Conversations with Students: How a Metaphor Dies

Students use a lot of cliches. It's because they don't know that they're cliches yet.

We were reading this great and frequently anthologized mid-century American short story about bullying called "The White Circle."

Question: Why did Tucker try to kill Anvil?
Answer: Tucker probably wanted to teach Anvil a lesson.

IRONY ALERT!! As my clever hubby said, "well, Anvil definitely won't do it again." And that's how a metaphor that began with how teachers use rewards and punishments just up and died.

Conversations with Students and Awesome Article Grab-Bag

Five
Student: Ms. Barton, you are seriously one of the sweetest people I've ever met in my whole life.
Me: Aw, that's sweet of you to say. I wish you would tell my freshmen.
Student: They don't like you?
Me: Yeah, they say that I'm mean.
Student: Well, you gotta be mean to freshmen. We put a freshman in a locker the other day.

Another student later insisted that the student who said the above was being sarcastic when he called me sweet, but I promise you he was not.

The student who called me sweet, by the way, has given me and my co-teacher hip-hop names. I am Dr. Jetlife, and my co-teacher is B-murder. Another student of my co-teacher's has started using this moniker:

Six (day after the election)
Student: B-murder, I knew Barack Obama was gonna get back to bidness.

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Some really great articles about education have come out in the last few days. Here they are:
Bill Ayers, "Open Letter to President Obama"
Charles Payne, "Getting the Questions Right on Chicago Schools"
Chicago Tribune Series on truancy, "An Empty Desk Epidemic"

Plus, by Charlie Tocci and yours truly, "What We've Learned about Unions Since the Strike" I think Charlie would agree with me that the articles listed above are way more powerful.

My "Lazy" Student has Dropped Out of High School. My "Bad" Kid is Saving His Own Life.

The student I called "Joey" in this post has dropped out of high school. I'm devastated. I wish he would choose what's right for his future, but I'm worried that he won't.

The student I called "Mike" in this post is doing "One Goal," formerly known as "US Empowered." He's taking school seriously and he's working hard this year. I couldn't be prouder.

Why I love My Hood

I had always hated Halloween for stealing my birthday (which was yesterday). Then I moved to Logan Square. Two kids tonight:

Me: Who are you? Quienes son?
Older brother: We're robots!
Me: wait a second. Are you Optimus Prime? [Nods] And are you--

Older bro: We're not really robots.
Me: Are you Bumble Bee? [Nods. Takes mask off.] Whoa! You're a little boy! I really thought you were robots!
Older bro: We're not robots! We're kids! [Takes mask off]
Younger bro: We're kids!
Me: You sure had me fooled.
Parents (whisper): Say Happy Halloween.
Kids: Happy Halloween!
Me: thank you!
Older bro: You're welcome!

Two Americas: Health Edition

In the America I grew up in, parents beg for a diagnosis of anxiety disorder or ADHD so that their children can have extra time. In my students' America, they refuse treatment because they're embarrassed or their home culture frowns on therapy and mood and mental disabilities.

In the America I grew up in, I was taught about health and nutrition more than once. In my students' America, that's not tested, so it's not taught.

In the America I grew up in, we got proper treatment for asthma (one brother and I have it). In my students' America, you use your rescue inhaler every day because you don't know that there are better treatments out there, and neither do your parents.

In the America I grew up in, my parents could afford glasses. In my students' America, free glasses are first-come, first-served.

In the America I grew up in, we had good health insurance. In my students' America, you have Medicaid or nothing.

In the America I grew up in, you didn't miss school if you had a sports injury. In my students' America, you miss multiple days of school going to the doctor and going downtown to get your Medicaid approvals.

In the America I grew up in, we had sex ed more than once, and very few people got pregnant. If you did get pregnant, you got an abortion and no one talked about it. In my students' America, you don't get sex ed because it's not provided for in funding or policy. If you get pregnant, your parents force you to have the baby to teach you a lesson, or because abortions are against your religion. You are forced to raise the baby to teach you a lesson. And, chances are, you drop out of school to raise your child.

In the America I grew up in, teachers are rarely sexist or racist. They know about political correctness. They never claim that fathers shouldn't have to pay child support if abortion is legal. In my students' America, that's not the case.

In the America I grew up in, students with disabilities get everything they need. In my students' America, you can be an amazing student with a physical disability who advocates for yourself and all the other students in the school. You are the most amazing young woman your teacher has ever met. You are afraid you won't get to go to the college of your choice because you won't be able to afford it.

