27 October 2005

Purple

In first grade Mrs. Lohr
Said my purple teepee
Wasn't realistic enough for a tent,
That purple was a color
For people who died,
That my drawing wasn't
Good enough
To hang with the others.
I walked back to my seat
Counting the swish swish swishes
Of my baggy corduroy trousers.
With a black crayon
Nightfall came
To my purple tent
In the middle
Of an afternoon.

In second grade Mr. Barta
Said draw anything;
He didn't care what.
I left my paper blank
And when he came around
To my desk
My heart beat like a tom tom.
He touched my head
With his big hand
And in a soft voice said
The snowfall
How clean
And white
And beautiful.

--Alexis Rotella


"Purple" by Alexis Rotella is found in the book "Step Lightly" poems for the journey collected by Nancy Willard, 1998, published by Harcourt Brace & Company.

05 October 2005

Missing the Best of Me

Growing up, I had a temper. A bad one. I would yell and slam doors and then pout about yelling and screaming until I got my way. My parents did not believe my babysitters, my teachers, and the mothers of my friends that I was calm and amiable when I was away from home. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a terror or badly behaved. But I am stubborn and I did believe that being loud would serve me. My temper tempered itself over time, but there were still the occasional flare ups through my teenage years. I remember throwing a pool cue across the pool hall I frequented every weekend of high school. Once I threw a chair across the kitchen because I was losing the argument with my dad. And at least once the ref had to step in between myself and the girl I was pissed off at on the basketball court. I never would have hit her, but I looked like I would.

Last year as a student teacher I was observed every day by my master teacher, once a week by my university supervisor who came to check in on me, and sometimes by fellow student teachers. Their feedback was always the same, that I was calm, collected, seemingly confident, and never ever raised my voice. I was soft-spoken and "gentle." Even hearing these descriptions sounded strange to me. That was not the person I knew. I had never been called patient in my life! Who were they watching? I started to try and step outside of myself and observe this person who was me dressed up like an English teacher. I wanted to see what they saw. Last Spring I had the chance when I was required to submit a video recording of my teaching to the State in order to receive my credential. I watched the video and hardly recognized myself. They were right! I did look confident. I was calm. There was strength in the fact that I was even-keeled, that students knew that they could not get to me and that I would take things in stride. My supervisor even told me that it was a powerful strategy because the day I did raise my voice or truly get mad at my class, the effect would be much more powerful.

I still didn't believe that I was a calm, somewhat confident teacher until I had the experience of interviewing in an affluent high school district across the way. I had an hour long interview in front of a panel of ten including two administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Question after question was fired at me without a chance for follow up as they went around the table one at a time, each with a different angle. I was a nervous wreck. My voice wasn't stable. All of the theory I'd studied was slipping right through my sweaty hands. I was bombing the interview with each shallow breath. What saved me was the end. They asked me to prepare a ten minute mock lesson. The moment I stood up in front of the panel and began to teach by leading my "class" through a close reading of Edwidge Danticat's "Farming of Bones," I was at peace. My voice regulated and softened. My heart stopped racing. I suddenly felt at ease and all thoughts of whether I would be offered the job or not, slipped away. I was in the moment. I was all of the best parts of me and I could see my "students" reflecting that back at me. At the very end of the interview they asked if there was anything else they should know. I said, "Well, I hope it was clear to you that I am most at home and comfortable when I am teaching. I love it. " You know what? They offered me the job.

I don't regret turning the job down to work with less privileged kids, but I do regret that I am not in a place where I love who I am in front of my students. In fact, I don't. I am angry. I am tired. I am not my best. I spent the first week of this job calm and even-keeled in the way that had provided me strength in the past, but it got me no where. Now, not a day goes by that I don't raise my voice, that I don't almost throw down my overhead pen or my clipboard. Not a day goes by that I don't consider walking right out and slamming my door, as if that would help me get my way.

Does my temper help the situation? Yes and no. It doesn't help because it lets students know that they are getting to me. Just yesterday, as I tried to be even, a student said, "She's mad. I can see it in her eye. She wants to throw something." I successfully ignored him, but I knew he was right. My even temper was just a look; I was burning up inside. One day last week, after the disaster with the sub, I came into the classroom pissed off, thinking I could use my anger to make a point. All it accomplished was to get the few students who do back me up to get mad at me too. One even said, "If you are gonna have a bad attitude, don't expect us to have a good one," to which I shot back with, "After the way you treated the sub, you deserve my bad attitude. You earned it!" But my students just stepped up to fight and were not scared into any sort of compliance at all. It was the wrong tactic.

