Last Day

I took a lot of pictures of my kids today. Leave a comment with an email address and I'll be more than willing to share them with you, but I probably ought not to post them in such a public place.

So close

Terrified that next year might not be any better. I'm going to have to work my ass off this summer to make sure that it will be. Now I just have to get my seniors through this exam and out the door. I hope they make it. One or two might not, which is really hard for me. And hard for them too, I'm sure. I've spent so much time working with them, trying to get them caught up, making sure they make up work. I've stayed after school, met them at McDonald's on Saturday mornings, at Tabbs on weeknights with a platter of sweet potato fries, during my planning period, during homeroom. I just hope it's enough. I don't like having so much power.

My favorite announcement of the year

Please pardon the interruption. Some of you have been very disrespectful to your teachers lately. If you are disrespectful to your teachers, I'll send you home. If you are disrespectful to your fellow students, I'll send you home. If you are disrespectful to any of the staff, I'll send you home. I just gave out 20 days at the house. I've got a stack of referrals and a new box of pens, and I will send you home.

(Students: Man, Ms. Principal come back crazier than ever. She'll do it too, she be sending people home for nothing)

Pardon the interruption again. Seniors: you have not graduated yet. If you think you don't have to follow the rules any more, I'll give you some days at the house too, and you won't graduate. You are not certified yet, and if you decide you don't have to follow school procedures any more, I'll send you home.

I paraphrase, of course, but these were the two best announcements I've heard all year. Maybe that says a little about how my attitude as a teacher has changed. At the beginning of the year I don't think I understood how important it is that the students have someone to be terrified of. I even made a student terrified of me when I told him I'd break his middle finger if he insisted on continuing to raise it in the direction of other students. He tried me on it, too, and I gave it a pretty good twist. Someone suggested I'd get fired for that up north... they were probably right.

annie are you ok

My freshman year in college, I had a 10 am physics class. Not early, but early enough for college. For williams, it was a big class, 35 or 40 students, and when the clock hit 10 and it was time for class to start, the prof would always push a little button and we would all hear the opening riff of "smooth criminal." He had it set up to fade out after about 5 or 6 seconds, well before "she came in through the window, to the sound of a creshendo" It was the perfect start to class, and by the time it had faded, everyone knew what was going on, namely, physics. When class ended, he pushed his hidden button somewhere, and the song started up again. Every once in a while he would vary the song, if there was another song that was perhaps more relevant to what we were doing, but from september through january, just about every class, I heard those same opening few notes.

This is something I'd like to try for next year. With less technology, and less time between classes, I wouldn't be able to work it exactly the same, but I think I could at least start, if not end class with it. Or end my bellringer with it, because when the music stops, that's when I need the focus on me, to try to teach something, anything,before I lose them.

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

What a b....

The cluster method was what I taught FM after school - it made so much more sense to him than any other way he had learned this stuff before, as I said in my mental math post. Obviously, as the woman says, the textbooks seem a little absurd, but really they are no more absurd than the insistence that all students use the standard algorithm (which she continues to call the most efficient, least error-prone, based on what evidence I wonder?) to the exclusion of all others. Certainly, it is often the best algorithm for multiplying five or six numbers by hand, but when will such a skill be neccessary or even useful? As far as division goes, until I started teaching I had used long division maybe once or twice in eight years. Clustering in division problems makes so much more sense.

Furthermore, the fact that this is being debated as the part of standard 4th and 5th grade math curriculum is almost as ridiculous as the fact that I am teaching in to high school freshmen. Whole number multiplication and division should be mastered by the end of third grade. Students should be able to compute fluently in decimals and fractions by the end of fifth grade, and in sixth grade should begin a two year course in algebra I. In 8th grade they should take geometry, algebra II in ninth grade, Precalc and Trig as sophomores, calc as juniors (basic single variable derivitive and integral calculus) and some elective their senior year, whether it be a serious statistics course, linear algebra, or multivariable calculus. Maybe I'm wrong - I don't know that much about how the brain develops at a young age and I am basing this mostly on my own experiences, which apparently are not the norm. Besides, to have anything like this actually work, we'd have to have middle school teachers who understand algebra and geometry and high school teachers who can explain eigenvalues and integrals in spherical coordinates. Not to mention students who want to learn.

