Day -11: On Discipline

My mom told me that a friend of hers who sometimes reads this blog said, "It's amazing that she doesn't have any discipline problems!"

I definitely don't mean to give that impression. I definitely do have discipline problems, if that means students who give me headaches, who interrupt/annoy/upset/hurt other students and/or me.

I am not a natural classroom manager. Thinking up curriculum ideas is easy for me, as is building relationships with students, seeing gaps in students' understanding and then planning interventions to fill in those gaps, making connections between content areas, trying out new instructional strategies, and lots of other parts of teaching. Not easy as in a cakewalk, but easy as in, while it's intellectually demanding, it builds on natural strengths of mine. Classroom management I do by sheer force of will. I will myself to establish a limit and enforce it. I try to will myself (when I'm feeling well-rested, anyway) to enforce those limits calmly without getting visibly angry, but I am not very good at that. Juan definitely knows he can get an emotional reaction from me if he pushes hard enough.

I remember when I was interviewing for my first teaching job 14(!) years ago (OK, it was just a summer program, but still), I said that I thought engaging curriculum was the foundation of good classroom management. I still believe that, in part. If students find the work they are doing meaningful and interesting, they are much less likely to get into trouble.

The only problem is ... that has been taken away from me. I have so little control over the curriculum I teach now, that I can't rely on my curriculum to limit discipline problems. But I still do my best. For whatever I'm teaching, I try to think up a meaningful end-product that students will show to some audience, even if it's just to each other. I can feel the difference in students' energy and focus when they are rehearsing a play they are about to perform for another class or even just putting finishing touches on their biographies that (after we share them in partners) I'm just going to pin up on the wall. I can't think up a great final product for every random grammar subskill I have to teach, but nonetheless, I try to tie isolated skills to a meaningful context whenever I can. I try to vary the pace of the day, too - mixing in lots of opportunities for whole group instruction, work in small groups, work in partners, and individual work, and I think this balance help some students get in the socializing time they need.

The part of classroom management I'm best at, as is probably apparent from the kinds of stories I write about in my blog, is the relationship-building part. I do think having strong relationship with students and their families is an essential precursor to good classroom management. Obviously, I don't have to eat lunch with students or go to their first communions, but building relationships with my students is actually my favorite part of my job, so it's no hardship for me to do that - though it does take time. But when a student knows that I know his parents well, that definitely affects the students' behavior.

I think another key to classroom management is a well-established set of routines and procedures. I might not be quite as good at this as I'd like to be, in fact I was lecturing my students just today about how they really should understand the rules for our end-of-the-day homework time by now! But I know clear expectations and predictability make a huge difference.

About a week ago, I felt like the end-of-the-year behavior slide was setting in, that restlessness that students and teachers alike feel as vacation approaches. I felt like I had been battling with students too much, so I cracked down. The most extreme example of this crackdown was last Wednesday when my class was walking across the playground to visit our first grade buddies, and I made us turn around and go back to our classroom without ever going to buddies because students were playing around in line and (potentially, anyway) distracting other classes. This consequence, while obviously not the fairest since all students were punished, worked (or at least stopped the problem and refocused the class on learning for the moment) because I gave it very dispassionately, and instead of giving a long lecture, I talked briefly about my decision and the reasons for it, and then moved on and started students on a math activity instead.

Our school uses this uniform system of consequences. The first time a student is doing something inappropriate on any given day, the student gets a warning. The second infraction during that same day is a 5-minute timeout. The third time is a 10-minute timeout. The fourth time is a timeout in another classroom plus a phone call home. And the fifth time is getting sent to the office. During my little crackdown this week, I started giving more consequences for small things like whispering when it was time to listen silently, etc. It has worked to allow me to teach more, for the most part, but it does get tiring to enforce.

A week into the crackdown, though, and its benefits are wearing off. Eventually students see that getting sent to another room for a timeout isn't all that bad (at least in some students' eyes). Juan has come to accept that consequence with little protest. He will always start crying, though, if he reaches "Level 5" and I send him to the office, which I've done three times this year, I think.

Each year I become a little stricter, and that's for the best, I think.

Everyone (i.e. their past teachers and their P.E/science/music/computer teachers), say that the class I have this year is challenging in terms of discipline issues, so I'm curious how my classroom management would feel with a new class next year.

There is a part of me that hates being the enforcer of limits, that knows how cool my students are as people and wants them to be engaged all the time, that blames myself if they are more interested in goofing off. But when there are 31 kids in one room who are often supposed to be doing the same thing at the same time (no matter how much I try to differentiate), the teacher has to be a strong enforcer of limits or nothing gets done. That's the one part of teaching that I wasn't sure I could do, and it has not been easy for me to learn how to do. So in some weird way, learning to be at least a passable enforcer of limits is something I'm proud of. And I can count on Juan to test just how good I am at navigating the love and limits dance each and every day!

Day -12: Readers' Choice

A quick story:

My friend who teaches the fifth grade bilingual class at our school and who has all my students from last year popped her head in my room last Friday. "Oh my God! I almost killed Pedro!" she burst out.

Pedro deserves a whole blog entry all to himself, but suffice it to say that he is rather odd. He is obsessed with fashion (especially Abercrombie and Fitch), has a new spiky gelled hairdo, is a tetherball star, and does not reason the same way your average fifth grader does.

