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Books rule!

eminnm — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:57:26 +0100

Here’s my favorite adorable kid thing that happened today. We are reading Holes as a class, and my kids LOVE IT. They keep taking it home to read ahead, and even though this is a book about a year above most of their reading levels, they are reading and comprehending it anyway through the sheer power of loving it so much. Today we had standardized testing literally all day, from 8:30 am until 2:30 pm, which was not so nice. But here’s the adorable: Brandon finishes his reading test a little early. He starts to read Holes. Five minutes later, frantically calls me over. “Ms. EMinNM! Look! Look! ‘A skeletal hand in an orange jumpsuit reached out from under the boat.’ THERE’S SOMEONE UNDER THERE!” “Whoa! Better keep reading to find out who!” I whisper, unable to tell him off for making noise during testing. Two pages later: “Ms. EMinNM! Look! It’s ZERO!” Ten minutes later we are done and the whole class is lining up for lunch. There’s Brandon, still at his desk, engrossed in his book. I remind him it’s time to leave. “Just one more minute!” The rest of the class starts leaving, and he sighs and starts to follow them. Then the line stops, held up behind another class in the hallway. And there goes Brandon, inching back to his desk to read just one more paragraph. This is my favorite thing ever. This kid has some learning disabilities, and he really struggles with focusing and understanding what he’s reading independently. But today he was SO INCREDIBLY EXCITED, and all about a book. Books rule.

Missing Skills

eminnm — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:36:17 +0100

Those of you who’ve been with me for a while may remember that my kids this year are an especially challenging bunch, with low attention spans and lower test scores. Today, 3 weeks from the end of their fourth grade year, we worked on the following concepts: story structure including conflict and climax, vocabulary words such as “despicable,” and how to properly read the word “gain.” In math, we worked on changing fractions into decimals, comparing and ordering decimals, and subtracting whole numbers. Two of these things are not like the others…and they suck at them. Although they could analyze the story structure of Holes and even figure out the complicated story-within-a-story parts, two of my students could not read the word “gain.” They pronounced it /jin/. Then /jan/. We reviewed the G-rule, again. They didn’t remember it, again. We compared it to the C-rule, again. They only halfway remembered that rule. Then we reviewed that when two vowels go a-walkin’, the first one does the talkin’. AGAIN. And they didn’t remember it. AGAIN! Then we worked on subtraction with fully half my kids (because only half of them could do it), and we went all the way back to basics with place value blocks. We saw why you cannot subtract 5 ones when you only have 2. They traded in the blocks for others. When trading in a tens rod, they had to physically count each block before deciding that they should get 10 ones cubes for it. When trading in a hundreds flat, they had to line up 10 tens rods to know that 10 tens equals one hundred. A couple of them had giant lightbulb moments. “You mean THAT’S why we cross out the one next door? We’re trading it in?” Meanwhile, fifteen minutes later, two of them had to take back out the place value blocks because they forgot, AGAIN, how many ones they should get for a ten. Here’s the thing that’s ridiculous. My kids are brilliant. When you explain things to them conceptually, they can really get it. They spent half their math block today explaining the difference between 0.7 and 0.74, and how to know which was greater. They explained how they visualized the decimals, explained how their corresponding fractions were different, and defended and challenged each others’ answers. The other half they struggled to figure out why 2 – 5 isn’t 3. Half of their reading block they argued for which of two events they thought was more climactic, in the miniature story-within-a-story happening 110 years before the main story of Holes. The other half they couldn’t remember letter sounds. My kids had no preschool because all the Head Starts in the area were closed or shut down when they were 4. I wasn’t there, obviously, but a colleague who was there told me they had a 2/3 chance of having one of the worst kindergarten teachers she’d ever seen, and then a 2/3 chance of having a first grade teacher who was either a) so crazy she was fired after that year, or b) possessed of a strange idea that if you present children with books, they will learn to read on their own. Second grade they had a 2/3 chance of having a long-term sub or rotating subs for half the year. None of these so-called awful teachers are still at the school, so I don’t know how much truth there is in these rumors, but I have heard it from multiple teachers who were there, independently of one another. Who knows. For whatever reason, through no fault of their own, they have been left with Swiss cheese instead of skills. Some skills they really got. Some skills they seem to have completely missed. And they have spent the intervening years between when they missed them and now faking their way through it. Rather than reinforcing number sense and regrouping every time they saw subtraction again, they were reinforcing bad habits and the wrong method of borrowing. Instead of reinforcing the C-rule and G-rule when they saw words like “gain” and “core,” they were mumbling through it and reinforcing that those words said jin and sore. And the part that kills me right now is that I haven’t fixed it. They are missing so much, and we didn’t have time to master all the new stuff PLUS relearn the old stuff (and unlearn the bad habits). I guess I can feel somewhat good that they know fractions and generalizations. But the idea of sending my kiddos to fifth grade when they can’t subtract, don’t know what sound g makes, and still regularly write only on the back of 3-hole paper (because they don’t know which side is the front) is devastating.

