Seventh grade lives 3

Forget pedagogy, curriculum, lesson plans, learning theory, brain research and all that for a moment.  This teaching business is often just an emotional hurricane from the first bell in the morning to the last in the afternoon.  Take today for example:

Second period:  today was the last day at school for the boy who lost his mother over the weekend.  We spoke briefly of it in the class, and the boys were visibly affected by his misfortune.  I could see them trying to imagine how it would feel if it happened to them.  I continued to feel troubled by what this fragile boy was facing.

Advisory:  Today was the final game of our basketball tournament.  My class was playing Mr. Beach’s.  Emotions ran high at the game.  The other classes were cheering from the stands.  My students constantly wanted only the best players to play while I insisted on playing anyone who wanted to.  Everyone was very excited--it was wonderful!  We lost but the whole event was very positive for the 7th grade boys and for the five of us who have their advisory periods.  (Next up:  spelling bee!)

Sixth period:  The excitement of the game carried over into this period, always my most difficult.  Somehow one boy who is always pretty hyped up and volatile was pushed off the edge by something someone said.   Next thing I knew he was in a violent rage, trying to throw tables and chairs, screaming and sobbing.  I hustled him outside asked him to just stand still for a moment, get hold of himself,  and calm down.  He was shaking and sobbing, but he did slowly calm down.  Later he came back into the room and soon, in typical boy fashion, he was his usual rambunctious self.  But the display of raw emotion was awesome and hard to forget. 

Meanwhile the provocateur in this case continued to be the most willful, determined, and successful disruptors in all of my classes.  This boy doesn’t even try to control his acting out, but rather issues a steady stream of mockery, goofiness, and impudence.  Yelling doesn’t have more than a transitory effect, so I began ignoring him.  Unfortunately the rest of the class continued to find him hilarious. 

I ended up addressing myself to them rather than him.  “He just wants an audience,” I said, “and if you are his audience ask yourselves, what will he teach you?  Is it more than I can teach you?  It’s up to you to deny him his audience so we can get on with the job of learning and teaching.”  Maybe they heard that, maybe not.  I intend to repeat this argument at every opportunity.  We’ll see. 

The emotion I feel is anger at this boy for making my job so difficult, even while I keep in mind that he’s only 13 and must be deeply troubled to manifest this behavior.  This is a common dichotomy--they piss me off while they evoke my concern for their futures.  This is a basic teacher issue--we care deeply for them even when they infuriate us.  It's sort of like parents, but with scores of kids and only for school hours.  It's what makes teaching so energizing and so exhausting at the same time.

And so another day in the hurricane of emotions that makes up seventh grade lives.

Seventh grade lives 2

Yesterday I learned that the mother of one of my students died suddenly over the weekend of a brain aneurism.  She died on his birthday.  As a result he and his two older sisters must go live with their father about an hour away.  He will go to a new school. 

I can only imagine how traumatic this is for him.  He’s a shy, awkward, overweight boy, with a sweet personality and a gentle manner.  He has a sadness about him that suggests a difficult life.  He’s also a whiz at Yu-Gi-Oh, a fantasy card game with endless detail.  I asked the class to observe a moment of silence for his mother which they did very respectfully.  He told us a little more about her death (more than he has spoken to the class all year), and some boys asked a few questions. 

Of course this is a painful subject for the boys to think about, and their reaction is not surprisingly to change the subject and the mood abruptly.  My heart is heavy thinking of what this boy will face in the months and years to come.  I wish him the best.

Do I hear harps?

The spring semester began a couple of weeks ago and I was gifted with...girls!!  Yes, my fourth period elective is comprised of 25 sixth grade girls.  I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but it has been a real game changer. 

Now don’t get me wrong.  I like my boys with all their ebullience and insouciance (hey--I am an English teacher after all!).  Their energy and fearlessness is invigorating and inspiring.  But it’s also exhausting.  The girls are different.  They’re still just 12 of course, and they’re lively enough, but they are easier to guide and work with.  They take less energy to direct, and so I can put more energy into the actual instruction. 

Fourth period comes in the middle of my two days without a conference period, and the more relaxed atmosphere with the girls has given these days a new character.  I feel more confident in the boys’ English 7 classes on either side and less drained at the end of the day. 

The elective with the girls includes practice for the CST (California Standards Test) in May and also a project for Women’s History Month.  Our smooth movement into the project has made me think that I should be able to do this with the boys as well, notwithstanding the qualities mentioned above.  Of course I have been told by the teachers on the third floor that other kinds of problems arise with girls that are equally challenging, but so far it’s a welcome change of pace.  I would almost recommend that everyone get to teach one class in the other academy.

I’m still puzzled as to exactly how teaching girls is different.  Certainly the majority of boys are equally cooperative and agreeable.  At most a third or so of the boys fuel most of the resistance to order and progress.  I can also see that there are a few girls who are very lively and might need more managing.  I also see that, as with the boys, many of the girls have a lot of other things on their minds with a higher priority than standardized tests or even women in history. 

