This afternoon, a partial transcript #SOL24 27/31

PA system: “We are in a secure school. Please clear the hallways and lock your doors. I repeat, we are in a secure school.”

Email: “If you see [student name] please contact me in the main office right away.”

Email: “Photo”

25 minutes pass

PA system: “We are still in a secure school. Please remain in your classrooms when the bell sounds.”

50 minutes pass

PA system: “The secure school has ended.”

Email: “We will be having a stand up meeting at 3:35 in the auditorium.”

Person: “First, I want to say that under a difficult circumstance, we got to the best possible outcome because so many people came together to do the right things. Even the students in question cooperated with the police.”

Person: “Police entered the classroom and made an arrest. Afterward, social workers were available for students in the classroom.”

Person: “The police recovered a replica gun and a knife from the student.”

Person: “The police also recovered a knife and a replica gun from a second student.”

Person: “The students involved will not be returning to school.”

Person: “Ever?”

Person: “Well, I don’t want to tell you something that might not be true, but they will not return any time soon.”

Person: “An email will be sent home to parents.”

Person: “Social workers will be available at the school tomorrow.”

Email: “Thanks again for all that you did today in support of students and colleagues.”

High school in March, by the numbers #SOL24 22/31

(After Harper’s Index)

Number of pencils borrowed by grade 9 students during period 2 today: 4

Number of pencils returned: 1

Number of pencils lost while students moved between desks, ≈6 feet apart: 2

Number of days in school so far: 11

Number of fire alarms pulled: 1

Temperature on the day of the pulled alarm: 2C (35F)

Highest temperature in March: 17C (63F)

Date of highest temperature: March 5

Lowest temperature in March: -14C (7F)

Date of lowest temperature: March 22 (yeah, that’s today)

Number of hours set aside for parent-teacher interviews last night: 4

Timing of these interviews: 3:30pm –7:30pm

Number of minutes planned for each interview: 10

Number of parents who requested an interview with me: 3

Number of their students I am concerned about: 0

Number of people at Iftar dinner after parent-teacher interviews last night: ≈150

Number of those who were teachers: ≈20

Number of hours I slept last night: 6.5

Number of hours of sleep I really need: 8

Reason for the missing hours: finished Tom Lake; a cat sat on me until I woke

Number of five-day weeks left in March: 0

Chances we will cram five days of drama into four days of school next week: 98%

Number of days left in the March Slice of Life Challenge: 9

Chances that I will manage to write every day until the end: 100%

Runaway #SOL24 20/31

He rarely comes to class, but when he does, we do what we can to make sure he has at least a little success. He’s in grade 9 and is currently illiterate in three languages. Research says that students with strong reading skills in their home languages often also have strong reading skills in their second language (see Short & Fitzsimmons, 2007 or this shorter article by Fred Genesee), but he doesn’t have strong reading skills anywhere. We can’t turn back time, but we’re doing what we can to move forward.

He’s lucky because this class has a push-in support teacher. She’s technically there for other students, but no rule says that she can only help them, so we’re using what wiggle room we have to create as much space for him as possible. When we were writing 100-word memoirs, she just happened to be sitting near him and just happened to be able to scribe for him. As I circulated, their heads were close together in front of the computer, counting words. When he realized he had written a story of exactly 100 words, he was so proud that he asked her to read it to him again. He beamed. Then he skipped for three days.

Then next time he made it to class during reading time, I sat with him and quietly talked through The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which he likes because it’s thick and he says it makes him look smart, while Ms H kept an eye on the other readers. Even the pictures were hard for him to understand, but he liked talking about them. Then he refused to do anything else.

Sometimes, he comes to class (late) and then asks to get water or go to the bathroom. I put him off as long as I can, but I am not the arbiter of his bodily functions; when he says, “Miss, I really have to go,” I let him. Sometimes he comes right back, but sometimes he runs. Two days ago, he swore he would only be gone for two minutes, then he took the hall pass and disappeared. I found him in the lobby later that day, skipping a different class. While we walked to where he was supposed to be, he told me that he had thrown up that morning, so he couldn’t return to my class. Given that he was practically bouncing up and down with energy as we edged towards his class, I reminded him that usually someone who throws up goes home, but he said he called home and his mother said no. Ahem. I found him in the hallways again that period and once the next period. He told me he just can’t stay in class.

