Chicago’s increasing violence–the latest “white alert” lockdown in a south side school

Up until now, all I knew about school violence was from reports in the newspaper. Today, while at a meeting in a school building, an announcement came over the PA system that we were in a Code White. All the doors were to be locked and no one was to leave.

I visit schools fairly often, and lately have noticed signs of increasing security. Visitor passes. Notices about color code alerts. Police presentations to parent groups about gang activity. Doors locked where they weren’t locked before.

And lately, in this area at least, violence seems to be especially targeting schools. So far this year, 20 school children have been killed in gun violence. In April alone, threats have been received at Rotolo Middle School in Batavia, South Suburban College in South Holland, St. Xavier University in Morgan Park, (prompting more school closings for the surrounding Mother McAuley High School, Brother Rice High School, Queen of Martyrs Elementary School and Evergreen Park Southwest Elementary), Sandburg High School in Orland Park, Malcolm X College on the West Side, and St. Charles North High School in the western suburbs.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999, Virginia Tech in April of last year, and the five deaths last month at Northern Illinois University.

Our group was eventually permitted to leave the building under escort, but not without some worrisome moments. Some of our group still had pre-school children in a daycare area of the school who continued to be held in lockdown.

Judge orders ESL classes

Here’s one idea for boosting enrollment at your local community college:

A judge known for creative sentencing has ordered three Spanish-speaking men to learn English or go to jail. The men, who faced prison for criminal conspiracy to commit robbery, can remain on parole if they learn to read and write English, earn their GEDs and get full-time jobs…

“Do you think we are going to supply you with a translator all of your life?” the judge asked them.

The four, ranging in age from 17 to 22, were in a group that police said accosted two men on a street in May. The two said they were asked if they had marijuana, told to empty their pockets, struck on the head, threatened with a gun and told to stay off the block.

How would you like these students in your class, though?

Keeping children quiet in the classroom

Two of my adult classes are at elementary schools. Some of the moms bring their pre-schoolers to class. It is always a challenge to keep them quiet enough to have an effective class. If the moms aren’t watching them, they disturb the class. If the moms are watching them, they keep the moms from paying attention to the lesson. In spite of the challenges, my students are quite motivated and they persevere.

I have been told I can not be responsible and the parents must be responsible for the children, yet, I seem to be the only one who is capable and willing to decide that a particular activity–like one child bonking another over the head with a plastic bottle–must be stopped, or that the noise threshold has been exceeded and must be scaled back before I lose my voice. Not having children of my own makes it harder, I imagine, to make judgments. Still, I have discovered some of the things that work or don’t work.

Doesn’t work:

• Stickers. If children have access to stickers, you will be cleaning them off of chairs, tables, the floor, and places you didn’t know your classroom had places.
• Foods with sugar. Show me a kid with Froot Loops in front of them and I’ll show you a kid bouncing off the ceiling.
• Play Dough. One day I brought four colors of play dough. By the end of the class there was one color–gray. They also managed to get play dough in the caps of the colored markers.
• Coloring books. This actually worked for a while. I bought four coloring books at the dollar store. Then one day all the coloring books disappeared during the class and never turned up again. Pages can be torn out one by one so each child can have one to color. They can take it home, or give it to teacher to staple to the bulletin board at the end of class.
• Toys that beep. Do I need to explain this one? Yes, parents bring toys that beep into the classroom. Don’t get me started on the subject of cellphones.

Works:

• Crayons. One classroom has a bucket of crayons (ice cream size bucket) that the kids are pretty good at sharing. Some other crayons from the dollar store (made in China) didn’t color and weren’t worth the money.
• Individually xeroxed pictures to color. The coloring book doesn’t disappear because it’s at home so you can make more copies. The kids don’t have a lot of choices, they can choose one picture or two or both to color. The adults don’t have to spend time helping them choose and tearing a page out of a book.
• Cards. I had some with Care Bears and the alphabet. They got colored on a bit but were still a big favorite. Maybe good for a half hour.
• Videos. If you have access to a VCR you can play a cartoon with the volume off. Requires someone to bring the tapes and someone to take time away from the class to play it. This one didn’t last too long.
• Food without obvious sugar. Parents in one school have access to the kitchen and sometimes bring fresh milk and snacks. It’s hard for kids to sit for so long without eating.
• A small table in the back of the room for activities. Sometimes two or three kids can play quietly for a long time at the table. It helps if the table is positioned so the children sit facing away from the class.

If you can only do one thing, get a bucket of crayons and some scratch paper, or several xeroxed copies of two or three pages from a coloring book.

No, you may NOT hit a child in my classroom.

