Our first GED this year!

R said she tried to call me to let me know, but I think she was put off by the voice mail.  When I called her, she said the GED was a "piece of cake" and she passed it  with a 550 average. She is working as a dietary aide and has already enrolled in our community college in a nursing program.  She said she wants to take me out to celebrate.  I suggested lunch on some Friday.  We'll see.  In any case, I am so pleased that she not only passed (I was sure she would), but that she is using the GED as a first step towards other goals.   I can check off four primary goals on our National Reporting Service list:  improving a level in basic skills, passing the GED, gaining employment, and entering post-secondary education.  Hurray for her and hurray for us!

A Thanksgiving essay

With some hesitation, I assigned the topics "I am thankful for..." or "A Perfect  Thanksgiving Day" as essay topics when I was gone on Monday.  I am aware that not all Thanksgivings are ideal and in some cases, they may be very sad and stressful for  students.

To my surprise, D. wrote her first essay since joining the class and it was excellent.  It was well organized and written with detail and emotion about a perfect Thanksgiving Day.  It talked about family time playing games, the aroma from the kitchen, and meeting new family members and how it made her happy.  I praised her and said how nice it was that it was like that for her.  She said she wrote the essay with difficulty and in fact, made up a lot of it.  In some ways, that makes it even a greater accomplishment.  But it also seems sad that she needed to do that.  I wonder what her day really will be like tomorrow. 

If I were retired....

If I were retired, I could stay in Atlanta another day.  As it is, I am taking one precious personal day to be here with my husband as he attends his annual convention.  I have loved being here--just being out of South Bend, enjoying the colors of fall a second time,  eating fantastic meals in new restaurants, going to the High Museum of Art, attending North Park Presbyterian Church.  But I need to get an early flight alone tomorrow so that I don't miss a second day of work.  I do like my work and I know it is worth doing.  But I would love the freedom to travel without making complicated arrangements.

"You Can't Sing It for Them"

A few weeks ago I went to a Notre Dame Saturday Scholar lecture.  Margot Fassler of the Sacred Music program presented "You Can't Sing It for Them", a documentary she and a colleague at Yale produced.   The video follows a young musician who attempts to combine several dying choirs in a mainline African-American Baptist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut into a "massed" choir--a word which was anathema to some. Excerpts of the video were very compelling and I was able to get one to use with my class.  I felt using it during our precious class time could be justified because a theme of the video was Black music from slave days to the present and I thought it fit right into my goal of broadening my students' lives.  Plus I am trying to learn to use more technology.

Well, we never did get the video hooked up to the big screen TV in the building.  We had to watch it on my little Mac laptop.  But the 25 minutes we spent watching it were a time of blessing for me.  It had been a morning of some frustration.  A group lesson on using formulas for circles seemed so confusing to students even though I did my best to make it concrete and to break it down into parts.  I found myself losing patience when so much careless guessing was occuring.

So it was so nice to end the morning with a time when it seemed that the teacher-student barriers were eased and we all watched with interest as a dilemma in a black church unfolded.  It led to some discussion of how different churches praised God--by being "caught by the Spirit" and jumping around or with hands raised or in a much more sedate style.

It would have been easy to have let my sub continue the video with the students on Monday when I will be absent, but the experience was giving me so much joy that I wanted to claim that for myself.

Working as a team

Several years ago, we had four childcare aides working every day.  One was college educated or at least trained in early childhood.  The other three were paid a lower wage and were required to have a high school diploma.  We almost always had a good person in charge, but the other workers ranged in motivation and ability.  At one point, there was a real crisis with threats and racial overtones.   I sent one woman home and my supervisors came in and out to keep peace until we could finish the school year.  We had to make changes!

Now we have three on staff and all are educated and are paid accordingly.  What a difference!  Not only are they real teachers with even the littlest ones, but they are able to work as a team so much better.  But with three, there still is the problem of who gets the "roamer".  The babies cry and demand attention, but then the older children who come to class with behavior and learning problems of their own don't get the help they need.  And then there is my perspective--eager to enroll more families to keep up the numbers and to include those who call persistently from the wait list. 

We have volunteers on some days, but not every day.  And volunteers are just that--they are not obligated to be there. 

I hope we have settled on a solution.  The default position is that the "roamer" will help with the older children.  If there are too many very little ones and no volunteer, we will ask parents to take 30-40 minute shifts to help out in the nursery.  We do have permission to call in one sub if we are really over our limits.  This week has gone better.

