We want to provide positive reinforcement. But that kid who never does the homework? At a certain point, the positive reinforcement needs to be replaced by a dose of honesty. People who don’t do their work get fired in the real world, not coaxed to work harder.

Some kids are absolutely allergic to hard work.

“That’s too much work!” those kids say when they get a long assignment. I really don’t understand why they are complaining. They don’t do the work anyway.

I know who will return the homework. I know who usually won’t. What I’m a little unclear on is why my nonreturners have to complain. What work? Often the assignment never even makes it out of their locker.

Eventually, I am calling home, making out homework logs, and issuing daily reminders. Parents are checking in. And lots of the time, I still never see that work.

P.S. I read this and think maybe readers will think that this is my problem and not a general problem. I assure anyone reading that homework is a huge problem in our lowest-scoring schools. I have colleagues who no longer give homework because they gave up on getting it back.

I am passing back papers from the end of last week. There are a lot of them and without thinking I say, “This is too many papers.” The class thought this was pretty funny.

“There’s a solution for that,” one student said.
“Yeah, stop giving us all that work,” another said.
A third chimed in, “It’s all your fault you know.”

I just grinned.

Let me make this post less theoretical: I have a student I’ll call Ulyses. Ulyses is a quiet boy who does more of his homework than most. He reliably does his classwork. Awhile back, he turned in an assignment which noted sadly that once he had been a good student who got good grades. He’s having a rough year this year in comparison.  He’s getting mostly Cs and some Bs. I took some time to tell him he was doing fine. I have given only a few “A” grades this year, I told him, and I have appreciated his steady efforts.

Here’s the thing: I’m not sure if he started kindergarten in the U.S. and is still in bilingual classes seven years later. Some of my students started kindergarten here and are in year seven — destined at this rate to finish high school in bilingual classes unless some changes are made. But I know Ulyses has been in bilingual classes since early elementary school.

He tells me he got high grades in his bilingual classes in elementary school. My question is the following: If he was doing so well, why has he been unable to pass the English-language exit test for all these years? He isn’t even doing particularly well on the test, not well enough to qualify for part-time help. He is in full-time bilingual classes. If this boy had actually been doing well, I would have expected him to learn English.

But I believe him when he tells me he always got good grades. He’s an honest kid. What I suspect happened here is a version of what I wrote when starting this entry. I bet his teachers just kept putting positive comments on his papers, no matter how many mistakes those papers had on them. They probably wanted to avoid making him feel bad, so they avoided directly correcting many of his mistakes.

They may have intended to be kind. What they did to Ulyses was not kind, however. This is a good kid without any learning disabilities who has fallen years behind grade level despite probably having been a diligent student, especially in his earlier years. An outsider might suspect this is an example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The scariest part of what I’ve written: I’m not sure Ulyse’s problems have resulted from the soft bigotry of low expectations. I think I’m looking at what can happen when current educational philosophy is put into practice by people who don’t understand that if you reward crap, you will keep getting crap.

Robbie really has no idea how to do his work. He is not defensive. Just resigned. I say you need to do this. He says he does not know how.  He missed – what, half the year last year? Who knows. He stays home to help his mom, despite attempted school and county interventions. I look at him. A brief silence falls. I know he does not know what I am talking about. He has missed so much I don’t know how to fill in the gaps. I launch in to try. He looks so defeated.

“When only 3 people pass your test, that says something about your teaching.”

I absolutely agree with that kid. I sometimes make tests that are harder than I expected, (actually I regularly do this despite my best efforts) but if I ever write a test that only 3 people pass, it will probably be time to retire. The test should reflect what I taught.

And I had better have taught more than three people in the room.

The men and women over in the Administration Office need to wrap their heads around the meaning of the broken water fountains.

Message sent to the Principal of our school:

“(Mr. Principal), please make sure that your staff and students are aware that this is not acceptable. We can not afford to be repairing equipment when our budgets are as tight as they are.”

From: (Someone in the Central Office)

I am sure we cannot afford to repair these fountains.

