Today in class I was conducting a partially-bunk lesson on Vietnam that involved the analysis of a song from that period. Going into it I had a feeling it was too much for a single period, which meant the discussion at the end of class (probably the most educational part of the lesson) would potentially devolve into me telling students what the lyrics meant rather than allowing them to think about it for themselves, all the while being irritated at myself for being dense about time management and about the students talking too much and wasting a lot of time.
All of that happened, by the way, which left them with a shallow understanding of the war in Vietnam leading into tomorrow's guest presentation by a veteran of the war, but something else also occurred during my fifth period class that was at the very least amusing, if not helpful for me as we head toward the end of the year. After listening to Country Joe and Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" and summarizing the stanzas, the students were to talk about how the music changed the meaning of the lyrics. That was fine for most of them, but one of my students located near my iPod had a much better idea about how he should spend his time.
Now, this year I've been much less paranoid about having my things stolen. I've left books out, my iPod sitting on my projector cart while I walk around the room, etc. Last year my students either destroyed or stole everything I brought in that was fragile or worth more than five bucks, so it's the huge improvement is reflected in my being able to move around my classroom without worrying about it long after the iPod has fallen silent. While I trust my students not to take all of my stuff, that doesn't mean they don't pick it up, look at it, carry it around and show it to other students. In this case the student located closest to my iPod reached over and started scrolling through the list of artists until he came to Eminem. From there he scrolled through the song titles until he found, "As* Like That," and it was all over. While kind enough not to blare it over the speakers the iPod was still attached to, a small contingent of my students started to whisper about the song, which caught my attention. What tripped them up was the fact that they never whisper in groups of more than two unless it's important or a big deal.
At first I thought they were just generally making fun of what was on the contraption, but they were hardly too shy to show me otherwise. They thought the song being on there was hilarious and said that, "I (had) a lot of explaining to do," trying to put me on the spot and waiting to see if I could think fast enough on my feet to get out of the situation. I learned too much about this last year (the hard way), which in part kept me from earning the respect of my students until near the end of the year- when I was too exhausted to be at all surprised or jarred by what my students did. This time, instead of coming off as if I'd been caught in some scandal, I just pocketed the iPod and walked off, tossing back over my should the direction to get back to work. While disappointed they didn't get a rise out of me, I could tell I'd earned points for that and more especially for having Eminem on my playlist.
Last year when I faced situations like this one I was always caught off guard. I was so paranoid about screwing up, being fired or reprimanded for doing or saying something wrong in my classroom. That was a lasting effect of hearing loads of stories of teachers being dismissed for seemingly trivial offenses (mostly in suburban schools, it seemed) while I was in the school of ed. When you get put on the spot for something like this, the students give you half a second to respond during which they'll be able to tell if you were even slightly jarred by whatever it was they discovered or heard or saw you do. Good luck getting a class back if they really want to rip into after an incident like that. That button is gigantic. In the mean time, you've got to learn to keep your mind from wandering through all of the worst-case scenarios. In short, you need to learn to react to situations like these quickly and in the appropriate way.
After school today I had the chance to sit around and chat with an esteemed colleague of mine. We talked about stakeholder accountability-something that's been on my mind lately. Within that vein what we spoke more specifically about what could be done to hold students responsible for their actions. In the setting we work in the only thing you can really hold over students is their respect for you. For the ones that give you the most trouble, if they do not respect you there is nothing you can do outside of a bribe to keep them in line. I think that idea would shock and appall my school-of-ed self, but it seems to be a reality on the front line. That version of me might also have found it shocking that I got style points for having a pretty bad Eminem song on an iPod in my classroom. I'll certainly take those point, however, as they'll help as we head toward the end of the year.
Today's Wine: Le Sciare Rocca Normanna 2008. This one was great and under ten bucks; medium-bodied, a bit fruity but also with a slight smokiness. I'd pick it up again.
Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts
Friday, May 7, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Parents Can Make or Break You
After a spring break blogging sabbatical, I’d like to come back and post a few ideas that may piss people off, but things I’ve wanted to get off my chest for a while. Basically I’m developing the opinion that while every stakeholder in child’s education is incredibly important, the onus of educating children in this country is shifting further and further onto teacher’s shoulders. While I’m terribly biased, I’d still like to vent my frustration and address the various stakeholders in separate posts: Parents, Teachers, Administrators and Students. First up are parents.
