Personal Renaissance

Today was a good day, and I have so much to say. My students think my class is hard; they say I never give them a break, ask hard problems, assign too much homework, etc. But several students have told me lately they will have me next year, and they hear my class is fun. Even some of my worst, most disrespectful students from last term say hi to me now when they see me in the halls or outside of school. I take these as signs that I have laid the right foundations.

I believe that teaching is a great profession, in part because so few jobs on the planet are so intrinsically correlated to the personal virtues of the practitioner. A great lawyer, for instance, can be just as petty as he or she may please, and still do good work. But a great teacher is, almost by prerequisite, a fantastic human being who truly cares about the common cause of humanity. A flawed character is rarely such a hindrance, plainer for all to see, than in the classroom.

Some of my classmates are feelers, naturally open-hearted. They tend to build relationships relatively easily and know their students well. They feel sorry and consequently have a hard time enforcing rules. I have the opposite problem. Due to my personality, my tendency is to gravitate toward rules and principles, perhaps at the expense of feelings. In the past, it has been difficult for me to love my students in anything more than an abstract sense of moral duty. Yet I believe in balance between principle and feeling, and recently I have felt myself starting to melt. I missed them last weekend!

Like all forms of love, loving my students is more vulnerable, yet ultimately a truer, more rewarding, position. I like to think this is part of my natural evolution as a teacher, but I also credit the development in no small part to the unique beauty of “Gretchen.” She is the one who hugs me for coming to her basketball games. When my mother came to visit, she was the one to smile the biggest and lead the cheers, “Give it up for the mom!”

So today, I told a white lie. (This is pretty unusual for me.) Gretchen came by my classroom after school to copy down the homework assignment and casually asked me if I liked her “performance” for the Black History program. In truth, I thought it was a pretty pedestrian “interpretative dance”—or whatever you call it. Gretchen does many things well, but dancing apparently is not one of them. More importantly, I am glad she had the confidence to try such a thing in front of the whole school, and I want her to feel good it. So I said, perhaps a little lamely, “Yeah!” and I smiled.

I also love T-Rex. She is probably my most brilliant student. When I was gone on Monday, she was the only one who actually sat down and cracked the secret code I assigned them to work on. But she also has attitude. She constantly says provocative things like how much she hates my class, how she’s going to drop out of school, etc. Actually, I think she loves my class, because she always does the assignments, she answers all my questions, and whenever I slip in the slightest way, T-Rex is the first to get on my case, telling me, “I used to think you were the only one around here who had their act together.” The other students know she is brilliant, and she rubs their noses in it. Sometimes she is right; the rest of the class is just being foolish. But she really just shows no respect. I guess there must be some reason why she has this attitude. Perhaps it is simple attention-getting. I wish I knew how to get through to her. I am not very good at talking to kids and figuring out what they are really thinking. I just talk sternly and tell them they are out of line. I pulled her out in the hall to do just that today, and when we went back inside, she put her head down sulkingly. But this is why I know she loves my class: She can’t stay mad at me for very long. After about ten minutes or so, she was participating again.

Even my ideas are starting to flow better. Take tonight. I got the idea to teach a “Homo Faber” (mankind the creator) unit later this spring about the sometimes tragic consequences of mankind’s creations. (Well, it’s not exactly a brand new idea to me, but it is coming together in my mind better than it did before.) We will examine the o-ring data for the Space Shuttle Challenger. And we will spend an entire block watching my favorite movie, Koyanasqaatsi. Fun! At least some of them might be provoked. You never know unless you try. That is one my new mottos, as a teacher.

I have all kinds of ideas tonight. I want to talk to my students tomorrow about the Black History program we had today. In that hour-plus program, there was precious little “history,” let alone substance of any kind. It was really more of a celebration than anything. But one student gave a speech about black men in prison that really awakens a passion in me. The disparities between men and women, among African Africans, are staggering. There are something like five times more black women than men in graduate and professional degree programs. You don’t even have to look that far. My “A” students are all girls. My PASSING students are almost all girls. Never mind the incarceration rates. Successful black women complain that there simply aren’t enough good, educated black men to go around. This is a perfect-storm convergence of race, class, and gender. There is a profound sickness here, a crisis of epidemic proportions that simply is not getting enough attention.

