Learn Me Gooder (6 page)

I have to tell you, you read my mind, man. I would love to be able to model subtraction in the real world by subtracting a couple of kids from my class! Or let me at least send them to the doctor to treat that really nasty minus infection. As it is, I might have to settle for demonstrating subtraction by disallowing Hot Cheetos from the kids’ diets and watching their weight go down.

I say this with one notable exception, because I think I have finally struck upon some true motivation for one of my really challenging kids!

Antonio is chubby, academically low, a talker, a player, a does-not-pay-attentioner, and generally an all-around slug. On the first math test, this kid got a 25. On the second math test, he got a 17. These were not at all hard or unfair math tests, either. He just wasn’t trying at all, and it showed.

Conversely, some of my other kids HAVE been picking it up quite a bit and trying harder. I am finally starting to get through to them that paying attention and doing their work the way we practice in class really CAN help them get the right answers and better grades.

In my homeroom, nearly every single one of my kids who had scored low on the first big test dramatically improved their grades on the second one, and the kids who had done well on the first test also did well on the second. One exception to this was Suzie, who seems to feel that math and science are not nearly as important as frequent napping. She’s putting all of her chips on osmosis through her textbook/pillow, and it just hasn’t paid off yet.

In my afternoon class, which contains Antonio the slug (and several other garden-variety slimers), I haven’t seen quite the same dramatic results, but there were a few kids who improved and several who did pass both tests.

I decided to make a really big deal about this and highlight the kids who have been showing effort. At the very beginning of the year, I had gotten stacks of cards from Denny’s, Golden Corral, and Popeye’s which said, “Buy one adult meal, get one kid’s meal free.” I took the time to fill them out with the kids’ names, my name, our school name, etc, along with the phrase “Math Improvement!” if they had bettered their score the second time around, or “Awesome Math Skills!” if they had passed both tests.

I gave these cards out on Monday. Everybody in my homeroom who got one loved it. Nestor saw the picture on one card and blurted out, “I LOVE the chicken of church!!”

“Um, do you mean Church’s Chicken?” I asked.

“YEAH!” he shouted.

Somewhere around 60% of the students in my second class got a card, as there are still several kids with very poor grades. Obviously, Antonio was in the 40% who did NOT receive this reward.

This apparently struck a nerve. Or a salivary gland. On Tuesday, Antonio started paying attention. He raised his hand to answer questions – and he answered them correctly! He brought his homework on Wednesday with work shown and completed. It was like a completely different kid had inhabited Antonio’s body.

The kids took the 6-weeks cumulative assessment today, and Antonio, while not having everything correct, had work shown for every question. He had labeled his coins, he had drawn place value charts, and he had shown his addition and subtraction steps. When I graded the tests, I found that this underachieving kid – 25 on the first test, 17 on the second – had scored an 80 on the 6-weeks test. An EIGHTY!!

Maybe the planets aligned just right for him to finally get with the program. Maybe something I said about effort finally seeped through. Maybe he had all of the answers to the test written on the back of his fake eye patch.

But I have a feeling it was the idea of free food that finally jump-started his engine.

And you know what? I’m ok with that. I see nothing wrong with the old carrot and stick strategy, and if the carrot comes with a deep fried all you can eat buffet, all the better!

Somebody will most definitely be getting a Golden Corral coupon Monday afternoon.

My own fondness for fast food produced interesting ramifications today after recess. The girls in line were giggling and looking at me, so I asked what they were talking about. Tiny Anna spoke up and said, “I saw you and Mrs. Fitzgerald at Taco Bell.”

The little girls around her giggled scandalously, and Big Jack, eyes wide as platters, demanded, “REALLY? You really saw them?”

We had in fact seen Tiny Anna and her family at the nearby Taco Bell back in August, the week before school started, during one of our teacher prep days. Why she had waited an entire grading period to bring this up is beyond me. Why this would be so scintillating to the other kids is beyond me. Why Big Jack would practically wet himself over this news is beyond me. However, I feel like I’ve learned a valuable lesson from this. Please be sure to remind me, if I ever decide to attempt an affair with a married coworker, to be sure NOT to take her to the local taco joint.

