the ferrous wheel

Today I discovered the importance of changing the routine up every now and then, and opening the doors to my students’ curiosity. First, I announced the very first science fair at my school. I was cringing and waiting for the backlash (”Why we gotta do this? This school be doin’ too much!”), but what I mostly got was excited students shouting out what they wanted to research. I’ve got a student who already knows she wants to research growth rates of bacteria at different temperatures. And another who wants to see how to preserve strawberries. Apparently most of them have done science fairs before, and have had good experiences with them…so I am excited.

Part two of my inspirational day comes from our new science journals. In truth, I started having them write a daily journal entry because I am conducting an action research project for my grad class, to see how I can improve my instruction by changing one small thing. Like most things in teahcing, after all I’ve read about how great interactive science journals are, I’m just now finding it out for myself. Today’s prompt: “Tell me about your attitude toward science in general. And then tell me one thing you have always wondered about, or seen on TV/in the movies.”

Some example responses I got:

“I always wonder is there really aliens in the sky because I watch the movie Signs and they came to earth.”

“I have alawys wondered could I use science to create a whole new world or species. That really interests me right now.”

“Something I always wanted to know is about the ice age and the history of dinosaur because some people say it’s a lie.”

“Yes, one myth. The one when you give ppl wedgies and pull there panties over there head. Another one is can you take your eye out.”

“Their is one thing I would like to know about science because on TV I wanna know like if someone gets murderd and the burn the body how can the homoside detectives determine who’s body it is if they have no identification on them?”

“One thing I always wanted to know that’s science related is how tv’s work. Like I want to know all the things you gotta do to get a movie onto a dvd then onto the television.”

“I want to know why of all the 9 planets, earth is the only one we can live on and there must be another one.”

And my favorite one, mostly because I’ve had this student for both years and she is such a hardworking student…yet she rarely ever asks why:
“I always wondered where a lot of science relate stuff come from?? Like who sat down and made chemicals and periodic tables??? Where did science ever come from?? Acid and base, how can you tell me milk is a base of acid when it really doesn’t taste like either one?? How does scientist deal with all the procedures and process everyday??? Does it get overwhelming??? What happen when they do experiments and they don’t work out and they have to do it all over again???”

This makes me think about why my curriculum looks the way it looks. Why do I have to spend days teaching mole conversions (boring), when I could be tapping their vast stores of curiosity to teach them the answers to all these questions? We have a student at my school who is incredibly bright but has some kind of mental disability - he is OHI, other health impairment. He rarely comes to school, but apparently he spends his days at the library. Just learning. Whatever he feels like learning. It says something about our curriculum if a student refuses to come to school because he knows he won’t learn what he wants to learn, yet he has a clear desire to learn something. It’s like this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson about how schools kill creativity.

The best I can do right now is respond to their journal entries in detail (and I wrote pages to some of them), encourage them to explore their ideas for the science fair, and keep trying to weave these things into my curriculum. I want to answer all of their questions, but where is the time?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, mostly because the year has been like it started with very little variation - the job has lost a lot of its novelty. Before winter break, I felt like I had lost some of my drive to improve. In some ways, I had, because after being in this for over a year I can see where my efforts will work and where they will encounter an immovable barrier. The field is rife with these immovable barriers, and teaching for only a year has shown me a lot in terms of what I can and can’t do. So I pick my battles a lot more wisely, which, I think, is the best that any second year teacher can do.
I also like to think that I’ve erected a better wall between my job and my personal life. I don’t come home complaining about everyday incidents anymore - student misbehavior is a given on any A day (when I teach the abysmal 10th graders), and only the biggest of fights makes it home in an anecdote. I hope that my roommate’s life is a little better off because of it.

In any case, things are much better this semester. I put my foot down and refused to teach music this semester. Really, all it took was a one minute conversation with my new principal about how I was stretched too thin - and since she values me as one half of her entire science department (and the unofficial department chair, since I get all the department mail), she had no objections. There is a new music teacher who was hired literally one day before the semester began. If I had known last semester that we had the resources to hire a music teacher….

Well, that’s one of those battles I can’t do much about. I now get to focus all of my attention on making physics the best science class there ever was. I am completely in love with teaching physics: no other science is this easy to teach kinesthetically. I do labs practically every day, except for review days interspersed throughout the month, during which my students get a chance to practice rearranging equations and reviewing vocabulary. Lab materials are ubiquitous: carts, weights, stopwatches, meter sticks, balls of different sizes. And the everyday examples are everywhere, easy to see, and easy to understand. Now my current struggle is how to make chemistry just as easy, without the access to chemicals and a fully-equipped lab room. It is for this very reason why I refused to teach biology when given the option at the end of last year. Posed with the question of teaching either environment science or biology, I chose music. In my head, biology is simply a lot of rote memorization because there is so much vocabulary. With my students, that’s just too daunting.

