TWIT (This Week In Teaching): The Line

The Line

 

                A lot has happened in the past two weeks in the bizarre world of teaching, a world unto itself in which one must adapt to survive, only the very definition of adapting has been changed. In the normal world, someone or something adapts and in so doing changes something about itself but still retains its essential “self.” A teacher must adapt by becoming less, by divesting talent and experience and ambition and creativity to satisfy the lowest common denominator: which in today’s world is stupidity. This absurdist play will surely one day be revealed by a trickster demon who will throw back the curtain, exposing the rafters and light tracks, and say with a shrug, “Ha, I was just having a bit of fun.”

                A unique aspect of teaching in relation to other careers is teachers almost never do the same thing twice. I’ve heard of some teachers with the luxury of creating materials that they use from year to year, but I’ve never tasted that bit of heaven. I’ve had more continuity between this year and last year than I’ve ever had; I’m teaching the same subject and the same grade and much of the same content, but as with every year, I have a completely new crop of students who bring along with them a completely new mixture of abilities, weaknesses, and challenges. And I supposed rewards.

                I said “almost never” above because teachers do get to do the same thing over again. But in the weirdest fashion. Take the first day of school. I show up with my exciting sense of renewal on that first day of school, give it my all, and at the end of it sit down to reflect on my performance. The next time I get to implement what I’ve learned from my reflection: 364 days later. If I teach for 30 years, I will teach only 30 first days. Only 30 first marking period parent-teacher conferences. Only 30 returns from Christmas breaks. And so on. How good can one get at something after doing it only 30 times in 30 years? Yet teachers are expected to be experts. And teachers are expected to give students multiple opportunities to master basic concepts. It’s just an odd profession.

                So every year teachers arrive to work in August pie-eyed with enthusiasm and optimism from a summer of relaxation and reinvigoration. All those obstacles I faced last year? They’ll vanish in the face of the new method I’ve developed. Defeated last year to the point that you drank too much, ate too much, watched too much bad TV, or became that terrible person you promised yourself you never would become? Solved and absolved in the light of your newfound Positive Mental Attitude.

                We report to work in August with reasonable and honest expectations. We expect to be able to apply the lessons we’ve learned in the past year, and in all the past years, to what we’re going to do this year. We expect to grow creatively, to struggle, and ultimately to succeed. We draw a line, one that represents all these expectations for us, but also for our bosses, our students, and their parents. And that sunny disposition hard-earned over what on the outside looked like a relaxing summer, but on the inside, yes below that enviable tan and few extra pounds from sleeping later and doing less physically, was a war zone, a desperate battle to deny the Negativity from winning, to offer safe harbor to Sanity, and to salvage what we can of the remnants of the Lost and Scattered Tribes of Self-Esteem, Success, and Ambition.

                But teaching, at least for me, has been a continual yearly retreat of that line. I’ve had to draw my forces in because they are being routed. I could go on about who and what is destroying my forces, but that’s for another time. Suffice it to say now, teachers, that it feels like the world stopped revolving around the sun and we’re stuck in September. And that all the other months have been squeezed into what were supposed to be short weeks before October and the school year got into full swing. Well, we’re swinging alright; just not in the way I’d hoped for in those heady summer days.

And now some news:

In the Lost Leadership category:

– As I walked down the hallway past the main lobby one morning, I passed a security guard standing with a child splashed with white liquid. A principal approaches and says, “Why’s he wearing milk, this early in the morning?”

Because the afternoon is a better time to wear milk.

– A principal came on the loudspeaker to say someone’s car needed to be moved. It was a Dodge Laredo. Pause reading here and pronounce the model of the car.

Hopefully you said “La-ray-dough.”

The principal said “La-red-o.”

In the Our Future is Doomed, But At Least It’ll Be Humorous category:

– Two students completing an exercise on stereotypes in which they must match a person’s picture with who or what they are.

Student 1: “That’s Maya Angelou.”

Student 2: “I don’t care!”

– A student confused about the fact that not every student has English the same time he does: “So some people have math?”

– A student, out of the blue and loud enough for the class to hear: “Oh my gosh, I missed my medication.” (Thankfully it was for asthma.)

– A student during a lesson in which I was using Spongebob as an example (I use Mr. Squarepants all the time.): “Plankton isn’t a pickle?”

– Although immune to students’ comments about my appearance because I’ve heard it all and it’s just old to me, this one made me pause: “You look like you got struck by lightning.” I couldn’t get an intelligible answer about why I looked like that, but I did get the impression it wasn’t supposed to be an insult.

