4 posts from 2007

I've been in the South for over a year now, and it still surprises me how extensively religion pervades my co-workers' and students' lives.  Sure, my students and co-workers last year in the Delta would talk about church and pray at assemblies.  I had a few students who weren't allowed to read Harry Potter because it involved witchcraft.  But the people at my new school, while not necessarily any more religious, are far more outspoken about it.

Our town has a reputation for being religious, and I see it crop up everywhere.  When I ask my students for favorite memories, "getting saved" is on the tip of most students' tongues, along with winning sports games and the other usual suspects.  Somehow a student revealed that he hadn't been saved and half the class exploded in a flurry of disbelieving questions.  If I ask students for milestones in their future, dying and "going to be with the Lord" are immediate suggestions.  I've had to break up heated arguments about how long a certain Old Testament character lived.  On their campaign posters for positions in our junior honors society, several of my students placed quotes from scripture.  Another student put "[alpha] give me strength in this test" at the top of her nine weeks exam.

This devoutness extends all the way up to the administration.  We were only fifteen minutes into the first day of school-wide in-service, before the year even began, when our principal gave us the unprompted reassurance that "God is throughout this building."  I looked up from my cold apple danish and noticed most of the teachers around me nodding in assent. He went on to explain that when they had been constructing our relatively young school building, the administration had prayed together for a way to ensure that God would be watching over the place.  They decided that lines of Scripture should be literally built into the walls, ceilings, and floors of every room in the school.  Our principal assured us that this had indeed happened. Once again, I saw nearly every head in the room nodding its approval.

That's not the only way authority and religion come together at my school either. On the back of the "In God We Trust" poster that the state requires you hang in every classroom, there's a sticker declaring that the poster was sponsored by a local church. While these examples do ring the separation-of-church-and-state bell in my brain, I'm not immediately filled with secular indignation so much as a personal and academic curiosity.  When a student asked me if a personal experience that "changed the way [he] thought about [his] spirituality" would qualify as a rite of passage, I wanted to interview him right then and there.  Here was an eighth-grader telling me about a change in the way he related to a powerful idea.  Given how devout so many of my students seem, they must have put some serious thought into these matters.  I would love to harness that enthusiasm and mental energy, if it's possible.

I've worried about those on the margins of the vocal and apparently overwhelming Christian majority at my school.  In at least one of my classes, though, we have a Catholic and a Jew, both of whom are eager to share information about their faith.  It was especially great to see the Jewish student share a story about visiting Israel with her family and have the rest of the class listen, rapt, and then demand to know more about what she saw.  I don't know that it's always that easy for her, but it felt good to know that that kind of moment could take place in my room.

I didn't leave Cleveland (my original placement) because I was unhappy at my school.  True, my school was a hard place to work and it was difficult to imagine going back there, but that wasn't the reason I started looking for a different school.  I changed schools because I wanted to live somewhere else, someplace I could have a life outside of school.  Living by myself in a small town like Cleveland last year made a difficult experience a truly depressing one.

But while a new school was of secondary importance to a change of scenery, the new work situation has been a great thing.  I feel like I'm actually teaching this year, like my students are actually learning.  On a more existential level, I come to school happy to see my students, rather than dreading them, and I come home with far more energy than last year.  Of course, it's a little hard to distinguish second-year improvements from new-school improvements.  No doubt the confidence bred of a year in the trenches has helped me, but I credit a lot of this year's improvements to being in an environment where I feel respected and appreciated.  There are perks that I feel guilty even mentioning to other MTC folk, because they illustrate how much wealthier my school is (one complimentary duty-free lunch for a month of perfect attendance by teachers, for example).  But that feeling of being respected stems much more from the school climate--my administration puts teachers first and makes decisions with our interests in mind.  My last school was chaotic and while we were dealing with a lower-income student population, that lack of structure stemmed from an administration that didn't (or didn't know how to) treat its teachers properly.

There are downsides to having switched schools, of course.  I felt horribly guilty last year once I'd made the decision to move, and while the guilt has subsided, it hasn't gone away.  I don't feel as though I deprived my students of a great teacher; my hindsight is clear enough to realize that my classes weren't much better--or any better, perhaps--than the status quo.  But I did deny my students and myself the chance to see me stick with them and do better on a second try.  Missing the chance to return to a school (while we're in the program) is also a drawback.  I don't envy my fellow second-years when they describe battling kids who they failed the year before, but I do envy their having a reputation.  I'll have to decide whether I want to teach next year (and if so, where) without any knowledge of what it's like to be an accepted, established figure.  

