I’ve been gone for a few days. Where was I? Winter camping with kids. It’s a wonderful opportunity for students to learn about the environment as well as themselves. I’ll be writing several posts as I get my thoughts together.
Last night it snowed. It was beautiful this morning as I walked to my car. Here’s a sneak – preview.
I’m not an English teacher. But I have several friends that are. It’s not uncommon for English classes to read a book and follow it up with the movie. Sometimes it’s something popular and the student has already seen the movie. What does the English teacher hear from the student in all seriousness?
“The book really follows the movie pretty well.”
Tonight’s experiment was Asian Chicken and Chili Soup. It’s another Everyday Food recipe. Maybe I just write about my food adventures so I can take a pretty picture and post it. The flash reflected off of the broth, but you’ll get the idea. I’m not quite like Sharkey when it comes to taking pictures.
This one was pretty easy. I didn’t poach the chicken. I cooked it in a frying pan and used some of the Red Curry Paste from my Thai cooking class last week. The thing that really gave it a kick was the Asian hot chili sauce. It was hot enough that I had to blow my nose – and I don’t have a cold. I really don’t know diddly squat about watercress. I don’t think I had enough, but it’s not exactly farmer’s market season these days. But all in all, the experiment was a success.
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about a Food Adventure. This was so easy and tasted really good. I modified a recipe out of my Everyday Food magazine. It’s from the March issue, so the recipe isn’t on the website yet. It is called “portobello, broccoli and red-pepper melts”. I switched the broccoli for asparagus and I used a pita instead of a slice of bread. It’s basically roasting your vegetables in the oven and putting them on a pita with some Gouda cheese and broiling it. Of course, the part that makes it good is the light mayo with a minced clove of garlic, salt and pepper on the pita. It’s just a thin layer, what can it hurt?
It always surprises me when I take the time to cook and it actually turns out. I’ve never thought of myself as a cook. But maybe I am…
The other night I picked out some books to bring to school. They’re for a student that is living in a shelter. Her parents are divorced. She was living with her dad. Her half brother did something bad and the girl didn’t keep quiet about it. Now, her father is siding with the brother and has given up all custody of her. Her mother is in another state and her best option for finishing high school is to stay here until the end of the year.
Life in the shelter is no picnic. They can’t go out unless it’s with an adult. They go to bed at 10 pm, they wake up a 6 am. There isn’t much to do there. So what does she do? She reads. Books are wonderful. They allow you to escape and imagine different realities of your life and the lives of others. You can be transported to far away lands. You can dream that life is so much more than you, living in a shelter, where your dad brought you your stuff, and didn’t even say goodbye.
So I ask, if you were in her situation, how well would you handle it? Would you have the strength and determination to live in a situation that felt like a jail just to finish high school? I don’t know if at 17, I was tough enough to do that. The general public really has no idea what many of these kids are going through. The obstacles that they have to overcome are enormous and in many cases, of no fault of their own.
I do know one thing. This girl is tough enough. She will get through it and she will not only survive, but she will turn into a productive citizen and be more responsible than her parents. I just wish she didn’t have to go through hell to get there.
What did I do to my tv? I had muted it while I was reading another blog tonight. After awhile I fumbled around to channel surf and get the volume back on. Oh look! Grey’s Anatomy is on. What? The voice on Meredith is not Meredith. She’s speaking Spanish. In walks Christina. She’s speaking Spanish too. Huh? Are they showing the repeat in Spanish because more and more of our population now speaks it? Yes, I actually thought that.
I went to my other tv and turned it on. All of these Grey’s characters are speaking in English. So what did I do to my other tv to make them all bilingual? I’ve had this tv for over a decade and not once have I ever made anyone speak Spanish on purpose. After about five minutes of pushing various buttons on the remote I figured out how to make them monolingual again.
Does this surprise me that I don’t know all the ins and outs of the tv? Nope. I can hook up the vcr and dvd players, iPod port, etc. and get it all to work. If it works, I don’t think too much about it. But then again, I did have my HDTV for over a year before my brother-in-law came over and pushed a few buttons on my remote to get the digital channels. Oh well…
Have you read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? If you haven’t, I recommend you do. The concept of one event tipping the scales to start an epidemic or an event is quite interesting. By the way, his book Blink is fascinating also…
I have a tipping point in my gangsta class. Honestly, four weeks ago I wouldn’t have worried about their behavior for a sub. I have my share of kids that given the opportunity, could choose to behave poorly. But for whatever reason, they were under control, didn’t antagonize each other and did their work. At the start of a new quarter I had several students added to my class. Some were added because they moved to the area. One was court ordered to come to school. And one was in a different class and someone realized that he had failed not earned credit in Algebra 1 and needed to make it up to succeed in other classes. He’s a repeater.
The repeater was gone on Friday. Guess what? My class was back to normal – the way it was before repeater was added. We had a good time, joked around, learned some math and got things done. I didn’t have to constantly police my room.
What I realized is that this one kid is the tipping point. He’s an attention seeker with a low attention span. He’s completely capable of learning, but I haven’t figured out the trick to avert the poor behavior. Maybe if I make a game out of it with myself it won’t piss me off so much… I’ve already tried calling the parent. It’s one of those standard cases where you talk to the parent and say to yourself, “no wonder the kid has issues.” While I try to sort this out, I still have to figure out how to contain the poor behavior without letting it completely disrupt the rest of my class and short change the other 30 kids. Oh yeah, and get them to learn some math while I’m at it.
I’m a math teacher. But more accurately, I feel like I’m a wizard at juggling behavior. With the NCLB act, all teachers have to be highly qualified and pass very difficult tests to get licensed. But I’m pretty sure there is no PRAXIS test for classroom management. And before you can be effective at all in teaching your subject matter, you have to be able to juggle everything else that gets thrown at you. Some things just can’t be measured with a test.
