All Of the Above

Today we did a little experiential learning at Freeport Middle School. 

The essential question: Why is it not a good idea to wear T-shirts and shorts to school in December in Maine? 

What we discovered: Sometimes it's not a drill but the real thing and you have to stand outside when it's very, very cold and the fire trucks take a long, long time to come. 

Cause: A burning bread stick in a microwave oven.

Effect: I feel cold. 

Conclusion: (choose one)
a.  Do not put bread sticks in the cafeteria microwave.
b.  Dress warmly in Maine in the winter.
c.  All of the above.

Twenty-One Chairs

The material world is an entirely different reality to 13-year-olds. This beats last year's whirlygig constructed out of strips of lined paper atop the air vent.

We're Going to Have a Great Day!

This morning upon waking, I caught myself conversing inside my mind as if I was directing a class of students.  I might even have been talking out loud. A bit.

Okay. What's the date today everyone? Thursday. You're right! Almost the end of the week. We're getting there. Here we go.

Made it upright and collected the dogs.

Good morning! Everybody up and out! (This part was out loud). The "everybody" is all of two dogs, one big boxer and one small Boston terrier, who sleep on their own doggie beds on the floor next to our bed. My husband is not part of the everybody because he sleeps like a rock and wakes up after everybody else anyways.

The two dogs love the "everybody," I sense, because it makes them feel like they're in a pack, and according to Cesar Milan, all dogs need to feel part of a pack. They happily trot ahead, looking back at me for direction. I lead even from the rear, and out we go into the dawn for them to take care of dog business. 

The leading the dogs part is not so weird. They like the routine, tune into my voice, and who doesn't talk to their pets? What startled me this morning is how I oh-so-easily slid back into the narration of directing a whole group right inside my own head.

Ok. Shower done. Time? Yup, we're looking good. Let's make sure we remember the laptop charger today...


My God, when did I start doing this? I know I wasn't doing it this summer. Did it start with the new school year? When did my self-talk change to this craziness of the plural pronoun?

And then it hit me. I'm old. I am suddenly old. Just a few days before the students arrived this year, I turned 50. Half a century. It's the onset of dementia. I'm becoming daft, delusional!

The idea of retirement, for the very first time, lit up in my mind. When do people retire now-a-days? Certainly people are working longer and stronger than they ever have in history, considering technology's easing of physical labor and medicine's support of our health. But at the rate my mind is going now, with all this "we" and "everybody" business, I might slip into directing shoppers at Hannaford any day now.

Well, we'll just have to work on avoiding that, right? So for now let's just get lunched packed and start our day. We're going to have a great day, everybody!


















 article

It Could Have Happened in My Classroom

This little classroom moment posted to YouTube is making its rounds on the social media scene under a developing digital genre, "cringe." I could be wrong about it being a developing genre.  It's quite possible that cringe is no longer in its nascency but legit and here to stay.  I hope so. I'm all about truth-seeing and truth-telling. And here they are with the wide open truth of themselves, giving it their all -- their hearts, their souls, and what they have so far of their developing rhythm and body control. It's got to be middle school right? I am thinking late 7th grade or 8th. High school teachers, could this possibly be 9th?

Cringe is hard to explain. The sound of the word itself does a good job to begin with. When you say the word, you just can't help squinting or puckering up some part of your face. And what exactly lands something in the category of cringe? Older folks might think that little gal in the front is doing a fine job with her clogging dance but I think most of us can feel the cringe. Perhaps we need to turn to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 quote on obscenity: "I know it when I see it."

Viewing this YouTube clip makes me cringe on two levels.  First, I cringe remembering myself as a middle school kid. My gawky display at cheerleading tryouts. The streaks of orange in my hair, that were supposed to be highlights, from spraying Sun-In on selected clumps. Reading aloud to the class a report on oceanography -- all of oceanography - that I had captured onto 8 pages using an IBM Selectric typewriter.

The second level of cringe is present day.  I cringe as a teacher because this scene could have happened in my classroom. Rap and dancing like this has happened more times then I can count.  There was the time the entire plot of The Cay was relived by three boys, one reading the rap, the other busting moves around the room, and the third going at it with drumsticks on an overturned plastic bucket. Another time there was a poetic-costumed-musical interpretation (not sure what to call it) of suffering and death from the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages. 

Why do we do it?  Why do we allow the foolishness, the sometimes elaborate preparation followed by awkward displays, time-consuming costumes changes and furniture rearrangement while we grin and bare it? We know full well it's a stretch, at best, to align the frolic with Common Core. And we know full well that the outcome is bad. With the exception of a very few, most of the time middle school kids just are not good at presenting. We can coach them and give them rubrics, but in the end they're just not there yet.

But still we do it. We give them the time and the space, the projects and the prompts and encourage them to walk right out there into the land of cringe. Because that's what middle school teachers do. The outcome will be bad, almost always, but we must never let them know that. The important thing is they put themselves out there, show their true colors, give it a try and hopefully laugh a little too. It's 'A' for effort. 'A' for risk-taking. If you look real hard at whatever evidence flutters down after the fallout of the display -- the tattered script or a google doc that the group used to plan -- you may even find 'A' for content. 

Years later they will cringe at themselves, but in that moment they must never know anything other than it was absolutely amazing. 

Pedagogy vs. Pack Leading

Cosmo & Elmer watching me...always watching.

It should not take me by surprise by now but it does, how the new students enter the classroom on Day 1 -- tentative, their eyes on me, watching. Ears listening. Every movement, every cue. People who study such things say that middle schoolers have three basic questions on that first day: 1. Are my teachers nice?; 2. Where is my locker?; and 3. When is lunch? These are all important, and very much on middle schoolers' minds, but I think we need to look at question number one a little more thoroughly. There's a lot more going on there.  Here's what I pick up on when students first lock eyes with me:

1a.  Is this teacher nice?

1b.  Does she know what she's doing?

1c.  Is she going to understand me?

1d.  Am I going to understand her?

1e.  Is she going to keep the classroom running well?

1f.  Is she going to take charge of the situation if something is not going well?

1g.  Is she she going to create interesting lessons?

