Just Another Day at the Office

1. Watched my principal get into a shouting match with a cheeky student in the hallway between classes. Still think he is a nice, decent person, but my respect for him as an administrator is fading.
2. Sang “Happy Birthday” to one my students at the end of the last block. This arose from their curiosity after an afternoon announcement yesterday as to whether I could sing or not. (In fact, I did sing in select choir in both high school and college.) Students were impressed!
3. One of my favorite students informed me that she will not, after all, be moving to Ohio at the end of this week, as she had informed me yesterday. She can be a handful as far as her attitude at times, in that loud, impudent way we have all come to know and expect, but she is also one my brightest. I really love her, and I would be sad to see her go. Today she did a fabulous job “teaching” another student how to do polynomial division at the whiteboard. She is the best student I have, when it comes to playing the teacher role.
4. Transition has descended into en masse disrespect, verging on outright chaos. Today they were whistling and so on and so forth while I was trying to give them a make-up test for the one that every single student in the class failed on Monday. So much for the success story I wrote about last Saturday.
5. Made lots of jokes during my last block class. One of my favorites: Previously mentioned favorite student stopped short when she realized she was about to reveal something about herself she would rather not. “You can tell me later,” I joked. It was funnier in the moment.
6. Tried a group-based homework review that we did in Dr. Dougherty’s class one time. The students divide in groups, discuss a problem and prepare to present their solution and explanation. Then the teacher picks one student (I rolled a die) from the group to present, so the group has to make sure everyone understands. It seemed to work pretty well. I should probably do stuff like that more often.

1000 Empty Check Marks: The EDSE 600 "Stick to Your Guns" Blog

So Ben asked us to apply our classroom consequences “every time” for two weeks and then blog about the results. The thing is, I really do apply my consequences (and, to an admittedly lesser extent, rewards) pretty consistently—at least in name. This has never been a problem for me. The problem lies in the secondary consequences.

At the beginning of the year, my assistant principal encouraged me to write the students up if they refused to do the punishments I assigned them. So I did, and those students got ISS. The students resented me at first, but I got off to a pretty good start laying down the law and asserting order in my classroom. Then about halfway through the first nine-week term, I found a letter in my box from the same assistant principal. The gist of the note basically implied that I was not really doing my job, like the other teachers, because I was sending the students to him without calling the parents or doing other interventions first. I guess he felt I was putting the burden of parent contact on him. Fair enough, I suppose.

It is hard to explain what happened next. In a word, I failed. I was already feeling pretty guilty about not contacting my students’ parents from the very beginning. Then my telephone phobia kicked in for real, and the inertia, the enormity of the task before me, and the burden of the guilt itself all combined to paralyze me, and the one, main thing I did not do that I should done all along got even worse. I stopped writing the students up for ignoring my primary punishment, and ever since then, there has been a slow decline in my classroom management. The decline has been slower than you might think—in part because I was doing a lot of other things well, I think—but still a decline. Another thing that partially saved me was the fact that most of the students who got a lot of check marks beside their names in class were the same ones who would just carry on and on until they did something that deserved a straight office referral outright.

I have spent all this school year feeling pretty rotten about this one failure on my part. I stopped blogging for a while. (What was the point? Wallow in guilt for the whole world to see?) And by the way, you might think that the first phone call is the worst, but not really. The second and the third and the fourth phone calls require just as much effort to overcome whatever it is—my phobia? my inhibition?—as the very first one. Every day, I would get home, crash, forget about work for a while, then before you knew it, it would be too late to be calling people, then I would go to bed, get up in the morning, get ready for class, teach teach teach, until it was time to come home, crash, and then start the cycle all over again. It was so easy to put it off, day after day. Anyway…

So when we got this assignment, I knew what I was supposed to do. In order to carry out my consequences, I need to be calling parents. If they STILL refuse to do the punishment required, then I can write them up. Results? Well, I just now called half a dozen parents. We’ll see how it plays out from here. Did you see that? I just called half a dozen parents! And it went alright. Major victory for me! Now, I’ll be the first to admit I should have done this a long, long time ago. But hey, that’s a start, right? It almost amounts to a moral victory at this point, since (being on 4x4 block schedule) there are really only about three weeks left before I start all over with a new group of students. Hopefully, I can proceed in this vein of overcoming a deep personal inhibition on so many levels and carry this small bit of momentum into next term. And who knows? Maybe the seventh phone call will be slightly easier. Sort of like answering tech support phone calls for a living was panic-inducing for the first month or so, then routine after that.

