Seating and movement

This is an assignment I had to do for class. I describe the seating arrangement in my mentor's classroom, the way she moves throughout the classroom, and the educational implications of this arrangement.

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My mentor teacher has a cavernous room. But fully 1/3 of it remains unused because it shares a wall with the cafeteria and the noise would make learning all but impossible, so she only uses the front of the room. Even so, there is quite a bit of noise from the cafeteria for much of her teaching day.

There are two parallel lines of chairs, one along the wall next to the door, the other about two feet in front of it, following the diagonal line of the wall. These two lines make up one side of a triangle. Three more parallel lines of chairs going diagonally in the other direction are the second side. The third side of the triangle is the front wall with the blackboard, and there is a very large triangular open space in the middle of the room. The teacher's desk is tucked away behind the line of chairs along the diagonal wall, in the space leading off to the darkened, unused part of the room. Three large windows are almost entirely painted over, so virtually no sunlight reaches the classroom.

I find this seating arrangement unconducive to just about all of my mentor's goals. She wants the students to work individually most of the time, either on journals, worksheets or doing independent reading, and yet they are crammed tightly and regimentally together in a rather large space. The students are literally shunted off to the sides, leaving a gap in the center in which the teacher rarely takes up position. The teacher wants them to share their journal entries aloud with each other; but because of the large open space in the middle of the classroom, it is very difficult for anyone on one side of the triangle to hear someone speaking on the other side of it. Many students go up to the blackboard to share instead of speaking from their seats, but even then the apex of the triangle is about 20 feet away so unless the person sharing is speaking loudly and distinctly there is not much chance of everyone understanding what is being said. In addition, a significant portion of the students - those who are near the bottom of the triangle, formed by the blackboard - cannot see most of what has been written on the board from their seats.

The seating arrangement works against the most important goal of teaching, which is increasing the amount of time students spend concentrating on their work. This time on task comes in spurts that can be measured in seconds before another conversation breaks out somewhere in the room. The chairs are much too close together, inviting small-scale conversations. In one of the classes, there's a girl who I almost only see from the back of her head because she spends pretty much the entire 4-period English block turned around talking to the girls behind her.

My mentor told me that the students had originally been assigned seats in order for her to be able to learn their names. Now she occasionally tries to "break up groups" who are constantly talking, but because the whole class stays together pretty much for the entire day it doesn't seem to matter who is sitting next to whom - there's always something more interesting going on with one's fellow students than the work that has been assigned. The teacher also allows students to get up whenever they need to sharpen a pencil, get a tissue or sanitize their hands. This leads to students strolling casually across the open triangle and making comments or entering into conversation with other groups while everyone is supposed to be working.

The teacher spends most of her time behind the perimeter of the triangle, far from her desk. When she is giving directions she will sometimes come into the open space, but not often - and she does not stay there for long. She almost never moves between the seats because there is not enough room; she is a heavy-set woman and only someone much more slender could negotiate the space. When she is sitting at her desk and writing a referral for a student, a procedure that takes about 3-4 minutes and one which she has done at least once every time I have been in her classroom, it is as if she has disappeared because her desk is outside the communal classroom space. If she comes into the triangle at all, she is usually standing at the apex, near her desk, and speaking from there. I tend to sit close to her desk, since that is the only vantage point from which I can see most of the students and the blackboard as well; but my mentor writes on the blackboard first thing in the morning, before the students arrive, and does not change anything on the board for the entire day. There is no functioning technology of any kind in the classroom, with the exception of the electric pencil sharpener and the loudspeaker.

This may sound harsh, but the message that this whole arrangement communicates is that the teacher doesn't want to be with the students, and there is nothing for them to learn. It is hard to imagine how instructor and students can engage productively with each other in this classroom setup.

However, because there are more than 30 students in the class and so much of the room is unusable, coming up with an adequate seating arrangement is difficult. Contrary to what would normally be my impulse, which is to be the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage," I would probably put my desk in front of the blackboard and have three concentric arcs of student chairs around it. I would set the chairs up with enough space between them so that I can walk up to anyone in the room in less than two seconds if I am leaning on the front of my desk, and I would make it a point at the beginning of the term to say that a walk-through space between desks has to be maintained. I would also try to stagger the chairs so that I can see everyone in the class from my desk, although this might not be possible.