The fifth graders have been doing a project in which they thought of "What's your favorite ...?" questions, surveyed first graders, and made bar and pie graphs showing the results of their surveys. As they were preparing posters with their results, Pedro picked up a glue stick, proceeded to smear glue all over the bottom of both his sneakers, and then started walking around the classroom. My friend finally realized what was going on and was so angry that all she could think of to do was point furiously at Pedro and scream, "KNEEL! KNEEL RIGHT NOW!"

Fortunately for her and him, he gathered what the word "kneel" meant and did it, thereby getting his sticky feet off the floor. My friend was so angry and flabbergasted that she made Pedro stay there for a minute or two until she calmed down and had time to deal with him. He cheerfully mopped up the sticky mess. What he will take from this incident is anyone's guess.

***

I can't believe there are so few days left of school!

In talking with a few people who read this blog, I've heard some ideas for topics they'd like for me to write about during these last few days. To save myself some time and brain energy tonight, I thought I'd pose a question instead of writing a regular post.

What do you want to read about? I have 12 days left at my school with my students. What do you want to know about them and my teaching life?

Some topics other people have suggested to spark your thinking:
- discipline (i.e. what kinds of discipline problems do I deal with, how do I deal with them, etc.)
- the social worlds of the girls in my class (ins and outs of their cliques, gossip, etc.)
- how my curriculum has changed as a result of No Child Left Behind and other mandates (what, specifically, I have stopped doing and what I do more of now)

Please take a minute and post your vote for a topic you'd like to read about - one of these or anything else that you've been wondering about. You can post your comment anonymously if you want. Or you can send me an email to my regular email address if you have it. Thanks!

Day -13: Celebrations

Nope, this isn't a picture of a friend getting married.

On Saturday, five of my students had their first communions at the church down the street from our school. The pews were packed with probably 1000 people. The boy who passed the collection basket down my row was a former student of mine, and I saw lots of other former students and their families, too. There were many poofy white dresses and tiny suits, plus lots of hairspray, cologne, nervousness, and pride.

Day -14: Open House Photos

Here are a few things my students showed off at Open House. You can click on them to see slightly bigger versions.

First, this is an example of a list each student made of things they wanted their parents to see.


Here are some posters a pair of students made about the book Sarah, Plain and Tall. It's hard to see in this picture, but I liked their comic-book style drawings.


And here are a few of my students' biographies. Anyone know who Omar Bravo (on the biography in the upper righthand corner) is? I didn't, but all my students do!


Probably the biggest hit of the evening was the little iPhoto slideshow I made a pictures from our field trips this year. One parent asked if I could email her some of the pictures that her daughter is in. This is the first year that a few parents of students in my class have email.

Day -15: Japan Is Cooler than China

At least that's what Alex thinks (Alex of the "I rest my case" comment a few days back).

I was hanging out with Alex and a few other kids at the Book Fair after school. (Oh, the excitement the Book Fair creates ... but that's another story.) He spotted a book in a new Magic School Bus series that centers on social studies rather than science themes. In this particular installment, Ms. Frizzle takes her class to China.

Alex flipped through the book briefly and then put it back. "That looks cool," I said.

"Yeah," Alex answered half-heartedly, "but I'm more into Japan than China."

"Really? Why?" I asked.

"Japan is cooler than China," he elaborated. "Japan has cool cartoons. And Tokyo looks like the future."

***

Tonight was Open House. I love Open House, but I didn't get home until 9:00, having worked more than 13 hours straight with about a 10-minute break for lunch. I'll post a few photos tomorrow.

Day -16: Health

Today I found out that Celeste, one of my former students who's in 7th grade now, has had a really tough past few months. Turns out that since hitting her head in a car accident recently, Celeste has had two epileptic seizures. And then a month ago, her dad had a serious stroke while he was at work. He has been hospitalized ever since. Currently, he can't talk and is almost entirely paralyzed on the left side of his body, though he can wiggle his toes. I got all this news from Celeste's second-grade sister. I ran into the second grader on the playground and asked how Celeste was. Out spilled all the details, very matter-of-factly. But this normally very bubbly second grader was clearly out-of-sorts.

Students' lives can contain such tragedy. And health issues occupy a surprising amount of my time.

This year, I have a student with diabetes. She needs to get her insulin levels checked every day at lunch and has to stay in at recess every morning for a snack. She was hospitalized for almost a week last summer when her diabetes was diagnosed. I have another student this year who has a hormone disorder which made her grow to her full adult height by the end of third grade. She is 5'9" now, I'd say, and looks like she's at least 15. I don't know the name of her condition, but she goes frequently for MRIs and check-ups. I have another student David (mentioned in the "duda") post) with achondroplasia, which means he is a little person. His mom is illiterate in Spanish and in English, so she sometimes has difficulty accessing services for him, but he has a team of doctors that keep tabs on him. I have two students with serious asthma and lots more with less-serious asthma. One of the serious asthma cases, Leonardo, also has serious vision issues that went uncorrected until this year because his mom didn't have health insurance and couldn't pay for an opthamologist's exam. Janette has spent much of the year without her glasses, which keep breaking. And Marco just went to get his glasses today, after being referred for them back in October.

