Little Known Facts

Junior English is a survey of American literature. Because the literature exists within the context of history, and because my kids tuned out every word their history teachers ever told them, I find myself trying to teach them a little bit of historical context along with the literature. For this past unit, I even brought in a guest speaker to teach them some of the more titillating (in an appropriate degree, of course) things about our nation’s beginnings.

I recently graded their quizzes over colonial and Revolutionary War-era literature. There were two questions on the back, asking for three facts they’d learned about Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, respectively.

Just in case you, too, would like to know more about these fine men, I’ve included some responses from my students below.

Little Known Facts About Benjamin Franklin

• he stoked himself
• he played with Zink Baperis
• gave up to go home
• he did not have wooden teeth
• Ben was the 1st president
• he died
• he helped with the light
• he was big President
• In vented Electricity
• he was a Fat Man

Little Known Facts About Thomas Jefferson

• sleped with his slaves
• who-ha
• he didn’t like the laws
• invnted Stuff
• that where an the decleration
• he was tall
• wrote letters to John
• he was a boy
• liked being naked
• made his half sister

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…

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.

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.

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.

Juniors

I’m so very badly behind on all of this. I always have the best intentions about edublogging during the school year, but it seems like they always collapse. My mental energy just gets all used up!

My juniors are tough – real tough. There are some really good kids in there. But, see, at CHS we have academies – specialized in-school mini-schools where students with specific interests can tailor their classes. All the kids who think they might want to be teachers are in a teaching academy. All the kids who think they might want to go into medical fields are in a medical academy. All the kids who are interested in technology are in a tech academy. So all of the juniors and seniors who have any sort of plan, goal, or intrinsic motivation have already split off into more specialized English classes, leaving me with… well, my junior class. A handful of great kids who want to learn, buffered by a thick wall of kids who want to sleep, goof off, disrupt, drop out, and otherwise drive me crazy.

I had a bad day a few weeks ago. I’d been warned that one of my students was going to be a challenge, and he was. Things blew up when he confronted me and tried to fight with me, in the library, in front of the class. I had to send him out of the room without a referral slip or anything – and while I didn’t feel physically threatened or anything, my fight-or-flight reflexes were definitely jumping into high gear. I’d never been treated like that by a student. It really made me quite nostalgic for my shorter kids.

Then he came back a week later, and was a much better kid. May have had something to do with having a bad cold. But I’ll take it.

And then they transferred his cousin into that class. His cousin is the sort of kid I’d like to like. He’s the sort of kid I’d like to save. He’s (apparently) got the worst case of unmedicated ADHD I’ve ever seen. Remember the kid last year who made monkey noises and threw himself out of his chair all the time? Well, at least that was kind of cute. This kid CANNOT SHUT HIS MOUTH. During silent reading, he’s talking. During my lessons, he’s talking. He’s out of his seat, bugging other kids, taking things off peoples’ desks – including mine – running his mouth, making inappropriate drug references. It’s to the point where I begin to suspect that he’s long since passed the ADHD line and is now firmly in the category of “seeing what I can get away with because I have an IEP.” I hate to say it, but if you saw this kid, you’d say it, too.

So Noisy Boy is transferred into my junior class, which is over-full, and stuffed with disruptive, noisy kids. His accommodations include minimizing auditory distractions and giving him constant attention. I can’t do it. There is no place and no time in that particular class when I can cut down auditory distractions. I can’t give him constant attention, because I’m so busy trying to keep the rest of the class from mutiny.

And he’s cousins with Challenging Boy, and ever since he transferred into my class, it’s recess time at the family reunion.

Gah.

Okay, I have to go put on my big girl shoes and go to school now. I’m working with IT to get access to WordPress again – I think I’ve convinced them that it’s a valid form of professional development. They granted me access two days ago, but yesterday it was gone again. We’ll see. Hopefully I can start posting more regularly again, and get caught up on everything that has been going on in the first month of school.

Lunch Club

The two boys sat there and wasted time in class last week, time that was sufficient to finish the assignment. They already have failing grades due to missing work – three weeks into the school year. I told them that they’d better get it done as homework, that they’d better be ready to turn it in, or that they’d be spending lunch with me on Friday.

When they walked in to class today, I asked them. Sure enough, no homework – just abashed grins and dumb excuses.

“I guess I’ll be seeing you at lunch, huh, Mrs. Bees.”

“Yep.” I handed them lunch passes, already filled out. “You’ve got five minutes to get your lunch and bring it up here.”

