The First Circle

All Thanksgiving weekend long, I bothered my family with comparisons between The First Circle (life in a Soviet Prison) and Orthodox Judaism (everyone subscribes to an ideal and carefully studies certain texts, which the higher-ups believe implicitly and issue hallucinatory directives about, and the proletarians then merge with real-life considerations). However, while finishing the book this Shabbat, I noted that it actually has a good deal more in common with twenty-first century American education. See if you can tell which of these quotes are from The First Circle, and which I made up about modern education in America:

• It came to their attention that the principal was always reprimanding teachers for failing too many students, and they realized that they would scrape by even if they knew nothing.
• Nothing is true until it has been filed.
• The ignoramuses could easily have been shown up if the examiners had asked enough questions, but the teachers themselves were overworked—what with committees, meetings, and writing various memoranda and reports—and failing their students meant extra work for the teachers.
• It never occurred to the administration that statements officially recorded on paper could be anything less than the truth, thus they demanded that everything be recorded on paper.
• The very worst punishment is… what is it? Being expelled, of course, to a wasteland far worse. But nothing, at the moment, seemed worse than being forced to do pointless work that one didn’t like, which would never mean the slightest thing outside these walls, anyhow.

They’re all from The First Circle, of course. And all apply to education here. Oh dear, oh dear. So much for democracy in America. Solzhenitsyn, 1: Tocqueville, 0.  

Let’s Build a Concentration Camp

I was contacted by my buddy from World History to share my grandfather’s testimony next week for a cross-curricular unit on the Holocaust. Always eager for as many people to watch his video as possible, I said yes, and he sent me the project ideas they had.

1. Write a narrative after reading Holocaust survivors’. What a good idea. Literacy, WAD, and creative, all in one shot.

2. Give a presentation on a topic on the Holocaust. Yes! Students teaching students for the win. And gaining public speaking skills, too.

3. Build a product (a Concentration Camp).  ?!!!

At first, I thought I was being pranked. There is no way someone would teach a bunch of kids to build models of concentration camps, right?  A+ for little Jimmy, he constructed a perfect copy of Majdanek. Little Sally only gets a C, her crematorium isn’t quite finished. I’m uncomfortable even making that joke.

I tried to pause and figure out if I was being over-sensitive. After all, building something is the best way for most of our kids to learn about stuff. And they will really, but really, understand the layout of the Holocaust if they have to build a model of a concentration camp. Yet… Why is my mind reeling, half in horror, half in laughter? (The laughter is because this teacher is a really good guy, and that makes the situation funny).

It wasn’t until I compared it to building a campus gallows to learn about the Civil Rights movement that I had it right in my mind: yes, this would be completely inappropriate, and it’s okay for me to say so. Especially because I know these educators truly want what’s best for their students, and are racking their brains trying to figure out what that is. Which makes this a highly entertaining episode in public education.

Just received from my colleague: We haven't really figured out what the product will be quite yet. But I promise it will be something proper, respectful, and powerful.  I won't do anything on the Holocaust without your approval first.  :)

I trust him. And seem to have inadvertently become the local Holocaust guru. Morbid, eh? I think I’ll recommend showing The Producers. Nothing like a few rounds of springtime, with Hitler, in Germany, to teach children about the Holocaust. 

*Also received from him: permission to write a blog about this. Quite literally: “Lol. Knock yourself out.”

Messing with my IB students to get them back on task.

The Sky Is Falling. Again.

Today, as students sat in quiet rows testing, there was a sudden crash. I looked up to see a piece of the ceiling dangling inches above the startled face of one of my students. Dead cockroaches and wasps had cascaded around him, and as I gingerly picked my way over to hold the ceiling up so he could move out from under it, they crunched under my feet.

So, I did what my students have taught me to do. First I called someone to tell them about it (maintenance), then I snapped a picture. I restrained myself from taking a selfie with my broken classroom.

Still, I think what I have to admit what I found the most incredible part of this picture is the students continuing to test even with the sky falling around them. I'm not sure if it's more a testament to their work ethic, or the regularity with which craziness happens in their lives (one of the vocab words on the test was "habituation"), but I am so impressed by these kids, each and every day.

Some of the broken things in my classroom lately:

The Case of the Missing Projector

This terrifying missive left in teachers' boxes in case any of us have pregnant students. 
Thank you, I now feel perfectly prepared to deliver a baby. Just make the student lie down, and all will be well.

Some of the awesome things in my classroom lately: 

Creating "Games of Life" for developmental psych projects:

Game of Life Level A+

All the love shared in our class. November shoutouts!

We staggered banged with terror through a million billion trillion stars

 How do you take a moment of total, resigned defeat, and turn it into a joke? That was the question that confronted me when I entered my trailer, chipper and refreshed, Monday morning after Thanksgiving. The handle of the door was gone, yanked completely off the trailer, with the inside handle flapping down, and I already knew what I wouldn’t find inside. Sure enough, the projector was gone, the cords hanging forlornly from the mount. My desk drawers were open, and the revolve tablet that the school gives to every teacher missing. Everything else was pristine. Well, if not pristine, at least how I’d left it before Thanksgiving.

