March 16, 2011
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The Daily News
1 I ducked the Ides of March beautifully yesterday.
2 Traditionally a lousy day in my life.
3 Won’t go into details, but I just want that thing to fly by unseen, like New Years or April Fools. Some days are just like that.
4 I not only ducked it; I conquered it.
5 We had some sort of testing yesterday. Bubble tests. Those are the tests that require Number 2 Pencils and strict, scripted instructions.
6 Followed by an hour of pure torture for students.
7 It’s GREAT for teachers though, because we can monitor pretty easily AND get papers graded uninterrupted, at work, for like six hours. This is nicer than spending all day every Sunday working.
8 My honors’ kids did fine. They were looking at gettting all SEVENTY questions done in an hour. SEVENTY.
9 They saw it as a challenge, and several wanted to stay after class to complete all seventy.
10 And of course I was proud of their attitudes and almost united work ethic.
11 My support class was completely different. Good kids who really just don’t know how to play the game.
12 In many ways, succeeding with them has been an honor to me. For whatever reason, they just don’t have the basic skills or motivation of the honors’ kids. To me as a teacher, they’re the ones that I could relate to, in many ways.
13 I always hear them say, “I’m a bad kid.” Or “We’re a bad class.” SO sad. I have spent the entire year simply teaching them that they are not “bad” and that I want them to succeed.
14 It’s arduous. But I respect them as young people. A lot of them hate reading, and hate those tests. They love other things, like skateboarding, or makeup, or art. Unfortunately, if you hate reading, you’re going to struggle in school.
15 So I keep teaching them vocabulary, and telling them stories to engage them.
16 And I continually let them know that I respect them.
17 The test they took was designed to see how well they read. It is almost like a thermometer. The more questions they answer correctly, the better they score as a reader.
18 Once the vocabulary becomes intolerable, they tend to fall asleep, or stare off into space in disbelief that anything can be so exquisitely boring.
19 So what happens is they do about a third of the test, or some kids just connect the bubble dots so that if connected, they look like Pokemon.
20 Yesterday I decided that if they stay focused and keep pounding down, that their test scores will increase significantly. I decided that the more answers they do, the better their chances of success.
21 So I would not allow anyone to slack off. One girl threw her hoodie over her head and tried nap time. I walked over and tapped her hoodie with my pencil. She got it, and probably did around four more questions.
22 One guy just stared at his paper like it had torched his village. I just said his name and walked over to him and he got right back to work.
23 It was absolute torture. But they could see that I cared, and that I have respected them all year. They stayed with it.
24 With one minute left in the class, I let up, and said, “You guys DID it!”
25 The one guy who stared at his paper lit up and said, “I am a BEAST!”
26 When they left, they all were exhausted, but I told them that I was WAY proud of them, and that I’m sure that their test scores will soar.
27 I actually have no idea that their test scores will climb. I simply assume that the more answers they seriously attack, the better their odds. It was a test that they took right after summer, the identical test. It is designed to see how much progress they have made.
28 What those tests don’t take into account is how they are monitored. I can guarantee that twenty-three students in the Cathedral (my nickname for my beautiful classroom) and a teacher who is constantly monitoring will do better than the same twenty-three students on the gym floor with a hundred other students. Or the same twenty-three students in a cafeteria with some drone on a microphone, and several gestapo sorts walking around intimidating them.
29 I have to guess we would get a lot more Pokemons in that sort of situation.
30 Overall, in the past week, my support students scored higher on their vocabulary sentences than they have all year, and their last vocabulary test succeeded remarkably because I changed how I structured it.
31 That spilled over to this test, which will be examined by some committee or other.
32 I always tell the students that we are going to be visited later in the year by the WPC.
33 They usually ignore that, because to them, who cares?
34 Inevitably some guy will ask, “What is the WPC, Mr. H?”
35 My answer?
36 White People with Clipboards.
37 Smile.
38 Well, sometimes our biggest conquests happen when we least expect them.
39 In my case, it was on the Ides of March.
40 Miracles come in all sorts of interesting packages.
41 I guess that was mines yesterday.
42 Mines.
43 You have a great day.
44 I just did.
45 It can happen.
46 Peace.
~H~