It also helps that little one-year-old C (the toddler tyrant) is adjusting and not crying all morning.  He even says good-by to his mother and she is very grateful for the change.  We all are.

Starting Over

Three new students this week, maybe four.  It's never easy to incorporate new families--both adults and children--and yet it lifts my spirits in some ways.  One mother is 31 and has three children, ages 12, 13, and 2.  The other one is 41 and has eight children ranging in age from 22 to 1.  She has been in class several years ago.  The third student comes from a home in which  the phone is answered with a "Bueno."  It took a while to get her in class because I was not communicating with those who answered the phone.  The fourth is a father whose baby's mom is ready to take the GED exam.  I'm not convinced he will stick with us.  So each one is atypical in a way.  All four can read fairly well so that helps with three of the GED exams, but all four are a lot weaker in math. 

That's OK.  In many ways, it's easier to pull up those math scores.  Although when someone comes into the class without being able to do basic whole number subtraction, multiplication, and division, it's a pretty big gap from that to passing the GED exam. 

Thinking through the act of writing

Over the years during pre-blogging days,  when I despaired about my work, I kept a journal for a week or so.  I would call it "A Week in the Life of Family Literacy."    This often helped me overcome my feeling of being overwhelmed.  I realize now that this blog does the same thing although now it is easier to share my thoughts with others and I am doing this over a longer period of time. 

Sometimes friends would say that I should write a book.  There are plenty of stories to tell.  But my daughter, the writer, says that you really need to focus on one story and follow it through.  There have been some individual students whose stories would be good candidates for that.  In fact, one GED graduate from last spring says she is writing her autobiography and wants me to edit it someday.  She called me last summer on my cell phone as I was shopping at a strip mall.  She said she didn't want me to be shocked when I read her story because it was a story of sexual abuse, early pregnancy, abortion, jail time, and more.  I told her that very little shocked me, but I did sit down on that mall bench with tears in my eyes.  At this point she has passed the GED, she continues to work a 40 hour week, she has enrolled at IVY Tech, she is the mother of two little girls and has married a man who loves and protects them even though he is not their father.  I hope her story can continue to be a positive one.

No GED--you're fired!

I asked D this morning why Family Literacy seemed to be working for her now when it didn't three years ago.  I said I couldn't remember why she left us and she said she couldn't either.  During those years, she worked fast food and a nursing home job, but eventually began working as an aide to handicapped adults.  This was a job she really liked.  However, she had lied on her application blank and said she had a GED.  Six months later, she was fired.  She asked her employer if she had been honest, would she have been hired?  He said that if he thought she were working on a GED, he would have hired her.  She would like to go back to that job, but we need to get that certificate for her first!

The tyranny of a toddler

We need to incorporate more students from our wait list into the class.  I have been hesitating because of little one year old C, who has taken our program hostage with his extreme separation anxiety from his mom. Ah, the tyranny of a toddler!  I don't dare take on new students until we get him a bit more settled.   The staff might declare mutiny!  We have all been brainstorming and things begin to go better and then his usually faithful mom took a day off to go to St. Vincent's to sign up for a Christmas basket--so tomorrow may be difficult again.

Hanging up on me!

After a week of no calls for ride requests and no calls to be excused, I sent K a letter saying how sorry we were that she was no longer interested in Family Literacy.  If she wished, she could call and get  back on the wait list.  I knew she had a doctor's appointment and a court date last week, but that would excuse her only two of the days.  She had given me a phone number, so I assumed her phone was connected, but I didn't call her this time.  I had done that enough.

After she got the letter, she did manage to find a phone and call me to complain about how I kicked her out of the program.  She said she had waited for me to pick her up on Monday.  Of course, when I had showed up the week before when she hadn't called, I was greeted rudely.  I explained our rules and she said she didn't care and hung up. 

I felt very badly and yet know that I need to enforce absences needing to be excused.  We are probably generous with three unexcused absences.  We are teaching these so-called "21st century skills"--and I sure one of them is reliability--as it always has been!

I have done this long enough to know that K may come back next year or the year after that with a greater level of maturity and ready to work.  Right now we have one student who refused to sing in circle with her toddler three years ago because it was too babyish for her sophisticated 17 year old self.   I don't remember why she left the program then, but she is back with her second son and I saw that although she doesn't always sing, she does participate on the more familiar tunes.  And her attitude is so much better about her work and her attendance.

I asked my husband if any of his Notre Dame students had ever hung up on him.  In the first place, his students never call him at home.  And they certainly never hang up on him.  They rarely miss an 8 am class so there is no need to be excused.  What a difference in our educational worlds!