Fashion police

One of my students said to me today, "Do you even think about your outfits before you put them on?" I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Like on Friday, you were wearing these khaki-ish pants, a green shirt, and a blue sweater. It just really didn't work."

I invited her to come to my house every day at 6 a.m. and be my personal wardrobe adviser.

Seriously though, it's amazing what kids notice.

I had another couple of students -- seniors -- in my office today talking to me about an issue they were having with another teacher. Right before they had to leave to go to class, they looked at each other conspiratorially and asked, "This may be a personal question, but are you okay? We have noticed that you've been sort of sad recently."

I was touched that they had noticed and that they'd said asked about it. It's nice to have little reminders every now and then of why I keep chugging along.

The dumps, and being down in them

The other day in my reading and writing lab we went over subject/verb agreement, and then as an informal assessment of the students' understanding I asked them to write a little story in which they played around with the S/V rule by using it both correctly and incorrectly. When I was grading them this morning I saw that one student had written this:

This IS such a boring class. July [sic] IS just about the worst teacher in the school.

I don't know if it's just first-year-teacher syndrome, or if it's just me. But if today hadn't been a professional development day I probably would have gone home sick at that point and never come back.

Proud

Yesterday I had so many occasions to be proud of my students. Wish I'd told them at the time, but I will tell them today.

The teacher becomes the student

I went snowboarding for the first time today! I didn't break anything personally, but we had three casualties among the students. The kids inducted me as a "real Minnesotan" now that I have participated in winter activities. (Even though I spent much of the day on my buttocks.)

Not what I looked like today

My little minions

Today in Life Skills class I had my students do my taxes. I gave them copies of my W2's (with certain bits of info redacted, of course) and the 1040EZ worksheet, and had jolly ranchers ready for the first ones who did it correctly.

One student said, "Isn't this something you PAY people to do for you?" Another said "You know that feeling you get when you're going to the dentist? I'm getting that feeling now, doing your taxes."

Turns out I'm going to be getting a $440 refund.


p.s. Filling out tax forms is part of the standard for personal and family resource management ...

Heads up

Not sure how many of you this applies to, but I work in a school where the computers are on a network, and students are using the computers ALL THE TIME.

We discovered yesterday that a few of our, shall we say, more creative students have downloaded a program that will allow them to access desktops of other people on the network. They use the program to do things like turn on their iTunes at full blast right when a teacher walks by, perform inappropriate web image searches, and delete each others' files.

The real problem was when they started doing it to teachers' computers, which contain confidential student information.

So. FYI.

"Your military"

I feel like I will keep coming back to this question again and again: What is my moral obligation as a career advisor to expose kids to military options? What is my moral obligation as someone who opposes the war in Iraq to advise kids against joining the military?

Yesterday I had a wonderful speaker - who also happens to be a parent - come in to hold a session at lunchtime. He had been an Army National Guard recruiter for many years, but now works in the private sector, so he had no (blatant, anyway) ulterior motives behind the information he gave to the students. My student who seems like he's been brainwashed by his recruiter sat down with the speaker and got some really excellent advice.

Afterwards I was talking about it with an administrator who said, a little disapprovingly, "When are you going to bring someone in from the other side?" I hadn't thought about that, but my gut reaction was, would that be helpful to me as a career advisor? Will I lose all credibility with the students who are planning to go to the military if I bring in a peace activist? Would they just choose to ignore all my previous advice and find themselves in a more dangerous situation?

Meanwhile, what message does it send to the rest of the school if I bring in a speaker who talks to the students about "Your Army," "Your Navy," "Your Coast Guard," etc., and don't bring in, for example, a soldier who has been to Iraq and come back totally disillusioned with the system?

Energy

Yesterday was one of those days. You know what I mean. The energy I was projecting combined with the energy I got back from the kids resulting in a neverending day from hell.

Now it's 6:30 a.m. and I'm not sure I have the energy to go back to school ...

Maybe I should just do what the kids do and get a couple of these ...

The Zone

We're going into week 3 of reading Guns, Germs and Steel with our Global Studies class, and the kids are amazing me every day.

Today I'm grading the journals they've been keeping as they read the book. Here are some excerpts [Warning: objectionable content ahead. Keep in mind, they are teenagers, and I always tell them that while I might not agree with everything they say, I respect their right to say it]:

In my opinion it could be possible to say that a less developed civilization stayed less developed because a more developed civilization held them down. However this is an effect not a cause. What factors made the "superior" civilization? What made them able to hold others down or enslave them.

If we relate the content we just read, he is saying the New Guineans are more smart and intelligent than white Europeans. If we see today's world the writer is totally wrong. Our present world show who is more smart and who is not and it's obvious from the observation that white people are smart.

While I was reading today, the thought popped into my head about when we went to the race exhibit last year. There was a moniter that showed the spread of of the human population. Humans started in Africa, then moved to other eastern countries that have people that are not white. From this information, I think that I can answer why white people had more "cargo." I think that darker skinned people evolved first, so they may have less of a drive to create new things. Although there may be less products that they get from the land, so they can't make the products that were brought over.

The explanations that the author comes up with for how societies ended up so different are insane. The possibility that it is because of the climate is crazy to me, but highly possible. Does it have anything to do with genetics? Does asking these questions really make a difference because are we honestly ever going to know for sure?

What I'm finding as the kids are struggling through the text (and we are still just finishing up the Prologue!) is that maybe what they said in grad school was true: kids will stretch up to their "zone of proximal development." We gave the kids a book that was too hard, but did a lot of preparation, and somehow they're getting it. A lot of them are actually REALLY getting into it.

I think teaching that way is like walking on hot coals. Until you've actually seen it happen, it sounds like a myth or an impossibility. If I weren't team-teaching this class with an experienced teacher, I don't think I would have had the guts to do it. It makes so much more sense to teach to the bottom than to to the top, or at least to the middle. But kids need more of our guts than that.