Need a Fairy Godmother!

More about Hyde

Several people commented on my post about “Hyde,” my junior for whom the best metaphor (thus far) seems to be a hand grenade tossed into my class. I wanted to respond to those comments, but decided that it would be better to do so as its own post.

Resources and Assistance

Molly suggested, wisely, that some of Hyde’s other teachers might have insight that would be helpful. Since the first day he came to my class, I’ve been trying to find anything that works. Unfortunately, it seems like Hyde has burned every bridge and every shred of teacher and administrator patience. Everyone is still pushing him, encouraging him… but he refuses to take any responsibility for himself or his behavior.

Last year I had a student who threw his desk around the room, threw things, and injured himself while in class. It was bad, but then again, he was 12. You can look at a 12-year-old with this sort of behavior and think that there’s hope, that he’ll grow out of it or find the right combination of meds or something. When that kid is 17, like Hyde, you begin to wonder what’s going to become of him.

Are some kids not teachable? I don’t like to think so, but Hyde makes me question it.

Hyde’s Diagnosis

Teachin’ asked about Hyde’s diagnosis. This is a point of contention for me. This district will give teachers accomodations (although we have to go hunting for them – they’re in our computerized grading system, and not handed to us as a separate folder or file) but usually will not give us the diagnosis unless we schedule a full IEP/504 meeting. So, technically speaking, I don’t know what Hyde’s diagnosis is. I have been told that he has “an alphabet soup of problems,” and that ADHD is one of them. From my own limited expertise, I would emphatically agree that Hyde is suffering from an emotional or behavioral disorder. He certainly exhibits symptoms that I’ve seen in confirmed SED students.

Accomodations and Legal Concerns

Teachin’ also raised concern about my legal situation as Hyde’s teacher if I can’t meet his accomodations. I’ll admit, it was one of my first concerns. I’ve been in touch with counselors, my department chair, and his case worker, and have kept copies of every email. I am a member of the NEA, but I haven’t brought up this particular issue to my building reps yet. Thus far, I’ve been doing everything that is asked of me. Hyde isn’t suffering from my actions in class – but the rest of my class is suffering as a result of his actions.

Hyde’s Future

Hyde ended up in ISS after our altercation. I spoke with the Dean to try to find out what’s going on with him.

Apparently Hyde is now on meds; his case worker says that the meds “turn him into a zombie” – which isn’t at all good for him, but will help those around him, I guess. (This is a point when I really wish I understood what his diagnosis was, so that I could understand what – on a chemical level – he’s dealing with. I mean, I know it’s not essential information since I’m not his nurse or counselor, but I am trying to teach “the whole child” – and IMHO, more information is better.)

Additionally, he’s put in paperwork to be transfered to an alternative school where he’d be in very small classrooms with lots of guidance and support. I wish I could say that I think he’ll thrive in that environment, but at least I can say that he certainly isn’t thriving in THIS environment, so perhaps a change will help.

The Dean, who has known Hyde since he was in elementary school, is at his wit’s end trying to convince Hyde to take his behavior and performance seriously. Hyde’s mom, meanwhile, is convinced that he’s headed for prison and has told the Dean that she would support Hyde being sent to juvenile detention. It’s not just me, I guess.

When I met Hyde, I wanted to be his champion. I wanted to take him under my wing and give him, if not success, then at least a chance. That lasted about a week before he made it clear that he doesn’t want a chance – at least, not from me. I can only hope that there is someone, somewhere, who will be able to reach him… before it is much, much too late…

PTC – A Halloween Story?

Yesterday and today are Parent-Teacher Conferences. Yesterday we taught for a full day and then had conferences until 8 PM in the cafeteria. Things went well; I had about 25 families come in, almost all with their student. That’s better than I had some days in my more affluent schools, and definitely better in terms of having the kids present. I think that’s incredibly valuable – I don’t like the feeling of talking behind the kids’ backs, and I’m not sure how much good it does in most cases. With middle school students it wasn’t as big a deal to me, because they’re children – but high schoolers are old enough to be taking responsibility for their own success.

