Forwarded by request.
mike
>From: Sheri & Doug [SMTP:spoogy@sirius.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2000 2:16 AM
To: 'xmca@weber.ucsd.edu'
Subject: re: teaching in brooklyn
Dear Rachel:
I would like to echo Pete's comments regarding taking nothing the kids say
or do as personal to you, and to come prepared with your own activities and
lesson plans. I just finished a 2-year stint as a substitute teacher in
Pete's district, the Oakland (CA) Unified School District, which I assume
has a similar socioeconomic background to Brooklyn. I was not a
"stip-sub," but the day-to-day variety--though you'll find you have schools
whose staff and whose small courtesies will incline you to frequent them.
I have taught classes from Kindergarten to High School, and I come away
with a great deal of respect for those teachers who are able to overcome
the difficulties of the environment and persevere. But substituting is
even harder, as every day you start over again. Students will not know
you, but they will know that you will not be giving them their grade. I
want to pass on a few ideas of how to overcome the really awful classes.
It is easy to feel that you are a failure after a few bad classes, and I
have seen some substitutes change their career plans after a couple of bad
days. Keep in mind that it is not you but the situation in which you find
yourself that is the primary difficulty.
As a substitute, your hands are tied. You are an authority figure to
children who feel disempowered by authority, and as you do not know them
and have not earned their respect, they will disrupt class to empower
themselves. Think of the movie "Cool Hand Luke," and you have a fair
approximation of what a lot of students think of class--and with some
reason. Given large classes and the little help avaliable for students
working below grade level (and this may be over half your class, whatever
the resource specialist list says), their experience of school is often
that the work they do is hard and pointless, and that you are a tyrant
waiting to send them to the office for punishment if they step out of line.
Except you aren't boss; you're a fraud. The students who feel most
helpless or angry will surely challenge you, as they will be certain that
there will be no consequences because you won't know their names. Expect
that. Come up with strategies for matching names with faces, and you will
find classes quiet down considerably. Escaping your role as jailer is more
difficult.
Beyond simple discipline, your job is to sell your lesson as something that
will be more empowering than the temporary satisfaction of defying you. If
you don't lose your cool in the face of defiant students and instead
continue to sell your lesson to the class, you will begin to earn some of
the respect you need to be heard. I preferred middle and high school
classes (though they were more disruptive) because you could appeal to the
students' real need to see what value education was going to be outside of
school. Remember, they do not know; many of them have no idea what it
takes to get a good job, or what opportunities they could have in the
future if they worked at it.
You can't count on a support network in their lives that supports
education. Some will have parents who don't value education. Others will
have parents who are overworked, tired, and/or not around, and their values
come from the street. Some will have parents who are angry at you because
you're the expert and you're failing them. Others will be angry at their
kids because they're failing them, and you'll be caught up in a whole
network of things that you won't understand. More than a few kids I've run
into have been receiving inadequate assistance--from lack of staff and
funding rather than malevolence--that will put you in the position of (for
example) trying to teach a child with a first-grade reading level in a
seventh-grade class. Roll with it. Find out who helps them with their
work (someone always does) and make your lesson-plan fit with that.
Again, keep in mind that to the kids you are making them do meaningless
work, and try to connect it to their world--to things they care about, if
you can. Make things topical, and draw from the news. School seems
abstract and irrelevant to a lot of kids. I talked a lot about the value
of writing skills in getting jobs. I used East Timor as an object example
of the importance of government of the people and the relevance of our
constitutional history. Connect what you're teaching to their lives and
their world, to their future and their dreams. Make it real and make it
matter, and you can begin to win their attention.
The kids who disrupt things don't think school matters, or that you care
about anything but your daily pay. You need to prove to them that it does
and you do. If things were really bad, I would talk about how much money
was being spent on each one of them each day in class, and how much over
the course of the year. "Do you really want to just throw away all that
money," I would ask them. When kids would say, as they would at times,
"you're just here for the money," I would tell them how much more I could
be making doing something else, and tell them what teaching meant to me. I
would be honest with them about how sad it made me not to be able to teach,
and about how hard things would be for them if they didn't take the skills
and knowledge the school was there to give them. I would talk about jobs I
have had, and how what I knew helped me to succeed. Be honest, and don't
worry about your authority. Just get a class quiet enough to be heard, and
you can earn that authority by virtue of your knowing things about the
world that they want to know.
If you are failing, keep plugging, and even in the worst classes you will
find sometimes what I thought of as the "embarrassed class" syndrome: Kids
who listened to you even as other kids continued to be disruptive, and who
were extra-polite in turning in work and saying goodbye. A kid who is
disruptive often can't even articulate their own feelings to themselves,
let alone to you. Serve as a model for self-discipline, and talk about
your feelings, and you will be surprised sometimes at their surprise, and
even interest. Be willing to be vulnerable in ways that they wouldn't dare
with each other, and you will sometimes be more interesting than being
disrupting is to them. If a kid tells you history isn't important for them
because they are going to be stars in the NBA, talk about sports history,
and about the history of sports in our society. If you can't get kids to
write an assignment, give writing assignments in which you have kids write
down their feelings about you, if they are angry, or about when they felt
sad or happy. Your job is not to force them to do a lesson plan or to
babysit them, but to try to engage them in the world of knowledge. Be
prepared to improvise if necessary.
If you have time--a month in one class, say--then you can begin to stick to
plans. Talk to the parents of kids who persist in being disruptive, if
your school allows it. Make them part of your team. Too often parents are
made to feel that the school is a place of expertise where the parent is
not wanted. Encourage them to visit your class, if they have time. Sell
what you're doing to the parent, and they will help to sell the kid on why
class is important. Give parents permission to be an expert on life who
can echo your messages to their kids, and the effect of what you say
increases.
This is already too long, and I've barely started. But one final thing:
Be kind to yourself. You will have days where you will lose your cool.
You will have days where you will feel that almost anyone would be better
at this than you. It's not true. Don't be crushed by the bad days, and
you will have days where you feel that even though you have only seen a kid
one day, you have made a difference.
Doug Williams
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