Macario was a talker and loved to be funny and get people to laugh, which wasn’t always welcome when it disrupted a lesson.
However, I must admit, even when Macario interrupted a lesson with one of his off-the-wall jokes or comments, I often laughed too. It was impossible not to like him.
Then, as he often did after he cracked the entire class up, he would apologize.
Janice, on the other hand, was an “A” student that enjoyed reading books and was as determined as I was to motivate Macario to do the school work and study.
I conspired with Janice to find ways to trick him into doing his homework, which even for the young girl that loved him was a challenge. He was more into having fun than being serious about anything.
Some might wonder why I didn’t contact his parents. In fact, I had called them several times over the months and even had a face-to-face parent conference, but his study habits did not change. I tried referrals to the counselor, and assigned after school detentions and even a Saturday school. Nothing worked
That is when I made the decision to see if Janice could help.
Between us, Janice and I managed to squeeze a “D” out of Macario in English his first semester in high school. Without her efforts, he would have failed.
To make a long story shorter but not too short, I kept Macario after class that day and asked him what was wrong. He swore nothing was wrong but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was disturbed and had lied to me because he glanced away to stare at the floor when he answered the question.
This was unusual since Macario had never lied to me. When confronted for something I saw him do in class, he always admitted guilt and said he was sorry (once again).
However, when Janice came into fifth period after lunch, I asked her what was going on and she told me everything she knew.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Since I don’t remember the student’s name and will not spend the time to search my files to find it, I will call him Macario because he was a happy boy of 14 when I knew him.
Macario was in my fourth period class before lunch and he wasn’t a good student and seldom did his work but he was a good person and someone easy to like and almost impossible to get angry at.
I also knew his girlfriend, who I will call Janice, since she was in my fifth period class after lunch. The couple often came to my class at lunch when my high school journalism students were working. The chess club also met there to play chess and the high school environmental club met there once a month to plan hikes and projects.
One would think that spending lunch with friends outside would be preferable to a teen.
If you knew the high school where I taught and the gang culture that dominated it, it made sense that good kids would want to find a sanctuary from the potential violence. The gang culture then was large enough that it brought an armed sheriff’s deputy to campus daily, who sat in his squad car in the mall where most of the kids ate lunch and where all the gang bangers could see that shotgun attached to the dash.
The high school also had an unarmed squad of campus police officers.
However, getting Macario to read or do homework was a challenge and 75% of the way through the school year, I wasn’t having much success beyond the minimum necessary to keep his girlfriend from leaving him.
Macario wasn’t interested in school work or reading books, but he was always in a good mood and happy, which is what made me suspicious something happened the one morning he came to class early and with a dazed, disturbed look on his face and didn’t say a word all period.
To go an entire period without attempting to get others to laugh was not Macario. At first, I thought he may have broken up with Janice, or a family member died or maybe his parents had separated and were going to get a divorce. I had no idea that Macario had been sexually molested.
That day Macario and Janice did not show up for lunch.
When Janice came to fifth, I asked if she’d had an argument with Macario or had broken up with him.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
It’s strange what triggers a memory. This memory should have been triggered when my wife and I were watching the Oprah show on November 5, 2010, where she had 200 adult men in her audience that had been sexually molested as children.
As millions know, Oprah was abused as a child and is seriously passionate about the awareness of sexual child abuse.
What triggered this memory was a series of stories such as Anthony Weiner‘s inappropriate Twitter exchanges with a 17-year old girl and French writer Tristane Banon, who refuses to testify in the Strauss-Khan U.S. sexual molestation case.
At this point, you may be thinking that this is about me being sexually molested as a child but no, that is not the story.
This “true” story is about a ninth grade student of mine while I was still teaching high school English.
Since I wrote many of my reports on a computer and kept them on a USB drive, I probably still have this report and the name of the boy that was molested stored away somewhere in a file, but I doubt if I would ever find it since that CPU is now on a shelf and has been replaced by a series of newer, faster computers over the years.
California has a law that mandates educators must report suspected child abuse or the educator (including teachers) may lose his or her job and never work in education in California again.
In California “child abuse” refers to physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and severe emotional abuse. The pdf. document to educate educators and/or teachers is 85 pages long and comes with a test. Source: Mandated Reporter Ca.com
If you are curious what this training entails, click on the above link and discover the training I had one year. We may not have used this exact manual, but we had one and spent several hours in a workshop learning what to do and what happened if we didn’t do anything.
The penalties for failure to report are severe. “A person who fails to make a required report is guilty of misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and/or up to a $1,000 fine.… Educators who fail to report may also risk loss of their license or credential,” which means losing your job as an educator/teacher.
