A2PNotes: Ann Arbor is home to some 16,000 public school students. Those students are parented by tens of thousands of women and men who haven’t a clue about what their kids really do at school all day, not because they don’t want to know. Quite the opposite, most parents of school-age children want to know what happens in the classroom, the lunch room and on the bus. Elementary school parents are hectored into helping out at school; expected to be involved. However, middle and high school are quite different. Parents become personae non gratae not only in the eyes of kids who are trying to become more independent, but in the eyes of a school District that does not provide many opportunities for parent classroom involvement in the upper grades. So, A2Politico has asked two kids to write about their lives as students. One of these students attends the AAPS, and the other attends a local private school. For obvious reasons, these two will write their entries anonymously. So, look for A Descent Into the Maelstrom, and read about what your kids wouldn’t tell you even if you asked.

The teacher stopped mid-sentence then said, “Oops, not supposed to talk about politics or my opinions with students in the classroom. Sorry.”

Teachers should be able to talk politics with students in the classroom without fear of repercussions. Do I think they should be allowed to talk about their political opinions in front of the entire class? No. Why? We don’t want teachers preaching about politics or their personal views in front of the whole class. However, when the discussion is with a student who has asked about the issue, I think it is appropriate for teachers to be able to talk with that student about the issue or issues.

There are certain disciplines in which politics can play more of a role, and where teachers should be able to discuss their opinions. For example, a social studies class, an economics class or a government class. In addition, even though teachers shouldn’t talk about politics or their personal opinions in class, they do. They use tone when discussing topics on which they are supposed to be “neutral.” For example, one of my teachers was discussing the Occupy Wall Street movement and this teacher used a very upbeat angle. The teacher described the demonstrators as “activists,” as opposed to “protesters.” The teacher also referred to the CEOs as “money bags.” This tells the students the teacher’s personal view is that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are correct, and the money bags are doing something that needs to be changed.

It could, of course, be argued that teachers and students shouldn’t talk politics—if they were to disagree—the teacher could retaliate against the student because of the student’s views. Do I think a teacher would do something like this? Yes. People can get very passionate about their political views. A student, on the other hand, could retaliate against a teacher by misbehaving in class. It could also possibly scare a student if a teacher had views that were radically different than the student’s views.

If the teacher’s political views differed from those of the student’s parents, it could lead to fights between the teacher and the parents which to lead to repercussions for the student.

Even with these objections, I think students need to learn about politics from a point of view that is different from that of their parents, because a lot of time students’ views agree with those of their parents. It not necessarily a problem for students’ views to be the same as their parents, but it is better for students to gain other perspectives on political issues. This can result in new voices in politics, I think.

I will end this a story. Throughout one year of school, I spent time talking to one of my teachers about politics during a break in classes. We talked about everything: unions, Republicans, the President, the War in Afghanistan and  elections. I felt like I knew this teacher better as a person because I understood how this teacher felt about real life issues, not just things from our books. At one point I was told that this teacher could be fired for expressing opinions and views of such depth to a student. I think this teacher ignored this rule because teachers don’t have a voice inside the classroom that doesn’t include something related to the curriculum.

I think that should change.

Please note: The names of all teachers and genders of all teachers have been withheld to protect their identities and their jobs. I thank them.

A2PNotes: Ann Arbor is home to some 16,000 public school students, and approximately 1,700 students who attend the city’s various private schools. Those students are parented by tens of thousands of women and men who haven’t a clue about what their kids really do at school all day, not because they don’t want to know. Quite the opposite, most parents of school-age children want to know what happens in the classroom, the lunch room and on the bus. Elementary school parents are hectored into helping out at school; expected to be involved. However, middle and high school are quite different. Parents become personae non gratae not only in the eyes of kids who are trying to become more independent, but in the eyes of a schools that don’t provide many opportunities for parent classroom involvement in the upper grades. So, A2Politico has asked two kids to write about their lives as students. One of these students attends the AAPS, and the other attends a local private school. For obvious reasons, these two will write their entries anonymously. So, look for A Descent Into the Maelström weekly, and read about what your kids wouldn’t tell you even if you asked.

