fun in threes, sometimes fours
education and teaching
First day back of the new semester. Being with the kids again reminds me of why I continue teaching: it's an incredible feeling to realize my job is simply to help a bunch of really great kids. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not. Were there some magnificent moments? Of course there were.
Could I have used another few days of break? Of course I could -- but not from the kids. Not from the kids. From the paperwork, meetings, and bureaucracy.
Today was our first day back in the building. It was, mercifully, a teacher workday. It's a good way to begin the new semester: I had time to do some serious planning in the morning, and I worked with the Special Ed teacher who co-teaches one of my classes to figure out some effective ways of simplifying a terrorizing, difficult text that's in our textbook. That's how I spent my morning. I could have used the afternoon to prepare some of the materials we'd planned on using and to create some differentiated (i.e., simplified) versions for some of my students who are still learning English. (I've got seven students in one class alone who speak very limited English, including one who speaks almost no English. She needs a specialized English class for absolute beginners, not anything I can give her. But I'll be damned if someone is going to be in my class and not learn something, so I make special mini-lessons for her that I squeeze in here and there. Otherwise, she works on Rosetta Stone.) Still, we didn't have that time.
Instead, we had a Clifton Strengths Finder session. Earlier in the year, we were asked required to take a survey to help find our strengths. Each question had two activities and you were to pick which one you preferred and to which degree, and there was a neutral option in the middle. For example, it might be something like this:
Imagine it's time for dinner. What are you more likely to do: pick the restaurant or decide to stay home? What an idiotic question! It depends. How tired is my wife? How tired am I? How much money do we have? What do we have in the refrigerator? What time is it? What plans do we have after dinner? I picked neutral.
Another one: Imagine you're speaking to community leaders. Are you the "let's get started now" type or the "No, I don't eve want to do that" type? Again, that depends. What am I talking about? How long am I expected to speak? To what end am I giving this speech? Do I even support the cause? Is this something likely to affect change or am I just a figurehead speaker? I picked neutral.
A third example: Imagine your boss asks you to work on a big project. Are you a big picture person or do you need details? Once again, it depends. What is this project? Do I feel it's in my scope of expertise? Will I be working on this alone or with a group? If it's with a group, what role will I be playing? What is the timeframe for this project? What is the budget? I picked neutral.
A final example: Imagine you're receiving an award. Would you want individual recognition or would you insist on recognition of the team effort. Bet you can guess where I'm going with this one: it depends, damnit.
Almost every one of the questions was like this. I picked "Neutral" over and over and over -- for most of the 190 questions. (Yes, 190 questions. Are these people insane? Does district administration think I have nothing better to do with my time than read 190 poorly-conceptualized questions?)
Just before break, I got an email from the district office politely requesting me to take the survey. I did take the survey. We don't have your data results. (New Year's Resolution: I am so sick of hearing the word "data" that I have sworn I will not use it myself at all in 2025. I hate that word now, oh how I detest it.) Well, I know I took it. But we don't have your results -- the session won't be as meaningful for you if you don't take the survey.
When I logged back in, I saw a message: "We were unable to tabulate your survey because you selected 'Neutral' too frequently." Well, that's what I get for thinking. I explained this in yet another email. Can you please take the survey again? Fine, I'll take the survey.
For probably 175 of the 190 questions, I randomly chose any of the options other than "Neutral." In fact, if I'd thought about it, I would have had one of my students come in during planning and pick them randomly for me: it was such a hassle because the survey software was so poorly programmed. Sometimes the "Submit" button worked the first time, sometimes I had to click it twice. Still, for about 15 of the questions, something caught my eye in the wording or the responses, and I actually answered those questions truthfully.
Today, we got those results back. Strangely and somewhat unexpectedly, the test results put my four top strengths as just the ones I'd choose for myself. Two thoughts about this: first, how did it do that? It was literally 92% random selections. Second: why did I spend all that time taking a survey when I already knew what the results would be?! I could have looked at this chart and told you most of my strengths would lie in the "Strategic Thinking" block, and four of my five "strengths" were in that quadrant. The only outlier was one in executing: I have a "restorative" strength -- I like to fix stuff and solve problems. No, I don't. I don't at all. I prefer to think things through carefully and avoid the damn problems in the first place. That's my priority.
