One of the most sickening realities teachers face is when they hear of the awful things their little darlings do to each other while we sit thinking they are wholly engrossed in the school-world we create for them.
Fair warning – graphic language employed in this post. Ironically, it’s the part where I quote the kids.
A week ago, we took two of our classes to a local university for an arts performance and a tour of the campus. The majesty of the campus seemed to awe the children, offering a sense of the importance of staying in school that even our incessant pro-college-rhetoric could not provide. We had two very affable tour guides and an abundance of chaperones, we thought our kids were engaged, well-supervised, and safe.
Oh, we were so wrong.
As we pointed out libraries and dorms, two boys were busy viciously tormenting, threatening, and harassing a girl. They employed the language inspired by the worst of male behavior and misogyny, the words of the R-rated movie funneled through the mouths of ten-year-old boys. They mocked her “small t---s” and told her they wanted to “feel her c--t,” or “f--- her p---sy.” They danced around her performing various sexual pantomimes on each other. This they kept up for quite a while, apparently, but when they threatened to “rape her” and “cut her up,” another girl overheard and finally went for an adult.
Back at school, the boys confessed to all of what they did and sobbed their remorse. To our frustration and agony, we found the school’s discipline book wanted for adequate consequences. They were suspended, expelled from all of their extra-curricular activities, and banned from all future field trips. We left open the possibility of future, more applicable consequences, but we don’t really know where to find aggressive sexual harassment seminars for fifth-graders. We tried to convey to them the gravity of what they said and did, but I doubt it got through.
A few days later, the leading perpetrator’s guardians revealed the second horror of this affair: that perhaps the boy’s issue stems not from R-rated television but from an NC-17-rated life, prior to coming to them. They recognize this is not an excuse but explain that they have been fighting many behavior problems at home. They already try to tightly control the boy’s access to the media and they have him involved in character education at church, but his behavior seems to just be worsening. We teachers are left wishing for a school social worker, a more than 1/3 time psychologist, or at least another semester of psychology in our prep classes.
But it does not end there. Today, I discovered a new horror in this affair, as I overheard, the leading perpetrator say that he “likes” the victim. I find that among all of the sickening aspects of this affair, this is the worst. To think that threatening rape and mutilation has become the hair-pulling of this generation of boys makes me sick. While I wonder about the minds of children exposed, in person, to what this boy has been exposed, I still doubt that any child could knowingly invoke such terms if they really understood them. I fear, however, that children tossing around such words of violence so freely is the foundation for adults perpetrating them. It is a self-concept of evil, a self-confidence in the horrific that I see the boys building in this. If at, ten-years-old, there is nothing they fear to imagine and say, how can we expect that, at twenty or thirty, there will be anything they fear to do?
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Trying to Love Teaching in October
October is the long stretch for teachers, week after unrelenting week without a vacation and with the build-up to the Devil’s Holiday, Halloween. (Teachers and the Christian Right are unusually united in their mutual distaste for October 31, if you don't know why, ask any teacher.) It is not, contrary to popular belief, rough for us teachers because we are lazy and unaccustomed to working as hard as people with “real jobs.” It is hard for us because it is hard for the children. The children then make it hard for us. Smart kids don’t pay attention, up-and-down kids go down at the slightest prompting, and the nasty ones seem to have a field day preying on the weak and our nerves.
But I’m trying to keep a better attitude these days, so I’m trying to focus my attention on the things that I enjoy and the things that are going right.
Newcomers : Every morning, for an hour before school, I teach the 10 newest 3-4-5 kids “survival English.” It’s a heap of fun, I can’t believe they pay me for it. There are a million ways to have fun teaching body parts, days of the week, basic prepositions. Today I found myself sitting on a desk with a 3rd grade sitting under the desk and a student who’s been in the U.S. since August saying, perfectly, “Mr. AB is on the desk. C---- is under the desk.” The curriculum is actually somewhat usable, and I supplement with language games and Starfall. The kids brim with excitement to learn anything, even at 7:30 in the morning, and their attitude is infectious. Best of all, their progress is palpable; by the end of each activity, let alone each day, I know that they’ve learned something.
