The summer leading up to my second year of teaching, I got the funniest and scariest email ever from my principal. "We finally figured out your schedule for next year! You will teach 6th, 7th, and 8th grade science and social studies. Your 6th and 7th grade classes will be blended AND your fourth block class will be all boys."
hahahahhahaha.
Say what.
Just so you know, in order to teach 6-8 science and social studies I will need to make fifteen lesson plans a week. Also, in case you were wondering I taught language arts and math the year before. Finally...a little known fact, if students struggle in math and language arts, science and social studies feel like organ chem and calculus.
Now that that's clear.
My first day of school ran smoothly. I had almost all of my seventh graders the previous year so a lot of them fell into the same procedures as before, they walked in grabbed their folders, sat down and started their warm-ups. My sixth graders were too scared to move (my classroom was in the seventh/eighth grade building). But my eighth graders were another story. My anxiety levels rose slowly throughout the day until 1:30 slowly circled around.
Many of my eighth graders were 16. They were not afraid of authority anymore and certainly not afraid of the 5'2 110 pound woman in front of them. This would be interesting.
Mike was in this class. He was approximately 6'2, long, lanky, and smiled using half of his face. With Mike there were good days and bad days. The good days were great. I got more work out of Mike then almost any other student and he helped keep others in line with his conformity to the rules of the classroom. On the bad days, Mike would refuse to do anything, or would come to class tardy and continue to walk around the room until I finally had to call for security to remove him.
If you should know one thing about me, it is that I am a persistent son of a gun. I will call parents and continue to call parents until they call me back, or I show up to your house. I do not know "appropriate" times so 6am, 6pm, 10am, 9pm, I will call visit, email, text, or carrier pigeon until you pick up the phone and talk to me about your kid. This persistence paid off with Mike.
Every time there was a bad or good day with Mike, I called his grandmother. I continued to call her until I saw a change in Mike. Mostly those changes happened when I called his grandma before class and then followed up with a call after class. The important note here is that there was a call. The best was when the call was detailing Mike's amazing work and attitude during class.
Through my conversations with Mike's grandmother I learned about his past as a child. I learned he was the center of a custody battle with his mother and grandma. I learned that he had never really been settled. I learned that social workers had been in and out of his life, even at school, due to the custody battle. Suddenly the tribulations in my class made much more sense, the social workers ALWAYS came at lunch, and lunch was right before Mrs. Frech's class.
Luckily for me, I was blessed to have a friendship with the In-School-Suspension teacher. Mr. Alexander was loved by most of my students (frequent guests :-)) and was especially loved by Mike. Mr. Alexander worked with Mike to move chains during football games and I went to watch him participate. Mike was eventually given a pet name by Mr. Alexander and myself and from then on Mike was a bright light in my day, even on the iwanttoripmyhairout why-the-h-amIdoingthis days.
Halfway through the year, Mike's mother won custody of him. As I walked through the courtyard between the seventh grade hallway and library I was handed a document stating that Mike's grandmother was not allowed to have any contact with him, including through me. I also learned that Mike's mother lived in a different school district then BSCA. I knew this would be a hard day.
I found Mike walking behind me and immediately ran into him and hugged him. Even through more write-ups than most students experience, arguments, and i'm going to ignore ms. frech until she goes away attitude days, Mike had my heart.
Luckily, Mike's mom decided to keep him at BSCA through the end of the year. Unluckily Mike and another boy decided to make a bad decision which landed them with a long term suspension. At the end of the suspension Mike's mom took him out of our school.
It is hard to lose the war when you have won so many battles. It is hard to immerse yourself into a culture that is transient and sometimes unreliable. It is hard to not take it personally when the fate of forty young people hangs in your ability to teach them. It is hard to let them in when you know they may leave. In this case I might have lost one student, but it taught me a great deal about the movements I could make with my others. My class of eight was down to seven.
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