What Kind of Bully Was He?

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Bullying thrums in the background of our schools. We started this sixth-grade class with the standard question: What is bullying? The follow-up question was a typical, not-so-critical-thinking question: Have you ever been bullied? Students began to share their histories, filling up the whole class period with sad stories.

Like all teachers who have taught for any length of time, I have sat through many versions of the bullying lecture. Anyone who thinks schools are not trying to reign in their bullies remembers another time or a distant place. Schools aggressively attack bullying, so much so that kids sometimes begin to make fun of our efforts: “Ms. Q! Nathaniel’s breathing my air!” “No, Ms. Q! He took the air. I am just trying to get it back!”

But a student stopped me with an original question during this one class:

“What kind of bully was he?” he asked.

“An evil one,” the girl replied quickly. “Pure evil.”

A few class members laughed. Others nodded. Ah, that kind of bully.

Such a smart question. I am still mulling the question and answer over in my mind. What kind of bully was he? The angry bully, the impulsive bully and the jealous bully should not be lumped together. Sometimes an open discussion with a jealous girl and the target of her jealously can solve the problem of the jealous bully. Once Jenna understands that Anita hates to feel left out by Jenna because Anita thinks Jenna’s awesome, sometimes Jenna and Anita may even become friends. Angry bullies form their own category as well as subcategories. Is Marcos angry most of the time? Why is Marcos angry? Is Marcos fine except when his parents are fighting? Has physical violence been modeled for Marcos at home? Does Jeff shove people just to shove people, without thinking about their feelings? Is he angry? Hungry? Or could he simply be ADHD and looking for attention?

I think I’ll skip any discussion of “pure evil,” other than to say I believe “pure evil” to be extremely rare. But pure evil exists. Dr. Martha Stout, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in her book The Sociopath Next Door, estimates that four percent of the global population may be made up of sociopaths, I’d guess many sociopaths may not qualify as evil, having no particular desire to make other kids miserable, but I have taught a few kids who had eyes so cold that I’d never be caught in the dark alone with them.

Eduhonesty: In this time when schools are teaching children to embrace diversity, that boy’s question made me wonder if we have given enough attention to the diverse sources and types of bullying.

What kind of bully is he? Or she? Any approach to bullying conflicts should begin with this question.

Tip #31: Change the Plan if You Don’t See Results

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(A tip mostly for newbies.)

In this time of preplanned curricula and common lesson plans, teachers often enter the classroom with their day scripted. For the first five to ten minutes, we do the multiplication story problem reinforcing the idea that distance equals rate times time. For the next twenty minutes we break into groups. Group 1 works on the latest software program, Group 2 creates a time/distance chart, and Group 3 learns how to move the variables around, discovering that distance divided by time will reveal the rate at which the train is travelling.

We have a sensible, probably viable lesson plan here. The teacher must make sure that laptops or tablets are not being used to kill worms or scale walls to get to gold coins on the next level, but our objectives are easily discerned and presumably fit the learning standards for the grade, or represent needed remediation.

Eduhonesty: The details of these plans eat up classroom minutes quickly. Between shutting down the worm games, checking the charts, and explaining how we find the train’s speed, teachers are constantly on the move. With luck, as we switch from group to group, we find students producing expected results.

With this post, I want to red-flag an alternative scenario. If you are shifting between groups and bogging down, stopping to explain and re-explain earlier material.. if you are regularly trying to help students figure out how “t” can be “time” and how to define a “rate”…  if the math answers you check seem to be coming out wrong… YOU ARE PROBABLY IMPLEMENTING THE WRONG LESSON PLAN.

Lesson plans should fit students. Too often today, we try to make students fit our lesson plans instead. If your kids don’t grasp the day’s concept, maybe you need to explain that concept differently. Your approach could be part of the confusion. But if you were told to teach 5th grade math to a group of 3rd graders who simply were not ready for that content, your problems are bigger than a few clarifications will ever be able to fix.

