Category: Learnin’ ‘Em Kids

I teach. Most of these posts are password-protected.

Anna

My friend Anna was born to teach elementary school.  Specifically, she was born to teach elementary school in Harlem.  That’s where we met in 2002.  I was starting my first year of teaching, she her third, even though she was a few years younger.  Anna was infinitely cooler than me.  She grew up on 106th Street in Manhattan; I spent my childhood on Old Highway 421 outside Boone, North Carolina, which occasionally got blocked off by Farmer Proffit’s cows who would wander into the road.  Anna had smoked since she could hold a cigarette so she had this sexy, gravelly voice and a low, rumbling laugh; my voice is sort of mid-range and boring, and my dad once described mine as a tavern-wench laugh.  Anna found it enormously funny when she fucked up; I blushed with shame at my errors.  She carried her fleshy body around as if men would find her irresistible (and they did); I tried in every way to camouflage mine.

Anna always played devil’s advocate.  If I was being hard on myself, she’d point out how and why I wasn’t giving myself a fair shake.  But the opposite was true too.  She’d call bullshit when she heard it.  When I complained about not being able to do something our administration mandated, she said, “But you can.  You don’t want to, but you can.”

And Anna loved her students.  I mean, unconditionally.  Like many inner-city schools, ours had some pretty needy kids:  abused kids, violent ones, pathological liars, kids with undiagnosed and untreated disorders, crack babies, everything.  Anna loved them all.  And because of the relationship she had with her students, she could afford to be, shall we say, unconventional.

One time, a boy was transferred to Anna from another fourth-grade class because the other teacher was about to blow a gasket.  I’m not going to say it was like “Stand and Deliver”, but MONTHS went by and this little guy didn’t get sent to office.  He even did some work and learned a few things.  Finally, I asked Anna how she was controlling this formerly wild-ass kid.  She held up a fist with the knuckle of her first finger stuck up into a point and said, “I used to dig this into the side of his neck when he got out of line.  Now I just have to hold it up, and he gets his act together.”  I stared at her.  She laughed her gravelly laugh and said, “What can I say?  He’s a kinesthetic learner.”

How To Make a Kid Fail Without Really Trying

I have individual writing conferences with my students for every written piece they produce, usually between their first and second drafts.  They take forfuckingever—5 minutes per conference with 30 kids equals two-and-a-half hours—but that little bit of focused time makes each kid feel special and accountable.  When I first started teaching, I would scribble all over the kids’ papers pointing out every little thing they did wrong, and believe me, the mistakes were various and sundry.  And eventually I learned that that approach made them (a) feel totally demoralized and (b) hate writing.

Now I do things differently.  For starters, I never write on their papers directly; I take notes on a separate sheet and let them make any changes on their own papers.  Not only does it help them learn to revise and edit, but it gives them ownership of their writing process.  But the most important lesson I’ve learned is, if I list ten to fifteen things they did well first and then one or two things they could work on, they’ll improve the hell out of those one or two things and feel proud of themselves to boot.

I take a similar tack for parent-teacher conferences.  I tell the parents everything that’s great about their kid, everything their kid does well, every way in which the kid meets or exceeds my expectations, and then I give them an area or two where the kid could improve.  Today I had a conference with the parent of a reasonably smart, totally charming, sorta naughty, completely undiagnosed-ADD kid.  I started off by saying, “I think —- is having a good year.  He seems to be learning a lot.”  That’s as far as I got, and this woman burst into tears!  She said in her thick Russian accent, “I’m so sorry.  It’s the first time I hear something like this about my son.  Whenever I come to school and people say, ‘Are you —-‘s mother?’, I freeze because I wait to hear them tell me how bad he is.”  It just broke my heart.

The Game

Redford gets so excited about the treat that he’ll get when he loads up into the car that sometimes he doesn’t wait for me to open the door before he tries to jump in.  He’s so pretty.

This morning, he did just that, and while I was fretting over his noggin, I dropped Violet’s leash.  She seized the opportunity to sprint toward the road, which of course made me freak out and run after her.  And then I remembered.  That’s her game.  As long as you chase her, she’ll run.  So I turned my attention back to my special needs son.  Sure enough, Violet came strolling back up the driveway and jumped in the car.

I was reminded of this kid, Michael, who I had my third year teaching in NY.  He was a handsome little guy, always in uniform:  navy pants, yellow button-down, navy tie.  (Some public schools in NY—mostly low socio-economic schools—opt to be uniform schools.)  Smart too.  But Michael was a desk-thrower.  And he cursed A LOT.  He’d have these fits where I’d have to evacuate the rest of the kids from the class and let him wreck the joint.  And sometimes he’d get mad and leave the classroom.  The first few times I ran after him.  I was worried he might hurt somebody or run out in the street and get hit by a bus or something.  About the fifth time, I don’t know, the novelty had worn off maybe, and it took me a little longer to follow him.  When I got into the hall, he was peeking back through the double doors to make sure I was coming.  That’s when I realized, he didn’t want to run away; he wanted to be chased.  Dogs and fourth-graders, man.

P.S.  I used to talk to Michael’s grandmother every day after school.  One Monday, I went out to tell her that he had a GREAT day.  I told her, “He was calm and focused.  He didn’t curse or have any tantrums.  He did all his work.”  She said, “Yeah, he started anti-psychotic meds on Saturday.”

Show, Don’t Tell

I’m trying to teach my students the whole show-don’t-tell thing so I wrote this little story…can YOU tell how I was feeling?  (I know it’s vanilla, but remember, my audience was 9-year-olds.)

