The Dark Side

I have never written a single blog that was not mandatory. I can even go a little further and admit that until yesterday, I had approached every single blog with contempt for its compulsory and unnatural nature. Usually the prompts are dry and unimaginative, so unless I choose to put forth serious effort (the kind of effort for which I never have time) my writing is also dry and unimaginative.

That fact never bothered me until yesterday. I have certainly had plenty to worry about besides blogging, but as I sat down to write about my favorite student - another potentially cliche and awful prompt - I realized that I have so many memories, so many stories that have shaped who I am as a teacher, as a person, over the last year. These stories deserve to be told. So with a little guilt trip from myself, a little inspiration from a fellow blogger, and a lot of need for an emotional outlet, I've decided to do my best to record some of my experiences... at the very least so I have something to look back on when this crazy ride is over.

It hasn't been all sunshine and butterflies. Here goes.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about a student I had last year. He was two years behind so he should have been in the ninth grade. Physically he looked like he should have been a senior. He was tall, he shaved, his voice had changed, he wore size 12 shoes. At the beginning of the year, among his 7th grade classmates, John stood out.

As is my habit, I immediately found myself drifting towards John. I tend to have a soft spot for the "troubled" kids. I tend to see good in them that my fellow teachers don't. I am fully aware that this tendency often lends itself to frustration, disappointment, and even guilt... this case is no exception.

From the jump John was a behavior problem. He usually walked into my room laughing, joking around, kicking someone's heels. It became a daily occurrence for me to send him back out of the room and have him "Come in the right way." He carried a black and gold faux Gucci backpack that literally had not one binder, pen, pencil, or unused sheet of notebook paper inside it. Eventually I got so fed up that I made him a classwork folder that was never allowed to leave my room. He was to put his classwork in that folder every day... even if it wasn't finished. Homework was a losing battle. 

As the first couple months of school dragged by, John began getting in trouble more and more. He was never involved in fights. There was nothing malicious about him... he just joked around a lot and, because of his mature appearance and previous record, teachers automatically assumed the worst. He steadily began to accumulate referrals for things like doing backflips on the way back from lunch or flicking mashed potatoes. He was crying for attention.

As a naive and completely inexperienced teacher, I was at a loss for how to help him. He wasn't a dumb kid. In fact he was quite the opposite. He wrote with fluency and perspective equal to some of my honors kids. None of his friends knew he was smart and he did everything he could to keep it that way. I did everything I could to force him out from behind that facade. I knew I could cold call on him in class and, amid snickers of anticipated humiliation from his classmates, he always mumbled the correct answer... as if he was ashamed to betray his reputation. I would grin and move on, delighting in the shocked expressions on his classmates' faces.

When I began offering after-school tutoring I always made sure he stayed. No one was ever willing to come pick him up, so another teacher and I would drive him home or he would just walk. As I got to know him better, I found out that his mom was never home. She usually stayed at her boyfriend's house. His dad was in jail. His older sister dropped out of school after ninth grade, pregnant. He had a younger sister and it was usually his job to make her dinner in the evenings. To say the cards were stacked against him would be a gross understatement and to steal a phrase I used last night, John was devastatingly aware of his own reality. He didn't complain about it, he was more than willing to talk about it openly - in fact he did so with such unabashed candor that it sometimes made me feel uncomfortable.

By the time January rolled around, he had compiled so many referrals that the principal was at his wit's end. The 7th grade teachers received several emails about interventions we were supposed to make, strategies for curbing his behavior, and ultimatums John had been offered. Honestly, I began ignoring most of these suggestions.

One morning as I was standing on hallway duty before homeroom, I glanced into my classroom just in time to see a black and gold backpack fly full speed across my room. It smacked the wall with such force that a couple of girls screamed, including the one at whom it was aimed. My eyes locked with John's. He showed no remorse. He was laughing. I was livid.

Employing my best teacher voice, I demanded that he see me in the hall. Still smirking, he sauntered across the front of the room. Without even pausing for conversation, I motioned for him to follow me to the office. When we got there I pointed at a chair indicating the place for him sit and I began furiously scribbling the situation down on a referral. I left him and the referral with the secretary and went back to my room.

During my planning period I finally had time to read my email. As per usual, there was one from the principal. Subject: John. It was sent the previous afternoon.

Teachers,

John has officially been warned that he has one more strike. There are no spaces left in the alternative school, so the next time he is sent to the office, it will result in automatic expulsion for one calendar year. This has already been board approved.

