Life Imitating Lit

But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below.

Don’t believe what the students say: Gothic mystery novels are so relevant to my life.  For instance, I completely sympathized with the expression of Dr. Jekyll in the passage above yesterday morning, when NOT ONE student from my class remembered to do her homework or bring her textbook.

Mr. Utterson at last turned and looked at his companion.  They were both pale; and there was an answering horror in their eyes.

Oh, and did I mention this was the morning of my first observation?  For my Master’s degree program?  

“God forgive us, God forgive us,” said Mr. Utterson.

But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, and walked on once more in silence.

I would have liked to follow suit, but what I did was calmly allow the students to get their books en masse; then borrowed an armful of copies from the workroom for the students who didn’t even have their books at school; then gave them a five-minute reading period before the lively discussion commenced.

And, for what it’s worth, my instructor was impressed at my handling of a difficult, though all-too-familiar, situation.  “How long did you say you’d been teaching?”

“Six years,” I said proudly.

“So you know how it is.”

Yes.  Yes, I sure do.  It takes a lot more than that to freeze my blood.

My New Favorite Brazilian Revolutionary

Dialogue cannot exist without humility.  The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance.  Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility.  How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?  How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others — mere “its” in whom I cannot recognize other “I”s?  How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of “pure” men, the owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members are “these people” or “the great unwashed”? How can I dialogue if I start from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in histosy is a sign of deterioration thus to be avoided?  How can I dialogue if I am closed to — and even offended by — the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness? Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue.  Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world.  Someone who cannot acknowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know.

Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

A Different Way of Thinking

So my first-period students are handing in their essays, and one doesn’t have hers.  Only she doesn’t say that; she speaks the words I dread most. “Did you get my dad’s e-mail?”

I didn’t, because her dad e-mailed me around midnight the day before.  I log on after class and it’s seven or eight paragraphs, articulately detailing his daughter’s new diagnosis of ADHD.  She didn’t finish the paper because she left part of it at school, and she tried to restart it at home but ran out of steam and worked herself into a frenzy. He finally told her to go to bed and he would talk to me about it.

I don’t even think about writing back.  I pick up the phone and call him at work.

The thing about parents is that most of the time, they just want to talk.  I hardly said a word during what turned out to be a 20-minute conversation.  When I did speak, I affirmed his feelings: I, too, want his daughter to be successful in spite of her disability.  I agreed that there was nothing wrong with his daughter, and mentioned that girls often receive a later diagnosis than boys because they tend to lack the hyperactivity that’s a telltale sign of the condition.  I pointed to the online syllabi that spelled out every single assignment for the quarter.  I explained that late work would receive a 10% penalty each day unless the student had requested an extension before the due date.

And then I told him that, just this once, I would accept the paper late with no penalty.  Because I could already see that his daughter was a special person, one who wanted to do the right thing and needed some extra help to be able to do so.  I offered to meet with her during lunch one day to discuss how I could help her best.  I didn’t rush him off the phone, even when the late bell informed me my class was waiting.  

This is what happens when teachers are educated: last year, I would have rolled my eyes at what I viewed as indulgence and coddling.  Now I know something now about ADHD and the stigma that comes with it, about the struggles families have to keep their kids afloat with a diagnosis they don’t fully understand.  

Yes, school’s been underway for less than two weeks.  But even so, this is an extraordinary amount of patience for me, the world’s biggest blowhard.  I suppose it comes from understanding the father’s point of view: he loves his daughter and wants her to succeed.  That means that sometimes he doesn’t know when to stop talking.  Other times, as Ron Clark pointed out yesterday, it may lead to uglier actions, more offensive words, barriers that are hard to break down.  But last week, it was harmless.  My class was glad for the two extra minutes of study time.  They had a quiz to take.

Ctrl + Shift

Looking back to the first day of the year, when everything seemed perfect and bright, I remember one detail that now seems extremely important.  As we shared stories and filled out forms and broke into groups for discussion, the students frequently chattered and whispered to one another.  Not a lot, just a little, and mostly during transitions — toward the end of a three-minute think period, or between “Let’s return to our seats” and “Who has an answer she’d like to share?”