There are ten minutes left in lunch when they come in, laughing and jostling each other. I ask what took them so long, and they acknowledge that they forgot to come up. (I’d call bull, but at least one is severely ADHD and probably has the capacity to be holding a reminder note and STILL forget about lunch detention five minutes after being assigned it.) They look genuinely sorry, and hand me a drink they brought me. I ask if they spit in it first, and they think that’s awful – and awfully funny. I trust them.

“You’ve got ten minutes, guys. You need to get to work.”

Nine minutes later, despite my every-minute warnings, they’ve accomplished the following:

• one book open
• a name on a sheet of paper
• eight minutes of stupid jokes

I’m cool as I tell them that I’m going to be talking to their parents. Boy 1 tells me – not seriously, thank goodness – that I’m putting him in a body bag. I advise him that it wasn’t my decision to waste an entire week, including the final chance during lunch, to do a four-problem assignment.

“I expect better of you guys,” I say as they stand to leave.

“Okay, Mrs. Bees.”

“No, seriously. I do. You know why?”

Eye-roll, grin, then in mocking voice, “Because you believe in us.”

“Actually,” I reply, “I wasn’t going to be quite that cheesy. I’m not going to say that I believe in you, because one thing I believe in is our infinite ability to screw up our own lives.”

“Oh my gosh,” they laugh.

“I’ve always got some teacher saying, ‘I believe in you,’” Boy 2 says, rolling his eyes. “I hate that.”

“I hate it when they say that,” agrees Boy 1. 

“I hate it that you know it’s cheesy,” adds Boy 2, to me, laughing. 

I go on. “What I was going to say, is that I know you can do better than this. You have to.”

“Dude,” says one of the boys as they head for the door. “I hate that you know that.”

Me? I hate that you don’t even try… and that you’re building the kind of habit that is going to absolutely hogtie you in college or the workplace or your day-to-day life. But I love that you laugh and bring me a drink to apologize for forgetting to come in. You’re good kids, but you’ve got a ways to go before you’ll be good men.

Being Missed

On the first day of school, one of my Latino students called me “Miss” to get my attention. It caught my attention because it was such a sweet-sounding thing. I’ve never been called “Miss” before. It makes me think of little children, calling their preschool teachers Miss Susie and Miss Anna. I wasn’t offended; sure, I’m an old married woman, but I’m not easily worked up over titles. Plus, it was the first day of school. They didn’t have to know my name right off the top of their heads.

Then it happened again. Someone – again, one of my Latino boys – got my attention in the hallway by calling me Miss.

I mention the fact that both boys were Latino because I suspected this was either a linguistic or cultural thing. When I realized I’d be teaching in this district, with its significantly higher Latino population, I wanted to be prepared to be a good teacher here. The Latino students at LMS were tough nuts to crack, and I wanted to learn how to interact more effectively. And, I’ll admit, I was concerned about what problems I might encounter. My new district has a (mistaken, I believe) reputation for disciplinary problems, mostly centering around the Hispanic population.

So I read up on the area, on issues facing Latino youth, on things teachers do wrong because they misunderstand the culture. And I learned that, culturally (and generally) they have a very different relationship with teachers than their non-Latino peers. Often, they avoid classroom participation, eye contact, etc., out of a sense of respect rather than apathy. Typically, they are taught to treat teachers with greater respect than we see in a lot of kids.

Plus, I grew up feeding my brain on stories about British school children, to whom calling any female teacher “Miss” appeared second nature. (This is confirmed by a colleague of mine from the UK.)

My point, if I have one, is that I took these two “Miss”s as a simple sign of respect, rooted in a cultural difference that I hadn’t encountered before.

And then it started to snowball. It seems like every time I turn around, another student – usually male – is calling me Miss. It’s ALL of them.

I spoke to some of the other teachers. They nodded as soon as I said it – apparently it’s not just me.

One of them, also married, forbids it in her classroom. She figures that she’s a Mrs., not a Miss, and that they’re largely being lazy. I’ve already encountered students who don’t know their teachers’ names – including their teachers from last year. (Maybe I should amend that to say that they don’t know their FEMALE teachers’ names…)

The other teacher, who is, in fact, a Miss, doesn’t mind. She told me that it stems from the ELL students, for whom it’s a respect thing. The other kids pick it up, but they also pick up the respectful undertone. So long as it’s not disrespectful, it doesn’t bother her.

