My students teaching me

My students pulled me out if my seat today, out of my comfort of writing a paper, and tried to teach me the 'rachet girl' dance, and how to dance loose as a goose. I think I failed the loose as a goose because I didn't go hard enough, according to them. However, they liked ny rachet girl.

I have the overwhelming feeling in a few hours, my attempts will be broadcast on YouTube.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

We started the year with 3 read 180 teachers here. 1 quit. Then 1 git reassigned subjects. The literacy specialist assigned to take over her class quit. I am the last man standing. I may not have been the beat teacher, but no one will say I don't have perseverance.

Can we fix it?

I ran into this problem when helping a student with his work last block, and over coming it absolutely stumped me: I was checking the student's worksheet that they had to finish - it was a set of questions about the first part of the story they just read: "Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allen Poe. Some of the questions were explictly from the text, others the students had to make inferences to answer. I was correcting his work, telling him he got some of the questions wrong. He got all upset and started complaining that 'I should just be glad that he tried.' (which in a sense is true because it is more than most of the students in that class do.) However, I explained to him that his answer was still wrong, doesn't matter how hard he tried.

 One of the questions was: How do the narrator's impressions of the mansion contribute to his feelings of anxiety. The student's response was: because he was ill in both his body and minds and he was not well. The student basically just copied a line out of the text. I tried to have the student re-read the questions and to identify what the question was asking (about the mansion). He was able to do that. Then I asked him to re-read his answer, and I asked if it was related to the question. He got all upset again, saying 'the story says...' then repeating what he wrote. He was so convinced because he was able to write a line down from the story that it HAD to be right. Try as I might to explain to him that his answer was off-topic, he was so adament he just wouldn't listen.

 I know the achievement gap goes so far beyond classroom behavior. I just wish that wouldn't have been an issue for me this year because I feel like I didn't even get to chip away at the root of the problem because my class was too busy being out of control. I wish I would have known from the beginning of the year the student had this problem, because two weeks from the end is not the time to start solving something that's obviously been engrained for many years. Sometimes I feel so hopeless to help, like these students really do need a superhero teacher to come in and save their education. I certainly know I wasn't that for them this year.

Grading

1. I'm not really sure how it took me this long in the year to relize the importance of writing rubrics (not for my students - I already knew it was important for them). It makes grading SO MUCH QUICKER. I am breezing through these tests when I have everything set up before. 2. Like noted above, I am currently grading these tests from the workshop we just finished, and I am so impressed at how much better my students' writing has gotten. For one, when the questions asks for a certain number of sentences, they give them to me. And complete ones at that! They are pulling information from the text to support their answer, too. It only took a whole year, but my 8th graders can now answer constructed response questions with success!

My anthem for the rest of the school year - New Soul by Yael Naim

I'm a new soul I came to this strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take
But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear
Finding myself making every possible mistake

See I'm a young soul in this very strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout what is true and fake
But why all this hate? try to communicate
Finding trust and love is not always easy to make

This is a happy end
Cause you don't understand
Everything you have done
Why's everything so wrong

This is a happy end
Come and give me your hand
I'll take you far away

I'm a new soul I came to this strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take
But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear
Finding myself making every possible mistake

Will the real Ms. Duncan please stand up?

So I was given the wrong email address for one of my parents (unknowingly to both parties, of course), and the following is the email I got back from the "wrong" Ms. Duncan:

 Ms. Gauthier, I’m afraid that you have the wrong e-mail address. If this was my child, I would definitely do more than just talk to him (because I’m old school), but I’m afraid I can’t help you. I hope you are able to contact the Ms. Duncan you are seeking and that she can help you solve this problem. I know it takes patience and perseverance to be a teacher. I applaud your efforts and wish you well. 

At first I was a little embarrased about this mistake, but after reading it over again, I decided it was a wonderful treat from an honest mistake. I hope the real Ms. Duncan responds in a similar fashion (yes, I do have the right email now!)

And we have reconnection

With my seemingly increasing waist-line, I have been finding solace solely with my students:

Student 1: "Oooh, Ms. Gauthier, you be getting big."
Me: "Um, is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
Student 1: "It's a good thing. You're too skinny!"
Student 2: "Yeah, you look good."

I know I haven't posted in a while, and this may seem like a strange post to reconnect, but I've been rolling this around in my head all day. I was wondering why my students don't think my moderatly skinny look is good, or mores-, why a more round shape is better.

I have two theories:

1) It's a cultural thing. Black women may just be more naturally curvy, therefore it's a more attractive feature to have a belly. See, Venus of Willendorf:


She was a symbol of fertility and beauty to her culture because that's just what women looked like.

It makes sense. Big or small, my students seem to overwhelmingly like who they are, and loudly profess they would not change an inch of their body for anyone (re-asserting my belief that Read 180 was not designed for my demographic; we just did a unit on peer pressure, and one of the articles was about self-esteem and how a lot of girls go on extreme diets because they don't like how they look. It went RIGHT OVER their heads. None of them could believe anyone would actually do that).

OR

2) This body type is not necessarily inherent to the culture, but attraction to this body type has grown out of the recent diet of low-income families. I see what my students eat - it's no wonder why they think my naturally skinny physique is something to be gawked at. If a whole group of people ate what they ate (they actually remarked this morning, in a dicussion on healthy foods to eat before the Leap test, that a snickers bar was a high-protein food) all the women would be curvey with a carb/sugar/fat-induced belly. Not saying it's their fault in any way, no one has taught them (or their parents, probably) what is healthy. Heck no one has really taught children, low-income or high-income what a healthy meal looks like. However, a high-income community may be over-eating and poorly eating, they still ashere to the notion that skinny is beautiful. No exceptions. Whereas my students love and accept their bodies the way they are, fat or naturally skinny. And that leads me to the question: which is better - adhereance to some false idea that supermodel skinny is the only "right" way to be, or loving your body, unhealthy or not? Both are unhealthy, in their own ways.

Alas, I have digressed from my point, and I apologize. However, I have been reading Octavio Paz's "Labryinth of Solitude." Pure philosophy. I can't help this.