Geography Lesson

I have no idea how to answer the questions the children are asking me about war with Iraq. They started asking all these questions yesterday, so we got out the globe to at least see where Iraq is located.

We passed Columbia, and here's the conversation that followed:

Student: I know everything about Columbia.

Me: Really? What do you know about it?

Student: I know that all the cocaine comes from Columbia.

Me: Ummmmm (unable to respond to this due to shock)

Student: I also know that if you sell cocaine, you can make a lot of money.

Me: Ok, but if you sell a lot of cocaine, you'll also go to jail for a very long time, harm others, maybe get yourself hurt...Why do you know all this stuff?

Student: My...um...neighbor...um...[realizing he should shut up]...I don't know. I made it up.

Again, these kids are eight years old. You should be very scared for the future of our country.

Tax Dollars

To any Dallas-area people reading, here's one to file under So Where do the Tax Dollars Go, Anyway?:

For two weeks, we have had no heat in our classroom. The majority of the school (built in the 1930s) is on a huge, beastly heat/AC generator that is controlled by the fools downtown. My room and the one next to me, however, share a small heater that's controlled in my classroom.

Two weeks ago today, it stopped working. Our maintenance people reported it to the headquarters downtown, and were basically told that the prospect of us receiving a new motor [that's what's broken] this school year was remote. I mean, please! These are little children we're talking about, trying to learn, trying to study, trying to take the !@#@$ TAKS test, and they're forced to sit in a room that is as cold as it is outside all day long. It's going to be, what, 38 for a high today? We can pay the superintendent half a million dollars a year, but we can't buy a stupid motor so that my students don't freeze?

Next week we have parent conferences, and if the heater isn't fixed by then, I'm going to try to get the parents to go downtown and complain. The last thing the district wants is 20 irate mommies at their offices screaming at them.

Insomnia

I got too much sleep last night and now I can't sleep tonight. Nyquil, sleeping pills, chamomile tea, illegal tranquili...well, I haven't gone that far, but almost.

Sunday nights do this to me. The degree of dread that I feel about returning to work Monday morning is only matched by the degree of dread I feel, um, most nights, since I loathe going to work so very much. That's not entirely fair - I don't really dread going to work per se, I just don't care. I don't really care about much of anything lately - it could be that I've been kind of sick, or I absolutely hate winter - I'm not sure. I'm not terribly sad, not really happy, just sort of here.

Standing at the top of January and staring down a long semester is pretty rough. My school doesn't let out until July - one week exactly before my birthday, actually. Six weeks vacation is one hell of a birthday present, but it just seems so far away.

I'm just so sick of thinking about, talking about, eating, breathing, sleeping and dreaming school and schoolchildren. I'm also pretty sick of Dallas. Plans are in the works to get out of here; it'll be a while [at least a year and a half] but knowing that I'm out of here eventually helps. I'm starting to look at grad schools and programs of study; I'm also looking into teaching abroad. I'd love to go somewhere fantastic like France, of course, but I'll probably be stuck in French Guyana instead. Wow. That place might not actually be so bad.

Whatever I took last is starting to work now and I'm feeling sleepy. Finally.

Plague

I think my class has the plague.

Yesterday there were eight of us absent, including me, and today there were six absent. We can't do anything with no one there, so we've been doing, um, nothing. It was so bad this morning - so many kids gone and so many of the ones that were there being sick - that we spent the first thirty minutes of the day dividing the room in half; the sick kids were on one side of the room and the well kids on the other. I sprayed everything in the room with Lysol and hoped no one else would get sick. By the end of the day, two more were in the nurse's office. I'm hoping the class will be small again tomorrow, as 16 kids are much easier to deal with than 22.

Today they also told us that next week we have to spend three days administering a mock TAKS test. [The TAKS test is that stupid Texas-only standardized test that's horribly racially biased, unfair and evil.] When we got back from Winter Break we had exactly 38 school days until the test. So far, they have wasted six of them on these stupid benchmarks, mock tests, writing prompts, etc. I can't get anything done! As soon as we start to get into something, we have to stop and do some dumb test. And now we've got the plague, so we're getting even more behind. So frustrating.

Lately

It's weird; I've been thinking I actually might like this job. The strangest part about it is that the last couple of weeks, since we've gotten back from Winter Break, have been a couple of the worst.

