So apparently, school lockers are becoming extinct:

All of the students we spoke with at Parkway West and Ladue, estimate about 95% of upperclassmen don’t use lockers.

“I see a lot of students carrying around very heavy backpacks, with their locker with them, a portable locker,” said Eileen Kiser, spanish teacher at Parkway West.

Several reasons are given when you ask “why” students today don’t use lockers; don’t have as many books because of newer technology, rather carry all items with them, and lockers are no longer used as a gathering spot to talk to classmates.

“Our lockers aren’t meeting places anymore because we are talking a lot through texts, so we don’t have to meet and share gossip at the lockers or anything,” Shanker said.

While we found no schools locally that have done away with lockers, a recent USA Today article says it’s a growing trend. KAI Design and Build, an architecture firm based in St. Louis, has designed two schools without lockers in Texas. KAI President, Darren James feels its only a matter of time before you see new schools in St. Louis being built lockerless. James says their statistics also show about 95 percent of students don’t use lockers. Some local teachers also feel, lockerless schools could be in the future.

Maybe I was ahead of my time! At least, until I regressed.

When I was in high school, I used to carry around all of my books in a huge duffel bag. Sometimes I would sell the use of my locker to others. My high school was rather large and the lockers are always along the periphery, which meant that they were never centrally located or easily accessible. The result was that the bag was severely overloaded and had to be replaced every year or so. Same make, same model, start all over again.

What changed things was the campus news program. I actually saw myself in the hallway and was horrified by what I saw. I was so… slouched. I’d learned by that point that posture matters, and so the next week I asked my parents to get me a traditional Jansport backpack and started switching at lunch time. Within a week, two girls commented that there was “something different” about me. Both meant it entirely complimentary.

Even the elementary schools in Redstone have lockers. They didn’t in my school system. This may actually be somewhat indicative of what the article is talking about, though. The schools in Redstone trend to the very old. The ones in my district were new. Newer schools, less likely to have lockers.

Getting rid of lockers presents a logistical challenge. Having “classroom books” makes it more difficult to assign homework (though more likely that the kids have books in class). I suppose it works to have a classroom set of books and a book for each student. A little more expensive, but school districts are (or often can be) less than rigorous about replacing textbooks. The Redstone textbooks still include Yugoslavia, which is not insignificant when you consider the heavy Slavic population of teachers (I’ve noticed a trend among teachers with Slavic names that they actually have maps of eastern Europe on the wall even if they’re not teaching social studies).

Having assurances that kids do have their books in class is rather important. The alternative is that they stare at you blank-eyed or that they “read off a neighbor” which makes classroom enforcement more difficult. I do fear that, however, without the accommodations of a locker and/or a classroom sets that more kids will simply keep their books at home rather than lug them around school all day like I did.

Except when referring to padded cells, when people talk about “rubber rooms” they are as likely as not talking about the New York education system’s reassignment centers, where teachers accused of misconduct bide their time until the district determines what to do with them.

I thought about that when I was confronted with a different sort of educational holding cell: alternative schools.

The school district I grew up in had an alternative school. It was a godsend. It took all (well, most) of the people that were disrupting everything in the regular classrooms and getting them the heck out of the way. I never labored under the illusion that they were getting much an education over there. I didn’t really care, though, because they weren’t getting an education where they were and at least this way they weren’t preventing anybody else from doing so. My perspective changed a little bit when I discovered that a friend of mine (a couple grades back) was sent to one. I never knew what for. I never asked. But he was a bright kid. I sort of gave him my sympathies as politely as I could (”That must have been tough” or something like that), but he actually shrugged it off. I hadn’t realized what a hellish place I thought it to be.

I have a couple of times been given an assignment to Redstone’s alternative school. It isn’t a hellish place. It helps, I suppose, that the school is comparatively underpopulated. When filling in for a social studies teacher for a half-day, I had all of six students over three periods assigned to the class. Only two showed up at all. My second assignment (another half-day) there was for PE. I thought that would be awful, but it wasn’t, really. Thirty kids over two periods. They self-organized and did their own thing.

The reason my only two assignments there have been half-days is that it seems largely staffed by coaches. So they miss half-days when they have some competition halfway across the state. While there are always exceptions, it was my experience that coaches tend to be the least… engaged… of classroom teachers.

The Missing Portion of the Post:

There is an “alternative” school in Callie. A military school, actually, in close to the literal sense. It’s run in conjunction with the local national guard. It’s for the real hard cases from all around the state. I’ve never actually seen the campus, but I do see the kids marching around town in a “TEN-HUT!” sort of way. The Callie Academy is for the really hard cases. From bits and pieces I here, that’s where kids go before they get kicked out of the system entirely. My wife sees a lot of them as patients. She says that they are actually uniformly polite with the “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” and among the most respectful patients she has. Instead of being accompanied by a parent, they’re accompanied by instructors (looking over their shoulders, I imagine, and causing the exceptional behavior).

This couldn’t be any more different than Redstone’s Alternative school. That’s where it really is approached more as a holding tank. I’ve frankly never seen anything like it. A fifteen year old pregnant girl in the hallway drops a pack of cigarettes and a teacher says “Hey, Molly, you dropped your cigarettes!” She picked them up and was on her way (yes, this actually happened). My own cigarettes never leave the car and aren’t even supposed to be there. There is no time I pull into the school and there aren’t a handful of kids smoking cigarettes at the grocery store across the street. I go to another corner of said grocery store, just so that I am not actually smoking with the students.

My first assignment had a kid take a cell phone call during class. The principal walked in. I’d told him to get off, but he waved me off saying he’d be done in a minute. The principal actually walked in at that point. I thought I was going to be in trouble, but he didn’t care. During PE, some kids who were ditching class came in and joined in the fun. I told the principal, who sent one kid back but let the rest stick around.

The odd thing about it is that the kids actually aren’t all that bad. They are mostly completely indifferent. They can’t really be bothered to challenge authority. Or maybe they just already won. When I had them for PE, I was left a note that they needed to play volleyball or basketball. Instead, they chose to play dodgeball. I told them that I would let the regular coach know that they said it was okay and they shrugged it off. They were pretty brutal with one another with volleyballs being thrown at heads from a few feet away. Never a complaint, though. Compare this to dodgeball in the grade school where all of my time is consumed comforting some kid that’s crying. (I’ve come to the conclusion that the bans on dodgeball have little to do with kids actually getting hurt - they’re really quite resilient - but rather a lot more to do with how annoying and time-consuming it is for teachers.)

They’re also oddly - and refreshingly, in some ways - self-directed. Fewer actual fights and feuds than in regular school. Everyone seems to know the hierarchy and acts accordingly. The weaker kids seem to be perceived as a waste of the stronger kids’ time.

