2 posts from September 2007

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?