Mental Math

Very often, I'm amazed at what my kids can't do. The fact that they can't do any sort of mental math has astonished me over and over again, as I wait on things like 30 divided by two or 46 divided by 10. Only today did I realize that even skills like these need to be taught.

I started thinking about a week ago about what I do when I divide something in my head. For example, if I wanted to divide 68 by 2, I first divide the sixty by 2, to get thirty, then divide the 8 by two, to get 4, and add to get 34. Pretty standard, I thought. But today after school, as I watched FM labor through the same problem using long division, I realized it might not be the standard thought process for my kids. So I stopped him and told him how I did it. Oh yeah, he said. That's so much easier. That does make sense. Hopefully, it is a little more intutive for him. FM has become my mental math experiment. A few days ago I caught him laboring over a multiplication problem where he had to multiply something by five. Just take half of it, I told him, and put a zero on the end. Works anytime you have to multiply by 5. That astounded him. And when I explained why, it was like a little light went off. It made sense.

Today, FM stayed after school along with DB. (DB was in my class for a few months in the fall before he got moved to pre-algebra. He is the sweetest kid in the world, and would kill to be back in my class. That's why he stays after school.) Anyway, DB was showing off his solving equations skills, while FM was solving some quadratics. FM was simplifying a square root, trying to make a factor tree for some number, and asked me what went into it. So I decided to tell them about how you can tell if three goes into a number. I told them any number they gave me, I could tell them if three went into it 5 seconds or less. They gave me some horrendous numbers, 5 and digits, and were amazed when I told them yes, three is a factor or no, three isn't a factor as soon as they had finished writing. Finally, after about five minutes of them giving me bigger and nastier numbers, I told them the trick, which had them holding their heads and laughing and generally being amazed at math. As they walked out the door, DB told me he was going to go right home and show that to his mom. FM said he was going to show it to his friends tomorrow. I need to think of some other "tricks" to have ready for them next time. I also need to decide what to do with the last month of the school year. Three weeks for seniors. Oh man.

Oreos

When I have a bad day, I have a few different coping mechanisms. One is to work in my garden. Another is to lay on the couch and read. Neither of these are very helpful. A third, more helpful mechanism, is to think about my favorite students and how wonderful they are.

HC is one of my favorite. Maybe my favorite, these days, I'm not sure. She's brilliant, but can get an attitude, and has told me more than once to shut up talking to her. Today, after a hectic day of testing, she came up to me in the hall.

"Mr. G., don't forget about those oreos."
"Right, the oreos. I'm heading back to my room now, come and I'll get them for you"

During a makeshift "game" that we were playing today, I awarded points for getting questions right as we were prepping for the test. HC, sure that she would come out tops, pressed me about what the winner would get, and finally, I cracked and said some oreos, after school.

As we walked back to my room, harried by a pair of her friends who seemed certain that their bus would leave without them, HC told me all about he new diet. She's keeping a list of all the things she eats and drinks, which she showed me, along with a list of exercises that she is going right home to do. She had tried this earlier in the year and given up after about a week, so I was excited and I hope she lasts a little longer this time. By the time we got to my room, I had forgetten why we had come. But of course, HC hadn't.
"Where them cookies at Mr. G?"
"Cookies? But isn't that counter to everything you were just telling me about?"
"Aw, it'll be alright. I ain't hardly but eat nothing all day."
"Would you rather have some gatorade instead?"
"Naw, just gimme the cookies. Well, no, gimme the gatorade."
"Alright.."
"No, I wan them cookies."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. No, I'll take that gatorade. I gotta go. Thanks Mr. G."
"I'm gonna have to start bringing fruit."
"Ok"

Infant Deaths Climb in South

NYT on symtoms of poverty in the Delta.

The Good Things

So, I can't teach 131 students in the cafeteria. Big deal. Some things are going right though. A former student, who was shunted out to pre-algebra, came to my class after school today. He never does anything in that pre-algebra class, and so he came to me for help. He smiles "I'm gonn be up in your class next year."

This leads to the theme of all the things that kids say in and about my class. "We don't do nothin up in here." "Girl, we don't never do nothin up in this classroom, he just be talkin'" "We ain't learned nothin up in here." "That man don't even teach." Today, I heard it from other kids, about every other algebra teacher. Kids are kids, and kids can complain like few other creatures on earth. I can't bother to take them very seriously.

