September 15, 2006
Week two is done, and I’m pretty sure most of my students don’t hate me. I’m an organizational train wreck and perpetually confused, but I’ve got a lot of people offering advice and most of it’s pretty good. The two senior members of my team and my mentor teacher have a combined 70 years of teaching experience, so they are worth learning from.
So far, I’m not sure I’m really teaching anyone anything. We’re doing a lot of writing and I’m doing a lot of reading and a lot of talking. I started the week with lessons on purpose and audience that went well, then tried to dive into the writing process and realized I was taking the wrong approach with a bad lesson plan and had to tap dance through two periods until my free period when I could change what I was doing.
I asked my mentor teacher why she was starting with the personal narrative, and she couldn’t really give me a reason. She suggested if I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow her plan, that I should follow the book instead. The book started with the writing process, which seemed right to me, so that’s where I decided to start.
And it fell apart quickly. I’m not sure you can really start by explaining the writing process to 12 year olds, but one thing is certain, the idiotic lesson I devised didn’t work. (And, yes, it was idiotic. That’s not just me being hard on myself. I don’t want to talk about it). One young lady said to me, “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘process.’ When I have to do a paper, I just write down what I think and show it to my dad, and he checks the spelling and grammar and tells me if it’s okay.” I stood there and looked at a sea of confused faces, and then I realized what my mentor teacher had been trying to tell me:
You start with purpose and audience, move on to having them generate a list of topics, talk a little about description and work on adjectives, move them through some pre-writing exercises and some drafting, have them work over their drafts, and then edit a bit, and then produce a finished paper. And then you go back with them to look at what they did – the writing process.
So now, I am following her lead.
I’ve had some minor triumphs and some minor struggles. I’ve got gifted kids who are eager to please and tired of hearing about descriptive writing and hamburger models, and I’ve got many students, only some of them learning disabled, who, by their own admission, have never read a book. I’ve got troublemakers who behave and good kids who write things in their journals that are downright insulting and several students who are incredibly obnoxious, but seem to believe that I will find their behavior somehow appropriate and funny, as if, because I don’t yell at them like most adults do, I’m basically a friend that they can insult and mess around with.
I’ve got several serial trouble makers who, so far, have been phenomenal in my class – model citizens in every respect. One has written several times in his journal that I am his favorite teacher and that he likes my class. All of the toughest kids in the school routinely say hello to me in the halls. Two others have begun to misbehave a little, but not enough to attract much notice. I’m just now starting the hard stuff, though – writing assignments and quizzes that really count for grades – so we’ll see if I start to struggle with a few more of these kids.
The second hardest thing has been the administrative nonsense, the meetings, the pointless paperwork. I had to fill out a paper for the office telling them my daily schedule. How can the office not know my daily schedule? Earlier this week we gave sheets to the students containing all of their personal data so that they could have their parents make corrections, sign, and return the sheet. Why no one would assume that data would get changed by students who either forge their parents signature or who change the information on the form after their parents have signed it is a bit of a mystery to me.
The hardest thing, of course, is just being new. It’s bad enough being a new person in any work place – not knowing who does what or how to get help. In this case, you can multiply that by 1,000. I have to be prepared to teach a lesson in language arts every single day. What that means most days, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t know where to start and once I start I don’t know what to do next. Some lessons work and some don’t, but none of them fit into any kind of logical progression or big picture for me yet.
Of course, I’ve got piles of resource materials. Huge piles. And I’ve got people willing to give me more and more and more. I don’t have time to look at any of it, but it’s there beckoning me. Today, I wanted an example of descriptive writing in a personal narrative, and simply grabbed a lit text and went with what I found – an excerpt from Into Thin Airby Jon Krakauer. It suited my purpose. It wasn’t the inspirational sort of thing I really wanted, but I have long since given up on putting together perfect lessons and having all of the resources I need. Much better that I improvise right now. I’m like a shipwreck survivor treading water in the ocean surrounded by tiny pieces of floating debris. If I could grab enough stuff, I might be able to make a raft, but if I stop treading water I’ll drown.