I cannot adequately articulate the emotions I felt at that moment. To say I felt guilty doesn't even scratch the surface. I was instantly nauseated. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream... then I calmed myself. I knew I could undo this.

I half walked, half jogged to the office. The only person I could find was the assistant principal.

"I already know what you're going to say, Buccilla. And no... there's nothing you can do about it."

"But I didn't know he was on his last strike! It wasn't even that bad, he just threw a backpack... that's not grounds for expulsion... this will ruin his life."

The words sank between us. Silence.

"He had plenty of chances. It's not your fault. This was bound to happen."

I tried to plead my case for another couple of minutes. I was getting nowhere. Dejected, I walked back to my classroom, racking my brain for options. I could see none. I had ruined this kid's life.

I haven't seen John since that day. I have his younger sister in class this year. She is bright. She's above grade level. She wants to be different and we've talked about that. After a couple weeks of school I finally worked up the courage to ask what her brother had been up to.

"Nothing," she said.

"Well what does he do during the day? He didn't try to get into another school?"

"Nope. He just walks the streets."

All I could muster was, "Will you ask him to come see me after school one day?"

I don't know what I would say to him. The most I can offer is to tutor him so that he can stay caught up. If we look at the statistics, kids like him rarely graduate. I still can't help but to feel guilty but I also know that harping on it will do no good. For now all I can do is learn from that mistake. That huge mistake that changed his life forever. I can make sure I don't repeat it. I can make sure I give his little sister every opportunity she deserves. It's on days like that one that I question whether I can do this job forever.

Reminding Myself Why I Do This Job

Describe your favorite student:

Sam is not my smartest student. In fact, he struggles more than most. He tries to hide the fact that he really can't read. When I conference with him individually or require him to write while I'm standing at his desk, he nervously hovers his pencil over his paper before he scribbles even the simplest of words in such illegible handwriting that he thinks I won't be able to notice the misspelling. He doesn't have poor handwriting. He writes his name very well. He writes the words basketball and Kobe Bryant very well.

Sam was one of my pee-wee basketball players last year. A sixth grader at the time, he had such heart and wide-eyed eagerness to learn that I constantly found myself gravitating towards him, making sure he was doing everything perfectly... because I knew he wanted that. I wasn't his teacher, so I really had no idea how far behind he was academically. All I knew of Sam was that he always did as he was told, most of his teammates seemed to like him, he knew when to joke, and he knew when to "give me his eyes." 

This year I've gotten to know him a little better. About three weeks ago, I got tired of him losing everything he ever did in my class, so I pulled a binder off my shelf and emptied from it the miscellaneous paper work it was storing.

"Come here," I said with a stern tone and a wry smirk on my face.

He looked at me, chin lowered, his eyes unsure as to whether I was mad or joking.

"Come here, Sam," I repeated, showing a little more of my smile.

At this he completely dropped his head, and as he dragged his feet towards my desk, snickers rippled throughout the room. In most situations I would nip this immediately. In most situations I'm pretty sure my students would know better than to laugh at all. But Sam was doing this intentionally. He knew he wasn't in trouble and he knows how to be a ham.

As he sat by my desk, emptying the crumpled papers and busted pens out of his frayed and faded backpack, I patiently explained to him how I was dividing each section of his new binder. 

"This section is for your Do Nows. I'm putting plenty of blank paper in here so you don't have to walk around the room anymore asking people for paper. This one's for your notes... again... blank paper, why?"

"So I don't have to walk around your room mooching off my classmates," he smirked.

"Very good."

Surprisingly we managed to pull most of his missing assignments out of that tiny backpack. I made him put each one in its proper section. My next step was to make something to go on the front of his binder, inside the clear sheet protector. I pulled out a blank sheet of printer paper and opened my drawer to find a marker... only highlighters. Yellow wouldn't have shown up, so I placed my hand on the hot pink one and looked at him. His eyes got wide and his jaw dropped.

"Don't do that to me, Miss B!"

"Oh yes... this is happening," I said.

In big, hot pink capital letters I wrote Sam's VERY Organized Language Arts Binder and then slid the sheet into the front of his binder. Perfect.

My last step was to take a pen out of my drawer, tie a long piece of yarn around the top, and duct tape it into the center of his binder.

"What's this for, Sam?"

"So I don't have to walk around your room mooching off my classmates," he repeated.