There were two pieces of inspiration for this post that I witnessed over break:
1.) an American child in Italy (approximately 10 years old) ignoring every waiter asking him questions because he’s playing video games at the table in a nice restaurant
2.) an American child (approximately 10 years old) playing video games in the SISTINE CHAPEL, being completely ignored by his parents and ignoring everything around him the entire time.
Those two things got me thinking again about what (in my opinion) a large part of good parenting is: providing children with healthy, educational life experiences AND helping children to better those experiences. While it’s impossible to categorize parents in a way that makes everyone happy, one of the ways I generally make sense of many things is by setting up spectrum and placing things along it or beside it. In this way, I generally think of parents very simply as good, bad, or something in between. Parents who get involved and help teach their children are at the good end. Those that do not are on the bad end.
Great Parents
Let’s start with the good news. Great parents are the saving grace of education. They are unmatchable supports, the driving force behind the healthy growth and development of our students. They want to know what’s going on at school so they can help their child grow even more. They’re actively involved in every aspect of their child’s life and even if they work two or three jobs they do their damndest to make sure their child is healthy and prepared for life. As I talk to more young adults my age, we tend to agree that our parents’ successes are reflected in our own; that their incredible ability to teach us right from wrong, instill work ethic in us and promote healthy learning from trial and error, making mistakes and scraping a knee now and again were the reasons we had successes in school, college, and in life in general. When I run into a great parent at school, I try to tell them how wonderful they are without sounding like a complete idiot. I thank them as much as possible and usually say something lame like “keep up the good work,” which feels inappropriate in some ways because I’m not a parent myself.
My highest-achieving student last year was the son of immigrant parents who spoke no English and gave up everything they had in their country to move their family to the U.S., hoping that their very bright son would be more successful here. His father worked pretty much around the clock, seven days a week, but made absolutely sure that he was at parent conferences and that his son was doing his job in school and out of school. When I told him his son was receiving the award for academic excellence in my class, he cried and thereby gained whatever respect I had that wasn’t already his. After crazy, oftentimes disheartening experiences with parents last year, he and his wife are two big reasons I tried to get parents more involved this year.
Not Great Parents
On the other side of this equation, parents can be the most frustrating, irritating, pugnacious, destructive stakeholders in this field. There are times that I have no desire to talk to parents. There are times I want to wring their necks because I seem to love their child more than they do. After a rough day in the classroom when I dole out a dozen detentions and perhaps a suspension because students can't control themselves (due to nice weather, bad weather, weather, an assembly, a field trip, a fight or the very fact that they're fourteen), I don't want to spend an hour and a half reliving it by explaining to parents that their students screwed up. For the chronic detainees, I've probably spoken to the parent a dozen times already, given them my feedback, suggested changes to be made and sometimes suggested things that can be done at home (why I'm qualified to do that, I have no idea, but as many parents ask I feel like I need to give some response). Especially at this point in the year, if a student has not begun to turn things around the last thing I really want to do is talk to his parent another time and see the same result: no change.
Hostile Parents
These are the ones that attack you (generally verbally). The buck generally passes completely out of their household and the teachers/school/everyone else are blamed whenever their child screws up. There are a thousand reasons why they are angry- a thousand results that show up in the student, but the fact is that they are working against the other stakeholders and not with them. They’ve let themselves and the student off the hook, which is very destructive.
Indifferent Parents
The extreme in this case is a parent who literally tells the school to stop calling because between 8 and 3 the student is the school’s problem. The funny thing about this is that even when these students leave, the parents do very little to make them “their problem”. Though it is a very small minority of parents, it’s still alarming how often this happens. The students of these parents generally plug into video games once home (or stay outside and do much worse) and the amount of student-parent interaction is dismal.
When I was a substitute teacher in rural Kansas I spent a lot of time in a specific elementary special education classroom. One of the students I worked with was nine years old, but was on a three year-old level developmentally and could not speak. This was a presumed case of neglect. One bitter-cold (near zero degrees), winter day this student was dropped off at school with just a sweatshirt on and was shivering uncontrollably, but couldn’t even tell us how cold she really was. While the family might not have been able to afford a coat, the history of neglect supported a different story. I’ve never had a stronger desire to punch a human in the teeth as I did when her parent did that.
This might seem like an over-simplification of the parent situation, because it is. As I spend more time in the field, however, the cliche "parents are the most important teachers" seems to become an incredible reality. Their importance in their children's early childhood development, reinforcement of academic skills outside of school and socialization of non-academic skills such as work ethic, respect for adults, etc. dwarfs many of the things other stakeholders can possibly do to ensure the success of children. I believe this country is starting to realize that education needs to be fixed, but parents are probably the last variable in the equation that will be targeted, as doing so would mean the government getting their hands into parenting. Even those furthest to the left would be leery of that.
