Jebruary 2024
January 3 Wednesday
This morning I stick my house key in my classroom door and consider just going back home. Home was cozy.
January 4 Thursday
I surprise two kids making a Tiktok video in the bathroom during first period. They’re dancing in front of a phone propped on a sink with their hoodies pulled way up. When they see me their eyes get really big and their mouths get really small. I say nothing but give them a ‘scram’ look before entering a stall. As soon as I shut the stall door I hear, “Quick quick!” followed by little feet pitter-pattering choreography against the tile floor. Within 20 seconds they’re gone. It’s hard to be mad, considering most kids who shouldn’t be in the bathroom are in there vaping. What these two are doing is collaborative, it’s physically active, and despite how hot they probably think that video is, it won’t be setting off the fire alarm.
January 5 Friday
We’re analyzing Robert Frost’s poem Dust of Snow, wherein the speaker derives simple pleasure from a crow in the tree above him shaking snow down onto his head. The question is: “Based on what you know about the speaker, what else might bring them joy?” (Any answer involving nature will be acceptable.)
Itzela: I don’t know maybe if he makes a snowman ✅
Domingo: Maybe if another crow throws snow at his head 🆗
Shorter Maksym: The poem is too short so I can’t tell 🤦♀️
Taller Maksym: In general snow brings joy to 70% of people ❓
Bring on the End of Course test!
January 8 Monday
Teaching is about constantly assessing and adjusting, taking new information in stride. Those skills have helped me not only at school but at Duke hospital, where I park on Monday afternoon not knowing it’ll be 24 hours before I move the car. We’re there for a routine oncology appointment, but Mom’s doctor wants to see some brain MRI results asap. She knows it will be quicker to send us through the ER than to order the scans herself, so we are escorted over to the waiting room. As the hours tick by I’m glad that I’ve gotten smart enough to keep a novel in my bag for occasions like this. Eventually I accept that I will not be going to work tomorrow, so Kim puts my absence into the attendance system and I send Matt and Lisa a sort of train-of-thought email that they somehow later translate into substitute teacher instructions. Gloria goes and helps Lydia’s ESL Earth Science class in my place. Somewhere in the time vortex that is a hospital I finish my book and it becomes Tuesday…I think. For some reason it comforts me that none of the many doctors who interview Mom seems to know what day it is, either. The MRIs do reveal a new small tumor near the brain stem, so Mom will be having more radiation soon.
January 10 Wednesday
I return from errands around campus to find Lisa’s student Prakat in my room. He looks up from his math work and says, “You need help.” He means to say “I need help” but his statement’s not wrong so I don’t correct him. We do some problems together. It becomes obvious he knows how to do the math, but he’s getting wrong answers because he doesn’t read closely enough to see how often interest is compounded or which decimal to round the answer to. Three problems in a row he calculates exponential growth instead of decay and has to start over. He sighs and says he likes thinking, but he doesn’t like this stuff. I type the word “tedious” and translate it into Gujarati. “Is this what you mean?” I ask. “Yes miss!” he laughs. He says math in India is not tedious. He wants to study computer science. I tell him what he’s doing right now might be tedious, but I’m pretty sure computer scientists have to pay attention to every tiny detail of what they’re doing, so this could be good practice. Embrace the tedium. That’s the best defense of American math education I can come up with right now.
January 11 Thursday
After school today Matt and I meet over Zoom with someone in Connecticut I found through a “Teaching SLIFE” Facebook page. (SLIFE stands for Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education). She used to work with a newcomer program that provided alternative, accelerated diploma paths for older high school SLIFE. On paper it looks exactly like what we’d like to establish here in Cary, so Matt and I have a lot of questions. She tells us what worked and what they’ve adjusted in their model. The biggest adjustment they made was keeping the students in-house rather than transferring them to the adult learning center. They found that students were less likely to drop out if they continued in the environment where they were already comfortable and had support. This makes absolute sense based on what we’ve seen with our own students. I’m thinking of Jesus, who never got his footing at the alternative online high school and begged to come back to Cary High. Once students and adults have invested the time to build relationships, those relationships become crucial. It sounds like her town of Somerville is about 10 to 15 years ahead of the demographic shift Cary is now experiencing via immigration. I’m hoping we won’t be that far behind in meeting our learners’ needs. Matt and I are almost giddy when we end the call with the promise to reconnect soon. It’s basically been an hour of nerding out with this lady who knows our precise professional challenges and throws around the same acronyms. We spend a lot of time trying to make kids feel seen, but apparently it’s good for us to feel seen too.
January 12 Friday
Lydia takes the science class outside to safely view sunspots through a telescope. As the students line up to peer closely at the projected image, Lydia tells the class she’ll be in Texas for a full solar eclipse in May. They want to know when the next one after that will be. The answer: 2045. Yonil says, “Oh my god! I’ll be 38!” He can barely fathom the age I am now.
