Pointlessly Biting My Tongue

 I am biting my tongue.

It is not my place to interfere, to pull rank, to fight my kids' battles.

But everything I know about teenage development and about teaching with equity and about decent human behavior tells me that something fundamentally is broken with so much of our school system.

I get that I'm weird: I include students' own self-assessment as part of their final grade. I allow late work and rewrites right up until the end of the semester, as long as the work is authentic and not just grade-grubbing. I don't mark down for late work. I don't give traditional tests. I think that grades should ultimately represent the students' engagement with the material and mastery of the content, not their behavior.

I've done a lot of reading, research, and contemplation. I've read a lot of what Ken O'Connor has put out there. I've read Pointless. I think about grading with equity in mind all. the. time. Every 504 and IEP requirement? Those are universal accommodations in my room. Extended time? You betcha. Need the audio? Here's the link. 

So I get that I'm weird.

But right now, my daughter is in tears because she doesn't understand her chemistry homework and she has a test tomorrow. She's had a cold all week (that I caught from my own students and then gave to her) and she's missed a couple of days of school. I kept her home because she was coughing, and even though we know it's a cold and not COVID, the stigma is there, and she doesn't want to get anyone else sick. She is exhausted and under the weather and she should have been in bed an hour ago, but she has to finish her chemistry and then read and thoughtfully annotate a 17th century passage for her American Lit class. It's her fault for procrastinating. Everything was posted online, so she should have kept up at home, and she only gets two late work passes per semester, so she has to get this done.

WHY? Why are we doing this to our kids?

What is she learning right now--long after she should be in bed--about chemistry? About American Lit? About responsibility? About humanity?

She is 15. Any metaphorical rebuttal you can give about accruing late fees on credit card payments and getting fired from a job when you didn't do your work by deadline is --frankly-- irrelevant. Because we are not teaching them about paying their bills on time or about the requirements of entry-level hourly jobs. We are teaching them chemistry. We are teaching them American Lit. We are teaching them Algebra. But we are grading them on compliance in a "gotcha" system that nails them if they are unable to pay attention one day, no matter what was going on in their lives.

I am really trying to bite my tongue. 

But this is my kid.

These are my kids. 

Quit punishing them for being human.

Grades should reflect understanding and mastery of content. And every damn kid in the room deserves the chance to truly understand the content, no matter what baggage they bring with them.

Are our policies in place because they make our lives easier? Or because they truly teach our students something meaningful?

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Are our grading procedures punitive? Or are they meant to acknowledge mastery?

Are we truly trying to reach and teach each kid in the room? Or are we demanding that they conform to a system that works best for us?

My daughter needs to go to bed. She has a chemistry test tomorrow.

I am officially two weeks behind in grading.

And so, I am biting my tongue.

Making a Memory

 As my students were working on their personal narrative essays this week, I wrote my own, to model my process from brainstorming to  revision to final edit, and to show them that writing is never done, it's just due.

The prompt: Write about an insignificant moment in your life that says something significant about you. Try to stay in the moment and avoid obvious "looking back reflection" at the end. Suggested length: 500-600 words.

The mentor text: "My Secret Pepsi Plot" by Boris Fishman.

Making a Memory

“Come on, guys, we are making a memory today!” my mom sang out, while my Pops snorted and I rolled my eyes. As usual, we were starting out 3 hours later than planned, and it would be getting dark soon. We piled into the truck, seat-belts optional, my baby sister on my mom’s lap and me in the middle, awkwardly straddling the 4wd shifter and snow plow lever in the center floor hump.

The only thing matching my Pops’ bitterness at being dragged away from work for “forced family fun” was the bitterness of the cold. I could feel it through my scruffy Moon Boots, a Christmas present to me the previous year, 3 years after they were popular. Everyone wore Duckies now, but I had knock-off Moon Boots, the silver lightning bolts on the side advertising my awkwardness.

Every year we had to cut down our own Christmas tree, a family tradition that Pops and I grudgingly put up with, because it made mom so happy. Trudging through the drifts, getting snow inside the scrunched up felt liners of my ugly boots, my socks working their way down my heels and bunching under my arches, jeans wet around the cuffs and fingers freezing because I couldn’t find my gloves, I grumbled under my breath. My mom held my sister’s hand, as she bobbled through the snow in her hand-me-down faded pink snow suit. Pops carried the chainsaw, ready to cut down a ridiculous, lop-sided tree that would never actually fit into our living room.

“This one?” I pointed, but mom rejected it. 

“This one?” No, not that one either. Pops sighed in exasperation.

“This one!” my mom breathed. This was the one, the perfect tree, her dream tree this year. The bottom branches were too wide; the top of the tree pointed slightly west. This was the perfect tree, the tree that would make this Christmas a perfect memory. These family moments meant everything to her, the family she’d built through sheer willpower and nursery rhymes.

I stood with my hands shoved deep into my pockets, willing my fingers to stop aching. As Pops sawed down the tree, jumping out of the way as it finally creaked over sideways, my sister ate snow from a small hillside on the tree farm. My mom tried to take a picture, capturing this memory moment forever, but she’d forgotten batteries for the camera again, just like she did every year. It was too dark to take a picture without the flash anyway, too dark to capture this memory that would never make it into a photo album.

As we finally dragged the tree back to the truck through the snow, Pops and I grunted and huffed, sticky sap and pine needles coating our fingers. I was on the pointy end of the tree, holding on through the scratchy branches, trying to keep the tree from scraping the ground and losing too many needles. Then, I tripped. The tree bounced to the ground and I landed with a face full of snow. Pops reached out to grab my hand and pull me back to my feet, but I yanked once, hard. He fell into the snow beside me, laughing as he landed, my sister piling gleefully on top.

And Mom smiled knowingly at her family, piled in a snowy, laughing heap on the ground, the mutant Charlie Brown tree momentarily forgotten, the snow glittering in the fading light.

This is not our tree. This is someone else's tree. Mom forgot batteries for the camera, so we don't have a picture of our tree.