When Good Intentions Go Wrong

Of course, I am sure we all would agree that offering vision screening at school is a good thing, right?

Evidently, it puts a bit more stress on families than we thought. It might even lead to deception.

You see, I have a very sweet young man in my class who struggles in all academic areas. I sent him to the vision screening just in case his eyes might be part of the problem.

As it turns out, he does have a bit of a vision problem…

he sees DOUBLE! (And he's struggling? Really?!?)

So we send home a note to his mother saying that he needs to be seen by an eye doctor.

No response.

We call home and leave message.

No response.

I talked to the student about how important it is for him to go to the doctor and asked him to push his mom to take him.

No response.

Weeks and weeks go by without a visit to the eye doctor.

And then one morning there was my students sitting at his desk with eyeglasses on his desk!

With a big smile on my face, I compliment him on his new spects and ask to see them on his face so I can "see how handsome" he looks in them.

He slips them on his big grinning face and

they're smudged

they're bent

they're crooked

they're too small for his head and

they're obviously not glasses made for him.

So I ask where he got them.

"From my mom."

So I ask where she got them.

"She just brought them home."

So I ask if he went to the eye doctor.

"uummmmm, yes?"

So I ask where.

"uuuummmm, Long Beach?" (Nowhere near where he lives.)

So I say, "Well, kiddo. I'm a bit worried. I don't think those glasses were made especially for your eyes like they should be."

And I had a nurse call his mom to check.

Sure enough, they were not his glasses. In an attempt to end our phone calls, notes, and messages, his mother gave him his little brother's glasses and told him wear them.

Initially I thought what a rotten thing that was for her to do. Her kid is seeing double and all she wants to do is get us off her back about it. Giving him someone else's prescription glasses could make things worse for him!

But then I put myself in her shoes. She has no insurance, no money, and no access (that she knew of) to any assistance. Maybe she just didn't know what to do.

Of course, our school has information on all sorts of programs to assist students in need of free medical care. We arranged for him to be seen by a doctor and get his glasses at no cost.

Am I being too easy on her? Is it just bad parenting to avoid addressing your child's medical needs or can it be justifiable under some circumstances?

Deck the Halls

Or the palm trees for that matter.

As a transplanted East Coaster living in California, I haven't been swept away by the Christmas spirit in several years. Ever since the first Christmas my mother and I did not travel back East for the holiday and she insisted on having a roaring fire in the fireplace despite the 87 degree temperatures outside, I just haven't been feeling it. Our family tree has gone from a giant Fir we cut down ourselves, to a tall artificial, to a smaller artificial, to what I lovingly refer to the Christmas bush which remains decorated in a bag in the garage, awaiting unveiling a few weeks before Christmas. Seriously, we are one step away from simply hanging a picture up of a decorated tree and calling it a night.

But all that may have changed tonight.

As I was walking my dog around my neighborhood this evening, I caught sight of a family decking out their patio with holiday cheer.

All four of them were in the socal uniform of tee-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. If that doesn't spell Holiday, I don't know what does.

Mom was stringing colored lights around the palm tree in front of their patio, a move that will most certainly result in a pink note taped to their door on behalf of our homeowners association chastising them for garishly decorating a community tree or some other nonsense.

Dad was hanging icicle lights along the patio fence while screaming, "Hand me those damn lights on the ground there, son. NO, the other damn lights. NOOOO…not those. Those fu*&ers by your foot!"

Son was hunting around by the light of half-hung Christmas lights for the right fu*&ers to hand his father, and daughter was sitting on the stoop sobbing because, from what I could gather, she didn't get to put the light-up Santa where she wanted it so therefore she was on strike.

Ahhhh, Christmas is in the air! Can you feel it too?

Ouch!

Please enjoy this little reenactment of today's dismissal conversation on the playground.

Anthony: What are you going to be for Halloween, Ms. Lee?

Me: Oh, I haven't really picked out anything.

Anthony: Maybe you could be a witch? You could get all hagged-out with green make-up, have messy hair, and put a wart on your nose.

Me: That is a good idea, Anthony but let's face it: it's gonna take a bit more than some green make-up to make my beautiful face look "hagged-out." Just look at me. I'm gorgeous! Not even a mask could hide my good looks. Ok, maybe a really thick rubber mask, but none of those flimsy ones. My beauty would just radiate through one of those. Turning me into a hag would be a big job.

Anthony: Or you could just put on a pointy hat.

The Value of Common Sense

So I have a student teacher right now, and I have to say she is doing a bang-up job with this little class of misfits.

Those of you who have had student teachers know, you never can anticipate what you're gonna get when you agree to this little bargain of "master teachership."

Bargain, you ask?

Yes, the actual deal (at a minimum) is that I sacrifice at least 8 weeks of my before and after-school prep time to preview, review, teach, model, advise, guide and direct a student teacher and in return I get (drumroll, please)

$120.00

that the university from which my student teacher came from pays out after I hound them for many months because they ALWAYS neglect to send it.

But there is more to that bargain than what we see on the surface, though. Isn't there always?

The other benefit for me depends wholly on the student teacher.

