rubinc in nyc!

I don’t really know what happened to the teachfor.us site for the past few days, but here’s the post I would have written on Tuesday if the site hadn’t been down:

The kids were waaay too cracked out on Christmas to attempt learning, so instead we watched the first episodes of The Future Is Wild. It’s a neat series in which a bunch of scientists collaborated on what they think the earth and its inhabitants will look like 5, 100, and 200 million years from now, and then got a bunch of computer graphics people to make a Discovery Channel-style documentary of the future animals. It’s pretty neat, and the kids got really into the bizaare animals, especially the “squibbons” - squid that live in the rainforest and swing from the trees. Also, there’s one part where they show continental drift making all the continents rejoin into one giant landmass, and every class reacted in the same way: “Pangaea! It’s Pangaea! OH MY GOD PANGAEA!!!!” I guess they learned something from our disastrous unit two.

Also, in one class the kids that were sitting at the same table where I had put the speakers noticed that they could feel the speakers vibrating and flipped out. It was actually pretty entertaining for me to watch them tinkering. First, they were just feeling the speakers vibrate and squealing because “sound does come from vibrations!” Then, they figured out that they could hold a tissue or a piece of paper in front of the speakers and it would flutter, because “the sound waves are moving it!!” My favorite thing they did was roll up their sleeves, press their elbows to the vibrating speakers and their wrist to their ears, and listen to the sound being conducted through their bone - because that is the exact demonstration I did with tuning forks to show that sound can travel through things besides air. They remembered what I did and did the same thing themselves, it’s like they learned something in science class!

Lastly, I didn’t get much Christmas swag because I don’t have a homeroom, but I did get a few sweet cards:

To Ms Rubin,

Have a Cool Christmas and New year with your family.

From, Jamie. 701.

Dear Ms. Rubin

I hope you have the best Christmas ever. And a wonderful New year. have the best Christmas ever be Happy on Christmas Day.

From Isha.

So now I am home and have almost two full weeks to regain my senses and figure out my plan of attack for the new year. Happy Holidays, and I’ll post again in 2009!

I graded the unit four tests this weekend, with a little help from an expert grader, and I am so happy! The average for the unit three test was a 58% and I was crushed, but for this unit it was a 75%! That is a huge improvement! TFA has you break each unit test down by the state standard each question is addressing, and they say that your class has only really mastered a standard if its average is 80% or higher on that part of the test. In previous tests I’ve never come close to 80% mastery, but on this test there was a 78% average for one standard and an 82% average for another! I realize this is an extremely dorky thing to get so excited about, and mastery of only one and a half standards out of a whole unit isn’t great, but for the first time I realize that the elusive TFA 80% benchmark is attainable.

Also, today I had one class write thank you letters to the people who gave us money on Donor’s Choose. Some choice excerpts:

I wanna say thank you for buying my teacher overhead. Now it is alot easier for us to learn in the class. She does alot of good things with the overheads. I hope that you still have enough money to get yourself what you wanna.

I love science. I like the way we do science. I like the way we use the overhead and overheard transparencys. It is real easy to do our work on the overhead my work is so much easier because I get to see pictures on the overhead  see graphs, people, houses and other stuff so thank you.

Thank you for the overhead thank you because it would be very hard for us to right down what she says so now we have color ink to see what the overhead thank you very much for helping our teacher because some kids in other countries don’t have stuff like we do we are very lucky to have stuff like this so the class would thank you for wasting your money on us thank you.

And yes, that last one really is all one sentence.

I didn’t fully anticipate that because all my “good” kids earn science points at the same rate, they would all reach the amount required for a fast food meal with me at the same time. I have taken four groups of kids to Burger King this week and two to McDonald’s, and I’m starting to feel like my whole paycheck is going towards clogging the arteries of my favorite students.

My first group of the day got McDonald’s for lunch, but since I can’t take them out of the school during the day I had to go get the food and bring it back. They were all really excited to place their orders for various Happy Meals with me, so I was dismayed when I got to the McDonald’s and realized that because it was so early (the seventh grade lunch shift is at 9:30 am) they were only serving breakfast. I did my best to pick out a variety of breakfast foods I thought the kids would like, but when I got back to the school the kids just whined because I hadn’t got what they wanted. I almost cried - I had to walk through a snowstorm (NYC never has snow days) and spend my own money to get what I thought would be a special treat for them, and they weren’t happy because it wasn’t the right special treat. Luckily once they started eating they changed their minds and decided that they did like pancakes and cinnamon rolls (surprise!), so it ended up being fun.