This is one of the biggest contemporary frustrations with teaching, and it seems to be nationwide: the powers that be require us to waste so much time on just such things as today's nonsense.
Everyone has returned home; K returns to work tomorrow -- the 2024 holiday season is over. The timeless magical period of Wigilia and Christmas and all the time preparing for it disappears, and the worries that for a few days we put out of our minds come crowding back in.
I woke up this morning thinking of school. The students are great -- the best group I've had in years. The amount of micro-managing and mindless paperwork has increase so much over the last two years that it has me dreading a return. I'm left in a stressful quandary:
It's a difficult decision that I'll have to make very soon, and it entails a conversation with my school's administration that I don't really anticipate gleefully.
L is still recovering from surgery. It will take a couple of weeks. It's still stressful to us all, though. It's "Worry 2" instead of "Worry 1" because we know it's temporary. She'll recover; she'll be able to breath better; her sinuses won't be giving her constant headaches. So it's a short-term worry -- hence, "Worry 2." But it's our daughter we're worried about: even when it's a seemingly unfounded worry, we can't just shake it off.
We have a leak in our roof. It might be under warranty from the company that replaced our roof a few years ago; it might not be. We won't know until the company comes out and looks at it. But we've been on the list for over a week now. It took them forever to start the work in the first place. I'm not confident we'll see anyone here for a long time.
And it's supposed to start raining tomorrow afternoon and rain through the weekend.
I've got it tarped, but not sufficiently for a heavy rain. The location of the leak and the shape of our roof make it difficult to tarp. And we have no idea how long this will last.
Do we just call another company and take the hit?
Do we call insurance (they suggested calling the company that replaced it in the first place -- a company the insurance adjuster had recommended, for the wrote our current roof)?
We have elected as president a narcissist who's a convicted felon who tried to retain power by overthrowing the democratic process, a man who is, in every possible sense of the idea, completely unfit for the office. And some very worrying people will likely have an influence on him. People like Curtis Yarvin:
Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America. (The Guardian)
When Trump takes office in a few weeks, it could conceivably lead to the end of America as we know it. Sure, the Republicans said the same things about Biden, but those fears were based on baseless conspiracy theories and good-old-fashioned hate-mongering. The people surrounding Trump aren't being conspiratorial about anything: they're saying it all aloud. They're not holding their cards close: they've laid them all out with the Project 2025 manifesto and rhetoric people like Yarvin are saying.
Given the post-election period and Trump’s preparation for a return to the White House, Yarvin’s program seems less fanciful then it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.
In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.
Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to – age-old move – gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully”, adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”
Yarvin responded: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” adding: “You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.”
Yarvin continued: “You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’”
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to carry out a wide array of anti-democratic or authoritarian moves, and effectively ran on these promises. Trump has suggested he might declare a state of emergency in response to America’s immigration crisis.
Trump also promised to pursue retribution on individually named antagonists like representative Nancy Pelosi and senator-elect Adam Schiff, and spoke more broadly about dispatching the US military to deal with “the enemy within”.
Later in the recording, Yarvin said that after a hypothetical authoritarian president was inaugurated in January, “you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past since perhaps the start of April”. Later expanding on the idea with “the idea that you’re going to be a Caesar and take power and operate with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd.”
“Machiavelli could tell you right away that that’s a stupid idea,” Yarvin added. (The Guardian)
This is, of course, a worry that leaves me thinking, "This is all out of my hands -- I can do nothing about it," and yet. And yet...
So when the holidays are over, it's not just a return to "normal" life. It's that with a few additional stressors (not even all mentioned here) thrown in. We'll get through it all, but it doesn't diminish the stress levels.
Every now and then, a student will challenge me to a chess game with much braggadocio and bravado.
"I'm going to beat you so bad, Mr. Scott!" comes the claim. "You don't stand a chance."
My response is usually simple: "Perhaps." There are plenty of thirteen-year-old chess players in the world (probably in the county) who could, indeed, thrash me. When facing an opponent for the first time, I prefer humility. Usually.