Yesterday, Ms H had a breakthrough. She saw him (in the hallway, of course) and made some sort of deal/ bet with him – and then he actually showed up to English class a mere 10 minutes late (thus missing most of reading time). Meanwhile, she had hatched a plan. She took him to a quiet room – but not the resource room; he refuses to go there – and she started a phonics assessment with him. She praised him for what he could do and talked about ways we could help. She told him she could start with what he can do instead of expecting him to be able to do impossible things. He was eager.

Ms H was excited that we’d found a way to start giving him some real support. That afternoon we talked through her plan. But this morning, he saw her in the hall during first period, turned around and went the other way. Then, he saw her at the beginning of our class. This time he ran away. Ran.

We stayed after class together, Ms H and I, trying to figure out how to help him accept our offers of support. We reminded ourselves that years of failing in school, years of hiding his weaknesses, mean that he probably thinks he’s beyond redemption. He may be afraid that he’ll just fail again and disappoint us in the process. We walked into the hallway partway through lunch, and there he was, right by our English classroom. Gotcha! Gently, we reminded him of his (broken) promise. I told him that it hurt Ms H’s feelings when he didn’t come. She told him that she had been really excited to see him today. He shifted his weight back and forth, back and forth. When we finished – maybe a 30 second “chat” – he said, “OK” and then… he ran.

Sweet runaway boy, how I hope you’ll let us try to help you read. Reading will make a bigger difference than you can imagine. It’s worth sticking around for.

Учителката #SOL24 8/31

We had only been talking for a few minutes when her phone rang. She glanced at the screen and said, “I have to take this. It’s my father. I’m so sorry.” With an apologetic look, she answered. I looked down at my notebook to give her what little privacy the conference room afforded.

“Говоря с учителката на И”

I looked up, startled. I had perfectly understood that sentence. She said it again, adding “да, да но…” Yup, my student’s mother was definitely speaking Bulgarian.

She hung up and started to apologize again – after all, she’s the one who had asked for this parent-teacher conference – but I interrupted and said, “Are you Bulgarian?” She looked at me quizzically, so I added, “I speak a little Bulgarian; I could understand what you said.”

Soon, the parent-teacher conference had taken a decidedly friendly turn. We talked about Bulgaria, which city she was from, where I had lived, and more. She told me a funny story about getting married in Canada: Bulgarians nod their head up and down to say “no” and side to side for “yes.” As she stood in front of the judge, answering questions so she could marry her fiancé, she kept saying “yes” but, in her enthusiasm, moving her head “no” – to the point where the judge decided he couldn’t accept her verbal answers. They had to call in an interpreter to verify her responses. “I tried to explain,” she laughed, “but I could tell the judge was worried.” In turn, I told her about trying to gauge students’ understanding during a lesson and finding myself completely bewildered by the sea of heads shaking all different directions.

“But… when did you live there?” she wanted to know.

I had to calculate. “Um… 1995? Nearly thirty years ago!”

“And you still remember the language?!” Her astonishment was clear.

“Oh no!” I laughed. “You just said about half of what I remember. The first half of what you said was more or less what I memorized so that I could leave phone messages for people. And the second part was about teachers.”

I spent a year teaching in Bulgaria. I loved it – the teaching, the country, the people, the language. As I started to make friends, I also started needing to call people. The problem was, no one lived alone in Bulgaria, so I always needed to ask to speak with the one person I knew – who was almost always the only English speaker in the home. I quickly learned to say, “May I speak with…?” (Мога ли да говоря с) Then, I waited. If there was silence followed by a familiar voice, I’d found my friend. If instead there was a long string of what was gibberish to my years, I took a deep breath and said, “Кажи му, че Аманда се обади”… “Tell him that Amanda called.” And then I hung up. Because that was all I could say. I was pretty much terrified every time I made a phone call all year, which means that those two phrases are tattooed in my brain.

I can also still remember bits of what I used to call the “train conversation.” That’s the conversation you have when you take the train from your town to the next one if you’re a blond foreigner in a sea of dark-haired Bulgarians. It’s pretty much always the same: Where are you from? What are you doing here? How long have you been here? How long are you staying? Do you like our country?” The whole train conversation lasts just under 10 minutes, and I must have had the conversation dozens of times in several languages.

All of this came together this week when the parent was speaking because what she said was, “Dad, I’m speaking with I’s teacher.” And I can 100% remember all of those words – apparently even 30 years after I last needed them.

