Sixteen to One

Twelve-hour days are really killer. I don't know how nurses do it. There's really only one a year for us: the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when we teach five hours of classes and follow that with five hours of parent conferences. In the lull between the two, I squeezed in an impromptu gathering of my French Club officers to plan an upcoming outreach project, wrote the last of my college recommendation letters, and got to use the bathroom approximately three seconds before I exploded. 

The meetings fell into a comfortable rhythm after an hour or so, and there were lots and lots of moments worthy of the Secretary's Report. The first mother had made an appointment and come to school just to tell me how much her daughter appreciated my sympathy after she had become emotional in class over a sick family member. Others told me how much my students loved the class, loved me, even loved the tests I gave (I promise I would never make up something that absurd!) They had discovered an unknown passion for the French language or American literature. Some of them were hoping for higher grades next quarter, but they were inspired by the online resources I suggested for extra practice, impressed by the detailed syllabi I provided each quarter, supportive of my high standards and desire to challenge my students to take an active role in their own education. They thought I was doing a great job.

Buried among sixteen wholly productive exchanges, however, was one laced with frustration and negativity. Sixteen to one. In baseball that would be a massacre. In craps it could win you a small fortune. In the grand scheme of things, you can't please everyone, and because one student is just not up to par in one class, one family is clearly not pleased.

So why on earth was I so haunted by the one? When my principal came by to ask how everything had gone, I shared this with her -- and even though it was late, she sat down and commiserated, and reminded me that sometimes there's just nothing you can do. I remarked that because teachers (for the most part) care so deeply for our students and feel each failure and triumph so acutely, it's even more painful when parents imply that we haven't done enough to help their child succeed. It's hitting below the belt. It's kicking us when we're down. It's a guilt trip down a well-worn mental path. Because really, there's a grain of truth in what they're saying: we probably could have done something more, and if we'd thought it would end like this, we would have found a way to.

Finally I promised my principal I would let it go and rethink the situation in the morning, and we said goodbye, and on the way out she promised to say a prayer for me and for my student. I stacked up my papers and turned off the lights and bundled up against the cold and stepped outside into the night, twelve full hours after I'd stepped in.

On the way out in the darkness, the convent chapel was a beacon, flooded with light, and through the window I caught a glimpse of a lone figure in white, kneeling before the altar.

The next morning I received an email of apology. A promise to work harder on communication. A step toward a positive resolution. Why was I so shocked by this development? I'm not sure. There was no reason to be. Sixteen to one is pretty fabulous, but seventeen to nothing? That's nothing short of a miracle.

Cheerleaders, Not Helicopters

Well, isn't this something:

When we examined whether regular help with homework had a positive impact on children’s academic performance, we were quite startled by what we found. Regardless of a family’s social class, racial or ethnic background, or a child’s grade level, consistent homework help almost never improved test scores or grades. Most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children with homework. Even more surprising to us was that when parents regularly helped with homework, kids usually performed worse. 

I can't say I'm surprised. At the high school level, many of my students regularly receive help from their parents, and the results are frequently negative:

• Parents complain that the work is too hard or the assignments are unclear. Since they have never attended my class or received my feedback, I can see why they think so! But, likewise, I find this kind of criticism unfair. I would much rather hear from my students.
• The corrections parents make to their children's work are often incorrect. In particular, they have a predilection for the passive voice (e.g., "Edgar Allan Poe is known for his impressive writing,") which I have made it my mission to eradicate in student writing.
• If students assume their parents will be helping them with their assignments, they will put forth less effort in communication, time management and locating resources -- the three main components of a successful homework assignment.

The article goes on to say that parents can be great motivators, and that they should go out of their way to communicate the value of education to their children -- insisting they keep their grades up, limiting leisure and extracurricular activities during the school year, and choosing schools where their children will be able to succeed with hard work and determination. But this helicopter parenting, in which parents are constantly communicating with teachers about their nearly-adult children, is detrimental to all three parties -- children, parents and teachers.

As Robinson and Harris conclude, "What should parents do? They should set the stage and then leave it."

Amen!

Six Ways to Sunday

Every day these little vignettes pass me by, when Sunday's peace seems a distant memory and I'm just trying to make it through another week. But now that I have a five-day weekend to reflect (thank you, late winter storm!) I find them coming back to me, making me smile all over again.