What’s the next, best step? You know your students and I’d say that’s up to you, based on what you are seeing. I would separate out the kids who understand the material. I’d find an enrichment activity for them to do while I worked with the lost and confused. Then I’d review the missing, basic algebra or whatever factor or concept I believe has forced other students off-track. I might even create a short, diagnostic quiz to figure out where different kids leapt that track. Is it algebraic manipulation or simple division itself?

Just because higher-ups or more experienced teachers handed you a lesson plan, please don’t blindly follow the entries on that sheet of paper. It’s your classroom and every single classroom is filled with a different mix of nuts and fruits. State standards and annual state tests have led to a frightening amount of pie-in-the-sky planning.

If your kids need division, please take the time to teach them division. When you find out what’s wrong, fill in the holes in student background knowledge. Make sure you can document and provide data to show what you are doing and why, but if your kids have leapt the track, or never got on the week’s educational train in the first place, you must step off the track with them. You have to teach your kids where they are. If you try to teach them where someone else wants them to be, you will have a long, frustrating year. More importantly, so will those poor, confused kids.

Tip #30: A Year’s Hand Sanitizer May Be Cheaper than One Insurance Co-Pay

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Classrooms are microbial stews. Especially when both parents must work, feverish kids come to school because the school nurse’s office feels more comforting than an empty house. Kids come to school because they want to play afternoon soccer, ignoring the pain in their joints and throat. Kids come to school because they feel fine in the morning and don’t expect yesterday’s fever and aches to return later in the afternoon. If nobody’s home, the school will be providing healthcare as the nurse or a secretary searches for parents or an emergency contact.

Or nobody will be providing healthcare because the kid knows his parents have to work, doesn’t want to go to the nurses office, and is just hoping to slip by unnoticed.

Eduhonesty: Shell out the $$ for that supersize bottle of hand sanitizer. If you have a few dollars to spare, Bath and Body Works carries fiercely fragrant little bottles of scented sanitizers. A bottle of Lemon Buttercream or Black Cherry Merlot hand sanitizer provides cheap aroma therapy as you walk aisles and check classwork. Kids light up in smiles sometimes when you share a few drops of that Lemon Buttercream, too.

I am back on hand sanitizer (some longtime readers may be thinking yada, yada, yada) because of those cheap hand dryers and no paper towels from my post yesterday. I’ve run the math for bathroom stops during passing periods and I KNOW that many students are skipping the drying portion of that stop, and some of those will skip washing if they can’t dry their hands. Bottles of hand sanitizer become pure self-defense in the absence of soap and water.

Many of the school windows that still open will be closing in the next few weeks. While planning, meeting, professionally developing, grouping, grading, regrouping, testing and creating data spreadsheets for administrations, swamped teachers necessarily let small details escape. For your own sake, move hand sanitizer from the “C” list to the “A” list. Then remind students to use that sanitizer, especially the ones who keep visiting the Kleenex box. If your class uses the sanitizer responsibly, bottles in front and back of the class will encourage use.*

It’s also time to get a flu shot.

*Recent example of irresponsible hand sanitizer use: While subbing, a student in my class squirted hand sanitizer into the pencil sharpener. In some classes, that sanitizer simply has to be in the teacher’s line of sight and away from certain kids.

 

 

 

Nitpicking in the Bathroom

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While I am blogging about small school moments, mechanical air dryers rate a line or two. I am secretly disguised as a middle school art teacher today. The student bathrooms have one or two air dryers each. Students are supposed to go to the bathroom during 3 minute passing periods.

It takes at least two minutes for those air dryers to get my hands dry.  Many students are obviously not washing their hands, are drying hands on their clothes, or are going to class while shaking wet hands. As much as I love the idea of saving trees, I suggest administrators and building managers install paper towels in student restrooms. Yes, towels are messy. Students crumple and toss those towels — sometimes from across the bathroom — often missing the trash.

But our schools will be healthier places if more students wash their hands. A kid who has to wait in line to get to the sink and then wait in line to get to the hand dryer is a kid who may say, “Forget it! I’m not going to be late to math again.”

