Follow up to what I wrote yesterday that I only got around to posting today... grading papers today, my students had to write whether they agreed or disagreed with various statements, then pick one and write a paragraph as to why. Whoopi's paragraph had the best example, hands down (she dictated to another student who is writing for her for extra credit).
Unedited:
I feel strongly about good always wins out over bad in the end like in real life like a guy shoots people and he shoots a girl and she reported him and he got caught and got locked up and she was good so I feel strongly about that sentence.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
all that is so you would no I did my work!!
Last week was spring break. I took the opportunity to go to the other side of the world (Spain) and have as little contact with children as possible. My flight home was yesterday, so I took a sick day. It was actually kind of legitimate, since I started developing a cough Sunday night, although luckily it seems to be going away; if I get sick again this year I'm going to have to find a way to order a new body. I arrived home carrying a bit of emotional baggage to make up for all the physical baggage the airlines lost (including my cell phone... grrr...), trying to get mentally ready to get back to school.
Now, bit of background on what I thought I was coming back to. My primary partner teacher, M, who started out as the science and reading teacher for both my section and its sister section (L's class), has chronic health problems. She's been out of the room for what I think amounts to months, now, and the last few in a row. She came back for another staff member's baby shower, the day Maria told me she was running away from home the last period of the day, so I saw her only briefly, but she told me she was going to try to come back for report card conferences but would absolutely be back after spring break. (While I love M as a person, it was not the best moment of my year discovering she felt well enough to come to a staff party but not school...)
She didn't come for report card conferences, but I assumed, naively, that she would be back after spring break. Not so much.
The powers that be put in her place a while ago a long term sub working on getting his certification who's been in the building several years, who was previously subbing for an eighth grade teacher moved to another school a few months into the school year because of teacher/student ratios (my school has a lot of people who are legally considered teachers but are in actuality "support" staff, some who are terrific and some who are not, including grade coordinators who handle discipline and grade-wide concerns, and subject coaches. It's probably a system that should be in more schools, albeit with more accountability to actually helping the staff rather than doing CYA for administration, but it sucked for the kids who lost their teacher for no good reason they could see, mid-year, twice). But since she's been out, I've been planning for both my class and the other class and trying to take care of most of the administrative responsibilities for them, so Mr. Crush has something to go on, as being thrust in mid year not the best time to jump into to all of that, and even occasionally attempting science although mostly leaving that to him, trying to figure out how to do my job well in terms of actually meeting the needs of my special ed kids, and now also doing resource. Basically I've been doing three jobs rather than one, none of them particularly well-designed or very well supported. Fun.
I walked in ten minutes before the bell, and discover one of Mr. Far's kids (my roommate from last year) in the hall. She is probably one of the through and through nicest, sweetest, most innocent kids in the building, and I couldn't imagine her breaking the rules on purpose.
"Hi, Honey, what are you doing in the hall before the bell's even rung?"
She glanced at me guiltily, but had a good cause. "I just wanted to check if Mr. Far is here."
"Was he not here yesterday? I wasn't here."
"No, he broke his ankle!" She looked like she was about to cry.
Now, the last time Far was out, and I went in to check on his kids, since they are largely mine from last year, the rumors were already flying. The sub looked about to cry. Far's class is notoriously hard to deal with. My gift to him, from last year...
"How are you guys doing? I just wanted to check on you, because Mr. Far asked me to make sure you all had been doing your best today for your guest teacher," I lied. I actually had only stopped in because I had run out of the building to do an errand on my prep, and on the way back in heard screaming from his classroom window. I hadn't known before I walked in his room that Far was even absent. "But I somehow heard all this screaming coming from this room, so I wanted to make sure everything was okay."
A class full of fingers pointed instantly at Vandal, a kid I had last year along with Honey in the after-school program for kids who needed extra hours of school to make up for their low test scores.
"Naw, man, naw... it was him! I mean him!" Vandal protested, pointing at the kids he thought I was mostly likely to believe would have been screaming instead.
"Uh-huh..."
"So Ms. A, Mr. Far got arrested?" asked another kid out of the blue. A couple kids nodded and started whispering, but attention was definitely on my reaction.
"Arrested?" I asked, a little confused.
"Yeah, didn't he get into a fight?" Jekyll added. I looked at his face. He's grown up a lot this year from when he was in my class- I think having a male teacher, especially someone like Far, has done wonders for him, but thankfully his sense of humor hasn't diminished too much with his newfound maturity. He almost kept a straight face, but there was a trace of a smile underneath.
"Well, yeah," I decided to play along, "we went to a club last night, and there was a big fight. But when the cops came I managed to get away, but Mr. Far didn't, so he took the fall for both of us. I'm going to bail him out after school, so he'll be back tomorrow. But since he had such a rough day in jail, I want to have good things to tell him about you, not that you were screaming out your window."
Most of the kids instantly knew I was joking, especially since it was pretty obvious (I thought, anyway) that they had made up the whole thing. A couple kids, though, had completely not expected me to go along with it, and all of a sudden were taken aback with the potential that maybe it wasn't a hoax of their classmates. There was a look of suspicious confusion on their faces, but most of them knew me well enough to know I was joking after a couple seconds. Honey, however, who would never imagine a teacher would make something up like that, was devastated.
"Mr. Far is in JAIL?" she wailed. "He got arrested? Is he okay? Was he okay in the fight? He's not hurt, right? He's getting out?"
I didn't have the heart to keep teasing after that, and confessed that actually he just didn't feel well. But long story short, while kids are treasure troves of gossip, reliable info on teachers is not always their strong points, particularly gullible ones like Honey. So I took the broken ankle story with a grain of salt, although it didn't sound like the kind of story someone would have made up for fun.
I walked upstairs. On my into the office to sign in, I see Mrs. B, Melissa's partner teacher.
"Oh, Ms. A, have you talked to Melissa?"
"No, what happened?"
"She's in the hospital!"
Long story, but thankfully far from the kids' version I heard later, which involved her having a heart attack. The hospital part was true, though.
I sign in, go back toward my classroom, see Mr. Crush in the 6th grade office and stop to talk about what he covered yesterday with my class, as M obviously had not come back... As we start talking, L comes in. She looked kind of upset, and without too much of the how-was-your-break small talk, jumped in.
"Did anybody... talk to you about it?"
I was confused. "What do you mean?"
"About... you know..."
"Oh, M not being back?" I brushed it off. "Yeah, can't say I'm terribly surprised..."
"No, about... the whole hospital thing..."
"Oh, Melissa? Yeah, Ms. B just told me..."
She looked confused. "Melissa's in the hospital? No, I didn't hear about that, is she okay?"
"Yeah, I think... Wait, what are you talking about then?"
"The other thing..."
"Oh, Far? Yeah, I just ran into one of his students, I heard about that too. I'll call him later, but I'm sure he's fine."
She looked even more confused.
"No... you mean, you really haven't talked to anyone? I left you a message..."
"My cell phone got lost with my luggage. Long story, but I don't have it right now. What's wrong? What are you talking about?"
L took a deep breath. "Now, don't freak out."
I started to freak out. "What?"
"Just, before I tell you, she's fine. She's really fine, she's home, she's okay. Don't freak out, she's gonna be just fine."
It's amazing how the words "don't freak out" make you do exactly that.
L took another deep breath. I started to hyperventilate.
"Whoopi got shot."
Whoopi (so nicknamed by her classmates who think she looks like Whoopi Goldberg) is the girl who wrote the fairly incomprehensible birthday card that she worked on for three days from my post back in December.
"She what? Like, with bullets? From a gun?"
"That's why I said to not freak out... She's fine, really. She got caught in some cross-fire, and she got shot, on the news something like three times, but she's okay, she's out of the hospital."
I almost fell over. As mornings go, finding that my partner teacher who was absolutely positively supposed to be there after months of absence is nowhere to be seen, one friend has a broken limb, one is in the hospital, and one of my student has been shot three times, all before 8:10 in the morning, is not the best way to start. And I'm not really a morning person to begin with. Way to come back from vacation...
Whoopi actually wound up coming into school today. She couldn't use her hand- she evidently still has a bullet in her arm, but she seemed to feel fine. I couldn't believe she actually showed up. Granted, the shooting evidently happened the last day of school before break, which was over a week ago, but still... she has a friggin bullet in her arm. As everyone in the class was fussing over her in the hall, I helped her open her locker. Cyrus came up to us.
"See, Whoopi? I told you! Everyone's going to be all nice to you and give you all this sympathy because you got shot. That's why I want to get shot. I'm gonna go get myself shot in the head."
I looked at him and said dryly, "If you get yourself shot in the head there won't be any Cyrus for us to give sympathy to or be nice to."
Cyrus appeared to contemplate this for a minute. "Well... yeah, maybe. I guess so."
What disturbed me the most was the total normalcy of how he said it, for all the other kids as well. Getting shot isn't even a huge or life-changing event... Cross-fire is a part of life. A few weeks ago Penelope came in grouchy and snappy. In the afternoon she explained to me that she was just tired. There was a gunfight in her neighborhood the night before, and some bullets hit her house. The cops spent a significant part of the night banging around her house looking for the bullets.
"Stupid cops... I didn't get any sleep. It's not like we shot anyone! I just wanted them to do it quietly."
