I wasn’t a bad kid when I was young but I was a hyperactive little snot, and I had a couple of fights in elementary school. Back then that kind of thing only got me a stern talking to in the principal’s office, even though today shenanigans like that would easily earn me a few days of suspension. It’s fair to say that growing up in the 70s worked in my favor more than once.
One of my two fights happened on the school bus. I usually shared a seat on the way home with one of my best friends, and for whatever reason we both decided one day -- pretty adamantly in fact -- that we both wanted to sit on the aisle. He was in the seat first and wouldn’t slide over when I got on (which, in my defense, was standard school bus etiquette and still is today) and instead turned sideways to direct me in toward the window. I wasn’t having any of this, and started leaning on him to nudge him over. He leaned back and soon the leaning became pushing, which then became angry pushing, which soon became me pinning him to the seat and him clawing at my face until the bus driver pulled us off of each other and hauled us out to the sidewalk, where our teacher was on bus duty. She expressed her grave disappointment and ominously promised that phone calls home would be made that evening. Our regret was so instantly palpable that we’d repaired our friendship and agreed on a seating arrangement before getting back on the bus, much to the surprise of all the other kids who’d witnessed us going after each other.
As promised, our teacher called our parents that night, and mine were none too happy. Whenever I got in trouble, I knew one of two things was going to happen: If I did something stupid, my dad was going to yell. If I did something historically stupid, my dad was going to sit me down in my bedroom and we were going to have A Long Talk. A call from my teacher merited A Long Talk.
I really didn’t mind the Long Talks so much. They weren’t always pleasant since they usually happened after I screwed up, but they weren’t a punishment themselves. Punishments would typically follow Long Talks and they were almost always deserved, but by the time we reached that point he and I had discussed the problem thoroughly, so I had a new perspective on what I had done wrong and was more prepared to handle similar situations differently.
One Long Talk that stuck with me came after that school bus fight. My dad was shocked and angry it had happened, because the other kid was one of my best friends: We played together at recess daily, we’d shared tents on Cub Scout camping trips, we played soccer together in the summers, and we’d been to each others' birthday parties. When I tried to explain how our back-and-forth pushing had escalated into a full-blown smackdown, I couldn’t.
“What if you had a big heavy chain at the bottom of a hill, and you needed to get it to the top?” my dad asked. “Would you push it?” No, I answered. That wouldn’t make any sense. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “If you want to get that chain up the hill, you have to pull it.”
Two things crossed my mind as he said this: (1) Why is my dad talking about chains? And then it hit me: (2) This isn’t really about chains or about me pushing another kid. This is a life lesson. When I finally connected those dots, it was perfectly clear what he was saying: You can’t force people to do what you want. You have to convince them to agree with you. If you want to lead, you have to give people a reason to follow.
Any skill I have now as a teacher when it comes to helping students process their behavior issues, I can attribute to when my father recognized he needed to invest the time in straightening me out. Whatever reason I’ve ever given people to see me as any kind of a leader didn’t come from some miraculous staff development experience, or some generic educational leadership book, or any particularly resonating professional examples, or any number of redundant inspirational platitudes. For me, it’s always come back to finding the best way to get that chain up to the top of the hill.
So thanks for that, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Sunday, June 8, 2014
The Compendium of 5th Grade Zen
5th Grade Zen comes from things happening or said in my school day that are so head-scratchingly odd or layered with unexpected wisdom that all I can do is step back and appreciate the moments... then later share them as Facebook status updates. To commemorate this being the final week of the school year (and likely my final week as a 5th grade teacher), I’ve put together a list of all the Moments of 5th Grade Zen that have occurred in the past year. Read, enjoy, and perhaps learn:
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"Fruit Smiles are the best fruit snacks because they don't taste like fruit."
"This grocery bag smells like a grocery bag."
During a lesson on bus safety we discussed how unsafe it is for students to stick their arms or heads out of the bus windows. Someone raised the point, "But dogs stick their heads out the windows of cars all the time." The only response I could think of: "And that's why dogs aren't allowed to ride the bus."
During a small group discussion, someone in class mentions Roman numerals. One student's response: "Those are great! I love Ramen noodles!"
Generally speaking, ten-year-old boys haven't mastered the subtleties of applying the Axe Body Spray discovered in their older brother's bedrooms.
While switching classes today one little girl had her arms so full of books she felt she had to carry her paper drinking cup in her mouth. While doing this, she sneezed right into the cup. To her credit she didn't drop it, but I hope she found a new one by the next time she was thirsty.
A girl came up to my desk during a test today. She asked me to read one of the questions to her. I did. "Okay," she said. "I just thought it was kind of a tongue twister. I wanted to see if you could say it."
