In Which I Rant Again

There was a kid in my class first semester. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Brilliant, but autistic. He excelled in class, even with the language barriers that autistic children have. (Thinking in pictures tends to slow down the speaking, social "niceties" are relatively meaningless, plays on words often don't make sense because of very literal thinking, etc.) He had a few quirks, for instance he would be reading his textbook chapters ahead of the class, but if I called on him, he knew exactly what we were doing and could provide an answer. He even did unthinkable things. He would volunteer to act in our stories! He would volunteer silly answers to our story lines. He would even, sometimes, smile. Great kid.

He switched classes at the semester. And now, he is failing.

His new teacher recognizes that he is brilliant, and that he knows all the information. But she is still failing him because he hasn't turned any of the assignments in. She wanted to know how he did in my class. Are you kidding me? He was the ace! She is concerned. He has an IEP, and he is failing, so what should she do?

I took the time to explain some of the little things about autism. That's great. The problem is, she doesn't see how that has anything to do with his missing work. So, I told her to talk to his counselor, or his special ed teacher.

*GROWL*

We have a CHEETAH here, and we're going to fail him because he is refusing to walk nicely with the elephants. We're just going to reinforce the idea that he is different, and wrong, and he cannot succeed in life.

Am I really so out of touch with reality? Am I really so different than the rest of the academic world? The other teachers in my department are all about the all mighty homework assignment. This, they say, will prepare the kids for the rigors of college, for the rigors of life.  OK. Sure. But, not all the kids are going to college. Not all the kids will study languages in college. They say, try missing deadlines at work, see where that gets you. Fine. Except, we tend to pick our professions because of our personal quirks. Math is hard for me, I mean I can do it just fine, but I have to spend a lot of mental energy making sure the numbers don't move around the page, and that they stay the same. I'm "good" at math, but it isn't fun for me. I didn't go into a career where math is a strong prerequisite. I cannot stand staying still, and being boxed in. I didn't go into a career where I am sitting in a cubicle or an office all day. I stand up, I walk around, I get to talk a lot. I get to interact with people. So, my ability as a student to sit still and be quiet actually had no bearing on my future ability in a career. And you know what? I still refuse to do work I deem boring or unnecessary. So, I've missed a few deadlines in life. Nobody has fired me for it, I still have a 4.0 in grad school. I have learned to pick my battles. But please, don't make me feel like I am wasting my time. I have too little of it to waste it on useless stuff. Which is why I refuse to waste my students' time.

Again, this kid, this wonderful, brilliant, funny kid is going to fail, and he is going to have all of society's messages reinforced by his teacher, simply because he is not doing work that is a waste of his time. He doesn't need the practice. He just needs to fill in the blanks in a spreadsheet to prove to a calculator that he can do the work like a good little robot. *growl*

In Which I Rant

I have a student. Actually, I have many, but that isn't the point. I have a student who is a really nice kid. He isn't going to be awarded any prizes for great intellectual prowess any time soon, but he is a really great kid. He is nice. He is fun. I'm sure the girls think he's cute. And I've never had a single problem with him. But his dad is a bully. And despite academics not being his son's strongest suit, the dad wants the kid to go to Harvard.

The kid has an IEP. Not a problem. I meet all of his accommodations except one in my normal instructional delivery. He's bringing home A's and B's in Spanish. But, now, Dad tells me I've done too good of a job accommodating his child, because he was unprepared for the rigors of a standardized test. He got a C. The average score was a C, just a few percentage points above the kid. 

Is this a darned if you do, darned if you don't scenario or what? Dad tells me at the beginning of the year, the parents are very concerned that he keep up his gpa so he can get in a good school. The kid has a good gpa, at least in my class, his exam score doesn't even change his grade because that was solid, he is speaking Spanish, and now... now I'm told I need to stop accommodating him so he can do well on standardized tests???? Never mind the part where average kids who don't have IEPs are scoring in the same range as this kid?

*GROWL*

End of rant

Cereal again?

I was just talking about how some of my former students still discuss events from our classes last year, and even years before. Then what happens? These very same students started a debate about a word we had used in one of our stories on my facebook page. 

The basic story is this:

Mike Tyson is famous. He is strong. Lots of people like him. But, he has a problem. He likes to eat people's ears. It is illegal to eat people's ears. The police come and arrest him. He goes to jail.

While he is in jail, he has an idea. He has to wait, because he can't do anything about his idea when he is in jail.

When he gets home, he makes Tyson Puffs - a cereal shaped like people's ears. Now he can eat ears and it isn't illegal. Now he doesn't go to jail. Now he is happy.