I don’t know what the difference is between these kids and the ones who get sent to the military school. I suspect that the latter are considerably further down the misbehavior path. I also think it depends on what the parents consent to (a lot won’t consent to their kid being sent across the state). It’s kind of funny that the system has given up on one set of bad kids, but is going the extra mile with what I suspect are a worse set of kids.

I consider a lot of public education to be a mere holding tank, but this was the first school I had ever been to that seemed to simply accept its role as such. I don’t really know how I feel about that. It seems honest, but also depressing. And I do wonder what is going to happen to these kids when they are allowed to leave the system. And if the results are actually any worse than in a regular classroom. One of the worst assignments I ever had was a remedial class at the middle school. I don’t know what separated those kids from the ones shipped off to the alternative school. But lordy, lordy, were they worse-behaved. It just seemed to bring out the worst in them. A constant tug-of-war with struggle and rebellion.

So maybe, in the end, maybe this is the lesser of evils. Or maybe it’s just easier. It’s hard to say.

One of the natural inclinations that, when I substitute teach, is not to put myself in the class. What I mean is, if I have a middle school class (for instance), I can usually guess half way through any period where I would fit in within the class’s dynamic. These are the students who would torture me. Those are the students who would be my friends. Those are the students who would unfortunately be my friends. Those are the students who would be kind but distant. That right there is the fat girl who would make fun of my weight to ingratiate herself with the popular-mean-nonfat girls. At the end of the day I do my write-up, and I should not mention - or fail to mention - a student on the basis of how I would expect they would have treated me at my middle school.

It’s a little different with the grade school kids because the social patterns aren’t all set yet. The notion of “I can’t be friendly with you because then other kids won’t like me” hasn’t fully set in yet outside of less than a handful of toxic individuals. I was actually a little surprised by this despite the fact that it matches up with my grade school experience. I remember a couple of kids at West Oak Elementary getting a really hard time, but it was rather an exception. I had previously thought that I had glossed this over because I wasn’t on the receiving end of much of it myself. But I am coming around to the idea of social patterns not having formed.

To jump back to middle school and high school and the inclination I have to resist, I guess it goes back to that saying that you graduate from the public school system but you never really leave it. The social patterns that establish themselves there long outlive their original context. I remember Eva saying that she and a previous boyfriend were having a hard time relating to one another because he was super-popular in school and she wasn’t. It sounds trivial, doesn’t it? Yet I am not sure it is. When your perception on that place that you spent seven hours a day for thirteen years of your life is so different, you can approach everything social with different assumptions. The justice of schoolground popularity, for instance. More basically, whether or not you can assume that people will like you.

Now, the older you get, the less all of this matters. But it does matter straight up through marriage. I don’t consider it a coincidence that all of the major romantic interests in my life have ranged from not-particularly-popular to unpopular. The friends through which you meet the person you marry are often (though not always) going to be people that you meet and become friends with while you labor under whatever impressions you have of your interactions with other people that you got from school. This isn’t set in stone (my brother Mitch was not-particularly-popular in high school but became Mr. Social in college), but it’s a general tendency I have seen.

All of this being really horrifying, when you think about it. Our social expectations being derived at a time when social alliances have no consequences beyond social standing. When being useful isn’t socially useful, for the most part. When being smart doesn’t help. When following the rules doesn’t help (and can hurt). These are the seeds from which our self-perceptions are often planted.

I had a kindergarten class today. It was a relatively light day, as far as academics go. The afternoon was spent with a Christmas “play” (more like a recital, but they called it a play). The rest of the day was spent with Christmas books and a couple short movies. Almost none of them involved Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

This was a problem.

Because over and over again, in any picture book or movie that showed the reindeer without Rudolph, the same response occurred: “WHERE’S RUDOLPH?!?!?!?!?!” My options of explaining this were three:

(1) Rudolph is a registered property of some media rights company and so any story where Rudolph appears must therefore pay this company money. In an effort to make their product less expensive and therefore enjoyed by a larger number of people, writers and producers of Christmas material where Rudolph does not play an integral part will leave Rudolph out of it. This, of course, diminished the enjoyment of the story for kindergarteners everywhere. So tell your parents to write your congressman in opposition to future copyright extensions so that eventually Rudolph can be more widely enjoyed by children such as yourself.

Pros: Accurate and potentially motivating young people for political involvement.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about.

(2) Think of it as though there are multiple parallel dimensions. What takes place in one universe does not necessarily take place in others. For instance, in this story, there are talking bears and wolves. As we know, in our dimension, bears and wolves don’t talk (and are more likely to attack one another than be best buddies). So, while Rudolph may exist in the world of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, he does not necessarily exist in this world of talking bears or wolves or this other world where dogs talk to one another in various accents.

Pros: Concedes the possible existence of Rudolph and places the context of the story within the storybook worlds where they are being told.

Cons: None of them will understand what the heck I am talking about. Except the words “Rudolph doesn’t exist.” They will understand that part.

(3) Rudolph is dead.

Pros: Short and to the point.

Cons: Will make kindergarteners cry.

(4) This story takes place before Rudolph was the lead reindeer. Remember how, at the beginning of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer how Rudolph wasn’t a part of the sled team? This story is like that.

Pros: Does not foreclose existence of Rudolph (and therefore Santa), comparatively short and to the point with an example they may be able to understand.

Cons: Kids have an incomplete understanding of “before” and “after.” Plus, if for instance there are only two reindeer, they will wonder why only two were necessary at the time of the story but Rudolph was one of several. Coming up with an explanation of how union regulations requires the hiring of more reindeer, or how animal rights advocates insisted on it, would require a greater understanding of the real world than kindergarteners are likely to have.

I went with #4, though left out the part about union regulations and instead opted for an explanation that the story took place when there were less people (errr, bear-people) and therefore less presents required carrying and therefore fewer reindeer were required.

To get to a more serious point, this actually is indicative to me of the problem of indefinite copyrights. Rudolph has extended beyond something that some guy made up for Montgomery Ward and into a cultural icon. Not even a pop culture icon, but a through-and-through cultural one. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate that Santa Claus himself wasn’t invented under the current copyright regime.

(To any kindergarteners reading this blog, that last part is a joke. Because, of course, nobody invented Santa Claus!)

Up until about the eighth grade, the first semester ended about two weeks after we returned from Christmas vacation. Then, some law was passed that allowed school to begin earlier in the year. A few days off and inservice days were shifted to the Spring, and the semesters were separated by winter break. Shortly after I graduated high school, there were grumblings that the school year was starting too soon. The local theme parks and other summer-fun places were complaining that they were left with only a little more than a couple months of business. So they tried to pass another law forcing districts to wait until September to start school. Education experts, in turn, argued that starting the semester earlier in the year was problematic because it would require splitting up the first semester again, which was problematic because of the brain drain that occurs over those two or so weeks.

