Finals and Foreigner

Well it's official. I made my first student cry today. Sure, I've had students cry in class before for other reasons, but this girl today definitely had tears running down her face because of me and my class. This suggested to me today that perhaps I built up this two-day final exam a little bit too much. I felt bad that she was this distraught because of me, and it took about half the day to remember that the reason why she was so worried about failing the final exam was because she only shows up about half the time, almost always tardy. Problem is, though, that she is a really great kid and tries really hard, so I'm really hoping that she can surprise us both and pass this test.

In reflecting on the year, I have a lot of students like her. It seems that a lot could be solved in class if the school culture were improved a bit so that the students would actually feel the importance of making it to school on time - or at all quite frankly. And then of course these students with terrible attendance records act totally offended when I tell them during the test that I can't answer their question, and no, I can't "just check" their work. I want to visit the class where all my students built these expectations of what tests are like in their minds. It amazes me.

I doubt you all care about the humongous countdown I have at the top of the page, but I feel like some days it is my source of life. And yes, I agree that needing a constant reminder of how much time is left probably indicates that I don't really like my job, but we've been having some of the worst behavior problems in class since the beginning of the year. I had a student yesterday break a pencil in six places (which is actually really hard to do) just so that he would have ammunition to throw at a classmate across the room. He was suspended for today, but that's just one more day that he's behind everyone else. I swear this school needs to revamp its discipline system somehow. I think I can handle these antics happening in Algebra, but now even my best class spends a significant amount of class time bouncing off the walls. So giving the final exam today and tomorrow for all my classes at the same time was a great idea. Today my entire day was more or less silent in class, and I expect the same for tomorrow. Unfortunately though I will need to spend the extended weekend thinking of just what I am going to do for all the students that chose to miss the final today for whatever reason. I wonder if I will see them again before school gets out in two weeks. For some of them, I really doubt it.

I'm sure that some of the craziness in class is because the students can tell that I am mentally done with this year. We have a countdown on the board, so they know I'm just as excited as they are, and my case of procrastination is getting more and more severe. It is amazing some days how I could possibly manage to get a lesson put together in time for class. These are my adrenaline-fueled lesson plans I guess. And this is a pretty typical Scott-thing for me to think, but I am going to be so much better planned out next year! My new-academic-year's resolution is to never have to lesson plan the night before ever again.

For now though, the craziness is part of my daily routine, especially when I choose sacrifice lesson planning time for a rock concert. But I will have you know that no lesson plan, no matter how amazing, would have been worth missing seeing Foreigner, Styx, and Kansas playing in the Bay Area, all at the same venue. Kansas was good - a little too vintage for me - and Styx was awesome - despite their hoards of white trash fans - but Foreigner was amazing. Their lead singer sounds exactly the same as Lou Gramm did, and the whole experience reminded me how much I would have loved to live during the Beatles-era onward. Anyway, this whole thing showed me that I really need to get my stuff organized enough so that I can still have a life on weekday nights. For now, that might just mean driving to North Bay to see old rock groups play - Chicago and the Doobie Brothers in three weeks!

Dirty Dancing and Uncensored Music - It's Prom Time

There's something really depressing about having to tell a parent with only two and a half weeks left of school that their child has an F. It's difficult to understand how some parents can be so surprised after an entire year of progress reports and grades being sent home. Unfortunately for some of these parents, they only understand the grade printout I give them, and don't understand enough English for me to explain all the good things that happen in class for their son or daughter. Math is traditionally the lowest performing subject at Richmond High, and as I looked around on Open House Night on Thursday, it seemed as though other teachers were having a lot happier interactions with their visiting students and parents. Of course, I was the only math class in my hallway, but I heard that other math teachers had similar experiences. I think over the summer I might consider brushing up on my Spanish because this night only reminded me that one of my goals for next year is to communicate way more with parents. It's just really intimidating when you know for a fact that the parents on the other end of your phone call do not speak English at all. I realized I really need to get on that next year, in large part due to the sheer number of parents that were in shock that I give homework every night. Apparently it's pretty common for my ninth graders to tell their parents that they don't have any or that they finished in class. I think next year I'll make getting a signature from their parents part of their homework at the beginning of the year.

