School Suck

It was hot today. The temperature was over 100 in my classroom. At 1:15 we had a fire alarm–maybe because someone pulled the alarm, maybe because it was scheduled, maybe it was just so hot that it set off the alarm.
I tried teaching while students fanned. Some editing went down with seniors. Some Antigone went done with sophomores. And lots of fanning.

Tests are not fun. I like to write them, and all, because if an A student has read the book, that student is going to get an A. Others, those who are not A students, do not get A’s on a well-written test. And, if you don’t read, it becomes painfully obvious to all involved.
But then there are other tests. Today was vocabulary. I refer to a vocabulary test as a “baby test.” Forgive me if you don’t want a baby associated with a vocabulary test, but COME ON! This is Honors English we are talking about here. The students get 20 words on Monday, homework is due on Wednesday, and a test is Friday. The homework is completing the sentences, synonyms, antonyms, and choosing the right word. Pretty basic stuff. The homework familiarizes them with the words for the test on Friday. The test is nothing more than their 20 words, spelled out alphabetically on the left-hand side, and the definitions of these words on the right-hand side. There are no tricks. The definitions are almost directly from the book. All they have to do is match the definition to the word. No spelling. Just matching. They have three minutes. Good students are done in around a minute.
Today, students did okay, but there were scores of zero, two, two, three, four . . . Really? Okay, maybe they had a bad day and weren’t ready for this. It might be new behavior. However, many of the students who received a poor score on the vocabulary test did not miss any on the homework. Forty problems, forty correct. Today, the same students could not match the same definitions to hardly any vocabulary words.
I also had them turn in a paper on Oedipus, or Sophocles, or Antigone. Anything they could find online that would provide a backstory for Antigone, which we start on Monday. ALL the text they would have would be copied and pasted. The only original words would be the name, date, period, and title. But I tested them again, making sure they followed simple directions of how to format the paper. Inch margins, 12 font, Times New Roman–they’ve probably known the drill since 4th grade. To add insult to injury, I gave them a perfect example–handed to them as a direction sheet–that they could follow line by line. Out of 65 students, 21 did it correctly. Was I being mean to ask for it to be done a certain way? Sure. But they were given exact directions that were not hard and only a third did it correctly.
Two papers would have counted and made the number 23, but the two students who turned in those two papers, turned in the exact same paper, except for the name, date, and period. Bad move, but that was their test of me. I passed. I am not thrilled that I passed, but such is life.
This behavior has been acceptable in their pasts. Calgon, take me away.

Sometimes you let your students have the stage. They spoke today, told stories, made their peers laugh, made them feel sad, and their audience made noises that you don’t hear in real life.
Pretty fun, whether they think so or not. Got to learn how to speak, and they’re pretty good at it without my help.
So far, I have 57 seniors who all have A’s. The reason is simple–I give them work that reflects the class and their media-savvy lifestyle, and they all do the assignments well, have different answers, don’t cheat, and agree to disagree, when necessary. They had five or six of those assignments over the summer, so everyone came to school with an A. I know once we “read” a book that their grades will plummet, but, for now, every assignment I’ve given has been done by every student.
Sometimes, I just sit and let them get it done. So far they have.
A long time ago at Long Beach Poly, the administration let us have business cards for free. I was Tom Stover, Provider of Knowledge. It was a joke then, but I’m not sure why. Provide some knowledge, spark some curiousity, which leads to learning, which (I THINK) is what everyone wants.
Or maybe they sit and think (and think and think and think).

