mathinaz

Ugh I am SO STRESSED OUT today. It’s this awful combination of being a few days before spring break, a few weeks before AIMS, and the end of the quarter. There is too much to do, too little time, and I’m running low on energy.

Unfortunately, only a small part of it is caused by the actual important part of my job: teaching. I’m getting to the end of my curriculum, to these ridiculous geometry objectives that I’ve never had to use and have no idea how to teach. (What exactly is a frieze pattern?!?!) So my planning isn’t super. My kids are getting crazy because rain has kept them inside for two days. We’re all antsy for break and nervous for AIMS. It’s not fun.

But most of my stress actually comes from all the things I have to do on top of teaching. Grades are due on Friday. All my gifted student paperwork is due on Thursday. Parent-Teacher conferences have to be magically coordinated amongst all the middle school teachers and arranged with parents, apparently by Friday (which is before we’re done with our grades, so we don’t actually know which parents we have to meet with yet). I’m behind on grad school work and I have final exams and a presentation on Thursday. Four Program Directors from TFA are visiting my classroom tomorrow and need all my lesson plans/unit plans/student data trackers, and clearly I’m going to have to clean my classroom for them in the morning. I have to run a softball practice tomorrow… because oh yeah, I’m a boys softball coach now. And that’s not even the whole list.

So I’m reacting to stress the best way I know how. I came home, did one thing I felt was urgent (sent my information to TFA… have not yet made a worksheet or anything functional for tomorrow), and then shut down. I cooked random things until I felt better (deviled eggs and bean salad? weirdest meal ever), talked on the phone with friends from home, and then went to the gym. Now it’s 10:20 and I’m giving up and going to bed. Hopefully the Work Fairy will magically get everything done while I’m asleep. Because otherwise I’m going to collapse at work tomorrow.

My Period 3 is still exhausting. They can NOT stop talking. I have enough control to get them quiet, but not enough control to keep them quiet. Someone always has to call something out. Or chat with their friend. Or yell because someone threw something/stole something/broke something. It’s impossible to teach without interruptions, and then have to interrupt my teaching further in the process of getting them to stop talking. The only way to get extended silence is for me to snap and get really angry, which finally gets them scared enough to take me seriously. But it ruins any good energy in my classroom, it ruins my day, and it ruins their feelings about math. I hate yelling at kids. I hate even more when kids won’t let their classmates learn.

On a really bad day, I’ll send kids out until the problem is no longer in my classroom. But that can’t be an every day solution, because then all those kids aren’t learning. Sure, you can argue that they don’t want to learn anyway, but they’re in 8th grade. They don’t know how much they want to learn, and not all of them are mature enough to control their behaviors in hopes of long-term gain. They just aren’t that good at the Big Picture yet. I don’t want to solidify their decision to not get an education… I’d like to at least try to get them somewhere. I wish I knew what I’m supposed to do.

And it’s annoying, but my job could be much worse. After my class, they go on to reading. It’s always been a rough group, but their reading teacher quit in October. They’ve had subs since then. They hired a teacher to replace her early this year, and the woman quit after ONE DAY. Now they’ve finally hired someone who is willing to put up a fight for these kids, but she just graduated college in December and that class is crazy. Imagine that… fresh out of college, and immediately stuck with this impossible group. (Sound familiar? No one feels her pain more than I do.) But at least I got them fresh at the beginning of the year… she has to fill a hole caused by all these quitting teachers, and try to manage what is now established insanity. She deserves a huge hug and some type of medal. And probably a pay raise….

Saturday night, I went with two other teachers to a Quinceañera for one of my students. For those who don’t know, a Quinceañera is a coming of age celebration for girls when they turn 15, and it’s a big deal in Mexican culture. Families can go as all-out for them as you’d go for a wedding. I’ve never been to one and was really happy to be invited. (Yes, this means I have 15-year-olds as 8th graders.)

To be honest, I was wondering how they were going to pull off this type of huge event, and the girl had even nervously warned me ahead of time that it was “in a ghetto place”. Turns out you don’t need a fancy ballroom to throw a great party - this was amazing. They had taken over the parking lot of their apartment building, and set up tables and speakers outside. The neighbors were somehow nice enough to allow blasting dance music outside their windows all night, and the parking lot was FULL of neighborhood kids all night long. Invited guests sat at folding tables, and plenty of others from the neighborhood stood around on the sidewalk and watched.

