Ice Ice Baby

Today, right at the end of class while the announcements hit the loudspeaker, I watched as a young gentleman in the front row slyly stole ice from his friend’s bag (her elbow was sore). I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out what students are thinking, and I watched these thoughts go through his head:

Ha, I’m getting all the ice.

All the ice be belong to me.

Oh, wait! She’s turning around! Quick, hide the ice! But where?

Front of my pants! Yeah! Nobody will look there!

Bus change what number? Is that my bus? What did the loudspeaker say?

At that point, his thoughts became vocal:

“Aaaah! It’s cold! It’s cold!” He leapt up from his chair and took his pants off. Because, you know, there was ice down them. Luckily, nobody comes to school without shorts to support their sagging habits. Ice chips spilled across his chair, and as everyone stared at him in consternation, I tried to figure out what to say. But it was difficult. I was laughing too hard. And then the bell rang and the kids left and my iceless, pantsless student ran off to the bus lot, so I didn’t have to say anything except, “bye! Have a good day! Make good choices! Don’t stuff ice down your pants!”

Earlier that class, I approached the young lady I’d been trying to get on task all block. She’d spent an entire half hour simply getting pencil and paper.

I don't know about you, but this is definitely a two-hour
activity for me. Next class; tearing the notebook margins off paper.

“What have you been doing for the whole half hour?” I asked her, trying to galvanize her into action.

She pointed to her pencil.

“Your pencil?”

“Yeah, I was doing my pencil.”

“Inappropriate. Inappropriate!” I stared at her with my most menacing teacher-look.

“What? I had to sharpen—oh! No, oh no, Ms. W, I didn’t mean that, please believe me—“ She broke off when she saw me grinning and then started to scream with laughter-- "Ms. W! You, you!" Yes, I’m turning into a high schooler myself.

To prep kids for learning about trench warfare, I asked them what their worst nightmares were. Their biggest answers: being homeless and having their family killed by a gang. Ouch.

While the rest of the class was moving through stations reading Dulce et Decorum Est, In Flanders’ Fields, soldier interview, and photos, my Spanish speakers had laptops to research la primera guerra mundial on. They stayed after during lunch to finish up—it’s possibly my favorite thing ever when they do that.

Yesterday, a representative from Wells Fargo came in to my class to teach my kids how to budget. She reminded me how inured I’ve become when she seemed really thrown off by my kids’ participation—screaming their thoughts at the presenter and each other is how they communicate, you know? When a horde of students thundered past the door, a security guard in hot pursuit, she seemed ready to leave. But she made it through, and even managed not to look too horrified when my kids told her, “food won’t cost anything, because we’ll have food stamps.”

Today I fed a hungry kid. I've started bringing lots of extra food-- nuts, granola bars, stuff like that-- to keep in my desk for my students who are actually weak with hunger. Those food stamps need to work better.

 Over break, I saw an old friend whom I’ve looked up to for many years, who is also a teacher. She mentioned that my blog is full of crazy moments. It’s true, but I reassured her that those aren't the majority, just the most writable. She laughed and told me that she gets it: “You can’t really write a blog post about it when a kid who’s cussed you out the past seven days, comes in the eighth day and wishes you good morning.” Which is exactly true, even though I mark those points in my mind and celebrate them gleefully. They just don’t make good blogging. What can I say? That today Juan took notes for the first time, and Jonquarius raised his hand two out of three gos, and Janiqua walked into class without calling anyone a bitch, and Juana actually wrote answers for every single question on her trench warfare guide… Those are incremental changes, but they’re super-exciting and ever-present in a teacher’s life. They may not make for great blogging, but they are happening. It's only my immediate family... and friends... and hairdresser, librarian, Trader Joe's cashier, fellow joggers, etc. that I force to listen to that. I save the juicy stuff for you, dear stranger on the internet.

Welcome to the Hood

This morning students got their report cards. A couple beckoned me over together and asked me why their grades were so low. In response, I pointed to their empty desks.

 

“Where’s your work?”

“No, Ms. W, we’re talking about our grades.”

“So am I.”

My rapier-like wit is completely wasted on the young. It took another ten minutes to explain that turning in three pieces of work that you’ve only done when I’m right on top of you will hardly lead to a good grade in history class.