For the large number of my students without health insurance, these health problems are that much more complicated and stressful. Whenever people start talking about denying health care services to undocumented immigrants and their children, I can't even bear to listen for very long. Are they honestly saying that they want Leonardo to die of an asthma attack? Or that Celeste shouldn't get epilepsy medication?

Day -17: MySpace

I've known this for awhile, but most of my 9- and 10-year old students have MySpace accounts. (And yes, you're not allowed to register unless you say you're 14 or older.)

When I started teaching five years ago, I think one of my 32 students had a computer at home with Internet access. Now I think almost a third of my class does. Most of the rest regularly use the Internet at friends' houses or at the library.

I was eating lunch with five students today, and over turkey sandwiches, we started talking about how much TV they watched. "Sometimes I watch 'Lety La Fea,'" Maria said, referring to a popular telenovela, "but I use the computer and MySpace more."

This prompted a whole discussion about their MySpace profiles, how they can protect themselves from the "people who can rape you" on MySpace (as one girl said), spam, friend requests, and Tom. Maria, the most-frequent MySpace user in the group (and the students whose family was considering moving back to Mexico because they are afraid of deportation), was listing off her MySpace friends, most of whom are students in our class, and added, "And then there's Tom."

"Yeah, everyone's friends with him," another girl added. "He started MySpace."

This cracked me up. For you non-MySpace users, there is this guy named Tom who supposedly did start MySpace and who becomes your "friend" as soon as you set up your account. The idea that my peers who are on MySpace and my students all have this same "friend" named Tom - that they and his 179 million other "friends" have never met - is rather odd. How many conversations has Tom inserted himself into?

I was impressed with my students' Internet savvy, their knowledge of Tom, their knowledge that those banner ads they saw for free iPods when they were setting up their MySpace accounts were not something to fall for. I wonder how the Internet and MySpace and YouTube and instant messaging will shape literacy practices and language learning in the future. I am not the first to wonder this, obviously. But I don't think teachers think about it enough.

***

On a different but communications-related note, AT&T decided that it's really no big deal to disable the phone system for a school of 850 students and 75 staff members for two days. They are supposedly "upgrading fiber optic cables" in our area, the principal says, and this upgrade involves cutting the current cables before the new ones are up and running. We have had no phone or Internet access for two days. What kind of business, especially one with almost 1000 employees on-site, would stand for this?

Day -18: Endings vs. Beginnings

Does it make me a bad teacher that I like the beginning of the school year so much better than the end?

I feel like by the end of the year, I'm supposed to have built one big, happy family. I'm supposed to be able to sit back and bask in the glow of all the learning we've done. But that's not how it is for me.

The beginning is all possibility. In September, I'm meeting this group of 30-odd students, getting to know them and falling in love with their quirks and smiles and questions and aspirations. They've just spent a couple of months sitting around watching too much TV (in some cases, anyway), away from their friends, and they have gotten bored, bored, bored. They are so eager at the beginning of the year, hanging on my every word, so excited to see what the mysterious world of fourth grade will be like, trying so hard to put their best foot forward. When I look at their work in the fall, I see what I need to help them with, and I dream big of all the progress they will make, all the learning we will do together. Kids really do ask me for homework and get sad on Friday because there isn't school the next day.

But now, they're sick of each other, sick of me, sick of our routines, sick of tests. Their hopes that suddenly they would master the multiplication facts they didn't learn in third grade haven't been realized either. It's so easy to focus on the gaps between where I want students to be and where they are now. At the beginning of the year, those gaps weren't my fault; I was just entrusted with closing them. But now I see, in some cases, how big the gaps remain, and it can't help but depress me.

Not that students haven't made progress. Of course they have. Sometimes I look at our whiteboard full of math problems we do each day and marvel at the fact that at the beginning of the year, they didn't know how to do any of those problems - find equivalent fractions, write decimals, calculate area and perimeter, do long division. But other times I focus on the students who still can't do some of those problems. Like Arturo, who still, still does not reliably use capital letters at the beginning of his sentences! He knows, when reminded, what to do. He punctuates sentences appropriately. He just does not start sentences with capital letters. I have handed back countless papers of his, forcing him to add capitals in appropriate places before I would grade his work. To what avail? Almost none. He will dutifully add capitals without any prompting from me about where they needed to go, but will he use capital letters appropriately on his own for his next assignment? Usually no. He is a smart kid. He remembers lots of other, much more obscure things. What's his block about capitals? I wish I knew. I think his fifth grade teacher is going to kill me.

Thankfully, the very-end-of-the-year nostalgia will set in, for both me and my students, pretty soon, and then we will focus on all the good parts of our year together. At the moment, though, I feel disintegration rather than creation.

Day -19: Math Whiz

On Friday, I gave my students a little quiz on multiplying by two-digit numbers and long division - the most difficult and important math concepts to master in fourth grade. We studied these concepts earlier in the year and have been doing other things in math lately, like decimals and probability. But since multiplying by two-digit numbers and long division are so important for success in fifth grade math, I want to reteach them to students who still are having trouble, so I wanted to see who needed reteaching.

For the last part of the quiz, I had students write and solve 3 division problems - one they considered easy, one they considered medium, and one they considered hard. (This is a Marilyn Burns assessment idea.)

