Tales from the schoolhouse 5

Today's tale starts back with my McLoud subbing adventures.

They really loved me as a sub because I was willing to teach junior high and I was willing to teach special needs students. Many of the other subs wouldn't go near the junior high. They do get kinda crazy at that age.

There was a resource classroom that I frequently subbed. That was absolutely the best. I just sat in there all day, and kids would come to me from other classes for extra help with their assignments. I’d sit at a half-round table, sometimes with just one student, sometimes 2-4. Basically, I was a tutor.

One little girl who came to me pretty regularly was very sweet but struggled with everything. She could read at an elementary level but really had difficulty with retention, and she was completely lost when it came to finding specific information  in a book. Tables of content and indexes were a complete mystery to her.

One day she came down to see me with her health class assignment. I was unfamiliar with the heath curriculum, having never subbed that class. She sat down and I read through her worksheet. They don’t really teach sex ed in Oklahoma, but the worksheet was for what passes for sex ed there.

One of the questions was about preventing sexually transmitted disease. I took the book and glanced through the chapter. Then I turned to the index and read that. I closed the book and pushed it aside.

“This book is worthless,” I told her. “For people who have sex, the way to prevent STDs is to use condoms.”

She giggled and looked down at her worksheet.

“Do you know what condoms are?”

More giggling. A nod.

“You can buy them at Family Dollar,” I told her. “They prevent pregnancy too. But they only work if you use them every time.”

“Okay!” she said, giggling some more.

Is it any wonder Oklahoma has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in the country? If the administration had found out I had conversations like that with kids, they’d have thrown me out on my ear.

Fast forward to the middle school in Oklahoma City where I taught the next year. I had morning duty at the metal detectors pretty much every week (see previous post - why the principal hated me). I found out that you actually can smuggle a cell phone through a metal detector if you have large enough boobs. But what usually triggered it was foil gum wrappers. Kids would hide gum in their shoes because they'd figured out that their shoes set off the metal detector anyway. But the 8th grader who set of the detector one fine morning in March didn't have any gum. He had a condom in his wallet. Guess what? They have foil wrappers too.

"Son," I told him sternly. " You really shouldn't carry condoms in your wallet. It can get easily damaged in your wallet, and then it won't be effective. You don't want that to happen!"

"No ma'am," he told me in surprise.

"So keep your condoms in that pocket in your backpack instead," I suggested.

"Good idea!" he said cheerfully as he trotted down the hall.

Now honestly, I don't know if he was using condoms or just carrying one for the glamour of it.

But I bet he remembered not to keep them in his wallet.

Tales from the schoolhouse 4

Today’s story is about a boy.

A quiet, plump, shy boy who always sat in the corner of the room and hardly ever spoke a word. He did his work (not well but he tried), and never caused any trouble. In a room full of loud, boisterous 7^th graders, he was easy to overlook. It was easy not to notice that he was gone for a few days. Or that he was even quieter than usual on his return.

It was hard not to notice that he turned in his final exam blank. Just his name on it. I’d been ordered not to fail any students. I wasn’t going to follow those orders. But I also didn’t want to just let this guy fail without understanding what was going on. I had no classroom of my own, so we met in the hallway.

“Is something going on?” I asked. “It’s not like you not to try.”

He looked at the floor. Finally he said “It’s just been really hard since my mom died. I miss her so much.”

Why the fuck didn’t anybody tell me this?

We’re not allowed to touch the students. I wish I could give him a hug. He’s crying.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It was two weeks ago. That’s why I missed those days.”

“You know, my father died when I was your age,” I told him.

He looked up.

So we talked for about half an hour. His mother had been disabled, in a wheelchair. He loved his dad but it was his mother he could talk to. His whole world was just shattered. I couldn’t do much except let him know that I understood by sharing my own loss and listening to his.

Eventually I said “If you’d like to take the test again, I could set that up for you.”

“Yes, please,” he told me.

So he retested. It didn’t matter what his score was really. I wasn’t going to fail him because he had the courage to try. Then the semester was over and he moved on to other classes. After Christmas, I got a call from the office that a parent wanted to speak to me. At that school, it usually wasn’t a good thing when a parent wanted to talk to you. Sometimes they just cussed you out. Sometimes they threw punches.

At the office was a small, sturdy Hispanic man holding his hat.

