Teaching journal 5/20 - 5/24

Keep it together. Keep it together. Keep it together.

As most of you know, my layoff was rescinded last week, and the outpouring of love and support has been staggering. Thank you all who continue to read and reach out. 

Monday, May 20, 2024 

Final three weeks of school. Welcome to the gauntlet. 

So begins the last few weeks of school where it would just be easy to give up (and I think many teachers do). The emotions alternate between wanting to submit to the chaos and let students run wild, or unleashing a rage so targeted that the idea of it existing within you is frightening. Not gonna lie: the physiological effect of these two wolves is thrilling, and I’m sure people pay good money for designer drugs that create it. 

Today, I started each class with some phonics—breaking down multisyllable words into base words, prefixes, and suffixes. I’ve said it before, but beginning English learners are really into that mathy language stuff—i.e. looking for patterns, etc—because you don’t really need to know what a word means to do it. 

With only three weeks left (I mean, really only two weeks depending on how adherent you are to those last four instructional days [not me!]), I decided to start unit five in the text book, which has the theme “Fitting In.”

We read a fable about the jay bird and the peacock, which is about the jay being envious of the peacocks’ lives. The jay then finds some peacock feathers and disguises itself like a peacock. Got to say”peacock” a lot in front of the class. A fun word to say, imo. Also a fun word to make students say.

But man, kids are so done with school. In my first period class there was a point when we were doing the worksheet and I think everybody was talking. Like, 20 side conversations going on at once. It was a stereotypical rowdy-class-scene in a movie with the teacher/me sadly mumbling “suffix or prefix?” while paper planes fly around the room and kids are doing handstands on the desk or whatever. 

Also in my first period, I have this group of five or so boys who think it’s very funny to do this elongated, boisterous, “yyyEEssss!” They picked it up the previous Friday when we were learning new vocabulary and the workshop was asking yes or no questions to monitor comprehension. As we were going through it as a class, I’d read the question and would then say “NoooOO? Or yyEEsss?”  The kids started mimicking me, and kept doing it. They sound like a mixture of the Swedish Chef muppet and the yes guy from The Simpsons who had a stroke. 

I didn’t say anything because the worst thing you can do is let students know something bothers you. 

Then it was the weekend and I had forgotten about all about it, but right away today, they started up again, but worse. There was a “yyyEEssss” every five seconds.

But this morning, I was not in the mood.  So after the nth “yes”  I stopped the lesson and was like, “Nobody thinks you’re funny. Look at everybody else. Do you see everybody laughing?” 

The boys were quiet.

“Do you understand?” I asked.

“Yyyyeeeesss,” said one boy in a very quiet voice.

I almost lost it. I had to turn around, it was so funny. I would forever lose them if they saw me laugh. Never let students see you laughing at their annoying jokes.

Third period, I just powered through. It was one of those class periods where I just kept talking, not letting the kids get a word in edgewise. You should’ve seen me, like, screaming Aesop’s fables at the kids. 

Please note, this is not a good way to teach an ELD class, where the students should be talking, but end of the year and all. 

We’re also at a point when the respectful students are so frustrated with the disruptive students. I’ll be at the front of the room, patiently waiting for everybody to stop talking and sit in their seats, and these students will take it upon themselves to yell at kids still making noise. “Callate!” they’ll say then the others will shout back, and it’s just this cacophony of kids shouting at the others to be quiet.

Then one of the Haitian boys came to me with a translator and said that one of the Spanish speaking kids said to shut up insulted the Haitian boy’s mother. Jesus Christ, I thought. I put Google translate up on the screen for all the students to see, and typed out: We have three weeks to keep it together. We need to be respectful. I am the teacher and I will tell students to shut up. That is not your job. Just keep it together. Just keep it together for three more weeks. Just keep it together.

We had a little discussion on what “keeping it together” means. This will be my mantra until the end of school. 

During fourth period, had a zoom meeting with the other ELD coaches that do my job at other schools. This will be our last meeting as a team, and you could feel the heaviness of that. For the past two years, I’ve worked closely with four super bright women who have been so supportive and excellent mentors, and I’m bummed that we won’t be colleagues anymore. But I’m hopeful that our paths will cross again. Working for the school district is sort of like being in The Wire, how each new season has the same characters, but they’re moved around to different roles.

And at the end of the day, I was making copies on bright, bright orange paper because, you know, sometimes different color paper is fun. But you don’t wanna leave paper in the printer because that’ll definitely ruin somebody else’s day. I needed 25 copies, so I pinched a stack of bright orange paper, weighed it in my hand, and thought maybe I’ll just grab a few more. I put the sheets in, hit copy. When it was finished, I opened the paper tray to remove whatever was left over, but there was none! Zero sheets left. I had successfully eyeballed the perfect amount of paper. Sometimes, it feels good to be a gangster.

