starting this week, I began something new. Something obvious. Something basic. Something I should have been doing all along. I blocked off a portion of the white-board and wrote an outline of what we’d be doing, including information about what kind of activity it would be.

Next class, M-Jeezy was like a different young man – much more attentive, much more focused, much more involved. He asked penetrating questions, and he didn’t giggle too much.

A success, I thought.

Back to yesterday morning. M-Jezzy sits down at the computer and logs into “aka cool people,” and starts typing. This is what he writes:

now sence my teacher was started to put the agenda on the board i am starting to learn more in class and i know no wat to do.And i am not getting confused write me

I can’t remember the last time I felt so good.

Yet it was not what M-Jezzy wrote that made my day – it was that he did it spontaneously.

M-Jezzy was fifteen when I wrote this, theoretically a tenth-grader but he was still in eighth grade because of behavior. He’d been tossed out of regular school because of his behavior — basically an unwillingness to regulate his impulses in any way whatsoever — and then tossed out of alternative school for the same reason. All of this left him with few alternatives, which is how he landed in our day treatment facility — a last ditch effort to teach him the social and personal skills he so clearly lacked and so desperately needed.

In the end, it’s clear that we didn’t get through to M-Jezzy, for later this week, he’ll be going to trial facing six charges: misdemeanors and two felonies. The former: trespass charges and assault on a female; the latter: first degree murder and intentional child abuse with serious physical injury. He stands accused of beating to death his girlfriend’s four-year-old son.

From the accounts I’ve read in newspapers, it seems a reasonable assumption that he’s guilty. Knowing him personally and seeing his temper in action, I find it tragically plausible that he did indeed beat a toddler to death.

The vindictive (read: human) side of me thinks his punishment should be based on a simple mathematical equation. A proportion, really. Take the pounds per square inch of his punch over the weight of the child he beat to death. The other side of the proportion you can probably figure out: x over his weight. Solve for X. Then he should be beaten regularly by someone who can hit with that much force. Beaten for weeks on end. Months on end. The end will come — eventually, he’ll be beaten to death in one, long session. But he’ll never know which one it will be. So each time he sees his executioner, he’ll have to ask himself the same question his victim asked himself: how will it end this time?

Fortunately, I’m not in charge of sentencing. The compassionate side of me realizes that such punishment is cruel, but again, the vindictive side says, “Who is he to deserve mercy?” It’s a conundrum.

I write this to you because I want to be perfectly clear with you: I don’t know how M-Jezzy got from where he was merely a disruptive kid in an under-funded day treatment facility to a young man facing serious prison time (if he survives: my aunt, who worked in the prison system for twenty years, assures me that as soon as inmates find out what M-Jezzy got convicted of, if he’s convicted, they’ll take care of the problem). I don’t know the road he took, but I do know this: you remind me of him so much sometimes it’s terrifying. And now, it should be terrifying for you.

With concern,
Your Teacher

Positive and Negative

Thursday 10 October 2013

Dear Teresa,

When I asked you today to keep track of your positive comments and negative comments throughout the day, I didn't really realize you might not be able to tell the difference. I realized this when I saw in the positive column, "Please get out of my face."

Despite what you've been told, "please" doesn't always make all the difference in the world.

With a smile,
Your Teacher

255, 223, and 186

Friday 20 September 2013

Though I am not a mathematician, physicist, or astronomer, and though I teach words, words, words, my professional life is an orbit of numbers. Some of the numbers are relatively innocuous: attendance, school picture orders, class periods. Yet every fall I get a series of numbers that guides instructional decisions for the next months and serves as the first half of what, to some degree, is largely regarded as a metric of my effectiveness as a teacher. In the spring, students trudge back into the computer lab as they did today to take the second MAP test, and I sit at my computer, entering the various scores, hoping that each student will score higher than she did in the fall.

The fall testing regime tells me what I have to work with. There are rarely any surprises: I can often guess within three or four points what a given student will make. By the time they’ve taken the test, the students have been in my class for a month, plenty of time to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. Add to it the fact that English and math classes are grouped by ability in our county and it’s a relatively easy exercise, this “Guess My Score.”

But there are always surprises. Today, for example, student after student in one class just seemed to be scoring higher and higher. Given the fact that an average MAP reading score for an eighth grader is 220, seeing student after student score above 240 is astounding. “It’s no wonder these kids are in English I Honors, effectively skipping eight-grade English and going straight to a ninth-grade, rigorous honors course,” I thought as I punched in the numbers. I knew they would be high, but this high? Unheard of. The highest fall class average I’ve ever encountered. And then one student finished with a score of 255, just four points lower than the highest spring score I’d ever seen!

