Tag: students

What a day

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

giphyI had to be up at what will soon be Regular Time but for today was Two Damn Hours Early this morning, in order to drive across town to drop my son off at day care before driving back across town to go to a conference.  Which had precisely one (1) useful session out of the five that I attended before bailing early with the usual complement of complaints about how these horrible things always go.  Today’s highlight was the first session of the day after the keynote, where the guy began apologizing for having had a “long week” immediately when the first people walked into the room and did not stop apologizing until five minutes after the session was supposed to have begun, at which point he provided us with perhaps fifteen minutes of material in what was supposed to be a 45-minute session and then declared that he was glad that he’d been able to “stretch that out so long.”  The other fucker was an elbow-partner fucker, which is when the presenter for a session decides that the people attending his session to hear him provide his expertise on a topic would rather talk to the people next to them who they don’t know and were presumably also seeking, rather than possessing, said expertise.

Be aware that they could have pointed at me and said “You.  Head this session.” at any exact moment and I would have been able to fill 45 minutes with no preparation at all.  I’m a vet, motherfuckers, and really any teacher ought to be able to fill a time slot that short.  This is Goddamned ridiculous and I was about to type something about how I can’t believe how terrible these always are and how they are always terrible in the exact same way except really by now I shouldn’t be surprised any longer.

The one session that was good was great, though, and provided me with all sorts of useful information for next year.  I will be using stuff that this guy suggested we do.  Lots of it.

Welcome back, I guess.

On a positive note, I had several instances of people saying really kind things to me over the course of the conference, including the principal of the school letting it drop that he had been about to call me for an interview when the principal who ended up actually hiring me actually forbade him to do so, because she wanted me– which I feel like I could justifiably be angry about but I’m going to choose to be entertained by instead.  I randomly ran into the mother of a kid I had in both 6th and 8th grade, a kid who is entering college (yay!) next year, who was all kinds of excited to see me and told me that her entire family generally believes me to be the best teacher her kid ever had.

Which is fucking humbling.

I also ran into two former students today, one who was actually in my class that I ran into at the grocery (and recognized me first, and didn’t run away, and gave me a hug instead) and another who I didn’t actually have but who sat with me at lunch and when I asked him “how high school has been going” (he’s an incoming senior) proceeded to begin with first semester of his freshman year and tell me every class he’s taken and every grade he’s gotten.

On the plus side, he’s doing great, and this is a kid who just kind of makes everyone around him root for him to succeed, and on the negative side, I forgot that you never ask an autistic kid– or at least a kid with his particular stripe of autism– a wide-open question like that unless you’re prepared to get the entire answer.

So, yeah.  Despite the first half of this piece, it was in general a pretty good day.

The holy water story, plus some other stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

article-2185554-14656D19000005DC-909_306x423I have some really angry kids in my class this year.

That’s new.

I should explain.  I’ve had plenty of kids with anger management issues.  I’ve had plenty of kids who had explosive tempers.  That’s part and parcel of working in an urban middle school, and frankly is probably part and parcel of working with middle schoolers no matter where you find them.  But I’ve got a handful of girls in my afternoon class for whom pissed off at the world seems to be their only available emotional state.  They walk in angry and they somehow manage to stay angry for the entire time they’re in the room.  That’s the weird part.  Kids get angry all the time; they get angry at me all the time.  I’m used to that.  They don’t stay that way for long.  For a kid to keep up an angry mood for three successive class periods is exceptionally rare, and to do it for multiple days in a row practically unheard of.   Being mad is hard.  It takes work.  Most of them don’t have it in them.

And somehow in this group I have more than one of them.

I’m being weird today.  My son’s birthday was last Sunday, and today he got a gift card for Toys R’ Us in the mail from my aunt, so the three of us went to the comic shop (it’s Wednesday, after all) and to the toy store after I got home from work.  And the toy store managed to depress me.  I don’t even know why, but I’m still fighting it off.

I owe you two stories, I think.  The first one is the Holy Water story I teased the other day. One of my girls in my afternoon class– not one of the angry ones– came up to me on Monday and asked if she could go to her locker.  Later in the year this will be met with a near-automatic “no” except in case of emergencies, but they’re fifth graders and they’re not used to having to bring all of their stuff with them into classrooms so I’m being nice.  I do generally ask what they need, though.

“I need to put something in my locker,” she says.

Ah.  This is automatically lower-priority than needing to get something from a locker.  “What do you need to put in your locker?”

“My holy water.”

Um.

“You’re carrying holy water with you?”

“Yes.”

Parts of my brain immediately start a cage match with other parts of my brain, doing their best to starve the entire thing of any residual oxygen.

“Why, my dear, do you have holy water with you in class?”  Because Holy shit this is actually a new one.

“It helps me concentrate.”

