EDSE 500 Video Self-Observation & The End of Summer As We Know It

Yesterday I recorded myself teaching on video. It was only a review lesson with a very straightforward plan: Go over the questions from our last test. Honestly I do believe there is a lot of value in reviewing test or assignment questions students have already seen, because just getting the students to think about the work is half the battle. Taking a test is a good way to make sure everyone at least gave it a try. It might seem sort of dull to think of teaching this way, but every test opens a door to learning. Reviewing the test afterward is a good way to make sure everything is in order. Although the students were not exactly entertained by my teaching style, I feel somewhat justified in my approach, because they did significantly better on the final exam than they did for the test which I reviewed so meticulously with them.

I misplaced my cold-calling cards the other day, so my student participation largely relied on volunteers. Unfortunately, that meant only a few students were actively participating as much as I would like. Other than that, I was actually fairly pleased with what I saw of myself on videotape. I think my class time utilization was very down-to-business, patient, and thorough. I was fair and consistent with my classroom discipline. I questioned students well. I kept a calm and polite but very no-nonsense, businesslike teaching persona. All of those things come fairly natural for me at this point, and I am satisfied with all of these characteristics.

It never occurred to me before, but upon watching myself on film, I realized that my teaching style is very similar to my dad. Not to be complacent, but actually I feel pretty okay with that. I took two quarters of business law from my dad in college, and I definitely consider him at least in the 80th percentile as far as teachers. Nothing flashy, just honest, well-organized, high expectations, and no bull$#@! One could do worse. I think I am one of those teachers who runs a classroom where the students probably learn a lot (if they want?) but might often resent it at the time, because I give a lot of homework and rules and do not particularly razzle-dazzle entertain them every period like Moda might. But more on being liked or not liked later.

Speaking of Moda, my usual second-years were gone yesterday, so I was evaluated by another second-year who is not usually in my class or even in the same subject. He praised most of the same things I liked about my teaching. He wrote “great teacher presence” on top, “lots of participation,” and “fairly good student behavior — they’re just bored from not writing anything.” Fair enough, that last part. He especially liked my “mini-lesson / review” of how you subtract the exponents when dividing common variables. On the other hand, he had a number of quibbles with our classroom procedures that were not completely in my hands to begin with, and he also noticed some note-passing that slipped past me.

After I had watched the video of myself and set it up for the teacher who needed it after me, I returned to my own classroom. It was the last period of the day, and students were starting to finish their exams, which they had begun writing the period before. Dewey Boy had been in charge, and students were constantly getting out of their seats, often several at a time, casually shuffling around to hand in their exams and pick up a survey to complete. In my opinion, this is totally unacceptable for a testing (or really any independent work) environment. After a few minutes of it, I had become uncomfortable enough that I took it upon myself to change the procedure mid-stream. I started to tell the kids to stay in their seats and raise their hands if they were finished. Just as I was doing so, a couple boys in the back row started to get up. Unfortunately, I snapped at them. For the first time all month, I raised my voice, “Sit down!”

Well of course my least proud moment of summer school happened to come at the same time we handed out surveys. A solid third of the class wrote very harsh things toward me personally. One wrote “in other word just quite Mr. A” and another one wrote “Mr. A – Terrible” under an ugly face! Of course it bothers me.

This is not the first time I have won an unpopularity contest as a teacher. At the beginning of my second year of teaching in Namibia, the ninth-graders whom I had taught the year before groaned loudly and conspicuously when it was announced that I would be teaching ninth-grade math that year. No one did that for any of the other teachers. But things were different then. As I wrote already, I spent that first year actually resenting the students, which is not at all true now. I just wish the students could understand that asking a lot of them and being uncompromising comes from a sense of responsibility and caring, not at all from anger or hatred.

At the end of the period yesterday, “Tad” asked me if I had something against him. I assured him no, and indeed I quite liked him. He said he and I had a problem all summer long. He asked why I gotta be so strict. I explained to him that every teacher is different, and I have my rules the way I do because I want everyone in the class to be able to concentrate. If I allow students to move around and make noise as much as they want, other students will not be able to concentrate. To my surprise, Tad seemed to accept my reasoning fairly well. A couple minutes later, I came back to apologize to Tad for yelling at him to sit down earlier. I explained that I did not mean to yell, but that it just slipped out as he stood up while I was starting to talk. After our talk, Tad seemed to feel more okay with me, and we even bumped fists, together with Dewey Boy, outside after school.

