In My Life, I Will...

In the last week of school, with focus draining, one of the final assignments was for students to write a list of things they want to do in their life. The kids were creative, awkward, and hilarious. Here's a compilation for your enjoyment...

Touching

-Graduate High School

-Go to a good college

-Be a best-selling author

-Read 1,000 books

-Make my mother proud of me

-Be the first black female president

-Learn how to love

-Guide my children to be right and make good choices

-Make good decisions

-Take care of family

-Be a better person than my aunt

-Be respectful

-Become a husband (a good one)

-Live happy

-Eat healthy

-Only eat vegetables for a month

-Help poor people

-Give back to my community

-Apologize to my grandmother

-Speak my mind

-Pay the bills on time

-Keep my composure

-Love what I do

-Be nicer

Hilarious

-Sleep in the rain

-Meet Hillary Duff  

-Eat a raw egg

-Ride a tiger

-Go to Jersey Shore

-Get back dimples

-Work at Aeropostale

-Have my own sword

-I wanna be a BALLER!!!

-Become a Heat Seeker (people who search for the world’s hottest food)

-Get a 4.0 two times

-Try to make a super serum (so I can get super powers)

-Do Ninja training

-Get married to Ms. Cameron

-Have kids with Kim Kardashian and her sisters

-Eat dirt

-Break my butt bone

-Be a ghost hunter

-Crash people’s weddings

-I wanna go to sleep

-See Hey Arnold

-Go 2 days without tv

-Go 9 hours without the internet

-Get a job that is either at Foot Locker or Chipotle

-Put holy water on Jay-Z

-Have the longest dreads in the world

-Milk a goat

-Sleep upside down

-Watch tv for 3 nights straight

-Live

-Swim in Kool-Aid

-Wrestle a bear

-Start a country

-Meet Jesus without dying

-Be a anchopanor (entrepreneur??)

Inappropriate

-Go to a college party

-Sleep on a bitch (this is the kid who wrote be respectful – is it possible he spelled beach wrong??)

-Lose my virginity

-Smoke weed

-Drink liquor

-Have sex before I’m 18

-Be a stripper

-Get rid of hoes

-Be a pimp

Appropriate

-Get drunk when I turn 21

Terrifying

-Be in the Italian Mob

-Get shot

-Get locked up

-Kill someone!

-Create a bomb

-Steal

-Beat up  a hobo

-Cut my finger off

-Buy a gun

Interesting

-Have a sweet 18

-Eat frog heart (while beating)

-Be a mortician

-Live in a big purple house

-Kiss a bear

-Eat glue and see what it tastes like

-Get married 3 times

-Meet drag queens

-Kiss a dolphin

-Own 3 cell phones

-Create a new color

-Create a piece of gum

-Become a bird

-Write songs for Justin Bieber

-Have more than 500 shoes

-Have invisible powers

-Be a vampire

-Have a bi-racial wife

-Cross-breed animals

-Catch lightning in a bottle

-Marry a latina

-Live in a machine

-Get 30 tattoos

-Travel back in time

-Invent hovercrafts

-Help pregnant people

-Die then come back to life

-Buy Ms. Z a bike

-Climb the great canyon

-Create robot boxing

-Get all the shoes that come out this summer

-Sit on the clouds

-Have my own statue

-Watch my favorite Japanese show in Japan

-Be a bus driver

-Drink a river

Great Sequences:

1.     Go to college

2.     Get a job

3.     Get a car

4.     Get a house

5.     Have kids

6.     Become famous

7.     Go to the club

1.     Crash my first car

2.     Fix my first car

I Am Not the Enemy

This week has had a flood of angry parents coming at the teachers on my team from every direction for the failures we are making in our classroom. A parent that I have had five in-person meetings with along with many phone conferences (one of which lasting over half an hour, in which the mother mostly ranted about how much of a mistake it was to put her daughter back in a public school), I was cc'd on an email from my administrator addressing an angry complaint about me to my school's administration.

She is angry because I threw away her daughter's work during class. She states in the email to my administration that she "can't help but come to the conclusion that this has happened before", and implies that the zeros that her daughter has received in the past (which I have spent much time explaining to her the reasons for and explaining how her daughter can make the assignments up). She states that she is appalled at the unprofessionalism from an educator that this incident reveals. She compels my administrator to take this to the school-wide administration.