Teachers and administrators ought to try going from one end of their school to the other end during a student passing period while making a bathroom break in a student bathroom along the way. Are students given the time they need? Are students washing their hands? (A teacher in the bathroom will probably automatically increase the hand-washing rate, so if half the kids wash their hands, I’d assume the number may be more like a third or a quarter.) How are students managing books and electronics they are carrying?

Eduhonesty: Obviously that hand dryer aggravated the heck out of me.

 

We Live in Moments

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(The above is a genuine early childhood afternoon snack that I helped serve while I was working. All students received white milk and cucumber slices.)

In response to readers who think water bottles fall low on the list of educational priorities that America needs to address:

I agree. On the macro scale of educational importance, the Chicago Public School budgetary crisis dwarfs water bottles. The Detroit drop-out rate makes posts about missing vending machines seem absurd. School violence anywhere in America should trump water bottles.

But I also disagree. We live life in moments. Today, I ate carrot cake, coffee yogurt and broiled salmon. I read a few chapters of a vampire romance novel, walked my scruffy wheaten terrier in my sandals, put on a sundress for the hot October day, and admired the one and only tree in the neighborhood whose leaves are changing. I photographed the vivid reds, rusts, oranges, melons and yellows. Mysteriously, all the other local trees seem to have missed the change of seasons memo. I edited parts of my book while drinking a green tea frappe in my favorite coffee shop. I had a great day.

When government and school regulations make school food unpalatable, prevent students from bringing better options from home, and fill the vending machines with endless, identical bottles of water, well-meaning attempts at behavior-modification take away a few small pleasures from the school day. Imagine being forced to spend 180 days of a year eating a salt, fat and sugar-restricted diet, with your choice of white milk, bottled, or fountain water to wash down those taste-free victuals.

YUCCH. I have eaten some of those meals when I forgot my lunch. They make excellent diet choices, actually, low on calories and low on flavor. You’d have to be starving to ask for another helping. They also fascinate the other teachers, none of whom venture down to the cafeteria anymore.

“Is that what they’re eating?” They ask.

Eduhonesty: In some schools, the picture’s much more appetizing. I sub in a wealthier district that still offers local restaurant pizza and ice cream sandwiches. But I also work in districts where lunch offerings and snacks look positively grim, grimmer and grimmest. In our pursuit of academic excellence, we now sometimes neglect the nonacademic parts of the school day. That’s a mistake. Gym, recess, lunch and snack come together to form big parts of what a kid says when asked about the school day.

“How was your day?” We ask.

The answer to that question should be, “Great!”

We should be creating enthusiasm for school. Enthusiasm does not come automatically. We build enthusiasm, moment by moment.

If a little chocolate milk and a slice of pizza can up a kid’s answer from “O.K.” to “Great!”, we should be cutting up cheese and pepperoni pizzas, and throwing red jello with a daub of whip cream onto our food trays. I say, bring back dessert. Bring back pop machines. Bring back delicious food.

We will know we have succeeded when teachers start venturing into the cafeteria again, buying lunch trays that they regard as more than desperate and probably edible curiosities.

 

Threatening to Take the Water Bottles

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A small snippet from the trenches: I was in the main office of a middle school when a vending machine representative arrived to tell the secretaries that his company planned to remove the only student pop machine. He wanted to talk with the Principal. Students weren’t buying enough water to justify maintaining the machine, the rep explained, although he assured secretaries that the pop machine in the teachers’ lounge would stay. Teachers suck down sweetened, caffeinated water in the afternoon especially. I’m sure that machine does a brisk business.

I’m not sure what to say about the loss of the only vending machine in the cafeteria. Since all the slots of the machine are filled with water bottles, students will not be losing any delicious, thirst-quenching treats. Students can drink from water fountains when they are thirsty, no doubt the principal reason why the water-bottle machine saw little use.

You can’t screw up allowing kids to drink water, but couldn’t they drink Gatorade too? A sugar-free version of Vitamin Water? Bottles of fruit juice perhaps? Or something, anything, with a flavor other than eau d’plastique?