On a related note, a girl whom I had sent to the office a day or two before for challenging me and swearing in class, came to me after dismissal and apologized. On Wednesday, the day after the discipline incident, I had praised her neat work on a calendar project we were doing in class. Her partner, one of our more rowdy boys, caught onto my praise and bumped fists with her. I seconded by offering my own fist to bump. She seemed touched, said “Ahh!” and gave me a shy fist.

Today, we were all done with our tests and everything, so we basically just played games all day. Dewey Boy spent the first period trying to teach them a couple team building games, but we had to leave the hallways after other teachers began to complain about our noise. During the next three periods, I taught five boys in the class how to play Settlers of Catan, which is my favorite board game. I was actually surprised how well the game went over. Most of the boys who came over to see the game got interested in it. They learned it fairly quickly. And those who played really seemed to “get it” and enjoy the game. Behavior was pretty good. They helped me put the game away pretty nicely at the end, and I only had to tell them once not to grab cards or roll the dice too soon when they got over-eager. Overall, I was pleased to end the summer school on a good note. And Settlers of Catan is a lot more mathematical than most games, disguised under a lot of fun as it may be. At the end of the day, I made a point to shake hands with each student as I dismissed them.

EDSE 500 Group Work

Thursday morning, after watching my colleague, Dewey Kid, teach, our instructor, Ms. Monroe, was about to commit to come back for 3rd period when I mentioned that we would be doing group work during 4th period. Asked if I would prefer she come 3rd or 4th period, I waffled. “It’s up to you,” I said with an accommodating shrug. Then, after a moment’s reconsideration, I added that group activity is probably an area where I need more improvement. So she came to observe my 4th-period lesson.

The idea for my lesson was to have the kids build up to the Pythagorean Theorem sort of semi-inductively using the old classic manipulative stand-by’s of cut-outs and glue. Each group was supposed to make right triangles by placing, corner-to-corner, squares I had pre-cut for them out of graphing paper. The squares were cut so as to make combinations of 3-4-5, 6-8-10, & 5-12-13, the numbers so chosen because their squares add up perfectly in the Pythagorean Theorem (e.g. 3*3 + 4*4 = 5*5). A series of questions on a worksheet was supposed to lead them to the general equation for the Pythagorean Theorem.

Ms. Monroe praised the idea for my lesson and the questions on my worksheet. Suggestions for improvement, as I expected, lay mainly in how I managed the activity. One of the most important suggestions she gave was not only to explain every detailed instruction for the activity, both orally and in writing, but to demonstrate exactly how the activity should be done with an example before even separating the students into groups. I think I did try to explain the instructions and show with a drawing how the kids would put the squares together to make a right triangle inside, but I need to focus on explaining even more thoroughly and minutely, from beginning to end, as well as showing a tangible example of what the end product should look like. As Ms. Monroe observed, I circulated around the classroom well but spent too much time explaining and demonstrating to the students after they were already split into groups and starting to make messes with glue.

One of the other problems with the activity was that the individuals in the groups were not generally staying on task. Suggestions for improvement included: Split the students into smaller groups. Make sure the kids have something to do when the project is finished or while others are working. And assign pre-defined roles, possibly by random drawing. I will keep all those suggestions in mind for the future.

Another problem Dewey and I discussed regarding group activities in our classroom is that we had no system of group rewards or consequences in our rather bare-bones classroom management system. We were left trying to pick out individuals to punish, when actually it is a class-level noise and chaos that becomes problematic. At Ms. Monroe’s encouragement, Dewey and I decided that night to implement a class point system. Points can be won or lost, according to the teacher’s judgment of how the class, as a group, behaves. After enough points have accumulated, students can vote regarding how to save or redeem the points: Possible redemption prizes include a class-wide homework pass, a “math-free period” for music or outside games, and a class pizza party. Friday was our first day to implement the plan. I felt it worked well during our first two periods, but we sort of lost our way with it when Moda taught 3rd period with his usual loosey-goosey management style and did not utilize the system at all. By the end of 2nd period, the class had earned four points. By dismissal at the end of the day, we were back down to zero again.