With forty minutes left in class, an unknown student came to my room stating that a teacher wanted the female student (let's call her Kira). I know that Kira doesn't have the teacher who requested her, but I said she could step out. However, Kira began packing up all her belongings and brought her work to me. I told Kira that she could not leave for the remainder of class. Kira didn't say anything, but just continued to hold her work out to me. I told her she was no longer excused and should get back to work. Kira sat her work next to me, and I told her that if she left class without permission she would receive a zero. Kira walked out of class.

I looked at her work, and she had filled out a self-evaluation on classwork that she hadn't even completed yet. As she had walked out of class and is aware that she cannot evaluate herself until after she completes the work, I threw her work in the trash.


Kira came back in over twenty minutes later, and another student told her I threw her work away. She started yelling in my (for once) on-task classroom: "Aww no you didn't!". I didn't respond to Kira, but she muttered "fuck this class" and when I asked her to please leave the room, she said "no, no, no, shut up."


And her parent, who I have made myself available to on countless occasions, didn't have the decency to contact me, and instead accuses me of throwing her daughter's work away on multiple occasions (while Kira is failing three other classes).


Incidents like this have occurred all year with all of my colleagues and myself, but it still sucks, for lack of a better phrase. I spend all day working with children to have their parents come back with this type of feedback. I understand that after having your child in bad schools for years, you have to be an advocate. But I don't understand how any parent believes that this type of hostility is going to help their children.


If I were any less professional, I would let this taint the way that I view her child. However, I haven't let Kira walking out of class, using profanity, or hitting other students stop me from trying to help her succeed in my classroom. But all of that was surprisingly a lot less frustrating than reading that email from her mother.

A Good Conversation

I remember in the first month or so of school this year, I was driving to school and a song came on the radio. I don't remember what song it was, but I do remember nearly crying as I listened to it. Keep in mind, I had crazy, first-year teacher syndrome in which I found myself crying at completely random moments, but still, the song had an impact on me. And I had this strange thought: my kids would never appreciate this song; at this point, most of them wouldn't even know what it was talking about because the vocabulary was vastly above their level.

It saddens me the way I have to take a poem, a beautiful story, and stretch and pull and yank and thin it out so it is accessible to my crazy untameable classes. I have that image that I'm sure most lit teachers have, of an enjoyable in-depth discussion that brings out the best of the text. Instead, I often find myself giving in at the last minute to just trying to talk them into looking at the text, simply reading it, and then having to move on because they have wasted so much time.

I love reading, so it is often inconceivable to me that my students just don't.

Once, I tricked them. We had read most of Flowers for Algernon in the typical way: a few pages a day, some questions to make sure they at least knew what was going on even if the hadn't really read, and moving on. But then for the last part of the story, I told them we were just finishing up, and they were welcome to lean back and I was just going to turn off the lights and read and relax. I put on my best reading voice and read the last part of the text.

The students, even those who hadn't read at all, were aware of Charlie and what was happening to him. They knew that Algernon had died and many guessed Charlie would too, although there were those that thought the main character wouldn't possibly be killed.

As soon as I got everyone listening for a moment (which took a while and a lot of fighting), the room became silent. I read the same part of the story four times that day, and every time I reached the point at the story when you know Charlie dies, I got goosebumps. The kids were so still. And after WEEKS of the kids telling me what a stupid story it was and telling me I need to pick something interesting and less boring, I got countless comments: "That story was good."

Unfortunately, that doesn't change that they hadn't read most of it. And I'm not nearly accomplished enough to turn that enthusiasm into a broader love of reading.

But this week, one student said something in our class discussion. We read all of the Anne Frank play, and were starting to watch "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas". This student is in my lowest-performing class, and reads on a 5th grade level. When I asked about what their impression is of the portrayal of the concentration camp, he was the only one to volunteer. He said "they are controlled by fear." He then went on to describe to me:

The video game Batman has a villain, and in the game the last time you see him he says, "At the end of fear is oblivion." Then he just disappears. The student said, "It's the same with the people in the camps. You can tell by the way Anne and her family hid, and by the way that the little boy in the movie runs when they call him. There are so many of them, but it's too late. They are so controlled by fear that it's going to be easy for their lives to turn into oblivion. They could have done something, but they didn't know in time, and now they are too scared to."

Suddenly,  I found myself in a discussion of the way government holds its citizens accountable with fear, how systems large and small rely on fear to keep subjects in check - including schools - and how without fear, there would just be a mess. And suddenly we're talking about anarchy.