EDSE 600: Classroom Management Recap

My biggest frustrations are:

1. Students who sleep, eat, pass notes in class… because…
2. they care about my class less than anything else on Earth
3. High failure rate
4. Poor attendance and constant, unforewarned interruptions due to intercom, extra-curriculars, etc.
5. Slow pace of content instruction due to student deficiencies in some skills plus above-noted frustrations

Some things shamefully lacking:

1. Parent contact
2. Consistent bathroom procedure
3. “Tissue” and pencil-sharpening procedures, etc.
4. Preset time limits on quizzes & activities
5. Prize-giving for tickets reward system
6. Secondary consequences (due to lack of parent contact)

Some things abandoned without regret:

1. Red-Yellow-Green “traffic signal”
2. Hard-assness re: pre-bell craziness & a little in-class talking

The main thing I need to be doing but am not:

1. Parent phone calls

Some other adjustments I could stand to make:

1. Get back to more cold-calling (or ask-pause-call) rather than loudest unrestrained screaming out method (“I said that first, Mr. A!”)
2. Use a timer
3. Stamp warm-ups

Some unexpected positive developments:

1. Sense of humor in the classroom
2. Feeding off their energy when the class does respond
3. Hmm… Was there something else? Do witty comebacks count? Students who sometimes greet me back? The fact at least no one has physically assaulted my person?

Some things I am doing quite well:

1. Classroom presence
2. Administering consequences (at least nominally)
3. Starting and ending class procedures
4. Handling student outbursts, disrespect, etc.
5. Always keeping my cool & never taking anything personally

Overall I think my classroom management plan from the summer was a little, well, optimistic. I am certainly not doing everything as I said I would. But also it was a bit more strict and tight-laced than I feel like running my classroom now. I have become a bit less rigid (call it “structured” if you like) since then. There are good and bad sides to that. Right?

But anyway, I feel fairly well in control of my classroom most of the time, despite everything I am doing so poorly or not doing at all. I just wish I could get kids to listen. No amount of writing their names on the board can force them to do that. Some parents can make them pay attention and learn, but those are mostly the kids who are already doing well anyway.

There are good days and bad days.

Reality Sets In

I spent the first three weeks of the term teaching my Transition to Algebra class how to graph a line. We did it over and over again. I took them to the computer lab to work on virtual geoboards (http://nlvm.usu.edu). Then we practiced the slope, midpoint, and distance formulas over and over again. Finally we had a test. I was so happy when I got the tests graded! It was the first time all year my Transition class has gotten more than one or two A’s or B’s on a test. I think I had about five A’s. Hurray! I was “fin’ta” blog about this remarkable feat last Tuesday, when fittingly enough, our power went out while José and I—at his suggestion—were in the middle of watching the original Halloween movie.

The next day (last Wednesday), I found a note in my 3rd Block Algebra II class. I picked it up but deliberately chose not to look at it right away. When I finally read the note, I saw that it contained a cartoon of me discovering my broken bicycle (the rear wheel mangled, precisely where the actual damage was done) and a thought bubble coming out of my bearded, cartoon head, “Oh my God! I’m going back to Africa.” Now when the vandalism on my bicycle first happened, one of my students instantly came to mind. “Sajak” failed my class first term with less than 50% because he simply chose not study or do the work. Well for quite a while now, he has been downright hostile to me. Even if I just stood next Sajak, he would scoot over in his chair as far as possible away from me or even move to the next desk over until I told him to stay in his own chair. Once I asked him, “You don’t like me, do you?” He said, “No, I really don’t.” I asked him why, and he didn’t have an answer. So I joked, “Is it because of my beard?” He laughed at that, but it didn’t seem to relieve the hostility. I asked him if he liked his other teachers. He said he did. So I asked why he likes them and he doesn’t like me. He said, “I don’t know. ‘Cause they know how to teach, and you don’t.”

The same morning I found this note, the school counselor had come to me during my planning period and told me she had an irate parent in her office and asked what was going on with Sajak. I told her about his hostile attitude toward me and how he was failing my class because he was not doing anything. She told me that Sajak was a good student, the first in his family to be graduating high school, and if I knew where he came from, I would be impressed. She also said his mother was a most “obnoxious woman.” Well later that day I found this note on the floor right in front of Sajak’s desk, after I had moved him to the front row. It was right there, plain for me to see, as if he wanted me to find the note and know that it was him.

The next day after that (Thursday), I spoke with the principal, told him about the note, how it seems related to the person who vandalized my bike, and who I think wrote the note. When he got Sajak’s name, he chuckled and said his mother had been in to see him a few times, trying to get his grade changed. He had held firm and told the lady the grade will not be changed. Her son will just have to take his 45% and fail at the end. He told me Sajak can just sit in class and sleep, as long as he does not disturb class. And he told me he would look into the issue of who vandalized my bike. “Some of them know who did it, and we’ll find out,” he assured me. But to this day, nothing has been investigated. In the same class Thursday, I sent Sajak on an errand, hoping it would make a difference in his attitude toward me. But onn Friday, I had to write him up for talking back to me. “That boy got issues,” I believe were his final words. This week Sajak has been serving ISS.

