Archive for June, 2010

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Math addict

June 28, 2010

We hear a lot about meth abuse but math abuse damages people too. One of my students complained that every time he sat at the computer to practice long division he would get a pounding headache. Learning long division in your forties is enough to give anyone a headache, but I always see it as a red flag. I asked him, “Did you ever have a bad experience around math?”  He sat and thought. “Yes!” he said with sudden awareness. “When I was young I would sit at the kitchen table doing my math homework. My mom would stand behind me and when I got a problem wrong she’d hit me on the back of my head.” As bad as this sounds it’s not that uncommon. Many of my students have traumatic math memories, from the teacher who humiliated them at the chalkboard to the parent who used math skills as a barometer of intelligence; they leave math in the dust and never look back.

Some of my students still need to memorize their times tables. Henry hates math and he begged me not to make him do it. “What happened to you?” I asked. “My elementary teacher promised us an ice cream sundae if we memorized our times tables,” Henry said. “I memorized them and she never came through, she never made good on her promise.” Although it wasn’t a strike to the back of the head, what Henry’s teacher did scarred him for life.

I tell my students math is a puzzle (they like puzzles) and when you get good at it, it actually becomes fun. My goal is to create math addicts.

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Tired of running

June 24, 2010

Franklin has been cleaning my classroom. Chatty fellow, always has a smile. He told me his father was born in 1903 in Mississippi, a sharecropper. Franklin’s in his sixties but looks about 20 years younger. He comes from a big family and has a sister who is 81. Today he said he’d bring in a photo of his parents to show me. It’s hard to imagine Franklin committing a crime or spending his days smoking crack.  He seems so at peace with himself  at this point in his life.

A parole agent once told me that men reach a certain age and their testosterone decreases and they no longer have the energy or stamina to run the streets. Essentially, biology itself reduces recidivism. When a twenty-something guy comes in and tells me he’s tired of running, this may be true, but hormones have a drive and momentum of their own.

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143 words

June 18, 2010

The kittens have disappeared under the shed and now the mother cat spends most of her time there. So I celebrate this thing called hope and give a shout-out to everyone who reads my blog. There were 65,784,046 words generated on WordPress today and you are reading mine.  I’ll try not to overburden you with excess blog.

Marcus was the last one left in the classroom yesterday so I decided to read him a few pages from the book, You Are Enough. After I finished reading Marcus looked at me with tears in his eyes. “Was it upsetting?” I asked. “No, Ms. P, ” Marcus said. “No one has ever read to me in my whole life, that was the first time.” Marcus is 42. This morning he told me again how much it meant. I hope Marcus will join one of our in-class reading groups.

Posted in adult education, literacy, parolees, reading, teacher | Leave a Comment »

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Direct instruction

June 14, 2010

There is a workout room at the rehab, it looks more like a dirty garage filled with old iron barbells and antiquated equipment with torn padding. It’s the opposite of what most people think of when they imagine a gym. Sometimes I see my students working out when they are supposed to be in my class and I tell them, “When you’re done with your workout, come and exercise your brain.”

The other day I came by the weight room and found a resident sitting on one of the exercise benches feeding a newborn kitten with a tiny baby bottle. There are already three generations of cats who roam the property. The guys were hiding the latest litter of newborn kittens here in the gym, and back in the dorms had taken shifts all night feeding them by hand every two hours to keep them alive. A calico had given birth to the kittens the day before and ran off.  She is a kitten herself, only 7 months old. She reminds me of how some of my students have struggled with their responsibilities as parents. When the mother cat came back the next day the guys made several attempts to get her to be with her babies and let them suckle, but she wouldn’t. I went and picked her up, very gently, and put her nose near the kittens. She immediately took them by the scruff of their necks and carried them under the storage shed. One by one, I got her to take all five newborn kittens under the shed. Like my students at times, the mother cat needed some old-school direct instruction.

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Universal Product Code

June 7, 2010

Neck tattoos are the billboards of skin art — they advertise who you are.  In the mid-nineties I was a substitute teacher in juvenile hall. When I couldn’t remember a student’s name I’d walk up and down the rows of desks and sneak a peek at that student’s neck. More often than not their names would be inscribed on the back of their necks.  Maybe it was important to not be mistaken in a gang altercation?  What interests me most is what someone chooses for you to see that is not visible to themselves. Yvonne has a small tattoo of a woman’s handbag inked on her neck. I asked her if it had something to do with purse snatching. “No, Ms. P, it means I like money. I don’t take purses,” she reminded me with her typical candor. “I’m an international thief.”

Sequoia is a new student who grew up in a small town in Oregon. He isn’t actually enrolled but comes to my school to help out, tutor other students in math. He has a UPC barcode tattooed on the back of his neck. I asked him if he ever tried to scan himself at Target. Sequoia says the numbers in his UPC tattoo have special meaning but prefers to keep that to himself. I showed him our online encyclopedia and every time I glance over he is looking up some esoteric subject like cosmology or pantheism. Sequoia looks like he stepped out of a J.Crew ad until you notice the limp in his walk and the barcode on his neck.

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Disposable cameras

June 4, 2010

My students love photographs. They still shoot with disposable cameras and get pictures developed. I always ask to see their photos — they tell me so much about who is in or not in their lives. Students show me snapshots of children they haven’t seen in years and long-dead parents. Herve asked me for a scissors today so he could trim the tattered edges off the picture he carries of his girlfriend. These photos are not sequestered in albums or frames. Some were literally posted on prison-cell walls with toothpaste for an adhesive. They are treasured touchstones to the outside world, the family as an imagined unit, the lover, the beloved auntie or the grandparents who raised them. I always appreciate what students share with me, even if  it’s not necessarily how it is.

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Goodbye Terry

June 3, 2010

Many of my students arrive at and leave our residential rehab with most of their worldly possessions in black-plastic garbage bags. Parolees are dropped off by parole agents with only the clothes on their backs and a few come direct from the jail in olive-drab jumpsuits. Here at the rehab they get to pick from bags of donated clothing. I’ve seen some wearing donated T-shirts with the anti-smoking message, “It’s Quitting Time,”  as they walk out to have a cigarette.

Terry left yesterday. She had the best fashion sense, really anything she threw together — whether store-bought or donated — worked. I didn’t realize she left because she never came to say goodbye. I hope it all works out for her with Slim, her boy on the inside, and most of all I hope she can shelter herself from the world of intolerance, of narrow-minded mediocrity.

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