It's a Boy!

Last week my little bilingual class got a special treat, a fifth grade newcomer from Mexico! I was told two days ahead of time by the office that a new student would be arriving and I proceeded to mentally rehearse my Spanish and verbally prepare my students. Before all that, I was sitting at my desk when the students walked in on the morning I found out, creating name tags for my newcomer's desk and locker. I was greeted to a chorus of, "We have a new student? Who is it? Is it is boy or a girl?"

When I informed my darlings of his gender there were mixed reactions, some thrilled, some disappointed (mostly the girls who wanted another friend to gossip with), but one very entertained 5th grade girl giggled and exclaimed, "It sounds like we're having a BABY...It's a boy! CONGRATULATIONS!" For the rest of the day whenever we talked about the new students we made plans for our "new baby" discussing how we could take take of him, what we could do to support his language skills and how we could make his transition comfortable. My students shared great ideas, often from their own experiences about how their English acquisition.

My students have great hearts and the best of intentions. When the new baby showed up, they treated him wonderfully. What they didn't account for, was how much would change when he would get there. As much as I talked to them about him and tried to prepare them, two days wasn't enough. I spent the past two months building a classroom community built on trust, structure and continuity. Now we're using two languages, accommodating for another person, and they're getting a lot less individual attention.

On the first day with the "new baby" as soon as he went to the bathroom my classroom erupted. It was like my students had been waiting to jam every single ounce of English conversation and normalcy they could think of into the 2 minutes they had of freedom before he came back and they had to be on their "best behavior" again. My theory is that is comes from spending so much time creating classroom community. My class is comfortable and safe together. Change has come to their little tight knit community and they don't know what to do with it. I made sure to explain to them that they needed to wait to have those conversations when EVERYONE that was a part of their class was present. They'll accept that in time as they've accepted each other...but babies, like all new family members take time to get used to. The thing that impresses me the most is that while they have to grow into each other, they also decided to love him and care for him before they even knew him...just as if they were actually parents caring for a new baby. Maybe there really is something about being bilingual in a new and scary place that binds you unlike anything else...or maybe its just the magic of the unyielding acceptance of a child.

Strange Noises

When I moved in to my new place a week ago, my friend Jeremy asked me if there were any weird noises that I had to adjust to. I went to bed on that first night feeling pretty good and pretty lucky because things were blissfully silent. In fact, our walls and floors are cement so I have yet to have a problem with pipes, neighbors, miscellaneous squeaks, etc. That is, until tonight. Tonight I am typing as I sit awake at my computer table counting the minutes and listening to the most earth shattering shriek I have ever heard. For tonight, my dear friends, is the the night of the first storm in my new apartment. I live in a back corner apartment in our building complex and apparently the combination of the direction of the wind and the location of our little corner creates a perfect little wind tunnel. Wind finds its way in and upon trying to escape takes on the otherworldly sounds of a strangled horse-like creature.

In any case, I'm wide awake. And the question of acclimating oneself to strange noises got me thinking.

As many of you know, I'm starting a new job this year. I have three weeks before training and four full weeks before my first full day with students. If you are saying that it is WAY TO EARLY to start worrying about teaching then you are awesome and I want to be like you. Unfortunately for myself, I'm a thinker and a planner. And I haven't even been given my teaching manuals yet (and I'm teaching two grades simultaneously) so I'm really starting to panic!

As I think about weird noises, however, it reminds me that every new school year is kind of like my new apartment. You come in, work as hard as you can to put together a nice place for yourself. You adorn the walls and arrange the furniture for aesthetics as well as practicality. But eventually, your students (the strange noises) show up. That's when you have to start to adapt. There are some noises that will startle you and make you jump almost every time you get surprised by them for the rest of the year. There is the idle hum of the refrigerator that will barely receive much notice after a couple days of routine and habit. In any case, you start to make a comfortable place together and adapt to each others quirks, and if you work hard enough, you start to appreciate those noises because they are familiar and they mean that you are in a good place, a safe place, that you are home.

Let Them Fall

This post was inspired by my mother and the post Helping Students Navigating the Torrents of Change at Cool Cat Teacher.