So, life is okay. My tenth graders continue to be far more obnoxious that my students ever were last year (groups of terrorizing students come in biennial waves, apparently). My physics students continue to be amazing and a joy to teach. As a result, my mental health each week goes something like this:

Monday (A Day): Depressed. Hate teaching. Want to quit.

Tuesday (B Day): Love my job. Think that teaching is the most fulfilling career I will ever have.

Wednesday: Half day. Either an A or B day…either way, it’s fine.

Thursday (A Day): Loathe children. Incredibly depressed about the prospects of this country and our education system.
Friday (B Day): Think that if everyday were like this I would teach for the rest of my life.

For now, I’m okay with this cycle. It’ll continue until the end of the year, and then I’ll be thinking both, “It’s ending too soon!” and “It’s about time! I’m finally done!” Until then, I’ll be fighting the battle in shifts. Mondays and Thursdays, here I come.

I’m angry with my students. It’s the end of the first quarter, and half of them are failing. It’s not that I’ve changed the way I teach (if anything I’m much better than I was at this point last year), it’s not that I’ve changed the way I grade, and it’s not that my tests or projects are any harder.

It’s mostly because of this alternating A/B day schedule — students take twice as many subjects and, because the majority of them have no sense of responsibility (as TFA would put it, they have a very external locus of control), once they are over with A day they no longer think about A day. So the homework turn-in rate has plummeted. And since my grades are heavily project based, students who didn’t turn in a project are failing miserably. Miserably.

I don’t want them to get stuck in a hole that they can’t dig themselves out of so early in this year, but I also don’t want to cut them any slack. They need to take some control over their grade. I already do way too much for them. Proof: my pass rate last year was the highest in my school. I thought I was being too easy, but my assistant principal assured me that my class was very rigorous. I do a lot to enable students to pass — I stay late, I go to Saturday school to tutor, I hunt kids down during lunch and in the hallways and practically every time I see a student on my internal warning list, I remind them that they need to make up an assignment.

It’s not just the schedule that’s different this year, it’s also me. I’m tired of doing all of that because I believe now that it’s detrimental to my students’ future. If they don’t learn to take responsibility now, and if they can’t remember one weekly homework assignment, when will they learn? They don’t have time to learn. They won’t succeed in college, and many of them won’t even succeed in a basic job. It’s ridiculous. But if I fail them now, they might have to repeat. And some of them are too old to repeat, so they’ll just drop out.
So, is it better to let them fail now and learn from their mistake when they have a little bit of time to keep making mistakes, or is it better to push them ahead and do what I can to help them pass right now, so that they can actually get to the next step?

Today I stayed after a bit during tutoring to unpack some textbooks and break down some cardboard boxes (somehow, attacking cardboard boxes with a pair of scissors after a frustrating day is wonderful). Of course, the second bell rang for tutoring and kids were still wandering the halls. One kid - surprise, surprise, the brother of my most annoying child from last year…must be an annoying gene that runs in the family - was just sitting in a chair next to me peeling an orange and dropping his peels on the floor. Here’s the exchange that followed.

Me: “Are you serious? You can’t eat up here. Put that away, or go down to the cafeteria.”

Him: “Ok.”

He continues dropping orange peels. Then he walks around the corner to the staircase where he thinks I can’t see him. I follow him and see that he’s dropping orange peels again in the hallway.

“PICK THAT UP. NOW.”

“Oh, I didn’t even know you were there! You look like a student, that’s how young you look!”

Oh how I wanted to say this in response: “Oh, I didn’t even know you were there either! You look like a full grown adult, why are you still in the tenth grade? No, really, why? Is it maybe because you’re standing here dropping orange peels on the ground like an idiot when you should be in tutoring getting your homework done?”

…These things only come to me in retrospect. By that time, he had left and gone upstairs to his tutoring room. I wish I were quicker on my feet.

I keep thinking back to how I felt around this time last year. I think I went home a couple of times in tears. I know that definitely happened when my cell phone was stolen in November, when I still felt like I was floundering. Third period used to give me the worst nightmares, and I would feel anxious until that bell rang at 11:39, when the horrors would trickle into my classroom and make my life miserable.

This year, I’m much less bothered by students. That is, they don’t really make me feel anxious. They don’t really make me go home in tears (in fact, I haven’t cried once this year - and I shouldn’t have a reason to!). They just make me… ANGRY.

Half of my students are failing right now, because the alternating day schedule is throwing them off and they aren’t being responsible for their homework. On top of that, we can’t even do a lab write up for a lab we did two days ago because half of the students are like, “I don’t remember that. I ain’t doin’ this sh**.” Or, when I am circulating during independent practice, I get students who give up and say, “This doin’ too much. I ain’t doin’ this sh**.” Where last year I used to stop and first, reprimand them for their language, then encourage them and tell them I would help them do it, this year I just give them attitude back.

When they push their paper away and whine, I push their papers away and say, “I’m not helping you if you have that attitude,” or, “I’ll help you when you’re willing to accept help.” I’m not forcing anybody. I’m not going the extra mile (although I still do it a lot) for the kids who chronically whine and complain about the work. No. You either do it the first or second chance I give you, or you can leave.