On Saturday, José drove me up to Memphis to get my bicycle wheel repaired. It was very generous of him to do so, as he had no other reason to go that way at all, and it was all I could do just to get him to let me pay for gas. He said it would be an “adventure.” Well I ended up having to buy a whole new wheel altogether ($65 plus tax). When we finally got back, I found that the bicycle frame is actually bent just enough that the wheel is still out of alignment. Frustrating! Not sure how that is going to get fixed.

Along the way there and back, José and I talked quite a bit about his two favorite topics (besides Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all manner of b-movies that is): politics and philosophy. José is a conservative Republican Protestant from Oklahoma, an analytic philosopher and a self-styled “patriot” with elitist leanings—so we had lots to debate. He and I have some pretty different views, but I do give him credit for his good intentions and intellectual integrity. We talked about the upcoming elections, election procedures in general, political parties, whether a corporation deserves the same rights to make political contributions as a human being, the nature and existence (or not) of “altruism,” etc.

Later that evening we drove an hour or more south on Hwy. 61 to attend a Guy Fawkes Night party with a few Teacher Corps-mates. There was a bonfire and some gleeful burning of students’ work. Stories were told of racist football officiating, etc. Z Baby showed me pictures of her 15 year-old, smart, pretty, cooking & cleaning, piano-playing, varsity soccer-playing, more perfect than perfect Mormon sister. I joked about “wait[ing] for her” and asked if it would be alright to start writing letters. (When others objected, Z Baby pointed out that her own parents are 12 years apart in age.)

Actually I spent most of the party hanging out and talking with “Bliss Lady Detergent.” This summer, during our summer classes at Ole Miss, Bliss Lady was one of the more socially awkward college graduates I have ever met. Let’s be honest: She would apologize about five times every time she opened her mouth (“This is really stupid, but…”) and then ask whether it was “okay” to do something in the classroom. I remember wondering how she would fare on her own. I mention all this in order to note a most remarkable transformation. Now granted, I have never actually seen the Lady teach, but it seems to me the experience has really been good for her confidence. She teaches at a school that one of our colleagues has already quit from. Rather than complain, she interjects in class, last time we were up in Oxford, to say a positive word about another Teacher Corps colleague who also teaches at the same school. “Can I just say…”: She mentioned to everyone how Z Baby has been working with her students after school, not to take credit for herself or talk about her own situation, but just to make her classmate look good. That was awesome. Even asked point blank, it is hard to detect a sour note in Detergent’s teaching tale. Sure, we all have our frustrations, and she was blunt (but not bitterly so) about her administrators, but I have to say I am thoroughly impressed by this girl and how she seems to be taking everything calmly in stride, how she continues to “love” her students and give it her all. Keep it up!

I dub her “Detergent” because she spent half the party (okay, not literally) washing dishes. (I, on the other hand, have spent my entire teaching career perfecting the art of going extremely long stretches without washing / folding / ironing my laundry.) “I don’t do nothing gracefully,” she said. “Oh, doing nothing is easy,” I grinned, stretching my arms back and yawning. “I have no social skills,” she fretted, as her roommate shooed her out the door to join the s’mores makers around the fire. Her “office” is literally a hallway closet with a computer on the floor.

Later that evening, L.D. would ask me in the nicest possible way not to put my shoes up on the sofa that belongs to her superintendent. I was in the living room, half-asleep on the sofa, when I heard another classmate say from the kitchen, “I love A. He’s a great person, but…” followed by some commentary on my personal grooming. Haha! Later the same group of classmates and José got into a heated political debate that ended ugly—and suddenly it was time to go, under slightly awkward circumstances. In an impulse of tenderness, I tapped the sleeping Bliss Lid on her shoulder to say good-bye. She woke up disoriented.

José was pretty upset by the political discussion that had turned out badly. It was mildly uncomfortable. Then on the way out of town, we got stopped by some cops who asked to see license and registration, then joked that the car was stolen. José was pissed! He drove a few miles down the road silently, stopped, got out of the car, screamed, “I hate this f---ing state! I hate everyone in it! F---!” Then he got back in the car, said he was feeling better. I talked him down from his anger a little bit, and then we ended up discussing politics and philosophy some more, the rest of the way home.

So I have a Teacher Corps quiz for you. Read this article from the Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39341
Which teacher (see the end) do you feel more like at this point? Recently it has felt like reality has set in at my school. My students complain that I give them too many tests and quizzes. I get frustrated by their poor attendance and lackadaisical attitudes half the time they are there. Last Thursday, my average class attendance was literally about seven. Apparently there were a couple big extracurricular things going on, but there had been no warning given to those of us teachers not already in the know. My students said all their other teachers decided not to teach anything new. “I’m not your other teachers, am I?” I told them. “We know you’re not our other teachers! We knew YOU would teach new things today, anyway.” I made some quip about the absenteeism and how you learn so much as a new teacher around here. “It’s just getting started!” they laughed.