What sticks out is not the fact that they were talking; that’s pretty ubiquitous in a classroom full of fifteen-year-old girls.  It’s the fact that it didn’t bother me.  In fact, I viewed it with detached amusement, remembering the days when talking to my friends was so much more important than anything anyone else could possibly have to say.  My father used to bellow in frustration, after I had occupied the phone all night: “You JUST saw her!  And you’ll see her again tomorrow morning!”

“But daaaaad, that’s SCHOOL.  We can’t talk at school!”

Chatter used to just slice right through the stitches that held my temper in place.  But somehow, between last spring and this fall, it has ceased to matter to me: I accept it.  It comes with the territory.  I’m able to keep the atmosphere relaxed and open, but not chaotic; if it starts to get out of hand, I simply stop and wait, smiling, for the offenders to hear my silence and lapse into guilty submission.  Or I make a joke that gets everyone laughing and the talkers start to wonder what they missed.  I can’t explain it, but the thought of a class that’s visiting instead of learning doesn’t fill me with panic the way it once did.

I didn’t really realize this until I read the first chapter of Gregory Michie’s wonderful memoir, Holler if You Hear Me for my latest (and final!) grad course.  The exchanges between him (white, rural, educated) and his students (black, urban, below grade level) are priceless, but what really pulled me in was this bit at the end:

Before I knew it, the quest for control became my primary focus.  I began classifying days as good or bad solely in relation to how quiet and obedient the class had been.  Other concerns, such as whether the kids had learned anything of value, lessened in importance.  On the worst days, they didn’t matter at all.

It was an easy trap to fall into.  I became so obsessed with establishing control in the classroom that once I did — fragile as that control seemed — I was afraid to let go.  I began to feel that I always had to be the center of attention, the imparter of knowledge, the setter of agendas and boundaries.  But […] it doesn’t have to be that way  Letting go doesn’t have to mean a loss of control.  It is possible — even desirable — to step aside and let the kids take control.

Stepping aside can be a difficult thing for a teacher.  A few years back I was attempting to teach something at the blackboard of a tiny closed-sized classroom, and the kids weren’t getting it.  I thought I was explaining things clearly, but they weren’t following me.  I couldn’t understand why.  Then Santiago, a kid who always sat in the farthest seat from me, said, “If you’d get outta the way so we could see what you’re doing, it might help.”  I hadn’t realized it, but my body was partially blocking their view of the board.  I moved over and things cleared up quite a bit.  Sometimes that’s what being a teacher is: knowing when to crumple up your plans, get out of the way, and give the kids room to learn.

I wish I could have learned this on the first first day, but I’m glad I’m starting to learn it now.

Whitaker's Wisdom: Why Great?

After my offhand reference to Todd Whitaker in last week’s entry, I realized I probably had some explaining to do:

Whitaker wrote a book called “What Great Teachers Do Differently,” which I read in my very first grad school course.  It was a methods course, and the teacher (still my favorite) had us read all kinds of perspectives in order to determine our own.

The book is divided into fourteen principles that Whitaker believes separate okay teachers from brilliant ones. They’re all pretty common-sense ideas, but the way in which he discusses them is at once humbling and inspiring.  He reminds us of our many flaws while encouraging us to get rid of them and move on to become better teachers and humans.

His work is on my mind currently because I heard him speak at a teachers’ convention a few weeks ago: it was the first school-related event of the year, so I think I was paying better attention than I generally do at required meetings.  The presentation he gave there included many of the same principles in his book: basic ideas, but presented in a snappy and engaging manner.

I have a bad track record of starting weekly features (to be exact, it’s 0%) but I’d like to make a more short-term committment to discussing these principles in an effort to put them into practice.  So, here is the first.

