A Letter to the Parents of My Students

Dear Parents,

Welcome to what I hope will be an exciting year of learning, discovery and growth for your children. Your students will write across many different genres this year—memoir, short fiction, poetry, analytical essays, op-eds, speeches, and satire. They will read novels and non-fiction in book groups and with the whole class. They will engage in discussions that will challenge their ways of thinking about the world and open their minds to new perspectives. And, in addition to all of this, I hope to foster your children’s growth into mature, responsible, resourceful, self-aware high school students.

Eighth grade is a tricky year because students are still in middle school (although many of them already think and behave like high schoolers) and have a lot of middle school learning to do, yet we are already preparing them for the higher academic expectations of high school. Thus, there is a tension for many teachers and parents between giving children the structure and support of middle school—plenty of scaffolding, hand-holding through each step of projects, and communication between teachers and parents when students receive disappointing or surprising grades—and a taste of the new freedom and responsibility of high school, where students will be expected to advocate for themselves and take responsibility for their own grades and behavior. Thus, I believe that it is important for students to begin the growing up process of advocating for themselves, accepting full responsibility for their learning and feeling the natural consequences of their choices in eighth grade. It is important preparation for high school and the world beyond.

I see us (teachers and parents) as one team in the endeavor of helping your children successfully reach adulthood; it truly does take a village to raise a child. I feel great love and compassion for all my students, and part of this means accepting them and their imperfections, while simultaneously helping them to learn from their mistakes. No, your children are not perfect, because nobody is, but I don’t expect them to be. We all have days when we’re not at the top of our game, when we feel lazy, when we want to take the easy way out, and why shouldn’t kids, especially 13 year olds be the same? I will not be surprised when students are tardy to class, nor will I hold their excessive socialization against them. I will not fault my students for being 8^th graders and engaging in eighth grader-ish behavior. Yet, my goal is to help them develop into their best selves over the course of the year, and part of that necessarily means holding them accountable for their actions and allowing them to feel the natural consequences.

I’d like to begin with an example from my own high school experience. As a student, I myself was conscientious and dedicated, yet as many of my own students do, I saw school as a place to catch up with my friends as well as to learn, and my attention had a tendency to drift during lectures. Once, in high school, I did not listen carefully to the directions for a quiz, and as a result, I failed it. The teacher had apparently instructed us to fully write out the words “true” or “false” as responses, not “T” or “F” as I had done. I can imagine now she’d encountered some difficulty with students who wrote indistinguishable letters and would argue that what looked like a “T” was in fact an “F” or vice versa. In any case, I felt embarrassed and angry because had I not made that mistake, I would have received a score of 100% on the test. However, I didn’t push the teacher. Was it fair, I ask myself now? Maybe not, I had certainly demonstrated my own knowledge, although I did break the cardinal rule of listening closely to directions. However, I also did not advocate for myself, or make a case for why I deserved those points, and my silence cost me the grade I thought I deserved. Would I ever make those same mistakes again? No. I never did.

I learned several important lessons in a fairly innocuous way that day in high school. I learned to pay attention in class, I learned to accept responsibility for my faults and mistakes, and I learned to be resilient—that one poor mark would not significantly affect my overall grade. Thus, I’d like to suggest the same to you as parents. Please allow your students to make mistakes and learn from them. Sometimes, the growth and lessons learned from a poor performance or score can be worth more than the few points that assignment is worth to one’s overall grade. If your children work consistently and strive to do their best overall, a few blips or screw-ups will not affect their grades, and it can be worthwhile for students to see clearly how these choices they make do affect their performance.

This knowledge, the knowledge that the locus of control is internal not external, that students have the muscle to earn their own grades is empowering.  In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough, acclaimed author of several articles on character and parenting for The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine, argues that children need adversity—the chance to fall down and get back up without parents’ help. This knowledge, that they have the power, the skills and ability to manage their own lives is essential. As one coach quoted by Tough says, “her job was not to prevent [her students] from failing; it was to teach them how to learn from each failure, how to stare at their failures with unblinking honesty, and how to confront exactly why they had messed up. If they could do that, she believed, they would do better the next time” (Tough 183).  8^th graders need middle school-sized adversity; it prepares them, helps them develop resilience, for the larger challenges ahead in life.

