Study Hall Blues

Mr. P, when you let your beard grow you look like a hippie, and it distracts me. So, I just wanted to tell you that.

- Jordan

Jordan (6th grade) made this comment during study hall, apropos of nothing. It doesn't take much to distract Jordan. He moves around like a startled lemur

-- actually, that looks almost exactly like Jordan -- and can be perturbed by a whisper from across a noisy classroom. His natural habitat is a haphazard nest of half-crumpled paper, through which he frantically shuffles at the beginning and end of each class, a mostly useless ritual: I received perhaps two homework assignments from him during all of last semester.

Lately I have been narrowing my eyes whenever I see him, pointing at his chest, and mouthing "two oh five." (205 is the vaguely Orwellian name by which we refer to the detention room.) This makes him grin nervously. I'm not sure whether he is pleased or annoyed.

Jordan is one of the kids with whom I have a very easy relationship. This is largely because I don't teach him anymore, thanks to a restructuring that happened at the end of last semester: he got bumped to a lower Language Arts class, or I got bumped to a higher one, depending on how you look at it. Now the only time I see him is in Study Hall, after school, where my main job is to be mean.

Anyhow that's how I've been interpreting that particular function this semester. Our Study Hall is a lovely idea -- the kids get an hour after school in a controlled, quiet environment so they can finish their homework and go home unburdened. Meanwhile, their parents get to go to the gym (or adult education classes, or happy hour) and pick them up a little later.

Of course, the kids have already spent the last eight hours here. Also, they are done with their homework, or claim to be. Also, the ones who don't get picked up till six (I'm done at four. God bless the woman who stays) are the ones who aren't good at sitting still anyway. So you get a less lovely situation. My job is to play Trunchbull.

I don't mind; I think it's good for me, actually, since a large part of learning to be a teacher has been, for me, learning that love is not the same as being nice.

What bothers me is the kids like Tyrese. Everyone loves Tyrese, because he is a scoundrel, a roughneck, a charmer, and about three feet tall. Everyone else is bent on doing everything they can to help him. He is bent on getting himself as many detentions as possible.

Tyrese used to be in my class. Because of the above-mentioned restructuring, though, the main time I interact with him anymore is in study hall; which means that the main way I interact with him is by asking him to stop shouting, asking him to get up off the floor, asking him to stop shouting, and then giving him detention. Can you blame him if he doesn't seem to like me much anymore?

Oh well. One more preview, I guess, of the good and bad parts of being a parent. How do you people do it for decades on end? And I get to go home to a quiet house, too.

Pulvis Es

Recent conversation with the 5th grade on Latin words on their English derivatives:

JP: Can anyone think of a derivative for 'mortuus'? ['dead']

5A: Mortal!

JP: Good! What does 'mortal' mean?

5A: Human?

JP: Yes, well, close -- it's a certain characteristic of humans -- anybody know what?

5A: That they live for a while and then they die for a while.

JP: Yes, well, close -- Good -- mortal is the opposite of immortal, right? So it means you're going to die. We here in this room are all mortal -- that's right, we're all going to be dead one day -- me, and each of you, too -- you'll all be dead someday, yup! And...um...oh, well...

I don't know where that popped up from. Sometimes you just can't stop talking, you know? So, happy Lent, everybody.

Happy Monday

Weeping little girl #1 this week. And before lunchtime, too.

Where does sternness end and grouchiness begin? I'm afraid the latter had a lot to do with it. Sigh...

Why I Love My Job

I'm blogging in the middle of the week. Don't tell my lesson plans; they might remember something I haven't done and leap at my throat again. Or just grow another head.

It's been a grueling couple of weeks back. Week one was taken up entirely with parent-teacher conferences. Teaching is an odd business: I, a callow twenty-something, end up advising parents as to how they should be raising their children. Or anyway, restraining myself from advising them. Or anyway, letting them know what their little stinkers are getting into these days. Samples:

• There is the one whose daughter missed my class two Fridays running because of a hair appointment -- the daughter's appointment, I mean; and who frequently responds to calls home by saying, "Really? You gave her a detention? For that?" (Disobedience followed by defiance? You betcha.)

• There's the one whose son got a C this semester, causing her to yell at one of my coworkers until she cried.
  
  
• There's the one who lurks (perches?) outside the faculty office in order that we shouldn't forget that her son is St. Francis plus a genius IQ, and nothing like the illiterate little ruffian we've all come to know, not really.

Oh! But there's also:

• The one who works two jobs and takes night classes and still finds time to sit around the kitchen table helping her daughter with algebra.
  
  
• The one who can't stop telling us how much she loves the school, how much her kids love the class, how much she appreciates our hard work and sleepless nights, and wouldn't we like some extra composition notebooks for our classroom, because they were on sale, and do we mind if they're wide-ruled instead of college-ruled, because if that's a problem she can get some different ones?

And really, those ones predominate, and more than make up for the others.

[But one more quick one: One parent, after sweetly and soberly discussing her excellent daughter Elizabeth, informs us that Elizabeth has been having problems with bullies, and could we keep a closer watch; that Elizabeth has, moreover, been instructed in krav maga; and that she has instructed Elizabeth to use her skills if necessary. No by-your-leave, no if-you-don't-mind, just the intimation that Elizabeth can and will break bones if she needs to. The Badass Parent Award goes to her.]