There is racism in my private school. Even though it might not be appearant to someone who is new to the school or visiting, it’s something that becomes clear when you’re a student. It’s hidden from those who visit, because kids of different races co-mingle. They spend time together; there are inter-racial friendships. The teachers and the students, the whole community really discourages racism and racist comments and jokes. However, that’s on the surface.

It becomes clear that the sensitivity towards racial minorities is on the surface at my private school when you see how white kids behave when they are out of earshot of the teachers, and peers who are sensitive or active in Diversity Club. Diversity Club is a group that plans days for educating students about diversity. The group holds fund-raisers to bring in speakers who talk about topics such as the Holocaust, Hispanic heritage, and immigration. There are also groups for African Americans, Asians and Hispanic students.

The Diversity Club is, at the moment, only girls. White girls. Latina girls. Asian girls. Black girls. And Middle Eastern girls. Why is the Diversity Club populated by girls? Girls care about clubs, and in this club I’d say the majority of the members also care about diversity. However, this majority who care about diversity constitute a minority in the larger student body.

Why is that? Perhaps because whites are the majority at my school, and they aren’t impacted by racist jokes because they not the butt of the jokes. I hear jokes regularly that make fun of Asians and blacks. Much of the time the jokes focus on mimickry. In my language class, my teacher has an accent. This kid in my class reads materials in an exaggerated accent that makes fun of the teacher’s accent and the teacher’s racial group. I’m not sure the teacher understands the mocking tone, but she laughs along with it and so do many of the students. I laugh, too. I shouldn’t be laughing, but because everyone else is, including the teacher, it gives me permission to laugh. It’s easy to convince yourself that laughing at racial jokes is okay, especially when others are doing it.

Under the surface is the shark of privilege.

We white students have the privilege of making the jokes and laughing at the jokes. The minorities are given the privilege of being the object of the jokes. I’ve seen minorities laugh at racist jokes. That doesn’t mean they find it funny. It perhaps means they don’t feel like they can stand up against the majority. My friend, who is Hispanic, is an exception. This individual never laughs or lets pass a racist joke. This person is actually pretty popular, and I think it’s because this individual is popular that racist jokes are no laughing matter.

The fact that there is racism at my school, the fact that I am not completely absorbing the efforts of my teachers, events, and speakers who address racism, makes me feel that my private school needs to do more to make the student body more diverse. I think this would help balance out the white privilege that I feel and take advantage of on a regular basis. I don’t think numbers lead to equality, but I think increased diversity makes a difference. Obviously, there’s more of a chance that if someone is making a joke, there would be more people around who might say something.

The school officials try to educate us about diversity, but the efforts are ineffective after a certain point. The first time the program is interesting, the second time a little less so, and by the third I’m zoned out. I’m not listening to the speaker talk about the impact of racism. I’m thinking about the snack I’m going to have when I get home. In the classroom, there are many lessons about racism in the books we read. For example, we’re about to start a book by a black author and this means we’ll have those discussions—the ones that center on racism and its impact on the characters in the book, and in society. These discussions don’t work either. The class discussions are always about the characters in the book and society as a whole, but not about our school community.

Repetition doesn’t work.

What is ultimately going to help the kids change is when they develop relationships with kids who are of different racial groups.  This gets back to my idea that my private school needs to increase racial diversity. The problem, however, is money. On the one hand, money is associated with white privilege. On the other hand, lack of scholarship money keeps many minority students from enrolling in the school.

If the classroom discussions were focused on our school community, I think more white students would see and acknowledge what is going on at our own school. Since the discussions are abstract as opposed to concrete the students’ thoughts are abstract, as well. We’re not looking at it as an issue specific to our school community. Honestly, writing this is making me realize that students at my school, including me, have little idea of the impact of our words on the minority students, and on the overall atmosphere in our school community.

Can I change myself, my own attitudes or behaviors? I’m honestly not sure.

