Matching Tracksuits

Dear Terrence,

It really wasn’t that much I was asking you to do: put your head up. Simple. You began the class as you almost always do: head up but not really attentive. Within a few minutes, though, you folded those arms and dropped your head into the angle of your elbow.

“Terrence, put your head up, please.” Notice: I was polite. I was respectful. You can’t learn anything with your head down, so I needed you to raise your head and your attention. And you did. For a few seconds. Down it went again.

“Terrence, put your head up.” Notice: I was a little less polite. It’s hard to be polite with someone who’s being so disrespectful, and that’s really what it amounted to. When you don’t do what a teacher instructs you to do, it’s disrespect. Whether or not you agree with that is, sadly, irrelevant, because most of the world would accept that as a fair description of what you were doing. Your head went up, but this time, so did your arm, with your head now balanced on the side of your hand as you rested your elbow on your desk. So in a sense, you were obeying: your head was more “up” than it had been a few moments ago, but you knew perfectly well what I meant.

“Terrence, put your head up.” Notice: I was still polite. I tried to keep the edge out of my voice, because I was getting quite irritated with the whole situation and the disrespect you were showing in front of the whole classroom. The child in me wanted to respond in a similar fashion, with disrespect, with sarcasm. But thankfully I reminded myself that I am the adult, and while you could choose to act like an adult, you generally choose to act as you did.

It was at this point that you really crossed the line. But standing up and walking out of the classroom, you disrupted the class, you showed incredible disrespect, and you left me with no choice but to refer the matter to the administration. And you know that will mean an immediate three-day suspension. With your dreams of playing football — I eavesdrop in the hall, as do other teachers — that doesn’t seem like something you’d want. A discipline record and poor grades guarantee your disqualification from school sports. So it seemed very short-sighted of you.

See, here’s what you don’t understand: if I didn’t care about you, I’d just let you leave that head down. It’s much easier to let you sleep. So I ask you to put your head up knowing that I’m only making my life more difficult. I do it every day because I refuse to give up. You might force my hand as you did today, and if that’s the case, then I’ll do as instructed by my superiors and write you up every single time you do it. It doesn’t seem like a very productive way to spend my time, but I follow instructions. All I’m asking is that you do the same.

Still a little frustrated,
Your Teacher

Dear Terrence,

I watch you walking down the hall, getting upset by the least little thing, and I worry. Someone bumps into you, and you’re upset. Someone says something to you that you don’t want to hear, and you’re upset. Someone doesn’t do this or that, and you’re upset. And then today, you’re about to get into a fight because — because why exactly? I could never get more out of you than, “He play too much.”

Of course, you’re not the first to say that. I hear it a lot. “You play too much.” “They play too much.” “Mr. Jones play too much.” I hear it a lot, but I’m not sure what it means. I’m fairly certain you don’t mean that literally: I don’t think it’s the amount of time this or that person spends playing video games that upsets you. We’re not playing any sport in the hallway, so you’re not referring to that. What you must mean is that the person in question plays mind games too much. That’s the only thing I can figure. But an odd thing about mind games: they take two to play. So if he plays too much, if she plays too much, it only means that you’re playing along too much.

So he bumps you and perhaps it’s on purpose: it’s only “playing” if you play along. So someone says something you don’t like: it’s only “playing” if you play along.

Why not try ignoring the people who play too much? If they have no one to play with, they’ll go look for a new playmate. Simple.

Playfully,
Your Teacher

Dear Teresa,

You looked really sharp in that leather jacket, I must say. It really worked well with your tight, curly black hair, and you wore it with a confidence that was surprising. In short, it looked great.

Sadly, it was also a dress code violation.

I know, I know — I get tired of the dress code myself. I get tired of enforcing it. I get tired of policing it. I get tired of dealing with it. But truth be told, we all have a dress code. I can’t wear anything I want to school, and while your dress code as a student is much more restrictive than mine as a teacher, I can sympathize to a degree. Still, it’s my job to police it (I choose that verb carefully and deliberately), and every time I have to approach a student for the first time about a violation, I’m a little apprehensive. I know some students can’t handle that criticism well, and it risks turning into a confrontation that I really don’t want to have.

“No one else has said anything to me about it!” is a common refrain. Perhaps no one else noticed — after all, we teachers have a million and one things on our minds. Dress code sometimes takes a backseat.

“I wore it yesterday, and no one said anything about it!” is another common response. See above.

