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. 

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.

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? 

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*

Obama’s Education Speech Gets An A+

I’m no fan of Barack Obama’s platforms or policies, and I admit that I had reservations about his plan to address American school children live, but his speech was a flawless home run.  I don’t say this as a teacher or as a parent, but as a conservative.

I did not show the speech in my class–I had a lesson to teach and the students had work to do–but I hope they looked up the text later on in the day, like I did.

Listening to the radio yesterday afternoon and checking out a few news sites just made me sick that so many on the right would indulge in such petty vitriol over the speech after the fact.  Bottom line, a Republican could have given that speech and it still would have been great.  Be willing to give credit where it’s due. 

One complaint that surprised me yesterday is that the speech will do no good.  Well, maybe not.  But Barrack Obama is the world’s biggest celebrity, a bona fide pop icon, and if he wants to use his status to try to sell kids on hard work, responsibility, and good old fashioned duty, then I say, more power to him. 

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?

Summer School Follies

First of all, I like summer school. Its compacted time frame forces it to be rigorous, disciplined, and serious. Tardies and absences get hammered pretty quickly, daily quizzes and grade updates keep the kids on top of their game, and the fact that they (or their parents) had to pay for it creates an immediate investment that improves their own efforts. These kids may have messed up, but their desperation now brings out the best in them.

 

However, this summer I’ve noticed that too many kids come into summer school in an entirely wrong state of mind.

 

And I don’t just mean the stoner who asked to go to the bathroom about an hour and a half into the first day of school, and who never came back.

 

One boy just this morning looked at his failing grades in my class and rattled off his list of excuses, clearly a well prepared and rehearsed litany that he’s used comfortably for years. I can only surmise that he started this class, as he may start all of his classes, intending to “see what happens,” and fall back on his excuses if and when he fails. I just can’t get people like this to be more proactive, to overcome the fatalism that got deeply instilled in them somewhere along the line.

 

In June, a girl with special ed problems gave me two papers that had been due the week before, both very poorly done, and without any discussion with me about it first.

Chinese Quizlets

I just found a Web site called Quizlet that offers wiki-fied flashcards on a huge array of topics.  You can look up other people’s cards, or submit your own.  I’m really digging this one, one of many, many Chinese sets.  A lot of the Chinese flash cards don’t include the tones, so they’re not very useful, but this one is worthwhile.

50 More Things New Teachers Need To Know

“Don’t hit the kids and don’t hit on the kids.”  If I had to summarize my best advice about teaching in just one saying, that would be it.  However, last summer’s post, 50 Things New Teachers Need To Know, went into a bit more detail and has now garnered thousands of hits, making it this blog’s most popular post.

During the school year between then and now, I’ve made some more notes and now have this new collection ready.  As I say at the end, take it all with a grain of salt, but I have no doubt that this list is more useful than a bachelor’s degree in education.  Furthermore, I like this list even more than last year’s.  Enjoy!

 

1. Cover any windows on hallway-facing doors to your room from the inside with paper. If administrators complain about it, just cover as much as you can at eye level.  You don’t need lollygaggers out there distracting students by making faces at their friends in your class.

2. PC Myth #5: “Your teaching skills are more important than content knowledge.”  In my own undergrad days, an early class taught me that I wouldn’t need to worry about subject knowledge because I already had more than the students would, and I should just focus on methodology, classroom management, etc.  As a result, I spent my first couple of years as a teacher watching all those college theories go down in flames, and desperately playing catch up on the English facts that I needed to know to teach well. 

3.  Always remember: administrators are politicians. 

“Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius”

There’s a powerful new essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education about my least favorite of the many warm fuzzy trends that currently inform (and infect) American education: multiple intelligences.  I’ve ranted about this plenty of times: in every college class and inservice day, teachers are beaten with this idea and made to repeat it in order to get or keep their jobs; I just finished a series of classes this year where the curriculum was designed just to make teachers regurgitate praise for this bit of inspirational indoctrination.  I can’t overstate how pervasive this is. 

The idea: there is a wide variety of “intelligences” out there that influence our learning strengths and weaknesses, and teachers must approach students and classes at several levels to reach all of them.  That means creating lessons not just with verbal and mechanical components, but also physical, social-conversational, and even–I kid you not–nature appreciation. 

And as every good teacher has known from experience for years, it’s a complete pile of garbage. 

As the Chronicle essay points out, this philosophy serves our desire to cherish egalitarian equality–to assert that everyone has talent and value and has hidden but important things to offer the world.  Over my years of teaching, I’ve learned the opposite. 

Recommended Reading: The Deluxe Transitive Vampire

When I teach grammar, I try to come up with attention-grabbing example sentences.  The ones that come in textbooks are notoriously dull (“The person went to the place to get the thing.”), so I want to juice it up a bit and inject a bit of my trademarked brand of life into what most folks see as a dreadfully lame subject. 

Here are two examples of standard favorites in my classes:

I kicked the freshman. 

“Freshman” receives the action of the verb “kicked,” so it is the direct object.

I threw Paris Hilton a live grenade. 

What did I actually throw?  Paris Hilton?  Good gravy, no.  That would require touching her.  No, I threw a grenade.  That makes “grenade” the direct object.  Paris Hilton received the direct object, making her the indirect object.  And, hopefully, soon to be an irritating, repressed memory. 

This demonstration shares a bit of the twisted humor of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s classic grammar “textbook,” The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed.  Gordon’s approach is to present clear, sprightly explications of general grammatical matters with examples that tend to be about supernatural, nocturnal creatures interacting in the prosaic lives of hapless mortals of a dizzying variety of idiosyncratic bents.  (The book never makes this explicit, but I suppose the title character is meant to represent the fact that a transitive verb, like a vampire, only functions when it has an object upon which to act.  Cute, yes?)

I labor intensively, ripping asunder the very dendrites of my brain in Herculean attempts to come up with more than few clever example sentences in class; Gordon has filled an entire book where every page presents at least a few laugh-out-loud such sentences.

Examples:

• The robot designated the dentist his partner.
• There are five more cupcakes than we have frosting for; I’ll leave them for that loner by the river.
• Sophie, abandoning her rented canoe, exchanges pleasantries in the shade with a newt.

Required Reading For Pedantic Sticklers

You must, must, must immediately check out this scorching bit of grammatical derring do by humorist Eric D. Snider.  Not only that, but you must then read all of the comments under it.  Next year, this will be required reading in all of my classes.  All good education more or less happens this way.

The Great Grade Bailout

There is a great inequity in justice in our public school systems.  I refer, of course, to the fact that some students have higher grades than others.  This can only be the result of institutional disenfranchisement, and must be corrected by government intervention.  Besides, our nation’s future faces catastrophic academic failure if we don’t artificially prop it up now.

By which I mean, the failing students need a bailout.

All of those kids who are only half as likely to do any kind of studying or homework as they are to even show up at all will be granted a special dispensation from the Department of Education, something in the neighborhood of, say, 800 billion points.  (Though, what with corruption, unforeseen needs, and poor management, that total will likely exceed a trillion points.)

So every slacker who sat there and chose to finish a class with a 2% grade will now get to graduate, which is perfectly fair.  Uncle Sam will guarantee the success of every student in America.  After all, what with the obesity epidemic, most American kids are “too big to fail.”