Oh my GOODNESS, the minutiae of teaching.
Late start yesterday to go over strategies for teaching sophomores. Not sure if people are going to do them, but we have strategies in place.
Department meeting today. Old books need to go (hello, Ray Bradbury), if kids didn’t do their summer reading work give their name to the RTI coordinator.
Teachers giving summer reading a minimum of points and wondering why kids don’t do it. When you tell us all that a book check and syllabus whatever are combined to be the same points as summer reading, maybe you should reconsider. After all, summer reading is read a book, find an article you can tie in to the book, tie that article in, all why focusing on certain literary aspects of the book. For that, 10 to 15 points, around 1 percent of your semester grade.
Data has been gathered from the bootcamp questions–no one talks of it.
At least 10 emails a day.
Club week, so kids are here, there, everywhere.
Okay, so we’re doing a narrative lesson unit, but kids aren’t writing one. I realize it’s hard to grade papers, but that’s kind of the job title. Peer editing is not a teacher’s guidance.
Meetings for this task force. Meetings for this leadership team.
Crazy idea–maybe less minutiae would give teachers more time to (wait for it) teach their students. Don’t want to sound bitter and old here, because I am always willing to change and update and adapt/adjust, but this week is only three days in and I’m tired.

Teaching is a weird gig. One day, my students will have me turning grayER, the next they’ll be little angels, ready to learn. So they did bad on a quiz. I just wanted data from it to see what they knew (some of them? not so much). And now that has become the past.
We moved along. We laughed at their short-term memories. We told stories and things got better (at least for me). If a teacher can’t move past things, it’s going to be a tough year. It’s still going to be a tough year, but we’ll move forward.

I gave my sophomore kids a diagnostic test today. Multiple choice/things they should know. It didn’t really go as well as planned and, by that, I mean it went poorly. “The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words” got 50% correct answers. That’s alliteration. “Rhyming the vowel sounds in the middle of words” got 50% correct answers. That’s assonance. And these are kids in honors English, which is why I chose not to cap honors.
Of my 30 regular kids who turned in a paper (one chose not to) 20 out of 30 missed the alliteration question, 22 of 30 missed the assonance one.

I used to lay blame in places, but I go back to previous posts. A kid can only get so many free passes. The olive branch can only be extended so many times. At Day 9 I sit at the crossroads and wonder what the next 171 days have in store. I read their writing this weekend–it was just fine. And then there’s 33% on an alliteration question. MIXED SIGNALS. But, once again, their writing is fine, which means you have to DRILL AND KILL these terms in their heads. It’s like math. If you don’t know what eight times seven is, you are doomed by 3rd or 4th grade. Learn it over and over, practice it, and perhaps it will stick.

Luckily for me, I speak to my students. Tomorrow I will ask them what’s what. Really? You’re a sophomore in high school and don’t know what alliteration is? In multiple choice format? The other choices were repetition, onomatopoeia, assonance, and imagery. I suppose if they knew their lit terms that they might think repetition of consonant sounds could be repetition. After all, it has the same word in it. And onomatopoeia deals with sounds, as does assonance, and imagery. But if you knew these things, you would also know the answer was alliteration. Really rough ’round here.

My students watch Youtube videos of Matty B and Jacob Sartorius. I will include the latter so you can vomit a little in your mouth. Everyone thinks cussing in songs and adult themes are the cause of problems in this world–I argue that the damned will be punished in Hell by having to listen to these children fulfil their parents’ dreams. Not for the squeamish. Oh, and 30 million views.
http://https://youtu.be/IvxRsDpXPGo

Today was a bad day at work. The only thing that made it thus was my inability to have a Plan C, which I usually don’t have to have.
Plan A was simple–import quizzes that I wrote into classes that I teach and have students take said quizzes. Didn’t happen. Cursors just spun and nothing was imported. Bummer.
Plan B was simple–finish poems and stories and literary terms, since plan A didn’t work. Some classes put up with it, others did not. Not sure I blame them. I don’t think I sold it too well, but I get tired of always having to sell it.
Plan C was not present. Really, though, I never need a plan C, but I did today. Lesson learned.

We start Antigone and Greek Tragedy and the Oedipus Cycle (though we only read Antigone) this week. That is always fun and does not require a Plan C. One kid today knew who Oedipus was, and he’s a transfer from another school. Some things never change. One of the hardest parts of teaching for me is that nothing surprises me. Yes, kids say funny things, or I do, and we laugh at the surprise. But I can tell you how most days are going to go this year, who’s going to get what grade, what students won’t understand, and where I have to help them.
I don’t mind the last part–I like helping kids, but English should be different. There should be those who rise above it all, who come through when I have sold them short because others before me have scarred them, who do something that didn’t happen last year, and the year before that.
Monday! We’re usually better than today.
At least we have Nick Cave.
https://youtu.be/LWSDIpSg2b0

How do I start my own high school?

