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!