Some Sad School Stories

There are forty students enrolled in my third hour class.  Thirty showed up today: one had been suspended, nine others were truant. 

For the previous two classes, their homework—as explained at the beginning and end of each class and posted on the board—was to get a copy of a novel from a list I’d given them, and merely to bring it in to class today.  The list included authors such as Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury (and, for that matter, J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer) among two dozen others, the only other requirement being that the book they choose be at least 250 pages long.  I told them that our school librarian had a copy of the list and could help them find a book.  Obviously, they had a few hundred books to choose from.

Out of the thirty students in class today, only ten had a book.  A few others probably had a book but left it at home.  However, the vast majority of the unprepared twenty clearly hadn’t put forth any effort at all, hadn’t bothered to write down or remember the assignment, and had lost or thrown away my handout list.  They didn’t even care enough to try to do it.  Keep in mind that the assignment was merely to have a copy of the book with them.  That was it. 

And only one-fourth of the kids in that class will get credit for it. 

Is this a remedial class?  Far from it. 

UNLV Sponsors Youth Sexuality Activism Conference For CCSD Educators

A disturbing email went out to my school’s electronic bulletin board today.  Presumably it went out to every school in the district.  The message included two attachments giving details about an alternative sexuality conference on the UNLV campus on November 14 which will feature a series of workshops.  Are these workshops meant to help educators with their personal lives?  No, nothing like that.  Is it to assist them in avoiding the creation of a classroom environment where teasing and bullying of homosexual students might occur?  Partly. 

But the most unnerving thing about this conference is the inclusion of sessions meant to instruct teachers in training students “to get involved with the LGTBQ community in order to effect positive change. We will look at already established youth LGBTQ community groups, recent movements and types of youth activism.”  Is this serious?  Is UNLV actually promoting, and CCSD tacitly allowing, public teachers preparing to indoctrinate young people in alternative sexual lifestyles, to the point where these children will be encouraged to go out into the community and advocate for them? 

This is beyond political. 

Conservative Media’s Ironic Misunderstanding of “School Indoctrination”

A perceptive colleague alerted me to this story out of Chicago, where the mother of a boy investigated in that awful student beating recently told reporters that schools should be responsible for monitoring students outside of school hours. 

This perfectly illustrates something I’ve seen constantly in my years of teaching.  We conservatives worry that schools are brainwashing our kids with government propaganda, just as the mainstream media does, and though there are certainly programs and policies that clearly emanate from the left, this concern is essentially baseless. 

If the government’s effectively indoctrinating our kids, then where are the hordes of glassy-eyed teenage zombies chanting, “I love Big Brother?” 

No, our children are strongly resistant to any attempt to exert authority over them or persuade them to accept ideas in school…to a fault!

The irony here is that while conservative media gets itself into a tizzy about schools usurping too much authority over American children…that’s precisely what too many parents want us to do!

I’ve written plenty of stories on here about clueless parents who expect teachers to raise their kids.  It’s an epidemic.  These lazy, incompetent losers make teachers’ lives miserable.  Teachers spend a large percentage of their parent conferences trying to convince parents to do the work that a lot of conservatives are afraid we’re actively trying to steal away from them!

Schools taking over the job of parents?  Trust me, not a legitimate concern.  Now, the fuzzy teaching methods employed in too many classrooms–that’s a real problem to keep your eye on.

How the NCAA Helped Ruin American High Schools

The NCAA has a rule that remedial high school courses don’t count towards eligibility for college athletics.  I don’t know how other parts of the country have dealt with this, but CCSD’s answer has partly been to reduce / eliminate remedial classes. 

That’s great, right?  All those future college hoops stars are being put into more rigorous classes, just like the NCAA wanted, right? 

No, of course not.  Their rule didn’t suddenly make everyone smarter.  What schools do is simply change the names of classes, removing the “remedial” stigma from the title, while keeping them stocked with the same kids who would have been in remedial classes anyway (thus cheating the rule by “technically” complying with it), or–even worse–those poor kids who need more help get lumped into the regular classes where they push up class sizes, fall behind, cause trouble, irritate and bore the students who are at that level, and still certainly don’t get the experience that the NCAA’s rosy-eyed rule must assume they magically will.

