watchword: purposeful

So I went all Program-nuts after last week's observation made me realize that I am just sort of going through my scripted program for the sake of going through the scripted program. This is death in the classroom. If I do not have a clear purpose for being there, why should my students?

I went in on my day off and tracked out all my objectives and made calls to have people come into my classroom to support me and made a behavior log, all of which is very exciting and has already changed my approach, if not the whole mood of my classroom. I also had my head of department make phone calls home. Until now I had doubted the power of the phone call home, but Oh. Man. You should have seen them this morning, slinking in like dogs with their tails between their legs. They just sort of sat there, sullen, for the first hour of class, doing the work and occasionally shooting me a death glare. It was awesome. Then they got over it, and things were back to semi-chaos. But a little better.

Had a very serious conversation with The Firestarter today in which it was made expressly clear that if I so much as heard the flick of a lighter, his ass was OT'd down to Watts, no questions asked. Then I moved him front and center, away from his friends. We will see how that goes.

Lots of my kids are failing, which sucks. The good behavior class too, not the bad one, as the work is just a lot harder. (NOT my fault. Talk to the scripted program.) It does not help that anything below a 70% is a fail; most of these kids actually have what would traditionally be called a D. I swear, wherever we as a society set the bar, that's where they aim. Mostly, they are failing because of reading comprehension, as opposed to speaking, writing, or vocabulary. Very interesting - you would think you could pass that part of the test just by matching up the sentences on your exam with those in the book. It takes zero thought, right? But my kids lack test-taking skills. All of them, not just the ESL kids. It's really sad, just another example of how suburbanites are better prepared for success - no one's sending my students to SAT prep classes (though they are eligible for all kinds of free tutoring, which none of them are taking advantage of.) The scripted program is really good about building in practice for most other skills, but this is one area where I'm definitely going to have to supplement.

One of the Program Ten at my school quit her job on Thursday, and one of my best Program-Friends is talking about quitting. We all go through periods in which we're really despondent. At this point we've been in the classroom just long enough to get past the initial question - How do we get through to these kids? - and arrive at the real question - No, really - how the f*ck do we get through to these kids?

No word on how long you must remain in the classroom before arriving at an answer.