Potty Parents

I am in fact a good friend of JonoVision.  For various reasons, he chooses to keep his identity hidden from all but a chosen few.  He’s a fellow teacher, an exemplary parent, and a role model.

He brought to my attention a posting by Jacy, who contributes to a blog called Reject the Koolaid. Here’s what it’a all about:

we keep tabs on absurd trends, ideas, people and things including Crocs sandals, frivolous IP lawsuits, Rate My Professors, Invisible deodorant, Mummy Bloggers, Canadian Weather, Softwood Lumber Disputes, Hipster Parents, Dr. Oetker, and More…

In a recent post, Facebook: the madness, she writes:

So for months my 16-year-old daughter has urged me to get on Facebook, insisting that I remain “plugged in” despite my advancing years. So I set up a Facebook account with a weird made-up name and a quite hilarious headshot, if I do say so myself, of one of my favourite fictional characters. My son, daughter and American nephew invited me to be their friends. I have only three.

So my daughter is away for most of the month with my beloved in-laws, and told me if I need to get a message to her, just post it on her Facebook wall because she goes online once a day. I thought this was odd. I mean why not just e-mail? But I did as she said.
So one day I post a message to her wall and I see that all of her girlfriends, lovely girls that I have known since they were all in junior kindergarten together, have also posted her messages to tell her how much they miss her and …. oh yeah …. to divulge in great detail the fact that all four of them are raging potheads. Oh yes. All sorts of posts about how high they all got the night before and how they almost got arrested and “I’m so stoned right now I can barely type but getting high without you is not the same!” and so on and so on and so on.

What would you do if you found out your daughter was a pothead?  Or even a variant shade thereof?  I know what i would do, and I’ve had to do it to various parents over the years.

Most parents are saddened, shocked, indignant (my kid would never! type of indignancy).  But every one in a while, we get a few who shrug their shoulders, and say “what’s the big deal?”.

It seems that all kids are resigned to experimenting with drugs and alcohol, at least in Jacy’s eyes.  And in the eyes of many of her adherents, judging by the response, and JonoVision’s developing pariah-hood.

In the comments, he is called unenlightened (it’s not 1958 anymore) and an antiquated thinker (egads, no… say it ain’t so!).

Jacy’s response?

I am a pretty cool mother and I know this is what kids do — I did it at their age, and quite honestly, marijuana-smoking does not freak me out nearly as much as heavy boozing. They are good, close friends, look out for one another, hang out mostly exclusively with one another, they all do well in school, they all treat their parents (for the most part) with respect, they are not lazy, not stunned, they obey their curfews, they are basically very good kids.

Great; cool mothers  let their kids engage in illegal, mood altering behaviours.  Better to regulate these behavious than to drive them underground.

I would classify these enabling behaviours, on the part of parents, as illegal and akin to child abuse.  I know there are many many good parents out there, who know how to talk with their kids, and talk frankly about issues like sex and drugs.

JonoVision is one of those parents. I know his kids, and I personally know of their close and caring relationship.  And I sure as shit know that it is not normal for kids to experiment with pot.

Parents like Jacy make me sick, quite frankly.  They are a bigger hinderance to public education than  one might imagine.  Certainly, they make my job much harder to do.

Flunk

Why children no longer flunk in school

JILL MAHONEY

(full article here)

The realization crept up on Edmonton school administrators and shocked them to the core: One in five children was failing Grade 1.

It was the early 1980s and officials learned of the high retention rate by chance through a testing program that found that about 20 per cent of pupils, many of them boys whose birthdays fell just before the enrolment cutoff, were in their second year of Grade 1.

“That was simply unacceptable,” said Anne Mulgrew, supervisor of student assessment for Edmonton public schools.

The recognition, coupled with a burgeoning body of research concluding that repeating grades is harmful and doesn’t help children catch up, led the board to largely stop failing children in elementary and junior high schools.

You simply must read the entire article, if only to prove to yourself that platitudes and empty catch phrases get you pretty far int he edumacashun industry.

Some money quotes:

“Failing students really sends some very damning and negative messages, which impacts on their entire lives,” said Lori Tighe, director of assessment and instructional support services at the Winnipeg School Division.

Actually, there’s nothing quite so destructive to a student’s sense of self than to be given something which the don’t deserve, or for which they have not worked. The research, so far as I’ve seen, is pretty inconclusive, with arguments on both sides of the debate.

When faced contradictory data (opinions) concerningany complicated issue, I prefer to rely on common sense. Not the goof ole boys, common folk kind of common sense. But common sense borne of experience and first hand knowledge.

That kind of common sense tells me that kids’ self esteem is boosted by genuine achievement. Bullshit, feel-good, touchy feely policies like social promotion does very little to boost that sense of self worth, or build an inner locus of control.

