Tag: teaching

An unwelcome visitor #SOL24 1/31

I knew for sure that I had an unwelcome visitor on Saturday. I’d heard the quiet knocking every morning for days, but tried to pretend it wasn’t coming: I went to bed early, but soon sleep started to elude me; I woke daily with a tickle in the back of my throat. By Saturday there was no ignoring the visitor: the virus had arrived.

“I think I’m sick,” I croaked at my spouse, as if my voice and the circles under my bleary eyes didn’t make this obvious.

“I think you are,” he replied, and set me on the couch to recuperate.

We’ve had viruses visit before, of course. Mostly we greet them with tea and honey; we entertain them with ridiculous series on Netflix or long cuddles with good books; always, we like to offer them plenty of rest. This satisfies most viruses. After a day or two, they thank us politely and move on, sometimes leaving behind a bit of a mess, but nothing that we can’t handle if we’re cautious.

This virus though, the one that came on Saturday, this one has overstayed its welcome. I tried to coddle it over the weekend, hoping that it would be willing to move on by Monday morning, but no. Instead, the virus – which had initially taken up residence in my throat – decided that it was too confined and expanded into my lungs and my sinuses. There, it stretched out. “Ah… just what I needed: more space.” It took a particular liking to my lungs and hung out there, making it hard for me to breathe.

So, I took the virus to the doctor’s office where we tried to take a picture of it, but it was shy and hid from the x-ray. “Well,” said the doctor, “at least it’s not Pneumonia. She always overstays her welcome – a real hanger-on, that one.” Pneumonia has visited both me and my spouse, so I knew exactly what the doctor meant. She is a terrible guest. “Still,” the doctor continued, “there are some truly ill-mannered viruses going around right now. This one may stay for days.”

I nodded my head, but I didn’t believe her. I know how to deal with a virus, and I don’t get sick very often. I wheezed my way home and curled up on my couch. I played puzzle games with my virus and watched lots of bad TV. We downloaded a mindless game app and played for hours. We drank unending pots of tea with honey. We knit, pet the dog and took naps. Still, the virus stayed. It fiddled with the thermostat, so I tried to help it get comfortable with some ibuprofen. Then, ungrateful, it spent Monday evening painting my throat bright red. “Much better,” it squealed. After that, it yelled at me whenever I swallowed, “You’re ruining the paint job!”

Every afternoon, I checked in with my virus. “Maybe you could leave tomorrow?” I asked. The virus laughed, and watched me write increasingly tearful emails to the vice principal, telling her that I needed to be out yet again. Last night, as I created the fifth day of lesson plans, the virus was not even remotely helpful. In fact, it laughed even harder and said, “I *might* leave tomorrow, but I’m just not sure yet. Maybe you should go in just to see what I do.” I’d gotten wise to it, though. I knew that it just wanted to stay longer, so I called in sick and sent the (now pretty pathetic) lesson plans.

Today is the seventh day of the virus’s visit. I’ve told it that my spouse and I don’t typically welcome guests for more than a week without consulting with one another, so it is reluctantly packing up. The paint job it had so delighted in has largely faded, and it’s moved into a smaller space, mostly in my throat. I’ve offered it more tea and sleep, but I think it’s starting to crave something different, hopefully something it can’t find in this house. By Monday, this unwelcome visitor should be gone, and I should be back to work. Fingers crossed.

Sick Days

Second semester started with days of absent students. Some didn’t understand that the semester began in the middle of the week. Some thought the first few days were “kind of useless” and decided to stay home. Two were out of the country indefinitely. Lots of students were changing their timetables. Of course, most students were there, so I focused on the ones in the classroom, tried to make clear assignments for those who were out, and continued along.

By the end of the first full week, classes were well underway, but students seemed to be coming and going at an unusual rate. I chalked it up to, well, I don’t know what – but weird things happen in small environments, and schools are no exception. So, a lot of students were missing class, such is life, and talk at the teachers’ table at lunchtime suggested that this was true in many classes. Worse, some kids were getting sick and then were gone for days – days! None of the normal “sick for a day and then back” that usually happens. We couldn’t figure it out.