Conversations with Students: a series

One
Me: Check this out, I have four fat markers in my pocket! Do I look like a tagger?
Student: Nah, you gotta sag.

Two
Student: Ms. Barton, you've accomplished so much and you're so young! You're so successful!
Me: Thank you, that is so sweet of you to say. I don't feel very successful, though, at least not usually.
Student: Well, I think you could probably have chosen a better career...
Me: And that's why. Because people say that to me all the time.

Three

Me: J---, you're inferring that Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones is black because she speaks African American Vernacular English.
Student: I still don't believe that's a real thing. [pause] Ms. Barton, you must have a lot of black friends.
Me: Well, I do have some black friends, J-----, but I wouldn't say I have a lot. I study African American literature and culture. That's what my dissertation is about. That's why I know about AAVE.
Student: You must really love black people.
Me: Well, I love all people, but I do love black culture. That's why I've studied it for so long.
Student: Ooohhhhh, so that's why you got this stuff here [pointing to my posters of MLK and James Baldwin]
Me: Right.

Four

Me: I want to tell you something. You're not in trouble. Your pants are too tight. If you wear tights, you need to have something on that covers you down to your knees. Otherwise Ms. Lisa will put sweatpants on you.

Student: Really?

[later]

Student: Ms. Barton, I have some other pants in my backpack. Should I go change now?

Me: It can wait until lunch.

The Kids You Love the Most

I recently told a story about a certain type of kid named Joey. This is a story about a type of kid named Mike. Mike is the kid who is always talking when he's not supposed to be talking. He almost never does what he is told to do. When reprimanded, he becomes combative and belligerent. And, OK, if Mike were my peer, I would think he was kind of a jerk.

But Mike is not my peer. He's just a kid. When you ask Mike why he did what he did (if he can be civil at all), he'll sometimes say, "I guess I'm just a bad kid." Just like Joey, Mike has heard himself called this over and over for years. But Mike is not a bad kid. He's just a kid who messed up. Or one who messes up a lot. That's why I prefer the terminology of the consultant Kristyn Klei, who calls kids like Mike the kids you love the most.

I have not always thought this. When I was first teaching, I had a class full of Mikes (really, they were a combination of Mikes and Johnnys--the kid who will blindly follow whatever Mike does). They drove me nuts. I hated them. And I thought it was all their fault. When people of my generation were in high school (and for sure before), teens were thought of as pre-adults: people who, though inferior to teachers, had the emotional and cognitive capabilities of adults. These teens, so the thinking went, could be told that they had to be more responsible and less lazy. They would do what they were supposed to do if threatened with the proper punishments. And, the good news is, the majority of teens will do what they're supposed to do, most of the time. But if you think that they do this out of fear of being punished, you're wrong.

We now know (and knew when I was in high school, but forget that) that teens are not fully developed human beings. They may stop growing on the outside and start to look more and more like adults (especially kids like Mike, who are often male and of color), but they are still children. The cognitive research is now telling us that the human brain is not fully developed until the age of 25. And the part of the brain that is still developing is the prefrontal cortex, the part that helps you organize and make decisions, decisions like, "Would it be a good idea for me to blurt something out right now?" or "If I throw this thing across the room, am I likely to get in trouble?" or "Is getting into a fist fight ever a good idea?" or "Homework or video games?" The list goes on and on. A colleague and friend of mine has even developed this sort of knee-jerk response when we tell stories at lunch about the dumb things our kids have done. After every story, she says "underdeveloped frontal loooobe" in a funny voice.

When I was 22 and a brand new teacher, I found the Mikes and Johnnys of this world supremely frustrating, and I decided that they were my enemies. They were out to make sure that I could not conduct my class. And so I began to expect the worst from them--nothing but bad behavior, and certainly no academic work. And, don't get me wrong, I still lose my temper with the Mikes when they're driving me nuts. But you have to see a teen as a kid. When a kid does something dumb, HE REALLY WASN'T THINKING OF WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. In fact, he is somewhat incapable* of thinking ahead like that. So telling him that he has to be responsible and threatening him with punishment is just not going to work in a lot of cases. Calling him a bad kid will just make that label stick in his mind, so that he learns to assume that he is the kind of kid who teachers hate. And that's why these are the kids we have to love the most.



