Pause. And begin again.

Blogging and gmail chatting during class.  I am sick.  Both physically sick and just intrinsically sick of school.  Need to go home.  

My freshman year in college, I had a 10 am physics class. Not early, but early enough for college. For williams, it was a big class, 35 or 40 students, and when the clock hit 10 and it was time for class to start, the prof would always push a little button and we would all hear the opening riff of "smooth criminal." He had it set up to fade out after about 5 or 6 seconds, well before "she came in through the window, to the sound of a creshendo" It was the perfect start to class, and by the time it had faded, everyone knew what was going on, namely, physics. When class ended, he pushed his hidden button somewhere, and the song started up again. Every once in a while he would vary the song, if there was another song that was perhaps more relevant to what we were doing, but from september through january, just about every class, I heard those same opening few notes.

This is something I'd like to try for next year. With less technology, and less time between classes, I wouldn't be able to work it exactly the same, but I think I could at least start, if not end class with it. Or end my bellringer with it, because when the music stops, that's when I need the focus on me, to try to teach something, anything,before I lose them.

Very often, I'm amazed at what my kids can't do. The fact that they can't do any sort of mental math has astonished me over and over again, as I wait on things like 30 divided by two or 46 divided by 10. Only today did I realize that even skills like these need to be taught.

I started thinking about a week ago about what I do when I divide something in my head. For example, if I wanted to divide 68 by 2, I first divide the sixty by 2, to get thirty, then divide the 8 by two, to get 4, and add to get 34. Pretty standard, I thought. But today after school, as I watched FM labor through the same problem using long division, I realized it might not be the standard thought process for my kids. So I stopped him and told him how I did it. Oh yeah, he said. That's so much easier. That does make sense. Hopefully, it is a little more intutive for him. FM has become my mental math experiment. A few days ago I caught him laboring over a multiplication problem where he had to multiply something by five. Just take half of it, I told him, and put a zero on the end. Works anytime you have to multiply by 5. That astounded him. And when I explained why, it was like a little light went off. It made sense.

Today, FM stayed after school along with DB. (DB was in my class for a few months in the fall before he got moved to pre-algebra. He is the sweetest kid in the world, and would kill to be back in my class. That's why he stays after school.) Anyway, DB was showing off his solving equations skills, while FM was solving some quadratics. FM was simplifying a square root, trying to make a factor tree for some number, and asked me what went into it. So I decided to tell them about how you can tell if three goes into a number. I told them any number they gave me, I could tell them if three went into it 5 seconds or less. They gave me some horrendous numbers, 5 and digits, and were amazed when I told them yes, three is a factor or no, three isn't a factor as soon as they had finished writing. Finally, after about five minutes of them giving me bigger and nastier numbers, I told them the trick, which had them holding their heads and laughing and generally being amazed at math. As they walked out the door, DB told me he was going to go right home and show that to his mom. FM said he was going to show it to his friends tomorrow. I need to think of some other "tricks" to have ready for them next time. I also need to decide what to do with the last month of the school year. Three weeks for seniors. Oh man.

When I have a bad day, I have a few different coping mechanisms. One is to work in my garden. Another is to lay on the couch and read. Neither of these are very helpful. A third, more helpful mechanism, is to think about my favorite students and how wonderful they are.

HC is one of my favorite. Maybe my favorite, these days, I'm not sure. She's brilliant, but can get an attitude, and has told me more than once to shut up talking to her. Today, after a hectic day of testing, she came up to me in the hall.

"Mr. G., don't forget about those oreos."
"Right, the oreos. I'm heading back to my room now, come and I'll get them for you"

During a makeshift "game" that we were playing today, I awarded points for getting questions right as we were prepping for the test. HC, sure that she would come out tops, pressed me about what the winner would get, and finally, I cracked and said some oreos, after school.

As we walked back to my room, harried by a pair of her friends who seemed certain that their bus would leave without them, HC told me all about he new diet. She's keeping a list of all the things she eats and drinks, which she showed me, along with a list of exercises that she is going right home to do. She had tried this earlier in the year and given up after about a week, so I was excited and I hope she lasts a little longer this time. By the time we got to my room, I had forgetten why we had come. But of course, HC hadn't.
"Where them cookies at Mr. G?"
"Cookies? But isn't that counter to everything you were just telling me about?"
"Aw, it'll be alright. I ain't hardly but eat nothing all day."
"Would you rather have some gatorade instead?"
"Naw, just gimme the cookies. Well, no, gimme the gatorade."
"Alright.."
"No, I wan them cookies."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. No, I'll take that gatorade. I gotta go. Thanks Mr. G."
"I'm gonna have to start bringing fruit."
"Ok"

NYT on symtoms of poverty in the Delta.