The real question would be whether I could keep the chairs far enough away from each other to discourage side conversations and still have room for everyone in the class. Because these are ninth graders and they are just learning what it means to have an in-depth discussion - or at least they are supposed to be learning that - it is probably not such a bad thing if they have to direct their comments tp me and then I bounce the comments back outward to the rest of the class. I would prefer that they engage each other, and in fact they are doing so in the classes I observe - it's just that most of this engagement is completely unrelated to their education.

Wild and exotic animals

On Friday Mrs. D passed around an article detailing the suicide in Zanesville, Ohio of a man who kept dozens of wild and exotic animals as pets. He freed the animals from their "dilapidated" cages before shooting himself in his driveway, and the police only caught wind of what was happening when a bear and a tiger were spotted on the road. They spent the rest of the day hunting down the reportedly aggressive animals in order to prevent anyone from being injured or killed; only six of the creatures were sedated and brought to area zoos.

The article created a productive uproar in Mrs. D's classroom. Most of the students were against killing the animals, while a significant minority was for it. I suggested Mrs. D have them go through the article and pick out words and phrases backing up their opinions, and noted that most of them were able to do it - including those who recognized that the "dilapidated" condition of the cages meant that the animals were poorly cared-for.

After that, Mrs. D decided to give her original plan a shot and have them work in small groups to develop a list of five questions that the article did not answer. Between the two of us, we managed to keep the groups enough on task to accomplish that. But I noticed that the kids either weren't able or didn't want to make enough effort to have a civil discussion on this subject, about which they all felt so strongly. The comments quickly became insults about the intelligence, physical attributes, or maternal physical attributes of those who disagreed with each other.

When school let out Mrs. D and I sat together for a good half hour talking about possible strategies to motivate more courteous discussion habits. She suggested we divide them into teams and add points for a good argument while deducting points for shouts or personal remarks. Today there was no discussion on the agenda, so I didn't see that strategy put into practice. I'd like to know if it has an effect.

But during our discussion, Mrs. D came up with an interesting cultural contrast. In the suburban high school she attended, she told me, there were cliques galore - Goths, jocks, punks, cheerleaders, etc. - and all of them were set on tearing down members of other cliques. "I don't see that here," she said. "There aren't even body image issues that are so typical of white high schools." I theorized that there was violence woven into the culture of most high schools, but in suburbia the violence tended to be more psychological. "Maybe there's a strongly supportive community here that might be weaker in a more individualistic suburban setting," I suggested.

It brought home to me a lot of the reading I've been doing in other classes about respecting the contributions of various cultures to the class. Mrs. D's classroom - in fact, the whole high school - is not particularly diverse. Pretty much all the students are from lower economic status African American families; the teachers are the ones who provide a little variety, such as it is. But of course that isn't the kind of diversity that counts, or the kind I'm reading about in my Education courses. I'm not sure if it should count or not, but my gut feeling says that teachers have to be included in the learning community as well.

"Not everyone is intelligent."

My mentor teacher had a great writing prompt for the "bellwork" writing assignment yesterday: "If you were in charge of balancing the district's budget after big budget cuts from the state, what would you cut? Security, sports, new books, something else?"

Of course, a bunch of the kids said they would cut teachers "who don't teach anyway," not realizing that, in their case, this would mean that there would be 70 kids in their 9th grade English class. But almost all of them argued against cutting sports. My mentor talked about some districts in the area that have cut school funding for football, demanding that the families of team members pay up to $300 per season plus the cost of uniforms and helmets. Nobody liked that idea.

A female ringleader in this class, who will occasionally burst out into a spontaneous and loud rap in the middle of being given directions and who will constantly and casually toss out outrageous (and loud) insults while others are speaking - who, when I was standing in for the sub on Monday, would barely let me get three words out before she would interrupt me with a loud question - made a particularly telling comment:

"We can't cut out the sports program, because not everyone is intelligent. The sports program is the only way a lot of us can get money for college."