“Let’s go on that one,” said my friend Geoff, pointing at a metal tower that stretched about a hundred twenty feet in the air.  We had decided to spend our last day of freedom before the school year started at Carowinds, wringing every ounce of fun out of our summer vacation.  The sign in front of us said ‘Drop Zone’, which pretty much summed up the ride.  Surrounding the giant pole were sixteen outward-facing seats.  The passengers were pulled slowly up to the top of the ride and then released to fall sixty miles per hour toward Earth before the airbrakes screamed on.  Geoff and I had had a discussion in the car on the way to the amusement park about rides.  “I don’t understand people who don’t like roller coasters,” I had said.  “They’re so much fun.”  Now as we stood in front of this towering colossus, I was having second thoughts.


For all the previous rides, I had shifted from foot to foot, sat on the handrail, and urged the line on quietly, “Come on.  Come on.”  I couldn’t wait to get to the front.  Now I found myself dragging my feet, whispering, “Slow down.”  In no time at all, we were at the gate.  It swung open, and Geoff and I stepped through.  I let my eyes wander up the shaft and almost fell over backwards.  Could I tell Geoff I didn’t want to go?  Could I lie and say I wasn’t feeling well?  Come to think of it, I wasn’t feeling well.

My brain didn’t work fast enough, and I found myself sliding back into the hard seat.  The u-shaped brace lowered itself toward my belly button.  I grabbed onto it and felt it click into place.  There was no turning back.  The operator’s voice droned a welcome and some safety instructions, but all I could hear was a rushing roar like a space shuttle engine.  The seats raised about two feet and stopped.  My legs dangled like a kindergartener’s in a big chair.  I pushed myself back into the seat and grasped tightly to the safety bar. No, no, no.  This was a bad idea.  I turned my head to the side.  Geoff was staring straight ahead and smiling.

The seats began to rise steadily.  First, I saw the tops of people’s heads, then the roofs of the ride pavillions, next the tops of trees, and finally the skyline of Charlotte in the distance.  I could see for miles.  I had a vision of my safety bar popping up. Don’t think about that, Amy.  I squeezed my eyes shut.  That made things worse because all the swooning in my head shot to my stomach.  My eyes slammed back open.

And then it happened.  The brakes were released.  Geoff laughed loudly.  My arms and legs stiffened, but my hair shot skyward as we hurtled toward the ground.  Tears blew upward to my hairline, and a silent scream erupted from my throat. Make it stop.  Eons passed.

The brakes finally screeched on.  We coasted the last 15 feet and stopped with a jerk.  The shoulder braces popped up, and I tumbled forward out of the seat.  My arms and legs had no bones; I wobbled toward the exit.  Geoff was smiling and exclaiming that he wanted to go again.  “No way,” I said.  Never again would I question people who didn’t like roller coasters.  Now I knew how they felt.

Retalliation

From my journal:

Sunday, March 2, 2003  10:23pm

My kids are hell-bent on retalliation.  Two wrongs, in their minds, definitely make a right.  If they are hit, they have to hit back.  If someone kicks them, that person will be kicked.  If their mother is disrespected, the disrespecter’s mother will be verbally violated.

I was in the middle of the literacy Thursday morning, when someone cried out about an injustice that had been done to them.  The other party mentioned that it had been started by the first.  So I stopped the lesson, as I am wont to do, and told a story.

That morning, as fate would have it, I got on the late bus (6:57), so it was crowded.  I found an inward-facing seat near the back.  There are also those five seats that line the very back of the bus, the extreme two seats not giving you enough room to put your feet down and all of them always hot as hell from being right on top of the engine.  Well, someone was sitting in each of the end seats, and a construction worker (I’ll call him Man #1),  sitting in the middle one (the two seats on either side of him left empty).  A guy (Man #2) squeezed to the back and politely said, “Excuse me”, and directed himself for one of the empty seats.  Man #1, at that point, exhaled in obvious exasperation, thinking this may ward the guy off.  But Man #2 continued to move toward the seat, and Man #1 said loudly, “I’m not going to move onto the middle for you!” (referring to having to straddle the bump between the other empty seat and his own).

At this point in the story, I asked my kids what they wanted to do when people were nasty like that.  They were all like, “Hit him!”…”Beat him up!”  I said, “Well, I usually FEEL like hitting the person, but generally I’m just nasty back to them.”

Anyhow, Man #2 said nothing, didn’t even make a face–he simply reached down on the floor and picked up Man #1’s glove that he’d dropped.  You could see a look of “I’m-such-a-dick” flash over the guy’s face, and he muttered, “Thank you”.

I told the kids, “In that moment, when that guy had the opportunity to be nasty or retalliate and he chose to be kind, HE WON.”  Of course, Man #1 was so dead-set on being right that his humility quickly left him, and he spat, “Where’s my other glove?!”  Sure enough, Man #2 leaned down and plucked it off the floor and handed it to him.  Man #1 continued to make remarks (e.g. “Next week, they’re gonna want to be sitting on your lap!”) until he got off the bus, but Man #2 just read his paper.

Later on in the afternoon, after I’d told this story, Shaneequa ran up to me and said, “Ms. Scott!  Shanice just walked by my chair and bumped it really hard on purpose!”, acting out the offense for emphasis.  I just looked at her and said, “Shaneequa, be the guy who picked up the gloves.”  She paused, nodded, and walked away.