Tuesday, July 29, 2008

*Reflections on Teaching* Third Year

III.
One Purple Candle
third year

The note in his permanent school file said it all. “There’s obviously something not right with this child, but given his home life, what can we possibly do?”
When I was involuntarily moved to fourth grade at the end of my second year, I took a quick look at the last names on my class list. His last name leaped off the page at me. Could this be another child from the same family as the boy I had last year; the chair throwing, screaming, pencil losing child? “Look out,” his teachers from last year warned me. “He crawls around on the floor, barking like a dog. Oh, and sometimes he bites.” Oh, yes, this was certainly the same family.
The skinny boy arrived with smudged glasses, hair in his face, looking at the ground. This wasn’t Chris’s class. He was being forced to repeat the fourth grade. His first fourth grade teacher had convinced mom that having to repeat a grade might convince Chris to stop acting up and start doing his work in school. His old classmates were still in the building, and here he was, stuck with the little kids, in the same grade as his younger half-brother.
I started the year with a basic math review, just to see what the kids could do. Chris aced it. Not one problem wrong. “Obviously he’s not repeating a grade because he needs an extra year with the curriculum,” I mused. “What do I do with this child?” I began the year trying to individualize his curriculum, thinking up challenging projects I hoped he’d be interested in. He half heartedly attempted some of them, but seemed more upset at being forced to do something different from the rest of the class than he was about doing work he already knew how to do. So, it was back with the rest of the class for him.
I waited for the chair throwing, or the yelling, or some form of the violence I’d seen in his older half-sibling. What I got instead were coping mechanisms straight out of a mental hospital. I believe to this day that most of his coping mechanisms were a result of boredom. He could already do about seventy-five percent of what I was teaching. When you’re bored, your mind begins to wander, and the wanderings of his mind may have taken him home. I can’t say for sure. But I can imagine what life at home must be like for the younger, much smaller, sibling of a boy who throws chairs and screams at adults at school.
Thus, the coping mechanisms. He did a bit of crawling, dog-like, on the floor. I think he barked once or twice, but he never bit anyone that year. More commonly, his hand creature would come calling. Fingertips grazing the table, middle finger up and sniffing, his hand would roam around his desk, stopping to read what Chris had written, or glance across the aisle at one of his classmates. The hand never spoke, and he never spoke to it, just made small noises for it. The real fun started when both hand creatures showed up. They didn’t like each other, you see, and trouble ensued. Arms flailing, body careening as far as the confines of the desk would allow, Chris’s hand creatures would battle it out. I’m not sure what they were fighting over; I never asked and he never told me. It’s quite possible he didn’t know either.
He thrived on attention, and like most kids who do, he didn’t care if the attention was coming for something positive or not. Laughter bolstered him, and many of his disturbances were of the garden variety class clown type.
More often, though, Chris’s coping mechanism was avoidance. He avoided school work, he avoided getting too close. He didn’t keep any close friends, choosing instead to flit from one to the next. He’d often escape into art; he drew some of the most amazing comic book art I’ve seen from a child so young.
On good days, when he was more lucid, Chris was charming, funny, and endearing. Sadly, those days were few and far between; most days ended with Chris in the back of the classroom, or in the hallway, lying sprawled on the ground, muttering to himself. He just couldn’t handle life in a classroom most days.
I took his name before the Teacher Assistance Team. Before a child could be referred for any sort of testing, the TAT team had to meet and decide if there were other strategies the classroom teacher could try, or if testing was the right course of action. All his previous teachers had taken his name to the team, and each time, the team had decided that a rough and unpredictable home life caused these behaviors; we could test him, but what good would it do? “But I’ve had kids from bad homes,” I argued, “they lash out, they make inappropriate comments or jokes, or they just get real quiet. Ten-year-olds don’t crawl around on the floor, barking and biting; they don’t pretend their hands are some sort of animals. There’s something else going on with this kid.” But my requests that he be tested by the school psychologists went unheeded. “There’s just nothing we can do,” they told me.
I’d had a pretty good amount of interaction with mom the year before, dealing with the violent older half-brother. I knew a little bit about what home was like. Four kids, three different dads; one dad who was in and out of the home and favored the two that were his. Mom, the one constant adult, sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t, often left the kids home alone with the oldest child, who was mentally about six, violent and unpredictable, undisciplined and unrestrained by the adults in his life. Mom went through phases where she tried, always unsuccessfully, to “get her life in order.” During those phases, the kids would come to school with clean clothes and snacks, much calmer than normal. But it never lasted. One week, maybe two, and Chris would show up wearing the same stained shirt all week, begging for snacks from classmates.
At Christmas that year, I knew mom hadn’t been in one of her “See, I’m capable and we have a normal family” phases, so I was floored to see his sloppy scrawl on the tag on the Christmas present saying, “From Chris.” I knew this had to be something he had taken the time to do himself. I carefully peeled back the wrinkled, over-taped wrapping paper to reveal a small square candle, marbled purple and white, sitting in a delicate silver holder.
“Oh, how great,” I enthused, “this will really match in my bedroom.”
Chris, who was having a good day, needed clarification. “Well, so what color is your bedroom?”
“It’s blue,” I told him, “but most of the pictures and blankets have some purple in them. This goes great. I already know just where I’m going to put it.”
For the rest of the Christmas party, I couldn’t help but overhear snippets of Chris’s grinning conversations with anyone who would listen. “…and it matches her bedroom…she has a shelf where she’s going to put it….”
That little purple dollar store candle still graces the top of my dresser. I can still see Chris, grinning, drawing, hand creatures duking it out, every time I see it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to part with it.
There are kids who touch us each year with their intelligence, or creativity, or winning personality. Chris touched me with his vulnerability that day. The rest of the year wasn’t easy, bad days still abounded, but I found it was enough for me to know I had connected with this particular child, on this particular day.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