1. We've just finished learning venir, to come, and bid goodbye to the early-dismissal track star; as she leaves, I explain to the class that revenir, to come back, is conjugated the same way. "So if you want to ask someone to come ba--," and inspiration cuts me off. I stride to the doorway and shout, "REVIENS!" She halts, bewildered, and the class dissolves in laughter. Meanwhile, the students in the hall get a sneak preview of my new advertising campaign for the French program.
2. My favorite lesson of the whole year happens to be the day of my annual observation. I guide the class in the rhythmic tapping of iambic pentameter, the beating of the heart through the poet's words. Da-DUM. Da-DUM. Da-DUM. Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince! Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark. Titania waked and straightway loved an ass. Hyperbole, metaphor, double entendre. Richly-laden lines twist over and around them until their own are pouring forth: Australia is a lovely place to be.  My doggie loves to play and roll in snow. Morning coffee suddenly sounds poetic, and sunburned afternoons call to them from future summers. When the bell rings, my department chair apologizes for staying through the whole period: "I just didn't want to leave."
3. Midway through a quiz, a student decides to reword a sentence and spends a good three minutes crossing it out. Her laborious scraping of pen on paper is finally interrupted with the clean smack of a whiteout pen on her desk, delivered with silent reproach by her neighbor who doesn't even look up from her own work. I can't help but laugh: that girl will make a great mom someday.
4. During a "free" period as I'm hustling through the next batch of papers, I comment on one: "When I die, I want you to write my obituary." I am completely serious. If she can make a paper about Salinger sound as fresh and hopeful as he wasn't, I imagine she could do a lot for my posthumous public image. 
5. Two separate parents, within a week of each other, thanked me for being hard on their children. "This is part of growing up," one said. "She needs to take responsibility for her actions," said another. My faith in modern parenting ceased its precipitous freefall and actually took a few halting, hopeful steps back toward the light.
6. In the stairwell, as students jostle each other to get to break and I attempt to keep out of the way, I spot one who is particularly pained by the tangle of backpacks and ponytails. "This is SO not ideal," she huffs. I suppress a smile, but as I consider her words over the next few days, I realize it's a perfect thesis statement for my life. Maybe for yours, too.

Part Parent

“… and what about this last section?” I ask.  

“It’s Writing.  Sentence Improvement.”

“So how will you do these?”

“Read the sentence first to see if anything sounds off.  Then trim it — cross out interrupters, prepositional phrases and modifiers.  Eliminate the wrong answers.  Guess if I have to.

“How many will you do?”

“At least half, but they go easy to hard, so if I need to I’ll skip the last ones.”

“Very good.”  I close the book.  “I think you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” she says, and she means it. “This helped, like, so much.”

I walk her out to the living room, say goodbye to her dad.  “I’ll miss seeing you — ” I say, and mean it just as much.

“I know; me, too,” she laughs.

“I’m proud of you,” I finish.  “I know you’re going to do a great job.  Let me know how it goes.”

“We’ll call you with the results,” her dad says, as they close the door.  “Thanks again.”

I wave, turn on the porch light, lock the deadbolt behind them.  

That fluttery feeling — out in the real world, what will happen? Will she meet her goals?  Did I do my job?

This must be what it’s like, interrupts my subconscious.  Being a parent.

True Grit, and Other Virtues

The recent education issue of the New York Times had lots of great fodder for discussion and / or blogging. After the Russian pieces, I read an excellent feature that brings together two highly-rated headmasters — one from a charter school in low-income Harlem, one from a staggeringly expensive country school in Riverdale — to discuss the difference between great students and great people.

The difference, of course (of course!) is character.  And they have admirably narrowed down that nebulous category to eight key ideas like zest (enthusiasm,) grit (perseverence,) and my favority, curiosity (wanting to know just for the sake of knowing.)  They promote these virtues with posters, lessons and even a character report card on which each student is ranked by all of his teachers.

Can you teach virtue, as such? It’s a perplexing question, one I’m sure every parent would love to be able to answer.  Children need to see examples of it in action, of course, but they also need to learn what “it” is and why it is not only honorable, but useful (the charter program first began studying character in an effort to learn why more of their students didn’t go on to finish college.)  Maybe this is the way, or the way to the way.

Beyond the Call

Between construction delays, two hurricanes and an earthquake, things were off to a slow start this year, and administrators pleaded with us to be flexible in rescheduling events whose dates had already come and gone before classes began in earnest.  One casualty was Back-to-School Night, which was rescheduled twice and finally combined into one massive evening of upperclassmen, underclassmen and teachers.

