hungry bored and tired http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com dispatches from an urban middle school posterous.com Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:58:00 -0700 Untitled http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/163268945 http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/163268945

Blog has moved: www.theteachingcurve.blogspot.com. Thanks for reading!

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Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:57:00 -0800 Figurative language http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/figurative-language http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/figurative-language

I was told my last post was too sad. Let me make it up to you by showing you why I LOVE Oscar. These are excerpts from his recent test on figurative language.

Look at the last answer. The prompt was write your own example of personification:

Fig_lang_1

 

This one is less outrageous, but still wonderful:

Fig_lang_2_edit

NB: This is after I told Oscar several times that "gazizzle" is not a onomatopoeia and he should not use it on his test. Luckily he covered his bases with "ka-boom."

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Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:50:00 -0800 You can lead a horse to water... http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water

There is this constant tension in the life of a full-time tutor: to what extent do you push/ force/ cajole/ incentivize/ threaten your tutees to work/ study/ put forth any sort of effort/ not destroy their lives, and to what extent you let them make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons? In general I'd say we try to lean toward the latter, but some students -- one of my 6th grade tutees in particular -- are so academically behind and emotionally troubled and just generally out-of-it that allowing them to "make their own mistakes" is equivalent to giving up on them altogether.

That is why I call said tutee every night on the phone to help with his homework. Tutee resents this with a passion and it is a major source of conflict in our relationship, but he just can't/ won't/ doesn't get the work done on his own.

Also, though, he doesn't get it done with me. Instead what he does, as of late, is works through every question with me, eventually producing the right answer (also complaining/ insulting me at regular intervals), then we pause for the amount of time he needs to write down the answer, then we move on, until the whole assignment is complete... and then the next morning when he turns in the assignment he hasn't actually written anything on the paper.

So you can lead a horse to water and you can open the horse's mouth and you can pour water into the horse's mouth and you can close the horse's mouth and then keep watching the horse until it makes a swallowing motion, and you can promise the horse a reward if it drinks the water, and you can inform the horse of consequences for not drinking the water, but no, friends, you really cannot make it drink.

 

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Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:04:00 -0800 Welcome to the Tutor Cabin http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/welcome-to-the-tutor-cabin http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/welcome-to-the-tutor-cabin

Have I told you about my living situation? This should have been part of my earlier entry about daily absurdities.

You might be wondering how a publicly funded inner-city school could afford to hire 50 full-time tutors. Part of the answer is grants. The other part of the answer is:

In lieu of paying us an actual salary, my school provides each tutor with a stipend, housing, a bus pass, and unlimited laundry detergent. Basically, the school rents two triple-decker houses, and all the tutors live together in 8-person apartment units. Words I use when describing this living situation include co-ed frat house, commune, Branch Davidian Compound,* co-op, half-way house, and now, Tutor Cabin, which has replaced Milk Bucket as my favorite two-word phrase. It derives from a question recently asked of my friend and fellow-tutor by one of her students: "Miss, who lives in your Tutor Cabin??" See, the school never really established a policy on what we should tell the kids about our housing situation,** and the subject can be awkward with immature middle schoolers who are not ready to grasp the concept of co-ed habitation -- or perfectly well-adjusted middle schoolers who are not ready to grasp the concept of the majority of their school staff living together in a giant house, because, actually, yes, that's really weird. So there's a lot of curiousity and a lot of, apparently, misconceptions. I'm not sure exactly what this student was picturing when she asked about our Tutor Cabins, but I don't think she was too far off.

Another defining aspect of life in the Tutor Cabin is that, for reasons that are unclear but totally appreciated, the school provides all our basic household supplies. Every couple weeks we submit orders for tinfoil, wet wipes, etc. to one of those grocery-store-delivery-truck services, and on Friday all our supplies are shipped to school. An unintended consequence of this system is that from week to week and apartment to apartment, there ends up being no variation in brand or style of product. I am slowly forgetting the concept of consumer choice. There is just The Dish Soap and The Paper Towels. Basically, communism. (Keep in mind the only houses I ever see in this city are the other Tutor Cabins.) This past week something went wrong with our delivery order and my apartment ended up without sponges and with only two hand soaps. When my housemates told me about our rations, I said "I can't believe we didn't get any sponges and only got two hand soaps!" and then I laughed at myself. I actually bartered another house for one sponge before it occured to me that I could purchase one for like 12 cents.

