Mom's Homework

            I am writing this blog because my mom told me I should. That’s right. At 46, I still do what my mom tells me to--- to be honest, I do it more now than I ever did in any other decade. My mom’s usually right about the important stuff. I resented that truth when I was in my teens and twenties.  Now that I’m ending my fourth decade, I count on it.

            I called mom and dad on my way to bowling last night to check in with them and share some news I figured only they would understand or be happy for me to share with them. Two wonderful things happened. I found an” attaboy” specifically addressed to me and my closest teaching colleagues in my email yesterday, and I saw the beginnings of a real change in a student who had the potential to be a challenge student this year.

            Mom says those are the things I should commit to paper so I remember them because something may come of them. She’s probably right, so here goes:

            I was on a field trip last week to a diversity summit. I mentioned it in an earlier blog. I was invigorated for teaching by it, but I already was inspired by the opportunity to try something new with my students this year. On the bus ride to the conference, I sat with two of my closest teaching buddies. Our friendship was founded upon a discovered mutual passion for teaching our students and shared teacher values for excellence, empathy, and compassion.

            So, on the ride up, we shared and discussed many things: the new electronic systems we are learning this year; how to use the data we now have about our students to help them meet with success in our classes; enrichment and intervention periods; how we assess our students’ learning and what improvements we are making; and stories about growing up and our families—lots of stories. I was aware our superintendent was there, but we didn’t really feel a need to be self-conscious about our conversations. They were kid-friendly and therefore boss-friendly. We really needed the chance to catch up.

It turns out our boss was listening. A week later our conversations on the bus ride had become a faded memory.

             Yesterday morning, I saw a message from our superintendent labeled “Kudos”, but I thought it was a general message to the faculty about the success of our in-service training, so I was startled when I saw this message when I finally opened it in the afternoon:

Good morning.  KUDOS to the three of you!  I could not help but notice the rich professional dialogue that took place both on the ride to the Diversity Summit and on the ride back to Stewartstown.  I congratulate you for making exceptional use of the time available to share best practices and instructional strategies.  Our students are fortunate indeed.

I’m not sure I’ve ever received a note like that from a superintendent before. It was humbling. Mom says I should shout it from the rooftops. Hello rooftops. I’m shouting at you now.

            The second reason I called my folks was to share a small victory. I met one of my students in seventh grade last year while covering the intervention room. The intent of the duty was to be on-hand to help students who needed to catch up with a missing assignment and to monitor students while they made up a missed quiz or test. This young man was a frequent visitor because he not only would not do his work, but he also was often an active disruptor of his science class.

            Every time he came in, I would ask him what he did. He would tell me honestly, and then I would ask: “Was it worth it?” Sometimes he would say it was, but most of the time he would say it wasn’t. The difference was often predicated upon exactly how irritated he was when he walked in.

            This year, he’s my student, and after the first two weeks of school, he started to show similar, work-avoidance behaviors. He would interrupt other students by tapping their shoulders, try to whisper across the room or rock apathetically back and forth in his chair. I didn’t take the bait to get angry or correct him with frothing hostility, but I did redirect. I had sidebar conversations with him, worked with him one on one, and tried to get him to understand he was in a room for learning that was safe for everyone, my strongest, my weakest, and every student in between.

            Yesterday he showed me a willingness to make the effort. Every day, as a warm up, I share with my students a quote for the day and a Greek or Latin Root Word. We are in the Latin Roots now. Since I already have shared 30 common Greek Roots with my students and we are now into the Latin Roots, to make sure the Greek Roots are not forgotten, I share words derived from the Greek Roots as vocabulary words for students to look up.

            To help my students understand the value of this daily practice, I shared that I once tutored a student who needed to improve his verbal scores to get into a college that wanted him to play soccer for them. I helped him improve his verbal score by 200 points in 4 weeks by teaching him roots. When students can look at a word and recognize there is a root word in it and remember what the root means, they have a better chance of decoding the word. I received big thumbs up from my students after that story.

            Yesterday, my former intervention “buddy” volunteered an answer when we started decoding words, “Mr. Logan, can there be more than one root word in the vocab word at the same time?”

            I answered him.“Absolutely. Which word do you see that looks like there is more than one root word?”

            “Pathological?”

            I was stunned—I hadn’t really paid that close attention to the word when I pulled it from the “pathy” list, he was right. I was extremely proud of him. “You are absolutely right. He’s in it to win it! Awesome!”  I rushed to his chair and gave him a fist bump.  “You took the skill and found something about a word no one else could see. More than that, you recognized ‘logy’ was being used in the word even though they changed the root to ‘logical.’ You made my day.”

            My “buddy” is cool. He didn’t beam but his eyes did, even though he held his countenance in his controlled smirk. He was proud too.

            Today. It happened again in the same class period, this time a student who has been identified as having language standards issues in English class(among other things, that means that acquiring vocabulary is a challenge for her.) stepped up to the plate, swung for the fences and knocked it out of the park. That one student’s decision to jump on board the train to success gave his peers permission to do the same. Now, I really don’t want to mess this up.

            That’s my story, I’m sticking to it. Pssst--- tell my mom I did my homework would ya?