Part of what makes it difficult for me to manage students working in groups is that I sometimes do not have a clear idea of how I want to kids to work. I just want them to work cooperatively, productively, and within a reasonable amount of noise. Perhaps it is too much to ask for them to do all that without more specific routines and instructions. I suppose I like the idea of defining roles within the groups, but it seems like something I will have to give a lot of thought between now and then as to how the roles should work, how I will monitor them, and what even to call them.

Lines in the Sand

Last week, our class had a boy dismissed from summer school. “Andy” had simply not taken us seriously when we said that each tardy after the first equals detention or that coming to school the next morning without your lines (punishment) finished also equals detention. By policy, a fourth detention earns expulsion from the summer school. It was more of a mess than it should have been, however, and the principal kept coming back to our classroom to speak with us several times throughout the day. At one point, Moda and I both had to leave the classroom and accompany the principal to the office to talk with Andy’s mother. Understandably, she was upset, and so she put up a fight about it. Apparently, Andy had not been taking his detention slips home, and we did not have copies to show her. The moral of this story: CYA and document your $@#!!

Then on Friday we had another boy cuss me out after I assigned him detention for failure to participate. When Moda escorted him out of the room, apparently the boy kept on running his mouth and even threatened me physically! Afterwards, Moda told me that the boy recently had an uncle pass away. Still, we agreed that circumstances did not excuse such defiance and verbal aggression, so the boy was not back in school this morning.

A year and a half ago, if you told me that my two biggest classroom management concerns would be expelled within my first two weeks of teaching in a new school, I would have said dream on! Now, it just makes me a little sad. Somehow, I could see a small sliver of myself in each of those boys. Moda used to call him an “@$$hole,” but I defended Andy. I guess I found it loveably pathetic the way he used to compensate for his lack of confidence in math by posturing and talking about basketball, the way he would try to get on my good side by making eye contact and asking me out-of-turn questions as I sat to the side, observing other teachers. I take it as a sign of the progress I have made, both as a teacher and as a person, that I can say these things now. Back in the bad old days, I used to resent my “learners” in Namibia so much that I actually dreaded leaving my house most of the time! It took me a long time to learn any better. Now it sounds trite, but it really is all about loving the person, hating the behavior, and not taking any of their bull-$#@! disrespect personally. Because it is not personal. Kids are just kids, loveable in their imperfect humanity.

Recently another Teacher Corps rookie interrupted my interminable rambling to ask me, “What was (so) difficult?” about my Peace Corps experience teaching in Namibia. What was it? Externally, it was the entire culture of the school, the any excuse not to go to class mentality. It was the way my students so quickly figured out that nothing would happen to them if they blew off my detention. The administration was, to put it perfectly bluntly, indolent, inconsistent, and virtually indifferent when it came to discipline issues, or just about anything else for that matter, and the parents were literally a hundred kilometers away in many cases. The students were generally far, far behind where they should have been, academically, so much so that I spent my first week of summer school here in Mississippi in awe of how competent the students are! But my attitude is what made it worst of all.

Today we received a pep talk from Ben, our super- (some would say un-) human program manager, who urged us to be less “polite” with the students. There was some blah-blah about not seeming “weak” and so on. Well, I thought his advice was a bunch of hooey. There is a big difference between being polite and being soft on rules! I raised my hand to suggest politely an alternative perspective, but he refused to take questions until the end of the session. By the time he finished, all I had left to say was, “Do you have any positive feedback to share with us?”

When I first walked into a classroom, all I knew about classroom management was to start off “strict and mean,” but actually I had no idea how to go about doing that, especially when I was literally on my own. I tried very hard not to appear weak, but what happened is that I spent the whole first year feeling mad all the time, because I was trying to assert rules and expectations without a system of consequences standing behind me that I could count on in any way. For lack of a better system, I ended up trying to intimidate the students into submission, which led to several memorable confrontations. Let’s put it this way: More then one broomstick met its demise at my hands that year, cracked hard across desktops. One time, during the lengthy end-of-term exams, when most teachers were huddled in the staffroom ostensibly “marking” their exams while the students ran amok, I found a full-grown ninth-grade boy carrying a stick around the school grounds. Of course, the boy refused to give over the stick, which I considered a weapon. I told him several times in my best, stern teacher voice, “Give me the stick,” but he just stared me down and refused. A crowd gathered. I put my hand on the stick. Still he refused. I continued to tell him to let go. I tugged at the stick, but he held on even harder. It was me against this full-grown boy, locked in a physical battle of wills in the middle of that dirty sandlot schoolyard, with a crowd of a hundred students watching. My heart rate was racing, and the only thing on my mind was not to back down. All this because there was no system, because I did not know the boy’s name, and because I did not want to appear weak.

