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Description
One of the benefits of being the ‘old’ woman in my college courses was that a lot of what my classmates dreaded about first days and meeting parents I had already experienced from the parent side of the plate.  I wouldn’t say I was intimidated by going in on my first day, but I was certainly prepared for students to try to intimidate me, no easy feat when the teacher is 6’ tall and athletically built with a bit of extra padding.  I had two teaching gigs prior to taking a job at a facility for adjudicated adolescent male sex offenders so this wasn’t a fresh out of college feed me to the wolves sort of situation.  What it was though was a class full of boys who had a teacher they adored leave suddenly (as in disagreed with the administration and quit on the spot) and a new face came in to replace her so it must be the new face’s fault the teacher left, sort of situation.

I had literally been called on Monday to come to work on Tuesday and assured that the old teacher was leaving her lesson plans so that I could pick up where she had left off and fill time while acclimating myself and building my lesson plans to something that suited my own personal style.  When I arrive Tuesday morning an hour before class I find that she has not only NOT left her lesson plans she also still has all the teacher editions for the grammar books, she had apparently taken most of her grading home and had forgotten (?) to bring them in from her car when she left on Monday.  So now, what to do with 20+ resentful young men on my first day with them?  Alright, simple enough. We will start with Literature today and introductions as well as begin their journal writing; it would fill up time and give me breathing room to come up with something more concrete after classes.  I grab the Lit books she had on the shelves and flip through them, deciding it was as good a day as any to start on some plays and chose Julius Caesar for starters.

Here come my boys, guided by their behavioral health aide, hands clasped behind their backs all of them dressed in sweat pants and t-shirts that match the color of the counseling group they are assigned to.  It would make it easier at weekly staffings to know which student was paired with which therapist.  They stopped just outside my classroom door and waited to be told they could enter, lots of discipline here was my thought about then.  When they filed in I seated them in alphabetical order to make it easier for me to remember their names more quickly, there was some rumbling but not much as they knew they were gaining or losing points (yes yes token economy in use) based on how they behaved.  Finally they were seated and looking at me expectantly, I took up what is my usual perch on the corner of my desk.

“Hi, I’m Miss M (last name left out to protect the not so innocent ex-husband) and it would appear we are going to be exploring English together for the remainder of the year.” The silence was deafening.  “Now I understand that you are unhappy about your former teacher leaving and I’ve heard that some of you believe that she left because they wanted to bring me in for this job,” a few heads nod and lips curl. “I can assure you that is not the case.  Your former teacher had planned to retire at the end of the year but for personal reasons she chose to leave earlier than that.”  At least they weren’t glaring at me any longer and a few of them appeared to visibly relax.  “I probably approach things differently than she did, that doesn’t mean she was wrong or I’m wrong, it just means that she and I are different but it also means that it may take you gentlemen some time to adjust to my style and that’s okay too, we will all adjust to one another quickly enough, fair enough?” This brought a few mutters yeahs and some shrugs, but it was progress over stony silence.

Clapping my hands I shot off the corner of my desk and began the wandering of the rows, I am ADHD so standing still while I teach is something I’ve not yet perfected. “Alright gentlemen, we are going to take some time to get to know each other today.  I’ll go first and then we will start with first desk first row nearest the door and each of you can tell a small bit about yourselves as well,” more muttering, these were young men after all and talking wasn’t their strongest trait.  I introduced myself, kept it short and light and revealed to them that yes I like all sorts of music, I think reading well and being well read is essential, I love football and baseball and who my favorite teams and players were.  Things with them started off stilted, I mostly got my name is X and I’m X years old, I have X number of siblings and I hate school sort of answers but as things went on we got to student R, I am sure there is an article of its own all about R and what he taught me, R apparently did voices and he did them very well..so, in his best Irish brogue I got the rapid rundown of who he was and the class got a laugh that I think they needed.  After R was done came S, and he proved to me that I can think on my feet and be very sincere though what he had said has stayed with me all this time probably because of how profoundly sad it made me at that moment.

S: “yeah yeah my name’s S and I’m a sex offender”

Me: “whoa whoa” the class gasped and now were all staring between me and S, I hadn’t interrupted anyone else’s introduction so they just KNEW S was busted.

S: “what, you’ve read my file? It is who I am and no fancy rich college lady teacher can change that”

Me: “First of all reading your file IS part of my job here but I can tell all of you that I’ve not read any files on anyone here as of yet and I won’t for at least the next three weeks.  I want to get to know you, not your file.  Secondly son, your sex offense is what you DID it is not who you ARE, so how about you start that one over for me.”  He stared at  me with narrowed eyes and I was certain he’d just taken this up as his power struggle and would not be saying another word, but I also wasn’t going to press him if he didn’t.  I know when and what battles to pick and this was not one of them.  Finally, after a very long pause and just when I was about to give the nod to the next young man, S spoke up.