Another student asked me for a private conversation. “Um, Ms. W, can you be pregnant and have your period?”

Phew, I thought, as scary as that question is, there’s a degree of relief implied. But the amount of unwanted information that came out over the course of the conversation is more than I wanted to know. This week, I’ve counseled two students over romantic issues, listened to another vent about her drunken father (“I love him when he’s sober. He’s just, you know, never sober”), and taught a girl a trick for bug bites that she thought was voodoo. I really need a degree in therapy instead of teaching.

At lunch, the trailer park teachers ordered pizza to celebrate the last day before spring break. We were all there, and it reminded me of the Breakfast Club. We have our jock, who can get away with wearing neon orange sneakers and chest-bumping students and swearing up and down the halls because he’s so cool. We have our nerd, who at one point or another has dragged us all into his trailer to see his history games. We take turns being the basket case. We also have our mama bear, our awkward grampa, our sexy librarian, and our hillbilly (now now, Hannah, down here I’m called “rile cuhntray”) who has recently been replaced by Jerry Springer. I guess I’m the religious nut who doesn’t eat the pizza.

I showed my kids a slam poem about racism in history books, and this was the response one wrote:

Define the words of Black and White

Black girl work hard, White girl gets it EZ.

We all are a part of this community, this world, this land, and this country as one.

So why the hell you talking to me like I ain’t got no damn sense.

You see we can be smart, handsome, cute and all that.

But you think I can’t do this because I’m Black.

You see in my mind you fill me with hatred of every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day, every month, and every year.

Jesus loves everybody and I see it clear.

And you damn sure ain’t gonna disrespect me because I’m black.

Better yet I’ll go Napoleon on your ass.

Better act like you made of glass.

Now time and time this white girl called me a thing because I liked her brother.

She said you know where you got it from.

I said, yo mother.

The kids jumped up cheering wildly after she presented it, and then they were all off writing slam poems—I could barely get them to stop for history class. Even the kid who had gotten bounced into my trailer asked me for a pen so he could write one. 

The last class of the day was cancelled, and everyone headed out to the football stadium for the Spring Fling. Kids mulled around the field, buying cotton candy and hoops practice and racing on the bounce thingies. Four of my kids ran up and grabbed me, nearly giving me a heart attack. Well, three of my kids plus one who bounces into my trailer so often he thinks he’s my student. They told me to watch out—I’d know if there was a fight because all the black kids would be running towards the riot, holding their cell phones out to try to film it. We laughed. Shouldn’t have. Half an hour later, that’s exactly what happened.

I and another history teacher were told to watch the area by the dunking booth, so we picked some prime real estate by the bleachers and watched administrators get dunked (the Spanish teachers had to leave us—they were responsible for the area by the churros table. Ha). Students lined up to dunk assistant principals and favorite teachers. The crowd screamed with glee as their least-favorite administrator got into the booth. The entire school—literally every student and teacher, and I’m using the word correctly—came flooding over the football field to watch this administrator plunge into the freezing water. It was delicious for them to have such a goodcleanfun way of expressing their feelings.

About ten minutes after that, my friend and I spotted trouble. Over by the dance pavilion, kids’ hands were waving above the crowd. Uh-oh. Gang signs. Security guards started to mosey that way, and we watched as students started to throw drinks as well as gang signs. Within seconds, a huge fight was going on. True to form, students ran towards it from across the field to join the riot. Pretty soon, whistles were blowing, police were converging, and we were ushering students towards the buses.

Welcome to the Hood.

Maybe students think teachers are stupid. Maybe they think that wasn’t exactly what we expected to happen. In fact, plenty of teachers—all of them—muttered something about how “the kids had to ruin it” as we cleared the field. Maybe they were surprised, and exactly as stupid as the kids think. But I couldn’t pretend a surprise I didn’t feel. This ended exactly the way I expected it to. How could students not take the advantage of the anonymity of the dance field to begin a riot? That was exactly where we kept glancing the whole time. I knew it would start at the dance area. What I didn’t expect was how normal a riot would feel. Watching the security guards hang back, the kids run towards an area where the fighting was taking place, all while the sun was shining and the music blasting, ruined my ideas of drama. I moved towards the center of the field to keep kids from heading towards the ruckus, and then calmly schlepped chairs back to the main building with my friend. Along the way, we saw: twelve cop cars, two ambulances (a girl’s broken leg was, I think, the worst injury), a fire engine, a student lying on the ground with at least six policemen holding him down, and a girl suffering from the sun and hunger—she hadn’t eaten in a day and the riot had completely overwhelmed her. She we stopped to help. I gave her the last Trader Joe’s bar from my feed-the-students-stash left before pesach and we sat with her, telling her things to make her laugh and keep her spirits up until she could go home. I think it was the ability to help her that made the whole thing seem, well, manageable. Tossing starfish back in the ocean, one at a time.