In order to explain why this subject even deserves a blog post, I need to rewind to last Friday. We had an in-service day, and several of us went to lunch together. While eating, we talked about conferences.

Our school has three “sessions” of PTCs at a go. There’s the evening session on Wednesday that lasts three hours. Then there’s a full-day session, from 8:30-4, on Thursday. Finally, there’s a third evening session from 5-8 on Thursday. The evening sessions take place in the cafeteria, where we’re lined up at tables in alphabetical order and families mill around like they’re registering for college classes on a pre-internet campus. The day session takes place in our individual classrooms.

The idea of having conferences in our classrooms is kind of nice. We don’t have an Open House/Back-to-School Night, so this is a parent’s first opportunity to see my classroom. (And I have a nice one, so I like to show it off.) Even better, in between conferences I can get work done. I’ve got a lovely list of to-do items today, including reorganizing my desk and putting together my file cabinet. I couldn’t do that if I was stuck in the cafeteria.

At lunch last Friday, though, it came out that there’s a flip side to the situation. My department head warned me that I might – or would – encounter the following situations while alone in my room:

• drunken parents
• irrationally angry parents
• dangerously violent parents
• parents deliberately coming during the day so that they’ll find it easier to try to bully the isolated teacher
• parents in their pajamas
• parents in… uhm… school-inappropriate attire
• parents looking for other teachers and deciding that I look like a likely receptacle for their off-base personal attacks of said teachers
• parents strung out on meth (see bullets 2 & 3)

I was advised to leave my door open, to open up the doors of the teacher work area so that there’s a straight path between my room and those on the other side of the wing, to have a plan for enlisting the help of either of the able-bodied men whose classrooms adjoin mine, and to have the admin/security’s number memorized. In what may have been a coincidence, we got a district-wide email the day before PTC reminding us that you have to punch 9 before dialing 911 on our classroom phones.

I’m… flabbergasted. And curious. I wonder if it will really happen? A couple of the teachers I ate with claimed to have had any number of the above walk into their classrooms over the years, but I don’t know how exaggerated it all is. I mean, yes – the Rural School District is “tougher” than most of the Urban SD, and much more so than most of the Suburban SD.

I’ve set up my conference area by the door. Visitors will sit in student desks, which means that they have to slide out of their seats sideways. I’ve got a moveable chair on the other side of the student desks, and I wore sensible shoes. I don’t think anything is going to happen today – all of my parents yesterday were super nice, even those whose kids were failing. But if something does, I don’t want to have to use my ninja skills on them.

Awful

My junior class makes me miss my seventh graders so much.

Probably I handled this entirely wrongly. I’m not sure I care.

Remember Noisy Boy? Well, he’s going to need a real name, I think, because I suspect we’re going to get to talk about him a lot. I’m told that there’s a softer side to him, so for now, let’s call him Hyde – maybe eventually I’ll meet Jekyll.

Hyde has issues. Let’s not forget that. Hypothetically, his behavior is not his fault. He’s supposed to have severe ADHD. He’s adopted, and I don’t know what the story is behind that. If I had to guess, based on his behavior, I’d say there’s some trauma there – some sort of “my parents didn’t want me, so who the hell cares who I am or how I act” feeling.

He’s angry, and he’s irritated, and he’s bored, and he could give a damn.

Yesterday we were reading Act II of “The Crucible.” A couple of talented student readers were reading the main roles, and doing a great job at it. It was interesting, understandable, and even – as junior English goes – enjoyable. Most of the kids were into it. Hyde, however, was refusing to look at a book, rocking his chair to the point where it almost fell over several times, and disrupting his cousin. I quietly told him to put his chair down and read along; he physically resisted me.

