group work

today was a day when it felt like class wasn't a total failure. you might have noticed the absence of student-focused writing lately. mostly this is for lack of a way to express how much at sea i feel when thinking about them.

last week was parent/teacher conferences and to be honest i rarely respect the parents i deal with. i know that's not fair. i know it's tough to raise a kid today. i know. i know. but, still. there have to be some things you just know are right as a parent. i find it difficult to talk to most of the parents, especially on the phone, because they simply don't represent what i say accurately to their kids. they lie. now, the kids to the same thing, but they're kids. that's really to be expected, at least a little. but at parent/teacher conference time i tell the kids i'll give them an extra ten points if they show up with parents to meet with me. i just want everyone in the same place at the same time. it works surprisingly well. kids who are already successful bring parents because it's in their nature to do what's right and so i get to say all sorts of pretty things about them. this feels good for the kid, the parents and for me. the kids who are struggling but want to do well drag in with their parents, too to get that ten points. this gives me a chance to say really specific things to both parents and child about what sort of changes might make things better. perhaps the little angel might go to bed before 2am so he's awake for my class in the morning. maybe forcing the child to come home right after school because her parents don't trust her is keeping her from afterschool tutoring, an opportunity she really shouldn't miss.

but then there are the others. the freakout parents. the ones who are never at home when i call, never return a call when i leave a message or have disconnected numbers but leave me urgent messages to call them anyway. they are parents who have raised children who arrive 45 minutes into a 55 minute class, children who scream across a room at other children, children who do not know the meaning of "sit down", "stop talking", "please get out your book" or "stop hitting that child, children who scream, "i wasn't DOING ANYTHING!" when i say their names. and so this year for the very first time, i reprimanded a child in front of a parent during a meeting. okay, this happened more than once. several times. i actually turned to a boy and said, "the way you talk to your mother is inappropriate." one mother, trailing at least five clamoring children, screamed at the oldest as they followed me down the stairs ten minutes after the meetings were scheduled to be over at almost 9pm, "if you don't do better in her class, i won't buy you an i-phone." indeed. this is the second year he's failed my class and as far as i can tell, his tenth grade self has exactly one credit to his name. one class he's passed in two years. an i-phone for that.

so i wasn't exactly expecting to have fun today, the first day back after all that. i was thinking cruel thoughts about short-sighted people bringing up bland children on screaming and technology. and today we're supposed to talk about writing dialog. at 8am. yay. when the bell rang at 8 there were exactly three children in the class. there are 20 children on the roster but four or five do not show up at all, so they read until about 12 showed up. and we started talking. nothing fancy, but they sort of got into it. i told them secrets. they devoured them like magic tricks. i wasn't expecting that. then we put them in groups. this is where all hell usually breaks loose. most schools emphasize group work because it teaches cooperation skills. generally, i find it teaches fighting skills, isolation skills, bullying skills, laziness skills and a host of other horrible, misery-enhancing skills. still, i know that when done right it can work. it is simply that for the past fifteen or so years i've rarely seen it done right and almost never accomplished it myself. but that's the key. turning a classroom over to fifteen children whose mothers still wipe things off their faces with a spit-moistened finger is tough to do. but on the monday morning after the most annoying parent/teacher conferences ever, inviting chaos into the room doesn't really seem all that terrifying.

groups of three. this is the best way to group kids, i think. maybe you've got something better, but three somehow cuts down on all that makes kids mean. there are three girls in the room and i offered them the opportunity to choose their groups, to determine their fates, more or less. they stared in horror. so i chose for them. everyone in a group. the assignment is as follows:

1. select a scenario from the five on the board.
2. determine the details of your two (or three) characters, such as age, relationship, personality.
3. write a page of dialog that represents the scenario.

i gave them scenarios that would encourage conversation- a teenager coming home past curfew to find an angry parent waiting up. a person asking another person out on a date. a woman telling someone she's pregnant. a parent teacher conference. you get the idea. and they started to discuss. they talked quietly, leaning in. i had never seen anything like that so i wandered around, peering over desks and shoulders, reading bits of writing and hearing bits of discussion.

and here's what happened. choosing a single scenario meant discussing the situation and once they began thinking of characters, they got involved in what was happening. they got involved in the lives of people they didn't even know a few minutes earlier, people who didn't exist at all until just then. one group chose the date scene and they couldn't stop giggling. i don't think you'd be able to find three more unlike children anywhere but they laughed the whole time they wrote. and they looked at each other, cracked each other up with cheesy come on lines and possible opportunities for hitting on someone.

the boys tended to like the pregnancy one. but they got so caught up in writing for their characters they didn't even realize they'd begun writing the intro to a very long story about a thirteen year old girl who was overwhelmed by the burden of starting a new family even as her old family abandoned her. when i asked them questions about her, they answered together, in unison, like they knew her. they really did know her. and they were angry for her, on her behalf.

at the end of the hour, not a single group had produced a page of dialog. i had done what everyone says you have to do. it's like breathing underwater. going against everything your brain is screaming for you to do. i let them control everything. and they did. instead of a page of dialog they created stories, rich and full and detailed, heavy with dialog and anger and hilarity. they created scenes and motives. they created people. and it was good.