Week 14: November 24-26

081126: Day 59
In lieu of a two-day midterm, I asked my students to create characterization maps for an assigned character in Forged by Fire and then take a mini-test. They had two days to complete these assignments. Periods 1, 3, 4, and 5 had no problem–well, they had minimal problems–and completed their work. Mostly.

Seventh period. The lack of activity in seventh period remains incomprehensible to me. MM, EFS, QF and DCr did nothing for all of Tuesday. I went over to help them a bunch of times, and yet every time I returned, they still had done nothing. MM is typically a star student, but he was disgruntled. And angry at me for giving him work. At least, such was my perception. When MM asked me when the project was due, I told him Wednesday, as I had told him a couple times already. He reacted with outrage and further doing of nothing.

So, today, the drop-dead day on the project, MM and EFS (typically the leaders: QF does his own thing a lot of the time and DCr was blessedly absent) sat once again like bumps on a log. I confronted MM about his attitude, in response to which he told me I had given them too much work. When I gestured to the many completed projects around the room–my proof that the project was not impossibly hard–he insulted them: “Miss, those look like crap.”

I looked away, stopped speaking for twenty seconds or so, and regained my composure. Fucking kid won’t do work for two days running and then insults the work of classmates who actually bothered to try? Happy Thanksgiving to you as well!

081125: Day 58
BU and I had a day of it together. At 7:55 this morning, BU came into the classroom, as usual. We had this exchange:

BU: Miss G, I woke up this morning and it was like I had peed. But I hadn’t.
Me: [waiting it out]
BU: Should I tell you what was in my boxers? No, I shouldn’t tell you what was in my boxers–
Me: You should talk to a guy about that.
BU: I’m not that gay. Should I talk to Ms. C [related service provider] about that? Yeah, I should talk to Ms. C about that . . .
Me: [waiting it out]

I am rather proud of how I handled the situation; I’m pretty sure I didn’t even turn red.

Fast-forward to eighth period as I am walking through the hallway to take work down to my four (four!) suspended kiddies. I saw BU walking in front of me, heading to the water fountain. By the time I caught up to him, I could see that he was furious: tears were dripping off his cheeks. He told me AR and TE grabbed him by his hoodie and hit him in the head. I talked BU into coming back to my classroom with me, so we could send an email to the Deans’ Office reporting the incident.

BU dictated the incident to me, and I used my Life Spaces Crisis Intervention skills to establish an accurate timeline of what exactly had happened. We mailed it to Ms. L, Ms. Po, Ms. Pe, Dean M, Dean G, AP B (because BU loves AP B, who is his music teacher), AP L and AP A. Then I walked BU around, trying to find someone who could take better care of his intense emotions than I: AP A, who referred us to Ms. C (his counselor), who wasn’t there, so we went to AP B, who then called TE down to his office to try to settle the problem.

All this while, I was wearing brand new (clearance-rack!) Enzo Angiolini high heels. They are beautiful, but made of pain. I was counting on wearing my Isotoner slippers for pretty much the entirety of both my prep periods and my lunch, but instead I trooped all over our endlessly big school. My feet were still hurting when I woke up Wednesday morning.

081124: Day 57
The bells on the seventh floor broke a couple weeks ago. Most people on the floor cannot hear them in their classrooms, but can faintly make them out ringing in the hallway. As a result, security or a school aide rings the fire alarm bell, somewhere between seconds and a minute or two after the first bell. All announcements have also been rendered silent in the classrooms by this peculiar malfunction.

Today, while walking to get a picture taken for a school ID during my eighth period prep, I heard an announcement for a rapid dismissal. I walked into Ms. Po’s class to let them know there was going to be a rapid dismissal, you know, because no one in classrooms can hear announcements. The bell rang, the kids left, and Ms. Po and I proceeded to shoot the shit for awhile, thrilled at the extra twenty minutes of calm.

Mr. K dropped by and asked us if we were heading down to the required staff meeting in the planetarium. We looked at him confused because, you know, no one in classrooms can hear announcements. We pulled our stuff together, got yelled at by a school aide for not going to the required meeting–but we can’t hear ANY announcements!–and headed downstairs.

It was a nice faculty meeting, though. Progress reports came out and our school has improved five or so percentage points and gone from the 45th percentile to the 55th. We got USB drives as a thank you. The staff left disoriented and vaguely pleased.

Week 12: November 10-14

081115: Bonus Day
I finished my last session of Life Spaces Crisis Intervention! I get my Saturdays back!

081114: Day 51
I followed the steps of the writing process and wrote my first successful short story. Turns out that what I’m teaching my students actually works.

See, I needed a short story for the test on Thursday that would be short enough to read in 7 minutes or so, followed a clear plot structure and included setting, protagonist, antagonist, and conflict. Those elements had to be clear, but the story had to be just complicated enough to be a true test of my students’ ability to apply what they’d learned to something they hadn’t read before.

So I did everything I asked the kids to: I brainstormed a setting, protagonist, antagonist, and a conflict. I laid out the events of the story on a plot pyramid that included exposition, three incidents of rising action, a climax, falling action and a resolution. I turned that pyramid into a draft.

