Cedar is 20 months old today

Cedar is 20 months old today! Almost closing in on the terrible twos!

He's all boy now. No trace of baby left here.

Thankfully he's mostly done with teething, he's kind of having a resurgence (molars), but for several months has been free of this menace. Since he's not teething, he's been less bitey, thankfully.

He's still an awesome eater, and will eat anything as far as I can tell. He can feed himself for the most part, but is still funny about using utensils. He can do it, but often chooses not to. Guess using his hands seem more efficient. He loves fruits and vegetables.

He's pretty good at walking now. He can walk on the sand without falling down most of the time. He can walk backwards (which he thinks is hilarious), and likes to twirl around a bit if he's in the right mood. He runs away if he knows you want him for a diaper change or a bath.

His favorite toys right now are stackable cups, and he's still a really big fan of jar lids. He also likes his duplos although he hasn't figured out how to put them together yet. Other toys he likes are balls, cans, and rattly things.

He's as passionate about reading as ever--if I had the stamina for it, I think he would sit in my lap for hours and be read to. He's going through a stage where he wants to know what things are called, and points at whatever he wants to know the name of. He clearly remembers this because if I ask him to point at something specific, he usually can, although with less familiar items, he needs a wait time of about 5 seconds.

He still likes his "specks", but he's also into sticks and rocks now. When we go to the beach he will try to pick up all the rocks and give them to me. He's also really fascinated by holes, and will poke any he finds.

He gets pretty splashy in the bath.

He still takes the huge afternoon nap that lasts a couple of hours.

He still thinks everything's funny. The sound of his laugh is changing a little bit and he sounds less like a baby all the time.

He's still very easy to take places. He likes the stimulation of being out and about, although he not crazy about being in the car for any length of time. He likes to hold your hand while you drive.

He's really into the dog. Brian's taught him how to feed the dog a treat, and he likes that. They go for walks together a lot, although, now I can't take them both to the beach by myself because of the logistics of keeping her on a leash and carrying him at the same time.

He's still not talking. He makes some random noises, but other than dada and mama isn't talking, just babbling a bit.

I love how he comes running up to the door when he hears my keys in the lock. It's almost always time for dinner by the time I get home. It's still pretty nice out, so I take him and the dog for a walk over to the bay after dinner. When it's too windy, or I'm too tired, we just hang out in the living room and play until it's time for bath and bedtime. He still goes to bed around 8pm, and that seems to work well. He's currently into watching football with daddy when he's home. Otherwise, I chase him around the living room and throw his balls for him to chase.

He's usually a happy mellow kid, but when he doesn't get something he wants, he cries like all get out. Preview of the terrible twos???

He had to give up his beloved pacifier...he had taken to sticking the whole thing in his mouth (to chew on with his incoming back molars) so we had to take it away, and he's had to give it up cold turkey. As a result, it takes him longer to go to sleep at night, but I'm hoping it will also encourage him to work on talking.

Working with At-Risk Youth: Exposure

Exposure means helping your students connect with the unfamiliar. There are many wonderful and fascinating things in this world, but your students probably have no idea many of them exist! We are all products of our environment, and in some cases, the environment may be rather limited. For this reason, a good teacher is an ambassador to other realms and possibilities. You can open a lot of doors for your students, and one of the best ways to do this is bring the world to them. This doesn’t mean you have to go on fancy field trips, but rather bring the outside world in to your room (although I highly recommend taking the students on fieldtrips if time and finances permit). But assuming you’re working with limited time and resources, here’s some things that open doors and require almost nothing in terms of time and energy, but will definitely broaden your student’s horizons:

