Southern High School News - April 2007

My 9th grade German 1 class, hobbled together from the finest students in the Freshman Academy, is going as well as can be. I hadn't taught 9th graders in a long while, and I almost forgot how willfull and immature they can sometimes be. I am trying to appeal to their interests, and largely succeeding, but the class gets noisy sometimes. The classroom culture of off-topic chatter can easily get out of hand. Modern foreign languages teachers allow for students utilizing the target language in a wide variety of modalities, including oral speech, i.e., conversations, which for today's child is a license to talk whenever the need arises. This approach to German instruction, however valid and essential it is, only feeds and supports the inevitable culture of off-topic chatter in the collective teenage ego. In any case, the German 1 kids, despite their rambunctious demeanor, are using the language in valid ways, and for that I am satisfied.

The next unit is all about clothes, and one idea I had floating around is for the kids to create a fashion show, with students modeling what they are wearing, or even using costumes, sometimes outlandish, as they walk down the runway. And students take turns commenting on the clothes: colors, size, fit, style, etc......Stay tuned for that.

Plans like those are huge risks. Who wants to allow the kids all that freedom? Well, I do. We started a clothing project, cutting pictures of men and women from clothing magazines, pasting them to paper to form a booklet. The kids then use the current linguistic devices (see my German 1 Website for examples of those) by describing the clothes and the styles in their own words. I might modify the assignment and have the kids create a wall of fashion outside our door, with the pictures attached to the running commentary of the clothes. In any case, some sort of project will be created in a step-by-step, methodical manner. I enjoy the hidden agendas of classrooms, and injecting into it values and methods on how to deal with modern life, like maintaining concurrent projects and managing limited resources.

It's sometimes hard with my German 1 group. They still suffer from a low-level sort of social ineptitude, a holdover from the middle school years. They are full of energy and don't do well with traditional forms of instruction. They like to interact and create projects. They don't tolerate downtime one bit. Like one smart girl in my class, who rarely does homework and mostly takes advantage of my communicative-based classroom by talking constantly with others, an intelligent girl, for sure, but wholly inappropriate, in my view, behaviorally in a classroom. She says, "Now Herr Kandah, if you gave homework like this, where we cut and paste, you know I'll do it." That sums up her whole atittude toward how to behave in school. One girl said, while the hallway was filled with inter-class pandemonium, kids running around, yelling and laughing, and being generally nutso, "These kids, they got no one at home that they have to listen to, so why should they listen to anyone here?" My students are full of insights.

Southern High School is under the microscope, they say, although all year I rarely saw any central office administrators visiting. I heard they were on campus, but never saw them. Of course, foreign language isn't a priority, so they always ignore us anyways. Fellow teachers are generally disrguntled by all this negative attention to our school, rightly so, because people really don't publicly appreciate the entrenched sociological currents running our community, many of these work against our mission as a school. The biggest one is poverty. Too many kids living in households with minimal resources. Siingle parent households abound, with many single parents needing to work multiple jobs. This leads of course to poorly attended kids at home, who normally embark on alternative paths, shall we say, without guidance from adult figures.

No easy answers on how to "fix" Southern. But does it really need fixing? Are the aforementioned problems even fixable?

Blogging As Medium

Using blogs at Southern can disrupt the conceptual continuity I attempt to create in my instructional program there. The whole concept of the Internet community as one organic repository of human knowledge, a teeming unity of ideas promoted, supported, developed, and often discarded by the sentience of the being itself, can only be further advance through the technical medium of blogging. More people can now readily promote their own world-view for human consumption, if desired, with blogging tools. So now this year I make the plunge and experiment with numerous blogs.

Like vox.com, the first blog I heard about. An article in the Economist magazine about vox's founder and her technical contributions to the blogging infrastructure on the Web alerted me to the vox.com domain. I found Vox easy to use and nicely integrated with youtube videos, and other online video/media sites; within seconds you are tapped into the vox.com community with your writings and media of choice. There are a fair amount of ads at vox.com, but the format of your blogs are all appealing to the web surfer in terms of organization and color schemes. And a decent amount of blog customization is available to more experience web-users.

