Colleges apparently getting people’s hopes up in order to dash them:

The 18-year-old high school senior in Thornwood, New York, said she spent about $780 on 12 applications after mailings from top schools like Duke, which sent a wall poster. She was rejected by Duke, Columbia and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and plans to attend the University of Maryland.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, someone is interested in me,’” Ederer said in an interview. “They attract you with an e-mail and a few pamphlets and big envelopes filled with a ton of information and make you want to go to that school, and they don’t accept you.”

The rationale of this behavior being pretty simple: it looks better when you reject a higher percentage of your applicants. There’s actually a sign posted at Redstone High School wherein a few dozen colleges have a “common application process.” Apply to one, apply to all! That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but they basically make it easier to apply to as many as you want to. In part, I suspect, so that these schools can come across as being more selective than they otherwise are.

My alma mater, Southern Tech University, is trying to join the University of Delosa as a state flagship university. The goalposts that the state has set up for Sotech make it pay for the university to become more selective. More admissions typically correlates with lower medians, higher drop-out rates, and higher acceptance rates. All of which allow DU to turn their nose up at us and say “you have more in common with Delosa Polytechnic than you do with us.”

As a proud Pack alum, I wish my university well in its goal. The better it does, the better my degree looks… but a lot of it is tribal pride. Most alums seem to feel the same way. Of course, it becomes paradoxical after a point. A lot of people that got in under previous, more lenient admissions, would be less likely to get in under more recent standards. They’re wanting the university to attract better students than they, often, were. Whether I would get in to Southern Tech or not simply wasn’t a question. And indeed, I would likely get in under the newer proposed admission policies, as well. Though as they attract a better class of student, I would be less likely to get into the Honors College, which was one of the real boons to my time at the U. Beyond that, the fact that the university was less selective made it more attractive to me to begin with. I had deferred acceptance into DU, but I was intimidated by the prospect of going to a school that I “barely got into*.”

* – I didn’t fully appreciate how good my high school was and how much of a “leg up” I would have on a lot of my college classmates.

A reminder that I came up in the 80’s…

I didn’t say *my* 4th grade class. Even so, this was another class in my school, so I knew a lot of the kids because I was in the same class as them in earlier grades or the 5th grade. This picture will not be up for very long and will be replaced with an obscured one.

1 – Lived down the street from me. Disappeared from our school system at some point not long after this picture was taken (in fact, I could have sworn she had been gone by the 4th grade). She later died of a drug overdose.

2 – One of my best friends through parts of middle school. Then we went on different trajectories. He got a girlfriend pregnant almost immediately after high school and never went to college.

3 – I knew him quite well growing up, then at some point he just turned. He dropped out of high school and did a stint in prison.

4 – My family was close to her family and I’ve written about her on this blog before. She moved to Deseret and became part of some strange religion that required that she change her name. She was pregnant by 19 and had another kid by 21. While pregnant with her second, she cut off all ties to her family. She had one brother who ended up in Cascadia. He, too, severed all ties with his parents. It’s really weird, because their parents (who used to sit us often) seemed like great folks.

5. I was a horrible, horrible friend to this kid. I don’t even want to recount what exactly I did, but it ruined him socially. He must have known. Yet, years later, sent a Facebook friend request and we’ve chatted. If his Facebook info is to be believed, he has done unbelievably well for himself.

6. Remember that girl I posted about who married the guy several leagues below her? For those of you who don’t remember, she’s an MD now.

7. Is female. Even today, looks a little bit like a guy in drag.

8. Went to the prom with a guy who turned out to be gay. It should have been the first clue. She was gorgeous and he was utterly uninterested in her all night long. She was pissed, but they’re Facebook friends now, so I guess she got over it.

9. Graduated college at age 20, got two masters degrees and a PhD. Is a statistical analyst for a major insurance company. Four kids. Writes zombie fiction.

10. I was often confused with her brother, who was decidedly unpopular.

11. He left after the 4th grade, I think. He and I were friends, but the guy has the personality of a Monty Card dealer. I hope he ended up in Vegas.

With the exception of the tall brown kid, the boy below #4, and the girl between #7 and #8, I actually don’t remember any of the other kids in this picture. Which is rather astonishing to me, because it used to be that I remembered everybody.

A couple weeks back I had a few jobs at Pitts Elementary, which (along with Clark) is among the spottiest schools in town. And I was told, from start, that I was being handed a “problem class.” I was excited to discover that I would have not one but two “prep times” while the kids were in music and library respectively. Unfortunately, I had to stay in the classroom through music because a couple kids had been banned from the class and so I had to sit them. But other than that, things had actually gone pretty well. Right up until recess.