“And… you have decided that you don’t need to concentrate any longer?  We still have an entire class period left after we finish with math.”

“No.  I’m tired and I think I’m done concentrating for today.”

“I think your holy water needs to stay with you, then.  Perhaps it could use a recharge this Sunday; it appears to be losing some of its potency.”

“So I need to keep concentrating?”

“Indeed.”

She stands there and stares at me for a minute.

“Back to your seat, dear.”

She turns and leaves.

Today, as we’re working on two-digit multiplication, a concept they all appeared to have a decent grasp of until I began trying to teach it, one of my girls came up to me and demanded that I yell at her.

“Why do you need me to do that?”

“Because you yelled at me yesterday and I went back to my seat and did my work.”

I think about this.  I didn’t yell at anyone yesterday.  In fact, I’ve made a big deal with this class that I didn’t even need to raise my voice on Monday or Tuesday after a reasonably rough first couple of days.

“I don’t remember yelling at you yesterday.”

She thinks for a minute.  “That was my teacher last year.  Sorry.  Can you yell at me anyway?”

Brain, cage match, starving, etc.

“Honey, I don’t think–”

“I really think it’ll help.”

What in the blue sadomasochistic fuck is going on right now.

She finally got me to bark GET AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW at her, at which point she smiled, thanked me, and literally skipped off back to her seat.  I watched her for a moment and then looked over my shoulder, fully convinced that one of my bosses would have taken that moment to appear in my classroom for the first time all year.  No one was there.  The kids all looked shocked for a moment, then realized what was going on and went back to what they were doing.  They were so blasé about it, in fact, that I find myself suspecting that this was a regular move that this kid pulled last year.  Which… hell, I don’t even know what to do about that.

I’ll stop being tired all the time soon, right?  How the fuck is it 9 PM already?

A brief first day report

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Odd fact: when going through previous posts for posts about teaching to possibly include in Searching for Malumba, I discovered something interesting:  I have not talked about the first day of school on most of the first days of school since I’ve been blogging.

Possibly because I get home and I am too tired to qualify as a living thing.  So, the short version: my homeroom girls are nice.  Scary nice.  Like, “I don’t believe you, and we’ll see what I think of you in a week” nice.  My afternoon kids… well, let’s just say that class is still in flux, because that’s where my special education kids are going to end up and we’ve not finalized class lists yet.  “In flux” sounds like a fair way to put it.

So… what is that?  Cautiously optimistic?  I’ll go with cautiously optimistic.

WELL ALL RIGHTY THEN

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Got to work at 7:15, finished my classroom at 4:32, the Parent Night was from 4:30 to 6:00, got home at 6:30 or so, ate dinner, spent half an hour putting together a couple of presentations for tomorrow, and now I can die.

I am tired as hell, guys.

Okay, you win

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

687353104039906987A student walks up to me.  He’s got a huge shit-eating grin on his face.

“I’m going to take control of your body and your brain,” he says to me, “and then you’re going to give me a Jolly Rancher.”

The hell you say, I think to myself, but I say “Go for it.”

“You are now breathing manually,” he says.

He got his Jolly Rancher, the little bastard.

(Very long day.  Including positively Hobbit-like levels of both First and Second Breakfast. This is all I have, but hopefully it got a smile out of you.)

In which I am renewed

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I’ve had two run-ins with former students recently, both while attempting to buy food from fast-food joints.  On the first I was in between errands and needed to grab something before my DC parent meeting; the second was simply an issue of my wife and I not feeling like making real dinner.  In both cases, the kids recognized me right before I figured out who they were, and in both cases I remembered the kids, although the first one looked different enough that I had to have her remind me of her last name.

The second kid… man, it was surprisingly nice to see him.  In his case I was actually in the restaurant as opposed to going through a drive-thru so we had a chance to talk for a minute.  He’s a senior, graduating in a couple of months (which, God, does that make me feel old) and going directly into the Army after graduation.  Which… whoa.

A moment after he asked me if I was Mr. Siler, and I blinked at him a couple of times and called him by name, one of the other customers in line looked at me and said “Is he worth remembering?”  Yeah, he certainly is; he was one of the good ones.  He’s apparently working two different jobs right now in addition to school.  His younger brother, who I remember being considerably more troubled than he was (and who he cracked “wasn’t nearly as worth remembering” when I asked about him) is also doing well in school and working more than one job, a fact that warms the heart fairly considerably.

I shook the kid’s hand and told him I was proud of him.  And I am.  It was nice to see him.