Competent Kids : I’ve found a favorite type of kid. I call them the "competent kids" because they are not necessarily the smartest or highest-scoring, but they come to school, every day, ready to learn and they let few things get in their way. They are more organized than me, always appear in uniform and never forget their homework. They are not teacher’s pets, they are too saavy for that. I get the vague feeling they realize we teachers are each just one part in a twenty-year journey, can't get too attached to one. My favorite competent kid moment came when a student came up to me, against class policy but during a transition. She asked me a pointless question in a very loud voice, also unusually. Then she surreptitiously handed me a note, informing me that a student was eating banned Hot Cheetoes in class and walked away. Not a vengeance-inducing or lesson-interrupting snitch, just a polite FYI at a down moment. I watched the kid and decided to intervene. G---- discreetly nodded with approval.
Data: I’m a data fiend. I love tracking progress, taking averages, comparing performances and disaggregating big piles of scores. I love logging the grades and making big spreadsheets of color-formatted cells that turn red, yellow and green with the scores, giving me a tapestry of information about who’s learning, failing and what I need to teach and teach again. I love sorting the data to watch for correlations, finding that only the students who’ve mastered x had a chance on y. I love the way the data mimics the daily life in the classroom, the unbroken stream of failures stemming from the absentee, the unwavering success of that student who’s hand is always in the air.
Progress: Every week we take a timed math facts test, 100 problems in 5 minutes. 4th and 5th graders should be working on multiplication and division, but this year we started on subtraction. Even at that, only 4 students passed the first week. The Man said it best: “It is not that you can’t do this, it is has never before been asked of you. Now it is being demanded.” We spent 10 minutes the next day in class learning the word “demand.” As of last week, over 50 students have passed and the vast majority are in range. I take real pride in that because I decided to stop teaching the district’s math curriculum that never would have addressed their incapability. Without out my intervention, and the flexibility I was given to make that intervention, we probably would’ve sent them to middle school with only a tentative grasp of the most basic of arithmetic. Now, we practice subtraction at the beginning of every day and in every down moment. Now, we’ve re-understood the concept and we’ve learned new ways to do the operations fast. They may be 5th graders learning subtraction in October, but they are learning something desperately important and they are learning it because of me. Knowing that will get me to Thanksgiving.
But I’m trying to keep a better attitude these days, so I’m trying to focus my attention on the things that I enjoy and the things that are going right.
Newcomers : Every morning, for an hour before school, I teach the 10 newest 3-4-5 kids “survival English.” It’s a heap of fun, I can’t believe they pay me for it. There are a million ways to have fun teaching body parts, days of the week, basic prepositions. Today I found myself sitting on a desk with a 3rd grade sitting under the desk and a student who’s been in the U.S. since August saying, perfectly, “Mr. AB is on the desk. C---- is under the desk.” The curriculum is actually somewhat usable, and I supplement with language games and Starfall. The kids brim with excitement to learn anything, even at 7:30 in the morning, and their attitude is infectious. Best of all, their progress is palpable; by the end of each activity, let alone each day, I know that they’ve learned something.
Competent Kids : I’ve found a favorite type of kid. I call them the "competent kids" because they are not necessarily the smartest or highest-scoring, but they come to school, every day, ready to learn and they let few things get in their way. They are more organized than me, always appear in uniform and never forget their homework. They are not teacher’s pets, they are too saavy for that. I get the vague feeling they realize we teachers are each just one part in a twenty-year journey, can't get too attached to one. My favorite competent kid moment came when a student came up to me, against class policy but during a transition. She asked me a pointless question in a very loud voice, also unusually. Then she surreptitiously handed me a note, informing me that a student was eating banned Hot Cheetoes in class and walked away. Not a vengeance-inducing or lesson-interrupting snitch, just a polite FYI at a down moment. I watched the kid and decided to intervene. G---- discreetly nodded with approval.
Data: I’m a data fiend. I love tracking progress, taking averages, comparing performances and disaggregating big piles of scores. I love logging the grades and making big spreadsheets of color-formatted cells that turn red, yellow and green with the scores, giving me a tapestry of information about who’s learning, failing and what I need to teach and teach again. I love sorting the data to watch for correlations, finding that only the students who’ve mastered x had a chance on y. I love the way the data mimics the daily life in the classroom, the unbroken stream of failures stemming from the absentee, the unwavering success of that student who’s hand is always in the air.
