So you know when you get your group of kids on the first day, there are those who immediately set off your alarms?  Well, that definitely happened to me on my first day.

I have a student who clearly needs help.  His peers are weary of him already and his confrontational style seems not as intentional as inherent.  The startling comments and “seething anger”, as his last year’s teacher put it only three weeks into the school year, seem uncontrollable.  This same teacher recorded that he asked if her windows were bullet proof.  I wasn’t, of course, given this information up front.  I had to seek it out. 

His first quickwrite of this year centered on cussing out his last teachers and cranking them nightly on the phone.  His pride in his violent video games is apparent.  

Like children with Asperger’s (of which he has not been tested to date), he seems unaware of cues or the goings on around him: calling out with inappropriate comments, walking in front of me while I talk to the class, handing me items while I’m in the middle of instruction.  Annoying, yes, but harmless.  

He also will not make eye contact (could be cultural, but this seems different than others of his ethnicity and nationality) and walks robotically, stiffly, without movement in his shoulders.  Strangely enough, and I’m clearly not a diagnostician (though I play one on TV), the few students in my career who have had symptoms like this seem to also come with apparent sinus problems.  His eyes are puffy with nasal issues, he is sniffy, and I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection.

So I approached the counselors who know me as a real student advocate and as a teacher with a somewhat effective antenna.  I don’t send kids to the office.  I handle my own discipline issues, which are few.  So when I come in, they listen.  The afternoon after the first day of school I walked in and said, “So, what’s up with X?”  They pretty much flopped the file onto the desk, a file the size of our Language of Literature book.(...)
Read the rest of Should a free education be unconditional? (363 words)

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Post tags: 100% accountability, 2008, achievement gap, aspergers, blog, collaboration, Curriculum, differentiation, Ed Tech, education, education policy, ELA, employment, free, fundraising, Joanne Jacobs, k-12, k12, learning, metacognition, performance pay, special ed, teaching, technology, test, Title I

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© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2008. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008, blog, collaboration, critical thinking, CST, CUE, Ed Tech, education, education policy, ELA, integration, internet literacy, Joanne Jacobs, k-12, k12, Language Arts, life long learners, merit pay, metacognition, middle school, peer teaching, performance pay, PI, professional development, research, school accountability, technology, Think Aloud, Title I, UCI, Writers Project

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Nobody can deny that this is happening, but there is also another symptom of NCLB that has slowly passed like a plague of yore over our schools, the disappearance of electives from the schedules of the middle-ground students.  (...)
Read the rest of NCLB? How ’bout B-studentsLB (354 words)

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 100% accountability, 2008, achievement gap, blog, competition, credential, critical thinking, education, education policy, ELA, electives, equity, fundraising, integration, Joanne Jacobs, k-12, k12, middle school, NCLB, New York Times, ny times, reform, teaching, Title I

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1. “An antiquated compensation system”

2. “A personnel system designed for the 1930s”

3. “A dysfunctional training-and-licensure regimen”

4. A system that allows “teachers surprisingly little control over fundamental decisions about their work”

5. A lack of teacher’s pay keeping up with the increased student enrollment since the 1950s

6. “Narrow ‘accountability’ systems for schools” 

But they missed one: 

7. Our inability to go to the bathroom when we need to(...)
Read the rest of The Seventh Affliction (303 words)

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, education policy, ELA, Joanne Jacobs, k-12, k12, middle school, NCLB, school funding, teaching

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