Anyway, it's lights out time in Tutor Cabin 3. Good night, America.

*This one started after we all got matching sweatshirts, which we mostly all wear all the time around the house, so sometimes you walk into a room wearing your sweatshirt and realize there are seven people in the room in matching sweatshirts.

**Though we are rarely at a loss for policies.

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Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:29:00 -0800 another one was to nun http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/another-one-was-to-nun http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/another-one-was-to-nun

i'm reading one of my 8th grader's english essays, and she just used the word nun as a verb.

"Theseus gave Hermia two options. One option was to be killed and another was to nun."

you might decry the state of our modern education system, but i think this is language evolving.

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Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:46:00 -0800 aspects of my daily life that i would find absurd if they weren't aspects of my daily life http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/aspects-of-my-daily-life-that-i-would-think-a-45682 http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/aspects-of-my-daily-life-that-i-would-think-a-45682

1. milk bucket: milk bucket is a bucket that you pour milk into when the children in your homeroom are finished not actually drinking the milk you distributed at breakfast. many days i forget to bring in the milk bucket from the supply closet until the last minute. today one of the little girls who is extremely kind and helpful, but in this one instance creepy, leaned in and whispered "milk bucket" as she walked to her seat. milk bucket is my least favorite part of morning duties and my most favorite phrase to use as an interjection. 

2. it recently occured to me that i spend the majority of my weekend pretending to be an off-task child. let me explain. monday through thursday my job is to tutor and do milk bucket-type things, but friday and saturday i spend in teacher training. in teacher training, we get in small groups and practice teaching a 6-minute lesson while our "students" (the other teacher residents) act like real students, a.k.a. misbehave. but in order to make it a useful simulation, we as students have to do "planned misbehaviors." so we get little papers that say, like, "at 3 minutes, make weird noises until the teacher gives you a demerit." i like to think that this is how our students actually think about their time in class. like, "i was trying to learn math today, but i had to make a cat noise at 27 minutes, so."

sidenote: we have our big teaching gateway test this weekend, which is where we have to teach a 6-minute lesson to real students, except they're not real real students, because they're actually really good students who are doing, yes, planned misbehaviors. i failed my practice gateway because i missed a student standing and walking in the middle of my round. that is all my feedback form said: "missed a student standing and walking." teaching is sort of like doing this experiment: http://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo

3. waking up at 5:30 a.m.

4. oh, here's another story about dead chickens for you. i am not even trying to make this the theme of my blog, but sure. today i sat in on the 7th grade ancient world history class, and they were learning about mummification by mummifying chickens. 7th graders and dead chickens and salt and something that smells like formaldehyde. i left half-way through class. it is a really unnerving experience to have a child make eye-contact with you at the same moment they realize they have inserted their arm all the way through the body of a dead chicken.

 

on the plus side, the past two weeks (post-winter break) have been great. one of the teachers told me that over winter break, the kids forget they hate you. she was totally right. yesterday this one kid, who shortly before break told me he would never speak to me ever again, bought me a cherry donut.

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Sun, 25 Dec 2011 12:58:00 -0800 about the title of this blog http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/about-the-title-of-this-blog http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/about-the-title-of-this-blog

i should explain.

at my school, when students finish an assignment early and have a minute or two to kill, they’re encouraged to do something called “Me Right Now” which basically means make a thought map about how you feel at the moment. i grade daily mini-quizzes from all the 6th grade math classes, so i see a lot of MRNs scribbled on the backs of papers. and here’s what i have learned from an informal analysis of hundreds of samples: at any given moment, approx. 95% of students are hungry, bored, and tired.* the only real variation is in their spelling.

to clarify, i myself am usually hungry, never bored, and always tired. often exasperated.