Penelope, is, incidently, trying to make up for weeks (verging on months) of apathy and indifference to school. She's a really special kid, loves learning about other cultures and is, when not beating other kids in a rage (which to be fair has only happened a couple times this whole year, though she's had other problems and evidently spent last summer under house arrest, I'm not real clear on why) actually really respectful and considerate of others in a way that I wish more adults were. Over break, as part of a reading program we're supposed to be having the kids do, she was the only one who actually recorded what she read, how many pages (145!), and even wrote a summary of what she read for me to prove that she actually read it. The only problem lay in what she read... I'm not sure how I'm going to pass this onto the reading coach...
The summary, with spelling but not much grammar edited, for your reading pleasure (consider it a preview, I'm sure they have it at Barnes and Nobles...):
G-Spot
The book The G-Spot is about a teen. She was 16 when she first heard about a man named G, and G was a pimp he got money from left to right. So she always heard this about him like one day he almost killed his cousin because his cousin because his cousin couldn't pay him his money so what she knew was that G was very strict about his money but as she got older she always heard things about him. She lived with her grandmom. Ok so shen she was 18 she and her friend wanted to go to G Spot the club G onde. Well, really her friend wanted to go but you had to be 21 or older to get in because it was a strip club. At her house she lived with her brother that was kind of mental but not too mental and one day she met G she didn't really know who he was until he told her and by then she had a crush (editor's note- the word she wrote is actually "clow" but I can't figure out what that is... "crush" is my best guess). So you know he got money so he told her he will help her get some money for her brothers school. So she love her brother and wanted him to finish his school so she went along with it.
Then they lived together started going out and then he was beating her.
but I didn't finish reading the story.
(arrow pointing up to her summary)
all that is so you would know I did my work!!
Have a good day (smiley face inserted here)
Now, bit of background on what I thought I was coming back to. My primary partner teacher, M, who started out as the science and reading teacher for both my section and its sister section (L's class), has chronic health problems. She's been out of the room for what I think amounts to months, now, and the last few in a row. She came back for another staff member's baby shower, the day Maria told me she was running away from home the last period of the day, so I saw her only briefly, but she told me she was going to try to come back for report card conferences but would absolutely be back after spring break. (While I love M as a person, it was not the best moment of my year discovering she felt well enough to come to a staff party but not school...)
She didn't come for report card conferences, but I assumed, naively, that she would be back after spring break. Not so much.
The powers that be put in her place a while ago a long term sub working on getting his certification who's been in the building several years, who was previously subbing for an eighth grade teacher moved to another school a few months into the school year because of teacher/student ratios (my school has a lot of people who are legally considered teachers but are in actuality "support" staff, some who are terrific and some who are not, including grade coordinators who handle discipline and grade-wide concerns, and subject coaches. It's probably a system that should be in more schools, albeit with more accountability to actually helping the staff rather than doing CYA for administration, but it sucked for the kids who lost their teacher for no good reason they could see, mid-year, twice). But since she's been out, I've been planning for both my class and the other class and trying to take care of most of the administrative responsibilities for them, so Mr. Crush has something to go on, as being thrust in mid year not the best time to jump into to all of that, and even occasionally attempting science although mostly leaving that to him, trying to figure out how to do my job well in terms of actually meeting the needs of my special ed kids, and now also doing resource. Basically I've been doing three jobs rather than one, none of them particularly well-designed or very well supported. Fun.
I walked in ten minutes before the bell, and discover one of Mr. Far's kids (my roommate from last year) in the hall. She is probably one of the through and through nicest, sweetest, most innocent kids in the building, and I couldn't imagine her breaking the rules on purpose.
"Hi, Honey, what are you doing in the hall before the bell's even rung?"
She glanced at me guiltily, but had a good cause. "I just wanted to check if Mr. Far is here."
"Was he not here yesterday? I wasn't here."
"No, he broke his ankle!" She looked like she was about to cry.
Now, the last time Far was out, and I went in to check on his kids, since they are largely mine from last year, the rumors were already flying. The sub looked about to cry. Far's class is notoriously hard to deal with. My gift to him, from last year...
"How are you guys doing? I just wanted to check on you, because Mr. Far asked me to make sure you all had been doing your best today for your guest teacher," I lied. I actually had only stopped in because I had run out of the building to do an errand on my prep, and on the way back in heard screaming from his classroom window. I hadn't known before I walked in his room that Far was even absent. "But I somehow heard all this screaming coming from this room, so I wanted to make sure everything was okay."
A class full of fingers pointed instantly at Vandal, a kid I had last year along with Honey in the after-school program for kids who needed extra hours of school to make up for their low test scores.
"Naw, man, naw... it was him! I mean him!" Vandal protested, pointing at the kids he thought I was mostly likely to believe would have been screaming instead.
"Uh-huh..."
"So Ms. A, Mr. Far got arrested?" asked another kid out of the blue. A couple kids nodded and started whispering, but attention was definitely on my reaction.
"Arrested?" I asked, a little confused.
"Yeah, didn't he get into a fight?" Jekyll added. I looked at his face. He's grown up a lot this year from when he was in my class- I think having a male teacher, especially someone like Far, has done wonders for him, but thankfully his sense of humor hasn't diminished too much with his newfound maturity. He almost kept a straight face, but there was a trace of a smile underneath.
"Well, yeah," I decided to play along, "we went to a club last night, and there was a big fight. But when the cops came I managed to get away, but Mr. Far didn't, so he took the fall for both of us. I'm going to bail him out after school, so he'll be back tomorrow. But since he had such a rough day in jail, I want to have good things to tell him about you, not that you were screaming out your window."
Most of the kids instantly knew I was joking, especially since it was pretty obvious (I thought, anyway) that they had made up the whole thing. A couple kids, though, had completely not expected me to go along with it, and all of a sudden were taken aback with the potential that maybe it wasn't a hoax of their classmates. There was a look of suspicious confusion on their faces, but most of them knew me well enough to know I was joking after a couple seconds. Honey, however, who would never imagine a teacher would make something up like that, was devastated.
"Mr. Far is in JAIL?" she wailed. "He got arrested? Is he okay? Was he okay in the fight? He's not hurt, right? He's getting out?"
I didn't have the heart to keep teasing after that, and confessed that actually he just didn't feel well. But long story short, while kids are treasure troves of gossip, reliable info on teachers is not always their strong points, particularly gullible ones like Honey. So I took the broken ankle story with a grain of salt, although it didn't sound like the kind of story someone would have made up for fun.
I walked upstairs. On my into the office to sign in, I see Mrs. B, Melissa's partner teacher.
"Oh, Ms. A, have you talked to Melissa?"
"No, what happened?"
"She's in the hospital!"
Long story, but thankfully far from the kids' version I heard later, which involved her having a heart attack. The hospital part was true, though.
I sign in, go back toward my classroom, see Mr. Crush in the 6th grade office and stop to talk about what he covered yesterday with my class, as M obviously had not come back... As we start talking, L comes in. She looked kind of upset, and without too much of the how-was-your-break small talk, jumped in.
"Did anybody... talk to you about it?"
I was confused. "What do you mean?"
"About... you know..."
"Oh, M not being back?" I brushed it off. "Yeah, can't say I'm terribly surprised..."
"No, about... the whole hospital thing..."
"Oh, Melissa? Yeah, Ms. B just told me..."
She looked confused. "Melissa's in the hospital? No, I didn't hear about that, is she okay?"
"Yeah, I think... Wait, what are you talking about then?"
"The other thing..."
"Oh, Far? Yeah, I just ran into one of his students, I heard about that too. I'll call him later, but I'm sure he's fine."
She looked even more confused.
"No... you mean, you really haven't talked to anyone? I left you a message..."
"My cell phone got lost with my luggage. Long story, but I don't have it right now. What's wrong? What are you talking about?"
L took a deep breath. "Now, don't freak out."
I started to freak out. "What?"
"Just, before I tell you, she's fine. She's really fine, she's home, she's okay. Don't freak out, she's gonna be just fine."
It's amazing how the words "don't freak out" make you do exactly that.
L took another deep breath. I started to hyperventilate.
"Whoopi got shot."
Whoopi (so nicknamed by her classmates who think she looks like Whoopi Goldberg) is the girl who wrote the fairly incomprehensible birthday card that she worked on for three days from my post back in December.
"She what? Like, with bullets? From a gun?"
"That's why I said to not freak out... She's fine, really. She got caught in some cross-fire, and she got shot, on the news something like three times, but she's okay, she's out of the hospital."
I almost fell over. As mornings go, finding that my partner teacher who was absolutely positively supposed to be there after months of absence is nowhere to be seen, one friend has a broken limb, one is in the hospital, and one of my student has been shot three times, all before 8:10 in the morning, is not the best way to start. And I'm not really a morning person to begin with. Way to come back from vacation...
Whoopi actually wound up coming into school today. She couldn't use her hand- she evidently still has a bullet in her arm, but she seemed to feel fine. I couldn't believe she actually showed up. Granted, the shooting evidently happened the last day of school before break, which was over a week ago, but still... she has a friggin bullet in her arm. As everyone in the class was fussing over her in the hall, I helped her open her locker. Cyrus came up to us.
"See, Whoopi? I told you! Everyone's going to be all nice to you and give you all this sympathy because you got shot. That's why I want to get shot. I'm gonna go get myself shot in the head."
I looked at him and said dryly, "If you get yourself shot in the head there won't be any Cyrus for us to give sympathy to or be nice to."
Cyrus appeared to contemplate this for a minute. "Well... yeah, maybe. I guess so."
