Young Men's Club - 5/30/08 Season Finale

So today was my last day of teaching. I leave for Baltimore next week. It was a very bitter-sweet day. It was also pretty easy. Mainly due to the fact that, because it was my last day, I found it very difficult to be as strict as I normally am. Don't get me wrong. The rules were still enforced. I just didn't stress out about it. The day started with an incident that, oddly enough, didn't even involve my club. There were three girls in another club that were running around. I told them to stop. They stopped briefly and then started up again. They were having some bizarre disagreement. I think the strangest thing of all is that they were looking for adult intervention and I was the only one around. They finally just walked over to me and told me their story. And it was a long one. I gave each one of them the opportunity to talk. Then, like Solomon, I rendered judgement. Basically, they were all guilty of something and they all owed each other apologies. And that was the end of that. Funny how that worked out. They just wanted to be heard. The boys were a little rambunctious today. Nothing out of control, but definitely more energy than usual. Partly because of normal Friday energy and partly because today was their last chance to test me. Now the other reason why today was made easier was because the other after school program was giving a presentation. So I only had to entertain the kids for about 40 minutes. I took them outside and we ran the drumming pieces and recitals for the Spring show. After about 3 runs of each, I gave them about 20 minutes of free time. I personally found it very strange that one of them chose that time to play with his Nintendo DS. On top of that, most of the other kids chose to watch him play it. Basically, they chose video games over exercise. The presentation was not so great, but it killed time. At the end of the day, my supervisor made a nice little speech in front of everyone thanking me for the job that I had done over the course of the school year. I made an effort to give a special unique send off message to each of the boys. I shook each one's hand and told them all I was very proud. There were definitely a couple of long faces. I guess that the whole thing hasn't really hit me yet. It just seems so weird that I won't be going back there for the rest of the school year. I guess I've been going for so long that it felt like just another Friday. Or maybe I'm just in denial. I did try to soften the blow by assuring everyone that I'd be back in the Fall. I can't honestly say if that's true or not, but if nothing pops up on the career front, I would definitely go back there. It's a very good school and they are good kids. (For the most part) They drove me crazy at times and at other times they made me very proud. I hoped they learned a lot from me and I've definitely learned a lot from them. I do regret that I wasn't able to stick with them until the very end. But I am confident that they are going to do great. And so will I.

Until next Fall.

Young Men's Club - 5/29/08

Today was the penultimate day. I didn't have to make an announcement that I was leaving. News travels fast in an elementary school. The boys seemed to take the news well. There is already speculation as to who will take over the club. I honestly have no idea. I also, however, would be rather interested to know. Perhaps have the new person observe my club. I have no control over that. Anyway, another gorgeous day which meant another day outside. It was also spent mostly drumming. But this time I really tried to focus on proper technique. But I could only get so far. Most of them are only interested in hitting the buckets as hard as they possibly can. But a couple of them are actually pretty good. And I guess that's more than I can ask for. Next we worked on the drumming pieces for the show. Unfortunately, the quality of the performance seemed to have dropped. One of them, Jeremiah, always had some problems with tempo. Basically, he has absolutely no rhythm. Also, his mission seems to be to hit the drums as hard and as fast as possible. Which throws everyone off. But today, it really seemed like everyone was trying to play faster and faster. Basically, no one was listening to each other. I chose to chalk that up to the fact that it was getting late and it was a really nice day out. Both of which must have made it difficult to focus. In the end, I'm realizing that I have to just let it go. They will perform however they will perform. It will be good. It won't be great. Parents will be proud. Life will go on.