Tired but grateful...

eminnm — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:00:42 +0100

It has been a REALLY long time since I’ve written, and I think it’s just because I am so incredibly busy and exhausted that I haven’t had the time. Rather than try to catch up on stuff since the last post, here are some little things that I am grateful for.

The notes my kids left on the board yesterday. I was out for a training, so my kids wrote me notes, such as this gem: “Dear Ms. EMinNM, We were good for the sub and we did all are work and the sub was nice exept the boys sometimes were notty. Welcome back! We missed you! Love, Arya and Liana and Brittany”
Having had the time to go grocery shopping yesterday, for the first time in two weeks. Seriously, I have been that busy that I just go home at 8 and crash at 9 every night. After two days of almonds, month-old granola bars and Gushers, I bought more food and life is good.
Kiddos who help out all weekend at a tournament that is NOT raising money for them. My basketball players worked so hard and were so great, and were also hilarious. A few boys even came in on Sunday, even though their team was already eliminated, just to help.
Students that are easily manipulated into being excited. We have been working on the distributive property all week and today we were trying to make the connection to the standard algorithm of multiplication and why it works. Yeah, this is about as exciting as it sounds. Not at all. But the fact that it MAKES SENSE and that tons of high schoolers don’t even know why you go down, then across, etc. was enough for kids to be gasping in lightbulbs of enthusiasm. I was impressed.
Holes by Louis Sachar. We are doing it as a shared reading read-aloud, and my kids LOVE it. They beg to read more and ask if they can take it home to read it, and we read for like an hour today because I couldn’t say no.

That’s it. I promise I’ll be more interesting next time. I’m just too tired right now…

Chicken noodle...

eminnm — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:40:42 +0100

I was playing hangman with my kids in afterschool for a few minutes before the bus left. One of my kids chose, as her puzzle, “Ms. EMinNM love’s us!” and I thought it was so cute that I overlooked the improper apostrophe. My favorite was this one though. My puzzle was “Chicken Noodle Soup” and they had guessed Chicken Noodle _o_ _. Me: So what could it be? What do you eat that has chicken and noodles? Chicken noodle… Kid: Pork! Chicken Noodle Pork! I lost it laughing. Now gracing your dinner table…chicken noodle pork!

Books are Exciting!