– Students were required to write about a movie script they would develop that wouldn’t be pedestrian, one of their vocabulary words. One child, obviously not understanding the meaning of pedestrian, amongst his other problems, said he would include some scary monsters like “Freddy Cougar.”

And in the Teachers Need to Drink More, Not Less category:

I meant to write “Read IEPs.” Something else was obviously on my mind. And the worst part is that I didn’t realize my mistake for about a week.

                  So that’s it for This Week in Teaching. Plenty of strange occurrences hit the cutting room floor – like the meeting in which every teacher present experienced the strongest case of déjà vu in which we conducted the exact same conversation about problem student behavior that we have every year; and the near-discipline meeting I had because a princ-bureaucrat-ipal reads the letter of the law and as a teacher one needs to implement the spirit of the law to adapt it to one’s students – but perhaps they’ll resurface with a push of anger at a later time. In fact, I’d bet on that.

TWIT – This Week In Teaching returns

I woke up this morning to my 5:30 alarm clock with a greater dose of morning confusion than normal. I wondered, since I have alarms set only for weekdays, why my alarm was blaring at 5:30 on a Saturday morning. Despite my mental fogginess, I began to rejoice in the fact that I could turn off the alarm and go back to sleep for at least 3 more hours.
Then it hit me as I slowly began to truly awaken (come to life is more like it). Today is Friday.
My heart sunk.
I had slept so deeply and soundly that I must’ve been relaxed to my very core. But then that interior Edenic serenity dissolved as I pressed a button on my phone to confirm that it was indeed Friday. This is my first case of the Fridays.

Despite this heartbreaking start to my day, I felt good as the day started. I had no meeting to go to at the start of the day (which is usually the tortuous case) so I got some work done at a relaxing pace. Too often a teacher’s schedule turns into a mad dash from start to end time. That’s not a woe-is-me, my-job-is-harder-than-yours complaint. It’s a silly constraint on a teacher’s efficacy. But I digress.

So if we’re plotting this day like a roller coaster, I started off at the bottom, soared to the top on the thrust of a Friday and a general, rebounded joy of being a teacher.
Then a girl mentions her parent was trying to get a hold of me.
Most teachers can tell you war stories about talking to parents. I surely have my own, but in general, at least in my district, I should be billing the parents a few hundred bucks an hour because the call inevitably becomes a couch session for them. Some link their woes as an excuse for their kids behavior, but more often than not, it’s clear the person desperately needs someone to listen. I don’t mind listening; it’s the least I can do (unfortunately). This call was different.

I’d heard it all before:
Normal sounding guy says he’s the child’s guardian.
Asking a fairly minor question that may or may not indicate adequate involvement in the child’s education (don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with almost any involvement).
And then the day’s roller coaster took another dip. Or was it a rise?
He tells me he’s the girl’s uncle. That he’s her legal guardian. That her mom, his sister, died a few years ago. That he’s in the process of adopting her. That he’s 65. That he’s disabled.
I wanted to cry.
He wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t reaching out for sympathy. He wasn’t trying to unload his burden.
He simply gave me the facts.
And then he said what so many others say, that the child’s education is important to him and he wants to make sure she does what she’s supposed to. But where his spiel wasn’t a spiel was in what it lacked: the threat. The parents who for whatever reason – saving face; looking in someone’s eyes, even their own, even falsely, that they’re winning at parenting; etc. – follow up their assurances that they care about their child’s education with threats that the bad behavior or lack of effort will disappear are the parents of the child who struggles on his own to get by. With getting by often being alive from one day to the next, passed on by an inadequate school, and not getting by as in succeeding.
This man made me smile. He didn’t make me realize I’m doing a job that’s worth doing or renew my efforts to reach these keeeeds. He simply gave me a glimpse into a human being better than a human being. He is selfless for the sake of a child. I love every student I teach. I love that aspect of teaching that allows me to be a part of a student’s life. But at the end of every day, teaching is merely interaction with humans (if it can be confirmed that 7th graders are human). And the most important, most rewarding, and most difficult, near impossible, thing about it is treating them with that elusive selfless love. That roller coaster I’m on, I think it often goes into the twilight zone.

Travels in Reading (YA Edition): Book 6 – Let the Circle Be Unbroken

Book 6

Let the Circle Be Unbroken by Mildred Taylor is a YA sequel to Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I’ve been teaching ROTHMC for at least six of the ten years I’ve been teaching. I’ve read it at least twenty times, and I think I could recite the book to my students.