“I just want to thank you. You were so kind to my son. He told me all about it. He told me none of the other teachers noticed or cared. It meant so much to him.”

Literally, I had done the absolute minimum that any decent human being would do. At that school, parental deportations, arrests, and deaths were not all that uncommon. I guess people just get numb after awhile. But it was sweet of him to thank me. I’ll never forget his gentle sad face or the effort he made to seek me out.

Tales from the schoolhouse 3

There are so many stories to tell that it’s hard to sort them out in my mind. Today I’ll tell about the beginning of the end of my teaching career. 

It happened shortly after I started my first (and last) year as a full-time teacher. I had interviewed for the position of 7^th grade science teacher. I was really pumped about this, because from my subbing experience I knew that science was my favorite subject to teach. However, the school administration instead hired a combat veteran suffering from heavy-duty PTSD to teach science and decided that I should teach German!

I should have run away screaming. But I really needed the job.

No text books, no classroom, and no idea how to teach German, especially to kids who were already functionally illiterate in two other languages. But, more about that later.

Today’s tale starts with a lock-down. Another school in our district had a child bring a weapon to school, so every school went into lock-down. I hadn’t been instructed in lock-down procedure, but the teacher with whom I shared my room was familiar with the process. Doors locked. Window shades drawn. No one allowed in the hallways. Wait for the all-clear announcement. But you know how it is with kids. There was a bathroom emergency. Not in my room, but apparently another teacher let a child go to the bathroom rather than wet himself. The principal got on the intercom with an extremely rude and condescending announcement publicly shaming the teacher. I was appalled. She could have been stern, she could have reiterated the procedures, but instead she mocked her faculty in a tone of complete disdain.

Later that day, I listened to my fellow teachers in the break room complaining bitterly about the principal’s behavior. So I drafted a rather meekly worded email to the principal, asking that she not publicly shame teachers as it had a significant impact on student respect for the faculty and classroom management.

She called me into her office during my planning hour. Her office was at the opposite end of the school from the main school office and other administrative staff. Rumor had it that she requested that separation because she spend all day working on her PhD instead of doing her job. I sat down at the round table in her office.

“Where do you want to teach next year?” she asked me.

I thought it an odd conversation starter. I looked at her face and saw that she was seething with rage. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I could see that I was dealing with a total bully.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I haven’t thought about it.”

She launched into a tirade. I wish I had a recording of it, but the gist was that “I’m great and the students are great but the teachers at this school are a bunch of incompetent losers who make all of the problems around here.” This went on for a while. She wanted to make me angry or make me break down. If I yelled back, she would have grounds to fire me. I knew she wanted to. If I cried or apologized, I’d be forever under her tyrannical thumb. Amazingly, I managed to stay totally calm.

“I don’t agree,” I told her. “I haven’t been here very long, but all the teachers I’ve met are really caring, smart professionals who are trying their hardest to do a good job. They deserve respect and support for that.”

“You’re wrong!” she yelled at me.

I honestly don’t remember how the meeting ended. Clearly not the way she wanted it to, because I simply refused to play her game, which gave her nowhere to go. Of course, from that day onwards, I was a dead woman walking. Not that it really made any difference to me. The job couldn’t have been any worse.

Tales from the schoolhouse 2

My tale today is about basketball.

In McLoud, there wasn’t really a PE class at the junior high. The kids who didn’t play on sports teams got little organized exercise. However, during the long lunch hour, students who were so inclined would toss a football, play basketball, or just fool around.

As a substitute, I had a little more leeway than a regular teacher, so I would sometimes take my students outside on nice days for a few minutes at the end of a long 1½ hour class. Inevitably, the girls would sit on the benches and picnic tables and the boys would grab a ball and play a pickup game on the basketball court. Gentle encouragement to get the girls to participate fell on deaf ears, so I figured to lead by example and joined the games myself. So there I was, a mediocre-at-best ball player, playing rough and tumble pickup games with a bunch of teenage guys. I managed to hold my own, earning their grudging respect, but not one of the girls ever joined in. And let me tell you, those well-fed Oklahoma girls could have sure used the exercise.

Fast forward to the Oklahoma City junior high where I taught full-time the next year. My students invited me to join the after-lunch shenanigans on the basketball court. Only this time, the court was filled with black girls playing horse, and they absolutely put me to shame. I couldn’t begin to mimic the amazing shots they pulled off. Afterwards, they shook their heads sadly and said “Miz Mongold, you’re real nice, but you’re a terrible basketball player.” I couldn’t disagree.