Common sense, and if they lack common sense, I don't get my extra "bonus."

But before I describe my bonus, I must admit student teachers have a difficult job.

Teachers, including student teachers, must possess the skills to multi-task, and that is not an understatement. They must teach highly engaging and interesting lessons while simultaneously scanning the room for students who look confused, lost, or who were never with you in the first place, and mentally target them for future help. Meanwhile, they must also be on the lookout for students off task, playing around, chatting, and generally not following the rules, and utilize a variety of techniques to alter their behavior without interrupting the flow of the lesson and sacrificing precious instructional minutes. Speaking of instructional minutes, teachers must also fit lessons into the appropriate amounts of allotted minutes while remembering to send child X to speech therapy, children A, B, and C to the resource teacher, and child F to counseling (which is one we NEVER forget to send) at their scheduled times. During this time, teachers are constantly checking for understanding, adjusting the lessons on-the-fly to meet the unique needs of a particular group, moving around the room to maintain proximity with every child all the time (a physical impossibility yet still expected), noting what's working and not working for future use, and developing ways to get the objective across to every child in the class in a meaningful way.

And student teachers have to do all that while having their every move evaluated by a master teacher.

And if they can do all those things, it's due almost entirely to their finely developed use of common sense. Then, we master teachers get many hours to prep and plan that vastly make up for the sacrificed time before and after school and the paltry stipend. Bonus!

I have had several student teachers who could do all those things listed above, including the young lady I have now, and they make my job as a master teacher a joy. After all, we are here to teach, right? Be it children learning their basics or adults beginning a new career, we love to see when people "get it." We also love more prep time, which I for one desperately need.

But not every student teacher is cut from the same cloth…

Let's face it; either student teachers have common sense or they don't. If they don't, I can't teach it to them because it's "common" sense, meaning something everyone should have if they were not raised by wolves. In my experience, the lack of common sense is what does-in most failed student teachers.

Take "Tanya" for example. Like all student teachers in my state, she completed 90 hours of observation in a classroom and her requisite classes before darkening my door. Unlike all student teachers, I made her observe me for weeks before taking the reins in any subjects because she did not seem to possess much common sense.

In my room, when it comes to student discipline, I focus on positive behaviors before I slam kids for the negative. If I see kids fooling around in their desks, I reward kids who are not and the others usually get the message. If they continue, I issue consequences. We are all happier, myself included, if issues can be handled through positive reinforcement.

In Tanya's eighth week of her eight week student teaching stint, and after many long hours of discussion and direction about how things needed be done in my classroom, I gave over my students to her for a day of teaching. (I had a feeling she would not last out the week.) Her idea of positive reinforcement was to put a kid in time-out in the front of the room with a rolling pocket chart hiding him because, as she told the class, "A naughty boy like him is not worthy of being seen by others."

What was his offense? Not knowing the answer to a question when she called on him, and it was his first offense of the day.

How was this positive? In her mind, the other students were being rewarded by NOT having to stand in time-out.

She did not last out the week. Bye, Bye, Tanya.

You can't teach common sense.

My favorite disastrous student teacher was "Marge."

Although I did not want to give Marge my class for a week, her student teaching supervisor begged me to give this woman a chance. After all, she's a single mom raising 2 kids on her own after a messy divorce and really needs this teaching career.

But I kept saying…

You can't teach common sense.

Turns out, you REALLY can't. What adult with any common sense would think of leaving 30 children unattended in a classroom, especially after a student uprising?

Uummmm, that would be Marge.

Day one of her independent week, while I was working in the teacher's lounge to give her the space her supervisor asked me to give her, Marge decided to take away PE as a class consequence for poor behavior…by 8:30 in the morning.

What on God's green earth could they possibly have done in the 45 minutes school had been in session to warrant, what is to them, the most severe consequence possible?

More importantly, now that you've taken away their most prized subject, what are you going to use to manage their behavior for the rest of the day?

(But what about the uprising you mentioned, Edna?)

Oh, well, after the consequence was issued to the class, little Ralphie began pounding his fists on his desk and chanting "NO PE, NO WORK! NO PE, NO WORK!" Soon the entire class was pounding and chanting, and Marge had officially lost all control of the class by 8:32 in the morning.

So Marge approached Ralphie's desk and attempted to silence him, but he got up and ran away from her...

so she chased him…

and she has a limp from some old injury so she kinda runs like Igor…

and he ran (because children are like puppies. If you run, they run)

So Ralphie is running in a big circle around the room and she is fast in pursuit Hunchback-style and the kids are in hysterics.

Eventually, she catches him by the arm and immediately begins to drag him up to the office, leaving my hysterical class unattended.

And I see her, Ralphie in tow, marching by the window of the teacher's lounge and immediately wonder, "If she is up here by the office, who is with my class?"

Turns out, no one! When I raced down there, I found chaos. Chaos that immediately folded its hands and sat up straight when it saw me in the doorway.

She did not last out the week. Bye bye, Marge.

Of course the kids were wrong for what they did, but a modicum of common sense on the teacher's part would have avoided the whole episode, and unfortunately…

You can't teach common sense.

And, therefore, I don't get my prep time!