A New Ecology

This is a great and important question. One I ask myself all the time : )

I started the year with a lot of short, structured writing assignments. We wrote almost every day for the first four weeks of class. We wrote literary letters, quotation responses, college application essays and Anglo-Saxon boasts.

Some of my goals:

• to learn about the students and their writing
• to establish a writing environment in and for the class
• to suggest that the integration of personal anecotes is a form of intelligence
• to establish expectations for formal and informal writing
• to get some brainstorming done before we start writers’ workshop

The writing had to be short, for general sanity.

The writing also had to be structured. The students like structure (format, number of words, pen color, deadlines) in English class. The fear of failure is rampent. No matter how many times I tell the students that there is not always a wrong answer, they have anxiety about their work being “good enough.” Is it mean to tell them that ”good enough never is”? Maybe I am missing something.

I don’t always like structure, but I’m working on that. Giving clear expectations, albeit superficial ones, makes it easier for me to give students positive credit. And they are very concerned with credit. It also protects me. As a writing teacher, I was/am worried that my first marginal impressions will expose cultural assumptions  and implications that I am not aware of yet. It is difficult to nurture thinkers and writers that I know little about.

I think the best way to discover and work out cultural differences is to write along with the student. So, I do. We share stories and thoughts. We laugh a lot.

Here is part of my boast: Hail to the Senior Class!!!

Kimber walks,      wit-wrangling and weary,
from a milky      limestone lair
to a scholar’s home     sur, in Sula.
I bring brain-broadners       to board minds abroad.
I face this fuerza-inter   with academic armor aimed
to nurture empathy    in English and Earthsense!

PS. As far as reading goes…English 12 started with Beowulf. I won’t start with this text again, at least not the text book version. I thought a chronological approach was a good plan. I’m rethinking that, not boasting about it. AP Literature started with “What is the Use of Art, Anyway?” by Coomaraswamy. I’ll stick with this one and recommend it.

Hondurans celebrate their independence for almost two months. On September 1st, we had an assembly for the official flag-raising at EIS. The students shared their presentations from their Estadios Sociales classes. It was all in Spanish.

Even though I didn’t understand the presentations or the etiquette for Flag Day, it reminded me of raising the flag at Camp Anokijig. It was always a meditation on unity and responsibility. The flag ceremony at Anokijig made me feel like part of camp and this assembly made me feel like part of Honduras. It was also nice to see my students in a different way.

The international flags outside of the administration building:

Yes, it’s upside down!

Well, there is at least one student who likes my class. I am partially flattered, because it is nice to hear “Miss” followed by my name.  I am also seriously reconsidering my course objectives. Why is a student telling me, in Spanish, that he likes my English class?

There are a lot of reasons, cultural and institutional, that students are still speaking Spanish to their AP English teacher.

Culturally, it is just easier to speak a first language. I can identify with that. It is stressful for me to call a cab, negotiate a price and give directions to the gym, a place where I hope to release stress. Institutionally, the ease of Spanish has evolved as a bad habit here. The students feel they are entitled to a lot of things. And Speaking Spanish is one of them.

It takes me 5 hours to plan a 60 minute lesson, so I am not in a position to change the culture of language or get the school to kick this bad habit (these are seniors…as they so often remind me). That’s not to say that it is impossible to motivate students to speak English in a bilingual school. There are schools that do this successfully and without the classic ‘prizes or punishment’ routine. What I need to do is figure out how I am going to manage this in the classroom every day.

The students are very apologetic when I remind them that they are in English class, “Yes, Miss,” “I know, Miss” and ”I’m Sorry, Miss.” They understand the importance of fluency in English and the burden of an accent. (I let them laugh at my Spanish accent.) Now that I have had them in class for two weeks, I know they are proficient in English. Now I wonder if speaking Spanish is really a habit, or is it a choice?

To some extent, I identify with teachers in other departments. They still learn. They have meaningful discussions. They comprehend the material that is presented to them in English.

At the same time, it is very clear to me that my students are not getting the most out of their time in my classroom. They are not getting the best of me. Let’s face it, I have not mastered the crafts of lesson planning, giving directions or providing timely anecdotes. What I have mastered is conversation. And some of the best moments of teaching and learning are when students accidentally say things. Brilliant or offensive, accidents are invaluable when you recognize them and ask them to linger.   

This is one of the high school courtyards.

Soon it will be filled with 400 students in blue uniforms.

Today there were no meetings or trainings. The staffs, “new foreign hires,” the “returning hires” and the “local hires,” were given the day to prepare our classrooms and materials for the first day of school.

Preparing the classroom was easy…wait, what? This sort of ambiguous task is not supposed to be easy for new teachers. After I rearranged the desks (out of standard rows and into the somewhat standard U shape), I looked around for other things to do. It didn’t take me long to remember that I had never had a classroom before and realize that I didn’t travel with any inspirational posters or colorful books.  Some of my colleagues had a similar experience, and they stopped in to ask “now what?”

Rob, a colleague from Wisconsin, would remind us to ask more than “now what?” He would encourage us to ask “what do we need to know in order to do what needs to be done?” We didn’t get that far. The air conditioning started to drip, pour. So I took some time to practice Spanish with the maintenance crew.  And we know that the students and teachers constitute a classroom, not posters and books.

The process of preparing materials has/had a familiar kind of ease. The first day of school should be very interesting without a handbook of school policies or class lists.

The only information I have about the student body has come from teachers returning to the chaos of school after their relaxing summers on the beach. Even though I don’t believe that all students will “be spoiled rotten,” will “steal tests,” will “hack my computer to change their grades,” will “refuse to speak English in English class”…this is all I have. I also have some advice on how to be “more credible” : dye my hair black. I’m not sure what to do with that.

Please Note: Sharing minor annoyances in the form of generalizations that begin with “All of our students (insert negative character trait or extreme one-time occurrence here)…” and end with “…and there is nothing we can to do change it. That’s how it has always been.” is distracting and scary for this new teacher. I think you are trying to be helpful. I appreciate that. I just wish you would also tell me why you are sharing these fascinating tips. Now that I know some things that might be true for some students, what should I do?

…yes, fishgarbage.

• We watched “Shift Happens” in an assembly.
• We use three-ply carbon paper forms to check out books and requisition pens.
• The science department is going paperless this year.
• The English department is buying classroom dictionaries.
• A scanner has to recognize my fingerprint to get into school every morning.
• Our guards play cards in the shade and lean their homemade armory against the gate.