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Fork

Friday 28 August 2009

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It’s a famous riddle: You stand at a fork in the road. One road leads to happiness; the other leads to sorrow. You don’t know which is which. At the fork stand two men. One always tells the truth; the other always lies. You don’t know which is which. You’re allowed one question to determine which road to choose. What do you ask?

The intricacies of the riddle concern me less than the general theme: a life-changing moment, with two, diametrically opposite outcomes.

As a middle school teacher, I often encounter kids standing at just such an intersection. Generally, they don’t realize this, and the ones who do will probably ask the right questions in life.

Of the ones who haven’t yet realized that every moment offers decisions that can change the outcome of the rest of their lives, there are three varieties.

The first give every indication that all will be well with them. This is not to say they’re all studious and hard working. Indeed, many are not–as many of us were at thirteen. Still, there’s something about how they carry themselves that speaks to their future success.

The second group is a mystery. Truth be told, they usually turn out alright too, but they’re just not giving the clear signs yet. They’re not giving any signs yet, and that’s fine. They’re thirteen.

The third group is the group that haunts me. I see them and it’s difficult for me to imagine them making many good choices in life because it’s hard to see them making choices, period.

And not to choose in this case is a choice.

It’s not that they lack intelligence or even vigor. They simply don’t see the choice. They don’t see choice at all in their lives.

They are victims, eternally, and of everything. Adults don’t seem like them and they don’t know why–and they think there’s nothing they can do about it. They speak with loud voices that echo through the hallways and it’s just the way they are: “I’m a loud talker–it’s just the way I am.” They get referrals because teachers are picking on them and out to get them. Only with great difficulty can the make eye contact with anyone at all. They are subject to the whims and silliness of others: people are constantly “making” them do something. They react violently when they feel they’ve been disrespected, and often no disrespect was meant. They consistently show self-destructive views that make it all but certain that the cycles of dysfunction that they have obviously experienced in their lives will continue to haunt them, and their children, and their grandchildren.

Working with them is like working with a blind girl who’s always been blind and who doesn’t even realize she’s blind. Talking to them, trying to present any view that differs from the calcified reality of their first thirteen years is like speaking Finish to an Egyptian.

There are those that wake up and make the changes they have to, that realize they’re actually in control of a great deal of their lives. I know several such people. But the odds are against them, and the fact that I can do very little to change those odds is sometimes the most depressing aspect of teaching.

Forever Innocent

Monday 23 February 2009

“I didn’t do that! I’ll put it on my mother!”

“Well, you see, what happened…”

“Didn’t you see all those others doing it to?”

“But she was talking to me!”

“But he tried to trip me!”

“Well, he knocked my books off the desk.”

“No. No — that is not what I did.”

“What?!”

Sometimes, the excuses pile up. When they all come from one individual, someone who is always in the middle of things but always innocent, we see a life stretching out in front of this him that is so frustrating because he has such a warped perception of everything going on around him. We hope he can begin to look around and start taking some of the responsibility for the negative consequences he faces almost every day, but sometimes it seems the odds are against him.

Religion, Education, and the End Times

Monday 25 February 2008

A client at the day treatment program I used to work at asked me an odd question one day.

“Is it true that people are going to have computer chips implanted in them at some time?” the boy asked, “Because my foster mom said that that was going to happen.”

“Ah,” I thought, “you just told me an awful lot about your foster mom.”

What I actually said was somewhat more toned down: “Nah, John, that’s not necessarily going to happen, and even if it does, it probably won’t mean what your foster mom seems to think it will mean.”

And immediately I thought that perhaps I’d said more than I should have, for it seems to be a theological/religious statement I made. I did qualify it: “not necessarily” and “probably.” Still, I’m sensitive about discussing anything having to do with religion with students.

When student teaching, I had an interesting exchange with a student about this. He was concerned that I had crossed some line by explaining the Christianization of Britain. I differentiated teaching and proselytizing. “If we’d been discussing the Turkish empire, I would have discussed Islam. If we’d been talking about the partition of India, I would have discussed Hinduism and Islam.”

