Ripple effects

Sometimes it seems hard to think of a title.  But I have been pondering the sad effects of one crime.  A student called after two weeks of intermittent excuses of no phone and sick children to say that she would like a leave of absence for a few weeks.  She did not say why except to say it wasn't fair to take someone else's place.  But the local paper reported the next day that the trial of her brother along with six others for murder had begun with jury selection.   I am thinking of the sad ramifications of this crime.  Not only is one young man dead, but six others will probably spend years in prison. And then think of all the sisters and mothers and children who are also affected.  P needed to drop out of class.  Her own 2 1/2 year old is out of control and needs to be in a structured and loving situation like our preschool.  (However our lives are easier without him there!)  We sent her a card today to say we would miss her and hoped she could come back soon.

The bus situation continues to be difficult.  The students say the driver "has an attitude."  She has driven for us for years off and on and is not pleasant to the students.  Some of them have memories of her that go back to elementary school days.  One of our staff, an attractive and very professional looking young black woman,  was helping the students get on the bus one day.   The driver (who is also black) snapped at her, "What are you doing here? Who are you?"  I have asked the students to greet her pleasantly and to thank her for the ride.  This morning it occurred to me that even though I pray for much at  Family Literacy, I had never prayed for this bus driver.  I told the students this and said that if they were praying women, and I knew some of them were, they could also pray for her.  How does prayer work?  I'm not sure it will change the bus driver, but it might change the students' attitudes toward her.  And maybe it will change her as well.  (Oh, ye of little faith!)

Tough love

The young mother who loves to go out clubbing on Ladies' Night did not go out last night.  She was on time and worked hard all morning.  She made her initial call to register for the GED exam, but is going to hold off a few weeks to pull up her math score.  She asked if she had to quit once she took the exam.  I told her most students stopped coming, but she did not have to leave us.  She recognizes that our program is also a great place for her children and that they love coming to class.  This pleases me immensely.  Our program is not a GED class with daycare; it really is a family program with great opportunities for the children as well as the parents.

The last few days all students have been accounted for.  Either they are in class or they have called with excuses although a few students have had sick children for quite a while!  Do I make liars out of them by requiring excuses?  One of those students with sick children did not call for two days because she had no minutes left on her phone.  I happen to know from others that her father has just gone to jail and her brother is on trial this week.  I have offered students a "leave of absence" if personal problems get too much for them, but she may not want to talk about all of that yet.  At least I don't think she is angry at me because last Thursday  I asked her to show a little less cleavage in her school dress.

Now, a request for any readers--please leave a comment here and there.  I really have enjoyed this process of blogging but I would enjoy it even more with your feedback!

Ladies' Night

It's Wednesday night and I have learned that Wednesday night is when ladies are admitted free at the clubs in our town.  Maybe that is why attendance has been low on Thursdays!  One honest student told me  she overslept the last two Thursdays.  Apparently her preschoolers also sleep in.  I went into my teacher mode and said that if you had a job,  you would not last long with that kind of excuse.  She said she knows that but when her friends text her to join them, it is so hard to say No.  She assured me she'll be in class tomorrow.  I hope she is.  She actually is our best student and should be the first to take the GED exam this fall.

An "integrated lesson"

I am so pleased with the ways we were able to use the Met Artwork of the Day this week.  The object was a set of gold jewelry from the 17th-18th c. BC that was found in Mesopotamia.  I knew the students would like seeing it--a bit of "bling-bling" as they used to call it from a long time ago!   Here are the activities we did based on that presentation:

1.  Read the description and noted unfamiliar words:  emanate, deity, personages, talisman, millenium, etc.

2.  Determined the age of the jewelry which meant figuring the difference between 1800 BC and 2010 AD.

3.  Found Mesopotamia on the globe in present-day Iraq.

4.  Drew the actual size of the largest pendant on paper using 1 3/8 inches as a diameter.  This introduced the word "diameter" and reviewed the work we had done earlier in the week with rulers.

5.  Reread the description and tried to determine the meaning of the vocabulary words from context.

6.  Discussed talismans in our own lives.  One student said she brought her ultrasound photo to Bingo as a good luck charm!

Professional Development

Professional development is a good thing.  Of course!  I have set several goals for myself since last year and am working on finding ways to meet those goals.  I want to do more integrated math and hands-on math.  (I wish I could say this without jargon!)   I want to continue to emphasize vocabulary and reading for fun.  I want to find ways to broaden the experiences of my students.  I have pursued ways through listservs and a summer class to meet my own goals. 

