Thanksgiving night

Don’t know what to wish for.
A steadier heart,
Emptier hands,
Quieter cats?
That I find the earring
Lost across the river
Lose the soldier
Self, and gain a road
Through the woods.
Or softer boots.

Tech Surprises

My first attempt at bringing tech to my classroom was, well, a flop. I’d been teaching the kids how to automatically decode the short /i/ sound – fluent reading is a key cornerstone of reading comprehension. To make it more entertaining, I’d acted out Monty Python and the "Knights of Nik!". Then someone had posted another MP skit on Facebook, and I – finally – realized that Youtube is a treasure trove of material I can bring into my classroom. I cued up the skit to project on my Interwrite screen, pushed play.
I expected the kids to break into laughter, the way my son did over the weekend as I played skit after skit of Brit humor to him on our home computer. But they remained stone-faced. Clearly I still had a lot to learn.
I’ve been at Galileo since August. To say it’s an amazing place is a cliché – but like most cliches, has some basis in truth. The people who thought this place up had an astounding vision – take a school that had demonstrated, in its history, failure significant enough to be featured on national television as an example of educational hopelessness. Close it. Reopen it, a year later. Fill it with enough sturdy laptops for each kid to have continuous access, and document cameras, electronic boards, scanners, I touches. Hire people who are passionate about teaching middle schoolers, and make them spend at least a week in the summer learning how to use all the toys – enough to orient them and wow them – and make sure they keep learning. Establish strong, heavy structure for both behavior and academic support, and encourage staff to use it.
See if you can change some lives.
For me, it’s been a ride. I’m not afraid of technology – I don’t think, anyway – but the learning curve for an Interwrite board is steeper than that for a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. I stumbled around a lot. It didn’t help that the new Special Education laws had their own learning curve, and I spent the first few weeks of school gasping for breath trying to learn those. It didn’t help, either, that I sustained a head injury at the beginning of the school year.
But I figured it out. By the time of my first evaluation, I could at least project a worksheet on the board and write on it. My kids, the lowest readers in the school, had learned what they could and couldn’t get away with in my class, and we played the rhythm that is so integral to successful learning in a classroom. Not that there weren’t stumbles. For these kids, school is only a worthwhile enterprise in its margins – before and after school, and at lunch. They’ve learned that they will only understand and remember bits and pieces of what is taught in an academic class, and mostly they’ve stopped trying.
Then it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I had to figure out what to do on Tuesday. The policy is, of course, "bell to bell teaching." Remember how your teachers showed movies the day before a holiday? No longer allowed – if you can’t demonstrate how the lesson will enhance progress toward the state standards, you don’t do it. And that makes sense; but I couldn’t just proceed with the standard lesson, either.
In the classrooms of younger, more with-it teachers, I’d seen them use a Jeopardy game to review for tests – and someone mentioned that there was a structure available on line that you could feed your questions and answers into. I found it, and took 15 minutes to set up a game based on the stuff I’d taught so far. That still left time – we have 70-minute periods at Galileo. Enough time for a writing project.
I’ve spent most of my Thanksgiving breaks constructing my annual holiday letter. Maybe the kids could to that to learn letter-writing skills… but I already knew what they would say, faced with the open ended task. "I can’t think of anything to write!"
Youtube came to the rescue, this time. My older son played me some clips of Jonathan Coulton a couple of years ago – wasn’t there a snarky holiday-letter song? Sure enough – a quick search revealed "Merry Christmas from Chiron Alpha Prime." If the Andersons could come up with something positive to say about working in asteroid mines whilst abused by Santa-robots, the kids could write something good too! I found a version that was clean enough for middle school and played it for the kids as an intro. Then I handed out notebook paper.
"Couldn’t we use the laptops to write our letters, Ms. Syrovy?"
And yes. Of course they could. And suddenly I found myself walking around, useless, because each kid was, assiduously and independently, constructing a paragraph about their year. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
I think this tech thing will work for me.

The Docent

Eyebrows groomed but bristling
He spoke with soft, precise inflection
Like an aged pastor.
"How do you push the rudder?"
Hands backed with rapt faces
"Soft and easy!"
I put on lipstick.
He had them.