Eduhonesty: I doubt most kids will even notice when the water machine disappears. If I had not been standing in that office, I would never have noticed. But I wish our kids were not so legislated, regulated, manipulated and redirected. I wish they could go grab a chocolate milk or even a Sprite. Would an occasional High-C or grape juice do them any harm? We don’t have to put Monster in these machines — but we might try noncaffeinated beverages with actual flavor.

Because if schools think the water machine discourages sweets, I disagree. My route home includes a Starbucks that I always skip in the afternoon, when high school students from across the street swamp that particular location. After a long day of delicious water, I can understand why all the many-colored frappuccinos are flowing out the door.

A long day of substandard organic food and water fountains has to make that Grande Mocha Frappuccino look like the answer to a prayer.

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A Laugh for Everyone Who Ever Sat Through a School Assembly

For teachers and parents who have listened to students tackling the national anthem, I offer a favorite snippet from The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! Despite my unabashedly nonprofit approach to blogging, I don’t own this and will probably feel compelled to pull it in a few days. But for now, have some fun. Feel free to give some money to YouTube, too. I can’t think of a noncharitable site that deserves it more.

 

Fortunately, I Can Afford to Teach

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I retired and am now subbing. My pay rate varies between districts, but I don’t worry too much about the actual numbers. I enter these classrooms for love, not money.The average rate for a Substitute Teacher, K-12 is $11.35 per hour, according to PayScale.com.

I work in one district that pays substitute paraprofessionals and substitute teachers exactly the same money. When I first heard the head of human resources explaining this pay set-up, I thought, “Why would I teach? Assistants have a much easier job.” Teachers get a few more breaks during the day, but assistants get paid the same amount per hour to cut up the apples for snack as teachers do to manage the behavior of twenty five-year-olds. Ummm… duhh?

I still teach. I like teaching. I don’t fear unruly minions. I can get the banana or potato chant going when I want everyone’s attention. I can cope with sketchy or absent lesson plans. One advantage to spending years working in a disadvantaged school with high turnover and few subs: You become a Grand Master of Sudden Emergencies.

Here’s the part that I find the funniest about my post-retirement subbing: My cleaning lady makes more money than I do.

 

Tip #29: Smile at Brandon Especially When You Don’t Want To

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I subbed for “Brandon” today, not my first rodeo with a Brandon kicking at his chute. Brandon wrote on his table in marker and crayon. He shredded assignments, cardboard and random papers. He tried to crumple a classmate’s math paper. He left the room without permission twice and skipped an assignment or two. Brandon’s teacher had forewarned me.

He’s a little, blond boy who takes all the caps off the markers right before gym and leaves them open inside his box. I don’t think his glue stick breaks by accident. I don’t think his snack crackers ended up in crumbs around his seat by accident, either.

Brandon is hell on wheels compared to the average kindergartener. At five years of age, he can still play the cuteness card, but he only has a few years before that card will no longer rescue him. As I say, I have known Brandons and I marvel at how early some problems manifest themselves in little kids. Right now, he is being called ADHD and his teachers are gathering documentation to support that case.

He may be ADHD. Obviously I can’t draw any major conclusions based on seven hours of protecting kids and tables in one classroom. I will note that his behavior always seemed destructive as well as distracted.

Still, I had an enjoyable day. I kept a sharp watch, breathed deeply, and smiled at my cute, little miscreant every chance I got, every time he followed the program or did what had been asked. He smiled back after awhile. He started trying to get me to smile, although he never fully sheathed the crayons or highlighters.

Eduhonesty: No quick fix will change Brandon. Smiles cannot change the fact that Brandon naturally throws wrenches into class routines. I’d like to recommend you smile anyway. Praise any behavior you can praise. You may not win, but you have nothing to lose.

As you teach, you will encounter students who do not respond well to positive reinforcement, and who respond to almost nothing else. Find a place in your heart for them anyway. Find a way to include them in group activities. Figure out what works best, even if that best leaves a few crayon streaks in its wake. You may have to sit Brandon beside you or you may want to find him an isolated corner. Where is he comfortable? The more relaxed Brandon becomes, the easier your life will be.

If it helps, remind yourself that no education class you will ever take will teach you half as much about classroom management as a month or two with Brandon.