Later, he put his head down and went to sleep. I might would have ignored it – probably every teacher occasionally makes the decision that a sleeping kid is better than a disruptive one – but he was showing so much underwear that I couldn’t let it go. Without interrupting the reading, I woke him and told him he needed to pull up his pants. He told me (loudly) that there was nothing wrong with his pants, and put his head back down. At that point, I recognized that continuing the conversation would definitely disrupt class, so I waited.

After the reading was done, he immediately came to life and began bugging another student, taking her things and rooting through her bag. I pulled him aside and tried to talk to him about his attitude. He threw himself onto a desk, began twisting back and forth, rolling his eyes and making faces at me. He told me that the reading was boring and stupid, that he didn’t know or care what was going on, and that my entire class was boring and stupid.

I asked him what his goals were, what he wanted. He told me that I wasn’t allowed to talk to him, that he didn’t have to answer any of my questions. I told him that he should, because I was trying to respect him and talk to him like an adult. I asked the question again. He began saying “I dunno” over and over and over again, like a six year old having a tantrum. I finally told him that I was going to have to write him up if he couldn’t behave any better than this, and he told me that I didn’t have the right to write him up for not answering a question. I walked away and called security.

While waiting for security to show up, I tried to wrangle my class back under control. They’d had ten minutes to begin working on the assignment, and had taken that ten minutes to pack up, walk around the room, move desks around, and throw all the cushions off of the sofa. I stood in front of the door and told them that no one was leaving until I saw people in their desks working on the classwork.

The bell rang, and – knowing I meant business – the class remained seated. I said that anyone who had 5 or more of the questions answered could show me their work and go; two students did. Challenging Boy (Hyde’s cousin) tried to sneak past me and was sent back to his seat. As the halls filled, I let those with 4 questions done go, then 3 questions. Several kids, figuring I’d eventually let everyone go, just sat there. I stopped before the 2 question release and told them that no one was allowed to go without showing me at least one completed question. Backpacks flew open.

Hyde tried to storm out of the room. I blocked the door and told him he had to show me one answer. A few kids came by with an answered question and I let them go. Hyde came up with a one-word, incorrect answer scrawled on a sheet of paper. I told him it was wrong, and asked if he could tell me what the question was. (He hadn’t even opened the book.) He went over to his cousin’s desk and began loudly commenting on the stupidity of it all. Most of the class correctly answered the first question and was released. My next class was waiting in the hall to enter.

Meanwhile, security still hadn’t shown up.

Hyde went over to my printer and jerked out a sheet of paper. (I realized later that he nearly broke the paper tray in the process.) A moment later he came up to the door with an incomprehensible scrawl, covering the entire page in one-inch-high letters. I looked at him. “Hyde, I’m not accepting this. You’re a young adult and you can’t turn in work that looks like this. You need to do this correctly.”

At this point he began yelling at me.

“YOU’RE PISSING ME OFF,” he yelled.

“You’re not exactly making me very happy, either,” I responded.

“Well, that’s just great. You want a cookie?” he snarled. “What’s the big deal? I’m just going to throw it away the minute I leave this stupid room anyway.”

He crumpled up the sheet of paper, threw it across the room, and stomped back to my desk. He took another sheet of paper out of the printer, sat down, and rewrote his answer, this time making some approximation at correct assignment format. He shoved it under my face, and I took a moment to read it. It was close enough.

“I’ll accept that,” I said, “but for now, you need to take a seat.”

“Well that’s just great. I’m having fun now,” he said.

He threw himself into a seat. I ignored him and called security again. There’d been a miscommunication; they thought he just needed to go to the bathroom. (He’s on a hall freeze list.) Then they got confused when I said he was still in my room. They tried to tell me just to send him down the hall and they’d meet him; I refused, knowing he’d never show up.

Finally a security guard arrived, with apologies about the confusion. I explained the situation and handed him the hastily written referral slip that I’d been working on, off and on, for the past fifteen minutes. Hyde saw the guard and stood up, throwing his crumpled-up assignment across the room as he went. My classroom full of sophomores tried not to stare.

