minime mirabile dictu

Or: Before I knew what I got myself into, I was in the middle of it

Let's imagine, for a second, that you are a new teacher at a new school.  You are still in the "feeling-out" period of the first two months: the students are learning how to behave around you, and you're modulating how much bullshit you should take from them.  An unfortunate corollary to it all: many of your male students do not have positive male role models in their lives, and are consequently unused to and uncomfortable with male authority of any kind.

At lunch, one of your worst-behaved male students is sitting at the wrong table.  You ask him to move.  He lambasts you, waving his arms and gesticulating for dramatic effect.  You ignore him and walk away.  You establish yourself at the end of your lunch table, viewing it longways, arms folded, legs apart.  The previously mentioned troublemaker gets up from his incorrect seat, positions himself 10 feet behind you, and bullrushes you at full speed, lunch trey outstretched.  He yells, "Get out of the way" as he slams the trey into the small of your back.  You--flustered beyond belief--say, "No, you say 'Excuse me'".  He rams you again and yells, "I said move!"

One bruhaha later, you've written him up for assault on a school employee.  You are called down to the office to meet with his mother.  The principal is half an hour late, so you make small talk with her.  She does not yet know what this whole affair is about, so she is kind and receptive to your small talk.  You learn that she recently worked as a secretary for the H_________ Police Dept. for 7 years.

When the principal arrives, you relate your story.  The mother is supportive until an out-of-school suspension for her son is mentioned.  As if the words were a trigger, she crouches defensively, threatening to "pull her son out" and "sue".  You think nothing of it, and go to Oxford for the weekend.

On Monday, you come back to a disciplinary hearing.  The mother calls you before a board of teachers and administrators.  When you recount your story for them all to hear, the mother interrupts you and says, "On Friday, you didn't say anything about my son ramming you in the back.  On Friday, you told me that you swung your arm up and hit my son!  You're making this up about my son assaulting you!  Moreover, I have 7 years of experience in law enforcement, and this isn't assault anyways!"

Faced with an irate parent; in company of colleagues whom you barely know; threatened with possible legal action; bewildered by a seeming disregard for factual accuracy; and underneath it all burdened with a deep resentment for the asshole kid who started this whole affair (by assaulting you), the question is:   What do you do?

You are a white male first-year teacher in the Mississippi Delta.  You also have long hair that people, who are NOT students, have been wont to touch and tug on.  Ahh, but how times change...

Halfway through your first year, whilst trying to find ways to burn a 3-hour 4th period scheduling clusterf**k, you sit down to teach chess to some of your freshmen.  As you sit and instruct, a student comes from behind you and starts playing with your hair, commenting about "how pretty it is"...

What do you do?

As I am completing this blog at the very dregs of punctuality, it must be brief.  I'll post a sequel later:

Many things that I would like to say have been admirably covered by others (beware the messiah complex, etc.).  I want to individually stress these two points:

1. prepare to be miserable.  Eventually your misery will buy you back some happiness, but be prepared to wait six or eight months before you can start purhcasing any.  You will have a lot of work to do, and you will not know how to do it all.  The Summer School will prepare you as best we can, but this profession in this area is a sink-or-swim proposition.  In the end it's up to you: keep you head above water in the fall, and learn how to swim in the spring.  By the second year, you'll be diving for pearls.

2.  Find a hobby that involves what Mississippi does well.  If you have joined MTC because you wanted to find traditional high culture, you will quit.  If you joined MTC because you wanted to find traditionally liberally-minded people, you will quit.  If you joined MTC because you wanted to find an enlightned public school system, you will quit.  Many things Mississippi does poorly.  If the things we do poorly are the things that get your rocks off, you won't make it.  What you need to do is find a reason to love the state: do you like to hunt? do you like the outdoors? do you like Civil War history?  do you like to fish?  do you like to gamble in riverboat casinos?

If you can find a reason to love the state--and if your reason to love the state will also help relieve stress--then your time here will be much more enjoyable.  Mississippi is rural; don't come here with a city-slicker carpet-bagger mentality.  If you want to stay sane and have fun, you'll have to accept the state (and its people) on their own terms.

I tell you what, my standards for and knowledge of the internet are really low.  I'm the same way with computers in general.  I still have a soft spot for Windows 3.1 because you could click on "File Manager" and have your computer's innards look directly at you without flashy graphics or hotkeys or extraneous clicking.  So in this respect I have no advice to offer to MTC's webmasters.

I got to thinking, though, that our main competition is TFA, so I might as well mosey to their website to see how they are set up.  And they beat the pants off of us.  Badly.  They look professional and we look like our website was made in the Delta.  My advice is to beg, borrow, or steal every aspect of TFA's website.  If I have to choose one thing in particular, they have an awesome interactive map that allows you to zoom into a particular TFA region to learn more about it.