After all, who am I to make judgments about whether or not the Beast is rising? Who am I to say that chip implants will not necessarily be a sign that the Beast?

I wonder if I didn’t overstep some boundary with that…

Sunshine After the Rain

Sunday 3 February 2008

I’d just finished a tough second period. Most classes with second period are tough — it’s just that kind of class. I was a little down about how much of a disaster that period could be when I decided to walk down to the cafeteria for a cookie.

The next-door social studies teacher emerged as I was walking by and told me about an unexpected exchange he’d had with a student.

“Latonya was talking in class,” he began, “And I told her to be quiet.”

Latonya (not her real name, of course) is a bright young lady in my related arts class. I’m teaching “Self-Advocacy,” which is basically social skills. And while Latonya is a very sweet young lady when she wants to be, she has a reputation for being tough on teachers.

In fact, the first time I met her was when I was calling her down for inappropriate behavior in the hallway and she began telling me how stupid my judgment was. When she first found out that I was teacher her third quarter related arts class, she said, “No way I’m staying in that class.” But by and by, talking very occasionally in the hallway or while outside before lunch, she came to change her opinion of me, and I of her. Before long, she was asking me when she’d be in my class, saying, “Mr. S, I can’t wait to be in your class.”

Now she’s in my class, and she’s one of the few who genuinely wants to learn how to make their school days more successful. She listens; she participates; she behaves wonderfully. But it’s not an academically challenging class, and I was curious how she was doing in other, “real” classes.

It seemed I was about to find out.

“You told her to be quiet, and…?”

“And she said, ‘Okay.’ And did it.”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

Mr. W. continued: “I was so surprised that I just looked at her and said, ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Mr. S. teaches us to just say “okay” whenever a teacher asks us to do something,’ she explained.”

It’s hard to explain the odd elation I felt. Part of it was for me — “Hey, I taught someone something!” It was important to feel positive after having had such a negative lesson. Most of the elation I felt was for Latonya. For someone whose auto-pilot sends her into fits of denial and aggression when confronted by a teacher like that, she accomplished something ineffably significant in just saying, “Okay.”

When I saw her in the hall during the next break, I told her how proud I was of her.

I wish I had a picture of her expression.

I walked back down the hallway, thinking, “These are the moments that keep me going in this job…”

Dumbfounded

Friday 1 February 2008

Young Lady:You teachers are so disrespectful. It’s so unfair.
gls:I’m sorry — I don’t follow.
Young Lady:You tell me to be quiet and that’s fine. But what happens if I tell you to be quiet?
gls:[Pauses in thought; wonders if he heard correctly; contemplates an adequate response.] Well, generally kids don’t tell adults to be quiet.
Young Lady:God — you don’t get it. [Storms out.]
gls:[To self.] No, you don’t get it.

So many of my students think that they’re adults’ equals, that they can talk to adults just like they talk to their peers.

Did our teachers think the same of us?

Showing One’s Needs

Wednesday 23 January 2008

I’m starting my related arts class this quarter. I was scheduled to teach “Study Skills,” but after looking at my roster and talking to folks in guidance, I switched. I’m teaching “Self-Advocacy,” which I’m interpreting as socials skills (i.e., learn the skills to deal with problematic situations and come out positively).

And some of these students really need social skills.

Yesterday, while talking to the new students, I asked one of them her name. She mumbled something, and at the same moment, someone in the front of the class said her name as well. I really didn’t catch either one, so I asked her again.

“She already told you. Why do I gotta tell you again?” she responded, with — as the students would say — attitude.

If I were teaching anything other than social skills, I don’t know that I could have kept my cool as well as I did. I simply turned it into a teachable moment when I had a one-on-one moment with her.

But it’s that kind of response that just floors me. “What in the world are you hoping to accomplish by responding to an innocuous question like that with such disrespect?” I thought.