The other night, a second-year and I made a toast to Ben, to the dismay and chagrin of one of the other second-years. She and I are both former Peace Corps, and perhaps that gives us some of our perspective to see where Ben is coming from. He works hard and expects the same of others. He is totally devoted to Teacher Corps. But he is not there to support us emotionally. He sees rules and order as utterly essential, to the point of coming off heartless. But he is consistent. He listens to ideas and works hard to implement the ones he likes. So what that he reputedly keeps his spare change sorted in separate jars for each denomination? He is who he is, and he is good for Teacher Corps. Even if does he state his opinions as though they are fact.

Bad classroom management is very stressful. It will eat you alive. Prolonged stress ultimately wears away at you, body and soul, eroding the very fiber of your character, until you either flee the situation altogether or you end up doing things you later regret. During my first year of teaching in Namibia, I honestly felt more like a soldier in a war zone than a teacher! For the first time in my life, I felt like I could somehow empathize with the perpetrators of military massacres! I could watch a movie about a Nazi concentration camp and see parallels with how I was handling a group of students, trying to get them to rat each other out! Most of my students hated me, and nobody suffered more than I did.

Here is my thing: There are at least two very wrong paths a rookie teacher can go down. One is to be too reluctant to dish out consequences, out of fear, if you will, or perhaps more accurately, out of misplaced compassion. This is probably the most likely mistake among my colleagues, and so I can appreciate for that reason Ben’s little speech, as wacky as it seems. Another approach, equally harmful, however, is to try the intimidation tack and ultimately end up blaming the students for their chaos and “disrespect.” Both arise out of a lack of clear rules and consequences or the unwillingness or inability to enforce them consistently. Both are bad, bad, bad.

In my evaluation today, Jaws praised my firm, consistent use of classroom “consequences,” in spite of my liberal use of polite language. I have come a long, long way, if I do say so myself.

EDSE 500 Questioning Technique

Last week, I first tried the so-called “cold calling” questioning method of pulling randomly shuffled name cards, but the lesson was a flop. I was trying my best at the time to work outside my comfort zone, so to speak, and teach a lesson based on induction. However, because the entire lesson consisted of a single activity, and because my pace in leading them trough that activity was entirely too slow, the students became bored and disengaged. I also had trouble leading them by the nose like that into the unfamiliar territory of inductive thinking. What, you are not going to tell me what to do? Terrifying! In short, the kids were not exactly buying into what I was trying to accomplish that day, but I doubted whether the cold calling cards had anything to do it. So I wanted to give the questioning technique another try, this time with a more deductive lecture that we would all be more comfortable doing.

In short, it worked. The kids who usually volunteer to answer every question still got their chances to answer a question or two, but the cold calling technique really seemed to help get a lot more out of those who are usually reluctant to talk. I made a point to tailor each question in such a way that no student should be completely stumped, yet the answer to one question would often lead directly into the next question (and another student). I meticulously thanked and praised every student after they had answered, which hopefully will encourage the shy ones to volunteer more often. In fact, when I later asked for volunteers, I was happy to acknowledge the hand of one of my shier students who hardly ever raised her hand before. Furthermore, when I drew the name of a boy asleep in the back row (once I had written his name on the board and shaken his arm to wake him up), the questions actually seemed to revive him, and he never seemed to get drowsy again for the rest of the period.

Today was also the day of my big scary evaluation from Jaws. In our feedback session in the cafeteria afterwards, at a big round yellow table still wet from being wiped down from the after-school lunch rush, he commented that my questioning technique was among the strengths of my lesson. I definitely plan on using “cold calling” name cards this fall. Hooray for Teacher Corps!