Lately, in Dr. Mullins class, we have been talking about what makes a good (high school) principal. On Saturday, our guest speaker, Dean of the School of Education at Ole Miss, told us the number one quality of a good principal is “courage,” which he illustrated as the fortitude to suspend your star quarterback on the eve of a big game. Later, Dr. Mullins polled the class and wrote up on the whiteboard board all the essential qualities of a principal we could think of. I never really considered it before, but I am seriously mulling it over now: “Principal Corps”—or something like it—that is. Because I identify myself as pretty strong in a lot of those characteristics we listed, so much so that I began to wonder if I would actually make a better principal than a classroom teacher. One certainly has the opportunity to affect a bigger change in that position. Certainly, there would be drawbacks, namely the increased responsibility and all that entails, the constantly having to resolve conflicts, and losing the intrinsic rewards of direct classroom interaction with students. But leadership has its own rewards. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to come back as principal of the school I teach at now. I think I might have heard a call last weekend. Maybe. I have plenty of time to think it over.

She Needs a Valentine

I used to work on school stuff from the moment I got to school at 7:00 in the morning until I left nine or ten hours later in the afternoon. Recently I find myself spending large portions of my planning period browsing the Internet, clicking on the various news headlines on Yahoo! front page, reading investment advice, updating my blog, doing my assignments for an online class, etc. Today I walked outside and looked at the birds and the rain puddles, the decrepit remains of some parade floats parked behind the school for who knows how many years. At home, I buy stocks for my new IRA, clean and cook, take out the trash, discuss with my roommate the issue of our Internet turning off and on with the whim of his noisy computer fan, and make miscellaneous phone calls to people queued up to hear from me. I told one of them I feel in the midst of winter doldrums. Or call it spring fever. Basically I feel like doing everything but school these days.

Sometimes the weather is warm, then the next day it turns cold again. The locals say Mississippi is like that. Today a co-worker who was giving me a ride home told me of an April several years ago when they went from 80-degree temps to snow within one week!

Is it possible to have a harmless crush on a student? I think so. I’ll go to 123-baby-names.com and find a pseudonym for her: Here, I’ll call her “Gretchen.” So last week, it came up in class that I should come watch her play basketball. It was the last home game of the regular season, and I was feeling a little guilty I had not made it out to any of the basketball games yet (mostly due to my transportation situation). So I showed up. She saw me during the pre-game warm-ups, called out my name, waived and smiled. She went on to play the whole game, scored 25% of her team’s points, and won. I enjoyed it. Now, I had another good student on the girls team, as well as a few students I know on the boys team—and it was good to cheer for them too—but I’ll be honest here, it was Gretchen in particular I felt most fondly for. The next morning, she thanked me for coming to the game, and I replied, “I didn’t know you were such a star!” But she is. Gretchen is one of the best students I’ve ever had. She’s a teacher’s dream: Smart, hard-working, participates in class, polite and respectful. And she has gotten the highest score on each of the tests I have given this term. So this week we host the district playoffs. Monday, the morning of the first round, Gretchen told me she probably wouldn’t be playing much that night, as she was not feeling well, but for some reason I showed up anyhow. And she played. She did well. And we won. She didn’t seem to notice me before the game this time, and at one point, she took a tumble on the court diving after a loose ball, colliding with another player. I found myself feeling worried for her and mostly just wanting to express sympathy and encouragement. I couldn’t believe the disinterested manner of the white physical trainer who took his time coming to her aid, only to pull her up gruffly by the elbow. But she seemed fine after a spell on the bench and played the whole game afterwards. During the boys game, after the girls came out of the locker room, she spotted me from across the gym, waived, held up nine fingers to tell me how many points she scored. I held up my hands and clapped for her. Today, at school, she told me she wanted to talk about something personal after school. “Well, not that personal,” she said. So after school, she found her way to my classroom, and I asked her what’s up. She asked me why I walked home after the game. She told me I just about had her crying for making me come to her games only to have to walk home at night. She said she was going to have to start taking up donations to buy me a car, “dead serious!” (Can you imagine that?) I think the thing is, Gretchen is cute and all, for sure, but it’s not like I have the hots for her exactly. I’ve just never had such a perfect human being, as a student, actually show an interest in me, as a person. I am touched, and I like her back. Tremendously.

Play Widit / Get Saved

i am addicted to
asphalt and temper
tamtrums this
soilthat neverdries
and driving the wrong
way in parking lots
paying too much for
cable TV not to
mention childbirth on
the street named twiceas
far without candy… these
1000 subtle variations
of i don’t know are
taking up space in my
comfort time alone with
my beer

---

There’s something pretty beautiful about that
wreck we kept our life’s work in She speaks of
unconditional love which to me is surely exaggerations
and some redundant use of the word “after…”

the children of divorce & a tenfold stagnation:
If you have civil rights and half a dozen other
convenient Excuses, behold: She held a bird in her hand

There is a museum for white people Called (quiet)
who wants to know what happens here in
Wintertime and everything i don’t have is forgiveness

Everytime my Minister decides, an airplane, the Poet of our Time,
throws unfinished homework all over our backyard, in flames.. She
waits here for answers until the time expires, listens to the music

for lovers, the Stopsign killswitch weirdline slamstep, One
beer after another Ambushed by crawlers on the way
to my bicycle, Hey, you Don’t know much about God, huh?