The other day while we were driving in the car, my mom made the statement that she wouldn't have wanted to protect her children from all of the hard things they have gone through in life. Not that she would ever wish any pain on us, but that she knew the importance of letting us make our own mistakes, deal with our own challenges, and find our own way when the situation called for it. The truth is, if you spend every moment holding your child's hand and protecting them from "danger", they will never learn to fend for themselves, never learn any coping mechanisms, and never understand how to deal when they find themselves confronted with the real world.

The same thing works for school and the classroom. In fact, in a society where the role of teacher is an ever blurring line which takes on the function on parent more and more, many of the same attributes apply. I find it very tempting to hold my students hands when times get tough. I also find it almost impossible not to make exceptions for good kids who have a bad day.

I have found, however, that there is something to be said for consistency. Students who know the rules and what is expected of them will learn to accept responsibility for consequences and will rarely have that bad day again. Failing is a part of life. Making mistakes is a part of life. Not allowing our students to do either of those things is crippling them and giving them false expectation for their future. We need to instead be teaching them strong lessons and equipping them with the tools in their arsenals to rise again after failure, mistakes, or simple life unfairness have dealt them a low blow.

A System That Works

I sat down to dinner with a fellow bilingual teacher last night and we started to share some of the successes that we have had with classroom management over the past year. As we talked I realized that I was nervous about being a part of a school that doesn't have a school wide behavior managment program (though they are starting something this year and I'm excited to be a part of that.) It is one of the things that I think worked wonders in my former school (coupled with No Excuses University which I personally think everyone should get on board with.) As we talked I began to try to rework my personal classroom system because I am always trying to get better/more efficient. Born from my coworker whose room I have shared for the past two years, my system involves individual sticker charts (grids of about 25 squares) that students must fill before they can visit the prize box. Stickers are given every morning at the beginning of the day for homework and then sporatically throughout the day for awesome deeds and participation. While students are getting ready for lunch I open the prize box for less than five minutes for students whose charts are full. This system works way better than anything I've done before and so, with everything else that is changing this year i've decided that it is the one thing that will remain constant. Just let me tell you why...

1. It is interactive. There is something to be said for interactive teaching and I'm a fan of anything that gets you moving around the room and connecting face to face with students even during whole group instruction.
2. It is not obtrusive. Students leave their charts on the desk and you can come over and reward them without even stopping your lecture.
3. It teaches responsibility. Students are required to keep track if their own charts and must start over again at zero if they lose theirs.
4. It minimizes classroom crime. Students have names at the top of their chart and stickers take some effort to peel off so students are forced into an honest situation.
5. Students recieve immediate reinforcement. Instead of waiting until the end of the day or the end of a lesson, students are reinforced for positive behavior as it occurs.
6. It is a good motivator. If I am having a rough class with students who are slow to volunteer I have only to pick up a sheet of stickers and their eyes and ears and hands perk right up.
7. It is low maintenance. Sometimes I even allow other students to be in charge of stickers if it is going to be cumbersome for me. The prizes are quick to distribute and it is not something that needs time slotted for it even daily (charts take a while to fill).

This year I noticed that the system turned a little but stale toward the end if the year. One week we put away charts, took out some ziploc bags, wrote their names on them and did the exact same system using flat marbles. The marbles had a monetary value and at the end of the week I pulled some of the prizes from the box and we had an auction. It was really fun and even reinforced the value of money. So what I'm saying is...

8. It is versatile: easy to adapt and make new again.

Pointless Rules

I suppose this post could be called "choosing your battles" as well...but I'm not kidding about the pointlessness.

I think that today's teacher's pointless rules are developed from out very own school experiences. We remember teachers who were deathly opposed to gum chewing or using red pen to do math homework and we decide, "Hey, if those rules were good enough for them..."

I remember with fondness one particular rule from high school French class. All work that was peer edited (on a daily basis) needed to be corrected in GREEN PEN. Now this managed to create all kinds of unforeseen difficulties. 1st, in the course of a year, you find yourself needing at least 2 of these pens because one always seems to get lost, dried up, eaten by the dog, etc. However, green pens (and maybe this has changed since my childhood days) only come in packs with about a billion other multicolored pens. Unfortunately, students in my high school were not allowed to use any of the other beautifully colored pens for their other assignments in any other class. I imagine that if someone had started to manufacture boxes of green pens during that time period, a French student could have made a fortune peddling their wares. And the silly thing is, parents didn't get up in arms about the situation, they just followed the rules year after year wasting their money trying to get their students what they "needed" in order to be productive members of their classroom.

