Matching Tracksuits

education and teaching

Lunch with Nana, Dinner with Papa, and Work

Monday 21 January 2019

With Nana still in rehab and Papa alone, we take care of them the best we can. Poor Nana has to put up with institutional food, which, she claims, is not terrible, but which I also know is not great. Poor Papa can cook eggs and warm things up in the microwave, but he’s never done much more than that.

This afternoon, since it was MLK Day and the kids and I had the day off, we took over a favorite chicken sandwich for Nana and cheered as we saw evidence of an ever-increasing appetite.

In the evening, we went to make dinner at Papa’s. We either cook something here and take it over every night or take everything there to cook.

Dinner a couple of nights ago

Other than that, an uneventful day. I spent an hour in the morning planning lessons for the next several days (this week and a little beyond) for one class and another hour in the afternoon planning for another class, plus half an hour in the evening grading papers.

This year, I’ve kept track of all my out-of-classroom hours — planning, grading, going to meetings, etc. For this first semester, I’ve spent 115 hours above the 40-hour work weeks. That’s just a little over half a day shy of three full work weeks. If I keep this pace up — and I see no reason why I wouldn’t — I’ll have spent close to six weeks’ worth of time outside the classroom doing work. Add to that the half-hour morning duty I have every third week, which makes 2.5 hours a week or 30 hours for the year, and I’ll have 260 hours of additional work on top of my normal work week. That’s six and a half weeks of work. I have about nine weeks off during summer break, but I probably spend an additional 40 or so hours over the summer planning for the coming year. (I’ll keep track this summer.) That’s seven and a half weeks of work, which means my summer “vacation” is really not much of vacation — I’ve just put in the hours in advance.

Papa looking at bills

I don’t say this to complain. Much of the time I spend grading is because I try to push my kids as hard as I can, which produces a lot of material for me to assess. I have a reputation to keep up, after all: students tell me that they’ve heard since they entered the school in sixth grade that I’m the most demanding teacher in the school. I don’t know about that, but it certainly doesn’t hurt one’s sense of self-worth to hear something like that. In other words, I could do less work and get by, but then it wouldn’t be the Dread Teacher Mr. Scott’s.

Finally, I must have been under a rock, but I just learned of Mary Oliver’s death tonight, listening to the news in the car. A poet of fairly simple verse, she’s always a great choice for thirteen-year-olds. In past years, when I had students put together annotated portfolios as their culminating poetry unit project (which is not to say I have my students read poems for one dedicated unit and then neglect poetry for the rest of the year, but I find it’s good to spend three or four weeks focusing on what makes poetry poetry to equip them for the rest of the year), almost every student included an Oliver poem, and they all said they liked her because she’s easy to understand. I personally have always liked poems that require a bit more digging, but that’s not to say I’m a big fan of someone like Louis Gluck, someone who writes poetry that is almost impenetrable. My favorites — Bishop, Heany, Levine, and the like — require some thought, require a bit of effort, but always reward with a moment of stunned epiphany.

And since I’ve been talking about work, why not include Levine’s poem on the same subject:

Gallery of Shakespeare

Friday 18 January 2019

I posted the seven quotes around the room, seven key passages from the second and third scenes of Romeo and Juliet act three. The kids spread out in groups of three or four and took four to five minutes looking at the quotes, completing three steps:

  1. Define up to three words on the Post-It note.
  2. Note any language tricks (inversions, elliptical constructions, parallel construction, figurative language, etc.).
  3. Discuss and note what earlier passages in the play this reminds you of; mark specific elements.

After time was up, they rotated to the next quote. (It’s called a gallery walk in edu-speak.)

The kids read Juliet’s thoughts about Romeo:

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess’d it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d: so tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.

And sure enough, they picked up on the parallels with Romeo’s words in the balcony scene:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.

They read Juliet’s furious reaction to the news that her newlywed husband killed her beloved cousin:

O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!
O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell,
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In moral paradise of such sweet flesh?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!

And they caught the parallel with Romeo’s words in the first scene:

Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire,
sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

And they actually think it’s, to use their words, pretty cool.

Wednesday Night Inferring

Wednesday 16 January 2019

A busy day for everyone culminates in us arriving separately at home after seven, two hours after we normally eat dinner. After school, a long meeting, and a visit with Nana (out of the hospital and back in rehab — hurrah!), I’d stopped for something for us to eat; after work, shuttling the Girl to choir practice while taking the Boy shopping, running the Boy to basketball practice after dropping the Girl off at volleyball practice, then picking everyone up, K arrived shortly after.

As we ate, the kids and I decided that K’s plan for the rest of the evening was flawed.

“I’ll put away all the groceries and then go to bed if you’ll put the Boy to bed.”

“Nope. I’ll put away the groceries while you take a hot bath, and then I’ll put the Boy to bed while you go to bed yourself.” L and E agreed — Mama needed to call it a day. As I was bustling about the kitchen, I remembered it was garbage night.

