Suckling at the Teat of Knowledge

Inside joke. Because when you're one of four crazed first year teachers sitting in the media center during your planning period two days before Thanksgiving you all inevitably talk about suckling at the teat of knowledge at the top of your voices while all around you students stop, stare, and then sidle by uneasily. 

And this must-read link which encapsulates EVERYTHING about teaching: New Classroom Rules.

Savage Inequalities: Life In a War Zone

Yes, I am reading Jonathon Kozol. I thought I would learn about students in inner city schools. And, as I read about students who go to schools where the basic infrastructure is broken, where they play in toxic sludge that seeps through the playground dirt, where they have 20 books for 100 students, and where it is clear that MLK’s dream has never surfaced because the student population is entirely black, I realize with shock that this is where I teach. How can you live in a reality and be completely oblivious of it? Yes, of course my students are mostly minority. And of course there's a connection between their races and the lack of resources they face. But I hadn't quite connected the reality of everyday school life with the statistical, general anti-racist endeavor I've embarked upon. 

This is what you call ironic. 56 years ago, Dorothy
Counts tries to integrate my school and leaves after
four days because of violence and harassment.
Half a century later, the school is segregated once again,
but with a different race. The violence remains. 

Friday was an adrenaline-rush day. The campus felt like a war zone. Police were everywhere. There’d been a gang fight at a neighborhood park that had bled over onto campus in the morning, and the principal recruited some extra security. Apparently gang violence ramps up around Thanksgiving time. The principal came on the loudspeaker to ask teachers to check their email—we were in “restricted movement,” meaning that students would stay in the trailers and could only leave in an emergency, escorted by a security guard.

What bravery looks like

My classes were 1/3 down in size. Many students had been suspended during the fights over the past few days or, during the campus-wide searches, been found in possession. Class was a lot calmer with only 25 students, and I felt incredibly peaceful as I moved around the classroom. It’s much easier to keep track of that many bodies, and give them the attention and guidance they need.

During one class, an assistant principal came in with two security guards and asked for two of my students. One is a boy whose previous communications with me have been: “I don’t do anything because I’m from the G,” “Fuck this test,” “I’m fucking suspended because you won’t let me go to the fucking bathroom and I said ‘what the fuck?’ ” and on this day, when I showed him his grade and asked him, straight-up, what he could do differently, he said, “yeah, I know, I just did nothing and chilled all the time, but you talked to my mom, and I’m going to do my work now" (yes!). The other boy is a bright hyperactive kid who likes to eat in class and litter the wrappers on the floor, sit on the desk with his back to me, and interrupt class. He's a ninth grader who sucks his thumb. The only time he listens is during lectures, when his eyes get wide at the historical facts being presented. Anyhow, they were both taken out by the principal, and I found out later during a faculty meeting that student searches have been approved. And a good thing, too-- a knife was found on campus.  Last week it was a clip of bullets. I think about how I feel strangely safe and untouchable—as a teacher I’m mostly background noise— and then contemplate the danger my students move through daily.

After school ended, a school-wide faculty meeting was called. The head sergeant on campus walked us through what gang signs look like. Apparently all that cute patriotic insignia is actually gang colors. Black means ready for a fight. Camouflage isn’t good either. We’re told to be very observant, and I think about how I have no idea what to observe.

That day, in my fourth block, a truly enormous cockroach crawled down the whiteboard. My students yelled and jumped up on their seats and I stood indecisively in front of the whiteboard with a paper towel in my hand, unwilling to touch such a large specimen. After it disappeared behind the board, I forgot about it and took it as a matter of course. Another teacher had popped in earlier to tell me about the enormous rat he saw scurry beneath his trailer. It all seemed normal, or at least something to smile at. But the truth is, it isn’t.

What my high school window should have said years ago

In the school I teach at, the heating was broken in the gym for the first two months and students sweltered in 90+ degree heat as they played volleyball and basketball. One teacher I know teaches two classes at the same time, running up and down between the floors to give instruction and set her kids working independently. Another teacher has a class of 65. I teach classes of 35 students in a trailer with space for 25 and desks for 33. The administration is too small to handle all of the 1,700 students' needs even with their sleepless dedication, and passes on the impossibilities they face to the teachers-- everyone is making bricks without straw. One of my students was suspended because she was attacked by boys in the bathroom and everyone involved got suspended, including the victim. I was thinking of going in to do some grading today but on second thought realize that it’s not safe for me to be on campus on a Sunday without security and plenty of other teachers around. My students who live in the area get to make no such decision. The school has more cockroaches than teachers. The part that adds a Daliesque surrealism to the whole? The fact that this takes place in a completely pre-Civil Rights, almost utterly segregated school. I have 2 and a half white children in all of my 110 students. Can we look at such inequality and say that race has nothing to do with it?

