Month: November 2016

It works on so many levels, but for practical purposes, we’ll focus on the easy two. On one level, the seniors are reading Camus’s The Stranger, which I would like to argue is an existential book, but Camus himself argues that it’s a book of the absurd. Hard to go against that.
We just started the book, but today I was going over Camus’s definition of the absurd. It included the deadening routine that we face daily, the idea of time passing as a destructive element, and the feeling of isolation in a sea of people. I know that’s not the cheeriest of topics to fill a class period with, but, when asking students to relate to them, it becomes a little clearer.
Hello, deadening routine. Perhaps the ringing of a bell will snap us out of our slumber.
Good afternoon, time passing. Guess what? We are never going to get that time back again.
Welcome, isolation. Glad to see you–we’ve all felt so . . . alone.
A little hyperbole, sure, but students had all been there in some form or another.
As for me, I try to keep it positive with the existential slant that IS coming in the book. I quote Shakespeare through Iago, and tell students that “‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.”
But, oh, that deadening routine.
Enough of this–it’s too quick a reminder of what I was reminded of twice today.
You knew this song was coming.

What would happen if North High were treated like a business? Sceptics always argue that you can’t treat a school like a business, but why not? We have employees (someone is giving me a salary), we have product (grades 9 through 12), and it takes money to run the day-to-day operations.
Many might assume that our customers are parents and the community, but maybe the customer is actually our “product,” the students.
Today, two students came to see me and brought up the subject of graduating early, as juniors who will have spent six semesters at school. Both plan on going to El Camino College in September of 2017.
Student One was told it could happen and planned her junior year around this process. She came to see me today because she now has been told she needs to be at North during her senior year. She followed the schedules her counselor laid out for her, was told earlier that taking these classes would get her what she needed, and now has been told it is not enough. She’s not pleased. She has nothing against North High–she just wants to start college early.
Student Two will be graduating early, after her junior year. She has taken the necessary classes, has a different counselor, and will be attending El Camino College next year. She’s not happy that she couldn’t take AP Statistics during her junior year, but even though we let students sign up for the class, and even though she had taken Calculus B/C as a sophomore and received a 5 on the AP test, our administration decided that NO juniors would end up being in the class because of scheduling. We tell students, implore them, coerce them, to take four years of math, yet when push comes to shove, we don’t let one of the brightest math students we have take a class because of scheduling.
That’s the deal here–why were those junior kids even signing up for AP Statistics? Those must have been some pretty good kids who had jumped through many math hoops and figured they would extend their math resume even more. By making them wait another year, one of the students will be gone, and others might change their minds. The AP Statistics teacher might have wanted them in the class, or have another section opened up for the demand, but that ship has sailed this year.
Back to Student Two, who wants to be an infectious disease doctor and work for Doctors Without Borders. When she told me that today, I wanted to go into a corner and weep happy tears. Instead I told her how awesome that was–Doctors Without Borders is one of my favorite groups who always seem to work tirelessly in places not always desirable–and how impressed I was. That’s who we’re losing. Someone who gets good grades, who takes mostly-senior classes during her sophomore year and OWNS on the AP test, who challenges herself with hard classes, and is involved in school.
In her defense, what does North have to offer her for a senior year? As a business who wants to keep their customers as long as possible, it’s tough to compete with Opportunities for Learning, or El Camino College, as both offer classes students need, free of charge. Taking classes at El Camino College not only gives students college credit, but high school credit as well. It’s tough to sell an AP Class that you have to attend for 180 days AND pass an AP test for college credit when you can just attend that college in the first place.
Our customers are starting to figure this out.

A breath of fresh air came back to North High today, and it couldn’t have come soon enough.
Anh Nguyen returned to North after a lengthy absence due to an ankle/foot injury. She hobbled all the way out to my room, gave me a hug, and told me of her journey back to teaching, which was anything but easy. Seeing her back at school made my day.
Students used to tell me things about her–mainly because they received low grades in her Honors Geometry class–but, over the years, I found out it was on them. We both taught Honors, shared many students, and our grades were eerily similar, even though the disciplines of math and English are often not so. If a student got a good grade from her, they were a good student for me. Same went for kids who did not do well.
It takes effort to not do well these days in school. You have to work at not working. Teachers are trying every politically correct assignment they can to coerce points out of each student. There’s everything you can imagine in the world of getting work done in class–heaven forbid if we ask a student to take a book home and read it. We read to them, or have the audio playing on our computers (I was guilty of the latter today). There’s projects, group work, presentations, annotations–I’ve posted all that here before.
It just makes our school look questionable, though, when students with 4.5 GPAs can’t pass any of their AP tests, or score woefully on the SATs or ACTs. How does that make our school look in the scholastic community? Just looking up a random student at North High (one of mine, actually), I find that a 3.94 weighted GPA gets you ranked 69th out of 441 total seniors. That means that around 15% of our seniors have over a 4.0 GPA. Seems a bit high to me.
Either way, numbers should add up. Many don’t. Problem. What’s our brand?
But Anh Nguyen is back, and that means there’s another oldtimer on campus with me. I know we will keep helping students, but we will also keep testing them, too. My guess is that students’ grades and performances in our classes will be mirrored in their standardized test scores.
Welcome back, Anh. Together we will start a de-evolution revolution.

