Second verse, same as the first

On October 10, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

This has been kind of a frustrating week, and I can’t quite put my finger on why– for all I know, it’s the meat shakes again. Or maybe it’s fractions, which are apparently the most difficult mathematics in the history of time and are certainly rapidly becoming the most frustrating to me. I got a heavy dose of “we’ve never seen this shit before” from third and fourth hour today, including one kid who, when adding mixed numbers, had to be harangued for five solid minutes before admitting that he knew what two plus seven was.

This is a seventh grader, and this is emphatically not a fucking joke or hyperbole. Two plus seven. He spent five minutes insisting that he didn’t know and that math was hard and why am I bothering him and god I don’t know and I don’t get it and once I finally got an answer out of him immediately switched to insisting that he’d been telling me the answer was nine for “the whole time” and that I was just hassling him. This kid’s ideal day at school is one where no teacher ever talks to him and he does nothing whatsoever; he will do literally nothing if someone is not hovering over him making absolutely certain that he is doing work for literally every second of his day. It hasn’t sunk in yet that that shit’s not gonna fly in my classroom, and I’m sure as hell not ever going to let someone get away with “I don’t know” when the question is fucking seven plus two.

But if he doesn’t pass ISTEP, it’s my fault, for not bringing enough fucking balloons and firecrackers into class and keeping him entertained.

I let them get into my head too much, I think. I have a kid who is currently signed up for the Washington, D.C. trip later this year who is, while not the worst behaved kid I’ve ever had, easily in the top ten– and that’s in twelve years of teaching, so we’re dealing with a sample size in the low four figures by now. I should have kicked him off the list immediately; there was never any chance that this kid was going to be able to pull his behavior together well enough to convince me to take him eight hundred miles from home for four days. Never. But I didn’t cut him off last year because kicking him off a trip he’ll take as a seventh grader when he was in sixth grade didn’t seem fair. So far this year he literally hasn’t made it through a single week of school without at least a day or two, sometimes more, of either in-school suspension or out of school suspension. This week he was here Monday, absent Tuesday, in class yesterday and today, and then by the end of the day today he’d managed to land in the office three times from three different teachers, including getting called out of my class for something that didn’t have anything to do with me– so that’s four times in the office, actually– and he’s in ISS for the next three days for the cumulative effects of all of that.

If there’s ever been a time to pull the trigger, it’s now; my principal okayed me to kick him off last year. And I still keep not wanting to do it because maybe he’ll get it together. I keep throwing questions at this other kid– in private, mind you; it’s not like I’m calling him out in front of the whole class– hoping that sooner or later the math will click. And it’s not gonna. For either of them. And I keep banging my head against the wall, because banging my head against the wall until the wall breaks down is my goddamn job.

I need a goddamn cheeseburger.

Terrible decisions: interlude

On September 7, 2013September 7, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting1 Comment

Lowe’s wants $2000, sans material costs, to tile our bathroom, which has 37 square feet of floor space and less than 70 square feet of shower wall space. The entire budget for the bathroom is $2500, so… looks like I get to learn how to tile.

I can do this. Really. Honest.

While we were at Lowe’s today getting bad news, the boy was sort of misbehaving. Not really in any large way, just in that toddler “I want to do things that I find interesting, but are not compatible with my health or your desires” sort of way. He got a bit screechy about wanting to push “his cart” (he’s two; everything is his lately) in some direction other than toward the front door after we decided it was time to leave, and I made an Executive Daddy Decision, put my screeching son in the cart, and we took off, mildly embarrassed at the terrible sounds my poor, oppressed little boy was making.

Then we got to the front of the store, where there was a father with three little kids with him. Two boys: the oldest, maybe nine, then maybe a six or seven year old, and an infant of indeterminate gender in a stroller. All three were screaming and crying. The two older boys wanted candy, and were bawling at Daddy’s refusal to buy them candy, repeatedly insisting that he justify his non-purchasing-candy ways for them. The infant was also screaming, probably just because its brothers were.

My son isn’t old enough for me to have had to make any real decision about physically disciplining him yet. I am ambivalent about whether spanking an older child is ever a useful practice. I am certain that it is worse than useless with a two-year-old.

And I’m not sure whether I think this guy should have full-on slapped both of his kids in their faces for their stupid, embarrassing public display of bullshit or whether I respect him for his restraint. One way or another, he got out of the store without beating either of his spoiled-ass kids, although I can’t vouch for what happened when he got them back to the car.