This isn’t to say that all athletes are slow–actually, my experience is quite the opposite–but those who do need slower classes are poorly served by this rule, and the rest of their campus suffers for it, too.  Schools can’t just target the schedules of potential future athletes, so everyone–sports players and not–are equally affected by the policy.  The NCAA could do everyone a huge favor by revising this ineffective, counterproductive rule.

Classrooms in the Movies…

• …never have more students than desks.
• …have every student in class, every day.
• …have mostly the same group of kids at the end of the year as they had on the first day of school.  If someone moves in or out, it’s a big event.
• …have some loud or obnoxious students, but only because they want  attention.  Inside, they’re all decent people who just need someone to reach out and understand them.  None of them are consciously choosing to act like jerks or thugs, and all of them are secretly very, very bright, once you get to know them.
• …never have more than one kid having a serious emotional crisis at a time.  Once that issue is resolved, another kid can have a problem.
• …never have any students who have been mainstreamed into that class due to politically correct special ed policies.  They certainly don’t have ten of them.
• …never actually seem to do much intensive studying, drilling, or practice.  All those feel-good group discussions of emotional discovery someone produce students who achieve very well academically.
• …are always full of students who look well groomed, healthy, and alert, despite involvement with broken homes, poverty, gangs, and substance abuse.  No student in a movie looks or acts any differently than, say, your average young Hollywood actor.  For some reason.
• …are always full of curious young adults who, despite being hard-partying hedonists, speak with the kind of vocabularies that, oddly enough, Hollywood screenwriters would have.  They all know the difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt.  They know their times tables.  They can read for more than five minutes without falling asleep. 
• …rarely have students who come to school high.  If they do, they’re just good, smart goofballs who do it for a laugh.  All ends well.
• …never have students who refuse to take the medication prescribed by their psychiatrist. 
• …never have students who bounce back and forth between the classroom and juvenile hall.
• …are staffed by teachers who can magically command attention with a single request, who enjoy instant raport with their students, and whose off the wall teaching ideas always work like a charm.  They’re certainly more effective than the crusty, strict teachers, who are invariably the villains. 

The Single Purpose of All Education

Something we read in my English 101 class on Tuesday brought up the question of why we go to school.  You would think that after these poor kids had been through 12 or 13 years of it already, someone would have explained it, but no.  Actually, you’d really wonder why students themselves had never demanded an explanation, but apparently not.

School is not for giving you vocational skills or to develop character or to keep you out of trouble.  We all go to school for one reason.  Think about it: all the major aspects of each discipline do the same thing; they have one general goal in common.

English: outlining writing; defending a thesis with evidence in an organized composition; grammar and diagramming sentences

Math: applying formulas; solving equations

Science: using the scientific method

History: creating timelines; finding causes, effects, and connections between events

Art: using perspective, proportions, and other techniques

See the pattern? 

Cherish the Living

A student in one of my classes killed himself last night.  The news was delivered in a staff meeting held before school started today. 

 

He was clearly in a bad place in life, but not visibly any more so than many of his peers.  Just in these first four weeks, he missed more classes than he attended, was late to a couple of others, and always appeared very tired.  He was uninvolved in his work in class, missing most of it, but he did do some of it, and he did it pretty well (if he were only being graded on the work he’d turned in, he’d have a B).  He asked me questions a few times, and I could tell that he was bright and mature; he just seemed unmotivated. 

 

His father actually emailed me a couple of weeks ago, asking how his son was doing.  I responded that the young man had been missing a lot of class.  After that, he came a little more often.  Today I thought of replying to that address again to offer my condolences to the father, but I haven’t done it.  I’m not sure it would be appropriate.  He has too much grief on his mind to care about noticing the sympathy of strangers. 

 

I have no idea why this boy committed suicide.  I assumed the reason for the disconnect between his apparent potential and his substandard performance was drugs.  His appearance was that of a typical stoner, and it would explain the sleepiness.  I could be wrong, and I hope I was.  Surely, I can see now, his problems must have gone deeper than that.  I’ll never know what the story was there, but even though I didn’t really know this kid at all—I only ever saw him four or five times—I was shocked to hear about his death.  Suicide is always shocking; the death of young people always tragic.