Another example today: I was handing out note cards. “What are these for?” one young man asked — a young man who has a reputation in the school as one who would talk back to a brick wall. I didn’t say anything immediately and he looked at the note card, looked at me, smacked his teeth, and asked again, “What are these for?!”

Again: “What in the world are you hoping to accomplish by responding that way?”

Teaching to Standards

Tuesday 17 July 2007

One of the problems of teaching to No Child Left Behind standards is the risk of teachers becoming nothing more than their students’ test scores.

Via Eduwonk.com I found one such teacher’s story:

I teach in an inner city school where inequity is apparent. The neighborhood has a high poverty level. Violence and poor housing conditions tuck my students in at night!

Underemployment, unemployment, lack of health insurance is the norm. It has only been of late that a “real” grocery store was available for residents to purchase fresh foods.

We are locked into teaching reading practices that are driven by federal government’s bad research. I witness a lack of all that made school a joy for my students. Literally the things that helped to build community and self-respect and self-esteem for children have disappeared. In their place is rigid schedules and long periods of disjointed phonics, and disjointed language practices.

One of the reasons many teachers are not fans of NCLB is that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. That “one-size” is often, as this teacher comments, “disjointed.”

This teacher writes of her students’ lack of satisfactory achievement according to the NCLB-mandated state testing.

My Unsatisfactory “grade” was followed by the comment:”This teacher�s students made minimal growth in her classroom this year.”

Most of my children are reading on or above grade level. The amount of “progress/growth” made this year by most of my children was no where near minimal.

I asked my principal if she believed that statement that appeared on my evaluation. She said “Yes, I do, based on your DIBELS scores!”

Her statement hurt me because I know the amount of work I did this year with my precious students. The amount of growth the children had in all areas was in no way “minimal.” I mentioned that the reading levels of some of my first-graders were equal to the end of second grade. She said the district didn�t recognize non-standardized test scores. (susanohanian.org)

Having worked with at-risk kids, I can understand (to a degree) what this teacher is going through.

Such “teaching” turns both students and teachers into little more than cogs in some great bureaucratic machinery. No one is working toward “learning” in any real sense here, and as far as teaching critical thinking, it’s probably non-existent.

Very often, kids coming from such backgrounds need so much more than simple reading and writing instruction. They step into school with huge disadvantages to begin with, and to some degree, reading and writing alone will not help them. They need work with social skills and an understanding of the social framework that exists outside the inner city.

This is not to say that I am advocating a sixties-style “go where the students take us” type of teaching, and I am not suggesting that all standards are a bad thing. However, NCLB’s cookie-cutter approach seems to do little for many students and teachers.

Improvement

Thursday 21 June 2007

When teaching English as a Foreign Language, I often wondered whether I would work in an educational setting that provided such clear evidence of progress. When you take a first year class that speaks no English and help turn it into a group of kids almost all of whom pass the English language exit exam with good marks, there’s a definite sense of achievement.

Then I spent seven months working with autistic children.

A couple of the students finished the year as completely different children than when they started. Gains in reading ability, social interaction, verbal expression, math skills, and general life skills left me simply astounded, and understandably proud that I had something to do with it. (Seven Months)

Now, working with at-risk kids, I get a third example.

A young man came up to me the other day to tell me something.

When he first arrived, he spoke to me only when he absolutely had to, he cussed me out on a fairly regular basis, and he never, in any circumstances, looked me in the eye. He had trouble getting along with other kids, and if you judged him just from that, you’d come away thinking he was a fairly unpleasant person.

This time, his eyes wide with a big smile, he said, “I done something good today, but you didn’t see it.” He then told me about how he’d managed to keep his temper under control with another kid in the program whom he finds irritating.

It was the first time I’d ever seen pride in his face.