eminnm — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:23:24 +0100

Today we finished our read-aloud book that we’ve been reading for a few months now. It was fun, because the ending is very dramatic and involves a couple cliffhangers plus some false foreshadowing that our heroes lost the big game. But in the end they win, and it’s very exciting. My kids were too funny, because we kept stopping to make predictions when the narrator made it sound like they lost, and they were all bursting to tell their partner exactly why they thought the team lost. Then they would rise up on their knees to raise their hands, everyone making ooh-ooh noises, wanting to share with the class. After we shared predictions, though, they fell perfectly silent to hear every word of the next section. At the end of the book, when they announce the winning team by reading the names of all the players, my kids actually cheered out loud when they heard our heroes’ names. When we finished the whole book, I told them I wanted to give them a chance to write about their reactions and to talk about them. They actually (gasp!) picked to write their reactions first, so we spent 15 minutes, which was all the time we had left, with them just writing. They wrote paragraphs, long run-on sentences of ideas, even a whole page explaining how they felt at the end, how worried they were that our team would lose, and what they thought the message of the story was. The awesome part about all this was that my kids were very lukewarm about books at the beginning of the year. They were compliant, and they’d read what you gave them as best they could, but they didn’t really get into books or stories. When I asked them to free write, they had no idea what to say, because they didn’t really have any reactions to the book. They were kind of impartial. When I gave them actual questions to write about, they might write a sentence. Maybe two, if it was a red-letter day. Writing was so much harder than talking, and they didn’t really grasp the idea that writing is just another way of saying what you want to say. Seeing them today made my heart happy, because I want my kids to be as excited about books as I am. I want them to love the story, feel connected to the characters, and understand the messages we can learn from books. I want them to be so excited they can’t wait to talk about them, and just as excited to write down what they’re thinking, because they’ve made the connection between saying something in writing and saying it out loud. They have been just that excited about this book. Maybe it’s because they’ve enjoyed the shared experience reading together, or because they can relate to the issues and story line. Whatever the reason, they saw this book the way true readers see books, and I was so happy for them.

Life Lessons from Basketball

eminnm — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:10:15 +0100

Last weekend was our last elementary school basketball tournament. Our boys had some issues, because they are actually way more sensitive than our girls. This happened last year too. When the girls encounter difficulties, they toughen up and prove they aren’t scared by playing harder. It takes a lot more to break our girls. The boys, on the other hand, get down by two points and they fall apart and give up. It’s very frustrating. So they did their fall-apart and ended up in 5^th place. Oh well. But our girls did awesome. They won every game until Saturday night, when we were playing a VERY tough team that has been undefeated all season. We’d lost to them 5 times before, and every game was aggressive and sometimes nasty. In our last game against them, four of their girls ganged up on one of our smallest players and when the dust settled, her thumb was dislocated. She popped it back in, cried for a while, iced it, taped it, and went back in in the fourth quarter. These girls are tough. So we are playing this team, and they get off to an early lead. Their coach puts in the girls who don’t usually get to play as much. But the refs are calling a very loose game, so the girls start playing really aggressively. Unfortunately, when you’re one of those girls who doesn’t play as much, aggressive doesn’t mean good basketball, it means you’re hurting people. One of our girls got punched in the stomach so hard she puked. Another got shoved down right on her head and had to be carried off the court. We’re mad, our girls are reaching their breaking point, and the parents are going nuts, in a bad way. Finally, one of their girls jumps for the ball, right into one of my girls who has it. Her teeth slam into my player’s face, and her braces leave little train tracks across my girl’s eye, which immediately puffs up like a balloon. This is ridiculous. They’re 10 years old, for heaven’s sake. I almost pushed to forfeit rather than be maimed, but that would kill our players, so we toughed it out and lost by 6 points. We were tired, we were pissed, and the girls were more than a little broken, emotionally and physically. On Sunday we had to beat another team just for the chance to play this aggressive team again. Twice. Before our first game of the day, we gathered the girls in a circle in the lobby. It’s just us coaches, the girls, and all the moms and grandmas that come to every game. No boys in sight. And in a totally unplanned, spur-of-the-moment thing, one by one we go around the circle, with every adult telling all the girls how proud they are of them. One mom gives actual basketball advice: watch out for fast breaks, play good defense. Another tells them to be tough, never let anyone see you cry, just do your best every minute. A grandma gives life advice: you girls are playing hard because you love it. Never forget that the point is to be having fun with your friends, doing your best and enjoying it. You work hard for what is important to you. Most moms just say how proud they are of how hard the girls are working, and how they kept trying and kept fighting yesterday even when nothing was going their way. It is such a beautiful circle of three generations of women showing their love, urging their daughters to be strong, to work hard, and to never stop trying. Yes, they’re only 10 years old, but they’re learning lessons in basketball that they can use for their whole lives. Today might be about making that layup, but tomorrow it’s about fighting through poverty, staying in school, and supporting their families. And here are those families today, telling them they love them, showing them they will always be there. We didn’t win the tournament. We beat that aggressive team once (the only game they’ve lost all season, by the way) and then they beat us again for the championship and we took second. But I am so proud of our girls for the way they played. They played with class and they treated their opponents with respect. And they worked their absolute hardest, every minute till the end.

