Teaching...and more

Some tips for the newbies...

Learn their names- it lets them know you care about them and it helps
with discipline. They won't act up as much if they know you know who
they are.

Keep your cool, its probably one of the most important things you can
do.

Be prepared, I try to arrive at least 15-20 mins early each day.

Act tough- either you work the crowd, or the crowd works you.

Its not that big of a deal- at the end of the day, you don't have to
go back if you don't want to.

Its easy to piss them off- tell them to do their work, sit in their
assigned seats, take away their drinks and drawings... Pick your
battles.

Today, I'm in high school teaching math. It's nice because they're
working silently and working hard. I taught about multiplying,
dividing, adding and subtracting fractions this morning- but taught
many students in Spanish. Gotta be versatile- too bad I don't speak
Arabic... They spoke English pretty well though.

I'm almost done with Barack Obama's first book: Dreams From My Father-
its really good. Its helped to explain some of the things I see in the
schools.

One excerpt I read yesterday was from a pastor talking with him who
had this to say about the public schools:

"The first thing you have to realize...is that the public school
system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-
city schools are about social control. Period. They're operated as
holding pens- miniature jails, really... Just think about what a real
education would involve. It would start by giving a child an
understnading of himself, his world his culture, his community. That's
the starting point of any educational process. Thats what makes a
child hungry to learn- the promise of being part of something, of
mastering his environment. But for the black child, everything's
turned upside down. He's learning about someone else's history and
culture... Is it any wonder the black child looses interest in
learning?at least the girls have older women to talk to, the example
of motherhood. But the boys have nothing. Half of them don't even know
their own fathers. There's nobody to guide them through the process of
becoming a man. In every society, young men will have violent
tendencies. Either they're directed and disciplined in creative
pursuits or those tendencies destroy the young men, society, or both.
" p. 258

I agree with a lot of what this guy says- there are some big problems
in education- but its not the schools' fault- the absent fathers,
poverty, lack of discipline- all contribute to one big social problem.
I try to help as a positive influence in their lives. I learn their
names- even if I'll never see them again. I encourage them to work
hard. If all of the adults in their lives showed them just a little
love- it would go a long way. It takes a village...

( ps- I'm typing all of these on my phone...)