I know that each student is so insightful in their own way, but when they are all together that is lost. It takes a conversation like this to reground me in the fact that every one of my students is brilliant, even though they very frequently make terrible, annoying, angering decisions. If one student can do this, they certainly all can.

Spring Break Wasn't Worth It

Getting back into the swing of things after a break is never easy, but this has been a little ridiculous. Opposed to the normal crazy behavior, many of the kids were merely apathetic when we first came back on Tuesday, grouchy even when I started our drama unit by asking them to write out a script for a scene from Elf (how can you be grumpy when you get to watch Elf???)

However, things did seem to pick up. By yesterday, we were beginning to read our plays for this unit, which meant beginning A Midsummer Night's Dream for my honors class, and The Diary of Anne Frank (the play) for my other classes.

My honors class surprised me with their enthusiasm for Shakespeare. They are appalled at the love triangles, and are ecstatic that the characters are all fighting over one another. In all actuality, it sounds a lot like middle school love lives.

Anne Frank started out fantastic with my second period as well. [I can't believe I just wrote that sentence. It felt nice. I'm going to do it again.] Anne Frank started out fantastic with my second period as well.

They were asking questions about the background (many of them weren't at all familiar with the Holocaust), and actually asked me to keep going when we had to stop. After that, I was so excited to start with the other classes.

Flop.

My third period was unruly, but my fifth period seriously looked as if someone had released a hive of tracker jackers on them. All but four students were actually yelling out over the reading. I had to keep pausing to ask one after the other to stop play fighting, running around the room, and SIT DOWN and be quiet. We got less than halfway through the scene that all the other classes got through.

After that experience,  I was hesitant to continue today.

But then third period came in with halos. After ten pages, they, too, asked if we could keep going. Maybe the magic would continue with fifth mod?

No. Worst teaching day. Ever.

"Your class is so boring."

"No, it's not just her class, it's her."

"She's the worst teacher ever. I don't get why bad teachers don't just go work at TGI Fridays." 

"There's one around the corner."

"I bet she quits after today."

"Oh, look, she looks heartbroken."

"Look at her, doesn't she look so sad?"

After this lovely conversation between five of my students, I decided to keep my sanity and post the reading assignment on the board with a notice that there would be a quiz at the end of class. I hate doing that, but I didn't think I would last much longer with any semblance of self control.

Of course, instead of even starting their work, most just picked up on (highly inappropriate) conversation topics of their choosing. When I interrupted a conversation questioning the sexual orientation of fellow students outside of that class, I asked them "How would you feel if you walked into their class and heard them all talking about you?" I got an array of responses:

"I don't give a sh** what they're saying about me."

"I hope they've got somethin to say about me."

"They're probably all talking about you."

Clearly, I made an impression on them. Then, the highlight of it all. End of class. Four minutes left. Four minutes!

Student 1: "You just need to go teach in an all white school where the kids are good."

Student 2: "That was racist!"

Student 3: "Yeah, you said all white school!"

Me: "The reason that was racist was not because she said 'all white school', but because she assumes that the white students will be better behaved"

Student 1: "Well, they would be."

Student 2: "You're black!"

Student 1: "That's why I'm bad."

Me: "Then you're deluding yourself."

Student 2: "What's deluding?"

Me: "It means she's tricking herself into thinking she has an excuse for being bad, when really that's no excuse at all. It's a choice she makes."

Student 2: "Yeah, you're delusing yourself."

Again, clearly, impression made.

I'll keep in mind all the other classes are loving it. I'll keep repeating to myself "Can we read more?".

Is it summer yet???

List of Grievances

I have a joke for you.

It’s two days before spring break. You’re coasting on a useful and important writing unit, a practice that your students have been forbidden up until after the state test because writing is not tested.

And you get notice of a formal observation to take place in 36 hours, with a pre-conference taking place in a meager 12. But wait! You aren’t going to be there tomorrow because you have to spend the morning in court, so your conference will take place the morning of.

Did I mention that the observation takes place the last day of school before break?

I choose to laugh, because otherwise I might cry.

I’m not making excuses; I understand that I can be observed at any time and really do work hard in every class. But observations at a school are more like a checklist and a series of “gotcha” moments. Did she use group work? Did she time independent reading to under twelve minutes? Did she include the words “in order to” in her objective? (Oh no, she did not).

And this is my final formal observation of the year.

Outside of the curriculum. The day before break. No time to make changes after the pre-conference like there should be.

