Chosen Few

In Tolerance Club today we had the students take the literacy test that the state of Louisiana administered to people who could not offer proof of a fifth grade education when they tried to register to vote as late as 1964. It consists of 30 questions and had to be completed in ten minutes with 100% accuracy in order to qualify.

When we were finished, we watched this video of Harvard students who also took the test. Their reactions were pretty close to our own.

Not a single one of us made the cut. Although I was pretty confident of my performance, it turned out that I misread the directions for number 12, and without time to go back and check my work my error stood. Oh well. Who needs democracy, anyway?

Everytime a Bell Rings

As I've mentioned before, the Tolerance Club at our school sponsors a movie each month. This December we're showing It's a Wonderful Life. It fits with our spotlighted IB learner profile trait, Caring, and it also reinforces our core concept that one person can make a huge positive impact on many lives.

On Monday, we had planned to show a clip to our student members and have them do the advertising for our show tomorrow, but that plan went awry with the inclement weather. (Not complaining!) So, it's been left up to us adult fogies to promote an old black and white movie and encourage a school full of tweens to show and hopefully grow.

It's usually my job to find the trailer that will play on the morning announcements, and so it was with more than a few sighs that I looked at what was available on the internet this afternoon. As a die-hard fan of the film, some of them were certainly sighs of appreciation and even anticipation to share this great movie with a new generation, but there were sighs of consternation as well. Most of the clips were much too anachronistic to draw our students in.

I was about to despair before I found this one:

(If you can't see the image click here. It's really worth it!)

The Wolf of Bedford Falls?

Oh. Yeah.

Room of Requirement

There has been a fair amount of shenanigans in Tolerance Club in the last few weeks. Don't misunderstand me; it's not that I don't appreciate the kids who voluntarily show up for an hour after school each Monday, and it's not that I don't know that kids have a lot of pent-up energy after seven solid hours of schooling. Even so, the behavior of the group has become, well, intolerable.

It was with this in mind that we adult sponsors planned to spend the first half of our meeting today having the students re-establish group "norms."

(Actually, I would have preferred to call them "rules" or even "agreements," because the term "norm" brings with it a lot of freight, especially in respect to the imposition of questionable business models on education-- I'm talking to you PLCs. Take for example this definition: Norms keep a group functioning as a system instead of a collection of individuals. Um. Does anyone else recognize that as a line from a dystopian novel? No? Well it should be.)

But I digress. So, we had the students brainstorm a list of rules that they could agree to follow when they attended Tolerance Club. The first one was to treat each other with respect, and when pressed, they defined that as sharing supplies and listening when others spoke. The list went on, and seemed pretty comprehensive until someone wanted to add "Have fun" for number eleven.

A hand shot up. "But what if we can't have fun and follow these rules?"

"I don't know. Is having fun more important than being respectful?" I countered.

"Maybe," he shrugged mischievously.

"Erase having fun then," I said, and we did.

"Wait," another student interjected. "You don't want us to have fun?" she asked with more than a hint of indignation.

"Oh, we want you to have fun," I told her, "It's just not required."

Traction

This is our fourth year of doing Tolerance Club, and today's meeting was full of surprises. In other years, we have embraced the largely sixth grade participation as a good thing, hoping that we could count on their commitment as their middle school time progressed. That was never the case, though. For some reason, Tolerance Club just wasn't appealing to 7th and 8th graders, and all but our most faithful participants dropped out. This year, we made the conscious decision to be happy with whoever we got-- everyone can use a little tolerance, right? So, imagine our delight when the majority of the kids who showed up were in seventh grade, most of them our alumni from last year.

Could it be that this tolerance thing is finally catching on?

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

The Tolerance Club sponsored our monthly movie today. Last time we showed The Miracle Worker and the library was pretty packed, so we asked for permission to branch out into the theater. The movie was The Hammer, rated PG-13, and so we required our middle schoolers to get a permission slip signed by a parent.

As usual, the TC kids made posters and we ran a trailer on the morning announcements promising a snack and a couple hours of community and service to any student interested in watching this true story of Matt Hamill, born deaf, who against all odds becomes a national NCAA wrestling champ.

This afternoon, the assistant principal and I waited in the lobby as the bell rang, ready to collect permission slip "tickets" and usher the students into the theatre. At first it was a trickle, a few kids came right after their last class, eager to see the movie. Soon, the lobby was full, and when we started letting them in, it was literally only a matter of minutes before we ran out of snacks. As I dashed back to our team room to scrounge up some spare treats, I passed a line of students that ran past the main office and well down the hallway.

