Ruth’s Neighborhood

Evaluating My Performance During the Year:

1. Select a "learning goal" where the students were successful.  Tell why:

Participles.  By the end of the year most of them could identify participles and participial phrases.  Why?  Because I labored with it; I spent hours and days and weeks on participles, incorporating them into a thousand different lessons in a thousand different ways.  Eventually the repetition effectuated some learning.

2. Select a "learning goal" where the students were not successful.  Tell why:

My students were not any good at higher-order thinking skills.  Why not?  Because I have not found a good way to teach those sorts of things; in order to effectively teach skills like this, one of two things has to occur.  You either have to:

                                   1. have a school that encourages outside-the-box thinking

                                    or

                                   2. know what the hell you're doing as a teacher.

Neither one is true in my case, so teaching integration and analysis is still not easy.  I guess it's all about repetition, the same way it is with participles.

3. Give a general overview of your year in order to make sure you don't get a bad grade.  Tell why:

By the end of the year I was teaching things;  It took a while to establish my classroom in such a way to allow me to do my paid job.  At the end, I was teaching "Romeo and Juliet", and I was (no small accomplishment) teaching it.  Everything you need to know about the English language (and about interaction between people) is found in Shakespeare.   To (semi-)effectively teach a real masterwork gave me the feeling that I was inching towards being a real teacher and not just another jackass sitting in a classroom to serve some ulterior motives.

Now, with my freshmen, I didn't get anywhere close to teaching Shakespeare.  We were still remediating during the 4th 9 weeks: phrases and clauses?  plot and setting elements?  having students say, "We didn't know there was more than nouns and verbs"?

I don't really know what else to say.  I've already had to write another "end-of-year" evaluation blog.  I'm sort of tired of talking about my last year.  I'd like just to teach another.

1. Describe Yourself as an Instructional Coach

As a coach,  I like to look for little mistakes that may escape detection but will become important later on.  For instance: when teachers do not verbally specify their plans for the day or their expectations of the students.  That is something I think is important, and I try to reinforce it in my coaching.  The students must always be told exactly what is expected of them, and what they need to do.

2. What aspect of coaching has been most difficult?

The physical exertion.  Honestly, I have no idea. I can't say that coaching has flummoxed me.  Perhaps what's difficult is that I don't know if i'm giving good or bad advice.

3. Describe how your coaching techniques have developed.

Um, I've only been "coaching" for 2 weeks.  That's not a lot of developmental time.  If anything, I've learned to be harsher with Parks than with Hayley and Jen.  Parks needs to hear how bad he is; Hayley and Jen are awesome teachers.

4. How has coaching impacted my own teaching?

Well, the things I "coach" are the things I've found myself emphasizing in my lessons: clear delineation of plans and expectations, firm discipline, confident command of the classroom.  I don't know if it's coming across, but I'm trying at any rate to emphasize them.

This year I gave only my own self-made tests.  I do not like multiple-choice English tests: I do not see English's primary purpose--to teach one to analyze, interpret, and express oneself competently--well served by having students choose among some pre-made responses.  I also love teaching grammar, and enjoy having students explain spatially the way sentence parts interact: this sort of testing is impossible with multiple-choice.  I can have students identify the correct of four sentences with M-C, but they cannot draw arrows from modifiers to nouns/verbs, cordon off unnecessary phrases, and trace the causation of verbs in a multiple choice format.

I should make tests that look like the SATP since I will be teaching English II next year; I should make a greater effort to ask questions on a higher DOK level; I should probably focus more on commonly-accepted aspects of English than those that I believe are the most interesting or enlightening. 

Example: I think poetic meter--and the notation of it--is what makes poetry fascinating, but the State of MS. shovels meter under the ambiguous term "Rhythm", and places no emphasis on being able to notate the flux of iambs and anapests and trochees.  Perhaps I shouldn't test that skill.

At some point it's about my kids and not about me, so I'll grudgingly change the way I test--sometimes.  Their tests may have an SATP multiple-choice section, but they will not be able to totally escape my goading them into expansive and nuanced written responses.

