I called them the Eagles of Doom. They decorated my windows last year. On the other side of the building, I’d had a pink and purple SOAR painted by my daughter, but I inherited this room. The eagles were great.

“You had better be safe, accountable, and respectful with an outstanding attitude — or else!” They seemed to say.

This year, the paint had been erased all over the school, part of a new start for a new principal. The school did not abandon the SOAR acronym but its manifestations were smaller. A virus appeared to have decimated the eagle population. Overall, I’ll acknowledge the hallways may have made a better first impression, although I personally believe the walls of elementary and middle schools should be a little messy. Let the kids paint, I’d say. I missed taping their art to the exterior windows, also verboten.

We became more tasteful. I can’t fault the new administration for this. They wanted to raise the kids respect for their school. I am hoping they succeeded.

Eagles or no eagles, I will miss my walls. I will miss my posters, the ones I could still safely hang. I will miss the rituals, even the writing of academic standards in student-friendly language on whiteboards. I enjoyed making my room into a nest away from home.

Retirement is undiscovered country. Wish me luck, readers. I just blew up the rhythm of my life. I want more time to write and I’m pretty sure it was time to go, but … Life without random eagles will feel extremely odd at first.

She was a seventeen-year-old girl in middle school. Small and awkward, she spoke little English, but she was learning fast. I’ll call her “Pilar.” She was pregnant and she wanted an abortion. Her mom wanted her to keep the baby. The school social worker was supporting the girl. I was trying to get out of the middle.

Dad had fled the scene. He did not want a baby and he’d put enough miles between himself and the situation so that no help could be expected from him. I think he’d run to Mexico. This girl was standing alone. She was the only child at home, a home that consisted of Pilar and mom. She had no intention of talking to any girlfriends. I thought mom might make my student decide to have her baby or cause her regret to regret her choice later, but this girl knew what she wanted. She wanted to finish school. Back in Mexico, Pilar’s own father had kept her out of school until she was eight years old, when mom had seized her as part of a messy divorce and run away, eventually to the United States. Pilar was so grateful to finally get to go to school. A dream student, she listened attentively, asked many questions and did all her homework.

Pilar had also seen friends and neighborhood girls have babies and she’d watched them leave school. She wanted no part of the teenage-mom life. Home with a baby when you could be in school?

Whether you are pro-choice or not, my student made a remarkably courageous choice with only a social worker she could barely understand for strong support. I laid out the information to help with her choice as best I could, but I did not steer. I did try to keep all parties talking to one another.

Pilar did not have a baby. She did finish school. Given her mom’s push against the abortion, I found the steadfast resolve of this immigrant girl stunning. She never wavered.

When discussing America’s current educational struggles, I believe we don’t spend enough time on the issue of teenage moms lately, in part because the current trend seems promising. Nevertheless, we still have many teenage mothers and these moms frequently fail to finish school. Their children may then arrive at school without knowing letters, numbers, or shapes. When a girl has two or even three children before she is twenty, flashcards or educational games rarely enter the picture, forget money for Gymboree or kindermusik classes. These children’s children have fallen full academic years behind their peers when they start kindergarten if they don’t attend preschool.

(Yes, we are pushing academics too young and too hard, but that’s another post.)

When Pilar finally does have children, I’d bet there will be flashcards, online math quizzes and webquests. There will be trips to the library and to museums. Homework will likely be finished before the videogames begin.

Eduhonesty: Teen-age births have been declining in the recent past.

(http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/reproductive-health/teen-pregnancy/trends.html)

From the same article:

Characteristics Associated with Adolescent Childbearing

Numerous individual, family, and community characteristics have been linked to adolescent childbearing. For example, adolescents who are enrolled in school and engaged in learning (including participating in after-school activities, having positive attitudes toward school, and performing well educationally) are less likely than are other adolescents to have or to father a baby. At the family level, adolescents with mothers who gave birth as teens and/or whose mothers have only a high school degree are more likely to have a baby before age 20 than are teens whose mothers were older at their birth or who attended at least some college. In addition, having lived with both biological parents at age 14 is associated with a lower risk of a teen birth. At the community level, adolescents who live in wealthier neighborhoods with strong levels of employment are less likely to have or to father a baby than are adolescents in neighborhoods in which income and employment opportunities are more limited.

