Hallie and Heartbreak

A significant portion of my afternoon was spent searching for Hallie--or, rather, trying to figure out why she wasn't in our 5th period class. 

Hallie was brought to my attention this morning when the SPED teacher (special ed, for you acronominally challenged readers) stopped by to ask how she was doing and to tell us a little bit about her.  She suffers from an anxiety disorder which plays out in all sorts of interesting ways for her at school.  She has "behavior goals" associated with her tendency to pull our her hair and also for her extreme chattiness in class.  I had noticed the latter, but not the former.  I asked the SPED teacher what I should do should I notice the hair pulling, and she said that she wasn't sure, but that she'd get back to me.

I went about the rest of my teaching day, sort of anticipating seeing Hallie with this new lens, but when fifth period rolled around she wasn't there.  5th period was a kind of disaster (see below).  So when school finished up and I did some logistics with a few papers (and by "logistics" I mean entering in grades and by "a few" I mean around 120), I went down to the office to ascertain where, in fact, Hallie had been during our fifth period class.

I spoke with the following people in my search: the registrar, the guidance counselor, Hallie's sixth period science teacher, the front office manager, and, finally, the assistant principal.  No one knew where she had been.  I pieced together the following: that she had spent an unknown period of time in the main office sometime before lunch; that she had not signed out to leave school; that her schedule had recently changed (assistant principal: "She's probably confused"); that she had attended sixth period (sixth period teacher: "I'm sure she skipped your class.  She's already said some things about what the older kids say.  I'm sure she heard an older kid say that you can skip class by hiding out in the bathroom.  I bet that's where she was."); and that there wasn't a coherent system for tracking children (assistant principal: "Thanks for following up on this.  If you all don't tell us, then we never know where the children are").

I look forward to hearing from Hallie tomorrow about where she was today.

Fifth period broke my heart today.  There were quite a few logistical things to go over (or, rather, we decided that we must go over more logistics), and Laura likes an orderly class environment.  The kids came in less than orderly.  Many were down right distractible and visibly exhausted, having just endured four 55 minutes classes with a mere 30 minute break for lunch.  And then they were made to endure a barrage of instructions: take out your planner, copy down the instructions from the board, put away your planner, get out the HW, hand forward the HW, get out a piece of paper and a pen, put away your binder, summarize each paragraph of this assignment.  The assignment rigamarole took 15 or 20 minutes in periods 1-4.  It took almost 50 minutes in period 5, mostly becuase the kids were bored, and a group of boys weren't shy about expressing their boredom and distaste for the assignment--and the class.  And Laura got into a power struggle with about five boys, and, at least from my observer's point of view, she managed to "win" the power struggle by shutting the kids down, but that victory came with a high price: we lost a lot of time and we basically never got to the fun, play with words and sentences exercise that had gone pretty well with our other classes.

So much of the time was spent demanding (and not really getting) the compliance of a group of pissed of boys, who, in this writer's humble opinion, had every reason to be pissed and disengaged, since they were basically being told how to fill out forms and to complete an assignment that most of them already knew how to do and didn't care much for.  If I had been those boys, I would have been pissed off to.

What breaks my heart about the way it all went down was that I can see the course the ship is on, and it's heading for the rocks.  The boys Laura went to war with mock her when she turns her back on them, and I see this gap growing and widening between them.  And we've only had three class meetings.  In three class meetings those boys have learned that what she wants is their obedience and their compliance, and that what matters is what she wants them to do.

I suggested to Laura that we switch things up with period 5, that we do the fun, engaging stuff at the beginning of class and leave any logistics we might need to deal with for the end of class.  Worst case scenario, we lose some logistics in favor of giving the kids an opportunity to do something that is fun and engaging and interesting--and that is, frankly, more about their learning than the forms and the logs and the homework.