I thought I had seen everything in my classroom. We are far away from the main campus, so we can pretty much do what we want.  Food not allowed?  No problem in my classroom. Children not allowed? If the moms want to learn English , they have to bring the children.  Keeping them from disturbing the class requires endless patience and more than a little experimentation.  But worth it. When you educate the mother you educate the whole family.  Or so I tell them. I even have a mom that breastfeeds in the classroom.

But today there was something new.  A new student , trying to keep her small child quiet, hit him. Of course there was no question I could not keep silent about this, but I froze, and in a split second tried to remember everything I knew about dealing with this on the employment level.

There was the neighbor who told a cryptic tale about someone–a “mandated reporter”–who had reported child abuse but some unnamed dreadful thing had happened as a result, and that person would never make such a report again.  Then there was the day working in a public agency when I was sitting at my desk and suddenly became aware of one of the City’s Finest standing behind me. A co-worker had witnessed a client hitting a child and, slipping away from his desk, had gone to the administrator’s office and called the police. The mother had thought nothing of it at the time, but as the discussion progressed, it was revealed that she herself had been abused as a child and was now horrified to realize her own role in perpetuating the abuse.

So what did I actually witness in my class?  Was it abuse?  No.  It was playful, but meant to control the child’s behavior.  But why hit a child gently if they do not understand you can also hit hard? It was a pattern, and I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg without knowing how much was under the surface.

What was my own legal obligation?  This state has a law about “mandated reporters”, that is, people who are required by law to report any child abuse they witness or risk losing their jobs.  I don’t know if I am a mandated reporter, but probably not.  Children are technically not permitted in the classroom, so technically I never see children as part of my job. But there are all kinds of people running around that building who are definitely mandated reporters, and this mom would eventually run afoul of them if she didn’t figure out another way to manage her child. I could help my student understand American culture and law without appearing to make any value judgments.

A class discussion ensued where I tried to get a basic Spanish vocabulary to talk about what was going on.  What was the Spanish word for hit?  How do I explain “illegal”?  I could certainly explain the awkward situation it place me in to have something illegal go on in my classroom when children were not even permitted there in the first place.  The student had to leave early, so as she left I asked the other students to help think of ways to help her. The other students tell me hitting children is common in Mexican classrooms.  Mexican teachers will also pull the children’ hair.

But in my classroom, no one is going to hit any child, even symbolically.

Care Bears in Sudan–”Punish with Bullets”

A friend of mine once nearly triggered an international incident when he put children named Saddam and Mohammed in a wastebasket to demonstrate the preposition “in”. The administrator stuck up for him–after all, he was wearing traditional robes in the classroom–and it all blew over.

Sudan is not quite so unemotional. Knife-brandishing crowds, demonstrating, when else–on Friday–demanded a British teacher whose students named a teddy bear “Mohammed” be executed by shooting. Uh, don’t you shoot people with guns?

Are we developed yet?–more staff training

Oh good, more staff training. On rather short notice this time, but there’s nothing like getting paid to think about something you’re going to do anyhow.

Here’s what I learned from staff development three weeks ago:

1. Bring food for your students. Have a bag with some kind of snack and pass it around. The students will start bringing food too. This really works. I got a huge 99-cent bag of animal crackers and found a package of napkins in one of the classroom file cabinets. These students do come straight from work and I know my class is competing with the thought of a hot meal.

2. Put your tables in a vee with an aisle down the middle. You can’t do this if you have those little bitty desks, but in two of my classes this is working very well. The students are facing the front instead of each other, they are more engaged, but can still practice with each other, and there is space for me to walk around the tables and check their work.

3. Ask students about their goals. Do they want a better job? a GED? a university degree? Or do they want to be able to talk to their grandchildren who only speak English? Don’t know yet if this helps, but perhaps they will think I’m responsive to their input. Perhaps I will be more responsive to their input.

4. Give tests. I was annoyed at something else today, so I decided to implement this one right away and gave a pop quiz. Haven’t evaluated this one yet, but basically seems good because it means the students do something instead of the teacher doing something.

Oh, yes, there is usually a food budget for these shindigs which puts you symbolically at a nicer place in the food chain than you really are.

OMG, the grant application deadline is WHEN? oh, right, no problem…

So this week you just got a new textbook you get to teach for the first time, you found out you’re teaching that odd class in a remote location with less than a week to prepare, the dean will be around tomorrow to see if you’ve got all the names written in your attendence book, you haven’t written your syllabus yet, you’ve been talking to students about their goals and there are some special purpose funds that fit right into what you want to do this semester? And the deadline for grant applications is approaching quickly…

First you need a bunch of links. Here is the site with the most complete listing of links on the web. Some of the examples funded grants are no longer on line, but there is still a lot of info there.