The fun part of Back-to-School Night is watching the parents rush around, confused and harried, trying to find the classrooms their daughters use every day.  They take the stairs and arrive, huffing and puffing, with just as much anxiety as the students.  “Am I in the right room?  Did the bell already ring?  What did I miss?”  This is supposed to make them empathize with the students, but I think it has the same effect on us — when we see how difficult it is for an adult to keep pace, we’re a little more forgiving of the children of whom we expect so much.

This year, however, my grad school schedule interfered with the event, and I didn’t want to miss the second class after (due to an e-mail problem) I had been completely unprepared for the first one.  My principal was kind enough to excuse me once I told her I was planning to let the families of my students know ahead of time.  

So I wrote a letter and made sixty copies of it to send home with my students.  Their parents read and signed (and some even added a “Thank you” at the bottom, which warmed my heart.)  In compiling the notes, of course, some were missing, so the afternoon of the event I sat down with the school directory and spoke to about a dozen answering machines and one slightly-confused relative.

For the handful whose phone service wasn’t working (full voicemail, no voicemail, dead end) I resorted to e-mail, sending out a note with the same message: I was sorry to miss them, I had posted a copy of my class policies online, and they should feel free to contact me if they had any questions.  All told, the communication took at least as long as the event itself.

So it was lovely, the next morning, to receive an e-mail from one parent who was grateful for the communication, which she said was “beyond the call.”  She added that her daughter, typically a math person, was “actually looking forward to English this year, so you have made a great impression.”  

Sometimes one little note is all it takes.  This one is going in my portfolio for sure.

Going to Extremes

Next time you’re looking to kill half an hour, read this fascinating trilogy of pieces about an American family who placed their three children in a Russian-language school in Moscow.  They first floundered, but finally found their footing and flourished.  (Accidental alliteration?  Never.)

My thoughts about their experience were very strong, but also very conflicted:

1. Good for them!  Not enough kids get to have an experience like that.
2. Would the kids have wanted that experience, though, if they had asked them?
3. Of course not.  Left to their own devices, most kids won’t even brush their teeth.
4. Is education supposed to be stressful to the point at which kids don’t have enough energy to have fun on the weekends — only to recover?
5. That kind of attitude has landed our country at the bottom of the test-score pile.
6. Who cares about test scores?  Are they really learning?
7. They’re learning a foreign language, and fluently!  You know you would have loved to do that as a kid.
8. Yes, but I would have wanted it to be my decision, and I would have wanted it to be in a less insular and pampered environment.  For $10,000 in yearly tuition, they should be flying to the moon by now.
9. Your own school costs more than that.  So does the school where you teach.
10. My school’s not in Moscow.
11. Moscow has the fourth-highest cost of living in the world.  Baltimore isn’t even ranked.
12. Are you actually doing Internet research to support your argument against yourself?
13.  … 

It disintegrated further from there, but I’m not settled, even if the odds seem to have won the day.  Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting story.

A Different Way of Thinking

So my first-period students are handing in their essays, and one doesn’t have hers.  Only she doesn’t say that; she speaks the words I dread most. “Did you get my dad’s e-mail?”

I didn’t, because her dad e-mailed me around midnight the day before.  I log on after class and it’s seven or eight paragraphs, articulately detailing his daughter’s new diagnosis of ADHD.  She didn’t finish the paper because she left part of it at school, and she tried to restart it at home but ran out of steam and worked herself into a frenzy. He finally told her to go to bed and he would talk to me about it.

I don’t even think about writing back.  I pick up the phone and call him at work.

The thing about parents is that most of the time, they just want to talk.  I hardly said a word during what turned out to be a 20-minute conversation.  When I did speak, I affirmed his feelings: I, too, want his daughter to be successful in spite of her disability.  I agreed that there was nothing wrong with his daughter, and mentioned that girls often receive a later diagnosis than boys because they tend to lack the hyperactivity that’s a telltale sign of the condition.  I pointed to the online syllabi that spelled out every single assignment for the quarter.  I explained that late work would receive a 10% penalty each day unless the student had requested an extension before the due date.

And then I told him that, just this once, I would accept the paper late with no penalty.  Because I could already see that his daughter was a special person, one who wanted to do the right thing and needed some extra help to be able to do so.  I offered to meet with her during lunch one day to discuss how I could help her best.  I didn’t rush him off the phone, even when the late bell informed me my class was waiting.  

This is what happens when teachers are educated: last year, I would have rolled my eyes at what I viewed as indulgence and coddling.  Now I know something now about ADHD and the stigma that comes with it, about the struggles families have to keep their kids afloat with a diagnosis they don’t fully understand.  