What I was thinking, though, was anything but humble: "Perhaps. But remember, young one, I have worked with you for quite some time now. I know how you think. I know your critical thinking abilities. I know how much patience you have (or in this case, don't have). I know how easily (or not) you make connections between seemingly disparate passages of the text. I know how well you infer. Very strong chess players do all these things better than the average person; you do most of these at about an average (or even below average) level. Also, to beat me, you'll need to know chess theory better than I do, which requires study and focus -- two things you don't always excel at. Therefore, taking all of this into consideration, it's highly unlikely that you will beat me."
Now, thinking all these things, I often just play along with the trash talk: "Buddy, I'm going to kick you so hard your grandmother is going to feel it." The most brutal trash talk I do is when, after a couple of moves, I just give the player my queen. "I won't be needing that." Among those who have a basic understanding of chess, this always elicits hoots and laughs. One student might run over to someone not watching the game and recount excitedly what I just did.
I thought about that today as students in my last period class struggled mightily with making claims for an argumentative writing assignment with which we're concluding the semester. I thought I'd set everything up perfectly for them to see some connections that would lead to good claims. We were annotating the text for things illustrating the narrator's family's poverty and the acts of kindness they perform and in turn receive. I made sure students saw two passages:
Here we have two acts of kindness that directly contribute to the family's survival. Yet none of the students could make the connections and inferences necessary to come up with a simple claim about this: "The family receives basic needs from the actions of others."
The co-teacher in the class, seeing the same problem, started searching online for some sentence stems to help them with their claims. When working with struggling students, sentence stems (also known as frames) help students orient their thinking and direct their writing.
"Since claims can be so varied," I told her, "I doubt you'll find much." She's a great special education teacher and a real advocate for all students: she didn't give up. Still, she found nothing.
"I just don't know how to teach these kids such basic critical thinking skills," I said. I've tried logic puzzles and similar ideas, but I'm just not good at that. I feel that's teaching skills (inferring, categorizing, comparing/contrasting) that most kids have learned years ago. It's something an elementary teacher would be trained to teach. Not someone who studied secondary education.
It's from classes like this that the "I'm going to beat you badly!" chess claims emerge. One such kid kept bragging while I set up pieces, and he put his class materials away. He sat down across from me and said, "Okay, so how do you play this game?"
Sept 19, 2017
Our state is no longer using the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment that it has used since I first began teaching in South Carolina over a decade ago. The test was a nationally-normed test that provided teachers with a wealth of useful data about kids' skills and abilities. And since it was nationally normed, it provided a broad overview for parents (and teachers) about where an individual child was nationally in relation to the rest of his peers.
As a teacher, I was able, at a glance, to see what a student needed. If the national normal for eighth graders in the fall was 220 points, I knew that a kid scoring 210 was fairly far behind the norm, and a kid reading below 200 was reading at something like a first grade level.
Then last year, a funny thing happened: it was announced that the national norm for eighth graders had been re-established at 218. This was the former norm for seventh graders. This suggests that as a nation, we've dropped a little over the last decade.
What can the state do about this? It reflects so badly on our schools that we must do something. What do we do? Get serious about holding back students who don't master content? Implement a serious, statewide program to deal with the behavior problems that correlate (and likely significantly contribute to) this decline? Budget more money to decrease class size?
None of these things. Instead, they dumped the test. The test is showing results we don't like, so what do we do? We stop using that test. Easy -- problem solved.
One key skill a good reader consistently employs is the simple cognitive act of connecting what she's reading to what she already knows. "Connect to Background Knowledge" says the teacher's poster of effective readers' skills. When talking to the district language arts coordinator about skills our students are lacking, this was one that the three eighth-grade English teachers agreed was one of the most critical and yet most lacking skills.
"I remember sitting with my family when I was their age," I said, "watching the local news at six and the national news at six thirty." I knew about current events and how they were connected to previous events as a result. I knew about Chernobyl as it was happening (with of course the Soviet propaganda delay taken into account). I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall in almost real-time. I knew about the Tiananmen Square massacre because Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather told me about these events. I was, therefore, constantly building new background knowledge.
"Why don't we get back to watching the CNN Kids news to remedy this?" the ELA coordinator suggested. We all thought it might be a good idea and decided to talk to the social studies teachers about why they weren't doing it anymore.
I should have guessed why.
