Teenagers and their Peers

As a teenager I had a few close friends, not many but some I knew I could rely on. Today my students appear to have tons of friends but I often have the feeling they know virtually nothing about them outside school and seldom seem to care.

Thus they spend ample time on their cell phones textmessaging their peers, even during lessons when I have to battle to make them put the wretched thing in their bags and often have to fight again so that it actually stays there. They always seem to have a wonderful piece of news to share with someone. Similarly if I look at their Facebook page they have hundreds of so-called friends.

Yet whenever a kid is absent from school, nobody seems to know what has happened to them. During the day nobody takes the time to send a message so as to find out. If I hand out photocopies, they very rarely ask one for the absent student. Even after a few days the kid’s absence is often still a mystery. It is almost as if by being absent the student no longer existed.

One incident last week made me wonder about the sort of relationship they have with each other. Once a week, I help and supervise a class where the students work in pairs on a common project for half the year. It was snowing outside and a few kids hadn’t made it to school. As usual I went round and took down the names of the kids who were not in school for the administration. One boy was on his own and when I asked him if the girl he was working with was absent because she lived in the country, he answered he had no idea. Another boy has been missing since the beginning of the month and the guy who works with him still hasn’t contacted him to ask whether and when he was coming back.

Maybe I am embellishing the past but I seem to remember that in similar circumstances we contacted each other, inquired about our friends’ health and informed them about school work.

How?

– How can you not be horrified when a former students of yours takes his life at the age of 17?

– How do you come to accept such a terrifying piece of information when you remember him as one of the most pleasant and charming students you have ever had?

– How can you possibly comfort his friends and schoolmates?

I was away with my French and Swedish collegues for the weekend and got the news when we came back only a little while ago. This is is the second time one of our students has killed himself in the past six months. This boy was my student last year and was in the same class as the girl wo killed herself in April. Once again I feel shocked, devastated and at a loss for words.

Besides we are still in Sweden but we know that thanks to msn, FB and mobile phones, the students here are bound to now about his death. Tomorrow morning when we see the students again, there won’t be the school social worker and doctor to help us deal with them.

I hope and pray that we’ll be able to find words that will resonate with the youngsters who are under our responsibility and help them come to terms with such shocking news.

To Trust or Not To Trust?

This morning I finished reading A Code of Jewish Ethics, Volume 2: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, which I had started two weeks ago. It took me some time to read this book, not because it is hard or boring – quite the opposite in fact – but because it is quite thought-provoking and challenged some aspects of my life and beliefs in a very powerful way.

I haven’t blogged about it yet, apart from announcing its release a few months ago but it has inspired my latest parshah posts.

After this, I felt I would need something light and had purchased Hold Tight by Harlan Coben. I picked it up as it dealt with a topic I have studied several times with my students, namely the dangers of Internet for teenagers.

I usually use extracts from Now You See Me by Rochelle Krich and thought another thriller would be a good addition to my lesson. Harlan’s novel is a bit far-fetched but one thing I find interesting here is that it questions parental responsibility as regards what kids do on the Internet.

To get a fair idea of Harlan Coben’s view on this issue you can read The Under Cover Parent, an article he wrote for the New York Times in march 2008.

If you have the time, read it and let me know what you think as a parent or an educator.

Matchmaking

Before you get me wrong, I have not become a shadchan overnight. The matchmaking I am referring to is the art of associating French and Swedish students for our exchange.

We have had an exchange with a Swedish high school for over ten years now and it usually works fine. I tend to think that pairing the students wisely is a major key to a successful exchange but this is not an easy task.

Last week I received the last Swedish files sent by our collegues in Boras and started matching the students according to the criteria I have set up with years.

– Same sort of backgrounds. I reckon a ten day-trip is not the perfect time for teenagers to discover completely different lifestyles. The kids are apprehensive enough: they are going to a country they don’t know and will have to speak a foreign language; this in itself is stressful enough.

– Similar tastes. When the students fill in the forms we give them, they are requested to write about their extra-curricular activities and I try to find at least one common hobby. There again I hope that a football player or a pianist will relax more easily if they attend a match or a concert during the exchange, or even just a training session. It is something they can relate to and they will find it interesting to share and compare.

– Same size families. This is more difficult and does not always work but I gather that an only child may find it more difficult to adapt in a large household where he/she will not get the attention they are used to. I have found that only children tend to get homesick more than other kids.

– Juggling with imperatives. Sometimes the obvious matching is impossible because one student is allergic to cats while the seemingly perfect counterpart has two cats. There are also the vegetarians, the parents who insist their child be in a smoke-free environment and this year the daughter of Jehovah Witnesses.

– Flair, unless you prefer to call it luck. The less rational criterion I admit but a necessary ingredient.

Feel free to comment, add your own criteria or criticize. It is always interesting to get different perspectives.

No Words

There are numerous things teacher’s training does not prepare you for. You are expected to teach and teaching is what you learn. Even though you often come across teaching situations you would never have guessed would happen. Experience more or less fills the gaps and with years you may feel less inadequate. Thereore you usually manage to cope as long as what you have to handle belongs to the field of teaching.

However, one thing you do not learn is how to deal with a student’s death and how to face her or his classmates after such an unexpected and shocking event.

Thus last Friday one of my students – a bright and talented girl – killed herself and because of the Easter break we have only just come back to school this morning.

All the teachers that knew her are devastated and so are the students. I wish I could find the words some of these kids wil need but for the time being I feel numb and shaken.

