fun in threes, sometimes fours
education and teaching
Reading eighth-graders' journals is like jumping in a time machine: all the angst, all the broken hearts, all the frustration with school. I see myself a thousand times over. Bored with this. Frustrated about that. Irritated with him. In love with her.
"Nothing new under the sun."
They'll find this out for themselves. But when I leave comments in their journal, how can I say this without being dismissive? It's a fine line.
Returning to school as a student was always something of a mix. There was a little relief because, let's face it: free time can get a little boring when you're a teen. At the same time, there was the return to dreaded classes and dreaded teachers. There were classes we didn't feel were worth our time (sometimes rightly, often not), but this was not the real problem.
The true problem was in the personnel: the teachers.
Though they were few, there were teachers gifted at turning interesting subject matter into drudgery because of their inability to share their enthusiasm or (probably more likely) their complete lack of enthusiasm. Such teachers often complained about the end of break, relied heavily on sarcasm in their interactions with students, and generally made no effort to hide the fact that they really didn't want to be there, that they really didn't enjoy working with us, and that, given any other options, they would choose just about any job over being a teacher. (This is certainly not to say that any teacher who complains about the end of a break or uses sarcasm is such a teacher.)
Those were the classes we endured when going back to school after a break. Was it best to have such a teacher first period, fourth period, or seventh? That was the only question. First period meant getting the dreaded class over with from the beginning. Seventh period meant capping a potentially great day with a sure disaster. Fourth was always good for me: not early enough to put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day and not late enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth before heading home.
I know there are still teachers like that. I suspect that if I snooped around a bit, I'd find one or two in my own school. Most teachers would say the same of their schools, I'm sure.
For such teachers, being in class is just as much drudgery as it is for the students. Neither wants to be there; all are counting the minutes to the end of the class. Such teachers drag themselves out of bed every morning and breathe a sigh of relief when the day is done. And so the first day back for them is sheer torture. It's a return to work.
Along the lines of the old adage, I've never worked a day in my life as long as I've been employed in education. Going back to school today was a pleasure. Indeed, I couldn't get to sleep for the excitement last night of trying some new lessons in old units. I walked down the hall this morning with an enormous smile on my face, and I greeted everyone -- students, teachers, administrators -- with a genuinely goofy cheerfulness. I told students that I'd missed them, that I'd been looking forward to returning, that I was a little bored without working with them.
Perhaps this helps explain why I have no behavior issues in my classroom beyond the talkative nature of thirteen-year-olds.
My English 1 Honors class is about to start the Odyssey. For their weekly short essay assignment, I asked about heroes and heroism. Commenting on the usual association of "hero" with super powers, one student wrote the following:
In fact in the real world having superpowers would make you a villain sooner than it would a hero because though the idea of superheroes saving the world on a regular basis is nice and all, name one superpower and there are probably more than ten different ways to exploit it for personal gain and in a world where “look out for number one” is a personal motto for most of the world it is no long shot that with real superpowers there would be more villains than heroes in the world.
Getting these kinds of results is a real boost: such potential in this kid's writing. The problems are purely cosmetic: nothing a few mini-lessons on sentence variation, punctuation, and voice can't buff out.
Bonnie Davis writes in How to Teach Students Who Don't Look Like You,
In searching for the causes of the achievement gap, [Haycock] and her research colleagues ask adults why there is a gap. They hear comments from educators that the children are too poor, the parents don't care, and they come to school hungry. The reasons, she adds, are always about the children and their families. Yet, when she talks to the students, she hears different reasons. Students talk about teachers who do not know their subject matter, counselors who underestimate their potential and misplace them, administrators who dismiss their concerns, and a curriculum and expectations that are so low level that students are bored.
I'm curious about the methods of this study. Were teachers simply asked to share their assumptions, with researchers later collating and categorizing them? Or was there a questionnaire? Either way, there is an element of interpretation necessitated by such research that might make it far from objective.
I'm particularly curious about the claim that students find the curriculum so low-level that they're bored. I don't doubt their claim to be bored, but I'm skeptical about the cause of that boredom.
In my own classroom experience, I've found the state-mandated curriculum to be too challenging for many of the students placed in on-level classes (students who, generally, actually read two to three grade levels lower than their actual grade). I often feel my expectations are too high.
But is this why children are bored in the classroom? Is there a societal element? I believe there is. Contemporary entertainment media -- games, television, the Internet -- have taught students to expect short, entertaining bites of information.
The question is obvious: are we competing with the new media?
We might be in competition for students' attention, but to that I'm tempted to say, "Well, that's at least equally the students', parents' and teachers' fault." I agree that teachers should be interesting and engaging, but the point of the classroom is not entertainment, and the defining criterion of an effective twenty-first century teacher should not be their ability to entertain students.
