Night School started this week.  I volunteered to teach Night School (for the first time in 18 years of teaching) last year, when it became obvious that one of us was a PhD candidate with classes to take, classes to teach, a study to conduct over multiple years, and a dissertation to write and one of us was not. 

The mechanics of Night School are as follows:  we have a six-week block, Monday through Thursday from 3:45 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.  In that time period we help students reclaim a half credit (basically, a semester) that they lost, usually due to lack-of-turning-it-in (a chronic problem for some students), but sometimes for lack-of-coming-to-class.  Offered classes are usually the required classes (math, English, history, science) and sometimes we get an elective in there (students need a certain number of electives to graduate, too).  There are generally two English teachers, because English is required all four years of high school and students fail all four years and otherwise it’s impossible to schedule enough English for them to make up all of it. (Sadly, there is generally a good collection of students who have managed to fail at least one part of multiple years of English).

Night School exhausts me.  I have not pieced together why, but I think it’s a combination of age, diet, metabolism, and passive aggressiveness.  The students are fine, usually – I just have had enough by 3:30 and want to go home.

The January block is when I teach seniors.  Technically, I’m teaching English 4A for the first six-week block, and English 4B for the second six-week block, but since actual seniors are still actually in English 4B during day school those second six weeks (and therefore haven’t failed yet), I don’t have any students then.  I’m fine with that (see the above paragraph).

So, I have 15 seniors in Night School this term.  They are not excited to be there, but they have actually made their peace with the importance of passing (finally) so they’re much better behaved than they were during the fall semester when they failed.  Approximately six of them actually failed my class, which is even sadder than the fact that they failed anything.

It’s not our calling to repeat everything they missed during their failed semester of English 4.  Rather, we are to work on strengthening their English skills and giving them the flavor of English 4, with the reasoning being that between their spotty attendance/attention during their day school class and their slightly-less spotty attention to Night School, they will acquire a whole class.

I try to think of things to teach to Night School that will be easy for them to get through but still work the “English class” part of their brains.  It is an extra prep, and I don’t get extra time to prepare for it, but they do pay me a little bit more so I guess that’s the trade off.

This first week, we went through poetry terms and analysis, mainly because every regular student ever (and many AP students) is uncertain about poetry.  They declare that they “hate” it, but what they mean is “I don’t understand and I hate being wrong over and over and/or looking stupid.”  Which is reasonable.  I “hate” running now, although I used to run a couple of miles every day, because now I’m large and wobbly and can’t breath when I run and I look stupid.  If I did it more often, I probably wouldn’t “hate” it.  So, to complete the analogy, I’m making them “run” more often so they can do it better.

For the books we’ll read, I have decided on A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, and if we have time Much Ado About Nothing (because no one teaches the Comedies and why not??).  But at the pace they are reading ALBD, I don’t know that we will get to the Shakespeare.  Sadly. (to be clear, I am sad, although I guess they would be sad if I made them read it?)

Although I appreciate the extra income, I don’t fully, philosophically agree with the concept of Night School.  Night School says to students “We expect a relatively large proportion of you to fail, so we have in place this structure which will allow you to repair your failure.”  I am the Queen of Compassion, so it’s not that I don’t think there should be structures in place to catch students when they fall; rather, my disagreement comes from sadness that any one fails in the first place.  

Truly, a student who comes to class every day and attempts to complete each assignment will not fail my class.  The knowledge and skills are repeated and reinforced often enough that the student who is there and trying will learn sufficient skills to pass both the course and the state-required testing.

Why don’t students come to school regularly?  And why, when they are there, do they fail to turn in assignments?

I think the answers to these questions lie at the heart of the problems in education in our country.  The answers are complex, and my version of the answers is definitely not complete – but I would say this:  students don’t come to school regularly because of dysfunction of some sort at home, and they don’t turn in assignments regularly because of some dysfunction in their education.

I have 17 year old students who are essentially raising themselves.  They live in an apartment with friends, or at their alcoholic aunt’s house, or with their elderly grandparents.  They have parents who are either literally or figuratively battling demons on a daily basis, and so the student has to tend to siblings (including taking them to doctor’s appointments during the school day) in addition to tending to their own classes.  They are working two jobs in addition to attending high school because someone has to pay the bills.  There are as many dysfunctions as there are grains of sand at White Sands National Monument, and not all of them are “fatal” to a student’s success.  But some of them are.  Helping our students and their families mend the dysfunction in their personal system is one way we could make Night School unnecessary.

The other answer I have has to do with educational dysfunction.  Most of these educational problems are apparent by the time the student gets to middle school, but because the system is not set up to mend holes in educational progression past a certain point (about third grade, by my reckoning), the student comes up with personalized avoidance behaviors to distract attention from the fact that he/she cannot read and comprehend, or that numbers dance on the page, or that their body chemically will not allow them to sit still longer than 35 seconds at a time--or, catastrophically, all of the above.  Some of these students get identified and codified into the Special Education system, but many many of them do not.  They need more help, sooner, than we give them.  They need to not be in classes of 30 or more, where the teacher is unable to do much more than flog the class towards completion, stragglers be damned.  Most of all, they need a middle school experience that teaches them despite their raging hormones and social experiments and the aforementioned educational holes.  If we did better in middle school education, that is another way we could make Night School unnecessary.

In the mean time, I will be dragging my out-of-shape, middle-aged, chronically sarcastic self to Night School.  I will try to help these students reclaim their credit and their opportunity to graduate with their classmates.  It’s who I am and what I do. 

TTFN