One student's mother told me that he writes poetry, and that these people sent him a letter saying that they wanted to publish his poems. My first thought, of course, was poetry.com, who want to publish everyone's poem in a special, hardbound, coffee-table edition. Today, he brought be the poems, and the letters from, you guessed it, poetry.com. I guess I do have something in common with my students - I too submitted my early works filled with forced rhymes and the fleeting charm of feelings that seem, momentarily, eternal. The first poem that I submitted, was in fact entitled "Always." Today, as we were all preparing for the state test in what we called Academy One (unofficially: chaos in the cafeteria), he asked me if he would take me for algebra II next year. Not likely, I told him, since he was signed up for geometry, but I assured him that he could and should take both, especially if he hopes to satisfy his interest in architecture. Well then, if he does take it, could I especially request that he be in my class? Sure, I could do that.

Furthermore, in the cafeteria, my students made me proud. "I already know how to do this junk." "We been knowing how to do that." "When we learn this, back in August?" Even one of my most difficult students, and I have a few of those, called to me, across the caf, in that voice that can so often be a torment - MR. G, COME HERE. Oh no, god no. AIN'T YOU SO PROUD OF ME I DID THIS ONE ALL BY MYSELF. Yes, in fact, I am proud of you, very proud. Now do the rest.

Another happiness - the same student to whom I referred in an earlier blog, who claimed to have spent the night in the baseball dugout, showed up at the middle school to play soccer today. I throw out a casual invitation probably once every other week to any and all of my kids; I figure it would be good for all of them, and certainly better than whatever else they are doing. We threw him in goal for a while, then he came out and got his toe stomped on, but he soldiered on until the end, showing me later how purple it was.

I often forget that these kids are, well, kids. The guys, at least, often have the bodies of adults. Well, at least the seniors. The freshmen still appear as if they would fit in quite well in a middle school, but the two guys who came out today, if I saw them for the first time outside of school, I would judge to be between 20 and 22, rather than 17. One of them has two inches and at least 60 pounds on me. But they are kids, they need attention, they need to feel respected and listened to, and they need so much love. I can't do enough.

Unconscionable

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat, who voted against New York’s new budget, called it “an unconscionable, discriminatory addition to the school aid formula.” (nyt)

Brodsky is from Westchester county, where the median home value is in the range of $350,000 and high school graduation rates are near 99%. What is unconscionable is that in the Bronx, graduation rates hover around 50%, and more money is spent, per student, in Westchester County than in the Bronx. When children begin their academic lives three steps behind, of course the logical thing to do is to make sure that those children, slighted by the system and by a capricious fate, have all the advantages that the state can confer. As long as the graduation rate in the Westchester is 50 percentage points higher than that in the Bronx, all state aid should go do the Bronx and none should go to Westchester. The rich kids can hack it.

(Graduation rates, per pupil expenditure, and other stats taken from publicschoolreview.com)

Happy Birthday to me

My kids would say I'm blessed. In the past, I would have said I'm lucky. Now, I'm no longer sure what sort of word to use, but whether I attribute it to blind chance and luck or to a higher power, I was born and grew up with a wonderful group of friends.
Just today, I got a birthday card. Granted, my birthday was a month and a week ago, but the best cards have no need to be on time. Their lateness just confirms that someone has been thinking about me all that time, waiting for the right inspiration to write a note. In fact, the card came from one of my neighbors, Jenny, and her daughter, Ashley. When my house was a duplex, they inhabited the other half. Ashley was a freshman when I was a senior, which means I was in third grade when she first got on the bus to kindergarten, a moment I remember well. We played all sorts of games, one that I'm sure Jenny recalls with dread was the "game" when my sister (it may have been me, but I might as well have blame her) decided to unzip the pink beanbag that was a current feature in Ashley's room. That room was the mirror image of mine at the time, and later became the room I called home during high school and on to today, after my dad took on the ambitious project of converting the old mill house into a single-family dwelling. And yet, as terbulent as my room was over the ensuing years, the floor covered with soccer or ski clothes or whatever sort of clothing happened to be in season, papers, books - I never was and still and not what you would call a neat man - yet no matter how much I abused my mother's sense of order, the room was never as joyfully chaotic as it was on that day when Rachael, who could only have been four or five at the time, unleashed an avalanche of miniature styrofoam snowballs from the bright pink bean bag.
They poured out, swamping our version of the peter rabbit board game, and began to run to all corners of the room. As the senior child in the group, older than the rest by four years, I ought to have done sometime. Although I may have organized some sort of half-hearted cleaning attempt, what I remember was how tiny the bits of styrofoam were, so light that they fell in slow motion when you tossed handfuls of them up in the air, and so small that they fit not only between the edge of the hardwood floor and the wall (the molding was not something my dad had gotten to by that point) but into some of the larger cracks between the floorboards as well. Later, with the trusty shop-vac, I realized that they were some of the more difficult cases to dislodge.