Thanksgiving marks kind of a “restart” in the school year. We’ve been at it for 51 days–some days have been great, while others need a little fine tuning. There are five days off to figure things out and come back as if it’s a first day.
I have plenty to be thankful for at work and at home. But I live in a strange world.
Remember that “all lives matter” stuff? Well, there’s this.

And, don’t forget this for your stocking stuffer.

I could go on, but others are sometimes better at saying things. 30 years ago, MTV actually played this video. Glad that nothing Burroughs speaks about could happen today.

Happy Thanksgiving to most.

School is so silly sometimes. Today, on the infamous two-day week before Thanksgiving, the campus was pretty lonely. Most of the folks in the office took the day off, or had closed doors, and there just didn’t seem to be that immediacy and energy the campus usually has. When I left school at 2:57, a mere seven minutes after the final bell, it was like leaving a ghost town. It was like walking along the beach a week or two after summer has ended and the weather starts to cool.
However, mixed in with the curriculum, was APNsgiving. A simple explanation would be that students in APN brought food in a pot luck fashion and we ate it at lunch. A longer explanation would be along other lines–students wanted to get together with both APN classes, bring many different foods, hang out with each other, and orchestrate a kind of Thanksgiving inside school walls. I’m not sure anyone said “grace,” but there was more food than any group of students was going to finish, plus kids playing silly games, talking, listening to music, and just being decent people for an extended lunch period.
Gillian Hart, the Government teacher of APN, did way more than I–she bought two dozen empanadas. I didn’t do a thing except bring my microwave over to her class. The rest was all done by students, from the initial idea to the feast itself. It’s not the greatest empowerment of them, but it has to start somewhere, and it’s all about green-lighting ideas that offer positive outcomes.
And, while all this was happening today, in the midst of students having a good time that they created, I thought about how this year almost didn’t happen for APN. Gillian Hart and I, who have taught this 43-yr-old program since 2002, had to battle for months to keep it in existence. Just writing that line makes me want to stop writing about the battle, and I will.
I’ll end positively. APN still exists, and today it existed well.

We’re reading Lord of the Flies. Or, we are supposed to be reading Lord of the Flies. Or, some students are reading the book. Or, we have checked out the book. Worst of all–many have not checked out the book after a week.
If we test them, they do not do well. They will say that the test is too hard, but it could be an oral test, or an essay test. Hard to do well when you don’t read.
So we don’t test them. We write commentaries and engage in Socratic seminars. We devise essential questions that rely on a base knowledge of the books. We give them projects, to be done in groups, and we all know how that works.
I could not read Heart of Darkness as a senior in high school. Too hard. I could not read A Passage to India. I was too immature for Forster. Somehow I got through Fathers and Sons and A Farewell to Arms, along with many classroom renditions of Shakespeare, where the teachers let us read just to kill time with our stellar performances.
When my teacher talked about the Forster and Conrad novels, I had no idea what she was talking about. I hadn’t read, so no words coming out of her mouth were going to mean anything.

Today, three of my English classes returned to the text to look at Chapters 2 and 3. It was a lesson in style analysis, where we looked at the author’s devices in creating character and setting, in this case. All the grunt work is designed so students can synthesize text and turn it into their writing, while using Golding’s words and ideas, too. Fair enough?
Here’s how it went.

I used to think that students came to school to learn, and that if the opportunity for learning were presented to them, they would take it. I’ve said this same thing many times in job interviews–if students are coming to school, they want to learn (and we should teach them).
Jimmy Carter never said the word malaise itself, but we all know what he meant. And he said it in 1979. I’ve been living it lately and spend hours per day/week/month devising ways to combat it. I am met at every turn with malaise. I am so frustrated I keep hitting the wrong keys when I type this, so I will let President Carter finish it for me.
His fist and tone say it all.

