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education and teaching

Little Steps

Monday 15 November 2021 | 0 Comments

Dear Terrence,

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

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

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

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

I do have some bad news, though: while no one is messing with you, you’ve made it clear what gets under your skin, and if a teacher wanted to mess with you, wanted to provoke you so that she could write you up, you’ve made it easy for that teacher (whom I hope you never meet) to do just that. You’ve made it clear what your buttons are, what gets you heated and easily leads to a disrespectful outburst. All a teacher would have to do is push just a little and BOOM! there you go, and there’s the excuse to write a referral. In that case, such a teacher would have played you, controlled you. I hope you never meet such a teacher, but it’s entirely possible. It’s also possible that a teacher who wouldn’t normally do that might, in a moment of frustrated weakness, do just that to “get some peace” for a while.

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

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

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

Chess Club Week 2

Thursday 11 November 2021 | 0 Comments

We had our second meeting of chess club this afternoon. It was scheduled to go from 3:30 to 4:30, but at 4:50, I finally had to tell two sweet but slightly nerdy girls (after all, we’re talking about chess club here) that they’d have to photograph their game and finish it next week.

The position is not terribly hopeful for black, but she does have a passed pawn. However, it’s only on the second rank, so it’s not passed all that much. White has a two-pawn advantage but might have a bit of difficulty getting the G and H pawns rolling before the black king can get over to help move that passed pawn along.

Reading

Tuesday 09 November 2021 | 0 Comments

Tuesday Unknowns

Tuesday 19 October 2021 | 0 Comments

Unknown 1

We had an online meeting tonight with a company that helps student-athletes navigate the challenge of getting an academic scholarship. It’s something that I have absolutely no firsthand knowledge and little to no general knowledge about. The question is, given the cost of the service (it’s not cheap by any stretch), just how much will this provide us in the long run. Its cost would certainly be justified if we ended up with major savings to L’s college costs through a scholarship to play volleyball. Yet if we just get nothing for it — no real offer, no real scholarship, no real hope — then it was obviously money poorly spent.

Unknown 2

We had a teacher workday today, and the day concluded with a presentation from a therapist about trauma and its effects on learning. It basically boiled down to, “Don’t be a dick and compound these at-risk kids’ issues by taking everything personally and letting that trigger you into a power struggle that damages the relationship.” That’s laudable, and certainly a very basic best practice for classroom management, but it got me thinking about how much we never know about our students in a given moment: what taught a kid to react this way to this stimulus, what’s going on in the kid’s head at the moment, how we’re contributing to it, what other social forces, unseen and unknown, are contributing at that moment due to peer pressure and the idea of lost face — the whole miasmic mess we find ourselves in when an at-risk student is in full panic mode. Not an excuse for disregarding the processes we went over today. Far from it — a full admission to their basic necessity. Yet it still leaves me feeling a bit like Sisyphus.

Unknown 3

One of our final renovations on our house will begin tomorrow: the guest bathroom will get a complete makeover.

Heaven knows it needs it. In a lot of ways, it was always the room most in need of renovation. Ugly subway tiles on the counter, some god-awful trim around the sink, old toilet — it was all awful.

Was?! It is awful. It has been awful for years. And tomorrow, we start renovating it all. Well, we’re not doing anything — we’re hiring our Polish friend who’s done so much already in our home.

This last unknown is finally known: when will we ever get that bathroom done…

How Much Time?

Friday 15 October 2021 | 0 Comments

Sometimes, I find myself wondering just how much time I need to give students to finish an assignment. If they're playing around and wasting time, then they're doing just that -- wasting time. Why should they get extra time? But if I assess what they do turn in, then it's so incomplete that it's more an assessment of behavior rather than skill.

Take our current project: we're writing about how the narrator effectively creates the voice of an uneducated slave girl in Nightjohn by judicious decisions in diction, regularly irregular grammar, and extensive use of fragments. We've gone over all this stuff. We've practiced finding it. We've found it. We've noted it.

