I was up in my classroom last night until 10 or so. Not because I was feverishly putting together curriculum or sweating over content. Rather I was trying to get my room in order. It has been my experience that getting more room in order and organized is much harder than planning out my courses. The reason for this is simple - the students. It's really hard for me to complete lesson plans without my kids in mind. I think the best education is tailored to individual students. Kind of hard to do that when I have met all but one of my students so far.
This years speaker for our district wide inservice day was Mervlyn K. Kitashima. She presented "No More 'Children at Risk: Children at Promise.'" Despite my distaste for education 'experts,' I found her presentation quite interesting. She certainly knows what she is talking about. She grew up in a dysfunctional and poor family in Hawaii. Her father was a white military officer from New Jersey while her mother was Hawaiian. Her father was a rampant alcoholic who was quite intelligent but didn't know how to share his intelligence with his children. She recalls him sitting at their kitchen table with his books piled up around him and his glasses of alcohol piled up around his books. Because of her home life, school became her sanctuary where she knew she would at least have a safe place and a meal. However, she became a bully off the school grounds because she was constantly ridiculed for her 'mixed' race and appearance. The focus of her presentation was on not viewing kids as "at risk," but rather viewing all children "at promise."
While Kitashima was quite passionate and interesting, her presentation skills left some things lacking. For instance, she tried to qualify all of her statements with psychological and clinical jargon. She would say something like, "There are four reasons children should be classified as 'at risk.'" As she was chronicling those four reasons, she would branch off into narratives to illustrate her reasons. By the time she ended her narratives and got back to the points, I had forgotten what her original points were. She should have chucked the jargon and gone straight for the narratives. Here is one I'll never forget - when her father and mother were fighting, which was quite often, she would seek refuge at her grandmother's. Kitashima had long dark hair down to her waist. But since she was poor, she didn't bath regularly nor take much time for hygiene. She recalled her grandmother taking the time to heat water for her and scrub her good and clean. Then she would take her time untangling the massive knots she had in her long hair. The imagery she used was incredible. The final image Kitashima left us with - and the image that drove home the importance of dedication and compassion - was that of her waking up crying in the middle of the night. Her grandmother had a wooden leg, which she took off when she slept. Since her grandmother slept in a bedroom across the house from Kitashima's room, she recalled crying from her nightmare and seeing her grandmother dragging herself across the floor to comfort Kitashima. Now that is dedication - and an image and narrative that I won't ever forget. There is a lesson in that for my Comp students.
I'm always interested in how teachers behave themselves during these presentations. I think it's ironic how we often act when we are in the role of students. I was up in the balcony of our auditorium, surrounded by coaches (and I am one too). And there is not a worse audience for presentations than coaches. Now I have been guilty of drawing up plays while listening to a presenter. But we had one guy from our distract - I believe he teaches at the middle school - who chose to blather throughout most of the presentation. Now had a student blathered during one of his classes, he probably would have run the kid out. But the irony was lost on him.
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