The rest of the conference went swimmingly. Shared language can do that. I’m confident that we can work as a team to support her child for the rest of the semester. And I get to spend a few days reminiscing about a year of amazing experiences – and trying to call up a few more words.

(Written for “Multi-Lingual Friday”)

Knock-on Effects #SOL24 7/31

Today, I got an *AMAZING* message from a former student. She is graduating from university and is “almost an RN now.” I am aglow with happiness for her – and for us: she’s going to be a wonderful nurse. I am proud to say that a tiny part of her story relates to my post from yesterday.

You see… back when Mr. 13 was Mr. 6, he was driving his teacher up a wall. They butted heads regularly (in a first-grade sort of way – the kind where it turns out that six-year-olds need to follow rules sometimes), most often in reading group. There, Mr. 6 would some days read fluently, then other days act silly, “reading” words that were not on the page. We were baffled. The story goes that one night, angry with my insistence that he try to sound out words, he “read” his entire book without looking at the pages *even once*. But he couldn’t read individual words.

Because his teacher was both kind and deeply experienced, she had already flagged his reading as potentially problematic. Because I knew that dyslexia ran in my family, I already knew to pay attention to my children’s reading. Because my colleague’s wife was a child psychologist who did lots of educational testing, she advised testing Mr. 6 asap, rather than following the school system’s recommendation to“wait and see.” Because we have good health insurance, we could pay for private educational testing. And because of all that, we discovered that Mr. 6 had dyslexia when he was, well, 6.

The chips continued to fall in our favour. First, even though I am a high school English teacher, I was already learning about how people learn to read, so I knew that people with dyslexia benefit from early intervention. Then, when the principal said it was “too bad” that Mr. 6 was going into Grade 2 because the school’s reading intervention program started in Grade 3, we were wealthy enough to pay for tutoring. Then, I began researching dyslexia and found Dr. Sally Shaywitz’s book, Overcoming Dyslexia which recommended specific research-based tutoring programs. In a final bit of good fortune, a local tutoring company specialized in exactly this.

Y’all, that is a lot of good luck. Learning to read should NOT be a matter of luck.

Now, let me tell you about my student. She had struggled to learn to read when she was little, but she was an incredibly hard worker, so she managed to stay on top of things. She was seriously smart, so she was able to figure things out, even though reading remained, well, not easy. By the time I met her, she was in 10th grade, and she was working her butt off. She was also doing extremely well in school.

Still, as we got to know each other over a few years, she confided in me that she wasn’t “as smart” as her friends because she took “three times as long” to do her homework and made “stupid mistakes” if she wasn’t focused. I believed her, but I didn’t know what to make of this… until about ¾ of the way through Shaywitz’s book. There, I read a description of a high school student with dyslexia. Right away, I thought of her. Pages later, Shaywitz listed some common signs of dyslexia – and suddenly I had concrete questions I could ask someone.

I explained to this young person that I had an idea about her learning. Then I read her the description in Shaywitz’s book. Recognition dawned: “That’s exactly me!” I am not an educational psychologist, so I can’t diagnose anything, but at least we had an idea of what might be happening. All we needed was some testing – which our school system couldn’t provide because, first, our limited resources go to students who “are not able to access the curriculum” and this student was on the Honour Roll and, second, those same resources are meant for students in our system, and she was nearing graduation. We fought on. One thing led to another, and things stayed plenty dang complicated, but in the end she was able to get accommodations when she went to university. Things weren’t easy, but they were, at least, easier.

Looking back, it all feels awfully precarious. What if my child’s teacher hadn’t noticed his uneven reading? What if we hadn’t known to get him tested? What if I hadn’t been reading about dyslexia? What if?

I think about all the people who will benefit from having this brilliant, determined, caring young person as their nurse. I know this is supposed to be a slice of life – and I really want you to know how much I admire the student I’m writing about – but I have to end with what I already said: learning to read well should not be a matter of luck. As a profession, we are trying to make changes so that more students learn to read well. I hope our systems don’t give up when our first attempts aren’t perfect. I hope our system doesn’t write off students who are already in high school. I hope we have success story after success story to tell in years to come. And I really hope you’re lucky enough to have this person as your nurse. That would, indeed, be lucky.