The winds were strong this afternoon, and my windows were open to keep the room temperature down. Predictably, this distracted a lot of kids. To bring them back I said, "Okay, yes. It's windy out. But you've all spent your entire lives on Earth and you've seen wind before. It's nothing new." To which one little wisenheimer scientist replied, "But you can't actually *see* wind."
After I finished giving directions to the class about how to complete their next activity, I asked if anyone had any questions. One student raised her hand. "Yeah. Did you get a haircut?"
As I'm doing some incidental planning with another teacher in the back of the classroom, a student walks up with a question about a project. I answer the question. The student stands there looking at us for a few unnecessary seconds before finally narrating to himself, "Okay. I'm going to walk away now." And then he did just that.
"I never have any lucky days!... Well, except for yesterday."
This morning as the students were arriving, one of my boys walked right up to me and said, "I had to take the garbage out last night when it was snowing, and it was really cold. But it was so beautiful I just stood there and looked at it for awhile."
We conducted a survey about favorite after-school snacks for a data collection/graphing activity this afternoon. Instead of just raising her hand for the ‘other’ category, one girl loudly announced her choice: “Chocolate-covered popcorn, baby!”
A group of students made a poster to represent themselves. So of course one of the drawings they included is a volcano with birthday cakes erupting from it.
During class I announced there were five more minutes for the students to finish their warm-up problems. One student said, "Five minutes?! Can I have a little time to work? I'm not Jimmy John's!"
A student approached my desk with a wrapped gift and said, "My mom wanted me to give you this." Then he set it down and walked away without another word.
I gave a math test that had questions where student to answer with "greater than/less than" inequality symbols, like this: <. Students will often draw jagged teeth in these symbols to make them into mouths. But today, one girl went further and turned her symbol into a detailed, violently hungry-looking shark.
I recently gave an assignment in which students had to find a way a man could time 30 minutes using newly-purchased 9-minute and 13-minute sand glass timers. One student answered, "He could just set a real timer for 30 minutes like everyone else, and not waste his money on junk like that."
This Conversation:
Student: "I'm not very happy today."
Me: "Why is that?"
Student: "Because nobody laughs at any of my jokes."
Me: "Well, you know, not everybody is going to laugh at the same things."
Student: "I know. But these jokes are FUNNY!"
I'm grading tests today. One problem asked the students to write a real-world situation to match a mathematical expression. One student wrote a situation about a teacher named "Miss Anthrope."
One of my girls spilled some guacamole she'd brought for her snack on her pants. She wiped it off the best she could but left behind a small stain. She brought this concern to me. I looked down at the pants she was wearing -- camouflage leggings overlayed with some kind of indecipherable flower pattern. "I really don't think anyone is going to notice," I told her. She looked down at her pants for a moment, looked back up at me and said, "Good point."
In today's math lesson I was introducing surface area. After I gave a brief preview of our activities, one of the more clever girls raised her and said with a noticeable grin, "So we really are thinking outside of the box today, aren't we?"
During my prep time today I was in my room with the door locked and the lights off, enjoying the natural daylight coming in through the windows. My door handle starts shaking, hard. I open it and see two of my girls needing to get something they forgot. "It'd work better to knock," I said.
"But the lights were off," they replied. "We didn't know you were in the room!"
"So if you didn't know I was in here," I asked, "why did you think shaking the handle that much was going to do anything?"
They had no response.
At the end of the day I walked into the media center to pick up the class and noticed the room was filled with a certain smell. Our media specialist sees me scrunching up my face at it and says: "I love the smell of 5th grade in the afternoon. It smells like... attitude."
I gave a test today. The kids have been repeatedly coached to take their time and check their work. About half an hour into the test, one boy decides he's done. Immediately after he hands it in the dam breaks wide open and fourteen other students, none of them wanting to be the first one done, hand their tests in as well.
Two kids are playing a game when one tries to sneak around the rules for an extra turn. "You already played, you liar!" says his partner. The sneaky kid grins and replies, "I didn't lie. I just didn't tell the truth."
Today was Historical Character Day. One boy walks in wearing a white and green "Cat in the Hat" style hat and a long, thick white wizard beard. I asked him who he was dressed as. His answer: "Abraham Lincoln."
**********
Happy summer, everyone! May your upcoming school year be filled with inordinate amounts of accidental wisdom.
**********
"Fruit Smiles are the best fruit snacks because they don't taste like fruit."
"This grocery bag smells like a grocery bag."
During a lesson on bus safety we discussed how unsafe it is for students to stick their arms or heads out of the bus windows. Someone raised the point, "But dogs stick their heads out the windows of cars all the time." The only response I could think of: "And that's why dogs aren't allowed to ride the bus."
During a small group discussion, someone in class mentions Roman numerals. One student's response: "Those are great! I love Ramen noodles!"
Generally speaking, ten-year-old boys haven't mastered the subtleties of applying the Axe Body Spray discovered in their older brother's bedrooms.
