Meet Malasia M.

            Malasia: “Who me?” (loudly, with a puzzled expression on her face).

Me: “Yes you Malasia. The sucking sounds you are making with your teeth are very distracting for the rest of the students and inappropriate for the classroom. Please take a seat in the focus zone until you are ready to be dismissed for snack.”

            Malasia: “Ugh. Why you’se always sending me to that old chair?” (throwing her hands in the air, slowly rolling her way over to the “focus zone” and collapsing into the chair with a huge sigh)

            Me: “Thank you to those of you who are ignoring the distractions that sometimes come into our classroom” (trying hard not to look at Malasia as she begins to lick and gnaw away at the desk with her teeth)

            ----3 minutes go by, the class is dismissed for snack, Malasia joins----

Malasia: “Burp! Mr. Millah, can I drink this soda thingy?” (innocently holding up a 24 oz. bottle of Mountain Dew.

Malasia is one of those students who can infuriate teachers at times with her demanding questions, interesting sounds and uncoordinated movement. Yet at the end of the day I often can’t help but laugh at her personality and expressions. Malasia is probably the biggest girl in the class and can often put on a very tough front. I have a feeling that she may have been a bully in previous grades, but she has become more friendly and kind since entering my 3^rd grade classroom. Overall, she is making progress academically—particularly in Writing. 

            Yet today I want to talk more about the sounds that come out of her—the sounds that children make are perhaps one of the most laughable aspects of the profession of teaching. Malasia, sucks her teeth every mini-lesson, throws her hands up and down making loud smacking sounds every time she wants to answer a question, has a very loud “Huh?” when she doesn’t understand something and has somehow manages to make me (and the rest of the class) acutely aware that she has digestive problems during snack, all the way from across the room. 

           At the same time, Malasia can be incredibly kind and sweet. She often asks me questions in the most gentle and kind way possible—many times just a few minutes after being chastised for something else. She can be very kind to students whom others bully or whom she shares her snack with. Yet the barbaric sounds continue to be a problem. In Room 206, we are working with Malasia to help her control her impulses. We ask her to think before she acts, create a checklist of questions to answer before she says or does anything and have even created simple hand signals to warn her that her volume is getting to high. Improvement is slow, but I am optimistic that with more time and maturity she will be better able to control herself and the sounds that she produces. But for now, we try to find (and even show her) the humor in the noise she makes. 

Parent Teacher Conferences

This Tuesday at VOICE Charter School, we will be having our first set of parent-teacher conferences. When I first found out about the parent teacher conferences, I just assumed that they would somehow jus naturally come together and that this would simply be another minor (informal) time commitment that would supplement the work that I am already doing on a daily basis in the classroom. This notion couldn’t have been further than the truth; there is so much more to parent-teacher conferences than what might at first meet the eye.

The central component to the conferences are the report cards. My co-teacher and I spent several hours this week after school ended working through the 30 report cards we had to complete. This entailed inputting both behavioral and academic grades, filling out performance indicators, adding detailed comments and revising to make sure that our comments were specific, measurable and in-line with the grades we gave. I had to really keep my writing focused to avoid writing too much (although the temptation to just write everything on my mind was ever present.)

Having finished report cards, we then moved on to scheduling the actual conferences. The conferences will all occur on Tuesday from 1-8pm with a two hour break in the middle. Each conference is to last 10 minutes. The tricky part during scheduling was making sure the conferences were convenient for the 12 or so families in our class with siblings in lower grades. This prompted a high volume of emails exchanged between my co-teacher and I and the other teachers in the school, as we all tried to coordinate the meetings to make everything convenient for parents. We were able to resolve most of the conflicts after much work on this and several notes home to parents requesting their flexibility.

The last step was the actual preparation for the meetings. We collected writing samples, exam booklets, behavior notes and created talking points for each conference. Doing so required hours of planning and preparation. My hope is that each parent will have a solid idea of where his or her child stands in comparison with 3^rd grade benchmarks, where they can grow/improve and how the parent can best support their children. Yet, even with all this preparation, I still feel somewhat unprepared. I wonder how parents will respond to these meetings. I’m also interested to see how many parents will show up, what kind of questions they will have and how they will react to constructive feedback of their children. In a few days I will hopefully be able to report back on how these conferences go.