My Husband, the Lumberjack (Or, the Power of Yet)

I am not a quitter, but at the beginning of the school year, I thought I might have to quit teaching.

(Actually, that's not true. I am kind of a quitter. I never mean to be, but I get distracted and lose interest in things. Also, I am not a detail-oriented person, so once I have to get down into all the boring details, I lose steam. And I grew up with this weird belief where I thought to myself that if something was difficult, it was because it wasn't meant to be. It never occurred to me that I might have to push through something that was hard. This is a lesson I am learning rather late in life.)

The first day of school this year was rough. This was unexpected and discouraging. Usually the first day of school is awesome, at least for someone who teaches mostly freshmen, because the kids are nervous about their first day of high school, and so there are no behavior issues or distractions. The kids come in, looking so very young, so very much like they are still middle-school students, and about a third of them stare at you, wide-eyed at their new surroundings and lacking self-awareness; another third are quietly and forcefully trying to blend in with their surroundings and avoid drawing any attention to themselves; the other third are either anxiously trying to engage the attention of their peers by any means possible or are desperately and loudly showing off how much Spanish they remember from middle school. It is hilarious and heartwarming to watch, and there are usually no problems.

But the first day of class this year, the kids came in - almost forty of them in my 7th period class - and defied all my expectations.

They were not shy.

They were not nervous.

They were ready to take over.

I had several who were blurters - who constantly blurted out wrong answers, purposefully stupid guesses (the laughter of peers is highly sought-after), some right answers, and worst of all, tons of English. They whispered to those who were next to them, had conversations with each other across the room, addressed me as though I were one of them, ignored instructions the first time they were given and followed them the second time loudly, haphazardly, inefficiently, and only after several interruptions. They made jokes, pushed conversations in new directions, and reacted so loudly and forcefully to the fact that I was not speaking any English that me speaking Spanish itself became such a distraction and I was forced to switch back to English to regain control of the class. It was a nightmare. I made it work, but I was flustered, and irritated, and unhappy at the way I was having to teach, and of course trying to remain perfectly calm on the outside.

This was all going on when I showed my PowerPoint. Every year at the beginning of class, I show my students a PowerPoint that has pictures of me and my family, and tell them in Spanish about things like how old we are, what our names are, how long I've lived in Reno, how I studied in Chile, etc. The point is that if the kids are paying attention to what I say, to my hand gestures, and to the words and pictures, they understand all this information about my family even though I'm saying it all in Spanish and all words on the PowerPoint are in Spanish. These are first-year Spanish students who didn't take it in middle school, but most of them, by the end of my presentation, are able to get at least 80% correct when I ask them questions. This activity is usually good because they realize that I am not going to translate, but if they are paying attention, they will understand what I am saying.

Of course, this year, since the class was so into what they wanted to do with the time rather than what I wanted to do, the activity was quite a bit more chaotic than usual, with quite a bit more waiting, quiet signals, and giving the Mom Look. Outwardly I was still calm, firm, and pleasant; inwardly, I wanted to scream at them all and terrify them into submission. So, I was showing the PowerPoint to my students, and as I showed the picture of Ian, looking handsome with his bearded face and red plaid long-sleeved shirt, a student blurted out, in English, "Is your husband a lumberjack?"

He was rewarded instantly by laughter and the reactions of his peers. "Lumberjack! Ha!" "Of course he's not a lumberjack!" "That's a stupid question!" "Why do you think he looks like a lumberjack?" "Oh yeah, he's wearing lumberjack clothes!" It again became an eruption for me to calm down.

I was so irritated. Of course, I kept my calm and didn't show how mad I was at the student for his stupid question. Asking questions for genuine lack of knowledge or clarity is one thing; throwing out a question to entertain one's peers is another, and it kept happening the entire first half of class. I genuinely wanted to walk out. Worst of all, the kids all came in so agitated, like a bottle of soda shaken up, that I wasn't quite sure who had said it and I didn't know their names yet, so it made discipline hard. So I had to smooth everything out again and continue. But to be honest, inwardly I was furious. I hated that class and was certain they were going to destroy my life or, at the very least, my teaching career.