Later, when the lights were back up and the late buses had pulled off into a rainy Friday afternoon, we counted up how many permission slips there were and then added in the last minute phone calls home that we had approved. Our house was over 200, meaning that close to 30% of our student body had come to the movie.

Wow.

How Far Have We Come Again?

Today in Tolerance Club, we did an activity that we've had success with every year. Called In and Out, the concept is simple: everyone in the group forms a large circle, and then someone reads a series of statements. If you feel like it it describes you, then you step in, otherwise you stay out. (It's kind of like the Hokey Pokey with an agenda.)

The activity is designed to spotlight our uniqueness by highlighting our commonalities and differences, and the kids love it. As we hear statements like, I speak more than one language fluently, I consider myself a musician, I like to read for fun, I have a friend or relative with a disability, the perimeter undulates like a living cell under a microscope, and people laugh in delight, recognition, or even embarrassment at their admissions and the attendant associations.

It's always a bonding experience and it's always eye-opening, too. Today my personal wake-up call came when we heard, I have been told I couldn't do something because of my gender, and the only ones inside the circle were girls.

Chipping Away

"I saw you carrying a bag into school yesterday," one of my homeroom students said this morning.

He's autistic, and he doesn't usually initiate conversations with me, so I was glad that he did, but like many teachers, I carry several bags every day, so it took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about."You mean that bag of chips?" I asked.

"Yeah. What were those for?"

"They were snacks for the Tolerance Club meeting," I told him.

"What's the Tolerance Club?" he asked.

"It's a club for kids that meets after school," I started. "We watch movies and talk about how to make our school a friendlier place. Do you think you would ever want to come to it?"

"No!" he said.

"Why not?" I asked him.

"Because it's for normal people," he answered.

That took me aback a bit. "It's for people who like people who are different," I told him. "Everybody is different in some way, right?"

"Yes," he said.

"So, would you like to come to a meeting sometime?" I asked again.

"Will I get chips?"

"Yep," I assured him.

"Then yes."

Bully Pulpit

Today I took the opportunity to promote a couple of up-coming Tolerance Club activities in all of my English classes. In addition to the showing of Bully that we arranged, we were sharing the Academy Award Winning short subject documentary, Strangers No More, today after school.

I don't often take class time to do so, because there are always posters and morning announcements about every event, so I assume that if they are interested, students will attend.

Wrong. We had 15 new people show up this afternoon, and yes, they were all my students.

Where Do We Start?

We saw the movie Bully today. It has been on our list since we first heard of it, but in order to encourage as many members of our school community to see it, the Tolerance Club is sponsoring a showing next Sunday afternoon, and I have agreed to help facilitate a brief discussion afterward for whoever is interested in staying. Obviously, I wanted to see the movie in advance.

There are tons of materials about bullying available both in general, and on the official website of the movie. So much stuff is out there in fact, that it can be overwhelming. Watching the movie today, which spans the school year 2009-10 and follows the experiences of five families of kids who have been bullied, my heart of course broke for the victims of such cruelty. As a person who works in a school, I know first hand how widespread bullying is, and also how difficult it is to address effectively, much less eradicate.

In fact, that is why we started the Tolerance Club, as an acknowledgement that we adults have to help the kids change the climate in their school. We, like most schools in the nation, have a zero tolerance for bullying, but most aggression takes place out of sight of authority. Must we be more vigilant? Absolutely, but the key is in changing the culture of the kids.

As I watched, I also considered what I might say next week and how best to focus the conversation in the little time we would have. The statistics say that 13 million kids get bullied each year, which is a staggering number, but common sense says that there are more bullies than victims. Therefore, parents are more likely to have children who are bullies, or at least bystanders, than they are to have kids who have been bullied.

That seems like a good place to start a discussion.

Moving Mountains

Our Tolerance Club took a group of 28 kids to the Martin Luther King Memorial this morning. I had been by the site from the Tidal Basin side, but not inside, as we had Isabel with us, and dogs are not allowed. This time, we entered from the Independence Avenue side, and I knew from the research I had done to prepare our group that the thirty-foot stones that flank the entrance are called The Mountain of Despair. Once inside, you see the huge center piece that has been removed to create the opening, and from it the sculpture of Dr. King emerges. This piece is called The Stone of Hope.

Both are a reference to a line in the I Have a Dream speech, but the symbolic power of those stones standing for what everyone wishing for equal civil rights faced, the mountain of despair, and what they were able to achieve through their hope and perseverance was very moving to me.

And it was not lost on our students, either. When, at the end of the trip,  we gathered to talk about our thoughts and observations, all of them were able to express their admiration and appreciation for those who had moved mountains to allow them to have the opportunities they do.

