Teaching with Tim

     Parent conference nights are held in LAUSD several times per year-teachers open up their classrooms for about two hours, parents sign in and wait their turn to talk with the teacher.  Almost invariably, parents are interested in their student’s grade above all else.  If the grade is good, the parent is happy.  At my school you rarely hear about parents getting cantankerous over curriculum or Catcher in the Rye. If the grade is bad, the parent usually chastises the child, whose “I don’t have any homework” refrain is now revealed for the lie it always was.  I hear that sometimes parents go after the teacher for a child’s low grade, claiming that the teacher has it out for their child, but I haven’t experienced this yet.  Parents do sometimes make a fuss when they have to wait too long for their turn.  I can’t tell you how many different ways administrators have told me to “move them along”-the furtive glance at my waiting line, the hand-on-shoulder conference, chatting up the line to keep everyone happy-but it’s hard to say “yes, your daughter is an interesting case, but two-minutes interesting, not five.” I understand their concern, though-I started 10 minutes early and stayed 20 minutes after, but I still didn’t get to speak with every parent who signed in.

     Nonetheless, I left parent conference night on Thursday feeling buoyant, self-satisfied, rejuvenated.  I think it’s kind of like the satisfaction you feel as a host who has just thrown a good party-I set up snacks, student work, suggested reading lists, newspapers, and an art area for the younger sisters and brothers. All of this was well received.  Even though I’ve been at it for a few years now, presenting myself to the world as “Teacher” still feels just a little strange.  Inevitably, I get at least one “you’re so young” comment, though it isn’t every five minutes like during my first year-most parents know me at this point.  During my senior year of college, while taking classes like “The Humanistic Foundations of Education,” I was developing a revised self-concept: Tim the Teacher.  I was imagining what I wanted to be like, how I wanted to carry myself, what I wanted to represent to students and to their parents.  In a way, Thursday’s parent night represented the actualization of that self-concept, something close to the realization of my romantic “Tim the Teacher” ideal.  Parents seemed happy to have their kids in my class, and I left feeling appreciated for the work I do.  One lingering frustration is that I can’t quite bridge the culture gap-I don’t speak Spanish, and about half of the conferences are conducted through my infinitely-patient translator-but I’m taking a class in the Winter through UCLA and traveling to Ecuador in the Spring, so I’ll give my gringo Spanish a test drive during May’s conferences. 

     Now that I’ve got all that self-congratulation out of my system, I should add that a well-executed parent conference night did more than just boost my ego.  I’ve mentioned before that kids seem to slowly evolve from generic “students” to individualized human beings over the course of a year.  Parent conferences are a big part of that process.  I found out that one student whose absenteeism was frustrating me was actually staying out of school for a series of painful skin operations.  I discovered that another student has a long history of serious social anxiety.  It didn’t surprise her parents when I told them that she hides out in my room during lunch and works alone while other students talk and use the computers.  Over and over again, especially with students who I didn’t have last year, I got the sense that I was jumping in at chapter twelve of a long story that the parents had been following from the beginning-that I would have to learn about what happened during those chapters I missed if I wanted to change the direction of this one.  Talking to parents face-to-face made me feel more optimistic about being successful with my students this year-like I had allies in the struggle. 

     I shouldn’t end this entry without mentioning that Los Angeles is on fire.  Below is the view from my apartment balcony two days ago.  The palm trees in the foreground are now obscured by smoky air, which filters the sunlight and suffuses the sky with a vague orange glow.  After being outside for a couple of hours, my eyes and throat hurt from the smoke, which smells like a campfire but with the smack of something dusty and arid thrown in-like a cloud of that light brown dirt you find on the ground where cacti grow.  Mayor Villaraigosa declared a state of emergency yesterday, and if you’re interested in a shocking slideshow of fire photos, check out latimes.com.  No danger in Echo Park just yet, but the whole city has this kind of on-edge, spooked feeling, like we’re all holding our breath until the air clears.   

Photo Credit: Liz

I usually ignore holidays in the classroom.  Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter-all of these come and go in Room 311 without much fanfare.  But Halloween is different.  Maybe in part because of my abiding love for Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe, I have always gone all out on the 31st.  This year I carved a pumpkin with my journalism elective, had a Halloween history candy quiz with homeroom, and taught Poe all day with my 7th and 8th graders… as the true master of Horror himself: 

Okay, technically that’s an Edward Scissorhands wig, and last year my principal said I looked more like Borat, but the costume was still pretty popular. 