It wasn't until I was a few hours removed and was having a glass of wine at home that I suddenly realized how funny the question was. I was making dinner, and as I was suddenly struck with how silly freshmen can be and how angry I was and how I actually love how their minds jump quickly between random connections, I started laughing so hard I almost couldn't tell Ian the story. "Is your husband a lumberjack?" Such a stupid question.

In between the end of that terrible class and going home, I remember going to into the bathroom and almost crying in the stall. I was frustrated with myself, with the kids, and with the school district for increasing class sizes last year. Up to this point in teaching my biggest classes had had thirty-two kids.

"I can't do it..." I mumbled to myself. "I can't manage AND teach a class of thirty-seven freshman. I can manage them or I can teach them. There are too many. I can't do both."

But I remembered watching a video about using the word "yet" to create a growth mindset. As much as I just wanted to resign, I figured I would try it. After all, I already felt like I was at rock-bottom, so what did I have to lose? So I added that one little word to the end of my sentence: "I can't manage AND teach a class of thirty-seven students... yet."

Even in that instant, I couldn't believe the change that made in my attitude. Just adding the word "yet" gave me hope. It made teaching thirty-seven students a skill to be figured out and practiced and learned rather than an innate ability that I unfortunately hadn't been born with.

And so I decided to give it a shot.

The next few weeks were tough, but I was mentally prepared. I knew what it felt like to have thirty-seven attention-hungry kids in one room. I assigned them all new seats the next day, immediately. There were so many inappropriate behavior issues going on, such as talking over me and each other, blurting out, having conversations across the room, having side-conversations while instruction was going on... and what was frustrating about this group of thirty-seven kids was that it wasn't simply two or three kids doing it, like in most classes. It was more like twelve.

In the past I had taken a more gentle approach to behavior management, and it had mostly worked well for me. But I stopped giving warnings for behavior issues and went immediately to consequences. If there was a minor misbehavior that I thought might lead to a worse behavior, I removed that kid from the classroom and had a private conversation and took away ALL participation points for the day, which dropped grades significantly when there were only three assignments in the grade book. I learned their names in the first week because knowing and using their names helps with behavior issues. If their behavior was attention-seeking, I removed them from their peers. If they were yelling out answers, I purposefully ignored them and called only on those who were raising their hand. I called a few parents. I talked to some coaches. (It's amazing what the threat of not being able to play a sport will do to male athletes.)

And within a couple weeks, the class had calmed down significantly. Kids were displaying much more appropriate classroom behavior, side-conversations had nearly been eliminated, and the number of blurters was reduced to two kids who have impulse control issues that we continue to work on. But all in all, they became much more pleasant. I was able to make connections with some of my more difficult ones so that even when they were being disciplined, they understood why and liked and respected me enough that they accepted their consequences graciously.

This is not to say that the class is perfect. They are still an energetic, impulsive, attention-hungry group of thirty-seven freshmen (now thirty-eight) in the last and shortest class of the day, and I still have to be quick and consistent with consequences (which I should be anyway). But I like them and they like me. I've come to see how quick their wits are; they have an excellent sense of humor, for the most part; most are genuinely interested in learning Spanish and they try their best, and they are learning a lot. It is not perfect, but it is much improved.

A few weeks ago, I felt like my struggle had come full circle when we were learning about descriptions. I was showing them pictures and using actions to illustrate words such as "tall," "short," "thin," "brunette," and "weak." And when I acted out "strong" and started asking different kids if they were strong, I had one of my kids ask in his novice-level Spanish, "Is your husband strong?"

I smirked and nodded exaggeratedly and answered, "Sí, mi esposo es muy fuerte."

They all laughed and whooped, and then one of my blurters yelled out, "Of course he's strong, he's a lumberjack!"

