In School Suspension of disbelief

(the pictures are from Kate Eric's collection, Stories for Bad Children)

As luck would have it, I got me a gig. It seems my willingness to take on the most bizarre and inhumane of jobs (refrigerator factory worker, nuclear power plant janitor, waitress, gas station cashier, middle school teacher) and my networking skills have paid off. Instead of sleeping too late and goofing around for the next two weeks, I'll be an ISS monitor at a middle school down the street, where a friend is an AP. Cush, I thought--read a book and babysit the bad kids. I kinda like the bad kids, as frustrating as they can be. Thank God, cause I have $17 in my checking account.

Yesterday a boy said angrily, "you're a bad teacher" when I wouldn't let him turn in half-done homework. My pulse quickened and I replied quickly, "yeah, well, I hear you're not the greatest student." The other kids laughed, and I felt ashamed. I had shamed him, reinforced the label put on him for years. I don't even know these kids, I'm a sub, there's no established rapport to fall back on in order to excuse sarcasm. These are kids who are here for getting busted with pot, who had been in fights or threatened to kill their teachers. They swear, a lot, and talk about hip-hop, sex, and gangs. I'm no angel, but I worry about them. A lot of them have learning disabilities, and have learned to hide their embarrassment behind a billy badass attitude. I'd be an asshole to assume I knew them, knew what they were all about, what their parents are like, their home, their experiences, their history.

The ISS routine in place was to copy down definitions of 50 words, such as "integrity" and "honor," then do homework. (If you knew why I'm a long-term sub, i.e. where the old guy went, you'd find that very ironic, but mum's the word. Watch the news.) Screw that noise. Determined they would learn something before they continued down the path to the ALC and eventually TYC, I decided to promise them extra credit in Language Arts if they would write about what they wanted to be when they grew up, or about who they look up to. I thought if I could make them think about things for themselves, not for their peers or their pride, wisom would somehow ensue. So far this week no one has taken me up on it. I procured books from the library, thinking a good read would make their day of sitting silently go faster. This was difficult, as the library would only give me the throwaway books, concerned the kids might rip up good books. I offered them the option of drawing or reading the newspaper, in addition to their classwork. No sleeping allowed. As the AP described, they were not supposed to have a good time in ISS--they were not supposed to want to come back again. That means I have to be bad cop all the time.I'm not really a confrontational person by nature--I don't go looking to start shit but I don't take it either. Shit, that is. And when you are the one in charge of making 8-10 juvenile delinquents who have not been taught manners, don't know how to play nice with others, and wouldn't read a book for free food and video games, you are doomed to be unpopular. I can deal, I thought. I've got a good teacher voice. I can be intimidating, stretched out to my full 5'11''. I can verbally demolish these kids, whose best burn is "shut up," or "you're gay." After a day or two though, I realized my approach must change.

I forced a softness into my voice, made myself think of them as just emotionally-confused and immature kids who are trying to find themselves, and offered help upon help when what I really wanted to give them was a sharp kick to the side of the head. Graduate school and ivory tower-type jobs make education seem easily student-centered. In real life, some students don't want your help, don't want to write, don't want to read, don't want to be here. I don't blame them, hearing the way some teachers (including myself at times) talk to them, pulling power plays over things like gum, talking, whatever. They're kids, they will break rules, they will push buttons. The bottom line is, it does matter what you say and how you say it. I'll be damned if I turn out like Principal Vernon:


I realize I'm not a savior or a martyr. I can't turn a kid around in a few days of ISS. I'll be disappointed a lot. It's a tough job that someone's gotta do, someone that isn't going to make things worse. So I focus on small victories. Larissa will be with me until Christmas. I'm not sure exactly what she did, but it must have been pretty bad. She is 14 but could pass for 26, her clothes too revealing for 8th grade, her makeup caked on. She worked hard all day but around 2pm she got very grumpy with me and refused to do anything else. After engaging in a brief and pointless power struggle, I dared her to read a book. It's 3:14, and she's still reading it. Danielle is also a frequent flyer, with the worst mouth I've seen in a while. Despite the fact that she has dropped the F bomb 6 times and hit another kid in the head, she has worked on her assignment all day, talking to herself, writing, reading. Kenny has brought his science worksheets up to me four times, each time returning poutily to his desk after I point out that he has not answered all the questions. This last time, he kicked a chair and threw down his book as I explained how in real life, you can't half-ass things, that you see them through to the end like a man. Only nicer. He told me to shut up, defeated and frustrated. Several zingers bubbled up in my mouth, but I said nothing. A few minutes later when he looked at me, I mimicked his big lower lip, and after a few seconds' standoff, he cracked a smile. The two sixth grade girls, imprisoned for fighting (each other), admitted they didn't know what the fight was really about, just that some other kids had said one was badmouthing the other.

What doesn't bend, breaks. TJ is sleeping at the corner desk, but oh well. I just caught Larissa's eye as she glanced up from her book. She smiled back at me, and kept reading.

