15 + 9 points
Work is So Strange by the white bread cancer
August 7th, 2006 12:08 PM
Instead of waiting for interesting developments at my new job--three weeks in and the most excitment I've had was getting hit by a car--I've decided to recount a work experience from this spring, when I was teaching 7th grade. More precisly, teaching remedial after-school ESL (we say ELL now?) 7th grade, for the Princeton Review, on behalf of NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.
The school was Cesar Chavez, at 47th and Ashland, Chicago, a nice ride down through the back-of-the-yards from my Pilsen apartment (digression: I almost got hit by a freight train riding to work once--how well a stopped train can hide the moving one behind it). This gave me lots of time to ponder the guiding metaphor behind PR's new SideStreets pedagogy, which allowed us to speak of 'skills onramps' and 'highways to success' without mentioning how it's always poor neighborhoods that the metaphoric (and actual) highways get built through.
In my attempts to get beyond the English cirriculum (teaching Alice in WOnderland and Derrida instead of The Kite-Fighters and George Washington), I would try to make math class more interesting for some of the kids by throwing harder problems at them. I once promised a mixtape to whoever could sum the numbers from 1 to 100 first (one kid came in with a ms excel printout, which was almost right..) But my favorite exchange in math class was with Lee. He had a big mouth and trouble with fractions, which wasn't helped by my refusal to recognize division (come on, it's just multiplication by reciprocal). One day he asked what half of one half was, so I told him just to multiply by one half, which was like dividing by two. He insisted that you couldn't divide one half by two, but I told him he could divide any number by any number he wanted. So then of course he asks me What about zero? What's two divided by zero? He thinks he has me, and declares, triumphant, That's impossible! I don't flinch and tell him back, No that's not impossible, it's just undefined. To which he responds, totally destroying me--Man, that's some UNDEPOSSIBLE BULLSHIT! Deconstroyed, Lee, deconstroyed. And I hadn't even taught them my concrete vs. abstract lesson yet. I miss my kids a lot now that I work now that I work only with computers, which I guess are sort of like autistic deaf-mute children who die out all the time. Sigh.
The school was Cesar Chavez, at 47th and Ashland, Chicago, a nice ride down through the back-of-the-yards from my Pilsen apartment (digression: I almost got hit by a freight train riding to work once--how well a stopped train can hide the moving one behind it). This gave me lots of time to ponder the guiding metaphor behind PR's new SideStreets pedagogy, which allowed us to speak of 'skills onramps' and 'highways to success' without mentioning how it's always poor neighborhoods that the metaphoric (and actual) highways get built through.
In my attempts to get beyond the English cirriculum (teaching Alice in WOnderland and Derrida instead of The Kite-Fighters and George Washington), I would try to make math class more interesting for some of the kids by throwing harder problems at them. I once promised a mixtape to whoever could sum the numbers from 1 to 100 first (one kid came in with a ms excel printout, which was almost right..) But my favorite exchange in math class was with Lee. He had a big mouth and trouble with fractions, which wasn't helped by my refusal to recognize division (come on, it's just multiplication by reciprocal). One day he asked what half of one half was, so I told him just to multiply by one half, which was like dividing by two. He insisted that you couldn't divide one half by two, but I told him he could divide any number by any number he wanted. So then of course he asks me What about zero? What's two divided by zero? He thinks he has me, and declares, triumphant, That's impossible! I don't flinch and tell him back, No that's not impossible, it's just undefined. To which he responds, totally destroying me--Man, that's some UNDEPOSSIBLE BULLSHIT! Deconstroyed, Lee, deconstroyed. And I hadn't even taught them my concrete vs. abstract lesson yet. I miss my kids a lot now that I work now that I work only with computers, which I guess are sort of like autistic deaf-mute children who die out all the time. Sigh.
You should really Teach for America. The world would be a better place.