What disturbed me the most was the total normalcy of how he said it, for all the other kids as well. Getting shot isn't even a huge or life-changing event... Cross-fire is a part of life. A few weeks ago Penelope came in grouchy and snappy. In the afternoon she explained to me that she was just tired. There was a gunfight in her neighborhood the night before, and some bullets hit her house. The cops spent a significant part of the night banging around her house looking for the bullets.
"Stupid cops... I didn't get any sleep. It's not like we shot anyone! I just wanted them to do it quietly."
Penelope, is, incidently, trying to make up for weeks (verging on months) of apathy and indifference to school. She's a really special kid, loves learning about other cultures and is, when not beating other kids in a rage (which to be fair has only happened a couple times this whole year, though she's had other problems and evidently spent last summer under house arrest, I'm not real clear on why) actually really respectful and considerate of others in a way that I wish more adults were. Over break, as part of a reading program we're supposed to be having the kids do, she was the only one who actually recorded what she read, how many pages (145!), and even wrote a summary of what she read for me to prove that she actually read it. The only problem lay in what she read... I'm not sure how I'm going to pass this onto the reading coach...
The summary, with spelling but not much grammar edited, for your reading pleasure (consider it a preview, I'm sure they have it at Barnes and Nobles...):
G-Spot
The book The G-Spot is about a teen. She was 16 when she first heard about a man named G, and G was a pimp he got money from left to right. So she always heard this about him like one day he almost killed his cousin because his cousin because his cousin couldn't pay him his money so what she knew was that G was very strict about his money but as she got older she always heard things about him. She lived with her grandmom. Ok so shen she was 18 she and her friend wanted to go to G Spot the club G onde. Well, really her friend wanted to go but you had to be 21 or older to get in because it was a strip club. At her house she lived with her brother that was kind of mental but not too mental and one day she met G she didn't really know who he was until he told her and by then she had a crush (editor's note- the word she wrote is actually "clow" but I can't figure out what that is... "crush" is my best guess). So you know he got money so he told her he will help her get some money for her brothers school. So she love her brother and wanted him to finish his school so she went along with it.
Then they lived together started going out and then he was beating her.
but I didn't finish reading the story.
(arrow pointing up to her summary)
all that is so you would know I did my work!!
Have a good day (smiley face inserted here)
Thursday, March 29, 2007
A new kind of superhero...
I have no idea how I forgot about this when I was writing the other day, but it's okay because now I have two completely ridiculous stories.
When Melissa came back from her prep the other day, she was on the computer and in the "history" tab noticed that someone had been searching for porn. When she confronted her students about it, they told her that it had been one particular student who had done it while the "art" teacher was in the room. (I put quotation marks on that because this man is, as a teacher, completely useless. Funny, entertaining, and by and large popular with the students, but also completely and utterly useless- he's a long-term sub who basically hangs out and reads the paper with the kids. He's currently in for the art teacher who I think just walked out one day and never came back, and he has been for months, but the only art that happens during that period is kids drawing on their desks) They told her no one else would ever do it, and that she would never catch him because he would never do it while she was in the room. As she started devising a plan to catch him, she started checking the history of what he had been searching for (we're hoping most of the actual links got blocked by the school district, but somehow some of the computers aren't linked into the censor thingees properly- the history, however, shows all links searched for, not just visited, so she found quite a bit).
Best search of the bunch? Simpsons porn.
The other thing that I completely forgot about until Melissa reminded me of it is the new eighth grade superhero, formerly of my roomate from last year's class. This kid is now in a push-in (the "model" I do most of the time) class with a pretty awesome sped teacher, whose exploits include making up fake standardized tests with made-up words for the fun of watching other teachers explode. I have to say it was a pretty awesome test... although he then had to run to tell the people he gave it to that it was a joke before they went and flipped out on the department chair.
So the other day when I was with Little Jay, trying to find Big Jay's teachers, I run into this teacher, Jabberwock (after the text he based his fake test on), walking the little superhero down the hall. Jabberwock stops me.
"Ms. A, do you know M? He's one of my students."
"Nice to meet you, M."
"Now," Jabberwock started, obviously trying to keep a straight face, "M has decided that he needs a new tag. So he decided to be a superhero. See, he made a shirt and everything."
The kid grinned and nodded emphatically.
"I see," I said, noticing that the kid had drawn a Superman-style logo on the front of his t-shirt, only instead of an "S" there was a "J". "Super J?"
"Not quite..." Mr. Jabberwock trailed off.
"Super Jizz!" M yelled.
Jabberwock and I looked at each other. I looked away, then at the floor for a minute, trying very hard to not look at either M or LJ until I got my facial expressions under control.
"Super jizz?" I asked. M nodded emphatically some more, pushing his chest out to show off his "J".
"Now, I'm trying to explain to him why that's maybe not the best name without explaining why, exactly, that's not the best name, because he doesn't see why that might not be the best thing to go around calling himself and get known by..."
"Mmmhmmm," I tried to make agreeing sounds without laughing, and found myself silently thanking whatever powers that be that I started with sixth and not eighth grade...
"See, M, it's kind of like calling yourself "Super Snot", only worse." Jabberwock explained again.
"But why?"
Luckily LJ had wandered away to disrupt another class. I'm not sure I could have kept a straight face through that conversation or had to talk to him about it afterward. Part of me thinks that no kid could possibly have gotten through three years at that school and be that clueless about something like that... but part of me no longer doubts any potential for stupidity from any human being...
When Melissa came back from her prep the other day, she was on the computer and in the "history" tab noticed that someone had been searching for porn. When she confronted her students about it, they told her that it had been one particular student who had done it while the "art" teacher was in the room. (I put quotation marks on that because this man is, as a teacher, completely useless. Funny, entertaining, and by and large popular with the students, but also completely and utterly useless- he's a long-term sub who basically hangs out and reads the paper with the kids. He's currently in for the art teacher who I think just walked out one day and never came back, and he has been for months, but the only art that happens during that period is kids drawing on their desks) They told her no one else would ever do it, and that she would never catch him because he would never do it while she was in the room. As she started devising a plan to catch him, she started checking the history of what he had been searching for (we're hoping most of the actual links got blocked by the school district, but somehow some of the computers aren't linked into the censor thingees properly- the history, however, shows all links searched for, not just visited, so she found quite a bit).
Best search of the bunch? Simpsons porn.
The other thing that I completely forgot about until Melissa reminded me of it is the new eighth grade superhero, formerly of my roomate from last year's class. This kid is now in a push-in (the "model" I do most of the time) class with a pretty awesome sped teacher, whose exploits include making up fake standardized tests with made-up words for the fun of watching other teachers explode. I have to say it was a pretty awesome test... although he then had to run to tell the people he gave it to that it was a joke before they went and flipped out on the department chair.
So the other day when I was with Little Jay, trying to find Big Jay's teachers, I run into this teacher, Jabberwock (after the text he based his fake test on), walking the little superhero down the hall. Jabberwock stops me.
"Ms. A, do you know M? He's one of my students."
"Nice to meet you, M."
"Now," Jabberwock started, obviously trying to keep a straight face, "M has decided that he needs a new tag. So he decided to be a superhero. See, he made a shirt and everything."
The kid grinned and nodded emphatically.
"I see," I said, noticing that the kid had drawn a Superman-style logo on the front of his t-shirt, only instead of an "S" there was a "J". "Super J?"
"Not quite..." Mr. Jabberwock trailed off.
"Super Jizz!" M yelled.
Jabberwock and I looked at each other. I looked away, then at the floor for a minute, trying very hard to not look at either M or LJ until I got my facial expressions under control.
"Super jizz?" I asked. M nodded emphatically some more, pushing his chest out to show off his "J".
"Now, I'm trying to explain to him why that's maybe not the best name without explaining why, exactly, that's not the best name, because he doesn't see why that might not be the best thing to go around calling himself and get known by..."
"Mmmhmmm," I tried to make agreeing sounds without laughing, and found myself silently thanking whatever powers that be that I started with sixth and not eighth grade...
"See, M, it's kind of like calling yourself "Super Snot", only worse." Jabberwock explained again.
"But why?"
Luckily LJ had wandered away to disrupt another class. I'm not sure I could have kept a straight face through that conversation or had to talk to him about it afterward. Part of me thinks that no kid could possibly have gotten through three years at that school and be that clueless about something like that... but part of me no longer doubts any potential for stupidity from any human being...
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
meme of the day: darf
Just a thought unrelated to teaching directly- I have an addiction to internet news that, while it doesn't quite rival J's NewsBlues, isn't terribly far off. I mostly stick to BBC international; local news is too close to home and there's been too many cases where I found out a child at my school had a connection to something in the paper for me to want to have to filter even that small additional amount of emotional stress. Anyway, while I was checking through headlines before I got on to post this, I came across the headline: Blog Threats Spark Debate. Turns out the woman threatened blogs on learning theory- and from the posts I skimmed, not anything hugely controversial, just common sense stuff like, chunk information so the learner doesn't get overloaded and that people learn more when they're interested in the topic. It was written a bit more technically, of course, but still- death threats? Come on. Her following posts repeatedly made reference to a "Blogosphere" community, a term I've seen more and more in reference mostly to political monitoring.
And here's where I go, "huh?"
