My First Christmas Gift as a Teacher

For the whole week before we got out, one student whom I like but who also is one of my biggest clowns kept saying he had gotten a present for me. Needless to say, I was worried. Would it explode, corrode, implode, unload, decode(?), or another other disastrous -ode away my life, friends or home? Fortunately, I have lived to share my experience.

He came in before testing and presented the gift. A little intrigued upon receiving a heavy, wrapped cylinder I prayed that I was not holding a large stick of dynamite and gingerly removed its holiday robes. Voila, I exchanged quizzical glances with a 1.44 kilo Christmas Stick.

What is a Christmas stick you ask? Well, it's like a candy cane. But let me draw an analogy. Marble is to Heavenly Body as Candy Cane is to Christmas Stick. We're talking several orders of magnitude bigger than your average candy cane, complete with nutritional information on the back (about 70 servings at 22 grams per serving). Yep, just one huge, cylinder of striped sugar ready to stand and rotate outside of a barbershop near you.

At that point, I bust out laughing and thanked the student who looked on grinningly.

The Silent Epidemic

So, school this week started off alright on Monday. But, it went down hill quickly. I'll spare you the details from the trenches, but here are they highlights:

Sometime earlier in the week, during homeroom we learned that we had a previously unannounced "program" at 930. At the time, I thought they said Christmas program, so I thought I was just in for some more forced religiosity, which, by the by, I am no less comfortable with or desensitized to after one semester.

I had misheard. When I arrived, I discovered, from the folding board poster and the program guide My Fellow New Englander (MFNE) passed me in the stands, we were being graced with an Abstinence program: Think Before You Let It Go. Joy among joys. The host for this assembly was none other than one of our teachers dressed as Flavor Flav. Other highlights of the program were: 1) the long, long, long skit in which different students "role-played" situations in which they chose not to drink and have sex, but to study instead; 2) the poem delivered by a ninth-grader wearing a large wrapped gift costume (because I LOVE the idea that we should tell keep telling women that their virginity is a gift they should give to the man they wish to marry. I have NO problems with that metaphor AT ALL); 3) the cheerleaders doing a slow dance to some r&b song about sex; 4) the early head start program parading the children through the gym like some sort of perverse intimidation tactic (LOOK! BABIES! BE SCARED OF SEX! YOU'LL EXPLODE! AHHH!).

All of this was really just a nuisance. I'm used to my school wasting my time and the time of my students. But then MFNE showed me the pamphlet they were passing out which I had decided to ignore. Then, I was angry. Oh, so, angry.

"Condoms fail so often in preventing pregnancy (10%-36%) that doctors call them "antiquated birth control." Condoms fail even more often in trying to prevent STDs. * ... Condoms break, crack, slip, leak, can be applied too late, removed too early, deteriorate with time and heat, and FDA recommendations allow up to 4 defects per 1,000. Defect holes can be at least 50 times larger than the HIV virus."

WTF. As MFNE joked: Antiquated birth control? So, they want our kids to say, "no baby, condoms are antiquated birth control, I'll just pull out." I am still waiting for the reference list which I requested since the pamphlet, surprisingly, doesn't provide them. I would parse all of the misleading statements in the quotation above, but it actually makes me too blindingly angry to think about it. Instead, I'll link to these counter-facts from an organization more up my alley.

Also, on friday we had another surprise program, this one completely unannounced, in which the commander-in-chief guilt tripped the staff and the students into performing better and taking tests seriously. We then watched an "inspirational" video in which a white coach blindfolds a member of his lily-white team and provides him the opportunity to exceed expectations because he believed in himself. The whole video took a solid 7 minutes, full of dramatic music and skinny football players. How touching. I can't seem to find a copy of the video though. oh well.

Required Reflection on the First Semester in the Trenches

Well, as trenches go, my first semester has been the proverbial up and down. Luckily for this post, I am currently up for the down stroke. This post is going to be mostly just a medley of ideas running through my head about what's been working recently and how that reflects the changes I've gone through over the last four months.

Long thought:
What I feel like people expect/want me to say: I should have started off this year as a stricter teacher. I should have come out harder in terms of my rules, procedures, and management.

I think that statement would be largely false. I think, oddly enough, I came out as hard as I could. I planned out my procedures as best I could; I was as strict as I could really imagine being; I was as authoritarian as I could imagine being. The classroom I created was much different than the one I had during summer school and even than the one I though I would have during summer school. Mostly, this decision was one of (accurately) low self-confidence. I was very right to think I am not yet a good enough manager to have the classroom environment I want to have. I'm still not (obviously).

None of this was good enough. Management is not simply a matter of procedures, rewards and consequences. The tone behind management seems to be the most important aspect of management. When you lack the institutional support to back up your "objective" ladder of consequences, it seems that you need to get the students to respect you, personally, enough to back up all those consequences in house. In this culture, that becomes uncomfortably Machiavellian. Respect here seems to be almost synonymous with fear. Fear has to come even before love. Gaining students' respect becomes a matter of asserting emotional and psychological dominance over each student individually, and then once this hierarchy exists of showing the students that you will, in fact, love them. This love, in turn, allows them to maybe begin to try to think about loving you back.

Some people seem more able than others to develop this tone of fear and love in their classroom. As a TFA-er I was recently talking to told me, the best white male teachers she knew were the ones that have yelled at their students. In fact, I've been told on multiple occasions that i need to "yell" and get "angry" at my students. "Yelling" just operates as a way of creating that tone of fear. Once you've gotten word out that you can "yell," you have to do it less and less. Once you've got your own back, you're all set.

Unfortunately (or now fortunately) for me, only yesterday, did I, for the first time, feel like I had even begun to be able to impersonate someone who might be said to have such a tone. It wasn't even that I was angry that they were talking; but I needed them to think I was angry or they wouldn't listen to me. As one of my more annoying students said, "Mr. Weimer is becoming a man." It is the beginning of me trying to speak to my students in a language of verbal violence that they can understand so that eventually I might be able to show them another way of expressing those emotions or thoughts. This sort of "angry" tone is a function of a behavior that I do not want to have. That is a person I do not want to be. It is one of the reasons why I don't think I should stay here too long. For one, I honestly don't believe I will ever be able to impersonate a person who can have an angry tone well enough to convince these students. I need to be that person, which is a person I don't want to be. At the same time, just being able to impersonate that person adds a skill to my tool-belt I never thought I'd have. In most any other teaching situation, I think just the confidence behind the ability will be enough to secure respect.

Shorter Thoughts:
I love teaching. I love watching students think. I love helping them think. I love seeing them smile. I love seeing them frustrated by thinking. While these moments can often be rare in my poorly managed ninth-grade classes, they come around every so often. They are more frequent in Algebra II.

Non-verbal management is priceless: a look; a hand gesture; an eyebrow raise.

I don't know where I'll be in a year, but it'll be in a classroom.