“I forgive you,” I whispered into my son’s ear.

Maybe I don’t want him to get much older.

On progress and discipline

On August 22, 2013August 22, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I don’t normally bleed at work, and I’m not terribly fond of it, but I managed to be bleeding before the first bell even rang this morning. I broke up a fight– or, at least, what was about to be a fight– and one of the combatants managed to scratch my finger in an annoyingly painful fashion while I was separating the two of them. I spent most of the rest of the day telling my boss that he owed me workman’s compensation once my finger fell off. I didn’t know one of the kids; he’s relatively new to the building (possibly this year, but I think he came in late last year) and the other one was an eighth grade kid who I’ve been having irregular run-ins with since he was a fifth grader. I’ve broken up more than one fight he was in and manhandled him into the office on more than one occasion.

The weird thing? I actually get along with him fairly well, all considered. He didn’t start this particular brawl, and the fact that he let me get in between the two of them and separate them actually represents progress. I’m not going to go so far as to say that I’ve made a connection with him– I honestly don’t think anyone in the building except maybe for the football coach can say that, and I’m not even sure about him– but I seem to have figured out how to finesse him to get him to do what I want. I grabbed him in the hallway later that day and let him know that I’d put in my write-up that he wasn’t the guy who started the fight, and talked to him again at the end of the day to make sure that there wasn’t any ongoing beef with the kid who had been messing with him. He said it was going to be okay, and I figured he was telling the truth.

Then his bus was late. The buses are terrible this time of year, and this was a perfect example of why: when the bus finally showed up to school, there was still a primary center kid on the bus, who either didn’t know his address or had gotten on the wrong bus or some piece of nonsense that was keeping the driver from dropping him off at home. Complicating things, the driver’s radio wasn’t working properly for some reason and she wasn’t able to get in touch with anyone at the little guy’s school. So the kids all filed outside to get on the bus and then the driver had to make them all wait (outside, in drizzling rain) while she went inside and made some phone calls to try and figure out what to do with the kid.

This didn’t set well with him. So he and another kid (his girlfriend, maybe? And as I’m writing this it occurs to me to wonder where his little brother was…) decided to walk home.

They can’t walk home if they’re supposed to ride the bus, even if the bus is late. There are massive legal issues involved; if they’re bus riders, they ride the bus. Period. Is it unreasonable? Yeah, probably, on some level or another, but it’s still the rules and I’ve got to enforce them. I managed to get him to head back into the building, but he wasn’t happy about it.

“This is fuckin’ bullshit.”

One of our new paraprofessionals overhears this. “What did you just say?”

“Fuckin’ Christ, dude, leave me alone.”

He takes exception. And I did something I haven’t done before: I actually waved the guy off, letting the kid go into the building unmolested and holding the para back (not physically, mind you) to convince him to ignore a fourteen-year-old not only directly disrespecting him but doing so in an impressively profane fashion.

And the interesting thing? By the end of the conversation, the guy agreed with me. The kid, meanwhile, went inside, like I wanted him to, and while he was the last to sit down like he was supposed to, he did it. The thing about this kid? He’s all street, and has absolutely no parenting whatsoever at home. His mother’s worthless– another teacher in my building, who has his little brother, and is new to the building, met her the other day and said she was the rudest person she’d ever met. I have absolutely no idea where or who his father is. For all I know, neither does his mother.

This kid is not going to back down to anyone, and he’s even less likely to do so when he’s already had a shitty day. There are things I need him to do, right? I need him in the building, where I’m not going to get my ass sued off if he gets hit by a car while he’s walking home or just never goes home at all. I need him sitting down and being with everyone else (granted, this I need less than I need the first thing) and I need him back on the bus in a few minutes and not in a screaming match with the driver who’s keeping him from getting home on time. And a stranger (remember: new paraprofessional) getting all in his face about how he said “fuck” a couple of times is not going to make any of those things happen.

So I basically let him get away with dropping the F-bomb a couple of times. Maybe I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow. Today, this afternoon, wasn’t the time, and doing it in a confrontational manner definitely wasn’t going to work. Confrontation itself doesn’t work with this kid. The only thing I’ve seen work with him is quiet, calm conversation and simple, direct requests, which he’ll usually comply with, and ignoring his occasional outburst.

Is this doing the right thing? Or am I guilty of not having High Standards of Behavior now? Have I Done Nothing to punish his profanity if all I do is remind him about how to talk to adults tomorrow? Is a lunch detention really gonna make any difference?