One of my math whizzes this year is Omar. He is a rail-thin student who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was in first grade. He is a video game master. He has twin two-year old sisters. Some teenagers pointed guns at him and his family as they were coming home from a Halloween party this year. Writing in English is hard for him, and he gets a little mischievous when he is bored or uninterested in what we're doing in class. But he just loves math and has serious math skills that come from who-knows-where. One time Omar said to me, "How come math is so much funner than everything else?" as if this was a question that really stumped him. Another time back in December when he had a few minutes to kill in class, I came upon him solving a long multiplication problem. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm figuring out how many hours there are until Christmas," he answered. And sure enough, that's exactly what he was doing.

For his "hard" division problem on Friday, Omar gave himself the problem 123,456,789 divided by 2. And he got it right! That made my day.

Day -20: Game Over

Today Juan came into my room at lunch, hysterical. "I'm scared, I'm scared," he kept blubbering through tears. "I'm afraid I'm gonna get suspended."

As the story came out, I discovered he had taught some people the Bloody Mary game, which I don't really understand but have some vague recollection of from elementary school. In Juan's version, it basically involves one student closing his eyes while the other touches the first's hands and, through some sort of voodoo power of suggestion, makes the first person feel an alleged spirit touching his hands. This game had spread like wildfire and was freaking out the entire fourth and fifth grade classes. Juan thought that he was going to be called to account by the principal. I'm not sure exactly what he thought the suspend-able infraction in teaching students the Bloody Mary game was, but he was convinced it was seriously wrong. I let him sit in my classroom until he calmed down a little. I promised that after students came back from lunch and English Language Development, we would have a little talk and we could put the game and its spooky powers to rest.

After lunch was over and I went to go pick up my class, Juan was in tears again. In a brief and interrupted exchange, he explained that he was still worried about getting suspended. When I explained that I really didn't think that he should worry about this, he told me that he had already gotten in trouble, that the principal had made him "sit on the bench" for the end of recess (our school's punishment for recess rule-breaking). The rest of my teaching day was such that I never got to fully understand what this meant. My best guess is that Juan probably went up the prinicpal and confessed that he had taught students a game that was freaking everyone out. I bet the principal, trying to dispatch with problems as quickly as possible, simply said, "Mmmm, that was a bad choice. Go sit on the bench for the rest of recess," without even thinking about it. A rule-breaker presents himself and gets punished. Why would the punisher do anything different? I'm really not blaming the principal. I like him, for the most part. I didn't have time to hear Juan out either.

Things calmed down a little, but Juan really wanted to make sure I talked to the class about not playing the game anymore, that it wasn't real, etc. I said this, and in the course of my little lecture said, "The game is over."

"Game over!" Wilfredo, an avid video game player called out.

I took the analogy and tried to run with it. "Yep, game over," I repeated. "You've gotten the high score, you gone to the highest level, and it's just not fun anymore." I tried to make my best video game sound effects, which, not being a video game player, were not very good. "Game ... over," I repeated with attempted sound effects this time.

It did at least get students' attention, if not put the game to rest permanently. And Juan had no more tears for the day.

How do Bloody Mary and Punch-Buggy and not stepping on cracks so as not to break your mother's back spread across generations and geographical areas and socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups? Nintendo and Punch-Buggy. My students have those things in common with all fourth graders in America. One is propagated via marketing, the other through what exactly?

Day -21: Grass

Here's another poem by a former student that I discovered in my files.

Grass

The green grass
looks like money
Its dark as
cuauhcamole.
Light as paint.
Moves like
hands waving.
Looks like
spikes.


For the illustration, s/he (I don't remember who wrote it and there's no name!) drew a bunch of blades of grass, except three of the blades in the middle of the field had turned into little hands waving.

We finally finished state standardized testing today. Hooray! And I would wager that most of my students bombed the questions on figurative language. Did you know that fourth graders are supposed to be able to correctly identify similes, metaphors, personification, and hyperbole? Can the average U.S. adult do this? Plus, my students need to know the terms for these literary devices in both English and Spanish. I wish I could submit their poems as evidence that they can use figurative language in interesting ways, but nope, that is not to be. Their poems don't matter; their bubbles do.

***

Teaching high school doesn't usually sound that appealing to me, but this project, sort of related to grass, makes working with high school students seem pretty awesome.

Day -22: Being Funny

Though Juan is definitely the student in my class this year who demands the most attention, there are lots of other fascinating characters, too.

Take Alex, for example. He is obsessed with drawing SpongeBob and Captain Underpants characters; in December he drew me a whole SpongeBob Christmas scene. He always bids me farewell each day – every Friday, without fail, adding, “Have a great weekend.” In his school picture this year he is wearing a black t-shirt that says in white letters “Sometimes I Amaze Myself,” and he looks really, really amazed at himself in the picture. One day he asked me, apropos of nothing, “Do you know what Armageddon is?” He had been thinking about this and wanted to gauge whether I thought Armageddon was a real possibility in the near future, after ascertaining whether I was familiar with the concept. Another time, in the middle of something completely unrelated, he said, “Do you think we’re alone?” – as in are we alone in the universe or are there other life forms out there. You never know what he’ll say. (He’s also the maker of the harp seal drinking Coke and dreaming of a tropical paradise collage, for those who have been following the story.)

Today, when we came in the classroom, he started talking with another student about which team would win team points this week. Another student thought Team 3 might win, and Alex really disagreed. He offered a few reasons why, and then said forcefully, “I rest my case,” but under his breath added, “whatever that means.”

