Authentic Voice

I was working on a piece for my writing group this afternoon during homework club. My characters were middle school girls talking about school. (Not much of a stretch, right?) "Hey you guys," I called to the kids in the room. "Where do you think teachers get their ideas for assignments?"

A table of students looked at me with shrugs. "The principal?" one guessed.

"No!" her friend corrected her. "I think from the public county government. They tell them what they have to do."

"Thanks!" I said as I turned to my keyboard and typed ...from the public county government...

A Glow and a Grow

"I agree with you that a C does not reflect your son's academic ability," I told a concerned parent this afternoon. "Part of the issue is that he does not always see the value of our directions, and so he does not follow them."

To be honest I was a little nervous about this conference, because the student had his lowest grade in my class. His father was a teacher, and word had it that Dad was more than a little frustrated with both son and school.

The dad nodded. He was listening carefully.

"And while that shows critical thinking skills," I continued, "he frequently misses out on important details, and as a consequence his grades suffer."

"I know what you're talking about," his dad said. "We see the same thing at home. What can we do to help him?"

Spectator

Arms crossed, I grimaced this afternoon as I watched two eighth grade boys grab each other about the shoulders, back, and legs. Pushing and shoving, their goal was obviously to knock the other boy to the ground and keep him there. I said nothing, but every fiber of my teacher persona strained to scold them and put an immediate stop to such behavior.

But of course it was all fair in the wrestling match I was attending.

Wordless

The start of a new quarter brings a new reading class for me. At our school, sixth grade reading is delivered in the content area one discipline at a time, and on my team that means I teach four rounds of memoir every year. For the most part, I really like it: enough time passes in between lessons that I don't feel as if I'm teaching the same thing over and over, but I also have the opportunity to revise and tweak within months rather than years. Plus, as I've written before, every class can be different because individual students react differently to the same material, and in language arts, that's not a problem.

Take today, for example. My students were creating reading strategies posters. They had to read the descriptions of visualize, analyze, evaluate, connect, self-monitor, recall, infer, or question and illustrate the concept without using words. Then they do a gallery walk to "read" the other posters.

Over the last fourteen quarters, I've seen a lot of ways to communicate these ideas, some more effective than others. This morning I took a look at the product two boys were collaborating on. It was a two panel illustration. "He's reading a book," I said pointing to the first side. My students nodded happily. "But I can't tell what he's doing over there," I gestured to the right side of the page.

"He's folding shirts!" one of the boys told me.

I furrowed my brow a moment and studied the poster, waiting for enlightenment. "Is the book about folding shirts?" I asked slowly.

"Yes!" they were excited to confirm my guess.

"Then it's 'Recall', right?" I checked.

"Yeah!" They nodded. "He has a beard in the second picture to show that time has passed!"

What's Up Doc?

You know you have a grave set of documentary shorts when the most uplifting of the five is the one about Ebola.

The Benefit of Experience

I've often said that the two careers I chose, cooking and teaching, don't always get the respect they deserve, because everyone eats and everyone went to school, so everyone thinks they can do either job. I'll also repeat the story a colleague once told me about her ex-husband who couldn't imagine why she was tired at the end of the school day. "All you do is sit at your desk and say, 'You may begin.' What's so hard about that?" he asked her.

I guess it's one thing when people outside the profession think the job is easy, but recently a couple of teachers in our school seem to discount the value of experience in the field. They are career switchers who have implied in conversation that their private sector time has prepared them just as completely to teach as someone else's time actually spent in the classroom.

Maybe, but here's at least one observation they might find valuable:

Middle school kids are like magpies; they often can't resist shiny objects. Ergo, don't use push pins on bulletin boards in the hallway; they will be stolen.

Conflict

"What are the two main types of conflict?" I asked in every class today.

Oh, it should have been review, but when I posed the question I got a lot of blank stares. Still, there are many brave souls who are willing to make an educated guess, and I commend them.

"Serious and mild?" surmised one student.

"Verbal and physical?" hypothesised another.

"Bullies and friends?" conjectured someone else.

At last I saw the hand of a new-ish student, recently moved to our district from Hawaii. "Internal and external," he proclaimed confidently.

"Great!" I praised him. 'And do you happen to know the three types of external conflict?"

"Hitting, punching, and kicking?" he guessed.

No worries, friends, because by the end of the lesson the vast majority of students knew that conflict generally comes in four flavors: character vs self (which is internal), character vs character, character vs. society, and character vs environment or nature (all three of which are external).

However, at the end of the day, I was sequestered in a meeting in a classroom at the front of the building. When the final bell rang, I was distracted by the parade of students I saw through the window. There was a lot of energy as they joyously exited the building for the weekend, but as I watched I was appalled to see Mr. Hawaii run up to another student, smack her upside the head, and run off.

I wrote it up, but when I told my friend Mary the whole story starting with his knowledge and subsequent misinformation of conflict she shook her head at me.

"Foreshadowing!" she laughed. "Seriously? You didn't see that coming?"