Wednesday, May 28, 2008

#7: Journal Notes on Subbing Assignment for 19 November 2007

This 8th grade English Language Arts assignment was for a different school but in the same city as my very first assignment on October 30, 2007. The regular teacher and some of her colleagues were visiting grocery stores that day to solicit turkeys and hams for Thanksgiving baskets for local families. This was an annual event and the teachers enjoyed being part of it (the school was primarily African-American; she was white -- and like many teachers of both races there, deeply committed to her work with these children and their families). From time to time, they would be bringing the food back to a central collection point in the school. This meant that the regular teacher would be dropping in and out of her classroom, so we had a chance to talk beforehand as well as to connect throughout the day. I liked her -- she was young, brisk, down to earth, no-nonsense.

Her large classroom was pleasant and airy. Well chosen "Sayings" were posted on the walls and there were lots of books arranged in tall shelves, especially at the back of the room. She showed me around the room and explained where the textbooks were. I was to put them out on each desk before class and return them at the end of the day. I wondered how students did their homework if they couldn't take their books home. I have since learned that many schools now keep textbooks as their own property. Assignments, if any, are worksheets xeroxed from the books. I thought of the boxes of books I have from my own school days -- books I still treasure for the memories they evoke. That's been lost to these kids.

An unfortunate side effect is that the kids take no pride in such "communal property" -- they doodle in the books, scribble four-letter words in them, break their spines, drop them on the floor, and kick them under their desks. The books are actually handsomely produced -- huge, quite heavy (my arms ache from holding them), well-illustrated, and printed on expensive, heavyweight, glossy paper. Each one represents a considerable investment. Yet in school after school, I see them being trashed -- it doesn't matter which course -- science, English, geography -- you name it. Frankly, I think that if publishers made books smaller, lighter (and thus easier to carry in a backpack), and costing a mere fraction of what they do now, kids, schools, and books would all be better off. Students deserve to have their own personal, affordable textbooks. Great production values are praiseworthy, but not if no one's appreciating them. Publishers of expensive, overly elaborate, too-heavy books are out of touch with today's realities.

Besides major items like books, I'm also attentive to the "little things" in a classroom. Most classrooms have a box or two of kleenex around (it's always flu season in Michigan) and usually an antibacterial liquid or gel dispenser. Here, there was no anti-biotic and only a roll of rough toilet paper on the teacher's desk. Her chair was a plain orange plastic one -- no wheels, no swivel, no padded seat, nothing. I didn't mind (I usually don't sit much when I sub) but I knew I was in a school that was poorly funded -- and in a blighted area that deserves so much better.

Usually, I have found that teachers either teach several subjects or else different age groups, which means there is variety in assignments throughout the day. Here, each class was identical (except for the last class, where students were to read silently with no input from me). The day's theme was friendship. Students were to begin by reading a Robert Frost poem aloud. Then they were to continue reading aloud from an excerpt from Maya Angelou's *Caged Bird* about the friendship between a child and an older woman who understood how gifted the child was. Finally, they were to write down answers to five questions based on the readings.

The Robert Frost poem was the first hurdle. It involves a farmer hoeing his field when he hears a neighbor ride by on a horse. The neighbor slows down to talk and the farmer, although he has tons of work to do, willingly sets down his hoe and crosses the field to chat with his friend. Neither man has any regrets about his choice.

Well, "hoe" means one thing to me but quite another thing to today's black youngsters. It's not as if I hadn't seen this coming. A few breaths before the boy who was reading came to the fated word, my inner alarm bells went off. I hoped the mood Frost had created would carry us through but knew there might be trouble. And there was. The room erupted in bedlam, everyone giggling and getting rowdy. It took time to get them settled again.

Eventually, once they calmed down, I was able to tell them a little about Maya Angelou, a woman I greatly admire. Then I turned to the next student and asked him to begin reading. He sat at his desk, hunched over, and read in a barely audible voice. I stopped him -- "No, you need to stand up, honey, and speak loudly. We need to hear you."

He lurched uncomfortably to his feet but his voice was as soft as before. There was no expression, nothing. I stopped him again and briefly demonstrated what I was looking for. It did no good. So I let him finish and turned to the next student.