But when I am told I need to participate in several three hour "warm-up workshops" in October and November,  all on Friday mornings and Thursday afternoons which are not my work hours, I rebel.  I would like to know that these would be very productive in order to give up any personal time for them.  I am not optimistic.  In fact, I am very frustrated.  I carefully drafted an email to my supervisor laying out my concerns and apologizing for my unpleasantness.  He wrote back saying I was never unpleasant and thanked me for being me.  I was relieved at his listening attitude and we will see what will come of it.

I need to be open to learn new things.  I guess I just want to choose the new things I want to learn and that I feel will be useful to me and my students.

Picture this!

It's 11 am and break time.  Four young ladies are leaning on the rail of the second story porch smoking cigarettes.  Below them is a young African-American man.  One of the ladies asks him for a song.  He stands in the parking lot and sings to them--and to me!  I stop and listen and postpone my usual visit to the child care area.  The song is beautiful and delivered in great style! 

I played a CD called "Bach for Breakfast" for the last two mornings.    So I shared my music.  And later in the morning they shared their music.  We all wondered if he could come by and serenade us daily at break time.

So I will hang on to that visual image--the five of us, four young and black, one old and white, listening to a "dude" singing as if he were on a stage at a nightclub.

That will try to wipe out the image of my being on the phone for 15 minutes yesterday and again today wondering why students were not picked up by the bus.  Apparently it is a time of transition between the temporary bus driver and the permanent one who bid on the route.  Meanwhile no one picks up the waiting families.  One young lady said that she was going back to bed.  I said no, she wasn't and the bus was on its way for her.  Once again two families got started over an hour late, but we did get them there and work was accomplished.  It just takes so much effort. 

Another joy for today was looking at the Met Artwork of the Day site and seeing gold jewelry from Mesopotamia and 18th century BC.  I knew the students would think it looked like something they would be willing to wear today.  We gleaned six vocabulary words from the description.  We worked on what was essentially a subtraction of negative numbers problem--how long ago was 18th century BC?  And we found the present day site of Mesopotamia in Iraq on the globe.    All of this took time as I worked with two students at a time and my volunteer kept the others going in the classroom,  But one of my goals is to give the students a sense of other times and places and this was an enjoyable way to do just that.

Wisdom from others

"No Old Dogs..Just New Tricks"  This is what my supervisor suggested I post on my door!  

A quotation found in my 2010 Engagement Calendar:    "Journal writing is a voyage to the interior."  (Christina Baldwin)  Apparently Ms. Baldwin has written many books about "journaling."  Why do I not like that word?  I like to write in journals.   And this blog is a good way to reflect on my work and my attitude.

Advice from my sister who retired from teaching 2nd grade four years ago:  It is better to quit while you are still enjoying your work and you have the energy to do it.  It is better to quit on a positive note.  I know she is right.  But I also know it takes far more energy to teach 2nd grade full time than it takes to do what I am doing.  

B (a student from last year) passed the GED exam with a great score of 530--way above the average needed.  She called last weekend.  M is back in class because she did not pass the exam and did particularly poorly in Social Studies.  That is the difference between a student who reads for fun and one who doesn't.  I think I remember that B watched documentaries on TV--she just had more depth of  knowledge.

  I can teach students to use commas correctly and to write a five paragraph essay and to solve problems with percents.  But it is so much harder to fill in gaps in background knowledge.  So many students seem to have no sense of a world much bigger than their neighborhood and their lifetime.  

Maybe our "artwork of the day" will help.  I need to start playing music when they walk in.  And I need to find a way to keep up with the daily news.  

Then there is also the need to teach responsibility.  I stopped at S's house to pick her and her daughter up for class.  She lives right on my way and far out of the path of the bus route.  Her sister said she had overslept and couldn't come.  I said that oversleeping was not an excusable absence.  You can't oversleep and keep a job and the same holds true for a place in our class.  Ah, tough love!

Something old; something new

I'm old.  I've done this for years.  But today was a day of firsts:  yoga, the Met artwork of the day, fraction circles, reading aloud to the students and sustained silent reading (known as SSR in the jargon I learned this summer.)

Yesterday our childcare room was so busy and we had no extra help.   Today we had extra staff and volunteers and half of the families called in with illnesses.  So we were "flexible" (our mantra) and we took advantage of the opportunity for Jessica, a trained yoga instructor and one of our children's teachers) to do 15 minutes of yoga with us.  What fun to be in a circle with four students trying to breathe correctly and to do a few poses.  The smoker among us struggled and that was good for her to know.