“I rest my case,” is the kind of idiomatic English that my students rarely use, but Alex just decided to try it out anyway – and nailed its usage on the head without even knowing it. I cracked up so much at this unexpected expression coming out of Alex’s mouth that Alex started cracking up, and soon that whole side of the room was laughing.

My class this year is by far the funniest class I have ever taught. A lot of other teachers complain about this particular group of students and how challenging they are, but sometimes I think it’s just because they’re so funny. There are at least five students who want nothing more than to make everyone laugh.

I was telling the group of students who were eating lunch with me today how funny I thought they were, and I asked if they thought I was funny. They all nodded. I told them that I’m not sure all my classes thought I was funny – but maybe it’s because my other classes weren’t as funny, I added.

***

Juan made up another joke today as we were eating turkey sandwiches for lunch. “Where do turkeys come from?” he asked us.

“Where?” we asked.

“Kenturkey,” he said proudly.

My students all know I grew up in Kentucky, and they are endlessly fascinated by that fact. Kentucky seems like Oz to them - or Pluto or Zanzibar. They have no idea what it’s like, and it has a mesmerizing hold on them.

Day -23: Reality Sinking In

It's strange how knowing that I won't be teaching next year filters into my actions and thoughts.

I realized my second year of teaching - after coming to terms with the fact that I had saved almost nothing from my first year, or at least I hadn't saved it in a way that I could easily use it again - that organization is such a big part of teaching. But now I don't have a next year to organize for. One of my favorite things about teaching is that there's always a next time. This lesson on decimals didn't work out how I envisioned it - well, how can I make it work better next time? It seems so depressing to think that maybe I will never get to teach long division, personal narratives, the Gold Rush, etc. better than I did this year.

Another of my favorite things about teaching is always getting to try new things. Today we tried a reading comprehension strategy called "Hot Seat." It's not that deep, but I'd never really done it with my class before. The idea is that one person takes on the role of the main character of a story the class has read, and they're in the "hot seat." Meanwhile, the rest of the class thinks of questions to ask the character. My students loved this. I had each team of four students come up with a question to ask the main character, and midway through the question-asking, students really started playing up the whole interview dynamic. "Channel 4 here," a student sitting at Team 4 started off. Then students at other teams started miming cameras rolling and holding microphones out, and it just took off. It seems so sad that I won't really get to refine "hot seat" and figure out how to make it work best for my students.

But most of all, what I'm most afraid of not being able to live without, is those moments when all of a sudden, I see a students' eyes go from bored/struggling/disengaged to sparkling, when students get excited about something, when they understand something, when they connect to something we're talking about, when they see possibilities in front of them. I read somewhere recently about a veteran teacher who said that the truly great teachers were the ones who could see the face of God in all the students they taught. And I don't know if I even believe in God. But when I see that sparkle in students' eyes, I feel energy, too - a spiritual communion in a very literal sense. That's such power we have as teachers, to be able to make those moments happen sometimes, and I know I will miss it - the power and the communion.

Does that sound too wacky?

***

On Friday, Juan said to me with that sparkle in his eye, "I don't know when I started to get interested in poems."

"I do," I answered. "After you read Love That Dog."

Juan kind of nodded in agreement and then went back to writing a page-long joke-y love poem on his own time at recess. (I will try to get that poem and reprint it here - though I'm almost sure he will have lost it because he loses everything).

If you don't know Love That Dog, read it. Juan and a small group of other students read it this year with me, and it doesn't always speak to every student, but for some students, it's captivating. Maybe I'm giving it too much credit, but I think that after Juan read that book, he started checking out poetry books from the library, finding some of the poems mentioned in the book, and discovering new poets, too. You never know what will open up new worlds for students.

I know I will miss having Juans in my everyday life next year. And the chance to help open up new worlds for students.

But I am excited about grad school, too, and maybe it's just a pause from teaching ...

Day -24: Poems

My students are working on a poetry unit, and I was looking through my files for copies of poems by former students. I forgot how good some of my old students' poems were. Here are two. They probably lose something without the kid handwriting and cute illustrations that accompany them, but you'll get the idea.

Ocean

The ocean
is blue
as a
dolphin.
White as
the clouds
crashes like
cars.

STRABERRY'S
Straberry's mmm, mmm,
mmm they are so so
good. When I eat
them they are
like eating ice
cream. I can't
resist eating
straberry's
they are
so so
good
that
instead
of


selling ice cream
and loli pops
they should sell
straberry's lots
of them

Anti-childhood obesity marketers, take note. If anyone wants to license this poem for use in an ad campaign, the copyright holder is a seventh grader now, and I know where to find her. (She wrote most of it in the shape of a strawberry. I'm not sure how well that will translate to this page.)

Examples like these are priceless for teaching my current students how to write poems. Part of me really wants to just toss all my files out at the end of the school year because it will be so time-consuming to sort through them all and decide what's worth keeping. But on the other hand, I can't imagine teaching again without having files full of students' writing to use.

Day -25: Another Field Trip

Today we took a field trip to one of the missions. The best part, by far, was watching my students play, play, play at the awesome playground near the mission. They swung from super-high rings, sped down poles, jumped in unison off a wooden ship, played some sort of shark tag game they made up, and got really sweaty and glowing from the fun of it all.

