Kids are great. But some students definitely lack motivation, even if they have the energy to play video games for eight hours straight each night.

How can this be fixed? If the mystery of motivation could be solved, much of urban education might come together. The pundits in Washington ignore this facet of education, but motivation is bigger than any teacher, curriculum or set of standards.

Eduhonesty: You can set the standards anywhere you damn well please. It won’t matter it you can’t convince a student to actually do some work.

Treasure meditation is supposed to be 10 minutes of visualizing and experiencing my life after I have my greatest desires. My personal meditation includes no school and no students, interestingly enough. I go to empty ocean beaches, I go to a small lake nestled in fir-covered, green hills. I see myself holding a yard of beer in a crowded Irish pub. My consciousness avoids my school.

When it does enter the school hallways, it looks sadly at the fragmented, shattered staircase they just repaired. It’s worse now than it was, more dangerous than before. They fixed it less than a month ago but the gray tiles on the front of the risers are shattering, whether kicked by students or simply unable to bear the weight placed above them. The shards of tile are slipping hazards. I keep throwing them to the ground below for some custodian to spirit away.

Since I described the computer lab situation last year, perhaps I should throw in an update on the Computer Lab in 2012:

We now have spiffy laptops although no printer that works as yet. The computer lab has never been officially opened but I am going there anyway. So let’s say the lab opened in mid-March. People find me there and say, “Oh, is the computer lab open?”

I’m kind of amused to discover I don’t want to tell anyone that it’s open. Right now, the only people who are competing with me for the lab are the special education teachers who have their IEP (Individual Education Plan — the special program for students who need extra help) meetings there. I told one colleague who works near me. I can share the lab with him. I told a special education teacher. But mostly I’m keeping quiet.

For one thing, it’s cool in the lab. When the class goes above 85 degrees, that lab is a welcome refuge. As of this date in mid-March, the only student work saved on the disks in the downstairs lab comes from my classes. I don’t know what if anything is saved on the upstairs computers. We’re working downstairs because that was the only working lab on the day I started our PowerPoint projects. Since we are saving to specific machines, we’ll stay downstairs for now. I need to buy a flash drive so I can back-up student work.

The problem with this blog is that I approach it like I approach Facebook. I don’t want to put in personal truths because I wish to keep a light cyber-footprint. So I remain cloaked for the most part.

I have a lot of truths to tell and a lot of issues to get on the table. But I don’t want to lose my job. Contrary to what is often presented in the public, it’s absolutely possible to fire a teacher. It’s not as easy as it is in the private sector, but I have seen teachers fired.

It’s also possible to drive a teacher to quit. I watched as one long-time high school employee was moved to the middle school to teach material she hardly knew, then moved again into another subject in another room, isolated from the rest of the staff. She lasted out that year, but I never saw her again after that.

Eduhonesty: It’s difficult to fire a tenured teacher. Unions often can and do take care of their members.

Districts are more likely to drive unwanted teachers to quit and they have formidable powers at their disposal. That 3rd grade teacher who angered her Principal may suddenly find herself teaching 7th grade science in another building, if she has the endorsement, with a planning period at the tail end of the day and a sweltering room over the kitchen.

You can’t send 10 – 14 million illegal immigrants home. Even if you could locate them, even if you had enough manpower to detain and deport them, I doubt our economy could take the blow. They are holding up the lowest rungs of the service sector in many parts of the country.

So we are going to educate their children. Those kids won’t just hide in the basement or attic. I have no clue how many of my students came here through the back door. (I actually could make a reasonably good guess, but I’m not asking and I’m not supposed to ask.) I expect a fair number will never return to their home country in any case.

What does this mean for education? It means we need effective bilingual programs that prepare these students to enter American society. Right now, programs are a hodgepodge of philosophies and agendas. California and Arizona dictate one year of bilingual education while Illinois will allow a student to go from kindergarten through high school in bilingual classes. What’s best? We need to figure that out.

College libraries are loaded with academic research. Doctoral candidates fill libraries as they attempt to describe the many different states of American education, spewing out reports of varying validity and reliability.

It occurs to me that much of our older research may be pretty useless, though. The world has undergone a paradigm shift. America’s students are becoming steadily more linked into the world wide web and steadily less separable from each other, their electronics providing them with a constant barrage of communication. In the meantime, America has many more young, single parents, resulting in many minimally supervised children. Gangs control some neighborhoods. Demographics are changing all over the place.

From http://www.newgeography.com/content/003834-detroit-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me:

The children of today are not the same children who participated in the studies of the sixties. Their lives are too different. Their educational experience is necessarily different from those children who were young in the mid-1900s.

For example, homework studies of the past may genuinely no longer apply to today’s school population. The conditions of homework have changed too greatly. My students can go home and look up an essay, and then copy and paste that essay into a word document, or simply buy the essay outright. Even if they only copy and paste bits, the effect on learning is profound. The effect on integrity is equally profound.

Some weeks are so hard that it’s just impossible to blog them. Many people like to read accounts of brave, plucky people fighting against the invading aliens at all costs. Apocalyptic fiction has a real audience. But I believe almost no one would like to read a real-life, blow-by-blow, genuine account of that apocalypse. (Then again, “The Road” did pretty well.)

I don’t mind paperwork. I do mind nonsense paperwork, especially when I see that this work is creating extra confusion and trouble.

They have moved everybody’s rooms. I am to be on the second floor, sunside in a decrepit, older building without air-conditioning. The Principal promised he’d help, and I absolutely believe in his good intentions, but I also believe that I am screwed. I nonetheless had the kids move anyway. Maybe the invading alien hordes will put me out of my misery before I am actually forced to occupy that physical space.

If not, the 85 degree rule will go back into place. Above 85 degrees, we go outside if at all possible. Above 90 degrees, we go outside regardless. The test will be canceled at those temperatures for sure. Sigh.

Middle-school girls are so hard on themselves.

“I’m too fat,” they tell me. “My nose is too short. My nose is too big. I’m too short. I’m too tall. My hair’s too curly. My hair’s too straight.” They mostly agree that thin and light-complected is a win, despite the fact that complexions run darker in this school.

I had one girl run out of the class in tears when someone told her she was “flat.” They don’t necessarily want big breasts, but they sure don’t want to lose the breast-development competition.

Classroom instruction ground to a halt while I stood near the doorway, trying to simultaneously watch a class and discreetly convince the girl in the hallway that her breasts were just fine, exactly right for her age.