“I’ve worn it all year, and no one has said a word about it!” is one I hear every now and then. See above.

So when I see a dress code violation, I get a little nervous. I just don’t like situations that could escalate into a bigger issue. I always do my best not to escalate the situation, and I think I do a good job of keeping things calm. But there are some students who are determined — absolutely determined — to make an issue of it.

And then there are students like you: I mentioned the lovely jacket was a dress code violation, and you simply put it in your locker. I could tell from your body language that you were not happy at all about it, but still, you put it away without a word. I was more impressed when we talked about it: you said something like the responses above, with a few new twists, but you waited until the appropriate time to discuss it. That showed a maturity that is impressive.

Thank you for handling an unpleasant situation like a true young adult. It makes me feel even more fortunate to be your teacher.

Still smiling,
Your Teacher

Dear Teresa,

Since you phrased your starter self-evaluation as a letter and ended it by saying, “Yea so thats [sic]¹ the question, but wheres [sic] the answer,” I thought I would supply the answer. I feel it is important to make sure my students understand the methodology I employ in the classroom, and it is to that end that I write to you now.

You wrote that the reasons you “have no starters is becase [sic] to me there is no reason to do it.” It’s an odd thing to write: I gave you the reason at the very beginning of the year. This is a writing class: I want you writing as much as possible. Additionally, if you didn’t see a reason for doing them, perhaps you could have asked me in private why we do them. (To shout it out in class would be disrespectful, and I know you would never want to be disrespectful.) But you never asked for the reason, so I didn’t know you were confused about why we do starters. Finally, it seems fairly logical to me what the reason is: this is a writing class, and the best way to improve in writing is by doing it. That’s why most of my starters, if you haven’t noticed, are questions to help get you writing, to get your brain working in a compositional mode. It might have worked for you if you’d tried it, but you never did. So despite your claim to the contrary, there are clear and solid pedagogically-sound reasons for the starter we do in class.

Most puzzling, though, is your claim that I “don’t even check” the starters, which “don’t even get graded.” It’s a strange claim because I directly told the class several times, at the beginning of the year and throughout each quarter, that I take up the starters at the end of the quarter. I probably also said, “Take care to do them and keep up with them because it should be an easy A.” In addition, I told the class several times as we approached the due date of January 15 that they would need to bring in their starters at the end of the week. Why would I take them up if I weren’t going to grade them? There’s simply no logic in that. Finally, I often walk around the room as the class works on the starters (you excepted) and I check roll. When I do this, I’m looking at what students are writing, often interacting with them about their ideas or possibly pointing out a silly grammatical mistake. It is during this time that I often encourage students who are not working on the starter, students like you, to begin doing so. Some students do; you often do not. So to suggest that I don’t check the starters is patently misleading.

The real key to understanding your response, though, was when you contrasted my starters to Ms. H’s starters. To begin with, it doesn’t make much sense to compare them because we teach you different subjects: she teaches reading while I teach writing. Of course we’re going to have different kinds of starters; it only makes sense. However, the whole comparison is bogus to begin with. I spoke to Ms. H about your response, and she informed me that you don’t do the starters in her class either except on rare occasion. I would bet that your behavior in her classroom during the beginning of class is much like your behavior in my classroom: you sit without any materials ready, turning around in your desk, and engaging in conversation with everyone around you. Thus your attempt to contrast my starters with Ms. H’s starters is fairly meaningless.

I trust this explanation answers any questions you have about my starters. It is my sincerest wish that during this penultimate quarter, you mend your ways and begin taking this assignment seriously: it is intended to be a fairly easy way for students to improve their grade, and I hope you see and treat it as such. However, the choice is ultimately yours. I cannot make you or anyone else do anything. Don’t make the mistake, though, of suggesting that I haven’t fully explained to you the consequences of your choices.

Sincerely,
Your Teacher

Dear Terrence,

I was reading tonight, and I came across a passage that got me thinking about you again:

Most people, too, recognize the need for some immaterial moral principles as well: justice, fairness, freedom, love, compassion, solidarity, and so on. These are abstractions, manifested in concrete events, but not exhausted by those events. We measure the material manifestations against the abstract ideal we hold in our minds.

Music and art, too, move us from the sensory to the abstract. Most people who listen to a Mozart composition will conclude that its thousands of variations in pitch add up to something, evoke something, stand for something greater.The sounds of Mozart move us from the sensible to the abstract, the sensible to the insensible.  Aesthetic experiences are not important to everyone, but they can be a profound mystery to an unbeliever who is open to their power, a spiritual foot in the materialist’s door.