Par, pars, parsh, parch #SOL24 6/31

“Hey Mom! Can you come help with my English writing?”

I’m supposed to be doing my own writing – this writing, to be precise – and I’m still knee-deep in grade 9 projects, but he knows I won’t say no. Mr. 13 is an excellent writer – effective vocabulary, interesting sentence structures, good grasp of punctuation – and he is dyslexic. Years of Orton-Gillingham-based tutoring means that he reads well and knows how to make good use of extensions like Grammarly or Language Tool, but when push comes to shove, he still benefits from a once over by someone who’s not dyslexic. Also, he knows I like to read what he writes.

He’s reading his sentences aloud under his breath as I plunk down next to him. “Um… I need a word for like ‘kind of was related to the point but not 100%.'” My eyes widen as I try to figure out what on Earth he’s talking about. “Oh!” he snaps his fingers, “got it: partially!”

He types parsley.

He keeps going, then circles back to fix it. Parshly. Spellcheck suggests harshly as a replacement, so he changes it to parchly – and the new suggestion is archly. “Um, Mom?”

“Partially means ‘in part’ so it starts with the root part,” I say.

“Part isn’t really a root,” he interrupts. Then, “sorry.” He would know. He knows Latin and Greek origins of words; he understands spelling rules in ways I have never had to.

I laugh, “Just start with part.” He does. I break the word down orally so he can hear all the syllables, then I spell. “Now i a l…” I pause because he is looking at me like I have two heads. Finally, I reach over and type the word.

He stares for a long second, then shakes his head in wonder. “There is no way that word looks like /parshully/. I would never have guessed that.”

And he wouldn’t have. Which is why I was so angry last night when I found one of his old math tests where the teacher has circled his attempt at the word “isosceles” and written “Really???” with multiple question marks. He brushed it off – “I mean, she did tell us we had to be able to spell all the terms” – but she doesn’t see how hard he works to spell these words.

But now he’s moved on and is enthusiastically excoriating someone’s weak debate argument. He doesn’t need me again until the end, when I do a check for capital letters and other words that spellcheck didn’t get. This time, he’s mostly good. I ruffle his hair and head back to finish my own work.

I wish all teachers could understand his truth – the kind that looks good on the surface but is working awfully hard to stay afloat. “Isosceles,” I mutter, and his exasperated voice trails behind me, reminding me to let it go. “Mom!”

A call from the teacher

The phone rang after dinner. I warily checked the caller ID, then perked up when I saw my sister’s name. Ah, exactly what I needed! But just as we settled in to a nice chat, I heard a beep.

Call waiting. I didn’t even know we still had call waiting. We’re already the odd family out because we still have a landline, but I can’t even remember the last time two people tried to call our house at the same time. Odd. (For what it’s worth, our reasoning for the landline is complicated, but the crux of it is that one of the kids still doesn’t have a cell phone AND we want them to be able to answer the phone in a general sort of way – you know, like if their grandparents call.)

Even odder, the tiny screen displayed the school district’s phone number. Someone was calling us from a school at 8:15pm. I asked my sister to hold on, and clicked over. My younger child’s teacher chirped a cheery hello. Quickly, I hung up on my sister (sorry, sis) and devoted my attention to this unusual caller.

I was a little concerned. I mean, when was the last time we had a not-automated call from the school? We got his report card last week and nothing looked terribly amiss. And he was already at home, playing video games & chatting with his friends, safely in one piece. More than that, when I’d asked, “How was your day?” he had pleasantly replied, “boring” as he does virtually every day. Everything seemed fine.

But his teacher was talking. I calmed my racing mind and paid attention. She was just calling to say hello and see how things were going. She was impressed with his math work. She knows about his dyslexia and complimented his writing. We talked about this and that. Finally, I asked if she was calling everyone. Yes, she was. She had decided to call all of her students’ families just to check in after report cards. After all, she said, it’s really too bad that the students who are doing well don’t get this sort of attention. We had a very pleasant conversation, and I hung up in a good mood. Judging from her voice, I bet she felt pretty good, too.

Before I called my sister back, I realized: I have done this. I have called home to say something nice. I have called home to check in. I have been the chipper voice on the other end of the line, the teacher saying that things are going well. But, I have never been the parent who got this call. And you know what? It felt nice. It felt like the sort of thing I might want to do for the families of this semester’s students. In fact, maybe I’ll start again this week.