Posts Tagged ‘stories’

Running Shoe Sketches and Three Minutes of Class Time

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I’m sharing this story with everyone so they might feel more confident about changing their agendas and schedules to focus on what’s real and important from time to time.

The other day my wife and I were out for a walk when a car that drove past us slammed on its brakes, made an abrupt U-turn, and drove right up to where we were walking on the sidewalk. I was slightly concerned until I saw who jumped out: a former student shouting, “Mr. Ross! Mr. Ross! I have to tell you … ”

Four years earlier I taught this boy, now a young man, in a 10th grade social studies class. He wasn’t what you would call a ‘strong’ social studies student, but I’ll be the first to admit that the content was not enthralling, and it most definitely wasn’t relevant to a lot of the 15 year olds in the class. Anyway, several times during that semester I saw Ryley drawing running shoes, and I thought, “OK, the boy likes running shoes.”

One day, however, during an open book exam, I walked past his desk and saw he hadn’t even started because he was busy drawing yet another picture of shoes. “Hmmm…” I thought, and asked him, “Ryley, what’s up with the running shoes?”

With a big, embarrassed smile, he replied, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked.

“No one knows. Like I always draw running shoes and I don’t know why. It’s weird, right?”

And here I saw a 15 year-old boy who knew he should be working on his in-class exam, who knew he wasn’t the strongest social studies student in the class, who knew that there weren’t many other kids who drew running shoes, and he looked pretty embarrassed being caught with what he thought was a weird habit.

“Not at all,” I said, “I think it’s great! How long have you been doing this?”

“Like for as long as I can remember. I’ve always wanted to make running shoes when I grow up.”

“That’s great!” I said and I proceeded to tell him – in the middle of the open-book exam, that he was lucky to know exactly what he wanted to do at such a young age. I had run this lesson with that particular class, so this advice wasn’t coming out of left field, and I encouraged him to sketch out a life-plan that included running shoes. “Heck,” I said, “I can just see me and everyone in this room one day paying big money for your shoes. Wouldn’t that be awesome if we were all wearing your shoes one day?”

He nodded and smiled, and I gently encouraged him to get started and do his best on the in-class exam. That was it. Three minutes of my time.

Fast-forward 4 years and here he is, jumping out of his car to tell me, “I’m doing it! I’m doing it! I sent my designs off to a manufacturer in China and I’m getting my first prototype in a couple of weeks.”

It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about and then, once I did, he and I excitedly told my wife about the story of him drawing running shoes in social studies class.

“You were the one Mr. Ross. You were the one who told me to do it. I just thought you’d want to know.”

(How much time did I invest? Three minutes. It had nothing to do with me … but anyways … )

And here I saw a young man who was excited about life and his future plans, confident about himself, and grateful to a former teacher for not scolding him for drawing pictures in class when he should have been working. It was pretty cool to say the least, and I’m happy I spent the two or three classes talking to that group of students about life.

I’m glad I chose to make an otherwise boring course meaningful instead of  simply ‘covering’ the curriculum.

I’ll end with Ryley’s words, who messaged me on Facebook the other day:

hey mr. Ross! hope your doing well, i just thought i’d tell you i’m leaving to florence italy on tuesday to attend Polimoda fashion university for shoe design!!

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Posted in Growth, Reflections, Wisdom | 2 Comments »

We’re All Big Kids

Monday, May 25th, 2009

A few times this year my wonderful wife has sent me to work to help with our “VISA repayment plan” (it’s the least I can do considering she’s pregnant and working full time). So I’ve embarked on a few stints of substitute teaching. It’s been, surprisingly, amazingly educational.

Last week I found myself in a gymnasium with two classes of Gr.4 boys, organizing and refereeing “The Super Hockey Championships” between team green-hockey-sticks and team orange-hockey-sticks. We had a mini-training camp where we did stutter steps until there were two kids standing, lines with push-ups and sit-ups intermixed, and running races. It was serious business. And if it was something other than “The Super Hockey Championship” right afterward, they would’ve been too bagged to play. But it wasn’t, and the training-camp made the game all the more important.