The Cleveland Talks & My Dirk Habits

Yesterday, I took a day off to drive down to Cleveland and meet with the high school principal. “Cobra Cranberry” (*) seemed like a pretty good guy. He appeared friendly, sincere, and articulate. Also impressed with the school secretary; she seemed friendly and efficient. I was early for my appointment and had to rattle the front door to have a school janitor let me in. A few young black kids were walking across the school grounds wearing book bags, and a white police officer stopped to question them. Once inside, I met a young, slender man from Greenville with a casual way of dress and demeanor that frankly reminded me of so many of the young male teachers I knew in Namibia. The secretary, after first showing us to sit down, later came back and apologized for not introducing herself. After ten or fifteen awkward minutes during which the FedEx man came and went and the other young man revealed that he was also hoping to get hired to teach math there, Cobra finally arrived. With his football player dimensions and coach’s black tee & sweatpants, he flashed a great big smile, said, “You must be . . .” and after only a momentary pause, remembered my name. He showed me into his office directly and seemed to like what he saw of me. He commented that I looked like a math guy. When the interview was over, I mentioned that my predecessor, “Pickled Jaws,” (*) sends his greeting. (Actually he blatantly told me to drop his name. It worked.) Cobra’s face lit up, and he instantly offered up another hearty, gigantic handshake. As I left, the other prospective teacher was outside again, chatting with the UPS man.

It was a weird trip. I almost got stranded at a realty office earlier that day when the car I borrowed from my second-year mentor (see below) refused to start. The heat was sweltering inside the car, as I sat there sweating in my dark dress pants and tie, turning the key over and over again to no avail. Fifteen minutes later, after I had already tried fruitlessly to call the car’s owner and my dad in search of ideas, and not to mention the realty office secretary had gone around back to look for a sweaty man who might know something about cars, finally the car sprang back to life. The same thing happened a couple more times during the trip, the most frightening example being after I had stalled the car in a busy highway intersection and could not even find the hazard flashers on the unfamiliar dashboard. What a strange day. Probably the mystery has something to do with the electronic theft prevention circuitry in the key and ignition itself.

Anyway, apparently the school district had more or less reserved a spot for me at the middle school, unbeknownst to the high school principal, who had called to schedule an interview with me last week. So now that the high school seems to want to hire me, the school district personnel office has to approve. Last week, I found out that the middle school has partitions instead of solid walls inside the building and will have its third principal in three years, which only strengthens my preference to teach at the high school.

This week we started our summer school teaching. A couple days ago, I taught my first lesson and got evaluated by a second-year who has a somewhat different classroom management philosophy from the paradigm I had been working from. I tend to be fairly strict about classroom noise and do not allow students to blurt out whatever comes to their minds. “Priority Moda of the Wise Belief,” (*) on the other hand, truly seems to enjoy teaching, and I admire his lesson delivery quite a bit. He lets kids make, as he sees it, whatever verbalizing they need to do in order to process the topic at hand. His somewhat negative evaluation caused me a fair bit of self-doubt in the ensuing 24 hours. Do I really have a good reason, after all, for being so strict? Could I be more effective with a more tolerant approach? Sometimes it is said that you should be yourself, but could it not also be true that I am the way I am simply because it is how I learned to survive teaching in Africa and because it is more familiar to me, rather than because it is the most effective possible way to teach? Could Moda be right that my strictness is causing unnecessary student-teacher friction and student disengagement, or is it really, as I initially perceived it, more a matter of two markedly different teacher expectations clashing when placed back to back in the same classroom, with the same students?

Well, today I taught another lesson, and it went much better. The friction that was previously noted as, “You have a negative attitude,” by one of my students, was gone today. I was able to establish a much better rapport with the kids by asking them what fun or exciting things happened yesterday, joking that Dirk Nowitzki was my cousin, and using the NBA playoffs as a theme for my set. I established a better system for hand-raising in class. I told them, if I raise my hand when I ask a question, you have to raise your hand and wait for me to call on you before you answer. But if I ask a question with my hand down, you can answer all at once, right away. It worked fairly well and gave me a lot more flexibility to enforce my rules without becoming internally inconsistent, although I did sort of forget to raise my hand once or twice before asking questions. Moda continued to tease me for my so-called “militant” style, but he actually acknowledged today that classroom management is one of my strengths. The weakest aspects of my lesson were that my board writing became a bit disorganized, and I focused too much attention on just a few students who were eager to participate without drawing shyer students into the discussion or even assessing very well whether most of the class was with me. The former is an unusual problem for me, easily fixable, and probably due today to my experimenting toward a more horizontal, student-centered type of lecture environment, where students themselves work and explain examples to each other, etc. The latter is a deeper problem, but an easy trap for almost any teacher to fall into. You get in a rush, or you get flustered, or whatever, and you just start calling on the students you know can come through for you. I should probably take the suggestion of Moda and carry a class roster / seating chart with me in class, so that I can more consistently call on all of my students and check off their names as I go.

