Absence

As the end of a school year approaches, sometimes you can look back and see a few themes. And one I've been thinking of lately is that of absence, because there are a lot of different ways a student can be absent.

Every year we lose some international students for chunks of time. Our school year doesn't quite align with the school calendar in their home country, so they may arrive in September a couple of weeks late, or take three weeks for their Christmas vacation instead of two.  And this year a couple of our students missed an entire month in second term, spending it in limbo as they waited to hear if they and their families would be accepted as landed immigrants (they were).

And every year some parents pull their kids out for a week or two of school to go on a family vacation. Part of me understands why - it might be the only time both parents can get time off to go to Disneyland, and shouldn't they do it now before their child gets into high school and can't take the time off? The other part of me grumbles because sometimes  the students can't afford to miss the time academically, and I end up working harder than they do trying to get them caught up. Unfortunately, some Gr 8 students are still at a developmental level where they view a poor performance on a test as "I'm stupid" rather than "I missed 2 weeks of school, didn't do the homework my parents requested my teacher prepare for me, and haven't gone in for extra help." Then they shut down. So off I go, chasing them to try to prevent this.

This year, there seem to be a large number of students who miss a day of school every week or two, which adds up over time. Sometimes it's because they have to take care of younger siblings while their parent works. Occasionally, I've been surprised to find, it's simply because the parent wants company! On my bad days this leaves me wondering what kind of value our society places on education. 

Of course, there are absences due to behaviour issues (suspensions), and our team has had more than our fair share of those this year.

But what I find saddest of all, are the students who miss school due to emotional issues. Family problems, depression, anxiety, all these problems bubbling under what on the surface appears to be an empty desk. And on the days that they are physically there, they aren't really present at all.

How do you teach the student who is not there? How do you reach the student who is not there? How do you let them know that this too will pass?

 

Behind the Scenes

It's my fifth year at my school and I'm noticing once again that the longer you stay at a school the more unofficial responsibilities end up in your lap.

For instance, I'm in the only science lab room to have survived the make-over from junior high to middle school back in the mid-90's, so I've inherited the job as guardian of the school's science equipment. Usually this means my class and I will be in the middle of a lesson when two tiny grade 6 students will show up at the door to inform me that their teacher needs 8 beakers (but they don't know what size), three thermometers, and something else their teacher couldn't remember the name of but he drew a picture of it for me, look. Fortunately my class, being typical grade 8 students, looove to talk to each other, and will happily occupy themselves doing so while I dig out whatever it is that the tiny grade 6s are after.

As well, and much to my surprise, this being my second year teaching grade 8 home ec (which in itself is enough of a shock. Ever eaten anything I've cooked? Well, there's a good reason for that) I find myself as one of the two "senior" home ec teachers and in charge of the sewing program (Ever seen anything I've sewed? Well, there's a good reason for that). Consequently, I now know a lot more about fixing aged sewing machines than I used to. My training as a teacher has really come in handy for this because I am able to refrain from cursing even when I've managed to jam a sewing needle behind one of my finger nails. This is why some of the kids not only believe that I live at the school, but that I don't know any swear words either.

This has got me thinking about the other "unofficial" duties that are somehow magically carried out throughout the school year - the powerpoint presentations about student activities that are shown at various assemblies, the art displays that brighten up our hallways and ceilings, the strange games the students "compete" in during spirit assemblies, the miraculously clean staff room (seriously, if you could see the way we carry on in there you'd agree), the chocolate treats that appear in our mailboxes during report card time. I'll bet none of the people responsible for these things know how to swear either...

In the swim

When it's report card time (and, since I'm teaching summer school, it actually is right now) I start to reminisce about teaching swimming, and how it actually made more sense than teaching school does.

* The purpose of the lessons was clear - to learn to swim. There was no blaming the teacher for fostering the breakdown of society because she hadn't taught such-and-such. We were all there to swim.

* Students were in classes according to their level. When they had mastered the group of required skills then they moved up to the next level. Otherwise, they stayed in the same level where they got the practice they needed until they were ready.

* Report cards were checklists of skills and then one anecdotal comment - "It's been fun teaching you. Have a darn swell summer!"

