Day One

Okay. It's really hard not to scold kids. Here were the hazardous conversations I had to have today alone: the seven children who did not have their homework, the three who did not bring anything to write with to my class, the two who were tardy unexcused, the one who snapped the pencil I had just lent him in half and left it on the table when class was over, the one who broke one of my rulers and threw it on the floor, and the several who felt it necessary to have side conversations when one of their classmates was reading.

In Trouble

I got a scolding today. I won't say who administered it or what it pertained to, because that's not really relevant. I will say that nobody likes to be chided, and after years of teaching and aunting (and delivering more than a few tongue lashings myself) I have come to understand that such a rebuke is usually more for the benefit of the scolder than the scoldee.

As good as it feels to vent your righteous indignation, being reprimanded makes most people very defensive, and as a corollary, deaf to your message. All they're thinking of are excuses and reasons why you are more wrong than they are. That's exactly the position I was in today-- speechless, but also angry and closed-off to any legitimate concerns that may have been expressed in the admonishment.

So, although it's a little late in the new year, I hereby resolve to scold not, and also to curb my own negative reactions when reproached, because neither is especially productive.

Weather

I use iGoogle to keep track of the weather in places where there's a little piece of my heart. There are five locations stacked up and down in the center of my home page like a blue and white highrise and checking the weather is like looking out the windows of the apartments on different floors. Today, for the first time in my condominium of climate, there's snow behind every curtain-- in Minnesota, Buffalo, and Maine (which is hardly surprising but rarely happens all at once), and also in Washington and Atlanta a perfect palette of white will prevail. Cool.

The Timing Was Off

“My name is Helen,” the student read, “I sort of like my name. Helen is unusual, but I just can’t find it on key chains and stuff, which I hate. I also don’t like it, because everyone’s grandma is named Helen.”

“My grandmother’s name was Helen,” I said.

“See what I mean?” she answered.

We laughed, but later when I thought about the conversation, I thought about my grandmother. I never knew her; she died ten years before I was born. When I was growing up, my father rarely spoke about his parents, and as children, we never asked. To us, they were black and white faces in a picture frame, and nothing more.

So here’s everything I know about my grandmother: Her name was Helen and she lived her entire life in Little falls, NY. She married my grandfather, Harold, in 1920, at the age of 20. They had eight children, seven boys and one girl. I have a photograph of the entire family taken in 1942 when my father, the second youngest, was seven, and they are a very handsome family, indeed. In 1928, when the Phoenix Underwear Company mill, of which he was a manager, moved to NC, my grandfather bought a funeral home and became the town’s Catholic undertaker. The sinks and slab were in the basement, the parlors and office were on the ground floor, and the family lived upstairs.

Helen was very permissive with her children—no matter what they were having for dinner, she always made a platter of hamburgers, in case someone didn’t like the meal, and once, when the boys were rough-housing in the dining room, they tipped her china cupboard out the second floor window. When he heard the crash, my grandfather came running from his office downstairs, furious at the destruction, but she stood in front of the children. “Harold,” she told him, “they’re just boys, and boys will be boys.” Then she went and cleaned up the mess, because none of the boys were ever required to lift a finger around the house.

She was diagnosed with cancer at the age of fifty and was bed-ridden for most of a year. Dying, she was determined to make it to my uncle’s wedding in December of 1951, and to everyone’s amazement, she did. My grandmother died in the first days of 1952 and was buried on my father’s 17th birthday, something from which he never completely recovered.

That's it. My dad, my uncles, and my aunt are all gone now, and with them went the chance that I'll ever know much more about her, which is really a shame for me, because now? I'm interested.

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.

What is Literacy?

Before I left for my grammar PLC yesterday afternoon, my friend advised me to cheer up. "At least you'll have something to write about," she said.

"Don't worry about me," I told her, because I wasn't worried at all. I was attending as a teacher who had assigned out of context grammar worksheets and given a quiz on pronoun agreement in the last couple of days. Surely I would be embraced by the group.

That's not quite how it went down, though. Just as we were getting started, one of the other members entered the room breathlessly. "I have a question about grammar!" she announced. "How do you teach transitive and intransitive verbs?" she paused dramatically. "You see the text book," and here she opened it with a flourish, "only mentions action and linking verbs. What do we do about that?"

I happen to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs (hint: it has something to do with a direct object), but the discussion that followed was about whether it is reasonable to expect the same from sixth grade students, and what our objective might be for such an expectation. Will it make them more fluent writers? Will it make them better communicators? Is it worth not only the instructional time but also the engagement credibility you would be forced to spend on such an endeavor?

"I just think they should know basic grammar," the original teacher declared. "At some point it becomes a matter of cultural literacy."

Others posited that perhaps that was specialized knowledge that might not be a top priority for sixth grade. "Do you know the sixth grade science curriculum?" I asked her. She admitted that she did not. "You're a functional, productive citizen," I told her, "even without a sixth grade science education. It seems like you're doing okay."

She allowed that she was, and the conversation moved on.

That Which We Call a Rose

As part of the memoir genre study we are working on, I'm giving the students short daily writing exercises from which I hope they will be able to gather material. Last night they were supposed to write a page on their names-- what they mean, where they came from, how they like them, etc.

Today volunteers shared their pieces with the class. There were some touching tales of nicknames and namesakes, but there were some hilarious stories, too. One girl swore that her mother found her name on a keychain in Walmart that was 75% off. "She got my name on clearance!" she gasped.

Another girl told us that she was supposed to be named Dixie after her great grandmother, but when they informed the old woman about the honor, she said, "Why would she want that old name? She's too pretty for it! Call her something else." So they did.

And then there were the two students who were named by their young brothers after the Pink Power Ranger and one of the Rugrats.

This is going to be a good unit.