God, a third period like that makes me appreciate my fourth period so much. I wanted to cry, but they were smiling and joking, and I just smiled at them and was so happy that I had some nice kids to balance out the deeply troubled (and troubling) ones. They began writing spooky stories for our end-of-October formal writing assignment, and I played “Monster Mash” and “Thriller” and “I Put a Spell on You.”

I don’t know what to do with Hyde. I really don’t.

Trying not to be pigheaded

They’re giving out vaccinations against the H1N1 virus, but you can only get them if you’re in one of the following categories:

• pregnant women
• caregivers/contacts for infants younger than 6 months
• healthcare/EMS personnel
• people 6 months through 24 years old
• people with health conditions that exacerbate complications from flu

My students, all of whom are between the ages of 15 and 18, are eligible to receive the virus.

My school is in Rural School District. I live in Urban School District, about half an hour’s drive (under normal traffic situations) from my school. Here’s a map to help you visualize the geography:

I don’t know who funded it, but free H1N1 vaccination clinics were held at every school in the Urban and Suburban Districts this past week. Their intent was to vaccinate every student. (Unfortunately, they ran out of vaccines.) They did not send vaccines to the Rural School District, or to any of the other districts except the USD and SSD. I guess it’s okay if the RSD kids get swine flu?

Meanwhile, some of these smaller districts are reeling. I know someone whose school is having a 22% absentee rate, and I’ve heard numbers up to 30%. One district was completely shut down because over half of their teachers were out sick.

Wait – teachers?

Okay, obviously, some teachers are pregnant, live with infants, are under the age of 25, or have special health considerations. But there’s an awful lot of us who don’t fall under those categories.

In any given week – assuming I don’t ever leave my classroom – I directly interact with 170 students. That’s 170 kids that I could infect with H1N1, and 170 kids who could infect me. Each of those students has eight classes, and each class has between 20-40 students in it (except for ensemble/PE classes, which are larger). If I get H1N1, I could conceivably take down a very large portion of the school, just by infecting students who would pass it on to their classmates.

We’ve already had a great deal of absenteeism due to flu and, reportedly, swine flu – including some of my students. I guess that means I’ve already been exposed, to some degree.

We’re one of 41 states listed as having “wide-spread influenza activity.” At least seven people in our state (not an insignificant number compared to our relatively small population) have died as a result of H1N1.

I know several teachers who have already missed a week or more of school due to flu or H1N1 this year. The cost of teacher absenteeism is significant – not only does it cost the district money to hire a substitute, but students lose valuable instructional time. Even the best substitute isn’t the regular teacher and can’t teach in the exact same way. On top of that, schools receive their yearly budgets based on how many kids are sitting in seats during the first six weeks of school. Absenteeism due to illness has been so high this year that several school districts are facing catastrophic budget cuts.

Come ON, people. How can teachers not be a recommended group for H1N1 vaccines? We work with the highest risk group there is. I’m lucky; my room has windows and ventilation and room to move and breathe. Last year, I worked in a petri dish: completely sealed, too small, no air circulation, very rarely cleaned with real chemicals.

This isn’t a very well-organized post, but I’m aggravated and wanted to write about it. How are they handling vaccinations in your area? What do you think about distributing free vaccines to the wealthier, more prominent districts but not the small-town and rural districts? Do you think teachers ought to be in the target group?

Multitasking Much?

I was walking through the halls of the school today. I passed several of my students and stopped into the ISS room for a few minutes to help one of them figure out what work he was missing so that he could try to get it done before the end of quarter tomorrow. I passed a couple kids loitering (and by loitering, I mean pawing all over each other like teenagers in heat – which, of course, they were) and shooed them off to class. I continued on, trying to find a room where I could hold a meeting for the Young Writers’ Program. I ended up at the end of our wing and stepped into a colleague’s classroom. She was in there working at her desk while a handful of students worked on something at tables. She asked me if she could help me, and I asked if I could use her other classroom – a computer lab. She said that that would be fine, because she was using the small room that day. I thanked her, said something to one of my students who was in the room.