“L, take the garbage and recycling out,” I said, expecting a little fussing.

“Okay.” Nothing more.

She came back in, a little whiny, and said, “E always takes out one of them. Can he take out the recycling? I’ll go with him.”

“No, sweetie, it’s late. Just do a little more than you have to.”

“Oh, okay.” Nothing more.

From this, a simple inference: our daughter really is growing up. She’s not just sprouting vertically (she’s almost 5’4″ now); she’s not just developing into a young woman; she’s maturing. With my nose pressed to the ever-present every day, I forget that sometimes. It escapes me.

While all this was going on, the Boy had started his homework.

“What are you working on tonight?” I asked him.

“Inferring. We learned it today.”

As an English teacher, I’ve been working on the Boy’s (and the Girl’s) inferring skills for years. I taught him the word; he must have forgotten. The teacher did a better job today. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Making a good guess.”

Not a bad definition. I usually tell my students it’s “making a reasonable guess based on evidence.”

And there you might notice something: I teach eighth grade; my son is in first grade. Am I really teaching inferring again? Well, I’m not teaching inferring — they know what it is. But we’re still practicing it. Like mad. Especially (really, that should read “solely”) with my lower-achieving students. I give them a text like this:

Every day after work Paul took his muddy boots off on the steps of the front porch. Alice would have a fit if the boots made it so far as the welcome mat. He then took off his dusty overalls and threw them into a plastic garbage bag; Alice left a new garbage bag tied to the porch railing for him every morning. On his way in the house, he dropped the garbage bag off at the washing machine and went straight up the stairs to the shower as he was instructed. He would eat dinner with her after he was โ€œpresentable,โ€ as Alice had often said.

I then ask a question: What type of job does Paul do? How do you know this? I have the students back up their answers with three specific pieces of evidence from the text, then explain how that evidence is evidence. A good student response (an actual student response) looks like this:

Paul is a farmer.I know this because he is wearing muddy boots. Wearing muddy boots is evidence that he is a farmer because if he were to work in an office or inside he wouldn’t have muddy boots. Also, he is wearing overalls in which he would not have been wearing if he was working inside. Finally, Paulโ€™s overalls are dusty and most farmers work a lot outside so he must have gotten dirty from working outside.

So I applied the same thing to the Boy’s work. The same thing — a text followed by a question:

Everyone was singing for Mark. He blew out his candles. He had many presents. It was his special day. What special day was it?

E read the text and said, “It’s his birthday!”

“How do you know this?” I prodded.

“Because he got presents.”

“But we get presents at Christmas as well. How do you know it’s not Christmas?” He looked stumped for a moment, so I told him what I tell my own students: “Go back to the text. Find something in the text that shows it’s not Christmas.”

He read a while, thought a while, then said with a smile, “Because it says it’s his special day, not everyone’s special day. Christmas is everyone’s special day.”

I thought he’d pick up on the candles. That’s the more obvious piece of evidence. He went the more subtle route.

“That’s great. A very good observation. Now, can you find a third piece of evidence?”

Again, he looked, read, thought. “The candles. You don’t blow out candles on Christmas.”

After a tiring day, what a perfect ending.

Revisited

Monday 7 January 2019

In my journalism class, we’ve decided to shift from pure journalism to a bit of literary nonfiction, so we began the day with a writing exercise. I provided a starter and fifteen minutes to write: “During winter break, I learned…”

I wrote along with them and found myself thinking again of Bida and so began writing again about Bida:

During winter break, I learned anew that love and pain are often so closely twined that one cannot separate the two, that tugging on one brings the second along with it. I learned all this watching and participating in my daughterโ€™s grief as our family cat slowly died as she lay on our couch.

Weโ€™d had Bida for ten years. My daughter had never known life without that gray, grumpy, yet sweet rescue cat. She looked pitiful when we got her, hence the name, which means โ€œpoor little thingโ€ in Polish. She looked even more pitiful as she lay dying, thin, slow, her bones protruding, her long gray hair matted because we could no longer brush her without causing her pain.

When we arrived home that night, my wife went to check on her in the room in the basement where Bida always loved to sleep. In a panicked voice, she called me downstairs. The poor cat had fallen off the bag of insulation that she loved to sleep on and landed on her back, wedged between the bag and some shelving. I thought she was already dead, but when I pulled her out gently, she shuddered, gasped, and began breathing in shallow breaths.

โ€œGo get the kids,โ€ I told my wife. โ€œTheyโ€™ll want to say goodbye.โ€ She headed upstairs while I gently carried Bida to the couch in our basement family room and lay her down on the middle cushion. The four of us sat around the old, ornery cat for two hours as her breathing slowed, then stopped.

The first to come running from upstairs was L, my daughter. She was already beginning to cry, and when she saw Bida, the cat that had been around for as long as she could remember, she broke down into a sobbing, shuddering cry.

