It's Complicated

I have a student whom I find very challenging this year. Impulsive and disruptive, she has a genius for turning the focus of the class away from what I've planned and onto her. She's difficult to manage, partly because the other students are so willing to engage with her. The other day, she refused to move into her small discussion group. "What are you doing?" I asked her. "You talk all the time when you're not supposed to, and now that it's time to talk, you won't. Help me understand this."

She threw herself to the floor and sighed. "Nobody likes me," she said. "I don't want to talk to them."

"What do you mean?" I replied. "The kids in here like you."

"No they don't. They think I'm annoying. Watch!" And just like that, she flipped the attention of the class as she stood and queried every student in turn in her booming voice. "Do you think I'm annoying?"

To be honest, I sort of ceded control of the class, because their reactions were pretty hilarious. Most were like, yeah, duh, of course you're annoying, although a few kids tried to be kind, and one pantomimed locking her lips and throwing away the key. It's a small class, and she got through her survey quickly and then turned to me in a so there stance.

"That doesn't mean anything," I told her. "Watch this: Hayley, do you think I'm annoying?" I asked.

She looked at me and shrugged. "Yeah, sometimes," she said.

"Kaelan, do you think I'm annoying?" I asked another student.

"Mm hmm," he nodded."Especially when you make us get organized."

"But, do you like me?" I asked them.

"Of course," they both said. "Everybody's annoying sometimes."

"What about this one?" I pointed to the kid standing next to me. "Do you like her?"

Their affection for her was unanimous, and so I told her to get over to her group and get to work.

Holy Crow

Every year around this time large groups of crows (I know, I know, they're called murders) gather in the evenings right outside our house. Flock by flock, they fly in and fill the bare branches at the tops of the tall trees in the woods across the way, creating a noisy spectacle. Some of the neighbors find them threatening-- they  dash for their cars, ducking and making inevitable Hitchcock allusions.

I like the crows, though. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to pick out individual crow voices in all that racket, and when I feel like I can almost tell some apart from their kin and companions, the noise changes and it sounds like they are speaking in some language and I could understand them if only I knew it, or if at least there were subtitles against the gray evening sky.

How Could You Miss That?

One time, several years ago, the counselor came to get a student from my class, and when she returned I went over to her with concern. "Is everything all right?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I'm being bullied," she confided.

"Oh no," I said. "Who's doing that to you?" She whispered the name of another student. "When is it happening?" I asked with concern.

"In your class," she told me.

You could have knocked me over, so stunned was I. The two of them sat in the front of the room, about three feet from where I stood most of the time while teaching.

Teachers like to think that we know what's going on in our classrooms, but over the years I've learned that as much as we catch, we miss a lot, too, probably more, and so the best we can do is create an environment where the students feel safe to tell us when something goes wrong.

And as for missing things? I've come to expect it, so much so that I was barely surprised at all this afternoon when I discovered a toy soldier in my classroom. Armed and guarding a paper rocket, he was stationed in the corner of the room right below the flag and next to a sign reading Don't Touch! Bryan's Top Secret Missile Base. How long it's been there I have no idea, but Bryan is in 8th grade now.

Is that Opportunity or the Cable Guy Knocking?

When it became clear that our little network problem was neither going to resolve itself or be fixed by me, I gritted my teeth and called my Internet Service Provider. I don't like to ask for help. (Yes. I'm aware that's an issue that I should work on.) After I waited on hold for more than 10 minutes, the agent who answered my call couldn't do anything other than schedule a service appointment. The first available technician can't come out to the house until Friday. Not happy news.

Over at Mad Woman in the Forest, Laurie Halse Anderson is proposing a Blog Free February. Her point is that there is a lot of distraction on the internet, and taking a month away from it may break some bad habits. Maybe. I'll be interested to see how a week without the internet at home plays out for me. At the moment it feels more like a giant nuisance than the opportunity for positive change, but I'll let you know.

Technical Difficulties

Our home network is acting up tonight, and I’m not sure whether I’m going to be able to post my blog. It could be the weather—we’ve had an unexpected amount of snowfall— not enough to be crippling, but enough to catch most people unawares and slow everyone down a bit.

When I first realized that my internet access had been cut, I was irritated. After working unsuccessfully to resolve the problem myself, I paused, cable modem in hand, aware that for some reason, I could choose my next reaction. Would my annoyance escalate to extreme frustration, or would I calmly let go and accept my inability to go online and subsequently write and post my entry? My 335-days-in-a-row streak would end, as it must someday, and I would be free from the blame; in many ways it would be like a snow day from school. Yippee! No writing for me today!

I started writing my blog in a snowstorm last March. Sitting in front of the fire surfing the internet, I read about a month-long slice of life story challenge sponsored by the Two Writing Teachers website. Why not? I asked myself. How hard can 31 days of writing be? Since then, my blog has become so much more for me. There are days when I feel like I’ll never even find a sentence worth posting and others when the words fly from my fingers, but writing every day is something I value, mostly because I never thought I could really do it.

I know myself well enough to understand that if I want to continue, then the routine of daily practice is a must.

Give up? Not today.

Horatio's Revenge

So a big part of the class meeting yesterday was on cyber-bullying: what it is, what to do about it, how to avoid it. This morning a sixth grade student on the other team comes in with her mom, who wants to speak to the counselor and the principal. It seems her daughter got a mean and threatening email from one of our students yesterday afternoon. When confronted, our student said she had the gotten idea from the discussion in class. Wow. Talk about missing the message.

Memo to Horatio

We did a class meeting today on Internet Safety. It's an annual event, the counselors are tasked by the county to design a lesson to engage the students in a conversation about making wise choices in this cyber-era. I don't know why, but teaching the same lesson five times back-to-back is way easier than sitting through one. I'll have to ponder that fact, but it did give me the chance to consider the world that these kids are growing up in.

There are several 2-3 minute videos making the rounds in education these days about that world and how we are getting our students ready for it. Every one that I've seen has highlighted competition between the US and India and China... evidently, both of these countries have more honor students than we have students, and obviously that fact is supposed to scare the hell out of us (whoever we are) as well as motivate us into action. My God! Those Chinese and Indian honor students are going to... please fill in the blank, because really? I can't.

I guess the big question posed by all of these productions is whether or not we're adequately preparing kids for their future given how quickly the world is changing. I suppose it's natural to worry, but thirty-five years ago when I was in middle school, this world we live in now was undreamt of, too, and it seems like most of us have been able to adapt.