Student Art Corner

While our class is climbing the last nerve-wracking act of The Crucible, this object d'art is taking shape on the back of the study guide for one student. It's a perspective shot from a certain desk in the classroom: the line of sight is diagonally across the room from the side, with another student in the foreground, and myself in the background, happily about my business, it seems.

This girl is definitely influenced by cubism and surrealism more than realism, but one does have to appreciate the perspective, which I find to be the most intriguing element here. I think the thing I like the most is the compressed white board: in reality, the thing is twelve feet long, but here it's like seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope. It's distorted beautifully to suit her purpose. And the fact that she's using pen for a medium, which ain't easy for delicate things like shading & fading lines for making suggestions and such. This could have been quite good in pencil, with time.

Her world is apparent: the kid in front of her annoys her, and his F paper should make him shut up more often and face the front of the room; the teacher is way back there, saying Blah-Blah-Blah, and it's four excruciating minutes until the end of school. A great little snapshot: an emotion frozen in time. Been there a thousand times myself. I drew clocks, too. And calendars, indicating the last day of the school term, or sometimes, just Friday highlighted.

I hope she does all right on the Crucible final.

Cliff Clavin Would be Proud

Any disruption from the routine stirs them up: a minimum day, an assembly, a fight between classes, rain, whatever. They are so distracted by shiny objects, it'd be amusing, except that I have to teach them little unimportant things like critical thinking and literary analysis, and how to express ideas clearly in their speaking and writing.

The other occurrence that fights against my lesson plan is absences. Any school activity, such as an assembly, necessitates the absence of any kid who is part of the ASB (student government); Clubs Day (which has morphed from information disemination and membership drive into a fund-raising opportunity) means club officers are out of class either preparing or cleaning up after the event. I estimate a full third of my absences aren't illnesses or truancies, but are generated by the life of the school itself.

Today was the Red Cross blood drive. A worthy event which teaches generosity to the community and compassion for the needy. I'm all for it. And though they organize the thing as well as can be done, it inevitably causes absences in my middle-of-the-day periods, as the appointment schedule they use falls behind and causes waiting lines. That's fine: you want to give blood, you civic-minded kid, I encourage you, and you can make up whatever work you missed the next day. In the meantime, I'm going to teach my regular lesson, because I have these other kids, and we can't just pull over to a siding and wait until you get back.

If it were only that easy. Because it's the blood drive, and only because it's the blood drive, the kids who do show up (and this is the vast majority of the class) have been infected by the "different" day, and it creates a class of highly-distracted, talkative, energized students.

Well, since they're mostly talking about the blood drive, and asking other kids who have their forearms bandaged if it hurt, and if they feel faint, and for a full report on how fast the blood came out and if the orange juice was tart, instead of forcing them to pay attention to the short story, which I can't make any more interesting than I already do, I sabotaged their conversation by asking them if they knew what the four blood types are.

This has nothing to do with my lesson, but I have them, so I'm going to play the fish I hook. In the next ten minutes, they learn of the four blood types, what the Rh factor is, how before we had blood typing transfusion often resulted in the death of the recipient, that the Rh comes from the Rhesus monkeys who were used to discover this, that they donate a pint, which is how much a regular water bottle holds, that O- is the universal donor because anyone can receive that type, that what the promotion meant when it said "you can save up to three lives" is that we can separate the blood components now into three groups: plasma (for general blood volume), red cells (carry oxygen, yes, Henry, you remembered from sixth grade, good) and platelets (needed for blood clotting). Then a little bit about heart transplants and the differences between Christian Barnard's first baboon transplant in South Africa in the 60s and artificial hearts that extended life a handful of days, and today's amazing heart-lung transplants that give their recipients years and year of added life. Oh, sure: the donor hearts and other organs come from people who just died and who had given permission beforehand, usually by marking their driver licenses, or whose relatives give permission for their organs to be used for transplants upon their death. There is always a waiting list, so when someone dies who has the right organs that match what the recipient needs, the recipients are called into the hospital to have the operation in a matter of hours from the time their home phones ring.