There are nanoseconds on my dishes Biting off pieces
of corn chips and decades on classroom management supplying
us with bad ideas: She knows a thing or two about hand guns

We want to think bigger. Get the nowhere wrapped out of us
So if you have had enough basketball, volunteer
duty picking up pieces of trash at the end of the day, just

Take your nervous breakdown day off today and meet me picking
cotton off the road out by the casino crossing and We’ll type the
meaning in afterward. Because they were all thoroughly uninspired.

Children of Men

Saturday night, after class, I went with a group of classmates to see the new movie Children of Men at the cinema in Oxford. I thought it was an excellent movie. Children is graphically violent at times (although perhaps not exceptionally by today's standards), yet even more unsettling as a social statement. We all left shaken. Children depicts a near-future post-apocalyptic world brought on by the inexplicable infertility of all the world's women. But the premise of infertility is just a vehicle for a far more apt message. The movie depicts a xenophobic British government--the only world government left standing--deporting all foreigners, caging them, putting them in concentration camps. A currupt terrorist organization clashes with the government, fighting for humane treatment of the foreigners. This movie deals with dark themes all around, including assisted suicide, but mostly it addresses xenophobia and the swift yet massive erosion of human rights that might happen in times of crisis and fear.

I find the movie compelling because these two themes are among the most perturbing trends in America today. On the drive to Oxford Friday night, I saw a billboard in Batesville that said something to the effect that Harry Truman and the Enola Gay had the solution for that Iran/Iraq problem. Then this morning I saw this article on Yahoo about torture on TV. These are symptoms. That Abu Gharib was not any bigger scandal than it was, the fact that George W. Bush was still re-elctable even after those abuses and the policies which allowed them had been exposed, further indicts this new, cruel face of America. I am concerned that, in response to 9/11, terrorism, etc, America is drifiting not only toward an us-vs-them xenophobia but toward an unacceptably casual view of torture and a sad lack of respect for human rights.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070211/ap_en_tv/tv_american_torture

MYP Learner Profile Word for Today: "Reflective"

A few thoughts from Dr. Mullins’ class last week:

The word “is” is a linking verb, which is transitive, not intransitive. And no web address can possibly have an “@” symbol in it. These funny mistakes were made by an intelligent man who runs a reading institute and whose brother famously made a fortune selling a web browser.

A classmate raised the point that “there will always be someone flipping burgers at McDonald’s.” I would argue that there is no technical reason why we really need people to do most manual, minimum-wage jobs. We live in an age where computer technology is becoming sufficiently advanced that if we really devoted enough brains to the task, we could build machines to accomplish most menial chores, not the least of which includes flipping burgers at McDonald’s. In a sense, minimum wage is really a form of welfare for those whose education does not enable them to find meaningful employment doing anything else. It is not that we really need someone to flip those burgers, the problem is that we have so many people who need that job. Consider this: The more advanced a society, the more specialized and educated its citizenry must be in order to create the efficiencies that enable leisure, art, and luxury. But a society with disparate education will create an intellectual underclass, and these under-educated citizens have to do something. An ideal society, where everyone received the best possible education, would have a much smaller number of people in need of minimum wage labor. They would be doing much more valuable jobs (creating, managing, maintaining, teaching, serving people, etc.) and technology would take up the slack whenever the minimum-wage labor pool becomes so small that (gasp!) wages for simple tasks actually go up. Yes, in a sense, there will always be a lower class, but only because wealth is purely relative. What we consider poor would be wealthy in any other century, not to mention lots of other countries even now! There will always be some who benefit more and some who benefit less, regardless of the system in place. That’s just human nature. But I believe it is theoretically possible to raise the standard of living across the board and lessen the gross disparities that presently are growing. How? By perfecting education for everyone! How else?

Since before Teacher Corps began, two of my favorite ideas for reforming education have been to (1) fund schools at the state and federal (rather than local) level and (2) pay teachers more, so as to attract top talent, and link incentives to performance and hard-to-staff areas. Well guess what? It turns out I wasn’t the first one to think of these things, after all. None other than the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has weighed in on these issues and more, in their report “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” (They also proposed several other dramatic changes, such as restructuring high school so that most students leave at 16 to enter junior college, starting high-quality education as early as age 4 (3 for low-income kids), and communities contracting with outside operators to run their schools.) So it appears that change requires more than just a brilliant idea. Imagine that!