Over the years I have read some great books and articles on classroom management, observed master teachers, and taken workshops and classes that have all taught me some effective skills. Yet last night, when my brain was frazzled with planning and over planning, I reached not for pedagogy but the soothing and simplistic words of the master dog trainer, Cesar Milan in his 

article Essential Qualities of a Pack Leader

1. Be calm

2. Be consistent

3. Be instinctual

4. Be respectful

5. Be confident

Dumb, Dumber and Smarter

Now hold on a tick here! I haven't read Mark Bauerlein's 2009 book The Dumbest Generation, which appears to be built on the claim that people under 30 have been stupefied by the digital age, but already I don't like it's brash title. I came across the title when viewing a PBS documentary Digital Nation: Life on the Digital Frontier. Viewing a clip from the documentary was one of this week's assignments in a course I am taking, Digital Writing in the Classroom.

You have to be careful about labeling generations. Tom Brokaw went the brash-titled route as well with The Greatest Generation, people born in the 1920's  and I can think of more than a few moral shortfalls that bunch had! 

The under-30 set are some of the kindest, conscientious, technologically literate people who are socially, environmentally, and fiscally responsible to boot. As I have just turned 50 this summer, I have come to realize I will depend on these people when I start to wear Depends, so never would I put them down. I wonder if Bauerlein thought of that?

In any event, the real argument seems to be, are they dumber than older folks because their brains have been altered and their attention spans shortened due to their immersion in digital technology? The studies presented in the PBS video give evidence that students are now reading fewer books and writing with less stamina, in "burst and snippets." But "Dumb" lies in the eyes of the beholder. It depends what you're looking for. The target definition of "smart" is changing -- and it's changing rapidly. 

Students coming into my classroom as young adolescents have most definitely changed over the last dozen years.  I have seen that tendency to write in snippets and to be daunted by lengthy texts. More and more I need to work on drawing them into the traditional culture of reading and writing by teaching and especially modeling it directly and then providing the time during class to practice it. Without the time to practice within the classroom and without explicitly making my own contemplative processes as a reader and writer transparent to them, their skills would lag. 

Yet, my students have also changed in new and exciting ways as they work with digital literacies more and more in their lives and for academic purposes. They come in now with a well-developed eye for visual composition, in photos that they take as well as layout and graphic design. They are able to outpace me in producing iMovie and using Garage Band. It seems like once I get them started, they take off and find something new that I did not think about or even know about! And with minimal instruction about task and parameters, students have a great deal of enthusiasm and stamina when I ask them to interact digitally within their book clubs and invent new ways within digital formats to share information and authentic reflections with one another as they read.

So I am not willing to label the younger generation dumb and am keeping an open mind on new ways they can show me smart.

Mrs. Watermelon Head Cat

No one tells you this when you first start teaching, but rule number one in "Cultivating a Positive Classroom Environment" is you don't change your hairstyle during the school year, especially in middle school. Students don't like it when you change. They are allowed to saunter in suddenly donning cat ears atop hair newly streaked in psychedelic colors, but trim a bit here or curl a bit there and you are met with near-Puritanical scrutiny -- furrowed brows, whispers behind your back. The bolds ones will state, with flat-as-a-pancake intonation, "You got a haircut." 


So a hairstyle change for a teacher must come prior to day one. With all the stick-to-your-neck heat this summer, I went shorter than usual on my back-to-school haircut and had it graduated in the back to get it up and out of the way. There! A new look. Shorter than ever!  If I like it, I can keep it up with slight trims as we go through the year. If I don't like it, I can allow it to grow out slowly. Either way, my students will be sheltered from the sudden shock of their teacher changing her appearance mid-year.

With my new look established, I thought I could turn my mind onto more important things, like how can I refine the clarity of my Student Learning Objectives? And, more importantly, do I have enough boxes of not-the-scratchy-kind-but-the-good-kind of tissues?

Then my 22-year-old son saw my new haircut and my confidence sank. 

"Mom, why did you get a Can I Speak to Your Manager haircut?"

Google it. It's a real thing. I did, and I was horrified. 

"Is it really that bad? Isn't it a little more skillfully cut? A little less extreme?"

He walked around me a few times, rubbed his chin, and changed his mind. He decided it was not a Can I Speak to Your Manager. My haircut was, in fact, a Watermelon Head Cat.

Go ahead. Google that one. It comes up too.

Here I am three days away from lift off and I am Mrs. Watermelon Head Cat! 

Well, there's nothing to be done about it now. I could don cat ears too, but that would just be weird. Nobody wants a weird teacher.

As always, my husband to the rescue. He says cheerily, "Do you know the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut?" He smiles then delivers the punchline, "About two weeks."

Two weeks. Two weeks until I am Mrs. Cowperthwaite again.

Looking for September

I've been living in Maine a long time now and know well the annual return of the tourists flocking in like locust to feast on our lobster, rage on our roads, and tear up our lakes. I used to be one of the locust. I know the routine -- here they come, here they spend their money, there they go. I get it.

It typically doesn't bother me. I can move patiently and peacefully through the traffic with all the lane-changing shenanigans, beeping, and gesturing of the out-of-staters because it is not unlike navigating a middle school hallway. And the crowds in town do not usually bother me either because I spend the school year going around in the classroom between bodies that don't move when they see you struggling to get past them with a stack of a dozen textbooks that weight 15-pounds each.

But what on earth is going on this summer? It seems that there are just so many of them! And they are either zipping past you angrily or standing there dumbfounded. Maybe it's the lower gas prices. Or maybe nobody knows what's going to happen after the election in November, given the candidates, so it's all a last-ditch attempt to experience the way life should be. If you can't find it in Maine, what hope is left?

The cause of my rant was what should have been a simple trip to 
Hannaford Supermarket in Windham this morning. The two mile drive from my house took a little longer as we all had to slog along behind a camper pulling a sedan, pulling a boat, pulling a trailer with five bicycles and a grandmother in a rocking chair. O.K. That is all to be expected. Family vacations require a lot of stuff.

When I finally did arrived, it was a slower crawl to even get into the parking lot. This was due to a funeral procession that was swinging past the front of the supermarket. 

Or, so I thought. On second glance, it was a line of SUV's,  all of them black, all of them with out-of-state license plates, running their AC with the passengers inside. They were lining up for their curbside pickup of groceries. 

Well, this I understand too. If I had just driven hours through traffic with kids, dogs, and grandmother, I too would pull up and have someone fill my cars with groceries before I headed to the cabin on the lake. One less thing to worry about during a well-deserved vacation.

What I didn't expect was the mayhem inside the store. People, so many people! There was a swarm at the deli counter, waving their numbers like they were on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, babies crying, peaches rolling on the floor through the produce area. Peaches!