When the kids came back from recess, a kid named Lucus was whining that Deric hit him in the hallway. Lucus had alternated between being helpful and being one of the biggest problems in the class. I basically told him that I didn’t see it and so there isn’t much I can do about it. Then I saw Deric with his head buried in his arms, crying. I’m not proud of my inclination to just ignore Lucus, but there it is. Crying kids are harder to ignore, however. Marko and Lucus basically said that Deric cries a lot (along with Lucus reiterating that he was hit by Deric) and that the regular teacher always ignores it. I was less than entirely comfortable with that (with substitute teachers, I guess, crying works better than mere whining). So what happened, Deric? Todd hit me! Todd, did you hit Deric? Todd replies that he’s not getting involved. I tell him he’s already involved. Todd says he only hit Deric after Deric hit him. Lucus reiterates that he was hit by Deric. A neutral party, Marin, says that Deric did not hit Todd prior to Todd hitting Lucus. Marin, it should be said, is the kind of girl that I hope Clancy and I have if we have a girl. So I start preparing what I’m going to say to the principal and am informed (by Lucus, confirmed by Marin) that it’s actually the recess monitor’s responsibility and not mine.

Before I could get this settled, they had to go to the library. Since they were in the library, I thought I would get confirmation that it’s “not my problem.” So I went to the principal’s office with a kid that had been banned from the library. As a brief but not entirely irrelevant aside, when I was walking him to the main office, I got two or three inquiries about What Did Branden Do This Time? In fact, Branden had been well-behaved and helpful throughout. When I got to the main office, I had planned to just ask the clerk, but nobody was there because it was around lunchtime and the office-workers double as food-servers. The principal was in his office, though, and overheard me talking to Branden. He came out and chided Branden, saying that he thought Branden was going to start doing better. Actually, this is not about Brandon. Oh? So then with Brandon’s help, I explained everything and asked if this was something that I concern myself with or if it’s a recess monitor’s responsibility.

The end result was that the principal immediately took control of the situation. He pulled Lucus, Todd, Deric, and Marin out of the library and into his office. Lucus, I gather, quickly backtracked on his complaints about being hit to get out of the principal’s office as quickly as possible. Marin was out once she told him what she knew. Deric and Todd both ended up getting detention, surprise surprise. On the one hand, nobody saw what happened and so it’s difficult to discern (Todd’s story was – or became – that Deric hit him earlier in the day, and so Marin didn’t see it). One might be quick to say that this student is a troublemaker so we should assume he was at fault, but the assumptions about Branden made me particularly skittish about that in the afternoon. On the other hand, when I passed out the detention notices, Deric started crying again while Todd was showing it off to all of his friends. That, more or less, tells me what I need to know.

I’ve come to learn that teachers’ pets are actually a little like pets. Some are like hounds or shephards, and they can really help you out. Others, for the most part, just want to hump your leg. Then there are those that are exceptionally nice to you because they know that when you walk upstairs, you’ll discover that they pooped by your bed.

My first assignment had a teacher’s pet named Marinda. I really thought she was a godsend as she helped guide me through the class. The first half-day, she was quite helpful. By the end of the second day, I found her to be extremely annoying. I would specifically ask others for help, when I needed it, because she simply wouldn’t stop… everything. She just wouldn’t stop. I’ve learned to pick up on this type pretty quickly and go to others for help. If nothing else, there’s usually a quiet girl in the back of the class who likes things orderly and tidy and will answer any of your questions to keep the status quo. I can more easily understand teacher bias towards girls in this respect. At least in grade school, they like orderly and tidy a lot more than boys.

Most of the helpful boys fall into that third category. They’re actually not the best behaved kids in the room. Sometimes, they’re among the worst. They know this. It seems like they really can’t help themselves. They try to compensate by, when they’re not being bad, by being as helpful as possible, hoping to mitigate the negativity in the note I leave behind. Or else, the bad behavior and the help both trace back to the root cause. Outgoing kids with pent up energy. An inability to be quiet and sit still. A natural force that can be used for good, evil, or frequently both.