The thing is, that it’s hard not to accept these things as normal. Talking about the difficulties seems like grandstanding, emotional drama queening, and, especially in TFA, a constant battle of one-upmanship where everyone wants to prove that their school has the biggest challenges. I mean, Friday was crazy. But it was also a good day. There was a blood drive on campus, and droves of students flocked to donate (supervised by security guards, of course). While waiting to donate, two of my brightest students debated with me about women in combat in the marines. My classes finished their Industrial Revolution projects with serious intensity. One student started a classwide karaoke of Katie Perry songs which everyone joined in with as they worked, as only adorable 9^th graders can. I debuted the snowball activity which I’d been taught in my recent workshop, and at the end of 4^th period, as I saw a whole lot of paper on my classroom floor, I held up the wastebin and beckoned students to ball it up and make a basket. By the end of five minutes, my floor was pristine.

 

So you see, the students are eager and curious and work hard when given the chance, and are also silly children eager to sing and play and have fun. But they do these things in an environment that is filthy and violent and sometimes downright scary. We bring up inequality and race and power differentiation often in class—after all, world history is full of it. But how aware are they, really, that the mere fact that they have lost an average of ten minutes a week of learning due to insect-related invasions of their classroom gives them a disadvantage to students in schools that never see a cockroach? Will colleges take into account the fact that my students cannot take books home because we only have 35 for 110 students when they’re assessing applications? Will my students whose band practice or basketball games are cancelled due to safety considerations or equipment malfunctioning still receive scholarships to the universities of their choice? And will anyone ever say anything about the fact that America has lost its dream?

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun? 
Or fester like a sore-- 
And then run? 
Does it stink like rotten meat? 
Or crust and sugar over-- 
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags 
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Surprise! Honey, I'm Home

This morning, as I sat in a fairly well-run PD workshop on how to teach SIOP students, I compulsively checked my email. I miss my students and wanted news. I received the email from the principal about a number of fights on campus this morning and how there'd be extra security around, an email from an art teacher I'm co-planning with for the Butterfly exhibit on the Holocaust, an awesome youtube video of Michele Obama exhorting students to value their education (literacy block post-thanksgiving!), and the regular email from the basketball coach who runs in-school suspension listing the students that have been sent there (this email gets sent out every block so every teacher knows exactly who's been taken out by security). 

This morning, I saw FIVE of my second block in the email. One of them had been listed twice. So I immediately rattled off an email to the sub to find out what was up. By our lunch break I hadn't heard back, so I hightailed it out of the workshop, broke a whole lot of speeding laws, and raced into my classroom where third block was studying. As I made it in, I saw a gaggle of students literally crawling on all fours into the door, FORTY-FIVE MINUTES after the bell had rang. I strode in the other door.

I felt like a parent who had surprised the kids by coming home early. As they looked up from their projects with glowing smiles or fear (my raised eyebrows collared the ones who had slunk in late-- I took down their names without so much as blinking), I melted into joy. I spoke to the sub and watched as the kids worked. They were mostly on task, but two groups were sitting forlorn. Second block had destroyed their projects. I gave them new supplies, extra credit, extra time, and commiseration. Then I turned back to the sub. 

He told me that two students in my second block had wreaked terror yesterday, as well as another kid hiding out from some other class who really got the class riled up. Today they'd all kept throwing stuff, so he had just had security in to take the ones he saw out. I'm not sure what I'll do tomorrow-- their projects were supposed to be a test grade, and if they don't have them they'll all flunk. I think I'll make an open-book test where they literally simply have to read and find the information. That way they can learn it and get a grade, without hassle. Or fun. But they've pretty much forfeited fun.

The truth is, and I admitted it to my MTLD, I don't believe in this class the way I do my other two. The sub told me my third block were angels, and my fourth block rambunctious fun, but my second block? Terrors that the most hardened veterans would run from. Horribly, I agree. Most of those kids would probably do well enough if they were split up from each other, but mashed together, they're bent on not learning a thing, and making the class as unproductive as possible.

