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My son has a math test today. He was up till 3 a.m. studying for it.

In my experience, a positive mindset is essential to successful test-taking, so on the drive to school, I give him a piece of advice.

“Walk into the classroom,” I say, “look at the teacher and lay down a challenge, like ‘Let’s do it.’”

“It’s not her test,” the boy says.

“What does that mean?”

“It means every class takes the same test — Schneider, D’Antonio . . .”

“THAT DOESN’T MATTER,” I say. “The important thing is to lay down the challenge. ‘Stop bitin’ on my styles.’ Granted, that one doesn’t make any sense, but it gives you the positive mental framework that you need for mathematical success.”

At Northwood High School, Honors Euro Lit is known by its acronym — HEL (pronounced hell) — and widely regarded as the hardest class at the school.

In order to get an A in the class for the first semester, my son needed a very high score — around a 98 — on the final exam, didn’t get it, and finished with a semester grade of 89.27 — a high B.

If he’d had at least an 89.5, the teacher would have rounded it up to an A. So out of 1,000+ possible points over the course of the semester, an 89.27 means you missed an A by only three or four points.

I’ve always encouraged the boy to be proactive with his teachers. Some people call this “sucking up” but I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. When there’s a close call on a grade, those students may get the benefit of the doubt.

Being a public school teacher is unrewarding in many ways. You’re not going to get rich, for one thing. And you’re not going to be held in high esteem because the conventional wisdom is that public education in America is a disaster.

The only real attraction of the job is that every day you have an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. And even there, in most cases you will fail.

“Make sure the teachers know that you want to do well in their class,” I tell my kid. “Ask them what you need to do and they’ll tell you. They want to help you.”

After his final score was posted in HEL, he went in after school to talk to the teacher about his grade. They went over some previous assignments and exams, including a Macbeth exam where the teacher found a question that he felt he “didn’t teach very well.” He gave the boy four points back on the question, which gave him an 89.55 for the semester. That’s an A.

Father knows best, suckas! Academic success is not (just) about academics.

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First semester grades are out. My son missed getting straight A’s by a point and a half. He had an 88.5 in honors history.

He got an A in honors English with a 90.14.

The honors classes at Northwood are very demanding. Even the best students get low A’s and high B’s.

Three kids got A’s in the history class. The high score was a 91.1.

“The 91.1 is Ted,” my son says. We know Ted. “Ted is history. He’s bad at math, average in English, but he knows everything there is to know about history.”

“Make sure you touch base with the history teacher,” I say. “Let him know you’re really doing your best for him and ask him what you need to do to get that extra point and a half this semester. He’ll tell you.”

“He’ll say, ‘Study hard, get a good score on all the assignments, blah blah blah.’”

“You’re a pessimist,” I say. (I was going to say “fatalist” but I’m not sure he knows what that means.) “I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. They want you to do well and if there’s a close call on a grade, they may give you the benefit of the doubt. So be proactive with this guy.”

His mom chimes in at this point: “That’s right,” she says.

“I hate that,” the boy replies. “You don’t even know what he’s talking about. You just say ‘That’s right.’”

I say, “She doesn’t have to know what I’m talking about to know it’s right. If my lips are moving, it’s right.”

As a music teacher I often ask myself if we are truly preparing our students for success. I am not just referring to how well we teach the students to play their instruments, but more importantly if the students will take with them lessons/knowledge/experiences that will prepare them to be strong contributing members of any challenging discipline, and to any organization, in music and other areas of interest.

Approximately 70% of students in any youth orchestra will more than likely select a non-music related profession. Of the students who pursue music as a major in college, a strong percentage of them will end up pursuing a livelihood that is not centered around music.

So then, what skills will the young person take with him if he does not become a professional musician? … I began coaching chamber ensembles how to communicate and lead from within the ensemble, and play without a conductor. While the model was successful it required Team building aspects to make it whole. From this grew a set of core principles; Trust, Unfiltered Dialog, Commitment, Accountability, and Attention to Team Results.

— Wyatt Sutherland, Artistic Director and Founder, YellowCello Young Artists

This is also the critical issue with kids and sports, the main difference being that the percentage of kids who will not be professional athletes is closer to 100 than to 70.

I know a guy — let’s call him Goofus . . .

Goofus is dumb. I don’t mean that in a colloquial way. I don’t mean that he’s uneducated. I mean he clearly has a subnormal level of intelligence.

The most striking thing about him though is that he’s completely unaware of his own limitations. I’ve never heard him utter anything but platitudes and nonsense but in his mind, he’s the most interesting man in the world.

So many kids by the age of 12 or so have had their confidence in their own abilities extinguished by parents and teachers, that I really have to give Goofus’s parents a lot of credit.

I’m not kidding. They raised a supremely confident idiot.

Something this morning reminded me of one of my old calculus teachers . . .

He had a signature “joke” that he’d make whenever he or someone in the class mentioned being behind on something:

“I don’t mind getting a little behind once in a while.”

DOUBLE MEANING! GET IT?

No one ever laughed. There were always just a few seconds of ghastly silence.

Man, that guy was creepy . . .

A co-worker informs me that a Santa Ana elementary school teacher has been charged with child endangerment for keeping a gun in her classroom.

“Well, that’s Santa Ana,” I say. “What do you expect from people? Not a day goes by that you can’t pick up the Orange County Register and read about a gang-related slaying in Santa Ana. If I were a teacher in Santa Ana, you best believe I’d be packing heat too. Thank god this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Irvine where I live.”

“There are Asian gangs in Irvine.”

“Asian gangs in Irvine?! What a racist you are. I’ve lived in Irvine for seven years and I’ve never seen or heard of any Asian gang activity. Unless studying for AP exams counts as a gang activity. Blowing their brains out with mathematical formulas . . .”