I think MTC would be well-served to have an interactive map of Mississippi on either the first or second page.  Have some flashy graphics, some statistics, maybe pictures and blog links as well.  Like if I were to click on the "Greenville region", up would flash information about all the districts we serve in, perhaps some pictures of the schools and the towns in the area, and even links to the blogs of teachers who are placed in that particular region.  It would certainly allow for incoming MTC'ers to better vet their option of where to be placed.

Or, the Required Ole Miss EDSE 557 Education Manifesto Response

Part I: Describe how educational technology should be used to support teaching and learning [50-100 words]

It appears that educational technology should exist to unburden teachers and students of the most rote and mundane aspects of a school day.  Having freed the students to expand their educational horizons, ed. technology supports open-ended and simulated real-world experiences.  For this to be effective, teachers must break from the "student-as-bucket" approach and reorient themselves not as strict pedagogues, but as "facilitators" instead.

Part II: Cognitive tools and their association with educational technology [50-100 words]

This has already been mentioned above.  Cog. tools expose students to "authentic" learning in the hopes that more of the education sticks in their heads that way.  Many "authentic" environments will end up being computer simulations or other technology-dependent constructs.  Voila! as the French would say.  Here is ed. tech's entry point into the cog. tools discussion.  They are, or can be, synonymous with each other.

Part III: My crack at a learning activity that uses elements of ed. tech, cog. tools, and "authentic" learning environments [150-200 words]

I fly the kids in an airplane (technology!) to the British Lake District (authentic!) where we read Wordsworth's Lake District poems in the same setting in which they were written.  The students are unburdened of having to mentally-construct Wordsworth's images, insofar as the images will be visibly in front of the students.

Or...

Using an LCD projector and associated ed. tech tools (perhaps a TV, an open-ended documentary series? hmm?) I can virtually-reconstruct the Lake District and Wordsworth's life there.  The students could even go on self-guided virtual tours (by using computers!!!!) of the area in order to locate particular geographical landmarks that Wordsworth mentions in his poems.

Hooper-and-Reiber, were they to walk in on this classroom, would wet themselves with joy.  Students creating their own learning environments, guiding themselves through a virtual Lake District tour, free to choose any of the Lake Distict poems that tickle their fancy and then research those at their leisure.  A teacher who is free of pedantry, acting as a facilitator to instill love of poetry--not just rote facts of birth and death!!!--in the students' heads.  etc. etc. etc.

Part IV: Assessing Technology in K-12

    1. How and why is the integration of technology succeeding in K-12? [50-100 words]

          Why is it succeeding?  I cannot answer this question until "success" is defined.  If "success" means "technology is omnipresent in the classrooms", then the answer why is because technology is an easily quantifiable metric: in the absence of more enlightened methods of ascertaining school quality, the presence and numbers of 21st century technology is an easy tally mark to make.

    2. How and why is the integration of technology failing in K-12? [50-100 words]

       On the other hand, if "success" means what Hooper and Reiber want it to mean, if "success" is to mean students and teachers who depend on technology to transform the learning experience into something orgasmic, then K-12's integration of technology is still, well, less than tumescent.  The reasons why are easy, Hooper and Reiber mentioned them all: teachers who are scared of technology; teachers who are untrained in the uses of technology; and administrators whose focus is solely on putting technology in the school but lack the stamina to see that the technology, once placed, is efficiently used.  At the same time, Hooper and Reiber were disingenuous to compare the technological integration of doctors and dentists to the integration of teachers.  We all know that the business world is NOT the academic world, so demanding a similar hard-driving charge towards efficiency in education is wide of the mark.  Plenty of students can learn all they need to know without the use of simulated "authentic" worlds.  I mean, the entire historical human population prior to 1980 did alright, and nary was a computer to be found amongst them.

    3. Based on my teaching position, what must be done to make ed. tech central to the educational experience? [100-200 words]

       Here's the laundry list of obvious suspects: train teachers better, train administrators better, completely fund the technological etc. etc. etc, change the school culture concerning the possibilities of technology.

       But if you are asking for my personal opinion about my unique situation, then my answer is this: No one climbs Everest without a base camp; no one kills a deer without first scouting the area and putting up a stand; no one builds a house without a blueprint and a foundation.  Until we have a reliable internet connection, computers that can consistently log on to the school network, and sufficient space for to do whatever needs to be done, very little ed. tech. integration will occur.  Pedestals and columns can be built high even with a narrow base, but they too easily fall: until the fundamentals are taken care of, it will not matter how many educational simulation websites the district has purchased.  Until ease of use is assured, ed. tech. cannot be integrated.

And once our base is solid, you can go back and deal with that laundry list of obvious suspects.