I'm not completely TFA-brainwashed. A part of me believes that if I'm the same teacher with all three classes, there comes a point where it's not me. It's them. Admin will always say that a teacher controls everything in their class, but at the end of the day it requires supernatural powers to work 35 other human beings into a position where they want to learn. If my third block are eager, curious, hardworking scholars, and my fourth block took work to maneuver into fun-loving, competitive, audacious students, then does the fact that my second block refuses to do anything other than verbally and physically abuse each other (and me. And anyone who walks into the classroom.) mean that I'm a failure as a teacher? The fact that I don't think so may make me a terrible teachforamerican, but it definitely makes me a saner human being. 

And now, for the George Eliot (because you know only George Eliot is getting me through 2nd block):

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure. Middlemarch

So. To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. 

P.S. Walking into that classroom and seeing my third block's faces light up pushed my soul up through my ribcage and into a glow of rainbow above my head. When D, a student who started the semester refusing to work, talk, or say anything other than nasty disrespect to me and the other students, looked up from her half-completed project and asked, "but Ms. W, if this is your lunch break, when are you going to eat?" I could have cried. J kept calling "Ms. W's back!" from across the room (we're working on quieting the propensity to announce everything that happens and commenting on it in the middle of class, but frankly, today it made me happy), and A could not stop rising from his seat to goofily grin at me, hands in pockets, while I spoke to the sub. I had to restrain myself from grabbing them all in a big group hug-- I'm pretty sure that's not allowed. But geez, how you do lose your heart to your students! 

Post-Millennial Computer Illiteracy

Today I took my students to the computer lab to do a webquest on the Industrial Revolution. They had to look up inventors or inventions and create either resumes or advertisements as they chose. While they worked, we heard a loud series of thuds and then a lot of shouting. People seemed to be rioting in the corridor, screaming and running and then pushed in one direction by security guards’ piercing whistles. It was my third block, so in a wholly unreal moment they all looked up, said, “oh, a fight,” shrugged, and turned back to crafting Alexander Graham Bell’s resume so he can get another job if the whole telephone thing doesn't pan out. My fourth block would have gotten up to watch; my second block probably would have joined in (did I tell you about the kid who punched a computer? Yeah, my second block isn’t visiting the computer lab any more).

Only half of my fourth block arrived to the computer lab, so I looked out to check out what was going on. Many of the students were standing between the windmilling arms of three administrators and the whistles of the security guards, who were shouting at them to get into the classroom—except “him.” Who was “him”? I pointed my students into the classroom, hoping none of them were “him.” Something had gone wrong—when the rest of the class finally came up, they explained that they’d gotten stopped at the door downstairs. Another fight. Ah, well, and only 18 minutes left to research the Industrial Revolution.

The fights seemed pretty normal for my students, so I rolled with it, kept the door closed, and kept teaching. But the thing that I could not get over as I circled the computer lab was the number of students who asked me for help with the most elementary of tasks. I’ve helped some nonagenarians set up facebook accounts, so I thought I’d seen bad, but it’s a whole nother story to cringe while a high school student painstakingly types something with one finger, and then another asks for help to add a text box, or x’s out of all their tabs at once without even realizing it. Their computer access time, I realized, is near impossibly tiny, and they certainly don’t usually spend time doing schoolwork on it. The one thing they did know how to do, and well, was look up their music—this class has beats privileges for the week because of winning the class behavior prize, and as I walked around I heard overtones of their music trickling from their computers as they jazzed up their ads for phonographs and cotton gins (one kid created an ad for “cotton juice,” and I still don’t know how I’m going to grade that).

Back in the classroom, I set my kids up with the projects they’ll do while I’m gone at a SIOP workshop for the next two days: create an Industrial Revolution board game. I’m excited to see what we get—so far it looks like a whole lot of candylands set in factories, some industrialized bingo, inventor-invention matching, and, from the group with my student who wants to build stuff, a 3D theme park for factory workers. They have to use a certain number of the terms and names from the book, and I'm hoping it keeps them joyously busy for the next two days. And then... we move on to world wars!

Riding the Bull

Walking into my second block and handling classroom management feels like getting on a bull and trying to hang on as long as I can. The beginning is always hard—getting the attention of the class at the start of the day is much like catching a wild animal and dragging it, kicking and biting, into an enclosure. Then I try to put it through its paces, using a combination of coaxing and threats. I flick a few flies off the hide, sending the students who absolutely refuse to behave out until the rest of the class has stopped rearing and bucking. Those students can return later, to settle back placidly one by one without too greatly disturbing the general peace.