Well, they were amazed, and four periods of kids were listening to every word I said, something that doesn't happen every day, let me tell you. Once the topic was exhausted, I was able to turn their attention back to our literature book again, and the rest of our time was pretty productive, by literary measures.

I wonder if they'll stand for my putting any of that on their test?

Random Stats

By this coming June, these numbers will be accurate (some numbers are estimates):

3,150 young minds moving through my sphere of influence. (Will be over 5,000 by career's end).

About 1,200 serious, typed, double-spaced, big-points essays torturously written and torturously read.

650 Friday afternoons at my desk listening to the laughter and shouting slowly fade from the campus, after the last bell.

4 serious fist-fights in my room.

Fifty-five readings of the play "The Diary of Anne Frank" (I can still quote lines verbatim).

One cup of coffee laced with Ex-Lax.

~ 7,500 items collected (the majority bought with student money) in the form of canned food, raised for the local food bank.

~150 football games attended (I've missed a few).

3 blown overhead projector bulbs.

One dropped and destroyed laptop computer.

A file full of thank-you notes, cards, and letters.

3,240 recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Fifty-four photographs on my wall, and in my desk organizer, all scrawled on the back with well-wishes from thoughtful students who don't want to be forgotten.

And I'm not even 2/3 the way done.

More Handwriting

Is there really so much to learn in grammar school that children cannot be taught to write legibly, in cursive?

Literacy can be defined in several ways, but one of them has to do with reaching a certain level of artistic expression. Clear handwriting is part of that. A good fraction of these kids has never been taught how to hold the pen in their hands, or how to hold their hands, or how to guide the pen across the paper, or which muscles to use: they try to move the pen by leaving the side of their hand on the paper and moving their fingers to manipulate the pen. They write half a page, and the small muscles of their fingers become fatigued, and the appearance of their writing starts to deteriorate, to the point that the writing at the top of the page and that at the bottom could not be easily attributed to the same person.

Straighten out those fingers, cradle the pen between three points: the pads of the index, middle finger, and thumb, spaced equidistant around the instrument. Keep the full weight of your hand off the paper: use the pad of your forearm as the contact point with the desk instead. Nothing from the elbow to the fingertips moves, bends or contracts.

Now drive your forearm, hand, fingers and pen with upper-arm movement that originates in the shoulder. Yes, the movement carries all the way back (or rather, originates from) the shoulder. Those big muscles can generate pages of writing.

Fight the temptation to bend your fingers at all, and correct yourself when you do.

Yes, your writing will look sloppy as hell to begin with: you have not trained the larger muscles of the upper arm and shoulder. But after some consistent effort, and guarding against bad habits slipping back in, you will start to build muscle control and muscle memory, and your cursive handwriting will begin to be fuller and more fluid, with regularly-shaped characters. And you will be able to sustain that for over a page without hand/finger fatigue.

That beautiful handwriting that your mother had, that you can still see on the backs of those old photos: that's how she did it.

If You Keep Doing That, Your Hand Will Hurt

…comatose?

This is the product of over 30 minutes of reading and over 10 minutes dedicated to writing this log.

But a day-dreaming student I can take. What's really sad about this is that we produce a seventeen-year old who writes like a 3rd-grader. This is embarrassing, and yes, I'm talking about orthography (handwriting). How can anyone take this person seriously, no matter the clarity of thought or depth of insight?

We teach cursive handwriting in the 3rd grade, as a final step after teaching printing. But students consistently report to me that after they are taught the cursive alphabet, and using it the rest of that year, that they are seldom required to write in cursive in the 4th, 5th or 6th grades. By the time they get to secondary school, you have writing like this: cursive is abandonded, and the fine motor skills that used to be developed through physical activity have atrophied through computer and game console button-pushing so that whether printing or writing in cursive, this is the resultant appearance.

There is only one way to cure this: after children learn to write in cursive when they're eight, they are required to do most of their classwork in cursive afterwards. Or am I being too logical? If we don't, the result will often look like this.

Sometimes going backwards is the best way forward.

Still Fresh

I picked up Nineteen Eighty-four (not 1984: that is not what the author titled his work) over the weekend and polished it off in two days. Just couldn't put it down. It has always been one of my favorites, but it's been twenty-five years or so since I'd read it.