* Random name generators are great fun! Make up some weird-sounding abbreviations for all your acquaintances and enter them at http://www.bandnamemaker.com/generator/. Just disguise their names a bit and go ahead, trash your friends and coworkers with impunity! (**)

** The author makes no warrantees, express or implied.

EDSE 500 Focus Paper Reflection: White Academies

This assignment for Ms. Monroe's EDSE 500 class is to read and comment upon a "focus paper" from last summer's class. Curious about the white private schools I knew already to be common in the Delta, I chose to read Elizabeth Savage's paper, called "The Preservation of Segregation: The Philosophical Necessity of White Academies in Mississippi." Actually I read more than one paper from the group about Mississippi's historic and continuing efforts to resist racial integration in its schools, but I felt this one gave the best historical overview on the subject.

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/focus_05.htm

Clearly Mississippi has a long and tortured past when it comes to race relations. We all knew that coming in. What boggles my mind is how successfully and for how many decades Mississippi, despite very contrary mainstream opinion in the rest of the nation, has been able to dodge integration in a very substantial way. To this day, apparently a very large percentage (how many exactly?) of white students attend schools that are either all-but-exclusively white or at least majority white, while a corresponding percentage of black students attend school that are exclusively black. This happens even in areas where money is tight and blacks and white are geographically separated by a physical space no larger than a line of railroad tracks. Of course this is largely facilitated by the existence of white private schools called "academies." What I did not know is that many school districts serving almost exclusively black students are often controlled by white superintendents and/or school boards who allegedly are more invested in keeping costs down and maintaining the status quo than they really care about the (black) students' best interests.

The school district where I am going, in Cleveland, is a fascinating exception unfortunately not mentioned in this particular paper. In Cleveland School District, a dual public school system still exists. Even though the town is fairly small (pop. 15k), there are two high schools, two middle schools, and two elementaries. The East Side, where I will be teaching, is all black. The other side of town, just a skip and a hop away on the other side of the highway, is 60% white. All the university professors and USDA researchers of course send their kids to Cleveland High School on the white side of town. Again it simply boggles my mind that in the year 2006 in the United States of America, this kind of segregation is legally still allowed to exist. By what mechanisms is this duality perpetuated? One of my predecessors suspects that the outgoing superintendent is leaving primarily because he had advocated unification. I suppose it is all about local politics. Still it seems like one good lawsuit could really crumble the whole stack of cards--but of course that would require someone with a lot of courage and standing to make a case and a good lawyer interested in the publicity--not to mention it would probably result in nothing more than the foundation of another white academy.

Still, I learned a lot from this paper. The Legal Education Advisory Committee, which succeeded in passing 40 pro-segregation statutes in 1954 alone, the FBI thug-like State Sovereignty Commission, and the present-day Council of Conservative Citizens with honorary members like Senator Trent Lott, were all news to me. Eye-opening. Basically the efforts to resist integration are extremely deep-rooted and as outside pressure against segregation has increased, conservative (i.e. racist) Mississippians have simply become more ingenious in maintaining the status quo of racial separation. This has been going on for decades, and it continues surprisingly well unto this day. The very existence of white academies leads one to question where exactly the "progress" Dr. Mullins mentioned several days ago is coming from or leading. Without true and honest integration--until each and every citizen feels their own family invested in the quality of each and every school--how much progress can really be made?

Reflecting on this paper reminds me of the movie we watched in class the other day, "A Tale of Two Schools." A white school district administrator from the Mississippi Delta school featured in the film at one point commented how they did not want to get taken over by the state. She said something to the effect of, "That happened to us last year, and we NEVER want that to happen again." Suddenly, I wonder if she genuinely wanted to see the kids succeed or if she simply hated the outside meddling.

On the way back to Oxford this evening, Zed told an anecdote about a neighbor on his street. As he was moving in, the neighbor commented how relieved he was that no more "niggers" were moving there. Zed said that since then he has become friends with that neighbor and claims the guy is actually a pretty nice "character." I pointed out that plenty of nice, friendly (to us) people are also racists.

Delta Debut

Yesterday I used a firearm for the first time in my life!

