rubinc in nyc!

And yes, I did make it home safe and sound. We had a “rapid dismissal” - meaning we got out 10 minutes early, all the kids went straight out the back gate, all the teachers went out the side entrance, and the entire building was closed by 3. It was kind of disconcerting because people were palpably nervous, and there were a lot of extra police around the school, on the streets, and on the subway. Some teachers did get egged last year, but I don’t think anyone did today - although some kids did get caught bringing eggs to school in the morning (I haven’t heard yet what their fate will be). Apparently there were some knifing incidents on the subway in a different part of the Bronx, though…yikes.

On a happier note, for Halloween Ms. L and I dressed up as each other. She wore my labcoat, and since she is very stylish I wore a dress. A lot of my girl students commented on how “pretty” I looked and advised me to dress up more often, but the best compliment I got was when I overheard two boys whispering to each other in line about how “mad fly” I looked. Sweet.

…but I will be waiting until tomorrow to write an actual post.

The last time I skipped a weekday post, though, I got many concerned emails and phone calls. And since I wrote about gang initiation rituals yesterday, I thought I’d let you all know that I’m not posting because it’s taking forever to grade the unit 2 tests, not because of any dramatic gang activity.

As frustrated as I get with my students sometimes, I am constantly being reminded of why it is they act the way they do, and why I signed up to do this in the first place. Today was especially loaded with these little reminders, such as:

1. A student told me he was going to “beat me up,” so I called his house and his mother reassured me that she would “break his face” for the infraction. Small wonder he thinks violence is the way to handle things that upset him.
2. One of Ms. L’s students was acting particularly out of control this week, but when she attempted to call his family she found out that his mother kicked him out, because she “doesn’t want him anymore,” and he is living in a foster home.
3. When I was trying to help a girl who had spectacularly failed the last test, I realized that she couldn’t read a triple beam balance because she can’t add numbers that aren’t the same number of digits (she has no concept of place value, so when she adds 300 and 10 the way she lines them up is arbitrary - she could just as easily get 400 or 3010 as she could get the right answer). She’s not in special ed, has never been held back, and until today never realized that the way she added was not correct.
4. One of my “behavior problem” boys, Mario, stayed after school with me for an hour today to make up missing work. When Ms. L and I had to go, he sheepishly asked us to walk him home, since his mom couldn’t come for another half hour and he didn’t want to walk alone.
5. I was having a conversation with Johnny, who is very smart but easily distracted by the people sitting around him. We were discussing why he did so poorly on the last quiz, which according to him was because he was mad from something a classmate had done earlier in the day. In the middle of my spiel about personal accountability, not letting other kids bring you down, etc… he blurted out, “This is why I wanna go to a white kid school! The other kids there know how to behave and you can actually learn!”
6. It was one of my kid’s 13th birthday, and she informed me that it was really cool because she and her mom have the same birthday. Her mom is turning 30. Another TFA person I know has a student whose mother is only 13 years older than the kid.
7. Friday is Halloween, and we are having an early dismissal because apparently that’s the same day the Bloods do their initiation, which involves “cutting the face” of random people they catch on the streets. All the teachers and kids are advised not to walk alone and to go straight home.

So, yeah. I guess I can’t be too surprised that paying attention in science class is not the number one priority for most of my students. I just wish I could do a better job of making them understand that even though all these other things are going on in their lives, the only way to get away from them is to get their act together in school. Otherwise it won’t be too long until their kids are in the exact same place they are…

There was a group of principals visiting my school today, and they picked my class as one of the ones they randomly walked into. Thank God they picked the CTT class I co-teach with Ms. V, because that’s the only class where I actually get through lessons and don’t have to constantly tell kids to be quiet, sit down, stop punching each other, etc… Another teacher sat in on their debrief meeting at the end of the day, and apparently they had good things to say about it, yay!

On a less self-satisfactory note, I intercepted a journal two of my girls have apparently been passing back and forth all year in my class. The entire thing is pretty much a rant about how much they hate me and my “mad boring” class. It’s written in this weird mix of Bronx teenager slang and AIM speak, and riddled with ridiculous spelling errors. On the one hand it’s kind of annoying that they think those things, especially since the reason they are “mad bored” is that their behavior has repeatedly got them banned from activities the rest of the class enjoys, not because I’m going out of my way to make my class unpleasant for them. But on the other hand, it was pretty amusing to read. Especially since it had random gems like, “omg this iz like Random but I hav a berthmark on my BUT” thrown in. No lie. As hilarious as that is, however, it’s kind of depressing that a seventh grader can’t even spell “butt” right…

Lastly, thanks to Martini and some random couple, Ms. L’s proposal is now fully funded and a class set of lab aprons and goggles are on their way, woohoo!