“My friend John Eubanks was a great American.  He always said, ‘Give everything a sporting chance.  When you go coon huntin’, either take a cross cut saw with you so that you can cut down the tree the coon is in, or climb up the tree and punch him out and make him jump in among the dogs.  Give him a sporting chance.’  Many times my brother Sonny and I would make a coon jump in amongst twenty or thirty dogs.  But at least that coon had the option of whuppin’ all them dogs and walkin’ off if he wanted to.”
-Jerry Clower

It’s funny; my principal is a big coon hunter.  The teachers tell me that every year he shows up to school one day with a new pickup truck because he stuck his old one in an impossible bog the previous night trying to chase a coon down.  When the year began, I sympathized like never before with the coon in Jerry Clower’s story.  Somehow I’d gotten myself up in a tree and here came my principal to punch me out.  The year’s start was rough: many a time I jumped out of the tree and was torn up by those hounds.  Eventually, though, I realized that I had the option of whoopin’ the dogs, and even later on in the year I learned how to.  Granted, the odds are always against the coon—and I’m not by any means a prodigiously successful teacher—but every now and then the coon steals one.

As the coon jumps, one of two thoughts can cross his mind:

1.    it’s really not fair that I got punched out.  I should be able to stay in this tree and live my life the way I want to.  AND, even if the hunter had to punch me out, he could have given me a stick or a knife or SOMETHING to fight off these dogs with.  And why are the dogs so mean anyways?  Are they bred for this sort of thing?  They’re certainly ill-bred, I know that much.  The daddy hound probably left home when they were a little litter of pups.

2.    These dogs don’t know what’s about to hit them.  They’d better be in their seats and working on the bellringer when I hit the ground or I’m gonna whup ‘em all.

My first year has been a lesson in stoical responsibility.  My dad used to say of me that I had a “justice problem” because I’d get myself in trouble whenever I perceived some unfair treatment of me (and of other people too, but to a lesser extent.  It can’t be unusual that many of the most selfish people are also the most concerned about “fair” treatment).  Throughout high school and college I was—well, to be honest—monumentally irresponsible, and always ready to solipsize away any criticism of it.

The Teacher Corps certainly hasn’t entirely cured me: far too often I leave assignments ungraded; I fall asleep at 5pm after a tough day; I eat at Sonic, unhealthily and expensively; I exercise about never; hardly ever do I return phone messages and emails; and I don’t push my students as hard or as far as they should be pushed.

Nevertheless, while my first year may have been a failure on many fronts (can you only have a Maginot Line if you also have some well-guarded borders?  Or can your defenses be a series of Maginot Lines?), I am proud to have finally given up on the idea of faulting the whole world for my problems.

Certainly our students could be better parented, they could be more interested in school, the administration could be more supportive, the bell schedule could be regular, the secretaries could speak proper English, etc. etc. etc.

Ultimately, I am responsible for how my class is conducted.  If the class is derailed, I did not take appropriate preventative action.  If I’m going to teach my kids anything, I’m going to have to fight them and outsmart them and win them over WHILE holding them to a high standard.  I’m going to have to whup ‘em all, one way or another.

What I’ve mentioned isn’t what I’ve accomplished, but thinking any other way—or blaming anyone else—is more destructive.  I overheard another teacher defend his disciplinary stance towards his kids (they were overrunning him) by saying, “When they get bad, I say to myself ‘The meek shall inherit the earth,’ and then I just don’t bother with them.’”  I didn’t say anything at the time (I also developed a shrewd politicism this year), but I cannot imagine a more malignant, a more cankerous attitude than this.  Is this the role of a teacher, to feel uniquely persecuted and to withdraw in a monastic non-resistance?  You certainly have to ENDURE, almost endlessly, as a teacher, but your justification comes not in a pious acceptance of an unbridled fate, but comes instead through wrestling oppositely-running horses into harnesses and cracking the whip.

Or it comes from whuppin’ all them dogs and walkin’ off.

Editorial Note:  I realize the danger that comes with comparing students to dogs.  I love my kids to death and was merely working out a metaphor.  And maybe 15 of them will take Latin with me next year, which is something ANY dog is incapable of.

My first classroom management plan was nonsense.  It had little association with how my class would (or could) actually be taught.  In the powerpoint detailing my first discipline plan can be found a solicitation of student recommendations for authors; a one-day-then-no-tolerance policy for late work; a delusional attitude toward parent contact ("letters will be sent home before every nine weeks' exam"); and generally misguided bathroom, cleanliness, and entrance/exit policies. 

The classroom rules themselves are inconsequential: Pete already mentioned that our principal passed down from Sinai a set of rules we all were to use, so the ones mentioned in my plan were still-born.  Pete made another good point, that he came to rely heavily on his procedures.  As did I, so they were in constant flux as I searched for a way to integrate (DOK 4) a well-ordered classroom with my innate listing toward laziness, irresponsibility, and poor filing-and-recording procedures.