Ughhhhhhhhh

eminnm — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:52:37 +0100

My kids had to take a Nation’s Report Card test today. It was a disaster. First of all, no one met with us or gave us any information about what we should do to prepare things. They said they would take care of everything. But then they got here and it turns out we need to take down all our visuals, change our desk arrangements, put kids in different rooms. All of this could have been done easily, had you just LET US KNOW. Annoying, but not criminal. Then they show us the lists for accommodations groups. This means some kids get math tests read out loud to them, either because they are in Special Ed or because they are designated as English Language Learners. Basically the idea is that if you’re ELL, having someone read the test out loud to you makes it a little fairer because it alleviates some of that language burden. In practice, even though every kid at our school is ELL because none of them speak proficient academic English (because of our area and the history of language deprivation here…see other posts), only some of them “count” as ELL because their parents have said they sometimes speak Navajo at home. Those kids get tested, and by fourth grade most of the ones who haven’t passed out of ELL testing (by being the bare minimum of OK) are the ones who really have issues. For instance, all the kids who can’t read in fourth grade still count as ELL, because you have to be able to read at least some to graduate from ELL-hood. All the kids who don’t understand spoken language well and can’t follow directions still count as ELL. Basically, all your struggling students will be classified as ELL, plus some extras. In my class, this means 60% of kids. Usually we put all the ELL kids in one or two rooms so we can read the test out loud to them for math. NAEP made groups based on a list given to them by our Test Site Coordinator, which is wrong. This was a problem on the last standardized test we took too, but we fixed it then. The problem is that the people administering the NAEP test have no authority to change any groups; they are paper-pushers. We cannot change anything. In my room right now, where we are giving no accommodations at all, one-fourth of the kids have serious reading learning disabilities. One-fourth more have language issues. Go ahead, kids, do your best! Here’s where it gets really bad. The lady giving the test has a really thick accent. I have a hard time understanding her, and the kids are lost. Think about how hard this is: first you have to hear the language, then you have to figure out what it means, then you have to figure out why that matters, then you have to figure out what you’re supposed to do about it. Most of us do this instinctively, but for some of my kids each step is a separate effort. Now we’re adding that the accent is so strong you only understood half the words in the first place? However, I have just signed an agreement stating that I will not be able to talk during the administration of this test. That means I get to sit here and watch while she gives instructions and they don’t understand. Then she walks around, sees they aren’t with her, and chastises them. “Why weren’t you listening? You’re on the wrong page! Come on, you need to follow directions!” They were listening. They can’t understand her. Now they’re getting yelled at. There are so many problems with this. It’s frustrating, annoying, and upsetting. But one of the biggest ones is that it completely disinvests my kids in testing at all. Why would you try if you can’t read the words? Why would you try if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do? Why would you try if, when you ask for help, you get yelled at? I am watching one girl, who has the worst learning disabilities you’ve ever seen, circle bubbles at random, and who can blame her? This is stupid, it’s set up for her to fail, and no one is even giving her a fair shot at it. Fair doesn’t mean you give everyone the same thing. Fair means you give everyone what they need to be successful. Fair means you give everyone a chance. I spend so much time building my kids up and trying to get them to realize how important it is that they do their best. This test means nothing, but it is indistinguishable from the state test, which determines whether they get to be on the honors track in middle school, and have a much better chance of graduating and going to college. When they learn not to try today, they carry it over to the next time, when it really matters. These tests are already going to be hard for my kids. There’s no reason we need to make it belittling and upsetting too.