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

One of those days where I thought I had a lot of work for the students, but it ended up not being very much. Regardless, it was a surprisingly chill day. Dancing Girl was absent, which was undoubtedly the reason for such chillness. 

We began class with IXL. I’ve said this 100 times, but it’s so nice beginning class with 15 minutes of quiet computer time—for period one, it allows all the stragglers to arrive without missing anything very important (if I took roll right after the bell rang, I’d have to mark 5-10 kids every day as tardy). For third period, the computer program settles everyone down. Plus, both periods are still very into IXL. I don’t have to circulate around the room, hounding kids get off Youtube or videogames. 

Last year, the students were working on a computer program called System 44 and it was like pulling teeth to get them to do that program. By the end of the year, I knew nobody was really doing System 44, but was so tired of trying to enforce it that I just stopped caring if they were on Youtube.

We did a small quiz on the fable about the jay and peacocks. Again, I let kids work together on the quiz in hopes that would encourage discussion. I’ve allowed group work on the last three quizzes and I think this time was the first time it sort of clicked for the kids that they should be discussing the story. Before, they seemed hesitant or untrusting of my methods. Or maybe by allowing them to collaborate, I had taken the fun out of cheating?

After the quiz, we did the final writing portion of the zine project, which asked kids to fill in some sentence frames for their About the Author page. It was basically a Mad Libs for information: my name is so-and-so, I’m from this country, I’ve been in the United States for so and so months/years, this is my favorite food, TV show, etc. 

At the bottom, I made the students list three goals that they want to accomplish in the next four years. You wouldn’t believe how many freshman want to become a doctor in four years. But one girl listed “have many dogs” as one of her goals, and I had tell her it was the most fantastic goal I’ve ever heard.

I’m happy with how his project is going this year. I have a few students who are just buzzkills who either don’t do any work or just speed through everything in order to use their phones. But I would say at least 90% of the students are into the project. I can just be like, “All right, we’re gonna work on our zines for the next 40 minutes.” And then I’ll look around and everyone will actually be working on them.

During fourth period, I was looking over the worksheets I had students fill out while I was gone on Friday. This was was the rough draft for their zine page that explained why they picked their topic. One of the Vietnamese girls is doing her zine on “Ghosts” ( in fact a few students are doing theirs on ghosts, which is great, just great). 

For the past two weeks, I’ve been talking with the Vietnamese girls about ghosts from their culture, and they told me there’s a ghost in their folklore called something “Long Breast Ghost” which, true to its name, has very long breasts that hang down and entice children. Really puts American ghosts to shame. 

On this girl’s sheet, she talks about memories of watching a movie called “Ghost Breast,” which is supposedly very violent. 

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Yesterday, me and Mr. P were discussing which students to move up to ELD 3/4 next year. I probably won’t be at the school, but I still like to provide input. 

And we decided that Mr. P is going to hold back The Cheater’s little friend. 

This isn’t merely punishment. The kid showed up in November, which, in the grand scheme of things, is not that late into the school year. In fact, we’ve had kids show up later than him who are moving up a level next year. 

But almost immediately after The Cheater’s little friend showed up, he quickly fell into bad habits: skipping school, talking throughout class, constantly lying about having his phone. We have contacted his parents so many times. I’m sure they are tired of getting phone calls from the school.

And the shitty part is I truly believe there was potential. One-on-one, he’ll often acknowledge that he’s fucked up. He fundamentally seems like a smart kid, and would probably excel if he applied himself, but he’s so enamored with The Cheater and the lifestyle that he’s just kind of become corrupted. Maybe irreversibly so. 

It’s gonna be a big surprise for him when he shows up next year and has to repeat ELD 1/2 while all his peers—including The Cheater—have moved up. I hope he makes better decisions next year.

So, yeah, when The Cheater and his little buddy strolled into my class 45 minutes late today, each holding a matching smoothie or whatever, I didn’t really say anything. Just said good morning. I wasn’t even really a hardass about their phones. I just saw them squandering away, not participating, not doing any work, and basked in that sweet, sweet schadenfreude.

Enjoy your little smoothie, I thought. Probably won’t taste so good next year when you’re relearning the ABCs.

This is what some people in the biz referred to as fucking around and finding out.

Just want to reiterate that May is “Don’t Fuck With Teachers” month. 

But I guess the joke’s on me because The Cheater’s little friend left his smoothie on one of the desks, nearly full. After class, I picked it up to throw it away, but when I threw it in the trashcan, it landed vertically and caused a huge explosion of smoothie from the trashcan. That shit got all over me. 