During my 30 years as a teacher, I filed one report. It was the only time that I suspected that one of my students had been sexually molested.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
When I decided to write this post about one of the students I taught at Nogales High School in La Puente, California, I thought of The Natural, a baseball movie starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, and Glenn Close, where an average baseball player comes out of seemingly nowhere to become a legendary player with almost divine talent.
This is what Hollywood does best—the stuff dreams are made of.
Then I Googled “baseball movies” and discovered a Site listing almost 200 from A to Z (there wasn’t one for “Z”, but “Y” had Yankees West and The Yankles.
If you love baseball as many Americans do, you may want to visit Boston Baseball.com.
I even searched for “Baseball Movies” on YouTube, which resulted in more than five-hundred thousand hits, and I was sucked into watching a few clips.
I could have watched baseball videos for hours on YouTube. I suspect entire movies are there ten minutes at a time.
However, that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.
I wanted to write about one student of the thousands I taught. He was in one of my ninth grade English classes.
He hated water as many Americans do, and often started school with a liquid breakfast followed by a liquid lunch and a bag of greasy French fries. Then he arrived at his English class—my fifth period.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Less than 100 years ago, children were the property of parents and could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude. Children of the poor often ended in factories and coalmines as young as five years old and labored twelve-hour days six days a week. Then in 1938, the child labor law was passed and the pendulum swung the other way 180 degrees until today, we see incidents such as these taking place in American classrooms.
I knew an eighth grade English teacher that was knocked out by a student. The student ended with five days of suspension then was transferred to my English class where she walked in tardy one day and lifted a leg to fart in my face in front of about 34 students before sitting down. I never met the parents.
Between 1999 and 2000, 135,000 teachers were physically attacked by a student and over 300,000 elementary and secondary school teachers were threatened with injury in the United States. Source: Lib.Umn.edu
American teachers are not alone.
The Guardian in the UK reported, “A quarter of school staff have suffered violence at the hands of a student and a third have been confronted by aggressive parents.”
What’s needed is to swing the pendulum back half way and return to dunce caps and stools in the classroom corner, corporal punishment and fines or even jail time for parents and/or students of all ages.
Of course, we could swing the pendulum back to the 17th century when some of the American colonies had laws on the books that allowed the courts to execute children that did not change unacceptable, rebellious behavior by a certain age.
Maybe we should include the parents of those children too.
However, instead of the situation improving, President Obama wants to take away job security for public school teachers and no one in Washington D.C. mentions the parents or the students when academic performance is not improving.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Job security is perilous for teachers in America, and it’s growing worse.
A teacher is suspended for rattling a table to gain the students attention or pins a note about unacceptable classroom behavior to a child’s sweater because the mother hasn’t responded to earlier notes.
In both cases, the students were not paying attention in class or were misbehaving. The teachers were just doing his or her job.
For rattling a table, one girl ran from the room and dialed 911 to complain to the police and they came to the school. The school district put the teacher on leave. We may never know who the student was since the law protects children younger than 18.
In Florida, an angry mother complains and another teacher is put on leave. The reason was that the teacher stapled a note to the student’s sweater. The teacher wasn’t sure if the notes she was sending home were getting through since the child’s poor behavior in class hadn’t changed. Source: neatorama
The mother felt the teacher embarrassed her son on purpose. The wrong person got in trouble. The mother should have spend a month in jail for the trouble she caused.
I see no problem with embarrassing students and parents too when student behavior disrupts the learning enivronment. The classroom is where teaching and learning is supposed to take place. When a child’s behavior or academic progress is poor and parents are not doing their job, the next step should be to embarrass the child in front of his or her peers and have the parents spend 24 hours in jail.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Parents are the primary key to a child’s future success and development. One example is a neighbor couple that raised two children—a son and a daughter both over 30 today and college graduates.
I understand the son has a Ph.D. in alternative energy and the daughter a BA in design from a university in Hawaii. The son has had no problem finding jobs that pay well. He even bought a home at a time when many Americans are losing theirs.
Recently, the mother and I talked about the parenting debate that was sparked by an essay in The Wall Street Journal. It was obvious that she wasn’t an “average” American parent but she wasn’t a Tiger Mother either.
It seems this neighbor mother told her son she felt as if Amy Chua, the Tiger Mother, had attacked her in The Wall Street Journal essay, but the son with the Ph.D. explained what Chua wrote wasn’t meant to be a criticism of all American parents.
Later, the mother sent me an e-mail saying, “The style of parenting I like involves appropriate choices and consequences.
“The child gets to chose between walking or riding to school but not between going to school or not, between doing homework after school or after dinner—not whether or not to do it.
“If the child refuses to wear a coat on a cold day then they get cold and next time they wear a coat (natural consequences).”
A CBS News Report says the average American teen sends 17,000 text messages a month.
The mother still couldn’t bring herself to read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua’s memoir. She said it would make her angry.