My bathroom policy stands as a metaphor for my classroom management in general.  In my small attempt to discredit the welfare-mentality, nothing in my class is free of charge (not tissue paper, not pens, not paper, not the bathroom, not nothin') but must be paid for with tickets.  Prices inflate as the year progresses.  During my first year, the easy part of my bathroom policy was the price--I could afford to be inflexible on that.  The tough part was assigning a once-per-nine-weeks pass.  At the beginning I gave everyone one, but did a poor job keeping track.  Then I got angry at the idiots who seemingly had neither kidneys nor bladder, so my policy morphed into a "females only, and only for female problems" policy.  That was unfair, and totally unable to be adequately regulated and verified.  A "no-pass" policy briefly appeared, but exited just as quickly.  By second semester's end, I was back to the one-pass for all rule, with all the problems from year's start as concurrent baggage.

My solution for the coming year: take the work out of my hands and put it in the students'.  At the beginning of each semester, they will design an artistic bathroom pass, replete with all and sundry references to whatever they want.  When they want to use it, I mark nothing down, I only tear up their pass and throw it away.  The cut of the paper will have uncopiable irregularities to prevent forgery.

Same with all the rest.  Students will take attendance and absences.  Students will be responsible for taking a spare copy of the overhead notes and filing them in a missed-work binder.  Ditto homework collection.  Ditto room cleanliness.  Most of my kids can't tie their shoes and would steal mine if given the chance, but a few are worth their weight in shoelaces.  I gave this idea a dry-run in my homeroom halfway through the year, and I can say that since January I can count on one hand the number of times I had to take attendance or write my objectives on the board.

Granted, sometimes the attendance was wrong and the objectives indecipherable, but I wouldn't feel right in SHS with a perfect system.  I'd be out of place, like heraldry on a mule.

 One with a limp and with mange.

To tell you the truth, I have nothing to say about curriculum maps.

To say that they help is obvious: Karl already hit on the fallacy of strictly fly-by-night teaching (which stands in contrast to my style, which I call fly-by-early-morning).

To say that they aren't perfect creatures has been echoed repeatedly, as has the idea that this sort of thing is easy to do once you've taught the course and difficult if you haven't.

At most, I can only compare my experience last year with mine now: when Deb and Ward trotted out their curriculum map, I saw it as a super-human feat, to be able to pierce the veils of time and student-competence in order to establish a workable teaching schedule.  Having seen the guesswork and fingers-crossed best-wishes that actually go into making one, I realize now it's still a sort of fly-by-night proposition.

Regarding the importance of reading to children from an early age (MTCer's see comments here), an idea has occurred to me from time to time for a family literacy program. The idea is to establish an evening program where poor, at-risk families are encouraged by the prospect of free food and possibly even an hourly remuneration to attend reading workshops that last an hour or so each night. The setting is comfortable, friendly, and informal, but focused on reading and literacy, without the interruptions of television, cell phones, boyfriends, etc. For the first part of each session, the children (the younger the better) are read to by master reader volunteers (who could be teachers or advanced high school or middle school students) while the adults are taught literacy skills by trained adult literacy specialists. Later, since one important aim is to get parents in the habit of reading to their children, each adult is scheduled a formal, supervised time when they will read to their children, even if they have to rehearse a familiar storybook with help from a tutor. Overall, the emphasis is on encouraging regular attendence and participation while making adults and children alike comfortable with reading as an enjoyable family tradition.

It seems like a good idea in need of funding to me. Has the Barksdale Reading Institute considered anything like this?

You are a white male first-year teacher in the Mississippi Delta.  You also have long hair that people, who are NOT students, have been wont to touch and tug on.  Ahh, but how times change...

Halfway through your first year, whilst trying to find ways to burn a 3-hour 4th period scheduling clusterf**k, you sit down to teach chess to some of your freshmen.  As you sit and instruct, a student comes from behind you and starts playing with your hair, commenting about "how pretty it is"...

What do you do?

Hipscrews

It's been six weeks since my accident. Just over month since I came home from the hospital. In April, I left my house three times.

Emily stayed for two weeks, then had to go home. I've been driving since May 1, when I also started outpatient physical therapy in place of the therapist coming to my home. Monday, I gave up the walker for a cane -- the kind with four little feet, but I'll take it.

Physical therapy is three times a week, about three hours each time. I'm up to 45 reps at 80 pounds on the leg press. I can walk with a normal stride on the treadmill in the harness that lifts 50 pounds of my weight. (Five short of half my weight.) I only take pain meds at night.

Those of you who know me know that a year ago I could hold a 40-pound box on my shoulder and run up a six-foot ladder. For an eight- to ten-hour shift.