I had a panicked moment today when one of the girls from Vietnam asked “Is this you?” and turned her computer around, revealing this very Substack that you’re reading, translated into her language. 

“Yes,” I said tentatively. And for a good five minutes, I thought maybe I should delete this entire newsletter.

But I shook the thought away. The whole point of these posts is to hopefully give people a true and realistic point of view of what it is to be an ELD teacher. At times, it’s very frustrating, but for the most part, it’s a dream job. I approach each entry as if parents of my students would be reading it, so why not be comfortable with students reading it? I feel like I only vent my frustration with a few specific students, and those are the ones that don’t care enough about me to go searching for this newsletter. 

However, if you are one of my students and you end up finding these entries, just know that the majority of you are all lovely human beings, and I love spending each and every day with you.

Thursday, May 23, 2024

Starting to get a little nervous about the zine project. I have a handful of kids who just do not seem to know what we’re working toward, despite having worked on it for three weeks. I set the date for our Zinefest, which is a week from today. I am going to be gone tomorrow, and there’s no school on Monday, so that gives the students really only three more days to work. For some that might be a lot of time—a few students are pretty much finished already. But a lot of them need to hustle.

I guess I can rest easy because most everybody has all the writing parts complete, at least in rough draft form. But helping kids find art is one of the most cumbersome and time-consuming parts of this project. This far into it, if a student doesn’t have any art, I pull them aside and make them look for images. A lot of the less artistically-inclined students won’t advocate for themselves, or just don’t care. They’re not gonna ask me to print something out for them. So I have to be proactive and be like, “Hey you come over here let’s look for images for your zine.” And I do that one by one.

So today was pretty much just one of those technical days of gathering materials for individual students. I remember when I had to do this last year—it was the thing that made me wish I hadn’t begun the project. These are the days when it feels like you’re just doing too much, but also doing nothing at all. Nobody’s learning anything, but you’re still frazzled from trying to meet all the needs of the students.

The students have also determined when is time for class to be finished. After we were finished with IXL and the Jamboard today, students started packing up, even though I had planned half the class for them to work on zines. 

“Dudes, we still have 40 minutes left of class,” I said to the kids hovering by the door. “You have not done anything. Get working.” 

And they’ll say, “No. Tomorrow, tomorrow.”

I’m like, ”Bro.” 

Just keep it together, I have to tell myself. 

I started displaying “____ more days to keep it together” on the screen at the beginning of class. It’s nice to have a saying when kids are out of their seats or being crazy. “Are you keeping it together?” 

Third period was super quiet today. A lot of students were absent, and then half an hour before it ended, a bunch of students left to attend the The No Tardy Party, where kids without any tardies could get frozen yogurt. They all came back, sugared up and holding balloons, which they proceeded to pop.

Reader, you should’ve seen my eye twitch.

Nine more days to keep it together.

Today in math class, I was helping this big group of Haitian students and suddenly I could tell they were all talking about me. “What are you talking about?” I asked. They pointed to my hair. “Your hair is beautiful,” said Dead Eyes. Not even a hint of jest. I was very touched. 

I also caught a kid just like completely feeling up his girlfriend in the classroom. They were both looking out the window and he was behind her with his hands up her shirt. She wasn’t doing anything. I yelled “Hey!” and he turned to me, and just for a second, he kept his hands up her shirt. 

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked. 

They both kind of slinked away embarrassed. Jesus Christ, these kids. 

Nine more days.

Friday, May 24, 2024

I skipped school to go to Senior Beach Day with the Social Justice Academy. Really nice to get paid to “supervise” a bunch of seniors at the beach. There was a little ceremony where the kids got their stoles, and then we basically said, “Okay, meet back here at 2:00 p.m.” 

The weather wasn’t great, but it’s hard to complain when you’re with a bunch of teachers you love and respect, while drinking coffee and eating burritos. Although, there was a singer-songwriter guy on the boardwalk next to us, belting out religious songs that were seriously giving me anxiety. It was like acoustic Creed type shit. I’ve never wanted to take someone’s First Amendment rights away so bad. 

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NEW FICTION!

Earlier this week, I had the honor of having my story “The Usual” published over at Little Engines. This is the first fiction story I’ve published in lord knows how long, so I’m—as we say in Southern California—stoked. 

In the movie Groundhog Day, there’s a sequence where Bill Murray’s character repeatedly tries to end his life to escape the time loop. I’ve always wondered about the effects his actions have on the people surrounding him who aren’t in the time loop, and how witnessing something like that creates its own time loop, in a way. That’s what “The Usual” is about.

I hope you enjoy, and please subscribe to Little Engines.