Science Fair 2018
education and teaching
On the Proper Use of Time
1
At times, the school year seems to extend endlessly, a pile of days that stretches beyond our sight, under which we all seem to be crushed slowly. If there's a class that's an inordinate challenge, the weight of that pile seems to double, and somehow, no matter how well things are going in the year, a few more days seem to be tossed carelessly on the pile as third quarter approaches. "What?! I'm this exhausted, and we're just now in the back half?!"
Other times, the year seems entirely too short, something requiring calipers to measure. The list of standards the state requires teachers to cover seems to require twice the days the state allocates for the challenge. Some standards seem as if they might take a lifetime to master in and of themselves. "Assess the processes to revise strategies, address misconceptions, anticipate and overcome obstacles, and reflect on completeness of the inquiry." I'm still working on that one. "Determine appropriate disciplinary tools and develop a plan to communicate findings and/or take informed action." Ditto.
In between those two, the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, allocate a certain number of days to testing. In the decade-plus I've taught in the States, that number seems to grow every year. In the case of the hard-to-handle classes, it's a relief in a sense -- for the obvious reasons. It's tiring keeping them focused and engaged every day, and a test is just the right mind-numbing exercise to make the period pass by fairly painlessly. They get little to nothing out of it, and they put little to nothing into it, and everyone knows that's what's going to happen, but we do the dance anyway, and everyone goes home with their dance card happily filled. And yet for those same classes, it's a nightmare, for teachers already feel we're trying to cram too much into to little.
It just doesn't seem like the proper use of time.
2
Wednesday afternoons are often when I catch up with school work. The Girl has choir practice, until five and K and the Boy are out doing the grocery shopping as they wait, and so when I arrive home, the house is empty and silent. I make a cup of coffee, get out some papers to grade, or more likely, load this or that website that now holds my students' work and begin assessing, or I start sketching out my plans for the next week's activities.
Today, however, I had a thought: I don't have anything to do for school that is terribly pressing; my school is quite near the Aldi where K and E are shopping; I could easily pick up the Boy and take him home for a bit of playing. I called K; she asked the Boy; he was thrilled. Home we went, talking all the way about what we might play.
We settled on cars, with a bit of blocks. And in the midst of it all, out of seemingly nowhere, we ended up building jails for the misbehaving cars. E designed one, which meant he placed the blocks, and I hunted them down for him if he couldn't find them. Then we tested it, which meant he rammed a big car into the jail to see if it stood. It didn't; the bad car escaped. So we did it again, alternating who designed the jail. No jail held the prisoner for longer than a few moments when the Boy really set his mind and muscles to the task.
We made a big mess. The Boy got semi-hurt as he crashed his car into the pile a bit too hard. I accomplished absolutely nothing for school.
It was a proper use of time.
In Praise of Return
Coming back to school can be a relief for many of our students. They come from less than stable home lives, and the predictability of school is a comfort for them. These are often the kids that most often exhibit problematic behavior. Our principal sent us all an email to this effect. It read, in part, "Many of our students have experienced unrest over the break. Without their normal routines, meals, and social interactions found at school, they may need a readjustment period (and your grace) when returning."
One of the things I'd decided to change in my class was to provide a mechanism for regular praise of students, both individual and group. The individual is easier: it's just one person praising another. The group praise, though -- lots of kids focusing on the good actions of one student. That was a tough one.
In developing the lesson, I thought we should spend some time writing and thinking about praise, so I prepared a Pear Deck for the kids (which allows them to respond to given prompts and see their and others' responses projected anonymously. It's a great way to have a real-time anonymous discussion), asking questions about when they were last praised, how it felt, when they last praised someone else, how that felt.
Some of the answers were telling, echoing the ideas in the principal's email.
I asked students when they last remembered being praised. One student's response was memorable:
The last time I remember being praise was when I manage to talk to people because I can't really socialize with people. Another time I was praised was when I was working on something for a story and the person read it, and they said it was an amazing idea!
This young lady is one of the best students I've ever had: hard-working, kind, very intelligent, but painfully shy.
When I asked "How does it feel when you're praised," some of the answers really stood out:
- It made me feel special and proud of my work that I have done. I barely get noticed on things so it like amazing to be praised.
- I felt nothing because I didn't care.
Finally, I asked students to consider why praise might be important, given all the responses they'd given and read. One showed that at least one student understand how much impact something positive can have: "For example, it could be one compliment that could save someone's life...... They could be depressed and just needed someone to be nice to them and show them that people care about them."
Contrast this awareness with how students so often treat each other, with insults and snide comments that are meant to build themselves up by tearing others down. I wonder if anyone else saw the irony. Smart kids -- I'm sure they did.
Oplatek
Two Versions
My model response in a Romeo and Juliet online discussion forum at school. The question: We watched two versions of the balcony scene (2.2). Which one more-realistically shows two people in love? Provide three pieces of evidence from the video that touches on pacing and/or tone of voice. Additionally, you might want to use body language.