I noticed one of the little boys right at the start of the class. He was very athletic and a couple of times I caught him whispering things to his teammates. What he said couldn’t have been nice considering how deflated the recipients of the messages looked once the whispering ended … and the scowl on the whispering boys face confirmed my suspicion. I thought to myself, “I better keep an eye on this one.”

Each team had an A-shift and a B-shift. They were to take turns playing every three minutes. Four minutes into the game and one minute into B-shifts first shift, I noticed that a frumpy and clumsy looking boy hadn’t played yet. I walked over and asked him if he wanted to play. He nodded fiercely. I asked why he wasn’t playing and he looked up at the whispering/scowling boy. “Hmmm … ” I thought.  I gave whispering/scowling boy a penalty and insisted that frumpy/clumsy boy play during the penalty plus another shift to make up for his lost time.

Ten minutes later I announced, “4 minutes left!” At the same time I caught the same team trying to keep frumpy/clumsy boy on the bench … but this time it was another boy. This meant that new-penalty-boy would sit on the bench, and someone else from that team would have to come off so frumpy/clumsy boy could play. I chose whispering/scowling boy. He slammed his stick on the gym floor.

It was a close end to the game. The team taking all the penalties was trying to protect their one goal lead, and swarms of orange and green hockey sticks clashed and banged in that tiny little gymnasium. For these Gr.4 kids it meant everything. It was epic. And out of the corner of my eye I saw whispering/scowling boy wipe a tear from his eye. I realized he had only played about 4 minutes of the 20 minute game. I recalled how hard he worked in training camp. I thought how badly he wanted to win. How excluded he likely felt. How unfair it was that this strange man was making him miss the most important game of Gr.4 hockey. His tears were so real that I felt silly and ashamed.

And then I thought how we’re all this way. We’re all big kids. Some of us scowl and whisper, some of us klutz around, and most of us do other sorts of things. But at the end of the day, we all just want to be included. We just want to be part of the action. To be liked. To be acknowledged and validated by our peers and the people we look up to. But we forget these things as we get older because we get so good at hiding our feelings, forgetting that all of our own feelings – and other people’s too – come from the same place regardless of our age.

So I let the whispering/scowling boy with the face full of tears start playing before his team penalty “officially” ended with a nod and a smile. And I don’t know if it was the fact that he could play, or the knowing, warm look I gave him, but you should have seen his eyes light up. And maybe that was all the little tyke needed in the first place … just a bit of acknowledgment and validation.

And maybe that’s what all of us are looking for … the same things kids are: fair rules, solid boundaries, high-expectations, and a little bit of encouragement and validation along the way.

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Posted in Experience, Philosophy, Reflections, Wisdom | 1 Comment »

Slug Students and Positive Shock and Awe

Monday, April 6th, 2009

For some students, absolutely nothing their teachers teach them will ‘get through’ because their self-talk is resistant to learning. I am NOT talking about troubled, abused, incapable students; I’m talking about those ‘slug students’ who just sit there and resist learning because what they say to themselves on a minute-by-minute, second-by-second basis repels it. Their self-talk, for whatever reason, repels new information, new ideas, and new skills … like water off a ducks back. It’s stupid, lame, retarded, boring, who cares, this sucks, whatever, when does class end?

Example
I was in a classroom last week and overheard four female students converse during a work period. Here are some snippets:

“Mr. _____ is so lame. He thinks his subject is so important. It’s so stupid.”

“I have like no idea what they’re talking about in that class. Like I care … (friend says something) … Yeah, all I want is a pass.”

“______ (classmate) thinks he’s so smart. All he does is do homework. I think he’s the only one.”

“I can’t wait to watch ________ (reference to a reality TV show). All they do is fight with each other. It’s hilarious.”

“Are you working this weekend? Oh god, I hate my job. It’s like the lamest job ever … I don’t even do anything.” (friend replies with envious whine-like tone in her voice) “You’re sooo luckeeey you don’t have to do anything.”