"There was just too much pushback from parents," a social studies teacher explained. "This one is mad about the network choice. 'Why CNN and not another news station?'" Never mind for a moment that no other media outlets produce, to my knowledge, the equivalent. "They would say stuff like, 'Why are you showing our kids liberal propaganda?' And then there were those on the other side who felt it was too conservative."
"How about telling the parents, 'Well, that sounds like an excellent conversation to have tonight at the dinner table,'" I suggested.
"Have you checked your messages lately?" the co-teacher who works with me during seventh period asked when she came in.
"Nope." But I was curious. So while I walked back to my desk to enter roll, I checked my phone. There was a message on a group chat.
I couldn't help it. I just started laughing. Howling, in fact.
"Mr. S?! What happened?" several students asked. While I'm not a "don't smile before Christmas" type of teacher, I rarely find myself simply laughing so hard it's difficult to control myself, but when your world suddenly goes from absurd to Czech-film absurd, there's no other reaction possible:
That's right -- the state board of education is voting on whether or not to ban the textbook our district adopted.
Now, as absurd as that sounds, it's not entirely the school board's fault. The new state law allows any South Carolina citizen to challenge any book that's currently used in any school in the state. So some parent found something in the textbook that she didn't like and lodged a formal complaint. According to the state regulations (as I understand them), that sets in motion the whole process of reviewing a book and then voting on its status.
At the end of the day, I added my own thoughts: Mississippi, look out! South Carolina is hell-bent on making to the bottom of the education ladder. Then as students were dismissing, the chat picked up again:
Why would I want this? Because perhaps that would shake up enough people that many would finally start campaigning against this absurd new policy. Were the book to be banned, that's literally millions of dollars down the drain.
"We as taxpayers should consider a class-action lawsuit if that happens," the science teacher suggested. I don't even know if that's possible, but it's a lovely thought.
In the end, I don't think it will get banned, for the fiscal reasons outlined above. But it did get me thinking: if I were a retiree living in close proximity (say, a thirty- or so minute drive to Columbia), I would challenge books on a weekly basis. I would challenge elementary school books, middle school books, high school books. Before one challenge got resolved, I would lodge another. I would make it my personal mission to gum up the system so much that the school board itself would regret the legislation and push back against it.
Every morning I have hall duty in the arts wing. On one side is the band; on the other, strings. I walk back and forth between the two, listening to a beautiful cacophony of kids learning music.
A young lady is practicing her violin part. I recognize the melody.
"Do you know what that is? Who wrote it? What it's called?" I ask with a smile. The boy standing with her is one of my favorite students, but I don't teach him. He's on a team down the hall, but he's a sweet young man who smiles a lot and is friendly with everyone, so we've chat a little almost every morning. He glances at the sheet music at the same time she does. I beat them to it, though.
"Edvard Grieg. It's called In the Hall of the Mountain King." One of those pieces we all recognize from this or that film or advertisement, but few can identify by name. "Bet you didn't expect an English teacher to know that, did you?" I laugh. They both agree it was unexpected, then go back to practicing.
We received a text this morning about some visitors to our school: we would be having district personnel touring, and they are not paying attention to us teachers; they're looking for what students are doing. In other words, no need to talk to them or anything. I got admittedly a bit snarky and replied,
Usually, when someone on the group text makes a comment everyone likes, hearts and thumbs-up start bouncing all over the place. For this -- nothing. Several teachers later said they appreciated my text, but no one felt comfortable expressing it in a way that everyone could see it. I think that speaks to the overall feeling that seems to be sitting like a low, heavy fog, and if I were to guess, I'd say it's not just our school.
Of course, the district personnel come to my classroom. The first one comes accompanied by our principal. Did he guide her here? As soon as they leave, another administrator brings another district person to our classroom.
It was a good day to visit, truth be told. The kids are having a Socratic Seminar -- one of their favorite activities. After we'd watched a bit of Harvest of Shame yesterday in preparation for our unit on immigration stories, we transitioned to Harvest of Shame Revisited -- a 2010 return to the topic of conditions migrant farm workers face. The common question on the viewing guide was the same: "Why do these folks earn so little money?" So this morning, I decided to change plans. We discussed that. In a limited way. In a South Carolina way.