I can see right away the reality of one oft-cited distinction between most girls and most boys, namely that the girls move easily and eagerly into a collaborative mode.  In this class they immediately began to work together on their Women in History projects.  The boys have had a harder time working together.  Many groups don’t gel and never get focused. 

At the same time the boys really are more competitive. I’m trying to enlist that quality in their attitude towards their measured reading grade levels.  The intersection of collaboration and competitiveness is, of course, the team, and I’m trying to create that environment in class.

Anyway, it’s too soon to draw sweeping conclusions, and I don't want to over-generalize.  I’m sure I’ll comment more in the months to come. 

Until then, is that harps I hear fourth period?

Another pastoral interlude

I went birding again today in MacArthur Park with students and parents of Leo Politi Elementary School in Pico Union.  The principal and one of the teachers joined about 30 students and as many parents in a lively perambulation around the lake.  As it was the time before, this was a wonderful outing, a perfect teaching experience that linked school and neighborhood, parent and child, nature and city, learning and life.  We saw over 30 species of birds, and many of the parents were just as amazed at what there was to see in their familiar and very urban park.

From the ubiquitous pigeon to the red-tailed hawk perched up on the "Westlake Theatre" sign to the visiting Ross' Goose, American Wigeons, and Ring Necked Ducks we all enjoyed a couple of hours with our avian family.  To see these students (who might be in my class at YOKA in a couple of years!) soaking up knowledge--checking in the book, looking at the birds, asking questions--provided a clear template of what learning should be like, whether it's in the classroom or out of it.  A big congratulations to principal Rumble for leading his students on this little adventure and to my friend Judith, a veteran birder, for initiating this series of walks.

(And what does this have to do with the "sturm und drang" of my previous post?  Beats me....it's so confusing!)

Teaching as struggle

Each period, each day I feel like I am locked in a fast-paced wrestling match with my students. I like them, and we chat amiably before and after class, but when the bell rings we all spring into action. I grab onto them and try mightily to push them into a learning place; they resist and try to escape into their own world of disorder and play. We race around the room, wrestling back and forth, up and down. I prevail briefly as they write an assignment or listen to my directions, but then they come charging back, raucous and impudent. I don’t give up--I hurl threats and rewards at them, ominous intimations of inchoate disaster, until they fall back, feigning retreat, only to slip around a corner and run off in a different direction.

Periodically we both take a momentary respite to catch our breaths. During these moments we laugh good-naturedly, as if at our shared situation, but then the contest resumes with renewed vigor. And so it goes for an hour, or an hour and 45 minutes in the block period, until the bell rings and I let them leave. Then it feels like I have passed into the eye of a hurricane--where there was fury and tumult there is now an uneasy calm.

But my next opponents are already gathering outside my door, lining up as is our custom at YOKA. Again I go outside and chat amiably with them before ushering them into the room. Then...the match is on again!

I was thinking of my job in these terms the other day. It had been a reasonably successful day. I got through my lesson, but only by wrestling them inch by inch towards the learning goal. So of course I’m exhausted, but then I realized that anything this difficult and challenging--and worthwhile--will exhaust a person. Some people thrive on intense, grueling contests that leave them exhausted--in play and work--and I guess I’m one of them! 

This job is so much harder than my previous couple of positions, but I’m exhilarated by it even as it exhausts me. I get better at it day by day, albeit with setbacks from time to time, but I should not be deluded into thinking that it will ever be “easy” because it really can’t be any other way if you think about it. After all, our job it to take children--with all their love of chaotic free play who at 12 are on the verge of that rebellion against authority that will eventually make them into independent adults--and make them write and read and follow directions and sit still and be quiet.

How could it possibly be easy to bend their will to mine--especially when they outnumber me 30-1? To be sure, about a third of the students are very cooperative and easy to manage. This doesn’t mean they’re learning what I want them too, but it means I can work with them to help them learn. If they made up the whole class, teaching would be much easier. But they aren’t and never will be the whole class, and they too must learn to operate in an environment of disorder and discord.

Simply put, this is what teaching children is--intense, combative, unceasing. If I accept that reality and stop expecting that it will get easy, then I can also enjoy the considerable pleasures of teaching. These pleasures include the camaraderie that comes from shared struggle, the learning moments that occur every hour of every day, the awesome sight of children growing up, and the satisfaction of playing a small role in that process.

So that’s where I am now, approaching the midpoint of this school year that marks my return to the arena I left 20 years ago. Grades are due next week--fire up the midnight oil!

Too many top priorities

I haven’t posted in a while.  I had a much-needed three week winter break during which I got much less done than I intended (so what else is new?). Now school has been back in session almost two weeks, during which time my journey has been very bumpy.  Just when I think I’ve made some progress rolling the boulder up the hill, it slips away from me and rolls back down the hill, knocking me over on the way down.  Where do I stand as I face the end of the first semester?

