poverty book and sundry

I just thought I'd start out by talking about the things I've seen in my month and a half teaching that have been exactly to the letter, like the things written in the book. First of all is the story telling. The casual register example story in the book has been played out three or four times in my class, usually I stop it before it gets too far, but it always starts something like "Maaan, Tiesha so dumb" and then continues, with constant interjectons. Sometimes, when I let my students talk during homeroom, I try to actually figure out what it is that they're talking about, and I never can figure it out. There is no chonology to it, no sense of time, and I feel like the minds of many of my students are organized in the same ways that they speak - they don't have a strong sense of time or chronological order. Maybe this is part of the reason my students often seem to struggle with the idea of cause and effect. They don't seem to attach any importance to what comes first and what comes second, in discipline situations and in math problems.

The other thing that has leapt out especially clearly to me is the need to sacrifice relationships for achievement if one hopes to move into the middle-class. This is especially hard for high school students, who usually define themselves by their relationships, and even more difficult in a school which doesn't offer students any other ways to define themselves. In high school, I was a soccer player. I was a skier. I was on the newspaper. I was involved in the student council. All sorts of junk. These were all different ways that I could define myself, different groups I put myself in. But in a school of 1800, where the only extracurriculars are sports (and a fledgling "tech team"), the vast majority of the students are left with only one way to define themselves in school - the friends they hang with. To be cool with their friends, they sacrifice school. To do well in school, they have to sacrifice their loser friends.
I don't really know what to do about this yet. Obviously, more extra-curriculars would be a start. Create more clubs, teams, organizations, so that students can see themselves in a group besides the friends or the gang that they run with. But even so, sacrifices will have to be made, and having multiple ways of representing yourself will only make that sacrifice of relationships a little less painful. I wonder, though, how effective mentoring relationships can be at easing that pain. At first, it seems likely that substitiuting one relationship for another might be helpful, but I feel like if a student is seen to be giving up relationships for a teacher's vision, rather than his own vision of how he wants to change his life, then giving up relationships might be even more difficult. Trying to establish a mentoring relationship in these circumstances would, I feel, be really hard. But as the book says, one of the biggest factors in "making it"; is relationships with positive role models. I just don't yet know how to foster those kinds of relationships.
Aside from the book, I guess I might blog about a few other things I've been thinking lately. It's my planning period, after all, and I can't bring myself to start to organize for fourth block quite yet.
Differentiated Instruction
Some students pick up things after 2 examples. Some students need two weeks. This is hard, and I don't know what to do. Teach right down the middle? Or teach to the low end? I need to somehow -

Students arrive. One wants a progress report for her Mama, even though she claims that last week is her last week of school. What are her plans for the weekend. She can't do nothing after school because she's got to stay home with her baby. She's failing three of her classes, mine included, but she can't seem to get rid of that smile. She really is a good kid. The other asked for a progress report yesterday, and so I gave it to her today. She's failing too. A third student is with them. They say you failed all your students. The second student pipes up
Naw, he\'s a good teacher, I just be missing too many days.
He still supposd to give you your work
He call me last night, but I was with my baby\'s dady
(Me)You know all you have to do is get me the work, and then I can go back into the computer and change your grade
Yeah, I fittnta do it. You's the only class I'm failing&

So, I got called a good teacher. Even if she just said it because she wants to pass and wants me to like her so that I'll pass her, it still feels good, after my second block tells me that I can't teach, every single day. That's where I\'m having the biggest problem with differentiating my instruction. There are some students in there who never should have passed algebra I. There are some, in fact, who have still not yet passed the algebra I state test, juniors. And there are some who have already whipped through algebra I and geometry, and are ready to tear into algebra II. Well, not really, but there are some who at least have a strong fundamental sense of what we do with numbers. One who really is awesome. i don't wonder why those kids act up. I know. When I'm explaining systems of linear equations for the fourth day in a row, they are just ready to go to sleep. What is really frustrating though, is when they don't get it. When they have it, and then lose it, or when they can substitute or add equations but cannot add fractions. One girl, while good at a lot of things, still doesn't have a clue about what fractions are or what we do with them.

Organization
When the year started off, I thought I was good. I had hanging files, manilla folders, post-it notes, paper clips, everything a man could want to organize himself, right? Wrong. I just seem to always have so many things going on that I can\'t keep up with putting things where they need to be, nevermind coming up with new places to put all the other things that I had never even thought of having to file (attendence reports, do not admit lists, I probably should even file all my late bus passes, rather than crumple them up and throw them out). Places to file transparencies, detention slips, memos... The list of things I have yet to find a place for goes on.
Organization