Carriage traffic was jammed up behind what looked like little Zamboni machines everywhere blocking aisles. But this was not an ice arena and the Zamboni's were actually large silver carts filled with grocery bags, driven very, very, VERY slowly by very stressed employees trying to fill the orders for the vacationing people lined up outside in their SUV's. It takes a long time because they are following a  precise list sent through earlier online by the precise shoppers.

You know it's bad when the disabled people in the electric shopping carts start ramming their way through. After getting pegged in the back of the knees and my toes nearly run over by one eldery man making a run on sweet potatoes, I learned to listen for the ssszzzttt sound of the electric motor winding up prior to the bursts forward. 

I don't know if there were more people using electric carts today or it seemed like there were more of them because I was on high alert for another affront to the back of my knees, but the electric carts seemed to be everywhere.  

I have to give Hannaford credit. There were employees in all the right places helping people, all hands on deck, every register open. One voice called out to me, a bright-eyed young man stacking jars of pickles as fast as people were snatching them off the shelf. (I must have had a look of anguish on my face.)

"How are you today, ma'am? May I help you find something?"

And I found myself thinking a thought no teacher in her right mind, on summer break ever should: September. Just September.



 

To Snack or Not To Snack in the Classroom?

 
My time has come. It was a very long ride of not ever thinking about my weight and there was even a spell of having to eat to keep my weight up. Then came "Oh, look! I have curves!" when I looked in the mirror, which was amusing at first. Now, not so much. My time has come to lose weight. 

I tried to act surprised when I stepped on the scale at my recent medical appointment. "Well, what do you know! Look at that, will you!" But I knew it was coming. My doctor recommended the Whole30 plan with tremendous enthusiasm and first-hand experience, as she has been on it several years. (She looks fabulous, by the way.) 

The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom by Melissa and Dallas Hartwig is a heavy book that Amazon Prime got here lickety split. With the exception of the many recipes that make up the later half of the book, I have read all the rules, regulations, advice, guidelines, explanations and plans and am ready to begin on Monday. 

In a nut shell -- which is important, because you do keep it very simple and you do eat a lot of nuts -- you follow a very strict diet for 30 days and then reintroduce foods after that and see how they affect your body and your weight. The basics: no sugar, no alcohol, no dairy, no grain, no legumes, no exceptions. Losing excess weight is a side benefit, as the diet is really intended to target your gut bacteria and the inflammatory response, which my developing osteoarthritis and my skin issues will hopefully thank. 

I have heard that with any good diet should come advice on lifestyle changes and rethinking relationships with food consumption. The Whole30 book devotes a great deal to this and as I read, I came across something that made me think about my students and my growing aversion to snacking in the middle school classroom and had to write about it here

I have kept my classroom snacking disdain under wraps for a while now because I do not want to ever become that old persnickety teacher with the perpetual scowl. (If I do, put me out to pasture). But I have found allies in Melissa and Dallas Hartwig on the issue, so let's talk about it. 

The current rational for having students snack sometime between when they arrive (at our school it is 7:30 am) and when they get to lunch (11:20 am for our 7th graders) is two-fold. First, many 13-year-olds say they don't eat breakfast. And second, even if they did eat breakfast, they need to eat again before lunch because their metabolisms are high, their blood sugar drops, or they are simply growing so fast that the food needs to keep going in.

All of these are true. Most of my students say they are STARVING all the time and so the crumply-bagged snacks and small plastic ware containers from home enter into the classroom. Kids eat and we go on learning without much incident most of the time.

If you walked into our classroom during the middle of the school year, you wouldn't really notice the issue. That's because it takes a lot of management from my end to get there.

There is the snack-begging to control. At some point, a student will stroll in with a Family-Sized box of Cheez-It crackers tucked under his arm or a Picnic Day Extravaganza-Sized bag of SmartFood balanced on top of her books, and it turns into a feeding frenzy. 

"Can I have some?" The cries erupt. Hands are outstretched. Chairs go flying. And there's me in the center saying, as I so often do, "What's happening?" 

It's all fun and games until someone calls out, "Where's the broom?"

So management has to step in. That's me. "Here. Napkins. Pour out what you will eat and what you want to share at your table, then put the rest in your locker." Sometimes that directive in itself turns into a tussle.

The detritus of snacking is a problem too. I have to remind students often to take care of their trash because once the snack has been eaten, the wrappers and the small plastic ware that once contained them, are no longer within the vision of the student. It's as if it no longer exists in their physical realm. Many simply don't see their own wrapper.

Others do see it but are sneaky. Rather than walk to the bin to dispose of the trash, they invent some impressive ways of hiding it. There's always origami. I've found cranes made out of Cool Ranch Dorito bags and endless other shapes and bags folded and jammed into unusual places around the room. One that gets me every year is the small, strategically-placed plastic container aligned on a book shelf in front of a book spine of the same color as the lid. It usually hides for quite a while until the residue on the inside of the translucent part begins to decompose and change color and then the gig is up.

Aside from the management part, I am more concerned about why kids are so hungry and the choices of food that are available to them for snacking and for meals. Most of the snack choices I see on a daily basis are not healthy and lunch portions and the quality of the food not so good. So are kids really STARVING all the time?  Well, technically not starving but they certainly are hungry and in need of nutrition.

The authors of Whole30 are not fans of snacking and here's why. They believe snacking between meals can disrupt the normal hormonal functions which then increase the feeling of being hungry more often which forces you to eat more snacks and not enough at meal times. They advocate eating three or four full meals and increasing the quality and quantity of each meal, rather than snacking if you feel hungry. They emphasize eating in each meal more protein and more fats (yes, fats -- good fats) to help the hunger. 

With all the growing and hormones flying around in middle school, and the obvious fact that a classroom should be a place of learning, shouldn't we be focusing more on the quality and quantity of meals and not encouraging snacking during class? Can we ever imagine a school where meals of high-quality protein and a fabulous variety of organic vegetables and grain dishes are served in a way that truly nourishes students so they do not feel so hungry?

I don't know what the solution is within the reality of what I see right now. I do know that students are rushed in the morning. I do know that young adolescents would mostly prefer to start school later (which would give them more time perhaps to eat a larger breakfast). I do know that some students do not have food in their homes or a parent who is watching over their nutrition. And I do know that time for lunch, as well as the school lunch program, are limited. 

