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.

Oddly good behavior

I have one, completely quiet student sitting in my classroom for lunch. And he's reading a book. These past two Fridays have been very strange. Someone needs to investigate what they're putting in the breakfasts on Friday.... actually, now that I think about it, no one needs to investigate that at all. Let's just keep it going.

And I speak as a proud Catholic

"Time after time, they have rejected compromises on social issues because of fundamentalist rigidity, not Christian engagement with a changing world. They could have agreed, for example, to secular civil unions for gays - and not full "marriage" rights - but instead they insisted that neither were acceptable at all. They could have made a strong and vital case for the immorality and evil of abortion as a civil-rights issue, without demanding it be criminalized by the state. They could have accepted a compromise on contraception in health-care policies, but they have refused...

...And the obsession among Catholic and evangelical leaders with an issue like contraception stands in stark contrast to their indifference to, for example, the torture in which the last administration engaged, the growing social inequality fostered by unfettered capitalism, the Christian moral imperative of universal health care, and the unjust use of the death penalty."

I am in no way trying to start anything here, I just needed to express how wonderful this Newsweek article is. And what does this have to do with teaching? Well, I'm reading the article on my planning period, and let's face it - I deal with the intelligences of 8th graders all day. I needed an intellectually stimulating post.

A healthy classroom, one panther buck at a time.

No, I'm not talking about the way my students treat each other (or me) because that still pretty much sucks. I am talking about what my students eat. I may be kind of sucking as a reading teacher, but I've found a new excitement in teaching my kids how to make healthier eating choices. Realistically, I am probably not going to stop them from bringing a purse full of candy to school or having hot cheetos for breakfast, but I am going to make sure I'm only encouraging healthy decisions.

- Being a role model; anyone that knows me knows I love anything with sugar, particularly because I can eat it for all three meals and never gain a pound. However, more and more students spend lunch in my classroom now, and it's very contradictory for me to say "don't eat that entire bag of jolly ranchers for breakfast" and then I have a bag of cookies with a side of tootsie rolls at lunch. I've started bringing soley granola bars, fruit, and a real main course at lunch so when my students ask for food, I only have healthy things to give to them (and guess what - they're hungry and they'll eat it!). I gave a granola bar to an unwilling student today (she wanted a bag of chips), and she finally ate it and came back to me and said "Ms. Gauthier, that bar thing was actually really good!" Winning.

- Encouraging healthy choices through panther bucks; Yes, those little slips of aper I give out for good behavior that practically cause a daily riot in my classroom because goodness forbid, I passed a student up who swears he or she was on task! They trade them in at the end of the week for candy, chips, and poweraids because I was under the assumption that's the only thing that would motivate them. Actually, yet again, my students surprise me, and they in fact, do like healthy things - they're just not going to eat them as a default (oh, students, I do empathize with you). Therefore, I'm starting to do what the government doesn't have the balls to do: all the new healthy things at my panther buck store are going to be dirt cheap, whereas the healthy chips and candy prices are going to be jacked way up to encourage healthy buying. I know this isn't teaching them real-life, but hopefully I will enstill the idea in their mind that it is more worthwhile to go for the healthy choice. And if they want to still choose unhealthy, hey, it's gonna cost them.

- CALLING ALL 8TH GRADERS (or those of us that still think like an 8th grader); my students have given me some ideas of healthy things they actually do like (and are realistic to sell to students during the last 10 minutes of class on Fridays) such as oranges (like the little cuties ones that come in the bags), granola bars. BUT I NEED MORE IDEAS. What do middle school/ high school students like they are actually healthy and do not cost Ms. Gauthier a fortune to buy every week. Comments would be appreciated on this post, with any ideas that you have!

Mentoree

I have a mentor teacher!!!! And she's going to actually get someone to get me new computers to replace the broken ones in my classroom!

Yes, I was supposed to be assigned a mentor teacher at the beginning of the school year, but you know, better late than never? I am so excited to fianlly, actually maybe talk to someone at this school that knwos what the heck she's doing (because I guess of all my friends here, I have a tendency to pair up with the ones who equally don't know what the hell they're doing). We'll see how this plays out, but we do have a meeting set up for next week, so it's a start.

Operation: 'Make My Classroom into a Child Labor History Timeline' is a-go.

Monday Madness

It's Monday... which means my students are out of control. However, today was worse than normal because it's like they went backwards from ALL the progress we were making since the beginning of the semester. It was so bad I actually called parents today. And calling parents is my LEAST favorite part of being a teacher, and I have many. Of course, I only got a hold of one parent, but I'm hoping I get some calls back, or at least my descriptive messages are enough to do something.

class pictahhhs

"Your students are champs at being the most opposed to everything." - Jenn McVearry

It's like she spends every day in my classroom - I couldn't have better described my day thus far.

Reflections on the nature of today

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

On the way home from New Orleans tonight, King's speech was broadcast on the radio, and I listened to it. I have to admit that was the only thing I did in remembrance of MLK day, despite King being such a man I hold in high esteem; a leader I look towards for inspiration and guidance for non-violent conflict resolution. Listening to his speech tonight made me think. The title of this blog is "One Day" - the catchphrase, if you will, of TFA signifying our mission that one day all children will have the opportunity of an excellent education. However, this phrase is repeated so much in King's speech, it was hard not to draw similarities between the two.

In reality, TFA's mission is the same as any other do-good organization or individual - to right the wrong that exists in our world. We all hope that "one day" all that we do will make a difference, and things will start to change. It's true that the works of MLK and his followers made a lot of change. No longer is one legally discriminated against because of the color of their skin. That one day has come. However, I see every day how the color of my students' skin affects their education. They are black, therefore they go to crappy schools. They are black, therefore they are more likely to drop out. They are black, therefore they are labeled as "ghetto" and thus label themselves as thus.

Their "one day" has not yet come because in this country we refuse to address the heart of the issue, that these kids are getting the short end of the stick, and instead feel sorry for the po' black kids who are never gonna get a good education. Don't feel bad for them - I certainly don't feel bad for my students. I feel outraged at the system however, for fucking them over ultimately, when it comes down to it, because of the color of their skin.

It's not enough to hear the word of King, feel warm fuzzies inside for those few minutes, comment on how wonderful a man he was, and complacently move on about our day content that everything is ok because we don't have segregation anymore. I guarantee America still hasn't reached the "One Day" King was envisioning when he gave this speech.

"Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed." As I go back into school tomorrow, I will King because I know our work isn't done yet.