Yep, the Brian De Palma film from 1974. I saw it more than once in the theater with my mother because she liked Paul Williams and the soundtrack. This returns to me today because on my drive home I was listening to satellite radio and Jason Schwartzman (he of many Wes Anderson films, Phantom Planet, and Talia Shire’s womb) has a recurring show called “Coconut Records,” where he plays songs and talks. Today, he opened his show with “The Hell of It,” from Phantom of the Paradise.
Did you get all that? It was a lot of information–titles, dates, people, radio shows–so I would completely understand that you might not understand. No big deal that you are not in my 70’s-movies-Brian-De-Palma-Paul-Williams-satellite-radio circle. Circles, though, are a big deal to me, to which I will return.
Even though my mother and father raised me and I spent an incredible amount of time with them, I don’t remember many things we had in common. I was into sports, music, and media while they weren’t. But, about every month, I was able to see just about any movie with my mom. She didn’t really have an idea of what most of the movies were about (or maybe she did and was just being mom-savvy), but we saw a ton of them together. Some were awful, others turned out to be iconic, while more of them were just movies of the time that you might see on cable today.
Phantom of the Paradise might be R. There is kind of an orgy scene in there along with some violence. Come on, it’s Brian De Palma learning his eventual craft. But we sometimes saw hard-R B-movies on a double feature, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, plus other movies that I would have had to sneak into with my friends. Either way, hearing the song reminded me that we had many things in common, especially when it came to movies. And, since we did see many movies of the early to mid-70’s, we exposed each other to some crappy movies, but also ones that defined that generation of change, disengagement, and/or disgust. I saw Five Easy Pieces with her.
In class today I had an easy lesson. Students had to upload a favorite scene from a movie, write a little summary of it, and tell why it’s a favorite scene of theirs. We decided in our PLC meetings that students should write a summary of something. Me, not wanting to read 100 Chapter 2 summaries of Lord of the Flies, decided to do things differently.
They were loud, they were quiet, they talked to others, they laughed–and they did it. We didn’t have to pretend that they had read a Chapter; instead, they got to choose something from that huge databank that is their brains, and recollect something they actually enjoyed. They showed me their scenes, asked if I knew them, and I mostly did, for I know many of their circles, which gives us that common ground. Stover, for the WIN.
So I got through a Thursday. And, if my mom is reading this somewhere, thanks for letting me see some 70’s movies that I probably shouldn’t have, but am glad I did. Turn up one of your favorite Paul Williams songs and enjoy it again with me.

Want to give students something to look forward to? Feed them something good.
Today was Fall Festival at North High, which translates to clubs on the quad at lunch, with a myriad of foods on display for all to enjoy. And pay for. If you didn’t know, or haven’t been reading my posts, our students don’t eat. They have the prospect of almost-free food, if they claim it, but they choose not to. Today, they chose to pay over ten dollars for a variety of items.
North High clubs brought Korean bbq, In-n-Out, lumpia, Hawaiian chicken, bacon fried rice, pozole, fry bread, manapua, Spam musubi, and so on. I repped TED-Ed Club and was less than creative–we sold donuts. 80 of them. Gone. Yes, to 30 bucks going into our account.
It’s so funny to watch students the day previous with their phones, taking pictures of the menus for today’s cuisine. The food’s not even that great, it’s a bit overpriced, but kids chomp at the bit to get out to that quad for the food frenzy.
To me, that’s DATA. Remember data? I keep hearing how we’re going to be looking at it, but all I remember looking at this year was our Smarter Balanced data in math and English which only applied to last year’s juniors, and was glossed over quickly during a before-school-started meeting. There’s so much more out there, and today added even more, albeit food data.
Look–at Stover High School, good food would translate to better students. Dip Day was already a “win” for APN, and Fall Festival seals the deal. So, grab a non-plastic utensil, an actual plate, and bring on the fixings. After a home-cooked meal, maybe an extended time period for lunch, perhaps some music in the background . . . who wouldn’t want to power through some data?

I used to be pretty popular.
Students thought something of me and would line up during November (and sometimes before) to have me proofread their personal statements for college. I would literally spend my entire lunch period reading students papers until the line went away. Sometimes, it didn’t go away and I didn’t get to eat any of my lunch.
This year, I told students I would read anything they wrote for college and/or write them a letter of recommendation. But there was a catch–it would cost them 50 bucks. But there was another catch–they would get back their 50 bucks once they wrote me a thank-you note, baked me something delicious, or both. This was in response to the class of 2016, who had me read and write many papers for them, all for nothing in return. It’s not that tough, people. Plus, I’m pretty much forcing students to have some manners. Hey, somebody has to.
I am popular no more, it seems. Okay, there are a few former students who I had two years ago who walk into my class and drop off their personal statements, as if I am a service. I won’t read one word of their papers unless they are present with me, though. It’s November 15th and only one former student has had me read her work.
I have two students whose work is in my briefcase, but no 50 bucks from either. It is not my job to read those papers–this is not in my contract at all–but I will read them and mark them up and offer suggestions since I have barely had to read papers at all during lunch this year. Maybe it’s the 50 bucks or the horror of writing a thank-you note to the person who could get you into a good college, but I don’t get when I turned into Old Man Warner, from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
After all, the Old Man is told, “That over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery,” to which he replies, “Pack of crazy fools.” This is a nostalgic cry, but I’ve given up on the past. As for the young folks, maybe they are crazy, but at least I get to eat my lunches in November. Thanks???