8 Bad Days and Counting

1. Some kids are beyond reach.  Discuss.

2. No kid is beyond reach, but schools can’t do it alone and our society isn’t committed to doing everything it would take to truly help these kids, so for all intents and purposes, from the point of view of the school, they are beyond reach.  Discuss.

3.  All kids are within reach.  Failure to reach these students is failure of the imagination and commitment of the school administration, staff, and classroom teachers.  Discuss.

4. We’re rattling around in a box of our own making.  How to get out?  Time to blast this thing wide open with some new ideas.  What’s old is working so-so but not well.  Where can I get a paradigm shift?  Discuss.

5. Don’t worry about what you can’t control.  School culture is bigger than one classroom or hallway.  Children have baggage.  Discuss.

6. When you stop rattling and look at the box, you see the cracks in the walls.  Investment.  What have we done to invest the 65-75% of kids who don’t stand out in any major way, behaviorally or academically?  The swing voters, so to speak.  Is there a place in our school for more than behaviorism?  What about a little of this?  Do we have goals that speak to children?  Do they have goals?  Yeah, sure, we set goals, but do they have any power?

7.  Looking at the cracks in the box, again: Everyone talks a good game about “teaching kids to be good people” but what does it all add up to?  What does that teaching look like?  Is it happening in advisory?  I basically told my advisees today that they are hypocrites, who set nice-sounding little goals and talk about why it’s important not to be bullies, but then on the way out, trip someone intentionally. (I’m not feeling very nice this week).  They didn’t disagree.  When does the touchy-feely become real?  Cross that fuzzy boundary and start to mean something?  And why is it that when someone suggested to someone more important than me that we get some professional development on this stuff, on peer mediation, on running really meaningful advisories, the response was: no one should have to teach you how to care.  Oh.  Well then.  But just because you can keep a classroom of kids more-or-less safe and on-task doesn’t mean you know how to do the longer-term work that reduces rather than just suppresses the violence.  What does it mean, teaching kids to be better people?  Show me that.  Show me that when you’re on a mean block with kids whose parents occasionally say things like, I can’t help him anymore, I’m just waiting for them to take him away from me.  He’s ELEVEN.  He’s the sweetest child on Earth.  What a thing to hear from your mother.

8. My grades are due.  I have to work on that instead of this.  Anyway, I’m a little stuck.  It feels like a puzzle, something to be unraveled.  If you crack this code, if you figure out how to break through to the kids, all of them, or most of them all the time and the others most of the time, the world is yours.  Anything can happen.  But I’m stuck on this side of the code, I can’t see my way through it, resources are scarce, support is there but only for certain kinds of solutions which are a piece of the puzzle but not, in my mind, the solution.  I’m supposed to be a leader: what next?

If one wanted to do a “genre study”

of “chick-lit” - what are the best books to read? The Devil Wears Prada comes to mind… what else? I’m thinking of reading 5-6 books that sold well, are on the smarter end of the spectrum writing-wise, and that are set in different worlds (ie, I don’t want to read only about women who work in fashion). I already picked up a new book that is sort of chick-lit murder-mystery, called A Little Trouble with the Facts. The author’s hard-boiled, noir-esque voice is hilarious, but she relies on a lot of explication to fill in chapters that set up the background for the main story. Still, I’m enjoying it. Help me out here!

This was the week that was…

Pretty much all the teaching staff with the same sore throat and headache.  Three or four people out every day.  One boy jumps another after school at the start of the week, one of those things where you cannot imagine what
anyone had to prove as the aggressor is taller than most teachers and older than most of the other sixth graders, and the victim is a regular-sized, 11-year-old, hardworking, sweet-natured, intelligent kid.  No kidding, you can beat up *****???  C’mon.  Later in the week, another jumping, two of our girls attacking a third after school, with the instigation of half my grade.  I’m sure they had their reasons but again we are left slightly dumbfounded.  The girl picked on has a reputation for once having been a fighter, but this year in our school she hasn’t been in a single violent incident (right up until now).  That’s something, don’t you think?  The next day the girls’ mothers all come in and there’s almost a fight between the adults.  One mother storms out with her daughter and the other mother calls the police to file a report.  Friday, the girls are back in school, and the aggressors discover that they have been suspended while their victim has not, all evidence pointing to the fact that she didn’t do anything.  The two aggressors flip out.  School safety is called when one of them becomes uncontrollable, and they refuse to come.  Call 911, they tell my principal.  So 911 is called, the EMTs come, the girl is taken to the hospital.  What happens next, I don’t know.  All of this while we are teaching, unsuspecting until a school aide comes around and asks that we keep our doors closed and locked for the duration.

What is the long-term plan?  Our kids need something that we aren’t giving them.  What is it?  How do we find it and give it to them?

Lost

Kloe wants to know what you’re missing, what you’ve lost… real or metaphorical.   Go to her site and drop her a line, or answer on your blog.

Because I was in Turkey for a year, I’ve lost some of my connectedness in NYC, some of my sense of being in-the-know.  I’ve lost a half-dozen single earrings.  I’ve lost one book, one necklace, and one bowl, though I know exactly where they are.  I lost one cake to a disaster.  One friend to Paris.  Another to Vancouver.  My cat’s lost several teeth.  I lost a whole lot of markers, scissors, and other school supplies during the Science Exp0 prep day.  Over the years I’ve lost the friends and acquaintances that you lose when you end relationships.  I also lost certain loved places and at least one band to the end of  relationships.  I’ve lost hours, maybe weeks, to the internet. ;-)  I lost a pet once, briefly, only to find her again, several panicked hours later, three floors up chillin’ on the neighbors’ fire escape.  I lost weight, but also flexibility and muscle tone, when I lost my yoga studio.  My family once lost a camera in the Ben & Jerry’s Factory.  I lost the same hat twice last year, both times in historical places in Turkey.  I couldn’t bring myself to buy it a third time.