Rough Day.

eminnm — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 18:09:51 +0100

Here are some stories my kids told me yesterday: From my kid who has been sick for two days and got back yesterday. She kept complaining that her legs really hurt (which, as someone recovering from the same bug, I know is really painful) but stuck it out for a while. Then she started being finicky and difficult with her classmates so I pulled her into the hallway to talk to her about it, and she started sniffling and told me she just really didn’t feel good and they ran out of medicine at her house. It’s the end of the month and they don’t have any money. Then she burst into tears. When I picked my kids up from specials, and walked in to see the specials teacher screaming at my kids. He toned it down because I was there, but it was clear he was yelling two seconds before. I sent my kids back to the room to do their multiplication drills and pulled the main subject of his disapproval aside. She is one of my basketball players, her brother was last year, and she is one of the hardest-working, sweetest kids. But her self-confidence is a little shaky and if she you maker her feel stupid she breaks down (much like her brother, come to think of it, only she’s more resilient than he is). She falls apart crying so hard tears are dripping onto the floor. Apparently she didn’t finish her work in specials because she couldn’t find her pair of scissors, and so she got screamed at for messing around and the teacher told her she was going to be kicked off the basketball team. Which, apart from being wildly inappropriate to yell at a kid who didn’t finish cutting something out, is nowhere near his decision anyway. When we got to the part in our novel where the main character finally reveals in a vivid poem why he doesn’t want to talk about his pet dog, showing that the dog got hit by a car. My kids started sharing a lot of dead pet stories, which was sad because they had so many. Pets out here are not viewed in the same way I’m used to, and there are a lot of strays that are not cared for, so there are a lot of dead animals around. The worst story was from one of my most sensitive kids, who actually got teary while he was telling it. He said last year his grandpa was drinking a lot and then drove him to his mom’s work. When my kiddo was driving back home with his mom later, he saw their dog on the side of the road, dead. His grandpa had run it over on the way out and didn't even notice because he was drunk. It was a rough day.

Let's Jazzercise!

eminnm — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:13:10 +0100

I don’t want to talk about the awful mess of crud that made me sad today. So instead let me tell you about the spectacularly subpar aerobics class I went to Monday. So this was at the gym in Gallup, which is totally decent. There’s some weights and some cardio equipment and way around the back there’s a smallish basketball court, which was the site of the amazingness that was this step aerobics class. Picture, if you will: approximately 15 people. Big contingent of the New Year’s Resolution folks, who came in a big group like the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or something in matching pink and purple sweatshirts. Then there’s the old Navajo man with long, white hair pulled back into a ponytail, bright red sweatbands on his head and wrists, and red shorts pulled way up towards his armpits. Senorita Sensual, who is wearing really stylish workout clothes that fit her 6-months-pregnant body snugly. And let’s not forget Mr. Neck Tattoos. Nuff said. Plus me and my gym buddy, two awkward somewhat uncoordinated blond ladies. Our instructor was this awesome apple-shaped man in a tank top and short shorts, big old beer belly and wiry muscular legs. And we all proceeded to step up and down awkwardly for an hour. Senorita Sensual seems to be doing the Samba the whole time, to a song only she can hear. Mr. Neck Tattoo is SO HYPED UP and he is going to be WORKING OUT and so he will RUN when we march and he will JUMP when we hop. Of course, he will do all this three beats behind, so maybe he’s just trying to catch up. The Ya-Yas are not all using step boards so sometimes it just looks like they’re walking around, and two have brought iPods, which I can’t imagine why because who doesn’t want to listen to the techno remix of “Devil in a Blue Dress”? Old man is just confused, and definitely marching to the beat of his own drummer, who is playing a much slower song than ours. And me and my gym buddy are puffing away, trying to follow the instructor’s directions which sometimes involve such sense-making things as tiptoeing in circles around our step boards. I might have kicked my board off the risers. Twice. After an hour, we all clap and shake our heads and say congratulatory things to each other, like “Good workout!” and “Whew, time just flew!” Like we weren’t all being absurdly uncoordinated for the last 60 minutes. But after all that, it was a lot of fun! I think I’m going to try to go every week. It was just so typical ridiculous Gallup. You can’t help but love it.