As we move through the lesson, from group work to class contests to independent creative projects, I find myself sliding from side to side of the bull. I’m getting better at maintaining my balance, automatically compensating for the various tweakings and rollings that each student’s off-task behavior or outrageous flaunting of school rules demands, and handing out sugar in the form of applauding sticky notes or letters home to parents or participation points to those students who deserve it. If the class begins to work as a beautiful creature, displaying a cohesive stride, they get full class points.

Different classes have different paces that work best for them—while my third block prefers a steady, ground-eating trot with chances to backtrack and cover the ground again, my fourth block needs a brisk swinging pace that rolls them through the material swiftly. I’m still finding my second block’s pace—it’s currently a sort of ambling shamble that can quickly take off into an involuntary gallop across the countryside of profanity and mild student violence (they hit each other, smack each other, throw things at each other, kick each other, trip each other…) until I fall off in despair and sit quietly on the roadside, picking mental daisies while they rush ahead towards what looks like an overhanging cliff. But I suppose that’s the nature of the beast.

I saw the quote below and thought it perfectly fits the first year of teaching if you substitute “teaching a class” for “raising a child.”

--------------------

I took my class to a slam poetry event the other day. UNCC’s Sacrificial Poets were on campus, and the lucky first 6 teachers to request it got to take their classes to a performance. The poems were fantastic, about growing up black and knowing your skin is a ticking time bomb until conviction or death or a racist encounter, about how MLK has been turned into a commercial jingle and about turning size 14 feet into a joyous artistic experience. Our students snapped enthusiastically at the performers, and leaned forward in a breathless silence that was beautiful to behold. Afterwards, two students who had been in a workshop earlier got up to present—one on being bullied for her weight and another on losing a mother. They were excellent and intense and I silently passed out tissues among my class. Next up: slam poetry in the Industrial Revolution.

P.S. I'm Not Talking About You Ms. Wegner

Have you ever read, “An Indian Father's Plea”? I highly recommend it—it’s a heart-wrenching, highly erudite letter in which a father explains to his son’s kindergarten teacher that he’s not a slow learner, just from a different culture. My third block read it today because it’s currently Native American Heritage month, and also because it’s a terrifically composed letter. We talked about cultural difference and I asked them how many of them I'd pronounced names wrong for when they first entered our class. We laughed as five or six kids raised their hands and I went through and made sure I'm saying them right, now. Then I asked them to think. To consider themselves. Are there situations in which they’re misread by their teachers? Do their cultures or identities create gaps between their internal lives and school expectations? Students thought, intently, and for a ridiculous, beautiful 20 minutes utter silence reigned in my classroom as they wrote out their feelings.

The things that they wrote! They talked about being laughed at for their English, about language barriers and not learning about their own heritage. They spoke of their loud families and how teachers think they’re rude when they’re just being real. They hate being ignored. They hate being made to talk. They hate when the whole class is punished for one group’s misbehavior. They are Honduran and Mexican and Vietnamese and religious and atheist and angry and lazy. They want to play video games. They want to learn cursive instead of history. They want to sleep on their desks.

Some of them wrote directly to other teachers, and I feel myself trapped, wanting to give them a hint. But I have to respect student-teacher confidentiality. Passing on the honesty they decided to share would be a betrayal. Only one of them wrote to me specifically, and I added it here-- it makes me laugh even as I think he's right, we should build more stuff in class.

The best bit? Writing back to my students, thanking them for their honesty and bravery and affirming how deeply lucky I am to have them in our class.

Oh how I want to do this every day… I want to teach English! English!

Some of the more innocuous samples:

Precious: P.S. I'm not talking about you Ms. Wegner

Teach us cursive, dammit!

He wants to build stuff. Next up, Industrial Revolution! Lucky guy.

He spends every day angry. Feels angry that the black students in the school look at him because he's Hispanic, and mock his English, and make him an outsider. He never speaks much, just whispers the answer under his breath and then half grins as he peeks up at me to see if he got it right. My whole heart contracted when I read his honesty here. "I should of be a good kid but yall do me like I am... They think they smart but they aren't." My advice: to speak up and prove you are, man. That's the only way to change it.

And Not a Single Fuck Was Given...

How We Used to Be

Today I was told:

Shut the fuck up.

What the fuck?

Don’t even fucking talk to me. 

How We Are Now

Three different students, one of them not even mine, just a kid bounced to my trailer for misbehavior. Three different pieces of profanity.

