West Side Story

Confiscated a note from students yesterday. It was all about romance, of course, but my favorite line was about how the gender double standard is one of her “pet pees.” Gosh, don’t we all have those.

Making math sweet

One of my dearest students from last semester came by to visit before school started (I love being a second semester teacher. My kids from last semester pop by all the time and it gives me little jolts of joy in the middle of the day). He mentioned that algebra is hard, since he hasn’t really mastered multiplication yet, and next thing I knew we were deeply immersed in a math lesson that involved grouping candies on sticky notes in different ways, and moving around the plus signs and multiplication signs to show how it works. As the bell rang and he took off (candies clutched tightly in hand), I promised him that next time he came we wouldn’t do math. And I kept my word; this morning we made snow, instead. But more on that after my surprise for my students tomorrow.

My third block had a little West Side Story action today. Students were meant to be finishing up their essays on oppression throughout history (connecting slavery and the encomienda system to slavery today, and to oppression in their own lives). High on unbelievable success with my literacy block, about which I’ll tell you in a moment, I decided to set the bar high. I told students that writing is a conversation, and you can’t really focus on a conversation when you’re holding another on the side. So we were going to try silent writing and really focus—no chatting, at all.

I expected to have to remind students, and move them around a bit, but found something fascinating happened. As I marked the first two students whom I had to warn twice and had them move, they both erupted (both highly volatile personalities) into cries of how it was unfair, I wasn’t making the “Spanish kids” be quiet. The non-English speakers in the classroom were engaged in a vocab sheet that they were helping each other with, finding information in groups. However, before I had a chance to say more than, “they’re doing their work,” several of the African American students held a chorus of how I was always favoring the Hispanic students, never getting them in trouble, never moving them.

I stood, pretty nigh speechless, at the front of the class. I told them to move, and to focus on themselves instead of others, neither of which is going to get a high schooler feeling really good, and they did, sullenly moving to other desks and putting their heads down. I gazed over at the Spanish-speakers, blissfully unaware of the furor around them and about them, and then moved my stare over the bilingual kids, who kept their heads down, focused on their essays. Not a good situation.

So I moved over to one of the kids with his head down, and then to the girl with her head down. I talked to them, for a bit, about how those students were doing vocab lessons, because that’s what they needed right then, and it was a worksheet that could be done in groups, unlike writing, which is solitary. Once they built up their vocabularies, they’d be able to write like the native speakers. But right now, fair did not mean identical. Fair meant everyone getting what they needed. Also, I told both students that I’d learned in my teacher training class (thank you UNCC diversity class for coming in handy for once in my life) that students raised in South America are very group-oriented, more so than United States-born competitive, independent children. So I have to be very aware, when I’m having them do work, of that, and I try to give them work that is culturally appropriate. Lastly, I struggle with the fact that they can’t always understand the rules, that they don’t always know when they’re supposed to be quiet and when not. So I need to think about that, and how to make sure it’s fair for everyone.

The two students listened well, interjecting every so often with thoughts. Near us, a bilingual student pretended to write her essay with an ear cocked to our conversation. When I stood up, all three students were back on task and writing. After class, the bilingual student told me she’d felt just completely overwhelmed by the outpouring, but that if, as I said, I wanted to have some kind of class conversation about this, she’d be more than happy to act as a translator. Food for thought. Welcoming suggestions, right now.

Back to the startling success of the literacy block. I’d shown students a video about how “Education is the key; school is the lock” and read them a short essay I wrote about my problems being labeled a Bigmouth and troublemaker in school. Then they started writing, on the theme: “Why Education is Important to Me.” The class had been enraptured by the video, and broke into applause at the end of my essay—now they sat, sucking the ends of their pencils, side of the desk carving lines into their faces as they pounded lead to paper. When the bell rang, I watched two of my most remarkable students sit through it obliviously, deaf to everything but their own thoughts.

One was top of the class, a new arrival from New Jersey whose intelligence, fresh-faced confidence, and attitude towards learning is a joy in our school. One was a student whose struggles with school have a record as tall as the desk he constantly keeps rising from. I watched them both writing. The class star took her paper with her, to finish during the rest of school. She returned with two pages covered front-to-back in a passionate, slam-poeticized plea for education:

 

We go here thinking this is a fashion show. Some come here for the education and books. I come here to learn and graduate. Some come for the food, but it’s not a big enough plate. We come from our own place, maybe even out of state. We like history and math, social studies and science.

But what is school? We come here to get an education, to be someone or something. We all want to be celebrities and movie stars, but how long you think that’s gonna last? You wanna follow your dreams, and I understand that. Some people work fast some people work slow. But the ones that work slow were really going fast, didn’t you know?

But what is school? … Three more pages on that theme, with equal eloquence. 

The student for whom staying in his seat more than half a second is a struggle, rose to give me his paper after a few moments. He’s had success in my class before, but never had I gotten a full page of paper from him—usually it’s a challenge to get him to sign his name to things, and I have to circle around his desk, picking up fallen papers and affixing his name to their mostly blank pages. So when he handed his essay to me I could barely wait until his back was to me before perusing it. This is what I read, covering 2/3 of the page in neat handwriting:

School is boring I don’t know why I come when I come to school I just really think of the girls but then I realize that I’m not going to be in school forever. Sometimes I think what is the point of coming to school and all I do is skip class. I was talking with my mom one day and she asked me what I wanna do when I grow up. I looked at her dumbfounded and said a truck driver knowing that ima be in jail if I keep smoking and having drugs on my mind every time I fall asleep. Sometimes I wish I never met drugs because I promise you I would look like a good boy raising my hand after every question. When the teacher calls on me I try not to be seen because I don’t know the answer. When it’s test time I look at question one for at least an hour not because I’m taking my time. I just don’t know it. I try to ask for help but all the kids look at and wonder why do you even come to school just to copy and make a fool out of yourself?

During my lunch break, I flew to his case counselor’s classroom. I started waving the paper in her face, gushing about how simply overwhelmed I was at this outpouring of feeling from a student who normally never writes a word. He wrote! He wrote! He wrote and he wrote well, dammit, he wrote from the heart! And do you know what she did? I’ll tell you.

It's near the end of the day. Students are writing their essays. This particular student is on the computer by the side of the room, typing his in. Suddenly, his counselor (whom by the way he’s never met in person—the caseloads at the school are too big) marches into the room. I introduce her to the class, and she asks if this student is in the room. He looks up, startled, from where he’s whispering to another fellow, as his classmates point at him. She tells the class that teachers are giving rewards to deserving students in classes besides their own, and hands him a bag of smarties. The class stares in amazement. What did he do?

I pick up his paper, grinning. “He did this. He wrote an essay that rocked the socks off essays. He wrote truth, and he wrote from the heart.” They clamored to hear it read, and he grinned and said no. Better this way. He called me over later, and whispered, “Ms. W, can you call my mom?” I did, of course, and was only slightly disconcerted when halfway through the call, she interrupted me to insist I had a wrong number. Nope, I told her. This is him. Your son. He can write, dammit. He can write. Now, to carefully, oh so carefully, craft him a reply, a reply that says that that good boy is inside him, that anybody who can write like that about who they are and who they want to be, can achieve whatever they want. Dream, boy. Dream big. And I will dream with you.