โ€œNo, Bida!โ€ she shouted, dropping to her knees beside the couch and throwing an arm protectively but gently over the cat, who lay with her eyes open, her mouth gaping, the only movement being her rib cage that went up and down, up and down, up and down. โ€œNo, Bida! No!โ€ she cried, her body shaking more and more violently.

Iโ€™d never been a big fan of that cat. I put up with her because L loved her so. But in that moment, watching my daughter wrecked with pain, her face a puddle, her voice almost instantly hoarse from crying, I realized I loved that cat because she loved that cat. I understood that I was near tears because she was in tears, and even because I was sad to see that grumpy cat go, to see that sweet cat suffer, to see my daughter suffer along with her.

When you love something, you open yourself up to pain because of that. You will feel that personโ€™s pain with them; you will feel the pain of separation; you will eventually feel the pain of ultimate loss.

To love someone is to love their mortality, their temporariness, and the ________ness of everything they love.

A first draft — shows some promise, but nothing spectacular. That’s the idea.

Afterward, I had students choose the sentence they like most, the sentence they’re most proud of. “Be prepared to explain to a partner why you like that sentence, why that sentence fills you with a bit of pride,” I instructed. For my own sentence, I chose the first one: “During winter break, I learned anew that love and pain are often so closely twined that one cannot separate the two, that tugging on one brings the second along with it.”

“I like it because of the word ‘twined.’ I don’t think I’ve ever used that word, and it somehow provides a theme for the whole piece that I could go back and incorporate — images of thread, fabric, sewing, weaving, and so on,” I explained.

It was just the final lesson of a day filled with successful engagement from all students. I always worry a bit about how students will perform that first day back, and I’m always impressed. And then ask myself, “Why are you always worried? They’re always great!”

Three Boys, a Creek, and Pain

Saturday 29 December 2018

N and R came over for a little play time today after the Boy spent a couple of hours at their house this morning as K and I went to visit a dear friend who is in the final stages of a battle against cancer.

“The fight’s gone. It’s done,” said our friend. And what a fight he’d put up: this summer I helped him with an addition to his home, and he worked with a chemo backpack on, pumping him full of pain to fight the ultimate pain.

Seeing the boys playing, with all their energy, excitement, and passion was jarring in juxtaposition. All three of those boys will, at some point, grow old and die, long after I’ve done the same thing.

That’s what we all assume. We all wake up every day and work under that assumption without even thinking about it. We obviously can’t paralyze ourselves thinking every day, “Something could happen this day that takes someone we love away from us,” but a little reminder about our mortality is a good thing from time to time. It inspires us to do the little things that we might not have done because we’re tired, we need to do something else, or we just have other priorities at that moment.

Perhaps that’s what’s just beyond the edges of the addiction to pain some athletes feel. I’m nowhere near that level, but three nights of running have left my muscles aching in a way that I almost look forward to the next run, the next shot I have at pushing through the pain, of bettering the pain, because I won’t always be able to do that. There will come a time when I have to give up the fight, but each night I run, I can push against it.

Seeing that perseverance, limited though it might be, in my own children would be the purest blessing. One of the character traits I consistently see less and less frequently in my students is perseverance, or “grit” as edu-speak likes to call it these days. So many give up before even trying, convinced that they can’t do it, persuaded before they even begin that there’s no use in even trying.

It’s a natural enough inclination, I think. I already see it in E: he sometimes gives up on something so quickly that K and I just look at each other, that concerned parent look on our faces simultaneously.  So when E suggested tonight that he might want to join me on my run, it brought such a smile.

“But we’ll run the whole time, Daddy,” he said.

We did half a mile in just under seven minutes, with three short walking breaks and a lot of sweet, nonsensical chatter.

So I left for my solo run with a lighter step: the Boy took a little step toward becoming a fighter, toward realizing that that excitement in the creek with his friends can be found even in moments of pain.

Opล‚atek

Friday 21 December 2018

As a teacher, I often don’t always say the things I want to say. Most would interpret that negatively: “He doesn’t call kids jerks when he thinks they are.” That’s certainly the case, but for not so obvious reasons. Most obvious is the lack of professionalism such a pronouncement would exhibit, not to mention cruelty. More to the point, though, I don’t really experience that because I rarely — not never, but very, very rarely — hold such an opinion of a kid. They are, after all, kids. They’re still learning, still growing, and their impulse control and social skills are often simply not up to par because of a lack of maturity or a lack of consistent examples. I could count on one hand all the kids, over twenty years of teaching, that I just didn’t like as people. I haven’t met such a kid in several years now.

What I had in mind is the flip side of that — as a teacher, I don’t always tell a kid when I’m absolutely in love with some part of his journey, some portion of her personality, some facet of his persistence, some element of her youthful excitement.

I certainly tell a lot of kids a lot of positive things. But those moments seem relatively few and far between.

Why don’t I say those things? Probably because of a sense of vulnerability that seems to include for myself. Possibly because of a worry of how it might be taken. Perhaps because of a lack of time.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have some sort of occasion, some sort of event, that seemed actually to encourage such things?” I thought. And thinking back to my seven years of teaching in Poland, I realized such an occasion exists, just not in American culture.

