High Stakes Testing

A few years ago, I tried out for Jeopardy. I had taken the online test on a lark, and I guess I did well enough, because they e-mailed me a few weeks later and asked if I'd be interested in a live audition. The contestant search was being held at a hotel about five miles away, so how could I say no? There was a conflict, though. My appointment was the same date and time as my students' annual standardized reading test. Most research shows that students perform better when those tests are administered by teachers they know, and I was concerned about missing it. But, there were no second chances for the Jeopardy audition, and it wasn't that hard to get special permission from the administration of my school to go to the try-outs; in fact, they were kind of impressed that I had one at all.

And so, on a sunny morning in late May, instead of overseeing the sharpening of number two pencils and the bubbling of birth dates, middle initials, and test form numbers, I boarded a subway train bound for destiny-- Ken Jennings, look out. I confess that I was nervous; I had no idea what to expect. I found my way to the hotel, arriving ten minutes early. I joined a crowd of about 30 people milling around the lobby, silently sizing up the competition, or so it seemed to me until their tour guide called to them in German, and they left to board the bus out front. It was only then that I saw the tiny sign with white letters pressed into narrow rows of black felt and a miniature arrow pointing to a marble staircase leading down.

My palm stuck a little on the tarnished brass banister. At the foot of the steps, I saw a line of people waiting outside a plain white door. They really were checking out their opponents-- looking closely at everyone, asking probing questions. Silently, I took my place at the end of the line. As we waited, I overheard that for several people this was their second, or even third, audition. I also found out that most people had to travel a long way to get to this try out. My anxiety hopped up a level or two. Exactly at the appointed hour, the white door swung open and we were called in. I knew that Alex Trebec was in town for another gig, but when I stepped into that basement hotel meeting room, I knew he was nowhere near the place. They took Polaroid pictures of each of us, and then we sat at rows of folding tables facing a collapsible screen like the one my uncle used to show his super-8 movies on.

They gave each of us a Jeopardy logo pen and a pep talk about personality and the importance of constant clicking to be sure you ring in. We took another written test, and this time I wasn't quite as confident as I had been that night several months ago when I sat down and banged out the answers to their 50 questions in about eight minutes. They asked us to provide three personal anecdotes, and I tried to imagine Alex Trebec asking me about mine: "Someone told me that you once cooked a meal for the Queen of England? Tell me about that." There was also the live part of the audition where we competed against two others and we were rated on accuracy and telegenics. When they asked me what I might do with any money I won, I said I wanted to take my nephews to Loch Ness to find the monster, and they seemed to like that, but it was hard to tell.

It was over quickly, and they said that they would be in touch if there was a spot for us. Our names would stay on file for about a year, and if we didn't hear by then, we were welcome to try out again. Back at school the next day, I asked the kids how their test went, and most shrugged. "Who knows?" said one. I nodded, empathetically.

Nit-picking

There are two quintessential public school experiences that I've managed to escape so far: pink eye and lice. It's probably because I have no children of my own, and I know I'm not in the clear by any means. I've heard a lot of lice stories over the past couple of months-- more than I can remember from any other school year. Most memorable? The second grader who has had them on and off all year and has to go the clinic once a week for his nit-check, after spring break he came back with bugs crawling visibly through his hair. His teacher cringed and winced all the way through the story as she told me about it. For the first time ever this year, too, a couple of my own students have had lice, and so I dutifully bagged up all the bean bag chairs and throw pillows and put them away for two weeks.

Today a colleague, who is also a parent and wishes to remain anonymous (they all do when it comes to lice) told me how she spent the whole weekend delousing her children. She even called the Lice Lady. For 60 bucks an hour, the Lice Lady comes to your house with her special tools and combs gently and thoroughly through each family member's hair, giving a damage assessment and dispensing expert advice on completely ridding your home of these alarming parasites.

The Lice Lady told my friend to use the natural remedy instead of the harsher more common ones-- just drench your hair and scalp with the oily lavender-based concoction, and then wrap it in plastic for three hours! She also shared her anecdotal observation that when a family is infested, very rarely does the dad ever have lice. (Draw your own conclusions about that.) Oh, and lice LOVE clean hair, so there goes that myth of only the slovenly succumbing.

Honestly? My head itches just writing about it, and I won't fool myself that I'm immune, because according to the Lice Lady, anyone can get lice, and once you have 'em, you're in for loads and loads of laundry and weeks of nit-picking, and she should know-- lice are her business, and business is good.