 …

I’ve typed and deleted a full, long paragraph and a number of different sentences to continue the above. Believe me, I have plenty to say about Let the Circle Be Unbroken, partly because I always have a lot to say about what I read and partly because I’ve spent so much time reading, teaching, and discussing Roll of Thunder. But all that I thought I thought from years of reading and teaching the book evaporated when I tried to form my thoughts into coherent sentences/paragraphs. It’s funny, I’ve talked about this book with colleagues, but I suppose never in the depth that me writing about it forced me to go. It’s the difference between a passing two-minute conversation with someone, and an in-depth conversation over the course of hours.

So here goes.

These books do what I suppose YA novels should do: provide a platform for further student development. A work of YA fiction can teach a student about plot, character development, theme, etc. It can introduce students to what makes a good story so that when they start to read the classics in late middle school/early high school, they have a foundation to build upon. LCBU is historical fiction, and as such, just like ROTHMC, it provides a platform to teach not only the general aspects of fiction, but aspects of history that inform the novel and, hopefully, the students’ lives. I can’t tell you how much this is needed in my school. Each year, I get a sad laugh at the students trying to guess when the Civil War or MLK’s assassination happened. They don’t know where they live geographically, and therefore have no concept of the South besides the fact that their aunt lives in South Carolina. Or maybe it’s Georgia. I get to teach history, particularly Southern history which I’m fascinated with, and the kids are into it mostly because of ROTHMC. You can’t beat that.

LCBU is as page-turning exciting as ROTHMC. Taylor’s characters are well-developed and true to form in various circumstances. You begin to care about them and soon you’re unable to put the book down until you find out what happened to so-and-so. Maybe it’s a bit late in the review for summaries, but this is where it’s going. ROTHMC tells the story of the Logan family, landowners in Depression-era Mississippi. They are a rarity because they are black and own land. All the other landowners are white. The book traces the family’s struggle to stay together as a family and keep their land in the face of adversity, mostly having to do with racism. LCBU continues the story of the Logan’s struggles, focusing on broader topics than just racism such as unions during the Depression. Unfortunately the book drops a major plotline carried over from ROTHMC, but it still maintains reader interest as it follows the oldest Logan child’s attempts to help his family in their economic uncertainty.

I want to say that these books fall short of excellence. I want to talk about how annoying Mildred Taylor gets in her over-colloquial, over-picayune, over-regional storytelling. She talks often of the influence her family has had on her writing, specifically as storytellers and inspiration for her characters. But I get the feeling that Taylor is the smart kid in her family who’s showing off what her parents have praised her endlessly for doing. It’s not that she isn’t good; it’s just that the story gets old before the story comes to an end.

But I shouldn’t say those things, because I realize that I need to make room on my mental bookshelves for works that don’t meet my standards of writing. Because my standards are my standards, ideas, thoughts, and opinions crafted towards my own end as a reader and writer. That doesn’t mean some books do something different, equally important, and equally well.

Summer’s Out for School: A Bizarre Journey through the First Days of School

I don’t care how long I’ve slept; I don’t care what awesomeness awaits me when I wake up: I hate waking up. The transition from tranquil stasis, often filled with dream movies much more interesting than life itself, to the stark reality of real life is abrupt and jarring. I wake up and say, “Oh. You’re still here.”

So the alarm clock blared its demon squawk, trumpeting the advent of the first day of school. This is my 11^th first day of school (I didn’t start until Oct. 1 in my first year of teaching, so though I missed the actual first day of school, I did have my own first day. Believe me.). In some ways, it’s old hat. I’m used to the confusion, the ready to be unready, the mad dash to an arbitrary starting line, the sense of being on one of those airport conveyor belts for humans, the wait to be behind before things get started, and on and on with creative ways to begin wrong. But I’ll admit, I still get nervous. I don’t know what exactly I’m nervous about. I’ll do fine this year just like I did the last 11. But I’m still nervous. I’m standing in front of an audience, and the fact that the audience is 7^th graders doesn’t matter. I still have to perform, and performing makes me nervous. There’s also a lot of angst regarding the end of summer and the beginning of the long school year, a phenomenon that has no rival and which engenders sadness, despair, and a certain fatalism of powerlessness.

