Hiking

The second grades spent two days this week at an Audubon Society center in the city. It is a true green oasis in the midst of urbia (that's the opposite of "suburbia"). It smells like the woods, and it sounds like the woods, and that is rare to find in these parts. Even though large portions of my life have been spent in rural spaces, for many of my students this is a relatively unknown world.

I told them we would go on a hike on the second afternoon. They know I love to hike. We sat in a circle in the sun to get ready for what was really more of an amble over half a mile of flat trail than a hike.

"We're going hiking!" I announced.

A shout of approval went up. "Yay!"

"Wow," I said. "There is just about nothing that makes me happier than if I say 'We're going hiking' and people say 'Yay!' Let's do it again! We're going hiking!"

"Yay!" they cried even more enthusiastically, always eager to please.

"So, there are 4 things you need to know about hiking," I said. "And the first one is this. Hiking is hard work. So you have to be really strong and tough to do it. And that means no complaining. Even when it's hard, and you're tired, and you want to stop, you can't complain, because you have to be really tough.

"Second, I'm going to be first, and you need to be behind me." [We talked a bit about how we would make sure no one fell too far behind.] "Third, we want to see birds and animals, so we have to try to go quietly in the woods so we don't scare them away." [We agreed on a quiet way to get each others' attention if we needed to show each other something.] "And last, it's important to stay on the trail, because if we walk off the trail, we'll step on things and hurt them, and we want to leave the forest the way we found it."

I told them I had learned to hike when I was their age, about 8.

"When you learned to hike, did you complain?" Pili asked.

(It is at this point in the narrative, if not before, that my parents give each other knowing looks and chuckle.)

I thought for a minute and said, "Yes, actually, I did use to whine and complain when I went hiking. But that was because no one told me that you had to be tough and strong to hike. I didn't know that rule of hiking. And at first I didn't like it that much. But after awhile I discovered that the woods were full of beautiful things to see, and I learned that if I was really tired, instead of thinking about how much farther I had to go, I could just think about each step, one at a time. When it's hard, I try to think about this step that I'm taking right now, and nothing else."

"And then you get there!" Amelia finished my thought.

"Yes, then I get there," I repeated.

I am happy to report that 16 of us "hiked" through the urban wilds for over an hour, with a grand total of zero complaints. It was warm and gentle there, and we looked at small bugs, tree bark, cattails, mallards, and burrs. We picked up sticks and put them down again, we watched red-tailed hawks coast above us, and we enjoyed the first moments of spring.

The end of the insects

From Paige's final entomology test.

"A simple metamorphosis is when some bugs don't change like a waxworm changes but a milkweed bug does not. The life cycles goes like this egg - nymph - nymph - adult. It goes the nymph three times because it never changes.

"A complete metamorphosis is when a insect goes egg - larva - pupa - adult. A milkweed bug is different because it doesn't say larva or pupa insted it says nymph three times. The adult of a waxworm is a moth.

"When insects molt they shead something cemuller to skin but it is calld exoskeleton. When a insect is littel and it has to grow up it sheds the exoskeleton."

Cemuller! I love it.

I respectfully disagree

On our second-to-last neighborhood field trip a few weeks ago, my students embarrassed me. Some of them (not all, but some) were disrespectful, defiant, and rude, both to me and to our hosts at a community organization. One of our hosts was a community organizer who had been a founder of our school. I was humiliated when I would ask of a student a simple request, such as to move over, and he would respond with "No!" or "Why?," both mono-syllabic responses delivered in a hostile tone of voice.

I realized that I have an assumption that when you are out in public, you are on your best behavior. How many times, as a teacher, will I have to learn not to assume anything? I remembered that last year we used to talk about what kind of impression we wanted to make when we were out in public, but we hadn't revisited the topic this year. My third realization was that some of my students talk to me in this way, somewhat contemptuously, on a regular basis, and that if they talk to me that way at school, why wouldn't they talk to me that way in public?

Now, I may temporarily forget things I've learned before as a teacher, and make the same mistakes over and over again, but I usually eventually remember important lessons from years past. So I remembered that, as all first-grade teachers know, it is important to teach everything. We don't assume, when first grade begins, that students know how to knock on the bathroom stall doors, or stand in line, or sit in a circle, or walk across the classroom quietly. We teach our expectations for each of these things, and millions others, very explicitly.

So, I began to teach my students how to respectfully disagree. I went to a meeting, and I watched how adults disagreed with each other, and I took some notes. We made a list on the board. Our list included phrases such as:

• I object.
• Can I suggest an alternative?
• I disagree.
• Can we talk about this?

And many more. Then we practiced. Students pretended to be me; I pretended to be them; they pretended to be the principal while I pretended to be me.

It then occurred to me that they might start to think that if they respectfully disagreed with me, they would get exactly what they wanted. And while these words, delivered in a mild tone of voice, certainly make me more amenable to listening, I knew that there would be times when I simply could not engage in the conversation. When seventy things are going on around you, sometimes you need to just be able to say, "Go do that," and have someone do it, no questions asked.