To be continued.

everywhere is war

So last night, DD and I went to the fair in town. Just like the fairs set up in parking lots of all the other small cities in the country, it was a sea of asphalt filled with a few rides operated by the drug addicts and the mentally ill and hoardes of rigged games where you trade two dollars for a very slim chance to win a stuffed animal you could probably buy for three bucks. DD spent nearly 20 bucks trying to shoot basketballs into no-regulation rings, but I managed to resist the urge until right before we left, when I dropped two bucks on the game that involves throwing softball-sized balls into a what resembles a laundry basket, tilted at an angle.

When I was a kid, I won that at a carnival somewhere, but the carnie told me I had cheated, because I leaned in, and he didn't give me my four foot stuffed creature. So I figured I'd try it again. Three shots for two dollars. DD suggested the first one be a practice shot, and the carnie said "sure, first one's a practice shot, unless you make it, then I'll count it. just because you're white" I wasn't sure I had heard him right, and I really didn't want to believe that I had. I made the first shot, and even figured out the trick. Anyone can make the first shot because they leave the balls in the basket to dampen it, but they clear them out afterwards, to make the second two shots almost impossible. This way they get your confidence up, so you come back to try again and again. Anyway, as I took my second two shots, the guy sort of strck up a conversation with us, asking us where we were from, and so on, and as we left, he offered us a couple of small stuffed snakes, saying very clearing this time "just because you're white." I mumbled something, no, that's alright, no thanks, but he thrust them into our hands and i just turned a walked away, too stunned to really know what to say. We were leaving anyway, and gave the snakes to a seven or eight year old kid with big eyes, who smiled at the prospect of claiming them as his own prizes for winning a game.

The fair was really the first place where I saw blacks and whites socializing together in large numbers. My school has 4 white kids. DD and I stopped in at the bar on the way home, and it was all-white. When I've been to the bourbon mall, another restaurant / bar (try the fried pickles), it's also been all-white. Wal-mart and kroger were really the only places I had seen large numbers of white and black people together, and those, by nature, are not places that foster social interactions. Unfortunately, what I heard from that carnie last night was not the only sign of the latent racism that is still so strong here - DD heard a young white couple make the comment "these niggers are so fucked up." This world is so fucked up, when there are people thinking things like that.

The group of guys I play pickup soccer with is surprisingly mixed. There are whites, from the private school, blacks from the public school, whites and a few blacks from the catholic school (both alums and current students from all three). There are mexicans from the mexican restaurant, and there are a few guys from baghdad, doing who knows what here. Yet still, race is the defining characteristic, and generalizations based on race are still a little shocking to me "the damn mexicans just kick you too much" or even things like "where are all the mexicans today?. Usually, we play mexico vs usa, which is a convenient way to break up the teams. Sometimes the arabic guys go with the mexicans, sometimes with us, to even out the numbers. Most of the guys out there are really nice guys, and I wouldn't say they are racist. Yet race just looms larger on the radar here.


"until the color of a man's skin, is no more significant, than the color of his eyes

there's a war"

...

Reasons my kids struggle to focus on school:

JF's house got robbed over spring break and he only has two pair of uniform pants.

ME, MD, SC, LK, OT, and CA are pregnant. (MT might be too).

HM, LK, and RM have babies.

EW got kicked out of his house - again.

WB has been in court trying to get his own custody sorted out after his mom passed this summer.

HM just found out she has cervical cancer.