But despite not wanting to wake up, despite missing the summer and thinking of all the things I could’ve/would’ve/should’ve done, despite the added pressures of being an adult September brings with one swift punch, I’m looking forward to this school year. Like actually wanting it. Like actually wanting to try different things, to be creative, to teach. That feeling has been gone for a while, but I captured it this summer. I feel like a little kid who is told to hold out my hand, and an adult releases a lightning bug to crawl onto my hand. As I stare in awe and some fear at the tickle from the bug’s feet, it flies off and I immediately miss it. I try and try for the rest of the summer to capture another, but I’m too small. I have to wait through the long, cold winter to grow. But once I’m bigger and quicker and more able, I run outside with my jar and grab the first one I see. I tighten the lid with the air holes punched in it and I watch as the bug lights up the glass like a lighthouse. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine.

The above attitude, which feels as foreign as wearing metal underwear, did not just happen. I worked for it. I realized that the truth of being a part of a failing system is not that I have to do with every failure, but that every failure doesn’t have to do with me. There’s a lot in those trite, awkwardly-worded words. I don’t know if I’ve caved – that’s for time to teach me – but I do know that I’m in a better place to be better. I can help without feeling like I need to reach every corner where light doesn’t fall, even though I see those corners and I feel deeply for them.

One crucial area of change that I focused on is mornings. I hate mornings, and for a while, I hated mornings more because of where I had to go. I hated mornings so much that I’d stay up late, not caring about the tiring power of an early morning. I hated mornings so much that I’d stay in bed for the longest possible time, get up pissed off, and rush, increasing my pissed-offness, to work. My general disdain for my job leeched into all areas of my life. But its birth happened every morning.

I resolved to not live like that anymore. I resolved to take some control of my day, and hence my life. So I decided, though I hated it so, to wake up early enough to take a poop, take a shower, and eat something before having to leave at a time that wouldn’t require me to speed to work sans safety for myself and others. Taking a poop in the morning is a big deal for me. Two aspects of my pooping are rather unique. Maybe not unique to me, but unique in the sense that they factor into the rest of my life. One, I take a long time to crap. It’s nothing weird, but I just can’t dump and run. Pooping is an event for me. Two, as soon as I poop, I’m starving. So I like to move my bowels right before eating because I can eat comfortably. Yes, this is all TMI. But by taking a poop in the morning, I sought to wake up earlier – truly wake up, not just be on my feet with my eyes open because yes, just like pooping, waking takes me a while as well – and ready myself to eat better in the morning. My ideas were revolutionary. At least for my morning routine.

So I get up today on the first day of school and shuffle off to the bathroom. As I read the news and scanned a few other more serious web pages on my phone, I sat on the toilet and nothing happened. Finally time came for me to get in the shower, and there I sat, poopless. This could have easily frustrated me because I could have been sleeping and I could have had an empty gut to enjoy a hearty breakfast that would carry me easily to lunch and it’s so easy to get discouraged when trying something new especially in the face of something you hate, but. But I didn’t get discouraged. Oh well, I didn’t shit this morning. But I did wake up earlier for work than maybe I’ve ever woken up. And I didn’t want to watch the world burn. Even though it was still dark, even though I was a bit tired, even though I was going to work, even though I was going to a job with little reward and much heartbreak. I won in my loss.

Some observations on what on the whole is a very weird day:

Many proud parents posted “first day of school” pictures on Facebook, and as I taught my classes I thought of the many different but similar stories each of my students could tell about first days back to school. Though it doesn’t happen on exactly the same day, it’s pretty amazing that our entire country, all 800 billion of us (or whatever we’re up to now), send our children off to school. There are few things we do all together. Voting is another event that makes it seem like we actually do have a society and not some general agreement not to wipe each other out only because of our self-interest in remaining alive. Maybe in some ways sending our kids to school in September allows us to survive. Or at least allows society to survive. 

A sign is posted on the bathroom door in the faculty room: Sink Out of Order. I used the toilet, planning to use the student bathroom for the sink and soap. When I entered the faculty bathroom, I glanced at the sink. A large spider had spun a web in the upper part of the sink bowl, right where the water would flow if the sink had been in order. The spider shares the faculty’s confidence that it will be quite a long time before the sink is fixed.

My school has started a new program the administration is calling Enrichment. It’s a period tacked on to the end of the day with the stated goal of providing the additional academic, social, and behavioral support many of the students need. It’s a good idea, but as with any new program, there’s sure to be hiccups. But perhaps some of the teachers need to enroll in the Enrichment classes:

 

In the “Can’t Make This Up” category, here are two student gems:

I gave the students an assignment, to write about the best thing that happened to them this summer. One kid wrote that one of the best things that happened to him was that he finished his raps. He said he was happy about that because he had had “rapping block.

Another student asked how to spell Pennsylvania. I told him to use the abbreviation. He said, “Philly?”

And that’s how you start a school year in the weird world of public education.