I found myself wondering, again, if you’d ever been struck dumb by beauty, if something had moved you so deeply that you stopped in your tracks. And I thought back to all the things you told me today, all the facets of your reality that I find completely incomprehensible because I can’t imagine one stranger treating another like that, let alone one’s parent — I thought about all these things and realized it’s impossible for you to have experienced this. No, it’s not the usual rant I have about kids and classical music today, about your short attention spans and inability to keep multiple thoughts going in your head. It’s much more basic than that:

It’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, that triangle all teachers see again and again in all the various psychology courses we have to take as undergraduates (and even graduate students). The premise is basic: the needs on the bottom must be fulfilled before those above them can be fulfilled. One cannot worry about employment if one cannot breath without great difficulty. One cannot worry about friendship if one doesn’t feel safe. One cannot worry about self-esteem if one’s familial needs are not met. And one cannot worry about self-actualization until all the other needs are met. I’m not sure I totally agree with all of this: morality as being a top-level need strikes me as being unnecessarily postmodern. Still, for your situation, it resonates: how can you worry about beauty when you have to spend your time going out and looking for your father, who disappears only to reappear months later to inform you that he’ll likely be going to prison shortly? How can you worry about beauty when your mother and her boyfriend have knock-down fights and then blame them on you? How can you be concerned about aesthetics when the relative you stay with quit often is falling-down drunk? The only needs you seem to be having met are the physiological ones, and those just barely.

Once again, though, as you spoke, I felt like more of a part of the problem than the solution. I’ve been hard on you in class: I’ve taken things personally that I really had no business taking personally. I’ve responded like a caged animal at times though

What’s almost as tragic as your home situation is your school situation, then. How can we as teachers expect you to focus on higher-order thinking and fulfilling higher needs when your most basic go unmet? How can we hold you entirely and unquestionably responsible for behaviors that are defense mechanisms? How can we call ourselves teachers if we don’t work to figure out what’s going on with you, to stop taking your behaviors personally and start acting like an adult, unlike your guardians?

And how can the school system expect of you these things? Test you on these things and declare you’re, in one form or another, a failure because you don’t meet these standards? How can the school system expect us teachers to be truly successful with you when we’re like everyone else, ignoring all your basic needs in order to meet a score quota? How can the school system not realize that with some children, the academics are of secondary, tertiary, or even quaternary or quinary?

I can’t answer these questions, unfortunately. But perhaps, with the honesty we shared today, we can figure out some answers that work for us.

With apologies,
Your Teacher

It’s a struggle, working with a class of students that are such a mixed bag as some of my periods. Some have never really had much success in school, and they show it with their behavior. Some have never really learned basic social skills, and they show it with their behavior. Some desperately want to learn but struggle, and they show it with their behavior.

Many times, I’ve thought (and a few times even said) that I wish students could see them as I see them, to see their behavior issues as the problems they are, to see their future as I fear I see it unless they change. How to do that though?

“I’d give a whole month’s pay” begins one such little fantasy. Let them sit in my head, as in Being John Malkovich, but see what I see as I see it. But how to do that? It is of course impossible. The closest we could come would be a numerical representation of behaviors: you do this x times per lesson; you do that y times per lesson. Data, in other words. Yet how to get that data?

Enter: a perfect solution. A silly web site and app that are not so silly after all. I’d heard of classdojo.com before, but I’d only heard of it? Why hadn’t I simply loaded it into a browser, for when I did, I immediately saw the potential.

Numbers don’t lie. I might not catch all positive actions (and that’s what I really need to focus on for this to work), but I catch enough to make it meaningful. To make it count — literally now.

I often wonder just how much peace my students experience at home. It seems to be an inverse relationship: the more troubled the behavior, the less peaceful the home. A colleague tells of a home visit that sounds absolutely horrifying: two loud televisions in one room, one with sports and the other with some movie, a loud boom box in a nearby room, someone sticking his head in to yell “When’s dinner?!”, and all the while, the conversation continues about the student’s performance and not once does an adult offer to turn down any of the noise.

“They’re surrounded by noise, by motion, by stimulation,” another colleague mentions during lunch. “It’s no wonder they can’t sit still, can’t focus.”

Not to mention what they consume in the name of food.