Is happening right now! Half an hour left in class, and I’ve already entered all the day’s grades into my gradebook, and the day’s “earnings” into the spreadsheet I use to generate their paychecks. I can’t believe I’m getting a Master’s degree from this.

I gave out the first round of paychecks today, some kids got really into it and others (mostly the ones with low paychecks) seemed pretty indifferent.  One kid got mad at me because he thought I was giving them actual paychecks, and when he realized that I pay them in “Science Points” he was not a happy camper. Oh well.

The highlight of the day is my new best teacher buddy*, Ms. V. One of my four classes is a CTT, or “Collaborative Team Teaching,” class. This means that over half of the kids in there have IEPs (Individualized Education Plans - in less PC terms they are “Special Ed”), and they are supposed to have two teachers at all times - a general ed teacher and a special ed teacher. Unfortunately, their special ed teacher was moved to fill a 3rd grade vacancy back in September, so for over a month I’ve been teaching them solo. Not only is that super-illegal, it’s also been super-disastrous in terms of student learning. I struggle with management with all of my classes, but that one is especially challenging given the special needs of the kids in there - a lot of them have IEPs that are based solely on behavioral/emotional issues, not even learning disabilities. I have lost entire periods with that class because of fights, screaming arguments, dance parties, etc… and as a result, their quiz and test averages are consistently lower than my other three classes. Not to mention the fact that they’re consistently about a week behind the other classes in terms of what they’re even learning.
But that is changing starting today, thanks to Ms. V. She was doing pullout small group tutoring with special ed kids, but now she is going to co-teach that class with me. She is amazing. She’s one of those teachers who just has this… presence, and as soon as she walks in the room the kids all stop whatever shenanigans they’re in the middle of, sit up straight, and listen. Today for the first time I got through the entire lesson, we had successful individual work time, and I only had to deduct points from the paychecks of five kids. Five. Last week there were only four kids in the whole class who went a single day without losing points. Thanks to Ms. V, I actually felt like a teacher with that class today, instead of a frazzled babysitter. If she gets moved to another position, I will cry.

*Ms. L is sitting next to me in grad class, and wants me to make it clear that she is still my best overall teacher buddy. Which is true, even though she got to take a sick day today for a scratched cornea and I am mad jealous.

In addition to being the last day of the week, Fridays are also awesome because I only have to teach four periods - woohoo! Every other day of the week I have three classes for a single period and one for a double, and the doubles are pretty killer. But Fridays I have three glorious planning periods, and I can usually enter all my grades for the week into my grade book, make posters for upcoming lessons, and do various other dorky teacher stuff with time to spare.

I had one student today that was really difficult. Porsche is about four feet tall, and the best way to describe her is definitely “spark plug.” Sometimes she gets really engaged with the lesson and is really fun to teach, but other times… She’s already been kicked out of my class several times for acting out, and suspended three days for fighting. I saw her in the hall this morning with her hood on and told her to take it off (hoods are against the dress code), and her response was that she was wearing it up because her hair was a “big mess, just like yours.” When it was time for my class she came in “really hyper because I just ate a bunch of candy!!!”, and within about five minutes somehow her notebook went sailing across the room. I picked it up and told her she could have it back at the end of class (it wasn’t her science notebook, so she didn’t need it), and she flipped out at me with “you’re such a white teacher!!” Then later on she was drumming on her desk and loudly singing, and when I told her that I was taking points off her paycheck she jumped up and screamed at me that I was a cracker. Yes, Porsche, it’s true - if I wasn’t white, it would be  totally acceptable for you to throw a private karaoke party in my classroom. Ugh.

On a more flattering note, today I walked into a classroom to pull out a student who had to make up a quiz. I always wear my (slightly too large) lab coat when I’m teaching, but since this was during one of my preps I wasn’t wearing it. I didn’t really think about the fact that some of the kids have never seen me without my lab coat, but when I walked in without it there was this excited murmur that built up to one of the kids calling out, “Dang, Ms. Rubin is mad skinny!” I know I shouldn’t care about the approval of a bunch of twelve-year-olds, but after spending all year drowning my stress in ice cream, it’s nice to know that at least I’m not mad fat.

Wasted an entire period with one class today because there was supposed to be a 7th grade assembly in the auditorium, and the speaker never showed up… Is it bad that even though most of me was annoyed, part of me was relieved that I didn’t have to try and teach them that period?