In Poland, though, a tradition that invites such honesty has existed for centuries: sharing the opล‚atek.

I’ve done it for several years now, explaining it to the kids with a slide show and a bit of explanation about Christmas in Poland and substituting pizzelle from Aldi for the actual wafer.

This year, instead of just taking pictures, I participated. I always had a pizzelle in hand, but I waited for students to come to me; this year, I went to them. And told the shy kids who were coming out of their shell how exciting it was to watch them, to hear them assert themselves, to see the faces of other students as they share their often-striking ideas. I told the troubled students how much growth I’d already seen, how much I was rooting for them, how much it irritated me when I had to ask them to leave the classroom because their disruptive decisions were robbing others of opportunities. I told the kids who had started doing their work after a quarter, perhaps a quarter and a half of apathy, how proud I was of them.

And in return today, I got the loveliest Christmas card I have ever received from a student, thanking me for my words, thanking me for my encouragement and motivation, and assuring me that she was my favorite student.

Perhaps, but she’s tied with 120 others this year.

Meetings and Homework

Tuesday 28 August 2018

As a teacher, I’ve been in a number of meetings. I’m fortunate to say that I can’t make a claim like, “Not a day goes by that I’m not in some meeting or another,” but I suppose that’s possible.

We have grade-level meetings every Friday. We sit around and talk about what’s going well with the logistics of our grade — moving from class to class, getting materials out of lockers, going to the bathroom, going to lunch, heading back from lunch, getting to related arts classes. All these things and a million more. We talk about students who are showing bad behavior in multiple classes and make a plan for dealing with the kid, hopefully with more positive outcomes for the kid than he is currently experiencing.

Working on math homework

Every Tuesday we have professional development. We learn about new websites, new methodologies, new laws, new tools, new books, new paradigms. We go over how to accommodate children with mental and behavioral challenges in ways that are productive and in accordance with the documentation (IEPs/504s) in place for them.

Lately, we’ve been learning about the new way the district requires us to write our lesson plans. It’s tempting to think that since the lesson plan is a tool primarily for the teacher that the district would allow a great deal of flexibility in this endeavor, but that would be a faulty assumption. Verbiage, formatting, pacing, sequencing — all of this is decided for us. And when the district decides that it wants to make a change to this or that element of our lesson plans, we, as far as I know, have little to no input into the changes and are simply told, “This is how you do it now.” Perhaps some select few teachers get to attend those meetings where such matters are decided, but I’ve never met anyone who’s had a sense of having any input into these issues.

On altering Wednesdays after school, we have faculty and department meetings. These usually just turn into information-dissemination sessions, and I’m sure many participants find themselves thinking, “If you could just give me this in writing, I can read it on my own time.” Sometimes department meetings provide professional development as well.

A frustrating moment

While sometimes there’s a distinct feeling in the room that everyone would like to be doing something else (planning lessons? assessing student work? recording grades?), many of these meetings are indeed helpful. A large organization has to have meetings.

Today, however, I attended a first in my meeting-strewn career: we had a meeting about upcoming meetings. A meta-meeting.

First Day 2018

Monday 20 August 2018

A lot of new things this year: first, we have homeroom classes for the first time since I’ve been teaching at this school, which is about eleven years now. The new schedule takes some of the time after lunch (or rather, all the time after lunch) and moves it to the beginning of the day. It’s odd: I have several students in my homeroom that I don’t teach at all for the rest of the day. Then I have two students in my homeroom class as well as one of my English I classes and my journalism class.

Another big change: I have not two but three English I Honors classes this year. That means about 80 well-adjusted, well-behaved, hard-working students, and that’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing for the obvious reasons: there will be few if any behavior issues, and they’re all fairly motivated. The curse is connected to this: they’ll almost all do their work, which means an increased workload. I control how many assignments I give, so I control my ultimate workload. Still, what I’ve done in the past works, and I’m inclined to do the same thing even if it means more work.

The kids had a good first day as well. E’s worries about school turned out to be for naught: he loves his teachers already, and this evening he declared that his school is surely the best school in the world. L’s worries about the uniform disappeared as soon as she saw everyone else in a uniform — she suddenly didn’t feel like she looked so stupid.

The Show Begins Tomorrow

Sunday 19 August 2018

The first day of a new school year is like the moment the curtain rises on a play that is often improvisational and responsive to the audience’s reaction. Each year, I reinvent myself as a teacher a little bit, especially during those first days when I’m setting a tone for the year. Always looking for that sweet spot between commander-in-chief and coach, I waver between the “don’t smile before Christmas” type of teacher and the warm-and-welcoming-almost-a-friend type of teacher. Neither is sufficient in and of itself, and I really like the coach mentality more than the authoritarian mentality, but kids will be kids, and sometimes, I have some really emotionally damaged students who add a whole new dimension and need that forceful approach — if only for a second, like a splash of cold water to get their attention — so I waver between the two in the beginning.