I feel… not at all disrespected. It bugs me to think that they’re thinking of all female teachers as nameless – but then again, I don’t think of myself as Mrs. Bees. I think of myself as [Firstname]. And “Miss”… well, it just sounds so dang sweet. I can’t bring myself to tell them to knock it off.

Now, the kid who randomly belted out a monkey scream in the middle of independent work time… THAT I’ll tell them to knock off. Even though it was HELLA funny.

"This sucks. Why do we have to learn about history in English class?"

I’m teaching one section of American Lit (junior English) which, in my district, takes place after two solid years of U.S. History. Taking my cue from a veteran teacher at this school and in this subject, today I gave my kids a diagnostic test to see what they remembered or knew about their nation’s past.

I gave them a list of ten time frames, ten events, and ten historical people (authors and history-makers) and asked them to match them all together. If you’d like to try your hand at it, here they are:

1618-1776	Civil Rights Movement	Rev. John Edwards
1776-1800	Civil War	F. Scott Fitzgerald
1812-1880	Cold War	Ernest Hemingway
1861-1865	Colonization	Thomas Jefferson
1918-1921	Fight for Independence	Martin Luther King Jr.
1921-1929	Great Depression	Ronald Reagan
1929-1942	Prohibition	Franklin D. Roosevelt
1941-1945	Westward Expansion	John Steinbeck
1962-1970	World War I	Harriet Beecher Stowe
1945-1989	World War II	Mark Twain

(My history-minor husband and I agree that some of these aren’t as clear-cut or accurate as they might ought to be, but the spirit of the thing – particularly as it pertains to a literature survey class – is okay.)

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t do well. I was a little surprised at HOW poorly they did, though. I had three boys who seemed to know most of the answers, and I eventually stopped letting them answer while we were correcting. The rest of the class was clueless, to the degree that the class average on the assignment (were I to give a grade on it) was a 2%.

There’s no typo there. TWO percent. And given that I had several high Bs, you can estimate just how many zeroes I had.

And oh, the complaining! How indignant they all were, that I dared blur the lines between history class and English class! My arguments that they weren’t learning history but rather recalling what they’d already learned, all on deaf ears. And don’t even fool yourself that they listened to my explanation as to how literature gains meaning from its historical context.

I’m sharing, not because I blame our history teachers (I don’t… entirely) but because it gave me, in addition to gray hairs, a few good chuckles. For your viewing pleasure, I present A HISTORICAL TIMELINE ACCORDING TO ELEVENTH GRADERS.

From 1618 to 1776, during Mark Twain’s colonization of North America, Martin Luther King Jr. led us in our fight for independence. This span of over 150 years was also marked by World War I, which had no real leader. The passage time brought no peace; in 1776, Thomas Jefferson launched the Civil War at approximately the same time that Mark Twain dragged us into the Cold War. Both wars were ongoing until 1800.

The Cold War restarted in 1918 under the leadership of “that Harriet dude” (actual classroom comment), Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was particularly hard to take, since Ronald Reagan had enacted Prohibition in 1918 and maintained it until 1921. This may have contributed to the Great Depression, which Thomas Jefferson chronicled from 1921 until its conclusion in 1929.

Jefferson – who was a busy guy at mid-century – then led our nation into World War II from 1929 until 1942. Not content with his contributions in this area during the 1600s, Martin Luther King returned for part deux of his Fight for Independence. This led to Ronald Reagan’s Civil Rights Movement from 1941 through 1945.

At the end of the Civil Rights Movement, in 1945, John Steinbeck led us into World War II. Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan, perhaps in protest, re-enacted Prohibition for the duration of the war. This apparently caused a second Great Depression, again closely associated with Ronald Reagan, which lasted from 1945 until 1989.

World War II was waged from 1945 until 1989. Somewhere in the middle of the war (according to the one students whose answers led to this paragraph) we apparently became bored with that skirmish, and decided to start World War III. WWIII lasted from 1962 until 1970, at which point it appears we decided to go back to finish WWII.

Dude, kids. Apparently you NEED to learn about history in English class….

The best part of all of this is one of the students, who I’ll call Yvette. She didn’t do great on the diagnostic – got about half of them right – but knew about the events and was able to make smart connections between the events and the people who may have been associated with them. The mistakes she made make a certain kind of sense – it follows, in a way, that the Civil Rights Movement would come immediately after the Civil War, doesn’t it? She had by far the highest score of any girl, and was the most confident and forthcoming during our class discussion.

Yvette is a foreign exchange student. From Kazakhstan. She’s been in the U.S. for two weeks.

This may be a very long year….