Fifth/Sixth Combo

This class was filled to the brim with 5th and 6th grade Hispanic students. A teacher had quit or been removed and his kids shuffled off to a new school. The new teacher had to teach two classes at once in his little modular. The climate was chaotic, due to the instability of the kids. They had been abandoned mid-semester.

I guess the modulars were more or less considered permanent because a nice wooden deck had been built between classrooms. The kids thumped around on it before school started and that annoyed me. Why weren’t they out on the playground?

Do you speak Spanish? Bilingual students often ask me that. They are hopeful. Can’t blame them. It’s a struggle to understand English. They will write down what you say, but they have no clue what you mean. Sometimes I just can’t draw the energy to try to explain it to them.

Local paper put forth an article about bilingual teachers being laid off. Are non-bilingual teachers trying to save their own jobs?

The group chatted lively in Spanish throughout the day, often shouting across the room to one another. They charged in before school began, rumbling across the wooden deck, to leave their backpacks by their desks. I kept getting interrupted as I prepared the day’s lessons.

“Can I leave my backpack? Mr. G lets us.”

I was getting increasingly outraged. I had to stop and explain that Mr. G was not here and that I did not want to be interrupted. Finally I began yelling at them to get out and that brought on help from another teacher. He said they were a bad group and he would pop in during the day to keep control.

It was helpful to know he was about and would do that for me. I could not speak in front of the class. When I tried to talk, there was a constant hum of voices. They talked in Spanish and occasionally threw out insults in English. Interspersed among the Spanish were words like “four-eyes” and “bitch.” I could never tell who was speaking. I was also pelted with erasers.

The result was that very little learning was accomplished. I wanted to say outrageous things to insult them. One kid said the governor was a racist. With today’s climate of intolerance toward illegal immigration and talk about English only America, it is no wonder he felt there were racists among us.

I was unable to help them. They were vicious to one another as well. They attacked each other about conditions of observed stupidity. This does seem to be a condition of sixth graders.

The next day I let them do what they wanted. There was a steady stream of kids entering and leaving the classroom. Bunches gathered around all four computers and the printer. Soon strains of rap music floated on the air. When I asked them to turn off the sound they said their reports were about music. There didn’t seem to be any rules governing their representations other than they must be on poster board and contain words and pictures.

Throughout the day, the permanent teacher came in and seemed undisturbed by the chaotic environment. There were four classrooms around a quad and students streamed back and forth disturbing everything through the two days I worked there.

One group of students found a poem on the Internet about suicide. A large male student said he liked poetry, which I always think is an expression of inner emotions. When I showed him how to copy the poem and paste it into a word document for printing, he didn’t get it and kept writing the poem down on lined paper. He had no reaction to the amazing capabilities of technology!

This poetry-loving kid, during silent ball, kept slamming the ball at the other students. He was winning every game. I said, “Silent ball is not dodge ball,” and he stormed off in a rage. My preventing him from harming other students infuriated him. He sat in a corner and complained loudly.

Another sub in a class across the redwood deck agreed with me that the students were very undisciplined. “And this is May,” she said. What she meant was, she could understand the behavior better if school had just began. But the year was almost over and still the kids had no clue about how to behave in a classroom.

During the adolescent migration between rooms, I circulated among tables and tried to keep students on task. There were math and social studies assignments. Only about 6 out of 30 kids managed to complete the work. If a table had an industrious little worker in its midst, the rest of the students copied the answers.

This approach to learning was taught to me as a post-graduate credential student. The theory is that students learn in different ways. I did observe some discussion of concepts and ideas at each table, but until you actually perform the mathematical computations, you haven’t learned anything.

I think this is how kids can get passing grades in school but not pass the high school exit exams. If a judge in California can say the exit exam is unfair, it must be very frustrating for teachers.