As I read about this debate, I scratched my head. First, if they forget it over two weeks, then they never really learned it. Second, though, if we’re worried about what happens over two weeks, what about the two to three months of summer?! One of the frustrations for K-12 for me was that how it seemed that half of each year was spent reminding us of what we had learned over the previous year and forgotten over the summer (except that I didn’t forget, which made it even more frustrating). I was reminded of this when I read the following snipit from Reihan Salam’s piece on education:

Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist President Obama tapped to serve as his chief economic adviser, co-authored an important paper with Molly Fifer in 2006 on summer learning loss. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are at a big skills disadvantage in early grades, but that gap grows with each passing year. One reason is that while middle-class kids take part in enriching activities during the summer, ranging from camp to stimulating conversations with educated parents, poor kids are far less likely to do so. With that in mind, Krueger and Fifer called for a program of summer opportunity scholarships paying for enrichment programs during long vacations. It’s an excellent idea that should be pursued.

But what we really need is a cultural shift in which all of us take more responsibility for our education. We are not empty vessels into which credentialed professionals ladle knowledge. Rather, we are a special kind of animal uniquely good at learning through imitation and practice. Somehow we need to find better ways to capitalize on this fact — inside school walls and outside as well.

Or, of course, we could eliminate and/or divide out the “long vacations.”

There are a few arguments against this one. The theme park lobby being one of them. They like having things condensed in a way that allows them to concentrate all of their business over a short period of time (though, apparently, there is such a thing as “too short”). And a lot of leisure activities are season-specific (beaches, for instance). The fall and spring, where at least a few weeks of vacation would be harbored, can be too cold for outdoor swimming (where applicable) but too warm for playing in the snow (where applicable).

The second argument is that a lot of schools up north are not cut out for summers. They have non-existent or insufficient air conditioning. Which strikes me as insane no matter where you live. I hear this in particular about the northeast and that just strikes me as bizarre. They brag about how much money they spend on schools, but don’t shell out for adequate air conditioning systems?

The last argument is that summer school is necessary for some kids to get caught up.

In any event, I am unmoved by these arguments when you consider the degree of brain-drain that does occur over the summer. The third is the only really problematic one, to me. For the students that fall behind, I think the solution to that is with a quarter system where some classes over some quarters are repeated. While useful for shorthand, I think that overall the tendency to delineate too much by “grade level” is problematic. I would prefer more of an assessment/promotion approach on a class-by-class basis. So if we did go to a year-around system, I would support other changes occurring at the same time. Up to and including allowing families to pull their kids out of school for family trips, in the event that the months-off are staggered between the school. Staggering months-off could also go a ways towards alleviating the Disneyland problem.

As for the air conditioner problem, buck up and pay for it.

Long Island University Professor says that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was bullied, others agree and disagree:

Millions of viewers have reviewed the evidence. So, was Rudolph bullied?

“What they do to him is bullying especially what they’re teaching the kids now as big as it is in the schools, but yes, he was definitely bullied,” Audra Bamford said.

“We just watched it the other night and I was telling my kids that’s not how we treat our friends,” Ronette Hillenbrand added.

“No I don’t think he’s being bullied,” Dr. Friday said. “I think the problem lies with Santa. He’s just not hugging this poor defenseless thing.”

Santa’s involvement (or lack thereof) hadn’t really occurred to me. Perhaps it’s a telling indictment of how the expectation isn’t even there that authority figures will help.

I think it all depends on how far you stretch the definition of “bullied.” You can limit it to physical violence. You can broaden it a little to include threats of physical violence. You can broaden it even further to taunts and ostracization. I think all of these things apply as bullying of some sort, though some of these forms are more serious than others. I remember back in college I had a discussion with a female classmate wherein she argued that girls are worse bullies than men because guys rely on violence while girls are more creative and hit other girls where it really hurts: self-esteem. I countered that (a) violence hurts and (b) violence in boys is not unrelated to self-esteem. On the second point, she said that the same was true of girls and it was nothing like the self-esteem hit of being accused of being fat. We never came to an agreement. I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding of how boys and girls respond to accusations of weight (which hits girls far harder than boys) and physical weakness (the other way around).

As for Rudolph, I am inclined to agree with Dr. Giuliani that yes Rudolph was bullied, but disagree with his assertion that the movie promotes violence. The attitude towards the taunting of the other reindeer is treated with uniform negativity. If it does anything wrong, it’s to perpetuate the notion that the bullied are bullied because they are “special.” Which sounds nice, of course, but… doesn’t exactly ring true.

On the subject of bullying, Dr. Phi wonders to what extent “helicopter parenting” has actually helped alleviate the bullying problem from years past.

As the college football season descends into chaos, the subject of playoffs is again coming up. Which, as many of you know, I oppose. One of the main reasons for that opposition is that playoffs can render regular seasons moot.

Long before I took this stance, I got an object lesson in this. A particularly absurd one. This is more a telling of a story than a post about the BCS. I said almost all I have to say about college football playoffs here.

I am not a particularly athletic person. But there are two things to keep in mind: I started playing little league from a very young age. And I was pretty good at baseball. On the first point, it meant that while I didn’t have a whole lot of talent at sports like basketball or soccer, I was at least considerably more practiced than most. So when we played these things in PE, I was actually an asset to anyone willing to overlook that I was fat.

When it came to basketball, the “team leader” - Donnie - was not particularly willing to overlook that even despite the fact that I was 6′0″ tall in the 8th grade. There were six to a team and he had me swapping in and out for the 5th spot only because everybody had to play. One time we had six and the other team had four and I played for the opposing team and did remarkably well. It didn’t matter, though. I was not very athletic-looking. Our team came in second place (of six) overall, though. First and second place won a week of free time (fifth and sixth had a week of running laps).

After basketball came softball. This time there were only two teams. Donnie was one of the team captains. The other was Cory. Cory was on my little league team. Because he - like myself - was plugged in to the local little league, he knew who was good and who was not. So while Donnie was picking the jock-types, Cory was picking people he knew to be good. Donnie actually chuckled when I was Cory’s third pick, Cory, for his part, said he actually would have picked me sooner - as I was the best hitter on our little league team - but he knew he could wait for me. We both agreed he should have waited longer since it was apparent Donnie wasn’t going to pick me any time soon.

We destoyed them. Day after day, game after game. There were a lot of games because the mercy rule was called into effect regularly and we started over. Every now and again they would get lucky. We won 15 and they won twice. On the last day, the coaches announced it was the last day and that we were playing a “championship game.” And wouldn’t you know it, they won their third game that day. The end result? They had a week of free time and we had a week of running laps*.