So they will continue to snack in the classroom for now; I won't. And when it comes to the larger issue of student nutrition, I'll follow Ghandi's advice: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Over the summer I'll learn some more about this Whole30 idea and come back in September, ready to manage the student snacking in my classroom,  a little more slim and a little less persnickety.






 




 

Flag Action - Or Not

 
The day after the 4th of July, I am still seeing a lot of flag action as I scroll through my Facebook feed.  I like the one of the red and white stripes superimposed over amber waves of grain, and also the historical painting of the founding fathers standing next to the flag, looking dapper in their tights and tri-corn hats as they sign their lives away on the Declaration of Independence.

A day after and flags still keep coming -- draped behind a bald eagle, swaddled around a newborn baby, flapping out of a rear window of a pickup truck. The quotes "Freedom Isn't Free!" and "Home of the Free, Because of the Brave!" are often paired with the pictures.

Some people get a little over excited about it all and that's when the fun begins with the comments. There's one picture of a guy lighting the tip of a flag on fire that elicited cries of desecration: "Burn the guy!" and "He should be shot!"

While I like a good parade and feel deep gratitude for being born a U.S. Citizen, I do not get too worked up over the flag itself and all the rigmarole that goes along with it.  The flag, after all, is a piece of cloth on a stick -- often made in China -- that symbolizes, for many people, the power, freedom, and unity of our country.

One of the posts featured what looked like a child of the 1950's standing in a classroom with his hand on his heart, his eyes earnestly looking up at Old Glory.  There were words that suggested that all of what's wrong with America today will be solved if those darn schoolteachers would just go back to making children say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. I've seen this one before and this one always gets me. Where are the classrooms that are not saying the Pledge? I have taught in four school districts in Maine and in each of them, we have always started the day with the whole school saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Over the years, I have had three students who did not say the Pledge due to religious reasons and a couple more who chose not to say it just because they felt like being rebels. The rebels never really did find their cause and eventually went back to reciting it along with their classmates. In either case, I did not make a big deal out of.  My only rule is to be respectful of those who do choose to stand and say it. 

This idea that the younger generation is somehow deficient in patriotism and slacking off on being good citizens seems to have taken hold among the older generation. A couple years ago, Newsweek Magazine did a survey that turned into a mockery of young Americans. The survey had two questions: 1. Who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? and 2. Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? I don't remember the specifics of how the survey was conducted, but apparently most of those surveyed were avid viewers of Nickelodeon Television and consistently got question #2 correct. Question #1, not so much. (Leave a message on my blog if you seriously don't know the answer to either question.)

Beyond being amused, I was not all that concerned with the results of the survey. If the older generation is measuring whether or not a young person is a good citizen based on being able to regurgitate a  fact or recite a pledge, they will be sorely disappointed. My seventh graders hold access to all of human knowledge in their pockets (on iPhones) and very little in the way of rote memorization. They are far more global-thinking than previous generations, care more deeply about the health of the earth, and seem to know intrinsically the meaning of "all men are created equal." In fact, they sometimes ask me why we don't say "all men and women" or "all humans are created equal" instead.

It is comforting to keep some of the old traditions and, for many people, the flag symbolizes all the good of being American. It's also important to recognize that we certainly have some good young Americans coming up through the grades.  I cannot wait to see what new glory they will bring.

Godspeed, Jon Kauffman

Sometimes the name comes first and it takes you a moment to recall the eyes, the face, the voice, the whole of the student.  The name comes in the news or online, maybe a colleague tells you. You freeze as your mind searches, retrieves, then marries the name with the memory and finally you claim the student that the tragedy has taken: "He was mine." Your students are always yours.

Jon Kauffman was pure sunshine. Blond hair, clear smiling eyes and round face. He lit up the classroom with a positive, casual, friendly energy that never wavered. He was my student in seventh grade language arts class during the 2007-08 school year,  Room107 at Lake Region Middle School.

The news article said Jon's motorcycle collided with a white sedan on Route 25 in Effingham, New Hampshire on Friday, July 1. The white sedan fled the scene and my student was taken to the hospital where he later died. He was 21. They're still looking for the woman in the white sedan. 

It is hard to connect the vibrancy of the thirteen-year-old boy with death. The typical phrases rise up in my mind and form a chatter: So young. What a loss. Didn't I also have his younger sister? I think he had an older brother. So very sad. Then the anger: He didn't get a chance to live. His life had just begun. Where is the woman in the white sedan? Can't someone find her?

The mind chatter goes on for a day and then begins to quiet. A TV news station posts some photos. Pictures from his Facebook feed start to fill in the years after he left my classroom. There are the high school years, a girlfriend, a selfie in big sunglasses. There's the motorcycle by the lake. There he is with his brother. A truck. A group shot with friends. Same bright smile. I smile back.

I smile back at his picture because I realize he did have his own full life. Though it was shorter than I understand, shorter than I think was fair, it was his life.  It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is friendship, love, and adventure in his photos.

The 185 days that Jon was my student in seventh grade have now taken on a new proportion in the duration of his life.  In the sadness of losing one student, I am grateful for the gift of spending a school year with him and with each of them. In June, when I say goodbye to my seventh graders, I am reminded to understand that it is also godspeed, a blessing for the journey, no matter how long their road ahead may be.

Advice to the Incoming

The "Advice to an Incoming 7th Grader" letters that I ask my exiting 7th graders to write on the last day of school need to be screened carefully. You never quite know what a student will write. Most students do a fairly good job of taking on the big brother/big sister role of telling a nervous incoming student what to expect. The idea is that each of my new students in September gets a letter to open that makes them feel welcome and they get some words of wisdom from a peer on the academic, behavioral, and social expectations that naturally get a little more intense at this stage.

This year I decided to read through them and get the screening done before July so I can relax into summer and not have to rush right before school starts. So today's rainy weather has given me the right mood to settle in and read through the letters.

Typically I find that I have to pull out a few nutty ones. Some of the nuttier ones over the years had lines such as "Whatever you do, run for your life!" or "Fo shizzle. YOLO, you know, right?"  Letters with disturbing lines such as "Don't worry. Piece of cake. I didn't do any work in 7th grade and I still got As and Bs" also need to be culled. 

