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.

Misunderstandings

I don't mean to make this a blog where I continually make fun of my students. But then, I don't think of it as "making fun"—just a kind of fond laughing at their foibles. Parents can laugh at their kids, right? So, so can teachers, right? It's not like I play "warp the kid" like a certain godfather of mine used to do.

And when someone fills out a vocabulary card like this...well, it probably means I didn't explain what I wanted very clearly. Excerpt:

Word: Treacle.

What I think it means: kind.

Sentence where I found it: They lived on treacle.

What it actually means: A kind of molasses.

A new sentence using this word: I am a kind molasses.

Coincidentally, "a kind molasses" is exactly how I would describe this girl, based on her classroom demeanor. Except when she's a mean molasses.

The Slar Wowne

On a Latin test I recently graded, one of the sentences to be translated was:

Cornelia ancillam, nomine Syram, observat.

The correct translation would be "Cornelia watches a slave woman, named Syra." It's a pretty cool sentence—since Latin is highly inflected, we know what the direct object is way before we know what the verb is. Neat.

Some of them thought it was neat, too, or anyway were suitably baffled ("Did they just wait around for the verb, or what?"). One of them, though, translated the sentence as follows:

Cornia waches the slar wowne.

I loved this. Why did I love it? Of all the possible reasons she wrote it, none are good:

(1) She thought she was writing "slave woman."

(2) She had no idea what she was writing.

(3) She's not aware that writing is meant to convey ideas, but knows that I am going to pester her until she makes some marks.

I don't know what the world looks like to someone who can't read. I can't remember when words weren't one of the most important parts of me. I know there are a lot of functional illiterates in the world. I also know that it's not unusual for someone to get to sixth grade with their mind being a pile of mush. But I can't imagine it, because I am luckier than they are.

I asked the my 6th grade literature class recently to name their favorite story—something that wasn't just exciting, but was magical, mysterious, something that they believed might stay with them their entire lives.

Most of them named Zombieland.

Well, I'm a dope. It's the typical grownup mistake (I'm a grownup, kind of): take the thoughts that you formulated about your childhood fifteen years later, and assume that eleven-year-olds are thinking them right now.

But, really?? They can't mean Zombieland occupies the same space in their heads as The Phantom Tollboth and Matilda and Harold and the Purple Crayon did, and do, in mine. Can they? Do they have anything to fill that space? I'm not saying I never watched or read crap, but I watched and read stuff besides crap, too. I'm pretty sure their heads are filled mostly with crap.

And how am I going to convince them that they'll be so much richer—you know, like me—if they fill that space with the stuff I am always going on about? How do I get them to stop calling Lewis Carroll's Alice a whiny weirdo who talks to herself and cries too much? (Well, they're kind of right.)

I'm not really sure. But part of what made me love the slar wowne was the unintentional irony, coming as it did from the pencil of an Alice-mocker: to my ears, the phrase doesn't sound like sub-English but like middle-English; or even better, it's something Lewis Carroll could have thought of, like a mome rath.

So, anyway, I thought it would make a good name for a blog.