What it is about places like Oklahoma, where white girls are socialized to be completely sedentary by the age of 13? Considering that 34% of Oklahoma adults are obese and almost 10,000 Oklahomans died of heart disease in 2014, it seems that this is a thing worth trying to change.

Tales from the Schoolhouse 1

Sometimes I get into a funk and take some time off from creating things. I almost always find that when that happens, I have to branch off in a new direction to re-light the fuse.

With all the teacher walk-outs, the state of education is much in the news. I have some opinions about that, having been a teacher for a short, weird period of my life. So, branching off, I’m going to tell a few tales from those days. Bear with me, because I’m not going in any particular order, and I’ll probably meander around.

I’ll start with a 3-month gig I had as a long-term substitute in McLoud Oklahoma. The special needs math teacher was out on maternity leave. I knew this would be a challenge for me, having never been particularly genius at math. I had gone through the para training and alternative teacher certification by that point, but wasn’t really educated on this kind of teaching.

I walked into the classroom at the end of the hall and took stock. I would be teaching kids at several different levels, primarily from a basic mathematics book and a pre-algebra book. McLoud had 4 classes per day instead of 6, and the students were expected to do their schoolwork in class, so I only needed enough books for the classroom, not for each student to take home. I had one ancient student computer on a desk at the side of the room. I had one cabinet of supplies, mostly holiday decorations for the classroom.  There were scented candles and Jesus things on the teacher’s desk, and a broom in the corner, which I soon discovered was a necessity since many of the kids came to school straight from their morning chores in the barn. Yuck.

The lovely thing about teaching special needs classes is that class sizes are quite small – as legally required. So you do have a little more time to work with individual students, and classroom management is much, much easier. I had students who ranged from one boy who couldn’t tie his own shoes, didn't smell very good, and only knew how to calculate on his fingers to the quick-witted 7^th grader who seemed to be in special needs class only because he wasn’t at all good at sitting still or keeping quiet. There was also a skater dude who would bring in his skateboard and park it behind my desk, sit down in the back of the room, and promptly go to sleep, every day.

As I tackled the challenges of teaching math to these kids, I cast back to my days as a volunteer in my daughter’s classrooms in Oregon. There, the teachers relied heavily on “manipulatives” to teach math theory. From there they progressed to word problem solving, and THEN to what most of us think of as math, problems written in math’s symbolic language. It was a consistent and orchestrated approach that all the teachers in all the grades utilized. I quickly came to realize that these Oklahoma students had never been taught the concepts behind the math problems. They were unable to equate the symbols on the page to anything. It was purest luck that any of them could go beyond calculating on their fingers.

With no budget and no teaching supplies besides the textbooks, I turned to Google for inspiration. By luck I found a thing called “algebra cards.” Cardstock, scissors, a sharpie, and a Saturday’s afternoon work, and Monday morning I faced my class armed with my new tool. The cards are used to lay the algebra problem out on a table top. The students can then solve the equation by adding and removing cards, keeping the equation balanced as they isolate the variable. After we worked through several problems together, a light bulb started to go off. From then on, my algebra students regularly grabbed the cards and stood at the table, working together to solve the problems.

In that moment I realized that it was a GIFT that I am not great with math, because I could see and relate to the struggles of my students. Being able to figure out how to teach them made me realize I was not bad at math at all, I was just bad at doing math the way it had been taught to me. It helped me to see my students as people who were unconventional learners and started me down a path of discovery that led, eventually, to the democratic schooling movement.

But, back to McLoud. My methods worked really well on some students. For the ones who had severe learning disabilities, not as much. Perhaps with more time and support, I would have figured out how to tailor my instruction to every student. But the end of the semester came and the regular teacher returned. I went back to sporadic substituting for the remainder of the school year. At one point the teacher I had replaced sought me out and asked “What are these algebra cards the students keep asking for?” It was clear that she was not at all pleased that I had introduced this new method to her students. I explained them and gave her my cards, but I later found out she never used them. It was clear to me that neither she nor the district really cared about helping these students find their individual level of achievement. They taught them because they were legally obligated to do so, but there was no creativity, passion, or empathy in the process. I always wondered what happened to the clever, restless boy, or the skater kid who couldn’t stay awake. One does, you know.