education and teaching

Teaching to Share

Wednesday 10 February 2010 | 0 Comments

We've been teaching the Girl to share. With no siblings, she's fairly accustomed to having all her toys all to herself. Yet sharing is not something you can force or even teach like tying a shoe. It's something in which she needs to see the intrinsic value herself. And the only way to convey that -- the joy of sharing, you could call it -- is to model it.

"Here, Mama. Would you like some of my cake?" I ask K. She has a slice herself, but she gladly accepts. We smile, but they're genuine smiles: it's amusing, the whole process, and it's difficult to do it with a straight face.

L is beginning to catch on. The other day, she brought me a bit of candy she'd tried, saying, "Tata, I'm sharing this with you. I don't like it."

Cat Gut

Wednesday 03 February 2010 | 0 Comments

“Mr. Scott, is it true that chewing gum is made out of cat guts?”

The question floated up in the midst of a quiet, productive moment. It was, in a word, a gift.

“Of course,” I answered, deadpan. “What else would it be made out of?” I was wondering how long I could keep the straight face.

“Really?” She wasn’t buying it, and quite frankly, she shouldn’t have: I’m a bad liar.

“Seriously.”

A pause as she searched my face for some sign of deceit.

“Would I lie to you?” I asked, still holding the straight face.

“Yes!” she laughed.

At that moment, a young man seated behind me stood up, marched to the garbage can, and violently spat out his gum.

That question was a gift, I tell you.

January Reads

Tuesday 02 February 2010 | 2 Comments

I have decided to complete the "52 Books in 52 Weeks" challenge. I shouldn't be much of a challenge at all, given the amount I read for the classes I teach and the fact I'll be starting grad school (again) shortly. Still, I thought for a year I'd keep track of everything I'd read, regardless of the reason or, for that matter, the "quality."

January's list was varied, to say the least:

Author	Book
Dean Hamer	The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes
Bart Ehrman	God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer
Robert Baer	The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower
Bel Kaufman	Up the Down Staircase¹
Paul Langan	Shattered ^{2, 3}
Paul Langan and D. M. Blackwel	Blood is Thicker^{2, 3}
Anne Schraff	Someone to Love Me^{2, 3}
Anne Schraff	Until We Meet Again^{2, 3}

The Bluford books really shouldn't count, I tell myself. They were something I read because some students were reading them. At the same time, I learned a great deal from them.

The series is aimed at African American students, and many of my black students say they can truly relate to the characters and situations.

In the case of Someone to Love Me, that is truly tragic. It tells the story of Cindy, a high school freshman who has only a distant relationship with her mother, who is constantly going out with her boyfriend Rafe (I believe that was his name -- some shortened form of "Raphael"). She is constantly leaving her daughter at home with a couple of cats and a freezer filled TV dinners while she goes out on the town, eating out, buying new clothes, and generally acting selfishly irresponsible. When an elderly neighbor invites Cindy over for a hot dinner, she relish it: "It had been years since Cindy had eaten such wonderful homemade food." Perhaps the most damning passage in the book. The girl goes on to get involved with an abusive older boy and has to face her mother's anger -- and physical abuse -- when she tries to convince her that Rafe is a dealer. It is an emotional, sordid affair from page one.

If this is in any way the reality of any of my students, it's little wonder they have difficulty focusing on school work.

1. Re-read
2. For school
3. Bluford series (for school)

Adolescent Dhammapada

Wednesday 27 January 2010 | 0 Comments

In "The Childish Person" from the Dhammapada we read:

Childish, unthinking people
go through life as enemies of themselves,
committing detrimental actions
that bear bitter fruit.

Glenn Wallis, in his notes about his translation of the Dhammapada, explains that "childish" in this context as several meanings: "childlike" is certainly relevant, but the Buddha also meant a "person who ambitiously pursues material fortune, being pushed along by an ever-strengthening current of "I, me, mine." (125) (Other translations render "BÄla-vaggo" simply as "the fool", but I prefer Wallis' less vitriolic "the childish person.")

Later, in "The Practitioner", we find a similar notion:

Do not carelessly swallow a copper ball and,
burning, cry out, "This is pain!"

All too often, we cause ourselves the pain we're certain has exterior source. And nowhere is this more evident than the middle school. In that setting, it might sound like this:

Teacher: You display your buttons for anyone to see. You don't hide anything, and so if teachers wanted to pick on you, you make it easy for them. I know exactly what I could say to get you upset, and so I virtually control you.

Student (in a very disrespectful tone): Oh no! No! Let me just tell one thing. You don't control me. You don't. Ain't nobody in the world controls me. I control me.

Teacher: I just did it. I got you angry. I just got you to mouth off. A teacher would be justified for writing you up for the tone you used with me. If you were really in complete control of yourself, you would have sat quietly, thinking, "Right. Let me show this joker who's in charge of me."

Smile

Thursday 21 January 2010 | 0 Comments

Walking down the hallway, I try to smile and acknowledge students as we pass each other.

They say it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but I'm not convinced. Smiling is not always easy: sometimes I want to scowl because of some frustration; sometimes I want to have a blank expression due to exhaustion; occasionally, I don't want to hide my anger. In spite of all of these competing emotions, though, I still try to smile.

