Introduction to students

On Fridays, the students are supposed to come into the classroom, sit down quietly, take out their notebooks and do a freewrite. This was my first encounter with the non-honors students, and there was quite a difference.

Five minutes into the class, everyone was still socializing and no one was writing. Not only were there no uniforms to be seen, one girl was wearing a Nike zip-up jacket backwards. Several girls had gold braids in their hair, and one boy had broad gold streaks in his swept-back Afro. One boy was wearing two strings of long beads. Several of the kids were in mock fights, including one powerfully-built girl punching a much frailer-looking boy hard in the arm.

"It's halfway into the marking period, and you should all have two notebooks by now," said the teacher at last. This time she was standing in the center of the large empty triangle in front of the blackboard. "I'm not going to accept loose sheets of paper anymore. If you don't have a notebook you can put the pages in a folder. Who doesn't have a notebook or a folder?"

Two-thirds of the class raised their hands. She began distributing used folders.

"Now if your reading journal is mixed in with the bellwork, or if there are math or social studies pages in there, you'll get me angry while I'm grading," she continued. "I don't think you want to do that."

Her tone was gentle, almost humorous. I think the kids didn't take her terribly seriously, but they also weren't hostile to her.

After about 15 minutes of "writing" - i.e., mostly chatting with each other - came the sharing time. Nearly everyone had chosen to write about what he would do over the weekend, and I say HE advisedly because only one girl shared. Mostly they said they would be chillin', trying to think of something to do, or going to school sports events with their families.

Next comes the adverb work. The teacher hands out newspaper articles she's clipped and carefully taped to sheets of paper. The students are supposed to look for verbs and write them in dry eraser marker on their desks. The teacher later explains it's just a way to keep them interested by letting them use their graphics skills, but it's an organizational nightmare - distributing the articles, dry erase pens, cleaning off the desks with paper towels and spritzes of cleanser - both of which are in short supply - and then the kids are supposed to write sentences in their bellwork journals anyway, using at least five of the verbs they listed and incorporating adverbs.

Finally I get to introduce myself. I tell the class that I lived in Germany for 20 years, and they're all amazed. They want to know if I speak German, and when I tell them that I do, they start clamoring for me to say their names in German. I try to encourage them to ask me about different words, since the names are almost exactly the same, but they all want to hear my slightly different pronunciation. Only one girl, named Treasure, has a completely different word. I didn't realize that was her name - I thought she was asking me how to say the word "treasure," so I told her: "Schatz." No one could believe it. They started cracking up. "Shots? Does that really mean 'treasure'?"

For the third activity - this class meets for an hour and ten minutes a day - the teacher says to take out the literature textbook. Everyone groans. They're supposed to read aloud, but the text - Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" - is full of words they can hardly pronounce, like "champagne," and words they don't understand, like "refectory." Also, the dining hall is next door and the walls badly soundproofed, so we can hardly hear each other. Usually, the text comes from an audio CD, but the CD player in the classroom is broken, like the computers.

For the final class of the day, my introduction goes beyond the kids wanting me to say their names in German - although they want that too. Someone asks me about Anne Frank, and whether there are any Nazis in Germany. I start talking about neo-Nazis beating immigrants to death. When someone asks me why they did that, I turn the question around and ask the kids to come up with reasons. One girl suggests that it's because "the immigrants are taking all the jobs from the people who really deserve them." I smile at her and ask: "Do the immigrants not deserve jobs?" She's terribly embarrassed, and I apologize to her later.

During the bellwork "Freewrite Friday" sharing, one boy stands up and does a verse of a rap, after much encouragement from the rest of the class:

I was sittin' in the class, just
Singing my song
When I pulled out a booger
Fifty feet long

Everyone laughs. Later the teacher tells me he has an IEP because he's been diagnosed with an emotional disability.

The teacher has a much tougher life than I do. Not only is she teaching full-time, she has a seven year-old daughter and twin five year-old sons. She's single and also works part-time at Sam's Club because, she says, "once I've paid all the bills there's nothing left and I need a little spending money." Her mother gets the seven year-old off to school; she can drop the boys off at preschool earlier.

She collected all of the bellwork and reading journals from all of her classes to grade over the weekend. I hope she doesn't get too angry while grading - that's the last thing she needs.