Reading in America

Thursday 14 June 2007

Almost all of the kids in the program in which I teach have one thing in common: a hatred of reading. If I have them read a couple of paragraphs (say, 200 words total), they immediately begin complaining about how long that is.

“Man, that’s too long!” is a common refrain in the classroom.

When I have them read something to me aloud, it becomes clear fairly quickly why they’re not fans of reading: they’re not very good at it. They stumble on very basic words, and don’t recognize words they themselves use every day. And like most activities, the only way to improve reading is to practice — to do it. But many of the kids in the program come from demographics — low education and low income — in which reading is not particularly popular, probably for the very same reason.

And so for them, the dilemma of the 21st century is intensified: how do we teachers, in a world of video games, YouTube, and music videos successfully encourage reading?

Mileposts

Tuesday 29 May 2007

A kid who has gone from completely ignoring authority figures to complying but with a huff and a puff and an expression of disgust has still come a long way. A kid who has gone from cussing out staff when upset to merely walking away while being spoken to has begun developing coping skills.

I worry that some of our kids, despite the tremendous progress they made, will encounter less-than-perfect people in the world that will see their shortcomings and nothing else. They’ll be completely unaware of how far he/she has come and punish him/her in some way for lack of perfect social skills.

This possibility arises from the fact that the skills we’re teaching the kids are so basic that we don’t even notice when an adolescent uses them: eye contact; maturely disagreeing; accepting no. It’s the societal norm, the baseline. These socials skills are to normal life what reading is to majoring in English.

Change in Perspective

Thursday 10 May 2007

Some days at work, things are so hectic, so zoo-like, that I used to think, “There is no way I can survive another day at this place.” Kids get wound up and call you everything you can possibly imagine–and several things you probably can’t. Sticks and stones and all that, but there’s only so many times a person can be called “f****** herpes-a** b****” by a fifteen-year-old before it starts to grate.

Today, someone literally screamed at me, “I don’t have a problem with my voice tone!” It’s hard to keep a straight face at times like that…

What a change a successful interview can make. Today, I was positively aglow, I’m sure. And though I shouldn’t have, at least once I laughed when a kid started gnawing on my last emotional nerve. I thought, “I won’t have to hear this for much longer.”

And yet — there’s always an “and yet”…

I finally feel I’ve got the hang of this, and I do feel that my work has helped these kids. Sure, they call me all sorts of things; they yell and scream sometimes; they threaten; they defy; they deny — but they’ve been doing it with decreasing frequency lately. Proof that something has been working.

Still, I am looking forward to the change. As is K — she’s already looking for houses…

Learning to say “Okay”

Friday 16 February 2007

For many of the young people in the program where I work, one of the formal goals that forms part of the forest of paperwork about them is “Learn to say “Okay.'” What that means in practical terms is fairly simple: many of them are unable to accept criticism — broadly defined as anything even apparently critical of them or their actions — of any kind from adults.

A scenario from not so long ago illustrates how many things are going on that can make it difficult for someone just to say, “Okay.”

Two boys, in class, are doing something disruptive. Fidgeting with something, throwing it back and forth (maybe a jacket?) or something. I couldn’t see clearly what it was, but it caught my attention and I deemed it a distraction.

“Hey, guys, stop doing that, please.”

“Doing what?” one asks simultaneously with the other’s plea of innocence: “I wasn’t doin’ nothin’!”

Now it really doesn’t matter what they were doing. It really doesn’t matter if they were doing anything at all. The best response to bring the whole exchange to an end, to prevent it from escalating into something more serious, to ensure not getting into trouble, is to say, “Okay.”

“If you have a problem with that,” we tell them, “you can talk to the teacher afterward. If you don’t know exactly what the teacher is asking you to do, you can ask for clarification after saying “Okay.’ But getting defensive, taking it personally, exaggerating it into a personal affront will only make the situation worse.”

And so going back to the above scenario, I reminding the boys that one of the skills they’re working on is simply saying “Okay” and moving on.