So, I can't teach 131 students in the cafeteria. Big deal. Some things are going right though. A former student, who was shunted out to pre-algebra, came to my class after school today. He never does anything in that pre-algebra class, and so he came to me for help. He smiles "I'm gonn be up in your class next year."

This leads to the theme of all the things that kids say in and about my class. "We don't do nothin up in here." "Girl, we don't never do nothin up in this classroom, he just be talkin'" "We ain't learned nothin up in here." "That man don't even teach." Today, I heard it from other kids, about every other algebra teacher. Kids are kids, and kids can complain like few other creatures on earth. I can't bother to take them very seriously.

One student's mother told me that he writes poetry, and that these people sent him a letter saying that they wanted to publish his poems. My first thought, of course, was poetry.com, who want to publish everyone's poem in a special, hardbound, coffee-table edition. Today, he brought be the poems, and the letters from, you guessed it, poetry.com. I guess I do have something in common with my students - I too submitted my early works filled with forced rhymes and the fleeting charm of feelings that seem, momentarily, eternal. The first poem that I submitted, was in fact entitled "Always." Today, as we were all preparing for the state test in what we called Academy One (unofficially: chaos in the cafeteria), he asked me if he would take me for algebra II next year. Not likely, I told him, since he was signed up for geometry, but I assured him that he could and should take both, especially if he hopes to satisfy his interest in architecture. Well then, if he does take it, could I especially request that he be in my class? Sure, I could do that.

Furthermore, in the cafeteria, my students made me proud. "I already know how to do this junk." "We been knowing how to do that." "When we learn this, back in August?" Even one of my most difficult students, and I have a few of those, called to me, across the caf, in that voice that can so often be a torment - MR. G, COME HERE. Oh no, god no. AIN'T YOU SO PROUD OF ME I DID THIS ONE ALL BY MYSELF. Yes, in fact, I am proud of you, very proud. Now do the rest.

Another happiness - the same student to whom I referred in an earlier blog, who claimed to have spent the night in the baseball dugout, showed up at the middle school to play soccer today. I throw out a casual invitation probably once every other week to any and all of my kids; I figure it would be good for all of them, and certainly better than whatever else they are doing. We threw him in goal for a while, then he came out and got his toe stomped on, but he soldiered on until the end, showing me later how purple it was.

I often forget that these kids are, well, kids. The guys, at least, often have the bodies of adults. Well, at least the seniors. The freshmen still appear as if they would fit in quite well in a middle school, but the two guys who came out today, if I saw them for the first time outside of school, I would judge to be between 20 and 22, rather than 17. One of them has two inches and at least 60 pounds on me. But they are kids, they need attention, they need to feel respected and listened to, and they need so much love. I can't do enough.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Democrat, who voted against New York’s new budget, called it “an unconscionable, discriminatory addition to the school aid formula.” (nyt)

Brodsky is from Westchester county, where the median home value is in the range of $350,000 and high school graduation rates are near 99%. What is unconscionable is that in the Bronx, graduation rates hover around 50%, and more money is spent, per student, in Westchester County than in the Bronx. When children begin their academic lives three steps behind, of course the logical thing to do is to make sure that those children, slighted by the system and by a capricious fate, have all the advantages that the state can confer. As long as the graduation rate in the Westchester is 50 percentage points higher than that in the Bronx, all state aid should go do the Bronx and none should go to Westchester. The rich kids can hack it.

(Graduation rates, per pupil expenditure, and other stats taken from publicschoolreview.com)