It used to make me sad or worried that half of my students were failing. It still does, a little. But now it mostly just makes me angry. Why can’t they get it together, when they are 18 years old? Why do they continue to act like children?
Ugh.

One of the best things about living close to my school (besides the short commute) is that I always see my kids walking around. Last year I found out one student who I didn’t teach lived across the street from me. I used to follow him home awkwardly, trying to stay a couple paces behind so that I didn’t have to pass him and say hello, and make him feel awkward because he now has to walk home with a teacher.

Over the summer I saw two students walking around my neighborhood, just two blocks from where I live. Today, as I was biking home, I ran into two of my current kids - cousins - as I was crossing the street. One of them lives in the apartment complex next door! Crazy!

I actually hit it on my first quiz of the year. 80% big goal. Done. Only two sections of chemistry fell around 75 - 79%, and that’s easily fixable. My two physics sections passed it with flying colors. Can I actually be teaching well? In the first few weeks of school? No way!

I mean, sure, there are struggles. And then there are plenty of days when my voice is hoarse, I want to strangle certain kids, and I become a huge bundle of negativity. But I try to remind myself that things are going well, in comparison to this point last year. Last year, my first test had a 33% average. The first problem was that it wasn’t even aligned with what I was teaching, because I didn’t know I could change the test I was given by the other campus. The second problem was that I just really didn’t know how to teach.

Anyhow, I’m only writing this post to remind myself that things are going well this year. Relatively well. I’m exhausted after every day, music class is discouraging me because the kids clamored for it but now they say it’s boring, and doing labs is like organized chaos in chem class. But it’s worth it, because I guess the kids are getting what they totally didn’t get last year. Whew. Now I’m off to grade my second set of quizzes for the year, and hope that things stay this way!

I held three kids back in my class today after physics. While I was doing the closing and asking for key points from the day’s lesson, I quietly handed each of them a slip of paper that said, “Can I see you after class?” They sat there in suspense as the rest of the class filed out, one by one. One of them kept asking me if he was in trouble, but I didn’t gratify him with an answer.

Then I handed all three of them their graded homework. All three homeworks looked exactly the same - same mistakes, free response questions copied word for word. I mean, if you’re gonna copy, can’t you at least learn to alter some of your answers so that it doesn’t look that conspicuous? One of the girls protested that she and her friend had worked on it together because they had a sleepover. Yea. My ass you had a sleepover, and if you did, you wouldn’t have been working on your physics homework. Anyhow, after I had finished this spiel and gone through why I uphold the academic honor code, they had the nerve to ask: “So, are we still going to get zeroes for this?”

This is like last year, when a graded test went missing from my desk, and the next day I get a revision from a student with the exact same answers as the test that went missing. Since it was an interim, I had an excel spreadsheet of the exact answers that every student wrote. And then when I confronted him about it, he decided to continue to lie to my face…even when I showed him that he had written, verbatim, the same answers as I had on my spreadsheet.
They can’t draw a graph, they can’t rearrange an equation to solve for x, they can’t read high school level texts, they always divide 5 by 10 backwards and say the answer is 2. But worst of all: they can’t even cheat the right way.

It’s funny how now all of a sudden my old students love me. LOVE me. I see them in the hallways, during lunch, before and after school. They duck into my room whenever they can to say they miss me, give me hugs, tell me how much they don’t like their new teachers. I usually respond with, “I miss you too! Ok, now where are you supposed to be? Can I see a hall pass?”

I love seeing my old kids too - I would much rather teach them (I actually do have 6 of my former students in my classes, which is wonderful) than suffer through the first painful months without the advantage of close relationships with students.

I know I should be rooting for the new teachers at my school (and there are many, many of them! Basically less than a fourth of the teachers are returning this year), but a part of me is secretly happy that the kids come to me complaining about their new teachers. It means I get respect from kids and I don’t have to fight for it like I did last year. It means I’m one of the old faces, the one who knows how things were back in the old days.

This is only further proof of the fact that teachers who stay are the ones who make the biggest impact on their students.

At back to school night last Thursday, I had a conversation with one of my physics student and her father, that went something like this:

Father: “And is she talking too much in class?”

Me: “No, she’s doesn’t have any behavior problems!”

Student: “It’s cause I like her class. We actually get up and do stuff. It’s not like other classes, where you just sit there and read textbooks and then write about it.”

A huge smile breaks out on my face. I’m making a huge effort this year to make all of my science classes lab and inquiry based. I think I’ve only spent one day each in chemistry and physics without some type of lab or mini inquiry activity. And on those days, I still did some kind of cool demonstration to get the kids thinking, why? I’ve been spending money on the small knick-knacks I have to buy for labs, spending hours altering lab handouts to make them kid-friendly, and going in early to set up and take down lab stations. But it’s so worth it.

This week: lab stations to explore physical and chemical changes. Finding the velocity of a remote controlled car. Predicting the density of different types of soap.

I love being a science teacher.