One might say, that if anyone can publish their missives and manifestos, at will, whenever, to a worldwide media delivery system, wouldn't that only cheapen the idea matrices humans are hard wired to develop? Sifting through the rabble that can be cyberspace is made even more daunting by its wholesale use (overuse?)?. I say, so what? information gatherers like post-modern mankind should have the right to access whatever they can to suit their needs and desires. Within limits, of course, and now anyone who so chooses can contribute to the cognosphere that is the Internet.

(Now that term, cognosphere. I thought I was original when I coined it a moment ago, but the word has been used in a few select circles).

When I write, I mainly do it because I enjoy it, first and foremost, and if anyone wants to read it also, they are welcome to. I don't admit being a wise sage with every post, but occassionally something comes up people can relate to. Really, blogging is mostly to me an easy way for people to tame the Internet. My commentary surrounding those cybertravels is an added bonus.

Now in public schools, these online communities can be problematic. Ideas ill-suited to the youthful mind are spread through the vox network, and sometimes you run into inappropriate materials. But the benefits can outweigh these risks; students are thrilled with quickly seeing their work posted online in a medium they understand.

I use blogger.com for my current forums (personally, I dislike using "blog" all the time. Do we not have synonyms for this word? How about "forum"?). It is functional, easy to use, and full of great features. However, as in the vox example above, with freewheeling exhanges of ideas in the blogger-world, comes the risks of encountering non-instructional materials. Each blog setup at blogger.com comes with a navigation bar that includes the possibility of paging through the various forums set up by blogger.com users. Rarely things come up when scrolling through that go for shockvalue and not enlightenment. In spite of that, blogger.com works excellently for the average user.

I circumvented the blogger.com navigation bar with a bit of HTML customization, which, like vox.com blogger.com is available to advanced html coders. Whether it violates the blogger.com Terms of Service is an open question, since removing the navigation bar prevents a blogger.com feature automatically created with every blog.

Now I discover another solution to the blog-in-public-education problem: the website edublogs.org - a forum service designed for teachers and students of all levels. I assume, therefore, that objectionable materials are filtered out of their blogosphere. I may convert to it for my education-based blogs, and maintain blogger.com for other things. I need to experiment more with it, but on first glance it seems to be the best suited blog for educators in our public-schools.

So I go back to my first sentence above: since I use the blog frequently for my professional life and for my instructional delivery to students at Southern, restrictions to them on the WWW through badly cofigured web-filters frustrate my plan. Today I find that only when teachers are logged on the school network, can they view blogs at blogger.com, particulary kandah.org, which now uses a frame for a forum at the blogger web. Students couldn't see that blog, from where they get their assignments, nor their very own, which they use for their own assignments and such. Pretty lame, I thought, how kandah.org was blocked from Southern. I hope that gets resolved soon. I sent an email to the HelpDesk at DPS, and they responded promptly saying that indeed the Websense filter defaulted to restrictive sate when updates were applied; they said that soon that issue will be resolved.

However, my students, the smart kids that they are, have discovered work-arounds for the Websense Filter installed at DPS, using proxy servers around the world. These international proxy servers sometimes do weird things to your blogger dashboard, like make all the menus the same language of the server's host country. We learned a few Turkish words from this experience, finding a way to change to English.

How about that Job-Fair?

Chapel Hill-Carrbror City Schools had there annual job fait last Saturday morning, April 21, 2007. It started at 9:00 am, but my sister and I decided to get there two hours earlier to ensure a spot at the head of the line. She went to Wake County's job fair the previoes Saturday, and she said it was a madhouse, with hundreds of applicants and interviewees, some flying in from out of state. So we sauntered up to the door at 7:10, and ended up 6 and 7 in line. Behind us was a man holding a place for his wife. He was a talkative sort, who related to anyone who would listen his tribulations with the local board about his daughter school reassignment, and his objections and the district's hedging and hawing about accomodating his daughter. He was opinionated and altogether hilarious. One woman walked by us, and he said, "That's Mrs. So-and-So. And she is a b*&#2!" I thought, whatever you say pal, whatever you say. Then moments after his unsolicited observation, she asked us all to move our line outside to in front of the doors instead of staying inside standing in front of the tables. Loudmouth behind me looked at me as if her rather curt directive to us all waiting, dressed to impress teachers and administrators, was evidence of his crass comment about her. It wasn't, in my view.