I had to do the saddest thing. Imagine that you're eight, in third grade, and failing miserably at everything. You think things can't get worse, right? Well, then your teacher refers you for special ed testing, which you don't know about, but in the course of the secret meeting about you, it's decided that you're going to move back to second grade - effective immediately. No warning, no chance to say bye to his friends - hardly even a chance for me to come up with some weak excuse to tell his classmates so they won't make fun of him.

It wasn't my decision. It wasn't even my idea. But, of course, I had to be the one to write the letter to his parents [your kid is so behind and you're such bad parents for not putting him in kindergarten, but waiting to enroll him in school until he was six and half way through first grade, and his second grade teacher was such a failure at noticing that he should have been held back last year...] and tell the kid himself that he was going. The new teacher said he's even having trouble keeping up in there. Sad.

I'm starting to get things figured out, though. I'm getting slightly more organized, and I'm actually having some degree of success at teaching Math. [Math was my main fear/hated part of the day at work, because they just don't get anything.] Thirty percent of my class passed the Math TAKS Benchmark in January, which is better than they've done all year. They're all just so behind. I don't even know where to start. I did tell my principal that I'll stay another year and do third grade again. I want another chance with a new set of kids.

Right, so...

I made it through the first couple of days back. Craziness ensued once school started - our music teacher died over the break, apparently from some sort of accidental overdose - so the day started out weird. You don't really want to go to the office to sign in and see the obituary of one of your colleagues taped to the counter. She seemed like a nice person but kept to herself. RIP.


Today, I started the day by receiving two new students, including one who speaks absolutely no English. Well, by the end of the day I'd taught him how to say 'yes' and 'no,' as well as, 'my name is Felipe.'

The other validation I got for my current career situation came in the form of a tiny little red-haired girl.

Roberta was in my class at the beginning of the year, and about two months into school her dad started beating the crap out of her mom, so they left and Roberta moved to another school. We all cried when she left and I really did miss her.

About a month ago her mom showed up at my classroom, all frantic like, saying that Roberta was miserable at the new school and kept begging to come back. I said that it would be fine for her to come back, just put a neighborhood family member's address on the forms and bring her back as soon as you can (yes, I know that's wrong, but this is a very common practice at my school).
 
The semester ended, and I figured her mom had changed her mind.

So this morning, when I was putting New Kid A into his desk, the office called to say that a parent had requested me and New Kid B would be on her way to my room. I got mad at first, then asked...wait...is it Roberta?

When she opened the door to come in...I swear it was the cutest and sweetest thing I've ever seen. She was smiling so big and literally ran across the room and jumped up into my arms. The kid even brought me a present. Her mother looked so happy and relieved to see her child smiling again.

Ok, so that's the last time you're going to see anything cheerful and happy and lovely and good posted here, because we had the big 'Don't Do Anything But Teach To The Test' meeting today, and my life will now revolve around giving little children too much homework and more stress than their little minds can handle, robbing them of their childhood fun and for what? So that some number cruncher down in Austin can decide how much money my school will get per child next year

No More Vacation

I was discussing the sadness that is going back to school with my friend Sarah earlier today. Obviously neither of us are looking forward to returning to lesson plans, grading papers, waking up early, and, of course, screaming children. I almost want to quit and just get a job waiting tables or selling perfume or something that doesn't involve teaching.

That said, we were trying to think of anything that could make this job more bearable. We both noted that we did not miss our students much over the break. That knowledge will make it easier to think of work as just that - work. Not a personal mission to save the world.

See, starting in early March, we begin a battery of tests to see if these kids get to pass third grade. Many of them won't pass. It's sad. A combination of the truly inept teachers some of them have [i.e. untrained, uncertified people such as myself], the, um, inability to speak or read English, and, for many of the students, laziness and just plain not caring.

So, I'm just going to think of it all as a numbers game and focus on trying to get as many of the children to pass as I can. I read that sentence, and I realize how sad it is that education has come to this. Are other states this way? Is a 'good education' based on whether a little eight-year-old child can pass big, scary test?

I've also come to the conclusion that I don't want to continue in this job next year if at all possible. I'd like to transfer to a different school - preferably a high school. I want to do the same lesson over and over for two days rather than having to create six new and exciting lessons every day. I realize that the high school students will likely treat me terribly and often the kind treatment of my good students is all that gets me through the day, but I still would like the change.

I seriously cannot think about work anymore before 8:00 a.m. on Monday.