education and teaching

Growth

Monday 09 May 2022 | 0 Comments

It's that time of year: my students are writing their letters to next year's students. The English 8 kids wrote them last Friday; English I will be writing them in a couple of weeks.

The guidelines are simple:

Provide advice for rising eight-graders
Show off how well you can write now.

To achieve the second goal, I only allow students one class period to write the letters. The results could theoretically be a little better for the English 8 students if I gave them more time, but part of the charm in the whole exercise is watching next year's students' shock when I tell them at the letters they're reading are in fact first and only drafts.

One young lady's letter demonstrated so wonderfully how much she'd grown as a person from the beginning of the year. J, at the start of the year, was one of the most worrying students: her behavior was often disruptive; she was often disrespectful when teachers called her on her behavior; she rarely did any work, and what she did was not turned in or handed in still incomplete.

Yet over the course of the school year, she's calmed down, learned that butting heads with teachers is counterproductive, and begun doing her work (then doing her best). Her grade has gone from a 62 (just barely passing) to a 84, just six points shy of an A.

One paragraph of her letter reads:

How to stay out of trouble in the 8th grade? Staying out of trouble in the 8th grade is probably one of the most important things you can do. One thing you can do to prevent getting in trouble is to minimize your circle and stop posting things on social media. People take a lot of things to social media and the drama leads into school so now it’s the school’s problem and once you post something on social media there’s literally no going back. It's there forever. Having a lot of friends can cause you to get into a lot of stuff because once one of your friends is beefing with one another they are going to bring you into it because they want you to choose one or the other. My advice to you as a 8th grader right now is to never trust a soul, follow the right path and take it slow, that's how you can be successful in the 8th grade.

There's a certain cynicism in that conclusion, but perhaps it's not entirely awful advice.

Eighth-Grade Night

Thursday 21 April 2022 | 0 Comments

Wednesday in Class

Wednesday 20 April 2022 | 0 Comments

That fifth period can be a tough group of kids. They sometimes disregard what's going on in class to have a little private conversation that is not at all private because of the number of participants and the volume of their voices. They sometimes ignore simple instructions. A few of them are capable of being truly disrespectful to other students, to me, and by proxy, to themselves.

Yet by and large, they're a great group of kids. They're just typical 14-year-olds, many of whom come from less-than-perfect situations and have developed less-than-perfect habits. In my teaching career, there have only been a handful of students that, as humans, I didn't like, I just didn't trust. In almost 25 years of teaching perhaps four or five such kids. There are no such kids in this group.

But they can be tiring.

These final weeks of school, we're going through The Diary of Anne Frank. Why do such an important piece in the waning, testing-ladened final quarter of the year? That's when the district requires it. It might be a good thing, though, because these kids are more engaged now than they've been all year: more focused, more involved, more eager in their participation.

Plopped down in the middle of this is L, a young man from Mexico who speaks not a word of English. Not a word. Well, no, that's not true: he spoke not a word of English when he arrived last week. He's already picked up quite a bit. And today, he was able to follow along with the play, even though he didn't understand 95% of what the kids were saying.

"Where do you think we are?" I'd ask through my phone using Google Translate. He'd point to where we were -- each time, dead on. "Great!" I'd say. His smile was ear to ear.

Missed

Thursday 14 April 2022 | 0 Comments

They missed it, that little detail, but we had fun acting out their interpretations.

That One Detail

Wednesday 13 April 2022 | 0 Comments

They always miss it — that one detail that changes everything about the ending of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s so small, yet it tells us so much, and it’s a sign of how good an author Harper Lee was. She sets up the situation with a misdirection:

“Mr. Finch.” Mr. Tate was still planted to the floorboards. “Bob Ewell fell on his knife. I can prove it.”

Atticus wheeled around. His hands dug into his pockets. “Heck, can’t you even try to see it my way? You’ve got children of your own, but I’m older than you. When mine are grown I’ll be an old man if I’m still around, but right now I’m—if they don’t trust me they won’t trust anybody. Jem and Scout know what happened. If they hear of me saying downtown something different happened—Heck, I won’t have them any more. I can’t live one way in town and another way in my home.”

Mr. Tate rocked on his heels and said patiently, “He’d flung Jem down, he stumbled over a root under that tree and—look, I can show you.”

