No Child Left Behind & My Rather Large Behind

Three weeks into school and already I feel as pressed as a dried flower squashed and forgotten in one of those classic-looking books. (You know, the ones that adorn bookshelves, not necessarily for reading pleasure, but strictly for looks?) This whole pressed and squashed thing got me thinking about the similarities between the No Child Left Behind law and my rather large behind–which, by the way, I truly would like to leave behind.

Now, I hope this will be blessedly short and sweet because progress reports loom ominously on the horizon. For you non-educators and non-Texans, that means papers have to be graded and those grades duly recorded by law at the three-week mark. At this moment in my frazzled existence, neither the jolly red grading giant nor the ruby-red rubric fairy has yet to darken my classroom door with an offer of assistance. Sigh.

But before we tackle this behind-thing, here’s a big disclaimer… This is not a political rant and I am not a political pundit. Rather, it’s an observation of similarities and coincidences…

Point #1…Let me say that I have never read the 670 page 1.8-MB file that contains the law, but trust me, I don’t need to see it to know it’s huge–just like I don’t need to dust off the bathroom scale hidden in the back of my closet to weigh in on my back side.


Point #2…Sadly, despite our most valiant efforts as teachers, realistically there is no way to save every school and every child. School administrators and politicos must have all attended the same seminar somewhere and heard the “Starfish” story, got teary-eyed and vowed to save each and every washed up urchin, thus sparking the birth of EUs (Educational Utopians). I must admit that I, too, have succumbed and spent hours tossing the creatures back in only to look up and realize that for every one returned safely another 10 washed back up. Which, in some twisted way, all oddly parallels the hours expended in my aerobics class. For every calorie I burn, I probably eat two more when I return home famished.


Point #3…Accountability is important in every facet of life. Education shouldn’t be an exception. Apparently accountability provides the cornerstone for the hundreds of pages devoted to this law. At the risk of sounding callous, don’t we need to factor in personal responsibility at some point? It’s easy to play the blame game and cry victim. I do the same thing. It’s those evil marketing ploys that make me grab the chocolate, shout supersize, gulp lattes and want more, more, more.

I swear sometimes I should just slap myself silly.

Point #4…Despite all the rumblings and grumblings, No Child Left Behind will be here awhile–as will my, ahem, wide load.

But let’s end this on a positive note, I’ve traveled frequently with kids, and never once left one behind. ;-)

So, it’s all good after all.

Unless, of course, I start beeping when I back up.

Maladjusted hamsters, face creams & rubber chickens

Call me crazy, but life needs just a tad bit more humor to it.

We spend much of our time scurrying like maladjusted hamsters in a cage–serious and intent on whatever task presents itself. I have the lines on my face to prove it, and trust me, no amount of Elizabeth Arden magic face cream at $150 a pop is ever going to fix that. Perhaps a trip to one of those fancy, schmancy nip and tuck doctors would do the trick, but hey, I’m a public school teacher, so that stands about as much of a chance of happening as stopping kids from gawking at a full-fledged brawl in the hall.

So enter the chicken. Yep, the yellow, rubber chicken.

Probably about eight years ago, I discovered (without the benefit of an educational grant or the Bill Gates foundation) that kids learn more if you humor them a bit. I wish I could say I conducted a scientific study, extrapolated this, surveyed a little bit of that, did the hokey, pokey and…

But I didn’t. (Ok, maybe the hokey, pokey once or twice, but we can always save that story for another day.) Instead, I was presenting something insightful–probably a lecture about photo composition–and needed to point at something on the screen. I grabbed the first thing handy which just happened to be a rubber chicken (a recent acquisition from a high school journalism workshop).

“No, she didn’t,” someone said from the back of the room.

I looked up. Smiles everywhere.

The next day the class remembered everything. It hit me then that throughout our lives we remember best those moments either wrapped around laughter and fun or those touched with sadness and pain.

Given the choice, shouldn’t we package those lessons–those "teachable moments" as we call them in educational jargon–in humor?

I vote humor.

***

In case you were wondering (and I know you were), in addition to being a rather excellent pointer, here are some other uses for a rubber chicken (all tried, true and tested by my students)…

•As a blinker…Ever travel with kids in rush hour traffic and no one will let the school’s humongous van into the next lane? Well, roll down that window and stick the rubber chicken out. Cars will part as if Moses himself was there. (Not sure if it’s because the other driver’s are laughing so hard, or they’re giving wide berth to that crazy driver.)

•As a scare tactic… Our rubber chicken also squawks. Give the chicken a squeeze to scare panhandlers and other undesirables away from the kids when you’re on school trips. Trust me, it works.

•As a clearance detector… If you’re spatially impaired and if driving through underground garages makes you wonder if that rental vehicle with the luggage rack will make the clearance without shaving off the top, well then, stick the rubber chicken out the sunroof or window. If the chicken whacks its head on the ceiling, you probably ought to turn around.

