A Great Assignment

I spent the first day today on a three-day assignment where I had an excellent time and where I know I am going to have two more excellent days.  The job was at a middle school and I was substituting for a science teacher.

Just about everything concerning this job was excellent.  The regular teacher had written out a clean explanation of the times and classes when I would be working with students -- always a great start.

I have substituted for a few classes where I walked into the classroom and found no lesson plan and no obvious work to be done.  In cases like that, I have had to wing it and do a song and a dance about whatever subject the class concerned, and/or I have asked the students to spend their time reviewing work for the class and doing homework for other classes.  Compared to that sort of situation, today's classes were wonderful.

The schedule involved other teachers bringing their classes to my room, where I took over the students and gave them pages of work to do and then turn in by the end of the hour.  Some of them had difficulty understanding some of the reading on the sheets, so I was able to move among the class to those who had raised their hands for help, and give some assistance.

Before the day started, when I signed in at the main office, I had the foresight to ask for the number I should call in case I needed security.  It turned out that I didn't need it.  The students were fairly well behaved.

I also went to two classrooms on either side of mine and introduced myself.  I asked what measures they recommended for taking care of troublesome kids.  Both teachers told me that I had three good recourses.  First, I could send one or more students to their own classes.  Since kids are much quieter and better behaved with a teacher they know to be a "regular teacher" instead of a substitute, these two teachers didn't mind.   Second, I was given a name of a staff member who seems to be in charge of discipline and told that I could send a kid to him anytime, and have one of the other kids accompany the malefactor to make sure he got to this gentleman.  And third, I was told not to hesitate to send a student to the principal's office.

With these three behavioral tools, I was armed and ready for whatever might happen.  It was quite a contrast compared to a few schools I've worked in recently where almost no sanctions for misbehavior are provided, and where, having denied a substitute the tools he or she needs for classroom management, they then blame the substitute if the class does not behave.

The kids were third and fourth graders.  Don't assume that the little, younger students cannot be difficult.  When they are badly behaved, they all tend to run around in the classroom at the same time, and it is almost impossible to get them seated and doing productive work.

One of the great aspects of today's work that made me happy was that I was not confronted with what I have elsewhere called "the Black princess complex."  Many Black young ladies seem to start behaving as though they are "princesses" and deserve no discipline when they are in the firth or sixth grade.  This may sound like a racist remark, but any substitute in my school system would immediately recognize what is meant by "the Black princess Complex" if you simply named it to them.  We've all experienced it, and it is one of the most maddening things to deal with a student who shows no respect and who has "an attitude."But today's classes had no "princesses" in them.  The kids were not yet old enough.

One lf the teachers bringing a class to my room in the afternoon stopped me as I would leaving for the staff lunchroom.  She told me that her class, which was coming after lunch, had several problem kids, and I should not hesitate to send them to another classroom or to the principal.  One of them, a student larger than the others, was aggressive and got into fights.  Three of the students, she warned me, seemed to have weak bladder control, and if they asked to go to the bathroom they should be sent there immediately.

The student who often fought showed up in the classroom about fifteen minutes before lunchtime was over and asked if he could help.  I gave him the job of passing out worksheets to every place in the class so the kids would have them as soon as they arrived.  I also asked him to be a scorekeeper for me.  I set up a big chart on the whiteboard, one side designated with a big + and the other side with a big -.  I told him I would instruct him which names belonged on the chart, the plus being for the names of students who worked and the minus for the names of students who just fooled around.

A number of teachers in various schools I have subbed in have had a system where they award red tickets such as what one might get at the movies, and which the students can use eventually, when they've amassed enough, to "buy" prizes.  I announced that students would get tickets at the end of the class for completing their work.  And five minutes before the period ended, I asked for all the students' worksheets, quickly scanned them, and awarded tickets to kids who had completed answering the all the questions on the worksheets.

The pugnacious kid didn't get into any fights, and simply felt important.  And most important, although the students were a little noisy at times, about 95% did all their work and were awarded tickets.

I would be the first to admit that my classroom management skills are not first-rate.  But with the help of other teachers and with the sanctions that were in place and ready to be used, today went so well I am looking forward to tomorrow.

All Things Are Connected

"Special education" encompasses many types of students, ranging from those you might never guess are any different from "normal" (whatever that means) to those who are almost non-functional and need another human being taking care of them constantly.  While I was actively teaching almost every day at a local high school, the teacher of a class of high functioning special education students in the 11th grade decided one day to walk out.  She had had enough, and simply quit.  And as she left, she took with her almost everything she had placed on the walls as instructional aids and decoration.

I was asked if I wanted to take over the class.  I was eager to have a long-term assignment.  Never knowing what sort of class one is going to be working with every day involves a certain amount of stress.   Twenty days (at five days a week a full month) in a given school year was supposed to be the legal limit for a substitute teacher to teach any group of special education students.  I accepted the assignment eagerly.

At that point I was walking on crutches, waiting for a hip replacement operation that was still several months away.  After I accepted the assignment, I discovered I had gotten myself into an interesting situation.  For five periods a day, the class population consisted of shifting portions of the same group of about 12 students.  One period there were six students who worked on math.  Each one had different skills, so each one had to have lessons and worksheets and explanations geared specifically to him or her.  But most challenging was the fact that for at least one period a day I had all twelve gathered in the class together, and there had been no textbook they'd been working from.  For this class, I asked the assistant principal who'd given me the assignment what I should be teaching, what book I should use, where my materials were to come from.  I got got three words of guidance:  "Teach 'em science," she told me.  And that was that.

I accepted the assignment at the end of a Friday.  The teaching was to start on Monday.  I had the weekend to get organized, to decide just what it was I was going to teach and how I was going to do it.