My kids would say I'm blessed. In the past, I would have said I'm lucky. Now, I'm no longer sure what sort of word to use, but whether I attribute it to blind chance and luck or to a higher power, I was born and grew up with a wonderful group of friends.
Just today, I got a birthday card. Granted, my birthday was a month and a week ago, but the best cards have no need to be on time. Their lateness just confirms that someone has been thinking about me all that time, waiting for the right inspiration to write a note. In fact, the card came from one of my neighbors, Jenny, and her daughter, Ashley. When my house was a duplex, they inhabited the other half. Ashley was a freshman when I was a senior, which means I was in third grade when she first got on the bus to kindergarten, a moment I remember well. We played all sorts of games, one that I'm sure Jenny recalls with dread was the "game" when my sister (it may have been me, but I might as well have blame her) decided to unzip the pink beanbag that was a current feature in Ashley's room. That room was the mirror image of mine at the time, and later became the room I called home during high school and on to today, after my dad took on the ambitious project of converting the old mill house into a single-family dwelling. And yet, as terbulent as my room was over the ensuing years, the floor covered with soccer or ski clothes or whatever sort of clothing happened to be in season, papers, books - I never was and still and not what you would call a neat man - yet no matter how much I abused my mother's sense of order, the room was never as joyfully chaotic as it was on that day when Rachael, who could only have been four or five at the time, unleashed an avalanche of miniature styrofoam snowballs from the bright pink bean bag.
They poured out, swamping our version of the peter rabbit board game, and began to run to all corners of the room. As the senior child in the group, older than the rest by four years, I ought to have done sometime. Although I may have organized some sort of half-hearted cleaning attempt, what I remember was how tiny the bits of styrofoam were, so light that they fell in slow motion when you tossed handfuls of them up in the air, and so small that they fit not only between the edge of the hardwood floor and the wall (the molding was not something my dad had gotten to by that point) but into some of the larger cracks between the floorboards as well. Later, with the trusty shop-vac, I realized that they were some of the more difficult cases to dislodge.

To be continued.

So last night, DD and I went to the fair in town. Just like the fairs set up in parking lots of all the other small cities in the country, it was a sea of asphalt filled with a few rides operated by the drug addicts and the mentally ill and hoardes of rigged games where you trade two dollars for a very slim chance to win a stuffed animal you could probably buy for three bucks. DD spent nearly 20 bucks trying to shoot basketballs into no-regulation rings, but I managed to resist the urge until right before we left, when I dropped two bucks on the game that involves throwing softball-sized balls into a what resembles a laundry basket, tilted at an angle.

When I was a kid, I won that at a carnival somewhere, but the carnie told me I had cheated, because I leaned in, and he didn't give me my four foot stuffed creature. So I figured I'd try it again. Three shots for two dollars. DD suggested the first one be a practice shot, and the carnie said "sure, first one's a practice shot, unless you make it, then I'll count it. just because you're white" I wasn't sure I had heard him right, and I really didn't want to believe that I had. I made the first shot, and even figured out the trick. Anyone can make the first shot because they leave the balls in the basket to dampen it, but they clear them out afterwards, to make the second two shots almost impossible. This way they get your confidence up, so you come back to try again and again. Anyway, as I took my second two shots, the guy sort of strck up a conversation with us, asking us where we were from, and so on, and as we left, he offered us a couple of small stuffed snakes, saying very clearing this time "just because you're white." I mumbled something, no, that's alright, no thanks, but he thrust them into our hands and i just turned a walked away, too stunned to really know what to say. We were leaving anyway, and gave the snakes to a seven or eight year old kid with big eyes, who smiled at the prospect of claiming them as his own prizes for winning a game.

The fair was really the first place where I saw blacks and whites socializing together in large numbers. My school has 4 white kids. DD and I stopped in at the bar on the way home, and it was all-white. When I've been to the bourbon mall, another restaurant / bar (try the fried pickles), it's also been all-white. Wal-mart and kroger were really the only places I had seen large numbers of white and black people together, and those, by nature, are not places that foster social interactions. Unfortunately, what I heard from that carnie last night was not the only sign of the latent racism that is still so strong here - DD heard a young white couple make the comment "these niggers are so fucked up." This world is so fucked up, when there are people thinking things like that.

The group of guys I play pickup soccer with is surprisingly mixed. There are whites, from the private school, blacks from the public school, whites and a few blacks from the catholic school (both alums and current students from all three). There are mexicans from the mexican restaurant, and there are a few guys from baghdad, doing who knows what here. Yet still, race is the defining characteristic, and generalizations based on race are still a little shocking to me "the damn mexicans just kick you too much" or even things like "where are all the mexicans today?. Usually, we play mexico vs usa, which is a convenient way to break up the teams. Sometimes the arabic guys go with the mexicans, sometimes with us, to even out the numbers. Most of the guys out there are really nice guys, and I wouldn't say they are racist. Yet race just looms larger on the radar here.

"until the color of a man's skin, is no more significant, than the color of his eyes

there's a war"