Oh, who am I kidding? Even as I type this I know I'm romanticizing. Sure the skills were set out,  but what signified a "pass" certainly varied depending on the instructor. I remember, shamefully, that for a chunk of my career I was far too lenient about what constituted a pass because I wanted the kids to feel good about what they'd accomplished (that damn symbol of earning a badge) and that some of my students really struggled in the next level because they really weren't ready to be there. That was a difficult lesson for me to learn.

Then I moved to another city, and on to another pool where I encountered my polar opposite - instructors who prided themselves on being tough on the kids and imposed their own higher standards that bore no relation to the Red Cross guidelines. Swimming as boot camp. It wasn't much fun teaching there at times - those instructors kept complaining about me - but I stood my ground and my supervisors ended up siding with me.

As for why we were there, well it was more than just swimming. It was about having fun, and building confidence, and fitness, and better judgement, and making friends, and being creative too.

Why am I semi-pining then? When I write report cards, I worry about the students who haven't "got it" yet - what is it that they need that's still missing, what can I do to help them? And, even with smaller classes, even with a shorter curriculum, it all comes down to time.

If I could just sit with each of them, one-on-one, a little bit longer, maybe I could do a little bit more to get them comfortable in the water, and swimming on their own. More time is what makes sense.

Wake Me Up. Please.

Do people in other jobs have this kind of dream too?

Every teacher I know has the Back to School dream and, this being the last day of spring break, I started having mine last night.

There's the

1. Can't Control the Class dream. The students are running around, standing on desks, throwing things. And you're yelling and waving your arms. And they completely ignore you. The kind of dream where you wake up with a headache and a sore throat.

2. Not Prepared to Teach dream. This one has a few variations. There you are, facing a sea of faces, and suddenly you realise that a) you forgot your lesson plans at home, or b) you forgot to prepare a lesson in the first place, or c) this is a subject area you've never taught before in your life, like Chainsaw Wielding 101. This one always brings back horrible memories of being a substitute teacher.

3. You Can't Get to School on Time dream. You run out of gas. There are roadblocks. You get lost. What at first seems to be the school turns out to be a shopping mall. Or the wrong school. And then the bell rings...

4. You're Not Wearing Appropriate Clothing. Perhaps the least said about this one the better, although I admit I kind of liked the one I had where I was dressed like Elizabeth I (although I soon discovered I couldn't fit through the doorway, which quickly morphed the dream into type #3) 

There are probably others. But I'm too tired to think of them.

 

The Art of the Seating Plan

It's not as easy as it looks, designing a seating plan.

First there are the kids you have to seat as far away from one another as you can, and in my homeroom this year there are a few of those. Sometimes it's due to personality conflicts, and sometimes it's because they get along too well and, consequently, are rarely on task when they're together.

Then there are the kids who can, and are willing to, work with anyone. I love those kind students -- they're the ones who can really pull in the potential isolates and truly make the class a community -- and I try not to abuse their good will, seating them with a friend or two when I can. 

And there are the ESL kids. I want them to be comfortable (which would mean seating them with their language counterparts so they can help each other decode the English instructions) but I also want them to try to be a part of the class (which would mean seating them away from their language counterparts so that they interact with their Canadian peers more often).

I don't have to do this, I realise that. A couple of my colleagues let their students sit where they like, reserving the right to move certain students to another location if they're disrupting the learning of others. And that works great for them.

But I remember my own Grade 8 experience years ago. In September my teacher, Mr Jordan (a fine man and teacher who recently passed away), let us choose a partner to sit with. And I ended up sitting with Dana all year. I only remember him changing the seating plan once, and I didn't end up being affected at all, except Dana and I ended up moving back one position. Sandra and Michelle were still behind us; Lisa and Pam were still in front of us. At the time I didn't mind, but it wasn't until high school that I finally got a chance to get to know some of the other people in my Grade 8 class, and for some of them I wished that I'd had an opportunity to meet them sooner. Might have helped to make walking into a few of my new Grade 9 classes a little less scary.

And so this afternoon, roughly an hour after I started, I've now got two seating plans ready, one for each of my core classes. Some students will be happy, others will complain, but they all know that in about a month I'll be scrambling them up again. 