However, I am angry, but at a different sort of parent—the ones that followed the “Pied Piper of Self Esteem” in the 1960s making my job as a teacher more difficult for much of my teaching carrier (1975 – 2005).
A fellow teacher and friend still in the classroom says it’s worse now than when I left in 2005. He spends so much time documenting contacts with the “average” American parent he doesn’t have time to correct and record grades.
He had to hire a retired teacher to correct for him at $25 an hour.
Studies show the “average” American parent talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day while the “average” American child spends about 10 hours a day watching TV, social networking on Facebook, playing video games or sending text messages on mobile phones.
Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. described a different parenting model, “On average, Asian parents use more discipline and insist upon hard work more than Western parents. And on average, their kids do better.”
Dr. Twenge writing in Psychology Today said, “Asian Americans have the lowest self-esteem of any ethnic group in the U.S., but achieve the best academic performance (and, among adults, the lowest unemployment rate).”
“Oh, well, everyone does it!” However, does that make it right?
If the “average” Asian-American parent represents strict parenting and the soft, obsessive self-esteem parent represent the “average” American, what do we call parents between the two, which might describe my neighbor?
After all, “average” does not mean everyone. Average is a “norm” or the largest represented group in a population, which still leaves plenty of room for millions of horrible parents that beat their children and sexually molest them.
Child Help.org says, “(American) children are suffering from a hidden epidemic of child abuse and neglect.… Ninety percent of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator in some way; 68% are abused by family members.”
Did you know there are almost a million teens or children that belong to violent street gangs in the US? LA is the street-gang capital of America with 100,000.
Most of the gang bangers I taught earned FAILING grades and a thousand phone calls couldn’t change that.
Does “Parenting with Choices and Natural Consequences” describe the middle ground between the soft, self-esteem “norm” and the “average” Asian-American Tiger Parent?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Dr. Mark J. Perry writes a Blog called Carpe Diem at Blogspot.com. He bills himself as an expert in economics and finances.
Due to his Blog’s search engine rank, he probably has a wide following so he is misleading many people when he says, “Teachers in CA Receive More in Retirement than Active Teachers in More than Half of the U.S. States.”
While his statement and the chart he included with his post may be true, it doesn’t report all the facts and may mislead many who will then blame California’s retired teachers for part of the financial problems in the US.
However, I’m one of those teachers that retired after working thirty years in California’s public schools often spending 60 to 100 hours a week ten months each year teaching, planning and correcting student work at school and at home all hours of the week and weekends with no pay during the summer break.
In addition, the work didn’t stop when the winter or spring break arrived. Most teachers take work home and spend many days of the three weeks of paid vacation time catching up correcting student work and filling in grades in the grade book.
The only time the work stops is during the summer when there was no monthly pay for two full months.
In fact, after teaching thirty or more years, most teachers are at the high end of the pay scale making the average pay appear higher for retired teachers, and the retirement amount is based on the average annual earnings of the last three years of teaching.
When I retired, the calculation was about 1.95% x 30 (years) = 60.45% times the average of my last three years of earnings. That means I retired with a cut in pay equal to almost 40% of what I was earning my last year in the classroom but it was still higher than a teacher starting out was.
That is why when an average is figured for all active teachers, many are at the low end of the pay scale since so many Boomers are retiring and younger Americans are taking their place in the classroom, which lowers the average annual pay for active teachers.
In addition, California has the highest population in the country, which means more teachers boost that average retirement number higher since there are more teachers in the equation.
When I started teaching full time under contract in the 1970s, I earned about $12,000 annually with medical benefits and paid 8% of my pay into the California State Teachers Retirement System (CALstrs) for the next thirty years with California matching my contribution.
Unlike Social Security (SS), which is broke because the federal government spent the SS money workers paid, CALstrs is a retirement fund with more than 130 billion dollars that is invested in the private sector earning a 7% or higher rate of return annually besides the money flowing into the fund from active teachers that are still paying their annual 8% before taxes and the state’s matching funds.
The money that pays teacher retirement in California does not come out of the general fund that taxpayers pay into except for those matching dollars.
CALstrs reported recently that it is fully funded and has enough money to pay full retirement benefits for the next forty years as long as nothing changes.
Unlike Social Security and many other retirement plans across the country, the American taxpayer is not stuck paying for a teacher’s retirement in California.
However, I’m sure there are many politicians drooling over those billions of dollars that fund the CALstrs retirement system. California governors have borrowed from CALstrs before to balance the state budget then refused to pay hundreds of millions of dollars back to keep the CALstrs system funded.
Then the CALstrs board took the governor and the state to court and won each time so that borrowed money was paid back keeping CALstrs solvent.
Although I worked more than ten years (I started working at 15) before I became a teacher in 1975 to 2005, I cannot collect any SS yet I earned it. The federal government calls that double dipping since I collect retirement from CALstrs and California collects Federal dollars to fund parts of its educational system.
