The last few weeks of school bring out the goofy in us all, perhaps in a last-ditch effort to survive until summer break.

Out of the blue last week a student asked, “Do you have underarms?”

Was I supposed to answer that? (I didn’t.)

In the spirit of the season, therefore, I decided that to motivate my students to take the end-of-year high-stakes test carefully I would promise to show them three videos of myself “in order of increasing embarrassment.”

Every last one of my students qualified for the showings, which began with the taped performance of a song by my band, which I didn’t intend to be at all shameful. Students seemed to agree it wasn’t, judging from their comments that ranged from “That’s not embarrassing at all” and “Of course not–it’s not supposed to be” to “Yeah right, that’s embarrassing” to the disappointed “That’s not embarrassing!”

The next video was one a friend made for a song I wrote and recorded in college. My band does this song, too, but now it’s tons better; in the college video, I pretty much just sang along with myself and looked melancholy in a series of truck-driving-themed clips of me walking around, standing on a porch roof, or greeting a truck driver at a truck stop. The videography is sickeningly amateurish.

Class reactions to this second video were mixed. The first class shrieked with laughter: “You had hair!” was oft repeated, and the most annoyingly vocal girl of the lot didn’t stop yelling at me from across the room throughout the entire three-and-a-half-minutes, “Is that really you?”

The second class was much more subdued when it came to my college self. They’re more academically advanced, so maybe they have a better grasp on time’s effects on the gentlemanly type, or maybe they’re more polite. Plus, they had without my permission invited another teacher to join in the viewing and she insisted on making graciously positive comments about the song itself. Perhaps they hadn’t prepped her on the shame-the-teacher aspect of the viewing.

The third class, though, just seemed to take a while to register the truth. Finally one girl said, “That was you? You had hair!”

The final video brought wails of anguished joy from many students. I can say this with only partial confidence because to play up my embarrassment I was hiding behind my file cabinets. But really, they shrieked at my dancing.

“I have tears coming out of my eyes,” one student said afterward; another told me, “I haven’t laughed that hard in years.” (Geesh–that kid is only 13.)

And then there was the last word of the afternoon, today: “Mr. Jacobs, that’s okay. I can’t dance, either.”

Several years ago I made the mistake of letting myself sit through a conference with two parents who were quite angry at me. I handled myself well, but it made me want to throw in the towel. So last week when I found myself in a similar situation, I pressed the red button.


The seventh grade assistant principal had planned to sit in on the meeting–the mom’s curt emails had suggested she was rather angry at me–but a last-minute emergency pulled her away and I decided to go ahead with it myself.


I’d written several referrals for the boy, for walking out of the room without permission and encouraging other students to do the same (on separate occasions) and for general disruptiveness. I’d also emailed the mom for permission to assign after school detention in accordance with our team policy regarding when a substitute teacher leaves a negative comment about a student.


“I’ll tell you right now,” the mom said, “he is not serving ASD unless you’re going to bring him home. I am not going to come pick him up. And you’re singling him out,” she continued, pretty much spitting the words. “He is being treated unfair and I won’t stand for it.”


Her husband beside her didn’t look much happier; the boy was quietly observing their attack on me.


“Excuse me a moment,” I said, walking to the red button that pages the school office. “If you have concerns about me, then it would probably be good to have an administrator here to listen to those.”


We waited in silence for about five minutes until the sixth grade assistant principal showed up. I had worked with her very little, but she was in control of the meeting from the moment she walked in the door.


“This ASD business,” the stepdad launched into her, “needs to change. The teacher who assigns the ASD needs to be required to stay after, too.”


“We do have a paid position for that,” the principal said, “so a teacher is there with the students. What I think we can do right now is focus on getting through the remaining seventeen days of school. J–,” she said to the boy, “let’s agree that we will treat our teachers with respect and do your best for these last weeks. Can you agree to that?”


“Yes ma’am,” he said.


“You’ve got to make it through this year,” his mom told him. “I don’t want you to have to repeat this class. Not with this teacher.”