Indeed, this issue to me, is not just personal. It’s not just about helping your children achieve their personal best, although I do want that for them individually. This is an issue of social justice. When I look out into the bright eyes of my students, I know that I am looking at the future leaders of our country. I want them to be better leaders than the models I’ve had. I wish for leaders who are humble and sensitive. Who have a strong sense of integrity and responsibility to their constituents—who are responsible and follow through on their promises, who are unselfish and strive to fulfill the noble goals of the Declaration of Independence or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, visions that require continuous struggle. I believe that the feedback that students get from their their teachers, and their parents grooms them for the important roles they will later play in our society and cultivates their sense of accountability and responsibility for their actions.

The challenge for me, as a teacher at Mill Valley Middle School is to ensure that my students in turn are challenged. Often, though that challenge comes in the form of discomfort, or maybe even failure. In How Children Succeed, Tough studies the situation at Riverdale Country School, an elite private school in New York City. Dominic Randolph, the head of the school says, “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails at anything” (Tough 85-86). I tell my students that if they’re learning, they may be experiencing a feeling of “disequilibrium”—the discomfort and unsettling feeling when a task or concept is foreign and uncomfortable. This feeling arises when students find themselves in what Vygotsky, an important educational theorist refers to as the “zone of proximal development,” a space where their thinking is simultaneously supported and gently pushed forward. In fact, at Riverdale school, teachers explain that many parents, “while pushing their children to excel, inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth… ‘Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering…. They’re protected against it quite a bit… We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it okay for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens” (Tough 84).  I see my role as teacher as your partner, to work with you and ensure that your children are challenged.

On a day to day basis, I strive to challenge my students academically, but sometimes I have to challenge them personally, ie. with discipline or natural consequences for behaviors in class. Teenagers test limits; risk-taking and exploration are an important part of adolescent development. I firmly believe though, that when kids do take risks, they unconsciously desire limits. They need the adults in their lives to act as a rock to come up against. Firmness, limits, enforcement of rules and natural consequences for breaking them provide kids with a sense of security and structure that is reassuring and supportive. These limits and consequences are also essential to the maintenance of a classroom environment that is safe, respectful and productive for all students to learn. Sometimes, the needs or behaviors of individual students may conflict with the group’s learning goal, and it is at this point where I may sometimes institute non-punitive consequences for students’ behavior. Please be assured that I take the utmost care to maintain all students’ self-respect and dignity in my classroom in these instances, and that I will communicate with you if any serious discipline issues arise with your child. I’d like to request that as my teammates, you also support me in this endeavor.

Here are some ways I try to encourage accountability and self-awareness in my classroom, and that you can help, too:

1) Phrase compliments in terms of the work or effort students put into something, rather than about their aptitude or skills. This give students an internal locus of control—how hard they worked, rather than external—their intelligence, which they have no power over. Rather than saying, “This essay is so strong because you’re a really good writer,” say something like, “This essay is so strong because you put a lot of attention to detail in your revisions.”

2) Encourage students to track their own grades and scores on assignments. This way, students can begin to understand how test scores or homework assignments add up to affect their overall grade.

3) When students earn a grade that they are unhappy about, encourage them to read the teacher’s comments and reflect on why they earned this particular grade, and what they could have done differently. If students are unsure, please tell them to come talk with me about it. You might even email me with a heads up that your student would like to speak with me, but it is important for them to do the work of setting up the meeting themselves.

4) Engage in conversations with your son or daughter about what he or she is learning and is excited about at school. Ask him or her about classroom discussions, what she’s reading, or what her writing goals are. Try to make the focus more on the intrinsic rewards of learning and knowledge rather than the extrinsic and more fleeting rewards of points or grades.