I raised my hand, and the teacher recognized me.

"Darlene, I want to ask you something. You say not everyone is intelligent. But is everyone good enough at sports to get a scholarship?"

Of course, she and her backers in the seats around her thought so. The thing is, Darlene is intelligent. She has made strong, commonsense points during the few discussions I've witnessed. But she is so much more interested in negative attention than positive, it's going to be pretty tough for her to get past the F she will probably receive during this marking period.

They had me for breakfast.

Correction: They had the sub for breakfast. I didn't get in until 11 a.m. Me they had for lunch.

They liked the writing prompt I had for their bellwork: "Since so many people text and IM, why do we need to teach writing anymore?" A few of them did the required paragraph. But then a couple of seniors who were on a project came up to me and asked me if they could write some questions on the board and have the kids write responses, so I changed the prompt and had everyone write to those questions.

This of course caused confusion, but it wasn't too bad. Maybe the problem was that they thought that if I was going to change my whole lesson plan at the drop of a hat, I didn't know what I was doing and they could get away with anything they wanted - so they just kept trying to get away with more and more. All I know is that there were TWO visits by the principal but neither had any effect lasting more than 30 seconds.

By the time we got around to the creative writing assignment, things had already deteriorated pretty badly so there was not much chance it was going to spark anyone's creative genius. The sub, a tall, distinguished African American with an MBA, tried to help. But the moment he spoke out loud - he had a strong Caribbean accent - they laughed in his face.

What I should have done was set up a positive contingency right at the beginning: If everyone cooperates, you'll have 15 minutes of free conversation time at the end of class. If I don't get cooperation, there will be a grammar worksheet at the end of class. And I probably should have dealt more clearly with disruptions from the very beginning. I fell into the trap of wanting them to like me because I'm the teacher-in-training. One girl began shouting questions and rude comments the moment anyone else started speaking. I ignored her most of the time, but I couldn't completely.

I finally just adopted the "I'm waiting" pose, which ended up highlighting my helplessness. I took away their break time for the rest of the week; I hope my mentor teacher follows through on that, but I'll understand if she doesn't.

I realize this was an extremely difficult situation. I realize I was setting myself up for failure, taking over a class that I have just begun to get to know. I realize that they behaved this way for a few days last week as well, when their regular teacher was in charge. I realize that this is why urban school teachers burn out after an average of two years - and why my mentor teacher is thinking about applying for a transfer. But I still cried on my way out of school.

Mostly, I feel humbled. Maybe I'll do better when it's my classroom and I can establish myself from the beginning. The class gave me a chance - not much of one, but they did give me a chance. I didn't know how to use the chance they gave me.

Hopefully, I planted a few seeds. The fact that they didn't visibly rattle me, maybe, will earn me some respect. If my mentor teacher follows through on the withdrawal of break time privileges, maybe this will end up being a turning point. But for now, all I know is that I have a lot to learn.

Homecoming Friday

I missed Wednesday's class, and when I returned on Friday my mentor teacher told me there had been serious behavior problems all week. One boy whom she had sent to the principal's office never showed up there - he just walked out of the building, and the next day he tried to get into the classroom as if nothing had ever happened.

A girl dressed in maroon showed up on Friday; my mentor showed me her attendance record, and there were about three times more absences than "present"'s. As has become my wont, I went around to the students and asked them what they were doing, or if they needed help. The girl in maroon should have had her notebook out to do the bellwork, and there was nothing on her desk.

"Do you have your journal?" I asked her. "Because it needs to be out right now."

"I don't know where it is," she said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

I act as if I hadn't noticed. "Maybe it's in the blue crate over there. Mrs. D said there were a few journals that had been left in there from the last time she brought them home to grade."

"Oh, I remember," she deadpanned. "I left it at home."

"You don't want to check the blue crate?"

"No. I definitely left it at home." And she makes no move to get out a piece of paper or do anything else; she's waiting for me to leave, as if I was the one being rude.