Then, last week, my youngest got sick. He doesn’t love school, so I often look askance at any request to stay home, but on Tuesday, he was visibly unwell, so we let him stay home – and there he stayed for three full days. Three days! He’s 13! 13-year-olds bounce back ridiculously quickly; they don’t stay home for days because of a nondescript cold. (It wasn’t covid.) But here we were. By the time Friday rolled around, he’d missed the annual ice skating outing, pizza day, and more. He was ready to go back.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I started feeling sick on Saturday. I was gentle with myself, but I figured it was just a cold. Just a cold… and here I am, four days later, still at home. I am sick. It’s not Covid, but I was sick enough to check with the doctor on Monday. They shook their head and said, “there are some nasty viruses going around.” Indeed. Them they x-rayed my chest to see if I had pneumonia – I don’t. I’m just sick. Last night I slept 13 hours. I’ve spent most of the last three days sitting on the couch. My throat is a hot mess. I’m sick.

When I check class attendance, I see that the students are still sick, too. To date, only 6 of my 26 grade 9 students have perfect attendance; only 4 of the 21 grade 12s. No wonder I’ve been spending so much of my afternoon literacy block trying to simply find the students I need to work with. Whew.

I’m out again tomorrow – and I really hate being away from school. If I’m lucky, I’ll be better by Thursday. At least I’ve solved the mystery of all the missing students – they’re sick!

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.

If you could talk to your younger self

I was tidying the copying area in our office when a sheet of lined paper, adrift amidst the abandoned photocopies, caught my eye. A quick glance told me this was not my writing prompt, not my student. Still, I couldn’t help but read the words – and my heart broke open. Oh, how I wish I could tell this anonymous student about the poetry he has created, tell him that he is so much better than he knows.

If you could talk to your younger self what would you say

I would tell him
not to turn out like
me tell him to get good grades
and go to school dont skip
or anything Be good everything
like that if He turns out like me His
life will suck

My response (quickwrite)
If I could talk to the student whose paper was left behind

I would tell him
not to give up on
himself, tell him to hold on
and keep doing what he can. Be kind, everything
that I wish he could hear. If he knew the power of his
words, he would be stunned.

New shoes

During exam week, as semester one wound down and semester two loomed on the horizon, I bought myself some new shoes. Fluevogs were on sale and I decided to splurge, telling myself that the black and white pair were practically every day shoes. Mostly, I just thought they were awesome.

The Fluevogs, just waiting for me to buy them.

Days later, I wore the shoes for the first day of second semester. Right away, before period one even started, one of my new grade 9 students told me that she loved my shoes. Over the course of the morning, students and teachers complimented my shoes. I don’t think of myself as wildly fashionable, so I quite enjoyed the attention.

After the lunch bell rang, I spent a few quiet minutes in the classroom, straightening the desks and generally tidying. I know that each new semester brings both excitement and nerves, and I suspected I might have a few drop-ins. Sure enough, one of my regulars showed up to run down his classes so far.

I can’t get over how much I enjoy this young man. We spent two years in a row in English class together, and there were times when I wasn’t sure we were both going to make it. Somehow, by the time the second class had ended, we’d muddled through some actual reading and several pieces of writing that involved more than a few hastily scribbled sentences. We had even discovered that he is secretly an incredible teacher – and got him a peer tutoring placement in some ESL classes. Now, in grade 11, he is thriving (still challenging – but thriving).

He knows that I keep a blog – “are you famous yet, Miss?” – and thinks it’s ridiculous that I read so much – “do you even sleep?” He tells me he’s a “baller” and once spent a significant amount of class time explaining why Kobe is better than Michael Jordan. And yes, I tricked him into writing an opinion essay on this. He also likes to mock my “secret crush” on Jason Reynolds. I regularly book talk Long Way Down, the Ghost trilogy and Miles Morales. All the kids know I love his writing, but when I showed a video of Reynolds talking about how he didn’t read much in high school, this student was shocked. Reynolds is a Black man with impressive dreadlocks; I am a middle-aged white teacher with what this student called “the same haircut as all the other teachers” (ouch. And for the record, he is wrong.)