Then a sound near my head made me jump, and I woke up.

Monday night I was out at a marching band competition until well after 11 PM, and didn’t get to slep until after midnight. Hardly a big deal in my heyday, but now that’s a Responsible Adult who wakes up at 5 in the morning and deals with teenagers all day, I can’t hack it. I got through Tuesday with a minimum of zombie noises, had an appointment right after school, and then was out and didn’t get home until after 10. I probably didn’t fall asleep until after 11 – again, shouldn’t be a big deal, but in conjunction with Monday night…

So yeah. Today, I was hurting. We were reading a story out loud, and during first period I almost fell asleep. I mean, it’s bad enough when one of the students falls asleep, but what are you supposed to say when the teacher nods off? Gah.

Fortunately, after first period I had an 87-minute prep period followed by lunch, and I decided to make the best of it. I stripped the throw pillows off the loveseat in the back of the room, grabbed a fleece blanket (stashed in the room for just such an occasion), locked my door, and set the alarm on my cell phone for five minutes before the end of class. I turned off the lights, curled up, and shut my eyes.

It took a little while for my brain to relax enough for me to fall asleep. And then… back to work, apparently! I accomplished an awful lot during my prep period today – too bad none of it actually happened.

And let me tell you, I was SO disoriented when I woke up. I’ve taken 20-30 minute naps on that couch before (hey, sometimes the best use of a prep period is a power nap so that you are prepped to remain upright for the rest of the day!) but apparently 80 minutes was just enough time to drop me into some pretty solid REM. That, or I was astral projecting all over the building…

(Oh, and for the record? My colleague doesn’t have two classrooms. I just very conveniently invented a classroom for her, right where the bathrooms are IRL, so that I’d have a meeting space. Nicely done, Mrs. Bees.)

New Student, New Mom

About a week ago, I got an email in my inbox alerting me to the fact that I was going to have a new student in oine of my 10th grade classes. “Tara,” I learned, didn’t attend 9th grade. She hasn’t been in school since 8th grade, and we had no academic information about her.

My private reaction was less than enthusiastic. She’d make my third new student in a week. The first was a drop-out whose parents re-enrolled him. (He still hasn’t shown up.) The second was a transfer from out of state with dismal grades, and he didn’t exactly come in ready to impress. And now I had a girl who hadn’t been in school for a year, who was a total academic unknown. I figured she had probably been home-schooled, and wondered what that would mean for her – some around here are extraordinarily conservative and sheltered, while others are very nonconformist and progressive.

Tara walked in to class the next day flanked by two of my sweetest, funniest guys – really good kids, if not the best students in the world. It was clear they’d taken her under their wings, and I was relieved. Not only did that bode well for her, but it indicated to me that she probably had a decent attitude. These boys wouldn’t have taken to her if she didn’t. She was petite, with reddish hair and the general uniform of the adolescent Emo-Punk Lite – hoodie with a dark all-over print, screenprinted t-shirt, jeans, colorful sneakers. I greeted her, she introduced herself to me with a slight lisp and a smile, and I got her situated for her first day of class. (One of the boys tells her that I’m the nicest teacher in the school. I hope I don’t blush.) I’d guess that Tara’s on the younger end of my students – probably fifteen.

At the end of class she came up to me to clarify something, and I asked where she’s from (not acknowledging that I know she wasn’t in school before). She told me that she’s from Washington, and that she had been living with her mom, but her mom decided that she “couldn’t handle her” anymore. Not, I’m afraid, an uncommon story. So Tara’s mom sent her and the baby here, to live with Tara’s dad.

The word baby highlighted itself in the speech bubble over her head.

