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.