As I was ignoring the not-so-veiled barbs at me, the seventh grade assistant principal walked in, armed with the referrals I’d written. She took one look at the situation and talked only about how respectfully J– always treated her.


She then excused herself, and the first principal thanked the parents for coming; once they’d left the room she said to me, “I knew that mom when she was in school. She was even worse–nasty mean–than J– is. If you know the saying ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ that’s an example, right there.”


I was glad that she had sidestepped the parents’ anger, but my questions–specifically what to do about the ASD assignments–and concerns hadn’t been addressed, either. I closed up shop for the day and was heading out of the building when the seventh grade assistant principal stopped me.


“I’m sorry to come late,” she said.


“That’s alright,” I said. “I called for the other principal after I started the meeting–they were lighting into me pretty badly.”


“What was their concern?”


“That I was singling out J–.”


She looked at me. “You dog. Well, when I walked in I could see bringing up those referrals wouldn’t have helped the situation any, so I’ll just deal with those with in-school suspension.”


The next day it occurred to me that because I actually like the kid, I could pull J– out of in-school suspension at some point to do some reorganizing of my classroom.


“I don’t want to end the year on a bad note with him,” I told the assistant principal.


“Great idea,” she said. “And just food for thought: Doing that sort of thing earlier in the year would maybe help alleviate future problems like you’ve had with J–. If kids know their teacher likes them, they’re often more respectful.”


And J– was a great help; he retrieved a stepladder from (and later returned it to) the custodians so we could run some cables through the ceiling.


“I don’t have anything to give you as payment for your help,” I told him, “but I’d be a reference for you any day.”


A bit later the assistant principal told me, “I saw J– in the hallway today, and said to him, ‘Aren’t you in in-school suspension? Why are you out here in the hallway?’ He stood up straighter and got a proud look on his face and said, ‘I’m helping Mr. Jacobs.’”

Even though his university supervisor had emailed both him and me to say, “I’ve encouraged A– to contact you about when and where to meet you,” I didn’t hear a peep from my week-long-practicum student teacher until he showed up Monday morning–so I wasn’t too impressed even before meeting him.

And it slid from there.

“Here I am!” he said, striding into my room just five minutes before students would start to stream in. “I’m here, right on time. Well, one minute late, because I got stuck behind a school bus. Where is my seat?”

I settled him in at a computer desk in the back of the room. Actually, I meant for him to use a chair at the computer desk but to face forward, with the rest of the class, instead of staring the back wall, but he took out a pencil and a notebook and started writing. And writing.

(His supervising professor later told me he’d written six pages, once typed, on that first day. Perhaps it was on Tuesday that he asked me something like, “What time exactly was the tornado drill? From 8:26-8:43?”)

After my first class on Monday, at the start of planning period, A– brought his folder to my desk, pulled up another chair beside me, and said, “Okay, so here’s the deal. This is my list of things I need to do. It says they’re suggested activities, which means they’re required, and so I’m going to do them all. I’ll need to go talk to a guidance counselor about bullying, eat lunch in the cafeteria, observe another class for a whole class period. Oh, and I need to teach a twenty-minute lesson, and–“

“A–,” I interrupted, “I’m sure I’ll have time to talk through this with you in just a bit. However, at the moment I’m a bit behind in planning for my next period class, and I’d like to get that done first.”

“Oooh, of course!” he said with accommodating surprise. “Of course!” He noted that in his notebook.

When I’d finished my immediate to-do list, I asked him how he was fortunate enough to fulfill his practicum in one full week in May, after the university was out for the semester. Usually students in his position just visit a class for a couple hours each week during the term; he and a few others were apparently taking a little May term.

“There was a problem with the computers at my college and I was put out of the education degree program,” he said. “Now I have to work really hard to show that I’m serious so they’ll let me back in.”

And work hard he did, over the course of the week. His note taking put him in serious cahoots with my pencil sharpener, which he told me he’d figured out how to use so it wouldn’t eat his pencil; he walked with me to the office to submit papers for photocopying; he read to students so speedily he stumbled over words and forgot them in the dust; he classified “chewy” under the “taste” sensory details for the food essay brainstorming activity.

