Constructing Kasun, Educator

My cooperating teacher (I guess the technical term is student teacher–but how dare I call her that if she’s already beginning to work with students who recognize her as teacher) arrived from a local university on Monday.  Somehow I was certain she was going to begin three weeks from now.  Sure enough, as a transplant from the world of banking, she had been precise and effective at communicating her start date; I had been the one who had the hit the snooze button one too many times, apparently.  This is the third day I’ve been working with her, and so far, so good.

I’ve found, however, that explaining my rationales for why I do things is a bit like unpacking a closet or a storage unit.  There’s just so much stuff!  In many ways, it’s like spring cleaning where you want to go through every single item at once.  I want to tell her everything.  Like why I don’t give many tests or quizzes and how I decided to become a teacher.  Why I stand in the doorway to greet each student as class starts.  I want to give her my full analysis of each student. But, time is linear, and I can only go piece by piece.
Exhibit A:  Dirty laundry. It’s enlightening to hear her observations about my classes.  Today I slammed through two activities in efforts to get some meaty stuff written by my students.  I want them to post it to the wiki soon (probably tomorrow) and also get some good writing samples for a book I can try to get them published in (the deadline is looming).  One of the writing assignments included writing a review (students could choose–a movie, videogame, book, etc.).  I gave them one example and no other models.  The kids really needed at least one more.  But, no, I was in a rush!  She pointed out that a couple students were stuck on what the purpose of a review even was! Gosh!  What to do?  Just suck it up, realize she is already observing my dirty laundry and admit to her that her observation is accurate and rethink the way I’m making compromises with my curriculum!

Exhibit B:  Cherished possessions.  My cooperating teacher and I have been discussing the writing I’ve been having students do.  I have begun to slowly uncover my philosophy of writing instruction to her.  Or not so slowly.  She knows that I believe students must have a real purpose for what they do in class.  There are few esoteric exercises in my room.  Instead, if we’re writing, we’re sending letters to Senators and Representatives.  We’re posting to the wiki.  We’re trying to get books or parts of books published.  If we’re reading, we’re reading the way those of us who love to read do… because we chose the book ourselves or had it recommended to us by someone who cares.  My beliefs about education continue to bind me to the practice, and I can’t think of anything more important that I can share with her.

Exhibit C:  Cobwebs.  Sometimes I have to think really hard to uncover the reasons for why I’m doing something.  There are bits of theory I have to reach deeply at that I might not have recently considered.   A student today was truly lost and couldn’t seem to put together the concept of a review even after getting it explained to her three different ways.  I fumbled through my knowledge of the student’s background (she recently came from an inner-city school in New York–her sister has an IEP–she seems to have processing issues).  I began to put together that this student might have learning differences.  Maybe it’s time to start implementing some differentiated instruction with her?  The cobwebs are still heavy on this case, but I can begin to clear them away by going for differentiation.

We have six and a half more weeks to finish this tour through my own personal storage unit of educational philosophy and practice.  It’s a lot of work, but it feels so good to be going through it all, bit by bit.  I’m uncovering/discovering things I wouldn’t have otherwise without her presence.

I can understand better why a few of my students are so damaged, so broken, so unable to look in the mirror and believe there’s someone alive looking back at them. I just finished reading Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and can see many parallels between some of my students and the life Rodriguez described living.

I met Rodriguez at a book signing at a conference in 2002. He read from his book of short stories he had just published. I read the stories and was intrigued, but I had no idea this man had lived through so much as a gang member. While the stories are interesting, now that I’ve read his first book, which describes everything from the way he messed his pants in school because he didn’t know how to tell the teacher he needed to use the bathroom to how he shot at people and witnessed acts of violence that only make sense to people who have been robbed of the ability to see a purpose for living. So I’m left wondering why I didn’t read this book before. YES, I know gangs are bad. I know they provide a sense of community for people who see few alternatives to gang life. But this book somehow dissipates the dissonance in my head about how someone could really want to join a gang.

One of my students, I’ll call her Mordida, bit another very sweet girl yesterday. The police were involved. She bit and kicked and pulled out clumps of the kid’s hair. One school official commented, “The victim is lucky she still has her bicep, the bite was so strong.” This student was AWOL earlier this year, then came back to my school and has made appearances about once a week. Two days ago she showed up and whined, “I don’t have anything in my journal–I’ve hardly been here. I don’t know what to do.” I felt angry. She didn’t know about all the great writing we had done because she was busy doing whatever she does… I know she arranges some of the infamous “skipping parties” a lot of our students (especially the Latino students) go to to get drunk, maybe stoned, among other things. I asked her calmly, “A que veniste?” I wanted to know why she bothered to show up to class. She really didn’t have an answer, at least not one she could share with me.

So yesterday after school she jumped a sweet, quiet girl I know who has only arrived in the U.S. about four months ago. This morning the school found out about it. I checked the electronic attendance. Mordida had an all-day excused absence programmed in it. Funny, I thought. Security and administrators were involved. The victim hadn’t arrived, either. Then Mordida turned out to be at school after all, just there to find her friends and cause more trouble. She had called her own absence into school, and she must have faked an adult voice well enough to convince the office staff it was really her mother.

What I understand about Mordida is that something is very wrong with her world. She has been in big trouble for the five years or so. Somehow her world must be as corrupt and polluted as Rodriguez’s was. I don’t know if she’s in a gang, but the lifestyle she’s following is just as dead-end. Rodriguez’s world was (and in some ways still is–it’s our world, too) a place where injustices were perpetrated by all the people with power. Rodriguez’s high school was two in one–one for the affluent kids, another for the poor kids. Sounds painfully familiar. Mordida knows which school she belongs to. I guess I can see why she wants to lash out against it–just bite whatever comes along and hope that will provide some flavor to her painfully dark life.