1. National Geographic: Possibly the finest publication in the world, this is my number one pick for free time reading (or topical extensions). Reluctant readers seem to enjoy reading National Geographic as much as more advanced students, and if they do nothing more than read the photo captions, they’re still getting a lot of thought provoking reading done. Students who often won’t read anything else will usually read National Geographic. I’ve seen students with severe reading disabilities take a shine to National Geographic, as well as gang members. You just never know who will find it appealing. The beauty of National Geographic is that one little publication accomplishes so much: it increases student’s knowledge of other cultures, the entire gamut of sciences from astronomy to zoology, history, geography (of course), and often provides artistic inspiration and visual interest. It’s inherently interesting for students of all ages, and in an ESL classroom, is a good way of providing visual reminders of home since they run features on every conceivable part of the world. They often prompt interesting conversations, and in and of themselves may inspire you to teach certain topics you hadn’t considered. You can subscribe if you wish, but you can also get them free from all kinds of places. This is one of the most read items in my classroom, and when I’m doing thematic units, I pull out the issues that support the topic we’re reading about and put them in an expanded text set that students can browse during the course of that unit. For instance, in February, we often student China (Chinese New Year), so I pull the issues about China out of the main collection, and stick them in a box with the novels I have, and students often helps themselves to these and read them during class without any prompting whatsoever from me.

2. Temporary Libraries: When you are studying a particular topic, you can check out books from the school library or public library that support that topic, and expand the offerings in your classroom on an as-needed basis. For instance, when we studied Ancient Egypt one time, I went and checked out all these huge oversize picture books of the Pyramids, and the kids loved them. This works well for almost anything, and the library is full of this kind of stuff. Some of the very best items are found over in the children’s section. DK (Doring Kindley) and Usborne put out a huge range of picture reference books on almost every conceivable topic, and these are usually located in the children’s department (but trust me, they are equally fascinating to teens and adults). No matter what you’re studying, there’s probably some kind of complementary publication that would support it. Thematic units I’ve built “temporary classroom libraries” around are marine biology, Black History, Africa, the environment, Native Americans, and survival skills (while reading Hatchet). This is where you can think outside the box a bit, and bring in things that kids don’t normally experience in school. This also brings to life aspects of a topic that are consistently neglected by textbook publishers. For instance, during Black History Month, in addition to all the biographies I checked out, I also checked out a bunch of jazz CDs and we listened to them in class, and we also listened to audio excerpts of authors reading their works (definitely more interesting than the half a page bio in the textbook). I recently did a Driving Safety Week in my reading class, and brought in oversize picture books of cars and trucks, and that was a huge hit. Aside from books, you may to consider magazines, maps, brochures, guest speakers, music, Youtube clips, films, props, instruments, etc. If you are studying a particular part of the world or time period, see if you can bring in objects that represent that. Teens love realia just as much as kids do.

3. Permanent Library: There are some things that are so compelling to students that you should plan on keeping them around all the time. Plan on getting all of this stuff free or cheap because students may “fall in love” with something and it could disappear. Make sure whatever you have, it’s expendable. Aside from the usual suspects (popular novels), I highly recommend stocking vocational reading materials, college level textbooks on a variety of subjects (you can get these cheap at places like Goodwill or yard sales), picture books (National Geographic puts out some really nice ones on various topics), books about sports, manga (Japanese comics), comics like the Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes (reluctant readers WILL read these), poetry books, Art Books, Oversize/Big Books (still fascinating to teenagers), and books about things that students are interested in but not likely to find in a school setting because they aren’t part of the regular curriculum (e.g. Pirates, Ghost stories, etc). The reason you want to have these things around is so that students can enjoy them during their free time. Students can expand on their interests, or possibly develop new ones. I would suggest providing these kinds of materials at a variety of reading levels (easy to college level) and letting the students discover them on their own. I call my collection, the “mental vacation” and when a student is finished/bored, refer them to go take a “mental vacation”, and they know just what I mean.

