Dealing with attendance issues in student teaching

A star student, now at the start of student teaching, writes:

I do want to ask advice about some of the issues that have surprised me. The first issue is attendance. Unfortunately, the lower-level classes [at my school] tend to have poor attendance. This makes it difficult for me and the class on many levels. Obviously, these students are missing precious class time, and they fall behind for the simple fact that they do not get to partake in the class discussions, notes, etc. Furthermore, these students tend to disrupt the flow of class with their constant questions that, while certainly necessary for their academic development, frustrate the other students because we end up covering the same issues over and over again (this becomes a compounded problem when several students are absent on the same day but return to school on different days). Additionally, the attendance problems make it difficult for me to do much group work with the students.

How can I incorporate group work without then penalizing the students who were absent (and without driving myself crazy trying to remember make-up assignments to equal the missed group work)? I’m not as concerned about doing group with with the regular-level class (and later on, the honors classes I will pick up the last week in Sept.) But for this Skills class, it poses a problem for me. The attendance also makes it hard for me to establish routine in the classroom. I have been enlightened by the teachings of Harry Wong, and his explanation and reasoning for procedures/routines can’t be beat. Yet, I’m facing an uphill battle just trying to catch everyone up on missed work while still teaching the planned lessons. And if that isn’t bad enough, we still have a lot of new students entering the classes each day (I had 3 new students in one class period today! FYI, school started on Aug 29).

Your attendance situation gets me thinking in a couple ways. I don’t have any slam-dunk answers, but a few possibilities. I think you have to look for organizational structures that enable individuals at all different points of project completion to work at their own level and pace. You need a clear communication of weekly or daily assignments (on the board each day, or on a weekly handout you could give to students and refer them to). I think if you could make personal responsibility a part of the grade, you might be able to reward productive behavior, and perhaps give the non-achievers a clearer route by which they can earn credit. I think you need to focus fiercely on keeping things positive, giving students as much a way to EARN points for cooperative behavior as possible. You need to communicate relentlessly about all the routes to success in the class. And even when you’re feeling extremely disappointed, you have to bring a positive, upbeat message to the group. As Machiavelli says, praise in public, censure in private. (Of course, sometimes you’ll have to raise hell with them, but that strong spice must be used sparingly. Love them more than you scold them, and even if you find you have to kill them, make sure you do so with kindness rather than with anger.)

As you know, I would advocate as much a workshop approach as possible, where you could counsel kids one-on-one as much as possible (thus not worry about wasting whole-class time catching up the kids needing catching-up). Also, I would advocate the set-up of as much “IEP-type” instruction as possible. (Richard Kent advocates the use of “People Plans” instead of “Lesson Plans”). Can you set up workshop so students are working towards individual goals as much as, if not more than, whole-group or small-group projects? Think of approaching that fragmented group in terms of developing “IEPs” for all of them. How would that change things? (I know things like your lesson plans, mandated curricula, and cooperating teachers might not make these approaches easy or obviously implementable….)

Also: these kids obviously don’t have a stake in class. How could they develop one? Can you ask them? Can you negotiate with them? Can you lay out YOUR absolutes (what are they?)–and then find places to respond to THEIR needs/desires? I’m not suggesting you become a pushover (I don’t think that would happen); you could be very firm, and yet very open and flexible with them. I think you need to meet them halfway on some issues…. What ways are you using to find out their attitudes, feelings, difficulties, obstacles, and struggles? In what ways can you adjust on the basis of what you discover?

This could be your experimental class. You are not having these issues with other groups. Why not communicate to this group their “special” status? They’re your project class: puff them up to be your great success story. Pull out all the stops. Use psychological warfare. Make it personal, and do confide in them how well they are doing when they are doing well–and always SEE THEM to be doing well…. (Is that fighting dirty? All’s fair in love, war, and trouble classes….)

Montaigne Thing II: A Personal, Random Barlett’s Bin


“It wasn’t the sun. It wasn’t the wind. I have no excuses. My play led to a loss [and] I’m taking full responsibility. Maybe I can learn something from this.” Brant Brown on a dropped fly ball in the Cubs outfield in September 1998. (Here’s Ron Santo’s version of the event.)

