Last Monday was a low. Tuesday was worse in a way because on Tuesday I was determined to put Mighty in check. As if her behavior wasn't bad enough, I started feeling like she was rubbing off on other students, particularly Bub. Bub is a quiet boy, seems pretty bright, definitely has language barriers and that makes him resistant to any kind of reading and writing that I've observed. He'll try with short passages but anything longer than a short paragraph and he just won't work. For the past week, he'd been barely doing anything in class. And on Monday, he kept turning around all the time to talk to Mighty. On Tuesday, she was starting to be a little sassy but hadn't really done anything yet.
But Bub started showing a bad attitude. He wouldn't work on assignments, even when I repeatedly was directing him. Then I saw he was chewing gum. Not such a big deal but it is a school policy not to chew gum. So I told him to spit out his gum. "No." Excuse me? "It's my only piece." (And my inner thought is do you think I give a shit?) I repeat my instructions to spit it out. He refuses. I offer him the choice of spitting it out or having a consequence (having to write a note about what he's doing that is against the class/school rules and how he can fix the situation) and then spit out the gum. He refuses. I say "you can swallow it, spit it out, or put it in your pocket." He says "you gonna wash my pants for me?" We go back and forth way too much because I'm thinking two things: 1) this is so stupid, it's just a friggin piece of gum, but 2) he's testing me just like Mighty has been and at some point I need to put my foot down and issue consequences so that everyone knows I'm serious. I even say directly to him "do you want to tell the principal why you won't spit out the gum? Do you want to get kicked out of summer school?" to which he says in fact he does. I tell him that's a stupid decision and that he's smart and capable and I know he can do it but he has to try and he also has to follow our rules. He refuses again. I say don't make me make an example of you because I will send you to the office for this insubordance. He says he doesn't care.
I walk out into the hall to see if someone will walk down there with him (I didn't know I could just send them with a note yet). My Faculty Advisor is about to walk in to observe me and asks what's the problem with Mighty. Not her, Bub won't spit out his gum and won't follow my instructions. She walks in, tells him to spit out his gum, he says "it's my only piece," she says he has til the count of 3 before she pushes the panic button (the panic button!) next to the front door and asks the office/the police officer on duty to escort him to the office. She gets to 3 and as she finishes "3" he's standing, but she's already pushed the button. So, yeah, he gets escorted out by the principal and doesn't come back, that day or since.
The mood in the class was somber to say the least. Eventually Mighty is pissed about this episode and erupts and storms out, taking herself to the office. She is eventually sent back into the room and sulks the rest of the class period. So later I go to the office and talk with the principal, which was helpful I guess. I basically have permission to send Mighty to the office at the next sign of disrespect or misbehavior. She's a special case. As far as Bub, he was sent home and apparently expelled from summer school. Which sucks. It really sucks. I feel pretty guilty about it even though my FA keeps telling it was his choice. So much for "I am the instruction leader of my classroom. I am the behavioral leader of my classroom." chants that we have to do in our sessions.
Since that, however, Mighty has been behaving. She still didn't do much work -- except group work, especially if she gets to move around -- but she also didn't erupt or misbehave. And I hate to feel that my expectations of her are low but when all the staff at her middle school are saying well as long as she's not disruptive, you're doing fine and just leave her alone, or she's just a special case and needs much more help than you can give, it's hard to think "well, at least she's being quiet so other kids can learn" because that excuses her from work. That lowers my expectations for her ability to succeed. That makes me wonder if that's what other teachers have done in her past. Given up on her. Been satisfied as long as she's pacified. And I don't want to do that but it's so tempting. Because when I don't have to be on her all the time, or worried about how to handle her misbehavior, the whole classroom and my experience teaching feels so much better.
