Not Just a Job

It's always a flag when you're happy if a student happens to be absent, but what a relief to be able to teach your class without the distractions that certain kids regularly create. Such a situation illustrates the struggle that teachers face to balance the good of the group against the good of the individual.

As contrary as it might sound, I generally appreciate the disruptive student because she will not allow me to ignore her, and by so doing to fail her. She is usually not the only student who is unengaged by my class or lesson, and she does me the courtesy of letting me know. Even so, in the midst of working through all the issues involved, it's hard not to get frustrated and a be little resentful at times-- after all, not many of us became teachers in order to deal with contrary children. But many of us did become teachers to make a difference by reaching kids, and it's silly to think it should be easy.

Law and Order

I teach in a state where each morning we have a minute of silence mandated by law following the equally mandatory Pledge of Allegiance. Over the years, I've found most students to be pretty compliant to both requirements. Ours is a very international community, but even kids who are foreign citizens stand respectfully, and some of them even recite the pledge. If ever there's a problem, it's with that minute of silence-- sixty seconds of stillness can be quite a challenge for certain eleven-year-olds.

A couple of weeks ago, I was shushing one of the usual culprits, when he piped up to ask why we even have such a thing. (Mind you, he's been exposed to this routine since kindergarten. Did the question really only occur to him now?) "It's a state law," I told him when the minute had ended. "So, technically? Every time I ask you to be quiet during it, you're in violation of the law."

"What? Are they going to arrest me?" he asked. A couple of the other kids snickered.

I shrugged. "You could probably get a fine or something. I'm not really sure. Should we ask the resource officer?" I looked around the room at eleven suddenly wide-eyed children, and laughed. "I'm just telling you that the minute of silence wasn't my idea. By law, we're supposed to be quiet."

We moved on to whatever we were doing next, and I forgot about the whole thing until today. A student in another class came to my desk looking like his business was very urgent. "Is it true that you threatened to call the police on your homeroom if they wouldn't be quiet?"

Now that's how rumors get started.

Professional Courtesy

A couple of kids poked their heads in my door right after school. "Can we make some copies?" one of them asked. Kids don't ordinarily need to copy things at our school, so I asked them what was up. It turned out that another teacher, not on my team, had given out packets of information about a big field trip. One of the students had hers, but the other did not; they wanted to know if I would make a copy for her. I wondered if they had asked their teacher for another packet, and they told me that any student who lost the information would be penalized with a lunch detention before receiving the replacement. The single copy that they had in their possession had already been paid for in precious lunch time, and that student was hoping to spare her friend a similar fate.

I understand that the teacher who imposes it is trying to instill a sense of responsibility and consequences in the students, but I think that such a penalty for losing paperwork is dumb and overly-punitive. Even so, I hesitated when asked to make the copies. The students wheedled and begged and swore that they would never tell the other teacher. (Had they visions of me, stealthily entering the office, checking to see that the coast is clear, and surreptitiously feeding the papers into the machine, all the while looking over my shoulder for fear of my draconian co-worker?) In the end, I held my ground, though, unwilling to unilaterally undermine the professional judgment of a colleague.

I think they understood, but I'm still not sure I did the right thing.

Desks in Rows

A colleague stopped by my room to ask a question today. "Whoa!" she said, "What's going on in here?" She was reacting to the way the furniture in my classroom was arranged. Our school was built in the early 70's, and I know I have some of the original furniture in my room: heavy chairs made out of chromed steel with some sort of ceramic seats and backs (all in the harvest palette of the time, too-- gold, brown, rust, and red) and trapezoid-shaped tables that I push into hexagons most of the time.

My room is big but not huge, and I want a central space where the kids can sit on the floor in a circle, but I also want a place where they can meet in small groups, so we push the furniture around to accommodate those things. When we have class meetings, I arrange the tables in a big parallelogram with an open space in the center, and thirty of us sit around the perimeter. If I have a meeting, I move them into a conference table shape. It hardly takes a minute, and rearranging the room is stimulating and engaging for the students.

Tomorrow, the counselor is coming in to do academic planning and 7th grade scheduling. She wants to use the projector and needs the kids to be able to see the screen and copy what's there. When we were planning the activity last week, it occurred to me that this would be an opportunity for me to arrange my room in a configuration it's seldom seen: rows facing forward.