 

The First Four Weeks

The first four weeks of school are over.  Some thoughts:

• As students transition into using new vocabulary words in their own writing, they seem to have an instinct for using unfamiliar words as adjectives.  I find myself reviewing parts of speech much more than I’d like to at the high school level.  Most teens need to be reminded that parts of speech are not interchangeable.  The first word of our first unit is “adulterate,” the verb meaning “to corrupt or make impure.”  Without closer guidance, they’ll just use it like this: “He was a really adulterate guy.”  Of course, if they’re talking about Bill Clinton, I guess I could give them half credit.
• I usually don’t like open house, the annual night where parents come in to meet their kids’ teachers.  I never know what to do up there, not that it ever makes any difference, anyway.  Life goes on as if it never happened, and I forget everyone I met as soon as I go home.  This year, though, one parent thanked me for assigning  a list of options from which students have to choose for their independent reading this quarter.  “If you hadn’t assigned these,” she said, “the kids would never read them.”  It’s nice enough to get a compliment, but it’s even better when a parent understands the reasoning behind what I do!
• Yesterday, a college student called me to say that he’d missed the last two weeks of class because his grandmother died.  He offered to bring me a note from his parents.  I told him that was unnecessary. 
• Every year I notice this: before our morning announcements, kids in an honors class will all stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance together.  Kids in non-honors classes rarely will.  It’s a very stark, and very absolute, difference.  This begs a chicken-or-the-egg question: is a student’s citizenship influenced by their academic performance, or is their academic performance influenced by their citizenship?  Or are both, perhaps, shaped by the same factors in the home environment…

Worst. Cheater. Ever.

Here’s one to add to my collection of cheating stories.  Yesterday, I passed some papers out that had been turned in for homework to another class.  We would review it as we went over the answers and they graded the papers.  As I started going over it, one girl, sitting right in the front of the room–right in front of me, in fact–pulled out her blank paper and started writing down the answers as I gave them out.  I stood there–right there–looking at this and wondering if she’d really have the gall to try to turn this in.

Sure enough, after I finished the review and the papers had been graded and were getting passed back up, she hurriedly stuck her paper in the stack.  I pulled it out and showed it to her, trying not to laugh, and said, “Kid, I have to be honest.  In ten years of teaching, this is the single worst attempt at cheating that I’ve ever seen.”  I pointed out that, for one thing, the papers that had been graded weren’t even those of the current class, but from a period earlier in the day, so that her one paper from this last class of the day would kind of stick out.  She didn’t even try to fake the “graded by” signature that teachers expect.   

At first she didn’t have anything to say, then tried to play it off by laughing and saying, “I didn’t know that was cheating.”  Of course, if she didn’t know it was cheating, then she wouldn’t have tried shoving her paper into the stack when she thought I wasn’t looking (even though, again, I was standing right by her desk), and she wouldn’t have marked two of her answers wrong just to make it look more authentic.  (Actually, I have to give her some credit for that.  Most cheaters just turn in perfect papers and think it doesn’t look suspicious.) 

Well, we’ll see if the dean can get some sense into her.  For my part, this is just another sign of a post-ethical generation sleazing its way into the world.  *sigh*

Quirky, Perky, Goofy, Nerdy: New Videos Make Classic Lit Fun

Last night before an English 101 class, I grabbed a complimentary copy of USA Today off of a newsstand.  I thought I’d have a few minutes to kill near the end of class while the students did some peer editing, and I wanted to do a crossword puzzle.  The newsstand was out of the New York Times.

But when the time came and I was looking for the puzzle, I never got to it.  I found an article instead about a new Web site that had just launched.  I went to check it out and was both amused and impressed.

Our hostess is a quirky, perky, goofy, nerdy young lit major named Jenny, who takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of classic literature in a series of bite-sized videos.  The site, 60secondrecap.com, is a Cliff’s Notes for the text messaging generation.  They just got up and running, so their library will start building over time.  I looked at two of The Great Gatsby videos last night, and liked them enough to plan to use them in my high school classes for a fun review (if the overzealous school district server doesn’t block it first).  Hopefully she’ll get The Scarlet Letter and Lord of the Flies up by the time I’ll need them in a few weeks.

And Jenny, since your site says you take requests, any chance you’d consider doing something by Cormac McCarthy?