I know I must be doing something right when students smile back at me. It means that we have, at the very least, a pleasant working relationship (though frowns don't always mean the opposite). And a good relationship is an important part of the foundation for learning.

Oh, whom am I kidding? I'm a mean ogre...

Breaks

Friday 15 January 2010 | 0 Comments

The thing about breaks is that they are the epitome of entropy:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Breaks encourage cessation.

As a teacher, I experience this every single Christmas break and summer vacation. "As soon as I rest for a short while, I'll accomplish so much." It never happens, for breaks -- in my experience -- encourage mere anarchy to be loosed upon my world. At least for a brief moment.

With a blog, it's the same. For two weeks, I've done virtually nothing here, and the break has been almost unnoticeable: with the end of the semester, I've been so busy that grading and more grading has filled any break I might have convinced myself I was taking.

Through the break, though, there have been pictures:

Quotes from Yeats' "The Second Coming"

Ladies and Gentleman, May I Introduce William Shakespeare

Saturday 09 January 2010 | 2 Comments

I have the privilege of introducing a group of twenty eighth graders to the unabridged, unadulterated Shakespeare. We began Romeo and Juliet this week, and it is the highlight of my year.

I began preparing a foundation earlier in the year by having the kids write sonnets and wrestle with iambic pentameter. I mentioned that Romeo and Juliet is, for the most part, in metered verse. “You mean he wrote the WHOLE play in iambic pentameter?” they asked incredulously. I got my Riverside Shakespeare, large enough to use in the gym as a free weight. “Not only that — most everything he wrote was in iambic pentameter.”

They were, in a word, terrified.

That’s understandable: the Bard does have quiet the reputation for being inaccessible to many casual modern readers: long sentences that sometime contain clauses with convoluted, inverted structure, and vocabulary that can make one’s toe nails curl.

We took it slowly.

In fact, we took a whole lesson on the prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The next day we spent an entire lesson on the opening fight scene. With some group work, class discussion, and multiple readings, they actually began to find Gregory and Sampson to be, amusingly, “losers.” Laughter in the classroom while reading Shakespeare is musical.

The result: comments like this on our online forum:

The language isn’t as hard as I anticipated.
Now that we have taken the time in class to discuss the play in normal language, I find it rather challenging but yet understandable.
I was scared at the beginning because i didn’t think i would get any of it. Now that we have started i actually understand most of it.
At first i figured the language would be extremely difficult to understand and read like words such as “tis” or “thy” or “ay,” but if you read the words you can figure them out over time.

The most enjoyable will be observing their reaction as they watch Romeo + Juliet, the Luhrmann version of 1996. Not the best version in cinematic history, but I show it to illustrate the timelessness of the story.

It’s going to be a fun month.Photo by shizhao

New Games

Tuesday 29 December 2009 | 1 Comment

I never really liked card games as a kid. I guess Uno was alright once in a while, but that doesn't really count as a real card game. Since Windows hadn't yet come out when I was a kid, I never learned to play Hearts. Spades was popular among some friends, as was -- oddly enough -- euchre, but I just didn't get it. What was the point? (Bridge, of course, was out of the question then; now, it's the only card game I truly enjoy.)

L learned a new game today -- "learn" being used in a most generous way. She didn't quite get the point; she couldn't quite understand why Babcia took the upturned cards for herself sometimes and sometimes gave them to her.

I can't remember what this particular game is called in English. In Polish, it's "wojna" -- war. Perhaps it's the same in English. I can't really recall. (Another one of those odd circumstances in which I know the Polish but am unsure of the English.)

Most importantly: the Girl enjoyed it (for a few minutes).

"Let's play it again!" she chimed again and again.

Still in English, though...

Balance

Saturday 12 December 2009 | 0 Comments

"Shhh! There's a monster in there!" says L as we walk toward her room. She's at that age where she sees monsters, tigers, and bears everywhere. A "smoky, smoky dragon" is a common visitor at night, and right after a bath, an alligator -- simply named Alligator -- comes looking for her as she hides under her big bath towel. Saturday mornings she likes to jump in our bed (even if it's made up -- she'll willingly unmake it) and hide under the covers.

"Shhh, shhh, shhh!" she'll proclaim. "Monster's coming!"

I play along sometimes, but it creates a problem: she gets genuinely scared sometimes, and it's because there's an alligator under her bed or a dragon right over there, in the corner. I reassure here that there's no such thing is monsters, but it's difficult to do if I've just been playing along with her imagination earlier in the evening.

It's difficult to balance her developing imagination with her developing fear.

Will she learn there's no such thing as dragons before she learns Santa doesn't exist? I'm helping create both illusions, feeling slight pangs of guilt about it, and wondering if it's all avoidable.

14-year-old Poetry

Thursday 10 December 2009 | 0 Comments

People write about what they know. One of the prime motivations of confessional poetry was that we theoretically know more about ourselves than about anything else.

When you ask a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to write poetry, there is one guarantee: the boys will write about video games. In one portfolio of ten poems, one young man wrote two poems about games (including a haiku about “Call of Duty 5”), two poems about sports (one about playing, the other about watching), and one about hunting.

I mentioned this to a colleague this afternoon. She thought for a moment, then made a suggestion: “Next year you could tell them that each poem had to be about a different topic.”

“Then they’d simply say, ‘Well, they’re two different games, so that’s technically two different topics.'”