talkstowolves: I speak with wolves and other wicked creatures. (Default)
My students have all been poopy-mouths this morning, which has been most irritating in an amusing fashion. They insisted that cursing is too much a part of their language for them to ever turn it off. I told them that was poppycock. If I can turn it off for school-- let me just say here that my first word was "shit" and I have difficulty going any length of time in everyday conversation without some casual profanity-- then they surely can as well. They comforted themselves by saying they'd only have to watch their language this year (the seniors), because college professors don't care. I tried to explain something about polite society and having the courtesy not to use profanity recklessly around people who don't, but they didn't care about that. ::shakes her head::

Many of the kids around here have been sick for the past couple of weeks: crap-in-the-lungs sick, with lots of chunky wet coughs. I have been bravely sticking to the belief that it just wasn't going to get me. So I am bravely trying to ignore the fact that today my lungs feel heavier and I've started coughing (just a tiny bit, really, and it's dry so far!). However, I am also intelligent, so I will be climbing back into bed when I get home for a nap and some warmth. And picking up some of the old UltraVitamin C.

I can feel what little energy I had just draining away as I wait for Southern Literature to begin. By the time my class starts, I may not have the strength to wrestle them into discussing Their Eyes Were Watching God. Maybe I'll have us do a read-and-discuss: read passages from the book aloud and just see where they take us. I love this novel ever so much, so that could be quite soothing.
talkstowolves: Writer by heart, English teacher by trade.  (bad grammar makes me sic)
Today had the unpleasant quality of feeling like a brick wall that I had just run into. Repeatedly.

On Tuesday, I gave my World Lit kids some easy homework. I really do not subscribe to the practice of giving homework just to give homework, but I wanted to get them back into the mode of actually doing homework and hopefully expand their horizons a bit. So I asked them to research some non-American winter holiday traditions and write me a short essay reporting on their findings.

No one did it. One student said he couldn't find anything because when he typed his search into Google, it kept giving him American traditions. Another student claimed he didn't know they had to write anything. I know this is not the case considering I wrote the assignment on the board, talked about why we were doing it, and then explained how much their grade would decrease with each day the assignment was late.

This was not a very heartening way to start the semester.

They went on to be incredibly unimpressed by the Epic of Gilgamesh and unable to understand where Sumer was located.

My composition class was surprisingly better today (sadly due to the absence of a couple of individuals). They took notes and did as I asked them, although it's still going to be a major uphill battle. (An example of what I am dealing with: "What are the building blocks of sentences?" "Paragraphs?" "Of sentences? What are the pieces that make up a sentence?" "Uh... subjects?" "A little closer, but not quite. What are the things that are coming out of my mouth...?" "... ... words?" "Yes, words are the building blocks of sentences!") We managed to go over the basic structure of a paragraph and types of paragraphs and their positions in the basic 5-paragraph essay. Then we started practicing writing introductory paragraphs, though I think I might scale that back to just working on paragraphs in general next week.

In my free period, I managed to get all my grades submitted. I was even extra nice and prepared them in a document indicating the relevant semester average and credits each student received. That should make the office lady's job easier, later, when she actually has to prepare transcripts.

I did not, however, manage to put the finishing touches on any of my job applications during my free period. I was having a real problem with my blood sugar and my hydration today, so my mind was twitchy and scattered.

Only half my class showed up for Southern Literature. Again. Only a third of Andy's Government class showed up. The weather was worsening this afternoon and several counties had let their schools out early, but that didn't touch Montgomery county. It wasn't even raining when school let out (at it's normal time). I suspect that might have had some bearing on why our students didn't show up, though. Regardless, I still got my students through an introduction to Southern literature and started them on Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." They had difficulty reading the Southern dialect and didn't twig as quickly as I expected they would to the fact that you can read it aloud and figure it out. "Ms. B, what does 'solitry' mean?" I waited, sure she was going to get it now that she read it aloud. "Ms. B, what does soli..." "Solitry. Solitary." "Oh... oh!" I figured she had it then. But she repeated it with "calk'lated" later.

I had originally intended to submit applications after school today. Instead, we had lunch with my brother. Then we beat the weather home. And I worked desultorily on one grad application while attempting to stave off a bad headache, etc.

I am tired of this post now and I am sure most others are as well! I will close with my sadly low wordcount and take myself off to more water (hydration!) and reading.

Today's Goal: 750 words, and still owing 961 due to previous shortages.
Goal met? No. 272 words were written, leaving me owing 478 for a total of 1439.
Reason for stopping: I feel unwell and just don't have much in me.

