Matching Tracksuits

education and teaching

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?

A School with Character, No Doubt

Thursday 24 January 2008

I received an email with the title,

You are nominated for a Ph.d

I think I’ll pass.

Still, it’s not as bad as Armstrong College spelling “curriculum” with two “i’s” (i.e., “cirriculum”) on their “Academics” menu when their little site went live a couple of years ago…

Screen shot

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?”

Talk in the Hallway

Thursday 20 December 2007

Our school has a fairly strict dress code, and part of that includes the prohibition of wearing jackets inside the building. If students are cold, they are to bring a sweater.

Yesterday, before the last period, a young man came sauntering down the hall, slightly dragging one foot behind him in that ever-so-fashionable gangster shuffle, his camouflage jacket on, and everything about him shouting, “I have low self-esteem.”

As he approached me, I found myself thinking, “Come on — take the jacket off now so I don’t have to say something.” It was the last day before Christmas break; I’d finished all my classes; I did not want to have a confrontation over something silly.

But he didn’t, and so I said something, and he started showing his full “gangster” plumage. He refused to look at me; he refused to acknowledge me; in short, he acted like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.

I told him, “You’re making an issue of something that need not be an issue by showing me extreme disrespect. If we’re unable to work this out here, I’ll simply write a referral to the administration and let the vice principle work it out.” Nothing, for a moment. Finally, he looked at me. “That’s a start.”

As we talked, I eventually asked him, “How many times have you gotten in-school suspension.”

“Two.”

“Notice what I did?” I asked. “I didn’t even ask you ‘Have you ever gotten ISS?’ I knew. I don’t even know your name, yet I knew you’d had ISS. Want to know how I knew that?”

A begrudging, “How?”

“Your body language screams it,” I told him. “No one who hadn’t been to ISS would have acted as you’ve been acting over a stupid coat. Your slouching refusal to give me eye contact, your silly refusal to acknowledge anything I said, the way you smack your teeth as if to provide punctuation to every single sentence I utter — all these things said, ‘This is a kid who finds himself in trouble a lot.’ Did you want to tell me that?”

These kids have no idea how much they communicate without even opening their mouths, something I hope to start remedying next quarter when I teach my related arts class. More later — right now the syllabus is still in development…

Walk the Line

Thursday 13 December 2007

What is it that’s so difficult about walking in a line? Is there some genetic abnormality that appeared about the same time as public education that makes it all but impossible to walk in a single-file line 100 feet to the media center?

I have to preteach each and every class before heading down the hall to the library or to the computer lab, or anywhere for that matter, and of my four classes, only one manages to do it consistently well. Another manages most of the time. The other two are just disasters.

Time for Natural Consequences.

What is the natural consequence of people walking down the hallway disruptively? Kids in the classrooms they pass lose learning time. The cost is time; the consequence, then, should be time. And that’s why our sixth period spent some portion of the twenty minutes of pre-lunch outside time practicing walking in a straight line. But I really didn’t want to belabor the point, and as always, I didn’t want to make it seem vindictive. Time for classroom management technique number two: provide choices, not threats.

“So, folks, we have a choice before us: either we’re going to walk down the hall in a manner befitting mature eighth graders and then we’ll go outside, or we’ll continue to try it until we do get it right.”

Of course they nailed it the first time, which is for them both good and bad. It’s good because they got to go outside immediately; it’s “bad” because they’ve once again shown that they’re capable of it and that there’s no reason for them to do otherwise.

The Cough

Sunday 9 December 2007

The other day, in sixth period, a significant number of the boys decided it would be amusing if they started coughing when I turned my back. Not sick, tickle-in-the-throat type coughing, but that one single cough we’ve all given at one point or another to warn someone that some authority figure is coming.

Why? They’re eighth graders — there’s no logical answer to questions about eight graders’ motivation.

It was one of those moments that I stand there with a stern look to hide the fact (probably not too successfully) that I’m running through all the various classroom management tricks I can remember in an attempt find effective means of ending this nonsense. Running through my mind was something along these lines:

I’m not really sure who’s doing it. I don’t really think it’s a significant enough issue to devote a lot of time to it. I want to make sure it doesn’t come back. I want to keep those who are working from thinking it might be fun to join in. I don’t want to seem vindictive, because it’s really not a big deal — just disruptive.

And a phrase I’d read some time ago in a book about classroom management popped into my head: make the disruption part of the consequence.

Basically, I had them cough like that continuously for a few minutes. I told them, “You’re going to do this for the next five minutes because it’s so fun and I want you to have fun in my class,” but I had no intention of trying to force them to go the full five minutes. “Ninety seconds should do the trick,” I thought as I walked away from the boys. Sure enough, after a little while, one of the boys exclaimed, “Mr. S, this is stupid.”

“I agree. Maybe we can stop doing this stupidity and get back to work, huh?”

Not a single disruption from them for the rest of the period.

Science in the ELA Classroom

Thursday 18 October 2007

The other day, right as we were in the middle of our starter, the principal walked into the room, strode purposefully to the back of the room, and sat down. A bit of a hush fell over the class at a time when I do not require complete silence–they’re doing pair work, after all. Still, everyone was especially quiet.

A principal observing a classroom is the perfect illustration of the bane of modern science: the inability to observe something without changing it in the process of observation.

Oh, what a beautiful morning…

Friday 7 September 2007

A teacher who wakes up thinking, “Oh my, what lovely light streaming in through the window” on an early-September Thursday morning has such calming thoughts for only a few milliseconds until the realization hits, the panic sets in, and stupid certainty that there’s no way he’ll get to work on time.