I'm actually pretty excited about starting the year over in a few months, to start things off with all the proper discipline actions and rules and procedures; I have had a lot of thoughts about "if only I had everything figured out on the first day of school..." Plus, next year our school will be getting about seven new TFA teachers since we have so many leaving. In one year, I will have gone from new, first-year teacher to veteran teacher. In three months, I have to act like I know what I'm doing for all our new TFAers, especially for the two math teachers we will be getting. To tell you the truth, I'm a little bummed I no longer get to be the "new-teacher-that-is-doing-much-better-than-we-did-in-our-first-year" teacher that everyone says to me - either out of truth or just plain courtesy to build my self-esteem. It's just weird that all of a sudden I have enough experience now to give help and constructive criticism to the new guys. I think it's similar to the feeling after being a freshman in high school or college, and realizing that next year you have to flip the mature switch so that you can all talk about how immature the new guys are.

In a nutshell, that's why I really want to get a break from teaching ninth graders - but of course I've been told that next year I'm teaching even more Algebra classes and probably an upper-level math class like Precalculus. I am super excited about the upper math class, and the possibility of teaching some of my awesome students again, but I'm actually pretty pissed that I'm not teaching any Geometry. All I've been thinking about these last few months is how I'm going to organize my materials this summer, and because of that, how incredibly awesome Geometry is going to be. Of course, I've been told what I'm teaching next year about 20 times, all from different sources, and every person has told me something different, so I'm going to assume nothing. Richmond High organizational skills strike again.

That being said, RHS prom was an incredible success. The event was in San Francisco at the SF Design Center, and the venue was actually pretty cool. Thanks to the horrible Homecoming events this year, we were over-prepared with staff chaperones this time, myself included. It's weird to think that we were all surprised that nothing bad happened; although it's much easier to handle the 374 students that were there compared to the couple thousand at school each day. Of course, when I say nothing bad happened, I'm not including the alcohol the students were drinking before and after the dance, and I'm also not including the dance moves that were the equivalent of having sex on the dance floor. And believe me, this doesn't even compare to the "dirty dancing" that my own high school was (and probably still is) familiar with. I was assigned to the third floor of the complex, so I don't know if anything was done about these minor (but not really that minor) things. All in all, having to stand in one place for two and a half hours was incredibly boring.

I had fooled myself into thinking that chaperoning was going to be a little fun, because I went out for dinner with a whole bunch of teachers in SF before our shift started. As it turned out, all the older teachers chose the 6:45-9:30 shift, and all the young teachers took the 9:30-12:15 shift, so we decided to make use of our formal attire beforehand. At dinner, I found out exactly how naive or uninformed I've been all year - they all had the scoop about EVERYTHING that has been going on at Richmond, inside and outside of school. I also learned that young women teachers are as bad as high schoolers when it comes to gossiping, and I think that's where they get the gossip to begin with. Anyway, it gave me an interesting perspective of TFA teachers (pretty much everyone there was TFA) - either we have some very creepy or dangerous characters as teachers at Richmond High, or TFA teachers are overly judgmental. According to dinner table conversation, our football coach at school has sexual harassment problems and deals drugs to students; he is, coincidentally enough, the one the confiscates the drugs from students to begin with, so it all makes sense. There is also a teacher on campus that literally hides students in her room when they don't want to be in their own class - in fact, we have been told to not accept any hall passes from this teacher and a couple other faculty members. It's definitely hard to maintain expectations of a positive learning environment when the staff isn't even all on the same page. According to the table's harsh review of our faculty, we are all over the map, so it's no wonder kids get away with so much crap at school. Although it did make me wonder what they would have said about me if I weren't there. Hopefully nothing - I tried not to add anything to the conversation and simply observe. If nothing else, it just reminded me that all the teachers - not just me - desperately need this summer break.