Teaching without a projector is hard. It means no pictures, no movies, no pre-organized graphic organizers to fill in with whiteboard markers or instructions or jeopardy or lecture notes. My whiteboard handwriting is terrible—students can’t read it. As I reviewed all of the activities we do in class, my mood plummeted deep into the bluest shaft of resigned surrender. Teaching just got a lot harder.

I called the office to report the robbery, found out five other trailers had been broken into, as well, and began mentally playing my plans for the next few days: my standard students are playing their review games on development, then testing, my IB students writing reports in the media center. The projector won’t become crucial until Wednesday, when I will try to introduce new material to my students. The comfortable schedule we’ve built up, of copying the Title, page #, date, and Warm Up off the board, is gone. So is our organized note-taking, in which students only copy that which is bolded on the board. What do I have left?

Stations

·      Socratic Seminars

·      Essay-writing

·      Gallery Walks

·      Text-shares

·      Projects

·      Presentations

·      Skits

Well, that doesn’t look so different from my normal classes. The difference is that the presentation of material, which I used to accomplish via powerpoint before each of these activities, has just become much more difficult. I feel a wave of fatigue wash over me at the thought. 

6:56 am. My students would be coming through the door in two minutes. I set up the happiest, most upbeat music I could, plastered a smile on my face, and told students, laughing, that “someone had gone Thanksgiving shopping in our trailer.” The students were outraged, and the smile started to slide off my face, but then one of them said, "well, it is Black Friday," and a giggle built up in the classroom. Soon they were deep in detective work, analyzing the crime scene. Only one mentioned feeling as though someone had just bludgeoned through their education. And yet, whether or not they take it personally, their education just got one jot more difficult, and my outrage on their behalf is melted into a kind of exhaustion that can barely think about re-planning my week’s lessons so that they work sans projector.

a man who had fallen among thieves
by e. e. cummings

a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less 
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal 
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly 
confessed a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars.

Keeping It Together (Barely)

Breaking News: Three thousand civilians and nineteen foreigners killed in plane crash.

Imagine that headline after 9/11.

Wednesday, four men were murdered in a synagogue in Har Nof by two Palestinians with meat cleavers and a gun. CNN, in its first report, lumped victims and murderers into the headline, “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians Dead in Jerusalem Mosque.” A fifth man, a heroic policeman, died after rushing in to stop the murderers. 

It seems ludicrous to fight a PR battle when five men have died while they were at peaceful morning prayer. But I think that if the PR battle is won, Israel would find it a lot easier to fight its actual battle and save lives. The whole world seems to know that Israel is to blame for "provoking" the murder of four men with its actions, while Jerusalemites cry out for protection from a government paralyzed by world opinion. 

I read article after article with suggestion after suggestion, and find myself shouting at my computer, “is that even going to work? What’s going to work?”  The Ashkelon mayor has paused construction work in the city by Arab workers, but even while that makes sense, after all the attacks in the past weeks, it also makes no sense, and penalizes people who just want to build, and to live their lives in peace. In fact, the one thing it does do is let the monsters know that their plan is working—Israel is under terror, and it’s terrified, and it’s shutting down the direction from which the threat is coming. Neighbors are turning on neighbors? Very well, we’ll fire them and post armed guards. Exactly what Hamas wants. Israeli society shut down, Arabs and Jews and Druse and Christians immobilized alike, maximum chaos and mistrust. A perfect vacuum for their twisted evil.

 

It’s hard to teach with a vise clamped around my heart. When there’s a lull in class, like today as students serenely made their Kohlberg morality cartoons, I fall out of the rhythm of the day and into a daze of contemplation. Everything seems imbued with an aura of pain. Sometimes I forget why I feel sad, and have to dig around in my memory to find the source of the physical twinges at my temples and in my chest. It makes it harder to deal with average things.

A student throwing shade seems a monument of sass. A two-minute lockdown after school hours spun into a quiet heart-racing panic alone in my trailer. A gurney wheeled to an ambulance stopped me short until one of my students explained: his cousin, shellfish allergy. My truant students seem more hopeless than usual, my class clown less funny and more desperate, Orthodox Judaism more sadistically delighted in misogyny, and even the beautiful frost on the trailer walkways a slippery accident waiting to happen. 

My students don’t know that I’m struggling to focus, nor that they’re the largest source of comfort that I have for a brighter future. Three students, in three different classes, asked me to teach them a Hebrew word this week. I gave each of them “shalom.” It means peace, and hello, and goodbye, and I also shared its Arabic cousin, “salaam.” The halls of the school ring with peace as my kids leave at the end of the day, and tomorrow, I am certain I will hear “shalom” usher in the morning. It gives me strength to rise up from my obsessive news-checking, and go back to work.

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

...

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?