The girl was dressed in a huge frilly pink dress with the biggest hoop skirt you’ve ever seen and looked gorgeous. She was accompanied by six boys in black tuxes with pink ties and her boyfriend in a white tux. A couple of my students were in this group, and I can’t describe how adorable it was to watch my students dressed in tuxes and trying to be adults. The ceremony started with the girl’s father taking off her flats and replacing them with high heels, and then dancing a song with her. It was beautiful and she was crying. Then there was a choreographed dance with her and the seven boys (again, watching the kids pull this off was fantastic). Then the whole group disappeared up into her apartment, and the guests were left alone with Mexican food and music. Our students were fascinated seeing their teachers outside the school, and most of them weren’t too cool to hang out with us most of the night.
When the birthday girl and her boys returned, they were all wearing matching street clothes, and they informed the guests that we were in for a surprise… of course, my kids had decided to perform “the ghetto remix.” They got in the same formation they had for the traditional dance, but then broke into a choreographed dance to “Drop It Low” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPLz3gx_mp8&feature=related ). So well done. And hilarious.

The rest of the night turned into a dance party, with little kids chasing bubbles and the teachers line-dancing with our students (Cupid Shuffle, again). By the time we left, we’d been there for almost three hours of student bonding and culture sharing. Definitely worth putting in time on a Saturday night.

I have a running challenge with my classes, where whichever class has the highest average at the end of the quarter earns a pizza party funded by me. The idea of a pizza party is huge in my classes, because the kids complain constantly that we don’t get enough free time and all we do is learn. (Which means I am doing my job, thanks kids.)

The competition is really between Period 1 and Period 4. My advanced class has a separate challenge (pizza party when we hit an 80% class average) and my Period 3 is nearly 10 percentage points behind. The two classes have been within a point of eachother, but in our last quiz Period 4 took nearly a four-point lead. Today, I pointed that out to my Period 1, and offered them an opportunity. I told them that after we learned the material for the day (volume), if they felt like they mastered it I would offer the class the chance to take a quiz. I promised I wouldn’t offer the quiz to any of my other classes, and they had to promise not to tell.

The whole class was SO ENTHUSIASTIC about taking the quiz. For the whole period, they were quiet and worked hard. They begged for extra practice problems and wanted me to hurry through the teaching to make sure they had time to quiz. Almost the only calling out I heard was, “Can we take the quiz yet? Are we ready?” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The kids were desperate to take a test. All of them. In my middle school math class. LOVE IT.

My lucky class did earn the chance to take a quiz, and they rocked it. The class averaged an 86.5%, which is stunning. Only problem is that Period 1 was at a 68% and Period 4 was at a 72.3%. This test brought Period 1 to a 71.3%… amazing, but not good enough.
So I made an executive teacher decision to reward the enthusiasm and encourage momentum, because the last thing I need is my class discouraged because they worked so hard and fell short. So I lied. My posted class average for Period 1 is a 72.5%… 0.2 points ahead of Period 4. Period 1 is so proud of themselves… they found me at lunch and afterschool to hear the news. Period 4 is newly motivated to not let this happen. And this is a secret between me and my blog readers.

If you need the title of this post explained, start here:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/secrets-americas-greatest-teachers-9961455

Ughhhhhh so many problems in the world. I had a pretty intense chat with another teacher after school about some of the kids we teach. She was telling me horror stories about students at our school and the conditions in which they live. It’s the sort of thing you should only hear on those “Save this child for only a dollar a day” commercials, not something that should be associated with faces I see every day. I literally started crying while she was talking.

This should not exist. No child, especially in such a developed country, should be fighting to stay alive the way some of our kids have to fight. It’s no wonder they’re having trouble in school. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wish I could stick my head in the sand so I never have to notice. I’m feeling guilty about the new running shoes I just bought. It’s also the kind of thing that makes me feel like I should teach here forever. Where else am I needed this much?

I started today by meeting with the mother of a very smart boy who does absolutely no work in class. His main accomplishments lately include sleeping so deeply that he was literally drooling on his math work… twice. His mother has no idea what to do and turned to him, frustrated, to ask what he needed. He had no answer. Neither did she.
I ended the school day in a meeting with my assistant principal, who was upset at me for not calling the parents of a student who was very disrespectful in my class. He called them because so many teachers have written referrals on this kid, and they were very upset that the teachers haven’t been keeping them informed. I appreciate my A.P letting me know this (I feel like people at school are still babying me and don’t always tell me when I’m doing things wrong, so getting scolded was almost a relief) but I’m a little confused by the parents. Last time I called, Mom told me that he was acting the same way at home and she had no idea what to do about it. Now she wants to know every time he misbehaves? HE MISBEHAVES EVERY DAY!!