Sam brings that binder to class every day now. He never forgets it. Every day he walks in, turns to his Do Now section, stretches his pen out as far as the yarn will let it reach, and playfully plucks at it like a guitar string. He may not get the Do Now questions correct most days and he may still misspell elementary words... but we're working on it. He wants to work on it.

When approaching this blog assignment I wrestled with how I was going to do it justice. There are so many kids who make my job worth it, who provide motivation to roll out of bed every day. It's easy to get excited about helping the "smart kids." It's easy to lean towards the kids who understand what I'm saying the first time around and only talk when they're supposed to. Sam probably talks too much, he's disorganized, and often times I have to repeat directions several times before he begins his work... but at the end of every day, when I reflect upon what I've accomplished, it's the things like making that binder for Sam that remind me why I do this job. I've met so many kids with poor backgrounds and rich personalities. Often times they don't realize how limited their opportunities really are... often times I'm glad for that. Kids like Sam, however, seem to be well aware of their own realities... devastatingly aware of their own realities. They know they're below reading level, that their parents can't afford binders, or that they're not the best athletes. They still show up everyday willing to make me laugh, willing to try in my class, and willing to humor me by letting me think they LOVE things like organized binders and subject-verb agreement. While Sam is indeed my favorite student, I am lucky to be able to say that I have several like him.

Portfolios: The Best and the Worst

I'm ashamed to say that today was the first time I looked at any of the portfolios from last year's class. There were some that I loved and some that clearly seemed thrown together at the last minute. Overall the ones that I liked the best were the ones that told a story. Below I've listed a set of guidelines that I think applies to what I viewed as the best portfolios.

1. Take tons of pictures. Even though MTC is full of gifted writers, a lot of people went overboard with the amount of copy on their page. Eventually I got sick of reading so I began scanning through pages simply looking at pictures and bold words. The portfolios that were able to get the point across with these key elements were the ones I enjoyed the most. Having said all that, I was disappointed in some of the photo essays. Many of them lacked a central theme, captions, or any explanation at all. Maybe it's the journalism major in me, but if the reader has to work to figure out the purpose of a photo, then you've failed!

2. Tell your story. I understand that the whole focus of Teacher Corps is on the students and I love that, but too many pictures of kids we don't know can get old. I enjoyed seeing MTCers with their students more than seeing tons of pictures of students in their natural environment. There's nothing special about a student sitting at a desk. Of course there is a place for some photos like that. But I want to see your story, not theirs. Some people chose to go as far back as their lives in high school. I'm not sure that I feel the need to go that far back. A general sense of life before MTC seemed to work well, but the bulk of the content needs to be about the two years in MTC.

3. Have a theme? Maybe. I know that establishing a theme is part of the requirement and that it's apparently what made the winning portfolio so great, but I think it's important not to let it get too cliche. Personally I would rather see a clean, well-put-together, and creative page than one that was forced to stick to some theme. In trying to think about what theme I would choose, I find myself becoming concerned that staying within a theme may keep me from doing some of the things I want to do.

Overall, my favorites were the ones that were modern, clean, and full of photos. Those were easy to follow and thus fun to view.

Bill Clinton Comes to the Grove

These pictures were taken last year when President Clinton came to the Grove. It was the first personal day I took last year :)

"No, you!"

Clinton paying homage to Faulkner.

Still jogging at 65!

Surrounded by Secret Service, but that won't stop me!

Getting closer!

Bam! This won me so many bets.

Fine, baby, you win.

First Day, Take Two

I was completely delusional about how my first day this year would be. Here's why:

1. By the end of last year I was lucky enough to have built really good rapports with nearly all of my students. I was able to joke around and have fun while still maintaining discipline. I was genuinely happy to see my kids walk through the door every morning, and instead of meeting them with stone-faced, rigid management, I took on a happier, more laid back persona. They really responded well to it and at the end of the year, I had far fewer discipline problems than I had at the beginning of the year. Seeing those students in the hallways the first day was easily as exciting for me as it seemed to be for them. They gave me hugs, asked about my summer, said they missed me... What a feeling! What I forgot was that I had laid the ground work for all of that at the beginning of last year. I tried to be the best disciplinarian I could be (even if that wasn't very good). I was fresh out of summer school, fresh out of Dr. Monroe's class. I was just fresh.