*Of course, the majority of children are able to stay out of trouble, and there are those especially mature children who are constantly thinking about their futures. But most teens just don't understand that getting bad grades now, or getting suspended, or even arrested, will mean bad things in the future.

The L-Word

Here's a student. Let's call him Johnny or Joey.* (Joey is usually, but not always, a male student.) Joey is clearly bright, with-it, perhaps worldly in ways that other students, even the brightest ones, are not. Joey tends to do well on tests when they concern things he has already learned, such as grammar, vocabulary, or standardized tests. Joey's report card, however, tells a different story. He gets mostly Ds and Fs. He rarely turns in homework. In fact, he almost never does an assignment outside of class, unless it is to read something that interests him. (When you ask him to write a response to what he reads, he won't do that, either.)

When you ask Joey about his performance, he has one word for you: "I guess I'm just lazy."

By the time he's 16, Joey, the promising, talented student with tons of "potential," has probably been told that he's lazy dozens, if not hundreds, of times, by teachers, coaches, parents, and maybe even his friends. Every teacher has taught a Joey. I have two brothers who were both considered "Joeys" when they were in school, and their teachers and my parents called them lazy. I, a strong student, was still called lazy when I didn't want to do chores, or didn't wake up early on weekends.

But I have learned something about this. Does it make sense to call someone lazy who gets Ds and Fs, but works hard for 12 hours a day both Saturday and Sunday helping his dad paint houses or lay carpet? Should you call someone lazy if she spends all her time creating brilliant, funny, beautiful comic books, but doesn't do any of her homework? Is a young man lazy if he spends all of his time outside of school lifting weights and learning martial arts, but not writing that essay? What if he has trouble getting out of bed, has lost interest in everything that ever interested him before, and spends most of his time on the couch instead of hanging out with friends?

Very few people, if any, are actually lazy in the sense that they are committing the sin of sloth. Kids who are not interested in school are almost always either A) interested in other things, or B) depressed. Teachers often respond to these students by punishing them with failing grades. The problem is, failing an unmotivated student is unlikely to motivate him. The Joeys of the world are already not extrinsically motivated. Daniel Pink's terrific argument in Drive, better in the shortened, TED talk version (with animation!) makes this very point. He argues that extrinsic motivation (grades, bonuses, detention, getting fired) does not lead to better performance when cognitive skill is required. Pink has his critics, but his argument is still worth considering, especially in light of this piece on reforming our industrial-revolution-era educational model. This piece essentially argues that, rather than use a punitive/extrinsically incentivized model of education, we need to remodel education completely, tapping into students' intrinsic motivation and training them as critical thinkers.

So, when a student tells me that he's lazy, I tend to argue with him. "Well," I say, "I don't think that lazy people work at their uncle's store for 4 hours every night after school, do you?" or "I don't see any lazy people lifting weights in a gym. Ever."

There is one exception to this rule, though, that both frustrates and fascinates me. Teenagers AS A WHOLE are amazingly lazy when it comes to moving their bodies. Walking down the hall. Taking out a pencil. Standing up and sitting down. They are SO FREAKING SLOW!!! Why? I googled "Why don't teenagers like to move?" and got millions of hits about teens not liking to relocate with their families. I googled "Why do teenagers walk so slowly?" and had more success. Here are some of the answers I found:

• they're too cool for that; people who move fast are overachievers
• they don't care that people are waiting for them or behind them; they're not going to hurry for the likes of you!
• late-onset growing pains
• they're passive-aggressive by nature and moving slowly is a way to take control
• they're uppity
• they're easily distracted (which is different from having ADHD)
• they're sleepy
• teenagers are conservative by nature and therefore they don't like to transition (provided by a friend who is a school therapist)

In sum, the only context in which I allow myself to call my students lazy is when I tell one to move across the room (or five feet!) to work with another and neither one will move. THAT is lazy. If they're not doing their work, then something else is going on.

*Johnny and Joey are always the generic names of choice when people who train teachers talk about students. Even when you work at a school where no one is named Johnny or Joey. As one of my students once said, "Jimmy is what white people call their kids who are named James."