I took another group to Burger King after school, and that was definitely my favorite part of the day. Bobby is seriously the funniest kid I have ever met, he cracks me up non-stop during class - one time he cut a mustache out of notebook paper and taped it under his nose while I wasn’t paying attention, and then he raised his hand and with a perfectly straight face asked if he could go to the bathroom to shave because “puberty just happened.” Seeing that story written out I realize it sounds kind of lame, but his delivery was impeccable. Anyway, today he got a pink plastic princess in his kids’ meal, and instead of whining and throwing it out like the other boy in his group did, he made a very big show of treating it with “all the respect a princess deserves,” and not letting any of the girls touch it. He then decided that it was his “bride,” who he would “like to kiss as is my husbandly duty, but I’m afraid that her whole head will fall off.” I realize that the fact I found this as hysterically funny as the rest of the kids means I’ve been spending way too much time with twelve-year-olds, so it’s a good thing there’s only two days until break.

Most of the kids seemed to get into playing review jeopardy in preparation for tomorrow’s unit test, but that didn’t prevent fights from breaking out in two of my classes.

Also, today’s after school McDonald’s trip was kind of soured by a group of “cool” kids showing up at the same time as me and my nerdy good kids. It was painful to see my good kids’ faces when we walked in and saw the kids who make them miserable during the day, who immediately started whispering and laughing while shooting sideways glances in our direction. Ugh. I hate middle school.

Three days.

In the middle of class today, a kid suddenly began to loudly sing “Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down…”

I asked him to please not Rick roll my lesson, and the kids exploded. They simply could not believe that me, their teacher, had heard of the internet. It’s funny, but I guess the fact that my teachers were humans with lives outside of school wasn’t apparent to me in middle school either.

Four days.

Nothing out of the ordinary today, just the usual screaming, shouting, and shoving with small spurts of learning thrown in. The two saving graces of the day were:

1. Burger King with three very sweet girls, who filled me in on all the hilarious seventh grade gossip (guess who has a crush on a sixth grader???) and reminded me that even though my students can be ridiculous, they still are just kids.
2. Christmas shopping and dinner at Max Brenner with Ms. L. It started to snow as we were walking back and was in general quite a magical evening. It would be even more magical, however, if NYC ever gave days off for snow.

Five more days!

Today our science consultant, Mr. K, came in to give the kids a practice ILSE (Intermediate-Level Science Examination, the hands-on science test they have to take at the end of eighth grade). I was in a bad mood because I still feel kind of achy and tired, and the kids were being very argumentative and rude to Mr. K as he was trying to explain the instructions. This one kid in particular kept ignoring Mr. K and trying to get my attention, and I was pretty mean to him as I tried to get him to be quiet and listen.

Student:  Ms. Rubin! Ms. Rubin! Ms. Rubin! MS. RUBIN!!

Me: Be quiet, you’re supposed to be listening to Mr. K.

Student: But it’s important!

Me: No, it’s important that you listen to Mr. K.

Student: But it’s really important!

Me: I don’t care what it is, stop talking.

Student: But, Ms. Rubin!

Me: SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND LISTEN TO MR.K!

He eventually gave up, but at the end of class he came over and wordlessly handed me a carefully wrapped package with my name on it. He was trying to get my attention to give me a Christmas present (a nice pen), and a card he made me (”Best wishes for the holidays and New Years, Ms. Rubin. Regards, your student”).

I am  a terrible person.

Back to school today, but still feeling under the weather and sadly without Ms. L - she caught whatever I had (have?), as did seemingly half the teachers at the school. There were so few eighth grade teachers in attendance today they had to split one of the eighth grade classes up amongst the others, since otherwise there wouldn’t have been enough teachers to cover all the classes.

The stressful highlight of today was this major behavior intervention we had during lunch. The class that is so problematic that they were put on lockdown has only been getting worse, so the 7th grade teachers picked out the top four offenders for some… special attention. A few days ago we told the Big Four that they would be coming to a special meeting regarding their behavior during lunch today, to get them sweating. Then today we rounded them up and put them in four separate waiting rooms, to let their anxiety build. One at a time we called them into the Judgment Chamber (aka empty math classroom), where we had set up a circle of seven desks - the four seventh grade teachers, the sixth grade teacher the student had last year, and two very intimidating adminstrators. Each kid had to stand in the center of the ring while each teacher listed all their infractions for the year (”Do you think it’s funny to slap girls on the bottom?”) and the interventions that had already been tried (”I call your house every week and nothing changes, don’t you care about what you’re doing to your family?”). Then the sixth grade teacher (who all the kids love) launched into a very sad monologue about how she had expected such great things from the kid in question in seventh grade, and was so disappointed about what she was hearing. Lastly, the administrators very sternly told them that if they did not sign a behavior contract and uphold all its conditions, they would be kicked out of the school. It reduced two of the three kids to tears, which was awesome. We ran out of time for the fourth kid, so he has to worry all weekend until we get to him on Monday. I’m pretty pumped about the behavior contracts, because I think now these kids finally realize that there are consequences for their actions beyond lunch detentions and parent phone calls - neither of which bother them any more.