We are going on a field trip (The Museum of Natural History!) in a few weeks, and only 32 kids get to go - mostly because that’s the most I am willing to deal with. So I told them that I will take the 8 kids from each class with the highest paychecks, and while most of the “bad” kids don’t care that much it has made a *huge* difference for Tareque. He is obsessesed with going on this field trip, and as a result has been doing much better at keeping himself together. For the past two days his journal entry to me has just been about the trip and how much he wants to go on it. Today the kids at his table were talking a lot, but every time I shot them a Teacher Stare he was looking up at me with this grin that screamed, “You see this? These idiots are talking, and I’m paying attention to you anyway!” And about halfway  through the lesson he got so annoyed with them that he turned his desk around so he was facing away from the other kids at his table and towards the front of the room instead. Wow. AND, although the video (volcanoes, woo!) his class was supposed to watch got cancelled because they didn’t get quiet when I counted down to zero, he didn’t flip out like he usually would have. Instead, his note to me just read:

I was really looking forward to that video. It’s too bad some people can’t just shut up.

This is not to say that he’s been perfect, he still goofed around in the line more than he should have and got out of his seat once without asking. But he has definitely improved, which lets me know that he can focus and stay on track when he wants to. I really hope that there are no major blowups between now and the field trip that prevent him from going, and that I can come up with something good to bribe him with after the field trip is over…

Nothing too out of the ordinary today, except reading this article made me realize that I need to do a better job of keeping up with absent students. Also, several students constantly get pulled from my class for ESL, reading, or counseling services (since they aren’t allowed to get pulled from math or English, science and social studies are the two classes they usually miss), so even if they are “here” every day, they may have only sat through one or two entire classes for the whole week. Then there are the three students I have who haven’t been in school for over a week because they can’t come back until they get caught up on  their vaccinations, and the new student who just joined my class last Friday, and the student who is in school every day but spends most of her time in the AP’s office instead of class because of behavior issues… I feel like I am constantly working with kids during lunch and after school to try and catch them up on what they missed, and I am still not doing an adequate job.
I do have to admit that there are certain students who I secretly hope are absent every day, and others who I breath a sigh of relief over when a counselor comes to take them from my class. I know being relieved over their absence is just shooting myself in the foot though, because when they come back and are behind they act out more. I should make a graph of behavior issues versus abseenteeism, I have a feeling there’s a correlation…

Regular school today ended on a low note when the AP had to come into my eighth period class and break up a seven person paper-ball throwing fight, but the workday ended positively with Science Club! Today we learned how to use microscopes, and the kids were SO EXCITED, except they kept calling them either “telescopes” or “microwaves” because those words are more familiar to them. We looked at shrimp eggs and seaweed, which the kids giddily declared to be “mad ghetto!” - apparently that’s a good thing.

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but over the weekend I did some number crunching with my gradebook in Excel. I had a hunch that class participation (which until starting the paychecks this week I measured on a scale out of 10, based pretty much solely on behavior) and quiz/test performance were related, and I was right!

Of course, it’s hard to say if the kids who call out and throw paper are failing because they don’t pay attention, or if they don’t pay attention because they are failing. I think it’s probably a combination of both, with bad behavior and bad performance feeding into each other in a giant downward spiral. So we actually had a mini-lesson on this graph yesterday, and I’ve been having private talks with some of the kids who are stuck in that doom loop to try and get them back on track. And some of them did seem to be more focused today, so I hope if I keep harping on the relation between behavior and grades (and between grades and passing seventh grade, and between passing seventh grade and having a better future…) that they will be more motivated to get it together in class. I hope.

Not much out of the ordinary today; it’s depressing that things that used to surprise me (e.g. kids randomly punching each other in class) have become routine. But today I rolled out a brand new behavior management system that I got from my North Star visit, which involves the kids earning weekly behavior-based “paychecks” that they can spend on a variety of incentives, from homework passes to me taking them out to lunch to getting to wear my labcoat. I think it will be helpful for each kid to get a piece of paper every week that says, “Here is how you did this week, here is where you lost points, and here is where you did well” - hopefully it will boost their awareness and accountability of their behavior.

Tareque started off strong today, and even wrote “Okay Day!” surrounded by stars in his special notebook. However, he had a tailspin about five minutes before the end of class that began with him calling the kid next to him a racist (ironic, given the comment he made last week) and ended with him running out of the room and me having to call security to go get him. All the seventh grade teachers have been having problems with him, and after a conversation with our (awesome!) AP, who has been dealing with the aftermath of a lot of those problems, the school has decided to do a “child study” on him. That means people who actually know what they’re doing will be getting involved with him and his family to figure out what is going on with him, and what needs to be done to get him back on track. On the one hand this is good news, but on the other hand it will take a long time and doesn’t really help me, Tareque, or any of his teachers anytime soon.

Anyways, here is the picture of my bulletin board I know you’ve all been dying to see!

I’m pretty proud of it, myself.