I also retired without medical as most teachers do in California. Only one or two school district out of hundreds in California offers a medical plan as part of the retirement. The district I worked for did not offer one except for COBRA, which is expensive for the retired teacher and only lasts until the retired teacher qualifies for Medicare.
The pay a teacher earns while teaching full time is based on the number of years in the classroom and how many degrees/units one has earned from college/universities. Teachers at the high end of the pay scale in California after thirty years may earn about $75,000 annually while a beginning teacher earns about $38,000 starting out (these were the figures I knew of in 2005).
Each school district has its own pay scale negotiated between the local branch of the teachers union and the school board so pay varies between school districts. Rural school districts in California often pay less than urban ones.
I suspect that applies to the nation too.
Where cost of living is higher, the pay would be higher and real estate in urban areas of California are expensive so the cost of living is higher than most of America.
In California, a teacher that retires after 42 years with a Masters Degree will earn 100% of his or her active teaching pay. However, if the teacher retires after 20 years of teaching at age 55, which is the earliest a teacher may collect at a reduced rate, that retirement pay will not even be 40% of the active teacher’s annual earnings.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Last night, my wife and I watched 60 Minutes for Sunday, March 27. Every public school principal, vice principal, counselor, teacher and parent may learn an important lesson from the basketball coach featured.
Bob Hurley is tough. The workouts Coach Hurley demands of his team are known as one of the toughest and most demanding in America, and he doesn’t go soft on the language, insults and shouting.
Yet the results are impressive and prove what Tough Love may accomplish.
What can we learn from the legendary coach that does nothing to build false self-esteem but everything to build confidence, discipline and skill?
If taken seriously, the answer to the previous question is that being a demanding coach, teacher and parent results in stronger, more successful adults.
Watch the video to discover what I mean.
After all, isn’t a parent in the home and/or teacher in the classroom supposed to prepare children to be the next generation of adults—not to have fun ten hours a day?
Another example of this approach to teach and raise children to become stronger, disciplined, adults with a better chance to survive and succeed, comes from Amy Chua, who wrote an infamous essay for The Wall Street Journal then with the release of her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a firestorm of criticism and support swept across America.
Since Bob Hurley is as tough as Amy Chua, why aren’t Amy Chua’s critics complaining about him?
When I was nineteen and in boot camp at MCRD in San Diego, the drill instructor called us recruits “maggots”. How is that different from Amy Chua getting angry and calling her younger daughter “garbage” or Coach Bob Hurley harshly criticizing his high school basketball players?
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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In a recent March 2011, 60 Minute segment, Katie Couric reported on an experimental New York City charter school founded on the idea that paying teachers $125,000 annually would attract the best people for the job and make a difference.
The principal’s name was Zeke Venderhoek. The students were mostly African American and Hispanic and almost all came from poor families. The teachers often put in 80 to 90 hour weeks.
When the fifth graders from Venderhoek’s charter school took the New York State Math and Reading Exam, the results revealed that on average the public schools in the district scored better than the charter school.
At the conclusion of 60 Minutes, Venderhoek said one year wasn’t enough to show improvement.
Halt!
Wait a minute!
I taught in public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) in a barrio with multi-generation, Latino street gangs, and often worked 60 to 100 hour weeks. From my classroom doorway, I witnessed a drive by shooting one year. Another year, in the evening when I was working late, a student was gunned down outside my room next to the school gate as he was leaving the campus.
However, over the years, district records revealed that my students often outperformed all other student in the district at the same grade level on standardized tests with improved writing skills. District administration said the records showed this to be true year after year and I did not teach in a charter school.
In the early 1980s, one African-American mother with a seventh grade, twelve-year-old daughter came to me. The mother was upset because the previous year’s standardized test scores said her daughter was reading several years behind grade level.
I told the mother the only way that would change was for her to turn off the TV and spend time with her daughter every evening and on weekends making sure her daughter did the homework, studied for tests and quizzes and read at least one hour or more every night seven days a week with a discussion before bedtime about what had been read. If there were questions, call me.
By the end of the year, that student’s literacy level had improved five years. That mother made the difference, and my mother did the same thing for me when I was in grade school. Without my mother’s effort at home, I would not be able to read today.
Why couldn’t Venderhoek’s Charter School show similar results?
The answer may be found from a 2009 Stanford University Charter School study that discovered only 17% of almost 5,000 nationwide charter school delivered on the promise that they would succeed where public schools often failed.
Seventeen percent is a FAILING grade and many of these charter schools had smaller class sizes, longer school years and days with stricter behavior codes with school uniforms.
In fact, students that did not perform could be sent back to the public schools, which is something private school may also do.
When will the country wake up and hold parents and students responsible to turn off the TV, shut down the Internet, study, do homework and read? Teachers cannot do it alone.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 