The relaxing highlight of the day was taking another two kids to Burger King after school. I really like spending time talking to the kids individually, as people, instead of yelling at them collectively as a screaming mass of pubescent craziness. Today it was two very sweet boys, one of whom even wrote me a thank you note for taking him! This was the best part of the conversation:

Student: We had a pushup test in gym today and I didn’t do very well.

Me: You know, I wasn’t very good at middle school gym either. (That, by the way, is the understatement of the century).
Student: And you still have a great career!

It kind of made me realize that even though my job is currently killing me, I am very lucky to be gainfully employed, making a decent wage, and in possession of a college degree and lots of options. Even though my kids drive me crazy, I want them to have those things too.

Except maybe Yenesey. I’m still mad at her for the whole Maffeo debacle.

Due to a combination of still feeling under the weather from Tuesday’s midday stomach surprise and being absolutely unable to face my bad class for the Two Hour Double Period From Hell, I did not go to school today. Instead, I slept in until 8, made all my lesson plans for now until break, and went Christmas shopping.

The TFA office in midtown has free photocopiers, so I spend at least two nights a week there making handouts for my kids. I have to make 115 of everything I give them, so over the course of the year I will probably have killed an acre of rainforest - FOR AMERICA! Anyway, the point of me telling you this is that when I went there today there were a bunch of nervous-looking twenty-somethings in suits sitting in the lobby. It took me a second to realize that they were college seniors at the office to interview for admission into next year’s corps. I was really tempted to warn them not to do it as I walked past, but there were TFA staff around and I thought they might not let me use the photocopiers if I tried to scare away their recruits…

Lastly, my third umbrella since moving to NYC broke as I was walking home, and now I am wet and umbrella-less. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good umbrella that won’t invert itself in the wind?

Awhile ago I wrote about Yenesey, whose classroom rampage was temporarily slowed by my communication with her basketball coach. Since then she’s been sort of on (when she moved to sit by herself so she could do all her work without getting distracted) and off (when she told Ms. L to “Shut the F*** up” in the hall). So today I was really impressed by something that happened with her. She was sitting next to Maffeo, who is a quiet and really sweet kid - he’s one of the ones who stayed with me until 5 to make my bulletin board last month. About halfway through class, I started hearing kids say “he’s crying! he’s crying!”, and I looked over to see that, indeed, Maffeo was crying. Not sobbing, but his head was buried in his arms with only his teary eyes poking out the top. The other kids started to make somewhat insensitive comments to him, but Yenesey told anyone who said anything some variant of “Shut up!”, “Leave him alone!” or “Mind your own business!” - and since she’s Yenesey, the other kids listened and left him alone. He was in tears for at least 20 minutes (he declined my offer to send him to the bathroom or the nurse), and several times I looked over to see Yenesey patting his shoulder and speaking calmly to him. I was touched.

And then, after class ended, I found out that he was crying because Yenesey stole all his pencils and was making fun of his (somewhat large) weight. She wasn’t being nice - she was covering her own ass. Bitch.
On the opposite end of the student spectrum, I had my first “Lunch Bunch” today. One of the things the kids can buy with their science points is a lunch with me at a local fine dining establishment (their choice of KFC, McDonald’s, or Burger King), and this week five students finally saved up enough points for it. Since I can’t actually take them out of the building, the “lunch” has to happen after school. Today I took three girls, and they were incredibly sweet and fun. They were so excited about going out with me, all day they were giggling and squirming with excitement. When we finally got to Burger King, they took a good ten minutes to decide what to order, and then spent a good forty-five minutes telling me all about their families, crushes, exploits, etc… and prying me for the relevant reciprocal information. I think it was more fun for me than it was for them.

After the girls went home, it was back to school for round two of bulletin board mania! I spent less time on fancy lettering and layout this time, but the student work is a lot better so hopefully it will all even out.

And last but not least, I guess my post yesterday about how supportive my administration is must have earned my some good kharma, because today my principal asked Ms. L and I to give him the names of our top two or three trouble kids. Apparently he has set up a private study room adjacent to his office, and from now until the end of the marking period those kids will spend science class there, learning from the textbook. I know this is very un-TFA of me, but I am so happy! And Tareque, who has gone rapidly downhill since the field trip, will be the first to go. I feel sort of bad about hanging him out to dry, but he often single-handedly prevents his entire class from getting through lessons, and  at this point I am not against sacrificing one for the benefit of all. Ah, the realpolitik of teaching.