Teaching (smarter)

Hi, guys.

The deal is, I have tendonitis in both wrists and some carpal tunnel and a little RSI and possibly nerve damage. I’m not really allowed to type until it gets better — and that could be a while.

I’m writing this from my classroom 25 minutes (ETA: 50) after class ended. There are ten students still here, asking me for help. I’m a little overwhelmed, frankly. Seven of them are freshmen who have projects due tomorrow (they are writing speeches based on primary source documents from the Crusades) while two are sophomores writing essays who need help outlining, and one is a senior who is working on a different essay.

Right now I am trying to teach one student how to write a topic sentence. I am explaining to someone else what “evaluate” means. Someone else is learning how to cite documents properly. The 9th graders are arguing over what a thesis is and how to write one. Another group of 9th graders have just realized that if they use a quote, they must explain it. (We have discussed this approximately once a day since the beginning of the year.) The girl sitting next to me is struggling to come up with a reason Mao was using his power in a negative way. The problem is English is so far from her native language that I have to spell every word for her — she spelled “each other” as “eacher” and “positive” as “postipe.” The young gentleman on my other side speaks French (he’s African) and I have been attempting to teach him what “natural resources” are in my shitty high school French. There is a young lady here I teach who has her very first credit card bill, which she brought in to show me so I can teach her how to to write a check and arrange the envelope.

I’m pretty freaking overwhelmed, actually. It’s hard to help kids one-on-one, and it’s hard to run a class of 34, but it’s really hard to help nine different people with twelve different things.

Boy, I can’t WAIT for projects/portfolios/finals/Regents to be over so I can go back to teaching.

I teach a class once a week that I don’t give grades to. We just review for the Regents. They are unmotivated to do any work, and I don’t really blame them. It’s a little bit of a disaster. It doesn’t excuse straight-up fucking rudeness, though. Today they talked over me for twenty minutes, while I used all my good-teacher techniques and felt increasingly frustrated and helpless. I don’t yell, usually, and I don’t call students out individually, and I don’t like punishing.

And then I realized I hadn’t felt this shitty and out of control with a class since I was a student teacher, four years ago, and just started yelling. I yelled and I glared and I shouted them down and told them exactly what they were going to write down and how they were going to do it and if they didn’t like it they could go to the AP’s office and I woudn’t miss them a bit. Then I yelled about how the Regents are only a month away and that they were in the class because they hadn’t passed yet; if they wanted to roll their eyes at me and never think about global history again, all they had to do was PASS this time, and I was trying to give them the tools to do that.

Then I said something about how it was impossible to teach if I wanted them to succeed more than they did. Then I yelled a little more.

Okay, it wasn’t my finest moment. But every kid in the room got out a notebook and started writing down notes. And they shut up, and they started asking for help. I wouldn’t say it was a model lesson, by any means; it was about the opposite of that. But I didn’t leave crying or angry. Sometimes that’s a win.

For the record, all the normal problems teaching children the difference between “succeed” and “secede” are multiplied times a thousand when the child in question is a native Bengali speaker.