I have enjoyed the Metropolitan Museum artwork of the day at home for several months.  If I pull it up daily on our laptop in class, it can enrich all of our lives.  Today's work was a Roman plate from 300 AD inscribed with a menorah, torah, ark, and a shofar.  One student recognized the menorah without knowing its name.  She was the one who wondered how anyone could know how old the plate was.  Good question.

Later in the morning I pulled out the fraction circles that I got from the Math Academy class I took at IVY Tech this summer.  We compared fractions, added unlike fractions, and subtracted with borrowing--all with the students demonstrating our work with the circles.

When I taught sixth grade years ago, we always began the afternoon session by my reading aloud to the students.  Those were good times of reading classic children's books.  A listserv I've been on this summer suggested doing the same with adults.  This morning I read the first chapter of Hatchet--hoping to leave the students with the cliff-hanger of the 13 year old boy 7000 feet in the air in a bush plane with a pilot stricken with a heart attack.  We followed that with ten minutes of silent reading.  The students all chose other books with titles like "Sister to Sister",  "I Never Thought It Could Happen to Me", and "Surviving Abuse."  Not one of them said that they ever read for pleasure.  We'll see if we can start some good habits.  I need to buy more books of the same genre.

My heart sinks when I know that so many students will be absent.  I have to fight discouragement as each call comes in.   But I have done this long enough that I can change plans and take advantage of the opportunities of a small group.  It was a good morning. 

Week two, day two

The buses were early and on time respectively.  Progress!  Seven families were present and one excused.  Progress!  Testing is finished for half the class and goals are being set.  If we had more space and children's teachers, we could take the four families on our wait list. 

There are at least three or four students who seem to have a real sense of enjoyment in learning.  They contribute ideas for new words to learn, they are willing to suggest alternatives for solutions to problems, and they say things like "the morning went by so fast."  That is always a good sign. 

Others are quiet and I am having to work at getting to know them.  All are doing well with reading and interacting with their children at PACT time.  One little fellow is pretty wild, but did better today.  If he doesn't settle down, we'll need to think about a referral.  It is always good to remember that this is a family program, not just a GED program with childcare.  Our goals are for the adults and the children.

So...at this point, I think how could I give up a good thing--and a needed thing? 

Sometimes it's fun!

The bus was a problem again.  This time two buses went to one housing project to pick up the same two families.   Again, this delayed the arrival of three students.   However, all seven families returned today in spite of dreary, rainy weather. 

I get my joy in little ways:  when S. says she had seen the word "cognitive" before but never knew what it meant,   when O. was full of ideas about the patterns in the tables of nines and, in fact, said she better let someone else take a turn, when S. said she would go right home and share those nines tricks with her ten-year-old daughter,  when the babies were so obviously delighted with the singing at circle time,  when a very wild 2 1/2 year old D. stopped his constant movement and tried to sing the alphabet song at circle.   Those are the rewards I would miss greatly.

A comment was made about my husband and retirement.  I always say I cannot even get him to retire from church softball, let alone his work as a professor.  He used to say he would quit and let the younger academics have a job, but now that he could do so, he thinks differently.  He has a major project that he never has time to work on.  Retirement would give him that time.  I wonder why he has such a hard time even contemplating the thought of that change in our lives. 

A long weekend ahead.  No posting for a few days.

A fiasco was not a failure

I had worried about the bus situation for today.  My expectations were low, but not low enough!  When I called the coordinator this morning to cancel one student, I was told that we could not possibly have a bus today.  I just couldn't say that was OK.  We had five young ladies with little children waiting for the buses.  I had already had one call asking for the number of the bus so she wouldn't miss it.  So I objected as firmly and nicely as I could.  And we got buses.

However, one of the buses brought two young ladies and their three children to the wrong school almost at the Michigan border and just dropped them off there.  That took even more phone calls and requests to get them back into the downtown area where we are located.

The students were stressed at arrival, but not angry.  And we had a great morning--even if it started 90 minutes late for some. Introductions were made, forms signed, and testing began.  Notes written for me at the end of the morning recognized the stress, but were positive. 

But this is the frustration of the job.  I knew there could be a problem and tried to prepare for it by emails, faxes and direct phone contact.  But the confusion still happened.

I like working with the students and the staff.  It is frustrations like this one and the ones we have with maintenance that make me think I would like to retire.  But these frustrations are nothing new; they have always been there and I have gotten over it.