It was excruciating, both for them and for me. I found the lack of expression most disturbing because it indicated they were only reading words, not thoughts. A few knew how to read with at least a hint of feeling but most read like automatons. Their only desire was to get it over with so they could sit down again. Some refused to stand at all. They sat where they were, mumbling the words while their classmates acted up around them, making so much noise that the reader couldn't have been heard anyway.

And these were 8th graders. I have heard poor readers before but nothing like this. What's going to happen to these kids, I kept wondering to myself.

[Note: for more data on this issue, see below for a May 12, 2008 report from ScienceDaily as well as Hope Clark's February 2008 essay on the crucial importance of reading to children.]

The next class was even worse. I had to shout so much during that hour that the pressure in my head caused a nosebleed! That's never happened before! I went off to one side, fumbled for my kleenex, and desperately fought to stem the flow. Somehow I managed and no one noticed, but I was quite worried because my body had never before reacted to the stress of subbing like that.

By the 4th hour, I was reading them the Frost poem myself and there wasn't a single titter. On my lips, apparently, the word triggered nothing unusual. The youngsters were quieter that hour too, which was a great relief, but by the time they returned for 6th hour (for silent reading), they had turned into demons. One of the boys even regaled the others with a brief rap about me -- it's a good thing I didn't understand the lingo because, from the boys' nervous laughter (and complaints addressed to them from some of the girls, who objected to the rap's content), I don't think the words referring to me were very "nice." By then, honestly, I no longer cared.

I kept walking around the room during that 6th hour, trying to keep everyone focused on their silent reading. One boy called to me, "Miss, can you help me with a foreign word?" I went to him and asked what the word was. "I don't know how to say it," he said. "Something like la-ki-shorah." I asked him to write it down and he did, forming the letters carefully.

"Lakeshore," I said. "You've written 'Lakeshore.'" The boy and the males around him broke into loud, guilty laughter. "It's just lakeshore," I said, bewildered. Had they never heard the term before? How could I best define something so obvious? "It's a beach along a lake, a lakeshore -- you know, where people build cottages, have picnics, or go for a walk along Lake Michigan. What on earth is so darn funny about that? Drive fifteen minutes from here and you'll see *miles* of lakeshore!"

The boys were laughing even louder. Several girls turned around and glared at them. Then one of the girls looked at me and I think she was as irritated with me as with the boys. "Miss," she said tersely, "it's a gang name." She turned back and faced the front of the room. That took me aback. I briefly chewed out those hopelessly childish males. "Grow up," I concluded scornfully, and walked away. (I later mentioned the "Lakeshore Incident" to their teacher, along with Frost's "hoe." She was startled and said she'd make sure such things never happened again.)

When their teacher came in from time to time, the room would grow quiet. She would scold them for all the noise they had been making before they saw her, but within moments of her departure, the room would be as unruly as before. I chalked it up to my own introverted personality and inexperience with this age group, but I've since been told by many regular teachers that it has nothing to do with that -- it's just how they treat subs.

Many of these schools have so many other serious problems that they simply don't have the energy to teach students how to behave around subs. Of course, subs could always send students to detention, but I have only done that two or three times over the past seven months and only when I was really at my wits' end. I don't see that detention helps kids. OK, so they eventually get expelled for a day or two, maybe even a week -- but how does that help? They need to be IN school, learning, not pissing away their educational opportunities. How does detention solve anything? It makes no sense to me.

There have to be better answers and many of them need to start with parents who, unfortunately, often have little or no parenting skills. Why then did they have children if they were unwilling or unable to commit themselves to a very difficult, often tedious, exasperating, maddening task? I find that hard to understand.

I, for example, knew by the time I was twenty that I would have very poor parenting skills to offer a child. I'm not patient enough. I'm an introvert. I need a lot of space and time for myself. I need quiet and a relatively germ-free environment since I catch colds easily and just as easily sink into melodramatic misery. I become a Greta Garbo: "I vant to be alone!" Children tend not to understand parameters like that until they're at least fifty. Since I could never wait that long, my offspring would be constantly pushing my buttons and we would all become nervous wrecks. Or worse.