“Here’s the sanding block, L. I hid it!”

And yet it always depends on the class: some groups come in and I see immediately that Joey in the back is going to be a living terror if I don’t make sure I set the right tone (which might not be the authoritarian despite the initial impression that he needs a “strong hand”); other groups come in and I see, though not immediately, that there aren’t any students set on hijacking the class, and I breathe a bit easier. Still, that hint of “I can become the strictest, meanest teacher in the world if I need to” must be there, around the edges, because you never know what’s going to happen in October when the honeymoon is over.

“E, you have to hold the vacuum hose right under where I’m sanding.”

So the night before, I sit thinking about who exactly I’ll become tomorrow. I know who I’ll end up being: I have enough experience that I can get to the coach stage fairly quickly once I’ve established that I know how to drop the hammer, but those first few days — I never really know.

The magic begins tomorrow, too. I’ll see wave after wave of totally foreign faces and look at attendance sheets that are just a bunch of names, and by the end of the first quarter, I’ll be able to predict how each student is going to react to a given assignment. By the end of the semester, I’ll even know what words a given student might use.

First coat

A Letter to Students

Tuesday 29 May 2018

Dear eighth graders,

As a teacher, it can sometimes be hard to remain optimistic. Every year there are those students who try oneโ€™s patience, who test oneโ€™s resolve, who feel they are incapable of doing anything good and seem determined to bring everyone down with them. And then there are just the immature attention-seekers who do anything they can to be the center of attention. Within the first class period or two, I can usually tell who all these folks are, and the rest of the year becomes a battle with their stubbornness as I try to help them see that their behaviors and choices are not only not helping them but in fact detrimental. Some never see the light, at least during this school year, and thatโ€™s why it can be difficult to fight the pessimism: those students left just as they came in, and I wonder if I helped them at all.

This year is one of the few in recent memory that is devoid of any such students. Sure, some of you tried my patience at times. Some of you sought attention in inappropriate ways. Yet all of youโ€”each and every studentโ€”showed growth and maturity this year, and it has been a true privilege to work with you this year. I can honestly say this has been one of the best years Iโ€™ve experienced in my nearly-twenty years of teaching. Iโ€™ve seen growth in reading skills, gains in emotional maturity, a surge of confidence in cognitive ability, and most importantly, an increase in maturity in so many of you that it gives me real hope for the future.

Many of you developed new reading and thinking skills that help you approach problematic texts in new ways. Instead of throwing up your hands and saying, โ€œI donโ€™t get it,โ€ you dig in and figure out some meaning, understanding that you donโ€™t have to comprehend everything perfectly in order to understand the text as a whole. That kind of persistence will serve you well in the future, and I am very pleased to see that so many of you developed that newly-found tenacity.

Several of you noticeably grew emotionally over the course of the year. You learned to keep your anger in check, to keep your frustrations from determining your path, and to see yourself as in control of your own life. This is one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching eighth grade: kids genuinely mature in a very clear way over the course of the year, but some of you seemed to grow emotionally two or three years. Belligerence gave way to cooperation; fatalism gave way to self-confidence; apathy gave way to self-concern. Instead of worrying how youโ€™ll make it emotionally in high school, I find myself calmly confident about how youโ€™ll handle the challenges of high school.

Many of you became observably more confident in your cognitive abilities. You came into the class thinking that perhaps you couldnโ€™t do the work, that perhaps things might be a bit more challenging than youโ€™d expected, or that it would be just the same struggle as it always is. Instead, you found that your success doesnโ€™t come just from your intelligence, which most of us underrate anyway. Most success comes from behaviors and decisions, and as your behaviors and decisions changed, so too your view of your own intelligence, and that self-possession produced still more confidence.

Finally, almost all of you grew more mature as the year progressed. You began handling challenges like an adult. You started accepting disappointments with calmness. You learned to set goals and priorities, understanding that achieving those aims often requires sacrifice.

To those of you who chose not to live up to your fullest potential, I can only say that I hope at some point in the not-too-distant-future you make the changes necessary for your success. Hard work and focus are never wasted, and it is through challenging ourselves that we grow stronger. Fortunately, youโ€™re only a young teen: thereโ€™s still plenty of time to grow into this adult thing.

To those of you who did your best in this and other classes, thank you. Your focus and hard work are rewards in and of themselves, and they bring rich dividends, but Iโ€™ll willingly (and somewhat selfishly) admit that they make my job easier.

I have only one wish for you as this year closes out: I hope that you can look at your life at any moment and truthfully say to yourself about yourself, โ€œI am doing the best with what I have where I am.โ€ If you can always say that about yourself, the brightest of futures awaits. Thank you again for a wonderful year.

Best regards,
Your teacher

Endings

Friday 25 May 2018

They dread and fear it all year. It’s always lurking under every question, every assignment, every activity. It’s the biggest and most significant English test they’ve ever taken: the End of Course Exam, or EOC. A state-mandated, state-created test that counts as 20% of English I Honors students’ final grade. A truly high-stakes test.ย It’s a stressful test for them.