Project: Short story, title of "Green Dream."
Status of project: Carin on transport down to Dunwain, sleep-deprived and awash in despair and delirium.
talkstowolves: We love stories that subvert the expected. Icon inspired by In the Night Garden, Valente. (not that kind of story)
In Current Events today, one of the young black gentlemen we teach complained that the news is boring. During the course of trying to inspire him differently, I inquired about his age-- he's 17 and will be 18 in May.

"Then you should be interested in the campaigning-- you'll be able to vote in the upcoming presidential election!" crowed I, feeling that I had trumped some of his arguments on why he shouldn't pursue the news.

"Uh-uh. I am never going to vote. I don't care about that stuff."

"But you should care about the person who is chosen to be the next leader of your country-- that person will be making decisions that could affect your life."

"No, not really."

"... Aren't you in [Andy's] Government class?"

"Oh, he is," Andy chimed in.

The student shrugged at me. I stared at him. After a second, I ventured, "You will have no right to complain about how your country is run if you don't vote."*

"I don't. I really don't care about any of that. It doesn't bother me."

"Well thank God you didn't live 50 or 60 years ago."**

The saddest thing about the above exchange is that I am 99% positive that he didn't understand what I meant by my last statement. I'm not even sure the smartest girl in the class got it. And that really bothers me, in that the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's is so recent as to be still on the back porch of today's society, yet none of my students seem to know anything about it or to care about it. (I know the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, but there were plenty of ways African Americans were prevented from voting in the near-century that followed.)

When I was in school, every year I would be irritated about February being Black History Month. I only verbalized my dissatisfaction once because I was afraid of somehow being labeled racist in daring to protest the institution. What I felt was this: every minority should have its own special educational month and, ideally, no one would have a special month because everyone would be learned about equally, always. So I stewed over the presence of Black History Month and the lack of Native American History Month and Chinese American History Month and so on until I realized that at least Black History Month was a step in the right direction: it may be unfair that the others didn't have one, but at least there was an attempt to open up education. (Although I still think that we shouldn't settle for having one month out of the year dedicated to educating students about one minority and should instead integrate full and open information about all peoples in all curricula. I will fight for that one the rest of my days.)

Last year, however, I fully embraced the convention of Black History Month. Why? Because nearly none of my students had any education regarding the Civil Rights movement... when the history literally surrounds us here in Montgomery, Alabama. The church that Martin Luther King Jr. preached at is literally less than ten minutes away. The bus stop where Rosa Parks boarded a bus and refused to relinquish her seat at, subsequently starting the Bus Boycott, is about the same distance. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches concluded in, surprise, Montgomery. And on.

I am passionate about literature and history: understanding where we come from is important to me. I celebrate the past triumphs of my family and ancestors, as well as feel sorrow for past transgressions. I feel that those who came before me are due respect for the sacrifices they made and the successes they achieved.

I have never lived in a mental world where all my fellow humans did not deserve the same rights and respect that I deserve. I don't care if you're male or female, homosexual or heterosexual (& etc.), black or white (or Asian or Native & etc.)... we all are the same, owed the same respect, owed the same civil rights, and beholden to show the same to our fellows.

And with these beliefs of mine, it absolutely boggles my mind that my students have no clear idea of what went down a mere four or five decades ago. It boggles my mind that my students aren't proud of that generation: that they couldn't care less about Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks or E.D. Nixon or A. Philip Randolph or John Lewis or etc. I am proud of that generation. I think what they did was awesome.

I'm going to try my best to make sure my students do too.

* "You have no right to complain if you don't vote" isn't wholly representative of my thoughts on the subject. For example, if you consciously choose not to vote because you can't, in good conscience, give your vote to either candidate: that is a decision. You can complain about the state of the country after that. If, however, you don't vote because you simply can't be bothered to care, you lose a lot of credit with me.

** That should have been "40 to 50 years or so" but I was speaking off the cuff.
talkstowolves: Writer by heart, English teacher by trade.  (bad grammar makes me sic)
Just because I know you're all dying to know how my research paper writing class turned out, in the end. Here's the tally:

Student 1: Brilliant student and the only one of two worth anything. Learned the process, practiced the process, wrote several rough drafts, worked with me to improve her drafts, turned in a complete final paper.
Topic: Racism and Social Injustice Portrayed Through Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Student 2: An average student, but usually committed to working really hard. Started out working thoroughly but tapered off half-way through the semester into wishy-washiness. Changed his topic three weeks before the paper was due. Still seemed to be on track to getting it done, then just turned up yesterday with nothing. Desperately typed up a page at the library and handed it in to me.
Topic: How Wilson Rawls Wove His Own Life and Experiences Into Where the Red Fern Grows.