When I introduced the food essay concept to him (my students each write an essay about a meaningful food, and then we have a class potluck), he said, “That is an excellent idea. Perfect. Because food these days is a really big thing for kids. Really big. It has been for quite a while, too. I mean, for a really long time.”

On Tuesday he was four and a half minutes late, which I know only because his first words of the day prompted me to look at the clock: “Just so you know, I was on time,” he said. “But I had to use the bathroom.”

On Wednesday, his professor and the education department chair dropped by unannounced at the beginning of my planning period. We were wrapping up details from first period when they slipped into the classroom. A– had planned to visit another class for the period, so he was gathering up his materials to head out.

“Hello,” I greeted the women. “Welcome! Thanks for coming by.”

They shook my hand; A– had every appearance of walking out without having hardly acknowledged them.

“A–, we came to meet with you and Mr. Jacobs,” one said to him. I invited them to be seated.

“Oh. Uh, actually, I was just going to go observe Band,” A– said.

“Well, you can go to that shortly,” his professor said, and I added, “A–, you can sit here.”

“I was hoping to stop by your office and see you this afternoon,” A– said, “after school is out for the day. I’ll just come by your office.”

The professor became short: “I won’t be there. I won’t be available. But we are available now, and that’s why we’re here.”

“Oh, of course!” he exclaimed, and sat down.

When his professors had explained to him that the field notes didn’t have to be so detailed, that the form for the notes specifies a few simple areas to note, and finally dismissed him–he was obviously itching to be on his way–they thanked me for agreeing to host A–.

“We’re concerned about him,” they said.

We chatted.

Later in the week A– told me, “I have a confidence problem, in that I’m maybe too upbeat and positive.”

“It’s good not to beat yourself up,” I told him, “but self reflection and self criticism that is constructive is really important”–and, as I ultimately noted on his evaluation, totally lacking in him.

In fact, I intentionally planned to leave myself a bit of post-A– time in order to think through my written feedback and relieve myself of the pressures of face-to-face honesty with someone in denial, but invited him to tell me how he thought he’d done throughout the week. We looked over the evaluation form; in each of the areas, he felt, he merited ratings of “adequate” or “exemplary.”

“I definitely dress professionally,” he said, stroking his tie. “It makes me look so much more professional. But I don’t know–being on such good terms with [a particular student who had heartily welcomed him] might not be professional, so I might only be ‘adequate’ there.”

It took me a thoughtful while, but a few days later I completed my evaluation of A– by noting specific observations and avoiding value judgments. It was difficult to pinpoint the big picture; small actions on his part were, I hoped, would be more helpful to his supervisors, who, frankly, had seemed eager for evidence against him in order to document reason to dismiss him from their program.

“I don’t know if I told you,” he said near the end of our time together, “about my first placement, which is why I had to do this one.”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“My practicum supervising teacher was known for wanting to squelch new talent,” he said. “Do you think I’ll get a B? I really want a B in this class.”

Thankfully I don’t need to grade him. However, my mother-in-law’s advice a few years ago–I’d received a reference request from the prospective employer of a former student teacher who had impressed me not at all–will still rule the day: “Remember the children,” she said. “Do it for them.”

In that case, as I will again, I advised against hiring.

One of my quite bright students is failing my classes–and others–quite miserably. He doesn’t seem to mind much, but every quarter I have on his report card noted the necessity of a parent conference. His dad and step mom have maybe contacted me once about this, but we’ve never met. Twice in April, however, his biological mom has requested and attended conferences and has shown some effort at getting A to pass.

At our meeting yesterday, she said she didn’t support A’s dad’s method of grounding him and putting him in his room alone for his grades; she didn’t see the good in that. She noted her consequence for failure: the cancellation of their summer trip to Disney.

