This blog might get less and useful on teaching and Chicago in general and more interesting as the story of an individual.
Found myself remembering Jerry, a dear friend and English teacher who literally dropped dead at a useless professional development meeting. His own story deserves more, but here's just a moment. He had such great insights about kids.
Teachers complain about individual kids who make their life hell, the way other workers complain about the boss (sometimes) or about a coworker who rubs them the wrong way. It is the job, of course, of a student to make a teacher's life miserable-- not all kids to all teachers, but for every wonderful bond where you're there for that kid, there's also a miserable bond, where one kid in a class has made his, or her, life mission to ruin your day, get a reaction, set you off. This is not a stupid 'all kids are malicious' riff, it results from a simple fact. You are the first adult the kid reacts to, learns to defy, fights against to become themselves, after their parents. You are the next authority figure against whom they prove themselves, establish their own identity,
weltenshung(?) (worldview). So they aren't being evil, they simply growing. As a teacher you agree to be the tree they carve up, the wall against which they kick, etc.*
So as a teacher, you commiserate about the jerk in second period, oh you have him/her? Yeah, and so-and-so. When you tell a story about how a class went badly, you inevitably tell it as a challenge with names. Sometimes you get questions, oh, so-and-so? Or you get advice on classroom management -- the police function. "If the kids spend all period looking out the windows, close the shades. " Don't treat it like a behavior problem and wrangle all period, treat it as an environment problem, and change the setup. Or change a rule.
I remember when I told stories, or others did, Jerry was the only one in the teachers' lounge to ask, what were you teaching? What was the subject? After years of teaching the remedial class, he knew that behavior problems were often reactions to not getting something. So you'd tell him what it was, and he'd suggest a different approach, or a way to break it down, or tell you what he'd done. He was always the one with murals painted on refrigerator boxes (they're huge, like scenery), and, I swear, boxes of costumes and props where other teachers had boxes of handouts. Oh, he had handouts, too. Many he did himself, as we all did, making up our own materials.
I was remembering him when I thought of a new approach to language, having told someone, again, about the USA being the only country int he world where knowing more than one language is a problem instead of an advantage.
So, you talk to a kid, frustrated at how hard learning Spanish is. Maybe they don't read English particularly well, and they're frustrated because, instead of being able to learn data + data + data, they keep tripping over, needing to learn a whole framework. So, you ask them, how do you catch a whale? You don't know. Neither do I. Is that because you
CAN't learn it, or because you HAVEN'T? Same with Spanish. Be patient with yourself. It's BIG. I was thinking of my student, who was so furious that this was so hard, and got his football coach to come tell me how he had to pass. I kept saying, he had to try.
And then I think of all those kids, classed as
SpEd because they had low reading scores. Now, was that because they COULDN'T learn to read, or because they'd never been taught? After a certain point, it doesn't matter, because all you deal with is the CAN'T. And the low scores which you don't want on your school's record.
Oh my, everything leads to a tirade. I swear I better to learn to knit better. Me and Madame
DeFarge. My list will be so long.
But teachers like Jerry are unnumbered and uncelebrated. Thank you, Jerry.
* Funny for someone like me, whose motto is, "Warning, I'm likely to do things inappropriate for my age and gender", to be the authority figure. Teachers did a pretty good job of policing each other for conformity. I realize only after the fact, one teacher was at great pains to point out, my clothes buttoned and zipped on the wrong side. You know, boy's and
girls' clothes. And another insistently wanted me to tell her I went to second-hand stores to buy my (men's) vests. I was so good at self-
defense on these things, I didn't even notice their nastiness -- their put-you-in-you-
placeness. She's on my list. Teachers who demean other teachers are on my list, but the principals who did this are first.
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