Chaos & Journeys

In response to the following questions from my graduate classroom management class:

What's wrong with a little chaos in the classroom?
Do students think when they misbehave? Do they misbehave for a reason?
What daily factors make your profession difficult...and which facilitate your efforts? Name and elaborate the most important.

I think chaos in the classroom implies something is going on that is unable to be controlled or managed. Don't get me wrong, there are times when there is chaos in my classroom, but these are the times where I feel the most uneasy, where I feel the students are swinging from vines and I need to play the role of zookeeper dangling raw meat in front of them in order to get them to listen. This can be incredibly trying. On the other hand, however, there are times where I exhibit and enforce controlled chaos. This is chaos that I start, chaos that I provoke, through my inevitable tangents or longed-for (but rarely see) heated (or any form of emotion) arguments. This type of chaos can be relieving, where the entire plan is thrown out the window, but where a sense of accomplishment prevails over all of the chaos, sometimes more so than any structured lesson could have.

I think students sometimes think when they misbehave; sometimes they do not. Sometimes students will act out just to get under the teacher's last nerve, because they know they can. Other times, students will misbehave just because it is in their nature to be chatty or to be forgetful of any rules or regulations their teachers or any other prominent member of society has put on them. This latter form of misbehavior is just an act of carelessness, of not thinking "what will happen to person X if I do behavior Y?," something that can be hard for many of us to figure out.

These misbehaviors are what make my profession difficult. The road blocks that interrupt the lesson, the desired plan. However, upon reflection, the bigger picture is what facilitates my efforts in my profession from day to day. What I mean by that is, there may be little road blocks, which may seem like significant brushfires at the time (5 students asking to go to the bathroom at once, a fire drill during a crucial lesson, the student who won't stop talking), but it is the conviction to actually get past the roadblocks and achieve the goal of a lesson or unit, or to wake up the next day and drive yourself back to school at 6:50 in the morning to do it all over again, that really proves the journey worthwhile, despite all the rocks in the road.

While I was writing this, I was thinking the entire time of one 9th grade class I've been struggling with lately. They've been inattentive, rude, bored, lazy, chaotic, all of the attributes a teacher does not want to be teaching to. It's only fitting that we are studying The Odyssey in this class. Because as I am reflecting here, I am comparing myself and this class to Odysseus and his trials from the gods. All he wants to do is make it home, but he has to deal with Cyclopes, Sirens, and ship-wrecking whirlpools. In spite of all this, he doesn't give up and is able to overcome all obstacles and complete his desired journey. I suppose that's like teaching in a way, and we as teachers always have to keep our goals in mind, or we won't make it along the journey.

Yes, We Can

This is in response to the "Yes, We Can" Barack Obama speech and subsequent music video that was released by Will.I.Am.

I don't usually extend my political views on too many people, or on a scale of people outside a few close friends, but this video compelled me.

I think we need an inspiration to be the leader of this country. I think we should take the values of past uniters--Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy--and together rally around a candidate who wants to rejoin the country back to the United States of America that our Founding Fathers envisioned, not the Divided States of Red and Blue that our Confounded Brothers and Sisters have incited through corrupt, immoral acts that are degrading our society.

Other countries may destroy each other through bombings and other forms of selfless dehumanizing acts, but we are destroying each other by not looking out for one another in an economical, environmental and moral sense like we should.

Barack Obama inspires the hope in me that it is possible to change a nation for the better, to change a people for the better, to unite US into a state where WE are all proud to be one, all of us as Americans.

I'm going to end this by referring to a true crusader of a united people, Martin Luther King, who I see echoed in Senator Obama's rhetoric, something the latter has been getting criticized on lately. And it is not until after it was too late that we as a country united around the rhetoric of the former, who said: "The world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around...But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars."

The time is now to unite around a star whose rhetoric and beliefs are enough to enlighten a country that has been in the dark for way too long. The light begins with Barack Obama.

Threats

Written on a day where there was a shooting threat that everyone at Sachem North "was going to die":

I can't believe we live in a world where students have to walk through metal detectors to learn, where ID badges and desks are the only line of defense, where we should be worried every time we go to a mall. Why can't the defense be a pen, a pencil, a piece of paper? A conversation with a friend, family member, teacher, anyone?

Instead, we are reduced to threats written on bathroom stalls, guns drawn on Christmas shoppers, and fear clouding our everyday lives like an impending storm hanging over our heads, waiting for the first drop of rain to fall, which will bring about the deluge, the torrent that will flood the world until we have to start all over again from the beginning.

What's for breakfast?