I go over to the blue crate and look for her journal while she studiously disregards me. It isn't there. I head over to my mentor and ask if the girl can write her bellwork on a piece of paper. When I inform the girl that that's what she should do, she takes out a piece of paper and continues to ignore it until I come back.

"So what are you writing about?" I ask her a little too brightly. She shrugs.

"What am I supposed to write about?"

"Whatever you want. It's Freewrite Friday."

She considers this. "I think I'm going to write about how fake people are," she decides. I give her two thumbs up. I don't think I need to take the topic personally; she had been talking to her neighbor about the Homecoming Dance on Saturday night and how everyone gets all dolled up for it, so I think that's why it was on her mind.

She actually does write her paragraph, and shares it afterward. But then Mrs. D asks everyone to share their bellwork paragraph from the day before, which there hadn't been time for because of a fire drill. The class gets deep into a discussion about whether or not any of the students would ever consider plastic surgery. It was the most engaged I had ever seen them. The girls all think it's okay to be fake for the first impression, but then if the guy really loves them he ought to be able to see beyond the bad hair days. The boys in the class didn't have much to say about that. This is still 9th grade, after all.

Now it's Sunday evening, and my mentor teacher called me to say she'll be absent tomorrow. I'm going to try to put into practice a few of the ideas I've gleaned from reading Mike Rose's LIVES ON THE BOUNDARY as well as my textbooks. The classes are still showing almost zero engagement with their short story, so after their bellwork I'm going to ask them to pick a picture from the story and write something about it (there are several illustrations of various kinds). I'll ask them to imagine they're seeing the picture for the first time, and write what they think it's about. Then I'll ask them to write about what happened just before the moment the image is depicting, and what is about to happen afterward. Then I'll ask them to write about what happened one month later, and finally one year later. Finally, they should take a fresh piece of paper and put it all into whatever form they want: A narrative, a poem, a rap, a conversation. When they share, I'll first ask for positive comments, then I'll ask for questions about what was written. If they seem into it, I'll have them write down the questions and think about them, and then maybe rewrite their pieces on Wednesday.

Afterward, I'll read some more of the story to them. Hopefully they'll be more engaged.

Was it a bad day, or are we slipping?

"Where's the class?" asked the Americorps "City Year" volunteer in my mentor teacher's classroom. He's supposed to follow around several students who need individual help staying on track for graduation.

He looked around at a bunch of empty deskchairs as the rest of the class slowly filed in, chatting and joking."There should be 15 more people here."

My mentor grinned. "I know. Isn't it great?"

Apparently a few more kids in the class had been suspended, besides the six who were out last week, and five had been bumped up to the Honors class. The teacher, the two City Year volunteers - one a little too cheerful, blonde and blue-eyed, but who never quite met my gaze, the other a mild-mannered African American at least 6'7" tall, both wearing red City Year insignia vests - and I assumed this would be a pretty good afternoon. After all, there were four of us to a much-reduced group of 9th graders.

More fools us. Silence never once descended during either the 5-8th period class or the 9th period class - not when the teacher was speaking, not when the announcements came over the loudspeaker, not even when, per the usual routine, students shared their bellwork journals about their favorite relatives besides their parents. I flatter myself that there was relative quiet when I read aloud part of the short story"The Most Dangerous Game" from the literature textbook , but I'm not sure that was the case since I was concentrating on giving my reading some dramatic flair.

The Americorps volunteers spent their time at the back of the room, apparently doing schoolwork; I didn't get a chance to ask them how old they were, but they both looked to be in their early 20s. My teacher kept threatening to "break up some groups, because you can't settle down and write," but she didn't move anyone for almost 15 minutes. In any case, the moves were ineffectual as the talking did not stop.

While they were working on their "favorite relative" prompt, I read the short story they were all discussing and was shocked by how inappropriate it was for this classroom. Written in the 1920s, the vocabulary was Victorian; the historical background needed to understand the main character was almost certainly unfamiliar; and the subject matter (an exile from the Russian Revolution buys a remote island, builds a castle on it, and hunts shipwrecked sailors for sport) completely irrelevant to these kids' lives.

