And I Am Not Making This Up

I stopped by the grocery store on the way home last night. As I came around the end of an aisle I was surprised by a six foot pig in a black teddy with garters and bustier. I nodded, smiled politely, and walked past, the oddness of the incident only fully registering a few steps beyond. With wrinkled brow, I turned to look again, but the pig had vanished.

I didn't really think that I had imagined it, but despite the fact that the store was sort of crowded, there were no other shoppers around for a reality check. Plus, the more I thought about it, what had it been doing there? At first I had assumed that it was some sort of product promotion, but that get-up really didn't fit with anything that they were selling at the grocery store. Also the pig wasn't doing anything other than standing there when I went past; it wasn't selling anything, nor did it approach me in any way.

I shook my head, only questioning my sanity slightly, and continued my shopping.

It was in the dairy section that I next encountered the pig. This time it was walking briskly toward me. There was a guy a few paces ahead of it, but if he noticed anything unusual he sure didn't show it. They passed me and disappeared around the corner. You can bet I was on my guard after that, but as I finished shopping and paid for my groceries, I did not see any more giant pigs. It was with relief that I crossed the parking lot, but as I approached my car a silver mini-van screeched toward me at high speed. I jumped aside and gasped as it careened away.

Riding shotgun? The pig.

Driving? The guy from the dairy aisle.

Really.

Perfecto

Conferences are over and they went well: I had a hundred percent participation; the kids did a nice job leading them, and only one other student cried. It was the last meeting of the day and, ironically, he was the kid with the highest grades. He had straight A's, but in the category breakdown, he had an 85% in homework for one of his classes.

I made the mistake of asking him about it, and he burst into tears explaining that he had misunderstood the directions on an assignment and had only received partial credit for it. That coupled with the fact that one of his teachers had commented that he should participate more had him literally sobbing for a good few minutes. His mother rubbed his shoulder and spoke to him in Spanish, "Usted no tiene que ser perfecto."

The day before, in preparation for the meeting, he had set two goals for himself. The first was to participate more in class and the second was to follow directions carefully. He and his mom were supposed to set one more together in the conference. "What do you think it should be?" I asked. He wiped his eyes and looked at his mother.

"Don't be so hard on yourself," she said and that is what he wrote.

All Conference Eve

Conference day isn't officially scheduled until tomorrow, but this afternoon I had a single student-led conference in order to accommodate a parent's conflict. Oooh, it was a good one! It had a little of everything-- obfuscation, disappointment, tears, scolding, recognition of personal strengths, pride in some tasks well-done, a promise and a plan for both improvement and continued success, and a hug at the end-- all in a little over 20 minutes.  Not bad for the first conference of the year. I wonder what tomorrow will be like.

Code Switching

I had the second session of my professional learning group on grammar today. Our assignment was to read the first three chapters of Catching Up on Conventions: Grammar Lessons for Middle School Writers by Chantal Francois and Elisa Zonana. This section of the book describes how they, two teachers committed to writing workshop, came to the conclusion that teaching grammar is important. Their main reason had to do with the fact that their classes were predominantly made up of ethnic minority students and they felt that it was necessary for them to master academic English, which is the language of power.

Our group talked a lot about this code switching. The reasons the authors described resonated with one of the other white teachers because she felt they applied to many of her students. For the teachers from our north county schools such an argument was irrelevant-- over 90 percent of their students speak the dominant language at home; they don't need to learn another vernacular. As for me, I thought it was hypocritical to make an argument like theirs without acknowledging that such an attitude perpetuates an unfair dynamic. To dismiss the necessity for some people to have to learn the language of the majority as simply a necessary evil does not address the underlying issues.

(Don't worry-- I'm not against teaching conventions-- I just think we should teach them to everybody, in the context of their writing, based on the individual needs of those particular students.)

The other teacher from my school, who is Black, affirmed the importance for people of color to learn to speak and write academic English but also pointed out the social complications that accompany such a choice. "It's sad to say," she told us, "but kids and even adults make fun of Black people who talk too White."

We also discussed proofreading marks, and one of the teachers confessed that she just never got the hang of using them: there were too many and she found the marks confusing. "It's just code switching," I teased, but when later the conversation turned to texting language, we discovered that of all the teachers there, I was the only one who doesn't use it, thanks to my trusty iPhone and perhaps my own resistance to code switching. In my experience, though, this is the exchange that is most difficult for students. Once they get hooked on shortening words and phrases and ignoring capitalization and punctuation, it is very difficult to get them to switch to standard conventions for school writing.

