Teaching journal 3/25 - 3/29

Trying to look for positives

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. UPDATE: on March 12, I got a layoff notice. This journal is a chronicle of my current experience before it ends. Hope you enjoy. 

Monday, March 25, 2024 

I realized over the weekend that I was probably depressed. Slept for a good portion of it. I guess it’d be impossible to not feel the cumulative effect of everything that’s been going on over the past few weeks, but with teaching, it’s hard to know the difference between regular exhaustion and depression. 

So today, I tried to pull myself together. I don’t believe that you can mediate depression with a simple change of attitude, or the toxic positivity of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps,” but for me, simply recognizing the symptoms is a step forward to feeling better.  

Anyway, I jumped out of bed. Did my best Stewart Smalley. I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, gosh darn, it I like myself.

The problem though, is I didn’t really have a lesson plan today. I’ve mentioned before, but if I go into school without knowing how I’m going to fill 90 minutes of class time, it causes anxiety. The only thing I had was a phonics worksheet about stressed and unstressed syllables. 

Personally, I didn’t really see the point of recognizing stressed/unstressed syllables. But I know ELD students are really into identifying patterns. This, I feel, is why all the newcomers seem much more engaged with math than my class. There are right and wrong answers that often rely on logic, whereas the English language is illogical. But when you have students break down multisyllable words and identify stressed syllables, that is something the human brain can do without a robust foundation in English. 

So we did that in both periods, and it went well. It also filled up more time than I imagined it would, so that alleviated some anxiety. 

My first period was unusually quiet, but something was up with third period. I’m gonna blame Dancing Girl, who, ever since the two new Haitian brothers came, has not done anything in my class except try to impress them. It doesn’t help that her two girlfriends also don’t really give a shit about school. So that rubs off on the brothers, who are good students, and want to be good students. But, you know, when you’re social circle is less inclined to learn, so are you. 

Plus, there was a weird incident today with Dancing Girl.

 At the beginning of every class, I give kids six minutes to finish up what they were doing on their phone befores locking them away in the closet. When six minutes is up, yell “time’s up!” and then start calling on students by name who don’t immediately stand up to put the phones away. Then I’ll start taking attendance, and if the kid still has their phone, I mark them tardy. I also display the attendance on the big screen so others can see me putting T’s next to their names. 

When I called Dancing Girl’s name, she still had her phone, so I marked her tardy. She then started whining, like No, teacher, no! Don’t like me tardy! 

I kept on doing attendance and her yelling got louder. She ran to put her phone away and was still freaking out because I kept the T next to her name. It escalated into a full-blown fit, working herself up to a point where she did this, like, pratfall (??) in the middle of the room. 

I couldn’t tell if she actually slipped or if she pretended to, but her tone didn’t change, so I knew she wasn’t hurt. She remained down there until I told her to get up and sit in her seat. But I could tell this outburst upset everyone else in the room. They all stared at her with this mix of horror and pity. 

So yeah, that totally fucked up that period. I asked everyone how they were doing, and a lot of them said, “Bad, Mr. Bradford.”

Mr. P was gone today, and I didn’t really talk to any other adults except for Mrs. E, whose class I assist during second period, but it’s not like we can really have a conversation during a regular class period. For being surrounded by people all day, there are times when teaching can feel like a very lonely profession, especially if you don’t have colleagues you can debrief with during your prep period. I fear that wherever I end up next year, it’s gonna take some time to make some new friends and I’ll probably be spending a lot of my prep time alone.

Wait, wasn’t I trying to improve my attitude? 

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

After coming home yesterday, frazzled and annoyed, it dawned on me that I had perhaps been purposefully putting too much pressure on myself. In teaching—just like any other job—it’s very easy to make your job harder than it needs to be. And I was doing that.

I’m still new enough that it’s not the curriculum that stresses me out (i.e. conscious incompetence), but my own expectations of how I want the class to move—a movement that includes both classroom management and rigor. Ideally, I’m trying to hit four skills every day: speaking, listening, talking, and writing—not to mention facilitating small reading groups at least two days a week. That’s a lot of boxes to hit, and very difficult for me. It requires running on all cylinders, which I can do, but it’s not sustainable.

These past two weeks, I realize I’ve been trying to compartmentalize the layoff and the associate principal predator scandal, and it’s wearing me out. I can’t run on full cylinders now, and it’s wearing me out. I needed to find grace with myself, and grace with the students. Plus, they’re all squirrely for Spring Break. And, you know, same.

So I decided to focus on a single goal this week: prepare these students for a vocabulary quiz. A laser-focused goal, I think, allows for better teaching than whirlwinding through a handful of objectives. I finished a professional development program last month and it taught me that if you focus on one specific goal, a lot of other objectives just seem to follow. 

I wrote the quiz that I’m going to give them on Thursday, and then transferred the questions onto a crossword puzzle, so today, that’s all we worked on. Students love a good worksheet. They worked quietly together and remained focused in both classes. 