Progress: Every week we take a timed math facts test, 100 problems in 5 minutes. 4th and 5th graders should be working on multiplication and division, but this year we started on subtraction. Even at that, only 4 students passed the first week. The Man said it best: “It is not that you can’t do this, it is has never before been asked of you. Now it is being demanded.” We spent 10 minutes the next day in class learning the word “demand.” As of last week, over 50 students have passed and the vast majority are in range. I take real pride in that because I decided to stop teaching the district’s math curriculum that never would have addressed their incapability. Without out my intervention, and the flexibility I was given to make that intervention, we probably would’ve sent them to middle school with only a tentative grasp of the most basic of arithmetic. Now, we practice subtraction at the beginning of every day and in every down moment. Now, we’ve re-understood the concept and we’ve learned new ways to do the operations fast. They may be 5th graders learning subtraction in October, but they are learning something desperately important and they are learning it because of me. Knowing that will get me to Thanksgiving.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Going (depart)Mental!
My school is experimenting with departmentalization in the upper grades, where there are only three classes this year. Students switch at recess and lunch, getting around two hours of each of reading, math/writing and ELD/social studies/science. I'm teaching math and writing. It was a move inspired by the tremendous amount of work required to teach all of the subjects when all of the curricula are so woefully inadequate, the struggle many of our more sophisticated/less mature students have with staying in the same classroom all day long, the dearth of upper-grade students, and our desire to share the pain of the woefully behind 5th graders.
So far it’s a very mixed bag.
The Good
Behavior – There are some terribly irritating personalities among the students this year. None who are immediately disruptive or seriously defiant, but a number who will make you livid by the end of the day. Departmentalization does a lot to take our focus off these students. They can only irritate us for about an hour and a half before, swoosh, off to another class.
Student Engagement – The flip of the above. Students only have to listen to me drone on for an hour and a half before, swoosh, they get another teacher. All three of us have very different styles and demand a very different manner of participation. None of us are a “hard act to follow.” The result is the feeling of freshness for each period.
Teacher Focus – With only writing and math to worry about, I can spend a lot more time preparing each week and each lesson. I have time to ready all the homework for the week in advance, to spend more time pouring over data and planning reteaches and interventions, to consider and prepare fun hooks and manipulative activities. I have time to learn, use and manage the Accelerated Math system, which is producing amazing results with individualized homework for all students.
Consistent Implementation of Reform – We’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on and trying to improve our practice, ---taking trainings, customizing curricula, devising action plans and assessing our effectiveness. At this point we know what we need to do and departmentalization gives us the focus to do it. Now we have one teacher focused on implementing GLAD for English development, one teacher focused on using EDI with reading skills and vocabulary, and one teacher focused on pushing through three years of math in one. For once, I feel like we are, with collective knowledge and individual practice, able to implement so many more (though never all, of course) of the things we know we should.
The Bad
Logistics – This has been a nightmare when it comes to scheduling preparation periods, assemblies, library times, et al. It has also meant that interruptions, which are innumerable and unavoidable in elementary school, MUST come out of somebody’s crucial math and language arts time. The 4th graders have me for math and writing for 1.5 hours a day, in the afternoon. If that time is interrupted by an assembly, I can’t just push the lesson to the morning and ditch the day’s science lesson like I used to. My pacing for this group is suffering greatly.
Enthusiasm – I’m realizing now that I don’t just want to teach math. I already miss teaching reading and it’s only the 7th week of school! I miss discussing “Maniac Magee” and I miss watching the class bond around the story we read together day after day. I miss thinking about word structure and cognates, I miss drawing complex vocabulary words through various stick figure abstractions.
Intervention for the Apathetic – For better and for worse, departmentalization leads us to focus on the kids who are buying in, or at least acting out, which hovers around 80%. The “bad kids” make enough noise to get our attention; it’s the ones’ who’ve learned to quietly do nothing who are really missing out. For example, I only watch B--- check out for 1.5 hours a day. Maybe if I saw her check out the whole day long I’d be more willing to try and break her out of her apathy. Maybe I’d be more inclined to force D--- to sit down and do something if he did as little work all day as he did in my math class. Maybe if they were more exclusively “my students,” I’d feel their needs to be more urgent. Realistically speaking, however, there’s only a handful of students who don’t warrant my urgent attention and I remember from years past how futile efforts with these outliers usually are.
