chuggin' along

I’ve been much less prolific in my posting recently than in semesters past, and when I have posted, it’s largely been in reaction to my administration, not my students. The thing is, my students are still brilliant and hilarious and prone to non sequiturs of the best sort. I love them, but I’m used to them, in a way. They bring me a feeling of deep contentedness, which is great but rarely inspires me to post. Administration, on the other hand, makes the worst kind of non sequiturs a veritable lifestyle, usually resulting in damage to my room, paycheck, or general health and well-being. After awhile people won’t listen to you yell anymore, and you must turn to the web.

That being said, the kids are the only reason I show up to work in the morning, let alone look forward to it, so I don’t know why I think people will keep coming back to this blog if it’s all administration, no kid.

KID STORY #1: The other day, I don’t know, there was something in the water and not one but two of my boys in my morning class spilled the sad and sordid details of their personal lives to me, up to and including their crews joining up with dangerous gangs, their frequent meth use, their friends’ meth addiction, other friends dying in drive-bys, families moving back to their home countries without them, the hovering threat of OT, near-miss violent confrontations, arrest in front of girlfriends’ already skeptical parents, raising stepsiblings more or less alone, fear of their own mortality, and mothers who have never hugged them or said “I Love You.” This all from, I remind you, two boys.

It is so interesting teaching ESL, because I have known one of these kids since he barely spoke a word of English, when he was just a punk middle-school type, and now he’s this articulate person with a whole world of concerns he never wanted to have, and I’ve seen him grow and change and become this new person and I’ve helped him – though not nearly as much as I should have – to develop the skills to express himself. I like him a lot better now – he really was a punk at first – and I worry about him a lot. If even half of this stuff is true (which I believe it is, and if you can believe this, I’ve omitted a lot more that I think is questionable) he’s got a lot more to deal with than anyone I know who’s my age, and a lot less support and fewer resources to do it with. I really want to believe that things will turn out OK for him. In fact, I sort of have to.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not wishing ill on the other kid. I’m just a lot more certain he’ll come out of things OK – even if that does mean, for him, joining the Marines. Thanks, cult of RTOC!

KID STORY #2: I have three rules of listening to music while working independently in my class. 1) No blatant misogyny. 2) No excessive profanity. 3) No “Smack That.” They complained at first but now, when the song comes on, someone wordlessly gets up within the first few beats and turns the radio off for just about 3 minutes. It’s pretty cute, actually.

So of course you’ve got the kids who are sassy – and yes, sassy is the right word. They will come up behind you with their headphones in, playing this song just loud enough for you to hear. They will serenade you on their way into the classroom. And yes, when you are teaching literary devices, they will realize that “smack” is an onomatopoetic word and start singing it as they take notes. You will laugh heartily, and they will be amazed, and you will realize that despite what you have been told by administration, you do not smile enough.

KID STORY #3: This one made me smile: my 9th grade boys, tumbling through my door before class like someone had tipped out a bag of marbles, standing in front of the Greek gods and goddesses posters we’d been collaging all week, arguing at a shout (a volume they seem incapable of operating below) about which god or goddess was best represented.

F: Zeus is the best! The women? The thunder? “Make the ground rumble”?!?
R: What? Poseidon! Poseidon is the best! Look at that…eel thing!
E: How is that the best? Where is Poseidon? I don’t see any Poseidon!
R: That’s because he is THERE! (jabbing at the world OLYMPUS, cut from a camera ad)

Also, note the general spike in participation by my skater kids since Hades entered the educational arena.

GENERAL NEWS #1: Ms. McD and I started a game club on Wednesday afternoons, where we sit around eating pizza and deepening students’ symbolic thinking skills via cutthroat All-Play rounds of Pictionary. I whupped a bunch of McD’s honors kids at Quiddler last night, which probably should not have felt as good as it did.

GENERAL NEWS #2: My SLC is really getting it together for the next two years, creating culturally relevant curriculum and planning activities to foster student investment in the community, and I AM GETTING A SPEECH CLASS!!! A year ago I never would have considered this a possibility, but things are changing: we’re more organized, I’m gaining slightly more respect and seniority, and the fates have aligned favorably for once. It will be a combination speech/leadership class with hand-picked kids in the 10th grade and above – a nice counterbalance to my all-freshman, all the time-style ESL classes.

GENERAL NEWS #3: The kids are reading more and writing better, especially the ELLs. It is pathetic, really, how my heart swells when I see a page of writing containing the future perfect tense with the correct, participial form of an irregular verb.

ADMINISTRATION IN BRIEF:

Trust me, you’ll want to hear these.

-One of our APs confessed to a social studies teacher that she believes herself to be the reincarnation of a French soldier from World War I. She does not see anything remotely strange about either the past life or bringing it up during a post-observation evaluation.

-Another of our APs – the highly competent, almost-fortyish fellow in charge of student discipline, in fact – was arrested on campus during lunch the other day, guns a-wavin’, for pulling a gun on the stepfather of a student from his former school when said student, jealous that she had been left for another student, threatened to reveal that they had been in a relationship.

And finally, a partial list of the books I have read in-class since we instituted sustained silent reading four months ago:
Bone 1-9, A Series of Unfortunate Events 1-4 and 7-13, Sorcery and Cecelia -or- The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, The Grand Tour, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, Blankets, Good-Bye Chunky Rice, Dreamland, This Lullaby, Someone Like You, Tenderness, Lush, Stuck in Neutral, Running Loose, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, The Princess Academy, Bound, The Perks of Being A Wallflower, Speak, Running With Scissors, The Handmaid's Tale.

I can heartily reccommend most of these books, and I can most definitely reccommend setting aside an hour a day to read. I feel so much more balanced, I can't even tell you.