There are three 6 mm screws in my left hip, each about 7.5 cm long. I'm packing a lot of titanium.

As suspected, I will not teach this school year. I am hopeful that I'll be able to do my summer school teaching and classwork in Oxford. With luck, I'll be fully recovered by August when school starts.

But it's a long road. There are days I lose the mental battle.

Life deals us cards. I've had some amazing hands dealt to me, and I think I've played them as well as I could. I still maintain that things do not, as many say, happen for a reason. Things happen randomly. Our job, as higher-order critters, is to give meaning to those things. And that, my friends, is what is known as a state of grace.

Since my brother's death in November 2003, my family has read this poem in place of the traditional blessing at Thanksgiving, his and my favorite holiday. It's good advice to keep in mind. I taught it to my students as an example of extended metaphor.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi,
    translation by Coleman Barks

above clouds

Thanks for the many thoughtful comments. Obviously, I do not want to get into what someone has politely called a shin-kicking contest, but I do think I should make a few points.

Prologue: No one who commented on my post has ever been in my classroom for so much as a second. I do not run the "silent classroom." It is a classroom run on mutual respect. Students speak freely in discussion, and engage in candid banter. I do not require raised hands, though many choose to do so, and are acknowledged. Students manage their time and move from one task to another. More days than not they participate in the teaching as well as learning. They know exactly what's expected of them. If you had come into my room in March (the last time I taught due to my accident), you would have thought I had no rules. Again, students know exactly what's expected of them. There's only one road to that. It might have many entrance ramps, but it's the same road: Tell them what's expected of them. Insist they live up to it. Do not tolerate it if they don't. Expect them to succeed in living up to your expectations. Respect them for it.

And now, for the main event:

First, anyone who knows me or has spoken to me or read my opinions about why I am teaching in Mississippi knows that my motives are far from what has been suggested in some comments. Specifically, I refer to accusations of "colonialism."  I assume what is meant is an oblique reference to some sort of systematized noblesse oblige in which privileged white offspring descend into the depths of savagery to sprinkle hope and salvation to the poor and oppressed. Paternalist, perhaps, but not colonialist.

My heritage, my experience, and my motives could not be further from that model. Of course, if one's only experience with me or my opinions was to have brushed me off at an MTC alumni event, it's hard to know this. Perhaps the prejudging of prejudice works in both directions. Having spent more years involved in various social justice projects than some of my commenters have been alive, I think I've gotten my head around why I'm in the Delta teaching. If you're interested in knowing, contact me directly. Better yet, drive into the Delta and join me with a cold one on my front porch for a conversation.

As for the inferences that my statements about adolescents reflect what "can only be racialized undertones," I ask you to take a moment to consider this. There's a saying that "he [who] is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail." What is your filter? Why, specifically, can this "only" be a racial issue? In my experience with raising a child, in dealing with adolescents from every geographic, racial, and economic strata, I find (and am in agreement with psychological and sociological research) that adolescents in the best of circumstances often have trouble with the self-regulation that make it difficult for them to appreciate the nuances of behavior necessary for self-regulation. That is, "You can talk, but not too loudly;" "You can be late to class if you have a good reason," and so forth. Additionally, children with developmental problems caused by a variety of things -- but most notably here in the Delta by poor prenatal nutrition, little or no verbal/cognitive stimulation in early life, drug or alcohol consumption by the mother -- are known to have problems with over-reaction to stimuli, poor self-regulation, and social management issues. This isn't a racial problem. It's an economic and class problem. In Mississippi these go hand-in-hand with race. But a wider and longer perspective might provide you with a different way to frame it. (The hammer quote is, interestingly, from Abraham Maslow, whose theories could inform this line of thought.)

Second, I do not need to caricaturize my students to make a point. Before the age of five, one of my students saw her mother shot in the back, and another saw her aunt shot in the chest by her uncle (about which she testified as the only witness). Another saw his mother set on fire (by the father, who late killed himself, of the student who sits next to him in second period). They've seen family members beaten, knifed, and run over by a car. A male student, recently more involved with town-rivalry gangs, regularly leaves blood stains on his chair from the crotch of his pants. At least seven that I know of are primary caretakers for grandparents or other relatives disabled by strokes, mothers who are crack addicts, or younger siblings. One student has eight children in his bedroom. He lives in a trailer with attic insulation blocking broken windows. Of the five current pregnancies, only one is by a boyfriend. The Delta certainly doesn't have a lock on family tragedy, but the isolation and stagnation of life where there are fewer than 3,000 people (people, not students) in a school district of 1,000 square miles does add a different dimension to how each of these incidents affects the student community as a whole.

