Monday, September 26, 2005

Today's Deep Thought

(Note: my students have a daily journal-writing assignment where they write for five minutes on a question/quote/topic that's on the board when they come in. Some days we discuss them; some days we don't. Today, we discussed.)

Me: "So, what makes a lady or a gentleman?"

Student: "Well, good manners and stuff."

Me: "What constitutes 'good manners'?"

Student: "Helping little old ladies and making sure your fly is always zipped."

Me: "Setting that bar really high, aren't you?"

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Get your freak on, junior high style

Yeesh. I chaperoned the seventh and eighth grade "social" last night. (The term "dance" is seen as too intimidating and too encouraging to the "come with a date" phenomenon. Ergo, social. But it's the same thing...D.J., chips and Coke, boys on one side and girls on the other for the first hour.)

The kids generally had a blast, and the peer leaders (juniors and seniors who act as mentors to groups of 6-8 7th or 8th grade girls or boys) came and helped get the dancing rolling. Several peer leaders hosted sleepover parties for their peer kids after the social, which I thought was fabulous, although I'll admit that the thought of spending a Saturday night with 17-20 thirteen-year-olds seems like the seventh circle of Hell to me!

Even though the dress code was casual, the kids were all told what was and was not appropriate attire for the dance. We went over it with them in homeroom. Still, we had girls show up in WAY short (read: barely covering everything that needed covering!) skirts and uber-tight tops. The tight, low-cut, belly-baring tops look completely obscene on girls who still have baby pudge and no breasts. Thirteen-year-olds who look like they're going clubbing just scare me.

The kids who showed up in inappropriate attire got a verbal reprimand, but nothing else. I think it sends a mixed message, but we don't have a protocol for what we do with inappropriately dressed kids. (Note to self: bring this up at next faculty meeting.)

And then there was the freak dancing.

I'm used to breaking up freaking, because I've done it for two years at the high school dances. What they do in their own homes with their parents' full knowledge and blessing is one thing, but at a Catholic high school dance, it's just not right. I did not expect to have to do it at the junior high dance.

The little boys weren't interested in dancing with the little girls. So the little girls just went and freaked with each other. That's a whole new level of icky.

I love dancing, and I do think it should be about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on, but I don't think it needs to look like what you do with your clothes off!

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Reasonable accommodation

At our department meeting this morning, the subject of reasonable accommodation for students with learning disabilities came up. One of the new things that we're doing, spearheaded by the assistant academic dean and the counseling department, is the creation of a notebook with a page for each student with a documented learning disability that details the student's strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Teachers are expected to look up those students who are in their classes and read the students' profiles, then make accommodations accordingly.

That opened up a whole can of worms. Some teachers were all in favor of accommodating students; others thought that students used the accommodations as crutches. Some felt the one-page reports were asking too much of the teachers. I pointed out that were we a public school, we'd be required by law to do IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) for all students with documented learning disabilities or disabilities that influenced their learning (like hearing impairment). An IEP can run to 10+ pages and involves an annual meeting with each student, the student's parents, the counselor, and the teachers. Comparatively, we're getting off easily.

Still, people brought up the following: Students may be uncomfortable asking for extended time in public. Students get diagnosed by family friends or others who may or may not have a stake in the students' academic success. Students who are from wealthier families may have greater access to testing since we don't do it in-house. Students who do not have documented learning disabilities don't get teacher continuity or requests for specific teachers honored. Parents try to work the system to give their children unfair advantages. Teachers aren't included in the process to the extent that perhaps they ought to be. And so on.

I know that people try to game the system. Heck, I've seen people do it. There isn't much to be done about that. However, should all the students suffer because a few take advantage?

I just don't know what's reasonable and what isn't.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Dein ist, dein, ja dein...

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra season is officially underway with this weekend's performances of the Mahler "Resurrection" Symphony #2.

I'm not a big Mahler fan (or actually a fan of German composers in general, probably because I don't have the correct voice type for singing great big loud Germanic music), but I enjoyed the "Resurrection" Symphony more than I thought I would. Like the Beethoven 9th, it's got a long period of chorus-sitting-onstage-and-waiting-to-sing that can be a bit uncomfortable on the ASOC's folding chairs. Between every movement, there were massive not-quite-surreptitious stretching and shifting position sessions in the chorus, including a completely spontaneous synchronized leg-cross in the back row between movements 2, 3, and 4.

Despite the discomfort, I found that the Mahler grew on me more and more each night. By the third performance of most concerts, I find it very hard to pay attention to the non-chorus parts and the concert usually seems longest that night. Last night's concert seemed to be over quickly, and the chorus part had improved since the previous two nights (which, again, is not always the case. Saturday nights can get fatigued and sloppy.) Robert Spano (ASO principal conductor) spoke to us during our warmup and said, "I'm in a mood tonight, so...as Donald [Runnicles, ASO principal guest conductor] says about Scottish foreplay, 'Brace yerself, lassie!'"

And we did. It was a great night, and the audience was as enthusiastically appreciative as they had been the two previous nights.

Now if I could only get the florid German poetry out of my head, I'd be a lot better off.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

And another gem from the mouth of a student...

Student: "So the moon is a place in the world, right?"
Me: "I'm going to hazard a guess and say, by definition, no."