“I ain’t sayin’ “Okay’ to something I didn’t do!” one replied indignantly.

“Why not?” I asked. “In saying “okay’ you’re not admitting to guilt. You’re not doing anything other than acknowledging that you heard and understood what the person in authority — be it a teacher or not — is saying.”

“But I didn’t do nothin’!” he protested.

“But that doesn’t matter.” I responded. “In protesting it, particularly in the manner you’re doing now, you’re not doing anything to help your situation.”

“Are you telling me that if someone accused you of doing something”

“Whoa, wait — I’m not accusing you of doing anything. I simply asked you both to stop. If you weren’t doing anything, then clearly I wasn’t talking to you. Even if I was addressing you alone and said “Stop doing that” and you were behaving perfectly, the best response is to say, “Okay’ and move on.”

“Move on?! You’re the one making an issue of this” he said, voice pitching upward into a virtual screech, eyebrows raised just enough to say — inadvertently or purposely — “You’re an idiot for saying that.

“No, I’m using this moment to remind you of a skill you’re working on and to try to get you to practice it.”

The boy couldn’t accept that saying “Okay” even if you’re completely innocent is anything more than an admission of guilt. And to prove his point, he brings up a most fascinating example: “So you’re sayin’ that if you walking down a street and cops come up to you and say, “You look like this guy who just robbed a bank,’ and arrested you, that you’d just say, “‘Okay.'”

The discussion is starting to get less and less productive as we range farther and farther off topic. Or are we off topic? Is this how the boy equates all these things? I decide to play along.

“Yes, I would. Or at least I hope I’d have a cool enough head to say that.”

“But you didn’t do it. Are you saying that if they said, “You robbed this bank,’ that you’d just say nothing, that you wouldn’t tell them you’re innocent? They’ll take you to jail and what — you’ll end up spending ten years in jail for something you didn’t do?!”

Right here, though I suspected it moments earlier, I realize the young man didn’t have a firm grasp on the workings of our criminal justice system. And another thing begins dawning — we’re really getting off track. Does this help the young man understand the situation? Is he just trying, like so many of the boys do, to get me so wrapped up in a discussion argument exchange that it’s just a matter of whoosh! blink! and the whole class is over? I decide, somewhat against my better judgment, to continue.

“Just because they arrest me doesn’t mean I’ll be spending ten years in jail. There’s a trial first, and in the meantime, I can be released on bail. But think of what they say, what you hear on TV, every time they arrest someone.” Almost together we recite the Miranda warning. Then I continue, “Now if I’m an idiot, I’ll start blathering on about how I’m innocent and how I didn’t do anything and then, in court, that will be used against me, because the irony is, it makes me look guilty. If I’m smart, I’ll shut my trap completely until I can get a lawyer.”

“But if you didn’t do nothin'””

“Especially if I hadn’t done anything,” I replied.

Finally things are winding down, and a boy enters from the other group.

“Hey, Mr. S, let’s ask him if he’d just say “okay.’ ‘Eric, if someone framed you.'”

And now everything is mixed up. Nothing is as it started. We’re no longer talking about whether or not saying “okay” helps you in a situation even if the request is relatively arbitrary; we’re no longer talking about whether or not saying “okay” is an admission of guilt — we’ve moved off into the netherworlds of arbitrary, six-sixty-degrees-of-separation tangents that suck up time and accomplish nothing.

Or is it simply that he doesn’t understand what I mean? Are all these scenarios that we’ve been bouncing off of each other identical to him?

In the end, he simply says, “Well, if that’s a skill, I guess it’s a skill I won’t use.”

And I think, “Okay — we’ll try again tomorrow.”

Suspension

Wednesday 18 October 2006

The typical suspension length at my high school was three days. I’d heard of year-long, but I never actually heard of anyone getting it. It was always out-of-school suspension as well. To my recollection, there was no such thing as in-school suspension at my high school.

There is certainly a move away from out-of-school suspension, for a variety of reasons.

