Tag Archives: MTV

Old People Alert: Words You Can’t Say

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Vocab testI’m giving a vocabulary test. I don’t like vocabulary tests. I’m tired of them. Even though I don’t love tests, vocabulary is important. Not just for students, but for me.  I’m getting old. Words change their meaning. Not being up on vocab is a dangerous thing.

I used to be at the epicenter of student pop culture, even though growing up I was a walking anachronism. You’d think technology would enhance this, but in fact, it’s done the opposite. It’s let me “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Streaming music online has let me drift off into indie-music obscurity, getting pleasantly out of touch.

In the process, I miss the shifting tide of vocabulary. Using old words has dated me.

Awesome is an 80′s word. So not “awesome,” to say. You can’t say “dude.” A “ratchet” is no longer a tool. It should never be said in public. Neither is “ho.” Used outside of December, it’s not nice. I tried to explain garden “hoe” to a student. She couldn’t make the connection–even with a picture.

VW MicrobusVocabulary is important. So is context. Kids think I’m a hippie because I grow vegetables and my vocab’s stuck in the 90′s, which reminds them of the 60′s if you just flip the first number. I tell them I’m not old enough to be a hippie.

Recently, I was discussing basketball, informing a student I’d defeat him on the court. I stopped just short of saying “yo mama.”  It is also a dated expression. I admitted I couldn’t shoot well but I “could play some Big D.” That, in my day, meant “defense.” Coach would yell up and down the court, “Give me some big D.” We’d win the game. I was the good at defense.

Defense is important. Stopping the other guy from scoring a basket means they didn’t get two points. This is the same as if I was able to score a basket, though with none of the glory and recognition. I learned to hang in there and never give up. It’s not a bad lesson for life.

Vocabulary alert:

Big D doesn’t mean “defense” anymore. It refers to the male fifth appendage. Never, ever, ever say that in the presence of teens. Even when discussing a sporting challenge. The class stopped. Something was desperately wrong. Even the good kids were drowning in their own laughter.

Someone finally filled me in. Time for me to study vocab again. Maybe even take a test.

I remember being overseas. I was teaching English, using a book from the 50′s.

“The cock crows at…”

“Mary is gay.”

“John went to fetch some water.”

Not cool (“cool” being another dated word). I took out my pen and began crossing off words. “You can’t say this.”

I have stepped over the generational divide. My vocabulary’s old and I even try to pick up the check at restaurants rather than ducking into the bathroom dividing the bill to the last cent. That’s how you know you’re really old. I’m stuck in my music instead of theirs. And I watch the Discovery Channel instead of MTV.

“Miss, did they have TV when you were in school?” I look at the student in front of me. She’s serious. I must respond politely.

Antique Apple“Yes, I was born in ’71. Computers weren’t invented. There was no Internet. You had to pick up the phone. Which was wired to the wall. To text, we wrote it all down, put it in an envelope, and put a stamp on it. I had a cast-iron Royal typewriter in high school and an electric typewriter in college, but by then they had a computer lab, but you had to fight the nerds to use them.”

“Wow.” She soaks this in. The phone buzzes in her back pocket. She goes to look, but remembering she’s in school glances at me and walks away. thinking.

“Thank God I didn’t have to live back then,” she thinks. But there are no words, because the vocabulary has changed. So she takes her leave, incredulous, in silence.

[images: thisisgrame.wordpress.com and http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/retro%20cars%5D

How to Scare Students on Parent Teacher Night

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image: nohomers.net

Last night was parent teacher night.  I love parent teacher night, but I don’t really love the format–basically, a million parents line up for ten seconds of my time. I feel somewhat like a cross between really, really rude, and a rock star.

We put out appointment sheets, but they never work for me, because they contain five-minute slots over the course of two hours, and I have 252 students this year.  That math just doesn’t hold up.  But, I do the best I can. I smile, thank them for coming, tell them I’ll be quick and that next year I’ll move the Keurig out in the hall with snacks. They smile and nobody yells at me to get moving. Many times the students come along, and often there are brothers and sisters who have been dragged out into the night to see me, too.  For them, I have a supply of crayons and my awesome fish tank to keep for entertainment and I say that I look forward to teaching them in seven years.

Holding parent conferences is a fine art–I’ve been on both sides of this aisle–the receiving end of conferences you know aren’t going to go well, and the facilitating end of thousands of conferences that I insist bring some modicum of joy to the adult who is seeing me at the end of a long day and who is entrusting me with their child.

But the students are always terrified. “What will she say?” That, I don’t mind, because it buys me at least two days of good behavior in advance. The quickest way to put the fear of God into a student who dares to brave the conference with their families is—to be really, really nice.