I was even able to do some reading assessments with a few of the new kids (we’ve gotten about three new students in the previous month). Sitting by a student and listening to them read is one of the most powerful tools. I get more information on not just their proficiency level, but their demeanor, motivation and academic attitude in a 10-minute one-on-one meeting than I could in three weeks of whole-class instruction. But they are hard to facilitate; other students will always need you.

I had to shame a kid for being gross today. 

It was one of the newer kids, the older of the two Haitian brothers. I’ve noticed how he acts toward the three Haitian girls in my class, and I don’t like it. Like, touching/stroking their faces. It creeps me out. But I get the impression that the girls don’t mind it. They all have crushes on each other.

But then today, he spanked one of their butts right in front of me and Mrs. E and we both shared this look like, “Did he really just do that?” 

I took a few minutes to collect my thoughts and took out my phone to translate. I typed out something along the lines of “This is a learning environment and that’s unacceptable. Plus it  grosses me out. This is a respectable, professional learning environment, and we don’t act like that.”

The student looked down and said softly,  “Yes, teacher. I understand.” 

I then went and told the group of girls what I had just told him, so everyone was on the same page.

It’s hard to bring that kind of stuff up with students, explaining the difference between school and home behavior. It’s especially hard when there’s linguistic and cultural barriers. There’s a good chance that none of the students even suspected they were doing anything wrong. And I wanted them to know their behavior was unacceptable, but also that I cared for them. 

Still, I imagine it was embarrassing for all of them. After that, they all got quiet and somber, and worked hard on the crossword puzzle. 

I don’t feel great about shaming a teenager, but he needed to hear it. 

After school, there was a big union rally after school at the central office in support of the laid-off teachers. It was a pretty big turnout, but not as big as last year when there were teacher raises on the table. I know not everyone cares about lil old laid-off me, but it would have been nicer to see more support. 

Organizers handed out pieces of pink paper with the names of everyone who got laid off for us to wave around. It’s kind of funny, but also just an inflated reminder of my sad fortune. Perhaps I’ll put it in a scrapbook.  

When it was time for the school board to hold their meeting, a group of us went into the auditorium and turned our backs to them while holding up our pink papers. At one point, someone started a chant and then we were immediately told to stop, and we did.

That’ll show them. 

Eye bags on point.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Today I introduced the new karaoke song, which I was very excited about. Last year around this time, I had the students learn Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own,” but I quickly realized that it was just too easy. So this year, I swapped that out for Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”  I wanted something poppy and sung by a woman. And, I’m sorry, 10+ years later, “Call Me Maybe” is still a total banger. 

Very glad I picked this song. Most of the students loved it. In fact, some even knew it already. Maybe that’s not so surprising given how popular it is/was, but it came out when most of them weren’t old enough to appreciate music.  

I gave the students a fill-in-the-blank sheet with the lyrics typed out, and had them use the karaoke video to fill in the missing spaces. For the majority of class, there was this cacophony of multiple computers playing Carly Rae Jespsen, and I still didn’t stop liking the song. It’s by far the most difficult song I’ve given out for karaoke (lots of lyrics in those choruses) but I think the students’ enthusiasm for it will be a motivator. 

After school, there was a voluntary all-staff meeting to talk about Charles De Freitas, the former associate principal who was arrested for allegedly sending lewd material to a minor. After a few words from the principal, we broke into smaller groups. There was a woman from the district who was moderating our group, and it felt a little more like damage control than anything actually therapeutic, like if Jeff Bezos came down and asked Amazon warehouse workers how they feel. Hence, people were still guarded.

One of the problems is that most teachers have issues with the current administration, and this Charles De Freitas mess is only compounded by—and in a way, related to—the ill will. There’s a lot of mistrust.

I didn’t have anything to add to the discussion. Because of my position as a central office employee, I don’t feel at all connected to the school’s administration. I also don’t know yet how schools work, the politics and inner workings. When teachers talk about the admin’s failure to build trust among teachers, I don’t have a point of reference of what that kind of trust feels like. I’ve just kind of felt ignorant and green throughout this whole ordeal. 

One woman in the meeting said that in the decade-plus of working at the school, she’s never seen morale this low. 

Given the layoffs—which, we found out last week, included Hoover’s entire front office staff—and the district’s poor job of handling this scandal, it feels a little like a deliberate effort to fuck over Hoover High School. A lot of people have put in a lot of hard work to build up its reputation over the last few decades, and it seems to be quickly unraveling. 

Whoops, I thought I was supposed to change my outlook this week. 

On the bright side, there was a mental health fair for students today. I went to check it out at the very end, but they had already started to tear it down. However, I did see two women walking therapy dogs back to the parking lot, and I got to pet them. So that was dope. 