Wow, it's still masterful. Reminds me of Steinbeck's novellas: he doesn't waste words. Everything that you read is essential to the story itself or to develop mood, foreshadow, etc. He's not James Michener. I caught myself reading for technical appreciation as much as recreation: an occupational hazard, I guess, but it didn't decrease my enjoyment one bit; as a matter of fact, I think I appreciated it all the more because of my technical viewpoint.

I don't know why it took me so long to pick it up again. All I can do is to whine "so many books, so little time." My "Want to Read" list grows, and I really only nibble at grain in the silo. I should live so long!


Sometimes kids are sweet, kind, considerate and appreciative. Then there are the other 179 school days to consider.

Weird little day, being back on campus after a Thursday holiday. This Friday is an orphan.

I think I like taking the one-day holiday on the official day: it helps us remember why we're not at work. All those three-day weekend things do is blur that realization. Hey, but that's just me, and there was a bit of resistance to the idea that I would have to get up and go to work this morning.

Projects due today, and students will feel like doing "nothing" because they see it as a day detached from regular school. We train them to do that by the way we run our classes, of course. I always want to do school on school days, but I'm sure there will be many movies running on campus today. Warehousing. That's not what I get paid to do, and I have a moral obligation to make good use of each of the 180 days I get with them. Lord knows they need the education.

Freshman problem is mostly solved, and for a while the bane of my existence is suspended, so class is like, well, a class. I'll have to see what I can do to quarantine him when he returns.

Slicing Through the Gordian Knot

Well, well, well,

A few Tattle-Parent messages, a few seat changes, and miracles can occur.

My freshmen are behaving significantly better, though there are still going to be challenges based more on maturity level than anything else now. We're actually getting some things done, and it feels more like a class where we're all invested. I've never had a class that took this much time to settle in. Or maybe I've just forgotten…

Even the Blurter seems to take my admonishments not to call out with the understanding that he's receiving grace, not judgment, which I hope makes him willing to work w/ me on improving his behavior. And I know what that means: patiently travel the long, slow road to maturity by his side. Eh, I've done it plenty of times before, so I can do it again.

I hope they like Lord of the Flies: they seems to understand it implicitly, already. :)

More Freshman Blues

I think I will win in the long run, but I see now that it is going to take constant pressure on my part. I don't like my overhanging shadow in the room to be the reason students behave civilly. I want them to do it because they are making a choice to enter into a social contract of mutual respect (allowing, of course, for the fact that I have an authority they don't have).

Some of these kids don't seem to be able, at this early date, to internalize the social contract. Too consumed with their own felt needs, too unused to carrying responsibility for their words and actions, and too unfamiliar with the good feeling that comes along with practicing a little maturity.

The majority of the class is fine; it's only a few that seem to not have stepped up, and need to be bump-started. I know what to do: clamp down for a while, be the gentle-but-felt authority in the room until the strays begin to feel the massage and accept the limits; then gently ease the control a bit, let them experience the positive feedback, then a bit more, until I find their level.

Mr. Coulter, the Freshman Whisperer.

OMG, I have Freshmen!

After six years of teaching no one younger than a sophomore, I'd forgotten what my old eighth-grade students were like, and why I wanted to move up to an assignment in the high school. Well, now I remember why I wanted to get away from them.

Freshmen are the Ghosts of Middle-schoolers Past (apologies to Charles Dickens).

They're babyish, and have almost no attention span. They want to peck at each other, and squabble and fight about everything: "Shut up." "No: you shut up!" That kind of crap. They give me instructions to "make him give me my eraser back." They want me to be Lord Arbiter of every perceived injustice, no matter how miniscule.

