This past week, I had the pleasure of distributing to 4 of my brightest math students their invitations to a summer math research program at Morgan State University.  This is the culmination of weeks of conversations I have been involved with in collaboration with their math department.  As part of the program, the students will commute to MSU over a 6 week period in June and July, where they will be matched up with faculty mentors and they will experience first hand how math research is done.  How much will they have to pay for the experience?  Nothing!  In fact, Morgan State is going to pay them each $3000.  It blows my mind.

When I delivered the invitations, I congratulated the students of course, but I also took the opportunity to deliver some tough love.  I told them that while their math skills fantastic and are what got them this opportunity, that it’s their behavior skills I’m worried about.  I told them that this opportunity makes them examples to the rest of the student body, and that they need to make sure their actions uphold a high standard at all times.  I told them that they need to know that the impression they make during their time at MSU will determine not only whether they are invited back the following summer, but it will also determine whether MSU expands their involvement for the rest of the school as a whole.  Lastly, I told them that they don’t owe me anything for helping get them this opportunity, because other people freely gave me the opportunities that I had.  Instead, I expect them to make the most of it so that they can open doors for future friendship students and for today’s elementary school students, and that’s how we can start to turn this city around.  I hope they took what I said to heart, but I plan on reinforcing it over the next several weeks anyway.

To be honest, I am really concerned that these kids might blow it.  Two of them in particular I would consider to be high-risk.  But that concern is far outweighed by my hope that this summer program might be the start of a major positive change in the course of their lives.  Sometimes kids just need a chance to shine.  In any case, helping make the connection so that these kids would have this awesome opportunity is probably the proudest achievement of the past two years.

It actually seems as though my days are flying by as the end of the year is drawing near, and I can finally feel safe to say that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.  It’s sad to say, but in this fourth quarter, I’ve finally found a groove that lets me get my job done without the huge burden I’ve felt for most of my teaching experience.  Could it be that I have actually figured it all out and am considering another year in teaching?  Heck no.  I’ve just found new ways of meeting what I consider to be my minimum requirement–that come class time, I need to have a coherent plan to teach the kids to do something new.

I have learned that all the crap they tell us we have to do just isn’t necessary to achieve the results I’m achieving.  I could be working 3 times as hard, but for what?  Frankly, I’m happy with my results.  I’ve got kids who couldn’t multiply last year doing algebra problems that take almost a full page of work.  I’ve got special ed kids correcting my mistakes on the board.  What is working is that I’m breaking every lesson down to the basics, I’m putting huge emphasis on students understanding the notation of algebra, and I’m being an absolute dick (excuse my language) in insisting on maximal standards for completion of classwork.

My class is not exciting, but I firmly believe that it’s time for these kids to understand that to get what they want, they have to work for it, and life isn’t just playtime.  The kids hate how nit-picky I am, but they are stepping up.  And the next day’s lesson goes so much better when they learned the background material from the day before thoroughly and correctly.

It hasn’t all been fun in games.  Things seem to run in cycles.  For a few days at a time, the kids will be motivated and so productive.  Then for a few days, they will be juvenile and rowdy, and I have to fight for every second of their attention.  When that happens, it makes me want to choke someone.   This past Monday, most of my 2nd period class had to take the AP exam, and I only had 6 kids in my room.  Those 6 kids were off the hook.  They cursed, bickered, talked about wildly inappropriate subjects, wouldn’t sit in their seats, sang, wouldn’t put their phones away, wouldn’t do the drill or the work, and were just all around jerks.  When that happens, for all that I’ve learned, I don’t know what to do with them.  Fortunately, Monday seemed to be the end of an approximately 3 week streak of generally insane behavior, and the rest of the week was pretty painless.  Let’s hope this next week stays that way.

If I can make it through this week, HSA testing is next week, then two weeks of class, then finals, then done!

March was a mostly good month.  The beginning of the month started out a bit bumpy.  The momentum I have been trying to keep up has been waning, and at times, it has felt like progress has stopped completely.  But individual students seem to be finding motivation in little bursts, which has been keeping things moving.  Also, I’ve been really happy with the results of demanding perfection.  Kids grumble and curse, but the quality of their work is much better.  Plus, I have come to realize how important it is to require this level of repetition of the detailed processes.  I think part of the reason that my students lack so many skills is because they weren’t required to turn in rigorous work.  I’m trying to tell the kids that just plugging numbers into their calculators means nothing, the point is that they understand the processes, the reasoning and the notation, so that we can build on that.  Maybe I will leave something of worth behind after all.

