Math, Middle-School Boys and Cookies

I subbed math today at Dixon Middle School where my brothers, sisters and kids all went to middle school (I went to Tomlinson Junior High in Lawton, Oklahoma). I got to sub Math which is my second favorite subject to teach after English.

The first half of the day were the kids in main-line classes and the the second half was for resource and special-ed. The special-ed kids try super hard, but disabilities make learning hard. The resource-student, junior gang-bangers were trying to push buttons while I was trying to help those with disabilities, so I was getting frustrated. During forth period, twenty minutes before the lunch bell rung, I decided to mess with the rotten kids. I had already sent one to the office for threats, disruptions and profanity and I wanted to lower the stress level just a little.

I pulled out the pack of cookies I had set aside for lunch and started looking at them. These kids, especially the boys, were starving. I opened the package slowly. Smelled the cookies loudly. Picked one out and sniffed it as if it were a fine cigar. I acted like I was going to eat it, put it back, then quickly snatched it back and gobbled it down greedily. I then sighed loudly and drank from my bottle of Coke.

I then ate the entire pack except one. I held it up and addressing the one boy who looked like he was about to cry from lunch anticipation, I told him I was going to put it in my pocket and save it until I went home. This kid also happened to be the loudest and most abrasive, but he is a middle-school boy after all and his stomach is still more important than his homies, the girls or mathematics in particular.

Every once in a while before the bell rang I would pull it out and smell it again.

He was in agony.

Between classes during hall monitoring, I would pull the cookie out and show it to him whenever I saw him. He was funny about it, but his friends teased him a lot.

Finally at the end of the day as I was exiting the building, I passed him as he was waiting at the main entrance for his mom and ate the cookie right in front of him. I told him how it tasted, but he said he already knew what Triple Double Oreos tasted like with a grumble and a huff. He told me I was a punk, but I responded that every time I ate an Oreo from then on I would think of him.

Man, I love middle-school boys.

Dixon Middle School: English

Finally, a class I can blog about. For the last six months or so, I’ve been subbing almost entirely with intellectually disabled students and it is quite illegal to blog about them. Middle school students? No one cares.

Dixon Middle School is where all my kids went to school as well as my brothers and sisters. When we moved from Oklahoma to Utah, I was already in high school, so I was the only person in my family who did not go to school at Dixon. Dixon is very old, but is in fairly good condition. It looks a lot like the school in Back to the Future. There is a little modernization, but it is easy to tell where that was added in with occasionally poorly placed wires, drill holes, sprinklers and computer cables. The class I was teaching in was originally a storage room for the neighboring biology class room and so was smaller than most of the English classes I’ve subbed in in newer buildings. Dixon is a Title I school where most students are minorities. This is the exception in very white-bread Utah County. Many of my students today asked if I could explain the lesson in Spanish. I answered in Korean and from that point on everyone spoke English.

We were learning how to do compare and contrast using Venn Diagrams. The text was Johnny Tremain comparing what Johnny was like before his accident and afterwards (when the forge cracked and spilled molten silver on his hand). The kids understood most of the physical problems, but many of the psychological/personality changes Johnny went through were lost on them. Fortunately, the teacher left a nicely designed, self-guided, fill in the black questionnaire to help them figure things out. The challenge came during the last fifteen minutes when I was required to spring a five paragraph essay on them that was due at the end of class. Ninety percent of the kids got it done with the remaining ten percent loudly complaining or saying they weren’t gonna do anything a sub told them they had to do. I taught seven periods and had the exact same reaction to the writing assignment.

Middle school! Loads of fun as always.

Provo Post High School I

Today, I substituted for a class of eight severely, mentally handicapped men who just graduated from either Provo High School or Timpview High School. These guys will go to this school until they are 23. The school works to try and help these guys build the skills to have jobs.

The school has three tiers of classes based on cognition. The class I subbed in is considered the lowest level group. None of these men could speak, but I was surprised to find how fast it took me to decipher their clues for bathroom, annoyance, boredom and interest. I was subbing for a para. The teacher would have been in the class with us, but had to leave to deal with one of the men all day. He was annoyed with my presence, but reacted by poking the other students in the face. The teacher and other para had planned on this, so the day was very easy.

We chilled out for the first 45mins and then watched the news for a while. We then did free exercise by using exercise machines and a Wii. Some of those guys are amazing Wii golfers. We then worked on the computer and they did their own attendance using the promethian machine. Lunch was mac and cheese and loads of ranch. After lunch, we watched The Bee Movie. And that was it. My job was to corral escapees and escort people to the bathroom.

