September 2023

September 1 Friday

Maksym gets to class about a minute late after lunch, but he knows that silent reading is always first, so he walks into the room reading his book. He keeps his eyes on it all the way to his desk and into his chair. The other students look up from their reading to chuckle, causing the usually serious Maksym to crack one of the first smiles I’ve seen from him. This kind of bonding outside of language will be essential if this mix of Ukrainian and Spanish speakers is to develop a sense of class community. My pencil lifts to mark him tardy but I just can’t do it. Not today.

September 5 Tuesday

Mauricio is beside himself with excitement to join a student club. He found two clubs that meet weekly during lunch, and one that meets twice weekly. “I have to planificate this!” he says.

September 6 Wednesday

What is going on when just saying your name out loud feels somehow forbidden or shameful? A new NC law passed over the summer (and vetoed by our Governor before being overridden) requires, among other things, that school personnel notify parents before using any name for their child other than what’s in our attendance system. It also says that local school boards will develop and share specific implementation guidelines for SB49, which as of yet has not happened. In other words, legislators want to get credit for being tough on trans kids, but don’t want to put the thought into how in the world it would actually play out in a school building. So for the moment our directive as teachers has not changed, but students are worried about being outed. For a kid in GSA who might be sharing for the first time the name that feels truest to them, saying that name aloud is always a big moment. It’s a little fraught, but also triumphant. All those emotions are there today as well, but heightened. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety that boggles me. Why are we living in some kind of funhouse world where policing kids’ gender identity is more important than protecting them from gun violence?

September 7 Thursday

Today all three Ukrainian boys are tardy, and not by a little bit. The shortest of the trio, Andrei, tells me that he and his new tall friends (They’re both named Maksym by the way) are over 10 minutes late because they were in the trash. “You were where?” I ask. The Maksyms nod to back him up. Andrei points to the Maksym who recently used his independent reading book as a tardy pass and tells me his bicycle was in the trash. I’m still confused. No, not his bicycle, the key to his bike lock. Ok but… “Who put it in the trash?” I ask. I need to know whether they were being bullied. I type out my question on the translator and show them the screen. “Him! He do it,” says Andrei, indicating his friend. I’m relieved it was an accident. I choose to believe this story and mark them tardy instead of skipping. I plop a container of sanitizing wipes on Maksym’s desk and say, “For the key.”

September 8 Friday

Third period has learned the names for the 5 branches of Earth Science, so it’s time to practice. Lydia leads the class outside around campus looking for examples. She picks up a rock. “Geology!” says the class. She points up at a cloud and they say, “Meteorology!” She encourages the students to use their new vocabulary to point out more examples. Dante, a freshman who arrived last spring and spent a few months in middle school, is pinging from group to group. A shoulder bump here. A giggle there. Milton calls me over to where he and Eduardo are walking together. We watch Dante try to figure out which rock to pick up, half bending down over several but unable to make a decision and thus bolting off with nothing. Milton is a very committed student who’s already reached the point of speaking to me in English. He says, “Eduardo says that Dante is family with Abraham.” He doesn’t mean they’re cousins. He’s making an observation just as Lydia instructed them to do, but this observation is more about psychology than geology. He’s noticing similarities between squirrel friend Abraham’s behavior last year and Dante’s now — the lack of impulse control, the saying and doing whatever comes into his mind to say or do. Milton’s not wrong. Later the class walks by some Canada geese. The geese straighten their necks and honk loudly at us. Dante tilts his head forward to elongate his neck and shouts back, “Ecology!” That’s another way he’s similar to Abraham — He’s very bright.

September 11 Monday

I go back to my classroom for lunch after Science class, but I don’t enter because my door is closed with a sign in the little window that says, “Test Today”. I think Matt must be giving an English proficiency screener. (The central office that usually does this has been overwhelmed with new students, so they have taken to sending students straight to us at the school with no information about their English ability or what classes they have credit for.) Turns out Matt’s not giving a test. The sign was made by two sneaky students who wanted the room to themselves! I cautiously crack the door to find Yareli and Delvin laughing. Yareli is a junior now. She’s come such a long way from fighting with Mileidy her first year here. Of the 50 Central American students with interrupted education who started in 2021, she’s one of 22 who are still in school. Both she and Delvin are good friends with Julio, the student who pointed to the G of LGBTQ on the cover of my book last year and then borrowed it to read. I thought he and Delvin were a couple. But Delvin doesn’t really know what Julio’s up to now, only saying that Julio doesn’t want to come back to school. Later Raquel tells me she’s encouraging Julio to go to SCORE, an alternative school where students who have at least 10 credits toward graduation complete the rest online. They have access to the school campus and teachers, but they are not required to go on any set schedule. I doubt Julio has the academic skills to do so much of his coursework independently. But the flexible schedule and accelerated nature of SCORE’s program sound good, and I wonder whether there’s a way to combine it with the sheltered program we have now at Cary.