It’s difficult to understate the degree to which substitutes have to rely on classroom helpers. Or at least I do. No amount of note-leaving by the teacher will explain everything. A lot of times, if you do something “wrong” (something other than the way it is usually done), you will have ten or so objections at once. Of course, sometimes it’s contradictory. I’ll pick a certain way to do something and the kids who prefer it that way will say “Yeah, we do that sometimes” while the rest will say “nuh-uh!” Fortunately, you can tell by a straw poll and by the words they use “we do it that way sometimes” versus “we always do it this way.” That’s when it gets complicated, though, because you have at least a couple kids excited about what you said you were going to do. Their hopes were up and everything.

Interestingly, one thing I haven’t really seen that I would have expected to is animosity towards teachers pets. I would think that Kid A would be upset with Kid B when Kid B informs me that the teacher doesn’t let the class do what Kid A is doing. But really, the Kid A’s seem to accept their fate with a stunning grace. Oh. Well. Busted. At most, they’ll try to negotiate. But whether they’re guide dogs or leg humpers, the teachers pets do not seem to be as ostracized as I would expect. It makes it easier to ask that quiet girl in the back of the class what we are supposed to do, knowing that I am not putting a target on their back.

Will’s post regarding the Hellspawn reminded me of something I haven’t thought of a lot in recent memory, save for an incident out a couple weeks ago when I was verbally savaged for using the “r-word” (for the uninitiated, there is a major movement to treat the word “retard” the same as the N-word; since the site speaks for itself, I offer a balancing opinion from the Washington post).

My precise wording: “in American classrooms, class proceeds at the pace of the slowest retard.” The person in the discussion who took offense, took great offense because she has a brother who is “developmentally challenged” and she really, really, really doesn’t like the use of that word.

In the larger scope, however, I refer back to my 3rd grade English class. In my grade school, we had a couple of “developmentally challenged” individuals. Not enough to constitute their own classroom, as Will had in his day minding the Hellspawn; instead, there was a special-ed teacher on staff for them who had them most of the day. To “innovate” around the difficulties of minding them (she couldn’t eat during normal lunch periods, instead having to mind her charges at the “special table” in the cafeteria/gym), the school decided to kill three birds with one stone. Bird #1 was that she needed a special lunch period. Bird #2 was that when she was eating, someone else had to “mind the hellspawn.” Bird #3 was that, due to state regulations, each of them had to spend “one class period with age-appropriate peers for socialization.”

In other words, the class period right after lunch was when her charges were farmed out to the other teachers of the school, dropped into their classes for “socialization” while the special ed teacher ate her lunch.

My 3rd grade year, we got “Ricky.” Ricky was one of the types who if you put his problems into a neat dossier, would doubtless generate sympathy. His parents were poor. Kenny McCormick-level poor. He was one of several (as in, “poor people who don’t get the idea of birth control or are religiously opposed to it” numerous) children, at least half of which were also “developmentally challenged.” He had physical deformities in addition to mental, deformities which if you got him to “smile for the camera” would, again, lead towards a sympathy reaction. His level of developmental problems meant that most of the day, he was barely doing preschool-level tasks instead of 3rd-grade tasks. He really, really liked the stuffed animals his parents tended to give him (rather than giving him breakable toys or anything that could be used as a weapon). It is not impossible, and indeed quite likely, that his health and development problems and those of his siblings were related to or exacerbated by the fact that his mother was a chain-smoker and alcoholic who had neither refrained from, nor limited, her usage of either during any of her pregnancies.

What the dossier would leave out is the following: he fit the definition of “hellspawn” almost perfectly. He was verbal without being understandable, communicating in a combination of grunts, groans, moans, and screams. He had severe impulse control issues, in that he had no impulse control at all. He would, when feeling balked or ignored, throw temper tantrums that involved physical violence with the strength of body that somehow seems to be a trademark of certain “developmentally challenged” individuals who never, ever, ever hold back from maximum. He had a predilection for throwing things – HARD. The stuffed animals didn’t really hurt. The hardcover books he liked to throw more, did. He was not above biting, and did in fact bite our teacher on at least two occasions hard enough to draw blood. He was such a disruption that for purposes of our English class over the course of that year, we probably got through 20% of what we were supposed to get through, and that only because after the second biting incident, the school actually did manage to remove him from the socialization aspect and found a teacher (the gym teacher, it turned out) who they could assign to watching him 1-on-1 during the time the special ed teacher was getting her lunch. His “socialization time” the remainder of the year was limited to the gym teacher keeping a 1-on-1 eye on him during recess periods, where he generally ran in circles off to one side while everyone else was on the playground equipment.