Giving instructions to them that involve anything like a multi-step process is a study in repetition, back-tracking, and explaining the Why at each step. Here's what we accomplished today in a normal period (58 minutes):

1. I reminded them to bring a reading book Monday


2. I announced the Greek/Latin Roots Quiz


3. After the general panic that ensued, I reminded them that I'd been giving them notices about this quiz, more than once a period, for the last two days


4. I walked them through the process of preparing a quiz sheet from a half-sheet of notebook paper: tear across, write the title of the quiz across the top, write your name/period/assignment name/date in the upper-right hand corner, number from one to ten, skipping lines

Okay, we're into the period about ten minutes now, but this is the first time, and I have fielded four or five questions about these simple, clear instructions (esp. the skipping lines, for some reason). Now for instructions about how to complete the quiz:

1. copy the word you see on the board next to No. 1 on your paper


2. Draw a box around the letters of that word that contains the Greek or Latin root (that you took notes on and completed a homework assignment on)


3. Write the meaning of the root, either above the box, or after the example word on the same line


4. Repeat for Nos. 2–10


5. When you're finished, turn your quiz face-down & occupy yourself quietly until I call time.
   

Oh. My. God. I had to repeat, slowly, the entire process, and put an example on the board, box, definition and all, before they were able to proceed without confirmation at each and every step (and there were four or five who called me over to confirm that they had done it correctly). It's three steps, kids! Copy, identify, define. And the definitions are one-word concepts, so simple a caveman could grunt them: "field," "air," water," high."

All right, these instructions and the time given for everyone to complete the quiz was something like fifteen minutes. For ten words. We've used 25 minutes. Time to score the quiz:

1. Make sure your name is on your paper


2. Trade papers


3. Write your name at the bottom of the person's quiz you just received (at the bottom, Timmy)


4. Each number is worth two points: one for identifying the root, one for the definition

So I read off the letters that should be boxed, slowly & carefully, and the definitions. A few questions about "What about this definition" which is good conscientious scoring, so I'm happy to do it. This takes another ten minutes (again, for ten items). So We're not approaching 40 minutes spent so far.

1. Write the number correct at the top of the quiz, out of 20, as a fraction


2. Return your quiz to its owner: owners, check the arithmetic, and pass your quiz forward

Well, that's another 3–4 minutes, but finally the completed, scored quizzes all come to the front of the room. We took the quiz, and I have less than 15 minutes left in the period. We open our books and continue the current short story until the bell, when I ask for hands from those who need to find a reading book for Monday, and dismiss them.

It's now 8:30 in the morning, and I'm exhausted.

Tagged

Yeah, I know, I don't come here often, so I missed the fact that my Comments have been spammed. So sorry you have to scroll through Viagra ads to see the pathetic few comments (not that your comments are pathetic: the fact that there're are so few such golden nuggets there is the pathetic part). And I can't seem to figure out how to delete old comments…

While I'm here:

Have you noticed that everything in our Therapeutic Society today is some kind of pathology to be treated? Things that used to be considered just part of the Human Condition are now diagnosed, then prescribed. The afore-mentioned Viagra is an example: almost completely a product targeted at male insecurity. And that insecurity has been given a name: "Erectile dysfunction. What would you say, ninety percent?

And this generation has been taught that what's wrong with them isn't a lack of character, but that they have oppositional defiance disorder (that one brings the biggest chuckle, because my father had a cure for that. He wore it around his waist), or whatever other bona fide borderline personality disorder has been added to the DSM.

I'm not saying there aren't actual problems out there. There have been times when I've been grateful for a kid going back on his ADD meds. But some of this other stuff is suspect. There are an awful lot of pills being pushed out there, and many of them seem to take the place of us having to engage the unpleasant realities around us. I don't need a bottle of Xanax: I need to to through the grieving process of a major loss, get through it, grow through it, an move forward with an emotional strength and maturity that I didn't have before, and maybe a drop of wisdom as well. The pill lets me circumvent that growth. Not good for me.

I'm not a pharmacological Luddite. Most of these drugs have legitimate uses, but when we over-prescribe them just to make life easy, it makes us weak.

Beat Down

I'm sitting at my desk, sneaking in a few peaceful moments & morsels of nourishment, when the air begins to tingle with excitement, and students are being pulled, as if by some magnetic force, out into the quad. That can mean only one thing.

Fight.

By the time I make it out to the quad, the assistant principal and security, out on lunch duty, have already separated the perps/combatants/adversaries, and are cleaning up w/ crowd control. Nothing for me to do here.