My summer roomy, Zed, drove me down this weekend to meet his wife and see his house in Leland, which is about 30 miles south of Cleveland. Actually it was not really very clear to me beforehand for some reason, but the other purpose for my presence on this trip apparently was to help Zed & wifey move. I primarily agreed in order to get out of Oxford and see the Delta for the first time. Another classmate, JD, also came along with us, largely in order to go house hunting. He and I got into a heated debate over Mexican immigration on the way down, which was rudely interrupted (haha!) every now and then by Zed pointing out and explaining the various cotton gins and other agricultural curiosities we passed along the way.

Anyway, after a number of large pieces of furniture had been carried by the ex-offensive lineman and I from the old house to the slightly nicer house with central air next door—not to mention JD had edged out another classmate (unbeknownst to her) for the house across the street—Zed cracked his huge goofy smile and asked if we were ready to go shooting. He quickly gave us a 5-minute crash-course on how to load and unload the shotguns, how to aim, and (most importantly) how to set the safety on or off. Then off we go in his (rather pimpin' it must be said) '87 Chevy Caprice. Just before leaving, Zed casually mentioned, "I hope no one calls the sheriff on us." So of course, that gets me thinking, "Oh, @&*#! What have I gotten myself into?" But we are practically already cruising down the road at this point, so I just keep quiet and hope for the best. We take a turn off the main highway, and drive for perhaps a mile, until we come to a bridge over a large, brown, turgid creek. Pretty much just your typical bridge on your typical country road in the smack middle of your typical cotton-growing South. Zed stops the car, and I dutifully pile boxes in my arms containing orange skeet targets and shot gun ammo.

The first report was shockingly loud. After that and after the first couple cars drove by, returning Zed’s friendly wave, my nervousness subsided a bit and I even ventured to try one shot at a branch sticking out of the water. Then it was JD’s turn, and even Zed, who has a deer skull named Stanley peering morbidly over his living room, advised him not to shoot the turtle he was aiming at--which to be fair did look a lot like a small piece of wood floating down the creek. I was still a little bit nervous at this point, and I felt a strong urge to stand about 20 yards behind the person who held the gun. This created an interesting sensation when another car would pass by every now and then, because of course I had to stand even with the shooter in order to stand aside for the car. After I started to get the hang of flinging clay targets over the water with a plastic throwing arm, I finally decided to take a shot at the moving targets. After about 3 or 4 attempts, I finally got the hang of holding the gun against my raised shoulder and looking down the sights so that the little red light sat right between the two little green lights. I said “Pull!” and somehow managed to follow the arching orange disk with my sight and pull the trigger appropriately. The orange round thing shattered into a very satisfying shower of very much littler orange things, and Zed, feeling very proud of having taught me to be a real Southern man, congratulated me with a big high-five. It was a very thrilling moment, but I didn’t want to push my luck. I was done for the day. A few empty shells later, JD had also hit his first target, and we packed it up.

Today, after the others got back from church and we were sufficiently nourished with hamburgers and Cokes, we drove out a short way to a tiny town(?) called Holly Ridge for a free blues jam. As soon as we got there, I knew I had really arrived in THE Mississippi Delta. At a quiet crossroads, an ancient grocery store with one ancient gas pump was the center of attention. A small crowd of surprisingly mixed race and age were standing around and seated across the road from the store, in front of which a casually seated old black man called “Model T” Ford would occasionally take a break from his blues guitar jamming for “Jack Daniels time.” Not long after we got ourselves comfortable with cans of Budweiser under a tree for shade, a large group of black middle-aged motorcyclists thundered up and rumbled slowly, ostentatiously past us before parking in echelon across the way. The music was pretty good. The scene was priceless. Old women danced suggestively around the drummer while white folks with a New Jersey Devils hat ate boiled crawfish and motorcyclists with black leather vests and bare brown bellies stood around with their arms folded, smiling. It was the smack middle of a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in rural Mississippi, and it seemed impossible not to feel happy.

