Teaching journal 1/22-1/26

Downpours, narcs, and a demand for corporal punishment (plus new AWKSD shirts!)

Recap: I’m a teacher in San Diego. I teach English Language Development (ELD, the new term for ESL) to 9-12 grade newcomers to the country. On January 3, I was informed that my position would be eliminated next year. This journal is a chronicle of my current experience before it ends. Hope you enjoy. 

Monday, January 22, 2024

First day of the new semester. San Diego is hit with a torrential downpour. Whenever it rains in San Diego, kids stay home. 

Today, there were seven kids in my first period.

The rain accounted for a majority of the empty seats, but we also moved a handful of kids who scored well on last semester’s final diagnostic to the next level of ELD. They had worked hard and made a lot of progress. So, at the beginning of class, I told them that they were moving up. They were very excited, jumping up and down. 

But the kids who remained were bummed. I’m sure some of them felt depleted, left behind. 

It was so quiet with the remaining kids. I had planned a presentation on new expectations for semester two, but decided to scrap it because with so many kids absent, what was the point? 

I told them to do IXL for 30 minutes, and after that we’d just hang out and try to figure out how we’d be together moving forward. Try to restore the classroom community atmosphere.

On a whim, I asked if anyone was interested in doing a small reading group? To my surprise all but two kids wanted to. We huddled around the back table and read little portions of a book. I tried to be as encouraging and optimistic as I could to lighten up the mournful tone that had settled over the room. We also played with whiteboards. I would say a word from a list, and kids would try to spell it. Students very much like the whiteboards.  

Before class ended, I put on the karaoke video of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” Our karaoke quiz is set for Wednesday, so I wanted to give an opportunity to practice as a whole class. Usually it’s fun leading a group of students in a choral singalong, but the kids weren’t having it today, so it was just Mr. Bradford in front of the class, singing to himself. 

It’s been a long time since I felt like I was dying on stage. Just imagine me, my forced enthusiasm waning, singing dead-eyed, monotone: “Sometimes I feel I’ve got to... uh uh... run away...” 

The building across campus—which is where I go to help out in a math class during period two—was completely flooded. The custodial team was squeegeeing the floors, and I saw more than a few kids slip. A shit show all around.

Overall, I feel like I didn’t teach anything today and just ended up bumming out a lot of kids. Yay me.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Have you ever had a boring nightmare? Like, one where you need to complete a task, but there are 100 smaller tasks to do before you can even get to it? And everything is so elusive and cumbersome that even the smallest task seems insurmountable? 

Today was that boring nightmare. 

All the kids who were absent yesterday came back to realize a handful of kids were no longer in the class. This caused utter confusion. The remaining students were all trying to get on PowerSchool to check their own schedules to see if they too had moved up a level. They didn’t understand why they were still in my class. 

I tried to explain that all the kids who moved up had tested well—that’s why Mr. P and I had decided to move them up. 

This lit a fire under their asses and they all wanted to retake the diagnostic right now. Most of these students spend a lot of time fucking around, and I wanted to say, “Fellas, you can’t just sit in the back and goof around and then expect to be able to pass this diagnostic that you haven’t studied for.”

Explaining this and then getting everybody settled down took about 30 minutes.

With so many changes, the dynamic in the classroom had definitely changed, which I know will make it hard for me to teach for a few days until an equilibrium settles in.

In an effort to start my lesson, I told them to open their computers and go to our digital textbook, but the section that I had assigned to them was not showing up. 

I guess when the semester changes, the book also changes somehow? I don’t even fucking know. Long story short, I had to go around the room and manually get everybody to the correct section.

While I was doing that, a new student suddenly showed up. There is never a convenient time for a new student to show up, but I was especially sweaty, frustrated and harried this time. 

The unit in the book is about a theoretical Global Village, and my plan was to relate it to the global village of our class. I made a questionnaire that asked students to list their languages, interests, and miles it took for them to get from their home to San Diego. Once the students had written that information down, I had planned for them to go around and record this information from the other students. 

But nobody was paying attention when I showed them how to use Google Maps. There had been so many distractions throughout the period that there was no way of saving it. 

Occasionally, I would look at the new student, and try to convey with my eyes: I’m sorry.

But I did the exact same lesson in my third period and it went really well. They say insanity is trying the same thing twice and expecting different results, but it can happen in education. Teaching is the epitome of insanity? 

I also gave back a vocabulary quiz to the kid who cheated. The Cheater, we’ll call him.

I said this, “This is not your handwriting, it’s your classmate’s.” 

The Cheater raised his hands, defensively. “No, no, no, that’s not her handwriting. I copied her, but it’s not her handwriting!”

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Karaoke quiz day! 

I fucking love karaoke days. They don’t require a lot of prep and it’s great to just sit next to a kid and have them read song lyrics to you. It’s also really fun to see how nervous they get, and there’s nothing better than when one student has practiced enough that they know the song well enough to actually sing along. 

But I made the mistake of creating another assignment for the other kids to do while waiting for their turn at karaoke. The project was to design a poster for our ELD Global Village using the information we gathered yesterday. 

We were using a program called Canva, which is kind of like an elementary version of Photoshop. I knew the students had used it once in Mr. P’s class, but many didn’t remember, so I spent the entirety of the period showing kids how to find images, change fonts, copy/paste, etc. 

Suffice it to say, we didn’t get to any karaoke.

I wasn’t upset, though. It was fun to see kids stretch their creative muscles. And as Mr. P said, there’s gonna be a time in their high school careers when they’re asked to make a presentation, so this type of practice is good.

In my third period, after I made everyone put their phones away in the closet, one kid got very adamant about telling me who still had their phones.

Although deep down I appreciated his diligence, I took the opportunity to teach them the word “narc.”