Yes, school’s been underway for less than two weeks.  But even so, this is an extraordinary amount of patience for me, the world’s biggest blowhard.  I suppose it comes from understanding the father’s point of view: he loves his daughter and wants her to succeed.  That means that sometimes he doesn’t know when to stop talking.  Other times, as Ron Clark pointed out yesterday, it may lead to uglier actions, more offensive words, barriers that are hard to break down.  But last week, it was harmless.  My class was glad for the two extra minutes of study time.  They had a quiz to take.

Teachers vs. Parents

The same semester I read Whitaker’s What Great Teachers Do Differently, I also read Ron Clark’s Excellent 11. Yet another reference to that class in this piece by Clark for CNN, in which he sternly admonishes helicopter parents to let teachers do what they do best:

Trust us. At times when I tell parents that their child has been a behavior problem, I can almost see the hairs rise on their backs. They are ready to fight and defend their child, and it is exhausting. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell a mom something her son did and she turns, looks at him and asks, “Is that true?” Well, of course it’s true. I just told you. 

My friend Melanie sent it to me several weeks ago, but I finally had enough time to read it yesterday, and I can only say AMEN!  Because, in the end, it’s all about the students.  And even they are not served well by indulgence.  They need to learn the rules of the classroom, and sometimes, their parents do too.

The Longest Day

It’s the longest day of the year, I remember suddenly, and boy, does it feel like it.

I am driving home from class; Stevie Nicks is wailing away on the stereo.  I am bawling, though I am not quite sure why.

For some aggravatingly unknown reason, I work much better under pressure than without it.  Thus the lazy shopping trip this morning, the e-mail exchange with my faraway sister, the heartwarming chat with the school principal when I dropped by with an early dinner for the staff… and then the frenzied consumption of 67 pages of textbook reading in hurried snatches between lessons for the remainder of the afternoon.  Sigh.

I’d read the chapter on ADHD (the shortest of the three, and it took me the longest – just reading about distractibility is enough to distract me!) and so launched into the one about emotional and behavioral disorders.  These are some of the most challenging students to teach, and they have some of the lowest rates of success in school, work and life.  They tend to run into trouble with law enforcement, teen pregnancy and substance abuse.  Absorb.  Absorb.  Highlight. Memorize.  Prepare for the quiz.

It wasn’t too hard, and afterward the instructor presented a [well-organized, thorough and informative] PowerPoint lecture about the chapter we’d just read. Then she started telling stories.  Like:

• A child tattles on his friend: “So-and-so just pimp-slapped me!” The teacher responds: “That’s not appropriate; we don’t say ‘pimp’ at school.” Child is puzzled. “Pimp’s not a bad man; pimp’s a rich man!”
• Teacher gives an assignment: write a letter to your parents. In it, try to persuade them to do something: anything you want. The child asks his family to please clean the house.
• Child is showing signs of emotional disturbance; in a conference, teacher finds out parents have been taking child to a strip bar.
• Staff remove a child who is throwing a tantrum from the classroom and place him in the “quiet room,” where he can calm down without hurting himself. He proceeds to run around the room yelling “gangbang!” and then demonstrate precisely what he means by that term.
• When physically restrained by her teacher, a child does what she has learned to do to escape such situations: urinate on both of them.

Somehow, I remained clinically detached from these harrowing stories. I asked questions, took notes, commented when appropriate.

I didn’t even feel sad, really, until my friend Rebecca exploded with: “Can’t we just start a boarding school somewhere and take these children there and give them what their parents can’t?  Feed them, clothe them, discipline them, show them affection, help them succeed?  They can have their kids back on the weekends.  I think it’s important for them to be with their parents.  But… someone has to do something!”

“Do it.  I’ll work for you,” I said.  I meant it more than anything I’d said in at least a month.

And then, after watching this extremely disturbing promo for a documentary on eating disorders (an internalized form of emotional disability,) another friend mused: “It seems so sad, so extreme, and yet we are so much closer to those girls than we realize.  Life is hard, and people have to deal with it somehow; we all have different coping mechanisms.  Mine might not be as unhealthy as starving myself to death, but just a little change in the way my brain was wired, and –” she couldn’t finish her sentence.

We finish our wrap-up activity, walk to the parking lot, smelling the rain and chattering about the next day.  I start the car, turn on the radio for some reason. Then Stevie.  Then the tears.  I think, over and over: it’s not fair.

None of it is fair.  Nor has it ever been.