Friday was a half day to allow teachers some time to get grading done before "deficiencies" are sent home. "Deficiencies" are notices sent home to the parents of children who are failing. Most of the students who are currently failing our class are failing because they haven't handed something in.
Anyways, I don't want to talk about failure today--or why those kids aren't handing things in. I want to talk about unstructured time. Because the classes were so short on Friday, Laura had them come in, sit down and read quietly (a new routine to create some semblance of order at the beginning of class), and then take a short quiz on the parts of speech. When they were done with the quiz, they were allowed to read or quietly.
Our fourth period class finished the quiz pretty quickly (I have nothing to say right about her giving the same exact quiz to our sixth and seventh graders), so there were almost fifteen minutes of unstructured time at the end of the period. We had no plan. And for some reason Laura didn't launch into one of the many little get-to-know-you games she keeps on hand for exactly this purpose (I think mostly because she was desperately entering data into her computer about missing work that our students handed in today, the last day before dread Deficiency-Day).
And so I had time, almost 15 full minutes, to just hang out with the kids. I talked to Stephen about Ender's Game, which he had just finished; he was particularly interested in how the teachers in the book manipulated the children at the end. I asked him if he was planning to read the other books in the series, and he said, with a curious look on his face: "There are other books?"
"I think so," I said. "You should check it out."
"Can I go down to the library?" He asked. I nodded, and the child ran off in search of a book.
I spent some time talking with Maggie about Marine Biology. Maggie is obsessed with dolphins and sea turtles; her notebooks are covered with elaborate drawings of dolphins and sea-turtles. While technically "doodles", these drawings are part comic books panels and part anatomical sketches. She says she wants to be an oceanographer. I smile: "That sounds like a great idea. You could hang out with the turtles."
I spent about five minutes at a table with Erin, Guadalupe, Javier and Alejo, a group of Latino kids who love to talk about Mexico. Javier says he has "been all over Mexico". When I ask him, "where?", he says: "I don't know. I was just a kid. But my dad used to take me all over the place with him." Alejo, who hasn't said much of anything all year, chimes in: "My father took me to visit my grandparents in Guadalajara." Guadalupe, who is known simply as "Loop", boasts that if you travel anywhere in Mexico you will find her. Her friends looks a little confused, as do I, for that matter. She explains: "there's like a thousand churches and towns named after me. I'm very popular down there." She smiles, a kind of sideways, playful smile. The kids around her chuckle. The conversation goes on; for a while they forget--and I forget--that the clock is ticking, that they are almost free.
When they are gone, and I'm on my way to car, it dawns on me that I haven't had the chance to have interactions like these with the kids since class picture day. I left school knowing a few of those kids a little bit better--and they left knowing that I knew them a little bit better, and, more than that, they knew that I was interested in their lives in ways deeper than whether or not they could identify a noun in a sentence (most them can; a few of them can't).
They all have stories. We have to make the time--and, perhaps, let go of some control of time--to seek them out.
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