Last summer a teacher told me she keeps a private running list of grievances on her desktop as therapy. I get it now.

On a positive note, during my observation my kids joyfully, enthusiastically, and with great mayhem shouted out the definitions of simile and metaphor and personification and figurative language. It doesn’t look neat and tidy but they sure were involved, with me standing on a chair and shouting the key words.

I think I got marked down for that.

The Paradox of Standardized Testing

There is a problem with testing.

At my school, the frenzy is excruciating. We held a pep rally for the state test. There were other school's marching bands, step teams,  cheerleaders, a radio host, and relays that revolved around the students answering multiple choice questions.

My school has not given me more than 1,000 pieces of printer paper all year, but they did manage to get t-shirts and lollipops with the phrase "Rock the MSA!"

Everyone's job is reflected in two days' worth of scores. This is what will be remembered from a student's and teacher's year of work. This is what reflects on how administrators are holding teachers accountable. And at a school like mine, which has had such low test scores in the past, it reflects on employees from the state department of education who have been intervening to raise our test scores. There is a long list of adults' names attached to these scores; it isn't all about the students.

And I think it's quite a bit of codswallop.

I do understand that tests allow us to really know if we are teaching all students to the same standard, which is important if you work in schools like mine where the students haven't been taught to the same standard. Ignoring that or pretending like it doesn't exist isn't going to help matters. The tests are needed because we need to know that all students are learning.

But the fact that every single teacher I talk to is ecstatic about testing being over so they can actually teach baffles me. We spent 7 1/2 months with administrators in and out of our classrooms, planning lessons that forbid activities such as writing or vocabulary exercises to leave room for teaching only tested standards.

Isn't the test supposed to be a catalyst to learning, not an inhibitor?

My 8th grade students cannot write. And I have been forbidden to teach writing. I was able to sneak it in here and there, but as a first year teacher, all eyes were on me and my classroom to see whether I was following the curriculum.

Is it fair to my students to send them to high school with only 2 months of preparation in writing rather than 9 1/2 - because my school wanted to boast better test scores?

At the same time, is it fair for my students to not perform as well on something that is going to be more immediately accessible than their writing to next year's teachers? This test is how they will be tracked into classes next year; it is likely that it will determine the group of students they are with and the level of rigor they might receive.

Does any of this make a bit of sense?

Testing today was painfully stressful. From 8:30 - 11:30 we administered three different sections. We had administrators left and right popping in with inspirational messages. It was the most positive I have seen my school.

But it was hyped up. The kids picked up on the sense of urgency and 35 students in my cramped room quickly became claustrophobic and I became short-tempered. Trying to keep 35 teenagers near-silent for 3 hours is laughable.

I always imagined testing days as a teacher would be relaxing. They are exhausting.

But after the test, I had students running up to me in the hallway. "I annotated the whole thing!" "I read every passage!" "I stretched my arms and took deep breaths when I was getting tired!" "I killed that test!"

No matter what I think about standardized testing, it feels so good to see my students feel like they're successful.

Those Kids Are Mean

"Why don't you just go back to Colorado?"

"Get the fuck outta my face."

"You can't control your class!"

"Ms. Z, those kids are mean!"

Apparently the day before big tests for my kids has in the past consisted of watching movies and sitting on the desks making idle chitchat. I always know when I'm breaking my kids' long-held habits of the past because quotes like the ones above become a lot more frequent.

My resolution to stop giving sarcastic retorts was tried dramatically today; to "get the fuck outta my face" I managed to respond with a mild and convincingly confused "I'm not not in your face", as I was as far across the room as I possible. Which drew one laugh from a reasonable child who moved up in my books, but drew a lot of scowls from the rest.

At my lunch break, a few students came in to pick up make-up work. That's when I got to hear "those kids are mean!" This shrewd observer was one of the girls from my second mod which is my class with the worst attitude. I don't know how to explain that class but to say that there is just a negativity that permeates everything. Those kids are mean.

But the girls that know that that class is malicious tend toward making callous remarks to me when they are all together in class. What is it about the groupthink mentality that makes the kids nasty to the teacher (and, admittedly, the teacher nasty to the kids) during class, and then outside of class they are great? It's as if we have specific roles to play, but only during class time. Outside of class we can be our nice, friendly selves. My next experiment is going to be pretending like it's not a class, and I'll sneak teach them.

Unfortunately, though, the uncaring attitude doesn't always stop outside of class. Today I admittedly did something stupid. I left my phone in one of the classrooms during a meeting. One period later, it was gone. Turned off. Goodbye, phone.