5) Treat minor set-backs for what they are, and don’t over-amplify the gravity of a missed homework assignment or a tardy. Allow students to feel the consequences of their actions, and perhaps the consequences given by the school or yourself, and then move on. We want to prepare students to handle true adversity, to push through huge challenges when the going gets tough. What does it teach our students if a lunch-time detention is treated as a minor catastrophe? Children are resilient; the natural inclination is to learn from their mistakes and not dwell on the past. Rest assured that I do not hold grudges against students for their misbehavior, either. Let’s get out of their way this year to allow them to learn and grow as they’re ready and eager to do.

Thank you for your thoughtful attention and consideration of my educational disciplinary philosophy. I am excited to learn and grow with you and your students this year!

Sincerely,

Annie Sterling

Home

In my new apartment, I wear socks to bed, cozy despite the cold of the home I’ve constructed over the past few months with Chris.

As the sun shifts from the front living room to the back bedroom throughout the day, my plump cat rotates her naps from the bay window, to the worn purple couch, to her nest of blankets on the bed, following the rays of warmth.

I think I could read for days from the library of books our two collections have joined to combine, lazily sipping peppermint tea in the living room on a day when the blasts of fog whisk across the rooftops and mist drenches you on a brief jaunt to the market around the corner. On a sunny day, though, the blacktop of our patio heats up, and it’s not such a chore to grade if I can bask in its warmth.

Never much of a cook before, I suddenly find myself enjoying adventurous forays into vegan chili, green curry, and tiramisu in the tight corner that is our kitchen. Feeding someone and choosing dishes that will nourish us both is, I realize, a concrete way of caring that I’ve never really experienced or wanted to show before.

The coffee pot awakens with a gurgle ten minutes after my alarm trills a rising scale of notes every weekday, and I bluster around, hair, makeup, outfit, breakfast, lunch, and snacks tucked in my bag and out the door in 35 minutes flat. I don’t often return before 6:30 in the evening, drooping with laptop, grading, and gym bag in tow. And though we both have work still to do, and may retire to separate rooms for these tasks after dinner, I can hear the keys of Chris’s laptop clicking and his voice muttering and as he dictates his essays to himself through the thin walls. The cat pads softly between us for a scratch or a massage as we work.

This is what it feels like to belong; this is what it feels like to finally be home.

Cover the Classroom in Pig's Blood

It was about 9:16 Monday morning, the start of second period, when CJ decided to take his last stand in my class. I guess it was a long time coming; he was ready to let me have it, since it had been a power struggle between him and me since the first day he came to class with his earbuds in and mouth wide open. Dude didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. A constant stream of sewage, a ranting litany of rapped profanity just low enough so I couldn’t quite hear it and thus couldn’t quite call him on it was always brewing. So when he refused to finish a required assignment on Monday morning, I wrote him a referral to the office to finish his work.

CJ, knowing he’d be kicked out of school for another referral, decided he’d better go out with a bang. “This is bullshit; I’m not gonna leave. You’re just making me more mad. I’m not gonna go to the fucking office; fuck this shit!”

Me: “CJ, You’re disrupting class and preventing other students from learning right now; please leave.” Calmly yet firmly: “CJ, take the referral and go to the office.” “If you don’t leave on your own, I’m going to have to call security.” “Ok, I’m calling security.”

When security finally arrived, CJ stood up without hesitation or reluctance. He seemed willing enough to leave, but not without delivering this emphatic final announcement: “I’m gonna rip this bitch’s head off.” He was furious with me.

I felt shaken, sad, hopeless. What had I done to drive this student to such anger? To respond in such a way to me? I know I wasn’t singling him out; I had already sent another student down to the office for the same offense earlier in the period. The rest of my lesson was shot and I was summoned out midway through to speak with a police officer and my assistant principal, since CJ’s outburst constituted a violent threat. CJ was eventually expelled, and after his explosion in my class, I never saw him again.

I stewed over this incident ever and felt like a failure as a teacher. I should be able to reach these tough cases like CJ. I should have better discipline in the classroom. I should command my students’ respect.