Our tour guide at the mission, though, was really not what they needed. He talked to us for an hour-and-a-half about obscure bits of Catholic trivia and equally obscure bits of local nineteenth century gossip. He made no mention of any negative aspects of the missions at all. He spoke as if he were addressing a group of well-educated adults, using words like "fabricated" and "bequest" in every sentence. And instead of letting my students wander around some parts of the mission and the attached museum and cemetery, discovering things for themselves, he wanted us to move all together in lockstep so he could tell us yet another story about yet another saint. But, umm, hello ... nine-year olds like thinking of their own questions and making their own observations and inferring things for themselves, not being lectured to for 90 minutes.

Oh well. At least they got to actually see a mission. That's the important part.

And plus, they got to hear that the history of our state is so tied up with the history of Mexico, where almost all their families are from. One student, after hearing his name mentioned a lot in stories about the mission, turned to me and said, "Teacher, there are a lot of ________(his name, in plural) here. I must be rich."

I wish someone would start a consulting business helping all the museums and historical sites revamp their educational programs to be developmentally appropriate for kids, plus train their docents in how to talk with English Learners. I know docents are volunteers, but I also know that they want their messages to get across to the students with whom they're working, so I bet they would be receptive to at least some high-quality training. (I'm sure someone is probably already doing this ... but I'm still almost always disappointed by the ways docents try to get their messages across to my students.)

I think it might be really fun to be a docent somewhere when I retire.

Day -26: A Humbling Day of the Teacher

Today was my birthday and also the Day of the Teacher.

Juan greeted me first thing in the morning with a big bouquet of calla lilies from his family's garden. "They're called Alcatraz," he kept repeating, which perhaps is a variety of calla lily. Who knows? Anyway, they were beautiful and all wrapped up fancy with blue ribbon. Our first grade buddies and my class sang me "Happy Birthday," a team of students made me a card with my name written in hieroglyphics (or a kid's book version of hieroglyphics, anyway), a bunch of my former students came back to visit me and give me hugs, and I got another big beautiful bouquet of flowers from a mystery parent when I was out of my classroom. I was happy with my students as they finished another part of standardized testing and made gorgeous Mother's Day cards. Those were the good parts of the day.

Then after school I found out that my friend's student got taken out of school in handcuffs and involuntarily committed to the psych ward of a hospital, at least overnight. He will almost certainly be expelled from our school.

This fourth grader has been extremely challenging almost from the moment he came to our school late in the fall. He deliberately tripped a first grader for absolutely no reason, gave his classmate a black eye, threw a chair in the principal's office, grabbed the vice-principal's arm so hard she had bruises, and lots, lots more. I knew him a little bit because he spent time in my classroom on two occasions - once when his class went on a field trip and he couldn't go and another time when he had a time out from his regular class. He was certainly the most challenging student I ever encountered, but he could be sweet and funny and insightful, too, just like any kid.

I don't really know what precipitated today's incident, but I do know that at lunch the office was locked down, he was in there screaming, there were four police cars outside, and in the end he was taken off to an ambulance in handcuffs.

Here's something I wrote on my train ride home:
I feel sad for the world in which this happened, for the world in which a boy could feel such anger, could be so disconnected from the social norms of behavior, could get so little help - apart from being one of 32 kids in a classroom with one teacher to meet his and the 31 other students' needs. I feel sad for the world in which a father could feel so tangibly the effects of discrimination and racism that he didn't want his son even tested for special ed services because of the stigma and the over-representation of black boys in special ed. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy could feel so unsupported, so confused within himself that the best thing he could think of do to was to hide his ADHD medication after pretending to take it. I feel sad for the world in which a boy could be laughing about basketball at recess in the morning and then at lunch be in a screaming rage. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy gets taken out of school in handcuffs. And I feel sad for the world in which this image of a black boy in handcuffs does not seem so strange; it's what his father was trying to avoid without knowing how. I feel sad for the world in which some people's spirits get broken so easily that I have a strange sort of respect for this boy's defiance, for his refusal to back down in the face of teachers, principals, and even the police. Not that he's in the right, of course.

That's what I wrote before my stop came. A few more thoughts: I feel sad for the other students at our school, too, the ones who got hurt by him physically, the ones who he scared, and the ones who were his friends sometimes. I feel sad for what seeing a boy taken away in handcuffs does to them (not that many kids saw this, but some did and many more will hear about it). And I feel sad for my friend, this student's teacher, who cared about him and tried so, so hard to figure out how to have him as part of his class.

And what I started thinking about as I rode my bike the rest of the way home is that on this Day of the Teacher, I guess it's important to remember that we teachers can only do so much. We are part of this crazy, messed up world, and sometimes we are in this web that we can't circumvent, where society plays out in ways we can influence but not separate ourselves from. And sometimes that breaks our hearts. I don't know what this student needs exactly, but I know that he needs more than a teacher and a dad and a vice principal that care about him. He needs a whole world that cares about him and his future. God, I hope he sees good doctors tonight.

Day -27: A Joke

This joke is only funny if you know a little Spanish. Plus, it works much, much better orally than on paper. But anyway ... I'll tell it first and then explain after.

It was time for lunch and my students were talking about beans for some reason. "They give you gas!" one boy said.