With change and introspection has come perhaps a loss of perspective on where life is going, and some loss of confidence, but with change and introspection will also come that thing called wisdom, one day.  Change is loss, but it’s also gain, like the cliche about losing a daughter but gaining a son-in-law or whatever… in that sense (not the marriage sense), I am soon to be losing one way of life and gaining another, losing certainties and gaining opportunities… but more on all that later.

Workshop

Okay… there should be a real post here, blah blah blah about my history with writing classes, but I have a nasty sore throat and my enthusiasm for any sort of effort whatsoever is at a bare minimum, so let me cut to the chase: I just registered for an 8 week class at MediaBistro: Personal Essay Boot Camp.  My first assignment is a short first-person piece on a time I felt like an outsider.  Grown-up learning.  Sweet.

More LEGO coolness on YouTube…

This one’s an assembly line making little LEGO cars.  I wonder, if you had enough LEGOs and enough engineers, could you make robots make robots?  LOL.

Lost City Radio

This should have been a book that everyone was talking about last year - and maybe it was, but I never heard of it until I found it on a list of best new novels by Latino writers. It’s also been on lists of best new novels, period.

She clutched his hand and pressed close to him as they made their way down the crowded sidewalk. “What’s the forest like?” she asked.

He considered her question, which she had asked more than once simply because she loved to hear him speak of it. “It goes on forever. It’s endless invention, it’s gaudy, it’s gnarled trunks and rotting husks, sunlight peeking through the canopy, and bursts of rain hitting the roof of the forest like tapping on metal. And color, color, color.”

“You don’t sound like a scientist, you sound like a poet.”

Rey smiled, “Can I be both?”

“But you’d rather be a poet.”

“Who wouldn’t?” he said.

From Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon.

Smoothest Science Exp0 Ever

(I have to use the zero to make this less google-able by my kids).

I love planning things very intensely, then watching them unfold, hopefully smoothly, and this year’s Science Exp0 was perfect in this regard.  Hours of time put into a schedule paid off; everyone knew where to go when, small discrepancies - like judges moving faster or slower than planned - turned out to be no major problem, the kids had a great day, the teachers thought it went well, and the judges were awesome.  The vast majority of my energy went to handling one behavior problem that spiraled out of control, but otherwise it was the easiest Science Exp0 we’ve ever done.  I credit my two fantastic science team members who helped with all the planning, the teachers who stayed with the kids all day and made sure they were where they belonged, doing the right thing, and a crack team of judges who showed up early, asked the kids great questions, scored really fairly, and had a terrific attitude all day long.

I could write three pages, or I could write two sentences, and neither would capture the day.  Good moments: teams that worked really hard and knew their stuff were voted the winners (this is not a guarantee!); having four alums of my school come back to be judges, polite, neatly dressed, incredibly helpful all day long, asking great questions, modeling everything we try to coax out of our children; hearing our judges warmly and humorously debrief the projects over lunch; talking to kids thrilled that “the judge came and we did so good, I know we did good, he liked our project, he asked us lots of questions and we knew the answers!”; spending a few minutes with our 8th graders, who were once my 6th graders, seeing how far they’ve come with their understanding of science and ability to take on a big project like this one.

Much of our staff went out on Arthur Avenue afterwards for Blue Moon and gobs of cheese-stuffed shells and fried calamari and a half-dozen toasts.  And then it was seven and the day was over!

Prep Day: In which we moan & grumble about computers

Wednesday - prep day - was harder than Thursday.  My team agreed to help the kids work on their projects all day Wednesday - it’s sort of a school tradition.  I had what seemed like a workable plan for dividing the kids up into 2 rooms for computer use and printing, and 2 rooms for board assembly, but as the day approached I could not figure out a plan for getting two printers working and in the right locations, nor did I have all their projects saved onto flash drives so that they would be able to use any computer rather than a particular computer.  So it ended up being one computer room, a long wait for laptops, me at the printer (with my personal laptop hooked up to it) barking at kids to back up and not crowd in on me, I would help them one by one (it was 95 degrees in my room, not a formula for calm).

Aside: The last 6 weeks have reminded me of the huge gulf between the poster-pretty image of technology integration and the reality in so many underfunded, no-IT-person, scarcely-even-an-outlet-to-be-found schools.  To me, the full-time IT position is the biggest need; what kind of organization has several hundred computers and has to call someone from outside to fix problems?  Now we want to put in an old-school computer lab upstairs but the wiring in the building is all wrong and this is the DOE’s answer: pay to have it rewired from the school’s operating budget.  Suffice to say that I’m sad that the UFT scheduled their rally against budget cuts for Wednesday, ’cause I’d have gone and tried to rally others if it weren’t such a crazy time for my department.

Anyway, most kids finished their projects, and we teachers left totally wiped out (of both energy and most of our arts & crafts supplies and anything else not tied down…).  There was one fight, but it could have happened any day.  And I hear that things were pretty calm on our corridor compared to elsewhere in the school, which makes me happy because I like to run a tight ship and for all we complain about this year’s kids being difficult, I think we’ve come really, really far with them.

The science team stayed at school doing last-minute prep of folders for teachers and judges, containing schedules, nametags, lists of projects and their numbers, and much more… then I went home, put my feet up, and started what promises to be an intense addiction to The Wire.

Hate mail?

I’m not sure what to make of the repeated searches for “k1ll ms. fr1zzle” and “ms. fr1zzle sucks” that have led people to my blog in the last couple of days.  I doubt they have anything to do with  me, but the only other ms. frizzle I know is my inspiration, an orange-haired science teacher in a children’s book series… not someone who inspires a lot of strong negative feelings, I imagine… weird.