Speaking of which, as of today, I am officially leaving the school after this school year.  I spoke with my administration today, and I submitted my resignation, effective July 1.  If I’m still in Baltimore next year, I might continue to work with the basketball team and with other extracurricular activities.  But my career in teaching is nearing its official end, and I feel unambiguously good about that.

Also during March, my administration graciously granted me leave to go on rugby tour to Barbados, which is another story entirely.  And of course, there was official Spring break, which wraps up today, as we return to school.

As usual, I know that the return to work is going to be jarring, but that feeling is tempered by the fact that the end finally seems within reach.  Coming back from winter break, I couldn’t say that, because my first semester this year was very difficult, and the idea that I could potentially be in for a carbon copy of that was frightening.  But this time, I’m returning to wrap up what has probably been the most successful quarter of my teaching career, and if I can replicate that, just once, maybe I can end this year on a good note.

One thing that is definitely coming toward us slowly but inevitably is HSA season.  Our sophomores are scheduled to take HSA’s in English, Biology and American Government, and about half of them will be repeating the HSA Algebra exam.  This year, it feels much better, seeing as it’s not me in the pressure cooker.  But because so many of our sophomores have not passed the algebra exam, I will still have a good deal of work to do.  Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to plan out my next year.

No more breaks from school now, it’s the home stretch.

Little Melvin is not the nickname of a student I teach.  Little Melvin Williams is a man who sold hundreds of millions of dollars of heroin and cocaine in Baltimore and spent 26 1/2 years in prison.  He claims to have witnessed approximately two hundred murders while in federal prison, and to have potentially had the ability to prevent about a third of them, but chose not to.  Last night, 7 other teachers and I had the opportunity to hear Little Melvin tell us his story in person.

Little Melvin is best recognized by most Americans as the guy who played The Deacon on The Wire.  But in Baltimore, he’s a living legend on the street.  It doesn’t take long to notice that Little Melvin is a gifted storyteller, so it’s tough to separate myth from fact in what he says, but most of it is well documented.  Little Melvin was a kid in Baltimore with genius-level intellect but with an interest in very little besides gambling.  By the time he was 17, he had been basically kicked out of school, but had meanwhile built a larger than life reputation as a gambler in cards, dice, and billiards.  He was so well known in town that the government put him up to try to talk down the rioters when King was assassinated.  As Melvin tells it, rather than being appreciative of his success in calming some of the rioters, the government became fearful of his influence, and began looking for a way to take him down.  Melvin claims that he wasn’t involved in any criminal activity at this point.  Others disagree.  In any case, they finally succeeded, but only with help from narcotics found on him, planted by a dirty cop–a fact attested to by an article in the Baltimore Sun.   Driven by anger at the corruption of the government, he decided while he was imprisoned that he would become the monster they claimed he was, and we he got out, he became hugely involved in the drug trade, being the first person to import narcotics into the city by the truckload.  Many years, many millions of dollars, and many thousands of pound of drugs later, he was caught again and put away for 22 more years.  While in jail, Little Melvin said he eventually found God, learned to control his anger, and taught himself everything he could about everything–Spanish, French, math, and–especially–law.

Besides his crazy story, Little Melvin had a lot to tell us about the intricacies criminal law, the rules of the ghetto and the narcotics business, and the horrors of federal prison.  Some of the things Little Melvin had to say about the federal prison in Terra Haute, IN, where he spent much of his sentence, were unreal.  He talked about how he still wakes up at precisely 4:30am, every day, no matter when he lays down, because at Terra Haute, they open all the prison doors at 6am, and your life is on the line from that instant.  He talked about people being incinerated in their cell by make-shift napalm.  Little Melvin told us, in detail, what might be whispered in a new arrival’s ear when he’s raped at knifepoint his first night in prison, after some predator pulls strings to be assigned as his bunkmate.  The place sounds as close to hell on Earth as anything I have ever heard.

He also told us about how the drug trade has changed since his day.  Melvin claims that the drug trade is next to impossible to stop today because so much of our economy depends on its existence.  He goes as far as to posit that the U.S. Government explicitly participates in the importation of narcotics to the country.  And he says that kids today won’t even listen to him.  All they want to hear about is the cars they hear he owned.  When he tells them about the horrors of prison, they reply, “nuh-uh, won’t happen to me!”  For all his wisdom, he was mostly at a loss for what to tell us about how to deal with the kids.  One piece of advice he could give us was how crucial it is that kids don’t care what you say, they watch what you do, and that’s where all your credibility resides.  I think that’s a lesson that every reflective teacher in the city can agree with.  It’s pretty easy to see what kids are raised by people who live what they teach.  And when you mess up as a teacher, the effects on student behavior are immediate.