The debate was about the word "Puffs". One girl said it was Pufs, another thought it was Poofs, and one boy said it was Puffs. It turns out, they were all right. In the English translation, we had written "Puffs", as we asked the story, we pronounced it "poofs" and when we wrote it in Spanish, we wrote "Pufs" to keep the pronunciation.  But really, it has been more than a year and a half, and here they are debating, literally the semantics of our story about cereal, body parts, and jail. 

And, it's on my facebook page!  Which means one - these students have become autonomous learners of the language; two - they are making connections and using the language outside of school (ACTFL standards); three - we have succeeded in building relationships with each other; four - the students have truly acquired some of the language; and five - I now have to explain to my family and adult friends why my students think a story about eating ears is hilarious.  :)

Oh! The connections... this all came up because I told my son I was going to eat his ears.  :)

The conversation in the hall

I was going through last semester's paperwork this morning. I was sorting through the student interest surveys recycling the ones belonging to those who are no longer my students, refiling the ones who are in this semester's classes. I ran across the survey belonging to the girl who I overheard being berated in the hall the other day.

And what did I see? Her favorite musical group is The Beatles. What is significant about that? Well, the teacher who was telling her how worthless she is, etc... her favorite group is also the Beatles.

So, when I saw her this morning, I mentioned this fact to her. It was completely non-confrontational. We were just talking about music. I didn't say anything about classroom management or discipline. Just, "Do you remember the girl you were talking to in the hall the other day? Well, I just came across some of her old papers, and her favorite group is the Beatles." She smiled, and said she would mention this to the girl. And since we were having such a lighthearted conversation, I slipped in a thought that I think this child has some big things on her plate beyond school. She agreed with me.

I don't know that anything will change. But, on the other hand, maybe I helped her see a part of this girl she may not have seen on her own. Other than that? I smile when I see this girl in the halls, I say hello to her.

honoring our students as people

I posted the following over on Ben Slavic's blog a while ago.  If you want to see the original discussion, click on the link in the title to this entry.

I had some truly amazing students last year. Amazing intellect, amazing creativity, amazing personality. Truly, I was blessed as a teacher to have some of these kids. One boy borrowed a grammar workbook to study at home. He came back to me a few weeks later to report that “I’m not quite sure I understand the subjunctive.” This was in the 8th grade. As far as our stories went… out of this world.



I have moved on to another school, and so have they. And, I am seeing what they are saying about Spanish. Oddly, they post about Spanish frequently on Facebook. Sometimes, they quote random lyrics or story lines from our classes last year. More often I see complaints about how boring and endless the verb conjugations are, powerpoint vocabulary lists that never end, worksheet after worksheet on topics they already understand, and homework.


These brilliant kids who could write novelettes in Spanish with minimal errors last year, who voraciously read through three Blaine Ray novels and Mira’s Piratas, are now defeated by the monstrous verb conjugation task at hand. They report that they are only now beginning to understand the preterit (although they were successfully using the preterit and imperfect in class last year) and they are feeling dumb that it is taking them so long. Two of them discussed their recent mid-term exams and how they spent so much effort trying to remember the rules for i->y and “basement verbs” that they were unable to answer a simple question “How do you say ‘they are singers?’”

And, oddly given all the complaints I got last year about how “boring” the Ana books were… they are begging to read “Real Books” like Pobre Ana again.


At first, reading through this recent discussion of theirs I too felt crushed. I didn’t prepare them properly for high school. I should have taken the time to explain the grammar… Then I felt angry. Who are these teachers who crush these absolutely brilliant kids? Why must we take these confident children who can speak and communicate in Spanish and force them to pay attention to such minutiae as whether or not they spelled a word correctly with an i or a y and thus convince them that they have not learned what they thought they had, and that they are not good at it. And then I felt pride too. Here they are, a year later (some more than a year later) posting to each other from multiple high schools, IN SPANISH, talking about Spanish, remembering our stories, reading Ana…

Then I wrote about a conversation I overheard in the hallway between a former student of mine and her new Spanish teacher, my colleague.  It broke my heart.  This girl is habitually tardy, she draws on herself in Sharpie, she smokes, she probably drinks, and she doesn't do homework. She has been suspended several times this year, which doesn't help her spotty attendance. She is also very introverted. It took me weeks before I got a glimpse of the beautiful person she is inside. The person waiting inside like a butterfly in its chrysalis.  She was never a superstar student of mine, but she did have a role to play in several of our stories. She is amazingly creative, and I honored that whenever I could.
 