Student 3: She was withdrawn from our school (maybe coming back?), but she didn't do much work anyway. She made it half-way through the outlining process, but kept turning in quotes-from-the-book-masquerading-as-plot-summary every time she tried to write a rough draft.
Topic: The Plight of the Black Woman as Interpreted from Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

Student 4: He could have had such an awesome paper. He was a bit lazy, but he worked with me really well up through the outline. He had such a clear and meaty outline too! He should have had no problem getting the required page count. Instead, his work ethic suddenly fizzled out and he turned up yesterday with a "No, I didn't do my paper. This is my last week at this school anyway." As if that makes this semester not count: no, sir, you're going to have to work harder in your senior year now to make up for this.
Topic: Symbolism in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."

Student 5: This fellow fought me from day one. He chose to write his paper on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, assuming it would be easy: and it would have been too, if he'd done even a little bit of work! Yet he didn't even finish reading the novel, much less seek out any sources. I kept meeting with him and reiterating what he needed to do, but it was like trying to drag a mule up an incline it was wholly dedicated to never setting foot on. After all this, though, he claimed he had his paper done and just "forgot it at home." This was an hour and 14 minutes before the deadline, so I told him he better start working on getting it up to the school. He left with some of the other boys in the class to "go get it," except he didn't call back up to the school until 12:36 (nearly an hour after the deadline) to say that he couldn't get a ride back up to the school. This was two hours after he'd left the school. There was no way I was softening on the deadline anyway, but he didn't really try, did he?
Topic: Christian Symbolism in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Student 6: I was so excited when this student first chose his topic. He was going to do a paper using Dr. Seuss! How fresh and invigorating an intellectual exercise that would have been, both for him and me. Definitely not the usual well-trod ground of high school research papers. We worked out a smashing outline togeter-- and then he just stopped working. Going to the library was entirely too much to ask, in his opinion. I did everything I could, but he just refused to write his paper in the end. He gave me a title page and a hand-written sheet of something yesterday. Sigh.
Topic: Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book and The Sneetches as Cautionary Tales.

Student 7: This student has disappeared. We haven't been able to contact him in weeks and none of the numbers we have for him are working. Awesome. Prior to disappearing, he was also dedicated to fighting me every step of the way. He chose the shortest book he could (Jack London's The Call of the Wild), didn't read it, and insisted that he'd never find time in two and a half months to go by a library for research. Apparently neither could he find the time to ever develop an actual topic. He had his mother start making excuses for him before he disappeared. And he obviously didn't turn a paper in yesterday.
Topic: ???? in Jack London's Call of the Wild.

Student 8: This is the plagiarist I posted about the other day: the one who turned up for all of five classes out of the entire semester. He was never present enough to learn the process of writing a research paper and certainly didn't grok it on his own. Meetings with his mother, with him, with him AND his mother never resulted in actual attendance or dedication to picking up the pieces of his education. He turned in a plagiarized rough draft: you all saw my comments on it. He neglected to return to school this week (big surprise, that) and turn in a final paper. Or take his tests in his other classes. Which he also never attended.
Topic: Something about love in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Student 9: This student could only be bothered to come to classes half the time and, when he did show up, couldn't be bothered to actually keep up with his homework or attend to what was going on. The only formal work he did for me was work with me on choosing his topic and the early conceptual steps in putting together an outline. And that was where the work got too hard for him to bother with anymore. However, he did turn in a paper yesterday. Complete with screenshots from the film version of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." No, I don't know why he thought that was appropriate. I've only glanced at it so far, but it's all biographical information about Poe and loosely-related thoughts on "The Tell-Tale Heart." Clearly written by someone who has no idea how to write a research paper.
Topic: An Analysis of the Mad Narrator in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."



This rate of failure makes me feel like a failure. I mean, obviously I'm doing something wrong, right? My teaching style is apparently off and I'm just not doing it right, yeah?

No. Because then I analyze myself and my teaching very carefully and very thoroughly. I often go overboard with the self-analysis, you know. And the truth is that I am NOT a bad teacher and I am NOT a failure. I bend over backwards for these kids and I spoon-feed them and I go really far in putting up with their bullshit before I snap and write snarky comments on their plagiarized rough drafts.

It doesn't matter. These kids are here because they don't care and their parents don't know what else to do with them, but at least have enough money to keep them in a school somewhere and off the streets. Which several of these kids seem to resent: they want to be on the streets. They honestly do not see why they need to have any kind of skills in researching or analytical thinking, and they laugh when I tell them they'll be doing this kind of stuff in college. ("Not at Trenholm Tech!" they crow.) And when I desperately try to appeal to them that these are skills they need in life, that the ability to find information and USE information to analyze, to deduce is vital to any kind of success in life... well, they think that's pretty funny too. Or they just stare at me with blank faces.