Of the two versions of the balcony scene, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s interpretation shows more realistically that Romeo and Juliet are in love simply because the actors’ performances are so natural as opposed to the wooden, flat way the BBC actors appear. This is first most noticeable in the famous lines, “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse thy name.”
The way she says “Deny thy father” makes it clear that she thinks this is an absurdly impossible idea and yet says it as if she were suggesting he change his mind about what he’ll have for lunch. She looks down and laughs just before she continues as if she’s laughing at her own absurdity.
This continues to the point where she says, “Be some other name,” which she says so slowly that it emphasizes her frustration with the situation.
A final touch that makes it all seem more realistic is the way they interrupt each other during the passage about swearing to the moon.
Twice Juliet begins her lines before Romeo has finished his, and that is a much more natural way of speaking. We often talk over each other in our excitement or frustration, and by talking over each other here, it highlights the excitement they feel about each other and the frustration they feel about their situation.
Mess Up
It’s important to admit to your failures as a teacher, small and large, and so when I realized that I hadn’t actually made the assignment in Google Classroom this afternoon, I muttered apologetically, “Sorry, I mess up.”
“Yeah, you messed up. You messed up my grade,” came a voice behind me. I knew immediately who said it: I’m a teacher, and it’s almost a requirement to be able to recognize students’ voices for any number of reasons, but also the young lady has a distinctive voice. It’s hard to miss C.
She’d just checked her grade while waiting for our work to load, and she discovered that her grade had dropped from a D to a F. The reason was simple: she hadn’t done the work earlier in the week when I was out with a sick little boy, and she hadn’t studied twelve Greek and Latin stems sufficiently to pass a quiz on them.
“I turned in several articles of the week just earlier this week,” she had complained.
“Yes,” I had agreed. “And since you turned them in late, they are a secondary priority when compared to other work that students turned in on time. It wasn’t a priority for you to turn it in on time, so it’s not a priority for me to grade it, I’m afraid. If you turn it in on time, I get it assessed quite quickly.”
It hadn’t been enough, and she’d been fuming, so when I admitted my silly mistake, she used it.
There’s a part of me that says, “What kind of thirteen-year-old thinks she can talk to an adult that way?” There’s a part of me that wonders how she could possibly think that anything positive could come of being aggressively disrespectful like that. There’s a part of me that wonders just what she thought my reaction might be. There’s a part of me that questions if she’ll ever learn how to deal with disappointments more effectively. There’s a part of me that wonders if she’ll spend all her life blaming others — it was my fault that her grade was so bad and not her fault for not preparing for a painfully simple quiz or for not turning in work on time.
What really made the situation frustrating for her was that she, as a basketball player, can’t play if she has grades below Cs. She missed a game because she had a D in my class; now she’s got an F in my class, and the prospect of playing again anytime soon seem painfully remote. And her frustration was understandable but directed at the wrong person.
Interpretation
My English I Honors students have just finished up a four-week poetry unit, which is in a way one of my favorite units we do. It’s not just that I love poetry, which I do, or that I hope to instill in them an appreciation of or even love of poetry, which I do, but it’s also a one of the units where we all see real growth in students’ ability to read and think critically.
At the start of the unit, there are the concerns: Some suggest they cannot understand poetry. Some suggest poetry is just about emotions. Some suggest that learning about poetry has no practical value later in life.
To the first concern, I always point out that learning to read increasingly challenging texts with greater levels of intentional ambiguity is just like everything else: it takes time and practice. I assure them that I’ll give them some skills — some tricks, I call them — that will help them ease the process.
To the second suggestion, I point out that while emotion is a critical element in a lot of poetry, it’s not the end of poetry in itself. It’s a means to an end. The emotion one finds in poetry is not what it’s about — except for some confessional poetry, of course. Even then, there’s always something bigger. I don’t tell them then, but what I’m referring to of course is the lyric moment of a poem, that point at which the reader has an epiphany because the speaker has an epiphany. (I am speaking of modern poetry, of course. When we move back into the nineteenth century and beyond, lyric moments tend to disappear a bit. Just a bit.)
The third worry is easy: No, you won’t read and interpret poetry your whole life, but you will need the skills — picking up on connotation, determining tone, reading for changes in mood — your whole life. No matter what you do, I say, no matter what the job, you’ll need these skills.
So we dive in. We read Elizabeth Bishop and Billy Collins, Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke, Langston Hughes and Howard Nemerov, Robert Hayden and in preparation for Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare. There are others, but I’ve found it most fruitful to read less and read more deeply than read more and only skim over the surface. We read poems and then go back to them again when we’ve learned another skill. We read poems once, twice, three times — again and again and again.
Then comes the test. A simple, four-question test. “Four questions, Mr. Scott?! Only four?!” they all reply when we prep for it. I give them two poems, both by W.D. Snodgrass: “Momentos, 1” and “A Locked House.”