The unappealing idea of students serving out-of-school suspensions roaming their communities during the day, possibly getting into more trouble, prompted some schools to create or expand their in-school suspension programs. In Louisiana, state officials became so concerned about suspended students missing instructional time that the legislature began funding in-school suspension programs.

The Kentucky Department of Education encourages school districts to develop policies that include well-rounded academic offerings for those students who stay in school during suspension. (Education World)

But it still exists. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have a job, for a majority of the clients in our program are there because of year-long, out-of-school suspension.

Out-of-school suspension (for simplicity, just “suspension” hereafter) is the lazy way out, though. It puts the burden of educating the most troubled students on someone else. In our organization’s case, that “someone else” receives most of funding through “professional begging” — that’s what the organization’s director likes to call his continual grant writing.

Suspension addresses only the behavior; it does nothing to correct the causes of the behavior. To be sure, those causes are myriad and most of them out of the effective reach of a public school system. If a child has been suspended for the remainder of a school year, the situation has reached a point at which therapists are probably necessary. Short of dealing with the causes, school systems are simply putting off the inevitable: a sense of failure so deeply ingrained and reinforced that the child gives up on doing anything other than fulfilling everyone’s expectations.

An old saying comes to mind: “If you think you’re going to succeed, you’re probably right; if you think you’re going to fail, you’re still probably right.” School systems that kick the tough kids out of school are feeding into the latter. Then organizations like ours have one more shell to break through before we can start reinforcing the former.

Perspective

Saturday 14 October 2006

In the switch from science to social studies at the day treatment program with teach in, I’ve gone from trying to follow the appropriate grade-level curriculum in science to allowing the kids (and myself) a bit of freedom in what we’re covering now in social studies. (We switch subjects every six-week grading period.) On talking to the lead teacher, I realized that it’s not as critical that we follow the curriculum because there’s such a mix of kids.

M-Jezzy, of science fame, has been asking about slavery. How did it begin? Who started it? How’d they get the slaves?

In explaining that we’d be looking at slavery next week, I got a response I’d been thinking I might hear, but had hoped to avoid nonetheless. Basically, a young man asked, “What can a white guy teach black people about slavery?” Now, to his credit, it was very polite — surprisingly maturely and subtly phrased, in fact. It was more like, “I don’t mean any offense or anything, but, you know, I’d rather hear about slavery from someone who’s experienced it, someone whose people experienced it.”

“That’s a very good point,” I said, thinking, “Am I glad I did some research before mentioning this,” for that’s exactly what I found:

In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sponsored a federal project dedicated to chronicling the experience of slavery as remembered by former slaves and their descendants. Their stories were recorded and transcribed, and this site presents dozens of select sound recordings and hundreds of transcriptions from the interviews. Beyond the content of the interviews, little to no biographical information is available on the individuals whose interviews appear here.

These interviews are available at PBS’s site for their series Slavery and the Making of America.

An Agenda

Friday 13 October 2006

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 (Agenda)

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.

akacoolpeople.com

Wednesday 4 October 2006

I work at a day treatment facility for troubled youth. They wind up in our program either through long-term suspension or via adjudication.

It can be a tough bunch of kids.

Recently, I set up a blog for the whole program with the aim of using it as a way for students to write for an actual audience, instead of just writing for the teacher, as is often the case.

But for that, we need an audience.

That’s obvious enough.

Since I’m just trying to get the kids excited about the idea of writing on a regular basis, I’m not having them do much of any correction. Small steps”

Read it with a smile. So I’m asking any willing readers to pop over to akacoolpeople.com and read what the kids have written so far, make a few comments (even if it’s “Hey, that sounds really great!”) and – most importantly – to keep checking back from time to time to make comments. It’ll be slow for a while (right now, there are only a few posts – two of them mine), but I’m hoping that as kids get comments, it will encourage them to write more. (And obviously enough, I’m looking for comments to the kids’ posts, not my own!)