I think I would be better at this if I weren’t so young and if I had any idea what it’s like to be a parent. I’m expected to interact pretty frequently with parents, but I’m never sure what I’m supposed to tell them (especially when they ask ME what to do… eek). I know I should just keep them informed, but I don’t really get what they can do about it. When you have a middle-school-aged child who’s a disrespectful slacker every day in class, what exactly are you able to do at home to fix this?? I’ve called parents and seen remarkable improvements for a few days (nothing like keeping a kid from their cell phone until behavior improves) but not long term.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely understand that parent contact is important and parents want to be involved, so I’m not trying to scoot out of anything. And this is NOT a “parents just don’t care” post… I know my kids’ parents care SO MUCH. This is just an honest question: realistically, how much can parents accomplish at home, in a short time frame, to improve eighth graders’ behaviors in school? What exactly can I be expecting here?

When my kids showed up to class today, a remarkable number of them asked me how I was doing. This is not a normal level of consideration from them, and definitely not their usual reaction to me on a Monday morning.

Turns out these kids had heard about the earthquake in Chile on Saturday, remembered that I used to live there, and spent the weekend concerned enough about me that it was their first thought when they walked into my classroom two days later. They wanted to know if my family and friends were okay. They wanted to know if I’d cried when I heard the news. They wanted to know if I was leaving them to go back and take care of things in Chile.

So while they cut out geometric nets and taped them together into 3-D figures, we talked about tectonic plates, tsunamis, and why the 7th biggest earthquake in recorded history was less destructive than the Haiti earthquake. We assuaged fears about 8.8 earthquakes in Arizona and the world ending in 2012. And we talked about the wonders of the Internet making the world smaller and how yes, everyone I know in Chile is alive and well.

While I was giving directions in class on Friday, I noticed that one of my students wasn’t listening to me because he was grabbing all the stomach fat he has, with both hands, and shaking it up and down. No one else had noticed him, and I don’t even think he realized he was doing it. When he looked up at me and noticed my “what on EARTH are you up to while I’m teaching?” look, he looked down at his hands and finally processed what he was doing.

Of course, instead of stopping or being embarrassed, he looked back up at me and grinned. He shook his fat a couple more times and said, “Sometimes, it talks to me. Grrrrrrrrrrrr!” (shakeshakeshake.)

I died. I was laughing so hard in front of my class that it took me a few minutes to get back under control. Kids say the darndest things.

Yesterday I was absent for the second time. Luckily, I did not spend the whole day worried about my kids (just most of it). Also luckily, most of my classes behaved relatively well and all of them turned in phenomenal work at the end of class, so that’s a huge win. The bad news is that Period 3 was such a terror that the sub called one of our advisors into the room… THREE TIMES IN 80 MINUTES. Her note to me says that her day was full of “extremes and variety.” One of my classes was the best 8th grade class she’s had at the school, and then my bad class was a nightmare. Welcome to my life.

The best part of coming back to school today was the dance after school. I expected low turnout from my kids, since it was from 4:00-5:30 (seriously) and included fourth to eighth graders. But they did show up, all dressed up and in tight circles with their friends, while the little kids legitimately played tag around them. It was adorable (and such a throwback to middle school awkwardness).

At one point, I ended up in a dance-off with a boy in my homeroom. This involved a very large circle of cheering children around us while we took turns dancing. He is actually an incredible dancer and spun around all over the place. I, on the other hand, performed my best over-the-top awkward teacher dances (the Lawnmower, the Shopping Cart, the Sprinkler, even that plug-your-nose-and-drop-into-water one). The kids knew I was messing around and cheered their faces off. I also got on stage with a few other teachers for the Cupid Shuffle, and then walking around bugging groups of my kids who thought they were too cool for the YMCA or the Macarena. I had a great time and I think the kids really love that non-academic contact with teachers, but seriously… who have I become?

One of my lovely colleagues drew this and hung it on my wall during lunch today:

(If you can’t see that well, it says “Thinks Meatloaf would do for love.” The choices are “Anything” and “That”)

A student was in my room with us while we ate (lunch detention), and watched us laugh at the poster and listened to us sing Meatloaf for awhile.  He finally started laughing with us and it was clear he got the joke.

I was really tired and not feeling so well by last period, which is the class with this student. So to cheer myself up, I paused right in the middle of teaching, looked at him and asked, “hey, what would Meat loaf do for love?”

The kid didn’t miss a beat. He answered, “He’d do anything. Well, except for that.”

We laughed. No one else got it. Then I kept teaching about midpoints.