Maybe it will turn up tomorrow; they really are good kids, even if they say mean things.

An Experiment in Silence

After almost a week of rough days filled with rowdy children, yelling, and snide comments, I thought it was necessary to take my day in a new direction. So in an attempt to not shriek, or say anything to the children that I shouldn't, I figured the best path would be silence.

I heard the idea from a teacher who said she once got so tired of no one listening that she went in one day, indicated that she had lost her voice, and simply typed everything out. What a grand idea to add to my constantly evolving repertoire of attention-grabbing feats (which in the past have included speaking in an English accent, jumping on a chair, standing in tree pose for the duration of my instruction, and an impromptu brown paper bag puppet on which I drew a red uniform polo and spoke to as if it is the only student in the room).

So this morning I wrote the directions on the projector as the students entered and simply pointed and jabbed at the board over and over until they got the hint. My first period is my honors class, so they got the gist fairly quickly and sat down to silently read. During class, they quite enjoyed getting to yell out my typing at other students when they were misbehaving, and I started to think I was on to something.

Second period immediately proved this tactic would be a disaster. Not even two minutes in, I was resorting to wild arm gestures, tapping, clapping, jumping, and the largest all-cap words I could fit on the board telling them to stop what they were doing. I wish I could share a snapshot of the room, but that is illegal, so you will have to make do with these images:

-Three girls in the front of the room hitting each other - back and forth
-A boy lounging on his desk like it's his bed
-One boy frantically yelling out whatever I type, jumping up and down
-A girl yelling at that boy
-Another girl swaying back and forth in front of the projector
-Many, many, oh-too-many shadow puppets

Not wanting to give in, I tried and tried again, resorting to bribing the students who would read my words aloud with candy. By third mod I gave up and greeted them with a vocal hello.

Unfortunately the negativity I was trying to avoid was not lost by my attempt at silence; it was just converted. My yells turned into flails and the yells of other students, and it was still as hectic as ever.

It seems that in my classroom, negativity is a highly communicable disease. The kids say things to each other and about each other that I still haven't grown numb to, today a girl looked straight at me and said I was "dumb" (and that was rather tame), and then suddenly I'm running off with sarcastic comments back. But it seems that when I use my most polite voice, greet the students at the door with a good afternoon, how are you, THAT just flows away and is never seen again.

When I told one of the other teachers my dilemma, stating "I can't believe I said that to a child!", she responded, "Brittany, they are not children, they are grown."

But aren't 8th graders still kids? How do I teach an 8th grader how to be nice? I am frequently reminded "Ms. Z, you don't teach kindergarten", and always respond "(student), you aren't in kindergarten!".

I suppose I will have to start with some form of vocality - silence experiment failed.

The ridiculousness that has led me here...

I started out teaching with the idea to keep a blog. However, the first months teaching isn't really the best time to pick up new hobbies. In fact, most of my old hobbies came to a grinding halt as teaching sucked the marrow out of everything else going on in my life. I made one post to a blog when I moved and that was that, until now.

The moment an administrator put a date that was out-of-date by about 6 weeks on one of my official observation documents was the moment that I decided I had to write about it. My observation took place in mid-November; my review meeting took place in the beginning of January. This is a small example of the severely broken system that I am working within. I know it's broken. Many, many people know it's broken. But working in it is still absurdly frustrating.

So I tried to blog in January when that occurred. And I failed spectacularly yet again. But third time is the charm, right?

Reflecting as a I drove home today, I realized I needed somewhere to vent other than my poor boyfriend who has nodded and listened to what probably accumulates to over 24 hours of me - talking - about school. There's got to be another audience.

Things I admit -

1. I am a first year teacher and fully realize I mostly still have no idea what I am doing
2. I yelled VERY LOUDLY, with emphasis, at a 13 year old today. I was shaking. ("Ms. Z, you turning red.")
3. I care so much that I get annoyed and decide I don't care at all, which really just leads to me complaining while putting in a lot of work to something I do care about.

So this is a project to inject positivity into what sometimes become far too negative and attempt to marry my school life and home life together in a way that is not overwhelming but instead supporting. I am scared to get too invested in work because I don't want my work to flow out of what I have so far been able to relegate to at-school and Sunday morning planning. But when it comes down to it, my work is a huge part of my life; finding a way to balance them without pushing them each into two separate corners would be healthy and, well, miraculous.