17 School Days Remaining

I am tempted to make one of those paper chains like the ones everybody made in elementary school in December, counting the days until Christmas. I could bring it in to class and make a huge thing about it each day as we remove one more link from the chain. I have said it before and I will say it again: I think in my own high school experience I underestimated how excited teachers were for the approaching end of a school year. Time to time I wish that I could have relived a little of high school with this new perspective.

So yes, less than four weeks left, which means my last post was forever ago, so of course the report is that life continues to be hectic. Last week I had the equivalent of a 40 page paper due for my credentialing program, so naturally I waited until the last minute and wrote the whole thing in one weekend. In my defense, this credentialing program is bogus; TFA has taught me everything and anything I need for this job. In fact, we were informed that due to such poor reviews of the program, TFA will be sending their new teachers elsewhere to get credentialed. I could have called that.

I had it all planned out in my mind back during Christmas break: during second semester I would catch up on lesson planning and grading so that my life would be a little more relaxing than the first four months. And yet here we are in the middle of May and I am still planning lessons the night before - every night - with humongous stacks of grading to be done on the weekend. I actually can't wait to have some spare time this summer to organize things and get things set ahead of time. Of course, it would be nice to get a head-start on that now, but then that would prevent me from enjoying such things as the annual "Bay to Breakers" San Francisco run. You might be surprised to hear that I did not wear running attire or in fact run at all, but instead dressed up as Donatello the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and walked through the streets of the city with a number of Bud Lights. The event, which at 7am is a true running event, becomes a drunken parade at around eight. Just about everyone dresses up or dresses down - there were numerous old naked men and women - so it is a crazy experience to say the least. That was just yesterday, so I did feel a little guilty nursing the remains of my headache today. Worth it!

When you have a countdown in your room until the end of school, it is hard to stay 100% motivated all the time, so it's no surprise that it's even harder to get the students to take the rest of the year seriously. The frustrating thing is that everyone seems to be reversing roles: my chronically absent and F students are suddenly interested in what they can do to pass and my higher-achieving students suddenly realized that they can slack off and still get that C they were aiming for. I think it is pretty clear that these students aren't used to taking class seriously when the year is nearing a close. Most students have told me that school's pretty much over when CSTs are over, which scared me a little since this is when everyone does their cumulative review for their final exam. Our final is at the end of next week, so in only nine class days I will be able to see exactly how much my students learned this year. Yikes.

High school prom is this Friday and this time around I'm a chaperone. I still hold that I don't think I'm a very good chaperone choice for an event where my age is even less obvious due to the fact that everyone will be dressed up - I no longer have that advantage in looking older. The dance is in San Francisco, so I'm not too worried about anything happening this time. The homecoming incident was more a product of the surrounding community, so I think having it in the city was a good choice.

That being said, there still always seems to be something happening in or around school to bring morale back down. Last Friday one of my students came in first period to tell me all about how four people were shot right outside of his house the night before - he heard it and saw the aftermath. This is a 15 year-old! The story came a day after a resource specialist teacher informed me of the awful and disturbing news that one of my special education students had tried to end her own life by hanging herself but did not succeed because she did not know how to do it. This was particularly upsetting to me last week because I am constantly disciplining students who bully her in my class, and yet I feel like there's more that I should be doing to prevent something as drastic as what could have been. I think she got transferred from my class, which in the end is definitely for the best. I've been told that mainstreaming special education students actually has a significant impact on their achievement compared to specialized schedules, but this here's a monster of a downside.

I hate to end the update on such a low note, so I figured as I lay here on top of my new sleeping bag I might as well introduce my summer plans. This weekend I made some very large purchases toward plans to hike the Washington section of the Pacific Crest Trail for about four weeks in July. I'm now equipped with a 15degree sleeping bag, a hiking backpack, a down jacket, rain gear, hiking boots, and all synthetic hiking clothes. I'm 100% committed and have the book purchases to prove it, so this only adds to the excitement of the approaching summer break. I'll be making the trek with a TFA friend and hopefully one of my cousins. Until then, we should probably practice and break in our gear, so perhaps we'll do that in a weekend or two.