While switching classes today one little girl had her arms so full of books she felt she had to carry her paper drinking cup in her mouth. While doing this, she sneezed right into the cup. To her credit she didn't drop it, but I hope she found a new one by the next time she was thirsty.
A girl came up to my desk during a test today. She asked me to read one of the questions to her. I did. "Okay," she said. "I just thought it was kind of a tongue twister. I wanted to see if you could say it."
The winds were strong this afternoon, and my windows were open to keep the room temperature down. Predictably, this distracted a lot of kids. To bring them back I said, "Okay, yes. It's windy out. But you've all spent your entire lives on Earth and you've seen wind before. It's nothing new." To which one little wisenheimer scientist replied, "But you can't actually *see* wind."
After I finished giving directions to the class about how to complete their next activity, I asked if anyone had any questions. One student raised her hand. "Yeah. Did you get a haircut?"
As I'm doing some incidental planning with another teacher in the back of the classroom, a student walks up with a question about a project. I answer the question. The student stands there looking at us for a few unnecessary seconds before finally narrating to himself, "Okay. I'm going to walk away now." And then he did just that.
"I never have any lucky days!... Well, except for yesterday."
This morning as the students were arriving, one of my boys walked right up to me and said, "I had to take the garbage out last night when it was snowing, and it was really cold. But it was so beautiful I just stood there and looked at it for awhile."
We conducted a survey about favorite after-school snacks for a data collection/graphing activity this afternoon. Instead of just raising her hand for the ‘other’ category, one girl loudly announced her choice: “Chocolate-covered popcorn, baby!”
A group of students made a poster to represent themselves. So of course one of the drawings they included is a volcano with birthday cakes erupting from it.
During class I announced there were five more minutes for the students to finish their warm-up problems. One student said, "Five minutes?! Can I have a little time to work? I'm not Jimmy John's!"
A student approached my desk with a wrapped gift and said, "My mom wanted me to give you this." Then he set it down and walked away without another word.
I gave a math test that had questions where student to answer with "greater than/less than" inequality symbols, like this: <. Students will often draw jagged teeth in these symbols to make them into mouths. But today, one girl went further and turned her symbol into a detailed, violently hungry-looking shark.
I recently gave an assignment in which students had to find a way a man could time 30 minutes using newly-purchased 9-minute and 13-minute sand glass timers. One student answered, "He could just set a real timer for 30 minutes like everyone else, and not waste his money on junk like that."
This Conversation:
Student: "I'm not very happy today."
Me: "Why is that?"
Student: "Because nobody laughs at any of my jokes."
Me: "Well, you know, not everybody is going to laugh at the same things."
Student: "I know. But these jokes are FUNNY!"
I'm grading tests today. One problem asked the students to write a real-world situation to match a mathematical expression. One student wrote a situation about a teacher named "Miss Anthrope."
One of my girls spilled some guacamole she'd brought for her snack on her pants. She wiped it off the best she could but left behind a small stain. She brought this concern to me. I looked down at the pants she was wearing -- camouflage leggings overlayed with some kind of indecipherable flower pattern. "I really don't think anyone is going to notice," I told her. She looked down at her pants for a moment, looked back up at me and said, "Good point."
In today's math lesson I was introducing surface area. After I gave a brief preview of our activities, one of the more clever girls raised her and said with a noticeable grin, "So we really are thinking outside of the box today, aren't we?"
During my prep time today I was in my room with the door locked and the lights off, enjoying the natural daylight coming in through the windows. My door handle starts shaking, hard. I open it and see two of my girls needing to get something they forgot. "It'd work better to knock," I said.
"But the lights were off," they replied. "We didn't know you were in the room!"
"So if you didn't know I was in here," I asked, "why did you think shaking the handle that much was going to do anything?"
They had no response.
At the end of the day I walked into the media center to pick up the class and noticed the room was filled with a certain smell. Our media specialist sees me scrunching up my face at it and says: "I love the smell of 5th grade in the afternoon. It smells like... attitude."
I gave a test today. The kids have been repeatedly coached to take their time and check their work. About half an hour into the test, one boy decides he's done. Immediately after he hands it in the dam breaks wide open and fourteen other students, none of them wanting to be the first one done, hand their tests in as well.
Two kids are playing a game when one tries to sneak around the rules for an extra turn. "You already played, you liar!" says his partner. The sneaky kid grins and replies, "I didn't lie. I just didn't tell the truth."
Today was Historical Character Day. One boy walks in wearing a white and green "Cat in the Hat" style hat and a long, thick white wizard beard. I asked him who he was dressed as. His answer: "Abraham Lincoln."