Most amazing? The kids loved it. Especially third period. BJ suggested that I had to “write the next chapter of that” and every time another horrible thing happened to Billy, my protagonist, FR would mutter, “Ooh, he tight! He tight!”

I may write more formulaic short stories. They are quite rewarding.

081113: Day 50
Where to start. Ms. P is facing a “routine” corporal punishment charge for taking a student’s hat off. KCh, who was student of the month for September, was suspended for play fighting in gym. DD’s baby picture, which was attached to his project on my bulletin board, was ripped off and stolen. I gave a test, which is always kind of hectic. Yet even among these moments of insanity, I haven’t revealed the most frustrating moment of my day.

I spent my sixth period with CA–whose mother kept him home for most of the first marking period because she is crazy, too–organizing his backpack and trying to get him to work. He hadn’t finished the test from first period, yet, and he still has not done ANY work on the short story project, despite our spending two days of class working on it.

He did nothing. I had him working on brainstorming some details about his protagonist, and all he could tell me was that the guy was 14 and a male. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer any of the following prompts (which were written on the worksheet): what does he look like? what does he do all day? what is he good at? what does he like? hate? goal in life? what do other characters say about him?

CA sat there, chewing on his tissue (both weird and gross, but that’s a different problem) and wouldn’t work even when confronted. He is failing all his classes because he has turned in no homework and often fails test due to his just sitting there, chewing his tissue. In his own words: “I just really don’t like to do work.” He participates well in class, so I feel confident that he is capable of the work. He just won’t do it.

He sat there and looked sheepish for a good fifteen minutes, assuming I would forgive him for his laziness and pass him anyway? I told him I would not. Neither would Ms. L or Ms. P or Ms. P. He continued to look sheepish and ignore the magnitude of the problem. When I suggested I would have to call his mother to discuss this, because discussing it with him was doing no good, he recommended that I call that day, because his brothers monopolize the phone on Saturdays and Sundays.

081112: Day 49
When we play Jeopardy or any other game in order to review a test, I always lay out rules at the get-go. Rule #1: If you yell at me, call me a cheater, accuse me of treating your team unfairly or argue over how many points you should get or the other team should lose, then I will not be having a good time. And if I’m not having a good time, then we will stop playing and the game will be over.

Third period did not follow this, my most important rule. Thus, we stopped playing the game. Well, I stopped playing the game, and they continued to play against one another. It was kind of a cluster-fuck up by the Smart Board, but they kept going through the questions and answers. And fighting. And trying to keep score. I was kind of impressed with their determination to play the game, given that it was still about English.

When I stepped back in to make sure they had covered the important stuff for Thursday’s test, little JC (who was just added) wanted to know which team would get the extra credit points I had offered to the victors. I explained that because the game had been canceled, there were no victors. So: no extra credit points for anyone. That’s what you get for breaking the rules, motherfuckers.

081110: Day 48
JS and MB have an odd relationship. JS, who is barely 4’10″, chases MB around the room with one of his copious highlighters at the end of nearly every fifth period. MB runs around to get away from him, but won’t actually exit the room to escape. They often have spats in class where MB complains that JS is bothering him or touching him or doing something else vaguely annoying. Yet MB sits himself in front of JS everyday.

The conflict in JS’s short story is between John and Bob: John is always bullying Bob. In much the same manner that JS bullies MB. This makes me wonder even more.

Privately, in our house meetings, we speculate about the illicit love between the boys. We think they have some kind of elementary-school level flirtation going on, with their unexpressed, inexpressible homosexuality working its way out by proxy of a florescent highlighter.

Week 10: October 27-31

081101: Bonus Day
In taking my Saturday workshop on helping students deal with crisis, I came to a realization about an incident that occurred during seventh grade. We were discussing the fact that as teachers we can’t always spend a half-hour talking to students in crisis because we cannot–legally–leave the other students in our room alone.

This reminded me of a day in band during seventh grade when Mr. P left us unattended. We were alone long enough for half of us to wander into the percussion section and begin to play all the percussion instruments. When Mr. P returned, he was furious and took us out into the hallway. He lined us up along the lockers and began to write detention slip after detention slip. This is the only time in my entire life I was in genuine danger of receiving disciplinary action.

In the end, he didn’t give any of us detentions. Looking back, knowing what I know now, he couldn’t have given us detentions. If he’d given us detentions, he would’ve had to admit that he wasn’t in the room–that he’d left 12-year-olds alone in the band room for an extended period of time. It also explains why he was so angry (it seemed out of proportion at the time) about our playing the percussion instruments–we could have directed unwanted attention to his leaving us alone.

081031: Day 42
Halloween tends to be a slow day around the school. Kids stay home, either because they have mayhem to cause elsewhere or because they are afraid of getting caught in such mayhem. To prevent problems before they begin, security is out in force and we have a rapid dismissal: the bell rings 10 minutes early and all kids must exit the building immediately through the nearest exit and leave school grounds.

