Once More, Into the Breach

I started this blog for a class back in 2012, when I was working through the University of Michigan's Secondary Masters and Certification (SMAC) program.  SMAC was an aggressive June-to-June program and caused some health and sleep issues, but it was the right step on the path that I've walked for more than a decade now.

I've posted occasionally since then, probably a form of work avoidance, to reflect on what was currently happening while I was the site coordinator for the EMU Bright Futures program at Ypsilanti Community Middle School -- Willow Run Campus.  The record here is far from complete; there are only a handful of postings meant for no known audience other than myself.  I've had plenty of experiences I never wrote about, and looking back at previous entries, there wasn't a clear motive for writing.  I simply had some stuff to say.  This place is the equivalent of screaming into an empty cave.  First, you need to remember the cave exists and go find it.  Then, you need something to scream.  Over the past 10 years or so, those two things haven't often aligned.

Just started my PhD in Educational Leadership at Eastern Michigan University.  One class right now (Educational Leadership in a Pluralistic Society), and it's kicking the rust off my writing chops.  Hence, I'm flipping the lights back on, on this dusty old carousel.  I'm supposed to do two more in the fall, but I think I'm going to call my advisor first.

Oh, speaking of my advisor, DR. KAUTZ: we completed SMAC together, were roommates briefly, and then he moved to NY and got his doctorate.  He was largely responsible for dragging me through the end of SMAC when I couldn't motivate myself to finish my thesis.  Now he's my advisor, who will be largely responsible for dragging me through my dissertation.  

I guess some things do align.

I don't give up (on broken things)

The students groaned when I told them I still wanted to try and complete the 750-piece puzzle we have at the front of the room.  The day before, one student made the mistake of spilling water on the table.  The dry cardboard pieces soaked up the liquid like so many tiny sponges, warping out of shape.  When they tried to dry them off with paper towels, the designs on the front of the pieces peeled away, rendering it useless.

"I don't give up on broken things," I said.  Some students paused, and nodded their heads approvingly.

I don't give up on broken things, particularly people.  Perhaps I am revealing a little too much of myself by admitting that I am often attracted to people with baggage, pasts with stories that include heartbreak, failure, addiction, or loss.  My friends accuse me of having a "Superman Complex," a reckless need to selflessly save others.  I think I can care too much.  I take responsibility over things that I cannot possibly control, and then I am especially hard on myself when it all goes wrong.  I do this because I, too, was broken at one time.  I was salvaged.  I just want to salvage other people, too.

In regards to my program, I've got a couple kids who just aren't getting it.  We've established the basic rules of program with them as clearly as possible.  One student has even been removed from program for a few months and recently let back in after a conversation with their parents and a behavior contract.  Their behaviors haven't changed: they frequently loiter in the hallway or restrooms to avoid participating in program.  They are inattentive and disrespectful when others are talking.  They do not stick with club activities and are frequently on their phones.

I've tried multiple ways to change their behavior: behavior contracts, calling parents, talking to the students personally about what they can do, giving them roles during clubs.  We're still not seeing any significant change.

I believe in the necessity of Bright Futures for my students, especially at our school.  Many have home lives that aren't very safe, stable, or supportive.  We provide a place for students that offers a different childhood or pre-adolescent narrative:  that there is somewhere a student can be loved unconditionally, in a way that facilitates positive development.

So what to do at this point?  On one hand, I have a responsibility to my program to keep things running smoothly and provide the best after-school experience I can for all of my students.  Removing students who are constantly disruptive of our structure is a necessary action.  On the other hand, our program exists to bring students back on track, more socially and emotionally than academic.  If I send these students away, am I really performing the function of our program?

GRIT and Safe Environs

Can ya believe that it's been literally years since I have last explored this space?  Back then, I was a doe-eyed, greenhorn teacher-in-training without any real classroom teaching experience, in the antebellum period before I began student teaching.  It is now March 2015, and a lot has changed.  I have been running an after-school program for Eastern Michigan University for almost three years.  My site is in the very middle school where I substitute taught for the first time, where the kids chewed me up and spat me out and prompted me to put the district on my "DO NOT CALL" list.  I train in Brazilian Jiujitsu.  I salsa dance.

I digress.

Of course, new activity here infers an underlying purpose.  A function.  Myself and my fellow site coordinators are tasked to reflect on our experiences with grit on a semi-regular basis.  They insisted Edmodo, but I thought it was the perfect opportunity to relight the blogging fires.  I'll be posting here and linking my responses.