When we asked about Little Melvin’s view of the future, he said that as a gambling man, he’s pretty pessimistic.  He tries to do his part through a program he started called Correct Choices.  He’s trying to start a rec center in a building he owns, but his efforts are being opposed by a group of citizens that hasn’t forgotten his dark days.  But Melvin does what he can.  However, in his view, kids have become more impulsive and fatalistic.  The real thugs don’t even expect to live to 25.  He thinks the best bet is to try to set them on the right path when they’re young, because when the kids get older, it’s almost impossible to turn them around.

Little Melvin spoke to us for about 4 hours straight, and if we detected any internal contradictions in his stories, we kept them to ourselves while he spoke.  It’s pretty intimidating to correct a man who you would assume has been directly responsible for many dozens of deaths, and who also professes to be a master of Tae Kwon Do, Goju Ryu, Shotokan, and Kung Fu.  Before he left, Little Melvin gave us his cell phone number and told us to call him anytime.  Incredibly enough, the man takes every call he gets, through his earpiece, without even bothering to screen them.  It happened several times throughout the meeting.  The most humorous moment of the night happened when he took the empty box of crackers my roommate had brought, declaring, “these crackers are the truth!”  I guess the man now finds joy in the simple pleasures in life.  After he left, it took our group another 2 hours just to debrief on all we had heard.

Overall, it was fascinating to hear what Little Melvin had to say.  He more or less epitomizes our most difficult students–extremely bright, disinterested, pissed off, abused, and betrayed.  The sad part for me as a teacher is that most of the real troublemakers of that caliber in my classroom are gone now.  I only have a small handful of gangbangers left, and those who still show up are there because they want a better lifestyle.  I don’t know what we could have done differently for the ones who dropped out, and Little Melvin didn’t have any easy answers.  And frankly, my feelings are mixed because I’m much more able to help my remaining students without them.

It was an interesting

night, to say the least!

Conference Day was a bit of an ordeal.  As I thought, there were excuses galore, and about half of my students rose to the occasion.  To me, the sheer neglect and lack of work ethic some of the kids bring is astounding.  abotu two-thirds of my students will be failing as of mid-quarter.  But on the bright side, my grades are fully updated, so no all-night grading session will be necessary.  I even gave students until this past Monday to fix and resubmit work, but only after school.  I told them, hell, even if you hadn’t done anything all quarter, you could just grab a copy of every worksheet, take a couple hours of the weekend, and knock every bit of it out.  And still, many of the students let the deadline blow by without any apparent fight.   The second Conference Day will be Monday.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m starting to notice my students coalescing into new groupings.  About 40% of my students have stepped up to the plate and really seem encouraged by the pace I’m trying to set.  Interestingly enough, this group is composed of people who fall all along the spectrum of talent.  Probably about 20% of my students have extremely poor attendance or have been suspended a significant amount of time, and therefore have little chance of passing.  But what is really vexing me is the 40% of my students who are there most days and think that just showing up will be enough to pass, let alone go on to make something of themselves.  I’m trying to tell them on a daily basis that just showing up is not nearly enough.  It’s so frustrating because I’ve seen the transcripts, and frankly, many of our students have already put themselves in a really rough spot and no longer have any margin for error.  It’s like trying to convince people that the building they’re in is burning down, but most of them just won’t believe it until it’s too late.

Today was frustrating, because every one of my four classes was completely out of hand.  One of the most irritating things about my job on a daily basis is that a large number of my students seem to think it’s okay to engage in conversation while I’m trying to teach, as though what I’m saying isn’t important and the rules don’t apply to them.  Not to mention how disrespectful it is.  I can’t even begin to describe what my day looked like in detail.  In fact, I probably don’t even remember anymore.  I’ve learned to forget at the end of the day, probably as some sort of coping mechanism.  Suffice it to say that it was awful.  It felt like last semester all over again, and looking back, if I had weeks in a row worth of days just like today, no wonder I was so depressed.

It just burns, because I hoped my students and I had turned a corner as a group where we could start relating on a more adult level.  But apparently, it’s just the new semester honeymoon, coming to an abrupt end.  Still, I’m going hope  that today was just a temporary setback and keep fighting to keep the little ember of motivation and relative propriety of behavior alive for as long as I can.