According to wikipedia, I am now a part of a global community that is used to track memes through research on hyperlinks and the like. Now, a small, cozy, blogocommunity, sure- there's a comfy little triangle of links between this blog and two written by two of my favorite people in the world, and I live with yet another of the bloggers I linked to. But I keep finding out that yet more random and widely spread people read this, which is cool but a little strange, since I initially started blogging assuming no one but my immediate friends and family would read it. But hey, we're all in this blogosphere together...
So anyway, the line that got me thinking about this was the wikipedia line about tracking memes... To any researchers reading this, your meme for the day is "darf". I'm not really sure what it means yet, but I'm working on it...
M's long-term sub replacement, Mr. M (it's so much harder to come up with good nicknames for teachers, sorry for all the initials that look the same...) was out today for the fourth day (not counting the weekend) in a row. My kids were a total pain in the butt this morning and just would not shut up for even 90 seconds, although I have a new girl that so far I absolutely love, and who seems to have a pretty sweet political analysis going, depending on where you are in the political spectrum. We're starting persuasive writing now, and her group brought up ending the war in Iraq as their goal- and no, for any conservative family out there, I did not in any way plant that thought in their heads, that was entirely on their own- so I asked them to think of specific goals surrounding that and reasons for it. One of her groupmates had just gone on a sugar high silly binge and was babbling about ending the violence, and then shot her fist up and yelled, "Black power!" before collapsing into giggles. I laughed, but my new girl kind of tuned us out for a minute, staring at her paper.
"Why should we fight for a government that doesn't care if we live or die?" she asked quietly, referring to BP's comment. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized what she said, and her expression went blank as she looked at me to see what my reaction would be. When I told her that was totally valid if she could support it with facts and examples, she relaxed a bit... She's gonna be an interesting one. Much like Pockets, who can't go three minutes without some kind of stupid outburst, generally involving someone's mom and a sexual act, but yet knows every political candidate of the last two presidential elections (at least), their histories, most important issues, related scandals (i.e. swift boat nonsense), and running mates, among other details. The kid probably knows more than most adults, and keep in mind he was barely out of the toddler stage two elections ago. Janine, refreshingly, has yet to say anything about anyone's mom or any sexual act. I'm hoping she's my replacement for Carver (my name, now that he's gone, for my baby that moved to Florida)- sweet, smart, well adjusted, all that good stuff. Especially since when they moved out Squirrely (the kid who brought the pelt in way back in the year) because the other kids jumped him, they told us we're gonna get a trade for evidently one of the worst girls in another class... fun times ahead.
Anyways... I was afraid to leave them alone with the sub in for M/Mr. M, so I didn't leave to go do resource (at some point I'm gonna start getting in trouble for that, I'm sure). When I finally got up there, 8th period, I wound up spending half an hour tracking down Jay's teachers. I have to write Jay's IEP this week, and have literally zero data on him or his ability or his levels. He finally did the reading test with me, although I highly doubt it was to the best of his ability, but he refused to do any of the math, and then was suspended out until after his IEP is going to be due, so I don't even have the chance to try and test him. Awesome. I'm debating a home visit to do it, actually, but his mom evidently doesn't speak English and my Spanish is pretty pathetic right now.
The half-hour was a half-hour wasted, however... when I finally found her, his math teacher got out her grade book.
"Absent, absent absent, zero. Zero, zero, zero, walked out, absent, cut, absent, zero. He never even bothered to turn anything in- I have nothing for him."
His reading teacher was pretty much the same.
"I don't even know what his handwriting looks like. I literally don't even think he's ever written his name on a sheet to turn in. I don't even know if he knows how to write his name."
Awesome. On the continually awkward side, trying to find them I ran into Little Jay, as usual chilling in the hallway. He has a new haircut, kind of a faux-hauk, but his hair is so short it's pretty subtle, and then he had little designs etched into the sides.
"New mohawk, huh?"
"Yeah," he grinned, "like it?" and swung around to walk me wherever I was going.
"Of course," I replied, mostly hoping that the little designs weren't gang symbols that I just didn't recognize- the gang in the neighborhood I lived in last year actually painted their symbol onto my car trunk, but theirs is pretty recognizable (and I'm hoping functions more like protection than anything else... so long as there's no gang wars I figure it doesn't really matter- it's more of a conversation piece than anything)... this was a little more abstract. "So what inspired the haircut?"
"You," LJ said kind of seriously but still smiling, and put his arm over my shoulders- he may be smaller than Big Jay but he's still bigger than me. Now, my 6th graders and I are fairly physically affectionate, just with small stuff like patting shoulders or hugs in the morning, and I have been known to tickle kids into promising improved behavior/homework/no more cursing- it's fine, it's with kids I already have a strong relationship with, etc. And if Cyrus, for example, (who started out smaller than me this year but is growing like a shepherd puppy and is already taller than me) put his arm around my shoulder, it wouldn't be weird in any way; like S said, my relationship with him is more maternal than anything else, and ditto for most of my other kids. BJ, though, not so much, and LJ, who's not even my student in any way.... like I said before, probably think slightly more grown thoughts than kids who still call me "Mom" by accident. And it's, well, weird. I patted his back and maneuvered as far from his body as possible, but he was determined to walk me to wherever I needed to go. We chatted for awhile- he wanted to know why I was trying to find BJ's teachers, I wanted to know what class he was supposed to be in ("I'm supposed to be with you, Miss. My teacher said." Uh huh. And you've never smoked a joint. Hey, was that a pig that just flew by?) - but then, as the reigning champion of non sequiturs, switched topics completely.
"Miss, say 'Darf'," he demanded.
"Darf?" I asked, a little confused.
"Darf! Like that," he clarified, emphasizing the "-rf" part of the word.
"Darf," I repeated, now even more confused.
"Yeah, like that!" he said, starting to laugh. I got a little nervous.
"What does that mean? Are you telling me to say something that's actually really dirty in another language?" I asked, racking my brain to think of how "darf" could possibly be inappropriate. I can probably curse in six different languages at this point (it's amazing how those words stick with you when everything else you learn can just fade away... and we circle back to the learning theory blog...), and for the life of me just could not think of anything.
"No, Miss! That's just like, our word, you and me. You're part of our group, now, that's what we use."
Not so much reassuring words from a kid like LJ, as charming and charismatic as he can be... I started hoping that "darf" wasn't a gang symbol of some kind.
As we were talking we swung by a room I needed to check for a teacher, actually the room I think he was supposed to be in. Of course, there was a sub, looking totally overwhelmed in the corner. LJ motioned to a friend, who climbed off the table he was reclining on and sauntered over.
"Yo, come here! Tell her our word."
The friend, clad in a black hoody, let out a quiet, pretty, musical howl: "Daaaaarrrrrrff!"
"You say it, Miss!"
"Darf."
"No! Like before, like him. He just added that stuff at the end. Daarrffff."
"Darf."
"Yeah!"
The friend laughed approvingly, then looked at LJ. "Yo, why she sayin' that?"
Which I actually was wondering myself as I distractedly tried to figure out how I was going to extricate myself from LJ, find BJ's teachers who seemed to have vanished from the third floor, and theoretically check in on some of my other resource kids, all before 9th period.
"She's part of us now, she knows our word." LJ swung off me and disappeared before I could even turn to the sub. One of the other kids in the class I knew from the MG program, so I chatted with him for a minute to see if he knew where his teachers would be. No luck. As I turned to go I realized LJ had actually swung into the classroom to hang out with his friends. I waved and started to leave.
"Goodbye, sweetie!" he called after me. Loudly.
Every time I start to think I'm getting comfortable with this job, something happens that makes me realize what a stupid thought that is.
Darf.
And here's where I go, "huh?"
According to wikipedia, I am now a part of a global community that is used to track memes through research on hyperlinks and the like. Now, a small, cozy, blogocommunity, sure- there's a comfy little triangle of links between this blog and two written by two of my favorite people in the world, and I live with yet another of the bloggers I linked to. But I keep finding out that yet more random and widely spread people read this, which is cool but a little strange, since I initially started blogging assuming no one but my immediate friends and family would read it. But hey, we're all in this blogosphere together...
So anyway, the line that got me thinking about this was the wikipedia line about tracking memes... To any researchers reading this, your meme for the day is "darf". I'm not really sure what it means yet, but I'm working on it...
M's long-term sub replacement, Mr. M (it's so much harder to come up with good nicknames for teachers, sorry for all the initials that look the same...) was out today for the fourth day (not counting the weekend) in a row. My kids were a total pain in the butt this morning and just would not shut up for even 90 seconds, although I have a new girl that so far I absolutely love, and who seems to have a pretty sweet political analysis going, depending on where you are in the political spectrum. We're starting persuasive writing now, and her group brought up ending the war in Iraq as their goal- and no, for any conservative family out there, I did not in any way plant that thought in their heads, that was entirely on their own- so I asked them to think of specific goals surrounding that and reasons for it. One of her groupmates had just gone on a sugar high silly binge and was babbling about ending the violence, and then shot her fist up and yelled, "Black power!" before collapsing into giggles. I laughed, but my new girl kind of tuned us out for a minute, staring at her paper.
