Day 117: Conflict

Today was Assessment Day.  The students who were taking the chapter test did that while the rest finished up anything they owed me.  Some of the items that they turned in were pretty cool! I have a nice collection of Pringles Can Constellation Viewers, some very nicely done Powerpoints and a few 3-Dimensional constellations.

In addition, there were several students walking around today with stellarium hats on, which made me proud.

I had another altercation with the same student from last week.  It began by me asking him to stop talking and escalated from there until he was yelling at me to not ever address him personally again.  He accused me of picking on little kids and speaking in a disrespectful tone.

I managed to keep my cool long enough to ask him to hang back after the class left so we could figure out what we going on.

"This isn't working for me and I don't think it's working for you."

I attempted to have a conversation and hear his concerns.  He was upset about the tone that I was using in class, both with him and with the other students.  He said that he feels constantly disrespected by teachers and expects to learn when he comes to school, not to be yelled at like a little kid.

I think I made a mistake by trying to have the conversation before we were both fully calm.  I think that I was calm and tried to hear what he had to say, but it's possible that I wasn't.  I know his level of frustration was just as high, if not higher, than mine.

I should have waited to talk to him, but I won't see him again until Monday because of conferences and inservice.  I know myself and I know that if I HAD waited, I would have found an excuse not to have the conversation.

As it is, I will think about his frustrations and why he's able to set me off so easily and hopefully connect with him again next week.  He's a bright kid, as well as charming, funny, personable and friendly.  He's also a natural born leader and I hope that he will use his power for good.

Sometimes, with kids who are bigger and taller than I am, it's easy to forget that they are still kids.  At the same time, I also have a ton to learn about interacting with my students, about defusing situations and winning them back.  I am able to do this to a certain extent, but I still have a long way to go until I'm the teacher I want to be.

Day 116: Still Dead

I went to bed at 7 last night.  I was too cold, so I put on lots of clothes. Then I was too hot, so I took them off again.  At 2 am, I was tossing and turning and didn't want to wake my wife, so I got up and went to the couch.

At 4, I decided I was up and stood in the shower, letting the steam clear up my sinuses for 20 minutes.

I was at work by 5.

Today was another "finish up your science contracts, which are due tomorrow" day.  I stayed in my chair, trying to keep my head from spinning.  It worked, for the most part.

Several students made stellariums (stellaria?) and wore them around for the day.

Hooray for the space hat!


I'm honestly not sure how I made it through the day...

Day 115: Walking Dead

Every once in a while, I time my lessons incredibly well.

For some reason, I feel like death warmed over.  I'm achy, have a cough and a sore throat.  As it happens, I was planning to have today and tomorrow be work days for my students.  Their science contracts on due on Wednesday before parent conferences on Thursday.

For the most part, they worked incredibly well.  I praised them for it with my increasingly tired tone.  I closed my eyes during my prep and felt slightly better after, but clearly I need to go to bed when I get home.

Day 114: Burn It All Down

My district uses Schoology as our Learning Management System.  It's our online gradebook, classroom page and discussion board.  For people who went to college, it's like Blackboard, but more appropriate for secondary schools.  I have worked with many different systems and I have excellent feelings about this one.  I think it's very versatile and has a ton of useful features.

One of the features that I was utilizing today was the "View Assignment Statistics" feature!  Once the grades for an assignment are placed in the book, you can view the distribution of those grades.  These are two of the interesting distributions from the quiz today.

I am deeply fascinated by these two graphs.  In the first image, what jumps out at me is the lack of students in the middle.  The second graph is fairly representative of my marking period grade distribution overall.  I had no less than 10 students either refuse to take the quiz or turn it back to me with nothing written.

Both these make perfect sense to me in terms of how my classes go.  I think my course is fairly easy.  We cover the Astronomy content on a level that might be more appropriate for a lower-level course.  It is designed to be a place where students will learn new information and expand their understanding of the universe.  It is NOT designed to be a super-intense training for future astrophysicists.

Those students who are paying attention, turning in assignments and being at least semi-active in class, are doing well.

Those who are not, are not.  There are VERY few students who are doing the assignments and not doing well.

I'm not sure what to take from this that doesn't sound like "I'm clearly teaching.  They just aren't doing their part."

I know there are more factors in play here.  I have several different students say to me that "This is the only class I'm doing poorly in.  This and Algebra 2."