He took my crush pretty seriously. For weeks he came back to it. “But you’re married,” he said. “Does your husband know?” Yes, yes he does. “But for real, if he asked you out, would you go out with him?” I suggested that it was unlikely that I would ever meet Reynolds, much less have dinner with him. “But what if you did?” this student worried. I said that I would go on an author date with him, an English teacher date – we would talk about writing and books. “That would be the most boring date ever,” he said and though I insisted that this would, in fact, be interesting for me, he was unconvinced.

But on this day we were talking about his new classes, not about books or writing. Then, after a minute of boasting that he was going to change a class because it was “way too much work” (“It’s day one,” I said, “you have no idea if it’s too much work.”), he suddenly stopped and said, “Miss, those are some fancy shoes.”

I was startled, then started to thank him, but he interrupted me. “Miss, if Jason Reynolds saw you in those shoes, he would definitely ask you on a date.” He paused. “Yeah, those are your Jason Reynolds date shoes, for sure.”

Though I expect that I will never, in fact, wear these shoes on a date with one of my favourite authors, I’m pretty sure I will call them “Jason Reynolds date shoes” for as long as I wear them. I mean, they are pretty cute.

Smokin’ in the boys room

I’m on hall duty, spending most of my time near the boys’ room on the first floor, the bathroom best known for its – ahem – popularity. Things have been largely quiet and then, abruptly, they aren’t. Literally. Laughter and loud voices echo out of the bathroom and into the hallway. I lean towards the entryway – there are no exterior doors to separate the washroom from the hallways, though there are stalls inside – and raise my voice: “Time to go to class!”

Brief silence, followed by a reply:

“We’re smoking!”

Gales of laughter billow out of the bathroom.

I dutifully contact the VPs, who dutifully arrive, and we dutifully shoo the boys out of the bathroom, smoke trailing behind them. They are almost giddy with their transgressions. We move them towards their classrooms.

After the kids have been, um, relocated, I chat briefly with one of the VPs. Shaking my head, I say, “There must be something we can do about this.” She laughs ruefully, “If you figure it out, let me know.” We commiserate about how this is a problem in every high school we know of, in schools around North America.

Having done what little we can, we both move off towards our next destination.

I’m halfway up the stairs when the old Motley Crue song starts playing in my head: “Smokin’ in the boys room/ Teacher don’t fill me up with your rules…” That song came out in 1989 – and yes, I remember it. I shake my head again, this time with a little laugh.

If anyone out there figures out how to stop the kids from smoking in the bathrooms, let us know. Until then, I’ll spend most of my hall duty near the boys’ room on the first floor.

Refrigerator Art

He was hard at work in the back of the class and, ok, it wasn’t on an assignment, but at least it meant that for a few blessed minutes of class he wasn’t pacing, wasn’t calling out, wasn’t asking to go to the bathroom, to the Resource Room, to get water. And eventually I could tell he was listening to the audiobook – even though his back was to me and he was hunched over the desk, scribbling. I hadn’t actually had any pedagogical goal in mind when I’d asked him to test the markers; I just wanted a little quiet. I think he might have, too.

So when class ended and he gave me a sheet full of drawings, I was calm enough to be kind of tickled. He described each one. I told him – sincerely – that I wished I could put it on the classroom wall, but that probably the blood and (water) gun would be inappropriate, even though things weren’t as bad as they looked out of context. He agreed, glanced down for a moment, then brightened, “You should hang it on your refrigerator.”

So I did. Photo for evidence. I can’t wait to show him tomorrow.

Just the three of us

There were only two students in the classroom. I had guessed that attendance would be low, but this was far lower than anything I anticipated. The hallways, already nearly empty, settled into semi-silence, and I had to accept that this was it. 

Almost – almost! – I sat down to get some work done. Neither of the two were especially talkative students; neither seemed deeply invested in English. Still, before my derrière quite hit my chair, I stood again and walked over to them. I nestled into a nearby seat and asked what they wanted to work on. Nothing. 

I thought of my own child. He would be furious if he ended up in a class with only one other student – even if they were vaguely friends. If I, as the teacher, asked him what he wanted to work on, he would probably glare at me (although, if I were not his mom, he would probably simply shrug his shoulders and look away). I knew better than to start with such an open-ended question. I needed to try again.

