Summer School

I know it's been awhile. I've been a bit overwhelmed with the end of the school year and all my craziness. I ran a half marathon and chaperoned prom...then I finished the school year and... got a nasty cold. Seriously, I was sick for more than a week. I'm not sure if I should be angry that I got sick on my one week off or if I should be glad that I didn't get sick the last week of school (that would have sucked).

Anyway, you might have noticed that I'm teaching summer school. The fact is: I need the money. I was unassigned from summer school from last year, and it's really hard to find a last minute job for 5 weeks. REALLLY hard. I hate lying. HATE. I'm too damn scrupulous.

So, I had my first big moment in class today. Oh, sure, I have some shitheads. And there's this one kid who's been showing up late and not doing his work. When I went to collect his signed Course Poicies (you know, you and your parens sign that you know and agree to the rules), he said his parents didn't sign them because they weren't talking to him.

Hold up.

Did I understand this right?

They are so mad that they won't talk to their son, not even to sign paperwork for school. Like most of my students, he is an English learner, and he mumbles and slurs his English. This is a trait of second language learners: they are scared of gettin the target language wrong, so they try to hide everything by talking quietly and not enunciating.

But let's get back to point at hand: they are so mad that they will not talk to their son. I got enough out of him that it was a very serious infraction that he didn't feel comfortable telling me (that's fine), but he knew what he did, he did have someone to talk to, and he didn't know when they would start talking to him again.

Wow.

I can't help but remember a conversation I had with a friend's father who is a family court judge. He told me that he tells parents that no matter how angry they are, they should never lock their child out. He knows it's tough; he knows how infuriating misbehaving teenagers can be, but the fact is that when they are running away and messing up and making bad choices is the EXACT moment that they NEED their PARENTS. As angry as you are, he told me, you need to take them back in and keep them safe. He said this not only as a family court judge, but as a father who had a son who struggled with drugs and had run away from home as a teenager.

I know that I don't "connect" with my students in many ways. I am not a touchy-feely person. It's not that I don't hug or shy away from human contact, but it takes me time to develop really deep relationships with people. A single school year doesn't really lend itself to my kind if friendship. Those of you who are my good friends know that I do care deeply about my friends: I'm not sure my students see that at the start of the year. (I did have one of the biggest pains in my ass stop and chat with me today -- a school year later, we might not be bff's, but we're good.)

So they don't always know, but I do feel deeply. I feel for my student whose parents won't talk to him. But not just that, but he is making choices that force them to that point. They must be beyond their limit (his limited conversation hints that whatever he did or didn't do was big). So here I am, trying to teach him English.

Big sigh.

Spunkalicious

I ran into one of the veteran English teachers while at the copy machine yesterday afternoon. He asked me how things were going. My reply was that there was a week left and I was still standing. What was I supposed to say: the truth? Sometimes I am treated like such crap that I want to crawl into a little ball and, well, bawl? He told me that I had spunk. We'll see if "spunk" gets me through next year.

Hell, we'll see if it gets me through the summer. I found out I get to teach rising Freshman who need extra skills. It's a chance to be "creative"; read: create a new curriculum, again. I'm still waiting to do something again so I don't have to keep starting from scratch. I guess the students will rotate through 3-4 classes per day. So, I'll only have to create one one-hour lesson per day, but it means I'll have God-knows how many students. I was looking forward to having 40 instead of 180.

On Monday, I'll try to figure out if this class has existed before so I hit the previous victi-- volunteer -- up for some help.

And Plus

I owe y'all some posts (prom was last weekend), but here's a quickie so you don't get bored.

I did not always have the perfect, English-teacher grammar and vocabulary that I do now. I used to say all sorts of horrible things: "and plus" was perhaps my biggest faux pas. It's redundant; you need either "and" or "plus", not both. I would also wait for any number of activities hopefully -- instead of hoping they would happen; the actions were not taking place in a hopeful manner. I would also pahk my cah (although I had absolutely no idea why everyone else was laughing at me -- I seriously could not hear the difference between car and cah). I eventuall figured it out when I ran home in 2nd grade and told my mom that we had learned about "stanzers" (sorta like a dawnzer, I guess) -- from Rach's boyfriend's older sister, no less. Turns out I got so used to adding Rs on words that I heard ending in As, I thought "stanza" was "stanzer".

Throughout all these (and more -- I used to say "disgusting" wrong (?) -- Rach, you gotta help me out on that one), my mother taught me what was right. Even today, hearing someone say "And, plus" is like nails on a chalkboard. It takes every ounce of my strength to not be a douchebag and correct them in a loud and deprecating manner.

So, as I was reading through a letter to send out with my students to the publice, I come across this, "I understand that this will take time; hopefully, the time you spend with your senior will lead to a rewarding experience for both of you."

Do you see it?

I know, I know. Grammar is actually descriptive and not prescriptive. Language and usage change and become "correct" as more and more people use them in a certain manner. Dictionaries track how people use words more than they tell us how to use them. But it still grates on my nerves. The time the expert sources will spend with the seniors will not be done in a hopeful manner (well, if they are helping tomorrow's leaders, maybe it will done in a hopeful manner), but the author means that he hopes the time will be rewarding.

sigh

And it's not even worth getting into a discussion about it. I'll just change it in my version. Still, mad props to my mom for teaching me about this little slip of adverbial usage.