**********
Happy summer, everyone! May your upcoming school year be filled with inordinate amounts of accidental wisdom.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
The Old Guard
There was a retirement party at my school this morning. Two people on our staff are leaving when the school year ends in another week. I've had good working and personal relationships with both of them that go back well over a decade each, and for several reasons I'm sorry to see them leave. As would be the case with most retirement parties, a lot of faces from the past showed up to help celebrate. Some of those visitors were people I hadn't seen in months, if not years. It was good to see so many familiar faces, and I'm glad I had a chance to catch up with how they are and what they're doing, whether they had retired themselves or had just moved on to different things.
I noticed something about the dynamics of the room I thought was interesting: Not unexpectedly, the tables were incredibly segregated between the newer and/or younger members of the current school staff and the people coming back just for the party. Those returning were there to acknowledge the retirement of two people they had known for so long and shared so many experiences with, and they showed a real joy about being back together. For much of the younger crowd though, who are all so far from the concept of retirement, it seemed more of a general celebration with an underlying theme. They shared their genuine best wishes with the retirees, but they spent most of the time talking and eating with each other while these other people they only peripherally knew at best mingled and caught up.
It felt odd at first to notice that, because I generally feel that even though I'm now one of the staff members with the most seniority in a school that is undeniably skewing younger than it has in decades (and remarkably so), I still like to think I'm active in what happens in the building. And there are only a handful of people who'd fit into that same category I do, the people who have been around long enough to have shared history with those returning visitors and each other, and who are also still (hopefully) seen as vital and contributing members of the current staff.
I can remember ten, fifteen, twenty years back when events like this took place in my younger days, and the veterans of that time would get back together to relive a part of their friendships they didn't have anymore. In those moments I tended to seek out and bond more with the people closer to my age and experience (not that there were many of us back then). But now I'm one of the people that has a foot in both camps, and it leaves me feeling somewhat displaced as I try to picture where I fit in with all of these dynamics. Does my seniority earn me any credibility with people, or is it a filter they use to placate me and write me off? Am I still seen as playing catch-up with the generation ahead of me since I don't have pictures of grandchildren to share or month-long winter vacations to talk about, or am I being slowly disregarded out to pasture because I pull away from the loudly-cackling, offensive-joke-telling end of the happy hour table? I honestly don't know. And even though I decided to blog about it tonight, I'm not sure I'm that concerned about where people see me inside of that dynamic. I suppose it's been my experience that people will see what they see from whatever perspective they bring, and will either accept or not accept people or things or ideas based on that. There's little any of us can actively do to change that, other than present what we hope to be the best versions of ourselves and move forward with whatever weight that carries.
If I really do have a foot anchored in both camps as much as I'd like to think I do, it still comes down to what I do with whatever situations that presents. I guess that's part of the reason why this chunk of life is called "middle age."
I noticed something about the dynamics of the room I thought was interesting: Not unexpectedly, the tables were incredibly segregated between the newer and/or younger members of the current school staff and the people coming back just for the party. Those returning were there to acknowledge the retirement of two people they had known for so long and shared so many experiences with, and they showed a real joy about being back together. For much of the younger crowd though, who are all so far from the concept of retirement, it seemed more of a general celebration with an underlying theme. They shared their genuine best wishes with the retirees, but they spent most of the time talking and eating with each other while these other people they only peripherally knew at best mingled and caught up.
It felt odd at first to notice that, because I generally feel that even though I'm now one of the staff members with the most seniority in a school that is undeniably skewing younger than it has in decades (and remarkably so), I still like to think I'm active in what happens in the building. And there are only a handful of people who'd fit into that same category I do, the people who have been around long enough to have shared history with those returning visitors and each other, and who are also still (hopefully) seen as vital and contributing members of the current staff.
I can remember ten, fifteen, twenty years back when events like this took place in my younger days, and the veterans of that time would get back together to relive a part of their friendships they didn't have anymore. In those moments I tended to seek out and bond more with the people closer to my age and experience (not that there were many of us back then). But now I'm one of the people that has a foot in both camps, and it leaves me feeling somewhat displaced as I try to picture where I fit in with all of these dynamics. Does my seniority earn me any credibility with people, or is it a filter they use to placate me and write me off? Am I still seen as playing catch-up with the generation ahead of me since I don't have pictures of grandchildren to share or month-long winter vacations to talk about, or am I being slowly disregarded out to pasture because I pull away from the loudly-cackling, offensive-joke-telling end of the happy hour table? I honestly don't know. And even though I decided to blog about it tonight, I'm not sure I'm that concerned about where people see me inside of that dynamic. I suppose it's been my experience that people will see what they see from whatever perspective they bring, and will either accept or not accept people or things or ideas based on that. There's little any of us can actively do to change that, other than present what we hope to be the best versions of ourselves and move forward with whatever weight that carries.
If I really do have a foot anchored in both camps as much as I'd like to think I do, it still comes down to what I do with whatever situations that presents. I guess that's part of the reason why this chunk of life is called "middle age."
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