The prompt is:

In what ways is grit infused (or in what ways can it be infused) with the goals you already have and aim to achieve when providing a safe environment? Reflect on this daily, every few days, weekly, whatever works for you., and share your musings with the rest of the group as well as respond to others' musings.

Considering that we've been bringing in a lot of new students lately, grit and establishing a safe environment is paramount.  I will admit that I feel that we could do a little more at my site to introduce the idea of "grit" to our newer students, and make grit a more central part of our work.  It isn't currently part of our everyday lexicon.  However, I will say that grit is an attitude that my staff and I have to adhere to when creating a safe environment at program.  We have rules and expectations and procedures and consequences that we try to communicate to our students and, when necessary, enforce.  It isn't always the most pleasant task trying to explain to an upset student the consequences of their actions, both personal and social.  On the personal level, inappropriate behavior can damage their reputation with others and develop pattern of counter-productive responses to conflict ("No, Christopher, just because somebody said something rude to you, you do not gain the privilege of retaliation").   On a social level, developing positive relationships with the people around you is an essential skill in society.  How you speak and act with others directly affects how you interact with one another, and positive interactions are necessary to get ahead in life (No, Christopher, it doesn't matter that 'you don't care.'  It's really important to realize that others definitely do.")

Oftentimes, disruptions do not have the best timing.  Transitions in between program activities or in the midst of doing beginning of the day announcements require personal attention, and if a disruption occurs, it is much easier to ignore it and carry on, than to drop what you are doing and address it.  The currents of program flow are sometimes stronger than our duty to positively develop our youth.

Can anyone offer quick and easy ways to address inappropriate behavior and instill a sense of grit within staff members (and site coordinators) who, at this point in the year, can be feeling a little burned out?

Check it

You can't just push away uncertainties; you have to push through them.

~Jeff Stanzler

14

14 hour day yesterday. Arriving at the high school at 7:00AM, doing the student teacher thing, and then staying through the end of parent/teacher conferences was a bit of a struggle. I wasn't told that my mentor is typically the last to finish his conferences, well past the allotted time. I guess it comes with the territory -- he teaches three AP classes and two history classes that students need to graduate. While sitting next to him and shuffling progress reports, I looked around the gymnasium and noticed that his queue was easily the longest. I attribute this to two things:

1. AP classes are hard, and many parents are concerned about their kids' grades
2. my mentor teacher scoffs at the "6 minute conference" rule.

Regarding the second point, I support his decision. You can't cut off a worried parent nor try to get through to a kid in front of his parents in 6 minutes. Let's face it, if it took just 6 minutes for students to be metacognitive about their behavior and study habits, a lot of students would not be failing. Sometimes I think that the teenage mind is in a chrysalis-like state. Their identities are still manifesting inside of some hard and crinkled cocoon. The problem is, it can be hard to get through to them because you somehow have to penetrate said cocoon. Also, that is the second reference to cocoons I have used on this blog. Happy Cocoon Day.

I was thankful to see the whole spectrum: the aggressive, "why-is-my-perfect-child-failing-your-class," "i-can-do-a-better-job-than-you" parent; the misbehaving kid who thinks he is hotter than magma, accompanied by his take-no-nonsense mother (My mentor really leaned into him. Best line: "What you do doesn't just reflect on you. When you do bad, you don't just make yourself look bad, you make your mom look bad, and everyone else who wants to see you succeed. You don't want to do that, do you?" SMOKED.); the conference where the kid is so worried about his grades and his parents' reactions that he bursts into tears; and the three minute chat with the parent of the kid with the highest grade in her class.

I hate to add another hat to the pile, but as a teacher it is completely necessary to be a diplomat. We need to be able to diffuse potentially volatile parents but still stand our ground and communicate that there are certain things that their child needs to comes to terms with before they can be successful. We need to have the savvy to convince a poor student to change his ways, cut the crap, but still inspire them to persevere. We need the empathy to build up the confidence of the kid who is failing, to make them understand that regardless of the letter grade they are receiving, we believe in them and know they can improve, as long as they keep trying.

Keep trying. My brother sent me this link the night before my fourteen-hour day, when I was up exceedingly late wracking my brain over just how I was going to teach about the Muslim caliphates. In a nutshell (or a cocoon, maybe), it's about how success often does not come without failure. The money line is at the end:

But despite their many advantages, Randolph isn’t yet convinced that the education they currently receive at Riverdale, or the support they receive at home, will provide them with the skills to negotiate the path toward the deeper success that Seligman and Peterson hold up as the ultimate product of good character: a happy, meaningful, productive life. Randolph wants his students to succeed, of course — it’s just that he believes that in order to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.