Teasing out the many factors influencing educational success can be difficult, but being born to a young mother tends to be a negative, if not inevitably so. In terms of our efforts to level the educational playing field, measures taken to lower the rate of teen-age pregnancy appear fairly successful. TV shows such as “16 and Pregnant”, which began airing on MTV in 2009, and “Teen Mom,” aided by high school programs in which students carry around realistic babies for days, have taken the teen-pregnancy trend in a promising direction.

We have a win here, if a win likely to disturb those who are not pro-choice. I thought I’d use a post to highlight this win. Pilar graduated last year.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-chicago-20150601-story.html
This link goes to a story about a diabetic, single Chicago dad who may need to cut his hours at McDonalds if he receives a wage hike to $15. I recommend this story, a tale for our times of interwoven, government assistance programs. The article caught my eye because dad sewed his daughter’s black lace, junior prom dress for her.

In my teaching career, I have dealt with so many single parents who juggle work and parenting as they try to help their children prepare for an easier life than the one dad or mom is currently living. I don’t know the backstory here, but I know dad made the choice to be there for his girl.

I also know these are tough times in many neighborhoods. I think I will run with this topic for awhile.

Where do classrooms go in the summer? Some lucky people get to leave their books and posters, knowing that they will return in a few months to pick up where they left off. Many of us are not so lucky, though. I won’t be back regardless, but I can’t leave my room for my successor. My successor is supposed to be upstairs. I’ve hardly ever been lucky enough to repeat a room and, when I did, painting was scheduled or Promethean boards were being installed or something. So I fill the car. Students carry boxes to my car. Family members and I cart my walls, drawers and shelves to the basement.

The basement’s quite a disaster at the moment. My photo only catches the entryway.

If their test scores and/or grades are low, my school’s students will be placed in an extra English or math class next year in place of any elective. While others take art, these students will be remediated. Scores indicate these students have not mastered fundamentals and thus require extra help.

I wish we could embed those fundamentals into a fun elective. I am concerned that we will push some students out the door, especially since unfortunate comparisons will be inevitable. What “Manny” will see is that school seems to be much less fun for him than for “Henry.” Henry gets to take art. Henry receives good grades and gets to go to the special lunch for kids on the honor roll, the lunch where kids can use electronics. In contrast, Manny will attend an extra math class. He may be going to a special lunch for kids who misbehave, where he does his homework or other academics, since disciplinary problems go hand-in-hand with academic struggles.

Eduhonesty: I am altogether in favor of special perks for students who are doing well. Incentives work sometimes. I have had students putting in extra work and hours to get to that electronics lunch. They don’t care about honor roll, but they do want to be part of honor roll lunch where they can use their phones and play sports after they eat.

Still, I strongly suggest that we take time to try to view the world through the eyes of those kids who are nowhere near getting to sit in that special lunch. If we are trying to save these kids, we need to remember that when school becomes too grim, some kids are going to head for the door, not the next tutoring opportunity. Manny’s secret mantra may become “I’m outta here. ” If he chants that mantra enough, he will make it happen.

He’s unfortunate enough to fall in that Hispanic category, too, a gray line that’s been falling but that remains above the other ethnicities recorded in the government’s chart.

Regarding yesterday’s surprise visit: Left to my own devices, at this time of year, I’d normally be playing math jeopardy or bingo. But, no, I was frantically trying to complete the week’s lesson plan which required presentations by a fair number of unwilling students. Bilingual students may benefit from class presentations (one-quarter of the rubric points on the team’s rubric), but they definitely don’t like them, with a few exceptions who are either towards the top of the class or are simply natural hams who crave an audience. If I’d been doing my own thing, I believe we’d have looked great, as we often do.

Eduhonesty: A perfectly awful ending for a perfectly awful year.

P.S. O.K., it wasn’t a perfectly awful year. That’s hyperbole. My kids and I had a great day today. We’ve had lots of great days. I love those kids. But really!? A surprise visit from a coach on the last real day of instruction? When I am retiring? The world of teaching has become so strange.

P.S.S. The actual feedback from that visit was entirely laudatory. I can definitely be my own harshest critic — a problem in these feedback-laden times.