I was here, though, for the brief period a few years ago when they shut down bathroom breaks. That sure failed. I remember vividly that one girl called her mom from the classroom of a colleague and her mom said, “Just go.” The girl went. So did everyone else in the class who wanted to go and my colleague had the choice of writing up a group of kids, with a likelihood that nothing much would happen to them, or just rolling over. She rolled. I walked upstairs at that time listening as a paraprofessional (!) explained to a student that restricting bathroom privileges violated the student’s civil rights and the student should just go if he felt like it. I took my kids in a group a few times, which was allowed, at the cost of a considerable amount of class time. I did not want to do this group activity, but some girls at certain times of the month require a little flexibility. (I’m sure the nurse was flooded with girls at this time, too, since sending girls to the nurse got around the bathroom restriction.) The restrictions did not last long since they began to suck up quantities of administrator time, as teachers were forced to write up kids for going to the bathroom.

So let’s assume we cannot keep our students out of the bathrooms. (Nor should we, obviously.) Then the next choice would be sending them with security to the bathroom. But security is pretty busy. In fact, they don’t always come when you call them. They certainly can’t be running around the school taking 14 year olds to the bathroom. That means students will actually be going by themselves to the bathroom sometimes.

And that means that vandalism will happen. A small percentage of our students create most of our disciplinary referrals, but members of that group can be hell on wheels. One thing that those Administrators who don’t work inside schools may not understand is that kids who know the system may not express their anger directly. They’ve learned not to push the adults in their lives. As a consequence, a few have become masters at the passive-aggressive comeback.

The water fountains really don’t stand a chance. More importantly, if we emphasize how upset we are at what’s happening to the fountains — the fountains will stand LESS of a chance. We will have targeted those fountains.

One of my neighbors is having trouble with a parent. The parent says my colleague is picking on her kid. She called and chewed out my poor colleague out on the phone, demanding a meeting. But all of this kid’s teachers are having trouble. Mom just doesn’t want to acknowledge that her boy is developing disturbing behaviors now that he is in 7th grade.

I do feel for some of these parents. They’ve been doing their best sometimes and until adolescence that best seemed to be working out. Call it hormones, call it what you choose, though, a number of kids decide to step off the education bus in middle school. A few do this earlier, a number do it in high school, but for most the turning point is middle school. Research documents the fact that middle school performance is an excellent indicator of college performance, research that most likely does not matter here. At this rate, this kid will never see the inside of a college.

The right parents can get some of these kids back on the education bus when they start trying to get off, although the best efforts of the most dedicated parents don’t always work. Good parents take away the game system until the grades go up and, sometimes, the grades go up. They help the school. Suspensions don’t turn into multiday vacations with Battlefield, Black Ops and Cheetos. Afternoon tutoring becomes part of the student’s schedule.

I looked at the newspaper article about the Elgin mom (see preceding entry) and my response was immediate: I felt profoundly sorry for her daughter. That girl will probably be suspended repeatedly, she’ll fall hopelessly behind, and she’ll leave school early, quite possibly to have a baby. A mom who encourages fighting sets her daughter up for all those suspensions. Most kids cannot make up the missing work because they’ve missed too much class time and too many explanations of new material. My colleague next door sends the math home to suspended kids, I’m sure, but that does little good when the kid is never there to hear how exponents work.

An Elgin mother was charged Thursday with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and aggravated battery after she drove her 16-year-old daughter to a local park so her daughter could fight another girl and even videotaped the incident, police said.

Asked for 5 discipline policies to put in place in a school district, a relatively strong student wrote this:

I will put cameras.
I will put a metal detector.
I will put a lot of security officers.
I will put police around the school.
I will put a big fence around the school.

His hypthothetical school may or may not be safe. It’s sure not very cheery. My middle school students enter through metal detectors. For years, schools in major urban areas such as Chicago have been putting those metal arches in middle schools and high schools, a fact that has caused brief flurries of discussion, discussion that fades away quickly. In post 9-11 times, we accept changes that would have seemed unthinkable a mere quarter-century ago. Security also waves a wand over my students and their backpacks as they enter.

On Friday,  we read an article about school security that led to my 5 discipline policies class opener. We talked about the article. My students told me all the ways they could get a gun into school past the metal detectors. This week I will have to share some of what I learned with the administration: No more letting them get away with, “It’s just my cell phone” when asked why the wand went off over their backpack as they walked into the building.