27 kids!

Suddenly, everything was not going so smoothly. It was 4th hour on "B" day and I had twenty-five kids sitting in rows, copies of a pre-writing worksheet strewn around the desks, pencils flying, students poking, a kid begging a pass to the nurse, and two boys in back who refused to pick their heads up off of their desks.

I was strolling up and down the aisles, trying to lead a discussion on writing a product review and reaching about four kids. Each time I paused to put one outburst out, another burst up behind my back. It was like waiting tables in a giant restaurant with no busboys and too many tables.

And every time I glanced up to the back of the room, TL was smiling and writing notes with his little green marker.

When the bell had rung and I was finished picking up pieces of inky, broken pens; twisted, torn worksheets; and the shavings from at least three pencils that someone had just sharpened and sharpened and sharpened, I sat down with my supervising teacher.

"Well," he said, "how did you think that went?" I had kind-of hoped he hadn't noticed.

He went on to explain that I had been bum-rushed by a very tricky class and handed me a piece of paper, full of those green-marker jottings, that detailed where I might have gone wrong.

He gave me some simple tips:

• Use a timer, say, "Now we're going to put away our worksheets and switch gears to the reading for today, I'm setting the timer for one minute, have your novels out when the bell rings."
• Tell the class exactly how you want the conversation to run. Tell them that sometimes you will say, "raise your hands," and you will expect them to wait to be called on, and sometimes you will ask a question and tell them to answer out loud, so everybody can talk. Sometimes you may even ask them to turn to their neighbors and talk about the question (for one minute, using the timer)
• Use the "take a break" strategy that has been systematically drummed into their brains since spring. And remember , it should be a time to collect thoughts or to take a breather, not a punishment.
• Randomize who you call on. Ask a silly question like, "raise your hands if you are wearing colored socks." Then ask those people with colored socks to share an answer from a group activity or from written work.

Well, today was "B" day again. I used all of TL's suggestions on the eager and calm students of first hour. The class sailed. They were digging the discussion, participating, and even understanding some of what I was saying. But these kids were not at all the same class that I would face in a few hours. 4B is a totally different beast.

And they responded too. More so. I had them in the palm of my hand... mostly. The discussion went just as I described it to them. they were (mostly) quiet when I was talking or when one of them had the floor. They participated in the discussion pairings and they reported back to me when i asked everyone who was wearing a necklace to tell me what they had said. They even took the conversation in a new, unplanned, but totally appropriate direction - all on their own.

It's amazing what a few simple tips from an experienced teacher can do.

Student Support Team Meeting

I continue to be impressed with the care that Crosswinds takes when dealing with individual students. This morning I attended a Student Support Team Meeting. These meetings are held twice a month to follow up on students who may need special attention. The team was comprised of representatives from each house, the principal, and the school psychologist.

I was fascinated by the meeting. I tried to picture it taking place in my own school, where meetings often break down into gossipy sessions full of complaints. The representatives presented their cases in a neutral manner, detailing the interventions that had been attempted. Fellow teachers offered suggestions and shared strategies that had been successful in the past.

These Student Support Team Meetings also serve as the first recorded intervention in the process of making a decision about special education status for students with behavioral and learning disabilities. I was impressed by the fact that Crosswinds has a bi-weekly meeting in place to discuss students who may be in need of services. I would love to see something along these lines implemented at MTS/ComArts.

My enthusiasm for the meeting was put in check by TL as we walked out of the meeting. When I told him how impressed I was with the format, professionalism, and efficiency of the meeting, he thanked me, but confided that he had been listening to similar complaints about the same kids for months, with concrete interventions. Perhaps our schools are more similar than I originally thought.

At any rate, the system is surely worth looking at.

Week 1, Crosswinds

My dreaded stint across town has begun, and as I feared, the drive and the hours are a real bummer. It is a twenty mile drive to Woodbury, which takes only a half an hour or so in the morning, but which takes anywhere from forty-five to seventy minutes at the end of the day. Meanwhile the sun is bright and warm and the days have all been beautiful. I am jealous of my family, who are quickly making my spring tan look pale.

But Crosswinds is fantastic. If it were not so far away (and not year-round) I would be begging for a position there. Being in an English classroom this week has made me question the turn that my career has taken. Originally, I planned to teach literature and writing, not video and editing. I still get to teach creative writing in my screenwriting classes, but it is not quite the same thing. It is exciting to discuss books and teach basic writing skills.