Suddenly, though, it clicked for me. Students can be dumb-shits and smart-asses, and it might have nothing to do with me, besides the fact that I’m a handy punching bag and an authority figure who’s difficult for many male students to reconcile themselves to. For I am a young female teacher, one they don’t want to admit is more knowledgeable and experienced than themselves. CJ is like Tyler, my high school boyfriend.

Although Tyler and I didn’t start “going steady” until our junior year, we met during sophomore year. Tyler spent his fourth periods slouched in the assistant principal’s office working on homework because he’d been kicked out of his fourth period teacher’s class and wasn’t allowed to return until he wrote her a letter of apology. I was always in and out of the AP’s office during fourth period because I was an ASB nerd and needed various signatures and approvals for the school activities I was planning.

I got to chatting with Tyler whenever I’d pass through the office, and I asked him what he was doing in there. He had that bitch Butler as an English teacher that year. She was so anal. I had her too, and suddenly the story she had recently related to my fifth period class after the incident with Tyler came rushing back to me.

My fifth period classmates and I filed into class boisterous and excited from lunch one day to find Mrs. Butler in a near hysterical state, blonde curls quivering in anger. “I tell you!” she told us, “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never had a student behave this way towards me. I’m just speechless!” she proclaimed and proceeded to speak the whole darn story. During fourth period, she had asked students to take out a piece of paper as usual for the reading quiz. One student, Tyler refused. He didn’t understand why this was important, or why anything the teacher asked him to do in class was important at all, for that matter. In fact, Mrs. Butler was a Nazi! She was a fascist, anal Nazi! He wanted to pour pig’s blood all over the classroom and burn it down! I know Tyler, he can be quite forceful, scathing, and dramatic when he wishes.

After this violent and disgusting outburst, Tyler was allowed to return to class on one condition, that he write Mrs. Butler a letter of apology. This, however, went against all his principles. He was right, and she was a Nazi, as far as he was concerned. So, as a matter of principle, Tyler spent the remainder of sophomore year in the office during fourth period.

Karma’s a bitch, though, and Tyler had to retake sophomore English during his senior year in order to graduate. And guess which teacher he got?! Mrs. Butler. Just the luck of the draw. By senior year, though, Tyler had grown a little bit in the way of humility and forgiveness. He made his long-overdue apology to Mrs. Butler, then passed sophomore English with flying colors, albeit a bit of annoyance at being stuck with the immature 10th graders all semester.

My take-aways from all this?
• Nice kids do stupid things.
• My students aren’t any shittier than my own high school boyfriend was, and I thought he was pretty funny (though also stupid and incredibly rude) at the time for standing up to Mrs. Butler. Thus, I must have been a little shit back then, too.
• Be transparent and explicit about your reasons for doing everything in the classroom.
• Student buy-in to the lessons is important.
• I will probably be able to laugh about this years later, though I’m crying about it now.

Post Script to these events:
After having this profound realization that everything was going to be okay, kids are kids and life goes on, I had to share my story and take-aways with my freshman class who’d been witness to the demise of CJ’s high school career. Their take-away from my profound story? “Ahhh, Ms. Sterling goes for bad boys!!”

Another week later, Frank, my student and CJ’s enlisted messenger, came to tell me, “Ms. Sterling, CJ said to tell you he’s sorry.” I responded, “Tell CJ I say thank you.” I was very thankful, and I was sorry, too, sorry that I could not help CJ more in his reading skills or in the difficult hand life had dealt him. Unfortunately, though CJ’s apology is enough for me, it will never be enough to salvage CJ’s academic career, to reverse the disservice our school system has done him in allowing him to reach 9th grade without achieving the reading and writing skills of a middle schooler, or to counteract the years of struggle he now faces. Life is supremely unfair.

Time Flies

Wow, somehow almost an entire year has gone by since my last post. But, it's a new year, I've got a new job, and I'm going to make a fresh start on blogging. Hopefully, the middle schoolers will provide me with some fresh, awkward, heart-warming material. For now, here are a couple links I've come across recently worth checking out:

1. A teacher in LA Unified discusses the challenges of teaching in a too-large, heterogeneous classroom. I identified with many of her experiences. Here is further evidence supporting my belief that smaller class sizes make for a better learning environment and happier teachers and students!