“So, X, I noticed that you haven’t yet revised your 100-word memoir. Want to look at that together?”

Wait.
Wait.
Wait.

Resigned yes.

I try again with the other student. Similar results.

Soon, though, Chromebooks were open, and they were both at least looking at their work. With one student, I was able to clarify the directions for a missing assignment, and they got to work. With the other, I walked through the revision process while I revised his piece in front of him: I asked questions, wrote down phrases he said, and generally showed him what deep revision might look like. Then, confident that he had understood, I reverted to the earlier draft and sent him off to revise on his own. I like to think he wasn’t horrified. 

We also all worked a bit on our more recent project – Humans of Gloucester. We looked at the transcript of an interview one had done and talked about what part might be interesting to an Instagram audience. We considered how even a tiny piece of an interview can have a story arc. When the bell rang, we were all startled. 

Two students. Turned out to be a pretty good class.

(And follow us on Instagram: @HumansofGloucester – we’ve already got some good posts up, including the one from this day.)

Outdoor toys

“Put the ball away!” I call over my shoulder as I head towards the classroom door. There’s a ruckus in the hallway that needs adult attention, a teacher visiting from Korea who has just arrived to watch today’s class, and two kids in the back of the room who are bouncing some sort of ball between them – maybe a lacrosse ball? Unclear. I trust that they’ve heard me and step into the hallway. Moments later…no, not moments, seconds… seconds later, I return my attention to the classroom, just in time to hear glass shatter.

They’ve broken one of the fluorescent lights. On the ceiling. 

Everyone is silent. Then, they are not, “What happened?” “You two are idiots” “Why don’t the lights have covers anyway? They’re supposed to have covers.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. The three boys in the back row are now sitting amidst a scattering of broken glass. I move them to the front row. A little overwhelmed and a little overstimulated by the chaos they’ve caused, they can’t quite stop laughing. I try to remember that this is a normal reaction, but I am annoyed. I start the timer for silent reading – the sound of ocean waves fills the classroom – and call the office to request a custodian.

That sorted, I head to my desk & rifle through a drawer until I find my blank cards. I walk to the front row and put one in front of the main offender. “What’s this for?” He’s aiming for an innocent look, but it’s ruined when he starts to laugh again. “Apologize,” I say tersely, “to the custodians.” He doesn’t argue.

When he’s finished, I pass the card to his friend. I check it over for appropriateness, then return it for signatures. 

It takes the custodians two passes to find all the thin shards of glass littering the back of the classroom. After the second sweeping, the boys ask if they can move back to their original seats. I don’t mince words, “No.” They don’t ask again.

****

Once the final bell of the day rings, a young person comes carefully into the room. “Um, Miss,” he starts, “can I have my ball back? I swear I won’t bring it to school again.” He is not one of the two culprits from the morning. I hold back a smile as I solemnly hand him his ball. “Thanks for keeping it at home.”

****

As I write this, my very own 13-year-old walks through the living room, dribbling a soccer ball. “Put. The Ball. Away,” I say.

He complains a little and tells me how unreasonable this rule is, but I do not budge. I am certain that balls are not indoor toys. The boys in my life, apparently, do not agree.

“Oh!”

I’ve just finished taking attendance and am closing my computer so that I can read along with my class when I hear a muffled gasp from the middle of the room.

“Oh!”

My eyes snap up. Is something wrong? A student has her hand over her mouth, eyes wide as she stares at her book. Her friend shoves her own book – newly started – to one side and leans in to see what’s on the page. The reader’s eyes are wide. She starts to dog-ear the corner but then, just before she creases the fold, she flips the page. Both girls’ eyes dart back and forth as they read quickly down the page. Another intake of breath then, heads together, they hold a whispered conference.

One of them looks up and catches my eye. I nod. I know this book. I know where they are. It is, in fact, gasp-worthy. The student takes a deep breath, then dives back into the story. Just last week she told me that she usually abandons books long before she gets this far, but not this one.

Page finished, her friend reluctantly returns to her own novel. If I had to bet, I’d say that Dear Martin will soon be flying off my shelves. For now, though, there’s at least one reader in the classroom who needs to finish this book.