Climbing the Great Wall & Heads in the Freezer

Although I have never been out of the country, yesterday I sat atop the Great Wall of China and felt the exhilaration that comes from being 24 years old again.

You see, I live vicariously. While some parents live their lives through their children, I experience life through my former students. Not only do I revel in those experiences, I can honestly say I've learned more from my students than I have ever learned from any professional development session or teacher inservice.

Yesterday, I just happened to get an e-mail from one of my favorite former students, Jonathan Magee, and with it was a photograph of him sitting atop the Great Wall of China. What a thrill.

Of course, hearing from Jonathan sent me down a memory lane of former newspaper deadlines and threats of heads in the freezer, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s start with an advanced organizer (don't you love that teacher lingo?) to keep you focused on the topics at hand…

•Teachers say the darnest things
•Kids repeat the darnest things
•I am not Jeffrey Dahmer

When Jonathan was on newspaper staff, we had a particularly rough deadline. I was exasperated and teetering on the outward edges of my sanity when I shouted at the newspaper staff: “If you don’t get this paper done, I’m going to cut off your heads and put them in the freezer and you won’t like it, not one bit.”

Silence.

A few smirks.

“Well, you won’t,” I said, slightly faltering, “like it.”

“Eewww,” one girl said. “That’s just nasty.”

“I think it’s illegal,” another said.

Sleep-deprived and stress-depraved, we all laughed, but from that point on, the staff was not rated by who was in the doghouse, but rather whose head was in the freezer. We even had levels. The higher up you were on the shelf, the more trouble you were in.

Jonathan was so enamored by the entire freezer motif that he actually wanted to shoot mug shots of all staff members, make cut-outs of their heads, fashion a makeshift facsimile of the inside of a freezer and move people’s heads around according to their standing on deadline.

I should have known the freezer thing would come back to haunt me, though. The school had a tradition during football season of honoring the top five seniors in class rank before a home game. The senior selected his or her most influential teacher who then accompanied the student out to the 50-yard line. The announcer would say something nice about the student and read something that the student wrote about the teacher.

Jonathan picked me so there we stood on the 50-yard line with the superintendent of schools standing on one side and a school board member standing on the other.

Throughout the stadium, the announcer’s voice boomed: “Jonathan says that, ‘Richie pushes everyone to do their work to the best of their abilities with an odd combination of friendly coercion and blunt threats of having their head put into a freezer. However….”

My students in the stands laughed; others gasped; Jonathan giggled. After catching a nervous glance from my superintendent, I assured him that he was welcome to come and inspect the freezer in the journalism room, that I hadn’t yet lopped off any heads nor had I stashed any in the freezer.

I dreaded the day when Jonathan graduated.

You see, I had him programmed into my speed dial. Jonathan was one of only two students who I have religiously and regularly baked a cheesecake for from scratch. Really and truly from scratch—not a box in sight. Call it the barter system. I bake you a cheesecake; you fix my computer. I bake you a cheesecake; you tell me why this software program went batty. I bake you a cheesecake; you tell me how to make the printer actually print. I bake you…well, you get the picture.

Jonathan went off to college and later went to study abroad. So much for speed dial. His current e-mail places him in Hong Kong working for the International Herald Tribune and doing—as always—exceptionally well.

While I’m happy for him, there still isn’t a school year that goes by that I don’t miss something about Jonathan. Here’s a short list of things I learned from Jonathan…

•It’s important not to take yourself so seriously. Take time to laugh at yourself.
•Never say anything you wouldn’t want to have repeated on a football field.
•You should probably stay away from sentences that mention any body parts.
• It’s good to occasionally feel that edge of panic and to depend on a kid. It develops a certain sense of empathy since children depend so much on adults.

Snake oil & motivational speakers

Snake oil.

Sadly that’s what first pops into my mind as I sit through yet another motivational speaker on the Welcome Back Day for teachers. Now mind you, I have nothing against motivational speakers. In fact, this one rates pretty high on my rating scale of smiley faces–probably worth eight smileys. (He was much better than the handshaking guy I listened to a few years back, but that’s an entirely different story.)

Still, sadly the fact remains, that I can’t shake that snake oil image. I like a good yarn as much as the next person, but I tend to wonder if we don’t have a bit of the Janet Cooke’s Jimmy working here. (Remember her? The Washington Post journalist who had to return her Pulitzer Prize once it was discovered that the main character–an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy –was not a real person. It made for a great story, but that’s all it was–a story. It was a sad day for journalism and marked the beginning of a series of fourth estate betrayals.

But let’s get back to the issue here. While listening to yet another sad story about how a teacher ripped the heart out of her fifth grade student, I marveled at my own educational history. I must be some sort of anomaly because I never had a teacher tell me I was a failure at life and would never amount to anything. Did I face mean teachers? Yes. Insensitive ones? Sure. Incompetent ones? Of course. But don’t you pretty much find those types of people in all kinds of professions? That’s just life, isn’t it?