When the kids left today for PE and electives, I moved the furniture to prepare for tomorrow. Later I sat at my desk, off to the side, and visualized all the tables turned 90 degrees to face me, students silently working, heads down, as I presided over the class ensconced behind the big desk. It was a scene from my childhood, and there was something comforting and nostalgic about the vision, but it made me giggle, too, because it was sooooo not us.

Best. Amish. Friendship. Bread. Ever.

The week before last, during all the snow, a neighbor came by to borrow a cup of oil, and in exchange she gave us some Amish Friendship Bread starter. We thanked her politely, but inwardly I groaned. I've been on the AFB train before, and it's a lot of pressure and responsibility to properly care for such a gift.

For those who are not familiar, the starter is yeast-based and the cycle from receiving the starter to finished product is 10 days. Each day you are responsible to take some action to maintain the brew on your counter. On days five and ten, you have to feed the starter with milk, sugar and flour, but on the other days you only need to stir and burp the gassy goo. It sounds relatively simple, but even so, you run the risk of the whole project taking over your kitchen if not a good portion of your free time. It bubbles and expands, and depending on the container, it pops the lid and spills over onto the counter.

Once you've fed it on day five, you have an even larger fermenting presence to deal with, and frequent clean-ups are not uncommon. When you arrive at day ten, you are charged to feed it once again and then split the resulting batter into four parts-- one to bake with, one to keep, and two for a couple of your friends. And then it all starts again...

After a few cycles, you run out of friends to bestow the starter upon, and frankly? I'm not so sure the ones you've given it to already are so happy with you. The bread itself, a product that, to its credit has almost endless variations, isn't really all that yummy, plus, the recipe inexplicably calls for pudding mix, which cancels out any homemade, non-processed benefits this high-sugar, high-fat dish might otherwise claim.

Even though I have a couple of bags of previous starters in the freezer from other friends (and none of us are even Amish! --but it seems somehow disloyal to throw them away), I took this batch to the end. Over the years I have made many, many variations on the recipe-- butterscotch, chocolate chip, peanut butter, blueberry, chocolate cherry, apricot almond, and more, but I wanted this to be really, really good in order to counteract that nagging resentment I was feeling toward my neighbor.

So here's what I did: I made a ton of cinnamon pecan streusel, and I layered it in with the batter and packed it on top of the loaf pans, and then I baked those suckers off. And you know what? It was delicious! But I still put the extra starter into the freezer.

Dry Spell

I have a couple of go-to strategies when it comes to coming up with an idea for my daily post:  I either write about the most memorable thing that happened to me recently or I try to connect some disparate events in my present and past to make a greater point. Days like today, when it's already 10:30 and I don't have an idea, I wish there were a couple of other tools in my inspiration box.

Oh golly, what to write about? My optimism and doubts about the facebook group I started for our school literary magazine?  Our visit to the mushy snow and muddy dog park? My nephew's School of Rock show? (His guitar playing was awesome and he sang lead on Just Like Heaven!) The inevitable frustration of the ubiquitous traffic congestion in our oh-so-populated-and-getting-more-crowded-all-the-time area? The death of Cesar Millan's beloved pitbull Daddy? The absurdity of cake challenges on the food network?

Hmmm. All promising, but none are quite ripe today.

Gifted Minds

Years ago I attended my first G/T Night for the parents of those students who had been designated gifted and/or talented. The objective was to provide an overview of the services such students would receive and what accommodations their teachers would provide in the classroom. My role was to represent my sixth grade team and answer any specific questions our students' parents might have.

The person in charge of the meeting had planned an ice breaker activity. It was some divergent thinking problem about a bank; you know the type:  

On November 11, such and such employees were there, this and that customer arrived, some money disappeared, and the police were called. What happened?

Each group was supposed to come up with some questions and a theory, and we all set to work trying to figure out who was responsible for the stolen money. A reward was offered for the first to come up with the solution.

Well... evidently the gifted apple does not fall far from the talented tree; let's just say it got a little competitive in there. People were calling out with questions and hypotheses, each group sure that they had the right answer. It was a real hubbub, and the coordinator struggled to regain control of the meeting. Finally things quieted somewhat, and she was able to point to one group who had been a bit quieter than the others. "What did you think?" she asked.

Their spokesman scratched his head. "Honestly?" he asked. "We're still trying to figure out why that bank was open on Veteran's Day."

Now that's divergent thinking.