I laughed too, and we moved on with the lesson. The first day, that joke would have resulted in a major disruption, and we would have wasted a significant amount of class time. And now I had the class under control to the extent that I could also laugh at the joke. I remembered how much I had despised them all the first day and how much I now look forward to teaching that class.

I had fought for it, and learned and grown, and they had learned and grown, and I had succeeded.

What Happened on Friday

Something unusual happened in one of my Spanish classes last Friday. This is a third-year Spanish class, one designed for heritage speakers - those kids whose parents speak Spanish at home, but who mostly grew up in the United States and thus have all their literacy training in English. They know Spanish vocabulary and can have a conversation in Spanish, but they haven't had much Language Arts training in Spanish.

Since day one of this school year, this class just hasn't clicked. An enthusiastic and productive atmosphere has been a struggle. They come in and just sit in their seats; they seem tired and listless most of the time; if I ask them to discuss a concept with a partner, they resist, not daring to open up and share any analyses or insights; some of them won't even discuss simple opinions, such as favorite foods. There are a few very chatty sophomore girls, and a few senior boys who are the complete opposite. These boys like to work (or sometimes, not work) on their own, and come with stoic faces, defensive or indifferent body language, and a silence that works as a kind of opposite downside to the girls' shrill sophomore laughter and constant gossip. (It's not that the males don't gossip -- if you get them going, they gossip quite a lot. But again, that's IF you get them going.)

The interesting thing is that I had many of these students last year, and last year the class atmosphere was positive. It felt like a close-knit group. I don't know if it's that more of them have senioritis this year, or if adding thirteen new kids to what was a class of twenty has changed the chemistry, or if the combination of personalities simply isn't working out. Based on their reactions to me and the way they talk to me, I am fairly certain that I have a good relationship with most of them, but they don't seem comfortable with each other. Some of them don't get along outside the classroom, but being what they call a "snitch" is the worst insult possible for many of them, so even if they have good reason to tell an adult, most of them won't.

All that to say... the classroom got so dull at one point that I realized these kids were going to need a lot more icebreaker and energizer activities: things to help them get to know each other, to trust each other more, at least within the classroom, and things to increase their energy levels at the start of class time. Otherwise, every class period was going to feel like an hour and thirty-five minutes of book work, even when it wasn't.

I decided to do an icebreaker on Friday: a game where you write a description of someone and others have to guess, and then you have to describe that person in one word while others guess, and then do an action to represent that person while others guess. High school kids like pretty much anything that revolves around them, especially if there's a social element, so I thought they would enjoy it. I had each kid write his or her name on a 3x5 card, and then I collected and redistributed them and told them that they needed to write a one-sentence description of that person ("and be nice, or I'm not going to read yours," I added).

So they did, and I gathered the cards once again, and looked through the descriptions. There were a few that included distinguishing features of their classmates, but for the most part, the descriptions were way too general: "This person is very nice and intelligent." "This person is athletic." "You're really nice and I like your long dark hair [not exactly an outstanding feature in a room with twenty Hispanic girls]." One person just wrote "He's a cutie," about one of the senior boys.

After I read a few to myself, I teased my students a bit: "Maybe we need to have a class on writing descriptions? These are really general." I said. "Let's just try it and see how it goes."

I actually thought it might be a good, teachable moment. I wanted them to see how little information a vague description actually gives, so I was going to read four or five and have them rewrite them after seeing how difficult they were to guess.

But then, something curious happened. As I read these vague descriptions, I started to see faces light up.

"This person is very intelligent," I read from the card. All the the kids started looking around the room and naming off the high achievers in the room. Even if the card wasn't describing them, those kids looked pleased that someone guessed their name, that someone thought they were intelligent. And when they landed on the actual object of the description - "Yep, it's L.," I would answer - that student would blush. "Aw, thanks guys," some of them started saying.

Again, the compliments varied, though some only slightly: "Very pretty and very kind"; "You're a really good friend;" even one that said, "You're super smart and your eyebrows are on point." (All of it was in Spanish, of course.) As I read these compliments out loud, more and more kids were smiling, and the body language relaxed: kids were sitting up straighter and uncrossing their arms, looking at each other and responding to each other rather than staring into space or looking at me. I thought it might be a good idea to give every single kid a compliment, but I didn't want it to get old, so I asked the kids if they were bored and we should move on, or if we should read through all them. "Let's read all of them!" was unanimous.