As I nonchalantly mentioned the fact to another TFA teacher during lunch, she thought nostalgically back on the days of our innocence.

“Remember when that wasn’t normal? I would have wigged out if someone said that to me outside the school… Now I’m just like, whatever. But I have noticed my road rage is getting out of hand.”

I laughed and agreed that we are becoming inured to profanity. Then I went back to my trailer and watched my students perform skits of Napoleon’s life. In the middle, an administrator came by on a walkthrough. I couldn’t help but chuckle secretly when she hauled a student off for cursing at her as she told him to raise his head off his desk—welcome to the monkey house.

And then the bell rang and my dearest students stayed to tell me about their thanksgiving plans or upcoming band parades or baseball tryouts, and I walked out of my classroom high and pure and free, leaving it all behind.

Playlist: SURVIVAL

And so, November.

Hakol Milemala: Everything's from above

My daily Pandora playlist (titled Survive TFA) now consists entirely of Avicii begging to Wake Me Up when it’s all over, Mike Schmidt affirming that Today I’m Okay, Wilson Phillip urging me to Hold On just one more day, Kelly Clarkson yodeling that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, Alicia Keys’ shouting that it’s a New Day, and lastly but bestly, Gad Elbaz reminding me that Hakol Milemala.  What an idget I was to think I could continue listening sedately to Charlotte’s best country while working in TFA.

I spent the week egging my students on to revolution. I promised my second block that if they stormed out on me and went to the gym, I’d give them all A’s for the unit for recreating the Tennis Court Oath. If they wrote a class constitution denouncing my power, they’d get at least 10 points extra credit. And one student did! A troublemaker whose English is none too hot constructed a “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens and Ms. W’s History Class” and I slapped a delighted 10 points of extra credit onto his grade. Sad that none of them have managed to corral the class into a Tennis Court Oath, but I can’t very well organize a walkout against myself, can I?

Adorable! I love it! And isn't it cute that he put gender equality in there?  

Last Tuesday I invited a professor of mine to observe and help me run a Socratic Seminar on Rousseau in third block. He began our follow-up conversation with “well, you know, the school you’re working at is different… how many of your students read on grade-level?” Witness the sudden savage transformation of Ms. W, compliant-slightly-eager-scholarly-sounding masters student, into verbal-nunchucks-wielding mouthy defender of students. He actually spoke paternally about my awesome student J, calling her a “goofball whose English isn’t great but who really got into the discussion.” That “goofball” (and God knows she is one, and sometimes also a serious pain in my arse, like when admin is in the room and she decides to interrupt every twenty seconds to announce how badly she has to pee and Ms. W’s a jerk for not letting her go because she lost her green passes) is one of the smartest students in my batch of 100+ kids and can whip his patronizing professorial ass in debate in two languages any day of the week. Which I did not tell him, but nodded and “aye-aye sir”ed and got the heck out of it.

Erm, might have been my expression towards my prof

I’ve known for awhile that my fourth block is startlingly musical. My first clue came when I tried the cute clap attention-getter we learned at Institute and had a full-fledged Stomp concert in my trailer for an unstoppable five minutes. Since then I’ve worked music into the curriculum every way I can. On Thursday students rewrote the words of their favorite songs to tell the story of the French Revolution, which meant that Friday was… that’s right, one of the most awesome revolutionary jam sessions ever. At the end, I caught one of my students on video freestyling about the Reign of Terror as the whole class provides the beat. The students who got bounced to my trailer for bad behavior refused to return to their own classes, and kept trying to get up and perform with my students. Some days I just love what I do.

Earlier on Friday, my second and third blocks recorded themselves “interviewing” members of the First, Second, and Third estates. Poring over the footage, I find myself giggling and making involuntary “awww” eyebrows at the kids. They put on fake French accents, and one of the most adorably earnest students whispered, eyes wide in Marie Antoinette style, that “Louis really isn’t that good in bed, you know?” Which I let her keep in because it is historically accurate for a good deal of their marriage. The boys mostly filmed fake guillotine scenes in which one person reports as the rest of the group has their head chopped off. Aaaand, back to you, Ms. W!

Not my actual student. But a picture of a student reading, anyways.
Still good.