*they’re often cold, too.

 

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Sun, 25 Dec 2011 12:57:00 -0800 chickens http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/chickens http://hungryboredandtired.posterous.com/chickens

hi friends.

i had decided against starting one of these “my life as a teacher”* blogs because i figured it would be hard for me to keep up with and my stories wouldn’t be interesting to actual people. all that is probably still true. anyway, here’s a story about a chicken.

quick run down of how my school/ job works: i work at a charter middle school where every student has a personal tutor, meaning every tutor has 4-6 personal tutees. when i signed on to be a tutor, i thought it meant my job was to help some kids with math and english. a more apt job description is: be entirely responsible for the educational, emotional, and psychological well-being of four young teenagers. 

this brings us to oscar.** oscar is a sixth grader, and he is awesome. this is an actual transcript of a text message oscar sent me when he first got a cell phone: “Dear Ms.A, sorry i cannot call you because i dont have any questions or inferences so i made you this text message. Thank you for reading this if you are.” i could give some context, but it would not elucidate anything. oscar no longer has a cellphone because he lost it on the bus the first week he had it, and then he got it back, and then it rang during school twice in the same day and he got detention. that’s the kind of kids oscar is. he perpetually shows up to tutorial without sharpened pencils, except one time when he brought four pencil sharpeners, and the next day i was like, “oscar, where are any of your pencil sharpeners?” and he was like “i dunno!” i really love oscar.

one day, oscar came into homeroom crying. sixth grade boys cry more than you’d expect, but this was still concerning. so i asked him what was wrong. “Ms. A, my pet chicken died,” he said in the most somber tone i have ever heard a 12-year-old produce.

how do you console a child over the loss of a pet chicken? i didn’t even know oscar had pet chickens. does he live on a farm? how could i have not known that? i felt like a terrible tutor. i had no idea what to say.

oscar proceeded to cry through breakfast. when he came to tutorial two hours later, he was carrying his own box of tissues. i asked him if he wanted to tell his tutorial partner why he was upset. “can’t you do it?” he asked. so i said, “ok, oscar is very sad because his… pet… died.” tutorial partner could tell something was up. “what was his pet?” he asked. “a chicken,” i said. “oscar is upset because his pet chicken died.” “what kind of pet is a chicken?” tutorial partner said with a smirk. i told him to be respectful, but also, good question.

cut to afternoon study hall, 6 hours later. oscar is still crying. it is so sad. that kid really really loved his chicken. i imagine him growing up with this chicken as his closest companion. baby pictures of a little oscar in a diaper holding a baby chick, young oscar learning to ride a bike with a fledgling chicken perched on the handlebars, etc. etc. 

oscar leaves school literally still crying. that evening i call his mom to check in. oscar’s mom and i don't understand half of what each other says, but she is always super sweet and receptive. “i’m just calling to let you know that oscar was very upset all day over the death of his… chicken,” i tell her. she is not surprised. i admit to her that i didn’t even know they had a chicken. oscar’s mom tells me that they visited a farm two days ago and oscar saw these “two little chickens” and just had to have them, and whatever his mom was thinking, they brought home “two little chickens” and then that morning, when oscar woke up and ran to check on his little chickens, one had fallen off the table (??) and died. (when i log this call in our database, i title it “Chicken Check-in.”)

definition of “two little chickens” is still unclear. i interpreted this as meaning chicks, but according to oscar, they were full-grown chickens, somehow living on a table in his house. regardless, he had owned this little chicken for about 48 hours before it died. he cried over it for at least 9.

the verdict is still out on whether oscar appreciated the irony of the school lunch entree that day. chicken nuggets are usually a favorite.

* right so i’m not actually a teacher, i’m a tutor/ TA, but who’s counting.

**not his real name, but i feel like it could be.

 

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