Fun story about this kid:  there was a brief period of time where I was both a computer teacher for fifth and sixth graders and teaching a single, multi-grade writing class, and he was in that class.  I was able to basically hand-pick those kids and both he and his brother were in the room.  There was a day when I’d had a sub because I had to go to a meeting, and so I had a couple of minutes to talk to the sub about what to expect with my students in the room.  “This class isn’t going to give you any trouble at all,” I said, looking around at my chosen group of perfect angels…

…and this kid has his pants off in the back of the room.  Well okay, mild exaggeration; they were down to his knees.  And, in his defense, he had basketball shorts on underneath them.  Which had apparently bound up on him, requiring a brief uniform adjustment.  Which he had just gone right ahead and done right in front of Jesus and errybody in the back of the room.

At which point I had to, for the first time in my teaching career (but, sadly, not the last,) use the phrase could you maybe put your pants back on please in class.  In front of a sub, who I had just told to expect a perfectly easy first hour class.

Yeah, that one was worth remembering.  🙂

On the teachers’ lounge

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching7 Comments

teachersloungeshirtI reblogged a post the other day called Choosing Sad Over Cynical, and I’m glad I did; it’s a magnificent piece that makes a point that I think teachers really need to hear.  Cynicism is a choice, and while I’ll freely admit it’s a choice I’ve made gleefully at more than one point in my career it’s absolutely useful to remind myself that there are better things to do with my mental health.

That said, I’ve been thinking about it over the last couple of days, and I’m going to take issue with one minor aspect of the post:

Way back when I was a newly minted Special Ed teacher, I remember listening to veteran teachers talk in that proverbial den of negativity, the faculty room. Any time I’d say something positive, some veteran teacher would say, “Oh, you’ll get over that soon. Wait a couple of years.” I’d notice how miserable these teachers were, how much they hated their jobs, the mean things they’d say about kids and parents.

It goes on from there, but you get the point.

First things first:  March Hare is absolutely right to describe your average teachers’ lounge as a “den of negativity.”  That description is both fair and accurate.  It also completely misses the point of the teachers’ lounge, and misses it in a way that’s hard to describe to people who aren’t teachers.

Yes, the teachers’ lounge is a den of negativity, and a place where people, usually teachers, are occasionally prone to say terrible, horrible things about the children who are in their charge.  But here’s the thing:  don’t worry about it.  What y’all need to realize– and I’m generalizing now because this post is far from the only post I’ve seen discussing teachers’ lounge “culture”– is that 1) my twenty-five minutes in the teachers’ lounge is literally the only 25 minutes of my day where I get to interact with adults when I’m not on the job.  Even if I have a co-teacher or paraprofessionals in my room, I don’t get to have “off-duty” conversations with those people while they’re in my classroom, and I’ll admit to being rather cold to people I shouldn’t have on the rare occasions where they tried to have a conversation unrelated to what was going on in the classroom.  That’s not the place.

The teachers’ lounge is the place.  During those 25 minutes I need to a) eat lunch, b) find a way to relax a little bit, and– and this is the important part– frequently I, and everyone else, need to c) find a way to blow off steam.  That’s a lot to do in 25 minutes, and I can build up a lot of damn steam in the first four hours of my day.

I’m sorry if it sounds terrible, and it probably does, but if calling Jimmy a stupid brain-dead motherfucker in the teachers’ lounge keeps me from treating Jimmy like a stupid brain-dead motherfucker in the classroom, I’m going to run my mouth about him– to people who know him, and who understand, mind you– in the teachers’ lounge, and I’m not going to feel too bad about it.

Wanna see something interesting, though?  Watch what happens if a sub tries to talk shit about our kids– or anybody else other than us who may happen to be in the teachers’ lounge at that time.  Every adult in the room will jump to the defense of a kid who we might have been perfectly happy to joke about the suspect parentage of five minutes ago.  Why?  He’s ours.  We can talk shit about our own kids.  Nobody else gets to.  Period.  And everybody in that room who hears me call Jimmy a stupid brain-dead motherfucker knows that I’m about to walk back into my classroom and work my ass off to teach the belligerent little shit some math.

Are there teachers who are complete burnouts, like she describes?  Absofuckinlutely.  I’ve come dangerously close to it at any number of points in my career– hell, the last two weeks have not been pretty; I really needed the last couple of days to go well and I’m glad they have, but I got home on Wednesday griping that I needed to find something else to do with my life, and not remotely for the first time.  But you identify a burnout by what they do in the classroom, not what they say in the teachers’ lounge.

We all sound like assholes in there.

The highlight of the day…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

shut up…was hearing about a student who explained to her teacher that she needed to go see the nurse because “the color was coming off” of her skin.

That’s new.

Didn’t actually happen to me, though.  I’m exhausted beyond anything that’s reasonable right now; I got a decent amount of sleep last night and despite a couple of Tweets to the contrary I had a decent day at work, although my worst group was easily my Honors class, which 1) rarely happens and 2) tends to annoy me out of proportion to their behavior.

It’s 7:13.  If I’m in bed in 45 minutes I’m not going to be surprised about it.