We began a new unit on Nightjohn and literacy in the English Studies class today. Just as the students were starting the kick-off, which was to answer the essential question, "How does literacy change lives?", I had remembered William Meredith's "The Illiterate." It's always been one of my favorites, a sonnet that takes all the rules about sonnets and bends them slightly. Cursing (internally only), I was frustrated that I hadn't thought of it earlier. It was one of those moments where the teaching-as-an-art kicked in. I thought about it for a moment, Googled the title, and, finding it available online, decided to improvise.
I thought I'd try a technique I'd learned at the South Carolina Middle School conference at Myrtle Beach last year, but not having printed copies, I had to improvise.
I projected the poem on the whiteboard and read it aloud to the students.
The Illiterate
By William Meredith
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
"Turn to a partner," I said when I finished, "and select the five to eight most important words in the poem." As they finished up, we went though the poem line by line, and I circled important words students called out from behind me. In the end, with a few suggestions from me, it looked something like this:
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
"That's more than five to eight words," one student pointed out.
"True, but this was what I was aiming for in the long run, so it worked out well."
I read the poem again, and then we talked about its meaning based on the highlighted words. They quickly saw that the letter contains three options: riches, sadness, and love. We jumped to the last line and reread it.
"Turn back to your partner and come up with three words that might describe his "feeling for the words that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved." The responses were varied, as I'd hoped:
We went back to the poem once more, and I led them to see that the  majority of the poem is an extended simile to explain the poets feeling when touching the unnamed subject's goodness.
Turning it back to the essential question, I had students write in their journal how literacy would change the narrator's life. We shared a few, then moved on to the next portion of the anticipatory lesson for Nightjohn.
As I write this, though, it occurs to me that I missed a significant portion of the potential power of the improvised activity. The narrator is not illiterate in the literal sense of the word (pun not intended). He is, however, illiterate. It might have been worthwhile to see if the kids could pick up on the emotional illiteracy that the poem is expressing.
Still, not bad for ninety seconds of planning and another sixty seconds of preparation.
I sit quietly, looking at the long list of assignments upon which the professor will be basing our grade. Thinking of all my other obligations, I find myself wondering if I'll survive the next few months.
And I am pleased with that.
Being a teacher without being a student on a regular basis is about like being a mechanic who never drives. It's one thing to "dish it out." It's another to take it.
To see the classroom from both sides of the desk is to ensure reasonable expectations from one's own students.
The first week of school is behind us. A hectic week of bureaucracy and smiles. The former comes from all the forms and materials we distribute to students and then take back up almost immediately. "Bring this back before the end of the first week!" The latter comes from my yearly effort to be genuinely friendly.
There's an old saying -- advice to new teachers, really -- that a teacher should never smile before Christmas. By the end of every school year, I'm so frustrated with my failures in dealing with this or that disruptive or disrespectful (somewhat synonymous in many ways) student that I promise myself that next year I will be a rock until Christmas. I will lay down the law and accept no compromise. I will be a drill instructor. I will pound them into submission and then convince them I'm a decent and nice guy.
Yet summer wanes, my planning progresses, and I inevitably turn my thoughts to what I want to do during the first days of school. And it occurs to me that I would most definitely not like to be beaten into submission as an initial experience with anyone. It would be hard to overcome the negative feelings such a first impression would create.
So when the first day of school arrives, I begin again to walk the ever-wiggling line between being a kind authoritative and devolving into a kind permissive teacher. Students might find the first overbearing at times but have a general faith -- now and in the future -- that all was done for their best; students find the second to be a favorite teacher while in middle school, only to look back on the teacher as one who was "nice but didn't teach us much."
Last week -- the first week back -- was the honeymoon period. The real test now begins. The sad thing is, I already have my eye on one or two that I believe will be major problems before the end of the first quarter. If I can work effectively with students and keep it only to one or two, it will be a great success.
The summer’s end nears. Morning temperatures are back in the lower seventies, and we return to eating breakfast on the deck occasionally. Bagels for us all, but the Girl prefers to dip hers in maple syrup. In a sense, it’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.
Here in the south, the end of summer is about the only time we can go outside and play comfortably. In July, it’s still 90 degrees as the sun sets. We try to head out sometimes for a little outdoor time, but no one wants to melt.
Still, there are options. And does it ever bring back memories: a few minutes of running through misted water on a hot summer afternoon was my idea of paradise when I was a kid. A few overlapping garbage bags fastened to the ground with whatever one could find would sometimes serve as a slide, though never for too long. Since we don’t have a sprinkler (they’ve all broken), L has somewhat limited options. It’s more fun for me, though.
The last of the crape myrtle blossoms begin falling.
And in this end is my beginning: a new school year both sparkles and looms.