That said, some good things have happened. I stepped out of the room for a moment early in the week to help a young lady with her locker, and when I got back there was a girl chasing a young man around the room. I called both of their parents on the spot and had them both in lunch detention with me the next day. The girl wrote a note and apologized. I don’t think I’ll have any more trouble like that with her. The boy was giving me an attitude when I yelled at him, but when he heard me talking to his grandmother, suddenly his ears perked up and he began working on his journal entry. I told her he was a good kid and had been doing his work, and that I expected this to be an isolated incident. His journal entry was not of Shakespearean quality that day, but it was good. I read it to the class, and then he asked me to read it to the next class and I did. He has had lunch detention and in-school suspension since that day, but he has been good in my class.
And my 6thperiod class might just be falling in line. Everything seemed hopelessly out of control early this week. From the low-level students to the gifted ones I was being constantly interrupted and thrown off my lessons. They were driving me nuts, rattling me like a bad comedian facing a room full of hecklers, and generally making my life miserable. I left work every day for a week feeling like I’d been in the ring with Mike Tyson all day. In each class, I might take a punch or two, but by 6thperiod I wasn’t able to block anything or hit back; I was taking blows to the head repeatedly, wobbling on my feet, waiting for my corner to throw in the towel. Wednesday I hit them with a “tell me where we are on the behavior chart as a class, what rules you might have broken, and how you can help this class work better” writing prompt and made clear to them that if they continued to make it hard for me to teach, then I would make it hard for them to do anything at all. I got my cell phone out and said that if ANYONE spoke out of turn or got up from their seats I was going to call their parents from the front of the room. I followed that writing prompt immediately with another, just to keep their heads down and force them to be quiet.
Meanwhile, my three biggest troublemakers were joining me for lunch every day and we were talking about music and various 12-year-old stuff. They started complaining about the math teachers; I told them I didn’t mind the complaining but that they should be respectful of my friends. One asked if he could sue for getting fake meat on his spaghetti and another said he couldn’t because he got his lunch for free. I corrected that assumption. “No, if it makes you sick and causes health problems that end up causing long-term problems for you and costing your parents a lot of money, you can definitely sue whether you paid for the food or not. You’ll have to find a lawyer to take your case, though.”
“Dang, that would cost too much.”
“Not necessarily. If you have a good enough case you can find a lawyer who will help you out. But you’ll have to convince them it’s worth the time and to do that, you’ll probably need to be able to communicate pretty well. Pay more attention in language arts, and you might be able to make that happen. If the fake meat really affects your health, that is.”
At one point they brought up Martin Luther King, and I got to talk about him a bit. I thought I was pushing my luck trying to give a lecture on history during lunch, but they actually seemed to listen.
By the end of the week all of them wanted to continue lunch detention. The administrator and the 30-year-veteran math teacher told me I wasn’t hard enough on them. I let the boys know that, and told them that if they ended up eating with me as a punishment again, they’d be eating alone with their desk facing a wall and no talking.
But if they behaved in class and did their work, I might just talk the assistant principal into letting them eat in my room on a regular basis. I may have lost a few battles along the way, but I’m winning the war. I think. Of course, when I’m under attack again on Monday I might not feel so confident. And all it will take is one poorly planned campaign and the whole offensive could fall apart.
Today, though, my 6thperiod was almost perfect. In fact, a quiz was interrupted by a fire drill, and these kids, who pushed and shoved and made all sorts of noise the last time we had a fire drill, were perfect, quiet, and incredibly well behaved. The most hard-headed of the troublemakers, who last week snuck off to the bathroom and came back to class several minutes late, was the first one back to the room. The other teachers had to keep shushing their kids and telling them to stay in line. My kids didn’t make a sound and stood outside in perfect order. I finished my lesson with them 3 minutes before the bell, and thanked them for making it so easy for me.
This is far and away the hardest job I have ever had; the hardest and most exhausting thing I’ve ever done.
But all in all (depending on what day you ask me – yesterday after abandoning my lesson after 2ndperiod and generally feeling inept through the entire day -- I wanted to quit), I’m enjoying it.
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