“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. Napoleon Bonaparte

“The more you complain, the longer God lets you live.” Unknown

“Nothing bad ever happens to a writer. Everything is material.” A Message from the Profession of English Majors, Garrison Keillor

“The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

[In reference to the poetry of Anne Sexton:]
“How do I explain these poems? Not at all. I quit teaching in colleges because it seemed so criminal to explain works of art.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“The great question which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'” Sigmund Freud

“No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.” Niels Bohr

For being reminded of those days when we did not know any better is all that is left to us when we do. Djuna Barnes

“She gave me everything a good woman can give a man. In return, she received from me all the heartache and misery a man can inflict upon a woman.” Diego Rivera

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Italo Calvino

The Montaigne Thing

Meg Hughes has completed her prelims at Purdue, and the thought of her accomplishment, her sharp mind, her deep reading, and her swift movement through things sent me back, sifting through some memories–as well as some ancient “WriteNow” and “WordPerfect” files on my old Macintosh.

Back when I was getting ready to begin my comprehensive exams at UIC, I remember running into John Huntington in the corridor. John looked on and commented, almost to himself as much to me, that when he took his exams, he felt he knew more then than he had ever known before . . . or since. There is some truth to that . . . at least so goes my testimony of the experience now as seen from his vantage (play to the tune of “The Circle of Life”).

But enough nostalgia! Kudos to Meg.

Late in the reading for my exams–it was the late 80’s, and we had a different, less apocalyptic George Bush as president (kinder? gentler?)–I began to cull quotations from my readings. I thought of a “joke”–one, alas, that I wound up never delivering. But the plan was this: at the end of the test period, as I submitted my exams, I was going to pull out and attach my “Montaigne Thing.” I even wrote up an introduction for context, which works adequately enough today, too. Without further ado then, here is, circa 1989, my Montaigne Thing, never submitted before this blog entry:

Please accept the following appendix. It’s become an appendix to my body, since, having found these quotations too indispensable to leave at home, I carry them in my wallet.

It’s called “The Montaigne Thing” in homage both to our President and to its inspiration, Montaigne, who used to adorn his study with quotations that particularly pleased him. In honoring both Montaigne and George Bush, we thus pay homage to those underlying principles of every one of our thoughts, the principles of permanence and change.

The reason, I think, that there is so much satire directed at George Bush when he says “the vision thing,” “the peace thing,” or some such expression, is not so much that he is an easy target, or a victim of the fishbowl environment of the presidency. Rather, at least in this case, it is that some profound Truth is captured in a surprising, almost ludicrous way. The Truth here is a major one, an epistemological one that I am sure you’ll see me discussing a number of times in these Exams. It’s that great Vygotskyan principle of “abbreviation,” or Burke’s theory of entitlement, whereby a single linguistic sign comes to encompass whole worlds of discourse. The substantive “thing” comes to represent whole processes–it is a noun that creates activities of thought.[1] It is a miracle, or what those of a more secular disposition have call “magic.”

 

 

From Permanence and Change of Kenneth Burke, p.272:

[Note: “troublesome antics”: being social, a cooperative agent in a competitive scene, a “propounder of new meanings,” of “education, propaganda, or suasion,”.etc.]

In these troublesome antics, we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of our impatience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made institutions–but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsovable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, through reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread–for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss.


From Attitudes Toward History, p41:

The progress of humane enlightment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.

 

From Rhetoric of Motives, p. 265

So we must keep trying anything and everything, improvising, borrowing from others, developing from others, dialectically using one text as comment upon another, schematizing; using the incentive to new wanderings, returning from these excursions to schematize again, being oversubtle were the straining seems to promise some further glimpse, and making amends by reduction to very simple anecdotes.

 

From the Topics of Aristotle, 164b

For it is the skilled propounder and objector who is, speaking generally, a dialectician. To formulate a proposition is to form a number of things into one–for the conclusion to which the argument leads must be taken generally, as a single thing–whereas to formulate an objection is to make one thing into many; for the objector either distinguishes or demolishes, partly granting, partly denying the statements proposed.

 

From Montaigne’s “Of Coaches,” p. 685:

It is very easy to demonstrate that great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously. We cannot make sure of the master cause; we pile up several of them, to see if by chance it will be found among them.

For one cause will not do

We must state many, one of which is true.                                                                                                                                                                Lucretius

 

From Montaigne’s “Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers,” p. 574:

This bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed in this manner: I set my hand to it only when pressed by too unnerving an idleness, and nowhere but home. Thus it has built itself up with diverse interruption and intervals, as occasions sometimes detain me elsewhere for several months. Moreover, I do not correct my first imaginings by my second–well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary and not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors, and I want people to see each part at its birth. It would give me pleasure to have begun earlier, and to be able to trace the course of my mutations. A valet who served me by writing at my dictation thought he had made a rich booty by stealing from me several pieces chosen to his taste. It consoles me that he will gain no more by it than I have lost.