And for me: a previous principal reassigned a teacher’s English I Honors classes to another teacher because her classes’ scores weren’t to his satisfaction. That’s the rumor, at any rate. While I’ve never worried that my students’ results would be dismal enough to merit such draconian measures, I always worry. The test is, in my eyes, a measure in part of my success as a teacher. Sure, it’s more the students, but I have to present the information. I have to guide the kids through the mandated standards.

Today, we got back the scores. With a mean of 89.04 (one point shy of an A), it meant that a lot of kids left with smiles. It’s not often that I deliver such good news.

Enemies

Thursday 17 May 2018

Sometimes, the Boy can be his own worst enemy. It’s true of all kids his age — and older. He’ll get upset about something, fuss about it, then escalate it when the resolution doesn’t appear to be going his way. The trick is to get him to see that habit and stop it.

Today he was upset about something. About what, it doesn’t really matter, but it involved L, who was helping me clean the bathrooms in preparation for the Boy’s birthday party Saturday. We have too much to do in too little time, so some of Friday’s cleaning shifted to today. The incident spilled over to a whine-fest with his mother, then with me. I sat him down and talked to him about what was going on.

“We’re all getting things ready for you. For your party. Every single thing we’re doing, we’re doing it for you. I think if someone was doing this much for me, I wouldn’t be upset because they weren’t paying enough attention to me at that moment. I’d be thankful. I’d say, ‘What can I do to help?'”

He calmed himself down with the little breathing exercise I taught him — basically, slow, measured breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth — and then went to ask K if there was anything he could do to help. She set him to washing dishes, a chore he adores.

“Thank you for showing me how fun it is to work together today,” he told me in the midst of his toothbrush session. “If I’d kept fussing, I would have missed out on a lot of fun.”

Later that night, as we readย Tashi in bed, Tashi had an opportunity to escape from bad guys who’d kidnapped him. He ran by the river, where he saw the wife of the Chief Bad Guy drowning. I stopped.

“Do you think Tashi should stop and help her?”

“No!” the Boy said incredulously.

“Why not?”

“Because she’s hisย enemy. If he helps her, she might just grab him and take him back to the other bad guys,” he explained earnestly.

“Or,” I said, thinking carefully how I could explain it, “she could be so impressed and touched that he helped her that she stops being his enemy.”

“Yeah, but inย Smurfs: the Lost Village, when [some character whose name I don’t remember] fell of the boat and the Smurfs helped him out of the water, he said, ‘Yeah, but I’m still bad!’ and captured them. And it wasย their boat. They made itย themselves!” His patience in explaining that was enchanting.

“Yes, that happens sometimes,” I replied, “but sometimes, something different happens. Sometimes they stop being enemies.” Iย knew this was going to happen in the book, and it rings true in my own life.

Just today, I had an encounter with a student that made me feel I was inย Groundhog Day. During morning duty, I’m charged with keeping all the kids sitting in the hall quietly and the hall calm and to do this, we teachers enforce a basic rule: “You can whisper, but you can’t talk.” Suzie — not her real name, of course — always talks. She speaks in a fairly low voice, but she’s engaging her vocal cords, which means she’s talking. Plus, I can occasionally hear her thirty or forty feet away.

“Suzie, whisper please,” I said calmly. Respectfully. As I’ve done every day I’m on duty for the entire school year. Her response is to quiet her voice at first but to continue talking, not whispering. Her response to being redirected again is to suggest that because other people are also talking, that I’m unfairly targeting her. Today I explained the simple fact: “That’s because you’ve taught me to expect it from you. The other people are not consistently disobeying me. The other students do it once and a while; you do itย every single day.” Again — quietly, calmly, respectfully.

Today, I talked to her about it again. It turns out, she doesn’t know what whispering is. “Iย am whispering,” she insisted. I explained again that if she puts her hand on her throat when she talks and she feels vibrations, she’s not whispering.

“Go ahead, try,” I said, smiling.

“No!” she cried, breaking into a smile herself. “It’s embarrassing!’

I pointed out to her that I wasn’t picking on her, that I in fact like her a lot and see a lot of potential in her. “As long as you can keep these little things under control.” (She also has a tendency to grow increasingly disrespectful when redirected multiple times.)

Here’s a girl that could have easily become my enemy. I could have simply snapped at her, signed her discipline card, or by this time, probably, simply have written an administrative referral. But instead of seeing an enemy, a rebellious little brat (like many adults would), I try to see something a little different: someone who just hasn’t had anyone take the time to show a genuine interest in her regarding the little things. It’s easier just to brush if off with sarcasm or a referral.

The funny thing is, in spite of the fact that she still grows disrespectful with me, I’m fairly certain she doesn’t see me as an enemy either. Sure, it’s not the same as saving the life of the wife of the bandit who threatened to pull all your nose hairs out like Tashi did, but it’s moving in that direction.