It’s much more dramatic when one knows the grade level norms for the MAP reading test.

Grade Fall Spring Growth
1 160 173 13
2 179 190 11
3 192 200 8
4 201 207 6
5 208 212 4
6 213 216 3
7 217 219 2
8 220 223 3
9 222 224 2

So the reading level of the student who scored a 255 is at least a college freshman, if not higher.

“What am I going to do with these kids?” I joked with a colleague. “They’re already scoring higher than they should at the end of ninth grade!”

“Make them your assistant teachers,” she replied.

Yet it’s not a serious problem: I just have to push them harder than usual. It would be a problem if they were mixed in with some students from other classes, because their reading level is significantly below grade level.

Later in the day, I had the opposite situation: student after student was scoring significantly below grade level. By significant, I mean a class average that, for the first twelve or thirteen students, didn’t rise above 197. Several students were scoring in the 180’s. Scroll back up and check the chart: that’s a second- or third-grade reading level. Though several students were absent from that class, I was still hopeful that by the time I entered the final scores, the average would rise above 200. But there were no scores high enough to pull the mean up, until the 223. The highest score in the class, and technically a score above average. The mean soared, rising to almost 201. I sighed in relief: it’s low, but having a sub-200 score seemed impossible. Unheard of. Then the next student finished: 186. The averaged dipped below 200 again, and stayed there until the end of testing, just two tenths of a point away from 200.

At the end of the day, I looked at the summary I’d created. Two classes drastically below average; two classes radically above. The lowest score put one student at a second-grade reading level; the highest score put another student at a college freshman or sophomore level.

“Thank goodness I don’t have them in the same class,” I thought. What could a teacher possibly do with students literally ten to twelve grade levels apart in reading? It’s essentially a return to the one-room school concept. Fortunately, I don’t have to figure out a way to solve that problem in my class, and the math teachers are equally fortunate. But social studies and science? There’s no leveling there, and so one’s class is likely to be an incredible mix of ability, motivation, and preparedness. I know there are ways to compensate for this (I have a Master’s in education, for heaven’s sake), but those techniques and tricks seem hardly up to such a challenge: they seem like they work only in theory. In practice, someone is always going to be bored, and thus someone is always going to be disruptive.

I wish I could end this with some sort of optimistic, pithy observation about the nature of education, about the malleability of the brain, about the strength of the human spirit, or some such cliche. I have answers I’ve found in books, but I don’t know how effective they are in dealing with such issues, especially when a significant portion of the challenge lies in challenging others to change their habits and behaviors.

It leaves me feeling pessimistic.

But I’ll get over it by Monday.

The Smile

Tuesday 17 September 2013

I saw her walking down the hall and as I always do, I shot her a smile.

She seems to need it: there’s always apathy just at the edges of her eyes, sadness just at the corners of her mouth. When she smiles, her dark cheeks set off the whites of her wide eyes and glistening teeth. She is transformed.

“You need to smile more often,” I tell her.  It’s not just honey and vinegar and all that. The ability to create a positive affect is a basic skill that everyone needs to master, and when one is as gifted with physical beauty as she is, something as simple as a pleasant smile puts everyone in the room at ease. She has that advantage, and she rarely uses it. In fact, most of her peers and teachers, I believe, think she’s ambivalent to the world, lazy at best, perpetually angry at worst.

Every time I smile at her, she smiles at me. That’s progress.

So I shot her the smile, and she smiled back.

“Who else do you smile at?” I asked.

“No one,” she replied, the smile disappearing.

Heartbreaking and heartening at the same time.

Your Letter

Wednesday 11 September 2013

Dear Terrence,

I read your letter and felt it really needed a reply: you touch on a lot of issues that got me thinking, gave me hope, and honestly caused me to worry a bit.

You wrote that you “feel like people criticize [you] because of [your] past,” something which “hurts [you] to even try to change.”I don’t know what you thought I might have known about your past, but I knew nothing. I’m fairly sure the other teachers on the team knew nothing about you, either. Yet we can all accurately guess about your past because of your present. I don’t mean to be offensive or blunt, but despite your desire to change, you still exhibit a lot of behaviors that draw negative attention to yourself. I don’t know about other teachers’ rooms, but I can describe some of the things in your behavior in my room that makes it pretty clear that you’ve had a rough past in school.

  1. You often blurt out things that you’re thinking, things that might not help the classroom atmosphere.
  2. You sometimes get up and move about the room for this or that reason without asking permission or seeming to notice that doing so would be an interruption.
  3. You put your head down when you get frustrated, and even when you’re not frustrated, you cover your face with your hands and completely disengage.
  4. When I correct you, you often quickly develop a negative, disrespectful attitude that comes out in your tone of voice and your body language.

