Life Changes

A lot has happened recently...

I finally (FINALLY) moved into my house. I am sleeping on the couch, keeping warm with space heaters, showering at friends' houses, and cooking with a microwave... but I'm living there. Heat, shower, and kitchen are all in progress and should be ready soon.

Our church recently multiplied again and there is a new group meeting at my house! It is small group of people who, for the most part, either work at Kingsbury or Streets Ministries and/or live in our neighborhood. I'm very excited to grow with this new family of believers who not only love the Lord but also love our community here.

And the biggest, most wonderful life change-- basketball season is over!!!!!!! So much more free time... which I will be spending painting, installing trim, raking leaves, etc.

Pictures soon to come!

Life These Days

I usually have coffee for breakfast.

I usually have the leftover cold coffee for lunch.

I usually eat whatever I managed to pack for lunch as a late afternoon snack after tutoring or basketball.

I spend afternoons pretending like I know how to coach basketball, or tutoring.

Today I had about 10 students after school, and I was simultaneously supervising a few in detention, reviewing two-step equations with one, reviewing slope-intercept form with another, teaching two how to solve systems of equations, helping one memorize her squares and square roots, and getting another group started on graphing inequalities. Three of those students are not even in my math class (or the 8th grade!) but just love to come hang out after school and learn math... and who am I to turn away a kid who voluntarily comes to learn math after school??? Sometimes tutoring makes my brain want to explode, but I LOVE it more than any other time of day.

I am prone to lovingly violent language... I often implore my students to stop killing my soul with their bad behavior, or (jokingly) threaten to tighten my "funnel of care" until it is wringing their necks.

I trip over things frequently (as in, multiple times a period) and make my kids crack up. I pretend as though I do it to entertain them but really I'm just clumsy.

I have never managed to procure a good eraser for my whiteboard so I have begun using a discarded fleece jacket that has been in my lost and found for a few months. It works like a charm but it looks ridiculous.

I frequently gives kids rides home from tutoring or basketball and the messiness of my car has become well known in the 8th grade. That is kind of embarrassing. I'm going to try to clean it out tonight.

I have also discovered the limit to the number of 8th grade bodies one can fit in a normal sized sedan. The limit: 5.

I have big dreams for my students and we are working and praying on getting a handful of them into private high schools. I spend a couple of hours a day either working on applications, talking to students about the applications, or dreaming with my co-teacher about their futures. I will be glad when high school application season is over.

This is life these days. Notice I didn't talk about anything other than school because there isn't much going on otherwise.

I vacillate between loving it and hating it. Sure do love the humans involved though.

Tired

I am tired.

As in, deep-in-my-bones, I-wake-up-tired-and-stay-tired-all-day-and-am-tired-when-I-go-to-bed tired.

As in, sometimes-I-struggle-to-open-my-eyes-in-the-morning, and yawn-87-times-just-during-1st-period tired.

As in, I-sometimes-want-to-quit-just-so-I-can-sleep-past-five-a.m. tired.

And yet Dorian and Jose and Charitey and Wendy and Fannie and Kiyanna and Chris and Wesley and 85 more of them keep me coming back. That, and daily miracles of the Lord. It is only by his grace that I am still standing.

Cultural Bias

Perhaps you have heard of the term "cultural bias," particularly if you have done any reading about urban education and the achievement gap.

The idea is that part of the gap in test scores between low- and high-income students come from a lack of common cultural knowledge-- for example, a test question may ask about compound interest on a bank account, a concept with which most middle and upper class middle school students would at least be vaguely aware of... they know their parents have bank accounts, many of them may have savings accounts, and they have at least some idea of what interest is and how it works. For a student in poverty whose family lives paycheck to paycheck, the word "interest" may be completely foreign. This student has to not only learn HOW to calculate interest, they must first learn WHAT interest even is. If they did not explicitly learn about interest in math class, they will miss that question on the test-- even if they know how to use percentages in other circumstances.

To be honest, I was always a LITTLE bit skeptical of cultural bias. It just seems like for the most part, my kids are quite worldly and know about a lot of things I wouldn't expect them to.

Until today. We took a practice writing test today (it is scored, but it's a lead-up to the final test at the end of the year)... the test that affects our school's AYP Language Arts score that determines whether or not we are a "failing" school or whether we are "meeting standards."

Without getting too specific, the writing prompt REQUIRED knowledge of what the Nobel Peace Prize is and what an Academy Award is for. If students don't know these two things, they literally have no chance of writing a coherent essay.

Is this fair? I am of the opinion that it is not. I would say both of those things fall under the category of "cultural background knowledge" that most students growing up in a middle class home and school environment would know about-- their families read the newspaper, watch the news, and they have much more school experience with the arts and humanities. My students stared at me in disbelief when I read the prompt, and hung their heads when I told them I couldn't answer any questions about the topic.