I've planned out everything so that what they have to do is less figuring-out-how-to-do-it and just doing it. We determined potential topic sentences as a class. We found evidence in groups. (Much of the evidence they already had -- it should have taken them about 5 minutes to find evidence because it was in earlier work.)

At this point, students who have been focused and working well are almost done; those who haven't are not close to done. They should work on it over the long weekend. Will they? Of course not. How do I know this? Fifteen years of teaching eighth grade at this school has shown me that 85% of the kids in on-level classes just won't do anything on their own at home. Anything at all.

English I students, on the other hand, finished up their analysis of "Sonnet 29" with an examination of the elements of a sonnet:

We then turned our attention to "Sonnet 18" -- undoubtedly Shakespeare's most famous sonnet:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

The difference in what they're working on is striking, but it's less striking when you see the difference in how they work. The kids in the honors classes, by and large, are focused and studious. They do homework when I require it. They pay attention when I'm demonstrating. They stay on task when I ask them to cooperate on a task. They remain silent when I tell them I want them to do some step or other on their own.

Taking a Chance

Monday 11 October 2021 | 0 Comments

I took the kiddos to the library today to get their first independent reading selections for the second quarter. The librarians came up with a clever game for the kids to play: they chose cards at random that “dared” them to get particular books.

“Get a book with a red cover.”

“Get a book by a female author.”

“Get a book from a friend’s recommendation.”

“Get a book with a one-word title.”

I talked the librarians into adding a new one: “Get a book Mr. Scott selects for you.”

For two girls I selected Ender’s Game — a science fiction masterpiece. I first read it when I was their age, and it thrilled me. What a shocking ending! I chose it for the two girls because they had never really read science fiction. “I’m more a dystopian fiction girl,” one of them said, “But I’ll give it a shot.”

Reading

Thursday 30 September 2021 | 0 Comments

I knew taking the picture might break the spell: an at-risk student who, of her own accord without any prompting or suggestion, chose to read a book during free time after lunch might not be thrilled about having her picture taken. But on the other hand, it’s a picture of success, and when it’s a kid you’ve already grown to love in a way, a kid you’re already pulling your hair out over and cheering on and fussing at with a smile — you go ahead and take that chance.

Sure enough — “Mr. S! Don’t!” And the spell was broken. But unlike many magical moments, this one has evidence to back it.

Discovery

Thursday 23 September 2021 | 0 Comments

We started working on poetry this week. I always begin with the same poem:

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It’s a perfect start-of-the-poetry-unit poem because it has so much in it that makes poetry great. There’s enough ambiguity to necessitate a little digging. There’s a title doing all the work a good poem title should do — integral to the poem yet still standing a little aloof. There’s parallelism and patterns. There’s such an economy of language.

We work through it slowly. First, we find some of the ambiguities: who is the “you”? It’s not the reader. What is that “they” in the final line? They flew, so we think at first it might be the sparrows, but they also seem to have fallen at some point — birds don’t usually fall. “It’s the snow!” someone realizes.

We tackle the ambiguity of the word “tell.” “It’s not ‘tell’ like ‘to tell a lie’, is it?” I ask. We determine that “discern” might be a synonym. Or just “tell the difference between.” “Between what?” I probe a little further. They realize that it’s telling the difference between snow and rain, and that that is what’s going on in that final stanza: whoever is watching the birds is experiencing a moment when the rain is turning to snow and more specifically, experiencing that liminal moment when we can’t quite tell what it is.

We work on the title a bit. “It begins with ‘Because,'” I point out. “What does that signify?” They soon realize that before that must have been a “Why” question. “So talk to your seat partner — what is the understood question?” Eventually, we get it: “Why did you write this poem and give it to me?” Finally, we unpack the whole title: at some point, someone asked the poet, “What is the line between prose and poetry?” He left the question unanswered and returned at some point with a poem, which he gave to the interrogator. Confused, she asks, “Why did you give me this?” And the class says in unison: “Because you asked about the line between prose and poetry!”