Community – I still shake everyone’s hand at the door, but that is, sadly, where my classroom community now ends. There seems to be insufficient time for a morning meeting. It’s very hard to build the sort of spirit and pride that my class had last year and I wonder and worry about how critical that was to our overall success.
The Ugly
My Room – At the end of the day, my room is just covered in papers. Now, instead of 30 students generating pile after pile, I have 100. The heaps of paper are insane. The grunge level on my floor looks like it should in December. I realized today that a significant amount of my preparation time is disappearing into just trying to keep order in my classroom!
The Conclusion
I am worrying that this is not a worthwhile trade, ---community for engagement, variety for focus. I wonder if we have brought the strengths and weaknesses of the middle schools to students earlier than they really need them. I know that good teachers are giving their best lessons to more students, which will do a lot to help an unusually far behind (even for our schools) group catch up. I also know our own weaknesses as instructors of the standards have been mitigated, however, I wonder if we have just created new ones in our roles as educators of the whole child.
I am holding out hope, however. We've only been at this for three weeks. It only makes sense that between the reshuffling of classes and the new system, it would take longer for everyone to gel and for even us professionals to get back to the top of our game. I am hoping that, as routines settle and transitions speed up, time for the unstandardized and unassessed lessons of community will return. Who knows...maybe I'll find a way to slip in a read aloud yet!
So far it’s a very mixed bag.
The Good
Behavior – There are some terribly irritating personalities among the students this year. None who are immediately disruptive or seriously defiant, but a number who will make you livid by the end of the day. Departmentalization does a lot to take our focus off these students. They can only irritate us for about an hour and a half before, swoosh, off to another class.
Student Engagement – The flip of the above. Students only have to listen to me drone on for an hour and a half before, swoosh, they get another teacher. All three of us have very different styles and demand a very different manner of participation. None of us are a “hard act to follow.” The result is the feeling of freshness for each period.
Teacher Focus – With only writing and math to worry about, I can spend a lot more time preparing each week and each lesson. I have time to ready all the homework for the week in advance, to spend more time pouring over data and planning reteaches and interventions, to consider and prepare fun hooks and manipulative activities. I have time to learn, use and manage the Accelerated Math system, which is producing amazing results with individualized homework for all students.
Consistent Implementation of Reform – We’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on and trying to improve our practice, ---taking trainings, customizing curricula, devising action plans and assessing our effectiveness. At this point we know what we need to do and departmentalization gives us the focus to do it. Now we have one teacher focused on implementing GLAD for English development, one teacher focused on using EDI with reading skills and vocabulary, and one teacher focused on pushing through three years of math in one. For once, I feel like we are, with collective knowledge and individual practice, able to implement so many more (though never all, of course) of the things we know we should.
The Bad
Logistics – This has been a nightmare when it comes to scheduling preparation periods, assemblies, library times, et al. It has also meant that interruptions, which are innumerable and unavoidable in elementary school, MUST come out of somebody’s crucial math and language arts time. The 4th graders have me for math and writing for 1.5 hours a day, in the afternoon. If that time is interrupted by an assembly, I can’t just push the lesson to the morning and ditch the day’s science lesson like I used to. My pacing for this group is suffering greatly.
Enthusiasm – I’m realizing now that I don’t just want to teach math. I already miss teaching reading and it’s only the 7th week of school! I miss discussing “Maniac Magee” and I miss watching the class bond around the story we read together day after day. I miss thinking about word structure and cognates, I miss drawing complex vocabulary words through various stick figure abstractions.
Intervention for the Apathetic – For better and for worse, departmentalization leads us to focus on the kids who are buying in, or at least acting out, which hovers around 80%. The “bad kids” make enough noise to get our attention; it’s the ones’ who’ve learned to quietly do nothing who are really missing out. For example, I only watch B--- check out for 1.5 hours a day. Maybe if I saw her check out the whole day long I’d be more willing to try and break her out of her apathy. Maybe I’d be more inclined to force D--- to sit down and do something if he did as little work all day as he did in my math class. Maybe if they were more exclusively “my students,” I’d feel their needs to be more urgent. Realistically speaking, however, there’s only a handful of students who don’t warrant my urgent attention and I remember from years past how futile efforts with these outliers usually are.