Now I do grant that there may be unique, specialized, and rare cases that social promotion might be appropriate. And I might start being a hard-ass about it in middle school (junior high, or grade 7 hereabouts). But in general, you need to hit them where it hurts. And that means if you phuck around and ruin your and others’ time in class, you do it all over.

And this time with moxy.

Laying low

I’ve been having to lay low for a while while I divest myself of an awful placement.  You might recall that I applied for transfer to a senior high school.  They (the evil school board, whose staffing department is run by an incompetent ex-principal I used to have.  And who remembers me.  I shouldda kept me mouth shut) balked.  I pushed.

I pushed a bit more, and it was suggested that I keep the volume down a bit.  WHich I’ve been doing.

The Toronto school shooting should have proven blogworthy, and I may just yet.  Until then, just six more teaching days until summer.

And no, I don’t get paid summers off.  Although I am lucky, I know plenty of teachers who take summer jobs to connect the ends.

Tragedy

(Updated below) 

On so many levels, what’s happened in Virginia is a tragedy. And with such tragedies, there is an instant – knee jerk, even – response by otherwise smart, but not so wise people, as to to how to prevent these things from happening again.

Unfortunately, psychopaths will be pyschopaths. If someone wants to kill people, they’ll find a way. Guns, knives, sharpened bamboo sticks, they’ll find a way.

There are a couple of things that strike me as a teacher.

The first is how stupidly easy it is to spot these people when they’re our students. The other is what I’d do were I presented with a psychopath in my school.

Predictability. We’ve all had them; a student who we just know no good will come of. You just see pure evil in their eyes. Sometimes you can quantify it, and convince administration to bounce them somewhere else, so that at the very least, they don’t corrupt your current crop of kiddies. At the worst, no one believes you (other than your teaching colleagues) and you have to find a vcery personal way to cope with the little cretin.

For me, an mano-a-mano talk, and a “don’t fuck with me or my class, and you’ll be fine” denoument usually works. But when push comes to shove, and nothing else works, I keep bouncing him (it’s a him 90% of the time) to the office. I do have a bad attitude, after all.

What kinds of kids are these? Well one, I remember, was a black kid who everyone thought was just misunderstood. Finally, after much cajoling, I got our guidance/resource teacher to talk to him. She (the resource teacher) was a youngish, pretty gal, who lasted five minutes, before he was punted to a system school. With devilish grin, he asked her if she’d ever had a “chocolate milkshake”. She knew exactly what he had meant. He was gone the next day.

You can recognize these kids easily. It’s a sad situation when the best thing you can do is send them away, so that they don’t damage your immediate surroundings. We must be able to do something preventative. We must have some other program or situation or plan to deal with these kinds of kids.

But no, it’s our job as a teacher to deal with them. I don’t know about you all, but they’ve neither trained me enough, nor pay me enough to do that job. Call it mission creep.

I actually keep a list of the names of such students. I fully expect to see their names in the news at some point. I’m not lookingg forward to that.

The second thing that comes to mind from this, and previous such events, is what I’d do if faced with a gun wielding gunman. Or what I’d counsel my students to do.

The official line is play passive when faced with a threatening, armed person. Do what you’re told to do, don’t bring attention to yourself. If you follow orders, you’ll be fine.

Sadly, experience now shows that this will not be the case. What I want to tell my kids is this: when faced with someone with a gun, fight back. Charge the assailant, throw things, make noise, and mob the bad guy. Bring him down, hold him down.

It’s what I want to tell my students (grades 8 and 9), but sadly I cannot. I expect in my email tomorrow morning a missive from the big heads downtown reminding us about lockdown procedures. Sit tight. Wait for help to come.

Not bloody likely. I’m fighting for my life.

And in the meantime, in Calgary, police have arrested a junior high student from St. Gregory School for uttering “Colombine like threats”. He was turned in by his parents. Sadly, he was also released back into their custody, on bail. Whatever that means for a 14 year old.

Update

Matthew Good is a Vancouver based singer songwriter. Although I’m not a big fan of his music, he runs a fairly level headed little blog, commenting on human rights issues, the “wars on terror”, and suchlike. He makes a good point in this post: 32 is a tragic number, but so is 176.  That’s how many civilian Iraqis were murdered last Saturday in Bagdad.

Where’s the hue and cry, the (inter)national media, the tearful tributes, the idiot new hounds waxing poetic?

No where. And yesterday, a middle class, popular, and rather smart white kid in my class brings up the same point. I had to quell a class rebellion as they just about lynched him.

Open-mindedness, people.  Open-mindednes.