"Why should we fight for a government that doesn't care if we live or die?" she asked quietly, referring to BP's comment. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized what she said, and her expression went blank as she looked at me to see what my reaction would be. When I told her that was totally valid if she could support it with facts and examples, she relaxed a bit... She's gonna be an interesting one. Much like Pockets, who can't go three minutes without some kind of stupid outburst, generally involving someone's mom and a sexual act, but yet knows every political candidate of the last two presidential elections (at least), their histories, most important issues, related scandals (i.e. swift boat nonsense), and running mates, among other details. The kid probably knows more than most adults, and keep in mind he was barely out of the toddler stage two elections ago. Janine, refreshingly, has yet to say anything about anyone's mom or any sexual act. I'm hoping she's my replacement for Carver (my name, now that he's gone, for my baby that moved to Florida)- sweet, smart, well adjusted, all that good stuff. Especially since when they moved out Squirrely (the kid who brought the pelt in way back in the year) because the other kids jumped him, they told us we're gonna get a trade for evidently one of the worst girls in another class... fun times ahead.
Anyways... I was afraid to leave them alone with the sub in for M/Mr. M, so I didn't leave to go do resource (at some point I'm gonna start getting in trouble for that, I'm sure). When I finally got up there, 8th period, I wound up spending half an hour tracking down Jay's teachers. I have to write Jay's IEP this week, and have literally zero data on him or his ability or his levels. He finally did the reading test with me, although I highly doubt it was to the best of his ability, but he refused to do any of the math, and then was suspended out until after his IEP is going to be due, so I don't even have the chance to try and test him. Awesome. I'm debating a home visit to do it, actually, but his mom evidently doesn't speak English and my Spanish is pretty pathetic right now.
The half-hour was a half-hour wasted, however... when I finally found her, his math teacher got out her grade book.
"Absent, absent absent, zero. Zero, zero, zero, walked out, absent, cut, absent, zero. He never even bothered to turn anything in- I have nothing for him."
His reading teacher was pretty much the same.
"I don't even know what his handwriting looks like. I literally don't even think he's ever written his name on a sheet to turn in. I don't even know if he knows how to write his name."
Awesome. On the continually awkward side, trying to find them I ran into Little Jay, as usual chilling in the hallway. He has a new haircut, kind of a faux-hauk, but his hair is so short it's pretty subtle, and then he had little designs etched into the sides.
"New mohawk, huh?"
"Yeah," he grinned, "like it?" and swung around to walk me wherever I was going.
"Of course," I replied, mostly hoping that the little designs weren't gang symbols that I just didn't recognize- the gang in the neighborhood I lived in last year actually painted their symbol onto my car trunk, but theirs is pretty recognizable (and I'm hoping functions more like protection than anything else... so long as there's no gang wars I figure it doesn't really matter- it's more of a conversation piece than anything)... this was a little more abstract. "So what inspired the haircut?"
"You," LJ said kind of seriously but still smiling, and put his arm over my shoulders- he may be smaller than Big Jay but he's still bigger than me. Now, my 6th graders and I are fairly physically affectionate, just with small stuff like patting shoulders or hugs in the morning, and I have been known to tickle kids into promising improved behavior/homework/no more cursing- it's fine, it's with kids I already have a strong relationship with, etc. And if Cyrus, for example, (who started out smaller than me this year but is growing like a shepherd puppy and is already taller than me) put his arm around my shoulder, it wouldn't be weird in any way; like S said, my relationship with him is more maternal than anything else, and ditto for most of my other kids. BJ, though, not so much, and LJ, who's not even my student in any way.... like I said before, probably think slightly more grown thoughts than kids who still call me "Mom" by accident. And it's, well, weird. I patted his back and maneuvered as far from his body as possible, but he was determined to walk me to wherever I needed to go. We chatted for awhile- he wanted to know why I was trying to find BJ's teachers, I wanted to know what class he was supposed to be in ("I'm supposed to be with you, Miss. My teacher said." Uh huh. And you've never smoked a joint. Hey, was that a pig that just flew by?) - but then, as the reigning champion of non sequiturs, switched topics completely.
"Miss, say 'Darf'," he demanded.
"Darf?" I asked, a little confused.
"Darf! Like that," he clarified, emphasizing the "-rf" part of the word.
"Darf," I repeated, now even more confused.
"Yeah, like that!" he said, starting to laugh. I got a little nervous.
"What does that mean? Are you telling me to say something that's actually really dirty in another language?" I asked, racking my brain to think of how "darf" could possibly be inappropriate. I can probably curse in six different languages at this point (it's amazing how those words stick with you when everything else you learn can just fade away... and we circle back to the learning theory blog...), and for the life of me just could not think of anything.
"No, Miss! That's just like, our word, you and me. You're part of our group, now, that's what we use."
Not so much reassuring words from a kid like LJ, as charming and charismatic as he can be... I started hoping that "darf" wasn't a gang symbol of some kind.
As we were talking we swung by a room I needed to check for a teacher, actually the room I think he was supposed to be in. Of course, there was a sub, looking totally overwhelmed in the corner. LJ motioned to a friend, who climbed off the table he was reclining on and sauntered over.
"Yo, come here! Tell her our word."
The friend, clad in a black hoody, let out a quiet, pretty, musical howl: "Daaaaarrrrrrff!"
"You say it, Miss!"
"Darf."
"No! Like before, like him. He just added that stuff at the end. Daarrffff."
"Darf."
"Yeah!"
The friend laughed approvingly, then looked at LJ. "Yo, why she sayin' that?"
Which I actually was wondering myself as I distractedly tried to figure out how I was going to extricate myself from LJ, find BJ's teachers who seemed to have vanished from the third floor, and theoretically check in on some of my other resource kids, all before 9th period.
"She's part of us now, she knows our word." LJ swung off me and disappeared before I could even turn to the sub. One of the other kids in the class I knew from the MG program, so I chatted with him for a minute to see if he knew where his teachers would be. No luck. As I turned to go I realized LJ had actually swung into the classroom to hang out with his friends. I waved and started to leave.
"Goodbye, sweetie!" he called after me. Loudly.
Every time I start to think I'm getting comfortable with this job, something happens that makes me realize what a stupid thought that is.
Darf.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
when i wish i was in (a different kind of) grad school
A friend still in college came over for dinner last night, and mentioned off hand this trend of music videos starting to be influenced by/attract queer (GLBTQ) ideas/identities. She phrased it better, of course, but it was much more evident when we all sat down and watched music videos for half an hour off YouTube. Ems and I were in slight shock; not having a TV just puts you totally out of the loop of a lot of this stuff, although we agreed it was better so we didn't just sit around all night and watch music videos. S, who brought up the whole thing, mentioned while we were watching a not particularly queer video, Beyonce and Shakira's Beautfiul Liar, that this was the stuff eight and nine year olds were watching now, obviously a little taken aback by the thought of the overwhelming sexual connotations of it. All I could think was, I want to write a paper deconstructing the reciprocal influence of this trend on the identities of young black and Latino girls (and boys, for that matter) in urban environments (okay, my school). Actually, I don't, I want somebody who's far more skilled at these kinds of analyses- *cough M cough cough J cough*- to do it so I can read it... and just know that that kind of work is going on.
Now, I listen to the radio on a daily basis, and almost always stations my kids listen to. I love what would probably most aptly be termed "pop-hop", and while I recognize the many many many problematic aspects to it, it's also a fun way to relate to my kids (with maybe four exceptions... currently the song about lip gloss makes me want to break the radio, and "Grillz" came pretty close to putting me into a homicidal rage after the 800th time I listened to it, it being the absolute favorite song of my kids last year- especially after they found out I didn't like it). Point being that I am very aware of both the good and bad they listen to, and I have heard all of these songs probably a hundred times.
I was just totally unaware that these videos were even out there; one of them is an alternate version for the song (Upgrade U) in which Beyonce actually plays against herself, as her standard sex kitten persona and then as Jay-Z, in his clothing, in his masculine counterpart to her standard role (with her femme self dancing around her-as-him), lip-synching to his words, looking, well, very rich and kind of queer. The seond video blew me away, "Like a Boy" by Ciara. Now, the kids LOVE these songs- we got new tables in my classroom yesterday, and for a while before they were set up there was a big open space, and as my kids had been pretty much rockstars for the previous four periods, I let them turn on the radio and have a dance party for fifteen minutes before we started setting the tables up. Both of these songs came on, and the kids damn near knew the moves from the Ciara video; I just didn't know the context, since I only listen to the radio, I don't watch the videos.
Well, damn, I was missing out. "2007. Ladies, I think it's time to switch roles," are the first words, with Ciara in a thin white tank, big jeans, and sneakers, with tattoos up and down her arms, and a scully hat- she could've borrowed the entire outfit from Little Jay, or pretty much any other boy in my entire school. She also plays against herself in another scene, one being in a suit and one in an overly feminine dress. A full dance group of all women, all dyked out, dance with her, all with moves exaggerating the masculinity of their roles (a stylized crotch grab is the most obvious). Yet all of them, Ciara especially, look absolutely gorgeous from a totally conventional feminine standpoint in close-ups, and the lyrics never touch on any kind of actual gender-bending or challenge sexuality in any way. The "sometimes I wish I did act like a boy," pretty much sums up the theme- what would men do if women acted like men (in relationships)?
And yet..