DD's pregnant cousin just died of sickle cell.

Someone threw a brick at CM's car - then he fought them.

Two girls went after each other with scissors.

WD had surgery on her esophagus.

RM's mom is in the hospital.

Someone that all my kids seem to have known got shot last night.

The list goes on, and I continue to be amazed that they show up at all.

It's hard to look too far ahead.

It's never too late...

for new rules and consequences.

Yes, it's mid-march. Yes, we just got back from spring break. But that doesn't mean that it is too late to introduce a little more order into the classroom, which was getting quite ragged there before break. I have to admit that I was hanging on for dear life at the end there and the way I limped towards spring break was reminiscent of a stock car as it pulls into the pit stop after a wreck, sheet metal flapping loose, tailpipe sparking as it drags along the ground and something unkown just starting to catch fire under the hood.

But I made it to spring break, which was in fact terribly depressing, for two reasons. The first was that I realized how much I hate my job, and spent at least 5 of my nine days off in deadly terror of returning. The second was that I realized that without my job, I have absolutely no life or prospects of a life down here. That first Saturday, when return was sufficiently distant, was the best day of the break. I woke up early, got a hair cut, planted a garden (one thing you can't quite do up north yet), cooked a good dinner and watched a movie with my roomie. Even despite the fact that Babel was a big dissapointment, it was a wonderful day, and I felt very accomplished. But aside from that - nada. So I have a job I hate and fear, but if I don't fill my time with the job, I have even less purpose and feel worse.

That said, today was surprisingly un-bad. They listened, they accepted, grudgingly, the new rules and consequences, and tomorrow I'm set to start handing out writing assignments. Yet here I am, it's Monday night, still with a huge stack of grading and some planning left to do, and I have hardly done anything since I got home. It's just such an intimidating amount of work to get started on. I wanted to have a rule of no work after 9 PM, but that is looking less and less likely. Less blogging, more grading. That's what I need.

Math is amazing, I promise.

It depresses the hell out of me to think about how cool math is. Because I wish my students could see that. Because I can't do enough to make them see that. Because I make math boring. Because these kids will never see the beauty in that.

After school today I saw a senior, the brother of one of my algebra I students. I asked him why I was not seeing his name on the superintendent's list, and he proceded to tell me about his different classes, the trouble that he had been having in his calculus class before his new teacher arrived. I asked him what they were doing now, and he gave me a reasonable explanation of finding maximum area of boxes that had polynomials as their sides. Damn the boxes though, the mathematics itself is beautiful.

But in a five minute walk down the hall, I explained anti-derivatives to the kid. Just taking a derivative backwards. He told me the antiderivative of 2x was x^2. Good, but what is the derivative of x^2 + 1? 2x. So what is the anti-derivative of 2x? It could be two x squared plus any number.


Just that small leap of inference was beautiful. I would kill to teach that calculus class. But it also kills me to think of these kids trying to find the maxima and minima of functions. Even if you had just a cubic function, taking the derivative is easy. But setting the resulting quadratic to zero and solving it? In eight grade, I ate solving quadratics problems. Bam, boom, negativebplusorminusthesquarerootofbsquaredminusfouracallovertwoa. Give me another. I just feel terrible, like I am not preparoing my kids for this at all. KW could do it in three years, maybe even two. But the rest of them? If QR ever cared about anything. Maybe CH. And maybe MR. But almost all of them are smart enough to be able to do it. With the exception of, perhaps, 3 students, all of my students are at a level of intelligence equal to or above my high school calc class. If they were born in the berkshires, about half of my kids would take calculus.

Math has always seemed easy to me. This hsa been, certainly, an impediment to teaching it. When I get out of here, it might be really nice to have the opportunity to teach kids for whom math is easy. I know, at that point, that I wouldn't really be making a difference, but it would be fun. I'd love to take the top fifth and sixth graders, take them through a program that would get them from algebra I through calc in ninth grade. That is so possible for so many kids. Right now, I could take KW from algebra I through calc by the end of her junior year. But I hope she leaves. She needs to be at the math and science academy. Just like most of my kids, she needs to be anywhere but here.

