Monday Motivator #33 2018-19

A Letter to Teachers From “That Kid”

My pain may not be visible.

Love Teach on April 17, 2019

https://www.weareteachers.com/a-letter-to-teachers-from-that-kid/?utm_source=WAT_MDR&utm_medium=Enews&utm_campaign=WAT_Enews042519

Dear Teacher,

I’m that kid. The kid who gets under your skin. The first grader who colors on your walls and spits on my table partners. The high school junior who mouths off and smirks from the back row. The child who knows exactly how to push your buttons, and does. Regularly.

I taunt. I terrorize. Sometimes I hit. I destroy. I curse. Rolling my eyes often seems like my favorite thing to do. I talk back. Maybe I’ve even made you cry a few times.

Don’t take my behavior toward you personally.

I know that doesn’t make any sense, since it’s mostly directed at you. But you know that old saying about having a bad day at work and going home and kicking the dog? Well, you’re the dog.

(I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.)

I really am a good kid deep down. There are so many things I care about. I have skills and strengths that I want to use to help other people. In fact, I secretly want for you to know all these good things about me.

But unfortunately, you don’t get to see these good things.

I am afraid. I am in pain. You know how if you put oil and water in a container together, the oil will float to the top? It’s like my fear and pain are the oil, and all the good things about me are water. Every once in a while, you might shake me up and see just a glimpse of those good things on the surface, but no matter how hard I try, the fear and pain will bubble up and cover everything again. It’s easy to think that the way that I react to fear and pain—the anger, the defiance—is the real me. In fact, I’ve even started to believe it.

The fear and pain I feel is different than what you may think. It’s not always actual physical fear or pain (though sometimes it is). I might be afraid that I’m not worthy of love, since my dad left me and my mom after I was born. I might be afraid that I will grow up to be like my mom, who is an alcoholic and misses all my baseball games. Or I might be in pain because my family and culture say I’m not manly enough since I cry a lot and am not really into sports. I might be in pain because someone who is supposed to love and protect me said something deeply hurtful that I won’t ever forget.

Maybe you look at me and think there’s no excuse for the way I behave. You might think, “This child has a stable family, loving parents, and a secure environment. I know kids with a lot less who behave perfectly fine.”

But please remember that there is always more than what you see.

What you might not know is that the pressure to be perfect or different than who I am is so intense and crushing that I believe I’m a failure, and I’m too scared to tell anybody that.

Or maybe my home life is fine, but I’m learning a very dangerous message—that I’m inadequate, unlovable, or not worthy of belonging—in some situation outside of home, or inside my own head. Maybe something is going on, or has happened, that nobody, not even my parents, knows about but me, and I do a really good job of faking that I’m happy or that I don’t care.

I know that I’m making things hard for you. I know you don’t deserve it. But I feel like you should know this: Somewhere, on a level I’m not even aware of, I’ve chosen you to behave this way toward because I know you’re a person who can help me.

This is a cry for help.

I want the same things everybody else does, but I’m asking for it in the most confusing and unflattering of ways.

I don’t know how to fix all of this (or I would have already). And I don’t think it’s necessarily your responsibility to fix me. But here’s how you can help me.

Start small. I’m fragile, and I’ve been hurt. Because I’ve got so much junk at the surface, maybe don’t try to remove it all at once or ask me to open up right away about my fear and pain.

Show me that you notice me—not my behavior, but something about me.

Ask me questions.

Don’t give in when I try to rile you up.

Maybe, slowly, I will learn to trust you. Or maybe I will take a long time, and you won’t see any progress in our time together, but your patience and kindness toward me will plant a seed that will sprout many years later.

But please, please, please don’t give up on me.

Love,

That Kid

Monday Motivator #32 2018-19

Slow Down

https://choiceliteracy.com/article/slow-down/?print=true

AUTHOR

Gretchen Schroeder

It’s easy for me to get caught up in a rush, both personally and professionally. There’s always something to check off my to-do list: another standard to cover, another appointment to keep, another event or meeting to attend. Lately, I’ve been trying to slow down. Although I can’t completely rid myself of my duties and obligations, I’ve realized that I can enjoy and get more out of them when I allow myself to be present in the moment, stop myself from thinking about what’s next, and give my time and attention to the matter at hand.

It has occurred to me that my students have a similar problem. Many times I see them rushing through their work, trying to get it done so they can move on to the next thing. My class is just one of six or seven courses my high school students are taking, so I understand that they may not always have as much time and motivation to slow down and think through their work as I might like. Instead, I’ve started looking for opportunities to slow down within the classroom, ways to help my students see the value of putting extra thought and time into their work.

Quotation Pass-Around

I began using this activity when I found myself repeatedly asking students to “go deeper” with their thinking and analysis of a text. While we are in the midst of reading a novel, I ask students to choose three quotations from their nightly reading. I don’t give much more direction other than to choose things that they think are important, interesting, and/or confusing. When students return to class with their quotations, they choose their favorite one (each student says theirs out loud to avoid repeats) and write it at the top of a piece of paper. We move our desks into a large circle and pass the papers to the right. Students spend one to two minutes responding to the quotation in front of them. Before their first response, I give them some ideas for what they can write about:

Why do you think this quotation is important?

What does it tell us about a character or event?