I haven't yet found the place to be on my tempered line. One minute, I get the message that I should try signifying or engaging in the verbal insult play that is a part of the culture, an entry door to acceptance. Sometimes this works. But the next minute, any attempt at signifying comes off as sarcasm and disrespect. It does not sit well with me or my students. It is not the kind of teacher or person I want to be and it is not a part of my culture so it doesn't come naturally. I am constantly wondering how to function as such a stranger, to make it clear that I mean business and can hang with their rhetoric. What I do know is that it is hard for me to separate from the feelings that come up in class. If I don't stay calm and unmoved, I take too much home with me. But if I let them walk all over me without reaction, we get no where.

Without a doubt, I am missing the kind of teaching that I fell in love with, the kind that removed me from my own ups and downs and put me fully into a moment I wanted to embrace. I know when I am that kind of teacher, my students shine. All I'm doing right now is hurting myself and possibly my students too. And yet, I've been called the "gentle voice" on campus. How is this possible and what kind of tempers are being unleashed in other classrooms? I try to remind myself to go towards tranquility. I ring a "singing bowl" used in Buddhist meditation to get my students' attention. I decorate my walls with poetry. One day I wore a shirt that said, "Tranquility." A student asked me what it meant and why I wore it. I answered: it means peace and it reminds me to be peaceful. He said, "Are you a hippy?" I said, "Maybe." He put a fake joint up to his lips and pretended to inhale and suddenly the idea of doling out marijuana to all of my students didn't seem like such a bad idea, a little induced-peace would be nice.

03 October 2005

It is a question of survival

The only way to survive the first year of teaching is to find a supportive network of other teachers. I'm here now at the home of three of those supportive teachers for dinner, a little respite before we all head to our respective rooms for another two to three hours of work before bed. As I was leaving work today, one of my students was in the hallway still at school because he'd been on the courtyard playing basketball. He said, "You're leaving already?" It was after 5:00 p.m. and I'd been there since 7:15 a.m. In my head I thought, "Don't be a martyr, just smile and say yes." But what came out was, "Yep, I'm finally heading home to do some more work." He was surprised and I made my point, but I don't want to be the kind of teacher that makes my hard work the burden of my students.

These blogs are challenging. On my twenty to thirty minute drive home I recount the day and think about the critical incidents. Everything feels significant. It is hard for me to think past the severely difficult moment or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, the moments that made me smile (like the impromptu debate over whether there is such a thing as love at first sight that my afternoon students jumped into). There is always so much to say, but some of it probably doesn't need to be said. This morning the principal told me she appreciates my insights on individual students. In the last few weeks with the whole staff I've raised specific concerns about individual students that speak to big picture issues at our school. I would not be as in tune to those issues without these writings. She told me that the other ninth grade teachers are struggling too, and they are veterans with close to thirty years of experience between them. She said my "compassion index" is high. One of my mentors has pointed out that I hear things others miss and consider things deeply, but hearing this from someone who doesn't know me as well seems to confirm this. Later, the principal told the visiting superintendent that I was really reflective and capable of looking at individuals within a larger frame. She said, "She's going to make it." That's how tough this is, that we have to talk about it as if it were a terminal illness. Even with these feathers in my cap, by lunch I was in the staff bathroom considering the idea of never letting myself out. Another teacher came in and I said, "I'm thinking about hiding," and then the tears almost unleashed themselves. This is just too much, too hard, too sad.

But beyond me, what is critical? What do I need to write? Where will I find this research question I'm trying to stumble upon? Today in my attempt to bridge modern slang to Shakespeare, we got into a "discussion" about the dynamic nature of language. I was setting up an activity where students would brainstorm current slang words for categories like "sex," "being intoxicated," "someone good looking," etc. This was something I borrowed from a teacher with forty years of experience and saw it work successfully. But just before sending them off to make their lists, I decided to ask someone to define slang. I turned to a young woman who I know has only been in the U.S. for one year. She is fully literate in Spanish and way above grade level reading in her own language. She is doing well in my class, but it is clearly a big challenge for her to keep up and ego-deflating to go from writing sophisticated Spanish poetry to stumbling through English. We have talked to each other in both Spanish and English and I've checked in with her on the phone. I know that she is not confident yet with her spoken English. I know even more so that she is not likely to know how to define slang. As soon as I asked her in front of the class to explain slang I regretted it. My regret was underscored by a call out from one of her peers, the same young man who just called me racist the other day. He said, "Why you ask her? She barely knows what you are saying!" But she knew. She gasped out, "Hey," and the look on her face told me she knew exactly what he had said about her. I immediately jumped on it and said, "You should be supportive of her. She is trying very hard and doing well. You know how hard it is to learn English." I don't know what else I said, but I have a sense I made it worse. I think I asked him to apologize to her and he refused saying he didn't mean it as an insult. In the meantime, my young Salvadoran started to cry and then hide behind her Sponge Bob backpack while a few of the girls went over to comfort her. I called the young man into the hallway and he told me that he hadn't meant to hurt her feelings but was trying to tell me not to ask her the question because she couldn't answer it. It was a triangle of misunderstandings. Still, I encouraged him to apologize to her and he said he wouldn't because he'd meant no harm. I let it go, but inside the room as I was walking over to talk to her, I saw him apologize. Later, I went to her myself and said, "Tengo la culpa para preguntarte sobre esa palabra. Es una palabra deficil para todos. Lo siento." She seemed a little comforted.