Hero and Villains

The Tolerance Club showed the movie Afghan Star today at school. Made in 2008, this remarkable documentary recounts the experience of four contestants on the Afghan TV version of American Idol, and it is very informative and revealing about life in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban regime.

Most interesting to me was the heightened awareness of and concern about the contestants' ethnicity and gender. Having read The Kite Runner, I was fascinated to see both a Pashtun and a Hazara man featured. The main drama however involved the women, for as controversial as singing in public was to this nation emerging from strict sharia law, allowing women to perform was even more divisive.

Each woman approached the storm of moral ambiguity differently. One tried to be as respectful as possible, honoring tradition as closely as she could, and the other was outspoken about her "open-mindedness," pushing the boundaries of propriety in her performances.

To add perspective, both women dressed quite modestly, and both covered their heads, and so the subtlety of their differences was mostly lost on a predominately western audience such as ours. When the one removed her head scarf and danced on stage for her exit number, though, there were many in the group that clapped.

There was at least one who did not. A sixth grade girl, who is Muslim and wears a head-covering herself, left the movie shortly after that scene. "What she did was really bad," she told her friend on the way out. "She showed her hair."

Over the Weight Limit

It's already been a week that I've been off from school, and I must say that I've been more than able to let it all go this time-- there's nothing happening that can't wait until the first Tuesday of 2012. Oh, January 3 will be a rocking day-- I predict that we will hit the ground running and continue non-stop, until, March? Unless there is a blizzard, Spring Break will be the next break; until then we will rocket along with planning and grading, on to the end of the quarter, then science fair, early release, professional development, spring conferences, standardized tests, field trips, meetings, conferences, referrals, tolerance clubs, writing clubs, homework clubs, literary magazine, and on and on.

It seems counter-intuitive that the busier we are, the easier it seems to leave our professional baggage behind at school on breaks like this, but the truth is that some things are just too heavy to bring along.

Not So Sunny Day

I haven't mentioned Tolerance Club in a while-- October is National Bullying Awareness Month, and so that fits in with our mission quite well. Today we showed the kids a Sesame Street clip where Big Bird gets an invitation to join the "Good Bird Club" and is all excited until the mean pigeon, blue jay and robin reject him, at first because his feet are too big.

We had a little technical difficulty streaming the video on our WiFi network, and so to fill the time while it loaded, I asked the kids to guess what might happen. "He's going to try and change his feet," one confidently predicted.

"And that won't be enough for those birds," another added. "They're going to make him keep on changing."

I was super-impressed by their accuracy. "Have you guys seen this before?" I asked.

"No!" they answered (and they totally would have said "duh," if they didn't just know it was rude). "That's what always happens with bullies."

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

A few weeks ago, I had a pretty intense conversation with the parent of a former student who is also very involved in the PTA at our school and in our district. She was concerned about some of the movies that the tolerance club had shown this year. Her objection was that we had not adequately helped the kids "process" the issues that they had been exposed to by viewing these films.

As an educator, I am wary of this idea of "helping" kids to think issues through. Many times it is reduced to getting the kids to say what they know we want to hear. This is part of the reason I became involved in the Tolerance Club. My experience has shown me that middle school children are very capable of parroting the "right" answers in discussions of, for example, bullying or discrimination, and yet their behavior when adults are not around belies their words. I wanted to find a way for the kids to come to the value of tolerance and acceptance on their own, so that they would be more likely to act on those values whether an adult was present or not.

I tried to explain my perspective to the parent. I told her that in my experience too much of education involved telling kids what to think rather than giving them the chance to think for themselves. She's a thoughtful person, and I received an email the next day thanking me for my time and assuring me that she values my experience and perspective, and asking if we can talk again.

Of course we will, and I'll welcome that conversation, because I thought of her today when I visited my garden for the first time in a week. There was a lot to do. The tomatoes were growing outside their cages, the strawberries desperately needed water, weeds were making steady progress, and the zucchini that had been no larger than my index finger had grown to almost 12 inches. I know I can't make my garden grow, but there's a lot I can do to help it do so.

Oh Lord!

Today the Tolerance Club sponsored another movie-- this one called New Muslim Cool. It's about a Puerto Rican-American rapper who has converted to Islam. Given the age and ethnic diversity of our student body, we thought it would be of interest, and we had about 50 kids stay after school to see it.