I can't tell you how much this struck me. Maybe because I understand the gravity of that lesson -- the first-hand experience of failure, and then, the process by which we dust ourselves off and find the necessary strength to rise above.

So I went in that day, ready to teach about the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the qualities of a good empire, and the reason why empires fall. I made a handout. Also, I completely bombed it. It was awful. If you don't believe me, I recorded it. Yes, there is a video record of me failing to teach why empires fail. This lesson had many levels.

But I took that failure, and over the next two hours, tweaked the lesson, and come 4th hour, I was able to reach my teaching objective. The kids knew what I was trying to make them understand, and the best part about it was, I didn't tell them what I wanted them to know. They figured it out on their own.

It was weird then, talking to their parents later that day during conferences. Well, I actually didn't say anything. My mentor did all the talking. But if I did say something, I would have told my 4th hour students that the lesson today was the result of me failing. By failing, I was able to troubleshoot my weaknesses, and then go back and repair them. School -- heck, life in general -- ain't about succeeding. It's about improvement. We must measure our worth not by how high we go, but how far we have come.

And to my 1st hour students, I would have told them I'm sorry. And to read their textbook.

SES

I'm in EDUC 606 (Educational Psychology) and we're talking about SES. We were just asked if we knew what "SES" meant. I do:

I love the eternal relevance between education and Korean pop music.

Teaching my first lesson (and b-boying)

Taught a brief lesson for the first time today. I think I stressed about it entirely too much. My mentor had me teach a theme in Chapter 6 in his AP World History classes. I never really took a world history class, so to speak. I mean, Ive had classes that covered specific areas in the world, like Imperial China, and narratives of colonized peoples do provide insight into historical world events -- but not always in a popular manner. Therefore, I was slightly worried that these high schoolers would absolutely destroy me with their history knowledge. I spent much of my preparation reading whatever I could find on the topic at hand: Ancient Indian civilization.

I hope this isn't news to you when I say that India is freaking huge. Maybe not geographically, but their history and their people are hella deep. Not to say that other histories are not as deep, but I was supposed to figure out how to teach a succinct, 10-15 minute lesson on ancient India and all of its deepness. It was like standing at the edge of a chasm.

Luckily, I settled on a topic that I felt could be explored within my allotted time frame: the Varna system. Basically (and please do destroy me with your knowledge if any of this is inaccurate), the Varna system was a social order based on the Vedic religion, divided into strict classes. My focus question was "How did religion organize ancient Indian society?" The takeaway for my students was to understand how the Varna system set occupations to specific groups of people. A secondary objective was to teach the students how to make concept maps. I'm not a big fan of concept maps myself, but I have to admit it can be a useful study tool. This was relevant because they kind of have a test on this stuff on Thursday.

After reviewing the varnas, I related them to reincarnation and dharma. I then kind of jumped into doing concept maps as a way to organize all this information (my example above). Once I had explained the concept of the concept map, I assigned a concept map explaining ancient India's diversity. It was a little difficult for me to actually come out and say I was assigning something, like I was pulling the trigger on someone's grade.

I guess it went OK. I did it twice, but I have to admit that the first time around felt more natural. I had a plan on what I wanted to do, but for the most part, I freestyled. The second time around, I had a page of comments from my mentor teacher, as well as an appearance by my field instructor to handle. It was less freestyle. I wish I had remembered to push the "record" button during 1st hour, because I would have liked to go back and see the difference.

Regarding freestyle, I think I almost prefer seat-of-your-pants teaching. It's probably not as effective, the more structured 4th hour class' takeaway was that religion was used to control the populace by forcing them into duties and discouraging rebellion (I DID NOT PLAN FOR THAT). My preference for freestyle teaching most likely comes from B-boying and substitute teaching. Both require me to do things on the fly. You could even throw in being a radio DJ in there as well. I guess you could say that my career has consisted of not planning.

Yeah, I know. It's not good. Good planning means a lot of positive things, among them class coherence and classroom management. So I guess my question is, how do I plan a lesson well, while still allowing room for freestyle? Can I have both? Or am I hoping for a contradiction?

Good teaching? Or just dancing?