As we sat there on the concrete, watching the cop cars and chatting with the girl, another teacher walked past. “Welcome to the hood,” she said. Where does she think we've been all year?

And, Break.

Could Not Be Happier

The kids can smell freedom. The teachers, too.
Okay, this isn't strictly accurate-- often I LOVE my job.
But it's been a tough ride.

In the movie Mean Girls, there’s a line where the principal quells a riot and then says, “I ought to cancel your Spring Fling.” Here at Crazy Times Charlotte High, we’re waiting to see whether our riot today will mean a cancelled Spring Fling tomorrow. 

Everyone’s praying not; the pep rally was cancelled today because lunch evolved into a full-on rumble (a teacher who works in a main campus building told me she locked her door, she was so nervous). Luckily, out in the trailer park we don’t see much action; the first I knew of the fights was when the principal cancelled the pep rally over the loudspeaker due to “lunch disturbances” and put us on “restricted movement.” A bunch of my students stayed to hang out during lunch, and when one senior was asked if she’s going to prom, she responded, “No! It’s our school, it will be too ratchet.” I protested then that our school's a fine place, but now I realize that was exactly the same time as a riot was taking place on the quad. Can’t nobody wait for spring break!

Everybody Run!

Breath! Ignore the large wasps,
balls of paper being thrown around,
and regularly repeated profanity. Focus! 

There’s a lot of gallows humor involved in being a teacher at a school like ours. While the trailer park teachers went for our ritual Friday-survival congratulatory roulette beers this week, we started talking about how to make sure our pregnant students still get the work they need. One teacher asked what would happen if they went into labor in our trailers, and suddenly we were off on a riot of hilariosity that only other teachers will find funny. Or understand.

-You’d probably get marked up from “developing” to “proficient” in classroom leadership.

-If you deliver it and teach the baby to read within a day, you’ll get marked “accomplished.”
 -“Distinguished” is saved for if you also teach the baby to tap dance.  

-I’d think mere delivery would be enough.

-Yeah, but you have to show data that proves your delivery was consistent.

-And that you’ve involved all your students in the process. Stations, perhaps?

-What about differentiation? Deliver this baby in an ADHD-friendly, SIOP-friendly, learning-style differentiated manner, or it doesn’t count!

-Nope, that’s not proficient unless you put some cross-curricular planning in. Maybe if you invite the health class to watch?

-Remember to show evidence of delivery!

-Probably if we showed up to the front office with our hands all bloody, they’d take it as evidence.

-Yeah, but they’d want to know if you called security, first, before they did anything about it.

-And whether you shared your newfound knowledge with your peers.

-That’s it. If my girl gives birth this month, you’re my first call.

Speaking of data and of the miracle of life, I’m going to keep a journal of everything I kill in my trailer and submit it humorously at my summative evaluation. First on the list: a wasp and a half.

You see, Friday a wasp got into my classroom, and in a fit of half-panic, half-humor, half-it's-Friday-Fun-Day, half-fractions-are-clearly-beyond-me, I laughed, "everybody run!" So they did (most of them already had, to be perfectly honest). I did too. That wasp scared me.

My kids are good at this.

A super-tough teacher from across the hall came in, slammed it on the floor with his clipboard, and told me to step on it. I did, gingerly. And when the second wasp buzzed in, I was ready. I leaped onto the desk, slammed it to the floor with Our Human Legacy: World History Through Time, and squished it with my shoe. Everyone cheered, and a student carried it triumphantly to the bin.

Oh, Friday fun day. Oh, for another week in the bag and spring break around the corner!