After the meeting I escorted her back to the office to request log-in information for our online grade books so that she could check A’s grades, and I mentioned to her, “I don’t know if you should make that Disney trip or not, but I think right now it may be more important to bond with A than for him to pass.” She seemed interested in the thought, although I qualified it with lots of statements like, “I’ve never raised a teen.”

As she went into the office I pulled A from his art class; she’d wanted to go through his materials and help him turn in missing work. A bit later they’d stationed themselves on the hallway floor, his locker contents strewn about.

Before his mom left, A stopped by my room to give me an update on his work. He seemed excited at having some direction and said “I will” to my “Give your mom a hug.”

Ten minutes later the guidance counselor scrambled into my room to say that, per A’s dad’s wishes as primary custodian, A’s biological mom is allowed only to see report cards and school handouts and is not to be contacted by teachers without the permission of the dad.

“Make sure you read the advisory notes in the online grade book,” she told me.

Oops.

I quickly notified A’s other teachers to remove his mom’s email from our homework emails list, and called his dad to apologize for overlooking his wishes. He didn’t seem upset with me, but claimed that he and his wife have been dealing with the A’s grades and A’s biological mom has been undermining their efforts of grounding.

“If you would like to come in to meet with us,” I said, “we would be more than happy to see if we can work together to get A’s grades back in shape.”

He didn’t bite.

In my college cafeteria I occasionally heard being played what I later learned was the well known “penis game.” As far as I could tell, one guy would say “penis” in low voice; the next contestant would say it louder, and so on, until it was being shouted for the whole world to hear.

I couldn’t help but remember that game this week during a team leaders discussion about our school’s current discipline program, which is being renamed Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS, commonly said as individual letters, not as a word, in order to conform to the terminology of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

“That’s a really unfortunate acronym,” I piped up. “It’s really bad.”

An assistant principal said, “What’s so bad about it? I don’t get it.” The teacher next to her leaned over and whispered in her ear; she laughed, horrified.

The general presence giggled, but the head principal closed the discussion with, “It’s a national program,” which makes it a great idea, apparently, even if it is one that I’d be happy to protest by playing a “PBIS game” round or two during a faculty meeting sometime.

As an acronym, after all, it sucks.

In my own classroom I use my professional latitude comfortably and as liberally as I can. As a team leader of half of the seventh grade faculty, however, I know my educational philosophies and practices don’t necessarily rule the day; as the saying goes, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team.'”

But while the prospect of sitting on a school bus with students for 100 miles on a single day doesn’t appeal to me any more than it does the next teacher, this week’s cancellation of my team’s April field trip to a nearby national park left me rather seething.

We’d been talking as a team about the trip since the beginning of the school year–I don’t even remember who proposed it–and the science teacher and a math teacher had already spent a Sunday afternoon driving around the park researching locations where students could write about their sensory observations in nature, take a scavenger hunt to learn about the history of the park and the Civilian Conservation Corps, and map a coordinate plane; students had already brought in permission forms; parents had already offered small donations toward the trip and/or signed up to be chaperons.

The “reasons” for the cancellation, and my analysis:

1. Money: Totally not legit. As quite a few students declined to sign up for our end-of-the-year “educational” blowout trip to an out-of-state amusement park, we calculated that most of our team’s available funds were claimed by empty seats on the charter buses. As I told my team, though, I was sure I could find more money to support the national park trip–we only needed $300 or $400–but they said they still didn’t want to go (see the second “reason”).

Not one hour later, when my principal found out we had empty seats on the amusement park charter buses, he said, “Oh, let me see if I can get some other faculty to go; I have some available money [my emphasis] to pay their way.” Even more frustrating was the fact that when the teacher counting student tickets to the amusement park recounted, she found she’d overlooked a few, which meant there was never any financial shortage after all.

2. Snow days: All the more reason to make the trip. We’ve had ten–five of them in March–which has cut our days to impact students’ lives. Other teachers seemed more concerned, though, at the loss of time in the classroom to prepare for the state’s damn tests. Even if those tests were important to the learning of our students–as I think they are not–the one other person on my team who really wanted the trip to happen correctly pointed out, “Just because we’re on a field trip doesn’t mean students can’t learn or review something that is going to be tested.”