I used to break up fights when I taught in the middle school. Because I was younger, and because the kids were smaller, and I could pull them apart without much fear of injury to myself. Looking at fifty next year, I'm not likely to do that with the bigger high school boys, unless they are tiny, or it's still at the trash-talk stage.

I never intervene in girl fights: the emotions are so intense that getting seriously scratched up while one girl is trying to get through me and back to the object of her wrath is a very real possibility. That, and the idea of me touching a teenage girl in any manner, even to break up a fight, is problematic for a male teacher on its face. Better to wait for security unless someone is receiving an ugly beat-down and can't even fend off blows. Still, a judgment call, because it'd be difficult to see a woman, young or old, taking a decisive beating, whether from a man or another woman.

This path of non-intervention goes against my sensibilities and upbringing, but the legal realities trump ethics here, sadly. The fear of being sued by a student who is even slightly injured, or just uses the claim of injury as a pretext for a suit, while being pulled off another student he is committing aggravated battery against ( oh, the irony), is very real, and could be a career-ender. Her tooth vs. my career. Sorry, Sheila, but they can do marvelous things with dental implants these days.

Stay Cool, Boy

Wrote my first referral (sends your little butt to the vice-principal form) yesterday.

I hate writing referrals. I work very hard to avoid it, for several reasons:

1. If I write a referral quickly, it may be passing my problem off to the administration too early, instead of taking the correct steps to deal with it myself.
2. It may send a message to the student that he is being "flushed" away, instead of at least listened to, however crazy, disrespectful, wrong-headed he is. And we all know what you are if you get flushed.
3. Referrals written by teachers who jump to writing unsupported referrals (for small offenses they should be handling though intermediate steps) carry less weight on the desk of the administrator, who may even develop sympathy for the referred student ("I know, Grover, she's crazy: I'm just going to write 'Counseled student' on this, and you can spent the rest of the period in in-house suspension. Just try not to set her off anymore, okay?").

The third reason is very important. I seldom write a referral before the second semester begins and that is a fact known by everyone. So when I do write a kid up, and provide justification (give the administrator specific information to use, written on the referral), that kid damn well better get a punishment.

More referrals during second semester because the teenage angst thaws with the daffodils in the spring.

Don't get me wrong: there are certain behaviors, notably continued disrespect, that jump right from a detention to a referral, and they're merited. If the kid is unmanageable, he's unmanageable, so here's you ticket to see the Old Man in the Office.

It's the same way with my affect in the classroom. I'm very patient with kids' behavior, and I provide a little margin room for them to be goofy kids. But when they see my expression change, and my voice firm up, and all the other small signals, they read it clearly, and I usually get immediate results. If I ever have to raise my voice, or keep a class after the bell to mini-lecture about their behavior, it means something to them, because it stands out so distinctly from my everyday smiling, glad-you're-here-kid affect. Teachers who raise their voices a lot, or are dramatic, or cuttingly sarcastic, who use these methods as the normal fare of their classroom interaction, quickly lose effectiveness, because kids tune them out (or down). The teacher (and I might suggest, the parent) who cries wolf is soon ignored and discounted.
Not I: when I raise an eyebrow, I usually get results, because the eyebrow isn't lost in the background noise of other emotions/demonstrations.

As Riff advises in West Side Story:

Boy, boy, crazy boy,
Get cool, boy!
Got a rocket in your pocket,
Keep coolly cool, boy!
Don't get hot,
'Cause man, you got
Some high times ahead.
Take it slow and Daddy-O,
You can live it up and die in bed!

Boy, boy, crazy boy!
Stay loose, boy!
Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it.
Turn off the juice, boy!
Go man, go,
But not like a yo-yo schoolboy.
Just play it cool, boy,
Real cool!

I'm the adult: he's the yo-yo schoolboy. It's my job to model maturity. I can't indulge my anger, my frustration, my indignity, except in measured doses designed to let students see the results of their mistreatment of others. Even then, I need to be in control, and meter it out. And when I do it right, that may be the most valuable lesson presented to them that day.

As Mark Twain Said…

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Haven't posted for months, and had to retrieve forgotten passwords and such just to get here. Pity: now I have no time to post, and Brother, have I got a lot to say.

Soon, mis amis, soon.