So, there I was working madly during my planning period (back in the days before the double blizzard when I still went to work) and I heard a heated discussion in the hall. I glanced up. This girl was standing there, head hanging down, and her new teacher was telling her that she should go withdraw from the class because maybe a foreign language wasn't for her. She was telling this beautiful person that she could not pass if she did not try harder, that she was guaranteed to fail, that she wasn't cut out for languages, she should withdraw before it affected her transcripts.
 
And, it seemed to me that I could see her retreating back inside of herself to a place of safety and warmth where before I had seen this beautiful person near the surface ready to spring forth. It seems to me that this child has something much bigger on her plate right now than her grade in Spanish class.
 
What does humiliating children do to them? Does it make them want to try harder? Do they respond by showing their brilliance? Or do they retreat to somewhere we can't reach? Do they withdraw and then decades later tell others that they never could learn that new language, they must not be good at languages? 
 
I just want to call bull____.
 
I know how I respond to humiliation. I threw a pen at my professor and withdrew from a class I loved.

an apology

I have a student who has barely turned in an assignment in two years. He falls asleep in class. He falls down asleep while standing. Often the only way to know he has been in class is to look around and see all of his belongings there after he has left. Sadly, this is his m.o. in all of his classes.

Each week on Thursday we do a dictation. I read five sentences in Spanish and students do their best to write what they hear. I read the entire passage two times, and then I project the correct version on the screen. Students are to then edit their paper, underlining their errors and writing the entire correct word directly beneat the original error. To that end, I have students skip two blank lines between every line of text. One blank line is for their edits, and the second one is for my eyes, and also to give me a space to write further edits should they need it.

Well, this particular student only left one line between each line of text. And then, at the bottom of the page he wrote "Lo siento por no tener dos linias blancas." Almost flawless Spanish. It means: I am sorry for not having two blank lines.

So:
1. He noticed he hadn't followed directions.
2. He cared enough to apologize.
3. He did it in Spanish!

English -> Spanish -> Persian?

I have posted before that some of my students are endeavoring to teach me Mandarin in exchange for my Spanish lessons. And I am loving it. I treasure the CD one child gave me of pop Chinese music.

I have another student who has not chosen to share her first language with me. That is, until recently. She is Persian. And she has not fallen in love with my class. Again, at least until recently. She is in the 8th grade, which means this is her second year with me.

Suddenly two weeks ago she exclaimed in the middle of class, "What did they just say?" I showed the video clip again and was met with incredulity. "Did they say 'bale'? That's Persian and means OK"

No, the characters had said "vale" which is Spanish for OK. So, I promised her I would find out if the two words had any common ancestry - we have discussed the Arabic influence in Spanish before, so it was a possibility. They don't. At least, not unless you go back to proto-Indoeuropean languages. Vale in Spanish comes from the Latin.

She also asked me about the word basta. Again, no apparent connection between the Persian and the Spanish.

But, that's not the point. The point is: She is noticing. She is caring. She is drawing comparisons between now three languages and cultures. And she trusts me to find out information for her. :)

It's not always about having the right answer. Sometimes, it is all about how we see the world and how we interact with our fellow human beings.

bragging

I had parent-teacher conferences just a few weeks ago. And some of the feedback I got really helped to put my teaching back in perspective.

• I had one student tell me he finally understands his grandmother when she speaks to him.
• Another family was telling me about their exchange student from Colombia, and my student listens to him on the phone and understands what he is saying to his family (although I told him to stop eavesdropping - LOL)
• Another student told me she has decided to go to Mexico this summer to see how good her Spanish really is.
• Three parents told me that their child has been watching installments of a BBC program we've been watching in class at home.
• A few more families told me that their kids are speaking in Spanish at home just for fun.
• The math teacher told me a few of the kids are speaking in Spanish during math.
• One boy who struggled so much last year was so excited to be going to high school to take more Spanish and asking me which language he should add as his third language.
• And two parents told me they have asked their children for help communicating with somebody at work and have gotten that help!

I've been feeling really down about my teaching lately. Which makes this so much more special. I have not been as creative or energetic or as into the kids as I should be. The non-teaching parts of the job just drain me so much. I was so excited to hear all these wonderful things - especially where the kids could talk to their relatives. What else matters?

Wow!