From what I have observed, a great many human beings are exactly like me. We simply do not make good parents. We are on this planet for other reasons. We should therefore NOT take the kind of chances that might wind up making us parents. Period. I knew that early on. This is proven by the fact that despite all my extraordinary precautions, the few times in my 20's when I thought I was pregnant felt like a genuine death sentence. Fortunately, either I wasn't pregnant or else extreme stress caused an early miscarriage. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't still be here today.

After all this, it might surprise readers to know that I'm actually quite good with kids because it's easy for me to morph into one of them (subs, of course, aren't paid to do that, so I have to shoe-horn myself into various expected adult roles). They and I both do "magical thinking." I love dragons, for example. So do they. Yet I still need my space. I'd probably be a wonderful aunt, but my three younger siblings, for their own reasons, never had children. Our line dies with us, which is fine with me -- and, presumably, with them. By now, I think most humans know deep down that there are too many of us on this planet. We are exhausting Mother Earth. We have been far too reckless with our seed. We need to be wiser, for the sake of all.

Thus, what I find difficult to grasp is why others exactly like me wind up having so many kids. I cannot fathom why they would let themselves -- to say nothing of their poor kids -- in for such a lengthy, painful karmic mess. The most disheartening thing I have heard from a regular teacher in the past seven months came from a woman on one of my return visits this spring to the school near the nuclear reactor (see #4: Notes for November 9, 2007). She said that several of her senior girls had recently told her that they intended to be pregnant before Graduation Day. "Why?" I asked her, deeply shocked. She replied tiredly that getting Welfare was how they planned to support themselves after they left school.

I could only groan. Twelve years of public school education and nothing -- nothing! -- has inspired them to dream anything bigger than that?! Their parents and our wretched test-driven educational system have tragically failed these young women and the men who'll father their babies. Our leaders have squandered our wealth on a "war of choice" and left too many of our young with empty futures. This isn't education. It's madness.

To judge by what I experienced during that November 19, 2007 assignment, most parents today can't be bothered to read to their kids. If any pregnant teenagers are reading this, at the barest minimum, people, READ to your kids. Discuss meanings and implications with them. Try to nourish bigger dreams for them than were nourished for you -- and perhaps discover more of your own along the way. Stint on other things if you simply can't cope, but at least READ to them. Otherwise, they're doomed and, trust me, they'll haunt you down through the ages and you'll have major regrets. It's not worth it.

Anyway, back to that day's 8th graders: for my own sanity, I tried simply to enjoy them. One on one, they're very engaging, creative, funny kids (I did have trouble understanding the black dialect but black teachers have told me they have the same problem). Enjoying them was no help, however -- they just got worse. So I resorted to being very stern, which did help, but only a little, and at too high a price. Truly, it's exhausting to act so stern. I'm not Sister Euphemia, a 6' tall, stern Dominican nun who taught highschool Latin when I was a student in the mid-late 50's. For each hour I have to act stern, I think my face winds up with another five years worth of wrinkles and my heart just wants to give up. Subs aren't paid much above minimum wage -- less when you factor in gas prices to get to a school and back. It's not worth it.

Over all, it was a terrible day. Dragging myself through the same dull assignment, hour after hour, made me think the day would never end. I felt trapped in a time-loop. The closecall with the nosebleed also continued to nag at me -- my body could hardly have given me a clearer signal. She did not like being in that place at all.

I finally wrote in my notes:
Do NOT come here for 8th grade again. Very out of control.

Months later, in the spring of 2008, I relented, curious to know if it would be easier now that I have had more experience with a wider number of schools. To change the dynamic, I even envisioned rearranging the classroom from standard-desks-in-rows to desks in a large circle. I thought that might work really well and I was eager to see if I was right. So at the beginning of May, I signed up for a 2-day assignment for the same teacher but, oddly, had to cancel it due to unexpected out-of-town company. A few weeks later, I accepted a one-day assignment for her, but wound up feverish with an exhausting flu, so again had to cancel. I think my body really did not wish to re-visit those 8th grade students.

For them, the school year is over now and they'll be 9th graders by autumn. That means they'll be bussed to one of an assortment of area highschools. My idea of desks in a circle and everyone clearly projecting their words as they read will have to wait for another group.

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