I have a rough class before lunch, and when we return from lunch, twenty minutes remain until the next class change. I work on social skills with them; I let them relax a while if they’ve worked well during class time; but most often, I try to give them peace. I turn the lights off, instruct them to put their heads down — why is it they won’t put their heads down when told but at least one every day wants to put her head down during class time? — and simply stop. Stop moving, stop talking, stop shaking a leg or beating a finger on the desk. Just stop. Take a moment to collect themselves.

Most of them can’t do it.

I try to play soft music for them, but I wonder if, obsessed as they are with rap “music,” the classical music I play for them might be exhausting. They might not even know what a melody is, and if that’s the case, they can’t find much pleasure in classical music. Add to it their painfully short attention spans and it becomes rather obvious that they can’t trace out the development of a musical theme, let alone notice when it repeats and begins morphing as it does in Romantic and Classical (as in the period, not the genre) music. I find Haydn works best, better than just about anything else.

Fast forward a couple of hours. K, E, and I have dinner together. What a blessing just to have dinner together. What a blessing that the Boy loves veggies. What a blessing that we had an entire zucchini to feed him.

After dinner, we go to the newly-paved street across from our house. K rides the scooter; the Boy coasts around on his whatever-it’s-called. They bump each other, chase each other, goof around. I take the pictures.

After riding, Nana and Papa bring the Girl back and everyone sits a while and talks, rides bikes, fusses, cries, laughs.

After bath, after snacks, the kids lie on the bed with K who reads a new book from the library, translating the English to Polish to provide the kids with more exposure to the language.

“Co to jest ‘snooty’?”

“Go with snobby,” I say.

What do all these vignettes have in common? A peace that comes with a family spending time as a family. A peace that I’m not sure some of my students can even imagine.

Dear Terrence,

Today was it. I do honestly like you all; I do honestly believe in your abilities and your intelligence; I do honestly see in you potential. But you all don’t see it in yourself, and because of that, you disrupt. Constantly. We’ve been in school three weeks now, and you’ve shown me that when given the chance to act like adults, you act like infants: you fuss about infantile things, you laugh uproariously and chaotically about infantile things; you fight over infantile things; you talk constantly about infantile things. You’ve shown me you’re just not ready to be treated like adults. What this means is that I must treat you like children. I must seem harsh in order to protect you, from yourselves and from your self-destructive habits. And so tomorrow, though I don’t really want to, I will be putting my foot down. That’s a cliche that doesn’t really adequately explain just how hard I’m going to hit you all tomorrow, so to speak. I expect to send at least ten students – that’s fully one third of you – to the assistant principal for being disruptive, because I’m going to define “disruptive” in such a harsh way that sneezing might get you sent from the room. I do this because you can’t handle the slightest amount of freedom: one off-hand comment to a peer turns into complete chaos in the class in a matter of seconds. One giggle sets ten others giggling. You are lemmings, robots – your behavior is so predictable. And so I am going to make my behavior equally predictable.

I expect to get calls from parents. I expect to see frustrated students. But I’m doing it for one reason: I will not let you screw up your own education because you find everything else in your tragic world more important.

So take a deep breath, and hope for a change in everyone else soon, because you can only change yourself, no one else. And until you do, all privileges in my classroom are indefinitely suspended. I know it sounds like I’m angry when I say this, and I am, but I’m not doing this to make my life easier or to torture you: I’m doing it to protect you.

Tying my boot laces already,
Your Teacher

Dear Terrence,

I thought today was a lost cause. I thought you guys would never get it all back together. I was convinced that getting you refocused would be all but impossible. After two interruptions like you guys experienced, it would have been difficult for anyone to get back to the task at hand.

First, the fight. If you could call it a fight. I still don’t know why James attacked Bryce, and I don’t know why Bryce just sat there in the desk and took it. Disturbing on so many levels, not the least of which was the entertainment factor it seemed to have for most of you. A young man was getting pummeled, and you guys laughed. Such brutality is so foreign to me that I can only recoil, but you guys find it funny. Or was that laugh something else?

Then there was the verbal altercation with the girls while I walked the two boys down to the grade-level administrator. I know even less about that incident than I do about the fight, but I know they were angry, ready to fight themselves. I saw it in their eyes.

So when I tried to rein you guys in, I was doubtful about the ultimate success. I’ll admit that part of me was convinced class was a wash. But somehow, you guys pulled it together. And I have to say I was impressed. No side conversations about the fights. No comments when the girls came back (well, almost none). Well done. More promise.

With hope,
Your Teacher