A2PNotes: Ann Arbor is home to some 16,000 public school students. Those students are parented by tens of thousands of women and men who haven’t a clue about what their kids really do at school all day, not because they don’t want to know. Quite the opposite, most parents of school-age children want to know what happens in the classroom, the lunch room and on the bus. Elementary school parents are hectored into helping out at school; expected to be involved. However, middle and high school are quite different. Parents become personae non gratae not only in the eyes of kids who are trying to become more independent, but in the eyes of a school District that does not provide many opportunities for parent classroom involvement in the upper grades. So, A2Politico has asked two kids to write about their lives as students. One of these students attends the AAPS, and the other attends a local private school. For obvious reasons, these two will write their entries anonymously. So, look for A Descent Into the Maelstrom weekly, and read about what your kids wouldn’t tell you even if you asked.

The impact a teacher has on a student’s learning is one of the most important, if not the most important, factor in a student’s education and success. Ideally, teachers help students discover new skills and new concepts while making personal connections with each individual.

My experience has been that the more recently hired teachers have been much better teachers.

Teachers that have been in the classroom a shorter time seem to be, in my experience, more focused on the teaching. What I mean is they’re focused on getting the students to understand the concepts as opposed to just handing out a worksheet and saying, “Do it.” Newer teachers use different teaching methods that help the students excel. For instance, newer teachers use classroom discussion, peer-to-peer discussions, and they instruct the students about the concepts we’re learning.

The worst teachers ask students to grade their own homework. Students cheat when doing this. For example when I didn’t complete my homework I could just give myself the highest grade. It was wrong, but I did it, and I wasn’t the only student who did. The teacher then simply looked at the scores on a separate sheet of paper and entered the grades. The worst teacher I ever had never gave us any real assignments or homework. It might sound funny for a student to be complaining about not getting any school work, but if you don’t get any school work you don’t learn anything.

In contrast, when the best teacher I’ve had in the AAPS gave us work, it was an amount of work that we could get done in a single class period. My best teacher has only given us homework a few times this year. Homework, in my experience, has not been a gauge of how good the teacher is. This is because some teachers who give homework every night, don’t teach the material the next day. The students grade the nightly homework then do in-class work in groups and/or individually. My worst teacher didn’t facilitate the class. What I mean by class facilitation is that the teacher interacts with the students by asking the class questions and seeing what we know and what we’ve learned. This is important because if the teacher doesn’t facilitate, why do we need a teacher in every class? The AAPS could have just a couple of teachers per school who walked around, gave out worksheets—which the students would complete, grade themselves (possibly cheating), then turn in. My best teacher, who interacts with the class, makes learning more fun and almost painless.

Another major difference between my best and worst teachers is their classroom management skills. My best teacher is less controlling and gives the students more freedom to interact with each other. This translates to the students wanting to get the work done and do it well. We want to please the Teach. There are times when my best teacher has to send students out into the hallway. It happens about once every other week. My best teacher even occasionally gets angry and speaks loudly to the class, but this teacher doesn’t single people out. My worst teacher, on the other hand, sends students two or three times per day to the Office and frequently yells at individuals and the class. This behavior doesn’t help the teacher gain control over the class; it fuels defiance. The students act as though they don’t need to listen to the teacher. The result is that the teacher gets angrier and angrier and the students more and more defiant. And learning? What learning?

This year, of my total teachers, three of them use some, if not all, of the teaching methods and classroom management tactics used by my best teacher. To me, this has meant a better learning experience. I am learning more. It also had made me feel better about going to school, and made me want to do the work well. I feel like I am trying to work to my potential. This year, I still self-check some of my work, but I don’t cheat. The teacher who asks us to self-check the work, makes it much more difficult to cheat, and I have more respect for the teacher because I feel like the teacher has more respect for the students, the job and the material.

Why should you care about what my best and worst teachers are like? This Best and Worst in School is happening to your children too. I know this because there are 30 other kids in my classes with me. There are 16,000 children in the Ann Arbor Public Schools and 1,078 teachers. I think continued evaluation of teachers even after they get tenure would improve the quality of instruction in the Ann Arbor Public Schools. I also believe that the AAPS needs to have higher expectations of students, as well, academically and behaviorally. The result of those two changes would mean an environment focused more on learning as opposed to “When’s the next break?” “When are we out of this class?” on the parts of both the students and the teachers.