Crosswinds is a product of a lawsuit against the St. Paul school system. It is a district of its own, funded by the St. Paul school district, created in order to provide quality programs for kids who live in (mostly poor) areas that were at one time (and perhaps still) offering less quality education than the schools in other districts. It is a 6-1oth grade middle school and is arranged into numerous houses in order to create a sense of a smaller community within the school. Each house is comprised of the four pieces of core curriculum, Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies and contains around eighty students.

As I said, Crosswinds is located in Woodbury, Minnesota. It is as close to St. Paul as you can get and still get an "in the country" feel. The school was built in the middle of a farmer's field, literally. The closest neighbor is a full-on farm with tractors and sheep and a guy in over-alls. It is an absolutely beautiful spot, especially for those city kids who get little chance to experience green spaces outside of city parks and lakes. Yesterday, when I arrived, I was greeted by a giant snapping turtle, laying her eggs in the garden in front of the school.

At Crosswinds, classrooms are all open; you can see above the half walls right out into the hallway and into your neighbor's classroom. Teachers do not have desks in their rooms, but rather an office shared with each other, which results in a massive amount of communication between the faculty and other staff.

Crosswinds employs the responsive classroom design. They have a homeroom everyday where students group up for announcements, sharing, and games.

They use an especially effective system to deal with behavioral issues. When a student first gets out of line, he/she is asked to "take a break." Students go to another part of the classroom for a moment to regroup and rejoin the class when they are ready. If the discipline needs to go further, students are sent to the "buddy room." Each classroom has a partner room to send students to. When a student is sent to the partner room, he/she fills out a form detailing the situation and his/her plan to amend the situation. When the buddy room teacher has a moment, he/she speaks with the troubled student. By this time, the student has had time to cool down and is able to communicate with a staff member who was not part of the problem, but who has a close relationship with the child. It works remarkably well.

I'm really enjoying my time in the classroom at Crosswinds. The students, all seventh or eighth graders, are a very diverse group, both economically and racially. They are very comfortable in their surroundings and the sense of a trusting, close-knit community is strong.

My supervising teacher, TL. has turned out to be just the kind of educator I respect. He has nine years of teaching experience, is thoughtful and calm in the classroom, has a passion for the kids and the job, and a keen interest in education in general. We've already spent a great deal of time discussing the philosophy and the future of the education in the U.S. We need more teachers like TL., far too many of our colleagues are ignorant or disinterested in anything save their immediate classroom needs.

I am already beginning to take over portions of the instruction and have received positive and constructive feedback from TL. As I watch him effortlessly and calmly manage twenty to twenty-five junior high students, I recognize that his patient, but insistent, brand of classroom management is a skill I need to observe closely.

I've come a long way from my first year teaching, when I frequently engaged and argued with students, constantly losing the battle, but I have a long way to go to catch up to TL.

It is Saturday today and I find my thoughts drifting back to the faces of the kids that I met during the week, a sure sign that I am quickly becoming fond of them. Despite all my moaning about this assignment, I am already sure I will miss it when the term is over.

Random Thoughts

End of the Year: It is a very difficult time for teachers in my school. In many schools, students are geared up for finals and are working hard at this time of the year. In fact, several schools declined to participate in the Film Fest because it was happening at the end of the school year and the students would be too busy with finals. At my school, it seems like the entire student body, 9-12, has seniorities. As soon as spring hits, attendance drops by half. It makes for a difficult year-end wrap-up and it makes the last 3-6 weeks feel ineffective. Of course, as I write this I've got several students sitting at computers tapping away at screenplays. They always try to prove me wrong, even when they don't know they are doing it.

Student Teaching, Part 2: I just got a reminder in my email to call my teacher/supervisor for the second half of my student teaching. I am dreading it (the student teaching, not the call). I have never been one of those MEA students who are already teaching and who refuse to admit they don't know it all. I've always embraced everything I've learned at Augsburg and much of has been applied to my classroom pretty quickly. I'm sure this will be the case when I complete my student teaching, but... It's in Woodbury, gas is almost $4.00, I am going to miss my wife and kids, I need a summer break to rejuvenate... On top of all of it, it seems like the supervising teacher is looking for me to come up with all of my own curriculum. He says they are in a two year cycle at this school, and that he is in his second year there, so he has no curriculum written for the units he is teaching this summer. Writing curriculum is one of my strengths; one of my favorite parts of teaching. But I have my own to do! I have given myself the huge task of getting a video/film curriculum online so that I can let the more academic stuff run on its own as I teach the more hands on aspects of the course. I feel like I'll never have enough time.