Drama Club - 5/28/08

Today was my last day of teaching Drama Club. It was all very strange. First of all, my announcement to the kids didn't go as I had planned. My replacement came in to observe my class. I chose to wait until the last possible moment to tell the kids that I was leaving. I thought that would make it an easier transition. I also didn't want to undermine my own authority. However, during snack time, my supervisor made the brilliant decision to introduce my replacement to the school nurse as MY REPLACEMENT. IN FRONT OF THE KIDS. He's a nice guy and all but give me a break. Why wasn't he thinking?! He soon corrected himself saying, "I shouldn't say that in front of the kids?" ( YOU THINK?! ) So there I was dealing with a bunch of jaw-dropped kids wondering if this news was true. I deflected the question until club officially started. It was a gorgeous day so we most definitely went outside. I broke the news to them there. I explained that, as they knew, I am a professional actor and that I had been offered a role in a Shakespeare play in Baltimore and that it starts next week. I also let them know that I had planned to return in the Fall. There were some groans of disapproval. There were many questions. There was a very brief sense that I wasn't in charge anymore. (I quickly put an end to that) There was a lot of jockeying for position to buddy up with the new teacher. I have to admit that I felt a little jealous about that. Oh how quickly their loyalties turn. We moved on to a classic beanbag game using the Hamlet speech. Then we went on to rehearse the show. Once again it was a 15 minute process that took about 35 minutes. We also played this cute little game to help the new teacher learn the kids' names. Each kid would say their name and then make a physical gesture. Then everyone had to repeat it. That was actually kind of fun. After that was done, the kids had about 15 minutes to play. After I brought them back, I gave the kids lollipops to help ease the pain of my departure. Just when my heart couldn't break anymore, as I was leaving the school, little Ashlee gave me a hug goodbye. I reassured her that I would be back in the Fall. Which, of course, would be a total lie if I make it big. Yes, I realize that you see through my jaded facade.

Young Men's Club - 5/22/08

Today's club was pretty much a piece of cake. That, of course, was due to the new policy of sending the poorly behaved kids out of the room. It just makes my life so much easier. The "Three Amigos" are no longer my concern. They get a very short leash. Nasir was the first to go. It seemed like he was trying at the beginning but he just couldn't keep it together. Basically, he's addicted to class-clownery. Next was Jourdan. It wasn't that he was doing anything major to piss me off. He just kept doing a bunch of little things over and over again. He'd start a little side conversation then back off; Give a little push to a kid and then back off; Finally, when he started making gross nasal noises, I had had enough. Did the punishment fit the crime? Who knows. I don't really care at this point. I am so tired of all of these clubs being about trying to keep him in line. Last was Christian. He was actually hanging in there for awhile. But in the end, he too could not control himself. It was a couple of little things to start. Then, when I was trying to speak, he began to openly play the drums. And that was that. I honestly don't know why these kids have to keep testing me every single day. What signals am I giving that says that I won't punish them if they misbehave? Oh well, if they want to learn the hard way, that's their problem.

Drama Club - 5/21/08

I'm in the home stretch. There's is only one week left before the school year ends for me. I spent today working on the final scene for the Spring show. It's a very simple little piece. They march in from opposite ends of the stage, shake hands with the other "team" and then one student gives a quick little speech that's at the end of the play. Despite the same deal that I always make with them, this still was a long process. I told them that if we got through it quickly, then we could play games for the rest of the time. Oh well. Also, the new policy change has made my life significantly easier. My site coordinator has given the green light on sending kids out of the class that aren't able to behave. So my typical problem kids are taken out of the room completely. I, of course, want to use it sparingly, but I'm more than willing to use it. Then there's this student Javelina. The good thing about her is that she actually has shown an inkling of interest in Drama. The bad news is that she's a diva. So on the one hand, I want her to be involved. On the other hand, she's very very difficult to work with. But I've found a solution. Whenever she starts becoming more and more of a diva, I simply ask this question of everyone in the room, "Would anyone else like to read this speech?" Of course, everyone raises their hands and she quickly realizes that she is not above reproach. Which I think is the best life lesson of all.

Young Men's Club - 5/13/08

I am counting down the days until I move on to my acting gig. But until then, there's a lot of work to do. The good news with the boys is that their work is pretty much done. There will be no new material that they'll have to learn. It's simply a matter of rehearsing what they already know. Which should have been simple. In fact, I made an announcement to them at the beginning of the club. I said that we would run the pieces for both the Spring and the Father/Son shows three times. After that, there would be free time to do whatever they wanted. Play games, go outside, whatever. All they had to do was get it together for about a half an hour. Well it didn't work out that way. They were so easily distracted. But the good news for me was that it didn't really matter. I knew that we were going to do what I wanted. It didn't matter if it took an hour. I repeatedly reminded them that they were cutting into their own play time. The unfortunate aspect of this policy is that the kids that do behave must pay the penalty of the three kids that don't know how to act. But they did get their comeuppance. When there was time to play, the rebellious kids had the distinct pleasure of sitting out.

