Tardiness is a recurrent problem at the Friends School because there is no enforcement of the consequences for being late to class. Last year my colleague Olivia stuck to her guns with a policy requiring late students to furnish a note from the principal's office. At the end of the year she acknowledge that despite her (herculean) consistency, the students continued to arrive late. What's the solution? I haven't figured one out in my eleventh grade classes, where students continue to arrive late.
But recently a solution presented itself in the 12th grade, where we are studying drama. Almost every class has at least a snippet of reading aloud or genuine acting on stage, and Friends kids love to read and act. The recently-established rule is: Come after the bell rings, and you forfeit your opportunity to act.
For the sake of the class's comprehension, I like to have certain students read particularly challenging speeches. There are a handful of students I can count on to deliver nuance the many others would gloss over. As it turns out, the best readers are also the least consistently punctual. During the initial days of this experiment in student behavior, I had a hard time maintainin my own rule, because sometimes the kids that arrived on time read terribly. No inflection in the voice, exclamation points blown past without consideration - let's not even hope for a facial expression or gesture.
But it was worth the slog. This week the good readers are arriving before the bell, and killing it on stage. My heart soared when I saw Nadia reach the third floor landing before the bell rang, since I hoped she would read a challenging stretch of A Raisin in the Sun, lines by a white man in a black household, who is very uncomfortable.
Raisin has exceedingly detailed stage directions, and for this scene I gave students the dialogue without the directions so they could determine just how Mr. Lindner would behave in the Youngers' apartment. They did beautifully, and Nadia interpreted the new directions, read by Mahdi, spectacularly. She was wiping sweat from her brow, shifting her seat, edging away from the hostile Beneatha, in a performance compelling enough to keep her classmates rapt in a 34 degree room.
Just one other note of triumph today - There is a student in the 11th grade who despises doing something she feels she has done before. She keeps me on my toes, since as I plan I think "OK, will this challenge Noor?" Yesterday I had a small "party on the inside", as my roommate Elaine would say, when, during an activity where Noor's class tried to put scrambled sections of a short story in order, I heard Noor complain to her group "Mish fahma!" which is my sloppy transliteration of the Arabic phrase for "I don't get it!" By the end of the activity Noor had gotten it, and had solid reasons for having ordered the sections the way she had. I love learning -- theirs and mine.
But recently a solution presented itself in the 12th grade, where we are studying drama. Almost every class has at least a snippet of reading aloud or genuine acting on stage, and Friends kids love to read and act. The recently-established rule is: Come after the bell rings, and you forfeit your opportunity to act.
For the sake of the class's comprehension, I like to have certain students read particularly challenging speeches. There are a handful of students I can count on to deliver nuance the many others would gloss over. As it turns out, the best readers are also the least consistently punctual. During the initial days of this experiment in student behavior, I had a hard time maintainin my own rule, because sometimes the kids that arrived on time read terribly. No inflection in the voice, exclamation points blown past without consideration - let's not even hope for a facial expression or gesture.
But it was worth the slog. This week the good readers are arriving before the bell, and killing it on stage. My heart soared when I saw Nadia reach the third floor landing before the bell rang, since I hoped she would read a challenging stretch of A Raisin in the Sun, lines by a white man in a black household, who is very uncomfortable.
Raisin has exceedingly detailed stage directions, and for this scene I gave students the dialogue without the directions so they could determine just how Mr. Lindner would behave in the Youngers' apartment. They did beautifully, and Nadia interpreted the new directions, read by Mahdi, spectacularly. She was wiping sweat from her brow, shifting her seat, edging away from the hostile Beneatha, in a performance compelling enough to keep her classmates rapt in a 34 degree room.
Just one other note of triumph today - There is a student in the 11th grade who despises doing something she feels she has done before. She keeps me on my toes, since as I plan I think "OK, will this challenge Noor?" Yesterday I had a small "party on the inside", as my roommate Elaine would say, when, during an activity where Noor's class tried to put scrambled sections of a short story in order, I heard Noor complain to her group "Mish fahma!" which is my sloppy transliteration of the Arabic phrase for "I don't get it!" By the end of the activity Noor had gotten it, and had solid reasons for having ordered the sections the way she had. I love learning -- theirs and mine.
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