Porch Time

We bought a couple of Adirondack chairs for our deck today. I use the term "deck" loosely-- it's really much more of a balcony, but the architects that designed the place labeled it a deck, and what can I say? That grandiosity has legs. We used to have a table and chairs, and while it was nice to eat out there a few evenings a year, there really wasn't enough room for anything else, and so our limited outdoor space went mostly unused. We decided to give the table and chairs away, and since then, the deck has been like a blank canvas just waiting for the right vision. Today we found it. Every summer, we take my nephews to Maine for a week. The place we rent is an old fisherman's house right on Eastern Bay across from Mount Desert Island. It has a porch that wraps around three sides in the back. There must be eight Adirondack chairs all lined up looking out over that half-acre lawn down to the mussel beach, across the bay, and right up to Sargent Mountain, the second highest peak in Acadia National Park. I have the same view from the bed I sleep in each year, and I can't help thinking that it wouldn't be a bad place to draw your last breath, provided that the windows were open, and the morning marine mist had burnt off, and the sun, or at least the moon, was shining on the mountain across the way. Every day when we're there we have porch time. In the beginning it was Aunt Tracey declaring forced togetherness: join me on the porch boys; you won't regret it, but if you do, please keep it to yourself. For less than an hour we would all sit on those chairs and read, or draw, or play guitar, or write, or, okay, Josh was allowed to pound wiffle balls into the yard, but that was his way of communing with himself and the place and the rest of us, which was all I wanted, and what made the whole trip worth it. It wasn't long, though, before I'd take my notebook and some coffee out there and through the screen I'd hear one of the boys ask another, "Is it porch time?" and the Adirondack chairs would fill. Back home, I missed porch time, and last year the end of vacation coincided with my desire to re-introduce a common "circle time" at the beginning of most classes to my sixth graders. Nancie Atwell famously has a rocking chair, and I wanted something like that in my classroom, too, so when I walked into World Market and saw their Adirondack chairs on clearance, I knew what I should do. We don't call it porch time in my class, but it's as close as I can manage inside four walls, miles from any ocean or mountain. It's a time and place to share our reading, writing, and thoughts, and I think it goes a long way toward building community with my students, and to be honest, there are times when the view from that chair is just as breath-taking or more so than the one from that porch in Maine.

Do as I Say, Not as I Did

We had another student-parent-teacher conference yesterday, this one with a mom and her daughter. The girl is pretty and out-going and in the world of sixth grade, she has become a social force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, because popularity is easy for her and academics are challenging, she has focused on the one much to the detriment of the other. Who can blame her? Don't we all prefer to play to our strengths? At any rate, her third quarter grades were low enough that we felt it was time to get her mom in.

We knew from prior school-home communication that Mom talked a tough game about her expectations for her daughter, but we were concerned because there didn't seem to be a lot of follow through. In addition, I knew from a writing piece this student had done, that her mother had been a teen parent. In a poignant profile, the student had told how her mother had become pregnant, gone through the teen-parenting program, and, at fifteen, had given birth to her. Then, she had returned to high school, graduated with her class, worked full time and earned a community college degree. Now married with two younger children, this twenty-seven-year-old candidly warned her daughter against making the same mistakes that she had. She framed her advice in terms of wanting her daughter to be able to enjoy being a kid, something she herself had missed.

But what a fine line to walk as a parent-- wanting to warn the daughter you gave birth to at fifteen against messing up in school and making other bad choices, but without making her feel as if she were somehow a liability or a mistake. And from the daughter's perspective, how seriously could she take such a warning, when the woman who is giving it, the mother she loves and respects more than anyone, is strong and successful despite the choices she made? The ambiguity of this dynamic seemed to shade all of their interactions as they sat with us at the conference table.

The student cried and admitted that she wasn't doing what she should, and then she promised to be more responsible. Her mother, dry-eyed, was predictably angry and disappointed. The student said she knew what her mother expected, and that she would do her best not to let her down again. I could tell that they were both sincere, as we were, too, in the desire to help this girl be more successful in school, but as they left, I understood what a powerful role model her mother was for this student, and I wondered how her words could ever outweigh her actions.

Box and Whiskers

Yesterday, just as I was finally coming out from behind my desk and preparing to go home, I heard a commotion like the three bears were coming down the hall. There was a great big deep voice, a medium skeptical voice, and a tiny little sassy voice. I looked toward the door, dropped my left ear toward my shoulder, and gave a listen to the footsteps approaching my door.

The school bookkeeper, her husband, and four-year-old granddaughter paused a moment before I waved them on in. "We have a favor to ask," she told me, then crossed her arms, raised her eyebrows, and cut her eyes at her husband.

"Can I move in with you?" he asked. There was silence, and then they all started laughing.

"Good one!" his wife said. "I did not see that coming."

"You know we have an extra room," I laughed, too, after only the briefest of hesitations, "any time you need it."

"Naw," he said, "but what I do need is some help with this here statistics homework."

I love math. In fact, I almost think I love it too much to be any kind of a good math teacher. When I was in school, math was always the dessert of my homework, and so I agreed to try and help him, even though I never actually took statistics.

He kissed his wife and granddaughter good-bye, and we sat down at one of the tables in my room. When I first looked at the 10 page assignment he showed me, I almost sent him away. The two problems on the first page included a paragraph each of incomprehensible jargon and 40 random double-digit numbers. There were phrases like "frequency table" "data set" and "classes of five starting with ten." I guess I couldn't hide the uh oh, because he was super-apologetic and showed me his indecipherable notes on the power point outline he had. This was an open admissions college class, and he told me that they were on their third instructor before the mid-term. "When is this due?" I asked him.