For the students who showed up, I had a writing workshop. They worked on organizing their short story ideas into plot pyramids. Using the ideas they brainstormed about setting, protagonist and antagonist, and conflict, they created the bones of a story with exposition, rising action (3-4 events), climax, falling action and resolution.

It worked amazingly well. LMS is writing a romance set in the WWE locker room. LF’s story is about a cat protecting his territory from a band of defiant rats. JK is writing about a drug boss and his new dealer who have a conflict over money. DCr’s story is called “The Cop Killers” and involves an antagonist who loves honeybuns and hates tall people.

Incidentally, my story is set in 1987 in an arcade. The protagonist is a bully who is in love with a curvy Pac-Man maven. Tune in later for a rough draft; right now, I only have a plot pyramid.

081030: Day 41
Ms. L gave up teaching her seventh period. She sat down behind her desk and refused to teach through the constant roar of conversation in her classroom. Of course, the kids immediately begged her to keep teaching. They wanted her to answer questions. They wanted to know things about U.S. History all of a sudden. She still refused.

I am proud and jealous.

She wants to transfer the good kids out of the class, but I kinda put the kibosh on that idea. Our classes are already busting out–I had 17 kids in my third period, which is illegal–and what would happen to the crappy kids who are left in her class? I’m not gonna say I want to teach the kids (see below), because I don’t, but that doesn’t change our responsibility as educators.

We have students who need to be removed from the class for their behavior. The answer has to be to take out the problem students, not the good ones. We made a hit list: we’re calling parents and compiling incident reports in order to get certain students suspended. I don’t expect the phone calls to make a difference in the kids’ behavior (they haven’t so far), but they are documentation that we have exhausted our resources as classroom teachers and the students need consequences doled out by those above us in the ladder of discipline.

081029: Day 40
In the movie of my life, I am the protagonist and fourth period is the antagonist. I once again lost myself to frustration and anger. I cannot keep teaching through the swearing and conversations and throwing of paper balls.

I am kind and it does not work. I am angry and it does not work. I give rewards and it does not work. I use I-statements–”I feel disrespected . . . I feel hurt . . . when you won’t listen to me”–and it does not work. I tell them I don’t like teaching their class and they don’t even listen to more than half of the sentence. I call parents and it does not work. I speak to individual students after class and it does not work.

Ms. D, one of the paraprofessionals, warned me a couple weeks ago that I have to be careful of my heart because these kids are not. But I have to teach them, which means I have to at least pretend to like them, which means they break my heart almost daily.

081028: Day 39
I got my first ever whiff of student-fart today.

081027: Day 38
In light of it being Halloween week and the fact that most of my students have already read “The Black Cat,” we read “The Most Evil Sorcerer” by R. L. Stine. Over the course of four days, I used that creepy little YA short story to teach characterization, antagonist and protagonist, conflict, and plot structure. Rats are thrown up, spiders crawl under a dude’s skin, an evil wizard is turned into a black, disgusting bug.

You should have heard me acting out the the rat part. It was inspired.

Week 7: October 6-10

081010: Day 28
We watched Pixar short films, rather the perfect medium for discussing the basic elements that all stories must have: character, setting and plot. Ms. A, my AP, commented during first period how amazing it was: put on a silly cartoon and every student is completely engaged, without a moment of teacher encouragement. The films–“Knick Knack” and “Lifted”–were wordless, allowing my kids to identify story elements and conflict without getting caught up in language processing or vocabulary issues.

081008: Day 27
How do you explain to a general education teacher that your special education students take quite a lot longer to do everything, including vocabulary? Or perhaps especially vocabulary, as their language skills are so impoverished as to be crippling?

Mr. B, my mentor from last year, came to watch my disillusioning fourth period in order to give me advice on how to settle them long enough to teach. He’s going to tell me what he saw this coming Tuesday, and I am unreasonably worried about what he will say. I am using emotional reasoning, as my Life Spaces Crisis Intervention training calls it: he will see my limited plans (five vocab words? that’s it?) for the day and blame me for my students’ behavior. Perhaps needless to say, emotional reasoning is an invalid approach to interpreting the world around you.

081007: Day 26
Monday on through Tuesday morning sinks me in the doldrums. I am swamped with Mercy work, leading me to spend literally the entirety of my waking hours on Monday engaged in the know and do of teaching; I hardly get enough sleep to function on Tuesday morning. I snapped at Jeff because he was relating some small detail about the Bill Ayers affair–which invokes my ire like little else these days–over breakfast.

There is a tipping point on Tuesday, though. During my second period prep I have my first chance of the week to organize all the random papers floating around my classroom. And organization makes me feel really good.

081006: Day 25
Mondays seem to last forever. We had our monthly staff development meeting after school. I had to write learning strategies that work for me on the front of my paper bag and then write learning strategies that don’t work for me on little strips of paper that I put inside the bag. Then I shared with my partner, Ms. W, and she shared with me. The rest of the session continued as such.

I snuck Hershey’s kisses from my pocket to keep me happy.