As she continued on about her living situation, I realized that for the first time, I had a mommy in one of my classes. I asked her about the baby, and learned that he’d been born six weeks early and was now two months old – meaning that she should have just given birth the week before, had things progressed to term. Looking at her again, I realized that she was carrying baby weight around her waist.

No wonder she wasn’t in school last year, or at least for the second semester. Here, and many other places, there are schools that help kids out when they get into that sort of situation. Maybe where she was, there was no such option. Maybe she just took the opportunity to drop out and try to reconcile this new development in her life…

Today, all of Tara’s demographic information had been put into the system, so I was able to get a tiny bit more information from her. She’s not fifteen; she’s seventeen – almost eighteen. I don’t know how she ended up not being school between eighth grade and eighteen, but a picture paints itself. A struggling student – and for all her very good intentions, she has been struggling – can’t pass, so she drops out and… what? Works at McDonalds? Finds a boyfriend, at any rate, or someone who will get her into trouble and then drop out of her life.

I’ve never taught a mom before. She looks like a child, acts like a child. And yet she’s lived through this mystery, is living a life so radically different than the other children around her…

Last Dance at Homecoming

I approve.

November, Here We Come…

I’ve gotten approval and a small working budget to run the NaNoWriMo Young Writers’ Program at my new school. I’m excited to see how it all turns out. I know it will be different than it was at the middle school – older teens are more cynical, more skeptical, more busy than middle school kids. I decided to try to get a headcount of interested students ahead of time, and was surprised to get numbers in excess of a hundred students…

So I’m having a signup/informative meeting next Thursday, in the choir room, because there’s no other place I can use after school this month. I’m hoping to get a good idea of numbers then. I’m going to have a kick-off party on November 2 (yes, a little late, but I can’t do it on the weekend) and would like to have a really nice, dress-up, parents-invited TGIO party early in December. Part of that will depend on how many students actually take part. A really nice graduation-type party seems kind of silly with only a half dozen kids.

I’m going to do once-weekly write-ins, if I can get computer lab access after school.

This year, I’m not going to promise POD published novels. They were just too much work. CreateSpace is apparently offering to do a free copy for all NaNo winners; I’ll tell the kids about that. If I have a manageable number of winners, I might do a raffle or something for publication.

I’m also not going to put their names on the chart until they’ve recorded at least 10% of their goal. I only have three charts – enough for 105 students – and I don’t want to waste any of them like I did last year.

I’m trying to recruit teachers to participate, too. So far, one has bitten…

I’m putting up posters tomorrow and Friday – three plain, B&W-on-colored-paper ones, and three FTW awesome ones:

 

Hopefully that will recruit some more people!

Epic Fail

I’m teaching about setting, and how – as students analyzing setting – we have to be specific and look for details. As an example, I’m talking about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I figure it’s a well-read enough book on its own, and that students who haven’t read it will have likely seen the movie.

I ask them what the setting of the story is and, predictably, get “Narnia.” When I press about the chronological setting of the story, I get mumbled responses about “WWII,” “WWI,” “the 1900s,” and “the 19th century.” I’ve expected this, and when I move to the next slide on PowerPoint the answers pop up, prewritten: Narnia, a long time ago.

Next I ask them if that’s enough detail. We pin down “a long time ago” – which is, after all, an awfully big place – using what some of the history buffs in the room know about the World Wars. Then I point out that if there is someone who has never heard of this book, and all we tell them is that it takes place in Narnia, he won’t know if Narnia is a distant planet, a magical kingdom, or a small town in eastern Idaho. (And wouldn’t the books be interesting if they did take place in eastern Idaho? There’s a creative writing exercise for you!) We begin spelling out some of the details of Narnia – the terrian, the climate, the political atmosphere.

Suddenly, a light bulb flickers dimly above one student’s head. Before he was just bored; now, he’s confused.

“Wait a second,” he says, after another student finishes explaining how the evil witch wants to seize all power in Narnia. “Aren’t we… isn’t this Epic Movie?”

Ladies and germs, my work here is done.