4. Setting: Sometimes it’s fun to leave the classroom and do the day’s learning in other settings. This is true anytime, but especially true during the blah days of winter, or when things are feeling a bit stale. Things I have done with my classes are read outside (when the weather’s nice enough), go for walks outdoors (observation activities, scavenger hunts, relay races and other physical challenges, trash pick-up). If you have the facilities, you can go to the library, do noisy group work in the cafeteria (if it’s empty—great place for practicing dialogs or doing messy projects that require a lot of space, by the way), use the auditorium, do things in the gym that support academics, you name it. If you live in a walkable community, you can go on community outings that support the goals of your class (almost anything can be justified under the heading of life skills!). Some off campus ideas include navigation/trip planning using public transportation (if you have it), going to a restaurant (multicultural studies or foreign language), going to the store (budgeting/finance), job seeking/career info (set up with area businesses), community clean-up projects, recycling trips, tours of local community services, and so on. Anything that gets the students out and interacting in the community in a positive way is probably something to consider. Consider the merits of incorporating service projects into whatever you teach.

These ideas aren’t new, and I certainly didn’t come up with them all by myself. Frankly I’ve stolen quite a few of them from other people, and had a lot of success using them in my work with at-risk students. The beauty of these principles is that they actually work for ANY kind of student, but some of them are so atypical for your average classroom setting that the sheer novelty of them often catches students by surprise, and promotes engagement. Students with labels aren’t that different from everyone else—they have the same need to be respected, want to belong to a supportive community, want to be able to make choices in how they spend their time, need supportive structures to feel safe, want to learn things that are useful and valuable, and need to be exposed to new things. Will these ideas solve all of your problems in working with tough cases? Probably not, but compared to what these students are used to: sterile/minimal environments, repressive top-down learning (canned curriculum), limited options—the sheer novelty of having a classroom environment that emphasizes a comfortable mix of individuality/community and intellectual freedom often works wonders. There’s a lot more that can be said about working with at-risk students, but in the grand scheme, having an overall structure that promotes the wonders of learning, and open inquiry often invites students into an academic world that they may have never envisioned themselves as being a part of. Students that typically feel excluded or marginalized, tend to be quite disengaged from school by the time they reach adolescence, and often thrive given a more personal, open-ended environment in which to conduct the business of learning.

Working with At-Risk Youth: Why do we have to do this?

The importance of cultivating an atmosphere of choice feeds right into the big question: “Why do I have to learn this stuff?” And hopefully you, the teacher, can answer that! Real-life applications are important to all students, but especially the at-risk ones. For a variety of reasons, most live in a world that only recognizes the here and the now (as opposed to delayed gratification—where you’re working at something for a really long time and eventually you’ll see where it all comes together and pays off). Delayed gratification may have worked well for you (especially if you have advanced degrees), but for most of your students, this is as foreign as another galaxy. When you don’t know where you’re doing to live next week, or whether or not you’ll have food at all during the last week of the month, or whether or not your mom is going to be deported at any moment, well it kind of puts a premium on what you can accomplish TODAY. And it’s not just your students who are thinking along these lines. Society is currently enamored with instant gratification, so many of your students come with this mindset too, but we teachers are mostly in the business of work now, play later. What this means is that students want to know, what can I do with this here and now? If you can’t answer that, you may have lost half the room already. Depending on what you are teaching, you may have to figure out how you can sell it to students coming from this mindset. The good news, is no matter what you are teaching, there are aspects of any discipline that are so inherently interesting, that you won’t have any trouble drumming up interest for your subject area. The tricks is to start seeing the world through the eyes of your students, and find out what things they find useful, motivating, and fascinating. And use this to your advantage (as a gateway) to ensure they stick around when you have to do the “other stuff” too.