A2PNotes: Ann Arbor is home to some 16,000 public school students, and approximately 1,700 students who attend the city’s various private schools. Those students are parented by tens of thousands of women and men who haven’t a clue about what their kids really do at school all day, not because they don’t want to know. Quite the opposite, most parents of school-age children want to know what happens in the classroom, the lunch room and on the bus. Elementary school parents are hectored into helping out at school; expected to be involved. However, middle and high school are quite different. Parents become personae non gratae not only in the eyes of kids who are trying to become more independent, but in the eyes of a schools that don’t provide many opportunities for parent classroom involvement in the upper grades. So, A2Politico has asked two kids to write about their lives as students. One of these students attends the AAPS, and the other attends a local private school. For obvious reasons, these two will write their entries anonymously. So, look for A Descent Into the Maelström weekly, and read about what your kids wouldn’t tell you even if you asked.

We begin to form groups in an attempt to keep the people we like close, and these groups are what make up the social ladder. At my private school, this ladder is more complex than the two simple “popular” and “unpopular” groups, and goes deeper than the “pretty girls are popular, everyone else isn’t” mentality that is found in so many movies and television shows such as “Glee.” Social “rankings” change constantly, people move from one rung on the ladder to the next.

Let’s start with the girls. The top of that ladder—the popular group—is probably the smallest of the four groups. These girls at my school are not popular in the sense that everyone likes them or everyone is dying to hang out with them — they’re just the kids who seem to pretty and fashionable, have names like “Courtney” and “Brittany,” and have an endless supply of inside jokes to giggle about during class. Below them on the ladder, there’s the athletic group—probably the largest of the girl groups. You don’t have to be extremely athletic to fit in with them, but they all play at least one sport. They’re more relaxed. After them, there’s the quiet group — the studious girls who no one really dislikes, but who do annoy some people. Girls on this rung of the ladder always do their homework and never break rules, are friendly but don’t have a ton to talk about. At the bottom, obviously, are the unpopular girls. Oddly, they act like they’re at the top of the ladder.

With the boys things are a bit simpler — here are rungs on that social ladder at my school: the popular boys, the “normal” boys, and the unpopular boys — labels that pretty much speak for themselves. There are only a few popular boys, but not a lot of people like them besides the popular girls. The normal group, the largest group by far, is a lot more approachable. They’re the kind of people that you can work well with when partnered with in class and are easy to talk to outside of the classroom. Then, come the unpopular boys, who tend to stick together, occasionally mingling with the “normal” boys, but never with the popular ones, or any of the girls.

So why do people get put into the groups they do? Actually, they don’t. I don’t think people aren’t forced into a group by others — we choose our friends, and by doing so choose where we fall on the social ladder. And what determines if a group is high or low on the ladder? That’s a tricky question. The groups who are placed on the bottom are less likable than other groups, but the popular kids aren’t exactly well-liked, and are still on top. It seems to be a combination of many things — the clothes they wear, how athletic they are, how good-looking they are, how smart they are, who they knew before coming to our school, how friendly, mature, and funny they are. It’s complicated and confusing sometimes.

Most of my private school classmates don’t pay a lot of attention to the labels associated with different groups — they just hang out with who they like and avoid those who they don’t. Sure, we’re all aware of the social ladder, but who says things like, We can’t be friends because he’s popular and I’m not? We think those things, don’t we?

In reality, we all know the social ladder is there and we’re aware of it, but it doesn’t play a huge role in our day-to-day lives. One day, after a game of dodgeball in gym, one of my classmates said something about avoiding the people who were throwing the balls, and a strategy of staying in the game while everyone else was attacking each other and getting hit like crazy.

This is a great analogy for my private school — it’s like a giant game of dodgeball, and if you’re not careful you’ll get hit. I’ve been trying my best just to stay in the game while avoiding the people throwing the balls, and in doing so I feel like I’ve become one of those kids who is off the social ladder. My friends come from a lot of different groups, but I don’t fit into just one of them. Not only does being off the social ladder allow me a nice view of the social ladder without the biases that come with belonging to a group on the ladder, it also gives me a comfortable spot to wait out this crazy game of private high school in Ann Arbor.