S: “fine, my name is S, and I’m 16. I was an only child and had wanted to go in the military before I got into trouble, now I’m not sure what I want to do or where I’ll be going when I get out of here.”  That was much more honest than I had expected him to be, but I was pleased and he appeared to be as well as evidenced through the big old grin I got!

Introductions continued and when they had finished I took time to explain to my class about the journal they’d be working on at the beginning of class starting on Wednesday.  I told them, sometimes I’d give them a topic on the board and other times they’d be allowed to free write, their thoughts and feelings on an issue where not right or wrong they were simply their thoughts and feelings.  The journals would not be slashed and hacked with my red pen for spelling and punctuation errors but that occasionally they may find a comment or question from me about something they had written.  Journals would be collected on Fridays and I would be making sure they had written every day in order to earn their points.  Seemed fair enough to them and thus my lunch hour that day was going to be spent at the store with  PO getting those nifty black n white hardcover journals.

Books where handed out and I asked them if they had done any Literature in class so far this year (this was December actually coming up on Christmas break for kids on the ‘outside’ or as my boys called it ‘in the real’) and their answer was no, they had done pages out of the grammar books and spelling tests.

Me: “That’s it?”
Class: “Yes”
Me: “Did you write paragraphs and essays and papers?”
Class: “no”
R: volunteering from the back where he’d been more or less not vested after his introduction, “she kept all our work in folders in the file cabinet back here.”
Me: “thanks R, I’ll look those over today before I go home”

Getting them back on track I told them then a bit of my style.  We would be reading a play yes, but we’d also being doing some fun writing assignments that went with the reading and in all of that they’d get to practice all those grammar rules they had studied since first grade.  That drew a bit of enthusiasm but not a lot, they just weren’t down with the whole reading part of class and that was okay, eventually they’d come round to my way of thinking.  I was sure of it.
As class was over and the guys were heading out to lunch the behavior aide V stopped to speak to me telling me that she’d never seen S smile since he got there.

Lesson for day one:  An incident in your life is not what and who you are, it does not define you unless you allow it to, it is you who defines yourself and only you have the power to sell yourself short.

Description
One of the benefits of being the ‘old’ woman in my college courses was that a lot of what my classmates dreaded about first days and meeting parents I had already experienced from the parent side of the plate.  I wouldn’t say I was intimidated by going in on my first day, but I was certainly prepared for students to try to intimidate me, no easy feat when the teacher is 6’ tall and athletically built with a bit of extra padding.  I had two teaching gigs prior to taking a job at a facility for adjudicated adolescent male sex offenders so this wasn’t a fresh out of college feed me to the wolves sort of situation.  What it was though was a class full of boys who had a teacher they adored leave suddenly (as in disagreed with the administration and quit on the spot) and a new face came in to replace her so it must be the new face’s fault the teacher left, sort of situation.

I had literally been called on Monday to come to work on Tuesday and assured that the old teacher was leaving her lesson plans so that I could pick up where she had left off and fill time while acclimating myself and building my lesson plans to something that suited my own personal style.  When I arrive Tuesday morning an hour before class I find that she has not only NOT left her lesson plans she also still has all the teacher editions for the grammar books, she had apparently taken most of her grading home and had forgotten (?) to bring them in from her car when she left on Monday.  So now, what to do with 20+ resentful young men on my first day with them?  Alright, simple enough. We will start with Literature today and introductions as well as begin their journal writing; it would fill up time and give me breathing room to come up with something more concrete after classes.  I grab the Lit books she had on the shelves and flip through them, deciding it was as good a day as any to start on some plays and chose Julius Caesar for starters.

Here come my boys, guided by their behavioral health aide, hands clasped behind their backs all of them dressed in sweat pants and t-shirts that match the color of the counseling group they are assigned to.  It would make it easier at weekly staffings to know which student was paired with which therapist.  They stopped just outside my classroom door and waited to be told they could enter, lots of discipline here was my thought about then.  When they filed in I seated them in alphabetical order to make it easier for me to remember their names more quickly, there was some rumbling but not much as they knew they were gaining or losing points (yes yes token economy in use) based on how they behaved.  Finally they were seated and looking at me expectantly, I took up what is my usual perch on the corner of my desk.