What stood out to me was that nobody thought there was anything wrong with this. So hardwired into our thinking that a playoff is how champions are determined, that this seemed perfectly fair to everybody involved. We’d had a playoff for basketball, hadn’t we? Well yes, because there were six teams, two of which had tied for first and a third was only one game back. This, on the other hand, was essentially stating that the first 17 games were scrimmages.

* - I say a week, but it was probably only a couple of days. The 15-2 record I am more sure about. If I’m off, it’s not by more than a game or two in either direction. I know they won no more than three games. I know we won no less than 13.

Such is The Atlantic’s solution to the problem of bullying:

Instead of asking why bullies bully, scientists led by University of Illinois psychology professor Karen D. Rudolph are beefing up the coping side of bullying research by looking into why victims retaliate, ignore, or repair relationships after an attack. Through a series of surveys to 373 second-graders and their teachers, they investigated how each child approached and valued his or her peer relationships, how many of the children had been bullied, and how they responded to such attacks.

The data was revelatory. Though it wasn’t astounding to find out that half of the children reported being the object of taunts, gossip, or intimidation, how they reacted to their harassers was. The key to anticipating victims’ responses, it turns out, is to figure out their motivations for interacting with their peers in the first place. That is, kids who wanted to be popular and feel superior tended to retaliate impulsively. Those who wanted to appear cool by avoiding criticisms were more likely to pretend like nothing happened. And those who were genuinely interested in fostering friendships tended to react in healthful, positive ways. They asked their teacher for advice, sought emotional support, and found means to solve the tension with those who harassed them.

From a moral perspective, it is, of course, beyond agitating that we put the burden on the bullied to smart their way out of the situation. Of course, as I’ve said in the past, there is a certain logic to it. After all, it’s the victims that care what’s happening. It’s the victims that agree with society as a whole that bullying is a bad thing. It’s not, of course, the bullies themselves.

And there are some truths to this. While some people will get bullied no matter what, there are different ways to cope with it and some are more productive than others. There were three things that worked for me, two of which involved changes on my part and the third a system change at the school district.

If we look at the public school popularity echelon as we look at economics, I was a low-class kid. One thing that improved my situation was making middle class friends. The more of those I had, the less of a target I was. Middle class folks have at least some upper class friends, and the bullies to some extent watch themselves. The more you surround yourself with people that the bullies don’t want to get into it with, the more they will target people that are alone or that associate in target-rich environments. Of course, this was a negative-sum approach. Being less a target than the next guy doesn’t help the whole. Unless you become middle class yourself and lend aid to lower class people. I did this a little, though not much.

The second thing I did was crass bribery, which no school would recommend but which worked for me. Instead of giving away money, I helped a couple of bullies with their homework. On the first order they stopped picking on me and even became friends of sorts, but on a second order they provided a degree of implicit protection. They never threatened other bullies, but so long as I was on friendly terms with the former bullies, the others started avoiding me. Unlike the previous, this actually may have been positive-sum. Not only did the bullies I bribed not go after me, they also stopped going after my friends. And I think there was a net gain. (My friends didn’t receive the second-order effects that I did, however.) It was this that got me through my eighth grade year.

The third change was a systems one, and I believe a positive net gain. I changed schools, from a relatively unwealthy middle school to a wealthy high school. The bullies were vastly outnumbered, and made smaller by the fact that the worst were shipped off to the alternative school. I hated my high school, but it was great in this respect. It provided me enough breathing room that I could at first be invisible, and then start making middle class friends.

My experience in substituting has reinforced the notion that dealing with bullies - at least from an institutional standpoint - is exceptionally hard. Even for teachers and administrators that mean well. Last spring I mentioned a story at Pitts Elementary where two kids got into a fight, of sorts, and when the detention slips were sent out one of the kids was crying and the other was showing it off to all of his friends. How, precisely, do you punish a kid who shows off his punishment slips to all of his friends?

I don’t even know where to begin.

The method of discipline involved moving magnets up and down a spectrum (up for good, down for bad). The hassle this caused cost me 20 minutes in the morning and then another 15 during spelling time. At first, kids were being “helpful” by moving magnets up and down based on whether their classmates were doing good. This was followed by kids moving up their own magnets. Tattling is always a headache, but this just formalized it. Worse, the more I had to monitor that, the less I could monitor the classroom, all of whom were on the play carpet supposed to be reading. But they weren’t reading, therefore more magnets were being moved.

Then there was the pencil-sharpening debacle, another 15 minutes. Everybody in the whole daggun class had an unsharpened pencil. The bickering at the pencil sharpener meant that I had to just sharpen them myself. At some point, I am pretty sure kids were just breaking their pencils because the sharpener was where the action was.

Elementary school kids are actually generally quite good about participating. Particularly when it comes to the Direct Instruction stuff because they love yelling out the repeat-after-me’s. From a teaching perspective, I don’t like DI because it just feels stupid and rote, though ideologically I don’t have a problem with it because it’s really supposed to work. But I could barely get half of the class involved.

Early grade schoolers are also surprisingly good about ceding to authority, generally speaking, but I was almost at the point where I was just going to pick up the kids and physically put them at their desks. Except for the degree of trouble it would have gotten me in.

Apparently yesterday there was a big thing about bullying, so accusations of bullying were flying everywhere. About a half-dozen kids all just left after lunch to go to the principal/counselor/nurse. I had to get the other teacher involved to straighten that all out.

There was one case of bullying that I almost had nailed. The kids were playing dodgeball and a kid was crying on the ground due to some other kid’s “unfair” balltoss. I didn’t see that, but the kid he was pointing at then proceeded to throw the dodgeball straight at his head while he was one the ground. The crying kid ran away. When I finally found him, he refused to identify the kid that did it. I would have come down on the bully anyway, but it was one of three kids (all with shaggy blond hair, all wearing NFL-logo jackets) and I wasn’t positive which one it was. I needed the bullied to point him out and he refused to do so.

Speaking of which, dodgeball really is a mixed blessing. I am strangely happy to see it, but it does involve a lot of injuries and a lot of crying. With the exception of the above, the crying tends to be temporary.

One kid is so excitable that they have to put her in a jacket lined with metal to keep her from running around everywhere.

One little girl (actually, one of the good ones) got a papercut. I basically told her to tough it up (I couldn’t see the cut, no matter how hard I tried). Five minutes later she was bawling. So off to the nurse she went. After which, other kids started trying to injure themselves so that they could go to the nurse, too.

I actually had a frame of reference here. One of the girls in this first grade class was in the first grade class I taught at “the good school” (Rushmore). She was held back for a questionable reason: she was doing fine, but her Irish Twin needed to be held back and so the parents held them both back to keep them together. The difference in behavior between first graders and second graders is negligible and favorable to the former, so she wasn’t an outstanding student because she was more “mature” than her classmates. She was just a diamond in the rough. At Rushmore, she was a middle of the pack student that I really only remembered because she would keep hugging me. So in the context of Rushmore, she was average. In the context here, she was far and away the best student I had. Only one other came close.

