Saturday, April 28, 2007

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?

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