White Cockroaches, Dead Car Batteries, and Amateur Production Studios.

Below: Some of my sixth graders and local performers: Slangston Hughes

The bugs always seem to come out in the upstairs bathroom.  

Last night there was what looked like an albino cockroach crossed with a neon fish crawling up the corner where tile meets wood.  I said, "Wow- what are you?" out loud and it only wiggled its antenna in response.  There was a regularly pigmented bug below it, trying to stay out of the limelight.  I thought perhaps they were having an affair.  How do they get all the way in there anyway?  All the windows up there have screens.  Anyway- I stayed out of its way and it was far enough from my shampoo bottle that I felt okay sharing a space with it temporarily.  Ten o'clock is far too late (for teacher time) to actually deal with anything.

Presently I am avoiding dealing with the reality of not having a working car and instead playing on two computers.  At six p.m. it is a mild 80 something outside, but the prospect of moving Ashlee's car to block our one-way street and then hooking up jumper cables is overwhelming to my absurdly sleepy self.  The only thing is- tomorrow I have an appointment to give six to seven of my eighth graders a ride to my house for a end-of-year BBQ and nothing but the Buick can get the job done.  The front passenger tire is also lopsided due to a lack of air.  It's all part of the excitement!  Who said teaching wasn't full of adventure?

I am also in the midst of a recording binge.  Well, now I guess it's just mass-production.  I'm copying cds for all my students- featuring their poems, songs, and sentences... and of course, my alter ego "C-Money," who performed in front of a crowd of 400 raucous middle-schoolers to try to pep them up for the standardized tests.  My favorite is a track of them stating a few words about what they've learned this year- over a subtle background melody.  

Also- I found out good news about my stats today.  In my sixth grade classes, we closed the gap between our school and Zachary Parish (the highest performing county in the state) by 26%.  They're still not where they're supposed to be- but they're a helluva lot closer than they were last year.  That feels good.  At least my sixth-graders still have a few years to narrow the gap even more.

My eighth graders are a little more fatalistic.  When you're about to turn 17 and still can't pass the 8th grade standardized test- it can be quite deterring.  But some of my 17-year olds who failed the test were right on the brink.  Only one of my eighth graders scored "unsatisfactory."  The rest were at least close.  

It's hard.  The system has failed them for so long... and then holds them accountable only once every 4-8 years- at which point the many years of not-teaching-enough, not-reaching-out-enough, not-remediating-enough, all catch up, and then the student- the victim- is villianized.  Made to feel like a failure because they were ten points away from an acceptable score on a test designed for a different demographic- who speaks a different dialect- who attend schools where they have doors on every bathroom stall and never worry about being able to afford toilet paper or that they might get shot on the way home from the bus stop and where they certainly don't have to bring their own envelopes so their report cards can be mailed home.  It just boggles my mind.

Anyway.

Once I figure out how to post mp3 tracks I'll let you hear some samples.