“So he gives her a poem about birds and rain and snow?!?” I ask. “What kind of crazy answer is that?” They talk a little. I give them a hint: “Look for patterns. Look for repetitions.” Then they see it. Two things in the poem: rain and snow; two things in the title: prose and poetry. It’s time to put the bow on it.

I write on the board.

__________ : rain :: __________ : snow

“Let’s finish the syllogism,” I invite, and together they say, “Prose is to rain as poetry is to snow.” Or we could have done it differently: “Rain is to snow as prose is to poetry.” We get the same results. Snow and rain are made of water; poetry and prose are made of words.

“So what’s the poem’s answer to the question? What’s the line between prose and poetry?”

“Not much.”

Not much, indeed, and yet so much. So much difference and so many glowing faces as the poem that just a while ago made no sense to them at all suddenly is this beautiful and pithy exploration of the nature of written language.

School Volleyball 2021

Wednesday 15 September 2021 | 0 Comments

I went to a volleyball game for our school team tonight — in part to take pictures, in part because I have to attend a given number of school events, but mainly because several of my sweet new students play on the volleyball team. It was a tough match against Mauldin, the middle school L would have attended if she hadn’t gone to a charter school. Our girls were out in front at the beginning, but soon fell behind. And then fell further behind. And then lost 10-25. The second set looked better, but they still went down 19-25. The third set was much like the first: 11-25.

I still haven’t attended one of L’s high school games, so all my associations with school volleyball are with last year’s perfect season: not a single set lost. I sat watching and thinking: L’s team from last year would beat Mauldin like Mauldin beat Hughes tonight. And versus Hughes? It would be brutal.

It was a good reminder of how much our L has improved.

Football Glory and Critical Thinking

Tuesday 14 September 2021 | 0 Comments

When we lived in Asheville, I worked for one year at a day treatment facility for kids who'd been expelled from alternative school. It was a tough bunch of mainly fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. At one point, though, two boys who'd known each other "on the outside" (as they'd referred to it) were in the program at the same time. At lunch they'd revel in their former football glory, recalling magnificent plays they'd been a part of and sharing in the sorrow of those losses that had stung so badly. At one point, one of the boys mentioned having a recording of one of those games.

"Really!?" The program director was incredulous, but he managed to talk the boy into bringing in the video.

A couple of days later, during afternoon free time, the kid put the video cassette into the VHS player and pressed play. Soon, the director was howling in laughter as he watched a little league game in full chaotic, cute glory.

"Man, I thought you were talking about games you'd played in middle school or something," he laughed. "I didn't realize you were talking about second grade!" He was just good-naturedly ribbing the kids, and they took it fairly well.

Soccer practice under a half-moon

Looking back on it this evening as I jogged laps in a parking lot while the Boy had soccer practice, it suddenly took on a newly instructive dimension for me. Had any of us really thought about it, we would have known it could not have been middle school football the boys were talking about. They'd experienced little success in middle school, showing out enough to be removed from the setting altogether. Even the most gifted player is going to have to meet certain standards -- administrators might bend some requirements for such a boy, but there are at least some requirements. These boys couldn't even make it through alternative school let alone the less structured setting of a typical middle school classroom, so there was no way we adults should have assumed they were talking about playing organized football in the last several years.

We made those assumptions, though, because they neatly and immediately fit our assumptions. When a fourteen-year-old boy is reveling in past glory, we don't expect it to be from early elementary school but from the recent past. It's an immediate and logical assumption that we make without even being aware that we've made such an assumption. The thing is, we make these kinds of assumptions constantly throughout the day. We couldn't function, I'd argue, if we were to give extended critical thought to each and every decision we make and every thought that flits through our mind. The trick is being aware enough of our thoughts to have as a conscious option the ability to switch on our critical thinking and go, "Now, hold on there."

It's one of the reasons I enjoy teaching literature to middle schoolers. It's just those "Now, hold on there" moments that critical reading encourages.