“Hi, I’m Miss M (last name left out to protect the not so innocent ex-husband) and it would appear we are going to be exploring English together for the remainder of the year.” The silence was deafening.  “Now I understand that you are unhappy about your former teacher leaving and I’ve heard that some of you believe that she left because they wanted to bring me in for this job,” a few heads nod and lips curl. “I can assure you that is not the case.  Your former teacher had planned to retire at the end of the year but for personal reasons she chose to leave earlier than that.”  At least they weren’t glaring at me any longer and a few of them appeared to visibly relax.  “I probably approach things differently than she did, that doesn’t mean she was wrong or I’m wrong, it just means that she and I are different but it also means that it may take you gentlemen some time to adjust to my style and that’s okay too, we will all adjust to one another quickly enough, fair enough?” This brought a few mutters yeahs and some shrugs, but it was progress over stony silence.

Clapping my hands I shot off the corner of my desk and began the wandering of the rows, I am ADHD so standing still while I teach is something I’ve not yet perfected. “Alright gentlemen, we are going to take some time to get to know each other today.  I’ll go first and then we will start with first desk first row nearest the door and each of you can tell a small bit about yourselves as well,” more muttering, these were young men after all and talking wasn’t their strongest trait.  I introduced myself, kept it short and light and revealed to them that yes I like all sorts of music, I think reading well and being well read is essential, I love football and baseball and who my favorite teams and players were.  Things with them started off stilted, I mostly got my name is X and I’m X years old, I have X number of siblings and I hate school sort of answers but as things went on we got to student R, I am sure there is an article of its own all about R and what he taught me, R apparently did voices and he did them very well..so, in his best Irish brogue I got the rapid rundown of who he was and the class got a laugh that I think they needed.  After R was done came S, and he proved to me that I can think on my feet and be very sincere though what he had said has stayed with me all this time probably because of how profoundly sad it made me at that moment.

S: “yeah yeah my name’s S and I’m a sex offender”

Me: “whoa whoa” the class gasped and now were all staring between me and S, I hadn’t interrupted anyone else’s introduction so they just KNEW S was busted.

S: “what, you’ve read my file? It is who I am and no fancy rich college lady teacher can change that”

Me: “First of all reading your file IS part of my job here but I can tell all of you that I’ve not read any files on anyone here as of yet and I won’t for at least the next three weeks.  I want to get to know you, not your file.  Secondly son, your sex offense is what you DID it is not who you ARE, so how about you start that one over for me.”  He stared at  me with narrowed eyes and I was certain he’d just taken this up as his power struggle and would not be saying another word, but I also wasn’t going to press him if he didn’t.  I know when and what battles to pick and this was not one of them.  Finally, after a very long pause and just when I was about to give the nod to the next young man, S spoke up.

S: “fine, my name is S, and I’m 16. I was an only child and had wanted to go in the military before I got into trouble, now I’m not sure what I want to do or where I’ll be going when I get out of here.”  That was much more honest than I had expected him to be, but I was pleased and he appeared to be as well as evidenced through the big old grin I got!

Introductions continued and when they had finished I took time to explain to my class about the journal they’d be working on at the beginning of class starting on Wednesday.  I told them, sometimes I’d give them a topic on the board and other times they’d be allowed to free write, their thoughts and feelings on an issue where not right or wrong they were simply their thoughts and feelings.  The journals would not be slashed and hacked with my red pen for spelling and punctuation errors but that occasionally they may find a comment or question from me about something they had written.  Journals would be collected on Fridays and I would be making sure they had written every day in order to earn their points.  Seemed fair enough to them and thus my lunch hour that day was going to be spent at the store with  PO getting those nifty black n white hardcover journals.

Books where handed out and I asked them if they had done any Literature in class so far this year (this was December actually coming up on Christmas break for kids on the ‘outside’ or as my boys called it ‘in the real’) and their answer was no, they had done pages out of the grammar books and spelling tests.

Me: “That’s it?”
Class: “Yes”
Me: “Did you write paragraphs and essays and papers?”
Class: “no”
R: volunteering from the back where he’d been more or less not vested after his introduction, “she kept all our work in folders in the file cabinet back here.”
Me: “thanks R, I’ll look those over today before I go home”

Getting them back on track I told them then a bit of my style.  We would be reading a play yes, but we’d also being doing some fun writing assignments that went with the reading and in all of that they’d get to practice all those grammar rules they had studied since first grade.  That drew a bit of enthusiasm but not a lot, they just weren’t down with the whole reading part of class and that was okay, eventually they’d come round to my way of thinking.  I was sure of it.
As class was over and the guys were heading out to lunch the behavior aide V stopped to speak to me telling me that she’d never seen S smile since he got there.

Lesson for day one:  An incident in your life is not what and who you are, it does not define you unless you allow it to, it is you who defines yourself and only you have the power to sell yourself short.