This leads us to the point...

The importance of rules:
1. Establish classroom authority.
2. Enhance the efficiency of the class.
3. Create safety and respect.

Simply put, if your classroom rules are nitpicking things that are not helping the classroom run smoothly, you will waste time trying to enforce them. Students need rules and discipline, but if there is no clear and direct purpose (except for the sake of having rules) students will not understand or respect them.

Exposure

We can't expect students to know about things they've never been exposed to. Maybe that doesn't sounds like an amazing revelation, but it is indeed the root of the one problem that I've heard teachers define as being the least fixable: motivation.

When I was younger, my brother and my dad watched sports on TV on occasion. I used to go to professional baseball games as a rare treat, but even then I was mostly just in it for the snacks. ;) As I was getting older, I didn't have the right body attributes necessary to make me very skilled in P.E. based sports nor was I befriended by those who shared any interest. In fact, it wasn't until I was 24 years old that I began to associate with people who actually took a vested interest in the sports world. I started to play a baseball simulation game and engage in conversations with coworkers only to find that I actually LOVE learning about sports. I like the numbers and the talent and the fan sociology behind it all. I find myself making the occasional sports analogy and all of a sudden I'm using a vocabulary that was once very much foreign to me.

Some people are intrinsically motivated. That is a lucky character trait that I feel blessed to have. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that, throughout life, I learned the things that I was supposed to be motivated in the way most people do: I was exposed to them. I watched "proper" ambitions modeled and followed suit. How was I supposed to know that I should like sports when my physical attributes did not suggest an aptitude and there was no clear model in my life who felt the need to sit down and explain to me their significance?

This is the exact same barrier that faces our students. There will always be those who, regardless of their situation, will seek out information for themselves. As for the rest of them, there needs to be guidance...lots and lots of guidance. If our students are not exposed to technology, how can we raise up those few students who will become instrumental in it's advancement? If students are only exposed to academics, who will become masters of their craft in arts and athletics? There are so many things that I am good at that I didn't even know existed when I was younger (especially around the time in life when I was asked to choose a career path). It is our responsibility as educators to pull from every single resource that we can get our hands on, so that students can reach their real potential and attain the motivation necessary (because they were inspired by something) to invest themselves in something that they are passionate about.

Monetary Value

The complaint that teachers are not paid enough can be heard far and wide on any given day. I tend not to engage in the discussion because 1) I put very little value in money and the need to gain more of it and 2) the worth of my job has always exceeded it's monetary value.

At some point though, you have to be practical. Without divulging too much of my own financial situation, let's just say that on a teacher's salary it is actually IMPOSSIBLE for a single young teacher with 4 years of undergraduate loans to pay rent/mortgage on their own in the Chicago suburbs and still be able to eat at the end of the day. I have run the numbers a million times and I can not grow something out of nothing. It is for this reason alone that I am adopting roommates this summer.

Roommates are fine, pinching pennies is fine...but what about everything else? What if there is an emergency? A hospital bill or a car breakdown? I'm pretty sure that I need my health to teach and a car to get to school every day. And even more than than, what about living life? Experiencing new things, going new places, and (inevitably) paying for them?

My friend and I have been trying to plan a trip this summer. We don't ask for much, but it is important to both of us to go to a Spanish speaking country to further our Spanish skills (which is a direct benefit to our students and parents upon the return of a new school year). We have a limited window of time in which to go (because financial constraints dictate my need to teach summer school) and limited funds on which to travel. We even looked into service projects in other countries where you can stay with a host family and found their costs to be almost twice as much as a regular vacation.

The point is, my story is not different from any one else's. In fact, I'm sure others have incurred unfortunate expenses that I couldn't even dream of. But money is not important to me. If someone else needs it and I have it, I don't bat an eyelash in offering it. I just want to be able to live life...and the monetary value applied to teachers doesn't cut it.

The problem:

1. Good teachers will feel devalued and believe less in the importance of what they do.
2. Good teachers will not be able to further their education (whether it be through travel or graduate level courses) which directly impacts the students they teach.
3. Good teachers will burn themselves out taking on second jobs or working all summer.
4. Good teachers will walk away.