Nobody Not You Get You Like You Got You

YOU GOT CAUGHT.

My second block came back from Thanksgiving in a mood to learn. Well, to be fair, two of my most difficult students were out Monday—one suspended and the other I don’t know where. But this gave two of my other students, incorrigible kids who usually sullenly refuse to work and erupt into profanity when prodded towards education, some space to engage in class. They’re really adorable, and their smiles lit up the class as they shot into the air when they thought the picture on the board represented their group’s vocab word (okay, it may have been disingenuous of me to give them “militarism,” but you gotta play your crowd, you know?).

One of my most challenging students filled in only his name on his guided notes and left the paper in the classroom. I had to laugh, though—he’d written his name under the warm-up question: what do you think causes wars? Yes, you cause wars, child. Very very small ones.

For our literacy block, my students watched Michele Obama tell them to care about their education. Then they wrote letters to their younger siblings, or cousins, or younger selves about how to succeed in school. Some of the letters were so poignant or funny I transcribed a few here. It makes quite a good list of advice:

Yep.

Be on point.

DON’T DO DRUGS.

Choose good friends. Over and over, they wrote this one. Over and over, I wrote "amen" beside it.

Raise your hand always to speak –from a student who never does… is this ironic?

Reach for the galaxy, not stars, because there are already footsteps on the moon.

Don’t be stupid… YOLO! Is it just me, or does that seem to be paradoxically incompatible advice?

If you do this, you will have more suxes Took me a little while to decode this into “success.”

Adorable: the student who wrote his letter to his "little bothers". If I had little brothers I'd probably call them that too.

Poignant: Dear little sister, in life there are ups and downs but for me it is mostly downs. Hopfuly it is the opiset for you. –I can’t help feeling that life has indeed dealt him a poor hand since he’s a ninth grader who can’t spell “hopefully” or “opposite,” but has a curiosity about history that even his fershlugina class can’t destroy.

The start of one fantastic letter: I'm going to be honest and keep it real, I have messed up my freshman year. I absolutely love weed and skittles. Wow on her honesty—the rest of the letter was about how she wishes she’d gotten it together earlier, and at the end of a page and a half she wrote, “I wish I had time to finish this.” Note to self: find out what skittles is. Are?

And my favorite, by the same student: nobody not you get you like you got you.

I made a Chanukah party for my 3^rd block at the start of literacy block today—they’d won the class behavior points prize so I surprised them with not just chocolate, but gelt, donuts, and dreidels to play with. They were really cute and quite good at the upside-down trick. It was also delicious to see kids who aren’t perhaps great at writing, or historical details, or speaking English, the stars of the class while they spun dreidels upside down.

My class is now a propaganda machine

My classes today were fun, all three of them. We were creating newspapers about events in WWI, and each class elected two “editors” who were responsible for answering students’ questions, editing their articles, creating a front page and layout, and assigning stories. The classes all voted really good students, both academically and socially intelligent, into the positions, and it was nice to watch them going around helping their peers, distributing i-pads for research, standing over students telling them where to find information, and nudging students into working. In fact, in every class I suddenly had two surrogate teachers. I’m betting they learned more about each of the battles of WWI than if they’d been doing their own research (though they did a bit, on what newspapers looked like in WWI). I did have to spend a good five minutes deleting pictures of weed off one of the i-pads (“we didn’t take those, Ms. W, promise!” and my response “you don’t even know what those are, right?”). The nice bit was that with two helpers fielding the basic assignment questions, I got a chance to observe and really talk to students more than I usually do. Someday I'm going to count the number of student interactions I have in any one class-- it's all a careful series of touching up relationships with students, edging them into feeling like they belong in the class, like they can succeed and are expected to, that their peers have their backs and that the sky is their limit. The newspapers are in the middle of being drafted and look good, with ads and propaganda and surveys of citizens and articles about the Lusitania and the Battle of the Somme and the Treaty of Versailles (okay, so it’s not a newspaper from one specific time, but that’s okay). Extra, Extra: I don't want this semester to end.

In honor of almost the end of the semester, and my phone calls to parents of failing students...