On Teens Having Sex

While national reports have repeatedly trumpeted the decline in teen pregnancy rates over the last two decades,  someone standing in the hallway during passing period at any high school in a high poverty urban neighborhood could tell you that this problem is still very much with us. As the numbers from the CDC show, the rates of teen pregnancy among Latina and black young women still remains much higher than the national average, and they are nearly twice the rate among white and Asian young women. The correlation between the teen birth rate and poverty--as both a cause of poverty and and effect of poverty--is staggering. Sixty percent of all teen births are from mothers living in poverty. Teen mothers have a 50% chance of graduating from high school, compared to 90% for all women, and children of teen mothers are at higher risk for a whole host of negative outcomes, including dropping out of high school, landing in prison, and becoming young mothers themselves.

Of course, the government is no help, what with the increase in parental consent, anti-Plan-B, and other laws that will undoubtedly result in increased teen pregnancies. The pro-life lobby is particularly guilty. When I drive down the highway, I see countless billboards telling pregnant adolescents not to be scared and to keep their babies. Parents don't help, either. The majority of my students are opposed to abortion under any circumstances, which means prevention has to be the way forward.

Particularly for a female, feminist urban teacher, this is a highly frustrating state of affairs, particularly when you see every day how completely ignorant your students are about sex, contraception, and STIs. Even though students in my district are required by law to receive sex education in 6th grade, I teach plenty of high school students who don't really understand how babies are made. Students should not have sex ed just once. They should have it early and often because, even though some are waiting longer to have sex, teenagers will always have sex. We already know that students need to learn how to reduce fractions or use 's more than once. Why can't we figure this out with sex ed? No matter how much people may think that "pregnancy pacts" and shows like 16 and Pregnant are to blame, the truth is that most teens in urban schools have no idea how easy it is to get pregnant because no one is telling them. When I hear that a student of mine is pregnant, I cry. I have seen teen mothers work hard and fight to finish high school, and I know they can do it. But I also know the extent to which society has failed and betrayed them by letting this happen in the first place.

On irony

OK, I haven't posted in a long time! I am not making any promises, but I have had several post ideas and I'm going to try to roll out a few of them over the next few weeks.

This one is brief. When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who I loved and who really taught me a lot about how to analyze literature, how to write an expository essay, and how to be a journalist. The year I finished high school, he left teaching to become a full-time editor for a newspaper, and he always gave the impression that teaching was something that he didn't really want to do. What he really wanted to do was talk about books. (More on that another day.) The other thing about him is that he was absolutely hilarious, and that his humor depended largely on his deftness with sarcasm. In fact, many of my favorite teachers were the ones who were cynical and funny. The cynical teacher whose #1 tool is a wit that depends almost entirely on the use of sarcasm has become a common stereotype in our culture--we see it all the time in movies, on T.V., and in literature. (Think Tina Fey in Mean Girls, Paul Giamatti in Sideways, etc, etc)

It was surprising, then, when I learned that Charlotte Danielson (THE Charlotte Danielson), in her exhaustive rubric of teaching, "Framework for Teaching," lists "sarcasm" as among the attributes of an "Unsatisfactory" teacher. But here's the thing. Adolescents really don't get sarcasm. I teach both freshmen and seniors, and neither group can reliably and predictably detect irony*--the seniors are an AP group and they still have a really hard time identifying irony. Irony requires us to understand language or ideas on multiple levels simultaneously, and most adolescents are only beginning to develop the ability to think abstractly when they begin high school. It's really amazing to watch this happen. But what it also means is that they just don't understand sarcasm.

For adolescents, sarcasm is likely go to one of two ways. 1) The child understands from your tone that you're being mean or insulting, and her feelings get hurt, or 2) The child doesn't understand that you don't mean what you say, and takes your statement at its face. (A student asks you to go to the bathroom, and you say, "Well, OK, I guess you really want to get a bad grade.") Either way, it's not doing what you want it to do. And, chances are, you really are being mean. Adolescents have really thin skins. That's not their problem, and it's not our job to make their skins thicker by hurling darts at them. It doesn't mean we have to stop trying to be funny, but maybe we should try to invent better ways.

*Irony, by the way, is when (1) you mean the opposite of what you say, as in "Yeah, Einstein was a real dummy," (2) when you know something that the people in the story you are reading don't, and they really need to know, as when Romeo doesn't know that Juliet isn't dead, or (3) when what you expect to happen is the opposite of what happens, like when you get a free ride when you've already paid.**

**This is the only situation in the catalogue presented by Alanis Morissette in her song "Ironic" that is actually ironic.