Community – I still shake everyone’s hand at the door, but that is, sadly, where my classroom community now ends. There seems to be insufficient time for a morning meeting. It’s very hard to build the sort of spirit and pride that my class had last year and I wonder and worry about how critical that was to our overall success.
The Ugly
My Room – At the end of the day, my room is just covered in papers. Now, instead of 30 students generating pile after pile, I have 100. The heaps of paper are insane. The grunge level on my floor looks like it should in December. I realized today that a significant amount of my preparation time is disappearing into just trying to keep order in my classroom!
The Conclusion
I am worrying that this is not a worthwhile trade, ---community for engagement, variety for focus. I wonder if we have brought the strengths and weaknesses of the middle schools to students earlier than they really need them. I know that good teachers are giving their best lessons to more students, which will do a lot to help an unusually far behind (even for our schools) group catch up. I also know our own weaknesses as instructors of the standards have been mitigated, however, I wonder if we have just created new ones in our roles as educators of the whole child.
I am holding out hope, however. We've only been at this for three weeks. It only makes sense that between the reshuffling of classes and the new system, it would take longer for everyone to gel and for even us professionals to get back to the top of our game. I am hoping that, as routines settle and transitions speed up, time for the unstandardized and unassessed lessons of community will return. Who knows...maybe I'll find a way to slip in a read aloud yet!
Monday, October 02, 2006
Caught!
Well, it had to happen some time. I have had an official complaint levied against me, a letter sent to my principal about my troublesome ways. Not by an angry parent, frustrated by some controversial part of my practice. Rather the complaint comes from another staff member who is concerned to find me… well, let’s leave that for a little later on.
Under our union contract, to account for the fact that the 4-5-6 teachers teach a longer school day than the 1-2-3, we are given two 50-minute prep periods a week. Usually, these preps are a great opportunity to make copies, finish one-on-one assessments, or meet with resource teachers. The students are taken out to P.E. during one of these prep periods and have in-class music lessons for the other.
These preps become a problem, however, because the music instruction is provided by one of the worst teachers I have ever seen. He takes a subject that most students are eager to enjoy and turns it into an hour of terror. He programs many weeks of videos and wholly uninteresting, babyish songs and then is shocked when the students don’t behave. He yells, demeans, and irrationally disciplines students. He calls the principal for the slightest disobedience. Worst of all, last year, he often did not show up (We have him on Fridays… easy day to get “sick.”) and often he did not phone ahead to warn of his absence. Teachers would find out he wasn’t coming only when he never showed up. His infrequent presence has made it impossible to plan on having the prep time or to even tell students that he’s coming, else when he doesn’t show up we are trapped with nothing to do and a class expecting a break.
Between his poor instruction and attendance, in frustration, the upper grade teachers tried to decline the “prep time,” but the union wouldn’t allow it, as it is a modification of our working conditions. We tried to get him to simply administer our tests, as we think he is detrimental to the cause of students learning to love music, but his supervisor said no.
This is the teacher filing a complaint against me.
Why? Because, he writes, “I always come to Mr. AB’s class and…”
Take a guess… what would cause you to write a letter to your supervisor and the teacher’s principal, out of tremendous concern that…
…I am just sitting at my desk reading the paper while the class does busy work?
…I am out of the room while the students reenact “Lord of the Flies?”
…I am telling the students vicious things about him to whip them into an antagonistic
fervor?
…We are playing games that make him concerned there is no real learning going on?
Wrong! The sentence concludes, “he is in the middle of something, either teaching a lesson or giving a test.”
Yes. Yes, I am. You got me, Mr. Music. You can come into my room at any time and I can be caught teaching.
This pathetic and unprofessional teacher, who was absent for over 20% of the school year last year, had the gall to write my boss a letter of complaint because I am always “in the middle of teaching” when he occassionally comes. Apparently, he believes that it spills over into “his instructional time.” (N.B. He does not, according to contract, have any duty aside from relieving me.) Apparently, he believes that I should stop my instruction in anticipation of his (potential) arrival and have the students quietly waiting. Apparently, he is complete disconnected from reality!