It starts out like this: The day before the conferences, I ask, “Hey, anyone coming to see me or am I going to be sitting here drinking coffee pondering the meaning of life by myself.”

A kid will approach, “I might come. What are you gonna say?”

“You know, the usual.” I say.

“What’s ‘the usual’?” usually the Student in Question has some inner conflict–did I do my homework? Did I fail to shut up in a timely manner? Did I forget my watch at home while meandering to her class? Do I come prepared? What will she SAY?

That’s the beauty. I never, ever say anything but nice things. No parent wants to drive from three towns away to see me for five minutes after working all day. They probably rushed home to have a quick dinner and collect kids–they don’t want to hear bad things. Parents hear bad things all the time. “Your son didn’t do his homework.” “Your daughter talks while I’m teaching.” “I think your child will be on the news someday, and it won’t be good.” You’ll never hear that from me. It’s not that I don’t express concerns–I do. I just find the greatness in each student and state it in caps with an exclamation point.

Sometimes, when a family member is clearly expecting to hear bad things I’ll come right out and speak to the question, “Listen, your son has amazing creativity–he organizes a little differently, but heck, so do I, and I’ve been successful in life. We all have our styles–I’ll help keep him on task.”

When I state things like that, I can see the hesitation leave their faces.  I see that years of negative meetings are opening up to the possibility that parent-teacher dialogue can be productive and positive.

Last night I said things like, “I can help you (student) to focus better, but honestly, your boss won’t fire your dad. He’ll fire you. It’s my job to prepare you so that doesn’t happen and you call the shots in your career. Can we achieve that goal?”

“Your daughter is respectful and has a great group of friends. You should be proud.”

“Your son hates school–let’s be honest. But that’s okay. [To student:] I daresay you’ve missed some skills–we’ll catch you up on the side, if you come at these times. No one will ever know.”

“Your daughter is very intelligent–she will always get A’s. But I don’t want her to get an A from me, I want her to imagine that scholarship in four years–I’d like her to work on college-level writing and research–we’re going to shoot for that goal instead. Here’s how…”

and the granddaddy of them all…

“Your son should consider performance. He is talented beyond measure.”  I know–where’d that come from? It’s something I’ve said only one other time in my entire career teaching. But when I see it, I have to acknowledge it.  ”Consider researching the greats, reading about the greats, finding local people to mentor you, and starting small.  You should be very busy practicing and improving your craft if you’re serious.”  Basically, I sentenced that boy to four years of extra work if he does it right. Which I hope he does.

What does every adult want to hear at a parent-teacher conference? They want to hear that their student has potential. That their student is kind and respectful. That their student will not be stuck living at home playing video games them forever.  Families have different values–certain cultures value academics so much that I always include “always works hard in class.”  Others value respect above all.

“Well, your daughter has a 110% in all classes, and she found the cure for cancer yesterday,” I will say.

“Yes, but is she respectful?”

Parents want to know that their children have good friends. While I’ll never talk about someone else’s student with another family, I might say, “Your son is getting involved in school and making a lot of good friends–I hope you’re proud of him and that you have a chance to meet his friends.”  That puts families at ease.

Setting up those relationships is always, always important.  I wish I had tons of time to just sit and converse with families, and thank them for lending me their students for a year or in some cases more.  I now see families where I’ve had multiple members. I’m not old enough to start having children of students–when that happens, I’ll probably be that old hippie-looking teacher with the silver braid talking about how in my day MTV was just invented and we only had one pair of sneakers, and computers hadn’t been invented so we had to read books. And when we communicated with friends, we had to pass notes on paper–and we liked it.

Today, I’ll go to school and thank everyone for bringing their families–it’s an honor that they did, because I like to assume that people have much better things to do than traipsing out to see me for such a small time. And then I’ll laugh and say, “What did you think I was going to say? Did I scare you?”

They will laugh with uncertainty–always keep them guessing–it’s the key to performing, to teaching, and to life–and then we will have a great class.

[Note: Please see my board on Learnist about having a successful parent-teacher night. This should be a time we look forward to on both sides, never a time of dread. Hope it helps!]

How I Chickened out of Reality TV…

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image:vinnylani.wordpress.com

Few people know this, but after finishing a grueling four years at a quality institution of higher learning–majoring in waitressing, I mean, Russian–I applied for, and got through several cuts in the selection process for MTV’s Real World. It was the second season, which would have landed me somewhere in Los Angeles, if I recall correctly.

Auditioning for a reality TV show is all about creating a character, though I would not have known it at the time, because reality TV was brand new.  The only two really shows around were Survivor in its infancy, and The Real World. Heck, in those days–hard to imagine, MTV even had music, not pregnant teens and Rhode Islanders hogging all the hair gel fighting with non natives of New Jersey after having way too much to drink. Reality TV shows were cool. I thought cool would be a good career interlude.

