Tag Archives: students

“Good try, though.” :)

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Some wise guy turned around my campaign sign at the espresso stand so’s all you could see was the blank back of it. And I found myself cracking up. I could just picture it: I pictured a man with a baseball cap on his head, a cup of drip coffee in one hand and a rascally grin on his face – slyly reaching out and pulling my sign out of the dirt, giving it a stealthy 180 turn, and re-planting it. And – maybe it’s my background as a middle school teacher – but the idea of that just cracked me up.

It reminds me of my first day teaching eighth graders at Allen School: My partner, Teresa, and I both started in the B-E school district at Allen Elementary School the same year. Teresa taught science and math to the youngsters and I taught social studies and English. We were both dazzled by our students right from the start – I remember half-way through the day we both popped out of our classrooms at the same time, looked down the hall at each other, big grins on our faces, and said simultaneously, “I love these kids!”

At the end of the day we were outside the building, waving good bye to our new students as they loaded onto the buses, and we suddenly – again, both at the same time – looked at each other and said, “Where’s ____?!” We realized we were missing one of our students.

Without needing to say anything more to each other (and this is probably when I recognized my new partner and I had some special cosmic connection) we both hauled off in the same direction – towards the side of the school – rounded the corner and found our missing 8th grader in the process of lighting up a cigarette. Simultaneously, we yelled, “Busted!” He grinned at us and we grinned back. And that was the end of that. We established right from the get-go who he was dealing with that year, and we also established that we genuinely cared about him and he wasn’t invisible to us.

Finding the sign turned around this morning made me flashback to that scene at the side of the school all those years ago.

Ahem. And no – I did not leave the sign turned with its backside to the road. Good try, though. 

campaign sign

I’ll Never Forget You

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I retire from teaching this week. I’ve been clearing out my space at school and came upon some notes and messages from my days as a teacher at Allen and Edison and West View that have brought tears to my eyes – I’m getting all choked up here. I have been blessed with such wonderful students in my career – kind and courageous and dear. I want to share some of what I’ve found this week – I want my students to know that their notes and kind words and art have stayed with me and meant a lot to me. I’ll never forget you. 

 

The “Lasts”

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“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
– Dr. Seuss

This week I’ve found myself being conscious of all the “lasts” – the last time I’ll ever do an algebra problem with a student; the last time I’ll do symmetrical art with a student; the last time I’ll teach a student how to recognize when a paragraph can be split into two; the last time I’ll talk about trench warfare, and the drummer boys in the Civil War, and why civilizations start around rivers; the last time I’ll say good-bye to my students at the end of a school year…

Whoah.

Stand with the Students

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A Facebook acquaintance recently suggested that high school students are incapable of original thought, and that the students from Parkland are being fed their lines by the “corrupt media” and “corrupt teachers.”

I’m a high school teacher. I’ve been teaching for more than 20 years. I know kids. I know the wisdom they’re capable of expressing. I have witnessed, first-hand, the intelligence and original thought of high school students. I don’t know about high school students from what FOX news is telling me about high school students – I know about high school students because I work with them every day. As a high school teacher I can assure you that there are high school students who are far more articulate, informed, and well-spoken than some adults I have met. The students from Parkland did not need to be “coached” to speak – they did not need to have ideas about gun violence fed to them by the media or their teachers – they lived through a school shooting – they saw their friends shot and killed – they have far more first-hand experience with gun violence in schools than the average adult. They are the experts – and it’s time to listen to them.

I once had to spend a day sequestered in a small room with my students because of concerns about our safety. I have experienced that kind of fear, first-hand. I am talking from experience here. Not from what FOX news has told me. I once (years ago – before Columbine) had a student tell me he could bring a gun to school and kill me. I know what that kind of threat feels like. And so when someone outside of education – someone who doesn’t have to worry about how he’s going to save his students if someone with a gun should suddenly appear in the door – tells me how I should feel about it all and cavalierly tells me that teachers should be armed – that that’s going to fix this mess – I get really frustrated. I’ve come to realize that, to some people, guns matter more than the lives of students and teachers.
That hurts, man.
We need to listen to the people who are dealing with this  threat every single day – the students and teachers who are walking into schools not knowing if they’re going to be walking out at the end of the day. Don’t discount their stories. Don’t belittle them. They are the ones on the front lines now.