And it's all so very depressing.
talkstowolves: Writer by heart, English teacher by trade.  (bad grammar makes me sic)
Note: Although I haven't been chronicling my teaching very closely this semester, rest assured the issues in this post are being brought up toward the end of the semester, mere days before the research papers are due, and you may feel free to assume that all relevant skills of research, writing, and documentation have been covered in class.

After I spent several classes going over citation (both parenthetical and on the bibliography), I had a student come in this morning and start asking about footnotes.

"Can I do it like this, Ms. B?"
"Er, no. You have to do the parenthetical citation that I showed you last week. It's in your MLA handbook if you forget what we went over in class."
"Oh, well I don't know nothing about that."

Then he asks about his thesis statement. It's a character study thesis, which is more of a thesis than I expected. I tell him it's not bad and he should definitely work with it since the paper is due tomorrow.

Then I tell him that the little picture he's included of Edgar Allan Poe at the bottom of his first page, after the Introduction, isn't going to count towards his page requirement and he launches into whining about how he's supposed to get five pages out of his topic.

"If you had done the research and gotten the seven required sources, good sources, you shouldn't have much of a problem coming up with five pages."
"Seven sources? M doesn't even have seven sources! No one does! I was on the phone with him yesterday, everyone's having the same problem."
"I know everyone's having the same problem! Sadly, I know! Because no one has gotten their sources like I've told them to except one or two people."
"Well, I couldn't find seven sources on [Edgar Allan Poe] for real."
"I promise you there are seven sources on Poe. Did you go to Huntingdon or AUM, the libraries I told you to go to?"
"What? Huntingdon?!"
"Yes, AUM and Huntingdon. I told you guys to go there because they're college libraries and well-suited to this kind of research."
"What? I didn't hear that."
"I repeated it over and over. That's where you needed to go. I suppose you better get by one after school and see if you can find some more sources you can quickly incorporate into your paper. And remember to guard against plagiarism!"
"I ain't pastin' and copyin' nothing!"

This is what I am constantly dealing with. This kid didn't have half the information because he missed at least half the classes. Some of the others will pull the same shit, except they're going to have to plead deafness.

Argh.
talkstowolves: (english teacher rage)
Let us have a tale of school.

I had just given my 11th graders their quiz on Their Eyes Were Watching God, when one of my seniors (hereafter known as Bearina) entered the classroom in search of her cel phone. Never mind that students aren't allowed to have cel phones in school. My students were distracted from their quiz, had to move around to allow her to search, and it was generally annoying.

She didn't find it and left, only to return a few moments later, claiming that our office lady had told her she could search again. She was visibly more agitated this time, again having students stand up and going so far as to demand they open their bags this time. She started bitching about how the cel phone wasn't hers and cost $500. My students were hopelessly derailed from their quiz-taking.

She left again and I finally got them settled back into their quiz. But all was not done! No, my door then burst open as Bearina and a 10th grader stumbled into my room, struggling. I thought they were fighting at first, as I rose, shouting them down, and then realized that the 10th grader had actually been holding Bearina back from another student. They exited my room as quickly as they had come with me hot on their heels.

I emerged into chaos. One of the office lady's was at the desk trying to talk to a client. (!) The Ineffectual Teacher was talking to the Neo-Nazi student, and he was arguing that she couldn't give him a demerit for whatever happened. Bearina was still being held off him by her boyfriend and the 10th grader, both of whom managed to get her to sit down. I called her boyfriend over and asked what had happened: apparently, the Neo-Nazi had gotten cute with her while she was searching for her phone and so she attacked him. (I found out later that she actually slammed him into a wall with a desk, pinning him, and proceeded to wave scissors in his face.)

At this point, Neo-Nazi returned to his class and Bearina proceeded to Andy's class (which she was currently supposed to be in). However, she opened the door and immediately started demanding which of the seniors had her phone. One of the other seniors talked back to her in a condescending tone, so she started in with the various obscenities, such as "I'll take all you motherfuckers on!" Andy asked her to be quiet, strongly yet respectfully, and so she slammed his door so hard back that it ricocheted off the table and television behind it. Andy came out shouting at her to sit down, with the office lady joining in, but she ignored them all and proceeded outside.

Just after all this ruckus, yet another senior approached me and gave me Bearina's missing cel phone. She said "she had left it on the table." I just told her to go back to class and went outside to where the other office lady was talking to a tearful Bearina. I handed over the phone, identified who had brought it to me, and waved off any appeals to agree with Bearina's actions.

All my 11th graders did pretty poorly on their quizzes, and I don't think it's entirely due to how much they read.

Bearina has been expelled. We have a zero tolerance policy regarding students attacking other students. It's a damn shame that this happened, though. Bearina had a good mind when she bothered to apply herself. I just hope she can shape up and find her way somewhere else.

March 2017

S M T W T F S
   1 234
5 67891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031 

Custom Text

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Styled By

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios