Posted on 09/04/2007 6:11:12 PM PDT by A_perfect_lady
Perhaps I'm just not that good at it. It's only my fourth year. They say it takes practice.
I am standing at the door of my classroom. It is 7:24am in Los Angeles, and my homeroom students are trickling in listlessly.
"Good morning. Please get your book out." I say to each group as they wander in. "Good morning, please get your book out. Good morning, please get your book out."
I say it about 10 times. It is school policy to use the 20 minutes of homeroom for silent reading, to set the right tone for a day of schoolwork, and add to the amount of time they spend during a day reading rather than watching YouTube, listening to iPods, playing with Gameboys, etc.
They stand for the Pledge, only because I went off on them like a bomb when they failed to do so at the beginning of the year. Even then it was a three week struggle to teach them not to flop back into their seats with a contemptuous sneer even before the "and justice for all."
Now that they are seated again, they are talking to each other, ignoring my directive to please begin reading. Only 8 of 32 students actually have their book out. I go around urging each one by name, and thanking those who have done so, also by name. I have found that barking orders at the group avails nothing. They do not recognize that anything I say is directed at them unless I stare them in the eye and say their name.
Here is where, already, those who do not teach in LAUSD have suggestions.
Keep them after school if they don't listen to you.
I can't without written parent permission given 24 hours in advance. If the child fails to bring back the signed note, I am stymied. I try calling them. The number is disconnected, or there is no one home. I send home another notice. The child fails to bring it back, explaining that mom works and no one is home and she doesn't speak English anyway and besides, he lost the note.
Send them to the counselor.
Counselor sends them back with a note saying that they have been "counselled." Child smirks as he hands it to me.
Send them to the Dean.
Dean sends them back with a note saying "This is a matter for the counselor."
There are byzantine paths I can trudge down to finally get children to pay 20 minutes of their lives to me for failing to get out their book for homeroom, but I don't have the energy for that because this is nothing compared to the resistance and apathy I'll face in actual classes. I'm saving my powder. I nag and urge them to get out their books until finally they do, and silence falls.
Now I can take attendance. The minute my eyes are off them the whispering and giggling starts. I stare them down a few times and eventually they dissolve into sullen silence. Books in their hands, they stare defiantly off into space. Never mind I let them pick out whatever book they wanted, provided by the tax-payer, at the library. Could be Harry Potter. Could be WWF. Could be Goosebumps. Only four of the students read. The others mark time, prefering to waste 20 minutes rather than read for pleasure. They'll do anything to avoid reading. They hate the written word with a passion. By the time homeroom is over, I am depressed, because they are our Nation's future.
Now comes my 8th grade English class. We are reading Bud, Not Buddy because it's one of the few books earmarked for 8th graders. It's about an orphan boy in Depression-era Michigan searching for his real father. At one point Bud meets a Union organizer. He is the good guy. The cops harass him because they are bad people who want to make sure the poor stay poor, we learn. That's what anti-union people are like, you see. I hate this book but they've already read Freak the Mighty, Jade Green, and The Outsiders, so I'm pretty much down to this.
Most of them read at the 4th grade level. For this district, that's pretty good. My ESL classes are at the 2nd grade level.
I say, "Before we begin reading today, let's review what we've read so far. Please take out your notes from yesterday." Four children take out their notes. Three children take out iPods and try to sneak them on. They thread the earphones up under their shirts, sneak in one earpod, and hide it with their hand as if resting their heads on their hands. The girls cover the pods with their hair. I wonder how they can afford iPods when they are all on subsidized lunch. Then I realize, oh, that is why they can afford iPods.
I catch them and ask them to put the iPods away. I would confiscate them, but the administration has warned us that if we do and we lose it or it's stolen, we have to pay the child's parents to replace the iPod. It's happened once already to a first year teacher, so I don't risk it.
Again, the children seem only vaguely aware that I am speaking to them when I say "Take out your notes from yesterday." So I walk around the room. "Thank you, Wendy. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Jose." Then what I call the second-tier students come awake and take out their notes. I thank them too. Finally I am down to the last six who flatly refuse to do anything until I look them in the eye and say, "Aron, can you take out your notes from yesterday? Are you sure you lost them? Can you open up your backpack? Open it up. Unzip it. Good. Now look in there. What about that folder? Pull it out. Let's see. There they are! Good!"
Finally we are ready to read about the innate goodness of union organizers.
Second period is Intermediate ESL. There are Asian students in this class. One Korean girl, two Thai, one Vietnamese, as well as an Indian girl, a boy from Sri Lanka, and a girl from Cambodia. There are also four Armenians. "Please open your books to page 146," I say. The Asians and Armenians open their books to page 146. The rest of the students, who are Hispanic, ignore me, turn to their friends, and begin chattering. I repeat my usual performance, "Thank you Min Sun, thank you Nafisa, thank you Narek, thank you Ruzanna..."
After much struggle, the Hispanic students finally open their books. A few of the Hispanic girls show signs of making an attempt to do their work. They are rare, and have a tendency to sit alone. Other students tease them.
We are reading about how racist whites victimized African-Americans during the Great Migration. Then we'll read more about slavery and segregation.
Now it is time to do our worksheets. The Asian and Armenian students listen attentively to the directions, ask questions, and then get to work. They are almost competitive in their desire to do well. One Armenian boy and the boy from Sri Lanka fall over themselves in their haste to beat the other and bring me their paper for inspection.
Most of the Hispanic students return to their gossip, except for the few ostracized girls who struggle to figure out how to fill in the blanks.
These scenes are repeated throughout the day. After school, we have an administrative meeting to find out how our API scores for 2007 were. I think it stands for Annual Proficiency Index. I'm half-dead from six hours of struggling with the inertia that is most of my students, but I look at the data they present.
The information is broken down by ethnicity. The White students are 50% proficient. The Filipinos are 51%. The Asians, despite the fact that most of them have only been in the country for a couple years, are at 61%. Blacks and Latinos are at 22%.
"What are we doing wrong," we are urged to ask ourselves, in looking at the scores for the Blacks and Latinos. "What should we give them, how do we help them access the material?"
All around me, teachers suggest programs, graphic organizers, smaller class sizes, etc, etc, until finally, an older woman points out quite brusquely that certain subgroups are doing fine and are being given all the same things that the non-achievers are given, and no more.
Immediately, the principal seeks to lead us away from this kernel of truth. "Research shows," she says insistently, "that effective classroom teaching overcomes cultural habits that aren't conducive--" She says it again "Research shows it."
What research, I wonder. Whose research? Research funded by whom? Conducted by whom? Greenpeace? Hampton-Brown employees ready to sell us another set of Highpoint books?
My Advanced ESL students must spend three weeks learning how Roosevelt saved America from the Great Depression using the New Deal. Then they have to write a paper about it. Are those the folks conducting this research?
Well, perhaps she's right. If I were just a better teacher, my Hispanic students would not bring the iPods the taxpayer bought them to school. And they'd be more interested in all those stories about unions, segregation, slavery, and the New Deal. It's all about how much better a teacher I could be, and should be. That is what we are here to discuss, that is the only acceptable way of looking at this data. So that is what we do until 3:20pm, when we are finally free to hear from our union organizer, and then return to our rooms and plan for tomorrow. Let's see, let me look at the materials I have been given to teach from. Maya Angelou, Gary Soto, Langston Hughes... in the hallway, one teacher opines loudly that if selfish taxpayers would give more, we'd have the materials we need to reach these students.
Ah yes, I think. That's what the students need. 40 gameboys and a cellphone. And an iPod in every backpack.
Outstanding column! If it hasn’t been published in the MSM somewhere, you should submit it as a guest column for the record.
You have quite a story to tell, and you tell it in a really compelling way.
You have both my sympathy and my admiration.
Maybe sleeping with some of your male students will get their attention in the classroom from now on.
It *is* all the rage these days.
/joke
As for the iPod problem, they have an interesting solution here in the ‘burbs. The teacher will read off the contents from the iPod the first time, the second time, he synchs it to his play list. Being that he’s an absolute fan of the worst jazz music ever created (I don’t even know how they get away calling that ‘jazz’) it is a fate worse than death.
I hear you. Been there.
Mess up the play list! Erase it, even--
I have long suggested that the single most effective thing this country could do to improve education would be to eliminate this silly idea of compulsory education.
Any @sshole who doesn't want to be in a classroom -- or whose parents don't want them to be in a classroom -- gets the hell out of school and stops wasting everyone else's time and money.
I bow to your patience. I’d be a raving maniac if I had to put up with that.
Well, that's what I'm doing here at FR. Raving maniacally! ;^)
I think they cloned my students from last year and sent them to you! I taught 6th and 8th grade at a low income middle school back then. I found that bribing them with candy was the only thing that had any effect. Isn’t that sad? Of course it was my last resort. I hated doing it, and it cost me a small fortune every week, but it was almost worth it. You have my sympathy - I know exactly what you’re going through!
Yes, candy. They like stickers, too.
There are a lot of conservatives who vent against teachers and teachers unions and over time they have become a big part of the problem in public education, but for the most part the problems are systemic. I am a babyboomer and when I went to school there were a lot of defecient teachers but the system was by and large a good one. If the system is sound, it can counteract some bad teachers. But today there are NO good teachers who can overcome a rotten system. A good teacher cannot teach against the system. The system has taken a lot of special education garbage and tried to adopt it to a broader population. I was a successful student in a successful system and that success can be reduced to this one premise. When I walked through that classroom door, I understood as well as the teacher understood that it was up to me as the individual to adjust to the teacher and the system if I was to be successful. In a weak willed people pleasing world, that idea has been turned upside down. This present rotten system has this delusion that the system can adjust to each and every individual, irregardless of what the student brings into the classroom as motivation. Somewhere in time, there was the business adage that the customer was always right. Now in the ever enlarging social welfare state, bureaucracies have adopted the the adage that the consumer of government services can do wrong. So it is, in the social welfare state, school is not to educate, but to indocrinate and prepare these present consumers of government, for future and further consumption of government as they grow older, nothing more, nothing less.