Every time I look at the video, there's a dozen girls at my school that spring to mind. There's one girl in particular that looks just like boy-Ciara in the video, not one of my students but somebody I chat with in the hall. All of these girls endure the standard, "You look like a boy," and variations of insults, although some of them, like the one I'm thinking of, are actually quite beautiful in a feminine way; they're attacked for their choice of dress and appearance, rather than whether or not they actually look like a boy. It goes beyond being a tomboy (although that's sort of a whole interesting phenomenon too...); I would put money on at least exploration into a queer identity for most of these girls at some point in their lives, if not that they turn out just completely gay. Now, I've rarely heard people insulted by words like dyke; homophobia is a little more vocal against males, so "faggot" tends to be the word of the day (and sometimes not even as an insult; that's just the identifier for a gay man, but that's more slippery). "Lesbian" is almost too exotic to be something taken seriously. One of my after-school eighth graders decided last week to set me up with his science teacher (another TFA member); I laughed and told him that was the second set-up of the week, since LJ was trying to get me to hook up with Ms. Lez. My match-maker looked puzzled.
"He thinks you're a lesbian?"
"Evidently. Or that I could be convinced into it."
"Huh."
But there was no questioning of it, and no disgust at it; it's simply too foreign a concept (particularly for the boys) for them to really put a value judgement on it or even evaluate whether it could be true or not.
So I wonder... given the huge importance of celebrity images like Ciara and Beyonce in developing self-image in their community, what is/could be the impact of these kinds of videos? It definitely legitimizes the choice of girls to look like boys; if Ciara does it, it's a valid fashion choice. Although it in a way would only legitimize it as a continuation of a straight identity, which sort of negates the point for girls who dress that way as sort of first steps to a queer/lesbian identity. And what about the relationship of the femme character obviously in a very sexualized relationship with the butch character? I don't even want to touch on how they're the same person... auto-sexual? Too complicated... Oh, what I would give for a gender studies class right now...
And yes, I know it's entirely possible I'm over-analyzing some stupid music videos in the vain hope of finding the intellectual stimulation missing from my life since I left Chicago. But honestly, I think this is stuff that should be studied; graduate educational theory should take into account the cultural context children are learning in as well as developmental issues that are quite often ignored (like the development of a sexual and/or gender identity). And for kids for whom celebrity culture is so ever-present and often defacto role models for self identity, who are also dealing with umpteen other issues... I just want someone to write a paper on it, okay?
(M, J, get ready, get set... go! please?)
Now, I listen to the radio on a daily basis, and almost always stations my kids listen to. I love what would probably most aptly be termed "pop-hop", and while I recognize the many many many problematic aspects to it, it's also a fun way to relate to my kids (with maybe four exceptions... currently the song about lip gloss makes me want to break the radio, and "Grillz" came pretty close to putting me into a homicidal rage after the 800th time I listened to it, it being the absolute favorite song of my kids last year- especially after they found out I didn't like it). Point being that I am very aware of both the good and bad they listen to, and I have heard all of these songs probably a hundred times.
I was just totally unaware that these videos were even out there; one of them is an alternate version for the song (Upgrade U) in which Beyonce actually plays against herself, as her standard sex kitten persona and then as Jay-Z, in his clothing, in his masculine counterpart to her standard role (with her femme self dancing around her-as-him), lip-synching to his words, looking, well, very rich and kind of queer. The seond video blew me away, "Like a Boy" by Ciara. Now, the kids LOVE these songs- we got new tables in my classroom yesterday, and for a while before they were set up there was a big open space, and as my kids had been pretty much rockstars for the previous four periods, I let them turn on the radio and have a dance party for fifteen minutes before we started setting the tables up. Both of these songs came on, and the kids damn near knew the moves from the Ciara video; I just didn't know the context, since I only listen to the radio, I don't watch the videos.
Well, damn, I was missing out. "2007. Ladies, I think it's time to switch roles," are the first words, with Ciara in a thin white tank, big jeans, and sneakers, with tattoos up and down her arms, and a scully hat- she could've borrowed the entire outfit from Little Jay, or pretty much any other boy in my entire school. She also plays against herself in another scene, one being in a suit and one in an overly feminine dress. A full dance group of all women, all dyked out, dance with her, all with moves exaggerating the masculinity of their roles (a stylized crotch grab is the most obvious). Yet all of them, Ciara especially, look absolutely gorgeous from a totally conventional feminine standpoint in close-ups, and the lyrics never touch on any kind of actual gender-bending or challenge sexuality in any way. The "sometimes I wish I did act like a boy," pretty much sums up the theme- what would men do if women acted like men (in relationships)?
And yet..
Every time I look at the video, there's a dozen girls at my school that spring to mind. There's one girl in particular that looks just like boy-Ciara in the video, not one of my students but somebody I chat with in the hall. All of these girls endure the standard, "You look like a boy," and variations of insults, although some of them, like the one I'm thinking of, are actually quite beautiful in a feminine way; they're attacked for their choice of dress and appearance, rather than whether or not they actually look like a boy. It goes beyond being a tomboy (although that's sort of a whole interesting phenomenon too...); I would put money on at least exploration into a queer identity for most of these girls at some point in their lives, if not that they turn out just completely gay. Now, I've rarely heard people insulted by words like dyke; homophobia is a little more vocal against males, so "faggot" tends to be the word of the day (and sometimes not even as an insult; that's just the identifier for a gay man, but that's more slippery). "Lesbian" is almost too exotic to be something taken seriously. One of my after-school eighth graders decided last week to set me up with his science teacher (another TFA member); I laughed and told him that was the second set-up of the week, since LJ was trying to get me to hook up with Ms. Lez. My match-maker looked puzzled.
"He thinks you're a lesbian?"
"Evidently. Or that I could be convinced into it."
"Huh."
But there was no questioning of it, and no disgust at it; it's simply too foreign a concept (particularly for the boys) for them to really put a value judgement on it or even evaluate whether it could be true or not.
So I wonder... given the huge importance of celebrity images like Ciara and Beyonce in developing self-image in their community, what is/could be the impact of these kinds of videos? It definitely legitimizes the choice of girls to look like boys; if Ciara does it, it's a valid fashion choice. Although it in a way would only legitimize it as a continuation of a straight identity, which sort of negates the point for girls who dress that way as sort of first steps to a queer/lesbian identity. And what about the relationship of the femme character obviously in a very sexualized relationship with the butch character? I don't even want to touch on how they're the same person... auto-sexual? Too complicated... Oh, what I would give for a gender studies class right now...
And yes, I know it's entirely possible I'm over-analyzing some stupid music videos in the vain hope of finding the intellectual stimulation missing from my life since I left Chicago. But honestly, I think this is stuff that should be studied; graduate educational theory should take into account the cultural context children are learning in as well as developmental issues that are quite often ignored (like the development of a sexual and/or gender identity). And for kids for whom celebrity culture is so ever-present and often defacto role models for self identity, who are also dealing with umpteen other issues... I just want someone to write a paper on it, okay?
(M, J, get ready, get set... go! please?)
Thursday, March 22, 2007
boring by this week's standards
Just thought I'd throw in that evidently two of my resource kids were suspended... not one. Which makes seven, eight if you count Sidekick's suspension from earlier this week... I haven't even checked on Urkel or one of my other resource girls in days, so I don't know about them.
On the plus side, with five kids out the rest of the class did an AMAZING job today during RELA (reading and english language arts). Small cooperative group work, one doing guided reading, one doing dictionary work, one supposed to be doing cause-and-effect but they decided collectively to review the play we just read and reassigned themselves parts and read it together instead. Most classes I hear my name called, without exaggeration, probably eighty times. Somehow they think if I didn't respond to them the first three times they called my name without raising their hand or being in their seats it'll work SO much better to just say my name repeatedly eighteen more times without taking a breath while walking around the room. Today they actually shooed me away because they wanted to keep focusing on their work and didn't want me to distract them, and they all wanted to spend the full two periods on their projects rather than switching every 25 minutes like I planned. I was in teacher heaven for probably two hours.
I even went over Bloom's Taxonomy with my high group-- if you're not a big educational theory dork/TFA member, Bloom's is a system of organizing thought processes that teachers use to sort of scaffold learning and push kids to more advanced critical thinking (being able to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge rather than just identifying and using it)-- and had them create questions from their reading (they chose the most difficult of the books I gave them the option of choosing between, I was proud) and categorize their questions. And all this with the other teacher who's been the consistent long-term sub for M. out today. It rocked.
If only I'd been observed today... course I probably didn't have some piece of paperwork in the right place, especially with all the teaching materials and student work covered up from the PSSAs...
Three more of my kids told me they think Dae took my wallet and passed it off to somebody. I really, really, really hope that's not true... I've managed to convince myself that it happened downtown, and now I'm trying to psych myself up for being mean/disappointed when my kids come back. They deserve some mean treatment, after basically ganging up and robbing another kid, in their class no less, and they need to know and understand that, but mostly I just miss them, even Dae, who I'm starting to have serious character doubts about. I need to borrow some of his mean streak.
On the plus side, with five kids out the rest of the class did an AMAZING job today during RELA (reading and english language arts). Small cooperative group work, one doing guided reading, one doing dictionary work, one supposed to be doing cause-and-effect but they decided collectively to review the play we just read and reassigned themselves parts and read it together instead. Most classes I hear my name called, without exaggeration, probably eighty times. Somehow they think if I didn't respond to them the first three times they called my name without raising their hand or being in their seats it'll work SO much better to just say my name repeatedly eighteen more times without taking a breath while walking around the room. Today they actually shooed me away because they wanted to keep focusing on their work and didn't want me to distract them, and they all wanted to spend the full two periods on their projects rather than switching every 25 minutes like I planned. I was in teacher heaven for probably two hours.