Today was Parent-Teacher Conference Day.  Few parents came; much time was for to burn.  The male teachers slung bullshit stories back and forth to pass the time.  Because I thought they were funny, here's a sampling:

(Coach W.) / Snakebit
Now, about 30 years ago, a couple of friends and I were camping in the Mississippi backwoods.  We had built a fire and set up tents.  It was getting on late in the night when one of my friends decided he had to go to the bathroom.  As we were in the woods, he had nowhere to go but in the bushes.  I was suspicious of the idea, but he insisted both that he had to go and that he would go in the bushes (some drinking had occurred).  Well, it was a "number 2", so he walked off and squat down, and damned if a snake didn't come up and bite him right in the ass.
He howls out, we run to him and find him floundering on the ground, grabbing his ass and screaming.  As soon as we figured out the story, we started running to the road, looking for a doctor.  It must have been 20 minutes before we hit the road, we hitched to the nearest town, and ran into the local doctor's office.  We meet the nurse and tell her that our friend is in deadly pain, bit by a snake; she asks us to wait for the doctor.
In a little while, the doctor comes out.  We tell him that our friend has been bit by a snake, and he says to us: "You all were camping, right?  Well, I know you have a pinknife with you.  What you need to do is get back to your friend and cut two slits crosswise through the fang-holes and suck the poison out--make sure not to swallow it, now.  That will buy us enough time for me to finish up with my patients here, and then I'll come to see you and your friend.  I'll fix him up right."
After that, we went back to our friend.  He was still at the campsite, grabbing his ass, crying and talking about he was going to die.  We told him we'd found a doctor and told him about his condition.
He asked, "Well, W, what did the doctor say?"
I told him, "The doctor says you're gonna die. He said there ain't nothin' to do to help you."
---Let me tell you!  Aint' nothin' I'm going to suck out of any man's ass!

(Mr. B) / Huntin' Rabbits

You don't believe me, but when you go to hunt rabbits, you got to have a permit.  And not only a permit, but a special Rabbit License too.  Now, I tell you, this is a story that really happened to a man I know.  This friend of mine was out huntin' rabbits.  *Boom* Shootin' the shotgun and picks up the rabbit.  *Boom* hits another, goes to pick it up.  Before long, here comes the game warden.  *Boom* man shoots another rabbit, goes and picks it up.   Game warden says, "You got a permit for that?"  *Boom* man shoots another, picks it up, says "Yeah, I got a permit".  *Boom* keeps on shootin' rabbits.  Game warden says, "You got a permit for THAT ONE?".  Man says, "Yeah, I got that permit too".  When the man *Boom* shoots another rabbit, the game warden goes to pick it up, sticks his finger in its ass, pulls the finger out, smells it, and says, "Now this here a Looziana rabbit.  You got a permit for that?"  Man says, *Boom* shoots again, says, "Yeah, I got a permit for that".  Game Warden picks up the rabbit the man just shot, sticks his finger in the rabbit's ass, pulls out, smells it, and says, "Now this here is a Texas rabbit.  You got a permit for THAT?"  Man says, *Boom* shoots another and says, "Yeah, I got that permit".  *Boom* ignores the game warden and shoots another.  Game warden picks up THAT rabbit, sticks the finger in the rabbit's ass, pulls out, smells it and says, "This here is an Alabama rabbit.  You got a permit for this one?! Or do you need to come with me?"  Man says, "I got permits for them all."  Game warden calls the bluff:  "You got permits for them all?  Well, where are YOU from that you've got permits for three states' worth of rabbits?!"
Man pulls down his pants, turns his ass towards the game warden and says, "If you're so damn smart, why don't you tell ME?!"

I have thought today about how much my perspective has changed since the beginning of the school year.  Not in a drastic sense like a restructuring of my beliefs towards poverty or race, but something as simple and easily overlooked as how to view a successful school day.

Let me be more specific.

Today in my fourth period, two freshmen almost started to fight.  One had guessed a wrong answer and the other was ragging him about it.  I gave the two a writing assignment, told them to be quiet now and not speak for the rest of the class.  Then I moved on and finished the lesson. (five-paragraph essays, incidentally).

A simple and easily forgotten story, right?

It wouldn't have been at the beginning of the year, for me or for many other first year teachers.  I would have been overwhelmed with my normal responsibilities, so much so that if I had somehow managed to keep the two students' hands from their respective necks I would have erupted in elation. 

Today, it was less than a pot-hole on a smooth road.

I don't tell this story to brag about my classroom management, because there was nothing unusual or innovative that I did.  I tell this story to show that many a thing I would have stressed about, or been derailed by, at the beginning of the year I now take in stride.  I don't even consider it a "successfully avoided implosion".