Oh, and I spoke my little bit of Mandarin to a few families and that was so much fun too. One father just looked at me all wide eyed and asked his son if he had understood me then answered me in Chinese. Another mother asked me as if she hadn't quite caught it, "Did you just speak to me in Chinese?" Heh. And that's because my students are sharing their language with me. And that thrills me to no end too. And I FINALLY learned how to say one students name. With the correct tones. Hopefully I'll be able to remember it come June when I read her diploma out loud.

team building

We took our students to the mountains for three days for a Team Building field trip. It's actually fantastic. The gains shown in the students' thinking, processing and just plain interacting with each other is amazing. Each year we see amazing friendships growing from the seends of this trip. One year there was this amazing bombshell of a girl who befriended this boy. He was this tiny little boy who was a bit of a social reject and a nerd. They became best friends for the next two years. Their common link? They both felt isolated by their peers - even though she was Ms Popularity and he was a typical geek. They both felt as though people judged them by looking at them and never saw beyond the surface they presented. It's heartening.

This year was difficult for me. I found it so difficult to put aside my fears and just interact with the kids the way this trip requires. But when I did, the magic was still there. It's amazing how much I still love having students.

accomodations

We had a meeting today with a specialist for hearing disorders and the parents of a student who who has auditory processing, language processing and visual disorders. We spent an hour collaborating with this woman on ways to help this child succeed, not just in school but in life. We asked her to come in to help us. We, his teachers, with his parents are fighting to get him on an IEP or a 504.

As she was leaving she told each of us how wonderful we were, how receptive we were. She said that in most schools she is being pushed out before she even opens her mouth.

I don't get that.

I mean, yes, there is some more work involved here. Especially because he is adament that nothing is wrong. Can you think of a single teenager who wants to be singled out like that? But together we were able to come up with strategies that will help him maintain his dignity and function better. We hope that what was taking him three hours can be limited to half an hour at home. We hope a lot of things. Right now, we don't know because we haven't tried any of these strategies.

But I really don't get not wanting to know how to help a kid like this because there is more work involved for you. I mean, aren't we here to help each of our students?

an equal exchange

I have a group of students who have decided that in exchange for my Spanish lessons they will teach me Chinese. I love it. The students get to be in a position as experts. But more than that, I am able to honor them for who they are, and for their culture. I am enforcing the idea that languages are important, not just Spanish.

One of these students was a very weak student, but now she is doing fantastic. And amazingly, although I know I am butchering the language every time I open my mouth, they adamently refuse to laugh at me. Instead they offer constant encouragement and model the words over and over again. In a sense we have become a team.

still thinking about teacher/parent/student interaction

I have a friend who is struggling right now. Her son is 7 and has been in 2nd grade for all of a month. My friend has already been cornered by her son's teacher several times.

The first time the teacher told her that her son has ADHD because he is dreamy and stares out of the window a lot. Mind you, the teacher was not talking about a student who was disrupting the class, just one who was not paying attention the whole day. (At his school there is one recess for the kids. How insane is that? Ask kids to sit still ALL day long and then get surprised when they daydream out the window???)

Be that as it may, a week or so later my friend was cornered again. He son had failed the math test 6/10. The teacher told my friend there was no way her child would pass second grade. Mind you, school has only been in session one week! It turns out that five of the questions were complex logic questions: "The number is less than three doubled, more than five minus three and is an odd number. What number is it?" AND it was a timed test!

And then my friend was cornered AGAIN. This time the teacher called her in the middle of the day to say that her son's reading comprehension was awful and he needed remedial help. He had turned in a book report that was all gibberish. My friend asked if the teacher had taken the time to talk to her son about the book, because she had learned more about sharks (the topic) during the book report process that she cared to know. She acknowledged that his writing leads something to be desired, but that does not reflect his reading comprehension. The teacher said no, she had not spoken with the boy, because it was obvious from his report he understood nothing.

My friend is at her wits end. She is talking to the principal. She is doing flash cards at home. She is thinking of withdrawing him and homeschooling him. (Not that I think homeschooling is a bad idea.) But why?

Because her interactions with this teacher have all been negative. The teacher has apparently made up her mind that the child is stupid and uneducable and all this one month into the year. And she feels caught up in the system, and her child feels incredibly stupid.

Now maybe he is immature and is not ready for 2nd grade. But I can't help thinking how different would this whole situation have looked if perhaps the teacher had started with talking about how creative he is, or how well he interacts with other students - he has so many friends, etc. What if the teacher kept trying new strategies and always went in thinking that all of her students were capable of learning?

postcards

One of my goals this year is to do a whole lot more noticing kids or catching them in the act of doing what they're supposed to be doing. I actually got this idea from FLYLady last year and I loved it. I am writing notes home to parents for every child. Actually, I brought it up to my team and as a team we will be sending home at least three for each child over the course of the year. I am keeping track to make sure that every child gets recognized at least three times.

