Finding Inspiration in the New Year

It’s been a rough two weeks at school. We had our first big fight the Friday before last, in which the principal and a teacher were hit, and had minor injuries, and in which the school police officer sprained a wrist and broke her finger.

These kinds of fights are routine at many neighborhood schools in Philly, but we’re a new school, and I’m of the opinion that the way we handle this really does matter. I don’t think it’s something we should sweep under the rug. The students who were suspended were all supposed to be back on this past Friday, but in one of those collective-unconscious moments that Philly students seem to have, all of them decided not to come to school together. So it hasn’t happened that everyone has come back and sat in a room and either a) been okay or b) even talked about it. I’m not sure if I feel comfortable being the one to start the dialogue on my own, not sure if I feel equipped to run that kind of a discussion with my students. Maybe I should give myself more credit. But I’m just not sure.

Regardless, this past week was a week full of suspensions, and angry students, and new levels of disrespect. It was also a week of progress. I’m trying to find one victory every day.

Last week’s frustrations:

1. One student, “meek,” who’s on my caseload and in my resource room losing his temper and getting in 4 fights in one day, resulting in his suspension.
2. Another student who’s on my caseload and in my advisory telling me to “go @#$% myself” and that I should just “go suck his #$%^” when I caught him sneaking into school through an unauthorized entrance and asked to see his bag.

A note on number 2 – students say hateful things to me/teachers pretty regularly, and it’s usually the result of them having lost their temper. You talk to them about it, and either they apologize (and mean it) or they don’t. If they don’t, or even if they do and it’s their 3rd or 4th offense, I send them to Dr. Bean and maybe they get suspended. I call home. Sometimes we have a meeting with their parent or guardian. But these little comments are the ones that get under your skin, the ones that make me fight to keep my temper and remember that they’re not mad at me, and that I am the responsible adult in this situation and need to act like it.

Last week’s inspirations:

1. ES in strategic english reading a GRADE LEVEL text, and struggling through it like a champ. He’s working on finding the central conflict in Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds,” and on analyzing the characters’ motivation. I was a little nervous about the frustration level of the story, and I want him to know that he should be proud of himself.
2. Miranda, one of the english teachers, and I have teamed up to help one particular student with his comprehension. MM takes corrective reading level B2 with me, but that only helps his decoding (which he really does need). However, when I take running records with him (which measures his reading level according to both decoding and comprehension) his struggles with comprehension are what holds him back. So, in response to this realization, I photocopy our corrective reading story for Miranda to go over with MM in their lab. That way, she works with him on comprehension, I work with him on decoding, and hopefully he’ll move up a level from M to N on reading a-z! My fingers are crossed.
3. Sha, my algebra 2 resource room student, is doing so much better at everything. We’re working with functions, and he’s remembering PEMDAS, he’s following the steps to set up the problems correctly, and he’s getting more right answers. His careless mistakes are still there, but usually now I don’t have to point them out to him, I just have to say “are you sure about that?” and he fixes it on his own. Slow but steady progress!
4. (THIS IS THE BEST ONE!) SJ, my original advisee, was in one of my classes that got re-rostered to another teacher, Andrew. He’s doing a good job with that class, and I’m much happier about it than I was when it first happened. So anyway, SJ comes up to me in the hallway and is like “Miss SBT, I need you back teaching that class. I don’t know if Mr. K can handle it, you know? He just ain’t holding it down.” So I respond that of course Mr. K can handle it, and he’s a great teacher, and I’ve heard SJ is doing really well in the class!

“No, Miss SBT, that’s not what I mean. It’s like, I feel more special in your class.”

“Well sweetie you know you’re special no matter what class you’re in! All of your teachers know that.”

He wrinkles his nose. “Not special like . . . retarded . . .” I give him a look, he corrects, “. . . I mean, not special like dumb.”

“I know,” I told him, “you mean that you feel more loved in my class, because you know I have love for you.”

“Yeah,” he says, smiling.

“Well, I’ll just have to send a little extra love your way then, so you can take it with you to Mr. K’s class. Plus you know Mr. K has love for you, too.”

“Okay, Miss SBT,” he says, smiling.

And he went to class.

I know my official job is to educate my kids, not to be their friends, but this is a kid (well, he’s 19, so kid is a relative term) who’s never taken school seriously before. And here he is, participating in class, turning in his homework more than 50% of the time according to his teachers, and generally being a rockstar. So if him feeling loved is helping, then whatever, I will send him heart post-it notes in the hallway that say “have a good day!” Also, I’m glad that, in some way, he felt loved/inspired in my class.

Mostly what I’m working on/swamped with right now is the fact that there’s one of me, one special ed teacher in the whole school. Unofficially, I’m the Special Ed Liaison, and I don’t know how to do that entire job while still teaching. It’s annoying because it gets in the way of me just being as good a teacher as I possibly can be. I’m getting a lot better at writing good lesson plans, and at knowing what ways to introduce material so that students will remember it and get into it.

But the PAPERWORK. The figuring out which students “need” resource rooms as opposed to others? (They could ALL use the extra help), the re-scheduling students so they get those special ed “minutes” that their IEPs require, the re-writing of those IEPs so they reflect the restrictive environment of our school, the progress monitoring of students I never see because I don’t teach them, and these things called “PLPs” our school has started with us (personalized learning plans; basically non-legal IEPs) that add another mound of paperwork.

I think this week I need to remember the mentality that this is my job, not my entire life. Yes, it’s more than a job because I care about my kids, but it’s not what I come home to. And when I make it into that, it makes me a worse teacher because I’m tired, cranky, and resentful.

Finding a balance, that’s what’s important. Doing what I need to do for me, and doing what I need to do for my kids. If this is something that I want to do for more than just two years (and I think that it is), I need to figure out how to do that.

So, on that note, I’m going to have the best week that I can, and I hope all of you do too

lots of love,

Miss SBT

Tagged: behavior, fights, inspiration, progress monitoring, re-rostering, reading levels, success, violence

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