*reflections on teaching* year 2

II.
Did I Sign Up For This?
second year

As a new teacher, there is shock the first time you hear it. All educators have dealt, at some point, with the assumption, the stereotype that we’re in this field for the money and the summers off. My first time was my own mom, remarking that it must be nice to get a paycheck, even when you aren’t working. She used to make remarks like that, anyways. Then she watched me live through my second year of teaching. That year is my own personal answer to those types of comments.
Through a combination of some spectacularly horrible scheduling and my second-year naiveté, I was convinced that it was a good idea to have a majority of the special education students from our grade level included for science and social studies in my general education classroom. To defend my second-year self a bit, kindly recall that my first year was spent crammed into the tiny, overheated corner room, trying not to step on twenty-eight fifth graders. When I heard the number eighteen – eighteen! – general education students for the first four hours of my school day, the fact that these four special education students would join the rest of us for the afternoon’s lessons didn’t seem all that important.
And so, I got them. Justin was the mildest, an emotionally impaired kid who tried to be sneaky, but just wasn’t; Bobby, severely learning disabled, but easy going – well, easy going right up till the day when mom was jailed for her fourth DUI and anger leaked into the classroom; Tim, autistic, but shockingly communicative, often depressed, prone to chair tossing and self-injury; and Michael, severely learning disabled and emotionally impaired, able to spell his name on a good day, prone to screaming shortly before he began tossing desks, chairs, and stripping posters from the wall.
I don’t believe those eighteen general education kids gained much academically that year. My afternoons were spent corralling them out of anger’s way, striving to captivate children with talk of simple machines and Core Democratic Values while their classmates were forcibly removed by up to three other adults.
But the defining moment of that year, the story I tell the cynics, isn’t one of those violent removals, awful as they were. It is instead, a scene that was played out in one hundred eighty different ways; yet on this day it stopped me dead in my tracks and forced me to ask the hard question: Can I possibly find the strength to do this for the next twenty-five years?
There is the typical hum of a class lining up. It’s gym day; glasses are snapped into their cases, locker doors are slammed as tennis shoes are retrieved. I check to see who’s still tying those shoes, and who’s taking advantage of the moment to engage in a little mini-party with friends. In that moment, as my attention is focused elsewhere, two meltdowns occur. Michael has lost his pencil, and is convinced someone has stolen it. Rather than alert me, he’s decided to do his own detective work. This child – in a body larger than my own – is tromping from one end of the line to the other, lifting my kids by the shirt front and screaming, “Give me my pencil, NOW!” In the split second that my eyes are following Michael, they shift focus to Tim. He’s curled up in a corner, head keeping a steady rhythm on the brick wall as he chants, “I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead.” Life slows for a moment as I think, “Kid who’s endangering others, or kid who’s endangering himself?”
I couldn’t tell you what the answer to that question was. What I can tell you is that they did make it to gym, late as usual, and that my meager planning time was spent dealing with the aftermath of meltdowns one and two. And I can tell you that some variation of this story played itself out nearly every day in my classroom that year. But somehow I made it – somehow we made it – and I found I had more in me than I knew was there. And my mom? She’s so busy being grateful that I’m not living in her spare room, scanning other people’s groceries at the food market that she doesn’t have time to comment on the amount of time off in my year. She now understands that having the summer off isn’t about a lovely, extended vacation. She understands that it’s about recuperating from twenty-some energy-zapping individuals so that you can bear the thought of walking into a classroom again for another nine months.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Reflections on teaching part 1