What should schools do with kids that fail? I know there are some cases of extenuating circumstances. But I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about the kid that puts forth absolutely no effort – the one that is capable of passing, yet chooses not to. Shouldn’t there be some sort of consequence? It’s a huge problem and I don’t know the answer.
As a matter of principle, I have to state that I have a problem with repeaters of classes. I know that there is a problem of how to deal with students that fail. In the past they have been required to take summer school or take an ALC (Alternative Learning Center) class to make up the credit. By the way, the students call ALC Assholes Last Chance. They’re not dumb. They know what it’s all about. There are problems with this system and I don’t have the answers. But to put them into a class with kids that aren’t failures is a bigger problem.
For one, the class is now larger and the other students get less attention from the teacher. I definitely know the difference between when I have a class of 20 verses a class of 42. With smaller classes, I know the struggles of each kid. I know how to tailor my lessons to help these kids with their particular stumbles in learning. Secondly, we are sending a message to the repeater that they will get unlimited chances. Why bother to try when I know that they’ll let me try again, over and over? What ever happened to the phrase, “The buck stops here”? They don’t get all of these do-overs when they are in trouble with the law. In college (if they make it there) they’ll at least have to pay to repeat a class.
But in the days of being measured by test scores and graduation rates, schools are running out of options to deal with failing kids. Notice I didn’t use the phrase failing schools that is so popular by the current media. Schools are bending over backwards (well, maybe just bending over in some cases) to try to get these kids to succeed. But the lack of motivation and lack of responsibility on the part of the student is killing us.
There is a book I recently read by Dr. Leonard Sax called Boys Adrift. It highlights the growing epidemic of lack of motivation in boys and young men today. He outlines various factors for what has caused the problem over the last 30 years. If what he says is true (and I have a tendency to believe it is), we’re in a heap of trouble.
So any of you who are educators, feel free to comment on what your school does with kids that fail. I’d love to hear some ideas that are being used in other places.
With Valentine’s Day last week I had more questions than usual about my status.
“Didn’t your husband give you some candy or somethin’?”
“What husband?”
“What? You’re not married? No boyfriend?”
“Nope.”
Confused looks abound. First hour, it was a boy asking. He proceeded to try to think of other teachers in the building that might be around my age to make a match for me. For each guess I told him that that person was already married. Then it turned into a guessing game of who isn’t married. He thought for sure a particular science teacher was single. I burst that bubble by telling him that I had met that teacher’s wife and son. Then he started thinking of ways that I could meet men. I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought of a bowling alley before!
In my 4th hour class, it’s mostly girls. They too were confused about the no boyfriend thing. Of the class of about 30, there were only 6 boys there. They must think that if you don’t have a boyfriend you’re going to shrivel up and die or something. We talked a little about the fact that it’s not a big deal to be single. I gave them my standard line for breaking off a relationship that isn’t going anywhere. They could see that it wasn’t so bad and it was a nice way to let the guy down. One of the senior girls in the class has known me since she was a sophomore. I think she wanted the rest of them to realize that I wasn’t some freak of nature and said something nice about my last boyfriend whom she had seen when he came to speak for our Career Day in the fall.
The end of the day was approaching and they were all excited for the dance that night. As they waited for the bell to ring I tried to impart my last bits of wisdom.
“You girls. You don’t let those boys do those things to you at the dance that you don’t want them to do. You just tell them no. Be strong.”
I’m sure I sound like some sort of lunatic. But they need to hear it from someone. The messages of our culture promote behavior that isn’t in their best interests. I sound like I’m really conservative but actually I’m quite liberal. The attitudes about sex and what teenagers are doing these days are just plain unhealthy. I do hope that I can be a good role model to these kids. They need an adult in their lives that is strong, knows what she wants, is independent and surprise, surprise… happy. Even if she is single.
There are so many things that they don’t teach you when you’re in school to become a teacher. What are the courses that you have to take exactly? Besides having a major in Mathematics, I had to make sure I had particular classes. In my case, I had to take an additional class in College Geometry and one in Probability and Statistics. My education classes included: Philosophy in Education, Content Area Literacy, Educational Psychology, Multicultural Education, The Exceptional Child, Writing, Listening & Speaking in the Content Area, a Methods class for Math and of course, Student Teaching. These courses are important on the road to becoming a teacher. But teaching is something that you really don’t know how you’re going to do until you’re actually doing it. And since you’re working with people, they can never cover all of the scenarios you will encounter.
We were talking at lunch the other day about what they don’t teach you. There are things that happen in your classroom that they just don’t cover in those classes. We joked that we should come up with a course and market it to some local college…
EDU 430: Seminar in Realities of Teaching
This course will address topics that have nothing to do with teaching your content. It will be taught by teachers who actually have current teaching experience. Topics will include: How to avoid fights in your classroom, What to do when there is one, Boy fights vs. Girl fights, Recognizing gang signs, Farts – and all the ways they disrupt your class, Translating teenage lingo, Cell phone technology and how it’s used and abused, spotting the cheater, conferences, talking with parents, writing recommendation letters – reading between the lines, controlling your emotions, acting, picking your battles, classroom disruptions, going with the flow, pregnancy – not yours, what to do if you catch kids having sex in school, recognizing drunk or high students and what to do, referring abuse, homelessness, various scenarios of being told to F off, flying under the radar, and many, many more!
Can this be covered in a semester? Can you teach it out of context? There are some things that you don’t really know how you’ll react until you’re in the situation. There are several careers where you just have to learn on the job. Teaching is one of them. But it sure would be nice to have a warning. But then again, would we do it if we did?
