Summer school has ended, which means posting will be quite light until the school year begins ~Aug. 25 (school doesn't start until the 2nd, but training will begin prior to that).

Here are some observations that came out of summer school:

Students do not like to be called on their behavior. Yes, this should seem obvious, but it's a little more counterintuitive than that. While students might pretend that they don't know that they're doing anything wrong (e.g. a student is talking with his/her friend during work time, but they're also done with their work), they know that they're supposed to be meeting my expectations, and they are failing to do so. In all honesty, I think it's embarrassing for them to fail to meet expectations. The rub, though, is this: I need to find a way to keep expectations so high that students, even when falling short, will still act appropriately.

All students can learn. This is one of those buzzworthy catchphrases that gets used by the most progressive of progressive educators. There are problem students, students with behavioral disabilities, and students with learning disabilities. There are students who know better, students who know nothing, students who go to bed hungry and wake up starving. The myriad students have myriad problems, and life keeps blundering forward without them. Except. Except that teachers can slow life down, can push them into the crowd. Perhaps we cannot teach them how to run, but at least we can teach them how to fall forward and let the momentum of the crowd push them along until they can get their own footing.

I may have spoken of this student before, but one of my precious little petunias made so much progress by the end of the summer that I couldn't help but be a little teary-eyed when I saw her test scores. This is a student who had no desire, no will, no visible ability. But we worked with her, pushed her, kept her moving when she wanted to stop, and by the end of the summer she had gone from understanding naught to getting a 96% on her test. It took a lot of work, a lot of frustration, a lot of elbow grease. I would finish working with her and just sit in my chair with my eyes staring at the ceiling because I was exhausted from explaining. But she did the progressives proud, even though she was LD and ADD and whatever other acronyms they wanted to append to her name.

I'm going to get pissed off, but I need to keep my temper. I'm usually on a pretty even keel. I don't like to get mad, and I truly enjoy working with students. But students know how to push buttons, and that's something I need to keep in my cortex. Even when I worked in Korea I had this problem, and those students were positively angels compared to what I've dealt with here. Students will eventually insult me, my family, my future children, my car, my clothing, my way of walking, my way of talking, my sense of humor, and pretty much everything else there is about me. I have to maintain a sense of balance in all of this, though, and realize that what they say doesn't matter. Tough to do, indubitably, but possible.


More observations later this week...

With all that's going on right now, I must say that I'm impressed that I somehow figured into a student's journal entry in her writing class. My precious petunia of a student got it into her head that I was treating her differently from every other student in class, so she decided to write about it instead of stab me. Or at least that's what I figure her two choices were.

Here is what happened, as far as I can recall: This industrious little ibis brought her cellular telephone to school (so many sixth graders to call, so little time...). Being that it's summer school, students get a little more leeway with respect to this, but that doesn't mean they can have their phones sitting out in the open during class.

When I saw the phone, I asked the little angel to put the phone away. As it happened, this clever student had dressed herself in athletic shorts this morning, so she didn't have a way to put her phone in her pockets. I told her that I didn't care that she had decided to wear clothes that were particularly impractical for both storing telephones and ballroom dancing, but that she had to put it away somewhere I couldn't see it anyway. Another student offered to hold it for the hour, but this precious petunia thought option Double-Q Lamda B, to put it between the pages of her notebook, was the best option. I told her that it was fine to put it there, but to make sure I didn't see it.

So what happened when I walked by her desk again? Of course the phone was sitting out right on the table. Being the strict disciplinarian that I am, I grabbed the phone and put it in my pocket, and immediately told her that I would give it back to her at the end of class, but no earlier.

She huffed and puffed, acting as though I had treated her differently than any other student. At the end of class, I returned the phone to her, as promised. I thought the issue was over, but her writing teacher let me know that she had said rather unkind things about me in her journal, which the teacher had read aloud in front of the class. The teacher, of course, didn't read the entry prior to reading it aloud, so the whole class was able to hear about my treacherous nature.

Boys and girls, today we have a problem. I'm currently teaching division at LoLMEECoA, and it's starting to frustrate me. Dear readers, nobody has drilled these kids on their multiplication tables.

I used to think that drilling and repetition of things like multiplication tables, single-digit subtraction and addition, and the various other math drills that we halfheartedly repeated in elementary school were relics of a time when teachers didn't know any better. Problem is, those drills prepared us for higher math.

I can instantly tell you the product of any two one-digit numbers, and drilling in elementary school (along with my grandparents giving me a plastic game/contraption that had all the times tables from 1-9 on semi-opaque square buttons, and which would show me the product when I pushed down on each semi-opaque button). My students, well, let's just say that they have a hard time telling me what the word "product" means.