Our Greatest Double Standard

It still always surprises me when a student blithely declares anything unfamiliar or which requires sustained concentration to be “boring,” and then dismisses it, as though their snap judgment is all the criteria necessary for rejecting something as unworthy of their effort.

What is it about us that we’re so accustomed to labelling something “boring” so quickly, and then so definitively putting it behind us and never looking back?  Why don’t we consider this trend, which developed fairly recently in our society’s history but which now has roots as deep as any cherished value, with any more scrutiny? 

Think about this: when we call something boring, what are we really saying?  What we usually mean is not that it is too inherently dull, but that it is too difficult to comprehend.  (Certainly, that’s what students mean.)  But when did it become such a virtue to announce that we are incapable of handling something?  Why do we now feel that it’s acceptable to ignore anything that taxes us? 

Imagine someone going into a gym and trying to lift five pounds.  They find it very hard.  Any normal person would think, “Wow, I’m really weak.  That’s awful.  I need to exercise until I’m stronger.”  But if we approached this situation the way many of us approach mental tasks, we’d think, “Wow, that’s too heavy.  This is stupid.  This is for losers.  I’m out of here.” 

And thus we become a society of intellectually flabby brain-wimps.  Worse, we become a nation of brain-wimps that prides itself on its ignorance, doing so in an unspoken compact where we pretend that our weakness is a virtue, so that we can reinforce each other’s desperation to ignore it.

One Week Down…

Last Monday as I drove to work for the first day of school, I flipped through radio stations hoping to find a song that might serve as a good omen for the year.  The soft adult contemporary station was playing Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young.”  Hmmm…nope.  The classic rock station was playing The Who’s “Baba O’Riley;” you know, the one that goes, “It’s only teenage wasteland.”  Heh heh.  Nice.

But a couple of days later the same station was playing “School’s Out For Summer.”  Really, classic rock station?  On the third day of school?  That’s just mean.

*****

My class sizes are pretty bad, just like every one else’s.  My smallest class has 36.  I have two classes at 45.  At least I don’t teach freshmen.  Thanks, budget cuts!

*****

In one of the sections of English 101 that I have two nights a week at UNLV, I saw a familiar face.  Turns out he’s a kid I had his first year in high school, four years ago.  I guess he wasn’t looking forward to another year with me: he dropped the class the next day.  I’ll try not to take that one personally!

*****

I got a lot of traffic for a post I wrote last week about my teaching resolutions for the new year.  I forgot a very important one: never again will I ever refer to a student aide as “yon servant wench.”  Apparently, nobody thinks this is funny except me.  But now who will fetch me flagons of grog?

*****

I usually get a sore throat by the end of the first week, but this year I got it by day two.  Not a good sign.  Must be getting old.  I feel much better after the weekend, so we’ll see how it goes today.  I look forward to my annual cold by the end of the month.  It’s a cruel twist of fate that my easiest month of the year–August–tends to be followed by my hardest–September.

*****

We went to a football game Friday, which was fun, except it was hot and there were teenagers there.  I forgot, that’s why I never see popular movies on opening night, too.  We moved to the very edge of the stands, where it was much cooler and there was a lot less cussing.  I noticed the visitor side, which was sedate and comfortable.  The next time we see a football game, it will be when we’re the visiting team!

*****

At the end of the fist week every year, I have every student write a letter about themselves, their goals and opinions for the year, and I seal it up and lock it in a drawer until the last week of school.  No matter how much I tell girls not to write that they’ll be with their boyfriends forever, most do, and they end up laughing or crying when they get the letter back in June.  This is also a good illustration of transiency around here.  Though some kids remember to ask for their letters when they move, most of us forget these for most of the year, and even though I try to track down the kids who are still at our school but in different classes, every June I end up throwing away at least two dozen letters, and a good fourth of the class in June won’t get a letter because they weren’t here the first week of school.  Way to be stable, Mom and Dad!

*****

I’ve only scared three kids out of my honors class so far.  Must.  Try.  Harder.