I.
Becoming
first year

“Here’s your keys, your room is at the end of the hall, on the left. Have fun.” And with those words, I find myself in my very own classroom. For the first time.

Twenty-eight battered and bruised desks, twenty-eight mismatching chairs, duct tape holding the dingy green carpet together. Is that a trap door in the corner? Scarred, wooden monstrosity which will be my desk. Probably spent its first life as a landing strip. Huge, saggy-shelf bookcase at the back of the room. Oh my, it’s hiding a door into another room. A secret, bat-cave entrance. Not a whiteboard in sight, it’s old school chalkboards in this classroom. Old rusty sink, not sure it even works. Six windows, four that open, but only two of them have screens. TV hung in the corner, like a pierced ear on your dad screaming, “See, I’m entirely hip and in touch with the times!”

Filing cabinets, three of them. Open a drawer and musty, years old paper grabs me by the nose. Three cabinets, nine drawers, all of them the same story. Will I need these things? These papers? These relics from another career? Black science counters taking up space at the back of the room. Wait, not just taking up space…these are cupboards. Moving aimlessly, opening cupboards, greeted by the detritus of thirty years in education. What will I possibly do with 79 rolls of scotch tape? Six bottles of vegetable oil? Thousands of pens? Coffee cans filled with crayon pieces? Dozens of gallons of tempura paint? What is tempura paint? Oh, Lord, am I expected to do my own art projects? Cause I don’t do art projects.

The books start coming. “This was fourth grade up until last year,” they explain, “those books you’ve got aren’t right, these are the ones you need. Teacher’s manuals? I’m sure they’ll turn up somewhere. Just keep looking.”

Landing strip haphazardly organized at last. Teacher’s editions gazing mutely back at me. A whole week. They want to see a whole week of lesson plans before the kids even come in the door. Every little detail, or just a general outline? Veteran teacher upstairs says, “Start with a review.” A review of what? What do they learn in fourth grade? Harry Wong says, “Start with procedures.” But what do fifth graders do while they’re learning procedures?

Just start at the beginning, I guess. Lesson 1.1. I’ll work in something about what the procedure is for using the restroom, too. Should I have them all practice? Or is just telling fifth graders what to do enough? Please, let this get easier. My weekends are going to be nonexistent.

Twenty-eight faces staring solemnly up at me. I wasn’t supposed to be their teacher. The beloved fourth-grade teacher was supposed to have looped with them. Who was I?

And that was the question on everyone’s mind: Who was I? Was I the pushover teacher, the one that all the other teachers hate to share a bus with on field trips because their kids behave so badly? Or was I the teacher whose children behave like small automatons because they are so completely terrified to so much as breathe the wrong way? Or was I something in between? Was I the worksheet teacher, sitting at her desk sipping coffee and ignoring raised hands? Or was I the inspiring teacher, who gave kids the tools to become what they were all along? Could I be?

reflections on teaching

Hey there,
It's been a while and I've been busy with life, but also with a summer writing institute for teachers. We focus on teaching, but also on our own writing. Encouraged by Josephine, I decided to post chapters of my writing about my experiences teaching. Hope you enjoy!