That is, unless I have a valid Buy One, Get One Free card to burn.
Talk to you later,
Cyrano de Burrito

So what did Paul say when you proposed the idea of meal coupons for improved performance? (Not that I believe you really proposed it.) Were you aware that Larry has been known to use those “Buy one adult meal, get one child’s meal free” coupons? It must be very off-putting for bystanders when the cashier says, “But sir, where is your child?” and Larry replies, “This card doesn’t say I have to have a kid with me! Gimme my meals!”

I think my instinct was dead-on, by the way. When I presented Antonio with his free food card today, he lit up like a Christmas tree. You’d have thought that I had just offered him a starring role in “High School Musical 6: Get a GED Already!”

You do make a very valid point, though. If his slug side starts to return, I may very well need to offer TWO cards as an incentive next time around.

Last Thursday marked the end of the first six-weeks grading period. Friday was Fair Day – The State Fair, not “play impartially without cheating” – so there was no school. I spent my long weekend getting grades together and putting them into the computer. I’ve decided that preparing report cards would be a lot more fun if Nintendo would hurry up and develop Gradebook Hero for the Playstation or Wii.

Today is the first Monday of October, and that means a big change in how I come to work. The summer dress code is officially over. Never mind the fact that it’s still over 100 degrees outside and even inside the classroom, I feel like a microwaved poodle. The HVAC units in our classrooms seem to have been cobbled together by drunk baby pandas in the 1950s, and they are just as likely to HEAT an already hot classroom as they are to cool it.

Nevertheless, now that it’s October, I’m required to wear a tie and a button-down shirt. For me, this automatically means a long-sleeve shirt, because I just can’t bring myself to wear a short-sleeve shirt with a tie and look like I stepped out of the NASA Apollo program of the ‘60s.

Our art teacher, Mr. Vann, decided a few years ago that he didn’t like his tie hanging down into the clay/paint/whatever, so he started wearing a bow tie. This hasn’t been challenged, so I’m thinking maybe I could start wearing a bolo and get away with it.

Or I could take a page from my old high school basketball coach, whom we called “The Guam Bomb.” Every game day, our coach showed up wearing a Hawaiian shirt, a tie, sweat pants, and cowboy boots. The tie was always undone and hanging loosely by the time the game actually started.

Usually, the transition from casual to dressy goes unnoticed, or at least uncommented on, by my students. This year, though, I received several compliments.
“Nice tie!”
“You look great today!”
“I like your shirt!”
“Handsome!”
“You look like a businessman!”
“Is that 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag?”

Just so you know, I threw that last one in as an example of the kind of thing that was NOT said to me today. Everything was very positive!

While my attire was new, the kids’ level of confusion retained its status quo, as evidenced by a few things I heard today.

Mrs. Bird shared a funny story at lunch. She’s been fed up with the rote, wooden, zombie-like nature of the kids’ Pledge of Allegiance recital in the mornings, so she had them write out the Pledge on paper. In addition to a plethora of misspellings, one thing really stood out to her.

Victor had written (and I assume has been saying), “One Asian, under God...”

He must have forgotten where he lives, though he wasn’t the only one geographically confused today. On our walk out to the buses, Isabel told me that when her dad gets out of jail (!), they are going to move away from the United States. I figured she meant they were moving to Mexico, so I jokingly asked her, “Oh, so you’ll move to Japan?”

“No!” she answered.

“The moon?” I asked.

“No!”

When I asked her where they were going to move to, she replied, “To Miami.”