So, let’s raise our hands and ask…Where exactly are these teachers and how come every motivational speaker had a teacher who channeled the Wicked Witch of the West? And then let’s ponder how come that teacher was always followed by Glinda the Good Witch of the North who inspired them to be all they can be? (And while we’re at it, just where in the Sam Hill are those ruby slippers anyway?…Sorry, got off track.)

But you see what I mean? It’s a bad version of good cop/bad cop. In the gazillion years–ok make that 22 years of teaching–I’ve never run across a peer who face-to-face, toe-to-toe told a kid, “I don’t like you. You’ll never amount to anything.” Now that is not to say that teachers (sadly again, myself included) from time to time haven’t thought, “Geez, you’re such a big, fat stupidhead.”

But that really shouldn’t be much of a shocker either. I think those thoughts can pop into your head regardless of your profession. In fact, I often think that about other drivers while maneuvering through rush hour traffic. (I have patience issues.) But to actually have those words reverberate across my vocal chords or any of my teacher friends, well, I don’t think so. Otherwise, I might encounter a nasty bit of road rage involving Mr. Smith & Wesson in the traffic “situation.” In a classroom “situation,” I’m sure my rather large behind would be sitting in the principal’s office. And, it wouldn’t be pretty, and I’m not just talking about my backside either.

It all just makes me wonder why we listen and gasp mesmerized by these witchy teacher stories. This doesn’t mean that these incidents haven’t occurred. I’m just saying that apparently these happen disproportionately to motivational speakers. Sort of a badge of the trade, I guess. So now that I’ve reached this epiphany, I’ll have to cross that field off my “Potential Things I Could Do If I Didn’t Teach” list.

Regardless of this new insight, I still joined in the laughter and felt a few tingly sensations once or twice as I listened to our speaker. I applauded, nodded in agreement, smiled and even stood for the ovation.

Snake oil. Not a cure, but it sure feels good.

In the beginning…my first blog entry

I doubt that I would have survived these 20-plus years as a public high school teacher if each and every day I didn’t ponder, “Is this the day?” You know that day–The Day to actually set your hair on fire and run screaming from the classroom. That day.

And now that I am just about to start my third year at my still-new-to-me school district in my new facilities, the irony is not lost on me that my classroom door is just mere feet from the emergency exit to the parking lot. So, you see, I really could set my hair on fire, run out the door, hop in my trusty blue mini-van and leave in a puff of smoke. If you love that kind of twisted humor, then I think you’ll like reading this blog.

Now that school is gearing up, I’m trying to shift my focus back to the classroom and my incoming students. I must say this focusing thing seems to get a bit more difficult each year. I know I’m not the only one. Kids have problems, too. Can’t you just hear the pens scribbling across prescription pads dispensing medication to treat ADD and ADHD in an attempt to find a magic pill to focus kids back on education? While I have no quick fix solution, sometimes I believe we should remember a simpler time when all a teacher had to do to focus students was to pop a bell ringer – an instructive little ditty that required no hands-on teaching from the instructor–on the overhead. Ah, those were the days, when kids labored over the day’s journal entry, math problem or some other bell ringer, while teachers throughout the school had a small, but important block of time to take care of things from attendance to handing back papers to recording grades.

My bell ringers always provide a small window of opportunity for me to exhale or inhale (depending on whether hyperventilation was in order for the day). Bell ringers also gave me a chance to survey the classroom scene and ponder whether this was, you know, “The Day.

Educational experts (defined as anyone and everyone who has ever sat in a classroom) like to ponder, too, and whine about the problems facing our public school system. They offer a wide array of this and that, believing they have the perfect solution to the problem du jour.

But I have a secret: perhaps instead of dissecting our educational system, we should just celebrate our successes, laugh at our shortcomings and learn from our mistakes and failures. This blog, Bell Ringers, is intended to provide stories from the trenches of more than two decades of classroom experience, three school districts, eight principals, four superintendents and hundreds of children. I’d also like to hear your stories, too, because we all need to celebrate, laugh and learn together.

To get us started, here’s one of my favorites: In my old school, I had just completed my allotted 20-minute lunch block with my lunch-bunch buddies when one of them — a social studies teacher — started talking about her morning class. She was lecturing about how prices have increased over the years. She used stockings as an example, except she used the word “hose.”

“I was telling the class about how the cost of hose had risen over the years, and I didn’t understand why most of the class was giggling,” she told us, “until my student teacher told me the class thought I was saying ‘ho’s’ as in prostitutes instead of nylons.”

Unfazed, she told the class it didn’t really matter which ones she was talking about — the point being that both have increased in price through the years.

Now, there’s a teacher for you, as well as a mini-lesson plan for laughter and learning – two things we certainly could use more of. Hopefully, you will find both here, and we can all survive another day.

And, should we fail? Well, we can always set our hair on fire and run screaming from the building.