Another coach popped in today, once again at a relatively unfortunate time. I had one of my lowest math students trying to present his project. I followed up with the only student who finished her project but had not yet spoken, not allowing her to take a “D” and skip the presentation as she requested. This student hates to speak in public, in part because she speaks almost no English. The Dean had just been in with a suspended student, collecting that student’s work, a student had thrown another student on his back only a few minutes previously in the hallway, and it was near the end of the day. I can’t give my class great attentiveness points. I was allowing a couple of kids to work on their presentations on the Chromebooks, too, since they had to finish and present today. The grades are due tomorrow. The room was a disaster, since we are throwing out binders, papers and other detritus from the closing school year. Some of them had tossed out their used math workbooks and one had torn up the cover of that book in the process, leaving the pieces on top of the garbage. Sigh.

I feel like I just took pop quiz #6,232 for the year and I’m pretty sure I failed to pass with flying colors. I’m not sure I passed in any form. Every other hour of the day would have been better, mostly much better, but that “pop quiz” has to be the perfect example of my luck for this year. Just like some of my kids taking the latest unexpected or overwhelming test, I am sure I looked sad. I felt sad.

I suppose I should appreciate my luck. Unlike my kids, I do have options. I can drop out of school, for example.

Eduhonesty: Oh, wait! I am dropping out. Retirement seems like the best plan at the moment. I am so done with pop quizzes.

The end of May always brings questions like this. Do we have stuff to do? Yes, we are going to work. We still have stuff to do.

“It’s not over yet,” I say, channeling Princess Leia in Star Wars.

So far, no one has done a Han Solo on me — “It is for me, sister,” Han Solo replies. — but I’m clear that a number of students think they’re done. One tried to go home with his mom after playing in the band at the high school graduation until I pointed out that he had a 20 point math project due tomorrow. He called his mom and settled in for the hour and a half remaining in the school day.

This cake is all but baked. The grades are almost all in. Everybody’s in a good mood. Even the failing are in a good mood, since they know the district does not plan to retain anyone. I give pep talks. I discuss higher education options. I push reading. I feed them red licorice. I liked it when I discovered they had made up their own candy and chips schedule for the week and taped this to the wall. A more alert teacher might have noticed the snack chart sooner, but I left the chart up. I support individual initiative.

Eduhonesty: A pleasant day was had by almost all as we researched math concepts on the Chromebooks, their music playing in the background.

I’d like to share a quick explanation why 82 minute, bell-to-bell instruction may not be such a good idea. I have a small, white remote. I am not good with small, white remotes, or keys for that matter. The start of this year was rocky. For one thing, for the first time ever, my students were being bombarded with tests, many of them academically above anything those students had ever seen before. They were unhappy. I was unhappy. They took out their unhappiness on me for some weeks, stashing that remote a couple of times among other incidents.

Fortunately, we made our peace. We’re a team now and have been for most of this year. I love those guys. They know I am trying to teach as fast as I reasonably can. I help as much as I am able and I provide retakes. For much of the year, I’ve driven an hour on Saturdays to make sure they received the tutoring they needed. They now realize the tests are not of my doing. So we’re fine.

They help me find my remote. They help me keep the classroom clean (mostly) and they volunteer for many tasks that make my day go smoother. But if they didn’t like me, my students could make my life nightmarish. I’ve seen it happen in more than one classroom. One year, a kind, soft-spoken, first-year teacher had gum put in her hair multiple times. Calculators were thrown out her windows. She never made it to a second year. I taught Spanish a couple of years ago and I was so glad to see the end of that year. One class, in particular, resented the pace created by the 304 page curriculum. I can’t blame them in the sense that we did almost no fun projects — we had no time with all those pages to cover — but that class was miserable and they made me miserable.

Eduhonesty: Kids push back. They don’t just march because we say march. They need to know why they are marching. They also benefit from having a rapport with their teacher. I know one can teach without that rapport but I don’t want to try. If we do nothing but push, push, push academics, we lose enormous amounts of time to passive resistance. In my experience, taking a few minutes to find out what everyone did over Memorial Day week-end results in a net time gain. The fact that I care that a kid visited her aunt makes that kid much more willing to work when we do buckle down.