I could see where this was coming from if he was a dedicated music teacher, so intense about music education that he carefully planned for every minute. There is a painful dearth of music in our schools and this could be a great time to address that. But he is absent most Fridays and he is as far from intense as you can imagine. He will frequently show vaguely music-related videos for 3-5 weeks straight. My first year, when he came back from an absence and found that the substitute showed the wrong part of a video, he refused to deviate from his plan and insisted that my students watch the same part of the same video again. Not as a prelude to engaging instruction, not as background building for a reading activity, but for the entire period. He does this for every class at every school he taught. How would you like to be paid $5,000 dollars for showing videos for 6 hours a day for a month?
Worst of all, as bad as he is, I probably would have been willing to acquiesce to his request, but he never even asked me. He went straight to my boss. Now I think I will prepare my class for music time…by giving them soda, cookies and spitballs.
It’s on, Music-Man.
Under our union contract, to account for the fact that the 4-5-6 teachers teach a longer school day than the 1-2-3, we are given two 50-minute prep periods a week. Usually, these preps are a great opportunity to make copies, finish one-on-one assessments, or meet with resource teachers. The students are taken out to P.E. during one of these prep periods and have in-class music lessons for the other.
These preps become a problem, however, because the music instruction is provided by one of the worst teachers I have ever seen. He takes a subject that most students are eager to enjoy and turns it into an hour of terror. He programs many weeks of videos and wholly uninteresting, babyish songs and then is shocked when the students don’t behave. He yells, demeans, and irrationally disciplines students. He calls the principal for the slightest disobedience. Worst of all, last year, he often did not show up (We have him on Fridays… easy day to get “sick.”) and often he did not phone ahead to warn of his absence. Teachers would find out he wasn’t coming only when he never showed up. His infrequent presence has made it impossible to plan on having the prep time or to even tell students that he’s coming, else when he doesn’t show up we are trapped with nothing to do and a class expecting a break.
Between his poor instruction and attendance, in frustration, the upper grade teachers tried to decline the “prep time,” but the union wouldn’t allow it, as it is a modification of our working conditions. We tried to get him to simply administer our tests, as we think he is detrimental to the cause of students learning to love music, but his supervisor said no.
This is the teacher filing a complaint against me.
Why? Because, he writes, “I always come to Mr. AB’s class and…”
Take a guess… what would cause you to write a letter to your supervisor and the teacher’s principal, out of tremendous concern that…
…I am just sitting at my desk reading the paper while the class does busy work?
…I am out of the room while the students reenact “Lord of the Flies?”
…I am telling the students vicious things about him to whip them into an antagonistic
fervor?
…We are playing games that make him concerned there is no real learning going on?
Wrong! The sentence concludes, “he is in the middle of something, either teaching a lesson or giving a test.”
Yes. Yes, I am. You got me, Mr. Music. You can come into my room at any time and I can be caught teaching.
This pathetic and unprofessional teacher, who was absent for over 20% of the school year last year, had the gall to write my boss a letter of complaint because I am always “in the middle of teaching” when he occassionally comes. Apparently, he believes that it spills over into “his instructional time.” (N.B. He does not, according to contract, have any duty aside from relieving me.) Apparently, he believes that I should stop my instruction in anticipation of his (potential) arrival and have the students quietly waiting. Apparently, he is complete disconnected from reality!
I could see where this was coming from if he was a dedicated music teacher, so intense about music education that he carefully planned for every minute. There is a painful dearth of music in our schools and this could be a great time to address that. But he is absent most Fridays and he is as far from intense as you can imagine. He will frequently show vaguely music-related videos for 3-5 weeks straight. My first year, when he came back from an absence and found that the substitute showed the wrong part of a video, he refused to deviate from his plan and insisted that my students watch the same part of the same video again. Not as a prelude to engaging instruction, not as background building for a reading activity, but for the entire period. He does this for every class at every school he taught. How would you like to be paid $5,000 dollars for showing videos for 6 hours a day for a month?
Worst of all, as bad as he is, I probably would have been willing to acquiesce to his request, but he never even asked me. He went straight to my boss. Now I think I will prepare my class for music time…by giving them soda, cookies and spitballs.
It’s on, Music-Man.
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