Next up: Teachers.
Today's Wine: While a bit of a cop-out, I'd like to use one post to pay tribute to the carafes of wine we drank in Italy. When we arrived we drank a few bottles, but found the half-liter carafes of house wine were rather nice at virtually every place we ate.
There were two pieces of inspiration for this post that I witnessed over break:
1.) an American child in Italy (approximately 10 years old) ignoring every waiter asking him questions because he’s playing video games at the table in a nice restaurant
2.) an American child (approximately 10 years old) playing video games in the SISTINE CHAPEL, being completely ignored by his parents and ignoring everything around him the entire time.
Those two things got me thinking again about what (in my opinion) a large part of good parenting is: providing children with healthy, educational life experiences AND helping children to better those experiences. While it’s impossible to categorize parents in a way that makes everyone happy, one of the ways I generally make sense of many things is by setting up spectrum and placing things along it or beside it. In this way, I generally think of parents very simply as good, bad, or something in between. Parents who get involved and help teach their children are at the good end. Those that do not are on the bad end.
Great Parents
Let’s start with the good news. Great parents are the saving grace of education. They are unmatchable supports, the driving force behind the healthy growth and development of our students. They want to know what’s going on at school so they can help their child grow even more. They’re actively involved in every aspect of their child’s life and even if they work two or three jobs they do their damndest to make sure their child is healthy and prepared for life. As I talk to more young adults my age, we tend to agree that our parents’ successes are reflected in our own; that their incredible ability to teach us right from wrong, instill work ethic in us and promote healthy learning from trial and error, making mistakes and scraping a knee now and again were the reasons we had successes in school, college, and in life in general. When I run into a great parent at school, I try to tell them how wonderful they are without sounding like a complete idiot. I thank them as much as possible and usually say something lame like “keep up the good work,” which feels inappropriate in some ways because I’m not a parent myself.
My highest-achieving student last year was the son of immigrant parents who spoke no English and gave up everything they had in their country to move their family to the U.S., hoping that their very bright son would be more successful here. His father worked pretty much around the clock, seven days a week, but made absolutely sure that he was at parent conferences and that his son was doing his job in school and out of school. When I told him his son was receiving the award for academic excellence in my class, he cried and thereby gained whatever respect I had that wasn’t already his. After crazy, oftentimes disheartening experiences with parents last year, he and his wife are two big reasons I tried to get parents more involved this year.
Not Great Parents
On the other side of this equation, parents can be the most frustrating, irritating, pugnacious, destructive stakeholders in this field. There are times that I have no desire to talk to parents. There are times I want to wring their necks because I seem to love their child more than they do. After a rough day in the classroom when I dole out a dozen detentions and perhaps a suspension because students can't control themselves (due to nice weather, bad weather, weather, an assembly, a field trip, a fight or the very fact that they're fourteen), I don't want to spend an hour and a half reliving it by explaining to parents that their students screwed up. For the chronic detainees, I've probably spoken to the parent a dozen times already, given them my feedback, suggested changes to be made and sometimes suggested things that can be done at home (why I'm qualified to do that, I have no idea, but as many parents ask I feel like I need to give some response). Especially at this point in the year, if a student has not begun to turn things around the last thing I really want to do is talk to his parent another time and see the same result: no change.
Hostile Parents
These are the ones that attack you (generally verbally). The buck generally passes completely out of their household and the teachers/school/everyone else are blamed whenever their child screws up. There are a thousand reasons why they are angry- a thousand results that show up in the student, but the fact is that they are working against the other stakeholders and not with them. They’ve let themselves and the student off the hook, which is very destructive.
Indifferent Parents
The extreme in this case is a parent who literally tells the school to stop calling because between 8 and 3 the student is the school’s problem. The funny thing about this is that even when these students leave, the parents do very little to make them “their problem”. Though it is a very small minority of parents, it’s still alarming how often this happens. The students of these parents generally plug into video games once home (or stay outside and do much worse) and the amount of student-parent interaction is dismal.
When I was a substitute teacher in rural Kansas I spent a lot of time in a specific elementary special education classroom. One of the students I worked with was nine years old, but was on a three year-old level developmentally and could not speak. This was a presumed case of neglect. One bitter-cold (near zero degrees), winter day this student was dropped off at school with just a sweatshirt on and was shivering uncontrollably, but couldn’t even tell us how cold she really was. While the family might not have been able to afford a coat, the history of neglect supported a different story. I’ve never had a stronger desire to punch a human in the teeth as I did when her parent did that.