Whitaker begins the book with the seemingly-obvious principle that observing great teachers is more useful than observing okay or bad teachers.  Although we often hear that we can learn what not to do from a poor teacher, we can learn a lot more from a good one, and more still from an excellent one.

How can we identify an excellent teacher? Whitaker observes wryly that while all teachers think they are great teachers, most of them are wrong.  The key litmus test is that truly great educators are able to accurately self-reflect; they know when they’ve taught a wonderful lesson and when they’ve taught a mediocre one.  Poor teachers always think they’ve done a great job, and when things aren’t going well, they’re quick to blame others or circumstances.

Whitaker also stresses the importance of identifying the variables in a great teacher’s repertoire.  In other words, what is s/he doing that other teachers are not?  For instance, all teachers take attendance — great and terrible ones.  Many teachers decorate their classrooms, including poor ones.  But a great teacher will never, for instance, argue with a student.  (Or use sarcasm, says Whitaker, though I respectfully disagree.)  Identifying these differences will help us to improve our craft through better interactions with students.

Planning While Hungry

My mother taught me to always plan meals while I’m hungry: if it sounds good then, it will sound good while you’re fixing dinner.  (She also taught me never to grocery shop while hungry.  Anyone who has done this can attest to the wisdom of her advice.)

I’ve been remembering this for the last week as I plan out the school year.  It’s a light one in some respects: I only have three classes, and every other day I only stay for an hour.  In others, it’s much heavier: my classes are 20+ students each, where my former average was half that.  And I have seminars, observations and portfolio sessions to schedule as I prepare for my graduation and certification in the spring.  In reality, it’s probably just another year — the comfort of routine buttressed by the intoxicating pleasure of a fresh start from scratch.

Every morning I awake eager to organize time, weigh assignments and measure out the calendar.  It’s the sort of task that ordinarily makes my skin crawl, but this time of year, when the evening air is heavy and cool and the crickets lend their muted tones to the symphony of fluttering keys and shuffling papers on the other side of the wall, it just makes me hungry for more.

My Big Idea this time around?  Quarter syllabi — to ensure an even number of points in each term, a lack of overlapping assignments and clarity from the get-go regarding due dates.  My inspiration was my own professor, the one who taught my summer class: her extraordinary organization was such a gift that it made me want to pay it forward to my own students.

The Longest Day

It’s the longest day of the year, I remember suddenly, and boy, does it feel like it.

I am driving home from class; Stevie Nicks is wailing away on the stereo.  I am bawling, though I am not quite sure why.

For some aggravatingly unknown reason, I work much better under pressure than without it.  Thus the lazy shopping trip this morning, the e-mail exchange with my faraway sister, the heartwarming chat with the school principal when I dropped by with an early dinner for the staff… and then the frenzied consumption of 67 pages of textbook reading in hurried snatches between lessons for the remainder of the afternoon.  Sigh.

I’d read the chapter on ADHD (the shortest of the three, and it took me the longest – just reading about distractibility is enough to distract me!) and so launched into the one about emotional and behavioral disorders.  These are some of the most challenging students to teach, and they have some of the lowest rates of success in school, work and life.  They tend to run into trouble with law enforcement, teen pregnancy and substance abuse.  Absorb.  Absorb.  Highlight. Memorize.  Prepare for the quiz.

It wasn’t too hard, and afterward the instructor presented a [well-organized, thorough and informative] PowerPoint lecture about the chapter we’d just read. Then she started telling stories.  Like:

• A child tattles on his friend: “So-and-so just pimp-slapped me!” The teacher responds: “That’s not appropriate; we don’t say ‘pimp’ at school.” Child is puzzled. “Pimp’s not a bad man; pimp’s a rich man!”
• Teacher gives an assignment: write a letter to your parents. In it, try to persuade them to do something: anything you want. The child asks his family to please clean the house.
• Child is showing signs of emotional disturbance; in a conference, teacher finds out parents have been taking child to a strip bar.
• Staff remove a child who is throwing a tantrum from the classroom and place him in the “quiet room,” where he can calm down without hurting himself. He proceeds to run around the room yelling “gangbang!” and then demonstrate precisely what he means by that term.
• When physically restrained by her teacher, a child does what she has learned to do to escape such situations: urinate on both of them.