I found it noteworthy that all three of the students I was “warned” about by the other teacher were male. The worst offenders were almost all female (one of the three she pointed to were an exception).

I’m going to have to come up with some better classroom management strategies. Not all of my grade school assignments are going to be at Creston and Rushmore.

I’ve taught previously at this school, Church Elementary, with a couple of pretty decent classes.

Notably, however, when I was last at Rushmore, one of my students was the daughter of Church’s principal.

“The main thing is to keep them from killing each other. If they learn something along the way, even better.” -The other first grade teacher.

I got an assignment at Rushmore elementary yesterday. Rushmore is far and away the best school in Redstone. The test scores say as much, but even before I saw them I singled out that school as having an absurdly positively atmosphere. I was glad to get the assignment because I had feared that I had been blackballed there after this whole incident (which, by the way, actually worked out in my favor: I got paid for one 1.5 days because of a mistake on their part).

It was my third straight assignment for the third grade, oddly enough.

One of the girls was 4′8″. In the third grade. I wonder if the high school girl’s basketball coach already knows her name. Speaking of which, last year I had a middle school student whose gender I was uncomfortably unsure of until I saw that she was on the girl’s basketball team. She was approaching 6′0″. As for Miss 54″, she commented that her father and brothers were “very tall” so I doubt that it’s just an odd growth spurt. She also didn’t seem like the kind of kid to be held back unless she was close to the borderline.

With the exception of a couple, every time I teach below the 5th grade, I am informed that I am a very tall individual and/or I have very large feet. This time I was informed that I was a very tall individual. One of the boys was bragging to another of the boys that at least they came up to my beltline.

I finally met Mrs. Truman. For those of you who do not recall, my actual last name is less common than “Truman” and so it’s odd to have someone with my same last name. And any time I teach at the middle school, I am asked if there is any relation. This time I made a point of stopping by to introduce myself. I know that she knew of my existence because she accidentally got my Valentine’s Day bag when I left it behind. I was… kind of disappointed in her, actually. She had very dyed and very dried hair. She was very friendly to me and we had a laugh about the event of the previous year, but given all of the raves I’d heard about her, I figured she would remind me of a third grade teacher I liked rather than the one that I hated.

I commented that any time I am asked about her among middle school kids I am told that she is/was “totally awesome” and that I might have benefited from the association. She appreciated the compliment and said that it would probably be different in high school, though, because her husband is a parole officer and “a lot of kids at Redstone High School have to deal with him.”

With the exception of the last name and the Valentine’s Day incident, I wouldn’t have expected her to know anything about me, but she actually knew that I am that guy that drives out all the way from Callie. The principal stopped by and said hello and asked if I was still making that drive. That seems to be my role. The guy who makes that really long drive. It also makes me wonder if, while I haven’t been blacklisted, they still think of me as iffy because of the whole incident over six months ago. He was nice, though.

The principal is very popular. Which is not surprising, since he either has the plum job or is actually so good that Rushmore’s impressiveness is attributable to him. I guess I have been watching too many crime shows, because when I think of a popular male principal, a part of my mind thinks that we’re going to discover that he’s kept a 15 year old girl chained up in his basement for five years or something equally harrowing.

The day was largely uneventful. Getting third graders to be quiet is a challenge. At the bad schools, it’s to get them to stop talking to one another. The only blow-up we had today was actually over academics. They all swore that the answer key was wrong about something and just blew up about it, requiring the other third grade teacher to come over.

The thing I’ve learned about elementary school kids is that they love routine - at least in school. They are very good at pointing out if you are doing anything that is not according to the routine and The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. No matter how minor.

Teachers have cooler gadgets than I was in school. We had blackboards and later overhead projectors. They have “smartboards.”

Rushmore used to be an “open classroom” environment. This was a hippie venture where they didn’t have separate rooms for everybody but instead taught everything in a wide open area with different sections. This adventure did not last long. But you can see the layout is not that of a typical school. The big open area in the middle still exists and the classrooms shuffled off to the side. They added new classrooms over the summer, though, so it almost looks traditional, though the layout still looks odd. It feels like somebody emptied out a department store and put in a school.

For all of the praises I sing to the school, it’s actually most known for a student-on-student shooting that happened there a long time back.

I really, really meant to take some pictures of the anti-bullying and positive mental attitude posters in the classroom. One of them had a picture of Alice (from the Brady Bunch) and ALF, saying that you want to be like the former but not like the latter. Putting aside that these kids probably don’t know who Alice and ALF are, who wouldn’t rather be ALF? Almost all of the anti-bullying stuff puts the onus on the bullied to extricate himself from the situation or “talk it out.” No surprise there, but one of the posters involving frogs managed to sum up the attitude very neatly.

Kay Steiger sounds off the warning bells with regard to online college:

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, a new study confirms some earlier findings about the efficacy of online learning in two-year colleges. The study, conduced by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, looked at more than 50,000 students in Washington state’s community or technical college system. What they found was that students who load up on online classes, especially early in their higher education careers, are less likely to finish their degrees. This is worrisome, especially because, as CCRC notes in its report, the number of students taking online courses is only increasing.

Other commentary has pointed out that online learning requires a basic degree of computer know-how that a lot of people don’t have and that online learning requires a level of discipline that traditional learning doesn’t. These are both very valid points and two of the three main reasons why online education will never become a norm (even as computer know-how increases). But there is something else at work, which Steiger points out: online students are not the same as physical students in terms of student profiles.

The Atlantic has been raising the banner of the non-traditional student. This is part of the “problem,” if you view it as such. Non-traditional students returning to school may be a good thing, but they’re often going to be the most marginal students. Not because they’re lazy or dumb, but because they have a lot of other things going on. That’s precisely what attracts them to the flexibility of online learning in the first place. This is also one of the reasons that for-profit universities have such abysmal graduation rates. They cater to precisely these students.

When we talk about increasing college enrollment, this is one of the things that we have to be looking at. We’d partially be bringing into the fold a lot of people who are not, at present, in a great position to do well in school. It may be worth bringing them into the fold anyway! But we have to accept that one of the costs of this is going to be higher drop-out rates and at least some students potentially hurt along the way with debt but no degree. Unless we’re going to start paying people to go to college, we have to factor this into the equation.

This is something that brick-and-mortar universities themselves often look at. One university near where I live is trying like hell to make the transition away from being a commuter school that provides the opportunity for a great education to people without a lot of options in favor of being a more traditional university. Why? Because a lot of these students are failing out. This hurts the university’s profile by making it look like a school that is failing. But by changing the student body to a more traditional one, the hope is that the numbers will improve and the university will look better. The only sacrifice required is shuffling off the “wrong” people to schools that are less good.