For one thing, I am getting to know these boys better and better, and the more I know them the more I like them.  They are mostly very likable and good-natured.  I enjoy chatting with them before class as they line up in the hallway and after school when I encounter them around the campus.  This sometimes makes it more enjoyable to teach them, but at other times when I face them as a class they resist all of my efforts to guide their behavior.  I have had more than a few very frustrating moments already in the new year.  I continue to feel constrained in what I can plan because of the difficulty in getting them to cooperate as a class.  

For another thing, it is truly awesome what the policy makers in the state government and the district administration expect me and all teachers to do.  Here’s a little list:

1. District concept-lessons for the four writing units (narrative, expository, response to literature, persuasive).  As I’ve said, they’re good lessons, very student-centered and constructivist, but they are very involved and often need to be simplified and abbreviated.  Each unit culminates in a major writing project.  For example, in the expository unit they must write a 500 word news story about an event in their neighborhood   It is a state and local priority for students to write more and better, of course, a priority that I share.
2. This is good since students should write a much as possible, and it also lends itself to the use of the online writing program I have described, MyAccess.  That has its own requirements for implementation, valuable as it is, and takes time to organize, but it is a priority that they write a lot.
3. We also want them to read more, especially on their own, so we have the program called “Accelerated Reader” in which students read a book at their level and then go online to take a brief quiz about the book.  I have now assigned them to read and pass quizzes on four books before the end of the semester.  This is now serving as homework, but it’s a lot of work to convince them that they really have to get a book from the library, read it, and pass the quiz on it.  Again, it’s worthwhile but has to be a priority of mine if it is to be successful.
4. Then on top of all this, we have the California Standards Test coming up in May and the District’s Periodic Assessments in February and April.  It is of course (you guessed it!) a priority for the state and district to prepare students for these tests.  I have received voluminous materials on paper and online to prepare them for these tests.  As I said in the kudzu post, I could spend all of my time on this priority alone.

So there you have it.  Four top priorities to be implemented with all of the attendant adaptation and organization they require.  I can’t argue with any of them, but together they present an almost insuperable challenge.   Each must be implemented on its own and then integrated with the others.  No wonder my head spins when I try to juggle them all in the pedagogical air!

And so I stride towards the end of a semester, the mid-point in the year, head bloodied but unbowed.  More soon.

Standardized Testing is the KUDZU of public education, part 2.

In the past decade standardized testing has come to dominate public education.  Schools are ranked and evaluated based on test scores.  Federal and state dollars are allocated based on test scores. Principals are fired and hired based on test scores.  Now teachers may be evaluated based on student test scores.  How did we get into this situation?

This trend to place more and more importance on test scores has been a political and not an educational decision.   Significantly, it has been a bipartisan political decision.  Democrats (Davis, Obama, Villaraigosa) and Republicans (Swarzenegger, Bush, Riordan) together with billionaire “reformers” (Broad, Gates) have relentlessly promoted standardized tests as the lingua franca of educational achievement.  The only voices of dissent have been the teachers themselves and their unions, and this dissent has strained the traditional bonds between teacher unions and Democrats.

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that as test scores have been adopted as the primary measure of student learning, the level of funding for public schools has stagnated and even declined. At the same time all other aspects of children’s lives have deteriorated dramatically.  Health care, housing, nutrition--American children are worse off in all these areas as more and more have slipped into poverty. 

But rather than focus on children’s lives as the cause of problems in education, the bipartisan consensus is emerging that the cause of low test scores is not poverty--hunger, homelessness, ill health--and not inadequate  funding--large class sizes, no support staff, deteriorating facilities.  Instead the primary cause of educational failure is....TEACHERS!   Yes, if teachers will just cooperate by placing the proper emphasis on test scores, then it won’t matter if the children are ill-fed, ill-housed, and in ill-health; it won't matter if classes are large, support negligible, and buildings decrepit. 

But not all teachers are the problem.  According the the prevailing “reform” meme coming from Republicans, many Democrats, and the billionaires, the problem is veteran teachers, i.e., the highest paid teachers who have enough job security, thanks to union strength, to resist the headlong rush to enshrine standardized testing as the ultimate arbiter of educational quality.  Disgracefully, this message has come from political leaders who have never hesitated to take campaign contributions from teachers but who now find it easier to blame high-priced veteran teachers for problems in the schools rather than take on the true cause, poverty.

So let’s sum up.  We have had three decades of Reaganism in which wealth has been steadily distributed up to the corporate elite and away from the middle class.  During this time more and more children have slipped into poverty, and funding for public education (especially in California) has declined or stagnated.  Parallel to these developments we have seen the rise of standardized tests that are cheaper to administer and cheaper to teach than more holistic, authentic measures of student achievement.  Anyone see a pattern here?

In Part 3:  What happened to the progressives?