Somehow, I remained clinically detached from these harrowing stories. I asked questions, took notes, commented when appropriate.

I didn’t even feel sad, really, until my friend Rebecca exploded with: “Can’t we just start a boarding school somewhere and take these children there and give them what their parents can’t?  Feed them, clothe them, discipline them, show them affection, help them succeed?  They can have their kids back on the weekends.  I think it’s important for them to be with their parents.  But… someone has to do something!”

“Do it.  I’ll work for you,” I said.  I meant it more than anything I’d said in at least a month.

And then, after watching this extremely disturbing promo for a documentary on eating disorders (an internalized form of emotional disability,) another friend mused: “It seems so sad, so extreme, and yet we are so much closer to those girls than we realize.  Life is hard, and people have to deal with it somehow; we all have different coping mechanisms.  Mine might not be as unhealthy as starving myself to death, but just a little change in the way my brain was wired, and –” she couldn’t finish her sentence.

We finish our wrap-up activity, walk to the parking lot, smelling the rain and chattering about the next day.  I start the car, turn on the radio for some reason. Then Stevie.  Then the tears.  I think, over and over: it’s not fair.

None of it is fair.  Nor has it ever been.

Through Another's Eyes

My summer grad course picked up the week school let out, so I went from preparing and grading tests to studying for them.

(Aside: While studying one afternoon, between ice cream trucks, barking dogs and a chanteur husband, I discovered this wonderful site, which boasts three different “shades” of noise designed to block out other noise. Blissful concentration!)

This course, which studies special education law, implementation and categories, is one I thought I’d find hard to swallow.  For one thing, it’s simply not practical for my current job; at a private school, we have very little funding and few resources, and thus very few students with special needs even apply.  For another, I’ve seen a lot of abuse of the system over the years; virtually anyone who is willing to fork over a few grand to an independent testing center can get his daughter diagnosed with a learning disability, entitling her to all sorts of special accommodations she may or may not need.  So I really expected to grit my teeth and eyeroll my way through the textbook.

I’ve been surprised, though.  I think, as I’ve said before, that a lot has to do with the instructor; she is the most organized and well-prepared of any I’ve had in this program.  She’s also very articulate and knows her content area well enough to be able to admirably defend current trends in the field, even if I don’t always agree with the rationale behind them. (More on that later.)  And she paces the class well; though it’s long (nearly three hours) she breaks it up with PowerPoint lectures, group activities, discussion and case studies.

Another strong point is the dynamic of the class.  Unlike most of my previous classes, there isn’t that select few students who dominate discussions unchecked.  Almost everyone contributes and no one monopolizes the floor for too long.  Again, much of the credit for that goes to the professor.

Last week the professor passed out copies of a journal article from American Anthropologist journal, June 1956.  We were instructed to list some adjectives that describe the Nacirema, a tribe under observation by an anthropological expert:

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as “holy-mouth-men.” The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.

The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.

Think about it for a minute, or read the rest if you want.

Gradually, it became clear that the objective of this exercise was to see ourselves with the horrified disgust that another “tribe” might express when encountering cold medicine, a toothbrush or a mother punishing her impertinent child by washing his mouth out with soap.

So, if I’ve learned anything so far in the class, it’s that I shouldn’t be so quick to make assumptions about a student with a disability.  He might lead an existence that’s foreign to me, but were he to return the analytical favor, I’m sure there’s plenty in my own set of rituals and values that doesn’t make much sense.  And I think, like the Nacirema, I’ve had it pretty easy so far.

Be Prepared

AP Exams are over.  I didn’t administer any myself, but boy, did I see the ripples: students missing class to study, showing up with that hollow, distracted look about them, asking for prayer and showing they needed it.