Do much course work in education and you’ll soon find yourself covering some of the same names in various classes: Piaget, Vygotsky, Erikson, Binet, Skinner, Kohlberg, and the list goes on.
It’s frustrating to cover the same material in course after course, but the advantage is that it sits solidly in your head, and you find yourself thinking about it at the oddest times.
For example, L and I sit down to play chess. Our chess is usually random motions of random pieces, but instructive all the same: she learns that we take turns, and that the object of the game is to defeat your opponent by taking pieces. It’s fun, but her attention span usually only last a few minutes before it’s time to have “tea” or feed her baby or any number of other priorities.
Today, we try something new. I tell her I’m going to set up pieces on my end of the board, and she needs to try to copy them on her end. A real challenge, to be sure. It is quite taxing on her spacial intelligence, for I am asking her to create a mirror image, which requires quite a bit of mental spacial manipulation.
I think of Piaget and Erikson — does she have the mental development for the task at hand. Technically, those gentlemen would probably say, “No.”
“She’s still at the very beginning of the preoperational state,” Piaget says.
Forget ed psych — let’s have some challenging fun.
The beginning is slow, and it takes her a good ten minutes to figure out that she’s supposed to be mirroring my pieces. But she puts everything together slowly, and it’s obvious she can do it.
More importantly, Â she loves it. And I figure it must be in her “zone of proximal development,” for she’s having great difficulty, but slowly she’s mastering it.
“Let’s do it again!”
And so we do it many times. Each time, I alter the order in which I put the pieces on the board. First one pawn, then the other, then a knight and bishop beside each other before moving to the other side. Sometimes a mix of major pieces and pawns.
Toward the end, I give her the real challenge: most of the major pieces and some of the pawns are on the board when I tell her, “Figure it out.”
She looks at my pieces, looks at her own, back at mine, and suddenly, in a flash, her side of the board is perfect.
Once we get the piece positioning down, we’ll start learning how the pawns move.
I first arrived in Poland in June 1996. I stayed until June 1998, when I went home for the summer before returning for a third year. In 2000, I went back to Poland for a week. In 2001, I moved back to Poland to teach English, returning to the States for the summer of 2002. K and I left for American in 2005 and made our first return visit in 2008. Now it's 2010, and I'm back in Poland for the fourth, maybe fifth time. Each time I arrive, one of the highlights has always been the unexpected encounter with former students.
Even when I lived here, I would bump into kids I hadn't seen in a couple of years (by then, adults), and we would chat a bit. It's great to see what your efforts have led to. Not all of them use English on a regular basis, but some do. Several of my students became English teachers (four that I can think of). A couple of them used English to communicate with the individual who would eventually become his/her spouse. Several of them worked abroad and used English with their employers.
During our return of 2008, I met at least ten former students. I bumped into four or five at a folk festival. One or two worked in shops that I visited. One married the son of a neighbor of my in-law's. I met a few at the Wednesday market in Jablonka. Each time, it was the same conversation: what they're doing; what I'm doing; plans for the future. Maybe a word or two about this or that amusing incident that happened in class years ago.
This year, I've met one, and only in passing, literally: he was in a car, I was on foot with the family. And that stands to reason: the kids I taught during my first three years are now in their late-twenties or early thirties. They have families of their own, and most likely they have achieved their wish of moving out of the village. I've heard as much about a few. The kids that I taught during my second stint in Poland are now in their early- to mid-twenties. They're done with college, possibly married, with new worries and new passions.
I walk down the street now and see young, new faces. I search the features for a similarity -- perhaps he or she is a younger sibling of this or that student. Very unlikely, I realize, but I only recently realized why it's so unlikely. The kids who are now in high school, whom I would now be teaching, were only newborns when I first arrived. At most, they were two or three years old.
It's a different world.
K has noted the same thing. "I go into the shops," she told a friend, "And every single face behind the counter is new." The teenagers have grown up, moved on, and miraculously, others have filled their spots.
It's really the curse of being a teacher: I stand still in time. I remain with one of the twelve milestones of one's life, and I get older while the kids get relatively younger.
It's also the surprise of the passing of time. Once, we all thought we were ageless, possessors of infinite youth and endless energy. As adults, we go back to a spot where we felt that invincibility, and though we shouldn't be, we're surprised that nothing is the same, either with ourselves or with the environment itself.
Naturally, in noting all of this, I'm saying nothing new. Heraclitus discussed it 2,500 years ago, using his famous "never see the same river twice" metaphor to illustrate the centrality of change in the universe. Perhaps part of the nature of change is its sensitiveness. We don't even realize it's happened until we return to one of the poles of our lives that serve to solidify and give meaning to our lives, and then we see how much the world -- including us -- has grown.