So, our next list was, "How to respectfully express disappointment." It included things like, "I would rather not, but if you really need me to, I can." Or, it offered a deep but calm sigh as a way to accept disappointing turns of events. We talked about how the teacher might say, "I can't talk to you about this now, but we can discuss it later." And we practiced with more role plays.

Of course, things did not change magically overnight. I realized that when students had spoken disrespectfully to me before, as long as it wasn't super out of line, I hadn't been sure of how to respond. In my desire not to have a strong emotional response, I would often simply ignore them. I wouldn't give them what they wanted, but I wouldn't let them know that their words or tone were unacceptable. Or, I would get frustrated and annoyed by how they spoke to me, and I would snap back, or give them a swift consequence.

So I began a slow process of trying to change patterns long ago established. "Jarad," I said the other day, "Nice job on the science work. Now turn it over and practice it once more."

"Awwwwwwwwwww," he moaned loudly and angrily as I turned away. I walked back over to his desk.

"Jarad," I said quietly, "that was not a respectful way to respond to me, and it didn't make me want to listen to you, or even be around you. Why don't we try that again?" Again, I told him to practice the science work. This time, he responded calmly and reasonably: "Ms. Swamp, I don't think I need to practice it again. I think I already know it."

I thought about it, and realized he was probably right. "You're right," I answered. "I think you do know it. Okay, you can put it away and get a book to read."

I had known that I didn't want my students to speak to me that way. What I had not anticipated was how powerful their revised tones and words would be. I myself had taught them to talk this way, but I still found myself strongly affected by these calm, reasonable phrases. Instead of being annoyed, I was willing to take a minute to think about their perspective. And often they were right, and I changed my mind, or we found a way to compromise. Things were much more civil.

I don't want it to sound like this has worked magically. We have almost two years of habits under our belts, and they are hard to break. Kids still whine or snap at me, and I still forget to calmly remind them to try it again. Sometimes I snap back, and they get madder, and then I get my way just because I'm the boss. But I have found a new way to respond to them: not with a consequence, but with a lesson or reminder, and then a do-over. I have high hopes for next year. If I start with a new class from Day 1, working on these kinds of communication lessons, we might get far by the end of the year.

Walking

I warned my kids that our field trip yesterday would be hard work for their bodies and their brains. "It's going to be like an expedition," I told them. "Lots and lots and lots of walking, and lots and lots and lots of thinking and focusing and learning. So get your bodies and brains ready!"

On the walk up the hill when we were almost back at school, I asked Israel if he was tired.

"Nope," he answered. "Are you?"

"Nope," I said.

"No," he agreed. "You must not be, because you're always climbing big mountains. This is nothing!"

A few minutes later:

"It was a lot of walking," Ramon said. "But I took it like a man!"

"Yeah," I said. "It was a lot of walking, but I took it like a woman!" He looked a little confused.

Families

Yesterday morning I went to a meeting of staff from other schools around the state who wanted to learn from our school. As one of the teacher representatives from my school, I was there to answer questions about just about anything they were wondering.

See if you can figure out what's wrong with this picture.

First question: "There are lots of things going really well at our school, but the one thing that we're having a really hard time with is family involvement. I mean, we just can't get families to show up at school. I can't tell you how many conferences I've scheduled where parents stand me up, without even a phone call. These people just don't come to the school, no matter what we do."

I am lucky enough to work at a school where I have never heard anyone say "these people" about our families. I knew immediately why families weren't showing up at their school. Would you go somewhere if the people who ran the place felt that way about you? I imagine families who face these kinds of attitudes from the school, and who may have painful histories with schools in their own lives, feel about going to the school kind of the way I feel about going to the dentist. It's never fun, I always get bad news, and it reminds me of how much it hurt when I was little.

We gave this teacher good advice: send teachers on home visits before school starts, or promise yourself you'll call each family once a month with good news. Build a relationship based on genuine feelings of good will, a common goal, and love for the students. Have culminating curricular events that students are proud of. I reminded her that one important part of this whole business is what we think and expect of families. "I have never in my life met a family who didn't want to be involved in their student's education, who didn't want the best for their child," I told her. "We have to believe that, to start from a place of knowing that about them. Families will meet those positive expectations if they feel them."

Contrast this teacher and her attitude, so common in the teaching world, with my sister, who has had such a grueling time of it this year. Systemic failures of her school and school system (and of our country) have made her teaching job an impossible task that is brutally heart-breaking on a daily basis. It would be easy for her to blame her students, and their families, almost understandable if she resorted to wondering what is wrong with them that their students act like this and can't do that. But instead, she talks regularly about how much she enjoys her students, what great kids they are, how they did this or that today that made her laugh. She had family conferences last week and ended the day feeling positive and connected, telling me how much she likes her students' families. If there's any test of a great teacher, she's passed it, then. Too bad she can't help out this veteran teacher in western Massachusetts who can't get her families to show up.