On one of the first days, I asked a student how her exam had gone.  “It was fine,” she said smilingly.  “My teacher prepared us really well.”  Toward the end of the exam period, I asked a different student about a different test.  “It was awful,” she said.  “My teacher didn’t prepare us at all.”

As someone who took a lot of AP exams herself, I was surprised to see how closely these students linked their teachers’ efforts to their successes and / or failures.  I remember studying a LOT on my own during these classes, and some teachers were certainly better instructors than others, but when I aced the exams (History, for instance) I tended to pat myself on the back, and when I left feeling defeated (Chemistry, which it’s a miracle I passed at all) I assumed it was because I hadn’t put enough time into preparing for it.

I’m not sure whether this is a generational gap (more consumerism) or just a personality difference, but it made me wonder, especially since I’m in the final throes of preparing my own students to take the SAT in two weeks.  I am torn between anger and despair, some mornings, when I ask a question none of them can answer: am I going crazy?  Have I not explained this multiple times before?  Are they just not interested, not aware, not engaged?  Or am I simply not doing a good enough job preparing them?

This time of the year is really the worst.  It’s all about the bottom line: when are the quizzes, and can I take them later if I have a really good excuse?  How much homework do we have, and are you planning to check whether we did it?  What, exactly, do we have to know for the exam, and what can we forget forever?

And for my part, I’m wondering where I went wrong in teaching them to be better students, curious people and informed citizens – and whether I did anything right at all.

Let's Get it Started

"The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach accordingly."

David Ausubel

My current grad course has an online forum, where we all take turns moderating discussions based on the text.  This was my week, along with my colleague James (we teach at the same school, but weren't really friends until we met out of school.  Isn't that funny?)

The effusive nature of most previous posts had bothered me, so I tapped into the Six Word Memoir for a framework: in six words, I asked my classmates to describe the methods of the most effective teacher they could remember. It was interesting to see the similar trends that emerged: openness and challenge were two of the most common.

Meanwhile, James used the above principle to run his forum.  Is this the most important thing? he asked -- and if not, what is?  Despite his many efforts at argument, he couldn't convince anyone to argue otherwise (except for the copout answer, "There is no single most important principle.")  One student offered a story in support: tutoring for a state assessment test, she came upon a question that referred to a letter written by Robert E. Lee.  Neither student knew who he was, so she tried to prompt them:

Me: Okay. Do you know any American Wars?
Students: Yes
Me: Alright. What was the very first American War?
Student: WWII?
Me: Well...actually i think it was the Revolutionary War... Do you remember what comes next?
Student: No. What does History have to do with this. I thought we were doing English.

So basically, I found out what they know....they know about different kinds of writing, but that isn't going to help them at all if they can't fit the writing into any of their prior knowledge.... I found out they don't know much about American history, so even though I am an English teacher, and responsible for them passing the English HSA, I have to not only backtrack, but backtrack completely out of my content area at this point.

After most of a semester in which you could hear a pin drop at any point in any class, we had suddenly revved everyone up.  The student who had shared this story went on to explain that he believed socio-economic status to be the single most important factor in determining success in school; if you were raised without the benefit of parental supervision and expectation, he argued, you couldn't possibly be expected to do well.  In reply, another student ended a rant with the following: "If you don't have the discipline to work things through for yourself, you deserve to be flipping burgers at McDonald's.  THE END!"  Another told of her own childhood as her voice shook with emotion: "My father was a drug addict, and my mother was never around.  But I'm not an outlier; they'll never make a movie about my life.  I just got myself to school, day after day, and here I am.  I'm doing fine.  I don't blame anyone."

James and I just gaped at each other as student after student broke his silence to unburden his soul and speakaloud of his insecurities and frustrations about the profession.  Somehow we had struck a nerve.  But how did we do it, and could we do it again?  That's anyone's guess.

Whenever anyone asks me what I like most about teaching, I don't hesitate to say: "Its unpredictability." You just never know what might happen next, and what it will be that gets things started.