Still, I'm unequivocally glad I switched schools.  It's made me a happier person and, I suspect, a better teacher.

How was the start of this year different from last year's?

It's hard to know what differences are in me and what are merely in my environment.  My new school is so different, so much better that I often can't believe that it is the same kind of institution as my last school, or that it's actually in the same (educationally) benighted state.

Classroom management has been worlds better this year than last, but I don't know where to give credit.  It certainly helps that I have complete walls around my classroom, a proactive administration, and students who come from--generally speaking--wealthier and more stable homes.  That said, I taught rules and procedures much more determinedly than I did last year, when I was afraid of losing my students' interest.  I'm definitely stricter than I was at this point last year.   The lid's on tight.  But there's also more going on inside.  I knew exactly what content I wanted to begin with and I've made sure that my class is one the students want to be in.

Put simply, I have confidence this year where I lacked it last year.   It's confidence that could only come from a year of teaching.  I know--really know in that sense-memory, empirical way--what kind of a classroom I want to run and why.   Too, I'm also more confident letting my personality show in front of a class.  Where last year I felt like I had to bend myself to fit the role of a teacher, this year I'm letting my personality augment how I teach.

For example, I never would have tried this last year (my lunch period class had been talking a bit on the way to the cafeteria on previous days):

"So you guys might not realize this, but I drive a really lame car.  And I got tired of my friends making fun of me for it, so this weekend I bought a motorcycle."

"No way!  Can we see it?"

"Yes--in fact, I brought it to school, and I parked it right out side the classroom!"

(Confused looks)

"Guys, we're going to ride my motorcycle to lunch!  But let me tell you a little bit about my bike.  It's long, it can seat 23 people, but there's no sidecar, so we'll have to be single-file to all fit on it.

 Also, it's invisible.

And we all have to wear our helmets.   Luckily our helmets let us communicate with telepathy, so we don't need to talk to anyone else, because they can just read our thoughts.  Did I mention these helmets are soundproof?  You can't hear other classes."

How has the beginning of this year been different from last?

Last year I wouldn't have been able to get 23 kids to pantomime putting on a helmet (pulling the visor down too--no bugs in the eyes!), turning a key simultaneously, opening up the throttle, and riding an invisible, silent, stretch motorcycle to the cafeteria.

Everything I've heard about the second year of teaching has been borne out, so far.  Yes, it's almost incomparably easier, in terms of classroom management, time management, lesson planning and all that.  Now that I can actually run a classroom, though, I've got more time and energy to spend fixing the myriad mistakes I made last year.  Chief among those is my failure to challenge my students in their writing, especially as it relates to critical thinking.  This year I'm determined to get every student writing paragraphs with real, arguable theses and well-chosen supporting details.

My kids have impressed me so far with their critical thinking, especially as compared to my Delta students last year.  There's been a glaring exception, though: when we're reading a story, they have a really hard time understanding characters' motives and expressing how they relate to their actions.  

We read a short story, "Charles," that deals with a misbehaving kindergartner and I asked my students whether they thought the kid would keep misbehaving after he was punished by his mom.  I explained that they would need to consider why he was misbehaving to begin with, since a behavior will continue until the reason for it is addressed.  Even with my explanation, most of my students told me that the kid would start acting right "because he got a whupping" or "because he knows he'll get punished if he does it again."

I encountered the same when we read another story, "Thank You, M'am," in which a young purse-snatcher gets smacked around and then fed and cared for by his would-be victim.  When I asked my classes to explain the actions of the two characters in the story, they almost always mentioned only extrinsic factors: the purse-snatcher started respecting the woman because she was nice, not because he started to want her trust.  The characters' intrinsic motives rarely figured into their consideration.

So what to make of this problem?  It strikes me that my kids, 8th-graders struggling to surf the hormonal waves of their adolescence, often don't know the intrinsic reasons for their own behavior.  No surprise, then, that they have trouble getting in the head of characters in a story.  The difficulty in getting them to take responsibility for their own actions is really in that recognition--"I'm doing/I did (blank) because I wanted (blank)."

It's interesting that my students seemed so confident in the power of a good parental beatdown to quell the misbehavior of that unruly kindergartner.  While we were reading "Charles," many students would comment that if they acted like that to their parents, they'd "be through the wall," and I gathered that most of them believed that whupping was the only route to discipline.  If they place such faith in the corrective rod, though, that the only explanation for good behavior is something outside themselves, are they giving up some of their autonomy to change themselves?