I Am

I've been wanting to tell you all about some of the tools I used to help first block get focused on our academic community for the last few weeks of school, but things have been so crazy here! I had to blend some more punitive measures with some more information about why making the choice to be kind can benefit us and the people around us.

We had to pause both our sharing time after free writes and our weekly community meetings. I told students that I wanted to hear their voices but that the voices they share with the community need to be helpful to the group as a whole. It's a distraction from the work we have to do when I have to spend my time policing sexist jokes, students calling out, and words that are just plain mean and unhelpful.

Instead, I used the random acts of kindness slips our school uses to hold weekly drawings to have students think about who has helped them throughout the week. After two weeks of no sharing and no community meeting, I saw students really thinking about who they wanted to honor with their slips. We added back in free write sharing and the responses were longer, more thoughtful, and helped create a more positive atmosphere. A week after that we went back to our community meetings where students were then able to ask for things like a checklist of end-of-semester work and a more consistent enforcement of the bathroom/break policy. Throughout the second half of the semester, students have been able to earn points and when they get to ten as a class, there is a reward. They are just over halfway toward their third reward.

To get us all thinking about why the way we treat others matters just as much as the content we need to study, we watched Tom Shadyac's wonderful documentary I Am at the recommendation of another English teacher. Shadyac, who directed a slew of Jim Carrey movies, explores the science behind kindness (he is also a fellow 'Hoo!). The scientists he interviews explains that evolution has created in us a genetic need to help other humans. Our attention was captured by the scientific study of how a person's feelings can physiologically affect another person's feelings by electricity given off by the heart. At one point during the film, Shadyac sits facing a small dish of yogurt that is hooked up to a device that measures the electricity flowing through the yogurt's cultures. When Shadyac, who is not physically connected to the yogurt, thinks about experiences and people that are stressful (ex-wife, lawyer, agent, etc.), the electricity increases in the yogurt. Students had to analyze the documentary as a vehicle for presenting research as well as explain how they could apply what they learned from the video in our classroom community.

Finally, two girls from my eleventh grade class offered to come and speak to the ninth graders. I knew this would be risky, but I was proud of how the girls explained that they used to cut up in school and disrespect teachers. As they have grown up, however, they have realized just how beneficial learning and positive relationships with teachers can be. A few days after that, Student J wrote that letter I shared in my last blog post.

We aren't perfect in first block. I had to refer a student to the office after he lied to me about his whereabouts during an extremely long bathroom break. That student, however, ended that day coming to talk to me about how sorry he was about lying, that he didn't realize he was lying when he did, and that he also knew that our conversation didn't affect his consequences. He said he just wanted me to know that he was sorry and hadn't meant to be disrespectful when I tried so hard to show him respect and understanding after the recent passing of his older brother.

 Knowing what I do about the crazy teenaged brain, I believe that he was  telling the truth about lying instinctively rather than maliciously. I also know that we built some trust in the last few weeks. What fifteen-year-old boy comes to shed a few tears about his older brother's death with a teacher he doesn't trust? I will be grateful for the rest that comes after the school year ends, but I can't really say that I will be glad to see the students go on Friday.

"Why Can't Separate Be Equal?"

My last class of the day is reading Night right now. In addition to a basic overview of the Holocaust, we also spend some time talking about the eugenics movement pioneered in the United States. We talked about what was different and what was similar between Eli's experiences in Night and the experiences of African-Americans, Catholics, and other minority groups in the U.S. During the course of our conversation, my students said some pretty horrific things:

"I don't believe it should be a law or anything, but I think it's better when the races are separate so that there's less fighting."

"It just doesn't look right when people who are white marry people who are black."

"Why can't separate be equal?"

My students made this comments very matter-of-factly. They spoke one at a time. They used people-first language like we have talked about and they've also worked on the terms they often use to describe people of color. They even asked me what I thought about interracial marriage and when I indicated I didn't have a problem with it, one boy noted that's probably because I live in a city a ways away from where I teach and that I'm used to seeing "people who are more diverse." No one yelled. No one talked over top of another. No one went nuts when I told them that we'd tried separate but equal and it hadn't worked. But no one advocated for racial harmony either.

A couple of weeks ago, we were reading The Odyssey in my first class of the day. We reached the part where Odysseus shoots one of the suitors through the nipple. The class of mostly fourteen-year-old boys lost it. I don't mean there were a couple of chuckles and then we kept reading, but they could not continue for several minutes. I don't mean to sound like a fuddy duddy or that I never want to have fun or laugh at silly things in my class, but I have spent a lot of time talking to my students about finding that line between having fun and still being able to do meaningful work.

One incident is horrifying and the other makes it hard to do my job, but I think they are both related. I love my students. I have such affection for each of them and their unique talents and strengths, even when they drive me crazy with their chatter or their parroting of views they hear at home. But days like the two above just make me wonder what am I supposed to do? How do I teach tolerance and maturity?

I think that job belongs to teachers whether or not parents have abdicated their role in teaching those virtues. I think that any one who works with young people takes on the task of being a person who helps raise those people. I'm just having a really hard time figuring out how to incorporate those virtues in my classroom. We stop and talk a lot and I like to think those times plant some seeds. We've also started doing weekly community meetings where we can talk about things that are bothering us. I'm interested to see if these help matters any. I'm reading so much about teaching kids how to advocate for themselves and be proud of their heritage. I haven't stumbled across any material about how to teach character in a way that works with a student-directed English curriculum. Any ideas, teachers and laypeople alike?