Expert Negotiator
Every Saturday morning, I wake up and walk down the hill to tutor one student. This one student is my favourite. He is also my most difficult. Never one to initiate conversation, verbally opposed to every suggestion, often times rude and inappropriate, this child is a challenge. But in him, there is a ray of light and an offer of hope. Although he bitterly complains about our short time together on Saturdays, I know he doesn’t mind so much – his bark is much worse than his bite. With moans, objections and excuses out of the way, we begin our weekly negotiations. We negotiate which subjects he will work on (he pretends to leave if I suggest math first), we negotiate how long we will work on the exercise, we negotiate what happens when all is finished, and last but not least we negotiate when we are done for the day. After all that – we are ready to work. But the challenges don’t end there. It is a struggle to teach any child who appears to be inattentive or unconcerned with the lesson. And I know my favourite student may not look it, but he is listening attentively and absorbing all of what I’m trying to teach him.
When it’s time for a snack break, I gently tease him about his “Beatles” style hair cut and although I know he would never begin a conversation, he enjoys the social contact. I’ve reached him when he smiles. We laugh together when I tell him stories of how I too, used to hate math as well as my grade 7 math teacher named Miss Work. I’ve connected with him on some level with that one smile, that one moment of sustained eye contact and a little shared laughter. It is the whole reason I wake up on Saturday mornings eagerly looking forward to our time together.
As I walk back up the hill, finished for another week with my favourite student, I feel satisfied that I’ve done a good job as a teacher and that I was able, if only for a short time, to crack the surface and let the light of hope shine in. Even if I had to negotiate for it.
Life is a Story
Professional Day. For some this means a day of no school. For others it means a day of workshops and meetings. Last Friday, the district had its last professional day of the school year. As teachers, we were scheduled to attend a couple of in-school workshops. Often, these Pro-D activities are dreadfully, dreadfully boring – lecture style presentations leave me wondering how I ever made it through university. Other times, however, the presenter of the workshop hits it right and manages to deliver something dynamic and fun. As we entered the class for the first session of the day, “Behaviour Management and Your Classroom”, I began to dread this hour and a half might be of the former kind and before I even reached my seat, my brain started to feel that familiar tingly, anaesthetizing sensation and my vision started to blur– I wasn’t going to make it! Much to my surprise the lecture quickly gave way to a lively story telling event – “Tales from the Crypt of a Nearly Retired Teacher”. This fellow colleague could really yarn! I found myself (and everyone around me) fully engaged and laughing out loud – the presentation was fantastic! 90 minutes passed like it was 10 and I was still feeling that all over glow of a good laugh when I entered the second session. As I nibbled on a complementary rock-hard bagel (meant to entice teachers to the workshop) I realized too late that this session smacked of university lecture. Immediately, I had trouble focussing my thoughts, my body beginning to numb out. I settled into the most comfortable position I could find on the hard plastic chair, and not unlike days past, I let my mental body be carried off on the voice of the lecturer, my physical body only a place holder. After the session was over and I regained my senses (and the sensation in my butt), I was able to reflect: this must be what a boring class is like for our students …. No, this IS what a boring class is like for our students! As teachers, we must strive to engage our students to the maximal degree, we have to liven our lessons and relate our teachings to the lives of those being taught. Life is a story, learning is a story and this is how we come to understand. Through interesting tales, relative anecdotes and the occasional joke we are drawn in and walk, if just for a moment, beside the storyteller. If each lesson were wrapped in a parable, I know many more students would be engaged and more learning would be taking place in our classrooms. Now, if I could only figure out how to enjoy a dried out, hard bagel!
Idyllic Childhood Lost?
In the last few weeks, while learning many aspects of my new job as high school resource teacher, I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to get acquainted with my new teenaged students and it has struck me how vastly different the adolescent experience is from one person to the next. Thinking back to my own high school years, of which I can remember blissfully little, I don’t recall having to face many of the issues that I’ve come to hear about in the last couple of weeks. It has shocked me to hear that one student has had to deal with the death of her brother and boyfriend within the same year. Another student, who has also lost a brother, is often late to school because he is helping his single mother, who lost a leg to cancer, get ready for her day. One student arrived to class sporting bruises on her face that she immediately claimed were from a rough game of lacrosse – but I found out later, were the result of a dispute with her father. Another battles depression. The list goes on and I have to wonder – is this state of adolescent affairs new or has it always been so desperate? The lives of these kids seem so far away from the kind of life I remember when I was young. In grappling to understand the plight of these children, I have to wonder– have times changed so much that adolescents of today are dealing with a lot more than those of the previous generation? Certainly circumstances have changed: the break up of the family unit is common place, the exposure to violence in the media has increased, the uncensored “googling” of any and all information, the advent of text messaging, Face Book and on-line chat rooms; I’m sure that a lot has changed in the last two decades and the pressures teenagers are having to deal with may indeed be greater than my own seemingly idyllic childhood. What ever happened to parents staying together for 33 years, Saturday morning cartoons vetoed because “kids need to play outside on nice days”, home baked bread, family dinners around the table, chores with no allowance, neighbourhood water fights in the summer, running around barefoot and unsupervised, having tree forts and secretly kissing the boy next door? Digging back through my own adolescent memories, I can not come up with something as singularly devastating as losing a sibling, or fighting the unseen evils of depression or being beaten by anyone, let alone a parent. In the getting to know of my students, I’ve become very aware that I haven’t experienced that kind of chaos and I feel very fortunate to have come from a solid, loving home. I can only hope that through this strong and seemingly rare trait that I’m able to show my students the compassion and understanding they deserve because everybody knows that being a teenager is difficult and given the chance, nobody would do it twice.
