23 September 2009

Immigration and the Digital Age

Some of my colleagues speak about their digital story project. The students featured just happen to be my very first group of ninth graders as juniors (they've now graduated).

September Scenes

Almost one month into the school year, and the papers have already stacked up, the steady clip of my teaching life eclipsing my personal life. Isn't about time for a few scenes from my teaching life?

1. A woman from the feds came by my room the other day to have me sign some Title I paperwork. While she took me away from my students for a few moments, they proceeded to stay focused on the task of their morning journal writing. When I'd finished signing the paper work, she said, "What a great class you have. Is this senior English?" I looked at her incredulously and said, "Ninth grade English." She couldn't believe ninth graders could be so calm and focused.

When strangers come through my classroom, usually some sort of audit or someone from another school, I always hear the same thing within just a few minutes, "What a great classroom you have," and "Your students are wonderful." I know that both of these things are true, but I also have decided over the years that such speedy impressions can only be made by comparisons. Strangers who visit my classroom have probably also visited the overcrowded and chaotic classrooms of large comprehensive high schools not too far away from where I teach.

2) Today is Wednesday and on Wednesday's we have a modified schedule. My first period ends at 9:15 instead of 9:37. Somehow in my planning, I completely forgot that today was Wednesday. I'm not sure this has happened to me since my first year of teaching five years ago. At 9:24, my students and I were still reading Richard Peck's "I Go Along," about a high school junior in a regular English class who decides to go on the field trip of the Advanced English class and realizes he's smart after all. Not a single student decided to tell me that it was well pas time to go. The next period's students waiting quietly outside my door, so quiet that it didn't tip me off. Stranger still, the other teachers didn't bother to let me know I was nearly 10 minutes past the end of first period. When I finally realized my error, my class didn't even seem upset with me.

This has got to be the most polite group of ninth graders ever! They seemed perfectly content to keep on reading with me. I think I'm in love.

3) Yesterday I visited the local middle school to see the unveiling of a mural that two current ninth graders worked on over the summer. One of these young men specifically invited me to go, and usually when a 14 year old goes out of their way to invite me, I do everything I can to be there. The mural was beautiful, and I enjoyed being the proud new teachers of these two artists. But what didn't settle too well with me was running into the younger sibling of a student I taught my first year in Oakland. Every teacher has those one or two students who will haunt them forever, and yesterday I me the sibling of mine. He was nearly as distasteful as his older brother. When I suggested he come to our high school next year (prior to knowing his family connection), he said, "My brother would said F- that." Then he proceeded to tell me, quite proudly, that his brother was now in jail, though he couldn't quite explain why. It makes me sad when the trajectory we see some students on is truly the reality. We do everything we can to interrupt the path and re-steer the student, but often we fail.