Report from the Field – Jake Firestine

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7 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Jake Firestine”

  1. Those admins can be used now to your favor. How? Enlist one of them, the one with whom you get along best, to help you. Ask him or her, whenever they are in your part of the building at the right time, to come into that class. One admin, a friend, would come in and huddle with me and look at the class, as if communicating something to me about one of the students. I would shake my head no as if to indicate that the kid was ok that day. The admin would then leave. The kids, now knowing who the subject of the little tête-à-tête was, after a few of those, just naturally changed their behavior, bc now they were aware that the problems they were creating were not just contained to the four walls of the classroom, that others with more power than I had were aware of them.

  2. What a relief, Jake! Having at least one admin on your side makes life so much easier. And now the admin can’t deny that powerful relationship building is happening in your classroom.

    Like you say, there will be ups and downs with those troublesome students. But you’ll always now have this great, shared experience you can all aspire to recreate again.

  3. It was great! I went home extremely relieved. I got to call my tough students grandma and give her good news! I could hear a big sigh of relief on her end. All in all, I’m most happy with how healing it was for me and for my most difficult student to have that positive interaction, where it seemed for the first time she let down her hard exterior. I know it won’t be all puppy dogs and rainbows, but like you said, it’s something to aspire to recreate.

    After our tableau was done, we had 5 minutes, and I asked them how they thought things went and if they preferred tableaus to the book. They were all for tableaus. One guy said seriously, “There’s some room for improvement, but overall, it was good.” I laughed and agreed.

  4. So happy for this. One telling fact is that your are dealing w the grandma. Think of the pressure on her! I admire her so much. And is it any surprise that a child acts out big time when a parent is not in the picture? They were screaming for an adult in their lives and you showed up to help the grandma.

    Teaching is about raising children, but doing it from enough distance that we don’t implode. It is a fine line to walk. You are walking it. The tableaux will provide you with materials to build the bridge to that class. Stories need to be set up, prepared for. There will be ups and downs but you must remains steady and when you leave the building don’t take any of it home.

    That, in fact, is one of the entire points about the Invisibles – no planning, so we can live our lives at home w our loved ones and to hell w the worry. Who needs it?

  5. Yes, it must be difficult. She has a grandson she’s also raising and he’s not an angel either. Knowing my parents who are also grandparents, they want to spoil their grandkids, not raise them. I can only imagine the line she’s walking wanting to be a grandparent with that additional responsibility.

    Ben, when you say that stories will need to be prepared for, what does that mean exactly?

  6. Jake asked:

    when you say that stories will need to be prepared for, what does that mean exactly?….

    Tableaux are needed prior to the stories working. That is why I set up three categories of tableaux before the three categories of stories in the book.

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