So far today I have not come across any nutty ones but am surprised to find that almost all of them have a similar message.  Our group of 7th graders this year characterized the team teachers as good and very supportive, but strict if students fooled around and misbehaved. There are lots of warnings to the incoming of what to do and what not to do in each of the teacher's classrooms. "Never ever sit in Mrs. Cowperthwaite's chair and don't even think about wheeling around the room in it!" (Yes, good. They nailed my pet peeve). The letters also seem to be characterizing the work in all classes as being "a lot" and that "It's really important to keep up on it and get it done." 

Well, now this is all very interesting because this year it felt like my teacherly advice was going in one very silly collective ear and out the other very silly collective ear. More than any previous years, I had assignments turned in late (or not at all) or partially completed and students satisfied with taking a lower grade. This year's group also introduced me to multi-colored stress putty and its amazing ability to stick to virtually any surface, long after its user had departed the classroom. They demonstrated new ways of propelling paper around the room. They communicated spontaneously and often by doing the Dab dance in the center of the classroom, sometimes in the middle of a test. Where, then, did all these earnest advice letters come from?

Here's one that could not have been any more concise:

"Best thing to do in 7th grade - shut up, sit down, put the phone away, read a book, pay attention."

That's it. Not even a closing and signature.

I'm not sure what to make of all this.  Though a couple mentioned enjoying the many field trips we took, as well as some of the projects we did throughout the team, the overriding tone of these letters is closer to stern than sage. What about all those carefully-planned lessons and activities, stories, films, writing shares, experiences and discussions we had in language arts class?  Not much mentioned about the learning and the content.

Hmm. Maybe I will just set these letters aside until August after all. I don't want to frighten the incoming.

The Eyes Have It

Almost every time I go to the grocery store I meet a former student stacking peppers in produce, slicing cheese behind the deli counter, or cashing me out at the register. The eyes I always remember, but everything else can change by the time one of my former seventh graders gets about halfway through high school. And if they are college students working on summer break, the changes are even more extreme.

The eyes catch me, a flash of recognition comes first by the young man or woman before me. This is followed by a smile and a hearty greeting. The student will usually say one of two things: "Hi, Mrs. Cowperthwaite!" or "You were my teacher! Remember me?" Once in a while they will say, "You were my favorite teacher!" or "I'm still writing!" both of which are lovely to hear.

It's the "Remember me?" that makes me want to melt into my shoes and hide because yes, yes, I do remember you. The eyes!  I know you...I know you...I just don't remember your name.

The name! If I am at Hannaford Supermarket, it is on the employee tag. Dare I slide my eyes down to read it? I do. I must. Everyone wants to hear their name. Everyone wants to be remembered.

I do the eye slide.

"Angelica! How are you doing?" 

"Carlton, it's good to see you! What year are you in now?"

They see the eye slide. Please forgive me. Once the name comes, I can usually remember a small personal detail and chat a bit and I hope that makes forgetting their name more forgivable. 

Why is it the name seems to go first?  Very rarely, I will remember a student's name after two years and retaining that name is usually for a good reason. That student either did something stellar (like got an award for work on cold fusion in science club or something) or their behavior was so unusual in seventh grade that everything about them, every interaction with them, is imprinted somewhere in my brain, probably whatever part retains the fight-or-flight response or the part where you file the warning of not to get too close to a hot stove. There have been a lot of hot stoves over the years.

Some names go quicker than others. If a Caitlyn, Kaitlyn, Kate, Katey, Cate, Caitlin Kaitlin, or Kayteeee comes my way, I have lost her name by August of the current year. Same goes for Aidan, Aiden, Ayden, Adin, or Aden. Sorry boys.

By now I have had close to twelve hundred students come through my classroom so of course that memory pipeline in my mind is full and spitting out rosters of earlier classes like a Play Doh press. Most teachers I work with say they have the same problem. But what to do about it? One veteran teacher, who has since retired, told me to be blunt about it. She told her students that if they ever see her after they had moved on from their year with her, that they should start out by saying their name when they greet her. I also observed this teacher meet a former student and she simply said, "Please remind me of your name, sweetheart."  My aunt, who had five children and had begun calling at least one of them by the dog's name daily, kept it even simpler than that. She renamed them (and the dog) all Dewdrop. Then her nieces and nephews all became Dewdrop. When grandchildren came, they were all Dewdrop.

I don't think I'm there yet with Sweetheart and Dewdrop, though. I may need another decade in the classroom trenches to pull that one off.  For now I'll have to rely on the eyes and the name tags.

Coming Down to Summer

I've never heard any other teacher talk about this so I'm going out on a limb here because I suspect there might be another teacher out there, especially a middle school teacher, who may feel the same way. The thing is, I feel weird the first few days of summer vacation. I walk in circles around the house, pick things up, forget where I put them down, stare at the backyard a lot, start things and walk away without finishing. I leave half-cups of coffee and vacant holes dug in the ground where a plant needs to go. There's a mental fog that comes over me. It's as if I am stultified by the silence, the stillness, the peace around me. No one is calling my name and I do not have a large clock ticking down the minutes until I can go to the bathroom.

At some point in the day, usually afternoon, I'll have a burst of lucidity and begin directing the dogs every few minutes. They give each other a look of wonder as to why I am home and telling them what to do but, being dogs, they eventually comply. Let's go everybody!  We're going outside now. We're going inside now. Wipe your paws. Get some water.  Time for lunch. It's possible I might be doing the same thing to my husband when he gets home in the evening. I'll have to ask him.

It's not that I don't have a life, things to accomplish. After I pack up the classroom, I peel out of the school parking lot with my summer to-do list like everyone else. There are beach trips planned, a pile of books I've been wanting to read, road trips to visit friends and family, gardening projects, a garage to clean out, and gym workouts to do. All of this just doesn't seem to happen until I wake up from whatever haze I fall into after the school year closes.

It certainly would be too strong to compare this feeling to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but I have my suspicions that it is related to coming down from the stress of the school year. The high-state of alertness and readiness required to respond to the shifting energy of young adolescents and the unexpected moments in the classroom, takes a while to shed.

A few years ago I attended a conference in which the presenter shared some occupational research that found classroom teachers are second only to air traffic controllers in the amount of split-second decision-making that they need to make during their work day. Now, I realize that I do not have the same level of urgency in my job.  I do not have human beings in life-support capsules at 30,000 feet up in the air, landing, and taking off on busy runways, so it is a bit of a stretch to compare the two professions. But, like an air traffic controller, I do have a 3-D area around me at school that I am monitoring, assessing every few seconds. And I have even witnessed a few crashes. One year I had a 6 ft. tall boy who would spontaneously lunge back in his chair and topple backwards, legs in the air, as he fought gravity with all the calamity of a cavalry horse coming down in battle. Another time, I came around the corner of the hallway that has a ramp to find, at the end of it, more girls than you would think possible extricating themselves from the second shelf of an overturned library cart. You just never know what anomaly will show up on your screen.