Filmmaker Badges: I made up all these badges on lanyards for the film festival. Green for regular attendees, red for festival sponsors, and blue for filmmakers (students with a film in the festival). Immediately, my video students started to ask if they could have theirs right away. At first I resisted, I was pretty sure they would get lost and I would have to give them another. Eventually, I gave in and started giving them out...with a promise from the students. They had to wear them everyday, in school and out, and tell anyone who asked all about the festival. They all agreed. I now have twenty or so very proud kids wearing their blue filmmaker badges wherever they go. None have been damaged or lost. Many times, because of the adult things my students have to experience, and because they look so grown-up, I forget that they are just kids. Little things, like being recognized as special with a plastic badge can mean a lot. They amaze me as they confuse me. I don't think I'll ever get them completely figured out.

PS: Still no R. I wrote a letter to his mother and sent it via snail mail. No response. It's time to let it go. maybe he will pop up again next year. I hope so.

Screening: Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Where: Minneapolis Parkway Theater
Presented by: .edu Film Fest
When 5/23-5/25

After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, three 12 year old friends, Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb, began filming their own shot-by-shot adaptation in the backyards of their Mississippi homes.

Seven years later their film was in the can.

Fourteen years later, in 2003, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin Texas was proud to announce the theatrical world premiere of
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.

And in 2004, it was announced that Hollywood producer Scott Rudin had purchased the life rights of Eric, Jayson and Chris to make a biographical film about their experiences making Raiders: The Adaptation.
Writer Daniel Clowes is currently working on the screenplay. To be released by Paramount Pictures.

Please come out and see this picture. Proceeds go to the nonprofit .edu Film Fest and will ensure that this festival continues to be free to all Minnesota high school students. Support this important festival and see a really cool movie at the same time. Tickets are $5.00, available at the Parkway.

Show times available in the City Pages and at www.theparkwaytheater.com

AWOL

I realized today that it has been over two weeks since I've seen R. Last week, I was calling the answering machines and dead phone numbers that fill the majority of our students parental contact pages and I was surprised when R.'s mother's phone reported that it did not accept incoming phone calls, at the subscriber's request. She was our only link.

R.'s parents are first generation immigrants from Liberia and his family lives miles and miles out in the suburbs. He is not embedded in the usual neighborhood net that can locate a lost kid, or a least report if he's okay or not. He rides the city bus for over an hour to get to school and spends his out-of-school time working at a big, suburban technology store.

R. is a great kid to have around. He's smart, interested in what I teach, and enthusiastic about learning. He comes in at lunch and takes tutorials on the internet, learning things about the applications that I don't even know. For a while, he was a big part of my program, taking both screenwriting and video. Then he started to slip. First it was his attendance, some tardies, then a day or two here and there, then it was a week. Next, when he did show up, he was hanging with a different crowd of kids and he was not acting like himself.

My colleague and I talked it over and decided to call in his parents. The conference was interesting. Liberia is an extremely messed up country - no government, tribal warfare, anarchy - and when R. was very young, he and his parents traveled across the country, waited it out in a refugee camp, and eventually made it to the U.S. Needless to say, these folks are justifiably pissed off that their kid would squander away the advantages that they risked their lives to give him.

In that meeting, R. finally admitted that he had been skipping school and smoking dope again. He made a commitment to get back on track. We put together a plan for him, little things to keep him hanging with the good guys and away from the smoke-in-the-park crowd. Publish PostHe did really well for a while, he was back to the old R. that my colleague and I really liked.

But lately, it is the same thing all over again. When he went missing for a week last month, he claimed that he got confused and thought it was spring break. He convinced his mother, but we weren't so sure. A few weeks ago, he had trouble concentrating and understanding a fairly straightforward task in a computer program that he knows pretty well. So I guess I wasn't surprised when I realized that he hadn't been around for a while.

I talked to the staff member who is charge of truancy. I told him about R.'s mom's phone. He said he'd do a little digging. We know the name of the store he works at, just not the location. We'll try to get him on the phone. Maybe that will help. Maybe not.

Engaging B.