One of my MTC colleagues mentioned that she'd never heard voices raised in anger in her family. Many MTC participants come from areas where there is little racial tension because there is little racial diversity. I think it's safe to say the several of us had not imagined the lives many of our students live every day. This was apparent in the shell-shocked conversations of the first few Oxford weekends.

Which brings me to hyperbole: A useful rhetorical and literary device, successfully employed for emphasis by revered third-years during my own summer training. Upon telling a summer student to try a new vocabulary word on his parents that night at dinner, one of this year's class was told in no uncertain terms, "They don't have parents, and they don't have dinner." We were advised not to let students use the bathroom during class because "they'll just gamble, do drugs, and have sex there." The line in my post that students interpret kindness and understanding as weakness is a direct quote from a TEAM teacher.

At the time many of us thought it seemed reductionist and harsh. Seemed. But the first few Oxford weekends proved that many had not taken the message seriously enough. Classrooms were disasters. Students were pitching quarters not in the restroom, but in the back of class while a teacher was in the room. Summer training, as easy-breezy as it seems now in retrospect, needed to be boot camp. An exaggerated experience that would get us to a point where classroom management was second nature and energy could be directed where our aspirations flew.

Many of my students have parents,or step parents they live with. Many of them might eat dinner with their parents. (Though if they do, they are in a minority even among the most affluent and well-educated.) And I'll even give the benefit of the doubt to most of the students who ask to go to the restroom. And those students, for the most part, are not the ones who cause the classroom management nightmares. I am grateful every day for the parents like the woman Karl met at the laundromat, and the ones who own local businesses, and come to parent night. (Twelve parents of my 128 students.) The issue is that the students who cause problems, while they might  be a minority in the classroom, occupy the vast majority of our time in classroom management. Those students who don't require cut-and-dry black-and-white rules to follow will manage themselves. They, for the most part, are grateful that there is a system in place to provide structure to the class. They've told me this. Thanked me for it. And as the months rolled by it was easy for me to see who was who. But the learning curve was steep.

In the first eight to twelve weeks of school, unless a teacher establishes himself or herself as the authority in the classroom, there will be problems down the road. It might come naturally to some, so they don't realize they've done it. But for most first-year teachers it's a struggle. Read the blogs. Listen to the conversations.

Authority in and of itself is not evil. It can be misused, and often is, resulting in opression. But children feel safer and happier when they know someone is in charge. Someone is making sure their needs are looked after. For many of our students, no one does this for them. Far too many have been doing this job -- even taking care of their parents -- and are relieved to have someone in a classroom as an authority figure. I know this sounds patronizing. But the effective use of authority is (dare I say it?) nuanced. The nuance lies in establishing it well enough so that it never needs to be used. Like an insurance policy, or keeping a fire extinguisher in the kitchen.

Epilogue: Lastly, I'd like to point to a question.

And I wonder, why aren't you teaching anymore, really? Of course there's no simple answer to this question, and there were opportunity costs and so on, but I do think you came to believe that classroom teaching was not a sustainable choice for you (it's not for me, either), and I wonder why. What was the problem teaching math to the 25 kids in the room? Why couldn't you explain to them the philosophical corruption of the system, the moral corruption of the stimulus-response model of education, the importance of a social morality based on mutual respect and empathy and reason and the toxic effect of one built on a fear of punishment, and make it all better and more sustainable? ...

...I know you remember how mutually oppressive, how corrosive, it is to be in this place and governed by its bells every day. I may be sympathetic to a claim that this system is so corrupt and corrupting that one cannot long maintain philosophical and moral purity when acting as one of its central cogs. But replacements are on the horizon, and they're supposed to last two years. What you're not acknowledging in your response is that Sabatier is -- with whatever imprecisions and inaccuracies -- waving toward a way to cope with that constant, stifling hostility without taking it personally or ending up a wretched, tortured heap. You and me, we just "walk out of Calculus."

I spent nearly 20 years on the policy side of education, and decided to leave theory and enter practice. Not as a two-year stopover, but as a life. I gave up a successful, comfortable midlife to do it. I find "opportunity costs" an interesting euphemism. It's very easy to know how to do something from afar. It's much more difficult to find a sustainable way to enact it. It requires a balance that often comes only with experience and maturity. The thousands of split-second decisions we, as teachers of a special-needs population, make every day is a tightrope walk not many are able to finish. Knowing how to establish an authority strong enough that it doesn't need to be brandished takes (wait for it) nuance.