Today I am four weekdays into summer vacation and am hoping that the stresses of the school year have washed their way through, that I am rested and my mind-fog will lift so I can begin my summer plans.  A little more coffee may help, just as soon as I find my mug.  I think I left it in the backyard.

Wait Until I Leave

Just about everyone who has attended public school in America can picture the scene on the last half-day of school. It is a boisterous morning of locker clean outs, returning library books, and farewell activities. Students sometimes give me small gifts and cards. Some students hand me a note that they do not want me to read until after they leave. 

Even after all these years, I still open these wait-until-I-leave notes a little tentatively. I guess it's because I question myself. I wonder if I have served each student well-enough. It's an easy "yes" with the well-rounded average seventh grader who happily breezes through the months doing what he or she is supposed to be doing. For other students, it's a long school year, a very long year of coaxing, and nudging, and sometimes dragging them along through learning. There's the social-emotional part too, the daily grind of telling them they are beautiful, wonderful, unique human beings without using any of those words because the only thing these types of students may accept from you, at first, is "Hey." These are the kind of kids that tend to write the wait-until-I-leave notes.

I know I should not really be so concerned. I have yet to open a note with a likeness of myself drawn in marker riding a broom with a wart on my nose. No student has ever written anything such as "You are not a highly effective teacher. Your lessons lack robustness." And I have never found a frowny face with the message:  "I feel sad because I do not meet standards. You stink. " Still, there's something about this mysterious parting that puts me a little on edge.

Maybe it's because these notes so shrouded in mystery feel a little dark and subdued on a day that is frivolous and bright. I remember as a kid loving the big clean-up, the good byes, and chanting as we left school: "No more pencils. No more books. No more teachers' dirty looks!" and racing out into the bright June sunshine into what felt like an infinite summer. I don't remember ever feeling compelled to hand a secret note to a teacher.

For the most part, my students did evacuate school this year with a healthy burst of joy, leaving a trail of papers on the floor that had all been carefully graded and noted with thoughtful comments (Why, oh why did I bother?) In their exuberance to evacuate, they also left water bottles, jackets, hoodies, single socks and a variety of objects that were fired in the kiln in art class. They whooped, waved, and hugged their way through the halls, down the stairwells, and into the big yellow buses.  Teachers at our school line up along the sidewalk and wave them away and then we all stumble back inside to tidy up the aftermath before we whoop off to our own summer.

I like to take my time with the aftermath, to be in my room alone for a bit as I purge old posters, peel away the bulletin boards, and toss out any piece of the room that just seems weary.  It's a shedding of the old year. It needs to go. The students that came through the room during the year will never come through the room again and I will never be the same teacher again. They change so rapidly from September to June and they change me, I hope for the better.

When I do finally sit down to open the wait-until-I-leave notes, I know that just about anything, of course, could be found inside. In past years, I've found long, heartfelt letters about how seventh grade will never, ever be forgotten. I've also had a few notes from students who were not looking forward to summer due to a variety of difficulties with home life. The best notes are the simple thank yous from students I did not think I reached. The note pictured above is this year's favorite.

Time to Upgrade

This is my cell phone. Go ahead. Laugh if you must. I've already bore the ridicule of 21 seventh-graders today when my phone slipped out of the small pocket of my purse during first period, skittered across the floor and landed square beside one of the student tables.

"What is it?"

A few of them came from neighboring tables to bend down and get a closer look.

"Oh my God, is that your cell phone?" 

"Yes, that's my cheap little cell phone that I've had forever," I explained with a chuckle.  No one was smiling.

"For real?"

"Yes, for real."

I went to pick it up and was blocked by a girl who had her iPhone 6S drawn like an Old West sharpshooter and she was taking aim at my LG.

"HOLD IT!" she shouted and with one arm she pressed the class back. They were now all out of their seats to get a look at the relic on the floor. With the other arm she shot a picture.

"It's a dinosaur!" Laughter. "Why do you have it?" More laughter. 

The girl's thumbs rapidly flew over her iPhone's keyboard. "Wait'l my mother sees THIS!" I saw what she typed: Check out Mrs. Cowperthwaite's phone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I may have missed an exclamation point).

Just like that, I was in middle school and by that I mean that I felt that I was back in middle school again, awkward and flustered. I felt as if I had to explain to them why I had this outdated little device.

"Well, I hardly ever use it."

They just stared.

"...and, so I um...I carry my iPad Mini around so I really don't need a cell phone other than this." Heat flushed at my face.

They were still just staring back at me.

"... and I only pay, like,  $35 every couple of months..." In my embarrassment I started talking like them.

Someone coughed. A boy, trying to be kind said, "Oh, well I guess that's cool."

Students exchanged looks and returned slowly to their seats as I quickly snatched up my little phone and slid it back into my purse. 
I started class as usual and we rolled along into the lesson for the day, but something was changed in the room, a shift in the energy. In middle school culture, the technology you carry defines you and the accidental sighting of my pitifully outdated cellphone somehow did not match the image my students had of me. They were shocked into sullenness over seeing my phone, as if I had revealed to them a wooden leg or that I live under a bridge.

So why do I still have this silly little phone?  

The truth is, our life over the last few years had gotten too expensive and my husband and I scrambled to downsize everything -- our house, our cars, our commutes, our utilities -- anything we could, as his income shrank and I co-signed student loans for my son. The phone just was not a priority for me. Upgrading to a more expensive phone and plan was something I could easily do without  and so I have gone on carrying the old LG all this time and limiting my texts to "K" and "C U L8R." I really don't mind and am happy to avoid the constant pressure of checking my messages or snapping photos of the world. Instead I can just "be" in the world.

But today I discovered that I did mind how my students perceived me. Today I just didn't measure up to their technological expectations.

It was Heraclitus of Ephesus, a wise Greek philosopher of ancient days, who said "The only constant in the universe is change." (Or something like that). As the universe would have it, I received an email when I got home this afternoon from my cellular service provider telling me that my old cell phone was obsolete and they were sending me a new one.  The change would be painless and free.  It's funny how things happen like this.

I guess it's time to upgrade, lest I become obsolete.