No, my school isn’t a place where most students are afraid of what might happen to them because of gangs. Most of my students don’t know people who have been killed in gang violence or drive-by shootings. But there are some students who flirt with these dangers, and some of them, like Mordida, fall quickly into patterns of behavior with no easy exit.

A couple nights ago we had the second of our parent-teacher conference nights at my high school.  Because I am an ESOL teacher, I wasn’t expecting many of my parents to make it.  You probably know the reasons.  Parents are working two and three jobs and can’t forgo the income to meet me.  They feel uncomfortable trying to navigate our system.  They didn’t get the announcement in their home language.

So I was expecting to get some work accomplished while many of my colleagues spent the evening talking with thirty parents or better.  I figured I’d get the usual four or so.

Instead, I got the big zero.

What happened?

Well, I didn’t push it with my students this year.  At all.  That usually helps to get me a few parents, I suppose.  I didn’t take the time to personally call any of the parents.  My school (as noted above) didn’t send the announcements in the home language.

But I think this situation begs a bigger question.  We know that routinely very few ESOL parents show up, so the question is, who is the event really for?  We could argue this point, but it’s for the mostly middle and upper-middle class parents who “get” school and want the chance to come in and advocate more for their kids.  I don’t begrudge them that opportunity,  but I wonder why we spend so much energy on an event that doesn’t improve outcomes for students who need the most help.

Possible solutions include better campaigning to get parents in the building, taking the teachers to their communities, and creating a more inviting environment.  Maybe we’d get to 25 percent of parents that way (in a best-case scenario).

But that’s still not good enough for me.  I want to see every one of our at-risk students and immigrant students and poor students being given the attention they deserve.  I want their teachers to be aware of their circumstances because they have meaningful relationships with students where the students look up to their teachers as mentors.  I want school to be a place where the students are aware of each other’s backgrounds and can appreciate the strengths and challenges they bring.

Instead, it’s me back in my classroom, trying to make my little dent with my sixty-odd ESOL students in my three classes, frustrated with an inequitable system, but not shouting with outrage about why and how we need to change it.

Today I was blessed.   I don’t know how else to put it.

A student I taught three years ago visited me.  He was a transfer from a nearby high school in a different district.  His writing skills were barely high enough to merit placement by my district’s standards in my class.  Verb tenses were muddled, and sometimes I wasn’t sure of what he was trying to say in his writing.  But during discussions, he often shined with his insights and his tenacious approach to understanding what we were discussing.

While he was in my class, I recognized that grit and determination.  He talked about how hard he trained for soccer for both my school and outside leagues.  During the off-season, he spent most days in training.  I watched him play for my high school team and realized he wasn’t the next Pele, but he was determined.

Last year I wrote one of his college recommendation letters.  He had big dreams of going to Division I schools to play soccer.  But, because he hadn’t worked quite as hard in academic schoolwork, he ended up being recruited by a small school in North Carolina.  He’d have to pay half the tuition to attend.  I wondered if he’d really do it.

Today he found me in another teacher’s classroom.  “Miss, I’ve come to find you three times this year.  I finally found you,” he smiled.  “Things are going really, really well.”

Since we had talked so much last year about his filling out the paperwork for college by himself and how to try to get into college, I guessed, but still wondered, that his quick assessment meant he was in college and doing well.

He is in college and playing soccer.  His first semester went ok academically, but now he’s knuckling down and studying a lot more.  “I really like the way my world civilizations professor teaches us.  He’s teaching us how to read and how to study,” he said.  “I got a 100 on our last test!”

He tells me his parents are extremely proud of him.  He’s unashamed of the fact that they couldn’t help him figure out how to approach college.  Instead, he’s just happy that he’s making them happy.

And, today, without his knowing it, he made me happier than I’ve been in a very long time.  I know he had help from his soccer coaches in the past and other teachers, but I couldn’t help myself from sharing a bit of the pride his parents feel in his accomplishments.

After reading more of Barry Lane’s After the End, I realized it was time to work more explicitly on question formation with my students, especially as a writing revision strategy.

Boy, was it fun.  I brought in a big cowgirl hat I  had bought in Mexico a few years ago and asked students to make up questions to find out about it.  Rapid-fire, they asked, “Where’d you get it? What size is it?  Who is it for?  Does it fit your dog? Why were you trying to hide your dog?”  etc.  They smiled and laughed as their questions led them into the story about how I hid my dog from the hotel staff where I was staying one weekend in a sleepy beach town in Mexico.  I borrowed the hat idea directly from Lane, who has his own funny hat he uses for a similar activity.

Next, I shared a short poem I wrote in honor of the student I have who asks the most quetions this year, Akram.  Sometimes (and he admits this), he asks questions just to make the time pass by.  We’re working on that, but, other times he asks questions that make me and the rest of the class think.  What more could I want?  The poem addresses those qualities, and I let the students know I want them to always question–that questioning is what intelligent people do.  And that they can become more intelligent via the questions they ask.   Later they asked me lots of questions about the poem as an exercise in revision.

We also reviewed the genres we’ve been writing in class, and–you guessed–they had to come up with questions about the genres.  We talked about why epitaphs are important (based on their questions), how poetry helps people express themselves, and how monologues and biographies are different.  That was all based on their questions–not my ideas for class discussion.

Finally, the students did a freewrite of questions.  They spent the last seven minutes of class listing all the questions they could think of.  As a quick concluding activity, I asked for a show of hands about if the students felt they were using their brains more.  It’s no surprise they agreed (though they were surprised) that they felt they were using their brains more in that class than most.

We’ll go back to questions.  They’re waiting to see my revision of my poem based on their questions, and then they’ll practice some questioning on their own pieces of writing.