Today, I learned that a colleague celebrates Friday Eve, which is a completely credible entry for the Teacher's Lexicon. In this case it's even more appropriate because we begin a four-day weekend at 3:00 tomorrow. Perhaps it is student anxiety about not seeing their teachers for so long that explains the number of fights that broke out today. Perhaps.
In either case, fights in the hallways are one of the many things for which NYC schools are known, and not without reason. City kids have to be sure they can hold their own in the face of perceived or real threat--that's just thw way it is. Nonetheless, there are still adults AND young people who genuinely pursue learning every day in all kinds of NYC school buildings all over this magnificent city. Today, JH gave me quite the boost when he came to me after a particularly tough class meeting to say "I think I got it while you were giving the examples."
I hope he saw my heart skip a beat as I was answering another teacher's question, erasing and looking for a stack of stuff, but I doubt he did. He thought he GOT IT, which means he was THINKING, which means he was LISTENING, which means he CARED enough to pay attention.
For those of you in the studio audience who have ever met and/or engaged in a conversation with a teen male on anything other than video games or sports, you will understand that this is big. Really big.
But WAIT! It gets better. The teen male in my life texted the following to me not an hour later: "3.8 GPA. Just sayin..." He got one B ("I don't like English. That's why.") and the the other grades are As and A-plusses.
YES!!!!!
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