"Yeah," another boy added, switching to Spanish. "Mi papá dice que los frijoles tienen la vitamina P2."

Explanation:
The boy said, "My dad said beans have vitamin P2."
The letter "p" in Spanish is pronounced like the word "pay" in English.
The number 2 in Spanish is "dos," pronounced with a long-o sound.
The word for farts in Spanish is "pedos" - pronounced "pay-dos."
P2=pedos

I was excited because I hardly ever get jokes in Spanish right away, but I got this one!

Maybe this doesn't make sense online ...

Day -28: Testing Inequitites

We finished our standardized testing in English. Tomorrow we get to start standardized testing in Spanish. Makes sense, right? Our bilingual program is attempting to enable students to achieve on grade level in both Spanish and English, so of course students should be assessed in both languages.

But it's not all it's cracked up to be. In my five years of being a bilingual teacher, I have administered three different state standardized tests in Spanish - the SABE (for three years), the Aprenda (for one year), and this year the STS - State Standardized Tests in Spanish. So can my students' scores be compared longitudinally? Of course not. Can I become familiar with the format and structure of the test so that I can prepare students well for it? Nope. There are reams and reams of documentation about the state standardized tests in English - released test questions, test blueprints. What is there for the state standardized tests in Spanish? One little pdf that lists how many questions will address each state standard in language arts and math.

Plus, in their infinite wisdom, the state has decided that only students in the US less than 12 months plus English Learners in bilingual programs need to take this test. That means that my students who have developed strong English skills in our bilingual program and have been redesignated as Fluent English Proficient don't get tested in Spanish. That makes sense, doesn't it? As numerous studies show, it is these redesignated students who outperform all other students (including English-only students) in standardized tests and other measures of achievement. So let's take all our highest-achieving students and throw out their scores.

Plus, since my Fluent English Proficient students don't get tested in Spanish, that means that I have to figure out something for them to do during the 8 hours of testing we will have over the next two weeks.

And best of all, we still haven't gotten students' results back for last year's standardized tests in Spanish. Try as I might to use data to inform my instruction, it's a little tough to do when I don't actually have the data.

But my students will valiantly fill in their bubbles tomorrow nonetheless.

Day -29: More on Colonization

I got to do another lesson this week about the attempts of Spain to colonize the indigenous peoples in California through the establishment of missions. Our role play last week of sixth graders coming to claim our classroom for their middle school and ordering us to do their homework worked so well, I decided to do another role play this time. Most of the class imagined they were Ohlone people (the first groups to live in the San Francisco Bay Area), while two students played the roles of the Spanish, coming to order the Ohlone to live at the mission. After a brief skit, I had students do a quickwrite, completing the sentence "If I were an Ohlone and the Spanish tried to tell me that I had to live at Mission Dolores, I ..."

Students' responses were fascinating. Two students said they would start a war. "Yo quiero mis derechos," (I want my rights) one of these students wrote.

Seven students said they would try to escape. "Yo me escaparía porque conozco más el bosque," (I would escape because I know the forest better) one escape planner wrote. Below his writing, he drew a picture of a Spanish soldier shooting a gun at him while he fled into the trees.

Five students wrote that they would go to Mission Dolores because they didn't want to get killed by the Spanish. We talked about how the Spanish had guns but the Ohlone only had bows and arrows, and this fact seemed to figure heavily in these students' decisions. "Yo hubiera dicho que si porque ellos tenían armas," (I would have said yes because they had weapons) one mission-goer wrote.

Seven trusting, optimistic students decided that they would go live at the mission because there might be more food there and maybe the Spanish would help them and teach them things. As one student put it, "Así yo tendría una mejor vida para mi y para los otros Ohlones. Ellos me podrían enseñar cosas que podría hacer" (That way I would have a better life for myself and for the other Ohlones. They could teach me things that I could do.)" "Yo les daría una oportunidad y ver como es así y si no me gusta allí, me voy," (I would give them an opportunity and see how it is there, and if I didn't like it there, I'd leave) another wrote.

Janette wrote a nuanced response. (She is often the most thoughtful writer in the class.) "Yo me escaparía," she wrote, "porque yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia. Pero si se llevan a mi familia pues con gusto voy" (I would escape because I wouldn't have wanted to be separated from my family. But if they take my family, then I'd go with pleasure."

I think these responses, which were really not guided by me at all, ended up reflecting the real range of choices that the Ohlone made - and that indigenous peoples around the world have made when faced with colonization.

I found my students' responses fascinating from a linguistic perspective, too. Social studies is basically the only thing that I teach entirely in Spanish, and I only get to teach it about 60 minutes a week now. As a non-native Spanish speaker, I had to stop and think about Spanish verb tenses when I posed the hypothetical quickwrite question in the conditional - "what would you do if ...?" These are the exact same verb tenses that even my most fluent English-speaking students cannot accurately produce. But in Spanish they could use tenses that I can't really produce correctly, like Janette's past perfect subjunctive ("yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia").

My students need more opportunities to write sophisticated compositions in Spanish and to draw on their knowledge of Spanish as they build their knowledge of English. I definitely can't rely on Houghton-Mifflin and other state-adopted materials for this kind of curriculum, though!

Day -30: Don't Assume

Today I introduced a unit on probability by having students do experiments with spinners. As you can see, half of a circular spinner was labeled "1," and then the remaining half was divided into two equal sections, which we labeled "2" and "3." Students did experiments to see which number the spinner would land on most frequently.