“Quit narcing on your friends,” I said, and they all laughed. I also taught them the phrase, “snitches get stitches” and displayed the translations on the screen. This might have been a mistake. I don’t know how the idiom translates, because some of the kids looked horrified. 

Thursday, January 25, 2024

How is it only Thursday? I feel like I’ve lived through three weeks since Monday. Yesterday, I had major dental work, a filling and a crown. I haven’t been sleeping well. Mr. Bradford needed an easy day. 

All I wanted was to get through karaoke. Remember how I said that you need something for the other kids to do while you’re conferencing one-on-one with a student?  Today, I was like, “Just finish your posters from yesterday, work on IXL for 30 minutes. Talk quietly. Just please don’t bother me.” 

And it worked. Maybe the students were watching YouTube or playing video games, but they were quiet. I got through every karaoke quiz. It felt great. I needed this kind of a quiet day . No chaos, no tech issues, just vibing. 

I also told both my classes about my dental work. I like to pretend kids care about that stuff. I was doing drilling impressions and they just stared like I was crazy.

If you wonder why I only write about periods one and three (I know you’ve been wondering, admit it!!), it’s because I help out in a math class during period two, providing language support and math assistance to the newcomers. 

But today during second period, I sat in on Mr. M‘s class because he was doing something cool with test preparation, and I wanted to observe him. 

It’s always humbling to watch other teachers work, especially teachers with much more experience. I think I’ve just normalized having this, like, sense of chaos in my classroom, but to watch a teacher in total control and organized is inspiring.

It’s also sort of depressing to consider that I still have so much more work to do to get to that level.  

I went back to Mrs. E, the math teacher—who has also been an incredible inspiration—and told her about feeling inadequate, and she was quick to set me straight. Becoming a good teacher takes time. It’ll come to me. 

Oh, but during Mr. M’s lesson, I got to sit next to a student who was just an absolute shithead last year. He didn’t do a single assignment and actively worked to disrupt the class. But now, he was engaging, on task, and asking me to check his answers. It was another reminder why working with kids is better than working with adults. Kids can grow out of their shittiness; shitty adults will remain shitty.  

During our prep, me and Mr. P discussed which students deserve awards. The Social Justice Academy—the academy of which I’m part—is doing this new thing where we award kids based on their ability to collaborate, empower, educate and other social justice virtues. 

The decision was hard because we have so many great students this year. Except for one, a shady kid with bully tendencies. The Cheater, in fact.

And almost on cue, Mr. P and I both suggested The Cheater for an award. 

Ha ha. 

Sometimes it just feels good to laugh. 

I also suggested a kid that we refer to as The Tiger who only shows up about once every two weeks. We call him The Tiger because last year he drew a picture of a tiger, and he said, “That’s me.”

But we didn’t nominate The Tiger. That nickname is a good enough award.

Friday, January 26, 2024

When I was in my student credential program, when I asked my guide teacher about classroom management, she said something along the lines of it’s all about “the force of personality.” 

At the time, I didn’t really know what that meant. However, days like today, I kind of get it.

I started preparing the kids for the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC), which is a mandated state test that measures kids’ English proficiency. If a kid passes the ELPAC, it means they get reclassified, and they’re no longer a designated English Learner. It’s a big deal, something that kids could put on their job resumes. It is almost like a degree.

However, the test is fucking hard. Some of the questions on it seem almost cruel, and when you have a kid who is six months in the United States, who barely knows how to write a sentence, it’s damn near impossible. Last year, when I was administering it, I had a few kids who were close to tears.

Really, the goal for doing ELPAC test prep for my level of students is not really getting them to pass, but to set expectations and try to alleviate the feelings of despair, frustration, and fear when they eventually face the test. Mr. P and I say straight to our kids: “We don’t expect you to pass.”  

The district provided a bunch of lesson plans to prepare the students, which are actually really good, but they’re also advanced for my students. I knew it was going to be a challenge to teach this because when encountered with difficult material, the teenagers’ natural instinct just to give up.

And this is where the force of personality comes in. If you are loud enough, and confident enough, kids will focus on whatever you put in front of them. It’s a little like smashing a square peg into a round hole, but if you hit it hard enough, it’ll happen. 

So that’s what I did with the difficult ELPAC materials, and what I imagined to be a total disaster actually went all right. I know a lot of the materials were going over their heads, but they were focused and they were giving it a shot.

During period one, I had three kids fucking around (including The Cheater). I moved one of them across the classroom, and this was after I watched the kid eat an entire Cup of Noodles, raw, with no water. I just stood and stared while he broke up the noodles on his desk with a black Crayola marker. 

At the end of class, a girl started talking to me and I eventually deciphered that she wanted me to whip those three boys who were not paying attention. 

With leather, she kept repeating in Spanish.

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NEW SHIRTS! 

I designed some new shirts because why the hell not? “Enjoy Your Delicious Moments” has been my favorite pizza box art for years, and it’s sort of been my white whale to find out the story behind it. Where did it come from? Who designed it? Why are the two pizza chefs stylized so differently? Who came up with “Enjoy Your Delicious Moments”? As far as modern art, it’s unsurpassed. 

I printed a limited quantity—about 30—and have sizes XS to XXL. The shirts are 50-50 cotton/poly, brand Bella-Canvas (heavy judgement to people who prints shirts on Gildan). Lovingly printed by San Diego’s best print shop, AKA. If you want one, Venmo $25 to Ryan-Bradford-2 and don’t forget to include your size and address. 

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Got a tip or wanna say hi? Email me at ryancraigbradford@gmail.com, or follow me on Twitter @theryanbradford. And if you like what you’ve just read, please hit that little heart icon at the end of the post.