Conflicted

Every week I give a little skills quiz to see how my students are testing on topics for which they are mandated to demonstrate mastery.

This past week it was on conflict-- they had to list the four basic types (character v. self, character, society, or nature) and then identify what type of conflict was described in a brief scenario. To their credit, most students did quite well (for those data crunchers out there, the pass rate was 90% and the average was even higher), but there were some misperceptions that we'll need to go back and address.

For example, my favorite incorrect answer was in reply to this: You can't decide whether to have spaghetti or tacos for lunch.

One student called that man versus nature, and even as I marked it wrong I couldn't help thinking that man! Those must have been some tacos.

Flasher Cards

One of the coolest things about giving every sixth grader an iPad is seeing the ways they find to use it to learn. (Of course, they are finding ways to use it NOT to learn, but the reverse is definitely true as well.)

Watching 80 people use something as simple as a glorified flash card app is amazing; all of its functionality is on display: some love the matching feature and try over and over to beat their best time, others prefer to practice vocabulary by filling in the blank. Many have discovered the dictionary feature embedded within, and some have even realized that they only need speak the words to make their cards.

This latter feature can be a little glitchy, though, particularly when one tries to use it in a room full of chattering sixth graders. Thus it was that I came upon one of my more conscientious students repeating the word dictate over and over into the screen of her iPad.

"I hate this thing!" she complained.

"Try saying it really slowly," the student next to her said.

Our class was ending, and many students were filing by her to put their English binders away as she enunciated the word in two elongated syllables.

"Oh my God!" one of her classmates said, and I looked over to find them both wide-eyed and giggling, looking at her device with bright red faces. "Here," he continued, and then leaned over her shoulder and typed d-i-c-t-a-t-e."

Pretest

A big focus of the quarterly reading class I teach is getting sixth graders to begin to identify theme as it relates to author's message. Most often, they want to boil it down to a moral or lesson, and that's a pretty good place to start. Today I read one of Dr. Seuss's lesser known tales to the class and then asked them to write down the message on an index card.

The story was "What Was I Afraid Of?" from the Sneetches collection, and for those who are unfamiliar, it is the truly bizarre account of a strange yellow (everybody is yellow in that book) nocturnal bear-like creature (the main character) who is (not surprisingly) terrified when he repeatedly runs into an empty pair of green pants that is able to walk, ride a bicycle, row a boat, and shiver in fear. In the end, he realizes that the pants are just as afraid of him as he is of them, and they befriend each other.

The moral of the story? According to the vast majority of my students it is Don't judge people by the way they look.

It could be, but here's the rub: I always ask them to test out their theories about theme by telling a story from their lives where they learned this lesson. Today? Not a single child of the 18 present could muster an anecdote of a time when they judged someone unfairly by their appearance. Neither have they ever been so unfairly judged, according to them.

Wow! Could it be that mankind has progressed that far?

Either that, or I have some work to do this quarter.

Degrees of Separation

We wake up to news on the radio every morning, and I often lay abed visualizing the conditions described in the traffic and weather reports before I rise. I was actually up and about the other morning though when I heard the news that there was a huge fire nearby. This time I didn't have to imagine a thing, I simply looked out the balcony door from our bedroom and saw hundreds of flashing lights surrounding a grayish-orange glow in the sky.

I'm ashamed to admit that my first thought was to whether all that activity would make it harder for me to get to school rather than for the people who were in danger of losing their property and so much more. Later, after I made it to work without any problem, I heard that a 73-year-old man had died at the hospital after being rescued from the burning house, and just today? I found out that he was the grandfather of some former students. We're going to reach out to them tomorrow from school.

I've written before about how I learned years ago that it's a mistake to be aggressive or rude on the road around here. You just never know who you might be flipping off. This lesson was (literally) driven home to me when I encountered a rather impatient driver on my way to summer school on the first day. The light had just changed when she laid on her horn, gave me the bird, and whizzed around me to shoot up the crowded drive. Traffic being what it was, she wasn't that far ahead of me when we both pulled into the middle school parking lot, but she made haste in getting inside the building before we met face to face. All her efforts were in vain though, because ten minutes later, in the staff meeting, I was introduced as her supervisor.

Now that was instant karma thrash, but I tend to believe that everything else is, too, we just don't recognize it as such.

Be good!

Trade Offs

There's this graphic I saw recently that I keep going back to-- it shows that half of the U.S. population lives in 146 counties, leaving the entire rest of the nation to the other half!

Living in one of the more populous regions as I do, I find myself fantasizing about life somewhere a little less crowded: Like somewhere you didn't have to show up 20 minutes early to a movie just to find a seat and still sit shoulder to shoulder with all the other patrons. Or maybe someplace where you could find a restaurant you liked where the wait for a table on a Saturday night was less than 45 minutes.

All that sounds great until I wonder if in those wide-open spaces the movie I want to see would even be playing and then consider just how far I'd have to drive to get to that restaurant.

Independent Reading

"So, what are you reading?" I asked and sat down next to one of the boys in my class as he worked today.

He shifted a little uncomfortably. "It's on my iPad," he told me.

"Okay," I said, "do you have it here?"

He punched in the security code, launched the iBook app, and handed his device to me.

"At Any Price," I read from the title page. "I've never heard of it. What's it about?"

"It's a grown up book," he said, "I just started it, but it's really good."

"Hmmm," I frowned and swiped the screen to reach the first pages. "Do your parents know you're reading this?"

"Oh yeah," he shrugged. "They know."

"So what's the conflict?" I asked him, since that was the assignment we were working on.

"Um," he hesitated as my eyes scanned the display.

Artemis, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia? What's up with all the Greeks? I wondered and then my eye fell on the final line of the prologue:

The right to my virginity will be ceded to the highest buyer.

I raised an eyebrow and looked sternly at the student.

"I might change it," he said.

Time Marches On

Just two weeks ago I was rushing through dark, unfamiliar streets searching for the home studio of my ukulele instructor desperately trying to avoid arriving late for my first lesson. It was with relief that I knocked on his door at 5 PM sharp.

The following Thursday I bolted out of school with plenty of time to spare, but the warren of one syllable street names seemed no more familiar to me. The light of day also confused me, and I wondered if perhaps I had the time wrong... would I be half an hour early? But 5 o'clock again found me on right on time.

Tonight? The last light of day was still draining purple in the western sky as I carried my tiny instrument to my car following the lesson. It may be only January, but spring inexorably approaches.