This might seem like an over-simplification of the parent situation, because it is. As I spend more time in the field, however, the cliche "parents are the most important teachers" seems to become an incredible reality. Their importance in their children's early childhood development, reinforcement of academic skills outside of school and socialization of non-academic skills such as work ethic, respect for adults, etc. dwarfs many of the things other stakeholders can possibly do to ensure the success of children. I believe this country is starting to realize that education needs to be fixed, but parents are probably the last variable in the equation that will be targeted, as doing so would mean the government getting their hands into parenting. Even those furthest to the left would be leery of that.
Next up: Teachers.
Today's Wine: While a bit of a cop-out, I'd like to use one post to pay tribute to the carafes of wine we drank in Italy. When we arrived we drank a few bottles, but found the half-liter carafes of house wine were rather nice at virtually every place we ate.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Do Teachers Need Breaks?
I'll come back to the issue of what I think summer break should be used for, but breaks throughout the school year still strike me as incredibly necessary. Many professions in this country are incredibly exhausting and while I have not worked in many other industries the jobs I have done that are exhausting do not compare to the position I currently hold.
In the spirit of taking a break, this post is short and sweet. Spring break should be used for two things: the first and less important is to prepare for the week or two after spring break and perhaps create a plan for the last few units of the year; the second is to rest up for what will be the final sprint to the end of the year.
It's going to be fast and messy and it's going to make your head spin. After spring break you'll realize how little time you have left to prepare students for exams and cram in the rest of your curriculum and you'll ratchet it up a notch. Students start going crazy and/or checking out entirely and your exhaustion level will peak around the end of May after which you may achieve some level of numbness that will pull you through the end of June where you'll land in a thick cloud of confusion as to what kind of freight train just smashed you to the ground.
I'll address how to pick up the pieces then. As for right now, I'm in Italy doing my damnedest to catch up on sleep and relax. Hopefully I've already planned the lesson for the day I get back so that I won't have to do it while in jet-legged fog the night we get back stateside (which happens to be the night before school begins again).
First Years: If you've made it this far, you'll make it to the end of the year. Do yourself and your students a favor and use spring break for what it's intended to be- a break.
Today's Wine: Whatever bottle I'm drinking on my quest to "sample" at least one nice local vintage each day during break.
In the spirit of taking a break, this post is short and sweet. Spring break should be used for two things: the first and less important is to prepare for the week or two after spring break and perhaps create a plan for the last few units of the year; the second is to rest up for what will be the final sprint to the end of the year.
It's going to be fast and messy and it's going to make your head spin. After spring break you'll realize how little time you have left to prepare students for exams and cram in the rest of your curriculum and you'll ratchet it up a notch. Students start going crazy and/or checking out entirely and your exhaustion level will peak around the end of May after which you may achieve some level of numbness that will pull you through the end of June where you'll land in a thick cloud of confusion as to what kind of freight train just smashed you to the ground.
I'll address how to pick up the pieces then. As for right now, I'm in Italy doing my damnedest to catch up on sleep and relax. Hopefully I've already planned the lesson for the day I get back so that I won't have to do it while in jet-legged fog the night we get back stateside (which happens to be the night before school begins again).
First Years: If you've made it this far, you'll make it to the end of the year. Do yourself and your students a favor and use spring break for what it's intended to be- a break.
Today's Wine: Whatever bottle I'm drinking on my quest to "sample" at least one nice local vintage each day during break.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Retreat
Sometimes I think I know a lot about education. Other times conversations with colleagues and other in the field leave me humbled and wondering if I really know a damn thing about this job. Generally I'm somewhere in between, but this weekend I experienced a lot of the latter.
I went to retreat this weekend with my principal, an ancient learning specialist (special education teacher), our parent coordinator, and two other teachers from our school- a magnificent English teacher and a third year math teacher who is brilliant, but is sometimes not well-received by our staff because he speaks so candidly. The invitation to attend the retreat was extended to the whole staff, but the three of us were asked specifically to attend. That fact went to my head a bit, so I used the opportunity to bring up issues that I've been thinking about lately. In reality I was probably only invited because they knew I'd be interested in attending, while the vast majority of the staff wouldn't be down for it, which means it probably wasn't the most appropriate place to blwo a lot of hot air about the major ed issues that have been bothering me.