Young Men's Club - 5/8/08

Today, I was somewhat of a rough day. It turns out that I will be leaving the school earlier than my commitment. So as a result, I've got a lot of loose ends to tie up. One of which is teaching the boys their lines for the Spring Show. Now here's the thing, as a professional actor, I understand that sitting down and learning lines is not fun. So you can imagine how it may feel for a group of 9 year-olds. But I just had to press on. I also went with a new tactic for trying to control their behavior. Rather than threaten them with what I would do specifically (whether it was a time out, a written notice, or telling their parent), I would instead give them a rather general threat. So if one kid would misbehave, I would smile and say, "Good. Keep doing that. Because it will help me remember how you've behaved today. And I've got something special planned for you." It was a pretty much a bluff. It's not like I'm going to do anything different than what I've already done. But the vagueness seems to work better. It allows their imaginations to kick in. Psychological warfare is the best. Also, I gave many many speeches about how actions speak louder than words. If they learn nothing else from me, it will be that.

Drama Club - 5/7/08

Today was a gorgeous day and I was determined to have club outside today. I saw a wonderful sight before club started. It was Jourdan's mother who had come to pick him up early. I did a nice little mental cartwheel. I knew then that I would at least have a chance to get some work done during the club today with him out of the picture. I swear that kid is just so disruptive. I announced to the kids that we were going outside to work. After the collective groan, I told them that they had a choice of working inside or outside. They chose outside. Honestly, I endured through the same shenanigans that I would have gone through inside. It just seemed a lot easier to deal with because I was outside. I also knew that any extra time I had at the end could be spent just letting the kids run around. So we did our standard warm up and then went right into the speeches. They know the words of the first speech so it was just a matter of the performance. I kept telling them to keep their energy up. I realized that one really cool saying that would help them do that was, "Play to Win." So I would say that periodically and that would spur them on. I also had to remind them to stop the fidgeting and the talking when it wasn't their line. Although I don't think they'll do that when they get on stage. We then moved on to Juliet's speech. I decided to break them up into two teams and split the lines up. With time running out, it's best to give them as few new lines to learn as possible. One team learned their lines rather quickly. The other team had focus issues. So, let the former team have free play time while the latter continued to work on the lines. After a few minutes of free play, I reigned everyone in and had them do it a couple more times just to keep it fresh in their minds. Why can't everyday be 70 degrees?

Young Men's Club - 5/6/08

I was informed today that the Young Men's Club will be performing at the annual Father/Son brunch in June. I was also told that there would be a visitor during the club. The head grant-writer or something. Couple that with the Spring show and the fact that I'm going to be leaving very soon and I ended up with a long list of things to do and a very short time to do them. The good news was that for the Father/Son show, they will do the same thing that they did for the Black History Show. The bad news was that I had to find out if they remembered it. Well it turned out, for the most part, that they did. The drumming piece was a little rusty to start, but they ended up back on track. The same was true with the, "I have a dream," speech. One major problem that I had with the drumming section was that my buckets have yet to be replaced, so I was short about 3 or 4 buckets. Which meant that everyone couldn't drum at the same time. However, it also meant that if anyone misbehaved, then I could replace them with someone who didn't have a bucket. It was quite the power trip. For the most part, the boys did fairly well today. I did, however, have to put them in a time out and I had to repeated give this speech: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is when you listen to me, we finish what we need to get done, and we have plenty of time left over to play games. The hard way is when you continue to interrupt me and continue to be distracted and I have to take time to address all of these issues. Either way, we're going to get it done." Lastly, the visit by the grant-writer was a non-factor. I didn't even notice when he/she came in. I ended the day with a very quick race. I had the best behaved child pick who they wanted to race against and then so on down the line.

Drama Club - 5/5/08

I think "Ugh" would be the best way to describe today's club. As always, I started in a good mood. It was a gorgeous day outside. My plan was to run the entire club outside. No tricks. No incentives. Just go right outside. I guess the only catch would have been that we would have done work but I still think that would have been a pretty good deal. Well it didn't work out that way. It started during snack time. One of the worst things that can happen during snack time is the spilling of a drink. Which, of course, happens all the time. The reason that this is such a catastrophe is because no one will actually admit that they spilled the drink. And they definitely don't rush to clean it up anytime soon. Being the responsible adult, I can't allow the group to leave without the mess being cleaned up. So I end up in a standoff with the kids about whose going to clean it up, and everybody saying that they didn't do it. That entire process took about 15 to 20 minutes. Just wasted time that we could have gone outside. And when they did eventually decide to clean it up, complete chaos broke out as every single kid decided that they wanted to be the one who would get towels to clean up the spill. So it went from no one wanting to handle it to everyone. As a result, I revoked the outside privileges. At least temporarily. We went to the auditorium and worked on the speech for the show. I worked on it with them as a group. I continued to used my trusty beanbag technique. I had them move the beanbag around in a circle as quickly as possible. It went fairly well. Unfortunately, you can't engage everyone all the time. There's always 2 or 3 or 4 kids that check out. So I had to keep reigning them in. But most of them managed to learn the first line. I decided to take them outside. But first we had to make bathroom trips. Well that process ended up taking about 15 minutes or so. Since that had taken so long, I had to cancel the trip outside. Needless to say, they weren't happy about that. And yet, for some reason, couldn't see how they were somehow partly responsible for that. Children can be so childish.