 I taught “The Tell Tale Heart” and for the warm up I asked students, “If you murdered someone, where would you hide the body?  Why? Explain in 4-5 sentences.”  I admit that this question would never appear under the heading “age-appropriate writing prompts for middle school students,” but I’m going to justify myself by saying that it was a good lead-in question for a story involving a corpse hidden under the floorboards.  Plus the students took to their warm up sheets with unusual gusto, explaining how they would burn the body, chop it into tiny pieces, hide it under Juan Soto’s bed so that everyone would blame him, tie a barbell to the foot and throw it into the ocean, feed it to their dogs, eat it themselves-virtually anything but “That would never happen because I wouldn’t murder someone.”  I explained to them afterwards that this was actually the correct answer, so I couldn’t be held responsible for encouraging their homicidal tendencies. 

Speaking of which, while we were sharing out the warm ups during one of my eighth grade classes, a normally quiet student gave a long, detailed answer that included chopping the body in half and putting one part in an abandoned field north of Pasadena and the other in a drainage ditch near the railroad tracks in Riverside.  Silence hung thick in the air for a few seconds after he finished reading.

A moment that should have been even more awkward, though, came later, when I had to deliver discipline while wearing eyebrow makeup and a fake mustache.  One student, I’ll call him Gilbert, had skipped homework detention two days in a row, so I held him after class.  I sat across the desk from him and delivered a long diatribe that involved injunctions about being responsible, staying focused, and making his parents proud.  He took it seriously and nodded throughout, wide-eyed.  It only occurred to me after he left that he could have completely broken my nerve if he had so much as smirked at the absurdity of it: this cartoon creature with wild black hair and makeup lecturing him on responsibility.  I am convinced, though, that the irony did not even occur to him.  The image of me he had in his mind–the stern-but-fair teacher/authority figure–was so strong that it seemed to shine straight through my makeup.

This version of myself that gives finger-wagging lectures on character sometimes still seems like a caricature to me, a costume even more ridiculous than my Edgar Allan Poe get-up.  Wasn’t it just ten years ago, to the day, that I was dropping pumpkins off a bridge with my friends to watch the seedy orange explosion at the bottom? (In spite of a Seattle Police Department sign promising a $250 fine for doing just that.)  I guess this incongruity is just part of the shared charade that takes place in any classroom.  Because some of the kids, too, are playing a role.  They pretend to be innocent and studious while I’m in earshot, but I know that they see movies like “Super Bad” and “Saw V” on the weekends, and some of the conversations I’ve overheard in the halls wouldn’t even make it to HBO uncensored.  I remember seeing Gilbert (of the wide eyes and the yes-mister-I’ll-do-better) working on a computer in the back of the classroom once.  He was having trouble with the internet, and I overheard him exclaim “What the f–k is wrong with this thing?”  I should add that he didn’t say this to impress his friends, or with the self-conscious glee of trying out a bad word for the first time, but completely naturally, like a balding father with his head under the hood of a broken-down Ford.  He owned that bad word.  Still, I appreciate that he never would have said it if he thought I could hear. 

During my first year of teaching, cursing and open defiance were fairly regular occurrences in my classroom.  I remember visiting the classroom of another teacher, our department chair at that time, and not even recognizing one of my homeroom students because her manner was so much different-it was as if, in his classroom, she were suddenly several years younger.  She raised her hand eagerly when he asked the class questions, and she sat up straight in her seat instead of slouching like she did in my room.  In my room, she chewed gum loudly and greeted almost everything I said with the words “Nah, Mister, I ain’t gonna do that.”  Yet in his classroom she seemed totally different, just short of angelic.  I’m happy to report that I can now command enough respect to get students to put on this kind of act-to disguise their baser natures.  We’re all playing our roles-they’ll play the respectful, hard-working students if I’ll play the competent, stern, well-prepared teacher… a role I wasn’t completely prepared to fill two years ago.  Shakespeare was right that life is a stage, I guess, but Polonius’s “to thine own self be true” requires certain caveats.

That’s about it, but I wanted to share three quick things that have nothing to do with any of the above before I end this installment:

1) I saw Marilynne Robinson (author of Pulitzer-winning “Gilead”) doing interview with Stephen Greenblatt of the NPR radio show, “Bookworm,” at the L.A. Library. The conversation was fascinating, and it prompted me to start listening to old episodes of “Bookworm” online. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you might really enjoy these David Foster Wallace interviews. Powerful stuff.

2) My journalism students created podcasts of their most recent issue of “Eagle News”. If you’re a fan of hard-hitting news and fearless journalism, they’re here.

3) Obligatory rumination on the weather: L.A. didn’t get the memo about Fall starting, apparently. It has still been sunny and 80+ non-stop. That may sound great, but I don’t really like it. Maybe I’m just a dour, grumpy Seattlite by nature, but I find it almost insulting, like the city is lying to you about the nature of life. I’m looking forward the holidays, when I’ll be back in a city with weather that is more… practical.  A climate with an implicit understanding that life is not all moonbeams and sunshine.  But best of all, of course, will be seeing all the family and friends I’ve been missing.