Entitlement

I’d forgotten how much work it is to come back to school after a week off.  Still recovering… I feel like I’m in a fog.  Luckily, so do the kids, so they’re not noticing anything.

March break is, of course, the prime time for international student travel.  We’re still missing  one group of kids, who are off traveling through Europe.  I miss these kids; the tone in class is decidedly less businesslike without them. Luckily, none of ours were involved in sinking ships and such.

Unfortunately, students from Tofield School visiting Santorini weren’t so lucky.  Their ferry sank from underneath them.

While reading about the events, I came across this interesting passage, aparantly in reference a grade 10 student at Toefield.

Strilchuk, 16, said she and her friends had no life jackets. When she saw a man clutching one, she pleaded with him to hand it over.

She said she made a fist and punched him in the face when he wouldn’t.

“He was holding it and he was 40 years old and we were kids,” she explained, adding that she pulled the life jacket from him and gave it to a friend.

Strilchuk said she later punched another man and took his life jacket for herself.

And this makes me absolutely sick

Lord of the flies on the high seas, indeed. Some punk ass kid believes that she has the right to someone else’s lifejacket, that she assaults not one, but two fellow passengers and steals theirs.  It’s a disgrace.  She should feel very ashamed of herself.

Now of course, none of us were there on that ship, and few of us have ever been in such a situation. But I can tell you unequivocally that I would never do such a thing.  Would you?

It’s related to this sense of entitlement I feel that too many kids have these days.  “It’s no fair that you have something that I want”, I can almost hear them whine. “Give it to me or I’ll… I’ll…”

What, drown?

A 45 year old man and his 16 year old daughter died in this tragedy. Kristen Strilchuk had better hope that one of people she punched and stole from  was not this man.

Such events have a habit of haunting you for a while.

Broken

It’s been a long, tough year so far. March Break was eagerly awaited, and anticipated. I am currently enjoying it immensly, drinking far too much good red wine, and laughing upon the pile of marking that I have.

And catching up on six seasons of The Sopranos. Just finished season 2.

Unlike Tony, I will be back.

Held to a standard

Teacher Dan, over at Dy/Dan, has called me out for assigning “the little fuckers” an extra dose when they screw around. For the record, it was a throw-away line. Not everyone may appreciate my humour.

I sure as shit don’t.

But in exploring his site, I found an earlier posting of his that challenges the homework mythos. As I told Dan in a comment, I want to believe that the homework thang is largely mythical and without merit. But I also know form personal experience that in some cases it’s necessary.

Grade nine, absolutely. Grade four, perhaps not so much.

I’ve had enough

Well, it’s not as though I’ve really had enough – I’d have quit by now – but I have made the decision to transfer to senior high school.  While it’s by no means a sure thing, I remain hopeful.  My colleagues tell me it’s difficult to transfer between divisions like this.

I guess we’ll see how many people I’ve pissed off.

But I am of conflicted mind about the move.  On the one hand, junior high is way so less stressful. I know the subject matter backwards, and in two languages.  I can plan an off the cuff lesson (say, after an all nighter, during which I might have lesson prepped) in real time, and put together a lab activity in ten minutes. And the kids don’t even have a clue. And those junior high behaviours… well, lets just say that I behave much like they do, so we have an understanding.

It’s not so tough as long as you understand where adolescents are coming from.

On the other hand, junior high kids, day in, day out, do leave their mark.  I’m tired of the fuckheads who should be in jail, who don’t want to be in school, or who love nothing more than to interrupt the learning of their classmates.

Senior high will be a challenge.  I’ll no doubt have to get up to speed with the various programs of study and deal with more demanding students and parents.  But hey! I know my science.  Before teaching I was a research biolchemist.  Shared a lab, an NSERC grant, and some nominally cutting edge research.

Unfortunately, there was no money in that. So I became a teacher.  I know, stupid move.

So there you go.  I’ll let you know what happens.

I love homework

It’s almost as though I planned it this way. A few days of musing about homework, and I just knew (the little hairs on the back of the neck kind of feeling) that I’d be dealing with parents about homework.

Well earlier this week, I had three parents form a common front and come to me with their concerns. Oh, and “there of lots of other concerned parents too… we’ve been talking to them”.

Yeh, right. Please keep in mind that I offer up about 30 minutes of homework every other day. Rarely on weekends, and never over holidays.

I’m trying to get a read on how much homework Alfie Kohn would suggest is reasonable for grade 9. Let’s see what he has to say from an article entitled Rethinking Homework, from which I shall pull out excerpts (italicized) and respond (bolded, just cos I can).

I’ve wanted to say this many times

Never had the guts, though. Unabashedly stolen from What It’s Like On The Inside.