One of my most sensitive, generous, favorite students came up to talk to me after school on Friday (I know I’m not supposed to have favorites, but this kid is the only one in all three of my classes that READS DURING MY CLASS! What the heck am I supposed to do? I saw The Things They Carried peeking out above his textbook and my teacherly heart just melted into proud joy. Also, the day we ran out of pencils because I hadn’t yet realized how often I need to make a pencil-replenishing run to the store, he came up and offered to donate his at the end of class. When somebody gets an answer right that he was too shy to say but has written down correctly, an adorable dorky wince of chagrin dances across his face (just raise your hand, kid!). But back to Friday). His teacher the block before had apparently started crying because the class was so awful to him. I’ve observed this teacher, and he’s a pretty tough guy with cool lesson ideas and at least a year’s experience under his belt, so it really hit me when my student told me he’d broken down before his students. (Rule # 1: Never let them see you cry. Rule # 2: air freshener is a must—a lot of students think Axe is shower in a bottle). I asked my student if he was okay, and he said a group of the kids who care had gone up to the teacher after to try to make him feel better. I sent the kid home for the weekend telling him that it’s students like him who want to learn that make it worth it for all us teachers. Then I emailed the teacher to check up on him.

I think I’m going to raise my student's spirits and find a copy of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to give him—he was interested when I mentioned it in class and nothing makes me as happy as buying books for people who appreciate it. Am I allowed to buy my students presents if the presents are books? By the way, I mentioned it in class because we were discussing race relations in France. The students wanted to know. In another block, we’d spent a good three minutes ogling the picture I’d put up of French laborers from that time, trying to decide if they were black or not (they looked black, and my students had shouted that out, but I was pretty convinced that any picture of third estate farmers from 1700's France would be white). No matter the topic, students want to know about race in connection with what we’re discussing. I do my best, and am sneaking the Haitian Revolution into the curriculum even though we’re not supposed to teach it. Partially it’s culturally aware teaching; partially an attempt to stick the “world” back in “world history”; partially an attempt to rectify the shocking fact that I never learned about the Haitian Revolution until I was living in Norway.

Richard Armitage making cravats look good

This weekend was a blissful catch-up for me. One of my best college friends came down to visit—also a teacher, she had Veteran’s Day off, too. We spent the weekend in bookstores, baking scones and drinking sweet potato soup from mugs, hiking through glorious fall foliage, and watching the four-hour BBC version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South (why hello, Thorin Oakenshield as Mr. Thornton… you are so much yummier as a manufacturer than a dwarf!). For the first time since starting TFA, I feel replenished as a human being and all ready to watch my students perform skits of Napoleon’s life tomorrow and then have a good long argument about whether his rule reflected the values of the French Revolution... and yes, they will have to explain why. Viva la revolucion!

You Have Jesus In You

 The Important Dreamy Addendum to the Nightmare:

Going to my desk to email parents during the lockdown yesterday and finding three of my students (tiny hyperactive kid, football player, and chutzpadic student who is now invested in class and whom I secretly find hilarious) curled up beneath my desk, grinning sheepishly up at me as they hide from the bad guys. Bickering only somewhat. Adorable.

Walking into my room to discover elves have been at it and I now have a projector. Pictures! Historic films! Prezis galore!

Calling a mom five minutes ago to tell her her son just scored a 91 on his Enlightenment test. 

My third block playing a tiptoe whisper game of history hangman our entire lockdown.

Playing Spanish hangman with three of my SIOP kids during lunch. L-O-S-I-E-N-T-O, Senora Miller.

My third block holding Enlightenment salon discussions and begging to show off their impersonations of Locke, Newton, and Diderot to the entire class. And today getting so into our girls-vs.-boys review game of the Enlightenment that my next door neighbor thought the kids had murdered me and were screaming “Wollstonecraft!” in celebration.

The returned Turning Point Academy student who told me, “Ms. W, you have Jesus in you.” Me: “What does that mean?” “You smile and are nice even when you’re mad.” 

Tomorrow will be even better...

Pinch Me; I Must Be Nightmaring

Today in 1^st block I met with the school social worker to discuss a possible DSS referral for one of my students.

Today in 2^nd block a young woman kicked a young man in the face. At least that’s not a social services issue—that’s straight to admin.

Today in 3^rd block we were in lockdown for a threat in the neighborhood.

Today in 4^th block we went back into lockdown and a gentleman in my class decided it was a good idea to spray the fire extinguisher across the class. I shared his curiosity as to what is inside those things, but 35 students locked in a classroom is probably not the best time to experiment.

Today I trekked across town to observe KIPP teachers boring the heck out of impeccably behaved students.

Tomorrow, I think, will be better.