Not Everything Has a Like Button

A few posts back I wrote about how my 7th graders have a fear of substitute teachers and that when I probed them a bit to find the underlying cause of the fear, it came down to a feeling of worry over whether or not they would "like" the sub or not.  I've been thinking a lot about the importance students place on "liking" or "not liking" a situation or a person. I think the world lately may be placing entirely too much emphasis on this like thing. 

It would be easy to blame Mark Zuckerberg and his blue thumbs up button, but then I remembered an axiom of communication theory: Media is a reflection of society. Society has embraced this one- dimensional evaluation of something. Either we like it or we don't. And we like the like button.

I suspect this narrow emphasis on "liking" and "not liking" is causing middle school kids a good deal of anxiety. What if they don't like something? It is a great unknown. You're supposed to like everything, right? And if you don't, then what? There is no thumbs down button. 

It was so much simpler when I was a kid. I don't remember anyone asking me, with any emphasis or frequency, whether or not I liked something. No one asked me if I liked my sixth-grade teacher Sister Mary Bernadette. It didn't occur to me to like or dislike her.  She was simply there, all six feet of her, in her black sensible shoes and her snowy white peach fuzz that trailed down both layers of her chin. She was my teacher, I was her student. She taught, I learned and we kept it at that.  No one asked me which TV shows I liked.  We all watched Good Times, Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, M.A.S.H  and every Peanuts holiday special.  No one asked if I liked visiting my grandparents for a Sunday dinner of ham, mashed potatoes, green peas and pearl onions. The dinner and the grandparents happened whether I liked them or not.  The burden of judging something or someone wasn't there. And I was empowered, in a way, because I was not attached to this feeling that I was somehow a victim if I did not like something.

The other day one of my students was splayed across a table and down onto his chair like someone had removed all the bones in his body. It was last period and students were nearing the deadline on their last graded assignment for the year, which was to read four short stories and write a very brief summary and opinion of each. They had three weeks to get the work done and lots of classroom time and support. This assignment was a little different because I chose the reading. (They usually choose their own books and stories.) The splayed boy had completed no work on the assignment and I had tried every technique I knew to motivate him. I knew he had the reading and the writing skills, he just was not doing any work. 

"Tell me exactly what the problem is here, and be totally honest with me. Why are you not doing the assignment?" I asked.

"I don't like it." It was a mumble because his face was mashed into the table but I understood it.

"Don't like what?"

"I don't like the stories and I don't like writing."

So I was wrong. I still had one more technique. The drop-the-reality-bomb-and-walk-away method. Use sparingly. Carefully and wisely consider the student. Sometimes works.

The bomb: "That's okay. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it because it is your final grade. Suck it up, buttercup!"

He did it. It wasn't stellar work, but he did it. Was it because I took "like" out of the equation?  Did he "not like" the buttercup rhyme? I don't know. I don't need to know. He sat upright, found his strength, and persevered.  And I like that. 


 

Hic Sunt Dracones

The last few days of school in our classroom will be Dragon Days. When you are void of ideas and utterly tuckered out from a long school year, you go with just about anything that enters you mind and you run with it. Grades will have already closed so there will be no more argumentative essays to write or insightful connections to make to literary texts. Why not have a little fun? We will be reading myths about dragons, watching some short videos on dragons, and creating some dragon art. The grand finale will be a classroom visit from a dragon, a real live bearded dragon.

The bearded dragon belongs to my son, but I care for him quite a bit and adore him!  He is a big guy, about the size of a teenage kitten, with a regal presence and a stunning profile. One of his favorite things to do it ride around on my shoulder in the sunshine when I am out doing some light gardening. My son has not settled on a name for him so I just call him Dragon.

When I announced that Dragon would be visiting the class, I expected a little stir of delight, as much delight as is socially acceptable among 13-year-olds.  I did hear one student say, "Cool, I like those things!"

What I didn't expect was this from one of the girls: "Mrs. C, do you know if you squeeze a bearded dragon really hard its throat will puff out and it will scream?" 

She is an unusual girl.

"Okay, so you won't be touching the dragon when it visits," I said.

"Oh no, I would never actually do that, I'm just saying..."

Still, she's not touching him.

Just saying.

Welcome to America

I may have overdone it on this one. I'm big on spelling the word 'definitely' correctly, so much so that I had it not only framed on our classroom bookcase, I also set 'definitely' as part of every password that students need to access online class content. 

And it goes further from here.  Each September I ask students to draw out the word in big letters in their journals with FINITE as the root in one color and the prefix DE and the suffix LY in another color. I put it on spelling quizzes and in puzzles.  I randomly stop kids walking in the room and ask them to spell it. I just have a thing for spelling the word right.

Somebody definitely had enough of it all. Just like with the whirligig that appeared one day on the air vent, there appeared today, just as suddenly, new writing in the frame to replace the word 'definitely.'  It wasn't much of a whodunit as the writing is in Mandarin. 

"What does it say?" I asked my Mandarin-speaking ELL student.

"It says,'Welcome to America'." He added, "I already know how to spell 'definitely'."

June Pencil

Last June I found this pencil left behind by one of the students. I placed it on a worksheet and took a picture so you could get an idea of the actual scale. Just think of the dexterity one must have to propel this little nugget along the paper! The stump of an eraser still in tact is impressive. The fact that a pencil still existed in June is impressive!

Pencils are a big issue in middle school. Over the summer, our teaching team sends out a happy letter to the parents of the incoming, reminding them that students are responsible for bringing their own writing utensils to school. We suggest a zip pouch filled with multiple, sharpened pencils, pens, and highlighters. The idea is that a student can be quick on the draw, ready to jot down a snippet of important information or begin a written assignment in the blink of an eye. Is it too much to ask?

Apparently so. Though the zip pouches often show up on the first day of school, they mysteriously disappear at a mind-boggling rate. By October, all but a few are gone. Students who still have their zip pouches start to guard them like gold; the rest begin pencil begging.

The pencils beggars start with their peers, and then begin begging the teachers.  Do you have a trick for lending out pencils and getting them returned? I don't believe you. I have tried them all and none of them hold up to the test of time and practicality. I have tried affixing giant orange and pink artificial flowers to the tops of pencils with floral tape thinking no middle school student would be caught dead walking down the hall with those things. Didn't work. The floral tape was picked off,  flowers ditched, and the pencil smuggled out the door.  I have tried taking a shoe as collateral for a lent pencil, only to be thwarted by a fire drill in which I must return the shoe without getting the pencil back. Besides, stinky feet just don't make it worth it. I have even tried Harry K. Wong's The First Days of School procedure of marking a can "Sharpened" and "To Be Sharpened" and assigning pencil duty to a vigilant and inflexible student who would badger her classmates into doing the right thing. But the appointed student got tired of doing pencil duty and by second semester it had become totally uncool to volunteer for it.