I have nothing to say.
I am a ball of paper, crumpled up into a mangled globular mess being shot through the air into the nearest waste-basket.
I am a tree that can no longer bare fruit due to a recent fungus infestation.
I am a river that has dried up.
I am a crayon box with one color.
I am a cigarette that just won't light.
I am a kernel that just won't pop.
I am a sneeze that just won't happen.

Gesundheit.

I need a second to breathe.
To come up from the water and take a breath.
To take a drink of water after a 3-day drought.
To find where I'm going after having been lost.

I need to not step into the same river twice.
i need to make everyday better for someone other than me.
Someone needs to make my everyday better.
I need to live everyday as if living everyday was uncertain.

My brain is fried like two eggs over a hot burner, skillet turned on high, crackling ham and melting cheese, aroma wafting in the beaming, hot sun of dawn, pine air refreshing the smell of dirt and dust, earth that is revolving, tilting, spinning, catapulting light years into and away from a black hole of oblivion.

Better

It's amazing to comment on how far I've come so far this year. Time-wise. I mean, I'm already (almost) halfway through the 2nd quarter, and it's already almost December.

However, I still feel like my head's back in September. Am I doing any good to my students?

I got into this job hoping that I would have a constant impact on my students and to teach them something I knew that they didn't. But, apparently this is easier said than done. I am constantly longing for the discourse that I had as a student in college, being challenged constantly by my professor and thinking sophisticatedly and outside the box, expanding my brain. But, to achieve this in high school is near-impossible.

The first week of school I quoted to my students something from Plato, something Protagoras said to his students: “If you associate with me, the result will be that on the very day you begin you will return home a better person, and the same will happen the next day too. Each day you will make constant progress towards being better.” I truly believe that some one person can have this impact on somebody else. And I'd like to think I'm capable of that with my students. But, I don't know if they're capable of accepting that.

How do I get them to that point? How do I get them to be better?

Wander This World

Starbucks. Stuyvesant Plaza. Sigur Ros. My room is dark, but there is a glow from within. There are only sounds within my dark room; the outside world is mute. My days go by in slow-motion playback. Take the bus back to State. Walk by myself through Dutch and Colonial. Listen to Jonny Lang on my CD player. I'm wandering this world, all alone.

How come whenever I start something new, and I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, I always get reminded of Albany? If I had never gone to school there, would these "first-experiences" be even harder?

Sitting in Starbucks--Selden this time--I wonder how I got here. And I believe it is from those first year experiences; it is through the wandering I did and have done, the wandering that is just inherent in human nature, of which I am just trying to do my part.....But, I think I just need to keep wandering this world right now. Alone, or not.

My personal credo

I stand for equality - we are all different, but the same. The world may have a multitude of religions, colors, races, languages, but in the end, we are all humans with hands, feet, toes, eyes, feelings and a heart the same physical breakdowns as the next person.

I know people are inherently good. We are born GOOD, but as we progress in age, we regress in good-naturedness. However, all we have to do is think back to our earliest memory - there is good in that. One of my earliest memories is as a kid, one, two, three, years old, bib around my neck, cake all over my face and all these people who loved me surrounding me, singing to me. There is only good in that; in that circumstance I know nothing bad at all. Does that type of situation still exist?

I stand for love. Like the famous quote, "Love makes the world go around." Hatred just adds fuel to an already enraging fire. Love more, and there will be less to hate.

I know it's hard to love someone or something that's so full of hate. That is near impossible. But, if we learn to forgive people who are so full of hate, then maybe we can teach them how to love. I am reminded of the brother of Rachel Scott, the first person to be murdered at Columbine High School. He learned to forgive his sister’s murderers for what they did, so that he could have peace of mind back, and to start channeling all the negativity that strained from that event into positivity as a motivational speaker.

I stand for family. Without family, I would not be here. They are my home that I keep returning to, and they are the blooming forest of trees that were planted when I was born.

I stand for the power of information. There is nothing more powerful than one's mind. Yet, the mind is being ignored these days with the onset of video games, high def television, computers that think for you, and the indolent iGeneration. Pick up a book, read some quotes, and respond to them! Interpret the words to fit your life and your mind! Then, go and tell someone else about it! Then, after you've successfully molded your mind and helped mold somebody else's, then go and take a well-deserved break.

I stand for educating the mind AND the body, as Plato told his students to do. Both entities must be able to work together in order to function at all. Take time out to go for a run or a hike, break the old bike out of the shed and discover new terrain. We are not physically fit until we are mentally fit as well.

It is in this new terrain that we can open our eyes to see things differently, the way others see them. With others’ help, the world can be a good place, the way it was intended. Remember - let one hand wash the other, but both hands wash the face. And it is because our hands each have five fingers, and all of our faces have two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth, that we can all do this cleansing together, as one body and one mind.