Almost any subject has here and now applications. What you’re leaning towards is hands-on real-life examples of your discipline in action. Almost any abstract concept, has a counterpart somewhere in the concrete day-to-day lived experience of your students. The trick is to start thinking about academics in terms of life experiences. For instance in math, you can measure all kinds of things—and they don’t have to be boring book examples of measurement. Measure the things people know intimately and care deeply about. Talk about money—the kids need to know more about that anyway, and as teens, they’re definitely interested in that. Study astronomy, where the really big numbers happen! These are just a few examples. Better yet, start getting interdisciplinary. Some of the most engaging lessons and units I’ve ever seen were interdisciplinary and combined multiple subjects (reading, science, life skills, etc). If you teach in a traditional setting, figure out what the other teachers are doing, and connect with that so that your students get more exposure to the same topic from different angles. For instance, take WWII—history teachers will obviously explore the historical implications, but science teachers could take on some of the technological developments that occurred at that time, Reading/Language Arts teachers can read novels from the perspective of various sides, and in math there’s a lot of opportunity to use the data regarding casualties, money spent, etc.

Working with At-Risk Youth: Choices

Once you’ve got them there, and established a “working group” (the way I envision a well-functioning group of learners), the third principle is to provide the maximum level of choice (within supportive structures). This is not something that your students are going to be good at initially--it will require training from you, and it won’t blossom overnight. The kinds of students with the fanciest labels are the very people with the least amount of practice making choices. The more labels you come to school with, the more likely you’ve been told what to do all your life. Kids with labels (Title I, SPED, ESL, whatever) are the ones who usually are “required” to do things, as opposed to the other kids who have had more experience with making choices about their future. But kids with labels need just as much practice with making choices as everyone else in the school. In fact, they need to get good at it because having a sense of personal agency (being a person who CAN make choices) is the only thing that will help them overcome whatever barriers happen to exist in their life.

You have to start out with baby steps, and build up to a greater amount of autonomy. Some examples of expanding choice in my classroom are: where to sit (I allow students to sit where they want as long as it works for me), what to read during SSR (students can choose from a number of different kinds of reading material, which may not always be novels), to work alone or with a partner (most of the things that occur in class aside from testing are things one could choose to work on alone or collaboratively—it doesn’t matter to me how it gets done), how much work to do (there’s set minimums for everyone, but students are welcome to exceed them for a higher grade since grades in my classes are based largely on productivity), what kinds of work to do (within various units, there’s a number of assignment options that students can choose from), how to spend free time if the work is finished, what kind of grade they want (I make the criterion for the grading very clear, and give students a choice to earn higher grades of they desire to do so) and later on, students help plan the curriculum by selecting some of the topics we study in class, or propose activities that support these objectives. Needless to say, going from “Where do I sit” to “What do I want to learn” is a bit of leap, and it takes time to get there, and not all classes can handle maximum choice, but no matter where they are, by the end of the year, you can bring an entire group of learners further up the spectrum on the scale of autonomy than where they were before they were in your class.

Working with At-Risk Youth: Respect and Relationships

Respect is number one on my list of moves because everything you do in the classroom begins and ends with respect. Unless mutual respect has been established, acceptance of you as the teacher will not happen, and without respect, the student may not choose to learn, which means all of your subsequent efforts will be in vain. This may be the very thing that makes working with at-risk youth one of the most difficult jobs out there—to be effective with these guys, you have to be able to build and establish respect very quickly in places where it may be entirely absent, and do so in a way that is perceived as being legitimate (“legit”) by the students. Respect is (and should be) as basic to teaching as liking kids, but we all have seen plenty of examples when that was not the case. Respect is something students talk a lot about, and a few may have very advanced ideas about respect, but as the teacher, you still have to be better be better at it than anyone else in the room. As much as students talk about “respect”, they need you to be the expert at it, and model it, so they can get better at it too. I can’t tell you how to go about it—but I will say that in this case, it’s very important to be “real”, whatever that means for you. Any amount of effort you have to put into to laying the groundwork for respect is completely worth it, and will pay enormous dividends later.