By skimming a succession of articles, I was quickly able to focus on what I want to accomplish with the grant and how to present it, the typical formats, and the typical reasons grants are rejected so I can watch for pitfalls. Then some very specific advice. Find out what exact format is required by your specific organization, get a copy of some successfully funded proposals, find a second set of eyes to proofread your paper, and present yourself in simple but formal language.

Okay , I’ve got all the stuff in hand and the blessing of my program coordinators as well. Ally Ooop.

“Academic Community” and the Food Chain Reconsidered

I really prefer spy novels–something like Helen McInnes, who mixed Nazis with art dealers and always managed to kill off a good number of the good guys. Or Graham Greene. Oh, yes, Graham Greene. The genuine real-life British spy. Travels with my Aunt, hilarious. Our Man in Havana, about a fake missle report by a Cuban vaccuum cleaner salesman who need some extra cash, published six months before the Cuban missle crisis. The copyright page made me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, the first Graham Greene novel I ever picked up was The Human Factor, which I still don’t like, so it was another twenty years before I picked up another one of his books. Oh, and there was the creepy The Silent American about the early days of Vietnam. Creepy for its glimpse of the Vietnamese mind as well as the British mind. Having lived in a former British protectorate, the British/American relationship is always interesting to explore. But of course it’s only fiction.

Somtimes though, I venture out of my favorite rut and pick up some other genre. Like the time my folks were staying in a house owned by a couple where the wife was a romance novel addict. Two basement rooms were devoted to the bookshelves full of Harlequins. My brother and I read a new romance every day, just like eating popcorn, mostly because there wasn’t anything else to read. The plots were all the same. Girl meets Bad Boy in a mansion. Falls in love but realizes it’s impossible because of his character. They fight and he admires her spunk. Discovers his character is okay after all becasue he loves his mother or somesuch. Lives happily ever after.

This week I picked up a whodunit, Margaret Maron’s One Coffee With. A Sigrid Harald Mystery. This one got me on the first papragraph:

Few institutions of higher learning are content that their faculties do nothing but teach. In the name of “academic community,” Administration arranges committees, faculty-student teas, receptions to meet the newest trustee, and interdisciiplinary seminars. Departments that submit to this nonsense unquestioningly are rewarded with buildings of their own or, at the very least, whole floors of contiguous classrooms and well-furnished offices.

In every college, though, there is always one department that doesn’t give a damn for academic community, that adopts a laissez-faire attitude toward Administration’s extracurricular entanglements and subsequantly finds itself jammed higgledy-piggledy into the college’s leftover spaces.

Of course you know this department will have the murder that will occupy the rest of the novel’s pages. My department is more like the first one, and will probably never have a murder mystery, or for that matter any other kind of mystery.

As I listened to the president’s remarks this morning over a bagel and designer coffee for the second time in a week, I pondered the dean’s remarks from yesterday. If you’re here for the money instead of becasue you love the students, then you don’t belong here, he said. Tonight I checked online for the direct deposit amount from the last week of fall semeter and concluded that was very true. Then I pondered my lack of health insurance and prescription benefits, the 25 hour weekly limit on teachers’ hours, and the emphasis on socializing with other faculty. Yes, indeed I do love my students. That is what keeps me going. Some day when I have a completely different life, I will look back on this semeter of staff development, trays of firsthand free food, and hours in the classroom with nostalgia, and perhaps wish I could live these days again.

Useful ESL Links for Teachers and Students

(Note: I’m still trying to get the links to work. In the meantime, all the links are listed on this post in line with the text.)

Here is a list of useful links for teachers from the community college system to resources for reading, cultural awareness, and teacher professional groups for Teaching English as a Second language and Teaching English as a Foreign language.

The following links have been recommended within the community college system:

General/ESL

allamericareads.org

Cultural Awareness

http://www.urgbanmozaik.com

Mozaik Magazine explores racial and multicultural issues with its online magazine and extensive archives.

http://www.mexiconnect.com/mex_/culxcomp.html

Comparing Cultural Differences: Mexico with Canada & the United States

http://wwwedchange.org/multicultural/

Multicultural Pavilion–a detailed and thorough list of resources and links about varied cultures and the effect on education. This is mostly a K-212 resource, but the information is useful for adult classes.

http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/general/minority.htm

Minority Literature/Multi-cultural Resources-Poems, stories and criticism from many cultures

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~cmmr/BEResources.html

Center for Multilingual, Multicultural Resources.This site is oriented especially toward adult education.

http://www.culturegrams.com

Culturegrams. these are four page summaries of history/culture for msot of the countries fo the world. Only a sample is online. The others need to be ordered.

http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article01.html

Cultural differences: Are we really that different? a thought-provoking article from someone who has had genuine experience.

http://www.wwcd.org/action/ampu/crosscult.html

Working on Common Cross-Cultural Challenges. A summary of the major impact points in cross-cultural communication.