So the week went by. My lessons are getting better. I tried to include more interactive pieces, even though those feel less "objective aligned" to me, but the kids get so much more involved if it's even remotely game-like or involves them getting out of their seats. This group doesn't seem so fond of partner work but movement activities, a definite yes. So I think that I'm slowly improving. It's frustrating though because I am so self-critical and because I can see all these ways I can improve but don't necessarily have the 1) time, 2) energy, 3) mental capacity, 4) desired levels of support, and 5) desired modeled examples, to improve. How many aspects of my teaching can I improve in a day? can I even address in a day? When there are 50 things for me to do better, and maybe I can improve on 1 a day, that's great... but there are still 49 to go.
The weekend was soooooooooo needed. We had no school on Friday for the 4th and I did very little. Slept half the day. Went to a movie with friends. It was gray and pouring rain all day. I've never seen rain heavier than in Houston. It was so depressing. Our day off and it's raining. Typical. But it's hot out and raining, which is new for me. Luckily the storm blew off by evening. Then we watched the fireworks from the parking garage on campus. We were too lazy to even go downtown to see the fireworks, but I didn't really feel like being swarmed by the Houston crowd. Saturday I went with some gals
to Galveston to the beach. The outing was good: we went in one cute shop and then just sat on the beach. I'm the only one who didn't get burned (yeah SPF 45 with frequent applications). However the beach was a little... gross. It looks like you're just in a desert and then suddenly there's a sandpatch about 30 feet long and then the murky ocean. Out in the distance was an oil rig of some sort. And the air is always hazy. Something about it just felt a little dirty. Especially when I walked down the beach and saw a little boy (maybe 7-8 yrs old) who'd dug out a pond about 5 feet from the waves. In the pond were about 3 medium fish that he'd caught. They were alive but in barely enough murky sandy water. One of them he had lying beside him in the sand. And he's sitting in this gross fish water playing with these half dead fish. He picks up the one beside him and puts it back in the water and the poor thing is barely breathing and floating on its side and he's just poking it. Yuck. What the hell. Why are the parents just sitting there drinking beer and letting their kid play with yucky fish?!Anyhow, Sat night we went out, tried to go dancing but it was a no-go. Only one of the gals wanted to dance, the others just wanted to drink beer at the pub next door to the bar. And at the bar my friend and I were hit on by middle age attorneys who were not at all interesting, classy, polite, or attractive. Their line to insert themselves into our conversation was "are you with the 80's party? (Does it look like we are, buddy?) Or the bachelorette party?" We say neither. "Well what good are you?" WHAT?! And then his buddy and he proceed to try to chat with us about Houston. No thanks. We ended up just drinking a beer and chilling, which was fun too. The nights are warm here, it's incredible. I've only worn a jacket once and that was Friday because it was pouring rain.
Yesterday, Sunday, I sunk into my Sunday depression, the "oh shit, now I have to lesson plan and think about the week ahead" feeling that just makes me wish more than anything that I was home, that I was back in Oregon, back doing a job that I was good at, that I didn't have to stress so much about on the weekends (at least not most of the time), back with people I love and places I love to go. But whatever. The day came and went and I was busier than I thought I'd be, which happens to me here. I think, oh no problem, I'll just bust out these lesson plans and then they take FOREVER. Plus I had to write each of my kids a note about their essays with some direction on how to revise.
But I did come up with a more interactive way to go over editing marks and editing today: I made these cool flashcards that served both as an interactive way for them to take notes on one
side about the cases in which you'd use the symbol and correcting a sentence (all my example sentences used one of their names so each person had at least 2 sentences about him/herself) and on the other side was the symbol which they could then hold up later in class when we edited a paragraph together (by symbol I mean like the little sign you put when you want someone to capitalize a letter... yeah that's actually in the state of Texas's objectives for 7th grade writing... whatever... they're working on editing their final draft of a personal narrative but all of my lessons have to be objective aligned to something from the state so there it is). And the kids actually got into it. I think they also know how to use these symbols pretty well so it was mostly review for them but that let them feel confident about it.AND... the craziest thing happened today. I don't even know how to comprehend it...