Mr. Tate reached in his side pocket and withdrew a long switchblade knife.

We assume that Tate is going to show Atticus how Bob Ewell fell on his knife, and he does just that.

Mr. Tate flicked open the knife. “It was like this,” he said. He held the knife and pretended to stumble; as he leaned forward his left arm went down in front of him. “See there? Stabbed himself through that soft stuff between his ribs. His whole weight drove it in.”

Mr. Tate closed the knife and jammed it back in his pocket. “Scout is eight years old,” he said. “She was too scared to know exactly what went on.”

But that’s not the reason Lee includes that detail. The real reason comes into focus a few paragraphs later:

“Heck,” said Atticus abruptly, “that was a switchblade you were waving. Where’d you get it?”

“Took it off a drunk man,” Mr. Tate answered coolly.

I was trying to remember. Mr. Ewell was on me… then he went down… Jem must have gotten up. At least I thought…

“Heck?”

“I said I took it off a drunk man downtown tonight. Ewell probably found that kitchen knife in the dump somewhere. Honed it down and bided his time… just bided his time.”

The kids were working on it today, and I pointed out that there’s a detail that makes everything different, changes the whole story. “No one has ever managed to see it,” I challenged them, and it’s true: most kids read right over that detail:

“Heck,” said Atticus abruptly, “that was a switchblade you were waving. Where’d you get it?”

“Took it off a drunk man,” Mr. Tate answered coolly.

The drunk man he took it off was Bob Ewell. When Tate arrives to investigate the body, he finds Bob Ewell lying on the ground, a knife in his craw, as he puts it, and a switchblade in his hand. In order to cover up Boo Radley’s involvement, he has to take the switchblade. He tampers with evidence to protect Boo Radley.

Today, though, one girl almost got it. “Mr. Scott, I think it’s something to do with this knife,” she said. She’d read the passage and knew something felt off. What felt off? It’s a detail that doesn’t seem to be connected to anything, and Lee brings it up twice, which means it must be important. I just smiled in response. “Could be something important.”

Later in the day, a couple of hours after class in fact, she emailed me:

I think that the switchblade was Bob Ewells and Heck heard the kids getting attacked and came to the scene and took the switchblade from Bob then Boo Radley, who can see very well in the dark, used a kitchen knife to kill Bob Ewell, making it look like Bob tripped and his death was an accident.

I’m not completely sure if this is right but I have a feeling it is.

“So close,” I replied.

We’ll see tomorrow if she got it.

Attorney’s Visit, Tournament Start, and Mexican Dinner

Friday 08 April 2022 | 0 Comments

More Testing

Wednesday 06 April 2022 | 0 Comments

“Isn’t that test in a couple of weeks the state test?” Mrs. G asked this morning.

“No, no,” clarified Mrs. H. “In a couple of weeks it’s the state pilot TDA test. The actual state test won’t be until May.”

“Remember Mrs. J was telling us about the test the state is making our school take and how Mr. F[, the school principal,] was trying to convince the district to count the state test in lieu of the second [district-mandated] test?”

“Oh, yes, I remember that.” The discussion continued along the lines of how frustrating it is to be testing so much but how we can get our kids more prepared for these district- and state-mandated tests.

That three English teachers were having trouble figuring out just how many major, schedule-impacting writing tests there were to be this year says a lot about the testing load the district and state put on teachers and students.

Our district mandates quarterly benchmark tests in English and math through the third quarter, and each of these impact the schedule and learning environment in a major way. Plus, the district requires us to give two major writing tests in preparation for the state writing test. Each of these take half the school day. So that’s eight days of testing right there — testing days that affect all classes and shorten all periods by approximately half. Naturally, it’s hard to get kids to engage in meaningful learning when they’ve just spent two hours analyzing some awful short story that’s at least 70 years old because the testing companies want to save money (i.e., boost revenue) by using texts that are in the public domain and hence don’t require licensing fees. (We English teachers hear all the time about how important it is to choose texts about things young readers can relate to, and the the state farms out its test development to a company that completely disregards that.) So the day is in essence a wash. Eight days down the drain — almost two full school weeks.

And that’s just what the district mandates.