Momentos, 1
Sorting out letters and piles of my old
Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards
That meant something once, I happened to find
Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
Who has turned up a severed hand.Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand
Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender,
In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies
That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned
Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,
And our ideals came easy.Then through the war and those two long years
Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks
Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried
This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,
Prove it had been, that it might come back.
That was before we got married.—Before we drained out one another’s force
With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret
And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce
And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,
I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,
I will find that it’s still there.
We read it together, make sure there are no unknown or confusing words, then move on to the second poem.
A Locked House
As we drove back, crossing the hill,
The house still
Hidden in the trees, I always thought—
A fool’s fear—that it might have caught
Fire, someone could have broken in.
As if things must have been
Too good here. Still, we always found
It locked tight, safe and sound.I mentioned that, once, as a joke;
No doubt we spoke
Of the absurdity
To fear some dour god’s jealousy
Of our good fortune. From the farm
Next door, our neighbors saw no harm
Came to the things we cared for here.
What did we have to fear?Maybe I should have thought: all
Such things rot, fall—
Barns, houses, furniture.
We two are stronger than we were
Apart; we’ve grown
Together. Everything we own
Can burn; we know what counts—some such
Idea. We said as much.We’d watched friends driven to betray;
Felt that love drained away
Some self they need.
We’d said love, like a growth, can feed
On hate we turn in and disguise;
We warned ourselves. That you might despise
Me—hate all we both loved best—
None of us ever guessed.The house still stands, locked, as it stood
Untouched a good
Two years after you went.
Some things passed in the settlement;
Some things slipped away. Enough’s left
That I come back sometimes. The theft
And vandalism were our own.
Maybe we should have known.
The questions:
- Identify tone and tonal shift of each poem. Make sure you quote specific passages of each poem in order to provide evidence.
- What is the lyric moment of each poem? What epiphany does the speaker have in each poem?
- Compare and contrast the two poems. How are the topics, tones, and lyric moments similar? How are they different?
- The author of these poems was an early writer of what’s called “confessional poetry,” in which the “I” in the poem is very often the poet himself/herself. It involves writing not about what’s going on in the world but what’s going on in the heart and mind of the poet. What can you infer about the author if we assume that the “I” in each poem is the poet himself?
These are somewhat tricky poems. “Momentos, 1” has a couple of tones in the first part of the poem that are then echoed in mutated form in the second half.
“A Locked House” uses a long, extended metaphor that, being a metaphor, is never expressly explicated. Experienced readers immediately see that the house is a metaphor for the speaker’s and his wife’s marriage, but thirteen-year-olds don’t always see that at first.
At a Loss
There are some times in my classroom that I am positively at a loss, that I am standing there, looking at what just happened, listening to what's being said, watching what's going on, and I find myself wondering, "What in the world do I do about this?" I've been in the classroom for almost twenty years now, and I've come to realize that I will always -- always -- have these moments.
Last week, for example, in order to load a document I wanted the students to view on the projector, I turned my back on my most challenging class -- challenging in that they are, by and large, not motivated and therefore not inclined to behave in a manner that produces the most efficient use of our limited class time -- and in the few seconds that I had my back turned, this happened.
This, in fact, is a photo after I kicked some of the papers into a more consolidated pile.
Apparently, in a matter of seconds, a boy who sits in the back of the room stood up, ran to the front of the room, grabbed a girl's binder, ran back to the back of the room, and emptied its contents on the floor with the girl in heated pursuit. This girl is not very popular, and she has a habit of antagonizing everyone around her and then playing the victim. In this case, though, she was the victim, but that didn't stop the kids from hooting in approval at the boy's actions.
I called them down; they stopped after a few seconds; and I didn't have the slightest clue what to do. I removed them both from the classroom, but that's hardly a preventative measure for the next time the kid gets an impulse to do something like this. Truth be told, the boy can be more antagonistic and disruptive among his peers as the girl.
These are thirteen-year-old kids. They're not two or three. Yet their behavior belies their age, because this sort of thing happens so frequently. If it was a one-time occurrence, it would just be a question of youthful hi-jinks, but something similar happens on a regular basis, and I never really know what to do to prevent it.
Lost Stars
E and I were lying on the bed in the master bedroom, reading. He always gets a book from school for his daily reading log, and often the book is leveled just right for reading with a parent: a few words he knows, enough short words that he can sound out, and a few words that he needs a lot of help with. Always a refrain of sorts, something easily remembered that he can just repeat.
Today’s book: My Dad and I.
We made it through the book, which was about all the things the narrator’s dad teaches him to do and all the things he teaches his dad to do, and E began teaching me about his star behavior system in school. Of course I knew all about it: I just had a conference with his teacher a few weeks ago, and we get a daily report about how many stars he ended the day with. But of course I let him explain it.
“We start with three stars, and if we do something wrong, we lose a star.” He paused, then added, “I haven’t lost a star yet this year.”
What will he do when he loses a star?
Updated B
The Girl got her report card today, and much to her surprise, she didn’t get that B. Turns out it was on the second quarter reporting period — which means she has a hole to dig herself out of. But at least the streak remains.