As for the classes: we are undergoing a schoolwide curricular shift, which means new classes, structures, and procedures for me; and also means that the curriculum this semester is largely up to me; and also means that two weeks into the semester, I am still waiting for many of my books and still trying to figure out what we're doing next week, let alone for the rest of the semester. But, for one: I now have an hour and a half every day for Language Arts and another hour and a half for math. Whee!

We are gonna do so much stuff! We are gonna do Coleridge and Poe and London and Dickinson and Shakespeare and, and, other cool stuff. And not only that: my Math and Language Arts classes are composed of upper-level sixth graders and advanced fifth-graders. The kids who actually want to learn. Double Whee!

As for the kids: this semester I am Mr. Love-and-Logic.

• If you are eating in study hall, I will take your microwave popcorn away and not give it back even if you bawl, flail on the floor, and throw things. (However, I will also let you borrow my personal squeezy stress ball until tomorrow.)
  
  
• I will also leave you crying on the floor because I don't think that being two chapters behind in your reading--It's C. S. Lewis, for crying out loud--is a good reason for you thinking that your life is never, ever going to be okay again. (However, I will covertly call the school councilor and let her know to come get you. I did have a class to go to.)

I have made three little boys cry this week, and it is not even Wednesday yet. It was for their own good.

Also I am a homeroom teacher now. Being mostly homeschooled myself I didn't even know what a homeroom teacher was until about a week ago. Apparently, it means that if you lost your locker combination, or your homework, or your lunch, or forgot to zip your fly, or are sad, it is my job to fix it, or at least to tell you why it is probably your fault.

This last part -- helping them understand that they are responsible for the stupid trouble they are in -- is what Teaching with Love and Logic author Jim Fay calls "driving the pain down into their little hearts." No, really! That's a direct quote.

Ahhhh...this is why I love my job. Because I'm an idiot.

I would talk more about how much I love my kids, how grateful I am to have each of them and how happy their faces make me every morning, but (a) it doesn't make as good a story, and (b) I would get all sentimental.

I just hope I make it to summer, that's all.

Creepy Beautiful

This must be what Genesis means by "creeping things."

Man, but he do creep good.

Analogy

Being a teacher is a constant reminder of what we must look like to God. I am always thinking about:

• How often, and with what enthusiasm, they shoot themselves in the foot;
• How they would be so much better off if they would just trust that all the pain is actually for their benefit;
• How I actually do have their best interests in mind, even when I require them to do unpleasant things;
• How putting off their work today will only double it tomorrow;
• How the end result is actually much, much better than they could ever imagine, because their brains aren't big enough to understand how great is the thing that they are working for;

and, especially,

• How much I love them even (or especially) when they spit in my face, purposely sabotage themselves, and just generally act like a bunch of little miscreants.

Actually, the comparison breaks down just a little bit on that last item. Or, really, on all of them. But you see what I mean.

Big and Little

Mr. P., you make us feel big and little at the same time.

-Sam

That's what one of my students said after I, laying on the sarcasm a little heavily, expressed surprise that the class still didn't know that heaving a book across the room wasn't standard classroom procedure.

Sam is a sixth-grade poet and doesn't know it—or anyway, won't admit it; he claims to dislike reading and writing, but accidentally gives the lie to this claim in every single English class.

I'm such a cynic that, every time he startles me with some clear-eyed and profound statement, I wonder for a second if I'm being played, whether he is using adopting the naivete as a pose, and will snicker the moment I give him a surprised, appreciative smile.

Nope, that's not Sam. That's more Kaelijn's style—she's the one who accuses Lewis Carroll's Alice of being a whiny pushover, criticizes my fashion sense—No, I don't wear skinnies (blech), even on the weekend, and never will, and I can't believe I'm discussing this with you—, and has already learned the deadly habit of flippancy at the age of 11.

Her cynicism isn't real, though. She's eleven; how could it be? It slips the moment she stops watching herself, and I feel a kind of vengeful gratitude every time I see her accidentally take pleasure in one of Carroll's stupid, stupid puns. She learned somewhere that world-weariness is cool, but imbibed the diction of disillusion without, bless her, any of the content.

When I was eight, an old lady stopped me outside of church to tell me: "My goodness, you have beautiful eyes. Do you know what beautiful eyes you have?" I have no idea what I responded, but I'm sure it was inaudible, since I was wishing I was underground or dead or both at the time. If I had thought of it, I would have said, "No, but do you know what horrifying breath you have?"

Just as well I didn't. I don't hold it against her, and I'm not claiming that the experience traumatized me. But I do remember vowing 5 minutes later that when I was old I would never, ever, ever talk to a kid my age in a way that would make them feel that mortifyingly small, would never become one of those people who, in Leif Enger's words, "believes that all kids have blunted senses."

I've done other things, certainly. I've yelled at my students, ignored them, shamed them for minor infractions, made unreasonable requests of them while refusing them their reasonable ones.

But, so far as I can tell, I don't treat them like children; if you see what I mean. Talking to a child as if he were a child is just as boneheaded as telling a girl that she throws like a girl. So I try to remember, even when I am yelling at them for not doing something that I never told them to do in the first place, that they are big and little at the same time.