Then the Superintendent shows up, and the guy behind me, let's call him New Yawk (I never did get his real name, never really was interested, frankly), made even more crass comments about him. I know the Superintendent, he is a nice person, capable, but we decided that his totally friendly and jovial public face - he made his rounds to everyone in line, chatting amiably for a minute or so with everyone - was part of the highly politicized and public nature of his job. Neverthless, I enjoyed the moment speaking with him. He spoke with everybody in line.

Soon after, two ladies with clipboards came walking out, checking to see who was registered for the job fair. My sister's name was on it, but, lo and behold, mine wasn't. I know I filled out their little form at the website. I never recalled a confirmation, and the form never said anything about it, but no problem, they allowed me to stay in line regardless, bless their souls.

NewYawk's wife finally walked up to him, late. She began arguing with her husband about trifling parking issues and whatnot. We were a tad embarrassed for them. My sister told me later that the two female teachers in front of us, number 4 and 5, whispered to her, "My Lord, my husband would not put up with me talking like that to him. They're from the North, and that's how they behave." The New Yawkers continued their exchange. He then looked at his wife and said, "Hey to talk him, he works for Durham Public Schools." She did too, two part time Special Ed positions between two elementary schools, a crazy job. Apparently she had been coming to Chapel Hill job fairs for five years running and hadn't yet secured a job in her field. She said to me, "Really? What are you coming out here for to work? You don't need this aggravation."

I said, "There's aggravation anywhere in teaching."

She replied, "Yeah but here, it's like a country club. Stay in Durham, there you have more freedom. Heree, parents are always breathing down teachers' necks. Just ask him he knows!" And she pointed to her husband. She referenced his long story about battles with school boards. I thought, while watching her cackle happily with her goofy husband, this is why you have not been able to get teaching work in the country club of Chapel Hill schools.

We sauntered in, and I made my way up to the high-school to talk with one particular high-school's team. I saw the principal of this high-school (I'll keep actual names out of this post). I thought, hey let's see if he recognizes my name as I introduce myself. I had emailed him numerous times, and he has always responded in a timely manner, so I considered him quite professional and efficient. He was cordial, but evinced no recollection of me. Not a problem. I walk to their table and see a man who happened to attend a DPS demonstration the previous week along with other Chapel Hill educators. I shook his hand, told him I recognized him, and talked briefly while standing. The woman at this table I hardly acknowledged, not maliciously of course, but the Spanish teacher, Mr. R., introduced her as Mrs. H., an assistant principal. I then focused my attention on her, and was asked to sit down for a little panel discussion, I thought.

She then asked me, "So why teaching?" Before I could collect my thoughts and answer this complex question, the principal of this high school walks up and says to Mrs. H., "I have a candidate for you." He shuttled a woman to Mrs. H., and I saw the principal motion to Mr. R to complete the interview. I was a stunned by this turn of events. After all, I had just begun my interview with Mrs. H. However, I turned to Mr. R, who I pegged as a smart affable young man, and started interviewing with him.

His first question was, "What was your GPA as undergraduate?" I couldn't believe it. Was this what the school district is all about? The GPAs of its teaching candidates? Fourteen years as a public educator in the area, Southern Durham High School, didn't deserve more attention? It was an alarming start to the discussion, but it evolved into a more interesting question and answer session.

I cannot be negative about my encounter at the interview table. I refuse to be. Bad manners, apparently, abound everywhere. Like I said, I enjoyed talking Mr. R., and I made sure to play up myself to him squarely and consicely, which is difficult because sometimes I have much to say about the current state of education or about my philosophy of education, or about my experience in a public high classroom, which was 3 times more than him and too many principals also it seems.

I left the job fair thinking I got a pretty good job already in the field of education, and for that I am thankful. I teach German and computer programming in a troubled area of Durham, exposing a lot of truly disadvantaged kids to high-end fields of elective knowledge. It's great there, but why did I attend this job fair? Well, maybe it's because I want to teach in a country club for the next half of my teaching career.