Once the basics of respect are established in the classroom environment, building healthy relationships and a sense of belonging are the next things to work on. These are important because people have an innate need to belong to groups, and feel good about themselves. Having a positive classroom pays dividends because it eliminates a lot of potential sources of distraction (drama and conflict), creates an environment where people feel safe to take risks and try new things (promotes receptiveness to learning), and have a sense of pride in themselves as learners (students see themselves as people who can learn). This is especially critical when you are teaching something that is stigmatized (such as Special Education, a remedial class, the ESL class, or something perceived of as having less prestige). No matter what you call it, the kids know the labels, and are aware of their status in the overall school and community. Creating an environment that’s an antidote to all of that—a safe space to come together and do the business of learning, is a highly effective way of boosting some of the statistics that schools track (and in turn get measured by): attendance, disciplinary rates, and of course, the biggie academic achievement (test scores). Positive classroom relationships promote better attendance rates (class is an enjoyable place to be, and sometimes is one of the only safe-havens in a kid’s life), decrease the amount of time spent on discipline (people prefer to do what everyone else around them is doing—and if that happens to be learning, so much the better), and if you have students showing up regularly, and working diligently while they’re there, the test scores DO tend to go up by default without having to do anything fancy.

Working with At-Risk Youth

Working with At-Risk Students

Ever since the beginning, I have seemed to gravitate towards working with at-risk students. While other teachers drool over high income school districts and teaching assignments like IB/AP classes and Honors English, I actually prefer a good old fashioned remedial reading class full of Title I students. My first students at the Memphis Literacy Council were adults who were former Title I students. As adults, they were very low-income, and had grown up poor (the older ones grew up out in the cotton fields of rural North Mississippi), many were (or had been) teen parents, several had obvious learning disabilities, some were homeless (or had been), and some had problems with drugs and alcohol (and a few even had parole officers that would call to check up on their attendance!). Others had overcome the same risk factors, and were in pretty stable situations, had worked successfully for years in entry-level jobs, but couldn’t advance to supervisory positions due to their low literacy. These guys were the inspiration for a lot of the things I have done ever since, knowing what the outcomes look like when you don’t get the help you need earlier in life.

During the four years that I worked with the adult learners at MLC, I went on to develop a rather Freirean philosophy of teaching. (I highly recommend reading some of Paulo Freire’s writing if you are planning on working with adolescents in any kind of learning or mentoring context—in his situation, he’s writing mainly speaking to working with adults in the area of literacy, but a lot of what he says is applicable to any sort of teaching that involves working with teens—who are basically adults in training, and have a similar desire for both personal autonomy and to belong to something greater than themselves). For some reason, Freire really resonates in my work with at-risk youth. If I had been aware of Paulo Freire back in my MLC days, I could have saved myself a lot of time developing various ideas about effective teaching that I arrived at by trial and error.

Boiled down to the essentials, and stripped of any fancy philosophical talk, my five basic principles of working with at-risk students are these:

1. Respect 2. Healthy Relationships and Belonging 3. Maximum choice (within supportive structures) 4. Real-life applications (what can I do with this here and now) 5. Exposure

For a breakdown on each of these, read the subsequent posts.

Back to School Classroom Survey

How many kids in your classroom? What I do is more like resource than anything. We have a cap of 15, so I’m usually right at capacity. Occasionally I’ll have an extra student or two in the room when another instructor is absent. Then again, more than a dozen feels totally crowded in such a small room.

How many desks? I don’t have desks, but tables. I couldn’t fit 15 desks in my room if my life depended on it. We’re often one chair short.

Do you have anybody to help you? Other than sometimes having a student as a TA to do the photocopying, not really.

How much did you spend out of your own pocket to get your worksite ready for the first day? Not sure, but I do spend my own money on supplies and books.

What is your biggest concern? Currently it’s drug use. Generally it’s figuring out what to do with certain students who aren’t making progress.

What's the best and the worst thing going on in your school? Best-some of the trade instructors are showing signs of interest in collaboration around students (who need interventions). I'm also liking the Timed Reading Program. Worst-my colleagues are behaving worse than the students.