Furthermore, some planning work for the field trip did remain, and seemed to be causing stress for the science teacher in particular. I didn’t think the activities had to be anything too demanding planning wise, but she felt she needed to return to the park to prep, and she wasn’t sure when she would do that, since over our week-long spring break she was going to be on a cruise.

I can’t say the cancellation was a complete surprise. Several times in the planning process I had occasionally sensed passive resistance: concerns about student safety on hikes (we implemented a plan for that); one teacher said buses exacerbate her motion sickness (we decided she could drive her own car; she is, however, going to be okay on the amusement park charter buses, as long as she sits in a front seat. School buses have front seats, too, by the way.); another teacher had some sort of previously scheduled dentist appointment or something (unchangeable, apparently, even six months in advance, when we established the field trip date). On these occasions I had explicitly asked, “Do we want to make this trip?” and the team’s consensus was always a clear “Yes.”

As the trip disintegrated, however, I decided not to stick to my team-leader guns. Forcing begrudged cooperation from teachers dead set against an activity would be a sure precipitate for field-trip-day-induced sick leave.

And so just as I had headed up organizing the trip I graciously headed up its nonoccurrence, and counted myself educated: Next time I want to offer my students a truly educational opportunity, I may need to go it alone.

There is, after all, no “I” in “team.”

For our two upcoming field trips one student’s mom, who, according to my colleagues, has never expressed any concern about HT’s complete lack of work ethic or effort, had said that the student would not be able to go unless both she and her boyfriend could chaperon.

There are certain parents that teachers love to have along on field trips as chaperons. Those parents are generally supportive of teachers and public education, excited about learning, and pleasant. They also generally have a sense of social norms and etiquette.

Those, however, are not these.

I happened to have a free chunk of time yesterday when another teacher asked me to go along with her to the office to talk with HT’s mom and her boyfriend of three years. They’d stopped by to pay for the field trips, but were uncertain as to what to pay, since they’d not heard about chaperoning, which was because their initial phone contact with one of HT’s teachers had consisted mainly of cursing at her, because teachers usually handpick chaperons, and because our school policy is that chaperons must be legal guardians.

“Let me check about Mr. L– being able to go,” I said, and left them sitting with HT on the bench outside the office. I tracked down the principal in charge of our trips in the cafeteria, who made a concession: If HT’s mom was along, the boyfriend could also come.

I conveyed the message.

“I can’t do the walking required for either of the field trips,” the mom said, lifting her cane. “And I’m not sending HT out of state or on the other trip without one of us. No way. I’ll keep him home instead.”

“I’ll take him trout fishing instead,” said the boyfriend. “Want to go trout fishing, HT?”

This whole exchange was an example of the occasional times when I am able to recognize that the other party involved is being irrational, idiotic, or otherwise out of touch with simple reality; I therefore could retain complete ability to be extremely pleasant and diplomatic.

“He will still be required to come to school,” I said, smiling my condolences, “even if he doesn’t go on the trips. Missing school would be an unexcused absence.”

“We’ll be getting a lot of fishing in,” the boyfriend said.

They stood up and headed toward the exit.

“You can tell the principal to kiss my,” the mom said, pointing to her butt as they walked out.

Not long later, the principal stopped by my room. “Mr. L– is able to go,” she said. “I hadn’t realized he has already been one of our Watch D.O.G.S.” (These “Dads Of Great Students” show up to walk around in our building as an additional community presence in the school.) “Apparently he’s in the system that lists guardians after all.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

Not long later, another teacher stopped by to tell me that the parents had called central office, who had called the school.

So now we have a chaperon.

For a group-based project, a rarity in my classroom, I told students to make group-member proposals that I would consider when assigning groups. As I could have guessed, my birds of similar feather flocked together; their group suggestions promised either exceptionally fine work or no work at all.