This isn't English

Fecho reiterates much of what we've read from Rosenblatt, Freire, Dewey, Delpit, and other educational theorists and researchers in an eloquent way. He uses narratives and metaphors and spends a while describing what his book is not. I appreciate his point that there's too much emphasis on "getting through" the school days instead of wrestling out-of-syncness in the classroom, but it wasn't until the narrative of the guitar lessons that I felt connected to Fecho. His thoughts on inquiry-based teaching, theory and practice, strong collaboration and learning with peers definitely resonated with me, and I made notes and everything, but when he described the futility of his childhood dream of being a guitar hero I saw his direct route to learning land. I took piano lessons for years, dutifully practicing chords and drills and performing in several recitals with perfectly executed concertos and opuses, but not with the intensity and passion I heard coming from the piano when my mom played it. The closest I came to that was when I sat playing a few songs that captured me--Canon in D, Moonlight Sonata, Water Music, Ave Maria, and Prelude No. 4 in E minor Opus 28. Those had meaning.

Gaughan

Reinventing English stretches the mind. We've all been saying for months the benefits that would follow if we were to somehow take the traditional structure of English education, with all its inequities and shortcomings, throw it up as high as possible, and put the pieces back together. But in a better way. Practical, no.

But Gaughan is teaching me to change what I can change, in the smallest of ways--a mindframe, a conversation, a question. Just the simple questions he asks in the first chapter, designed to examine the underlying assumptions that make up our kids, are brilliant. Too much of the time, we throw pre-packaged lessons their way, one size fits all, denying room for identity construction is in its most developmental phrase. Watch a John Hughes movie. Kids who don't like school are the ones stuck in Saturday detention. It doesn't mean they don't want to learn, just that they don't want to play the game. I don't blame them sometimes, depending on how anarchist of a mood I'm in.

Subbing gives me the chance to check out other teachers' rooms and meet different classes of kids, and I like talking to them about their lives and what they think about things. A lot of them sound like Billy--"the familiar suck continues to populate his language and his emergiving identity. No one wants to 'suck.' But if everything around you 'sucks' (at least, as you perceive those things), it is difficult to find the flowers of hope." (16) The 6th grade class I subbed for today was plagued with conflict--we had all the stereotypes present: a fat kid, a dumb kid, a funny kid, a non-verbal kid, a follower kid, a big girl, a popular girl, and a gay kid. That's not me labeling, this is how they viewed each other. And they all viewed each other as dumb, even themselves. From the moment the bell rang, I struggled to make them understand how mean their comments about each other were and prayed a fight didn't break out.

"But I don't like him!" the gay kid screamed about the fat kid.
"Darlin, don't you think you're going to have to work with people you don't necessarily like sometimes in real life?"
"It's ok," said fat kid, "I hate him too."

Sigh.

Life is harsh. It can suck, and often does. Why keep presenting learning as a sterilized desk-filled room and a scantron? Teach kids how to deal with life, to examine their culture and upbringing and how it affects them, to understand what things mean, who they are, what do they think. In the very least, don't ask them to check the horror stories some of them live everyday at the door so they can try really hard on your worksheets.

Ok. Down a notch. Back to Gaughan. Is anyone else putting this on their syllabus? I'm thinking about it.

"As teachers, I believe we silence too many conversations, in our fear of stepping out of the politically neutral perspective assigned to us by society."

I particularly like Gaughan's ideas on leaving our mark.

By the way, Mary Pierce Brosmer apparently opened a school for women writing for change.

What Makes Us Moral

saw this article from Time online, titled "What Makes Us Moral." More class-related blogs coming soon.

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crazy bus folk, part two

As a sort of informal research project, I began listening intently to people on Cap Metro's southbound route 3 that takes me to school. Crazy interesting shit happens on the bus. Today's was the best in a while:

I boarded shortly after one pm after conferring times with some crazy dude with bandaids on his arms who was talking to a fairly normal looking guy about the location of a certain hospital. He didn't seem quite as normal when he pulled out a huge empty prescription bottle and said he was new in town, from Houston, going to go refill his friend's prescription of hydrocodone. Huh. Then Bandaid Man pulled out a similarly empty bottle, and they guffawed together for sharing a mission. Bandaid Man had just gotten out of the hospital for a staph infection, which he continued to describe in gruesome detail as we got on the bus. At this point I had trained myself to stop listening. Instead I focused on the bus driver.

Most female bus drivers are either so nice they'd bring you a cupcake if you told them tomorrow's your birthday or so mean they'll not only not let you take your water on the bus but berate you on your weight or hair at the same time. Today's driver was of the latter sort. She honked irratically and swerved like a Kennedy on a boat. At the Koening stop, an equally angry disabled lady got on the bus. "Are all these people disabled?" she barked at the driver, gesturing to Bandaid Man and a dorky girl suffering from a broken foot and acne.
"Ma'am, just get on the bus," the driver moaned.
"Don't boss me around!" she growled. Bandaid Man and seemingly normal guy continued their discussion in front of me, and seemingly normal guy gave him a few of the pills he had left. I continued reading Tom Robbins and tried not to laugh. Dorky pimply broken foot girl looked like she was going to cry, and angrily texted someone about the injustices she was suffering.

For the next five or so minutes, the driver struggled to get the wheelchaired lady buckled. Her habit of backing up sharply (as if in her walking life she constantly made sneak turns and scared people and had continued her aggressive moving into wheelchairhood) knocked the seatbelt out of the driver's hands twice. She had really worked up a sweat trying to reach around the lady to get that seatbelt, too. Any attempts at directing a collaborative effort were met with the warning "don't boss me around."

We finally got buckled and arranged and were about to lurch off when the man at the stop told us we were leaking antifreeze, which resulted in five more minutes of phone calls and head shaking, bitching and clock watching. I was glad I didn't have class til four. It was a beautiful day. Tom Robbins held me in the weirdness of the moment:

"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."

thank you, nice white lady