Mighty participated. No, not just participated, she was engaged in it. She offered answers. At one point, when I was trying to get her to tell me what correction needed to be made to a sentence and she was struggling, instead of shutting down, instead of saying "IDK" for "I Don't Know," she actually said something like "I'm not really sure I understand what you're getting at." I was BLOWN away. Then (!) she did her in class assignment. AND she didn't rip up the note I gave her like she did last week -- though I had a cool backup plan if she ripped it up, which would have either made her laugh or made her punch me in the face. I was going to have a stack of Post-It notes with positive messages and if she ripped up my note, I was going to slap a Post-It on her desk. And if she ripped that up, I was going to slap another down. Over and over until she either cracked a smile or she looked like she was getting worked up. But, unfortunately? fortunately?, I didn't have to. In fact, when I, yet again, went to talk to her about her final essay (and her lack of work on it so far), she wasn't backtalking. I even suggested she could write about Lil Wayne because I know she likes him and at this point, if she turns in any writing whether or not it's personal narrative, I'll be excited. And by the end of the independent work time, she showed me a whole brainstorming cluster. WOW. I told her to bring me two paragraphs tomorrow because she is so far behind on work, so we'll see what happens but really WOW.
On the other hand, I feel like I'm letting another student down. Andy also is struggling to do work in class. Apparently he has anxiety attacks. He nearly had one in my class earlier this summer and last week had to leave school for one. And as much time as I try to spend guiding him while the others are working, as soon as I walk away to let him work, he just sits there, despite how many times I try to offer assistance or remind him to work. He just looks so stuck and overwhelmed but how can I make it easier than "Andy, you said you wanted to write about fishing and you said you wanted to talk about kinds of fish. So I want you to write 'Kinds of Fish,' good job, now I want you to write a list of 3 kinds of fish. Let's start there." Nothing. And I should have gotten his home phone number today and called home. I should've. But I didn't. Because honestly I'm insecure about it. I'm not sure what to say. Your kid isn't doing work. He's bright. He answers questions correctly verbally all the time. He seems to get it. But he has such a resistance to reading and writing, especially writing about himself. At first I thought maybe it was just an excuse, now I don't know. I just don't know how to help him and at this point he's failing if he can't write something. So I'm asking another teacher who's free during my period if she can come in and work one-on-one with him while I do peer review with the others. Because there are lots of kids who need my help. There's another girl, Diane, who writes on what I would think of as a 2nd or 3rd grade level. Even talking to her, developmentally she seems behind her peers. How do I help both these kids at once when I really feel like they need some individual help, while also helping all the others? And I only have EIGHT kids right now!
So there it is. I'm now getting a solid 5.25 hours of sleep but it helps me process to write and it helps me to feel slightly more in touch. Not really though. I feel like a bad friend and daughter and sister to everyone. I have these small slots in the day of availability, or am out of cell phone range like this weekend, or am just exhausted and feel like talking to people requires so much explanation of what's going on and reflection and I just want to forget about it because all I do all day is think about this. And it sucks.
But institute is almost over. I have to move out on Saturday and I'm headed back to the RGV (the Rio Grande Valley) and since I now have no placement, will move back into the dorms I was in before and they put me up for 4 nights while I'm supposed to look for housing. But without knowing where I'll be, given that our region is a 2-hr drive from the farthest west city to the farthest east city, how can I know where to plan to live? I still have to call me to-be roommate and let him know that I probably won't be living with him. Such a bummer because I was really excited about. But I just have no way of knowing right now what will happen. I really don't want to end up in Brownsville, which is right near the gulf. It just seems such much... uglier there than the west valley where I was going to be. Now I really want to be in the more rural west valley, but I have no say. It is out of my locus of control, as they say. I'm just trying to focus on Michael Franti's lyrics "I let go of my broken dreams, I let go to the mystery..." which is hard, especially for me and the way I've wanted control over my life and felt anxious about the unknown. It's very very hard. But in a way, I feel like I asked for that. I asked to become more flexible, less anxious about the future and the unknown. I asked for it about 7 or 8 months ago at least. And, oh, I've gotten opportunities to learn and to change, that is for sure."I let go of my broken dreams, I let go to the mystery..."
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