This is the best email I’ve had all week. Let me preface it by saying that I don’t know the sender, so I changed her name to protect the “innocent.”

From: anne sexton [mailto:annie-s@hotmail.com]
Subject: Teacher?

Only in Southern California could someone so woefully ignorant be a teacher.

Your childish clinging to some 1950’s idea of masculinity in order to bolster your own ego is pathetic, and the sad thing is, you’re teaching your son to be equally disrespectful. Wow. Nice parenting. In short, I’m sorry you have a small dick. It doesn’t give you the right to disrespect women.

Oh, And GO BEARS, mother fucker.

Love,

Anne Sexton
PhD candidate in English, UC Berkeley (ranked #1 in the world for their English program. Where’s USC ranked?)

Sweet! Here’s my reply:

Hi Anne –

You sound very angry about something but I’m not sure what.

I don’t know where the USC English program is ranked but I know where the football team is ranked! #1, BABY! FIGHT ON, TROJANS! See you Nov. 10 for another beating!

Also, I’m pretty sure “motherfucker” is one word, not two, Miss “#1 in the world” English program.

Love,

Paul

P.S. Send a picture!

My son’s having some trouble with 8th grade Algebra. When I work with him on it, I can see that he knows the material and he can do the calculations . . . his biggest problem is a fatalistic, let’s-get-it-over-with, I’m-no-good-at-math attitude, which leads to careless errors, and frustration if his first approach to a problem doesn’t work.

I encourage him to take a more positive attitude, to go into the next test saying positive things to himself, like “I know this material” and “I can handle these questions.”

“But I don’t know it,” he says. “Mrs. Bryant [his math teacher] throws the gyroball every pitch! And sometimes she hits me with it!”

What we have here is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy . . .

On the heels of my kid’s discovery that his tour group will not be break dancing their way across our nation’s capital, comes another disappointment — his tyrannical math teacher has been added to the list of chaperones.

“She’ll probably say, ‘Oh, Casey, I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you calculate the volume of the White House?’”

Xkcd will sell you a T-shirt with this slogan on it.

My son loves it. He thinks his 8th grade science teacher should get one.

“That’s a great idea,” I say, “if he wants to get fired.”

“He could just cross out BIZNATCHES and write KIDS instead,” he suggests.

But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and start to crow, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.

 

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

 

He had learned the worst lesson life can teach — that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.

 

This is how successful people live. They’re good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then?

 

Here is someone not set up for life’s working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy — that is every man’s tragedy.

 

The students in her class at Montessori school were asked ten questions about their “philosophy,” one a week. The first week the teacher asked, “Why are we here?” Instead of writing as the other kids did — here to do good, here to make the world a better place, etc. — Merry answered with her own question: “Why are apes here?” But the teacher found this an inadequate response and told her to go home and think about the question more seriously — “Expand on this,” the teacher said. So Merry went home and did as she was told and the next day handed in an additional sentence: “Why are kangaroos here?” It was at this point that Merry was first informed by a teacher that she had a “stubborn streak.”

 

The final question assigned to the class was “What is life?” Merry’s answer was something her father and mother chuckled over together that night. According to Merry, while the other students labored busily away with their phony deep thoughts, she — after an hour of thinking at her desk — wrote a single, unplatitudinous declarative sentence: “Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.” “You know,” said the Swede, “it’s smarter then it sounds. She’s a kid — how has she figured out that life is short? She is somethin’, our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard.” But once again the teacher didn’t agree, and she wrote beside Merry’s answer, “Is that all?” Yes, the Swede thought now, that is all. Thank God, that is all; even that is unendurable.

 

“You talk about what I’m dealing with as though anybody could deal with it. But nobody could deal with it. Nobody! Nobody has the weapons for this. You think I’m inept? You think I’m inadequate? If I’m inadequate, where are you going to get people who are adequate . . . if I’m . . . do you understand what I’m saying? What am I supposed to be? What are other people if I am inadequate?”

My son’s junior high school is having a co-ed pickleball tournament at lunch. The results are posted on the school web site. The funny thing is that if a team name contains any sort of cultural reference, the P.E. teacher in charge of the tournament either can’t or won’t put the name on the web site without a deliberate misspelling.

For example, 3 White Guys and a Hindu becomes 3 Wite Gus and a Hidu, because identifying someone as white, male or Hindu is unacceptable.

Curiously enough, the team name 3 Blondes and a Brunette comes through unscathed. Why are people allowed to self-identify as blondes, but not as white guys or Hindus? It seems like the same thing to me.

The weirdest one to me is 4 Asians and an Idiot, which comes out as 4 Ans and an Idiot.

I ask my son, “Who’s the idiot?”

“Some white guy,” he says.

“Why is it okay to call someone an idiot but not an Asian?”

“It’s not racial.”

If poetry is reduced to an algebraic equation with one meaning, and only a teacher has the meaning, and you can’t figure it out without the teacher, it’s no fun. And when you become an adult, when you see a poem in The New Yorker, you’ll turn the page and look for a cartoon. You’ll say, ‘I don’t have to work for a good grade anymore.’

— Ted Kooser

Good or bad? It doesn’t say.

OC Family’s Special Annual “10 Teachers Making a Difference” issue is out . . .

Continue reading Teachers Making a Difference

Having students write essays about books accomplishes three things. It makes them hate writing, because it’s such a fruitless, uninteresting assignment. It makes them hate reading, because even books they enjoy are turned against them. And it probably makes them hate thinking, because the kind of analysis they’re forced to do is so strained and dull.

— Joseph Weisberg

Continue reading Teaching Kids to Write