January 15 Monday
It’s lunch time and Milton has come to see Matt and me with a troubled heart. He’s facing pressure to send money to Mexico in addition to paying rent to his aunt and uncle. It’s important to him that we know he doesn’t want to drop out. If he leaves school, he tells us, it will be because he had to and not because he wanted to. Milton is a natural student full of questions and deep thoughts, but it’s not just love of learning that makes him want to stay. He has monetary motivation: He tells us that employees at the store where he works who speak fluent English earn an extra dollar per hour. He feels like he’s progressing quickly with his English here and getting close to that dollar.
We tell Milton that next week, when the new semester starts, he’ll be one of the “double-up” students, meaning he’ll work on two different classes online with me during fourth period. He’ll learn how to use the program called Edgenuity so that he can work on his credits outside of school, too. Milton nods and seems resolute when we end the conversation, but I can’t tell whether it’s because he intends to stay or because he got that awkward, “It’s not you it’s me” conversation with Matt and me out of the way before he goes MIA.
January 16 Tuesday
Today I’m asked to identify a former ESL student suspected of bullying Norberto, the student who can’t read. I don’t think the bully knows he’s illiterate, just that Norberto is small and walks home alone from school. The bully and a friend stole his bookbag yesterday and kicked him to the ground. This morning they returned the bookbag and warned Norberto to tell no one. He told Gloria. I can see the hand he rests on his knee shaking a little as he dictates his statement. I recognize the bully in the security camera footage, but not the friend, so administrators Sarisha, Amberlee, and Winnie track him across multiple feeds and monitors to see which classroom the boy enters after he leaves the cafeteria. This process takes a while, as the kid is in no hurry to get to class, but I know he stands no chance of escape. “I can’t stand a bully,” says Sarisha. I notice that all three admin wear black Dr. Martens-style boots with chunky soles and I’m pumped to work for some badass crime fighting women.
January 17 Wednesday
The crosswalk light in front of our school is malfunctioning, and the principal makes an announcement warning students to use extra caution until it’s repaired. This is the kind of announcement ESL teachers write down and put into their lesson plans because our students are not going to catch it the first time. Later in class, I’m explaining that Americans drive huge cars that will hit you in the chest, not the legs, if you’re looking down at your phone while crossing the street. “Oh shit!” Nasir says this involuntarily, then covers his mouth. “That is correct,” I say.
January 25 Thursday
It’s the first day of the new semester and the great Edgenuity experiment is beginning. But before we dive into the program we need to do some goal setting. I’ve printed out all the students’ transcripts and their job today is to analyze them. I distribute a checklist of classes required for graduation and help the students check off which ones they already have. Next they circle which ones they’ll get this semester. Then they can clearly see how many classes they’ll need after this semester. Student Services provides these printouts to students every year during class registration in March, but for English Learners it takes an explicit lesson (and then some) to make sense of the information.
Next we do an activity I’m calling, Why am I here? Students brainstorm answers, then share them with a partner, then circulate to four posters around the room to write their answers to the questions: Why am I in this class? Why am I in school today? Why am I in this country? Why am I on this planet? I see lots of answers during the brainstorming phase, some concrete and some philosophical. I can see that the students understand the purpose of this class. New kid Alan just transferred from a high school in Georgia and appears to be a tough customer. He shows me his answer to Why am I on this planet?: “Because my dad forgot to use protection.” I feel his eyes on my face as I read it, ready to see what kind of reaction he can get out of me. I’m thinking, “Oh, sweetie. Nice try.” I say, “That’s an answer I haven’t seen yet today! Good job! Make sure you fill out the rest of the paper.” He gets right back to work.
January 26 Friday
Aleida seems a little shy, maybe antisocial. On the first day of class I have to insist she sit with her assigned group rather than by herself. This is less because I really care where she sits and more so that the semester starts off in an orderly way with no confusion about who’s in charge of the class. Before this semester my only interaction with her was to recommend books from my classroom library when she sat in my room before school. She’s a reader. She broods. She prefers to let her hair hang in front of her eyes. Today she asks to speak to me privately. She looks almost distraught and tells me she needs to change classes because another female student in this class is a relative of hers and they don’t get along based on something that happened a long time ago back in Guatemala. She wrings her hands and says she can’t feel comfortable in this class, even if I never make her sit near or work with whoever it is. She doesn’t want to give me her name. I can deduce that Darilis was absent yesterday and present today. Maybe it’s her, which is ironic because Darilis is a reader too. She just wrote in her letter to the teacher that she loves to read because, “you can forget all the rest.” These two should be friends. Instead, I have this student who is extremely stressed for reasons she won’t quite make clear. I’m worried so I text Raquel a brief summary of what I know and send Aleida to talk to her. Later I hear back from Raquel that everything is ok, there’s just some old family drama that Darilis would like to keep her distance from. We change her schedule.
I’ve always thought it was great to have so many kids from the same region whose shared experiences and culture could help them support each other. But this imported Guatemalan beef, that we could do without.
January 31 Wednesday
Today a recruiter from Wake Tech presents in Spanish to our students. They take him up on his offer to call out any question at any point during the presentation. Everyone, that is, except Yenson — He hangs around afterward, inching his way up to the front where Mr. Fabre chats with a small group of students and teachers. Yenson looks about to leave when Mr. Fabre greets him and asks his name. That’s all it takes. Yenson gets in about five rapid-fire computer engineering questions before we tell him Mr. Fabre really has to leave, he’s already stayed longer than he expected to and our school isn’t even in his assigned portion of Wake County, and we promise he’ll come back another day.