My Students Review Books

 

After having studied a number of texts where authors and narrators dealt with the books they like best, my students had to write a short piece of writing about one of their favorite books. Here is what they wrote about and what they had to say:

– Candide by Voltaire. Maybe I should add they had to read it for French classes. I don’t suppose it is a book many would pick out by themselves. This book is apreciated because of Voltaire’s use of humor to denounce XVIIIth century French society.
– The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. My student liked it since it is a short novel.
– The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig. For the student who reviewed it, this book is a disturbing tale with fantastic elements.
– Le Horla, a collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant. More fantastic and exciting stories that deal with the narrator’s own fears and anxieties.
– Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. Here again my student was transported into a fantasy world she enjoyed.
– Animal Farm by George Orwell. The review hints that the denouncement of communism is quite effective.
– Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. An interesting novel with a lovely main character.
– Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda Two students reviewed this one. They enjoyed the characters, the complicity between them in spite of their differences and the narrator’s sense of humor.
– The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. A fanatstic book for people who like enigma and suspense.
– No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel. A novel which enebled the critic to know more about WW2.
– Will You Be There? by Guillaume Musso. For this book, my student forgot to mention why she liked it.
– Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Well-liked because it is a mixture of fantasy and love story.

Have you read and enjoyed any of these? What do the teenagers around you read?

Snow or Thoughts of a Ranting Teacher

 

For the first time in years we got a lot (by our standards) of snow on Monday. Because of the weather and the road conditions all public transport was cancelled on Tuesday morning but the town buses were up and running at the beginning of the afternoon. However there were still no coaches for those who live outside the town this morning.

As a result very few students were present yesterday and this morning – less than a third at best, sometimes a little as 15%. The kids present were those who live in town, the boarders and a few from surrounding villages whose parents had driven them to school.

To my surprise, while talking with the head this morning, I realized that 50% of the students live in town. Which means that, with the boarders and those whose parents could transport them, I should have had about 60% of them in front of me.

This got me wondering about the students’ parents. Why don’t they send them to school while in my hometown everything is within reasonable walking distance? How can they expect so much from us (teachers) when they don’t even manage to kick their own children out of the home in the morning?

I suppose some students twist the truth and tell their parents that the teachers will be absent anyway or that there will be so few students that they won’t do any work. Nevertheless the parents choose to believe the kids rather than phone the school to check what is going on. All the teachers were present and we did work although I chose not to go on with what we were doing but did a review of 2008 instead.

Getting them Off the Screen(s)

 

My students started having cell phones about ten years ago. Only a handful had one and we, teachers, had to worry about things that already seem to belong to the ice age.

Thus when we first went to Sweden on the school exchange, I kept warning one of the happy few about repeatedly lending his phone to his friends as the bill his parents would receive would be horrendous. He smiled but did not really heed my words; I think he was so proud of the prestige it gave him that he overlooked the bill. It turned out to be just that: horrendous.

Only one or two years later, most of our school students had phones. We now had to worry about preventing them from sending text messages during lessons. Occasionally a phone would ring or emit a short signal, we would take the phone and bring it to the admininstration who would keep it for a week. The word spread and you would no longer have to worry about phones ringing during lessons.

Eight years later and we have now to face a new generation and a new attitude. Students will risk anything to keep in touch with their peers on a permanent basis. They hide their phones in their bags and leave the bags on their desks. They hide them up their sleeves or in their pencil cases. Every now and again we will see a student absorbed in something which obviously is not what you are talking about. Whenever we manage to spot a phone and take it even the most pleasant student turns into a raging monster and ends up swearing at you, screaming and/or crying their eyes out.

What’s more, either the word no longer spreads among them or they couldn’t care less but the next phenomenon will be observed the next day with a different student. I am afraid they know what is bound to happen but cannot envisage losing touch with their friends for 55 minutes.

As a teacher I wonder what we can do to persuade these kids to give up their phones during lessons. As a human being I wonder how and why “we” created a generation which is so digitally-addicted and what parents tell their kids about what their attitude should be regarding mobile phones in class. As a Jew I wonder how observant parents manage to instill such a love of Torah (for want of a better expression) that their teenagers will give up their phones and computers for 25 hours every week.

Teacher’s Blues

Teaching seems enjoyable to outsiders since we are in contact with young people a lot or because of the holidays we get . As regards the holidays, I think we need them so as to erase the “hard disk” and forget all the horrible experiences we have had during the previous weeks. Concerning the fact that we work with young people, sometimes they can be so annoying that their age seems more of a problem than an asset.

I teach six classes this year; three of which are quite hard to work with. What I really can’t stand at the moment is students who can’t be bothered and make no efforts whatsoever to hide it. The three difficult classes are full of this kind of kids. They talk together as if that’s what they had come to the class for. When I tell them off, they stop for about one minute and and then resume their conversations as if nothing had happened.

My colleagues tell me that they experience the same problem with their own classes; which makes me wonder what we can do to change things.

Textbooks have never been so atractive, we have never spent so much time online working on one project or another, we try to keep up with what is going on in the outside world without being over demagogic.

Then, what is wrong?

Where I Have Been This Week

Everyone Needs Therapy gives sound advice to parents on how to bring about a healthy discussion about high-risk behavior with your teenagers.

At Hirhurim you will find the beginning of an ongoing series of guest posts by leaders from across the Jewish spectrum about why people become Orthodox. So far two Conservative rabbis, Rabbi David Wolpe and Rabbi Charles L. Arian, have shared insights.

Cooking with Yiddishe mama points to a CNN report about 5 foods that are good for you. A most welcome article as it includes 3 of my favorite foods.

I’ve just discovered a blog run by a young French woman who is studying to become a journalist. Apparently all the students in her school have been assigned to keep a blog. Yasmina has chosen to devote hers to Israeli films.