Professional Associations Related to Adult Education

(some have continuing education cpu’s)

http://www.tesol.org

Teachers of English to speakers of Other Languages. an international organization for ESL and EFL tachers at any level (K-12, adult ed, higher ed.), with state and local chapters throughout the world. anual converntion in the U.S. or Canada, other professional develop[ment activities, journals, materials, job bank for members and more.

http://www.itbe.org

Illinois TESOL-bilingual Education. The Illinois state affiliate of TESOL, for people involved with ESL or bilingual education at any level. Annual statewide convention, other professional development activities, newsletter, job bank on the web for ESL, adult educators and others.

http://.coabe.org

Commission on Adult Basic Education. COABE. A national organiztion for adult educators. Annual convention, newsletter, and other professional development opportunities.

http://www.iacea.net

Illinois Adult and continuing Educators Association IACEA. Affiliated with AAACE; Illinois organization for anyone involved with adult education. Annual convention, legislative advocacy for adult ed.

http://wwwaaace.org

American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. AAACE. An international organiztion for adult educators. Annual convention, journals, materials.

http://www.literacynet.org/ann

Adult Numeracy Network. ANN. A national organization for adult education math teachers. Annual convention, newsletter.

http://www.nctm.org

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. NCTM. A national organization for math teachers at all levels. National and regional conventions, journals, materials and more.

And from the MySpace blog for students at http://www.myspace.com/teachernotebook

Here is a list of links to useful sites for students of English as a Foreign Language.

(These sites are recommended within the community colleges system.)

Hello students.

Here are some interesting websites for English.
www.manythings.org

www.cdlponline.org

www.myefa.org

http://a4esl.org

www.englishclub.com

www.esl-lab.com

www.internet4classrooms.com/learn_eng.htm

(vocabulary practice)

www.eslgold.com/reading.html

Technical Update: After having some problems with tabs created in the header every time a page was published, I went back and tried to lookd at these links without being signed in. They were invisible. So apparently a page can’t be read publicly if it is unpublished. But publishing a page plays all kinds of havoc with the title at the top of the blog. Scouring the forums brought me to the conclusion that I could publish the pages and they would not show up in the header if they had an unpublished parent page. So that’s what I’ve tried to do and hopefully the pages with all the ESL links will be accessible to the public now.

Update on update: It didn’t work. Publishing a page with an unpublished parent page does not make it viewable to the public. Trying to view the page just sends viewer back to the blog’s main page. The page can only be viewed in edit mode. So it looks like if I want to make a list of links separate from a post, I’ll have to create another  post, not a page.

Jordan gets Snow..and King Abdullah gets heaters for Jordan’s Schools

Some of my best memories of Jordan are of sitting huddled around a kerosene heater with the librarian and a few other teachers in a small village school library, listening to a tape of “al-Layla Dobe,” squeezing a green lemon over a shared can of tuna, and toasting pita bread over the top of the soba. The main office where the mudira sat had a second larger upright propane heater on wheels, but the school’s classrooms were totally without heat, and birds flew in and out of the classrooms. (A bird in the classroom is lucky, I was told as I ducked the swooping creature, the sign of a safe place, since birds will not go where there is danger.) On the coldest days, many parents kept the smallest children home from school for weeks at a time.

Now the long awaited White Christmas, or maybe White Eid, has arrived in Jordan with major snowstorms. At the same time the King has discovered the children need heat in the classrooms. Says a Jordan Times editorial (links are only active for a week):

The snow and heavy precipitations we were praying for and were finally granted brought to the fore deficiencies that qualify as inexcusable.

One is lack of any heating system in public schools.

King Abdullah had graciously ordered that heating units be made available to these schools so that students can cope with the near zero temperatures in classrooms.

Since this year’s cold weather is not exactly unique, and the winter season is normally severe across the Kingdom, the question concerned authorities might want to answer is why schools have no heating systems until now.

Do they believe that keeping warm in the winter is a luxury that students can and should do without?

Is there always need for the King to intervene before action is taken to solve problems which common sense should take care of?

The short answer to the editor’s question is “yes.” For some reason government officials are unwilling to act and routinely defer any and all decision-making to the next higher level of government. At the same time, any grass-roots activity–like a teacher-parent organization–is completely lacking. This is a common pattern across the Arab world. I have never been able to figure out why.

According to the Jordan Times, Wednesday’s snows closed off the desert highway, stranding travelers in the areas of Maan and Petra, and on the road between Petra and Aqaba.

Jerusalem’s Old City also got an uncharacteristic snowfall. But did Amman get snow?