September 12 Tuesday

Beatriz is back at school! We hadn’t seen her yet this year. Her aunt was in Guatemala taking care of grandparents, leaving Beatriz in charge of childcare back in Cary. Based on her history (and her brother’s) of attempting to ghost us, I’m not convinced Beatriz was planning to come back. But when Raquel made the Where Are You? call, her aunt told us that — as coincidence would have it — she’d just gotten back in the country, and of course Beatriz was always going to keep studying after she was done Ubering for her nieces. And she was here the next day. This, like the key in the trash, is a story I choose to believe.

September 13 Wednesday

A colleague checks in with me about an ESL student in her class. She wants to know how much English he understands, because his responses to simple directions such as, “Take out your computer,” are often blank stares. “He looks at me like I’m speaking another language,” she pauses and smiles, “Which I am.” We laugh and I can see her attitude softening a little toward the situation. I tell her the student certainly has enough language to understand basic classroom instructions and a lot more. Obstinance is probably more at play here than confusion. But this interaction was a good reminder for both of us that no matter how basic the instructions, they are still in another language for an English Learner and thus require a level of concentration to discern that a native speaker doesn’t have to summon. Even though it might be a small amount of extra energy, it can accumulate and turn into mental fatigue that a native speaker doesn’t have to worry about. That’s why as much consistent language as possible within the classroom is always good.

September 14 Thursday

My fourth period students are practicing grammar by putting bulleted information points into paragraph form. One fact I provide for today’s paragraph about Cary High is “Home of the Imps”. Maksym’s paragraph declares Cary, “the place of the devils”. Close enough. That’s how most state legislators would describe it too.

September 15 Friday

This is AI doing my work for me while I eat pizza at my desk. That’s right — Give Quizizz a PDF, website, or YouTube video and it will generate a quiz! It can even suggest similar questions based on the questions based on the content of existing quizzes. This will be good for students who need extra grammar help, without giving them the exact same sentences.

September 18 Monday

The fire alarm goes off during morning announcements. There is no fire, but there is an emergency when we get back upstairs and the boys from second period realize it’s picture day and they’ve got serious hat hair. They fly off to the bathroom to damp and style their hair as classes line-up down the hallway for the photographer.

9/19/23 Tuesday

Two student members of GSA and I make remarks about SB49 implementation tonight to the school board. Here are mine. The public comments are about an even split in terms of opposition to the bill. One man who’s very much in favor tells the board that letting children think they’re trans is like telling a penguin she can fly. Danil’s next to me with some extra note cards in his lap. He flips one over and begins sketching a penguin holding a pride flag as the man rambles on about birds wasting their time trying to fly.

🏳️‍⚧️

9/20/23 Wednesday

At the faculty meeting we watch our annual training videos, which remind us that we are all mandated reporters of child abuse. Also that in the event that our lives or students’ lives are in danger and the “hide” and “run” options are not available, then we must fight. “If you choose the ‘fight’ option,” the narrator says, “stick with your decision and fight to survive.” I don’t think I’ll ever get used to professional development on literally fighting for my life.

I wonder whether Matilda thought she was fighting for her life last night. Lisa asked her this morning why she was crying in math class, and it led to Lisa helping her tell her counselor and SRO about getting into a fight last night with her mother’s 27-year-old boyfriend. There are scratches on her arms. No mandated reporter duties come into play, however, as today is her 18th birthday.