I even went over Bloom's Taxonomy with my high group-- if you're not a big educational theory dork/TFA member, Bloom's is a system of organizing thought processes that teachers use to sort of scaffold learning and push kids to more advanced critical thinking (being able to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge rather than just identifying and using it)-- and had them create questions from their reading (they chose the most difficult of the books I gave them the option of choosing between, I was proud) and categorize their questions. And all this with the other teacher who's been the consistent long-term sub for M. out today. It rocked.
If only I'd been observed today... course I probably didn't have some piece of paperwork in the right place, especially with all the teaching materials and student work covered up from the PSSAs...
Three more of my kids told me they think Dae took my wallet and passed it off to somebody. I really, really, really hope that's not true... I've managed to convince myself that it happened downtown, and now I'm trying to psych myself up for being mean/disappointed when my kids come back. They deserve some mean treatment, after basically ganging up and robbing another kid, in their class no less, and they need to know and understand that, but mostly I just miss them, even Dae, who I'm starting to have serious character doubts about. I need to borrow some of his mean streak.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
I want a day in the life of an accountant
Six of my kids were suspended today. Five boys from my class, and one resource kid. Three guesses as to which resource kid. No, I take that back... Just one. Think hard, now...
Evidently five (I thought it was four, but no, five) of my boys jumped another one of them on Friday and took his gameboy and something like eleven of his games. The kid's mom went to the police and is evidently pressing charges... It's Dae, Gecko, Huffy, and two other kids I don't think I've written about specifically. One is a generally a good kid following Dae's lead (as, actually, were all the rest of them), and the other is relatively new to my class, who got transferred for being harassed himself in another class. (My favorite story from the week before he was transferred in- from the same teacher who actually also had Jay back in the day: walking to an assembly, another kid calls this one, for whom I've yet to think of a good nickname although I'm leaning toward Pockets from his habit of cramming food such as whole cheesesteaks in there on a regular basis, a faggot. Pockets turns around and replies,
"Oh yeah? Then how come my fingers were in your mom's butt last night?")
They were supposed to be arrested but the police from the local station never showed... So they're out for five days. This morning someone asked about it in class, and Cyrus interrupted to add:
"See Ms. A? Another bad thing I wasn't involved in!"
I told him I was proud of him for how he had stayed out of the whole thing, since he's friends with all the boys that did the attack and robbery. He's also friends with the kid who got attacked, though... I really have no idea what his motivation was for staying out of it, but I'm glad he did. It's funny the things they need to know I appreciate. It also looks like my wallet was stolen while I was out at dinner last week, which clears Cyrus (huge relief, although it doesn't make the annoyance of the whole dealing with the stolen wallet thing any easier. I can't even begin to express how heartbroken I would have been if he had actually done that) but makes me even more disappointed in Dae, since I believe he now lied to me about it and made me doubt a kid that I really love who really just needs to know someone believes in him. It sucks; in a lot of ways Dae and Cyrus are my DJs of this year. They're the ones who've made the most obvious drastic improvements in behavior from their last year in school, that I have in some ways the most intense relationships with. Dae has definitely got a lot of DJ's sneakiness, that I just pray he grows out of... Thank god Cyrus doesn't have that, although I think some of the other teachers might appreciate that more than his current overwhelmingly oppositional behavior with some of them.
Tangent on that note- one of my professors came in today to do observations, although I was doing make-up testing. Cyrus was supposed to be finishing his test, but was having trouble concentrating and so was walking around the room. He started rifling through the health teacher's stack of posters as I was talking to the professor, so I told him to put it down.
"But this is my project!" he protested as he pulled one out. The subject? Cocaine and crack! My professor looked a little overwhelmed. Little bit embarassing. Just a little. And by little I mean... a lot. (ever see the Buffy episode in sixth season with the social worker...?)
Walking into the special ed office this morning I hear over someone's walkie that Jay had entered the building- the same time that another girl started having seizues evidently, outside, and an ambulance was on it's way. I asked the principal if the ambulance was for Jay, but she said no; I don't know whether at that point she knew about the security issue or not. Now, it's not like Jay's a regular at the building, but him coming isn't so shocking that it would go out over security. So I go up to see if he's there the beginning of third, but his teacher was out so I went around to check for some of my other eighth graders and see Little Jay in the hall.
"Where's your buddy, Jay?"
"He got locked up." Little Jay responded, lounging comfortably against the lockers with no thought of class even in the vicinity of his head.
"Locked up? What do you mean, locked up? He was here yesterday, and this morning, I heard it over the walkie. He's not locked up, it's not even 10:00 yet."
"No, Miss, I'm serious. He's locked up. He threatened a teacher or something."
Turns out he threatened a security officer yesterday at the end of the day, was suspended, and came back anyway and so was arrested for trespassing. Kid doesn't show up for months, and now he can't stay away... sometimes they're just stupid. I didn't get the chance today, but I'm definitely calling him tomorrow to yell at him for being stupid.
Little Jay, however, decided to be my best buddy. I told him to walk with me while I went around dropping PSSA stuff off and picking other PSSA stuff up. Kids aren't allowed to be alone with the testing material, even to carry it between rooms, which makes the whole thing a ginormous pain in the ass. Then he asked if he could stay with me for a while, and since I wasn't going back in with my main classroom, and his class was split up (not that he would have gone or attempted to learn anything anyway), I said sure so long as he didn't talk to whoever I brought into resource, and that he could use the computer so long as he did something educational first. So he came in, did First in Math for a little while, and checked out at the bell and even waited for a note to go back to class. Even the thug kids'll surprise you some days...
Lez told me that after I left Melissa's class yesterday when she was telling Jay that she wanted to have me following her around, Little Jay was all about it. I'm not sure how explicit he got, but evidently he was seconding her on my being hot and being jealous of my following Big Jay around, and he may have had an ulterior motive for following me today- he told Lez he'd work on getting me to hook up with her somehow.
This will come up later, but I gotta say, sometimes I get tired of being the young attractive teacher that the boys have a crush on and the girls relate to. Too much baggage. At least this time it was funny.
Anyway, I grilled him for awhile about how I keep hearing about how he and Big Jay used to be such good students, which he steadfastly denied, and how they were really sweet and polite, "-not that you haven't been polite to me. You've been very polite to me. But threatening security, and all the other stupid choices you guys have made this year? What changed?" LJ just shrugged. I asked him if he was in the same business as BJ. He claimed ignorance but it was a pretty clear cover to get me to ask him if they dealt drugs, which I didn't want to do outright. He told me anything we talked about would be in confidence- I suppose meaning he wouldn't tell BJ. I think he might have wanted to have an actual heart to heart, but I was just curious how much he would tell me right off the bat. Especially since when I first ran into him, he was practicing how to roll a joint using his late slip.
"Just practicing my skills," he responded when I gave him a look.
"On your late slip?"
"Uh huh."
"That's probably not the best thing to practice on. A lot of people have probably touched that paper. I wouldn't stick it in my mouth. Do you not get enough practice with the real thing?"
"Naw, I don't smoke that stuff. I'm just playing around."
And pigs have wings... and then in a slight veer of conversation:
"So do you smoke Newport cigarettes?"
"No."
"Tell the truth, Miss!"
"No, I do not smoke Newports. I promise. It's the truth."
"Do you smoke weed?"
"No."
"No, really. I won't tell." Actually probably true... Another teacher the TweedleJays are close with told me Big Jay offered her a sample.
"No. When you're a teacher, you can lose your job over something like that."
"Oh." I don't know if he believed me, but he let it drop.
The clincher of the day, however, came after school, when two of the eighth grade girls came in late, freaking out.
"Miss A! We gotta show you something! We don't want to say it in front of anyone, though."
Turns out someone thought it would be cute to put a condom on the third floor railing. Like, really on, not just hanging on. One of them touched it by accident before she saw it and was paranoid she was going to get a disease. They thought it was used because it had stuff inside it, but it wasn't quite that disgusting; I'm pretty sure it was just lubricant or spermicide or something, which I tried to explain to them before getting really uncomfortable with the whole topic.
"Oh, we know about that, Miss."
"And how would you know about something like spermicide in condoms in eighth grade?" I asked pointedly.
"Because our parents tell us! You know, like how to protect yourself from disease and stuff. But I'm a virgin, I never even touched one before! I washed my hand, like, fifteen times. Do you think that's enough?" Anita asked, panicking for probably the eighth time in as many minutes.
"Yeah, I'm a virgin too. Well, I mean, technically..." Maria started to answer but faded off. Guessing she was referring to oral sex or something else I didn't really want to know about, I waved her off.
"I don't even want to know..."
We started back downstairs to go back to the program. The girls started chattering in Spanish. Anita talks at lightening speed even in English, so in Spanish I had no hope of understanding, but Maria looked progressively more and more upset. I was going to keep going down the stairs but when we were almost there Anita yanked me back.
"Um, Miss, there's something we- Maria- well, she can't say it, but there's something we want to tell you..."
More conferencing in Spanish, then confession of the year... They told me Maria had been raped by a teenage neighbor when she was a little kid, which is why she stumbled over the "virgin" issue. Not only that but that her step-dad molested her for four years, only stopping last summer, and that her mom doesn't believe her. It was one of the more depressing conversations I've had yet this year. Some days I want to have a neon sign on me that says, "Please do not tell me anything you don't want me to report to someone else." because she flipped out when I talked about going to the police or DHS... I have to do something, though. The situation just sounded worse and worse the more she talked about it. Needless to say the end of the after-school program was shot. She started shaking as she told me, and a lot of it she just looked at Anita and Anita told me because she couldn't talk or she would start tearing up, and she kept saying that she just really didn't want to cry.