Young Men's Club -5/2/08

Today was a great day. That's because I had to do very little work. It turned out that one of the other after school programs was giving a performance in the auditorium. That meant that I only had to plan activities for about 20 minutes for before the show and about 20 minutes for after. Which is especially great because Fridays are so long. Also, my buckets still had not been returned at this point. I'm really getting sick of the whole damn thing at this point. Anyway, I simply started with the same game that I always play with the bean bag. The difference was that the kids had to through it back to me. This was to avoid a big free-for-all that usually happens as well as keep the game moving. When I took them to the auditorium for the show, I made absolutely sure that they were all completely separated. There were at least 6 or 7 chairs between each kid. That worked out brilliantly. Naturally, there was always one asshole and he got the distinct pleasure of sitting right next to me. Periodically, some kids would try to sneak over to near their buddies. That's why I took a perfect position in the back row in order to see all and bring the hammer down as need be. I'd make an excellent cop. After the show it was a few rounds of Duck, Duck, Goose and then I peaced them the fuck out.

Young Men's Club - 5/1/08

On this day, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. Maybe I was going to do a little bit of drumming and maybe a little bit of work on the speech. Unfortunately, the custodial staff who had been so kind in providing my club with buckets, promptly took about half of them for some reason. And at this point, it's impossible to have half the kids drumming. This is like the second or third time they've pulled this shit. They need to look up the word "gift." Anyway, by default, today became about working on the speeches. Despite the debacle of the previous day's experiment, I decided to try it again. I had the boys who were in the Drama club, teach the other boys the new lines. The difference was that I limited it to pairs hoping to avoid any major conflicts. In general, it worked out fairly well. Understandably, you ask kids to work privately and they turn it into an opportunity to screw around. I tried to pair kids who weren't close friends and yet they still managed to work it out, team up, and play instead of work. What I ended up doing was constantly calling each team over and telling them to perform the speech for me. When it was clear that they hadn't worked on it, I would make them run lines a few times and then tell them to go back and run those lines 10 times. I would stress the importance of repetition. After about a half-hour or so, I gathered all the kids in a circle and played a game with them based on how well they knew the speech. The old "toss the beanbag while reciting one word at a time game." This time, they had to be in the air when they had the beanbag. It was a pretty good idea accept that the boys who weren't playing at that exact moment would act like assholes. It's so annoying. Those boys would be punished by a loss of turn. Finally, I announced that the winning teams would be given prizes on the next day.

Drama Club - 4/30/08

I've been totally slacking with my blogs. So I'm just going to crank these out as best I can. On Wednesday's Drama Club, I recall that I was having a little bit of difficulty. Mainly because I wanted to try something new. The reason I wanted to try something new was because I was feeling a little bit lazy. But I also wanted to see what the kids were capable of. I had them break up into groups and learn a few lines of Juliet's speech on their own. I wanted to see if they could work together and do my job for me. I monitored the situation closely. I split them up between the boys and girls because you can't mix genders in that situation. Way too much tension. Also, the boys are learning a different speech. I'll start with the boys. They actually did rather well but that was because they had learned a large part of it in the Young Men's Club. Only one of them, Jourdan, was being a complete and total asshole about the whole thing. Seriously, the kid is an asshole. Everyone else was actually making an attempt to learn and he was doing everything he could to be a distraction. This included dancing, going over to the girls side, and sitting out and pouting. On the girl's side, that was just a mess. Basically, the whole thing consisted of one long power struggle. They simply could not work together for 5 minutes. One girl, Javelina, was so upset because everyone wouldn't just do whatever she said. They all had the nerve to have their own ideas. I hate to sound sexist, but the whole thing was really catty. And at such a young age. It ended with me giving up on this idea and going into a group rehearsal. This was then completely derailed because of a huge cockroach/waterbug. Everyone freaked out. Clearly my years of experience in Drama could not compete with the appearance of a large insect.