Is there a deeper meaning below the surface?

Does it foreshadow a future event?

Is it ironic in any way?

Does it remind you of something else?

Does it raise any questions?

The one rule of the activity is that each response needs to bring up something new, rather than just restating the same idea over and over again in different words. As the papers continue to move around the circle and all of the obvious ideas are expressed, the process gets more difficult. Students have to think a lot harder about the quotation and begin to look at it from different angles.

This activity typically takes up an entire class period, and sometimes the quotations don’t even make it all the way back to their original owners. Afterward, we look back over the chain of responses and I ask students to identify the most insightful ones. They are almost always the responses at the end of the chain. The lesson that is illustrated for students is that the best ideas aren’t always the ones that pop into your head first.

Reading Breaks

Many times when my students are presented with a more challenging text, they complain that even after reading it, they just don’t get it. While working through a unit on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, I was hearing this complaint a lot. Poe’s work is full of dense, complicated sentence structures and obscure vocabulary. When asked about the reading strategies they were using to improve their comprehension, most students admitted that they just kept plowing through the text, skipping over things that didn’t make sense. My students needed to learn how to slow down as they read, how to pause and check their understanding before continuing. If they weren’t going to stop on their own, I decided, I would have to build reading breaks into the story. I reformatted the next story we read by breaking it into one- or two-paragraph sections. I started by reading the first paragraph aloud and thinking aloud to show that even I, as the teacher, need to pause and reflect on what I have just read.

I also demonstrated how to annotate the text as you read. I explained to students that sometimes their annotations might   simply summarize a particularly difficult section, but that other times their annotations could reflect what they were inferring about character, setting, or plot. Students continued reading the story in this vein, stopping at each break to assess their understanding, annotate the text, and talk briefly with their group members. Although it took us a lot longer to read the story this way, the majority of students reported understanding it much better. Pausing to reflect while reading is a simple strategy that any student can do; it’s just that many of them are in too much of a hurry to do it. After building the breaks into the reading, students came to see that slowing down was a strategy they could turn to when reading became difficult.

One Beginning, Three Ways

In their rush to start on a piece of writing, students can tend to make the first sentence a throwaway, a means of getting started and on to the better stuff. But a good, effective lead is crucial to a piece of writing, and I want my students to see that you’re never going to open a book that has as its first line, “Today I’m going to be writing about . . .” We started by turning to our independent reading books and checking out the leads crafted by professional authors.

After we had many examples to look at, we began to put names to the strategies that the authors were using and grouping the leads into categories, such as dialogue, flashback, focus of sensory detail, mysterious, and more. When we went to write our next essay, I required students to write three different leads to the piece, employing a different strategy for each.

After students had crafted their leads, they shared them with their group members, who gave their opinions about which lead was most intriguing and would make them want to read on. Most often, students ended up choosing the second or third lead that they had created for the piece, once again demonstrating that the first thing that comes to mind isn’t always the most creative or original. Instead of dashing off the first sentence that comes to mind, students were creating leads that were more interesting and enticing for the reader.

Each of these strategies is grounded in the simple principle that taking the time to slow down, reflect, and put more thought into reading and writing produces a richer result.

Monday Motivator #31 2018-19

The Best Classical Music For The Classroom

April 13, 2019 by Michael Linsin

https://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/2019/04/13/classical-music-for-the-classroom/

Classical music has many wonderful benefits for the classroom.

Studies have shown that it can . . .

• reduce stress and anxiety
• improve memory
• increase productivity
• enhance concentration
• raise well-being
• spark creativity

I like to put the music on as students are entering the classroom and carrying out their first routine of the day. It helps set the tone and puts them in the proper mindset for learning.

It also has a strong calming effect and helps keep excitability at bay.

Over the years I’ve developed my favorite compositions that include both the classical period (1720-1830) as well as more contemporary classical music.

They’ve brought so much joy and peace to me and my students that I thought I’d share them with you—in no particular order.

Enjoy!

Gymnopedie No. 1

Clarinet Concerto Adagio

Echo

Vide Cor Meum

Adagio for Strings

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Hoppipolla

Concerto for Two Violins

Thursday

Nocturne op. 9 No. 2

Piano Concerto No. 23

Opus 23

Cello Suite No. 1

Claire De Lune

Suite for Orchestral No. 3

Brandenburg Concerto No. 3

Finding Beauty

Adagio in G Minor

Good For You, Too

Some of the above selections are more jaunty than others and thus lend themselves to heightening mood and positive energy, while others are best for their calming effect.

All, however, are astonishingly beautiful.

They work well for routines, transitions, and occasionally even during independent work. I recommend downloading the pieces you like best from iTunes or Amazon so you’re not interrupted by annoying ads.

You’ll find classical music good for you, too. Listen on your way to school or put it on in the background while working in your classroom.

The research on classical music and stress is especially compelling, but I just like the way it makes me feel and how it gets me into a faster and deeper state of flow.

If you’re a Pandora subscriber and just want to put the music on and forget about it, my favorite stations are Classical for Studying, Yo-Yo Ma, and This Will Destroy You.

If you get a chance, please leave a comment below and include your own favorite classical pieces and/or Pandora stations. I know I would appreciate it, and I think others would too.

Thanks for reading.

-Michael

Monday Motivator #30 2018-19