At the time, the auditioning process involved first sending in the actual application and getting through a few rounds of pre-screening.  The premise is this–shows cast people from all over the world to live together to see who will kill whom first.  They stole the idea from the cult classic Highlander, which was about a bunch of immortals roaming the world killing each other and assuming their power under the premise that “there can be only one.”  Same thing with reality TV. The one that defeats the other for screen time gets the best makeup, hair gel, bad fashion and endorsements–heck, I saw one relative victor advertising, um, pickles, and another recently got to make his own alcoholic drink, so that every time he overconsumes from here on in, he’ll get a slice of the profits.  He should do pretty well on that own.

Of course, I wouldn’t have seen that glamor then–the genre was still too new.  I would have cast myself as the “vegetarian weightlifter guitar playing Gandhi loving pacifist.” Although it seems like there would have been plenty of them in LA already, my guess is that there probably weren’t because they kept calling me for the next round.

As is the case with so many perfect opportunities in life, I got scared and backed out of the process just when it appeared success was on the horizon, choosing instead to work for a multi-million dollar corporation in a cubicle.  Although I didn’t get to sign any autographs, I did get to put pictures on my desk.

I always wonder what life would have been like if I did had followed through to the homestretch, been chosen, and then subsequently survived the show–would I have been able to drink that much herbal tea in opposition to the forces of people punching each other, engaging in romantic interludes, vomiting and backstabbing in front of all of America? Would someone have named a tea or brand of granola after me and allowed me to be the spokes-hippie? These are questions I’ll never be able to answer and reasons I always advise people to follow their dream.  Alas, I’ll never be a Vee Jay.  But that’s okay, because Vee Jays no longer exist since there isn’t any music on MTV. And I was too old to get a slot as a pregnant teen.

What can I do to recapture the moment? I’ll tell you what–I will start my own reality TV show, right in my very own classroom.  It’ll reach cult classic status before you can say Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Here’s what you’ll see:

Two hundred fifty amazing students fighting the odds to get an A from Casey, who will give anyone an A as long as they keep doing the work until it reaches “A” status.

The Underground Teacher Food Swap–three food-freak colleagues swapping home-raised chicken eggs for goat cheese and bread.The horror on the face of one when she sees the crackers are not gluten-free. All drink iced tea from mason jars and are avoided by “normal” staff who fear they might have their Easy Mac infected by the macrobiotic swill.   All recipes must pass by Gluten-Free woman, natural-food woman, vegetarian homesteader-wanna-be, and no processed ingredients are permitted. That leaves various varieties of lettuce and iced tea in mason jars.

This individual go through the quarterly begging for paper inquest, “Didn’t you get paper in September?” Why, yes I did, but you see, I have 252 students. I stole some from the guy who has twenty.  You know what, forget it, I’ll send them into the bathroom for sheets of one-ply. That should do it if I keep my notes to a minimum.

This individual try to keep up with the changes in ed reform–that would include memorizing three books–two on Common Core State Standards, which I can now recite better than a preacher at a bible convention, and a 101 paged guide on the new teacher evaluation system, which threatens to be the death of me as I attempt to collect data on 170 of my 250 students. That will be the best episode of them all–a veritable miniseries of episodes watching me track, coordinate, cry, file, and break down on a scale that even the Housewives of Orange County have never seen.

Camera guy, listen up: Pan in on the breakdown shot. If you’re good, and not the guy who took my picture at the DMV, you should be able to get a nice shot of me borrowing some saffron robes from the monks up the street from my house, and a parting shot of my self-immolation. Self-immolation always makes for good press, much better than emotional breakdowns. At a bare minimum, you should be able to get some film of me throwing the much-prized ream of paper into the air and sprinting for an application to the closest fast food restaurant.  This is a good Plan B season finale–who doesn’t want to see a vegetarian making Big Macs?

If you don’t want to watch a reality show involving my classroom because perhaps you already spent enough time enduring social studies in your own school career, I’ll pitch a few other shows–we could sneak into San Francisco and steal all the iPhones and watch the fallout like one of the doomsday apocalypse prep shows. We could follow the kid who got locked in gym lockers for most of school, give him a job in an upcoming start-up hiring all the kids who bullied him, and watch him beat the Trump of them.  We could drop some people opposing marriage equality in the middle of Provincetown, Morgan Spurlock 30-Days style, and see if we could get them to become more open-minded, or we could put a camera in each side of the Senate and House chambers and watch our elected officials make amends, cross the aisle and solve the problems of this nation or demand that they, themselves, be the first to jump off the fiscal cliff. Oh, right, those cameras already exist.

You know what–I think my IQ just dropped by ten points even thinking about this today. I’m going to just go and read a book.