Tempers, Tacos, Chess, and a Church

Monday 23 April 2018

A day of contrasts. At school, the kids in eighth-grade English as working on performances of small excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank, the play based on Anne’s diary. Most of the groups are doing great: they work well together; they take criticism from each other well since they know part of their grade comes from how well they’re performing as a group; they seem to enjoy the challenge. Most of them. One group, not so much. The group just isn’t getting along. One girl — we’ll call her Alicia — has a temper that could be measured in nanometers, and she has to express her thought when she finds herself annoyed, which is frequently. Another girl — we’ll call her Susan — just doesn’t care, and she doesn’t care that other people might care, and she doesn’t care that her apathy affects them. And she has a temper as well. One boy in the group likes to provoke anyone and everyone he can. And finally, a third girl has made a big turn-around this year in my class and has gone from being nasty to being a fairly well behaved, decent working young lady, but one who doesn’t like it when things don’t go her way. So while all other groups were developing their ideas, rehearsing their lines, planning who would bring what props, this group broke into fits of frustration and argument literally every three or four minutes.

How can you teach kids any subject when first they need to be taught how to control their temper, how to control their tongue, how to control their sense of self-injury?

At home, the Boy and I initiated what we’re going to try to make into a daily activity: a bit of chess together. He knows how to move the pawns fairly well now. He knows the basics of the rooks. Next, we’ll introduce bishops, the king, the queen, and finish up with the tricky knights.

He’s learning to pile up attackers and count defenders to determine if he can take a piece or not; he’s starting to think offensively and defensively at the same time; he’s eager to learn more — all good signs. His mind is growing. His body, too — faster, in fact.

Tonight was taco knight (see what I did there?), and the Boy loves Mexican food. We have a little Mexican restaurant down the street where the two of us have eaten dinner when the girls are out on their own, and he’s always eager for more.

Tonight, he skipped the beans and the rice and ate not one, not two, but three tacos. Half the fun for him is actually making the taco.

The calm and the joy of chess followed by tacos seemed so jarring juxtaposed with the chaos my one group of students was experiencing. Those who were causing the issues — what kind of jarring, chaotic home life might they have? It doesn’t seem that people who would go home to some time with their family and a bit of comfort food would have that much difficulty keeping themselves in check because it would have been modeled for them and perhaps taught explicitly.

In the evening, when the girls have gone to gymnastics and shopping, the Boy and I decided to play with Legos, and we decided we needed to make something we’d never made before. We decided on a church.

As I was building the roof, the Boy declared that he would start working on things for the inside. After a few minutes, he showed me something he’d made.

“It’s that table, where they do everything,” he explained.

“The altar?”

“Yeah.”

And he made it complete with chalices and a paten.

The Lesson

Tuesday 10 April 2018

There’s a lesson I share with my students every year that I both look forward to and dread. It’s at the beginning of the Anne Frank unit, and what I try to do is simple: make them empathize with the plight of Anne and all the other Jews (and non-Jews) who were victims of the Nazis’ fury. It’s a two-part lesson, with both parts running simultaneously. The main portion involves a presentation to build students’ background knowledge of the Holocaust. We begin with the rise of the Nazis, go through the systematic alienation and stigmatization of the Jewish population, touch on the ghettos, and end with the stark directions of Nazi doctors at the Birkenau train station: left or right. Death or imprisonment.

Through this whole process, students stop to reflect. We start with putting ourselves in Anne’s place:

We’re all unique in some way, and we all belong to a group that is itself unique in some way. Find the one thing that connects you to one group of people yet makes you different from many other people. It can race, religion, political views, where your family comes fromโ€”anything.

As we move through the lesson, students have other opportunities to reflect:

Leaders are blaming you subgroup for all the country’s problems. They are taking steps to remove your group’s power and influence in society. Write a diary entry about how your group is being singled out and treated differently.

Could this happen in the States? Many of my students divide themselves mentally in this exercise along racial lines, and many of my students are African American. It sounds to them like a return to the worst of the Jim Crow days. Could anything like that happen in 2018?

One day, soldiers come to your house and tell you and your family that everyone must move to a new section of town. You’re given ten minutes to gather your belongings. What do you take with you?

I’m surprised at how many students immediately write, “Cell phone.” Surprised and not surprised.

You hear rumors that people are being rounded up in other parts of the country and murdered. Write a dialog you overhear among adults.

Could this happen in 2018? Could an oppressed people be completely cut off from the reality of their situation? As students write, I find myself doubting it. Yet didn’t many Jews in the West doubt the initial reports of the Holocaust? “Why kill us? We’re their workforce!” The Jews who’d been shipped into concentration camps from the east knew, though. They’d already seen the Holocaust of bullets: men, women, and children, lined up in front of ditches, shot in the back of the head. Repeat.

One night, soldiers burst into your house and force you into trucks that begin speeding down the highway to an unknown location. Write a description of the experience for your diary.

I go over how wretched the transport was to the camps. Standing room only in boxcars. Need to go to the bathroom? There’s only one option. Back aching from standing for days on end? Too bad.