Barbie goes Bungee-Jumping

Well, for me Barbie was definitely this week’s theme. Our school has an annual literacy conference, this year with a side-theme of numeracy, and I decided to run an NCTM activity called “Barbie goes Bungee-Jumping” which had been recommended by someone on the Middleweb listserv. So I spent early in the week collecting Barbies from various staff members who offered to bring some of their daughters' dolls – I ended up with close to 20, way more than I needed, so that was great.

Then on Thursday, I ran through the activity with both of my own math classes to work out the bugs since I’ve never done this activity before. The lesson, as it is on paper, takes two periods, about twice as long as I would have with the students at the conference, so the run-through helped me think of ways to simplify the lesson. Essentially, each group of kids had a Barbie and a “bungee cord” they made out of elastic bands. Using a long sheet of paper taped to the wall, they dropped Barbie from a certain height and kept track of how far she fell when the cord was two elastics long, four elastics long, six elastics long, etc. Then they had to predict how many elastics they’d need to give her a safe but thrilling drop from 380 cm, which is the height of the first landing in our school’s front stairwell. In the original lesson, this meant they had to create a chart with their data and then create a scatterplot graph, but by the day of the conference I’d boiled it down to them just making the chart and then using that alone to make an estimate (I had a lot of grade 6’s in each group plus a sprinkling of developmentally-delayed kids so that was enough of a challenge for them).

Nobody abused Barbie too much, although I did have a group of grade 8 boys during the conference on Friday who kept undressing their Ken doll. The highlight of each lesson was actually going out to the stairwell and having each group’s Barbie do the bungee jump. Only one Barbie had a severe accident (one of the elastics in the cord broke and she fell), a couple got concussions and sued, and the rest had a safe jump. It ended up being one of the more popular sessions at the conference (I actually had kids trying to sneak into it even though they weren’t registered, definitely a compliment) and a couple of little boys told me it was the best thing they’d been to all day, the perfect thing to tell a slightly-burned-out-because-it’s-February teacher.

 

(Thanks to Peter for getting me to finally post something on here!) 

If You Do It Right, It Never Does

The other day at a pro-d workshop, I overheard a conversation between a beginning teacher and her friend. I have no idea what they were actually discussing about teaching, but I did catch the sentence "it will get easier in a few years once you have more experience."

And you know, as much as I'd like to believe that, I don't think it's actually true.

Take my experience so far this fall. This will be my tenth year of teaching in the public school system, and both my core classes are really nice groups of kids, so start-up should have been a breeze. But no, I feel like I've been in a wind-storm.  

It might be the new classroom. I've figured out how to get around the lack of storage, but not my lack of memory. I'm still "discovering" things I tucked away last June. The constant searching, both for things I know I have but can't remember where and for new things that might be in the classroom archives (or, I should say, cupboards), is definitely slowing me down.

It might be the new subjects. Science 8 isn't new to me but it now has a mostly new curriculum - I know the material but there's a difference between understanding what osmosis is and figuring out an interesting way to help the grade 8's to understand it too.

And I'm teaching ESL for the first time and it's to gr 6/7s. Gr 6s aren't like gr 8s. They like to run around. They like the electric pencil sharpener, far too much. They like to tell on each other (this last bit is fortunate because I don't know any Korean swear words yet. This is changing though) I'm only supposed to teach vocabulary and speaking so I'm gradually learning that if we play games, or if I can make what we're doing seem like a game, then the kids will contentedly work away.

Oh, and did I mention that in late January I'll start teaching Home Economics (and that, frankly, I neither cook nor sew...  To be fair, I volunteered to do this)

It might be that my schedule has changed and I'm now teaching double blocks of subjects rather than the single blocks I taught last year. And I'm rediscovering that, even if you're really short on planning time, you probably can't make a lesson for a double block by simply smushing together two of last year's single block lessons together. 

It might be that I'm on a new team. And I'm one of the team leaders. And that it seems like everytime I think "Oh, this will be straightforward" I realise that the other members of my team didn't do such-and-such that way last year and have very valid reasons for having not done so. Let's rename my position so it's more accurate - it's now Team Follower.

What it all comes down to is that most of the routines I've comfortably established over the past couple of years are now out the window. Despite my weariness (which is slowly evaporating as I rebound and create new routines), this isn't a bad thing. Because I'ver heard this somewhere before (probably on Middleweb) about the idea of teaching getting easier: if you do it right, it never does. 