All the kids discussed how we could do this or do that, but the bottom line was that all their ideas cost money. "Who's going to pay?" I pointed out there are a couple of sources, but one is we, the people. "They get paid so little because we want cheap food." That's true enough, and it led to the discussion I was intending about the necessity sometimes to sacrifice for the good of others.
Left out of the discussion -- the elephant in the room for some perhaps -- was the exorbitant salaries of CEOs. Where does that money come from? It can come from the consumers, but it can (many say should) also come from reduced CEO salaries or increased taxes on those earning at that level.
But this is South Carolina. And that is socialism. Not really, but it's going to be labeled Socialism (always with the capital letter) in many South Carolina homes. And that's at least part of the reason I didn't even bring that up.
Truth be told, the fact that it might raise some parents' dander is only part of the reason. To cover this well, I'd need to get a couple of articles for the kids to read about CEO wages compared to employee wages, and this was a spontaneous lesson. I'd decided to do it only this morning after reading yesterday's responses. But I do take that ugly s-word into consideration.
Such is teaching in South Carolina.
I've been reticent to force my own teaching methods and ideas on our kids. L turned out to be a good writer without my help, but E has been struggling a bit. Still, offers of help but nothing more.
Today, he asked for help with his essay. I showed him how I have my students plan and organize their writing, and he found the technique simple and useful. He went upstairs and rewrote his entire essay using my method.
"The essay is so much better!" he gushed.
"That and the fact that you spent two hours in the evening working on it are things you can be really proud of," I replied.
"Thank you."
I've always oved that about the Boy: when you complement him, he quietly and modestly thanks you for the complement. It has always made me smile.
Tuesday has very little going for it. It doesn't have the unambiguous "you have to get through it" feeling of Monday. It's not hump day. It's not Thursday (a.k.a. almost Friday). And of course, it's not Friday. But Tuesdays this year are even more intolerable because of our Collaborative Team Meeting. A weekly mandatory meeting, it's as bad as it sounds. Occasionally, we get something useful from it, but like so many things these days in education, it just has the feeling of being a report mill for the higher-ups (who usually make two, three, four, or more times the average teacher's salary) so they can justify their job.
It's often a day for giving a test. I would have said "A day for testing," but "testing" now has connotations of standardized testing, and the increase in standardized testing is one reason so many of us are trying not to give tests of our own as much as possible. After all, how much can these kids be tested?
"Why not just use all the tests you have to administer for the district as grades?" Today, for example, we went over our benchmark scores. The benchmark, according to the powers that be, is supposed to be an accurate reflection of the degree to which the students have mastered the standards we are to teach in a given quarter. The only problem: they always include questions from other standards which we are to teach in other quarters!
"How is that a benchmark?" I asked one of our leadership team (another useful bit of jargon).
"Well, it's also predictive," came the response.
Predictive of what? I don't need a test to tell me how well the students are going to do on a standard I haven't even covered yet.
And the questions themselves -- so often a jumble of confusion. We went over one question today (they are allowing us to see isolated questions this year, but only when they were projected on a screen without us taking pictures or copying it in any way -- profits over the kids!), and I had trouble making sense of how they were even supposed to answer it, let alone which was the correct answer.
"If I am struggling to make sense of the question, what chance do my students have?" I asked.
"Let's focus on the things in our control," came the reply.
When you start your day of with that kind of a meeting, it's a challenge to regain a positive footing when the kids start coming into the classroom. And had it been last year's kids that came in after such a meeting, I would have stood by the door as the students entered and daydreamed about simply walking to the front office and saying, "Someone better get in my room -- there's no adult there, and I'm not coming back."
But this year, I have such wonderful kids. Sure, some are disruptive and a little argumentative. Many are immature. Several are chronically lazy. But there's not a kid about whom I could say, when he's absent, "Well, thank the heavens for small mercies." There's not a kid that I just dread working with because I know she's going to turn every single thing into a confrontation and make me thing it would be more productive to bang my head against the cinder block wall for the entirety of the period than to work with that kid. And trust me -- I've taught plenty of kids like that. But this year, not a one.
So it's easy to reign in the frustrations of a meeting and put on a positive face when such a great group of kids comes in. But it makes all the uselessness of all bureaucratic nonsense all the more acute.