The squeaky wheel gets the kick

Today was my normal Tuesday routine say for a few changes.

At my first middle school where I spend half of my days, I have noticed my Hispanic students playing a pretty terrible game with one another. One student will run up behind the other, grab their arm and twist it behind this back all while yelling"Policia! Let me see you Papers!" (I don't know what the specific name is, but here is a bunch of Chinese students showing various techniques in this YouTube video).

It seems pretty violent, especially in a crowed hallway, ramming into lockers and random students. I told one kid to knock it off and I didn't want to see him do it again. He seemed confused about my presence, but I saw the fear in his eyes. It might have just been today, because my sixth grade science class it seemed like someone had pumped pixie sticks through the ventilation system.

We had a sub today in sixth grade science class also, she...well...I don't know. Subs are just seem weird to me. I suppose they are the educational mercenaries of the school system. They get a class, they do the job, and they go home. Sometimes the job takes longer, sometimes its just a couple hours. Whatever the case she was different. It may have been her thigh high brown books, because those were oddly distracting to me.

I didn't have to deal with crazed drone UFO guy today, he torments the classes for the second half of the day. Those poor poor kids. Well at least they're learning something....that in the world there are some crazy bastards.

So I went to my other school and found out that my teacher was having guest speakers. Not a big deal, but she said if I wanted I could go help out in another social studies class room. I figured sure, it always interesting to see another teacher teach. I found the classroom, introduced myself to the teacher and firmly planted myself in the back corner.

He began the class with a quick writing exercise. Two Questions: What are some characteristics of population growth? And Why is Portland the most populated city in Oregon? Fairly simply, nothing too crazy.

He then launched into his lecture. These poor poor kids. Talk about the most boring power point presentation ever. I hope he doesn't do this for all his classes. I think the kids were engaged, maybe not. He would ask questions and most where too busy writing down the massive amount of text from the slides. He would only talk about the beginning portion of the slide, but nothing really else. For example, he put up the definitions for urban and rural. He essentially copied everything from the text book, paragraph description. He would then ask the kids, whats a urban place and whats a rural place. Just not my style.

Oh...one thing, he made a comment about the Soviet Union's Virgin Land Campaign that was completely false. He didn't call it the Virgin Lands Campaign, but I was giddy with excitement  Us, Soviet Historians don't have much to be excited about, except when someone slips up and doesn't know what they are talking about.

The first glaring error was he said the Virgin Lands Campaign was under Stalin, while Stalin did have a type of campaign, it was much more "banging shoe at United Nations" Khrushchev's policy. He also said peasants where forced or bribed to move to the frontier regions of the Soviet Union. It was much more of a youth movement, showing the great socialist adventure that is Soviet agricultural farming.

I guess these are not earth shattering, but they are just some errors.


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I originally titled this entry "The squeaky wheel gets the kick" (by the way if you can name the game this phrase comes from, I will give you a long distance high-five), because we were discussing something in class last night.

My professor described this idea that we never really look at the quite student, because we are always paying attention to the student the requires our immediate attention. The loud student, who demands something right away takes away from the quite student who is silently working through their stuff. Its a sad but true fact. We associate quite students with being the good students, the smart students. This isn't always the case, these student often need just as much help as their louder more flamboyant counter-parts. I was one of these quite students, just keeping my head down so I could get the hell out of there everyday. I could have always used the attention or extra support.

Just something to remember.