You arrive at the camp. You’re split apart from your family and forced into a small barracks with many other people. Write a conversation you might have in the barracks with someone your age who has been there for several months.

What is there to say? I tell them about the reality of many of those who made it through selection: some inmate or another pointed at the smoke billowing out from the chimneys of the crematoria and said, “There’s your family.”

As all of this is going on, we play a game. “I have a lot of little slips of paper with an ‘X’ on it. You don’t want this slip of paper. You want to avoid getting one at all costs. And if you get one, you want to avoid getting a second one. Your goal is two-fold: end the lesson with as few of these slips as possible, and figure out what leads to getting one of these slips.” In the past, I made it more obvious: the paper had a small image of a bullet on it. The exercise was more explicit: “You’re going to try to avoid getting one of these bullets.” They figure out pretty soon — immediately, in fact — that I’m putting them in the situation of Jews in a ghetto or concentration camp. With the mass shootings that have been taking place in the last few months, I decided a bullet wasn’t a good idea, and it provided an unexpected benefit. The kids didn’t initially know what was going on with the slips. They didn’t know what they represented.

I passed them out in increasingly random fashion. The first people to get a slip were those who talked out of turn. Then I started handing them out to students who just asked a question. To students who simply raised their hand. To students who just made eye contact with me. At one point, I had all the students stand up. I counted them off and gave every fifth student a slip. Sometimes, toward the end of the lesson, I’d ask a student, “Do you have a slip?” He’d say, “No,” and I’d give him one. Then I’d ask another student the same question. She wouldn’t get a slip.

“What was the point of the slips?” I asked at the end of the lesson. By then they’d figured it out. “How could you avoid getting them?”

“You couldn’t,” one student answered immediately.

“Precisely. You had no rules by which you could simply put your head down, play by the rules, and make it safely to the other side. This was the reality of the Jews of Europe between 1939 and 1945. This is what Anne Frank and her family were trying to avoid by going into hiding.”

I think they’re actually excited to begin reading it tomorrow.

What a depressing way to end the day. Fortunately, the kids provided just the perfect antidote to such thoughts.

They made up a game. What was the goal? I have no idea — I couldn’t really figure it out. E, I think, couldn’t figure it out either. What were the rules? They changed, as they always do. What was the result? Isn’t it obvious?

And Repeat

Monday 5 March 2018

I don’t know how many times I’ve told students that, nine out of ten times, it’s not what you do that gets you in trouble but rather how you react to being corrected. It’s not the phone out that’s the problem; it’s how you responded when told to put it away. It’s not the mild horseplay that’s the problem; it’s how you responded when told to stop. It’s not the talking; it’s the reaction to being told to be quiet.

Today, when I had hall duty, one young man insisted on chatting in the time before school actually begins, when all students sit in the hallway, leaning against the walls, and relatively silent. There’s always some whispering, and all teachers ignore that because it’s not a problem. It’s when the kids start talking, and then others talk, and then the first group has to raise their voices to be heard above the increasing din, and soon, it’s chaos on the hall. So we — as well as all other grade levels — insist on silence. This young man, though, insisted on chatting despite being told to stop talking.

In such situations, I take a simple strategy: I tell the kid to go to my classroom and wait for me there. “When it’s locker time and my duty is therefore over, I’ll come talk to you about this.” Most kids comply without issue. And what do I do when I talk to them? Sometimes I sign their school behavior cards (ROCK cards they’re called) on the positive side for complying without problems and tell them next time, it’s a negative. And sometimes, it’s a negative.

Today, I had a batch of kids that I’d never had to call down, so I took their names and told them I was pressing them into service for tomorrow: “You’re going to be my leaders, my CEOs, those who set the good example and get the others around you who are talking to stop and whisper instead.” I looked at them with a pause for effect, then asked, “And you know what happens to CEOs who don’t perform well, right?” One girl answered, “They get fired.” “And you know what that means for you, right?”

But one boy just couldn’t get past his sense of victimization. I told him, “P, you need to go to my room please.”

“What’d I do?” he asked indignantly.

“You just need to go to my room, alright.”

“I didn’t do nothin’.”

“You just need to go to my room, alright.”

“I didn’t do nothin’.”

“You just need to go to my room, alright.”

“I didn’t do nothin’.”

“You just need to go to my room, alright.”

“I didn’t do nothin’.”

Literally about that many times. Well, maybe not that many times: I don’t haveย that much patience. I just ended the encounter with him still sitting where he had been sitting, leaving him with the comment that he can discuss it with the assistant principal when I complete the disciplinary referral.

What will happen to him? He’ll get a day or two of In-School Suspension. Will that change him? Not at all. He sees himself as a victim — I don’t teach him, but all his teachers confirm this first impression.

It’s such kids’ futures that seem so bleak to me. How can someone like that hold down a job? How can someone like that even make it to an interview?

The only hope is age: perhaps in the next four years, by the time he becomes an adult, something will click.