I figured there would be some complaining when I announced my group assignments today, so I prepared students for disappointment by announcing the appeals procedure: “First, you have to write your appeal on a piece of paper,” I said. “Then take your piece of paper and put it in the recycle box, where I won’t read it.”

Most students throughout the day chuckled, but some still complained, especially in my first class.

“Stop whining,” I ordered. “Or I’ll give you a demerit.”

“Whine, whine, whine,” a girl whined.

I gave her a demerit.

No one else said anything, and as I added the “Whining equals a demerit” line to my appeals procedure speech to later classes, things turned out pretty good, in that regard.

Somehow I still ended up with a few bozos together in thus-doomed groups. We’ll see how that works out.

Any prediction of winter weather keeps me from sleeping well.

“I remember that happening to me, too,” a friend told me recently–“back in middle school.”

Well, since I’m still in middle school, today’s winter storm warning–I think the first of this season–had me cheerful, tolerant (mostly), and rather optimistic about life in general.

But I’ve been way, way disappointed before; whole weeks have been thrown out of kilter from a Monday night storm dissipation, although probably never as bad as the story told me quite a few years ago by a teacher at my old school about a faculty snow party one school night when a big storm was supposedly bearing down: by midnight, many wings and beers later, no snow had fallen.

“There were a lot of hurting teachers the next day,” he said. “At school.”

Our five school delays and cancellations so far this year have been for trivial flurries or occasional frozen raindrops, at least as far as I could tell.

(Apparently a school board member, fed up with the “What the heck?” comments from disgruntled parents left with daytime parenting, posted some relevant snow-on-the-road photos to Facebook, but I remain skeptical. As a coworker has told me several times already this year, “We’re such wimps.”)

(Back when I was in school, I remember, my bus driver, Jim, would stop to put on or take off snow chains en route to school. And once I remember the bus stopping on an icy mountaintop–a pickup had slid into a field–and another pickup truck sliding into us from behind. That was the same year I wore out two pairs of boots from walking uphill both ways to and from school.)

I don’t mind trivial free days for playing guitar and singing, hanging with the girls, and helping out in the kitchen, but I do mind getting my hopes up for Some Weather Eventfulness and having my hopes dashed time and again after restless nights of uncertain snow dreams. Someday I’ll learn what I’ll tell my students: “Snow? Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

For now, though, here’s to another fretful night.

In the spirit of the Valentine’s Day season, I again introduced to my students my “Metaphors in Serious Love Poems” unit.


We began by listening to “Who You Are” and writing down the song’s four metaphors. Since it’s an original song, and students generally complain about anything me, I preempted any whining dislike of this favorite of mine by asking, “Why might someone think these are good metaphors for a love song?”


Then we moved on to Bartholomew Griffin’s “My lady’s hair is threads of beaten gold,” albeit with its “Her breast displays two silver fountains bright” tamed to a mild “Her neck is as a silver fountain bright.” That and the poem’s remaining metaphors depict a woman of unparalleled physical beauty– “until,” as I told my students, “we get to the ‘but.'”


After the giggles finally subsided, I read the line again, careful not to dwell on the additional “behind” (“But Ah, the worst and last is yet behind: For of a griffon she doth bear the mind!”), and quickly clarified, “Which means we now have a contrast: the poet has been saying she’s beautiful; however, these last lines suggest something different.” We defined “griffon,” and the girls in class became indignant.


(The next day, though, I got to wondering: Could the last lines just mean that the best part of the situation is yet to come? And that the best is that she thinks about Griffin a lot even though he can’t spell his own name? Ah, what unrequited scholarship!)


Then we read Shakespeare’s “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” (with “breasts” again changed to “neck”), and I asked the girls, “Which poem would you rather receive from your boyfriend on Valentine’s Day?”


Several in my advanced class spoke up to say they’d rather be loved as they are for who they are rather than be thought beautiful but unintelligent; her classmates emphatically agreed. 


In one of my other classes, however, the general female consensus was that even though they’d just said they’d slap Griffin for calling them a Griffon, they’d rather be considered beautiful and dull than be told their breath stinks.