If that is true, I'm not sure if the Algebra teacher and I are doing what we are supposed to and none of the other teachers are, or vice versa.

Or if, again, this is a MUCH bigger issue than one teacher can legitimately tackle.

Either way, I'll keep encouraging them to push themselves and grow.



The other item that was on my today was an altercation with a student.  After they finished their quizzes, I let them listen to music or work on other assignments silently.  Several students throughout the day had their music up too loud (because I'm now an old man) and they were asked to turn it down.

One student stared me down.  I could still hear his music from across the room.  At that point, I asked him to put it away.  He then became very loud, claiming that I was picking on him, that he had turned it down and that other people had their headphones on.  I told him that I couldn't hear theirs and he claimed that he had turned his down as I asked.

In an effort to maintain equality, I had everyone else put their phones away.  Because I'm a bully and a petulant child...

The first student then began yelling.
"Stop talking, please. People are still taking tests."

He didn't.  It escalated.  I asked him to step outside.

He didn't.  I called security to remove him.

It took him 2 solid minutes to gather his items, yelling the entire time.  Over the course of that rant, it sounded to me as though he called me a bitch, but I wouldn't swear by it and he says he didn't.


This is not the first such encounter I've had with this student.  He knows exactly how to push my buttons and if he doesn't get what he wants when he wants it, he'll push them VERY hard.

And I let him.

I have no idea how to de-escalate these situations.  Irrationality abounds on both sides.  I've tried to speak with him individually when the situation is not so tense and he's amenable to the conversation, so I may have to try that route again.

There is no quick fix.

Day 113: Face To Face

I very much enjoyed today's astronomy assignment/activity.  As a precursor to the quiz on constellations that they're going to have tomorrow, I handed them a piece of paper with stars on it.

Their task to identify which part of the sky is represented, find the constellations and label the major stars.

After a few minutes of unmitigated confusion, several fits of tears and screams about how hard this assignment was, I calmed down and they got to work.  Those who put the effort in seemed to find this activity somewhat fun.  They saw it like a puzzle, which is a great way to see it.

Tomorrow's quiz will be almost the same, but they will have to identify which is the summer sky and which is winter as well as the direction of the North Star.

While they were working, I called them up to check in any of the work that they had completed for the Science Contract for this chapter.  I reminded them that everything was going to be due on Wednesday (the day before parent-teacher conferences) but anything they wanted to turn in early could come in.

I have high hopes for the Experimental/Creative sections of this chapter.  They have the option of making a Pringles Can Constellation Viewer, constellation cookies, constellation cake, or building a stellarium!

Astronomical knowledge makes great headgear!

Since they were working on their own today, I was able to scoot my rolling chair around the room and work one-on-one with a bunch of different kids.  I love doing this because it reminds me that so much of the negative student behavior is often a front.

There are very few kids who, in a one on one situation, are out of control.  In my decade in the classroom, I think I have encountered less than a dozen.  Kids want to be heard, want to be spoken to as though they are people with valid opinions and concerns.

I wonder if this could be due to the fact that they are.

One of the easiest ways to get attention is be a loud, obnoxious jerk.  Believe me, I know.  Sitting across the desk from a student, giving them my full attention, is a great reminder, for them AND for me, that there are other, more productive ways to give and get attention.

I would love to do this more often, but it frequently feels as though I'm teaching in the ghost house from Super Mario Bros.

Like the Weeping Angels, except less scary.

In Physics, I demonstrated the importance of impulse by jumping off of the desk, twice. Once by bending my knees and once by not.

I should send a note of apology to the teacher in the room below me.

Day 112: Ouroboros

I am constantly amazed at how different groups of students react differently to the same lesson.

Today's Astronomy lesson was based around going through some of the major constellations and discussing the mythology behind each.  We started by talking about mythology from various cultures and how they are pervasive in our current society.  I asked them to tell me what myths they knew and filled in the gaps with names they didn't.

They were quite surprised to discover how much mythology they knew without actually realizing it.

"I'm the sexiest flower!!"

The narcissus was named for a Greek myth about a young man who starved to death while staring at the beauty of his own reflection.

Zeus was famous for his philandering and often visited the beautiful nymphs on Earth.  In another myth, his wife, Hera, came looking for him.  One of the nymphs stalled Hera by being very long-winded and allowed Zeus to escape.  When Hera discovered what had happened, she cursed the young nymph so that she was only able to repeat the last few words that had been spoken to her.