You write that you want teachers to “just give [you] a chance and stop messing with [you],” but if a teacher is correcting these behaviors, she’s not “messing” with you. You must understand that some of your behaviors genuinely disrupt the class, and a teacher cannot continue teaching over disruption.

I do have some bad news, though: while no one is messing with you, you’ve made it clear what gets under your skin, and if a teacher wanted to mess with you, wanted to provoke you so that she could write you up, you’ve made it easy for that teacher (whom I hope you never meet) to do just that.

Fortunately, I have some good news, too: letters like yours make a teacher’s day. It gives us hope that perhaps we can help make a difference in students’ lives. I don’t know a single teacher–especially the teachers on our team–who won’t go out of his or her way to help a student who wants to change his/her behavior to do just that. However (and it’s a pretty big “however”), you have to show that you are really trying to make these changes. You have to show progress on a regular basis. Not big progress; not 180 degree changes overnight. But teachers need to see that you are serious about something like this. Otherwise, we’re left wondering if you’re just playing us. I’m sure you’re not, but it has been known to happen, and teachers tend to be a bit wary about that.

Here’s what I suggest you do if you really want to be a “changed man” as you so aptly called it. First, make sure you go to each teacher and say as much to him/her. Look the teacher in the eye; make sure your facial expression is pleasant; be sure not to let yourself be distracted by anything other students might be doing; then say what you said in the letter. Second, make your strongest effort to change right then. Show the teacher you mean business. Show the teacher that you are not just talking the talk but you’re trying to walk the walk. Third, when you slip up (and you will: you’re trying to change some habits that you’ve had for a long time, I suspect), apologize. Sincerely. But not right then! If you do, the teacher is likely to think you’re just trying to disrupt further. Just smile as best you can and comply. After class, you can go to the teacher and say, “I really messed up. I appreciate your patience with me. I’ll do better next time.” Finally, make sure all your friends know what you’re up to. If you’re trying to be Mr. Thug with them but Mr. Nice Guy with your teachers, you’ll get those roles mixed up and cause yourself more trouble. Be a leader: tell your friends, “Hey, I’m sick of hating school, sick of dreading school, sick of feeling like I’m wasting time. I’m going to make some changes in how I act, how I think, how I see myself and the world.” Be a leader: show other kids how to do it. They’ll follow your example, because everyone loves to see a “troubled-kid-straightens-everything-out” story. We love it, all of us.

Understand that I’ll do everything in my power to help you. I have some tricks I can teach you about making a good impression, keeping your impulses in check, and having a positive affect. (If you don’t know what that means, ask me: I’ll gladly explain.) But as I said earlier, I and all the other teachers have to see change immediately. Not enormous change, but change. Effort.

Best of luck,
Your Teacher

Debut 2013

Tuesday 10 September 2013

Dear Terrence,

There you are! I’ve been wondering if you’d decided not to come to school at all this year, but it just turned out that you were going to a different school and hadn’t transferred to our happy classroom yet.

I thought I might have recognized you when I saw you, the new kid, walking down the hall. It was something about how you walked, how you carried yourself, how you wore your hair, how you interacted with people — hints of thug-wanna-be — that made me think, “Well, is that Terrence?” before I’d even met you.

You might have noticed that I’m trying for early intervention with you. I want to you to see early on that, despite your tendency to fly into disrespectful mini-rages when being redirected, despite your tendency to put your head down in class, despite your tendency to speak whatever comes into your mind, despite your tendency to get up and wander anywhere in the classroom you choose, I’m still on your side, I’m still hoping to help you, and I still think you can do better than you’re doing now.

You’ve got a lot to work on, though. You’ve built up a lot of bad habits that land you squarely and immediately in trouble, and you don’t seem to realize that you quickly create for yourself a reputation. Once that bad reputation is in place, few adults will give you the benefit of any doubt. I’m trying not to let that sway me, but I’ll be honest: eventually, and it might be sooner rather than later, I’ll reach a point that I decide it’s in everyone else’s best interest to get you out of the classroom through administrative referral and the accompanying suspension. In other words, I’ll get tired of dealing with the same issues again and again. You show progress, and I’ll have seemingly endless patience; otherwise, it’s going to be a long year for you in my class.

I don’t mean that to sound like a threat. It probably does to you. You’ve probably heard things like this from other teachers. Still, it’s your behavior that brings this on you. You’ll notice there are plenty of students I never have such conversations with. You can be in that group. But you’re the only one who can put yourself in that group.

Regards,
Your Teacher