Play on playa

Today, I had three students stay after school for help. Well, actually two students stayed after school for extra help and I made another stay for detention. BA told me that tomorrow he is going to bring drinks for after school, and FJ, after running up and down the hallway in search of a poster, came by even though he is not in need of any real math help. "Lemme do some o' that matrix stuff." he said, meaning the matrix multiplication he had witnessed me helping algebra II students with the week before. FH, in response to the traditional detention question of whether you will chose to sit quietly or to do math, said "Give me some of them fractions. I used to hate them, before you explained them to me." She got her fractions, plus a small dose of series. FJ multiplied some matrices. And BA graphed some functions. Then, though, as we were leaving the building, I gave FJ my phone to call his ride. Then, he asks to borrow my pen. I hand it to him and look back and he is copying something out of my phone. FJ, what are you doing? And then I see that he is, of course, copying down the numbers of one of my female students (if I've called your mom, dad, anty or grandma, your number is in my phone). At first I was so amazed I didn't even say anything, but then, once I did, FJ stopped copying. "Oh, I can get it on my own, I don't need your phone to get numbers. I bet you I can get it on my own, come on, I'll bet you." I just shook my head, held out my hand to get teh phone back, and kept on walking.

What keeps me going

Getting started on a long night of grading. No, trying to get started on a long night of grading. Failing. I'm failing, at getting my grades in. At staying organized. My kids are failing to learn any math, or to perform on assessments. They will soon be failing the state test.

But tonight, as I was sitting down to try to get something done for the hundredth time, my phone rang. "You know who this is?" "BC" "Yeah, how you doin' Mr. G." "Great. I've got your number in my phone." yeah, I know, I know. You know what time the valentines dance starts tonight?..."

Something about the fact that BC would call me to ask about the valentine's day dance, which I knew nothing about, really made me feel like I was making a difference, making a connections somehow. After he asked about the dance, and I made fun of him for not having any game, he reminded me that he would be coming after school tomorrow for help. It's crazy, but it will take so much effort on my part for Barry to pass, but I want so badly for him to do well. I just can't do it for everyone in there.

I also need to become more productive and stop fearing both grading and lesson planning. I mentally block them out, even if I don't allow myself to do anything else, I often won't begin planning/grading until close to 9 PM, which is terrible and impossible, and a complete waste of my time. If I am only going to spend a few hours doing it, I might as well put in those hours when I get home so I can sleep reasonably well, rather than waste a bunch of time before starting and then not sleep. Oh wait, I'm blogging right now. Good start, that.

Acting

Meet FJ. He was in this same room last year, same class, he often tells me, same block. He sits in the front row, talks too much, and has a tendency to curse and think I won't hear him. Lately, he has been one of my after school crew. He wants to be a chef, and his favorite food is spagetti with Velveta melted on top of it in the microwave.

This morning, I saw FJ in the hall with a bloody lip. "What happened F?" "Some boys jumped on me at the bus stop." "You alright?" "Yea, I'll get them later." "No, F, you won't."

FJ has a history with the bus. He's already been suspended from the bus once, I assume for disagreements with the same guys. FJ does not want to fight anyone, but he wants to save face and he wants the harrassment to cease. So he tells me he's going to get those guys. "F, you can't get suspended now, just when you're getting on a roll in my class." "Oh, I ain't fittn to get suspended, we gon' do it in the hood." "No, F, you're not going to do it at all. You're smarter than that." "But Mr. ---------...." "F, come see me after school and we'll talk about why you won't do this."

After school, F shuffles into my room as I am finishing up with a few students. I had momentarily forgotten why he was here, and he sensed my confusion. "You wanted to talk to me." "Yeah F, sit down. You're bus isn't the first one or anything?" "No." I finish dealing with the other students and sit down across from F, searching for something to say to keep him from fighting, when I know, had I been in his shoes, I would have wanted to fight as well. But he saves me the trouble and starts the conversation.

I been thinkin about what you said. And the reason we came down here from Memphis was so I wouldn't be gettin in no more of this trouble. I don't want to have to go and tell my mom I been fighting. It just about might braek her heart.

Pause.

So, I got something that'll work for me and work for you. The only way I can do this is if when my bus comes they see you pulling me away from the bus. I can't just not get on the bus, but if you're pulling me away, just by the arm, then there's nothin I can do.

Pause.

I ride bus 127.