And on a personal level, I grit my teeth when I hear people talking about how they want their kids to “work their way through college.” Presumably so that they won’t take it for granted. There may be something to this, though in my experience working while going to college is more often going to be a recipe for failure. A working student serves two masters. My ex-girlfriend, an honors student in high school, failed miserably in college due in no small part to the fact that she was working at a pet store the whole time. Could she have done both if she were more disciplined? Sure. But that’s the kind of disciplined student you don’t have to worry about in the first place. Meanwhile, my own GPA fell considerably when I started working while attending. It’s a serious distraction. Some people have no choice. But putting kids in that situation for the sake of making a point or thinking it will lead to better outcomes is mistaken.

One of the “no duh” things I have learned while substitute teaching is the extraordinary difference in time horizons between young people and older people. I don’t mean this in the typical sense that kids can’t think too far ahead. I mean it in the broader sense… that what we would consider a little time is actually a whole lot of time for them.

One place where this comes up is with recess. Recess at Redstone elementary schools runs at about 10-15 minutes. To me, 10-15 really isn’t enough time to do anything. But to say that they are thrilled about it is an understatement. Not just as a break from the tedious monotony of classwork. In the same 10-15 minutes that isn’t “time enough to do anything” they just bounce from one activity to another. They play this for a couple minutes, then that. And sometimes they ask for an extra five minutes. Five minutes is a half or a third of the time that isn’t sufficient to do anything, but it just makes their day if you give it to them. Five minutes.

Recess more generally is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s good for kids to be able to go out and play. I have become a believer that recess should not be considered a reward but rather a good thing in its own right. I didn’t used to really believe this all that much because back when I was in elementary school, we spent recess doing things other than running around as often as not. But judging by the Redstone kids, we are the exception. Or maybe it was related to the fact that we had PE almost every day and they get it once or twice a week.

On the other hand, as a substitute, that 10-15 minutes out of an 8-hour day (including lunch) tends to be the cause of about a half or a third of the major problems I’ve faced. A good portion of the time when they come back in, I hear stories about how so-and-so hit so-and-so. How it may have been an accident but the retaliation was real. And the bad blood from the playground can color the atmosphere for the rest of the day.

I had my first two substituting assignments last week. Both involved the third grade.

It’s always a good sign when you’re substituting for a male teacher. That’s because he’s usually a coach. And coaches, at least in Redstone, really have the plum jobs. Something to justify their salary and little more. It was frequently the case in my district that they taught the most basic of subjects, but in Redstone it’s not even that.

The time when I was teaching at the alternative school and had six students over three periods? Coach!

The time when I was doing a votech class on “workforce studies”? Coach!

And last week, it was “library tech.” Computer class! Coach!

The main thing was to avoid being bored while they listened to their headsets and learned to type using some free web site involving animated rhinos. The teacher (coach) said all I had to do was prevent them from talking and make sure that their posture was good. He was very concerned about their posture. When he left, he yelled “Posture!” and everybody sat up straight.

At the end of the day, I got to tell a teacher that her students were very well behaved in computer lab. I like getting to tell teachers that their classes were good.

I met the principal at this school (the last one I hadn’t substituted at before, I’m pretty sure), and this time not for a bad reason (it’s typically not good when a principal knows who you, a substitute teacher, are). We had lunchroom duty at the same time. I told a couple kids to stop running and he said “Actually, let them run. They fall, they hurt themselves, they are more careful about running in the future.” I’m not sold on the school itself (though the building itself is awesome), but I respect the attitude. On the other hand, during my off-period I was walking out to my car and a bunch of first graders were playing outside on a lawn near the parking lot with a huge hill unattended. I can think of 100 ways for something to go wrong with that.

There is a story in the background on all of this I cannot divulge because it actually got national news coverage and would give away my location. Frustrating.

The next day was a standard third grade class for a full day. It was at Creston, one of the “good schools.” The difference between a good school and a bad school is that (a) a good school you spend 50-75% of your time teaching or helping them learn and 25-50% of your time putting out fires and in a bad school you spend 50-75% of your time on classroom management, and (b) in a good school when you scream at the kids to be quiet, they do or at least try.

Things started breaking down towards the end of the day. The third grade is the first grade in which they have to stay all the way to 3:00 and the kids seemed to mentally check out at about 1, when they used to leave. I had to leave a less-than-stellar note for the teacher. She showed up before I left, however, and I talked to her about it in person. I told her that the kids weren’t bad, they just had trouble keeping quiet. She pounced on the latter part and said that she would give them a good talking-to.

It sort of feels like leaving reviews on eBay or the Subaru questionnaire where anything less than a perfect review is a bad review. It makes me almost want to say that they were perfect, because they were more good than bad.

My teaching experience is… limited. I’ll be the first to admit. Nonetheless, even substituting for a semester, there are some things you pick up on pretty quickly. Perhaps some of them are false-lessons to be unlearned later. But maybe not. In any event, I read “amen, brother!” when I read about a new style for teaching math:

Many students were sent to him because they had severe learning disabilities (a number have gone on to do university-level math). Mighton found that to be effective he often had to break things down into minute steps and assess each student’s understanding at each micro-level before moving on.

Take the example of positive and negative integers, which confuse many kids. Given a seemingly straightforward question like, “What is -7 + 5?”, many will end up guessing. One way to break it down, explains Mighton, would be to say: “Imagine you’re playing a game for money and you lost seven dollars and gained five. Don’t give me a number. Just tell me: Is that a good day or a bad day?”

Separating this step from the calculation makes it easier for kids to understand what the numbers mean. Teachers tell me that when they begin using Jump they are surprised to discover that what they were teaching as one step may contain as many as seven micro steps. Breaking things down this finely allows a teacher to identify the specific point at which a student may need help. “No step is too small to ignore,” Mighton says. “Math is like a ladder. If you miss a step, sometimes you can’t go on. And then you start losing your confidence and then the hierarchies develop. It’s all interconnected.”

This was precisely the problem I ran into when trying to teach a second grade girl to approximate and add. And this was how I finally got it through. You simply break it down into as many steps as humanly possible. I wanted to jump ahead straight to “Take 76, round it to 80, then take the 19, and round it to 20, and you get 100,” which was obviously too much. So I stepped back and said “What does 76 round to?” and she had no idea. So… another step back… the number that 76 rounds off to is going to be one of two numbers. Which ones?” and on to “What’s the first number in 76?” “7″ Okay, so take that number, or the next number up, and those are the two possibilities. So what are the two possible numbers you might round 76 up to?” Her first guess was 78, but we got there until I destroyed her confidence.

I’m always skeptical of claims that “any kid can learn up to college level math,” which the article suggests. But I do believe that there is more variability than Half Sigma and the like think. At least there is where there’s motivation, which can be the bigger nut to crack.

