School Suck

I didn’t use to like the idea of Poetry Out Loud. It’s a showcase for students to memorize a poem and recite it–some students even act it out in a Spoken Word kind of way. I didn’t like that you had to choose a poem from the Poetryoutloud.org web site and that you had to be an actor to get consideration for winning some accolades, even if the actual poets would not have wanted their poems read that way. And, I have the ability to hear some of the poets reading these same poems–online sources have them doing it–so any listener, really, can hear how the poet wanted it read.
However, I got over my stubborn attitude because it is still finding a poem, memorizing it, and then speaking it in front of a class. All of those are pretty good standards, goals, and learning targets for an English teacher. I had students do Poetry Out Loud last year and didn’t offer much guidance, figuring the web site, and prior experience, would get it done. It didn’t. They picked poems that were at the top of the alphabet–didn’t matter as long as it was short and they didn’t have to look through many poems to find one.
This year I gave students more time, had them pick poems that I told them should be in a voice that they are capable of speaking (some of them choose old British poems and they just don’t have the oral language to pull it off). That said, some nailed it, some struggled here and there, and some had to be prompted over an over for their lines. They did way better than last year, but all my classes are not done yet, as kids didn’t go today and I don’t know if they’ll go tomorrow.
Of the ones who went today, no one tried to act it out in Poetry Out Loud fashion. No one. Many asked how many points the assignment was worth. Some went, did poorly, and asked if they could do it again (we’re doing it today and tomorrow). The bottom line is that not many seemed to care about it, in general, except as a school assignment/exercise. If I had asked them what their poem was about, I’m not sure what answer I would have received. This was just another hoop they had to jump through in school.
I don’t usually sell my students short here, but this should be fun? Yeah, fun! Own that crap and have a good old time. Read it like a pirate. Raise and lower that voice. Stand out. Have some style. Act it out a little.
Every now and then, the attitude of the class is on the students. As I told them earlier, “This is the one assignment that you can control without any influence from me. You are the ones doing everything here, from start to finish.”
In one of my classes, only seven students spoke today. That leaves 25 for tomorrow. Before the bell even rang to start class, students asked if they HAD to do this. Others just flat out told me they were not going to. Really? Some of the poems are seven or eight lines, less than 50 words long, and can be memorized in a few minutes.
That attitude makes it tough, and it’s tough on the kids who are afraid of speaking when they know they are being judged by others who refuse to do the assignment. I get that others have given kids a pass because we don’t want them to feel “UNCOMFORTABLE,” but each day adds more training wheels and scaffolding instead of stripping them away.

Today, I told my students that my teaching days were finite, which doesn’t really mean anything, since everything is finite. But they knew what I meant–when the opportunity arises that benefits me not being in a classroom, I will be gone. Who knows when that will be?
But, I kidded that, once I’m gone it won’t be a big deal. I will be forgotten quickly and replaced by an automated kiosk like McDonald’s is implementing to offset $15/hr workers. This kiosk will be user-friendly (unlike me sometimes–HA!), with colorful touchpad buttons, and it will kick out articles that students can annotate. It will offer a myriad of essential question topics that fit the articles. Students will pick a question, use their notes and annotations, and produce papers of merit that are approved by some form of authority. It’s collaboration at its finest, with students getting exposed to articles carefully selected by a larger form of authority. State standards and learning targets will be omnipresent.
Sadly, students kind of nodded and agreed. One even went so far to add that they would rather place an order for food on a touchpad because that device does not judge. The touchpad doesn’t look down and avoid eye contact when you order that 40-nugget box AND two double cheeseburgers. It just takes the order, someone makes the “food,” and some form of authority hands it to you. The touchpad users would probably prefer it traveling down some chute into a waiting area where they would pick it up, kind of like luggage in an airport.
Don’t think it can happen? Oh, we will always have to have teachers, you say. Dunno about that. You want curriculum and common core and standards and learning targets? Anyone can generate those to the masses. It’s just that person of authority in the room and whoever gets to grade it. I’ll move away from this for now, but Stoverbot3000 (which will be way more effective than ED209 from Robocop) is not an impossibility.
But who is going to teach people to think? Who is going to expose them to something that actually matters in their lives? Or do we care if they have lives?
Last year, one of the higher-ups, when I brought up the “real world” and the fact that kids might someday enter it, scoffed and said, “The real world? This is public education.”
Yep. It is.
But, today I was playing Cloud Nothings on my stereo, and students didn’t complain. And, on certain days, students will come closer to my speakers and the Shazam app will tell them what song I’m playing. And there are movies they should see, for the more they know of everything, the more they are exposed to any circle of thought and knowledge, the fewer chances we will have of Stoverbot3000 coming to a classroom near you.
The real world? This is public education. I kid you not.

I’ve seen it all in teaching. Luckily, today in class, my kids did NOT see it all.
Fifth period had its general noise going on, then students started laughing and smiling. But it wasn’t from some amazing witticism that came from me. It was a quiet laughing and smiling, and their amusement was directed my way. You know how the class has a certain din, and then that din is diminished to the point where a teacher knows something is amiss–the sounds are not the same. This was that time.
Kids were turning red with amusement and I was turning red because this had to be something associated with me. I’m old, I don’t care, but when you run through all the things they could be noticing, it gets a little embarrassing, to the point where I noticed my cheeks getting red. Enough of that.
“What?” I asked.
They said nothing, but were still acting silly.
“What?” I asked. “What is it? What’s the deal?”
One kid spoke up. “You have a hole in your pants,” he said, smiling ear to ear.
Suck it, Thursday, for giving me a hole right in my crotch. My jeans were old, getting close to retirement, and they just gave up under pressure today. Gah.
I crossed my legs, laughed with them, the redness left my cheeks, and we moved forward.
This would have been a more embarrassing moment in some other circumstance, but we’re talking about teaching here, and other teachers have to understand. We’re up there all the time in class with the metaphorical holes in our jeans. Sometimes they’re not in the crotch, but big deal–we’ve seen worse and there’s a certain vulnerability you allow yourself when trying to do the greater good.
As I told my students today–you will have been filled with and exposed to all these great works and ideas and lessons throughout the year, but I will probably end up being remembered for having a hole in my jeans.
That’s the way it works sometimes. Time to throw them away and move on. As Huxley would tell us, Ending is better than mending.

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.