Ok F, so when you go over to get on the bus, I'll come after you and grab you and keep you from getting on the bus?

Right.

So, I went along with F's plan. I waited among a crowd of students for what seemed like ages, watching the bus numbers, and watching F watch me from across the lawn. I didn't need to worry about missing the bus though, because as soon as I saw it, G, who draws cartoons of me and is a very likeable, if dorky, guy, came up to me and said "F says the bus is here." I got a little closer, waited for the bus to pull up, and as the first kids started boarding I called out "F. F!" He looked up at me and headed toward the bus. G was jogging along beside me, telling me something I couldn't understand. I grabbed F by the arm. "Come on F. Let's go." He tries to pull away, and his eyes shine with anger. Had he sent G to tell me that he'd changed his minded and wanted to get on the bus after all? "Let me go man!" "No, F, come on. Let's go." Scattered shouts of "That man gotta get on the bus" and "How you gonna keep that man from gettin on his bus" echo around me.

We turn the corner back towards the school and, out of sight, I let go of F's arm. Another kid comes up behind us. "Hey, go back out there with the buses." He ignores me and starts talking to F. "That's aight, we'll get 'em tomorrow." "No" I say, "you won't get them tomorrow. It's over." The kid looks at me, then at F. "Cuz," says F, in that peculiar rythem that he has "i'll explain it all to you when we get home." and as a side note, to me, "This my cousin."

"Call your mom, F" I say as I pass him my phone. He puts in his number, and his mom's name shows up. He stopped being surprised about that a long time ago. "You ever consider acting?" "No, I never did think about that."

After F gets off the phone, as we continue to walk down the breezeway, F says "you know, I think I really could use a father figure in my life." I just shake my head "I'm way to young for that F." "oh, yeah, I didn't mean you, I just mean I think it would be good for me to have, you know, a guy at home to look up to and all that."

F, at 15, has diagnosed half of his own problem, and the probably the single biggest problem in the Delta. But at least today, he didn't fight.

Something

I haven't lately been given to eloquent blog postings, and this one will be no different. I promise, though, one of these days, I'll sit down and write something that might approach a thoughtful, or at least coherent, piece of prose. Until then, settle for snippets.

I think that my kids might have actually learned something. I've had them for 98 minutes a day, every day, since August seventh. I don't feel like doing the calculations, but even with the 5 or six days that I have been 'sick', the number of minutes I've spent "teaching" these kids is extreme. But finally, I am starting to see small glimpses of accomplishment. I just wanted to blog about it now before it disappears tomorrow.

Other things of note:
1. Kids have been staying after school, which is good. More need to stay after school, or some seniors will not graduate. How they get to this point and know nothing is beyond me.

2. I'm planning on implementing a long-term competive group sort of scenario in my algebra II class. Sit them in groups, give them points for everything, including attendence, quiz and test grades, homework, participation, and discipline. Anyone have any suggestions on this? Tried it before? Failed miserably? Had some success?

3. There was a third... Nope, completely forgot. State test is coming up quick. To be honest, I would be really happy if I got 80% to pass.

4. Oh, I remembered what was supposed to be #3. I have a student in Algebra II who can't solve 3x - 2 = 4. Even after we spent an hour going over this sort of thing after school. He never passed the algebra I state test. And he doesn't have a chance of passing my class. How can I grade him on the same scale that I grade everyone else, when his skill set is obviously so much less well suited to algebra than that of everyone else in the class? When I give a test on systems of equations and compositon of functions, and he just writes things that don't make any sense? This kid needs an IEP, but because expectations are so low for everyone else, he has managed to somehow pass everything up to algebra II, without knowing anything. What do I do with this kid?

Responsibility

I was all set to skip school tomorrow - call in sick and try to get caught up, but then I realized that my kids actually need me to be there tomorrow. They made plans to stay after school, because I told them they needed to, and if I don't show up, I'll never get them to come back again. So I have to go to school. So what if I didn't grade the binders, and if I didn't get the chance to, or rather couldn't bring myself to make some solid lesson plans for tomorrow. It's better that I go in there and wing it then if I just skip out altogether. It was a strange epiphany, though, that the kids actually rely on me.

One goal for next year - I need to keep on on grading and make my grading system more transparent.