How to Deal with Slug Students

How to Deal with Slug Students

When I walked over to this group of girls to see how their work was coming along, their bodies bristled, they stopped talking, and they waited for “teacher” to talk … in the same way we wait in fearful anticipation before a nurse gives us a needle. I spoke. They froze. They numbly nodded their heads when I asked if things were going well. They mumbled a couple of lame excuses as to why they couldn’t show me any of their finished work. They sat their like slugs, complaining about everything, liking nothing, and uninspired to do much of anything.

How do You Deal with Slug Students (or Workers)?
I’ve worked with many students like these ones over the years and, to be honest, they can be the most difficult (if you approach them the wrong way) because on a minute-by-minute basis they are telling themselves over-and-over that everything’s lame and everything sucks. Why would anyone work hard at something if they viewed the world that way? And if that’s the case, what could any teacher do to get them to do anything at all?

It’s easy to get frustrated with these students. It’s easy to write them off as lazy. As slugs. As wet noodles that aren’t worth pushing. Sadly, however, I’ve found that that’s how most people in their lives treat them and they’ve simply learned to respond in kind. But what I’ve found over the years is that what these slug students need – like what they’re really, really craving at a deep psychological level – is for someone to validate them. To put it another way, slug students are often hopeless students.

Positive Shock and Awe
What I’ve found works best is to give slug students a dose of positive shock and awe. They need someone to rattle their self-talk cages. They need someone to pull them aside and say how much potential they see in them. What outstanding qualities they possess. How frustrating it is to sit back and listen to them verbally beat themselves up – and the world – all class long. How their body language (have a look because I guarantee you that your slug students are really, really slouching) sends a message to everyone in their world that they don’t care about much of anything, especially themselves. They need to hear how happy you would be if you saw them taking pride in themselves. How happy you’d be if they found something they liked doing and poured their heart into it … regardless if it had anything to do with your course or not.

Basically, slug students need someone to come along and say, “I care about you, and I hate seeing you not care about you. In fact, in this class, I will not be able to stand by and watch you not care about you.” Slug students need their ongoing self-talk to be disrupted by something and someone totally unexpected.

Let me end with a story.
Seven years ago I was teaching a slug student who struggled with things, and her oral reading was awful. At the start of the course I let her pain through reading three sentences aloud to her classmates before respectfully moving on to the next student. After observing her repel everything we were learning in class and listening to her abuse herself over and over with her own self-talk, I finally pulled her aside and did the above (i.e. positive shock and awe), and encouraged her to read anything … just anything … for 30 minutes at night before going to bed. “Just read something! Steamy romance even,” I pleaded and then said quite seriously, “And I won’t tolerate you beating yourself up in my class any more. No more whatevers, yeah buts, or I’m stupids. Seriously.”

Three months passed and she would tell me from time to time she was finishing books. I continued to encourage her, but I remember being frustrated with her ongoing sluggish behavior in my class … but I didn’t want to be too hard on her either. With two weeks left in class we were reading a passage aloud and I asked her to read for the first time in 4 months. I was absolutely floored with how much she had improved. It was still tough to listen to, but it dawned on me that this slug student really had been reading. She really was trying. Her improvement was huge!

So I stopped her mid-sentence. She flinched. I said to her in front of all the students, “Get on up and stand on top of your desk chair.” I knew she was thinking the worst, but she obliged nonetheless. I explained to the class of students (hamming it up … in kind of an angry tone) that I had NEVER seen a student do what she did. And finally, I asked the class to give her a standing ovation for improving so much in her oral reading. They were a great group of students, we clapped and cheered for 3-5 seconds, and that was the end of it. When it was all said and done, I had maybe invested 20 minutes of time that semester working on that individual student.

Last year I met up with a few students from that class for dinner at the restaurant across the street from my house. She was there, and she was looking great. At a certain point during our two hours of reminiscing, she pulled me aside and said, “You were the only one Mr. Ross. You were the only one who believed in me. Everyone else thought I was stupid. My family, my friends, my boyfriends. You were it. The only one. It changed everything. I don’t know how I can thank you.”

20 minutes of positive shock and awe. Don’t write your slug students off. Validate them. Let them know you care.

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Posted in Great Examples, Growth, Philosophy, Reflections | 1 Comment »