I know that some of the kids may have wanted to go through all the compliments simply to avoid any actual work or mental effort. But based on the changed atmosphere in the room, I think there was more going on. In every class, you have kids who come from homes or situations where they may not have had anything positive said to them that day - maybe even that week. Even the kids who come from highly supportive and encouraging families have to deal with the shallow, hyper-critical, self-centered world of high school students who usually don't give compliments except to close friends. Even between friends, put-downs are considered a form of humor and entitled complaining is a common way to bond. For most people, high school is rough, or at least has many rough days. And it felt like magic to see the kids light up as their classmates encouraged them and pointed out the positive.

So, I read all of them. And in the space of ten minutes, every single kid in my classroom got an affirmation from a classmate. The kids, though their descriptive skills were lacking (and they later realized they had kind of missed the point when they had trouble guessing someone), wrote very kind and encouraging words, and I was pleased that they had all taken seriously my charge to not be hurtful toward anyone.

Moments like these are not, I would say, the norm of teaching, at least on a daily basis. But what happened on Friday was one of those magic moments that makes teaching the best job.

On Watching Honey, I Shrunk the Kids without You

I watched the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with my daughters a couple weeks ago. I was pretty excited when it appeared on Netflix, because it was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. The girls liked the movie and I was pleasantly surprised that it was just as fun to watch as an adult as it had been to watch as a kid. (Sometimes when you are an adult, the movies you loved as child fall flat when you re-watch them with your own children.) While I enjoyed watching the movie, in a way it made me sad. It reminded me of my brother Joe.

When we were kids, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was one of the movies we used to watch often. We had many of the lines memorized, and Joe had a special talent for not only memorizing entire scenes from movies, but also doing really good impressions of the characters. He did this often, and one summer we combined our talents with our chores.

We had a vegetable garden, and in the summer when the green beans were growing like crazy, one of our chores was to go out, following the vines which grew over almost the entire back of the chain-length fence in the backyard, and pick the green beans that were ripe. One of the things that Joe and I did when we picked green beans was quote lines from movies to entertain ourselves. And Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was a movie where we had entire scenes memorized. So when I was watching the film with my girls, many lines brought back a flood of memories, not just of the line and how funny we thought it was as kids, but also of my brother's voice quoting the line and imitating every character's voice and intonation, of sunny days in our backyard in the Arizona desert, of chores we did as kids and the things we would do for fun. I loved the memories, and it hurt a little when I remembered that I had nobody to share them with.

What I wanted to do after I watched the movie was call or text Joe, and reminisce about how much fun we had quoting movies and picking green beans together when we were kids (even though at the time it wasn't fun, because it was, after all, doing chores). I wanted to quote some of the lines that we thought were the funniest and talk about how it was a movie that hadn't lost its charm, at least to me, over the years.

After Joe died, one of my friends was telling me that she had heard the idea that every relationship we have with others forms part of our identity. The experiences and relationships we have with people are relationships that we do not share aspects of with everyone, so when someone dies, a part of you dies too, because you don't have that particular relationship with anyone else in your life. This made a lot of sense to me. I think it explains some of the loneliness that comes with death. I remember when Joe died that what I wanted more than anything was to be with my parents and youngest brother, and yet even while their presence comforted me, I still felt so lonely. I think that loneliness was me saying goodbye to Joe and missing him, but I think I was also facing the reality that part of me, our shared history and relationship, was now gone from the land of the living.

So I guess the point of this post is just to say that I miss Joe, and I miss the fun we had together. And maybe the point is also the realization that this movie now has a special place in my heart, because when I watch it, it's more than entertainment. When I watch it, I feel like it's giving me back a little piece of my brother and our childhood when we were best friends and used to quote movies together for fun.