Admittedly, Ricky is an extreme case. However, when confronted with people who in the educational system insist that “mixing classes” is the “fair way” to get scores up and insist that the slower kids will “learn from the advanced kids”, I cannot help but remember the year my English class was saddled with Ricky, and the fact that even with lesser students in the class who are not such extreme cases, class must necessarily move at the “pace of the slowest retard” and one sufficiently disruptive student can ruin the school year for up to 29 other kids.

“How was your day today?”

“A lot better than expected.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. A 7th grader was shot and killed last week.”

????

“Well, a lot of the kids were at his funeral today. And most of the rest of them kind of sullen. Made my day much easier.”

“That’s awful.”

“Absolutely. For the kid.”

I’ve literally been called in for every day for last week and next. I think teachers have a lot of sick days to burn or something. I even have a full day at the high school, which is a first (every HS assignment I’ve gotten has been half-day).

Right now I’m in the middle of my first four-day stint. I was initially excited about the prospect. One of the frustrations of substitute teaching is that you get to know the kids a little bit and then you’re on. I get excited when I see repeats. So a four day assignment? Awesome! Then I found out it was special ed, which lessened my excitement somewhat. But it was special ed at the middle school, which I’ve done before. Different teacher’s name, but the special ed room is chalk full of teachers, so it could be the same students regardless.

It wasn’t. It was, of course, the worst set of students I have ever had. I was warned. The teacher referred to them as “little pieces of…” {ask the student who arrived early to cover his ears} “shit.” Her expectations were basically null. Take a standardized test. They get as long as they need. They should finish in two days, but they have all four. Here’s the science lesson. If you get through this lesson, meant for one day, over the course of your tenure, you did okay.

The “special ed” in this case has a few kids with some learning disabilities, and surely a few others with disabilities I can’t see (a couple of them I had in regular classes and it never occurred to me that they would be special ed material), but mostly kids that needed to be put somewhere and for some reason not to the alternative school. Most of them seem not far below average, though a couple are. One student in particular had to answer a question about his opinion on evil corporations cutting down the forest and disrupting nature so that they can make evil profits. The “correct” answer was in the question (“I think it’s bad.”) but he couldn’t answer it. So I said, “Just put down what you think.” To which, he said with great exasperation, “I DON’T THINK!” He’s one of my favored students, along with an awesome girl who is Daria Morgandorffer with Aspergers. The rest would prefer throw stuff at one another or hit each other with rulers. I do what I can, but it isn’t much. Can you send a whole class to detention? A couple kids did get detention. One for throwing something right after I told him not to (easy to single that out) and another (not one of the few with obvious retardation, though clearly a kid with issues) for dropping his pants and farting in the face of another student. That was Day One. Day Two said kids refused to do their work because “I have detention this afternoon. I’ll do it then.”

So I’m two days in and dreading tomorrow and the next day something fierce. Fortunately, I had a weekend to unwind. But I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.

Almost any time I sub and talk to one of the other department teachers, they say “Look, if you have any problems, send them over to my room.” I got no such offers this time around. Over lunch I was asked by a teacher that I knew from having subbed for her before how the day was going. I told her it was a challenge in as diplomatic terms as I could. Another teacher – who is next door to me – said, “You’re just doing fantastic. I don’t think that they’ve ever been this quiet!”

Due to the factors mentioned here, I considered the notion that girls have a confidence deficit when it comes to math to be something of a myth. I am less sure that’s the case. The more I work with boys and math and girls and math, there really does seem to be an issue of, if not confidence, something related to it. A lot of teachers, feeling generous to substitutes, will simply give their students review material for that day’s lesson. Or a short lesson. So I tend to spend as much time helping the kids as I do in front of class teaching them. The difference between boys and girls is notable. The girls really do seem to be running a deficit of confidence. Or otherwise, they are otherwise more willing to express their lack of confidence.

I probably spend about 2/3 of my “helping” time with female students. They ask for help more frequently and they request your help for longer. But what jumped out at me was that, in contrast to the boys asking for help, the girls know the material. I keep wanting to tell them you know this! Because they do. Once we get off cluster math and onto the algorithm, they need minimal help. But despite having done it using the same method on the preceding two problems, they demand help on the third. I refuse to lay it out for them, pointing instead to the steps of the previous problems, and step by step they get it. Then they get to the next one and “I don’t know what to do!”

With the boy students, it’s more cut-and-dried. They get it or they don’t. And as soon as they get it, they want you out of their face as quickly as possible. They’re more likely to assume they understand it when they don’t. So while I am having to avoid yelling at the girls “YES YOU DO KNOW WHAT TO DO BECAUSE YOU’VE DONE IT SIX TIMES ALREADY!” with the boys I have the unpleasant task of saying “Well no, that’s not how you/we did it up there.”

