Some kids stick in your heart. They follow you around over the weekend, rising up like the ghost of Christmas Past when you’re doing the laundry or making the beds. They remind you that you may be the only person in their lives to show them a little hope.
Julie was one of those students (not her real name). The few off-handed remarks she’d made about conversations with her mother let me know that Julie might be the grownup in the family. It happens. I determined that I would give a little extra the next week, pay a little closer attention and not let her melt into the mix of 30 other sixth-grade faces in my class.
On Monday she broke the rules. It involved personal property of another student and class disruption and sneaking around doing something she knew not to. What timing!
She stood near my desk as I wrote out the required disciplinary paper that would send her to The Office and The Higher Ups.
“I’m disappointed that I have to do this,” I said.
She smiled, an oft-used survival technique employed in the face of pain, I could tell.
“You know better, don’t you?”
She nodded her head, the grin spread. Chin up, with a jaunty step, she headed out the door.
The next morning on my way through the administration office, I saw her sitting at one of the In-House Suspension tables, hunched over, unsmiling and bored.
“I miss you, Julie,” I said and turned over the book that lay face down on the table before her.
“I miss being in class for the next three days with nothing to do,” she offered with no grin and no gleam.
“Just think, you can finish this book, and maybe another one. You’ll have all day to read.”
This was not the way I wanted to reach her.
I don’t know which will do Julie more good – knowing she can’t break the rules and get away with it, or knowing that she still has a place among us and is wanted there?
Maybe both. We’ll see.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Hand to hand combat
Howard Hughes is back; he showed up the night of parent-teacher conferences.
I thought I was prepared with grade book, sign-in sheet, student progress reports and a 12-oz bottle of hand sanitizer. But I wasn’t ready for the parent who wiped her nose on the back of her right hand at the same exact moment I reached out with mine to thank her for coming.
I knew what was about to happen, but I couldn’t retract my offer of good will. I couldn’t withdraw my hand and risk offending one who entrusted her child to my tutelage.
As my fingers closed around hers, I felt the cooled moisture and imagined it seeping into my pores and racing toward my bloodstream.
And when the classroom door closed behind the exiting mother and offspring, I ran to the sink and turned on the water that sprayed from the faucet around which students often wrap their little lips to get a drink. Then I squirted foamy soap into my hands. Over and over and over.
Was I fast enough? Was I killing the germs? Would I live?
OK, maybe I over-reacted. But I know that teachers everywhere are dodging the sneezes and coughs of children who should be home getting well. It just doesn’t help when parents inadvertently share the love by spreading the germs.
With continuing cases of H1N1, health officials have not let up in their urgent warnings: wash your hands, cover your coughs. Keep your germs (and viruses) to yourself.
And keep your hands off your face, they say.
How many times during the day do we touch our faces to rub our brow, massage a temple or scratch an itch? Eyes are particularly susceptible to infectious transfers.
No one wants to be sick this time of year, so maybe it would help to follow a common behavioral rule for the sake of good health:
Keep your hands to yourself!
A smile and friendly verbal greeting may serve to get us safely through the season.
I thought I was prepared with grade book, sign-in sheet, student progress reports and a 12-oz bottle of hand sanitizer. But I wasn’t ready for the parent who wiped her nose on the back of her right hand at the same exact moment I reached out with mine to thank her for coming.
I knew what was about to happen, but I couldn’t retract my offer of good will. I couldn’t withdraw my hand and risk offending one who entrusted her child to my tutelage.
As my fingers closed around hers, I felt the cooled moisture and imagined it seeping into my pores and racing toward my bloodstream.
And when the classroom door closed behind the exiting mother and offspring, I ran to the sink and turned on the water that sprayed from the faucet around which students often wrap their little lips to get a drink. Then I squirted foamy soap into my hands. Over and over and over.
Was I fast enough? Was I killing the germs? Would I live?
OK, maybe I over-reacted. But I know that teachers everywhere are dodging the sneezes and coughs of children who should be home getting well. It just doesn’t help when parents inadvertently share the love by spreading the germs.
With continuing cases of H1N1, health officials have not let up in their urgent warnings: wash your hands, cover your coughs. Keep your germs (and viruses) to yourself.
And keep your hands off your face, they say.
How many times during the day do we touch our faces to rub our brow, massage a temple or scratch an itch? Eyes are particularly susceptible to infectious transfers.
No one wants to be sick this time of year, so maybe it would help to follow a common behavioral rule for the sake of good health:
Keep your hands to yourself!
A smile and friendly verbal greeting may serve to get us safely through the season.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Out of the Mouths of Babes
I learned something about my students’ writing last week. It’s better when they read it to me.
We had just finished reading the biography of Mark Twain written by one of his daughters who was 13 at the time. For homework I told my sixth-graders to write a biography of someone in their family.
On Friday afternoon, while a third of my students were gone to intramural football and volleyball games, I asked for volunteers from the remaining 19 to read their biographies. Five students raised a hand.
“I want to tell you about my grandpa,” read one boy. “I want to be just like him.”
A girl told about her 4-year-old brother who, “gets mostly everything he wants. I don’t get the fact that he chooses a toy over clothes. I think he should go for the clothes.”
Another girl read about her sister who has a different father, “but she treats me as though I am her full sister.”
Sharing his mother’s story, a boy read, “When she was 16 she became pregnant … She had to make some very hard choices, but she finally finished school.”
As I listened to each reader, the cadence of his or her voice, the added emphasis on specific words, and the accompanying smile or grimace told me so much more than I would have seen in their written words alone.
Normally, I read my students’ work with a critical eye – it’s my job. I see things like “grampa” and strike it out with a red pen to rewrite “grandpa.” I see the run-on sentences stringing out for lack of periods, and proper nouns that need capital letters. I am supposed to find these errors, and teach children not to make them. But in my typical, critical perusal, I sometimes miss their stories.
I’m glad I asked them to read them aloud this time. I needed to hear what they were trying to say.
Sometimes it’s just best to let them do the talking.
We had just finished reading the biography of Mark Twain written by one of his daughters who was 13 at the time. For homework I told my sixth-graders to write a biography of someone in their family.
On Friday afternoon, while a third of my students were gone to intramural football and volleyball games, I asked for volunteers from the remaining 19 to read their biographies. Five students raised a hand.
“I want to tell you about my grandpa,” read one boy. “I want to be just like him.”
A girl told about her 4-year-old brother who, “gets mostly everything he wants. I don’t get the fact that he chooses a toy over clothes. I think he should go for the clothes.”
Another girl read about her sister who has a different father, “but she treats me as though I am her full sister.”
Sharing his mother’s story, a boy read, “When she was 16 she became pregnant … She had to make some very hard choices, but she finally finished school.”
As I listened to each reader, the cadence of his or her voice, the added emphasis on specific words, and the accompanying smile or grimace told me so much more than I would have seen in their written words alone.
Normally, I read my students’ work with a critical eye – it’s my job. I see things like “grampa” and strike it out with a red pen to rewrite “grandpa.” I see the run-on sentences stringing out for lack of periods, and proper nouns that need capital letters. I am supposed to find these errors, and teach children not to make them. But in my typical, critical perusal, I sometimes miss their stories.
I’m glad I asked them to read them aloud this time. I needed to hear what they were trying to say.
Sometimes it’s just best to let them do the talking.
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