"This is an awesome class," the white City Year volunteer told me at one point. "You should have seen them last week. They're like on their best behavior."

"I was here a couple of days last week, and they seem a lot worse now," I replied.

"Oh no," he insisted. At the end of the day, when I told my mentor what he had said, she widened her eyes. "Ridiculous. This is the worst class I've had all year."

This internship is supposed to give me the opportunity to put into practice what I've been learning from my textbooks, and what it's doing is showing me how right my textbooks have been. High school English classrooms are hard to manage because the material is so boring, instruction is not in the least bit tailored to the individual students' needs, and the teacher-student dynamic resembles more a power struggle than a learning community.

Still, my mentor brought home a good point for the class. In the story, the Russian exile talks about how it is a "mathematical certainty" that he will always bag the hunted animal, and that nothing is more boring than perfection - which is why he decided to hunt the most dangerous game of all, i.e., men. In order to explain that sentiment, the teacher asked the kids whether they like doing video games once they've perfected them, or whether they start looking for a greater challenge. They related to that right away, and I'm sure they came away with at least a little insight into the character.

Next time I get the chance, I need to ask her how she grades all these journals - what her scoring rubric is, whether she does a lot of correcting for grammar. If she does, that would be another point for my textbooks over what I am seeing in the classroom.

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.

Meet the Mentor

I met my mentor teacher yesterday for my first field experience. She hadn't been planning on having a teaching intern, but the teacher I was placed with first decided she didn't want one this semester. So we both ended up with each other - hardly an auspicious beginning. Despite that, we related pretty well to each other.

It's an urban school with an illustrious past and a major sports reputation. Among the alumni: several NFL players, a former mayor and a former U.S. Senator, a few popular entertainment legends. But two years ago the school was deemed "failing" under No Child Left Behind, the principal was fired along with half the teachers, and now there are three "schools within a school" in the old building. One of those mini-schools is called the Ninth Grade Academy; that's where I'm placed. Its purpose is to bring together students of disparate backgrounds and neighborhoods and make them jell as an eventual graduating class.

When I got into the classroom there were only about a dozen kids in the room. Two of the boys were in uniform, one was in a sweater and tie. I was told there was a dress code, but it wasn't explained to me and I'm not sure what it was. Maybe everyone needed to be wearing a collar of some sort, precluding t-shirts and low necklines.

The kids were grading an "adverb practice" worksheet; they exchanged papers with their partners, then went around the class reading sentences aloud and telling everyone which words were the adverbs. The sentences were stereotypical: "The train raced quickly down the tracks." I immediately thought of ways I would spice them up: "The defensive back blatantly fouled the runner." One girl was marking her partner's worksheet with a crayon. But the students were extremely well-behaved. I later found out that this was the honors class.

After the adverb exercises, the teacher had them silently reading from whatever books they had brought from home. This gave my mentor and me the chance to chat in low whispers. She complained that the principal of the Academy was going to double the number of students in this class over the next few days, based on new standardized test results. She had begged him to wait until January, because the group was already in the middle of THE LORD OF THE FLIES and she didn't even have enough books for that many kids - but he had apparently decided to go through with it in spite of her objections.

Once the silent reading was done, they spent the rest of the period reading aloud from LORD OF THE FLIES, with most of the students taking roles (including the biggest role, that of narrator). I was a bit worried when I heard them read, because I literally did not understand a lot of what they were saying - I haven't encountered pronunciation like this in more than 20 years. The teacher never stopped the reading to ask questions or make comments. A few of the students followed along with their heads on their deskchairs turned to the side to look at the paperback books resting on the edges, the picture of literacy drudgery.

I remembered my own high school study of this novel in 1977. My teacher broke us up into small groups to discuss a bunch of questions he had on a list. One of them was: "Why is this book called LORD OF THE FLIES?" We tossed that one around for a few minutes, and then finally one of my co-future English majors opined wryly, "Because flies are attracted to shit and this book is a lordly pile of it."

No one would use language like that in this school building, but I bet the sentiment would have been cheered by most of the students in the room.