Maybe text talk is a minority dialect; it is a language that belongs to the young. The difference between that group and most ethnic minorities? One day young people will be in charge. r u rdy 4 dat?

Change is Good?

Well, I went ahead and did it. The Battle of the Sexes classes have been officially reorganized. The numbers in my two after-lunch classes are now 9 boys and 7 girls and 8 boys and 8 girls. Has the gender balance been a magic bullet? No. Some personalities still stand out, but in general? The students seemed less playful and less social and therefore more focused on the task at hand.

This particular success could be my imagination, but grouping, in the form of class scheduling, small group work, and even seating assignments is a time-honored tool of classroom management. Even so, I believe we should use our power carefully. These days, we try to spin it positively to the kids, especially when we split up friends, as in you don't work very well with that person, and We just want you to be successful, and Don't worry! You'll still see so-and-so at lunch.

We do that because kids, especially middle school kids, often have a hard time with what we adults see as a simple schedule change. As an example, when I told my classes of the above mentioned switches, there were gasps and groans of horror, and many kids openly begged me not to change their schedule. This after four weeks of school.

I believe that there are far more insidious reasons for us to take care about moving students for their own good as well as the good of the class, though. In my experience, a lot of the time the kids we want to separate are minority students. In a diverse school such as ours with almost equal representation of Asian, Black, Latino, and White students, it's most often those Black and Latino cliques that get busted up in the name of group dynamics, and that gives me pause.

A.K.A.

Middle school presents an opportunity for kids to reinvent themselves-- we always tell them it's a clean start, a fresh slate, a chance to be the best they can. Some take advantage and some don't, and some are more successful than others. Six years ago, I taught a young man named Kenneth who introduced himself as Kenny. Kenny was as cute and charming as they come, but he didn't always complete his work, which was what I was telling his mom in our parent-teacher conference when she whipped out her cell phone. "Excuse me," she said to me as she deliberately dialed.

Bemused, I waited for her cue to continue. In a moment I heard the mwah mwah of a voice answering the phone. "Is Brandon there?" she asked. Confused, I wondered if I should pretend to be busy with something else. "Well get him out of bed," she told the other party. I shuffled a few papers and clicked my pen once or twice. Soon I heard another muffled "hello" and she picked up that progress report and started in on the person on the other end of the line about those missing assignments. It quickly became clear that Kenny was an alias for the student formerly known as Brandon, which was his middle name. Once she hung up, it was sort of challenging to continue the conference-- I wasn't sure how to refer to her child.

I saw Kenny's mom today in a professional development class I'm teaching. "Do you remember me?" she asked, and I smiled because when I had seen her name on the roster I couldn't wait to find out how Kenny was doing.

"I sure do," I told her. "How's that son of yours?"

"He's a senior! Can you believe it?" she said.

"Wow!" I answered. "What's he going by these days? Kenny or Brandon?"

"I still call him Brandon," she shrugged, "but everyone else? They call him Kenny, and he's doing great."

By that, I took it that he was getting all his assignments in, and silently I congratulated him on his successful reinvention.

Now Playing

I recorded the first episode of Tony Danza's reality show on A&E but I haven't had the chance to watch it yet. Called Teach:Tony Danza, the premise is that Danza teaches one section of high school English to 26 students at a school in Philadelphia. What teacher could resist watching at least one episode?

This morning at the farmer's market we ran into some parents of former students, along with a relative of theirs who also works at one of our district middle schools. "Have you seen Tony Danza's show?" she asked. When I told her that I have it recorded, she said "I won't ruin it for you, but the guy has one class of 26, with another teacher in the room with him, and they make him cry in the first episode!"

The non-teacher in our group said, "That's good, right? It shows how hard teaching is." Not having seen the show, I hope he's right that it shows teaching can be tough rather than Tony Danza can be lame, but my reservations are a little more serious than that. I've read a bit about Danza's press junket to support the show, and it sounds like he is highly supportive of teachers and the complexity of the job we do. That represents a departure from the majority of other public voices recently heard on teaching and schools.

NBC and other high-profile media organizations have been paying a lot of attention to public education lately, inviting philanthropists, politicians, chancellors, and bureaucrats to speak about what the "problems" are. Notably absent? The voices of teachers... but don't worry: an actor who by most measures is a bit down in his career and taught one class for one school year is evidently a more than legitimate spokesperson for our profession. Just ask Oprah.