It’s bad enough that the district puts middle and high school students through this; it’s also rammed through the elementary schools. The Boy had his district-mandated third-quarter math benchmark test today. It was almost sixty questions. For a fourth grader.

I’ve been saying that eventually, the US has to realize this obsession with testing is doing nothing but harm to our students, and the powers that be eventually have to change this, but I’ve been saying it for nearly twenty years now, and instead of getting better, it’s getting worse.

What’s worse is, I don’t know of a single teacher that takes these benchmarks all that seriously. “They’re designed to show for which topics students need remediation,” the six-figure-salaried district big-shots explain to us. If as a teacher who’s now spent nearly 150 days working with these kids I can’t tell you off the top of my head who needs remediation with what topic, I probably am not putting enough thought into my teaching.

What’s frustrating is, I don’t know of a single classroom teacher that had any input into the discussion about whether these obsessive, intrusive tests would have any value to the teacher at all. These decisions were made by individuals making two to three times what teachers make while spending absolutely no time in the classroom. They haven’t been in a classroom for over a decade at best, I’d venture.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if a whole school — everyone from administrators on down — simply refused to spend the time administering these tests. Everyone. Simple refusal. “We’ve decided as a school that this is not the best way to spend our students’ time.” What if some schools did it? What if all schools did it? What if teachers were vocal about their opposition to all this testing (well, they are, to be honest)?

I imagine what I’d do if I were a student. All the students of course hate these tests. They’re completely meaningless to them. I think I’d be tempted just to choose random answers and apologize to my teacher if it ended up making him look bad in the eyes of the powers that be.

Random Pictures from the Walk I Took during the Boy's Soccer Practice

Shooting

Thursday 31 March 2022 | 0 Comments

In a tragic first since I’ve been teaching in the Greenville County school district, a young man was shot and killed in a middle school less than five miles from the school where I teach. A twelve-year-old named Jamari Jackson was shot in the hallway during class change, from what I’ve pieced together from various news outlets. The suspect is also twelve years old, and he is now charged with “murder, possession of a weapon during a violent crime, possession of a firearm on school property and unlawful possession of a weapon by a person under the age of 18.”

There’s nothing more I can say than that. Twelve-year-olds killing twelve-year-olds. America 2022.

Testing

Wednesday 30 March 2022 | 0 Comments

We had today our third benchmark test, this time for ELA. Tomorrow we’ll have the math benchmark. Science will be Friday. Three days of testing. And this is not testing for the whole year — this is just testing to cover the third quarter. For English and math benchmarks, we run a special testing schedule. Students test with their first academic period, and that testing session runs from 8:30 to 10:30, though it usually goes in fact to 11:00. That’s over two hours of the day dedicated to testing. THe rest of the day follows a normal sequence of classes, but each class period is reduced to 30 minutes. Thirty minutes with tired kids (those tests are awful — 50-70 questions that, in the case of English, cover 5-10 texts of varying interest and complexity) is hardly conducive effective learning. The day is not quite a wash, but it’s close. The thing is, though, we did this at the end of first quarter, at the end of second quarter, and now again at the end of third quarter. At the end of the fourth quarter we do it a final time, but it’s not district-mandated tests like the benchmarks but rather state-mandated tests. It amounts to the same: three days of testing four times. That’s twelve days of testing. That’s almost thee full school weeks. That’s not all the testing, though: we also have two TDA (text-dependent analysis) tests that the district mandates, running the same extended testing schedule.

And this year, the state requires us to do another, third TDA before the fourth and final TDA which actually counts. Those three TDAs plus the final actual state TDA means we’re up to 16 days of testing. That’s 8.8% of the year doing testing. Nearly ten percent of the year we’re doing testing.

First Day Back

Monday 28 March 2022 | 0 Comments

English 8 students began a new unit today on the Diary of Anne Frank, our final major reading selection for the year. We began with an anticipation lesson designed to get students empathetic to Anne Frank's situation and the dangers she faced as the Nazis took over Europe and began their unimaginable efforts to commit genocide.

English I Honors students worked on a brief review of phrases (see notes above) before heading out into the wild world of clauses. We looked at the definition of independent clauses and examined several examples, touching additionally (and briefly) on subordinate clauses.