Now It's Gone Too Far

The star of my last post walked in this morning with another one liner.

Me: Good morning!

Him: Pull my finger...

Thanks, I'll Be Here All Week

I have an autistic student in my homeroom this year. He goes to the life skills program for the rest of the day, but the 30 minutes we spend together in the morning is one of his few "main stream" opportunities. In homeroom, the teacher's role is to support and advocate for the students in whatever area they need it, and so for this guy, we work on social skills.

"Thanks! I'll be here all week!" was a phrase that he repeated over and over again one day recently. The other students are often unsure of how to interact with him, and they look to me in situations like that.

"That's what a comedian says," I told him. "Do you know any jokes?"

"Why did the chicken cross the road?" he said.

"To get to the other side?"

"Yeah. What's the difference between roast beef and pea soup?" he continued.

I was stumped. "I give up," I answered.

"Anybody can roast beef, but no one can pee soup," he dead panned.

All the other kids' eyes were on me, and when I laughed, they laughed, too. "Hey, that was pretty good," one girl said to our comedian, but he himself did not crack a smile.

"That joke was funny," I told him, "but do you think you should tell it in school, to your teacher?"

"No!" he grinned.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because it has 'pee'. Sorry! I won't say it again."

"Okay," I replied.

"Thanks! I'll be here all week!" he answered.

Let Them Eat Cake

It has long been my practice to bring a cake for my homeroom students on their birthdays. It often seems like such a celebration goes a long way toward building both community and a personal relationship with each student.

This year, a student who was having a hard time transitioning to middle school academically was moved into my group about a month ago. Since then, I've been working with him at lunch and after school, but he's been anything but receptive to the support I'm offering. This morning, that all changed. We had our first birthday since he joined our homeroom, and that boy was loving himself some chocolate cake. All of a sudden, though, his face fell. "Oh no!" he cried. "My birthday has already passed!"

"Don't worry," I told him, "we'll give you a halfy birthday."

He smiled with genuine relief, but then frowned again. "I guess I should come up for lunch and work on my math today," he said. "I don't even know when that is."

Cultural Exchange

We went to a wedding yesterday and the groom was Iranian. In the ladies room during the reception, several of his relatives were chattering excitedly in Farsi, and the sound of their conversation made me smile. As it turns out, I have a bit of a history with the language of Iran.

A friend of mine was born in Tehran to a Persian dad and an American mom. Her family fled the country when the Shah fell, and then they settled here in the States. At seven, my friend hardly spoke a word of English, in fact the only phrases she knew she had learned from pulling the string on her Chatty Cathy doll: I want a drink of water. I'm not tired. I love you... and so on.

I had the opposite experience. At my Swiss boarding school in the late 70's there was a large group of wealthy Iranian students. Most of their families were also allied with the Shah, but we graduated before the revolution. They were a dynamic presence on campus, to say the least, and so we all learned a little Farsi: Up yours. Screw you. Your mother is... and so on.

Tea Time

It's a cold December day here and so to take the chill off the afternoon, I made us some tea. When I was about six, my best friend, Nicci, had a tea party for her birthday. We were served tiny cups of tea with plenty of milk and sugar with our cake, and with one sip of that warm, sweet, creamy goodness I was hooked.

The only problem was that my mom would only allow me to have tea when I was sick. Despite my persistent requests, anything with caffeine and three teaspoons of sugar was definitely in the special occasion category. And so it remained, until one evening when we had a babysitter, and it occurred to me to ask her for a cup of tea.

I remember that she was surprised that such a little kid would drink tea, and I was flattered by my presumed sophistication. We didn't even have a tea kettle (my parents were coffee drinkers) so she boiled the water in a sauce pan and poured it carefully over one of the Tetley tea bags that my mom kept for iced tea. At my direction, she heaped three spoons of sugar into the steaming mug, but I was unprepared for her next question. "Do you like milk or lemon?"

My mind raced. I had only had hot tea with milk, and that's how I liked it, but I loved lemon, and that sounded really good, too. "Both," I said.

She looked confused. "Really?" she asked.

"Oh yeah," I told her, "I have it like that all the time."

She shrugged and a minute later set the curdled brew in front of me with some skepticism. It looked awful and tasted worse, but I knew I had to drink it, and I did.

It was a long time before I drank hot tea again, and over the years I've tried lots of different teas in several different ways, but these days it's milk and sugar again.

Literature About Letters

Every teacher knows how it is to have a student who either misunderstands, misses the point of, or in some other way just does not connect with an assignment. I have a particular student right now who has only turned in a draft of his Letter About Literature because his mother has been in daily contact with me for the last week.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I do the LAL unit with my sixth grade classes every year. (And I write about it, too. Click here for my thoughts in 2009 and here for those in 2010) Sponsored by the Library of Congress, it is a writing contest that has the lofty goal of inspiring kids to compose letters to authors explaining what personal difference their books have made. After re-reading my own observations from years past, I am reminded that it is a challenging task for sixth graders, but I won't be discouraged, either, because despite the challenge, I still think it is a valuable exercise which brings together all the important components of a language arts curriculum-- reading, writing, and higher order thinking.

Well, that's the idea anyway. Back to my recalcitrant student. Here's what he turned in:

Dear John,

Listen and listen closely. I never wanted to read your book but it looks cool and it also was a long book. So be happy that I’m reading it. Now I got to write about you and your book, so be happy cause I’m doing what I didn’t want to so PAY ATTENTION!!

I’m happy you listened closely and understood me. Are you happy I read your book? At the beginning I thought your book was like dew on the grass, now I like it. When I say dew I mean like the yucky stuff on the morning grass. 

Okaaaayyyy... Teacher Quiz!

Test yourself: what is the best response to this piece of writing?

A) I like your honesty.
B) Your voice really comes through.
C) Interesting use of figurative language.
D) See me
E) All of the above

You Might be a Writer If...

The other day when I was rooting around in the attic to find the early December box (note to self: clean out attic while it's cool enough to be up there), I came across the old magnetic marble run. We used to keep the colorful chutes, lever cups, and funnel on our refrigerator for whenever the nephews were over. Designing and redesigning runs to send marble after marble on its merry way was always good for lots of fun, but once the boys got old enough to lose interest, the set was tossed in a Target bag and lost in that black hole of storage space above our heads.

Looking at the sack of green and purple plastic, it occurred to me that I knew plenty of kids who had not had the chance to outgrow such a fun toy, and glad that they might be appreciated once more, I brought them to school.

So it was that they were scattered across the white board when the writing club met in my room this afternoon. I had not been mistaken: every kid who's had the chance to use it has loved the marble run, and the writing club members were no exception. They all wanted to arrange and rearrange the pieces to see if they could guide the marble safely to its bin. Finally, we told them that they could play with it at the end, but one clever young writer took up the dry erase marker to show us how the game was relevant to our cause,

and for the rest of the meeting, they took turns to see how many books they could publish.