Isabel’s understanding of the world was less than ideal, and I suppose that could have been a carry-over from today’s math lesson. We compared numbers in class, using the symbols for greater than, less than, and equal to. My kids seemed to grasp that concept pretty well for the most part. Of course, they really sank their teeth into the whole “alligator mouth eats the greater number” mnemonic. Literally. Almost all of them drew the symbols with jagged teeth, forked tongues, and in Jessie’s case, fiery breath.

Mrs. Fitzgerald told me at lunch that one of the kids in her class looked at a problem where the two numbers were equal and declared, “The alligator don’t know which side to eat!”

Unlike that alligator, I DO know which side to eat, and I’m hungry, so I’ll let you go here. I’ve got a certain fast food card with my name on it, now all I need to do is find a kid to be my accomplice.
Talk to you later,
Ernie Quality

I will give you credit for being innovative and thinking of a creative “solution” to the shirt and tie issue. I will not be USING your solution, however. While I really like the idea of cutting a hockey score out of the newspaper – Stars 1, Avalanche 1 – and clipping it to my shirt, I don’t think my principal would view it as a valid loophole.

Hey, you know that old theoretical exercise of putting a million monkeys at a million typewriters and seeing what they randomly produce? The old adage goes that eventually they would produce Hamlet and all of Shakespeare’s other works of genius.

I’m not so sure about that, but I know what they COULD produce pretty quickly – the district Benchmark Tests!

We have to administer the Benchmark tests – or as I call them, BMs – twice every year. These things are horrible. They are poorly written, they have some super difficult questions on them, and they often don’t even cover the topics we’ve been teaching.

The only good thing about BM days is that with half the day devoted to testing, my actual teaching periods are shortened, so the kids can’t waste as much time.

The higher powers defend these tests by saying that the Benchmarks are harder than the TAKS, so the kids will do much better on the TAKS. This is like saying that running away from bulls in Pamplona is much harder than roller skating at the local Big Wheel.

This is the first set of standardized tests of the year, so it serves as TAKS practice for the kids. It also serves as practice for the teachers in monitoring random kids. For the past few years, we haven’t been allowed to monitor our own kids during the TAKS. This is because of some educators south of here who cheated and helped their kids on the test. Now we all have to swap with teachers from other grade levels to ensure that we do not succumb to our base instinct for treachery and dishonesty. So on the TAKS days, my kids will take the test under the watchful eye of a teacher they may occasionally see in the hallway but whom they probably do not know very well. How will this affect their mood, temperament, anxiety level, and/or performance that day, you might ask? Well, imagine that the next time you drop your pants at the doctor’s office for your yearly physical, the FedEx delivery guy walks in snapping on rubber gloves.

This week, I switched places with Mr. Redd and watched his fourth graders. A lot of his kids were in my class last year, and it’s refreshing to know that they haven’t matured one bit since they were third graders.

We gave the kids a BM each morning this week; first reading, then math, then science, then social studies. Let me tell you, standing around for two hours every day with nothing to do but watch kids take a test is like Christmas coming early.

Mr. Redd left a page of observations on my desk after each test. Among the gems:
“Joaqim counting on his fingers… during the READING test! Probably counting up his IQ points. Who is this kid?”
“Lakeisha filled in a bubble on all 50 lines of the Scantron answer sheet. She did this without even opening her test booklet, so she never noticed that there were only 20 questions on the test.”
“I think Suzie pulled an all-nighter, because she fell asleep at 8:30.”

I went through the math tests and found many of them to be in almost pristine condition. Most of the kids showed no work at all. Maybe Franco has been spreading the word about his “new way” of doing math.

You’d think that the kids would understand that the way we practice solving math problems in class is the way they should solve math problems on a test. I mean, Lebron James doesn’t shoot jump shots in practice but then try to kick the ball through the hoop during a game. A concert pianist doesn’t sweep her trained fingers across the keys in rehearsal only to pound out a sonata with her elbows at the recital.

Never once in class have we scanned a problem, grabbed the first two numbers we saw, added them up in our heads, and then picked the answer that’s closest. However, that appears to be exactly what some of my kids did on the math benchmark.