These past several weeks have been quite eventful.  Baltimore was hit by one-two combination of storms that <i>each</i> dropped more snow than the city usually sees in an entire year.  The entire city was basically stopped dead in its tracks, and when it was all said and done, 6 entire school days were cancelled, and 4 more were reduced to half-days.  People are calling the storms Snowmaggedon and The Snowpocalypse, although there is no consensus as to which one is which.  Needless to say, I was completely ecstatic.  Typically, I travel as soon as I get any scheduled time off, but because of the snow, I was stuck at home.  This actually turned out to be a very good thing.  My living space is now more organized than ever before, and I think it ended up being a great time to relax and get my head right, without the stress of being out on the road.

The school schedule includes 5 emergency days in June, to be used for replacing days when school was cancelled.  But at 9 total snow days, we’re way passed that.  The state superintendent is petitioning for a waiver of the 180 school day requirement, and it’s not clear what would happen if it is not granted.  All I know is that my spring break tickets are booked, so they won’t be seeing me should they decide to truncate the break.

Counting the time we’ve actually been in school, we’re now in the fourth week of the new semester.  My back to basics strategy for this semester has been marginally successful so far.  At the very least, I’m seeing an increase in student engagement, and this is with relatively abstract material.  I’ve been trying to keep the momentum up, but I’m starting to sense rebellion.

One of my biggest problems has been getting kids to do classwork and settling on a grading policy that is fair, motivational, and sustainable.  This semester, I’ve decided to make a radical change.  I call it Conference Day.  It should be called Judgment Day.  Sacrificing some instructional time, I have decided to have my students hand in their work individually.  If it is complete and correctly done, it’s 100%.  If not, it goes in my gradebook as missing.  The grade can be recovered if they follow my instructions for rectifying the problem and resubmit the work on their own time after school.  Otherwise, it stays a zero.

I’m trying to kill several problems with one solution.

– I can’t grade at home.  I’ve tried it a million ways, and I can’t make it work.
– Turnaround is quick.  If a kid is slacking, they get called out on it face to face.
– Lastly, and most importantly, it gives me a chance to confront the issue of kids BS’ing their work by just filling the space with ink, but not understanding what they’re doing.  If it’s not done right, I tell them what’s wrong, show them an example, mark it missing, and send them back to the drawing board.

I’m hoping that this system will also lead to increased engagement on the day of the lesson, because students will want to avoid the endless series of revisions results from carelessly done or incomplete work.  And I’m really hoping the new system kills the end of quarter blitz for makeup work.

Backlash has been swift and vicious.  But I’m hoping it will pay dividends down the line, and that on the next Judgment Day–I mean, Conference Day–things will run much more smoothly.

While all the drama of the past month or so has been going on, I’ve still been coaching basketball, which has been a saga in and of itself.  We started the year off with our rag-tag group of kids, and lost 3 games in a row, right off the bat.  The kids, so used to instant gratification, started to get showing signs of giving up right off the bat.  Not only that, but our team took some major blows when some of our most talented kids were ruled ineligible, due to abysmal grades.  For a while, it looked like the team might disintegrate.  We had a group of kids who really didn’t know how to play at all, another group in the gray area of eligibility, and our most experienced players were proving to be extremely fickle in their dedication.  But our head coach stayed on them day and night, bring the kids in for meetings during lunch, holding practice every day after school, and calling them constantly to keep them reeled in.  I think the turning point was when Coach managed to get the kids into practice on the three snow days right before break, because over break, the kids one their first game at a tournament out in Baltimore County.  When I got back after break, we won three of our next four games.  We came back to win the last game of the first half of the season by about 12 points, after trailing the first 3 quarters.  I couldn’t have imagined a better note to end on, leading into the break in the sports schedule for finals.  Who would have thought at the beginning of the season that the play-offs would be within reach?
And then it fell apart.  Coach scheduled practice for every day after school during finals week.  It should have been easy for the kids to come, because during finals week, school let out at noon.  Yet, we were having practices with only 5 of our 15 players showing up.  Kids who had been leaders of the team up until that point were missing practice, with no explanation.  One of our players was kicked off the team entirely when he was spotted smoking pot a short walk from the school, when he should have been a practice.
All of this went down about a week ago, but Coach and I still don’t know what the heck happened.  Two of the players who disappeared haven’t even been to my class this past week.  The most bizarre thing is that this implosion happened just after we started tasting success.  You could say it went to their heads, but we really weren’t successful long enough to say that the kids started to get complacent.  It’s like something got into them all of the sudden and messed their heads all up.