I don’t know what the origin of this is. It could be a lingering skepticism towards girls and math that they have absorbed. A part of me wonders if they simply enjoy doing it “together” than boys do. One sixth-grader, I swear, kept alternating between “I don’t know what I’m doing” to “I bet I can do this better than you!” It’s also possible that rather than it being a case of society being indifferent to girls and math, we are concerned about it to the extent that they know they can rely on the help more than boys. So they don’t gain the self-confidence of being able to do what they can clearly do.

I don’t know, but if I have a daughter, this is going to be something that I am going to keep an eye on.

And, of course, it all makes me feel all the more worse about accusing the second grader of faking it.

I had a special ed class the other day. In involved everyone from a step below Down’s Syndrome to… Harvel. I was told by the teacher that Harvel was a special case, insofar as (a) he always knew the answer to any question you ask and (b) he had a tendency to get bored very easily. The first bit was important because it meant that, when we were going through the exercise, that I should call on Harvel if the two or three kids I first call on get it wrong. The second was important because Harvel had a tendency to skip ahead or stop paying attention and preventing that requires constant monitoring.

The lesson plan is, pretty much, goes at a speed just a little faster than the Down’s kids are capable of. I read three or four paragraphs. I ask them a question. I call on two or three kids to try to answer the question, call on Harvel if none of them got it right, then wait a few minutes for them to write the answer down in their workbook. Immediately after we started, Harvel was pounding through the worksheet. I could see him working ahead and though I was sympathetic to letting him do so, I had been specifically told not to. So I called on him. This was ineffective because he could apparently listen to what I was saying on page two while answering the questions on page 7 at the same time.

One of the paras then chided him for “getting ahead” and told him to cut it out. Reluctantly, he did. His misery was quite apparent, but he was compliant and, as the teacher had said, quite useful in being able to answer any question asked of him. In the first ten minutes of the class, he had gotten about half-way through the worksheet. The class as a whole got through a third of it over the entire 50 minutes. After class ended, some of the kids drew crude pictures. A couple of them tried to play on the computer. One of the older kids (I would guess maybe 15) was trying – and failing – to explain the relationship between a yellow light and a red light. Harvel (8th grade) was reading Alas, Babylon, which he had borrowed from his brother who was reading it in his high school class. Having actually read that book myself, he and I talked about it for a bit. He knew what he was reading.

So why was Harvel in this class? Two reasons: he did have a pretty serious speech impediment that made him sound slow, and he did have a physical disability. My guess is that early on he was put on the short bus track and they never took him off of it.

When I was in K-12, I never took any advanced or honors classes. At the time I thought it was cool because it allowed me to put forth less effort and spend more time drawing Vicious Victor comics. Looking back, I really, really wish I had taken normal classes. I would have been challenged, but I would have enjoyed the challenge. At least if college is any indication. It wasn’t until honors classes in college that I realized that school could be interesting. I thought I had it bad. I’ve got nothing on Harvel. That must be hell.

Incidentally, a few weeks ago I was doing a special ed class at the upper-elementary level. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Leroy was in there. He spoke almost normally (a little too fast and a little too softly to always be understood – but that’s not too unusual in a 5th grader) and followed along in class extremely well. However, when I read his assignment, the reason was obvious. He could think, he could talk, he could listen, but he could not write. Reading was probably difficult, too. He wrote numbers and letters backwards and sometimes incomprehensibly. He was smart enough to compensate for this by writing the answer down over and over again, just to make sure that one of them would be right and he would get credit. Apparently, about four years earlier, Leroy was in an accident and suffered oxygen deprivation, which did a number on him. Prior to that, he was a normal kid.

In a way, Leroy and Harvel are entirely opposite. Two parts of a whole. A kid who can’t communicate verbally very easily but has impeccable reading and writing ability, and then another kid that can seemingly do just about anything but. Illiteracy is almost certainly a bigger handicap than speech difficulties in the long run. Even so, it’s almost more tragic for these kids because unlike the others, they have to know what they’re missing out on. They have to understand the world around them in which they may never been independent participants. The Down’s kids, on the other hand, seem to live in a playground of sorts.

So going to bed at 10, waking up at 5, driving two hours round trip each day. Little access to the Internet throughout the day.

So I’m falling behind on some things, including Hit Coffee. Bear with me.