Monday, September 12, 2005

More overheard today...

Student: "So, like, Beowulf is, like, the, like, hero, because he, like, is, like, honorable..."
Me: "Whoa. I'm cutting you off of 'likes.' One 'like' per comment."
Brief pause.
Student: "That's, like, hard."
Me: "My point exactly. And that was your one 'like.'"

Overheard today

Student: "Hephaestus? Isn't that some product they used to use in schools that's dangerous?"

I think he meant asbestos.

Student: "Hey, look at Nick's monkey!"
Me: "Hey, let's not!"

I'm so glad that nobody walked into the room at that moment.

More later...

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Fun and games, but no busses

For some reason, probably because I'm my mother's child, I volunteered to go on the ninth grade class retreat as a chaperone.

No, I don't teach ninth grade. I don't moderate the ninth grade class. I don't even have a ninth grade homeroom anymore. But getting faculty to chaperone overnight trips is something of an onerous task at my school, so I raised my hand and hopped on the bus to camp Thursday morning, little knowing what lay in store.

My school admits students primarily at two grades: seventh and ninth. There's always been an issue with class unity in ninth grade between the new students and the kids who've been there since seventh grade. In previous years, the ninth graders have had an all-day retreat at a local church to try and encourage togetherness. Last year's retreat was, by all accounts, an unmitigated disaster, so the counseling department decided to try an overnight retreat this year to see if increased length of time and increased distance from school helped the kids to break out of their cliques a little more. An unforeseen benefit in the timing of this retreat was that there were several brand-new ninth graders who came this week as hurricane evacuees, so it was a nice opportunity for them to spend time with their new classmates.

Thursday morning, we put the luggage on the busses, went to Mass, then grabbed box lunches and headed up to the North Georgia mountains. The kids seemed excited; I'm not sure whether they were more excited about going to camp or missing class for two days, but they were sure loud!

We got up to camp later than we'd planned, so the staff got the kids going on their planned team-building activities right away. The staff assumed that the kids already knew each other's names, so they cut the icebreaker activity for the sake of time. Because many of them have only been at the school for two and a half weeks, they really don't know each other's names yet. The kids did have nametags, but they were pretty much destroyed by the time they got to camp. (How it's possible to destroy a stick-on nametag when all you're doing is sitting on a bus for two hours is beyond me, but it's obviously not beyond them!)

They ran around and did team-builders all afternoon, then ate dinner and had a little bit of free time before the evening concert. The guy who came out and performed was great -- the kids were all into the songs and the games and they were wound up by the end!

The chaperones were all on sleeping porches on the back of the cabins, which may not have been the best plan ever; I was nervous that we'd fall asleep and the girls would head out the front door. They didn't, but they were hopping in and out of bed so much and "whispering" (actually muted yelling) at each other so loudly that I didn't get a lot of sleep. I finally told them to get in their beds and close their eyes around 1 a.m. And 1:45 a.m. And at 2:15 a.m., I went all Wicked Witch of the West on them and said that anybody who couldn't control her mouth was going to come sleep out on the porch with me and Ms. N., the other chaperone. (She was knocked out on cold medicine at that point.) They settled down after that.

We had two more activity rotations on Friday morning, with a brief period of free time between breakfast and activities. Some of the boys used that free time to shoot off a fire extinguisher in one of their cabins, which the adults discovered before lunch. The counselors were really upset, not just that it had happened, but also that it could prejudice the administration against repeating the retreat next year.

The boys from the cabin where the incident had occurred had clean-up duty after lunch, and they were all worried that they'd be punished collectively for what had happened. They all said that they weren't involved, and then one kid came forward and said, "I did it." I was really proud of him -- it took guts to confess in front of his friends.

He wasn't the instigator; two boys from another cabin came in and were spraying the fire extinguisher and he walked in on them. They coerced him into spraying the extinguisher himself, probably so he wouldn't turn them in, although that sort of thinking may be too subtle for this age group. Anyhow, it put a blot on the end of what was otherwise a good trip.

We got the kids and their stuff up to the staging area for the busses around noon. By this point, we were down to eight faculty members because some had driven their own cars up and had already started back and some had gotten on the school's minibus with the JV volleyball players who had had to get back a little early so they could go play in an out-of-state tournament.

No busses.

They started calling the bus company and the school, and the bus company had messed up. They had scheduled busses for Saturday instead of Friday. So here we were, two hours from Atlanta, with two hundred kids and no transportation.

We needed four busses, but we could only get two each from two different companies and they had two different arrival times. I stayed with the kids in the last half of the alphabet, who were going out on the second set of busses.

The first group left around 4. We didn't leave till after six. The kids were real troopers; they sat around and talked and joked and played and generally had a good time. It may have been serendipitous...after all, nothing builds unity like adversity!

So will I be going on the Second Annual Ninth Grade Retreat next September? You bet!

But I'll take my own car. :-)

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Why I'm proud to teach where I do

Today we had a hastily convened faculty meeting after school to discuss our response to the people who have been displaced by Katrina who've called to see if we'll take their children at our school for the time being.

I'm so proud to say that we're not only taking up to 60 students, we're not charging for tuition, books, or uniforms. The other diocesan schools are going to do the same.

It isn't much, but anything we can do to lend some sense of stability to those shattered lives is worth doing.