Fortunately, the kid that is undoubtedly the heart of our team came back into the fold, as did his brother, who is our leading scorer.  Since then, it’s been as though we’ve started almost from scratch again, only with less raw talent and almost no depth on our bench.  The good news we don’t have to deal with some of the team drama queens anymore; the ones who are left are the ones who really want to be there.  And I have seen amazing growth in the skills, attitude, and work ethic of the players who have been dedicated enough to keep showing up.  I’m extremely proud of them.

The tough part will be getting the bulk of our mostly inexperienced squad on the same level as the two brothers.  We’re going to get some of our ineligible players back, but not until the very end of the season.  It’s going to be a bumpy road.

I think I’ve finally got my head back on straight–for the time being, at least.  I’m going to be here one more semester, and I’m going to try to make these kids learn something.  This time, the strategy is simple.  The kids must learn by working.  I’m tired of designing gimmicks, and I’m tired of hearing excuses.  We’re going to grind out this work.  I’ve started out of the semester by working on how I break down concepts, to make sure that my logic is sound.  And every few minutes, I reemphasize the need for everyone to listen to what I’m saying.  We don’t have time for the side conversations and the childish behavior.  I’m trying to nip all signs of negativity in the bud.

My class motto is “Don’t leave class today without understanding”.  They can’t go another semester of covering just two chapters.  I can’t go another semester of covering just two chapters.  By the end of the quarter, I felt like a little piece of my soul was dying every day that we repeated the same elementary crap over, and over, and over, again.  That was BS, and it pisses me off just thinking about it.  We have to move faster, and I’m messaging that to the kids constantly.  I need them to develop a sense of urgency.

As of Day 3, it’s working out well.  I’ve got most of my students factoring monomials, a skill that requires or leads to a thorough understanding of some pretty fundamental concepts.  I’ve managed to get a several kids who are used to not participating on-board and doing work.  The only problem is that our attendance has been abysmal, so I have to find a way to get the kids who have missed this info caught up, and that is a shame, because I’m teaching as hard as I can, and they’re missing the show.

Kids always start semesters off strong, and teachers usually have a little extra pep, too.  I don’t know how I’m going to sustain my level of effort, or if it’s even possible.  But maybe, just maybe, if we can pick up some momentum now, it will carry us somewhere before it runs out.

Well, I’m back.  We started the new semester today, at long last.  It’s going to be a long several months, but the end is in sight, I suppose.

I think my anxiety built up all the way until the very end of last semester, and then today, for whatever reason, I finally felt some relief.  Like a break in the storm or something.  I hope it lasts.

Class actually went well today.  I can tell that a lot of kids are trying to get their crap together, and I really emphasized positive change in my opening speech to each class.   If I can get more consistent, sustained work out of these kids, from beginning to end, I think this semester might actually turn out better than the last one.

—–

In other news, everyone is on the edge of their seats in Baltimore to find out what 5 schools are on the chopping block.  My almost assuredly isn’t, but I have a lot of friends who work at truly dysfunctional places.

This week, I got more of a taste than usual of what some of these kids have to endure outside of school.

Yesterday, less than an hour after learning about our seventh grader passing away, I got a message from my girlfriend saying that one of her students was in the hospital.  He had been stabbed in the back by his mother’s boyfriend while trying to defend his mother.  Not much is known about his condition at this point.

This morning, when I arrived at school, I found a flyer in my mailbox seeking any information on the whereabouts of one of our middle school students.  Some of the evidence seems to indicate that she ran away, but obviously this is pretty worrisome, because this is a rough city period, let alone if you’re a 13 year old girl out on your own.

I had a number of students report today for exam make-ups.  Some of them had ridiculous excuses for having missed their original testing time, but some of them had legitimate issues.  Two of my students have missed time in school due to their mothers being locked up this week.  Another student missed his test date because he was moving his belongings from his mother’s house to his brother’s.  I don’t know the details, but it sounds like big drama.

As for me, I’m still on the ropes.  Maybe it makes me a crappy person to be inundated with so much strife, yet so wrapped up in my own personal issues.  I’ve been trying hard to see what arrangements could be made at a school level to make my job more manageable.  I’ve been lobbying hard for some relief.  To my administrations credit, they have my back, in principle.  I think they actually seem to understand how fragile I’m feeling at the moment.  They know I might not last the semester.   But in practice, there’s not much they can do, and I take them at their word for that.  And I believe they’ll do what they can to help me keep it rolling for as long as I can.  In some ways, I guess this puts us almost back at square one.  But, if nothing else, I’ve been very upfront with where I stand, so I think we’re all on the same page.

All this, and I still have another semester to go.  June seems so far away…