A2PNotes: Ann Arbor is home to some 16,000 public school students. Those students are parented by tens of thousands of women and men who haven’t a clue about what their kids really do at school all day, not because they don’t want to know. Quite the opposite, most parents of school-age children want to know what happens in the classroom, the lunch room and on the bus. Elementary school parents are hectored into helping out at school; expected to be involved. However, middle and high school are quite different. Parents become personae non gratae not only in the eyes of kids who are trying to become more independent, but in the eyes of a school District that does not provide many opportunities for parent classroom involvement in the upper grades. So, A2Politico has asked two kids to write about their lives as students. One of these students attends the AAPS, and the other attends a local private school. For obvious reasons, these two will write their entries anonymously. So, look for A Descent Into the Maelstrom weekly, and read about what your kids wouldn’t tell you even if you asked.

VOE, a new behavior referral system, was begun as a result of budget cuts, and cut staff from the Detention Room. That was where teachers could send kids who were being disruptive or violent. I had experience with the Detention Room for talking while the teacher was instructing the class. The atmosphere in the DR didn’t make me feel like it was a punishment, it more like a time out. There were two supervisors who would talk to you, and then send you into the Detention Room to sit down for a little while. Then, they would send you back to class.

That ended this year with the VOEs. This year, when the teacher feels a student is disruptive or violent in class, the teacher may (or probably will not) fill out a very complicated VOE form. The VOE categorizes a high-five hand slap as a public display of affection. What does that mean? Along with high-fives in this category there is also kissing and hugging. Last year high-fiving would have never gotten a student sent to the Detention Room. Now, a high-five not only could get a student a VOE, and also a letter home to parents as well as a detention.

I know a classmate whom this happened to. I saw it happen. A teacher at my school saw two students high-five each other. I saw the teacher chase my classmate down the hallway, yelling, “Get back here. Why did you give a high-five. I’m going to give you a VOE.” What did this mean to my classmates? The VOE got the students a letter home to parents and a one-hour detention in which (unlike last year) you can’t do homework or read.

Only one of my six teachers supports the VOE system. For example, one time my friends and I were talking about this year’s new VOE system within earshot of a teacher. The teacher said, “This is crazy! Why did they do this?” Another one of my teachers and I were talking about the new VOE system, and this teacher is one who frequently gives kids high-fives, which now under the new VOE regime, is a public display of affection. In general, my teachers have said that giving a VOE to a student for not bringing a pencil to class once or twice, should not result in a detention, which it could under the new VOE system.

My teachers have, all but one, verbally put down the new VOE system, and say they refuse to use it because the system oversteps boundaries—it’s a bit “control freaky.”

Since September, I have seen a maximum of five, perhaps six VOEs given out by my teachers in my classes. Last year, I would say that I visited the Detention Room much more frequently and saw dozens of incidents where my classmates were sent to the Detention Room. Now, kids who would have been sent out of class and to the Detention Room, (myself included, of course) just stay in class and continue to disrupt the teacher. The Detention Room allowed both the teacher and the students to have a break from disruptions, so the teacher could teach and the students could learn. What the new VOE system means to me, as a student, is that when disruptive classmates aren’t getting sent out of the class, it impacts how much the teacher can get done in a class period. This is different from last year when disruptive classmates were sent to the Detention Room, and the teacher could get more accomplished.

I know it might sound funny for a student to say that the student discipline system should be made more effective, but it should. I’d say that the Detention Room should definitely be brought back as VOEs are a much less efficient and effective way of dealing with disruptive students in my Ann Arbor public school. In four out of my seven classes, I have consistently disruptive students who talk, and/or argue with the teacher and students. I have seen teachers in those classes give a total of six VOEs in the past five months of school. Last year, all of those students would have been sent to the Detention Room many, many more times.

I’d like to end this by giving my readers a high-five. This may or may not result in a VOE for me.