Thursday, March 28, 2024

I was experiencing low-level anxiety all day today. It’s just what happens during times of prolonged stress. The constant feeling of fight or flight. Sweaty and nervous. It definitely made me a little less patient, a little more irritable.

But it was a pretty fun day. In both classes I busted out the cloth dartboard and the Velcro balls, and we played Jeopardy for the first hour of both classes to prepare for the quiz, which the students would take during the last half-hour. 

We’ve been doing a lot of work with these words, and I thought maybe I was giving them too much practice, but a lot of kids struggled with the quiz. It bummed me out. That was my only goal this week was to get students to do well, and a lot of them barely passed.

We’re far enough in the year that I want students to recognize the steps we take to prepare them for a test. A handful of these students have had interrupted schooling in their lives, so they don’t really know how to be students. Some of them just see practice worksheets as things to turn in, and practice games as voluntary. They have yet to make the connection that this is preparing them for something down the line. I literally copied the test onto the Jeopardy board, and even told them that these would be on the test, and still some kids got the questions wrong.

But it’s totally teacher-like to focus on the students who aren’t getting it. I did have some students who’ve never passed do very well. I saw some fantastic original sentences. I even offered an extension question that asked students to use the word “become” in an original sentence, which was the hardest word we studied, and a few students absolutely nailed it. Going to focus on that. 

I know I talk about my grief with Dancing Girl a lot, but dear lord, it took her like 15 minutes to settle down today. It’s like every day I need to tell her not to leave the class, then wait for her to pop her popcorn, and then put her phone away (I teach 3rd period in Mr. P’s room because we have a student who can’t access my regular classroom since there’s no elevator in that building, and Mr. P has a microwave, and it’s absolutely convinced me never to get a microwave in my classroom). All the while, the other kids are waiting for Dancing Girl to settle down, so they see it as an opportunity to get out of their seats, commiserate, socialize, kick a fucking soccer ball around. And I’m just going from student to student, saying “sit down, sit down, sit down” with the dead eyes of a sea-addled sailor. 

I had to sit next to Dancing Girl during the test because she couldn’t stop talking. Another girl sitting near her was fed up and the two started throwing insults at each other. I heard a lot of callate and a few “tú mama”s thrown around. Sometimes you have to insert yourself before that kind of behavior escalates.

But when I sat next to Dancing Girl, she focused. It turned out to be one of the quietest quizzes I’ve ever held in that class, and for that, I was thankful. Still, there were times when Dancing Girl would burst out laughing for no reason, and that is never not alarming. 

But because I’m looking for positives, I just want to say I’ve never experienced anything that felt like disrespect from Dancing Girl. 

Her behavior is a challenge, but it’s not malicious. I had a few students last year that felt like they actively disrespected me, but that’s not the case this year. In fact, the only kid who comes close to that is The Cheater. I also feel support from the rest of class when Dancing Girl is being difficult. It’s like we all know how she is, and that there’s something going on with her. Last year, I knew a lot of kids couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to control the classroom (they mentioned it on their end-of-the-year surveys), but there’s more understanding this year. 

As Mr. P says, you can’t really control a student’s behavior, and it does no one any favors to throw them out of class unless they’re being violent or threatening. Throwing a kid out for simply talking is a waste of time for everybody—especially admin, who are often dealing with bigger fish. 

Friday, March 29, 2024

Last day before Spring Break. 

Spring Breeeeeeak. 

I gave the students a free day. They could use their phones, or play some of the games I have (multiple variations of Uno, chess, or regular playing cards). I put on Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio during first period, which is a great film because it’s weird and grotesque enough for high schoolers without feeling babyish. But I think only three or four kids actually watched it. Kids just don’t care about movie days anymore. 

At the end of the period, The Cheater nearly got into a fight with one of the new kids. I was like, for fuck’s sake, you can’t even mind your own business for 90 minutes without being asshole.

I asked the other kid what their argument was about, and he said The Cheater had “been touching his Buddha”. I don’t know what that means, but I told him that The Cheater doesn’t care about school, and it’s not worth the trouble the new kid would get if they actually fought. 

But that’s totally like The Cheater, who, I believe, is a bully at heart. This new kid is very nice, but he’s also a little small and young-looking. The Cheater seeks out the most vulnerable and likes to press their buttons. 

We did the same thing in third period, but I didn’t put on a movie. That group of kids—including Dancing Girl and her friends—just feels more like a community, so while I have to put rules up like “no chasing each other in the classroom,” I don’t have to worry about fights. They also like to play games. Spanish speakers were playing chess with Vietnamese speakers, and I even had a really fun few rounds of Uno with the most disengaged girl in my class. She sleeps all the time and will not do any work, but you should’ve seen how competitive she got during the game. 

Also, a group of three posted up on a beanbag and watched The Passion of the Christ on one of their phones. Pretty sure they were all teary-eyed by the end of it. 

Wild times on free day. 

Thanks for reading! See you in two weeks, No journal next week because Spring Breaaaaaak.