Additionally, if you yourself have a blog or web site and would be willing, give “aka cool people” a mention and see if you can steer some more traffic our way.

Thanks in advance for your help.

2k

Monday 25 September 2006

One of the young men I work with was doing afternoon chores today, and he asked me to show him how to tie up a garbage bag. When I finished, I asked, “Would you like me to help and take the trash out for you?”

“If you would, please.”

Such a simple response — something most of us might not pay much attention to. But when working with kids who sometimes demonstrate that, through no fault of their own, they have somewhat limited social skills, I notice.

Indeed, it’s my job, among other things, to notice.

I pointed out that I felt he’d earned 2,000 points for that interaction. He pulled out his point card and jotted them down, and after I signed it, I asked, “Do you know what you did to earn those points?”

He explained that he’d been polite.

“Correct.” I asked, “Do you know why it’s important to accept help politely like that?”

“Not really.”

Indeed, why? I paused for a moment, thinking about it. Why is it better to say, “If you would, please” than respond, “Yeah,” or “If you want to,” or any number of less-than-perfect formulations. It’s one of those things many of us parse without thinking, a response we expect to hear.

I thought for a moment, but not long. To be honest, I’m beginning to develop a skill for this explaining of social conventions.

“Because the next time you need help, I’ll be more likely to offer it. If you’d just said, ‘Yeah, if you want,’ I probably wouldn’t have felt that you really appreciated my help. But saying it like you did showed me that you really appreciated it, and so I’ll be more likely to offer to help you the next time I see you working on something.” Not a bad reason.
He accepted it and moved on.

The question is, will he remember it next time?

I’m starting to be optimistic enough about my job to think it’s quite possible. Dare I say, likely?

A’s

Friday 22 September 2006

In science class, we’re learning about the atomic world and what makes different elements different. To their surprise, it’s just the number of protons. Some are somewhat interested, but we’re not yet to the interest level that produces questions like, “You mean mercury could turn into into gold if we just took away one proton and one electron.”

What I wouldn’t give for a question like that. But we’re getting there.

One thing I’ve done to try to keep interest levels up is to make as many lessons hands-on as possible. Thus, last Friday we put all our new knowledge to work by making clay models of atoms. Each student chose an element (from a list I provided — I didn’t want anyone coming up with protactinium, for example) and then devised a way to make a model. Forgetting about the number of neutrons, we made semi-anatomically-correct models of sodium, oxygen, neon, and others. And at the end of the lesson, I announced there would be a quiz Monday.

The young men I work with probably have made very few A’s in their lives. This is not because of a lack of ability or intelligence, but the fact that their behavior problems get in the way of learning. And so, to this point, the grades have been relatively low as I learn how to tweak my lessons and quizzes and homework assignments just so — they must be instructive, vaguely interesting, challenging, yet not defeatingly so.

The quiz was simple: I put each clay model on a piece of paper that had a number in the corner, gave the students a periodic chart and sheet of paper, and told them to identify the elements. I let them take the time they needed, because when I saw some counting protons, others counting electrons, I thought, “This could be it — the quiz everyone passes.”

Not only that, but everyone got an “A.”

There was some bravado, as showing pleasure at having aced a quiz would have been a sign of weakness to some of these kids. But their eyes told me that they were pleased.

With that positive start, it was difficult not to have a productive lesson

Something positive I can do today is…

Friday 1 September 2006

The boys begin each day by deciding and declaring to the group something positive they will try to accomplish that day.

My desired daily positive accomplishment never changes, but that’s only in the broad view. Really to make a difference with these young men, I have to do what they do: come up with a concrete goal for each day.

Theirs: learn to identify and deal with anger; practice coping skills when frustrated; gracefully accept “No” for an answer; eliminate irrelevant responses. These are things we probably all have trouble with from time to time. They also provide a concrete example of how they can accomplish each goal.

Wonder what society would be like if we all did that every morning.