Back to the tired of being the young female teacher... she's not even in my class, or on my caseload... Just in my after school program. I've been friendly to her, but we're certainly not close- that was really the first conversation I've ever had with her, but she told me she just never knew an adult she trusted before, and I doubt she would've told me if not pushed to by Anita, who I do know well and who does trust me.
Just for one day I'd like to have a boring job. Maybe just have a day in the life of an accountant.
Evidently five (I thought it was four, but no, five) of my boys jumped another one of them on Friday and took his gameboy and something like eleven of his games. The kid's mom went to the police and is evidently pressing charges... It's Dae, Gecko, Huffy, and two other kids I don't think I've written about specifically. One is a generally a good kid following Dae's lead (as, actually, were all the rest of them), and the other is relatively new to my class, who got transferred for being harassed himself in another class. (My favorite story from the week before he was transferred in- from the same teacher who actually also had Jay back in the day: walking to an assembly, another kid calls this one, for whom I've yet to think of a good nickname although I'm leaning toward Pockets from his habit of cramming food such as whole cheesesteaks in there on a regular basis, a faggot. Pockets turns around and replies,
"Oh yeah? Then how come my fingers were in your mom's butt last night?")
They were supposed to be arrested but the police from the local station never showed... So they're out for five days. This morning someone asked about it in class, and Cyrus interrupted to add:
"See Ms. A? Another bad thing I wasn't involved in!"
I told him I was proud of him for how he had stayed out of the whole thing, since he's friends with all the boys that did the attack and robbery. He's also friends with the kid who got attacked, though... I really have no idea what his motivation was for staying out of it, but I'm glad he did. It's funny the things they need to know I appreciate. It also looks like my wallet was stolen while I was out at dinner last week, which clears Cyrus (huge relief, although it doesn't make the annoyance of the whole dealing with the stolen wallet thing any easier. I can't even begin to express how heartbroken I would have been if he had actually done that) but makes me even more disappointed in Dae, since I believe he now lied to me about it and made me doubt a kid that I really love who really just needs to know someone believes in him. It sucks; in a lot of ways Dae and Cyrus are my DJs of this year. They're the ones who've made the most obvious drastic improvements in behavior from their last year in school, that I have in some ways the most intense relationships with. Dae has definitely got a lot of DJ's sneakiness, that I just pray he grows out of... Thank god Cyrus doesn't have that, although I think some of the other teachers might appreciate that more than his current overwhelmingly oppositional behavior with some of them.
Tangent on that note- one of my professors came in today to do observations, although I was doing make-up testing. Cyrus was supposed to be finishing his test, but was having trouble concentrating and so was walking around the room. He started rifling through the health teacher's stack of posters as I was talking to the professor, so I told him to put it down.
"But this is my project!" he protested as he pulled one out. The subject? Cocaine and crack! My professor looked a little overwhelmed. Little bit embarassing. Just a little. And by little I mean... a lot. (ever see the Buffy episode in sixth season with the social worker...?)
Walking into the special ed office this morning I hear over someone's walkie that Jay had entered the building- the same time that another girl started having seizues evidently, outside, and an ambulance was on it's way. I asked the principal if the ambulance was for Jay, but she said no; I don't know whether at that point she knew about the security issue or not. Now, it's not like Jay's a regular at the building, but him coming isn't so shocking that it would go out over security. So I go up to see if he's there the beginning of third, but his teacher was out so I went around to check for some of my other eighth graders and see Little Jay in the hall.
"Where's your buddy, Jay?"
"He got locked up." Little Jay responded, lounging comfortably against the lockers with no thought of class even in the vicinity of his head.
"Locked up? What do you mean, locked up? He was here yesterday, and this morning, I heard it over the walkie. He's not locked up, it's not even 10:00 yet."
"No, Miss, I'm serious. He's locked up. He threatened a teacher or something."
Turns out he threatened a security officer yesterday at the end of the day, was suspended, and came back anyway and so was arrested for trespassing. Kid doesn't show up for months, and now he can't stay away... sometimes they're just stupid. I didn't get the chance today, but I'm definitely calling him tomorrow to yell at him for being stupid.
Little Jay, however, decided to be my best buddy. I told him to walk with me while I went around dropping PSSA stuff off and picking other PSSA stuff up. Kids aren't allowed to be alone with the testing material, even to carry it between rooms, which makes the whole thing a ginormous pain in the ass. Then he asked if he could stay with me for a while, and since I wasn't going back in with my main classroom, and his class was split up (not that he would have gone or attempted to learn anything anyway), I said sure so long as he didn't talk to whoever I brought into resource, and that he could use the computer so long as he did something educational first. So he came in, did First in Math for a little while, and checked out at the bell and even waited for a note to go back to class. Even the thug kids'll surprise you some days...
Lez told me that after I left Melissa's class yesterday when she was telling Jay that she wanted to have me following her around, Little Jay was all about it. I'm not sure how explicit he got, but evidently he was seconding her on my being hot and being jealous of my following Big Jay around, and he may have had an ulterior motive for following me today- he told Lez he'd work on getting me to hook up with her somehow.
This will come up later, but I gotta say, sometimes I get tired of being the young attractive teacher that the boys have a crush on and the girls relate to. Too much baggage. At least this time it was funny.
Anyway, I grilled him for awhile about how I keep hearing about how he and Big Jay used to be such good students, which he steadfastly denied, and how they were really sweet and polite, "-not that you haven't been polite to me. You've been very polite to me. But threatening security, and all the other stupid choices you guys have made this year? What changed?" LJ just shrugged. I asked him if he was in the same business as BJ. He claimed ignorance but it was a pretty clear cover to get me to ask him if they dealt drugs, which I didn't want to do outright. He told me anything we talked about would be in confidence- I suppose meaning he wouldn't tell BJ. I think he might have wanted to have an actual heart to heart, but I was just curious how much he would tell me right off the bat. Especially since when I first ran into him, he was practicing how to roll a joint using his late slip.
"Just practicing my skills," he responded when I gave him a look.
"On your late slip?"
"Uh huh."
"That's probably not the best thing to practice on. A lot of people have probably touched that paper. I wouldn't stick it in my mouth. Do you not get enough practice with the real thing?"
"Naw, I don't smoke that stuff. I'm just playing around."
And pigs have wings... and then in a slight veer of conversation:
"So do you smoke Newport cigarettes?"
"No."
"Tell the truth, Miss!"
"No, I do not smoke Newports. I promise. It's the truth."
"Do you smoke weed?"
"No."
"No, really. I won't tell." Actually probably true... Another teacher the TweedleJays are close with told me Big Jay offered her a sample.
"No. When you're a teacher, you can lose your job over something like that."
"Oh." I don't know if he believed me, but he let it drop.
The clincher of the day, however, came after school, when two of the eighth grade girls came in late, freaking out.
"Miss A! We gotta show you something! We don't want to say it in front of anyone, though."
Turns out someone thought it would be cute to put a condom on the third floor railing. Like, really on, not just hanging on. One of them touched it by accident before she saw it and was paranoid she was going to get a disease. They thought it was used because it had stuff inside it, but it wasn't quite that disgusting; I'm pretty sure it was just lubricant or spermicide or something, which I tried to explain to them before getting really uncomfortable with the whole topic.
"Oh, we know about that, Miss."
"And how would you know about something like spermicide in condoms in eighth grade?" I asked pointedly.
"Because our parents tell us! You know, like how to protect yourself from disease and stuff. But I'm a virgin, I never even touched one before! I washed my hand, like, fifteen times. Do you think that's enough?" Anita asked, panicking for probably the eighth time in as many minutes.
"Yeah, I'm a virgin too. Well, I mean, technically..." Maria started to answer but faded off. Guessing she was referring to oral sex or something else I didn't really want to know about, I waved her off.
"I don't even want to know..."
We started back downstairs to go back to the program. The girls started chattering in Spanish. Anita talks at lightening speed even in English, so in Spanish I had no hope of understanding, but Maria looked progressively more and more upset. I was going to keep going down the stairs but when we were almost there Anita yanked me back.
"Um, Miss, there's something we- Maria- well, she can't say it, but there's something we want to tell you..."
More conferencing in Spanish, then confession of the year... They told me Maria had been raped by a teenage neighbor when she was a little kid, which is why she stumbled over the "virgin" issue. Not only that but that her step-dad molested her for four years, only stopping last summer, and that her mom doesn't believe her. It was one of the more depressing conversations I've had yet this year. Some days I want to have a neon sign on me that says, "Please do not tell me anything you don't want me to report to someone else." because she flipped out when I talked about going to the police or DHS... I have to do something, though. The situation just sounded worse and worse the more she talked about it. Needless to say the end of the after-school program was shot. She started shaking as she told me, and a lot of it she just looked at Anita and Anita told me because she couldn't talk or she would start tearing up, and she kept saying that she just really didn't want to cry.
Back to the tired of being the young female teacher... she's not even in my class, or on my caseload... Just in my after school program. I've been friendly to her, but we're certainly not close- that was really the first conversation I've ever had with her, but she told me she just never knew an adult she trusted before, and I doubt she would've told me if not pushed to by Anita, who I do know well and who does trust me.
Just for one day I'd like to have a boring job. Maybe just have a day in the life of an accountant.
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