"Tonight," he sighed. "I don't know what I was thinking taking a full load of classes and trying to work, too." he said. He was a carpenter, and it turned out that he would get a raise at work and a shot at a promotion once he earned a college degree, and since the family could use the extra money, he wanted to get it done as fast as he could, so he was enrolled for 12 credit hours. Monday through Thursday, his day started at 4:30 AM when he got up for work and didn't end until way after 9:30 PM when his class was over. He tried to get his homework done on the weekend and in between work and the time when his class started.

"Do you have the book?" I asked him. And so we figured it out together, I consulting the index and the examples in the text, he using his notes and telling me what he remembered from the three teachers he'd had. Side by side we sat, me and this gigantic tattooed ex-con of a guy who smelled really, really good, and whose fingers were way too big for the calculator keys. As we worked, I realized that the stuff that was easiest for me to do was the hardest to explain to him, and I filed that away under, "in your face master teacher," to be taken out and examined at another time.

We were getting close to finishing, and I had the sense that he had stopped trying to understand a while ago-- he was going to be late for class, and all he wanted were some numbers on the page. "I wish I cared about this stuff," he said, "but I just don't." Still, he kept working, and I thought about this guy the way I think about my students sometimes. There was a tangible reward for him to take this class, and so he was compliant, but I knew that he wasn't really learning the material-- it was important, but not relevant. I wondered about the objectives of his employer, of the college, of that third instructor. Why were they putting him through these paces? What did they want? And when on earth did they think that those boxes and whiskers and stems and leaves would ever be of value to him?

Desk Jockey

A friend walked into my classroom during my planning time this afternoon and stopped in astonishment. "You're not behind your desk!" she exclaimed. "What's the occasion?"

I don't know what I was doing-- picking up papers the kids had left behind, shutting down the lap top that goes with the projector, returning a book to its shelf in my classroom library, something common and teacher-y enough, and her surprise took me by surprise. What does she mean by that? Do I really spend that much time at my desk? What if I do? All these questions occurred to me as I made my way back to my desk to sit down after she had gone.

I spun my comfy office chair around and looked out the window as I considered her words. In a moment or two, I swiveled back to my computer, checked my e-mail, sent a couple of quick replies, and then continued working on the student report I had started earlier. I needed to check my desk calendar, and my eyes fell on all the brightly colored post-its that make up my organizational system. I peeled a couple of them up and tossed them in the recycling bin next to me, satisfied that I had completed their charges.

I don't get a lot of desk-time when the students are there; I don't know many teachers who do. My teaching day starts at 7:40 and I teach straight through to 12:45, with 35 minutes for lunch. When my last class leaves my room for PE and electives, it's like a second job starts. There are meetings and phone calls and e-mails and paperwork and an assortment of little questions from counselors and colleagues. Then there's the grading and the planning. It's a lot to do, but I love my job, and I work hard to get it done. Personally, I think sitting at my desk helps.

The truth is, though, that there's really an infinite amount of work to be done in teaching. I could work 100 hours a week and still think of things I might do that would further benefit my students. When you can put an actual child's face to your labor, it's awfully hard to find the boundary between all-I-could and not-quite-enough.

The Poem for Today

Today I used this poem as the common text for my English classes.

God Says Yes To Me
By Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Before I planned the lesson and made the copies, I asked one of my most trusted teacher-friends what she thought about my teaching it. Even though I love the poem, I was second-guessing myself on account of any religious controversy it might stir. I really wanted to use it as an example of humorous poetry, because our April writing contest is to write a funny poem. In light of that competition, we've read several silly poems in class, but I wanted to talk about a different kind of humor with them, the kind that comes when you turn the conventional on its ear in a silly and playful way.

My friend replied that maybe it would be best if I didn't "teach" the poem so much as "use" it in my class, and by that I think she meant that it wouldn't be wise for me to agree or disagree with what the speaker in the poem says, but I could help my students construct their own meaning from it. In my opinion, this is the most authentic way to teach literature, but I confess that often I get caught up in sharing my own interpretation of whatever we're reading with my students, and it usually overshadows their own.

So today I was more cautious than usual in allowing the students to lead the class discussion on our text, and it went great. They had a lot of questions and comments, but together they figured it out. There were a couple common threads from the conversations in each class, but by far the main one was the fact that there were always four or five kids who couldn't get past the fact that God is female in this poem. "That's just wrong," one student told the group. "Everyone knows God is a guy."

"How can you be sure?" another kid asked.

"Hel-lo! He has a beard!" she answered.

In another class, a few boys argued that the poem was offensive, because it's insulting to God to call him a girl. That didn't go over well with the girls in the group. They wondered why being female would be insulting to anyone, and a spirited discussion ensued. The boys recovered, claiming that it wasn't being female that was the insult, it was being called a girl when you weren't, and then we were back to what do we really know about God, anyway?

One boy could not let it go, and he turned to me, as if I had the final word. "I hear what you're saying about the Bible," I ventured, "but it is a work of faith and not fact. Its truth lies with the believer."

His cheeks were pink from the debate. "Just wait! When you get to heaven," he told me, and silently I thanked him for assuming that I would make it there, "I am going to take you to God and say I told you so!"