In this case one of my greatest weaknesses became a strength: my interest in almost everything.  And I suppose that what many consider to be a failing of old age (I was in my early seventies) also helped.  I was (and still am) a talky old man.  

As an aside, I might add that the reason old folks are so talky is that they have far more hooks upon which to hang experiences on, more ways to relate to experiences, than students.  To a student, an old song may be just an old song.  To someone much older, a song may stir up many associations:  it may have been heard outside an outdoor cafe late at night while bicycling through Southern France just outside some ancient Roman ruins that have been there for two thousand years.  And that, itself, may summon up the wonder of history and the Roman Empire.

It also helped me during this assignment that I have an excellent education.  With my high school diploma from Phillips Exeter Academy (then and now considered to be one of the best secondary schools in America), a B.A. from Dartmouth College, graduate school in English from the University of California at Berkeley, and further graduate school (in writing) at what was then called San Francisco State College, I knew what good teaching was.  And having been in about 18 different countries, lived in three, and speaking three languages fluently and a smattering of a few others, I had had a wide range of experience.  I am not tooting my own horn here, but I am trying to indicate that in watching the videos and explaining them deeply, I had considerable background to draw upon.  

I've often found that coincidence shapes my actions.  In this case I had been watching a fascinating series of videos called "Walking with Dinosaurs."  In a half dozen or more episodes, filmmakers and scientists had created life stories about dinosaur species that had lived millions of years ago.  The depictions were the most realistic I had ever seen.  You would have thought the episodes had been made with the help of a time machine and that real dinosaurs had actually been filmed. 

Is there anyone who doesn't have as fascination with dinosaurs ?  Perhaps a few adults who have become so jaded they're no longer interested in just how strange and wonderful and magnificent these creatures must have been.  If this fascination is something that can be outgrown, then in my early seventies I must still not have outgrown my childhood.  

I'd like to claim that my way of using my dinosaur videos was fully developed from my first day using it.  It wasn't.  But my sense of wonder was.  And in the first few days I worked o\ut a method through which I could communicate my own sense of wonder as well as a great deal about science.  By mid-week I had given each student a notebook which they were to write in during this science class.  The night before each class, I reviewed a section of the video and made notes.  Part of my notes included a list of words -- vocabulary -- to try to teach.  And more of my own jottings contained ideas that flowed from what the students were seeing.

This was not to be the sort of lazy, do-nothing video fest I have seen a few teachers in our system use to duck out of serious academic work.  The videos in this case were to be used to accomplish two things:  1) To stimulate the students' interest; and 2) To introduce serious scientific concepts that could be explained and that they could learn about.  The dinosaurs were bait, excuses to bring up serious subjects every educated adult should know.

We saw different species of dinosaurs.  What is a species ?  What makes one different from another ?  Who was Darwin ?  What idea did he have that shook the world ?  Who was Wallace.  Did species evolve in one place that broke into pieces (Africa and South America) ?  Or were species transported by accident from one place to another and evolved into different species.  What is a carnivore ?  What is an herbivore ?   Look at the map.  What was Pangea ?   What is a fossil (Look, here's one I brought from home) ?  What is DNA ?  How much do we share with chimpanzees ?  How do we know the continents were once together.  What are volcanic, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks ?  What are minerals ?   What are elements ?  What states can a substance be in ?  How are solids, liquids and gases different ?  And so forth, for twenty days.  What is evolution ?  How does it work ?  

And somewhere in there, the most basic question of all, which comes up in discussion over and over and over:  How do we know what we think we know.

This kind of teaching excited me, and I think that most of the time it excited most of the students.  "Write this down," I would say, referring to the subjects and definitions I had put on the board before they viewed another section of the video.

These were special education students.  I had no idea how much the terms and definitions and all the material I was throwing at them and that they were copying into their notebooks would stick.  But at least they were being exposed to it.

During all this, my hip was deteriorating.  My pain was so acute I took a Darvon each day before I went to school.  At the beginning of this month-long assignment, I had had to use a cane to move around in class.  After two weeks, I used crutches.  The last few days I came into the room and sat in an office chair on wheels. I moved around that way, looking at what students were writing.   At that point, when I drove into the school parking lot and parked my car, a student or another teacher would often ask if they could carry my bag while I went to the office and signed in.  I must have looked terrible.

In class I used the Socratic method.  What is "extinct" mean, I would ask one student.  Name some animals that are now extinct, I said to another.  How do we know there were dinosaurs ? I asked still another.   "How do we know what we think we know ?"

On the last day of the last week of my assignment, one of the students came to me and asked, "We saw all these different kinds of dinosaurs.  Where did humans come from ?"

And then I knew I had succeeded.  They wanted to know.

My month-long term of teaching the class drew to an end.  Still no teacher specializing in teaching special education was on the horizon.  On my final day of the month with these students I was informed that since no special education teacher had yet been found, did I want to continue to teach the same students for another month.  Somehow they had gotten around the legal restrictions and I could continue teaching the same students during the coming week. 

I was enjoying the class so much that I didn't hesitate.  "Yes," I said.  "I would love it."

That weekend my hip became worse and worse.  I live on a hill, with thirty steps from my house up to the street where I park my car.  My wife was bed-ridden, and I cooked meals and fed her and took care of her.  On Monday, when I started off to work I found that despite the Darvon, I could not get up the steps to my car without crawling.

I called the school and explained that I was no longer physically able to get to school.  My hip operation was still a month or two away.  The woman I was speaking with over the phone, whom I knew very well and who may have been responsible for my originally getting the assignment, told me she understood.  They would find someone to fill in.  My job then was to get better as quickly as possible.

I put the phone down and cried.