 

St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, p.675:

In the first place, then, I wish by this preamble to put a stop to the expectations of readers who may think that I am about to lay down rules of rhetoric such as I have learnt, and taught too, in the secular schools, and to warn them that they need not look for any such from me. Not that I think such rules of no use, but that whatever use they have is to be learnt elsewhere; and if any good man should happen to have leisure for learning them, he is not to ask me to teach them either in this work or any other.

 

From A Grammar of Motives, p. 440:

All told, dialectic is concerned with different levels of grounding. It may be arrested after but a brief excursion, hardly more than a half-formulated enumeration of the most obvious factors in a situation. But whatever the range of the enterprise, the procedure is in general thus: Encountering some division, we retreat to a level of terms that allow for some kind of merger (as “near” and “far” are merged in the concept of “distance”); then we “return” to the division, now seeing it as pervaded by the spirit of the “One” we had found in our retreat.

 

From Erasmus’ De Copia, p. 89:

For there are those who hold a great many things in their minds, as though stored up in the earth, although in speaking and writing they are wonderfully destitute and bare.

 

From Erasmus’ De Copia, p. 87:

Therefore, whoever has resolved to read through every type of writer (for he who wishes to be considered learned must do that thoroughly once in his life) will first collect as many topics as possible. He will take them partly from classes of vices and virtues, partly from those things that are especially important in human affairs, and that are accustomed to come up most often in persuasion; and it will be best to arrange these according to the principle of affinity and opposition. For those that are related to one another automatically suggest what should follow, and the same thing is true of opposites.

 

Judith Rice Henderson, “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,” in Renaissance Eloquence, p.349:

[On the disease of schematization–or, a highpoint of Medieval thought:]

Now they were laboring so diligently to imitate Cicero that, like Nosoponus, they must lock themselves in an inner room, sealed from all disturbances, on nights proclaimed auspicious by astrology, eat only ten small currants and three coriander seeds coated with sugar to avoid distracting the brain, shun marriage and family and turn down public office, all to produce a letter of six periods asking a friend to return a book.

 

 

And what claim to dialectic would I have did I not let the Enemy speak?

 

From John Locke’s Essay, pp. 248-249:

To conclude this Consideration of the Imperfection, and Abuse of Language; the ends of Language in our Discourse with others, being chiefly these three: First, To make known one Man’s Thoughts or Ideas to another. Secondly, To do it with as much ease and quickness, as is possible; and Thirdly, Thereby to convey the Knowledge of Things. Language is either abused, or deficient, when it fails in any of these Three.

 

[W.S. Howell, 18th C, pp. 442-443: on DeQuincey’s absurdity, the castrophe of topical argument]

 

Back to the good guys:

Vico, p. 73

For when you instruct your prince, you do not teach him to approach the art of criticism directly, but inculcate him with many examples over a long period, before he is taught the art of forming judgements about them. [direction by way of indirection; danger of developing the critical faculty before eloquence]

 


[1]Note how we have a grammatical term for a verb acting as a noun, the “gerund,” but none for a noun acting as a verb. Perhaps creating such a term would help clarify the covert, but often momentous, power of naming.

 

 

We bloggers all pay homage to Winston Weathers

From page 44 of An Alternate Style: Options in Composition:

I, for example, try to capture each day some of the moods/events/thoughts/insights that I have experienced—and though some of my “material” may benefit from a Grammar A articulation, a good deal of it would be robbed of its vitality and immediacy if I did not write it down in Grammar B. Much of my journal writing is creative—not “arty,” not the creative of “creative writing class”—but the creative of immediate unhampered recollection, expression, outpouring—and that creative confrontation of the days of my life more freely comes into existence through Grammar B verbalization than through Grammar A verbalization. That’s what my psyche tells me at least. And I am willing to go along with it.

It Starts with a Poem



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A few colleagues have been exchanging poems via our English and Foreign Languages
listserv. The poems have dealt with some less-than-positive learning experiences
the poets had suffered in grade school: bad methods, bad teachers, all producing
bad effects on learning….

The original poem was an unexpected gift from out of the blue—but from
a poet who has led us to expect such generous spontaneity. As usual, a wonderful
read. It was the camaraderie of the poetic response, however, that stimulated
me to plunge—somehow—into this dialogue. What fun….

Continue reading It Starts with a Poem