The LA Times Article

2. And here's a great clip by another champion of public education, Matt Damon, speaking at the Save our Schools Rally in Washington:

See Matt Damon bald and in charge

Poking Fun at the Freshers

Five weeks into the school year and my freshman class is already providing me with plenty of fodder for poking fun at them. Here are just two of this week’s shining jewels…

1) This first one is my fault really—word to the wise, never feed chocolate to freshmen students, especially not before nine in the morning. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I did on Tuesday as part of an exercise in writing using sensory detail. The object: brainstorm words to describe how the chocolate stimulated all five of the senses, then write descriptive paragraphs using vivid sensory detail. The chocolate, though, only served to wind the students up to the point that when I asked for descriptive words for the sight of the chocolate, shouts of “Poo!” and “I can’t say it because it’s too rude!” were accompanied by wild laughter. Things got out of hand, and as a consequence I threatened to take away the class’ break. This greatly upset poor Ashley. Just as my department chair poked her head into my classroom to ask me a question, Ashley slammed down her hands, rose abruptly from her seat and screamed at the entire class, “Shut the fuck up! We’re gonna lose our damn break!” Needless to say, I had to send her packing, but she of course worked hard to maintain her tough image by stomping her feet and muttering curses at me under her breath as she left. So much for impressing my department chair with my classroom management skills. (Side note, same student is now suspended for three days due to some other unknown incident outside my classroom.)

2) Frank and Carlo are shrimpy freshmen boys, best friends both suffering serious cases of ADHD. Have you ever experienced a moment when there’s a lull in the conversation, just at the moment you say something dumb? So that the entire dinner table hears your remark loud and clear? This is just what happened to Frank and Carlo today. As the whole class poured out of the classroom, I turned my head to urge Frank and Carlo on just in time to witness their chorus of “I like to eat- eat- eat- pussies and vaginas!” sung to the tune of “I like to eat- eat- eat- apples and bananas.” Charming. Although I put on a show of disgust and lectured them about appropriate classroom language, really it is ridiculous moments like these that make teaching worthwhile. What goofballs :D

Teaching

A lone student’s shifty eyes
follow my ramble through
the rows of desks, hunched shoulders,
slouched shoulders, and
perilous backpacks askew on the floor.
How did I,
who know so little,
become “master” of this domain?
Sometimes, sun nudges fog away,
the squeak of chairs, tap of feet, turn of pages
slows as concentration settles the room;
my moment to ease into a desk and
join together in the labor of writing.

The Most Spirited School in the Bay

I have the privilege of working at the “Most Spirited School in the Bay.” That’s right, for two years running, my high school has won Wild 94.9’s radio contest to have such innovative new hip hop performers as Flo Rida and New Boyz serenade our students in assemblies in the school gym. We blew all other schools out of the water in terms of votes online. South City pride y’all!


For those whose ears didn’t immediately perk up at the mention of Flo Rida’s name, you’d probably recognize his song/laundry list of sexy items of female apparel: “Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, you know the whole club was looking at her… them baggy sweatpants and them reeboks with the straps, she turned around and gave that big booty a slap. She hit the floor, next thing you know, shorty got low low low low low low low.” In case you didn’t know, it’s a major hit. If you didn’t recognize that one, perhaps you’d know the catchy, “Oh hot damn, this is my jam. Keep ya partyin’ till the am. Y’all don’t understand. Make me throw my hands up in the ayer, ay, ay, ayer, ayer.” That was two years ago Flo Rida rocked our gym. Obnoxious, materialistic, objectifying women, but innocuous for the most part.



