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.
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.
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'."
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.
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.
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.
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.