Later, three of the other sponsors of the group and I were brainstorming appropriate titles for our last film of the year. We have shown five documentaries, and our thought was that a more main stream movie that conveyed a message might be a good way to finish the year. As we talked, three of us were using our smart phones to look up information on the titles we were considering. IMDB turned out to be a handy resource for us, but we had to laugh at how the "Parents Guide" information was presented. For example the section on profanity lists all of the swearing in a movie, out of context, like so:

At least one slang term for breasts (as in "It's as cold as a witch's t*t"), 6 damns, 3 hells, 3 craps, 1 ass (used with "hole"), 1 turd, and 2 uses of "Oh my God" and "Oh Lord" and 1 use each of "Jesus Christ" and "Oh God" as exclamations. 

Holy cow! I guess that's good to know, but can you imagine having that job?

Q-tip?

Our school is organizing an origami crane drive to benefit the survivors of the Japanese Tsunami. In support of the effort, the Tolerance Club learned how to fold them yesterday. The idea was that we would make some ourselves, but we would also teach other people how to make them, too.

First of all, those critters are complicated, but like skinning the proverbial cat, there are many ways to make the necessary folds, and since learning the skill, I have done my part to spread the word of the crane. Yesterday afternoon, two boys came to my room after track practice, one sorry he could not have been to the meeting, and the other just tagging along. "She's going to show us how to make origami cranes!" the first kid told his friend.

"What??!" his friend asked with profound confusion.

"Origami cranes," I repeated, but still he frowned.

I showed him one that was already finished. "Ooooooh," he answered, "origami cranes. I thought you said origami brains."

I laughed and crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at him. "Here! We can make those, too."

It Was a Dark and Stormy Prom Night in Mississippi

I have a conflict tomorrow after school; I'm double-booked. The Tolerance Club is showing a movie, Prom Night in Mississippi, and the literary and art magazine staff is supposed to judge the entries for our Dark and Stormy Night contest. I'm sure I'll work it out tomorrow, but tonight, the mash-up amuses me.

Emeritus

This year I gave up my position as co-coach of the girls basketball team at our school. There was no animosity involved; it was really just my realization that 15 years was enough and the fact that I wanted to do other things with that time, like the Tolerance Club and the Literary Magazine.

Still, it's an odd sensation to watch the games from the other side of the court. I know all the players, not to mention the plays. I like to imagine that I am helpful in some way, calling out encouragement and guidance in a familiar voice from a place where perhaps the coach's voice is too faint for the girls to hear. And I am still very disappointed when they lose, because I know they are so much better than that.

Exposure

We're still plugging away at the Tolerance Club. A couple of months ago, someone had the idea to sponsor movies every month or so after school and invite the whole student body. Our first presentation was Bullied, a short documentary about Jamie Nabozny, a gay teen who was so severely harassed in school with so little support from the administration that he sued the school district and won. We advertised, served popcorn and drinks, and offered an hour of community service credit for anyone who came to the library on a Friday afternoon. To our amazement, 75 kids showed up and heard the message that intolerance is wrong. They even applauded when the verdict was read.

Yesterday it was another documentary short, this one on kids with Tourette's Syndrome. In addition to the film, I Have Tourette's, but Tourette's Doesn't Have Me, we also had a guest speaker-- a young woman who was diagnosed with the neurological disorder at the age of four, but who went on to graduate from UVa and is currently in law school. Her presentation and Q&A with the 75 students who also attended this event were compelling and very moving in their honesty. At one point she told the kids that as hard as it was to cope with her condition and the social consequences, she was glad in a way to have had Tourette's, because everyone has to deal with something and her struggle made her much more empathetic.

I know enough about adolescent development to understand that having difficulty accepting differences is actually an appropriate stage for kids to work through. I don't expect miracles, but it feels good to initiate some real conversations the likes of which rarely happen in middle school.

Thank You, Laura

Today at lunch I was helping several kids put the finishing touches on their gifts of writing, and truth be told, I was completing my fifth one as well. In the midst of this mad effort to meet the deadline, my friend who teaches next door knocked on my window. "Are you eating lunch today?" she asked through the glass.

It is our practice to eat together in the team room almost every day. We enjoy each others' company, but there's more to it than that, because while it's true that no one else on the team always eats with us, it is also so that everyone else on the team eats with us sometimes, and we have an unspoken pact to keep that little welcome light of camaraderie burning. Today, however, was one of those rare times when I was not going to make it in for lunch.

I waved my hands desperately, gesturing at the computer and the kids. "I can't!" I replied. My friend nodded and turned toward the team room. A few minutes later she returned with my lunch all warmed up and ready to eat at my desk.

The day tumbled on headlong from there-- teaching, meetings, sub-plans and Tolerance Club after school. I ran several errands on my way home and have spent the evening packing and preparing for our road trip to Buffalo in the morning, but through it all the warm glow of my friend's small kindness has sustained me.