We're currently working on division in my classes, and it has been a disaster up till now. I guess disaster is a vague word. Let's say it's more '89 SF earthquake and less huge tsunami in the Pacific. Given that my students don't know their multiplication tables, they have a tough time with division. "Tough time," in this context, means that I can sit at their table for 45 minutes working on two simple division problems (I'm talking single-digit number into triple-digit number) and by the time they're finished they still don't know why the answer is what it is.

Monday was the first time I've been so exhausted by class that I just wanted to crawl into bed and pull my legs up to my chest and fall asleep afterward. Attempting to teach division to kids who can't do multiplication is like trying to teach the Hindenberg blimp not to explode: You know it wants to not explode, but it's just so full of hydrogen and there are so many damn sparks flying around, it's gonna explode eventually, and people will read about it in the paper. Put another way: I'm trying to show these kids how to write diaries in cursive before teaching them how to spell.

The average session attempting to teach division goes something like this:

Teacher (Me): Alright, what's 156 divided by 3?

My Precious Petunia of a Student: I don't know.

T: Alright, what's the first step?

MPPS: I don't know.

T: What numbers are we dividing?

MPPS: 3 divided by 186.

T: Well, no, you copied that wrong. Look at the board again. Good. We're actually dividing 156 by 3. Do you know what that means? We're trying to find out how many times 3 will go into 156. Okay, first step, can 3 go into 1?

MPPS: Yes.

T: You can put three gallons of water into a one gallon jug?

MPPS: No.

T: Then can 3 go into 1?

MPPS: Yes.

T: (Eyebrow raised in confusion)

MPPS: No, no.

T: Correct. Alright, so let's move over one place. Can 3 go into 15?

MPPS: No.

T: (Confused look)

MPPS: Yes, yes it can.

T: Okay, how many times can 3 go into 15? What's your guess?

MPPS: 20.

T: 20? (Head starting to hurt) 20? But that's bigger than 15.

MPPS: (Confused look) 30?

T: Thir...Ok, let's try to multiply. What's 3 times 30?

MPPS: I don't know.

T: Let's do it on your paper. Ok, 3 times 30 equals.

MPPS: I don't know.

T: Alright, what's 3 times 0?

MPPS: 3.

T: 3?

MPPS: Yes, 3! (exasperated)

T: Ok, then what's 3 times 1?

MPPS: 3.

T: So they're both 3?

MPPS: Yes. (Light bulb) No.

T: So what's 3 times 0?

MPPS: 0.

T: Ok, good. So where do we put the zero?

MPPS: (Puts zero behind a decimal point. Teacher is not quite sure where the decimal point came from, but realizes that the students have been learning about decimals, so the student has just decided to put them everywhere.)

T: Um, are you sure you want to put it behind the decimal? There's no decimal in the problem.

MPPS: Yes. (Studies paper) No.

T: Right, it has to go in front of the decimal. Actually, you don't even need a decimal in this one.

MPPS: Why not?

T: This time you don't, because there's no decimal in the problem. Ok, the zero goes there. So what's 3 times 3?

MPPS: (Looks quizically at paper)

T: Alright, let's count it up. What's 3 plus 3?

MPPS: 5. No, 6.

T: Yes, 6. And what's 3 plus 6?

MPPS: Why do we need to know 3 plus 6?

T: Because that's 3 times 3. We're doing 3 plus 3 plus 3, which is the same as 3 times 3.

MPPS: 3 plus 6 is 9.

T: Good, so what is 3 times 30?

MPPS: Nineteen.

T: Nineteen?

MPPS: Ninety.

T: Is ninety bigger than 15?

MPPS: Yes.

T: So can we put 90 into 15?

MPPS: No. Yes. I don't know. No.

T: (Mouth open)

MPPS: No.

T: Good. Okay, what you have to remember about division is that you can only use the numbers 0 through 9 for each part of the division. It can't be more than 9. So what do you guess? How many times does 3 go into 15? Remember, the most we can do is 9.

MPPS: 9!

T: No, I wasn't. ..I wasn't trying to tell you 9...

(This continues for twenty minutes. Eventually, the answer is determined, but the student doesn't understand why. It is at this point that the teacher seriously considers all of the great times he had at Mackubin Consolidated Widgets of Schenectady, New York. Since great is not an adjective that normally precedes times when referencing the Widgetorium, the teacher starts thinking about Battlestar Galactica, and how he should really finish up Season 3 as soon as possible.)