The Teacher's Voice

Desiree trailed a harried educational assistant into my office.
"She wants to call her mom," Linda said. "I don’t know why, this time. Everything’s fine."
"Sweetie. You need to be in class. Go." I said. And Desiree went to class.
The assistant shot me a look of gratitude. "I wish I could do that!"
Somewhere along the way, in my teaching career, I learned the Teacher’s Voice. Not quite the Voice from the novel Dune, it nevertheless tells my students that what I’m saying is true, that I have their best interests at heart, and that not following through will have consequences.
A few years ago, when Red Rock Canyon first began as an official Open Space, I came across a jeepload of young men who were determined to drive up one of its trails. I was walking by myself, but it only took a couple of sentences to get them to turn around. That’s the power that a teacher’s voice has.
But lately, I’m finding that it doesn’t work on everyone.
Andre is in the sixth grade. Every day that he comes to school, late, we fight the same battles. I ask him to put on glasses; he says they’re at home, or they’re broken. But he can’t see without them. So he sits in the front row – but turns every chance he gets, and talks to the boys behind him. No wonder; written language, to Andre, is inscrutable. His spelling is completely invented. He reads only the shortest, most regularly spelled words, at a rate of roughly 15 words per minute. School is a daily challenge and a daily frustration.
When the year first started, he fobbed my encouragement and direction off with a shrug. "You don’t help me, you help him," he snarled, pointing at a more obviously disabled peer. Now he just tells me that he doesn’t like me.
For my part, I remember an early lesson of working with kids: deal with each behavior on its own merits. Forget the past. Don’t – ever – carry grudges. So when Andre does something right, I shower praise. I celebrate every word he gets on paper. I cheer when I see glasses on his face. I use his name, often, when I talk about positive student behavior.
And a couple of times a day, it works.
The rest of the time, Andre alternates doing nothing with active aggression. He slapped a girl hard enough to leave marks on her face yesterday. The assistant principal and counselor asked me to perform a behavioral study called a Functional Behavior Analysis. And maybe it’ll show us something.
But I think I already know what’s going on with Andre. His current behavior works for him. His mother is nursing a broken shoulder. She claimed yesterday, in a Percocet-altered voice, that it was from the ice on her sidewalk, but it’s just as likely the result of maltreatment by her son. I phoned her early in the year to find out if there was anything that’s worked for her, to make Andre cooperate with her wishes. Nothing, she said. He does what he wants. In elementary school he did nothing, and learned nothing.
I threw a party for the kids the other day, to celebrate that they successfully finished a major unit. They loved playing the Wii the school provided for the celebration.
"I have one in my room," Andre, who was absent that day, sniffed later, "I don’t need to play it at school!" He was probably lying, but he’d made his point.
You’d think Andre was a failure in every area.
My window looks over the school’s athletic field. On nice days, Andre’s been there, surrounded by friends, playing football, every morning and evening. When a play begins, he stands, stolid, in the center of the field, clearly a key player. In the classroom, the other boys don’t follow the leadership he offers – they don’t want the consequences of defying the teacher. But they crave his approval on the football field.
Andre is thoroughly successful in minimizing his weaknesses, and showcasing his strengths.
He makes me remember my own failures: having proved repeatedly in school my total ineptitude with any games involving balls, I now avoid them. Why would I expect a smart kid who can’t read and write to behave any differently, if he has any choice about it?
But I am frightened for him, and my fear has its basis in my own past. In the early nineties, I worked as part of a group teaching young people with disabilities, who were often relegated to spending their days in front of a parent’s TV, how to get jobs in the community. For the most part, we were successful. One failure was a young man who barely spoke. He tried his choice of food service out at a local Village Inn. I attempted to coach him; he ignored me. When I repeated that he was to wipe the tables, not refill the ice in glasses, he turned and screamed clearly, despite his articulation impairment, "Leave me alone, you stupid bitch!" He ripped off his apron, darted out of the restaurant, and never came back to the training.
He succeeded. I left him alone. And is his likely sad, hopeless destination Andre’s, too?