The other thought is that this demonstrates the tremendous need for tracking. Take some second graders and try to start with “What’s the first number in 76″, they’re going to go absolutely crazy. This completely and entirely fails to bother some people, but perhaps due to my experiences it does bother me. And it’s a waste of their talent. The notion that “we shouldn’t worry about the really smart kids” because they’ll have the smarts to take care of themselves completely ignores the fact that it’s the smart kids that will be using their education to make this country better for the less smart ones. And while I may disagree with Sigma on the extent to which the left side of the bell curve can be taught, I am in full agreement that you have to approach different aptitudes differently. And just as you don’t want to throw the answers at second graders, like I tried to do, nor do you want to bore the quicker kids to death by starting at a point that is going to be intuitive for many.

The only non-school related aspect to this post: Most of the places I’ve lived, the fridge door is weighted to close with only moderate pressure. I’m not used to having to close the fridge door all the way. Just give it a shove and it closes itself. My parents’ fridge isn’t that way at all. I’m not sure why. It’s been a struggle to remember to close it.

I drove by my old middle and high school the other day. The high school apparently built a free-standing basketball gymnasium. I wonder if the old one is still there. Probably. It makes me angry, though not for the waste or anything like that. Rather, they took away what was already very limited parking to build that thing. Grumble. Understandable in its own way. Despite being in the football-mad south, I went to a “basketball school.” We cycled through football coaches all the time because they would come in expecting to be a Big Deal only to find that they were the #2 behind our legendary basketball coach (who the new gym, as well as the street in front of the school, is named for). The high school’s current coach is the son of a Division I basketball coach who made The Tourney last year.

Back when I was in middle school, I would occasionally miss the bus. The intermediate school forced you out within a half-hour of the bell and Mom wouldn’t come and pick me up until Jeopardy was over. So I’d have to go to the library, which I remember as being a long walk. It’s like right next door. Long walk? No wonder I was so fat.

A part of me would like to go inside and tour the facilities of both schools. And my elementary school, now that I think about it. But security and all that prevents anyone who is not a parent or a student from so much as using the parking lot to turn around. When I was in high school, I wanted to go to West Oak Elementary’s Open House in order to see the school again. But they wouldn’t let anyone who wasn’t a parent in. What the hell? Are they worried that I would kidnap and sexually abuse a parent? I find John Walsh’s America to be extremely aggravating.

Though it requires illegal parking (in an empty lot), I stop by the Southern Tech University campus just about every time I come to town. At least there I’m not a threat to anybody. I also stop by the book store to see if there’s anything new that I want. The jerseys were on sale for every size except mine.

Southern Tech’s expansion is pretty impressive. They almost have a livable area where you don’t have to drive through Scarytown in every direction to go somewhere to eat or hang out.

They’ve redistricted the schools, so my elementary school and my high school aren’t mine anymore. Or rather wouldn’t be my children’s if I moved into town. The elementary school is an upgrade, though the high school isn’t (from five stars to four). Really, though, most of my friends who went to Mayne High were miserable. Most of those who went to Southfield were content. The new Eastfield school (which is somehow west of Westfield - a story for another day) is more like Southfield. Wealthy enough to avoid being unpleasant, but not so wealthy as to be aggravating.

Aggravating, it would seem, is my word for the day. I’ve also been fighting off a headache.

There are two district stadia. The second is below the fold, at the bottom. The first is above, neatly nestled in town. Half of the bleachers actually sit atop parts of the school. This picture is from the special ed room, below said bleachers.

This is outside Lewis Elementary. Considering that Lewis is the worst school in the district, it fits. The school was, until somewhat recently, a middle school. Dwindling population lead to the decommissioning of an elementary school and Lewis’s conversion, sending all of the district kids to Clark Middle. (more…)

Colleges apparently getting people’s hopes up in order to dash them:

The 18-year-old high school senior in Thornwood, New York, said she spent about $780 on 12 applications after mailings from top schools like Duke, which sent a wall poster. She was rejected by Duke, Columbia and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and plans to attend the University of Maryland.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, someone is interested in me,’” Ederer said in an interview. “They attract you with an e-mail and a few pamphlets and big envelopes filled with a ton of information and make you want to go to that school, and they don’t accept you.”

The rationale of this behavior being pretty simple: it looks better when you reject a higher percentage of your applicants. There’s actually a sign posted at Redstone High School wherein a few dozen colleges have a “common application process.” Apply to one, apply to all! That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but they basically make it easier to apply to as many as you want to. In part, I suspect, so that these schools can come across as being more selective than they otherwise are.

My alma mater, Southern Tech University, is trying to join the University of Delosa as a state flagship university. The goalposts that the state has set up for Sotech make it pay for the university to become more selective. More admissions typically correlates with lower medians, higher drop-out rates, and higher acceptance rates. All of which allow DU to turn their nose up at us and say “you have more in common with Delosa Polytechnic than you do with us.”

As a proud Pack alum, I wish my university well in its goal. The better it does, the better my degree looks… but a lot of it is tribal pride. Most alums seem to feel the same way. Of course, it becomes paradoxical after a point. A lot of people that got in under previous, more lenient admissions, would be less likely to get in under more recent standards. They’re wanting the university to attract better students than they, often, were. Whether I would get in to Southern Tech or not simply wasn’t a question. And indeed, I would likely get in under the newer proposed admission policies, as well. Though as they attract a better class of student, I would be less likely to get into the Honors College, which was one of the real boons to my time at the U. Beyond that, the fact that the university was less selective made it more attractive to me to begin with. I had deferred acceptance into DU, but I was intimidated by the prospect of going to a school that I “barely got into*.”

* - I didn’t fully appreciate how good my high school was and how much of a “leg up” I would have on a lot of my college classmates.

A reminder that I came up in the 80’s…

I didn’t say *my* 4th grade class. Even so, this was another class in my school, so I knew a lot of the kids because I was in the same class as them in earlier grades or the 5th grade. This picture will not be up for very long and will be replaced with an obscured one.

1 - Lived down the street from me. Disappeared from our school system at some point not long after this picture was taken (in fact, I could have sworn she had been gone by the 4th grade). She later died of a drug overdose.

2 - One of my best friends through parts of middle school. Then we went on different trajectories. He got a girlfriend pregnant almost immediately after high school and never went to college.

3 - I knew him quite well growing up, then at some point he just turned. He dropped out of high school and did a stint in prison.

4 - My family was close to her family and I’ve written about her on this blog before. She moved to Deseret and became part of some strange religion that required that she change her name. She was pregnant by 19 and had another kid by 21. While pregnant with her second, she cut off all ties to her family. She had one brother who ended up in Cascadia. He, too, severed all ties with his parents. It’s really weird, because their parents (who used to sit us often) seemed like great folks.