And yet our school's future could be determined based on such cultural bias. In this example, even the best writers in our school could be foiled by lack of background knowledge. Is it fair to say a student is stupid because they don't know what the Academy Awards are? I don't really think so.

The Balance

This job (and life, it seems) is such a balance of good and terrible.

Today's example--

Hunter* is a tiny, scrawny white kid in my last period class who always looks bored in my class and somewhat superior toward his immature classmates. I always assumed he was pretty smart (since he always did what he was supposed to and looked bored) and then I realized when I graded this week's quizzes that he is usually just spacing out in my class doing nothing.

I had them write on the back of their quizzes 3 things they liked about my class so far and 3 things they wanted to change. I got some pretty funny answers ("I would like to change the room decorations, I like purple FYI," "I like that it is not FREEZING in here like in other classrooms," "I LOVE HUNGER GAMES!!!" [which has nothing to do with math class])

Hunter's made me sad- he wrote something along the lines of "there is nothing I like about this class particularly or anything I want to change, it's just another school in another state with a slightly different way of rotating classes." It felt hopeless and angry.

Today Hunter walked into my enrichment class and he was the first kid in the room- the only kid for about 5 minutes. I took a deep breath, knowing that he might hate me for bringing it up, but asked him about what he wrote and how many states he had lived in and how long he had been in Tennessee. Surprisingly, he was pretty open to talking about it and soon we were joking about places we would like to visit and Alcatraz (he lived in San Fran) and the Bengals jersey I was wearing for homecoming theme day.

I wondered if it was short lived but he kept the chatter and joking up even during math class after that-- stopping me once as I walked around checking work to add that he had never lived in Hawaii or Alaska but wanted to. It was a cool experience of making a connection with a kid who was previously long gone in my class.

Now the terrible to balance that out. M, whom I described a few weeks ago with the story about stopping him from fighting & being suspended and him thanking me, got in a fight in my classroom (!!) today with another student, Gumby* (so nicknamed for the sake of this blog because he walks like he is made out of rubber bands).

Gumby was in my class last year and was TERRIBLE. He almost got suspended the first week of this school year. Through a combination of deep investment and relationship building on my part and his English teacher's part, and a mentoring relationship with Reggie from Streets Ministries, this kid has made a 180º change-- it's incredible.

But then today, all the progress with M and Gumby was undone. They almost fought once, I separated them, talked to each extensively, thought I got through to them-- and suddenly they were trying to kill each other, and I was in the middle of it, restraining Gumby while another kid thankfully got M in a headlock and held him there until he chilled out. It was the worst thing I have experienced this year... the adrenaline hangover afterwards (with my 8th period class waiting for me to teach them math!), the stinging knuckles from where someone hit me or I got pushed into a locker (it happened so fast I legitimately have no idea what happened), and the sadness that these two kids, the two I've probably invested the most relationship building and prayers in, just did such a violent, brainless thing-- it was not good.

Such is the balance.

* I've decided that even though this blog is private I shouldn't use my students' real names since some of them have rather... ahem... unusual names. So I'll use nicknames/pseudonyms which may be descriptive-- like Gumby. I have another one, Slinky, that I look forward to writing about soon. Middle school boys are funny even in their body movements... like they are held together with elastic.

Best Quote Ever

M. (the one with the suspension story below) was in lunch detention with me today (for a very benign reason- talking too much in class).

He walked in with his lunch and said, "Ms. S, what is a veggie burger?"

I answered that it is a burger patty made out of a vegetables or beans, with no meat.

He made a disgusted face and said, "Ugh. What's the POINT OF THAT?"

Hahahaha.

Hallelujah

So in case you haven't heard the news, we finally got a 6th teacher for the eighth grade... such a HUGE answer to prayer I can not even begin to tell you. I had prayed all last week specifically that we would hear about a new teacher by Friday-- and then the Lord one-upped me because not only did we hear on Thursday, the new teacher actually showed up on Friday! Today (Monday) was our first day with her teaching and it was GLORIOUS.

I had 34-36 students in each class and although by most standards this is still huge it felt tiny. Also I went from five 40 minute periods a day to three 75 minute periods a day which made it so much easier to breathe/think/do everything other than run around like a chicken with my head cut off.

Even bigger answer to prayer, next Monday we are getting a 7th teacher who will also teach math and supposedly I will only have 24 students in my class. That is less than half the number of students I started the year with, if you will recall. 24 is a piece of cake. A breeze. A pie in the sky. And so on and so forth. I am pumped!

Best part of today-- some of my really terrible students, who were cheering last week about getting rid of me as their teacher, begging me in the hallway to PLEASE let them come back to my class. Har har har.