Post Summer School

Student Photo Analysis Essays plus Color Purple Character Chart. Larry Fishburne as Swain was a class fav in the movie.

"Irony" was our word of the day most days and the strange or funny reversal of expectation for me was that almost everything I had been told in advance about the class was flipped on its head. I was expecting a class full of low level behavior problems; instead, there were twenty-so warm and wonderful and wise kids. With the dean's help, the two or three compulsively disrupting children reined themselves in by the second week and by the end of the third THEY ALL PASSED! Miracle of miracles.  

Stagecoach and The Color Purple book and movie took up the full three weeks with some song lyrics and photo study thrown in.

"Wait, is this movie like that movie Quentin Tarantino The Hateful Eight where everyone turns out to the opposite of what they were at first?" says Nini, one of my favorite students, despite his "I hate to read" or maybe because of it, despite his Reagan Bush '84 hat, no, honestly I loved him because of it. "Reagan signed an amnesty bill in 1986 that allowed my mother to become a citizen and she will never forget him for it" and voila, a young conservative teen father whose grade average hovered around 55% for most of the class gives me life.

"Thank you, Cindy from June," "Thank you, Yesterday Cindy," I said over and over when planning for the next day or coming week and my prep work pays off because up pops that Bruce Springsteen lyric "My Father's House" with the word "atone" defined at the top and the instructions to circle all the specific sensory detail that creates Imagery but even June Cindy could not have predicted it would become such a perfect perfect moment when we've been reading about Mr. ____'s efforts to redeem himself after his abusive marriage to Celie AND the sensory detail pattern of describing-adjective plus specific-noun that Springsteen uses effortlessly were just the examples of what they needed to add to their Gary Winogrand photo analysis papers.

Super simple lesson: Listen and read the lyrics. What's happening? Draw lines around the beginning and end of the dream. What happens next? Is there a line that could be the thematic statement? Yes, the last line.

My father's house shines hard and bright
It stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned

"What does 'unatoned' mean?" asks sweet DJ, the Christian kid whose smiles and nods at me during the first week kept me on fire and who turned up the last day of class with cuts and bruises all over his face and when he asks the question, the other kids chime in for me and Banyan, the thoughtful and gentle intellectual of the class calls out "He's run out of time" and BAM! What else could a teacher ask for?

The steady mix of rushes of gratitude for their earnestness and forgiveness of each other and heady moments of inspiration and discovery combined with getting the news of Ruth's death the morning of the second Friday tendered an intensely emotional but blessedly healing experience.

I tried to keep the focus off me, wary of the dreaded "Ms. Fey Show" and told them my personal challenges should not get in the way of their success but I bet some of them were old and experienced enough to know that compartmentalizing is a nifty if imperfect and temporary way to handle grief. As we listened to Bruce sing it again, I wept as quiet as I could in the back of the class but Kev got up and brought me the Kleenex box with a smile. I might have brought up dear Aunt Ruth a couple of times too many.

No, I wanted them to know I understood their blended families, that I felt their incomprehensible losses. The athlete with perceptive comments who had been described by a counselor as "very low" told me on one of the last days that he had a busy night with all his aunts and uncles coming together for the first time "since the thing" for his dad. And when I ask a question about it, he says he can't talk about it and I know what he's saying. He passed the class. He was so behind but I gave him a work day with the student advocates downstairs, "Is there a printer in the room?" he asked and what a delight to say "Yes!" and he may not have earned the A that he said his mother required before he could play next season, but he did pass the class.

So did the three who kept me up at night, but they are barely past children and our class themes included Forgiveness so I'll just move on to one more of my favorite moments when quiet, bearded Yacob and Bonathan got into a fascinating back and forth during the Socratic Seminar about whether arguments are good for a relationship.

"But why do you need to be emotional?" asked Yacob. "Why not discuss without anger or yelling?" And Bonathan countered, "That's how you get out your pent up emotion" and the question was not even on my suggestion list but their thoughtful, respectful discussion was the whole point. Even one of the three who kept me up at night jumped in with relevant comments, kept his eyes on the speakers (since I had confiscated his phone) and transformed in the discussion with his peers from the repeated "I don't know" when I asked him to name a plot point of the novel the day before into an engaged participant.