9/21/23 Thursday

Zahra and Mayoly need some extra help. Gail suggests we give them only half the vocabulary words the rest of the class has to do. We’ve already had the class make flashcards for all ten words, as one goal for the week is to teach the students what flashcards are and how to study with them, so I go to where the two girls are seated and ask for their cards. I type into Zahra’s translator (no captcha this time) that we want to limit her vocabulary this week, and to please choose the 5 words she would like to learn. She flips through the cards and makes her choice. I take the same cards from Mayoly’s deck so that I only have to create one alternate quiz version. We already have a standard version, a modified version, and an extra-modified version, so I suppose I’ll call this one the “mega-modified” version. Time to study! We read through the five cards together, and then I hold up the definition side of the cards one at a time for Zahra to see. She doesn’t pronounce the words completely accurately, but I can tell she knows it. She’d recognize it on paper. Mayoly still can only work with two cards at a time, but that’s a start. She’s the one who came by herself to the open house in August, and met Jeferson and his brother. She lives with her sister and wrote in her letter of introduction that her mother died recently. She’s been through a lot and hasn’t gotten much formal schooling, but she’s very determined. Maybe tomorrow we’ll get a third card in the mix. Meanwhile, the table next to them is busy quizzing each other using all 10 cards. They picked up on the strategy quickly because they’d been in school previously and had been taught other study skills. With the rest of the class, we had to teach the concept of studying before they could employ any specific study strategies. At first, no matter how well we thought we modeled the task, the kids would write the word and definition on the same side of the card and try to turn them in. “No!” we would say. “Those are for you to study!” And the kids would look at us like, “Ok crazy.”

9/22/23 Friday

“That kid has a vape.” Lydia is looking over my shoulder. “That kid just vaped!” I turn around and it’s Dante. As if to confirm Milton’s theory that he is related to Abraham, Dante has done exactly what Abraham did once last year — vape in a classroom. At least Abraham attempted to do it while I was out of the room, not when two teachers were in there.

9/25/23 Monday

Mireya tells Gloria her sister won’t let her come to school. I believe it. Mireya has defied her sister’s wishes that she drop out and help care for her niece by returning to school. She told us this would be her last year. Her counselor is on board with Mireya graduating with the state minimum 22 credits rather than the Wake County standard 26 because her case is exceptional. But it will be very hard to get those credits this year. We might need to develop at CHS a pilot of that online/in-person hybrid plan that I was wishing Julio could access. We’re going to lose even more of the 22 we have left from her cohort.

9/26/23 Tuesday

Grecia lets me know very discreetly during class that my fly is open. She didn’t volunteer to share her warm up answer today, but she’s gonna get participation points nonetheless for this valuable contribution to class.

9/27 Wednesday

“Do I have to look at all the words, or just the dark words?” Wow, this question tells me a lot. As a class we’ve defined the plate tectonics vocabulary list in Spanish, and now the students are using the textbook glossary to define the terms in English. I have just helped Dante find the “S” section and told him to locate “subduction zone” on the page. I can clearly see there are only 12 terms on the page and expect him to find it very quickly. But he sees a jumble of text and is hunting through every single word on the page, leaving me to wonder what’s taking him so long. I start pointing to each term and tell him to stop me when I get to “subduction zone”. That’s when he asks the question about whether he has to check every word, or just the bolded ones. If he didn’t understand the structure of a glossary, why did he think I wanted him to find that term? What did he think he was supposed to do when he found it? At the end of the day Gloria tells me Dante and some of his buddies fell asleep during 4th period. I can see why — He’s in here breaking his brain over a task that I thought could not be simpler.

9/28 Thursday

In fourth period I ask questions about the students so we can practice pronouns. “Is Itzela here today?” “Yes, she is,” says the class. “Is Wilber here today?” “Yes, SHE is,” says Deiker, attempting humor. He playfully punches Wilber in the arm. Deiker is studious and thoughtful, and I believe if I ask him why he made that joke, it’s possible we could have a productive conversation about the pervasiveness and effects of femininity as an insult. If I asked the right question in the right way, we could have some deep discussion. Maybe Itzela would jump in — she’s the one who wrote “machismo” when I asked the class to identify themes from the American Teenager Project stories we read. I’ve never had a group identify more themes with so little prompting, so I know they’re ready to think at this level. But I’ve not been feeling great this week, which is why I have a mask on and am just hanging on til the end of the day. So rather than try to open any minds, I say, “Don’t be stupid,” and move on. Oops. Maybe I’ll change the world next week.

9/29 Friday

Jhovani tries to turn in a set of flashcards today with only the vocabulary word written on each one, no definition on the other side. “How did you use these to study?” I ask. “Yes!” he says. Great talk. But overall quiz grades are much better today, so we’re moving in the right direction as a class.

Next month: October 2023