Ole Miss This Someday

First impressions of Mississippi: (1) The people who warned me about the humidity were right, but I think it will be okay once I get used to it. I bet July will feel killer hot though. (2) The people seem proud--in a good way probably. People seem to feel genuinely (not arrogantly) proud of Ole Miss, proud of Oxford, proud of their culture in general, proud of their history (the good & the bad of it), proud of their food, proud of their sports, etc. (3) People for the most part seem pretty warm & friendly. Complete strangers have offered to help me when I look lost or confused. Very little sense so far of the black-white culture divide I have heard about, but mostly I have been sheltered under this little on-campus Teacher Corps community. Did get one interaction today with a couple friendly white Mississippian students who looked at me a little funny when I explained that we were going to teach in the Delta and who asked, "Why are you going there?" (4) People seem to take sports kind of seriously down here at Ole Miss and in Mississippi schools in general. Even the Teacher Corps seems to have a little of that sports-competitive culture to it, with a tradition of first- vs. second-year sports competitions during the summer. Perhaps it is my own background (small private Christian schools with virtually no competitive athletics to speak of) that is more unusual however.

We have an exceptional group of individuals here in the Teacher Corps. These are the best and the brightest and most motivated out of hundreds of applicants. Apparently we had a 9% acceptance rate this year, which makes me feel pretty special, to be perfectly honest. I know for dang sure I never would have made it into this group if it were not for my Peace Corps service. He have a Harvard Law grad, at least a couple Eagle Scouts, and 30% of us have worked in a homeless shelter before. Surpisingly there is only one other RPCV. We also have a lot of athletes in our group. One of our classmates even played on the Ole Miss women's basketball team.

At the same time, I feel like I have a lot of age & experience (esp. from Peace Corps) over most of my colleagues. I am literally the oldest person in the group, which was starting to make me feel pretty old until one of my classmates could not believe I was any older than 24. I'm actually 28! The majority of my classmates literally just graduated like a week ago from undergrad. That seems insanely young and naive to me. I have a feeling that for most of these folks--even though they are fabulous and many have great short-term experiences on their resumes--the next two years are going to be the most trying times of their lives, and most of them are not really aware of the completely. I mean it is one thing to be told the next two years are going to be the "most difficult" but also the "most rewarding" years of your life, but it is another thing entirely to actually walk through the fire. None of this is to say they will not be fine. I think everyone in this group can handle the challenge, and I certainly hope everyone stays for at least two years. I just have a sense that a lot of us are really going to get a rude awakening in a couple months or so--just how hard this teaching in a difficult environment can be until you start to get the hang of it and all.

The main thing that does bug me about Teacher Corps candidate selection is how many of the participants seem to think of it at some level as an intermediate time to decide what to do with life. I mean hello! We are being trained as professional teachers. Why is that not good enough? There should be more people really committed to the idea that they are going to be long-term teachers. It almost seems immature to me that people seem to think they just trying teaching out and maybe do their part for a couple years or so before moving on. That bugs me about Peace Corps too. I had so many colleagues who were probably better teachers than I was in Namibia, but I am virtually the only person from my group who was not a teacher before but plans to continue teaching. (Is there one other? Kris?) Maybe I am being too harsh. I hope that most of us continue to teach even after Teacher Corps is over.

Teacher Corps the organization has been pretty awesome so far. Ben Guest and Dr. Mullins are both very passionate--with very different personalities but completely devoted to Teacher Corps. I was touched on the first day we met how Dr. Mullins literally teared up when he got to talking about the impoverished kids we are here to help. The pride in the program is clear, and they tell us that the education faculty actually fight over who gets to teach the Teacher Corps classes.

Recently started reading How to be an Effective Teacher: The First Days of School by Wong & Wong, one of the free textbooks we get handed out for free and raved at about and then never mentioned again (from what I hear) here in Teacher Corps. The book has really got me thinking about how much I can and should do to improve the attitude and mood of my classroom. I have started to make a checklist in my mind of things I would like to do better, so let's see if I can get most of them down here so I can hold myself accountable later: (1) Smile more. Practice smiling in the mirror if I have to. (2) Say please and thank-you even more. (3) Shake kids' hands more. (4) Generally praise kids a lot, lot more. Criticize them less, and more privately when necessary. (5) Ceremoniously welcome kids on the first day of school (and ideally parents as well near the beginning of the year). (6) Create a welcome sign at my classroom door. (7) Post inspiring mottos at the door and all around the classroom. Continue to say the "Pledge to Myself" every day with homeroom. (8) Keep an eye out for any possible role models (famous or local) the kids would admire and aspire to in a positive way. Do my best to get them some sort of access (field trip? class visit? autograph?) for any such role model. (9) Constantly look for other ways to make my classroom, teaching persona, and procedures more inviting toward the kids and their learning.