The Purpose of Revolution

My students are writing essays on the purpose of revolution. Well, right now they’re just in the planning stages. They revolved through the room, hitting stations with different documents about revolution in history (French, Haitian), now (Arab Spring), and then thinking about it in their own lives. I told them so many anecdotes about my own rebellions in school that I wondered whether they would get ideas, but it was only my 4^th block (who have become my favorites for their boisterous hilarity) that realized they, too, could stage a coup and seize the power. I talked them down pretty quick; I’ve had too much practice on my own.

All my classes were remarkably well-behaved. 4^th block I’ve solved major problems by locking my door at the ring of the bell, and only letting in students with injunctions to “sit silently” when it’s convenient for the rest of the class. They have to go back out and try again in three minutes if they fail to sit silently, and while you would think that would be a great way to enhance a skipping problem, I have some unexpected allies. The area outside my trailer is now buzzing with bumble bees. Perfectly harmless, furry big bees that the kids are terrified of and will do anything (even behave well) in order to escape. I think they fill the trailers with a pleasant vernal atmosphere.

So today every class made its circuits from Arab Spring blog to Three Estates cartoon, gently exchanging “cállates” with the pull-out Spanish group instead of their usual all-out bitch-fests about differentiation (of course, in my fourth block instead they always try to get them to teach them Spanish—oh fourth block whom I love for your disruptive friendliness!). Two students who have never done a lick of work before, in two different classes, turned in full answer sheets. Tomorrow they will begin their writing.

Ms. W will allow one day of recovery credit if you create an
epic movie about what you did while skipping school. No illegal
activities allowed onscreen.

Students also took an open-notes quiz to check how well they’d copied French Rev lore and were prepped for their essays. Told ‘em to write me a note if they weren’t there on the days we studied this. Received many excuses but fortunately went back through my records to sift the lies. Got a bit tetchy with the number of kids who said they weren’t when they just hadn’t taken notes. Wanted to get creative in response to student notes like the one below:

Ms. W I'm sorry I wasn't here.

Options for response:

-I'm sorry too. F.

-Why not try coming, then?
-You skipped 22 days of school. Unfortunately, the day we took notes for this quiz wasn't one of them. F. 

-No worries, why don't you take the rest of the semester off, too?

-I'm sorry I can't grade this-- I have better things to do. Just like you, apparently.

What I went with:

-Checked my attendance records. You were. F. 

P.S. See me for recovery for your 22 absences.

A more heartfelt note:

Ms. W may I take this over because soda went all over my paper so I couldn't bring them they at home. Can I redo this because I don't want my grade to go down in this class.

Yes, girl! You may.

I Can Buy All the Jayz

This week has behaved much better than last. It seems aware of its place as the first in the spring calendar, and is taking its job seriously.

Students created adorkable French Revolution interviews. My favorite? The one entirely in Spanish, where they acted out the beheading of King Louis so thoroughly that I could understand the entire story even though it was in a foreign language. Oh, and the very studious girl who quietly made herself a fake mustache to wear as a nobleman and stuck with it the entire day. Wait, also the bloopers! Like when Juan (not his real name) stares at the camera, asks, “are you filming? Wait, what? Aaaaaaah! I can’t take it anymore!” in mock horror and runs offscreen holding his head in his hands while the other kids shout, “come back! Ms. W’s going to see this, you know!”

A girl trying to figure out where she’d rank in Old Regime France asked, “so, the clergy would be like the celebrities, and the 2^nd estate would be like me, and the third estate like the homeless?” That gave me pause— “No, the 2^nd estate were nobles, really really rich.”  

“I can buy all the Jayz,” she told me.

The kids love shoes. Why do they love shoes?

“Yeah, but can you buy a small country?” I asked her. The kids guffawed and got it. Still hit me for a loop when I think about how she lumped herself into the middle class and how I assume, and assumed, that any student at my school is in the lower income bracket, because otherwise their parents would use that money to get them the heck out. But then, I guess they might be spending it on all the Jayz.  

Two of my best and brightest started dating. I surprised them holding hands as they walked to school this morning. They chose my class to get into their first official lovers’ tiff:

--Napoleon was upholding the values of the French Revolution! He gave them the vote and everything!

--He gave the men the vote! But that doesn’t mean anything. He was really just in it for himself. He made his own siblings rule Europe!

--Ms. W, this is our first fight. And it’s your fault.

Children, I plead a joyous guilty.