New (School) Year’s Resolutions

On this eve of yet another glorious year of teaching, I want to set three goals for myself to improve my work.  After reflecting on what my strengths and weaknesses are, and what I want to achieve, I’ve settled on these basics:

1.  More time for independent readings in class.  Each quarter will start with a good book chosen by each student from my lists, and I’ll set aside a couple of class days to read and take notes and/or fill out a log.  After that, they might bring in their own stuff for a few more days of reading here and there.  We read plenty in my classes, but it’s usually from the textbook, with most of their other reading being done on their own.  That doesn’t cut it.  This will pack in more quantity of reading, which kids desperately need.

2.  Speaking of desperate needs, we’ll do more short, spontaneous compositions with instant editing and feedback.  I always want to do more of this, but never get around to it, and it’s so essential.  Quick writing workshops with paragraph-or-two compositions that they’ll peer edit / I’ll edit and they revise in another quick draft, all in one day.  This will benefit their mechanics better than enything else I can think of.  This must be done every other week, at least. 

3.  Finally, I’ll be nicer.  Not in class, I mean, where if anything I should be more strict and where my ability to act enthusiastic when “on stage” serves me well, but outside of class, when kids come in for help or make up work, or when I see kids outside of school.  As it is, my painfully shy, introverted side takes over there and I tend to mumble dismissive one liners and look the other way.  As much as I hate to admit it, a more engaging personality from me does improve classroom performance for them, so here’s one to work on…

Reviewed: Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese I

I’ve kicked my goal of learning Chinese back into high gear this summer, and this excellent set of audio CDs has been my main tool.  I’ve just checked it out of the library a couple of times until I finished it, but it’s also available for purchase. 

The set consists of nine CDs, including ones for a user’s guide and a lecture on Chinese history and culture at the end.  The other seven CDs are the language lessons themselves, each disc having two 30-minute lessons on it.  The narrator and example speakers are perfectly clear, making it as easy as possible to understand what level tone should be used in pronouncing each word. 

(However, I also found that I got the most out of these lessons when I started using the glossary of a textbook while I listened, so I could look up new words as I went.  That’s how I found that I had accidentally been pronouncing the word for “thing”–dongxi–as tongxi.  So I wish the lessons would also spell out the vocabulary in pinyin, the Romanized system of spelling Chinese invented to help Westerners.  It would have helped a lot.  A companion glossary showing the characters for the words would also have been nice–I want to learn how to read and write, also.  As it is, I had to look those up in my own textbook, too.)

The lessons must have been put together by experts, because they have just the right amount of repetition, practice, and drilling to really get you to soak all this new material in.  Words and phrases from old lessons sometimes pop up in new ones, and the dialogues build on each other in a very natural sequence.  Not too fast, not too slow, easy to review if needed (I listened to some of these two or three times).  This set of lessons is head and shoulders above some of the one or two disc “quick, traveller’s” sets I’ve picked up, which just run through a few pat phrases without any decent practice or understanding.  This one is highly recommended. 

One other thing, though: besides things we’d naturally expect in a beginner’s course, like introducing yourself, asking directions, ordering in a restaurant, etc., there were a couple of lessons in the middle of the course whose major sentences to be practiced were all things like this:

Ni xiang gen wo (yi chi ?) he yi diar dongxi ma?  Would you like to get something to drink with me?

Wo xiang yao liang be pijiu.  I’d like to order two beers.

Ni xiang chi wo nar ma?  Would you like to go to my place?

Hmm.  Don’t know how often those’ll come in handy.  Yes, the good people behind this excellent course of study thought that one of the basic needs of the new student is to become proficient in picking up local girls.  I guess it could have been worse.  They could have followed those up with a phrase they didn’t use until the shopping lesson:

Duoshao qian?  How much does it cost?

Blame The Teachers?!

An article in last Friday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal was called, “School district fails to meet ‘No Child’ goal.”  Apparently, the culprit behind our city’s epidemic academic failures is obvious to the media: blame the teachers!

Gee, why didn’t they call it “Local students fail to meet ‘No Child’ goal,” since they’re the ones who actually failed the tests?  Or how about, “Local parents fail to meet ‘No Child’ goal,” since they’re the ones who have failed to raise more studious children? 

Where are the headlines that say, “Doctors fail to meet heart disease goal” or “Clergy fails to meet Sabbath keeping goal?”  Aren’t those professions also responsible for the private choices of their constituencies, or is it only teachers who magically control what other people do with the tools and information they offer?