Friday we sat around a table brain-storming ideas of what to do with the many hours we would spend together over the course of the weekend. Because our parent coordinator was there, I figured I would bring up my frustration with parents in the community and ask what could be done to help them help us to help their children in the school. Apparently I came off as wanting to save the Bronx and personally make all the parents in the Bronx better. Because of the way I came off, the principal, learning specialist, and the parent coordinator shut me down, saying that there is no way to affect the parents who might benefit from some extra support and ideas on how to engage their students.
From that point forward I was pretty hesitant to offer my opinion on the work at hand. I regressed a bit to sitting and listening, feeling like I don't have enough experience to really offer a valid opinion on how to run any part of the school. Perhaps it was just me being stubborn as well.
After speaking frankly with my girlfriend about the matter (she works in my school and hears some of the gossip I don't), it's gotten around that I have kind of an attitude when I discuss ed issues and matters about the school with my colleagues. I kind of addressed this an earlier post and thought that I'd fixed the problem. Apparently that is not the case. What I thought was my cutting-out-the-crap to speak candidly has left me coming off as condescending and insensitive.
Perhaps my second year is not only going to be about learning a great deal about actually teaching students in the South Bronx (rather than holding on for dear life), it's also going to be about learning to be a positive part of my particular staff. It may be time for a while to take a step or two back and listen more carefully instead of barging in with my opinion.
Today's Wines: On Saturday I went to a wine bar and then to a regular bar. I had wine at both places that were remarkably different. At Cavatappo I had something referred to as a Super Tuscan which was really good (Bruni Poggio d'Elsa 2008) and off the medium-bodied section of the list. After that we just split a glass of something more "robust" (Rosso di Montepulciano - Il Seniero 2006). It was more expensive, but definitely seemed to have more bang for the buck. From there we went to a bar next door and had some generic wine from behind the bar, which, because we'd spent money on some good wine with some well-paired appetizers, had that thick grape-juice taste that comes from the big jugs of wine.
I went to retreat this weekend with my principal, an ancient learning specialist (special education teacher), our parent coordinator, and two other teachers from our school- a magnificent English teacher and a third year math teacher who is brilliant, but is sometimes not well-received by our staff because he speaks so candidly. The invitation to attend the retreat was extended to the whole staff, but the three of us were asked specifically to attend. That fact went to my head a bit, so I used the opportunity to bring up issues that I've been thinking about lately. In reality I was probably only invited because they knew I'd be interested in attending, while the vast majority of the staff wouldn't be down for it, which means it probably wasn't the most appropriate place to blwo a lot of hot air about the major ed issues that have been bothering me.
Friday we sat around a table brain-storming ideas of what to do with the many hours we would spend together over the course of the weekend. Because our parent coordinator was there, I figured I would bring up my frustration with parents in the community and ask what could be done to help them help us to help their children in the school. Apparently I came off as wanting to save the Bronx and personally make all the parents in the Bronx better. Because of the way I came off, the principal, learning specialist, and the parent coordinator shut me down, saying that there is no way to affect the parents who might benefit from some extra support and ideas on how to engage their students.
From that point forward I was pretty hesitant to offer my opinion on the work at hand. I regressed a bit to sitting and listening, feeling like I don't have enough experience to really offer a valid opinion on how to run any part of the school. Perhaps it was just me being stubborn as well.
After speaking frankly with my girlfriend about the matter (she works in my school and hears some of the gossip I don't), it's gotten around that I have kind of an attitude when I discuss ed issues and matters about the school with my colleagues. I kind of addressed this an earlier post and thought that I'd fixed the problem. Apparently that is not the case. What I thought was my cutting-out-the-crap to speak candidly has left me coming off as condescending and insensitive.
Perhaps my second year is not only going to be about learning a great deal about actually teaching students in the South Bronx (rather than holding on for dear life), it's also going to be about learning to be a positive part of my particular staff. It may be time for a while to take a step or two back and listen more carefully instead of barging in with my opinion.
Today's Wines: On Saturday I went to a wine bar and then to a regular bar. I had wine at both places that were remarkably different. At Cavatappo I had something referred to as a Super Tuscan which was really good (Bruni Poggio d'Elsa 2008) and off the medium-bodied section of the list. After that we just split a glass of something more "robust" (Rosso di Montepulciano - Il Seniero 2006). It was more expensive, but definitely seemed to have more bang for the buck. From there we went to a bar next door and had some generic wine from behind the bar, which, because we'd spent money on some good wine with some well-paired appetizers, had that thick grape-juice taste that comes from the big jugs of wine.
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