February 7 Wednesday
Zahra is slowly catching on to navigating the Edgenuity video transcripts. I’ve demonstrated to the class how to use Ctrl+F to search a keyword from the notes packet to find the place where the video presenter discusses it. Most of the notes packet tasks involve filling in a blank from the speaker’s words, so the transcript is very useful. Zahra tells me she can’t find a word she needs and shows me the blank space on her page. The good news is she has the correct portion of transcript pulled up, and she remembered how to bring up the search box. The bad news is her choice of search term: “The”. It appears 63 times in the text. I advise her to search a different word. By the end of class she’s got it figured out and finishes her notes packet as well as the online quiz. “Give me new paper please!” Her sparkly blush and her eyes shine.
February 9 Friday
An Earth Science teacher comes to tell me at lunch that one of her Ukrainian students (taller Maksym) wrote something potentially concerning on a mini whiteboard after finishing his test. Google Lens on her phone translated the text to something involving bullets. What should she do? My initial surprise is only that something like this didn’t happen sooner, given the severity of circumstances these kids have been in, and in which many of their family members are still trapped. I send the teacher to tell the whole thing to admin, then look through my desk drawer for a sticky note from August that I hope I can find. It’s contact info for a retired lady who accompanied Maksym and his family to Open Campus night. She told me to call her any time, she speaks Ukrainian and Russian, and she’d love to help out. I definitely could and should have called her before now to help us build relationships with families. You know, positive stuff. But instead our first contact with her is to send a suspicious photo which she confirms is Bad. Later, admin gets Maksym’s dad on campus and talks to both of them on speakerphone using Linguaphone. Folks from Student Services are there too, and they calmly conduct the threat assessment. We find out that one of the Ukrainian girls in the same class has a name that sort of rhymes with “bullet” in Ukrainian, so Maksym had attempted to write a joke about a bullet in her head. He says he thought she’d see it and laugh. The teacher took the board away before the girl saw the message, so there’s no way to know how amused she would have been. I come away from the whole thing unsure of whether Maksym is disturbed or just really bad at flirting.
February 12 Monday
I spend some time on the phone this evening with Danny’s sister helping her complete the online application for free or reduced price lunch. I’d like to think I’d go this extra mile for any student, but in truth I have the ulterior motive that Danny is kind of a behavioral wild card and I hope that this will get him on my side a little bit. We’ll see.
February 13 Tuesday
Gloria called Paola’s house to ask where she’s been. We’ve seen her maybe twice this semester. Turns out Paola’s taken advantage of the fact that a perimeter fence is going up around our school to tell her mom we were closed until its completion. The lie worked for two weeks until Gloria ruined it.
February 14 Wednesday
A girl comes into my room before school to ask where Timo’s first period class is. I assume she’s with the chorus and needs to confirm his class for their singing Valentines delivery later, but no, she’s his girlfriend. This is news to me! I’m happy for Timo and hope this relationship works out better than Edgar’s, which ended over communication struggles. Things seem on the right track as this girl has brought a huge gift basket that she wants to leave for Timo on his desk. The only problem is, Timo has Matt first period, and he’s not in the room right now. Matilda has Matt’s class too and happens to be in my room, so she helps out. I hear lots of giggles from the dark room next door as the girl and her friend set the basket on the desk Matilda points out.
February 15 Thursday
Rocio is new from Mexico but has made fast friends with Zahra because Zahra doesn’t seem to have met a stranger since she got here. A small roadblock to the friendship comes today when the translator app setting gets knocked accidentally from Persian to Polish. Communication is woefully suspended until I can figure out the issue and reset it. Both girls clap.
February 19 Monday
I walk around the room holding out my hand and saying “For me?” to students who haven’t yet put their phones under their seats in a way that is amusing only to myself. Most students scowl and quickly put them away. But Danny gives me his phone. It’s like when I give Kim the bag of chips because I want to be done eating them. It’s a rare moment of clarity from a student about these phones being way more than any of us can handle.
February 21 Wednesday
Sometimes I feel like I’m running a coworking space in my classroom. I only have 50–75% of the kids here any given day. The name of the company is the same reason the kids aren’t always here: WeWork. They come in shifts. There’s no pattern to it that I can tell, not even with Danny and Darilis who are dating. It’s whatever the work schedule allows.
February 22 Thursday
I tell students to take out their laptops, which Eriberto does, and perched on top of it is a roach that 100% came from his book bag. It’s not the wood kind that likes to live outside. It’s the German kind that likes to infest. I see it start to skidaddle across the desk and want to alert him to it without drawing attention to the fact that his home is probably full of roaches. I walk toward the desk and say softly to him, “There’s a bug,” and he responds by casually flicking it away onto the floor.
February 23 Friday
I surprise another TikTok dance crew in the bathroom, this time during lunch. No rule prevents dancing at lunch, but nevertheless my presence is not appreciated. As they flee I hear one girl say, “Every time!”
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