One of my goals for this student teaching exercise is to try and engage more of the students in my classroom. Despite the "fun" nature of my classes, they are actually pretty difficult and I hold the students to a pretty high standard. Add that to the culture of my school, where many students do just enough to get by, and many hardly try at all, and the result is usually a few students who give you that "thousand yard stare" when you are trying to motivate the classroom.

One of these students is B. He is just the kind of student that we want to attract to the Digital Media Academy at MTS. He is bright, creative and non-traditional. He wears emo style clothing (although, like most emo kids, he vigorously denies that he is emo) and has his hair dyed blue. He toured our school with his father and decided to sign up based on our arts curriculum. He started out in two of my classes and from the start, he was not what I expected.

B. has an engaging personality and I suspect that he has used it effectively in the past to succeed in a lot of ways. He immediately became popular with both students and teachers, although it quickly became apparent that he has a taste for drama.

B. knows a lot about computers, so right off, he went about beating the filter system in my classroom. The students in my room have less restrictive access to the internet than most of the school and it a privilege that I guard with a great deal of care. I was not pleased.

B. also came into video class with what he considered a great deal of experience in the subject, although he displayed none of this experience and refused to discuss anything he had done previously.

As the weeks stretch by, I became more and more worried about B. He had convinced someone that his interest in video was so high that he should be allowed to sign up for both the Video for TV and the Film and Video class. These two classes are very similar and while it is possible for a student to succeed in both of them at once, it is less likely that he/she will fail in one without failing in another. So I had B. in two blocks, basically refusing to work and earning zero credits.

Eventually, by talking with the principal, I got him out of one of the classes, but I was wracked by guilt at my failure to engage him in the other. Occasionally, he would take a camera to the park and collect footage that he claimed was for a video he was going to make for some non-existent song he had written in Music and Sound.

I talked to my colleague in the Sound Department and we compared notes on B. We realized that he was performing similarly in both of our rooms. B. basically keeps himself busy enough to not get in trouble, but never does enough to pass. I also conferred with my boss about B. and we agreed to keep an eye on his progress, but I did not find any solutions. This was my problem to solve.

And I did, by accident. On Thursday the 23rd, all of the entries for the .edu Film Festival were due and the video tapes were pouring in the door. We had been spending parts of our classes looking at the work from schools from all over the state. This is very interesting for me, and I found, very interesting to our students. From the different video projects they watched, they began to realize just how competitive we were.

High School video kind of exists in a vacuum. It is very difficult to know the quality of the work the students produce. It is easy to think that your stuff is pretty good, but without anything to compare it to, it is also easy to take that for granted. And what do you compare it to? YouTube? No, too amateur. Hollywood? Absolutely not!

As we watched the videos from other schools, the students began to realize something about themselves. They were pretty good filmmakers. Not always the best, but certainly not the worst. The projects that we made in the last two years could easily stand up to almost any entry in the festival. My students were impressed.

When you grow up as part of the working poor, you sometimes get used to the fact that your "things" are not always of top quality. A pair of Nike Air Jordans are a treasure to be spit-cleaned after the smallest scuff. Jeans are sometimes hitched up at the ankles with rubber bands so they will not drag and become frayed at the bottom. Tags are left on clothing, to show people that you can and do wear new hats and jerseys.

Children who come from this culture sometimes assume that their neighborhoods, their housing, their transportation, and even their education will probably be second rate. It is a joy to present them with a quality program.

As we watched the entries from small town schools and suburban schools, from prestigious public art schools and large city schools, I watched my students faces light up. We were good at what we were doing.

One of the students who was particularly taken with the video entries was B. He commented on each one with an insightful viewpoint. He threw out some editing terms and camera techniques that I thought he had never retained. At the end of the day he walked out of the classroom discussing film with his classmates.

And the next day, he walked right into class and asked for the camera. He had a CD in hand with a techno song that he written and recorded in the sound studio. He went outside, collected some decent images and sat right down at the computer to edit them. He asked a few questions and quickly understood the basic functions of the editing program and was soon putting together a pretty good music video.
4/24/08

When class was done, he asked if he could get the piece into the film festival. The due date had passed, it wasn't really right for me to let him enter. He wasn't even done. So I said yes. After all, this was supposed to be an educational experience, right? I told it had to be done by tomorrow morning. He looked at me, then back at the computer. He took out his cell phone and called his dad. "Dad, " he said. "I'm going to stay after school and work on a video so I can get it in the festival." He paused. "No, I'm serious, do you want to talk to my teacher? He's right here."

B. finished his video that afternoon. It turned out pretty good.