No. Really.

So, it was an assembly day today, which throws off everything. Kids are everywhere at once, or not at all, but there’s an assembly and the classes are shorter. For all that, not much happenened that was interesting.
I knew I didn’t have much lunch today–there was only a sandwich in my bag–so i took two bananas this morning, figuring the additional banana could take the place of something bad for me, like chips, or cookies, or both. My next-door teaching neighbor walked in, and because I wasn’t feeling like eating two bananas, I offered him one.
“Hey, I have two bananas. You want one?” I asked.
He said no.
I told him, “Hey, man, it’s got enough potassium to get you through the day. And I got two.”
He said, “Yeah, you got today covered for your potassium, but what about the rest of the year?”
“I’m gonna need a lot more bananas for that,” I said.
“There are not enough bananas,” he said.

We speak in riddles that have no solutions.

Gosh, I feel like I’ve thrown some shade just from the title of this post. Not true at all.
Chelsea Ha went to North High School for a little over a semester in her sophomore year (she came late), all of her junior year, and 5 days of senior year. She checked out yesterday. I don’t know any of the particulars, have no idea what school she’ll be attending in the future, or if this was just some move that had to be made and she’s actually working her way back to North High. But it doesn’t matter.
She was never my student, though she should have been. Simple story–when she came to school she got put into my wife’s speech class, which does not get many sophomores. My wife quickly put together that Chelsea was pretty talented and told her counselor to put her into Honors English, which I teach. Her counselor was also quick to note that Chelsea had not received all A’s at her previous school(s) and by not moving her into my class she was doing me a favor by keeping my workload down and keeping Chelsea at a level where the counselor had figured she belonged. Never mind that my wife had taught at North for 20 years, had classes of Honors and AP English and was the GATE coordinator for years. A quick scan of some C’s at some other school was the deciding factor, and it’s not like Honors English is the end-all/be-all.
Last year, as a junior, she took AP Language and got a 5 on the test (that’s the highest score you can get). But that was not her biggest achievement. In November she got to go back to New York to participate in the annual TED Youth Conference. She was one of five high school students who got to do this. IN THE WORLD. My wife had her in Speech, recorded her speeches (as she recorded everyone’s), sent them in to TED, and TED picked her to speak at their event. One of five in the world. TED flew her and her family back to New York for the extended weekend, all expenses paid. They flew my wife out and gave her a room, but it was just her.
Chelsea spoke, got to see New York, hung out with others in the TED world–my wife got to participate with other educators and learn new things and be immersed in a world of innovation and cutting-edge technology.
And, yeah, my wife still is a big deal with TED. She went to Banff this summer for TED Summit and now can host TEDx events. Chelsea is featured on TED’s YouTube channel and her image sometimes comes up when I’m searching for things TED. There might be more that she has going, but TED Youth was a big deal, it was a big deal that she was one of five picked, and that she came from just some old public high school in Torrance.

There may have been some recognition for Chelsea long after the fact on our daily bulletin, but that’s not the recognition you want (you can search NHS bulletin on YouTube and make up your own minds). My wife sent numerous emails to our administration singing Chelsea’s praises and what a positive moment this was for her and the school. None of those emails were returned. One in five in the world equalled no response from administration.
I asked Chelsea at the end of last year if the school had done anything to acknowledge her achievement, something that no one else in our area has ever done. Did they roll out any carpet? give her a lunch with the bigwigs in the district? make a plaque? trophy? Surely they used her in photo-ops to make themselves look good.
She said the principal saw her in passing in the office and shook her hand. Nothing else.

And so, Chelsea is gone. She could not say goodbye to my wife because she is gone, too.

As Vonnegut would write–so it goes.