In the early 1980s, when I was in middle school, we did not have pencil issues. It was such a non-issue that I cannot even remember it mentioned. One simply just had a pencil and you did not ask a teacher. I don't know. Maybe I am mis-remembering and getting old and cranky.

Tonight I am getting our summer team letter ready to send out to the parents of next year's crew.  Again I will remind them to buy a little zip pouch and fill it with writing utensils.  Remember, sharpened pencils. Lots of sharpened pencils, especially.

Thank You for Blessing Me

People bless me a lot for being a middle school teacher.  They bow to me, sometimes press their hands together in Namaste and add "I don't know how you do it" and "I could never teach middle school!" Sometimes people reveal to me that they were, themselves, beastly, revoltingly awkward, or otherwise so repellent in 7th grade that they can't even stand to think about that phase of their lives. Even elementary school teachers and high school teachers bless me. Elementary school teachers seem happy to release their students into middle school as soon as hormones start to churn up; high school teachers keep their blessings short and sweet. "7th grade? Oh, yuck. God bless you."

And yes, some days teaching middle school are hard and horrible. They just are. There can be crazy bursts of inexplicable laughter, objects moving about the room in extraordinary ways, or a body or two starts writhing on the floor.  There are tears and panic attacks, molars fall out with braces wires attached to them and periods start in chairs. On many occasions I find myself saying out loud, "What's happening?" They would all be doomed if this were 17th Century Salem.

But for the most part, I do feel blessed. Amidst all this pain and weirdness, a birth is happening and I get to witness it. Middle school students are going through a powerful transformation toward adulthood.  They are losing their childhood securities (the known world) and stepping into the first stages of the adult world (the great unknown).  There is excitement and dread, sass and paralyzing insecurity. They can be startlingly wise one day and irritatingly immature the next. It is a wonder to behold.

Middle school teaching is not for everyone, definitely not for the faint of heart. If you can roll with it and have the vision of seeing the unique being that is trying to unfold itself into the world, you can do it. Each day in a middle school is different. I have had no other job in which I have laughed every day, every single day.

Sub Phobia

Today I had to take a personal day to drive my son to the airport. Whenever I have to be out, I tell the students about it the day before and explain exactly what they will be doing for an assignment.  Still, I know it will turn into an issue, a protest at being abandoned for one whole day. It doesn't matter what school I am teaching in or what types of kids I am working with, the indignation crosses demographics. They all scowl and say "Noooooooooo!" the same way. 

I have tried not telling them ahead of time. I've tried sneaking off like an inexperienced parent leaving a child at daycare for the first time.  Doesn't work. I still have to deal with the scowls the next day, along with a litany of complaints about the sub. 

At the dawn of my teaching days, I used to think the protest was because they were all going to miss me. But thirteen-year-olds are more honest than adults trying to flatter themselves. With just a little probing I discovered it had nothing to do with missing me because they thought I was fabulous. They were, instead,  sub-phobic. Their biggest fear is that the Aesop Substitute Universe will send them a sub who .dun..dun..dun...THEY DON'T LIKE.

"Oh my God, what if we get the guy that smells like cheese and smiles at us like a ventriloquist dummy?"

"...Or that lady with the hairy mole that shows us pictures of her chihuahua with the missing chin!"

They are literally afraid of not liking the sub. I'm a big believer in facing fear so after I carefuly review the assignment they will be left with and assure them I will return, I simply tell them "So what? So what if you don't like the sub? You don't have to like your sub."

Silence. Blink. 

"We don't?"

"Nope, you only have to be respectful and do your assignment.  That's it. You'll be fine."

And they always are.

There is, I suspect, a larger issue here about being bothered by something that you don't like, an issue beyond the walls of the classroom. Are we, as a society becoming a little too touchy about things we don't like? That would be a longer discussion for a longer day.




 

Dr. Who And It's Not in Color

Sometimes they surprise you. Today I did not think we would make it more than eight or nine minutes into the 1963 episode of the classic sci-fi TV show Dr. Who before the squirming and indignation at being subjugated to boredom began. Even though I prepped them well, I still did not expect a very good outcome.

"Remember, like I said, this is old-school, everybody. You have to have patience to watch this. Things didn't go as fast in 1963 as they do today."
"Why are you doing this?"
"Doing what?"
"Making us watch it."
"Because it's part of our sci-fi unit and it's a classic."
"I love Dr. Who!" A voice shouted. I had an ally. One.
"Is it really old, like Back to the Future?"
"Can you make it be in color?"
"Can't we just read instead?"

You can see why I was concerned.


Lights out. Everybody comfortable. They all had their journals ready with their boxes drawn out on each page. Inside each box they had been instructed to jot down notes about setting, plot, character, tone, special effects, how technology is depicted.

The title of the episode is Escape and it came somewhere early in the first season of the show. If you're not familiar with the premise of Dr. Who, I'll spare you the details. For this episode you only need to know that Dr. Who, a time-traveler, along with his companions, are being held captive in a room by the Dalek who are a bunch of dastardly cyborgs. The 1963 Daleks looked like giant, aluminum badminton birdies. They wheeled around with toilet plunger protrusions that served as appendages and also provided the beings with sight.  The setting looks like painted cardboard from a high school play, and the acting is stilted. I thought the class would lose it when they heard the Dalek's voice, which sounded like someone talking into a fan through a soup can. In fact, I'm not entirely sure it wasn't someone speaking into a fan through a soup can. The whole production is the epitome of cheesiness.  Maybe we wouldn't even make it eight minutes.

But thirteen-year-olds are an enigma. You can't trust their attitudes, the sighs, the eye rolls, because just like the Maine weather, if you wait a minute it will change. The high string, synthetic whine of the Dr. Who theme music began. The waves of time undulated on the screen and it was like they were hypnotized. Not a peep out of any of them. They bought it.  I stopped the episode half way through. They jotted down some observations. I asked if they wanted to continue and was answered by a hearty, "Yes!"

We made it the full episode.