Experiences that would have been first semester's badges of honor are now given no special attention.  I--We--are so adept at handling them that they don't make a deep impression.  Regardless of how I, or we, feel personally about the jobs we are doing this year, take a moment to reflect on how easily you do things now that you thought impossible then.

It shows us all how far we've come.

Or: Why a dropout-prevention assemblies kill the motivation to live

Last Tuesday I was lassoed into chaperoning a Dropout-Prevention Program.  Simmons High's 25 biggest malcontents were herded into a bus and shipped to the middle school, where we picked up 15 more malcontents and headed off to Greenville.

Washington County had gone to an assuredly great expense to put on a "Get-on-the-Bus.MS" Dropout Prevention program.  Why that money was spent is still being debated.  The collected dropout risks from around the county gathered in the convention center and sat for 3 hours, listening to Washington County's 4 (repeat that: 4!) different school districts' representatives summarize their prevention plans.  Then a State Dept. of Education Secretary took the podium and--after apologizing in advance if she ran over her 5 minute time limit--regaled us with rambling reminisces, recriminations, and repetitions for well along half an hour.

Lost in the shuffle was any shape of speech directed towards our kids, to inform or inspire them to stay in school.

As soon as the show began, and I saw what was to come, I knew there might be trouble.  I sat myself next to L.S.W., the school's alpha troublemaker.  He chomped and kicked when I sat down, but took it well enough thereafter.  Despite three hours' nauseous natterings, he behaved better than I'd believed he would.  And, in a fit of misguided and ignorant inspiration, he leaned over to me during the proceedings and, passing judgment on the prevention program, said:

"If I'd have known this is what we'd be doing, I would have just stayed in school."

General Update:

-broke up another fight recently.  Two males, a freshman and senior, got into it at lunch.  I was 15 feet away, in a crowded cafeteria corridor, when it occurred, so the two had 10-15 solid seconds of thrown punches before I could break them up.  This was my first fight in which I did not arrive on time to defuse the fight, but had to literally jump between swinging fists.  Thankfully, as I jumped between the two, another senior grabbed one of the fighters around the waist and drug him towards the cafeteria door.  What that meant was that I didn't get hit by many punches at all: as best I can feel, only a single punch hit me in the elbow.

After I took one of the combatants to the office, I walked back to the cafeteria to get lunch and monitor my class.  Cue the movie scene: as I entered the cafeteria, the students caught notice of me and started clapping and shouting my name.  From the girls came shouts of, "Mr. Walker, our hero!"

No joke.

I got a standing ovation when I returned.  After I sat down, some of my seniors came up to me and said, "Mr. Walker, you must really care about this school.  We've never seen a teacher break up a fight like that before."

-started bird-watching.  I can now identify, with relative ease, red-winged blackbirds, mockingbirds, blue jays, cowbirds, cardinals, and various sparrows.  Bird-watching is a pleasant task: stress free and rewarding.

-Turkey season, March 15th.

I have already blogged about this in part, so I will both rehash and add some new:

-The material in Ann's summer school class could better be covered by a monitored reading of "Delta Autumn."  The multi-hour daily sessions seem a waste of time when much the same information can be gleaned from one 5 hour session with a book.  Granted, the information would need to be built upon and sharpened, but I think Ann's class would work better as a "refining" tool where we could reflect and discuss what we've read, rather than a freshmen-level ed-school bore-a-thon.

-We need more discipline training.  I see problems stemming from two sources:

1. The summer school kids are angels and totally unlike what we will face in our regular classrooms.  Experience with them does not acclimate us to the chronic high-school discipline issues.  And even when we conduct role-plays, they have an exotic once-in-a-lifetime feel about them.  We are equipped to deal with attempted homicide but not with subtle, everyday disrespect.

2. Many of these students misbehave because they are looking for attention (especially the younger ones).  During August and September, I would get angry at students who would pretend like they had an individual question, only to have them ask me what the directions (which i had just gone over) were when I got to their desks.  I realize now that the kids were just looking for some one-on-one time with an adult.

I remember that Brian Hawkins in particular emphasized how needy some of our students (especially female) would be, but I think he overplayed his hand.  Yes, they'll want our attention, but that desire won't often manifest itself sexually (as he often implied); in all likelihood you'll just have to deal with clingy, slightly annoying, and probably disruptive-because-it's-how-they-seek-attention kids.  Treating them kindly and benevolently will work better in the long term than an immediate outburst and disciplinary action.

Ultimately, though, the first years will have to sink or swim on their own merits.  No matter how well we (think that we) train them, the Summer School will never be a panacea. 

It's human nature, I guess, to demand individual responsibility and independent thinking from our students, but to be constantly complaining about how our summer school left us unprepared to deal with them.