Deconstructionist Commentary

Friday 31 August 2007

Our education system is broken because so many families in America don’t have maps, and that’s why our education system is not helping South Africa as it should.

Since we now live in SC, I’m particularly proud of this video…

August, and Everything After…

Wednesday 1 August 2007

And so August arrives, and instead of thinking, “I start teaching next month” it’s a question of a few days. August 20 — kids return and I, for the first time since finishing college, will be doing the work I spent all that time preparing for while in college: teach English.

I have nine years of teaching behind me. Seven are teaching EFL: English as a Foreign Language. One I spent working with autistic children. One I spent trying to teach science and social studies to at-risk youth, and spent most of my time teaching social skills. Now, for the first time since student teaching, I’ll be teaching “The Most Dangerous Game” and gerunds and dangling modifiers and indirect modifiers and interpretative skills and how to avoid run-on sentences.

I’ve got some planning done, bought a new domain name to have a class blog and to have a place to stick Moodle, and I’m starting to feel relaxed about it. Excited, even…

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.

A Day at the Park

Sunday 24 June 2007

Last week, we took the kids in the program — who have been really working hard on their social skills of late and making great progress — to Carowinds, a theme park on the North/South Carolina border.

It had been years since I’d been to an amusement park. And it certainly showed me how much I’ve aged — within about an hour, after having ridden one or two coasters with the kids, I was thinking, “Well, if we were to leave right now, I’d be perfectly content.”

And then one of the kids got the idea to go on the “Drop Zone Stunt Tower.” A tower with seats that pull you up to some relatively impressive height — at least it seems that way at the moment — and then drops you. Fairly simple.

The specs are not all that impressive:

  • Tower Height:174 feet
  • Maximum Height Reached by Transports: 160 feet
  • Length of Freefall Before Braking: 100 feet
  • Highest Speed: 56 M.P.H.
  • Lift Speed: 16 feet/second

But the overall experience is — weightlessness for just a few moments.

And I must admit that I, another staff, and one of the kids (we split up for a while) rode it more times than we could later remember.

Imagine that — in my mid-thirties and still able to have fun in a park.

Still, I couldn’t help but think the unavoidable, the predictable: I can’t wait until we take L to such places…

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.

NCLB

Wednesday 20 June 2007

How effective is No Child Left Behind? Not very.

In fact, it harms our kids instead of helping them. How?

Here’s a letter from a parent who’s also a teacher with 21 years’ experience which explains the problems perfectly: Letter about Re-Authorization of NCLB.

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?

Teaching Trotsky

Saturday 2 June 2007

Given the fact that the lads in the program had a very weak grasp on recent history, I decided to do a six-weeks’ grading period on 20th century history. A hundred years in six weeks means 16.7 years per week, and I knew it would be a very rough overview at best. That said, I started in 1917, with the Russian Revolution.

“Why are we studying this crap?” one asked. He’d been keen on learning about the 20th century, but an obscure revolution led by people with “weird” names in a country on the other side of the globe was not what he had in mind.

“Because what came out of the revolution, namely the Soviet Union and the totalitarian Communist state, shaped much of the 20th century.” Already I knew that I was painting with broad strokes. The revolution had produced a communist state, but it wasn’t immediately totalitarian — unless you happened to be in the upper class. Value judgments aside, I went on.

We looked at the revolution, the outcome, and then spent most of our time on the Stalinist Soviet Union.

The classic free-market critique of communism is that it destroys incentive. If I’m going to get my needs met whether or not I work, why should I work? If I know that no matter how hard I work, I’m going to get the same rewards, why not just do what’s necessary to get by? I used to think “Whether or not this argument is valid on a scale large enough to make an impact on society’s production remains to be seen,” but then I lived in Poland in the years just after the fall of communism. What I experienced were people who were supposed to be helping me — after all, by my shopping in their store, I was paying their salary — sitting and reading a newspaper, then looking up with an expression of disgust and saying, “What?”

A consultant who’s been working with our program mentioned later, as an aside admittedly unrelated to his job description, that he felt I’d painted with strokes too broad and therefore misleading. He felt I’d blurred the lines between Stalinism and communism and that the lads would equate the two as being necessarily connected, synonymous even.

“Communism doesn’t have to end in totalitarianism,” he pointed out.

True enough, but I began thinking about this and realized something that one thing missing from the discussion is scale. To have a small-scale commune is one thing; to have an entire country that is communist is something entirely different. Small-scale communism can work because it can foster a tighter community spirit — it can be more like “family.” You’re less likely to cheat someone whom you know, with whom you share common values, etc. Small-scale communism also tends to be more voluntary. Choice goes a long way in determining how much you’ll play “within the rules” of a given society. Bottom line, because of the community sentiment and the voluntary nature, small-scale communism tends to be ideologically self-sufficient.

Marxism suffers from fatal oversimplification: all workers are saints and all owners are devils. There are saints and sinners among workers and owners alike, and communism cannot overcome the inherent selfish nature that so many of us have.

State-scale communism, however, is not ideologically self-sufficient, and it’s largely anonymous. Corruption arises more easily when you have no idea whom you’re cheating. Add the fact that communism historically has not been “voluntary” and you have an instant recipe for Animal Farm-type “cheating.” And since it’s not voluntary and the state has to keep a lot of people “in line,” it’s easy enough to evolve into a police state.

Talking with the consultant later about this, I sketched out the above thoughts, concluding that, to my knowledge, there’s not a single modern communist state that hasn’t evolved into a totalitarian regime.

He suggested Cuba. Aside from the imprisoned political dissidents, the fact that Cubans are shut up behind their own “Iron Curtain”, and the lack of any oppositional political party, I guess I’d agree…