This is very sad. A lot of these kids have troubled home environments. If the parents or single parent just don’t give a blank what happens in school, and kids don’t do homework and don’t cooperate in class, what can we do? Schools could spend twice as much money on these types of kids, and what would it accomplish?
Schools and teachers don’t have the authority they need to reach these kids. So you can’t hold kids after school anymore because you have to notify the parents first? But then parents can’t be reached because they don’t have the right phone number? Or the parents are allegedly at work and can’t be reached to approve that after shool discipline?
Our country is in trouble,and schools are clearly troubled. God help us all if this description is true for a critical mass of public school students.
take a little responsibility for your incompetnace!
and change!
http://teachers.net/lessons/posts/3142.html
“classroom management by genghis”
I wrote this and it has helped hundreds of others and i am confident it will help you.
please write back
my email addres is at the end of the article.
It was painful to read because I know exactly what you’re talking about. I feel for ya.
And the part about “the nation’s future” I think is innaccurate. For alot of these kids, they are the service industry’s future. The justice system’s future. It’s sad but it’s a true, a lot of these kids don’t have much of a future, or atleast they think they don’t.
I hate that mentality about “all you have to do is teach a different way and they’ll listen!” That’s bunk. It’s the culture that’s warped, not the teaching methods. You’d have to change the kid’s personal attitude and outlook on life, but that comes from the influence of the parents, the community, and pop culture, and out of the realm of most any teacher.
It's not about learning here it's about who else will provide babysitting services for these charges other than the teacher and the taxpayer. The kids haven't experienced any supervision ... ever.
After school, it's about having more tax-sponsored activities to extend the nanny state into the evening hours.
And the closest school here (I forget, something like 4th through 6th grades) is 99% "Hispanic," with 75+% being ESL learners, and 100% are free lunch eligible.
This same school recently put up modular buildings on one of the soccer fields and I am told these buildings are classrooms for the parents of the students.
Many, many thanks to the author! I'm forwarding to my out-of-touch, disbelieving, and in deep denial groups!
The problem is that the current state of education did not condense upon the U.S. like a morning's dew.
It happened because a number of your colleagues decided- yes, actively decided,- that as long as their union could deliver more income to them; whatever else they did to the prospects of the children you are entrusted with, really was Someone Else's Problem.
Now, you weren't there during the worst of it, as the left began it's pogrom on education. And I hope you don't take my rant as a personal attack. It isn't.
Instead, I try to be as stunningly honest as you have just been, when you detailed the results of these several decades of leftist brilliance.
What they have done to the centuries-old idea that parents must deliver to schools, their children awake, alert, respectful and motivated to do their best... is criminal. But it was well thought out. The way to drain respect from children for all authority... is to saturate them with caustic propaganda about the sins of "authority".
The fact is that they did it well.
I don't recall parents spontaneously demanding that their children be handed every possible excuse for lack of effort. Parents didn't collectively insist on a far-left agenda of materials to propagandize with.
The unions... enabled by the authority of agency, acted in the name of all they represented, all of those noble teachers, and made a devil's deal. "Give us the control we need to craft our 'worker's paradise'... and we'll see you get a good rake-off of additional benefits." The teachers weighed the promise of cash in one hand... and the eventual cost of what they would be asked to allow to happen to the nation's children.
The deal was made. These people cannot act in the names of so many teachers, without those same teachers acquiescing to their agenda.
It's easy to burn a school down... and far, far more difficult to rebuild one. So, too, it is easy to trash the kind of environment where teachers act in loco parentis, with the authority willingly bestowed by parents to enforce respect, effort and behavior, on the part of children.
As long as the teachers agree that the most important part of their efforts need be directed at securing ever increasing levies and taxes out of the taxpayer parents... they will have no time or effort left available to explain hard realities to the parents of those children.And as long as parents accept things as they are...things will not improve. How could they?
We all feel badly for those teachers who could be actually opening up young minds, rather than slowly corroding them. But this is something that must come from the teachers.
You will collectively need to reach a realization of what is really important to you. And when you all finally come to an agreement to abandon the leftists who have so poisoned the well, your long rebuilding will only then begin.
But it will have no chance at all... until we all decide that tens of millions of children's futures trump the extremists' agenda.
My suggestion to you...run for your life. Move out of state to a small community in Idaho or Eastern WA.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.