You would think this would be so obvious that it would be no fun at all. But you are not 9 years old. They were so into this activity. A fair number of students were really surprised at how many more times their spinners landed on 1 than on the other numbers. And when some of them came up with the idea that the spinner landed on 1 more frequently because the area of the space labeled 1 was bigger, they were so excited! Seeing that not everyone's spinners landed on 1 most often was useful, too. We had talked about probability plenty of times before, but always abstractly. To really understand that the spinner landed on 1 most frequently not just because of luck but because of the design of the spinner is so important! It's a useful reminder for me that when kids actually investigate a problem for themselves, their understanding is so much deeper and long-lasting.

(Note: Only last year did I discover that spinning a paper clip around the point of a pencil works great for the spinning part of spinners. There are people like Marilyn Burns who try to convince you that you need to do much fancier things to have adequate spinners, but they're just wrong. Also, what would I do without cardstock for math manipulatives like these spinners. Why do schools not all have reams of cardstock? Construction paper is OK, but it's not the same.)

Later we made tissue paper flowers for Mother's Day (which is celebrated May 10 every year in Mexico and by lots of Latino families living in the U.S.). The only reason I had time for this little project is because our school was doing make-up standardized testing and I suddenly had an extra 45-minute block of time with my students that I don't normally have.



It's also important not to assume that students can envision how to draw half of a flower's petals on their folded pieces of tissue paper! You would not believe how hard this is for some of them. Next time, I need little stencils at each table, not just drawings on the board. Primary grade teachers, I really do have sympathy for you considering how much prep time this little activity took - and my students know how to use scissors!

Day -31: Overheard

On the playground today one second grader said to another, "Which would you rather kiss, your right eye or your left eye?"

"But I can't reach," the other kid answered indignantly.

"Yeah, it's a trick question," the first replied.

-----

The last day of April I pulled a kid aside for a little talk. Eddie really struggles academically. I'm almost sure he has undiagnosed learning disabilities (and yes, I have tried to get him tested; it's supposed to happen next fall). There's almost no way you can be a fourth grader born in the US yet have an English Proficiency Level of 2 (Early Intermediate) on the yearly English test without having learning disabilities. He is very socially adept and in addition to being popular in my class, he is friends with more kids outside my class than any other student. We have some sort of bond. He knows I push him and he respects me for it, I think. Anyway, I told him how I'd noticed that he had been paying less and less attention in class, goofing off more and more, turning in less of his work. I told him that I knew some of the other students at his table distracted him sometimes. Since students change tables every month, I told him that he would get to make a fresh start the very next day. "It's a new month, and I know I will see a new Eddie," I said.

He sat there with a blank look most of the time. This is not the first time he has heard one of these talks. Eventually he started crying and told me about some problems going on for him at home and how he doesn't like to see his mom cry. I listened and talked about how I knew his mom wanted him to learn as much as he could in school, that that would probably make her happier than most other things he could do for her. And then I sent him off to science class with a note explaining why he was late.

The next day, May 1st, when we were walking into our classroom, students were talking about the fact that it was a new month so we would be changing tables.

Eddie was near the front of our line with a smile on his face. "Yep, a new Eddie," he said cheerfully, not really to anyone, just to himself - but I was close enough to hear. Who knew he would remember my little line?

And he was a new Eddie. For that whole day. It didn't quite hold for today. But it's better than nothing.

-----

For those of you a little starved for Juan stories, here's one. It wasn't exactly just overheard, but still ...

He was wearing a long-sleeved gray t-shirt today and the cuffs of both sleeves each had two small holes in them. Near the end of the day, he put a pencil through the two holes on one cuff and hid his hand inside. "Look, I've been harpooned!" he cried out to me and anyone else whose attention he could grab.

Day -32: "Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge"

I'd never heard that quote until this weekend, but apparently it's from Albert Einstein. Imagination is so the opposite of what our educational system is setting me up to encourage in my students. I think if I were teaching next year I would put "Imagination is more important than knowledge" up in huge letters at the front of my classroom and make it the theme of my year - just to push myself to foster it, despite all the countervailing forces of standardized testing and memorization and carving even knowledge up into little tiny pieces that can be assessed by multiple-choice items.

I mentioned a few days ago that my students were making collages to launch the new oh-so-inspiring theme in our Houghton-Mifflin language arts series, "Nature: Friend and Foe." I gave them a bunch of calendars and magazines and told them to make fantasy scenes which somehow showed friends and/or foes in nature. Students are in the process of writing paragraphs to go with their collages. Here are a few samples of what they've come up with so far (in my words, based on students' comments to me):


I don't remember who made this or what the friend/foe story is, but I like the beaver(?) presiding over the coral reef.




A polar bear plopped into the Kentucky woods.




One elephant jumping over another on the Great Wall of China as a two-headed sea monster looks on.




A baby harp seal says "Yummy!" as he sips Coca-Cola and dreams of a tropical paradise. (I'll try to transcribe the actual story Alex wrote to go with this eventually.)




An egret(?) makes huevos rancheros for everyone as a bug squashes the people below. (Really, that's what Ramiro told me was happening.) And, yep, that's a bird smoking in the corner.


Vote for your favorite in the comments!