This is the kind of set-up Dixon should have had on Thursday. Even though these guys have severe handicaps, in a way they are better equipped to deal with society than the kids in that resource class.

One of the interesting things about this school is that it is part of Provo School District’s facilities complex. The district’s laundry is done there and it looked like a bunch of stuff from UVU is being done there as well. The bathroom the students had to go to was through the production floor. While I was taking the guys to a collective restroom break, I ran into a guy I had not seen in ten years: Richard Gauss.

Richard is a high-functioning autistic man that I went to church with as a kid. He was our shooting guard on the youth basketball team even though he was at least twenty years older than the rest of us. He had a great shot too.

Anyway, as I was walking through with my class, Richard runs up and we end up talking for a while. It was nice to see him. I found out that he is no longer living with his father, but in a half-way home. His dad is at an old-folks home in Lehi. Richard’s father, Jesse, is one of those men every man should want to be like. Rock-hard, strong, determined, opinionated, generous, hard-working, courageous and filled with integrity. I have missed Jesse for years. He was one of the men I looked up to as a kid and young single-father. I also used him as an example for my boys. Jesse cared for Richard by himself as his wife just could not deal with the difficulty special-needs kids have. I had a similar experience in how I had to raise kids after my wife left not being able to deal with how hard kids can be.

Dixon Middle School 1

(sharpie)

I love it when my assignment is within walking distance. Twenty minutes away is great. Dixon is the school my kids went to and that all my siblings went to except Ben (we were both in high school when my family moved to Utah).

The assignment was for a resource class: two double-block reading sections and two basic writing classes. I loved teaching the first two classes, because we used the Read180 program. The class is set up where there is a rotation between three different events: independent reading, small group reading/writing and individual computer instruction. Each rotation is twenty minutes long with between six and three kids.

The small group section covered scorpions. The passage was a non-fiction informational piece instructing the reader how to keep a pet scorpion. The kids found it interesting and had no problem reading out loud and then writing a short summary following a bubble-map like worksheet. The kids liked the subject matter, understood the reading and wrote well about it.

In the other rotations, the kids were self motivated and stayed focused.

The problem happened in the second writing class. This class exploded. I found out after the class that this class had been especially set up so the section would include all the behavior-challenged kids in one with a para with specific resource training. The para was absent. There was another adult there, Kevin, an undergrad observer from BYU.

I never got a chance to begin the lesson plan without a fight. The bell had not even rung and I had started rearranging the seating plan, moving desks, breaking up cliques, locking the computers, calling the class to attention and rotating between the various arguments and confrontations between the students (I at least got the roll called within the first five minutes). I got the kids going that wanted the lesson, 5 of the 23, and made sure they were sitting together. We did fifteen minutes of silent reading and then started a white-board based writing exercise. The previous writing class had no problem with the same material and really had a lot of fun. The remaining seventeen didn’t care. They knew they had a powerless sub that was not willing to break or be manipulated and so they tirelessly kept needling me and the others like starving arachnids.

Finally: Bang! Two kids started talking about drug-use and the firearms they had protecting their family’s stashes. I asked them to keep it down and to change the subject and they refused. That’s when I put my foot down, explaining I had no remaining options and had Kevin escort them both to the office. In hindsight, I should have known something was about to happen right before it did when most of the class fell silent and the tension ratcheted up. The scorpion stilling for the strike. Ten minutes later, Kevin came back, but by then only three kids insisted on making a ruckus. Five minutes latter, however, a counselor showed up with the two-malifactors and tried to help. The explosion started to happen again. None of the kids had any respect for the counselor. Eventually the class ended and I then gave a full report to the counselor. I also then relayed two incidents of racism and one where a kid had accused me of confronting him because he was brown (nothing new here, I simply replied that I was confronting him because he refused to be quiet).

Ten minutes later, the teacher walks in. He had been at a state-training for resource teachers. The counselor and I explained what had happened and the teacher revealed I should not have been alone in even the other classes with only an undergrad observer to help. The para should have been in at least two of the classes for sure and that the teacher and the para had planned on a possible explosion in this class in particular. They knew the class was a barrel full of scorpions ready to pounce.

The teacher explained that sometimes, with other adults there, he still had problems like this. This is a problem. Resource teachers:

• need full administration and district support
• should not be saddled with a class concentrated with known discipline problems
• should not have to teach a problematic class with more than ten kids
• should always have a para when there are possibly dangerous kids in a class

I have now taught many such classes in both middle and high schools and really think Dixon and/or the Provo School District defecated on this teacher and because poop rolls downhill, I got splattered as well . . . at least stung.