 

The Things You Discover

(Honestly, I haven't been sick since February. Just the usual run-of-the-mill busyness)

It's surprising what you find when you move into a new classroom.

Due to a series of events (my teaching partner moving on to a new position at another school, my decision to slightly change my teaching subjects), I'm moving into a new classroom.

 It's funny how each classroom in my school seems to come with its own baggage. The classroom I'm moving out of, for instance, is known as the Cursed Classroom. Windowless (aside from a long skylight) and air-conditioned, the room is reputed to have caused partial deafness in the two teacher-residents previous to me, both who developed sinus infections that led to hearing loss.

(So you can see how the sickness that I described in my previous entry seemed to feed into the Curse - she's dizzy, she's nauseous, its her inner ear! Can you hear us Alayne? Hello?)

Escaping that room with my hearing apparently intact, I'm moving into the only science room that survived fairly intact from the school's days as a junior high school. Great! It's big! There are counters! There are sinks! And there are cupboards - totally packed with old science supplies that may or may not be useful. And there are fililng cabinets - totally packed with files left behind by who knows how many generations of teachers. And there are a couple of shelves - packed with binders left behind by the aforementioned teachers.

This isn't a classroom. It's the school's bloody science archives!

So my apologies to my previous teaching partner if I ever insinuated that you were messy. I now understand that the reason you had things piled on the counter by your desk was simply because there was nowhere else to store them.

And get me a shovel. I've got some digging to do. 

 

 

Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?
(Ah, what would we do without The Clash?)

This past week I've been wrestling with the question that every teacher faces - am I too sick to teach?

You'd think the answer to that would be easy enough: in other jobs I've had, staying home sick simply meant that work piled up on the desk until I returned. But with teaching there's a complicating factor - the class(es) of students who need to be taught something by someone.

So instead of it being a simple question, there's in fact a series of questions to be answered:

1) Am I contagious, or physically unable to keep upright or from involuntarily expelling various fluids? If yes, go home; if no, continue to the next question.

2) Am I feeling badly enough that I'm willing to write up a full day-plan and do photocopying for the substitute, and willing to reteach lessons when I get back?

3) Can my classes cooperate with a substitute teacher, or will they duct-tape the poor person to a chair and start swinging from the light fixtures?

4) Can I plan a day where the teaching is less intensive and I can lean against the nearest wall while the students work on their own?

Usually I can get to question 4, and answer yes. Then it's a matter of staggering through the day, heading home immediately after school and going straight to bed. But this week was different - the flu sent me home from school part way through the day on Tuesday (thanks to my colleagues who looked after me), and I've been muddling through ever since. It couldn't have gone any other way - although I'm sure some of my students would have found me vomiting on them to be quite fascinating - but I'm still feeling guilty and out of touch. It will take most of Monday to figure out where my students are, what needs to be reviewed, and what to move onto next.

Who's Who in the Zoo
It's exam time at the local high school, which means some of the grade 9s have been filtering back to visit their old haunts.

Which is fine - I did the same when I was in grade 9 - and I enjoy chatting with them and finding out how things are going. But the other day I had the most disconcerting experience.

My classroom, because of its central location, has two doors that each open on to a different hallway, and as a result it gets used as a shortcut by students (and staff). I happened to be walking into my room from one of the hallways when I noticed about five young women in the room just ahead of me. When they turned to look at me I realised that two of the five were in my homeroom last year, and at least two of the others I'd taught art to.

This was the weird part. Normally when I meet up with grade 9's, even the shyest students will say hello and will stay for a couple of minutes to let me ask them questions about what they're doing now. But these girls, even though they had been quite happy to talk with me last year, now didn't want to talk to me at all.

"We just wanted to say hi," one of them said, and then they turned away and started walking. My attempts to engage them in conversation caused them to stop and just look at me. Finally I gave up and said, "Um, well, enjoy your tour," and they continued on their way out my other door.

They walked by a few minutes later and looked in, and then again a few minutes later yet.

I had the distinct impression of being a display at the zoo or, perhaps more accurately, an historical exhibit. Frankly, it was kind of creepy.

Fortunately, when we took our current grade 8's on their tour of the local high school yesterday, at least three former students came over to say hi. They smiled, they made eye contact, they asked questions and responded to mine.

It feels so much better to be present than past.