Last year, though, brought us a surprise performance by New Boyz, a group who will, I predict, only be known while they are actually still new—my guess: this two-hit-wonder group has the shelf-life of its current fans’ pubescent hormones. New Boyz is made up of two super-fine seventeen year old boys known as Legacy and Ben-J. You cannot imagine the thrill in Ashley’s voice as she excitedly told me about getting to touch Legacy’s abs during the concert in the gym. The music video for “Tie Me Down” is actually pretty charming, featuring Legacy and Ben-J clad in fresh baseball caps, cardigans, and kicks. With backpacks strapped on, they look just like any of my students. They wear skinny jeans hanging off their narrow butts, and they look pretty darn cute, as in I could imagine them seated in desks in front of me stumbling through lines of Shakespeare and groaning about the homework posted on the board.



The title of New Boyz’ big hit, “Tie Me Down,” is actually somewhat misleading, since really the boys sing in the chorus about how, “She ain’t gon’ tie me down.” Alright, fair enough. It seems like a good thing for teenagers to hang out with lots of friends and keep their options open. But, curious to know more, I looked up the lyrics, and what I found horrified me. The rap portion of the song, which must have been incomprehensible auditorily to my principal, contains such choice lines as,

“Yea you cute. So what?/ But lets get it through your head,/Yea we make love, sex, weed all in the bed,/…/ Now you stuck like a stain and I cant believe that,/…/ There’s too much girls and I ain’t lettin go,/ Cause my life is great,/ And you ain’t nothing but a ho,/…/ Ay yea you know I’m a man,/ And I have no feelings.”

Is this some kind of joke? It almost seemed too bad to be true.

Now call me an old fogey if you will, but I don’t think I am. Well, only partially anyway. I would say that I am not a fogey but a feminist. I object to the disrespect of women in this song, but also I object to the portrayal of masculinity. Perhaps I take myself and life too seriously. However, I saw Sarah and Lisa bouncing off the walls in anticipation of the concert. I saw the photos and doodlings of New Boyz on Brianna’s binder, and I fielded countless questions from these teenyboppers about who in my opinion was hotter, Legacy or Ben-J. Needless to say, I pleaded the fifth. These rappers are under-age minors, after all.

My students are a weird mix of innocence and experience. Strict Catholics, many of them certainly believe in “saving” themselves for marriage. However, one day I discovered an empty, discarded Trojan condoms box lying in the center of my classroom. I was horrified to realize that, thinking it was merely a candy wrapper, I had allowed it to lie there for most of the day. In class discussions of Romeo and Juliet, at least half of my students argued that love at first sight is indeed real. Their rationale? You see it in movies all the time! I quickly learned that the worst supervision duty at my school is the dances, because the main responsibility is to patrol for freak dancers, trolling the dance floor with a flashlight to break up such lewd and lascivious behavior. Seems incongruent, given our leadership-sponsored performances by Flo Rida and New Boyz, right?

In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy argues that with the rise of raunch culture and the porn industry, images of women have again been co-opted in the interests of men and making money. Women, rising in their careers and the workplace have had to play by the rules, becoming one of the boys in terms of chauvinism and giving the boys what they want and expect in terms of image. We’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that women’s lib has come so far that we don’t even need such a concept anymore. We’re living in a post-feminist world, in which women are so sexually “liberated” that we’re free to flash our tits on Girls Gone Wild and dress as skankily as “we” (i.e., the male world) desire, all in the name of sexual self-expression. Yet, as Levy points out, in the midst of all this “liberation” many women still may not be freely expressing their own selves, but really playing into the artificial, unrealistic, even dangerous ideals we’ve been steadily spoon fed by the media. Free, informed choice doesn’t necessarily exist. So, to be a cool chick, one that is most desirable, my female students must now make themselves sexually available and emotionally unattached, as recommended by New Boyz, and drape themselves in the right brands, becoming walking billboards and victims of consumer culture, as exalted in Flo Rida’s song, “Low.” These are the values that we, as a school, are actively supporting when we sponsor concerts by such inane, commercialized performers.

South City, I think we can do better than all this. There must be some positive, socially-conscious hip hop groups we could endeavor to bring to our school via Wild 94.9’s spirit competition this year. Any input?