Thoughts from suburbia

eminnm — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:40:28 +0100

I just watched a short HBO documentary called, “I Can’t Do This but I Can Do That,” which is about 8 different kids with learning differences, generally ages 9 to 14. They’re talking about what school is like for them, how they’ve been dealing with their academic issues, how it feels to struggle with school, and what they really enjoy doing. Here’s what I found really interesting about this documentary.

All those kids could read. Even the ones with the most severe dyslexia could read better than many of my kids at the same age.
All but one of those kids went to private school. Several of them went to schools specifically for students with learning differences.
All those kids got a lot of extra support. Most of them were shown doing homework with a parent or two parents who were sitting, focusing all their attention on their kid and how to help them. One of them had a scribe in school who wrote for her. Another had a special education teacher who helped them in the regular classroom. Another had (very expensive) Lindamood-Bell tutoring afterschool, which I recognized because my school used to use LMB and I was trained in it (at the end of the year, after “teaching” it all year, and at which point we discontinued the program for the following year, so go figure). But he was getting the program as it’s intended to be, one-on-one for intensive sessions with a specialist, rather than 27 students with an untrained first-year teacher. Even the student in public school got an assistive technology word-predictor computer to use, and he also had speech-to-text software to dictate essays. Plus he had a special ed teacher explaining how to use this software, one-on-one.
All these kids were so incredibly verbal. Most of them were more verbal than I even imagine a typical middle-class kid would be (though admittedly I have little frame of reference for this), much less a kid with reading, writing, and auditory processing issues. They used words like “inconceivable” and “express” and “excruciating.” They are obviously smart kids. Their academic issues were really and truly tied to a learning difference, and not a lack of opportunity, lack of exposure, or lack of resources.
When they described their experiences in typical school, most of them described things that were not evil educational practices. One kid said his fourth grade teacher had them recite times tables to the whole class to measure their progress, and then she listed their progress on the back of the newsletters home to families. I could see this being really motivating and a source of pride for most kids, who can see their work paying off and get to show it to their families. But for this kid it was devastating, because he felt like he would never get to make any progress at all and everybody would see it every single newsletter. It got to the point that he would panic every time he was called on, terrified to be embarrassed in front of everyone. Another kid said during writing time everyone else would start on their organizers and she would write the whole story in her head. She felt like she was making more progress than other kids, but she got yelled at for not working. In the end, she explained, with a lot of perspective for a 9-year-old, that she guessed it was kind of fair because even with all that great thinking, she hadn’t actually done anything that anyone else could see.

This is very interesting for a couple reasons. The first reason is that I want to put out some feelers, especially with my lowest kids, to make sure none of my munchkins are feeling like this. It’s really hard, especially with my space cadet kid who gets very little done because it seems like she just doesn’t care to do so (though she could be in an ADD-type situation where it’s not entirely her fault), not to get frustrated sometimes and point out exactly how far behind her classmates she has fallen because she isn’t working. They’ll be on final drafts, for example, when she is still on her organizer. In an ideal world, a specialist or I would be able to work with her one-on-one, but this is not that world. Which brings me to the second, altogether unsurprising, interesting thing. Having a processing disorder like dyslexia or dysgraphia or dyscalculia or auditory processing disorder or ADHD has made life difficult for these well-off, healthy, mostly white kids. But they are still better off academically than some of my kids who don’t have issues, plus they’re lightyears better off than my kids who do have learning differences. I’m not going to start talking about special education in my district or school, mostly because it makes me so angry it’ll ruin my day, but suffice it to say that my kids don’t get that kind of help. Their parents still help at home, most of them, and I help as their regular classroom teacher, but that’s about it. We get no special software, which I know because one of my kids had it in his IEP and we took it out because we don’t have the software to give him. We have no special education services. We have no trained specialists, no extra programs, no private schools or money for extra tutoring programs. We don’t even have good referral processes or diagnosis of these problems, so lots of kids just think they’re dumb. It’s just us: them, and me, and sometimes their mom. No wonder we don’t measure up.