The nymph's name was Echo.

The phrase "he flew too close to the sun" to describe someone who overextends themselves to their own downfall comes from the tale of Icarus and Daedalus, who made wings of wax to escape prison.  Icarus was warned not to fly too close to the sun lest his wings melt, but he neglected the advice and fell to his death.

Even the word "cereal" has mythological origins, being named after Ceres, which was the Roman name for Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and grain.

In  two of my five Astronomy classes, the kids were HIGHLY engaged.  The discussion moved forward quickly with them joining in with the various myths that they knew.  One class went particularly well through no doing of mine.  In that group, there was a student who normally is checked out, but was on the ball today because, as he said, "mythology is ballin'."

In the third class, the students seemed close to indifferent, while in the remaining two classes, they were actively disinterested.

Their disinterest triggered a vicious cycle of my unwillingness to be excited myself.  Or perhaps it was the other way around.  It's certainly possible that my telling the same story for the 3rd time, with the prospect for doing it twice more, sapped my enthusiasm which, in turn, triggered disinterest in them.

The chicken or the egg...

In theory, I should be the one to break this cycle.  I'm the teacher, I'm the adult, I'm the one with the maturity to take responsibility for the situation. (Shut up! I'm TOTES mature! You're just a doodoo head!)


I know this is how the cycle has to end.  Many days I can do it.  But today, it was a challenge.  It's exhausting to be spoken over all the time and it's hard to gather up the enthusiasm when you're exhausted.

"As soon as I'm done biting this bastard who's biting me, I'm going to make an AWESOME lesson for the Childlike Empress!"

Day 111: Not Wrong, But Wrong

Student: "Mr. Aion, are you collecting this sheet?"
Me: "I am. It's due at the end of the period."
Student: "Good! I need the points!"
Me: "It's not really about the points. It's only going to be worth about 10.  This is more to see what you know."
Student: "Nah. I'm all about the points."
Me: "Really? Because we have had 2 different 100 point assignments this marking period that you just didn't do."
Student: "That was a lot of work. I'll just take the points for this paper."
Me: "So you'll have 10 out of 210 possible points. That gives you a 5%"
Student: "But that's not a zero, is it?"

Waiter, I'd like my order to go, please.


This interaction bothers me for two completely different reasons.

The teacher in me is sad that points are so important.  Ideally, I want my students to strive to acquire knowledge and skills instead of points.  At worst, I would at least like them to see their scores as an indication of what knowledge and skills they have demonstrated.  I KNOW that not every kid who fails my class does so because they don't understand.

In fact, very few of them fail for this reason.  The majority of the students who are failing my classes are doing so because they will not complete assignments, therefore making it impossible for me to accurately assess their knowledge.

In reality, I recognize that a large portion of the students are working for the grades as their primary motivation and knowledge acquisition as secondary or tertiary.  Whatever gets a kid to learn...  I'm certainly not in a position to judge motivations.

But this brings me to my other concern.

While I want my students to be motivated by curiosity and interest, but if they are going to be motivated by grades, could they at least understand how those grades work??

They know that passing is a 60%, but I think schools have done a mediocre job of getting to understand how cumulation works.  It's easier to start with a high grade and maintain it than it is to start low and bring it up.

In all honesty, I'm no better at this, nor was I when I was in school.  "It's not due until Friday. I'll do it later" has put me in more tough spots than I can count.

The issue that concerns me, however, is more than just simple procrastination.  It stems from the complete confusion that I saw on the face of student today when I told her that, having missed almost 80 days of my class and having not turned in a single assignment all year, she wasn't really going to be able to pass my class.

"Well, what assignments can I turn in."
"You could start with any of them and we can work from there, but you've turned in nothing and you're never here. Did you really think you would be able to pass that way?"

And she did.  She honestly did.  She's in 11th grade.


I'm not sure what to do with this.  It's not attitude as much as ignorance in the literal sense of the word.  Many of my students are simply ignorant of how long term planning works in terms of chapters, marking periods, semesters or years.

I am in no way blaming the students for this.  As with any issue, there are some who are culpable, but this is a much bigger problem.  There are deep and systemic issues at work here.  I'm not sure how to even begin addressing them, or even if I can.