What happened today is not the end of the world for my student or for me as her teacher, but it does remind me of the real value of the affective filter. I can do real damage by putting students on the spot who are not ready yet. But, it's a difficult balance. Some students will never answer unless called upon. Some students need to be pushed in order to challenge themselves. Maybe I was testing the waters with her, trying to see if the month she's been in high school had given her more confidence in her spoken English. More than ten of my students were gone today for CELDT testing (to be tested out of ELD status, to be labeled proficient English speakers in other words), and maybe I thought that with less students she would step forward. But I certainly asked her the wrong question and knew it as I was asking it.

This incident speaks to a larger issue I've written about before: patterns of verbal participation. Students are more likely to talk and participate in small groups, but my students are a wreck in groups. I can handle classroom chaos and yet group work with this class of students is impossible. Which brings me back to a much more traditional model of classroom instruction, one I don't like because it puts me in the middle of it. Kids rely on me to direct them instead of becoming the self-directed learners we all want them to be.

01 October 2005

Pass or Fail: An Update

Not long ago I was worried that I would be failing half of the seniors in my poetry class. Last week I printed out missing assignment sheets for them and gave them two more days to get their work in. I debated doing it at all because I didn't want to give them the idea that I would always give them second and third chances, but the results are in and I'm glad I made the move I made.

Last night I entered the grades from all of their late work into my gradebook software. Instead of eleven students earning F's, there are only two! One of these students has only come to my class once in six weeks of school; I wouldn't even recognize her if she walked by. The other has a serious attendance issue and misses at least three days a week of my class. She makes it to her other classes, but not first period. There's only one D, too, which may be adjusted because he is a student with special needs. My poetry class is an interesting one. In the senior class there are ten students with special needs. Five of them are in my class. Last time I wrote on this subject all five of the students with special needs in my class were on the list of failing students and I wondered what modifications I needed to make for them. Turns out that giving them more time to turn in work was the way to go because all of those students are now passing. What is really exciting about all of this is that I figured I would have to reduce the number of assignments I counted for these students, but I went ahead and calculated their grades based on what they had turned in and the results were beautiful! All of my students with special needs have B's or higher in poetry without modification! One student even earned an A+. This same student has really struggled in other English classes. His dyslexia sometimes prevents him from spelling his own name correctly. He has been resistant to my class by complaining about it when he comes into the room and saying he wants to switch to P.E. but when it comes down to workshop time, he always has insightful things to say about the poems of his peers. His own work has stunned his classmates and he has a knack for hinting at something deeper than surface level description. I actually see that by the end of the semester he might be a fine poet. Because spelling isn't a big deal in our class and certainly isn't a topic to be discussed during workshop, he is released from his normal hangups. I can silently go through his poems and correct the spelling errors for him while praising the content of his work publicly to the class. I can't wait to see the look on his face next week when he sees that he has an A+ on his report card, especially because last week he had a D. This is the kind of reward we work for!

I'm feeling really satisfied with the poetry class right now. While Writer's Workshop is a bit heavy on the "I like this because..." comments rather than any critical feedback, I've decided to go with this for now. We've completed one full round of workshop where every student has presented a piece of their original work to the class for feedback. Even though this is a small school and students have known each other well for four years, they have expressed surprise at some of the things they've learned about one another in six short weeks of poetry. I am humbled that they have been willing to share this experience with me. Believe me, they were extremely resistant at first; I am the outsider. But they are moving forward and letting me bear witness to their lives. There is so much pain in this class. The short list includes child molestation, alcoholism, violent death, cancer, imposed immigration, and never knowing a father. They are writing through it and for the time being I will keep workshop as an uncritical place as they continue to become accustomed to the idea of sharing such raw thoughts.

I leave you with this anecdote from yesterday's workshop. A young man presented one of his own poems. He almost didn't read it to the class because he said, "I don't think it's really a poem. I don't know what a poem is." The class encouraged him to read it anyway and at the end they said, "Yes. This is a poem." The irony is that inside his poem he talked about being a tagger whose tag name was "Poem." Inside his poem he said he hates poetry and doesn't know why his tag name is Poem. I like to think that if he keeps writing he will become his name. I see the Poem in him already.