5. I was a horrible, horrible friend to this kid. I don’t even want to recount what exactly I did, but it ruined him socially. He must have known. Yet, years later, sent a Facebook friend request and we’ve chatted. If his Facebook info is to be believed, he has done unbelievably well for himself.

6. Remember that girl I posted about who married the guy several leagues below her? For those of you who don’t remember, she’s an MD now.

7. Is female. Even today, looks a little bit like a guy in drag.

8. Went to the prom with a guy who turned out to be gay. It should have been the first clue. She was gorgeous and he was utterly uninterested in her all night long. She was pissed, but they’re Facebook friends now, so I guess she got over it.

9. Graduated college at age 20, got two masters degrees and a PhD. Is a statistical analyst for a major insurance company. Four kids. Writes zombie fiction.

10. I was often confused with her brother, who was decidedly unpopular.

11. He left after the 4th grade, I think. He and I were friends, but the guy has the personality of a Monty Card dealer. I hope he ended up in Vegas.

With the exception of the tall brown kid, the boy below #4, and the girl between #7 and #8, I actually don’t remember any of the other kids in this picture. Which is rather astonishing to me, because it used to be that I remembered everybody.

A couple weeks back I had a few jobs at Pitts Elementary, which (along with Clark) is among the spottiest schools in town. And I was told, from start, that I was being handed a “problem class.” I was excited to discover that I would have not one but two “prep times” while the kids were in music and library respectively. Unfortunately, I had to stay in the classroom through music because a couple kids had been banned from the class and so I had to sit them. But other than that, things had actually gone pretty well. Right up until recess.

When the kids came back from recess, a kid named Lucus was whining that Deric hit him in the hallway. Lucus had alternated between being helpful and being one of the biggest problems in the class. I basically told him that I didn’t see it and so there isn’t much I can do about it. Then I saw Deric with his head buried in his arms, crying. I’m not proud of my inclination to just ignore Lucus, but there it is. Crying kids are harder to ignore, however. Marko and Lucus basically said that Deric cries a lot (along with Lucus reiterating that he was hit by Deric) and that the regular teacher always ignores it. I was less than entirely comfortable with that (with substitute teachers, I guess, crying works better than mere whining). So what happened, Deric? Todd hit me! Todd, did you hit Deric? Todd replies that he’s not getting involved. I tell him he’s already involved. Todd says he only hit Deric after Deric hit him. Lucus reiterates that he was hit by Deric. A neutral party, Marin, says that Deric did not hit Todd prior to Todd hitting Lucus. Marin, it should be said, is the kind of girl that I hope Clancy and I have if we have a girl. So I start preparing what I’m going to say to the principal and am informed (by Lucus, confirmed by Marin) that it’s actually the recess monitor’s responsibility and not mine.

Before I could get this settled, they had to go to the library. Since they were in the library, I thought I would get confirmation that it’s “not my problem.” So I went to the principal’s office with a kid that had been banned from the library. As a brief but not entirely irrelevant aside, when I was walking him to the main office, I got two or three inquiries about What Did Branden Do This Time? In fact, Branden had been well-behaved and helpful throughout. When I got to the main office, I had planned to just ask the clerk, but nobody was there because it was around lunchtime and the office-workers double as food-servers. The principal was in his office, though, and overheard me talking to Branden. He came out and chided Branden, saying that he thought Branden was going to start doing better. Actually, this is not about Brandon. Oh? So then with Brandon’s help, I explained everything and asked if this was something that I concern myself with or if it’s a recess monitor’s responsibility.

The end result was that the principal immediately took control of the situation. He pulled Lucus, Todd, Deric, and Marin out of the library and into his office. Lucus, I gather, quickly backtracked on his complaints about being hit to get out of the principal’s office as quickly as possible. Marin was out once she told him what she knew. Deric and Todd both ended up getting detention, surprise surprise. On the one hand, nobody saw what happened and so it’s difficult to discern (Todd’s story was - or became - that Deric hit him earlier in the day, and so Marin didn’t see it). One might be quick to say that this student is a troublemaker so we should assume he was at fault, but the assumptions about Branden made me particularly skittish about that in the afternoon. On the other hand, when I passed out the detention notices, Deric started crying again while Todd was showing it off to all of his friends. That, more or less, tells me what I need to know.

I’ve come to learn that teachers’ pets are actually a little like pets. Some are like hounds or shephards, and they can really help you out. Others, for the most part, just want to hump your leg. Then there are those that are exceptionally nice to you because they know that when you walk upstairs, you’ll discover that they pooped by your bed.

My first assignment had a teacher’s pet named Marinda. I really thought she was a godsend as she helped guide me through the class. The first half-day, she was quite helpful. By the end of the second day, I found her to be extremely annoying. I would specifically ask others for help, when I needed it, because she simply wouldn’t stop… everything. She just wouldn’t stop. I’ve learned to pick up on this type pretty quickly and go to others for help. If nothing else, there’s usually a quiet girl in the back of the class who likes things orderly and tidy and will answer any of your questions to keep the status quo. I can more easily understand teacher bias towards girls in this respect. At least in grade school, they like orderly and tidy a lot more than boys.

Most of the helpful boys fall into that third category. They’re actually not the best behaved kids in the room. Sometimes, they’re among the worst. They know this. It seems like they really can’t help themselves. They try to compensate by, when they’re not being bad, by being as helpful as possible, hoping to mitigate the negativity in the note I leave behind. Or else, the bad behavior and the help both trace back to the root cause. Outgoing kids with pent up energy. An inability to be quiet and sit still. A natural force that can be used for good, evil, or frequently both.

It’s difficult to understate the degree to which substitutes have to rely on classroom helpers. Or at least I do. No amount of note-leaving by the teacher will explain everything. A lot of times, if you do something “wrong” (something other than the way it is usually done), you will have ten or so objections at once. Of course, sometimes it’s contradictory. I’ll pick a certain way to do something and the kids who prefer it that way will say “Yeah, we do that sometimes” while the rest will say “nuh-uh!” Fortunately, you can tell by a straw poll and by the words they use “we do it that way sometimes” versus “we always do it this way.” That’s when it gets complicated, though, because you have at least a couple kids excited about what you said you were going to do. Their hopes were up and everything.

Interestingly, one thing I haven’t really seen that I would have expected to is animosity towards teachers pets. I would think that Kid A would be upset with Kid B when Kid B informs me that the teacher doesn’t let the class do what Kid A is doing. But really, the Kid A’s seem to accept their fate with a stunning grace. Oh. Well. Busted. At most, they’ll try to negotiate. But whether they’re guide dogs or leg humpers, the teachers pets do not seem to be as ostracized as I would expect. It makes it easier to ask that quiet girl in the back of the class what we are supposed to do, knowing that I am not putting a target on their back.