Watching the seminar, his buddy, who was supposed to be silently observing, said, "Ms. Fey is crying!" and I stage-whispered back at him, "I'm crying with happiness!"

Too many high points to even remember, but I want to remember them all -- the kids who stayed after class to talk; the athlete-leader who shut down, vehemently and incontrovertibly, some fellow student ambivalence about consent; Nini shaking the hand of the kid with social anxiety, saying, "I've known this guy since kindergarten!"; the private conversations with the same kid about the opening shot of Baby Driver; and then there was the time I was running out of time and my plan to divvy-up-vocabulary-definitions-then-have-them-teach-each-other-then-read-a-four-page-story had to be compressed to my giving a two minute recap of the plot of Ursula K. LeGuin's "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" and then showing them an NYU student's short film version as fodder for a practice Socratic Seminar.

"That was RAW!" called out Bonathan after I finished my plot summary. "I could see the whole thing in my head!"

Okay, we can't always avoid the Ms. Fey Show, but really, I'm more satisfied that all the cooperative and collaborative work I planned (Thank you, Smokey Daniels! Thank you, Jamie Almanzan!) kept their focus on talking to each other. We had some rough spots when they confused copying with conversation, but the best lessons were two variations on moving in groups to stations at the perimeter of the room. The first time I had thematic topics listed on large poster sized sheets and had the students brainstorm American Truths about the all-important Forgiveness, Journey, Hypocrisy (could not escape this theme over and over again in Stagecoach and Purple), Community and Identity. But you need to keep the groups small and I had 29 visual learners to wrangle so every other station was a repeat of the Theme Topics but asked the students to express them in images. Worked great.

The next variation was the day before the Stagecoach test. I put the essay questions in stations around the room, then had them sit in groups of three at each station and brainstorm "Who is the most ethical or moral character? Support your answer with specific details from the film" and "Who is the least ethical character?" and "What is ironic about the line 'They're saved from the blessings of civilization'? Include the context of the line from the film" and six other questions. They could take notes or not. After a minute or two of conversation, two students moved clockwise and the third student ("I need a code word!" "Butter!" "Okay, you're Butter. Butter moves to the left.") went the other way so each group was different each time. Worked great.

And there was Daily Oral Language with examples from their own work so we could improve their run-ons and fragments and punctuation. I cut out long strips of Post-It posters and wrote independent and dependent clauses on them so we could shift them around and learn how to place commas.

After the rainstorm, there was a full-on double rainbow! (DC plus comma plus IC)

There was a full-on double rainbow after the rainstorm! (IC no comma CD)

And of course on the last day we had to watch the Youtube video and connect it to Shug Avery's version of God wanting us to notice everything and enjoy everything and be grateful for everything. Which Kamani did with our last movie, the French version of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," when she noticed how the man who escapes death is transfixed by each twig on each tree, the way the sunlight shines through a leaf. Brava, Kamani!

 Another ironic bait and switch was the initial promise that the final exam would be multiple choice, ahh, easy, whoops! No, I needed to give and grade an essay exam based on the Common Final devised by the two high school's English departments, an analysis of a speech writer's persuasive tactics.

Okay. We can do this. The good news was that I had tracked down the spring essays that a few of the students had written and none of them had failed. Yay! So I prepared a quick review of prompt analysis and essay techniques using the Gettysburg Address, then cut down the script of David Foster Wallace's commencement address "This is Water" to two pages. The last Monday they read the speech, got the familiar prompt and wrote their essays. They did fine, everyone passed, some were exceptional.

What would I do differently? So so much. The day after they wrote their essays, I put the absent kids in the hall to write, then showed the rest of the class a film version of Wallace's speech.

"Okay, reactions?" I asked and found myself turning to my dependables, Banyan and Slad, and caught myself. I need to hear from each child every day. Sometimes you can give the kid the question ahead of time, let him have a heads up to prepare. The times that I had surprised Cadam, the target archer who wrote that he did not want to participate in class, and Naraz, the wry silent kid who wrote the same, they had risen to the occasion. Now I had let myself slip into a pattern that did not serve the class. Fall down seven times, get up eight.