2. Despite everything that Teacher Corps preaches about the first day, first week, first month, first semester... all of that stuff about "not smiling until Christmas" and "sending someone out on the first day" and "not letting anything slide".... it was like a totally forgot it... or OK, I'll admit it, I guess I was just a little cocky. I thought I could just walk back in and have that same rapport, that same laid-back demeanor, no management issues. WRONG!

Luckily for me I got a little mileage out of being around last year. The kids had either heard about me or seen me in the halls, but it was clear that by the end of the first week, things were far too laid back. It wasn't that kids were being disrespectful or talking out or slacking on work. In fact, I didn't have to give out anything worse than a warning, but that felt wrong. I was supposed to send a kid out of the room on day one! I was supposed to give warnings for sneezing!

I realized that what worried me wasn't poor behavior. The kids were fine. The problem was that I was being WAY too friendly. The kids liked me. At first they're supposed to be afraid of me, right?

So at the beginning of this week, our first full week, I laid down the hammer. I gave warnings for crumpling paper, coughing too loudly, standing up half way to grab a pencil. I gave my lunch class "silent lunch" because one student laughed in the hallway on the way to the cafeteria. The amazing thing is that the kids haven't seemed to stop liking me. They just seem more scared. I think that's good... but this is still only my second go around, so who knows.

Sage Wisdom

Dear First Years,
At this point in time, you are undoubtedly being inundated with anecdotal words of wisdom from the mouths of jaded and exhausted second year MTCers. While it’s true that we have one year under our belts and have gained knowledge and perspective on many things, I think you should keep two things in mind when listening.

1. We only just finished out first year of teaching, so while we mean well and would never misguide you or anyone else… we are still pretty new at this. Along with that freshness comes a relative inability to be objective. I am writing this blog while still sitting in my classroom at Byhalia Middle School, so don’t think that the short trip over to Holly Springs tomorrow will suddenly enlighten me. Not enough time has passed. I and the other second years (except maybe Matthew Gioia) will give you the best advice we can, but don’t take it as gospel.
2. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. For me, the worst thing about last summer was being scared to death by the awful stories I heard from second years. They talked of terrible children, unbearable stress, and isolation from friends and family. I heard so much of it that I dreaded coming back to Mississippi at the end of July and thought for sure that I was in for the worst, most stressful two years of my life. I don’t want to say that none of what they said was true or applicable to my situation, but it definitely would have been better for me to come into this job completely unbiased. So… listen to the stories… enjoy the stories… but then forget them. No one MTCer has ever had the same experience, and you should truly look forward to discovering yours on your own.

I can’t wait to watch you all grow through this next year. I am such a different person compared to who I was a year ago, and I would not have it any other way. I can’t tell you how proud it makes me to tell people I am a teacher, and it makes me even prouder to tell them where I’m a teacher. Our job is a difficult one and when you make it to this time next year you will truly feel like you can do anything. Attack every day with every bit of yourself that you can muster (some days it’s not much) and I can promise you that by the end of next year you will have no regrets.

Summer Wish List

Let me just begin by saying that these are the worst kind of blog assignments. It’s so difficult to articulate certain things like, “what I want to work on.” Many of the things I want to work on are intangible, and with only three weeks of summer school, it would be impossible to significantly change or improve upon anything on my wish list, which is as follows:

1. Become more stoic in my interactions with “the bad kids.” I am a very passionate and sometimes emotional person… I wear my feelings on my sleeve most of the time. That’s a BAD characteristic for a teacher in terms of discipline. On a positive note, it certainly helped me build some great relationships with students this year, but I had terrible rapports with the bad kids and they continued to slide over the year.
2. Make-up work. Summer school is definitely not a realistic way to work on this. I will be going from 140 students to 30 and there will be six other teachers in the classroom. To add to that, students are only allowed to have two absences before they fail. During the school year, I was pretty awful about keeping up with make-up work and tests. I usually didn’t address missing grades until the end of the 9 weeks or when a student came to me and asked.
3. Consistency with consequences.  I tend to cut the goods kids more slack than I should and by the end of this school year, they began to act a little more “grown” than I would have liked. I’m not saying they misbehaved or acted disrespectful, but I sensed that they began to think of themselves as my equal rather than my subordinate. Again… summer school is probably too short to really experience any of that.
4. Patience with kids who move slower. Towards the end of this school year I got pretty impatient with students who worked slowly or asked a lot of questions. I’m sure part of that was just being burned out, but it is in our job description to be understanding and helpful to those kids. It is worth the extra effort to make sure they grasp something, so I would like to do a better job of keeping that in mind.