I like the idea that this is a concrete way to recognize each student at different times and to include the parents. So many times the only communication we have with parents is when a child is having problems - even when we are recognizing the kids at school.

perfecto

I saw a few kids' faces just light up today. And the funny thing is, I didn't do anything. In three of my five classes today one of my barometer students, the kids who try hard but are processing the language slower than their peers, tried to translate a sentence from the reading. And I was able to give them an honest Perfecto! Hence the smile.

But, while I am happy they got their translations correct, I am happier that they volunteered to try - in front of their peers. And I think that made their victory all the sweeter.

Perfecto, indeed

student responsibility for missing work

This year I told the students that if they are absent they will need to write an essay in Spanish for each day's work they missed. Their essays will need to incorporate the vocabulary they missed why they were out. Because of that I have given them extra days over the stated policy (1 day + number of days absent = due date) in order to learn the new words.

Well, I received an email arguing that I am punishing a student because this student has an illness which requires day-time doctor's appointments and involves time spent out of school. The parents are asking if I am perhaps breaking the student's 504 by requiring "extra work" for absences.

The school nurse defended my position and told the parents that I am in compliance with the 504. I also responded to the parents by explaining that the essay is really the same as doing the problems she misses in math class or the work for lit, etc. Writing an essay is the closest that I can approximate making up all the work we do in class. For the most part we are talking for an hour, which perhaps does not seem as intensive as other classes, but it's also much more difficult to make up. The students cannot possibly recreate the environment of hearing and speaking Spanish for an hour.

Really, I am just flabbergasted by the whole thing. I cannot fathom that asking a student to make up work from an absence can be conceived of as punishing the student for being sick. Is there any such thing as personal accountability anymore?

the pagame that wasn't

After school on Friday a student came up to me and thanked me for the best class ever. Well, this is a student who has had his fair share of problems in my class and in others. I assumed he owed me a pagame, but when I asked him (my clipboard was in my room) he said he didn't think so. And sure enough, he didn't. It was a genuine thank you!

more circling

We were doing the circling with balls activity in class today. I decided to take the students outside because it was such a nice day out. The activity quickly evolved. We had three balls flying around in a large circle. We began with saying "me gusta/no me gusta ______" (I like/don't like____" with the sport that belonged to the ball. After ten minutes students had that down pretty well and were getting bored, so we changed. Before throwing/kicking/passing their ball they had to say "A _____ (student's name) le gusta _______" saying that (student) likes ____, using what we have learned about that student in class. So student x was throwing a basketball and saying that student y liked to ski. We did that with three balls simultaneously for about ten minutes as well. After that we changed to stating what students did *not* like to do.

It was great. The kids had fun. They liked the extra challenge of remembering the sport they had, what their classmates liked and what they did not like. And I think I actually saw them believing for two minutes that I care about them as individuals!

who should be a teacher?

I was in a conversation in another forum the other day, and was told by somebody not in education that I need to find another career.

Why?

Because education is not about relating to students as individuals. It is not about being a "social worker" as this person put it. It is not even about caring about students. It is simply putting information in children's brains.

As much as I know better, this comment is getting to me. Maybe it'sbecause I've had such a rough year and have fantasized about leaving my school, or even teaching for a while. But how can somebody even hope that their students will really LEARN if you don't care about them at all?

I know as an adult, I still really care if a presenter or an administrator relates to me in some way. How much more important is that relationship to a child? One of my comments that this person was reacting to was about a former student of mine who broke down after a school dance. Her step-father was late picking her up, and she was hysterical, because her mother was dying of a brain tumor and she was positive that she had died during the dance and that was why he was late picking her up. The fact that I cared, or that I held her and comforted her is why I am in the wrong profession. The fact that rather than teaching one September day not too many years ago, I passed around kleenex boxes and lied to students through my teeth telling them their father the pilot was fine, and the world wasn't ending tells this person that I have chosen the wrong career. Because, how can they learn if I'm so busy caring that I never teach?

But tell me, how can an adult going through a situation like that hope to perform at his/her optimum? Would it not be advantageous for a manager to take that into consideration when observing the quality of work produced? Or are weall supposed to be automatons whose personal lives have no impact onour professional lives?

And what happens to the children who have noone to care at home or at school? I doubt they learn much in their classes, but what really happens to them? I'm fairly sure a few of them end up being taught by my husband (at a detention center) or self-destructing in their own ways.

I teach Spanish, yes. But more than that, I teach people. And that means all the inconsistencies and vagueries that come with dealing with 120 adolescents 240 parents and 60+ other adults in some way or other every day. And, oddly enough, my kids still seem to come out of my classes having learned some Spanish by the end of the day.