Living in Gratitude: Nothing succeeds like....

Once upon a time, long ago during a time of dragons and terrible destruction, there lived a little boy who didn't want to go to school...

Well, to be honest, it was not that long ago.

And it was not a time of dragons and terrible destruction.

But it was during a time of terrible fear. Death. Anxiety. Upheaval.

Yep, that's right. The lost days of the pandemic.

I don't know how school went in your neck of the woods, but we went on Spring Break--very nervous about the rest of the year.

Then didn't come back. Texas approved remote instruction. Online teaching. We found out it was a lot like Dora the Explorer.

You ask a question. Wait expectantly and hopefully. No one answers.

Ten or fifteen awkward seconds later, you answer the question yourself and move on.

We took attendance daily, required students to show up on a Zoom meeting during the normal class schedule, and posted daily work online for them. If you are imagining that was a total disaster for kids with very little English, you would be 100% correct.

Some of our kids were still really engaged during remote learning. Like Victoria, who is the subject of a couple of other posts (A Face From The Past and Student of The...) She was a superstar, and kept me on my toes by continually asking for more work once she caught up.

Other kiddoes? Not so much.

Which brings us to Khalil, who was somewhat less diligent and motivated than the average students that year.

As a stereotypical 7th grade boy, actually, he wasn't convinced that he needed a lot of schooling. He was conversant in social English--it was just the academic usage that he was weak in. As a stereotypical 7th grade boy, he was convinced that he was going to earn his daily bread in one of two ways. Ways that DO NOT require a lot of schooling.

One of his 7th grade goals was to be a famous YouTuber. I mean, Mr. Beast made it, so can anyone, right?

Another of his 7th grade goals was to be a famous footballer. If Messi made it, so can anyone, right?

So Khalil spent most of that year dodging work-first in class, and then on Zoom. He was one of the students who would "pretend" his Zoom camera was messed up, or set it pointing to the ceiling-I saw an awful lot of ceiling fans that year, I remember-and then tune out during the class. Turn in minimally completed assignments. Late, always late.

But Khalil was a naturally bright student, a glib and confident smooth-talker. A born salesman with charisma to spare. Those kids are the ones who break teacher's hearts and crush their optimistic outlooks. Those who could do it--but won't. Those who get get in their own way.

But a funny thing happened during that awful year. He fell into success quite against his expectations.

There are several supplementary programs that ESL students use in Katy ISD. One of them provides online news articles at the students' current reading levels, through which they progress with progressively harder and more challenging selections. Like the best of such programs for students, it incorporates some competition.

Both competition against themselves, for who makes the most progress against their beginning levels. And competition for who completes the most articles or the highest scores in a school. Or district. Even the entire state of Texas.

So on a slower-than-normal Tuesday it began. Khalil logged into the program and completed two or three articles during class, on a day where no one else was really online.

So he received a congratulatory email--Adobe Flash fanfare and confetti, even--that he was the daily top scorer for McMeans Junior High School. He showed it to me, and we noted together that he was pretty close to the daily leader for Katy ISD, the entire district. At the time, that was about 25 schools.

That day he went into Beast Mode. Spent hours and hours completing articles. Learned how to answer the questions efficiently and quickly. How to pick out the main idea from the details. How to characterize opinion from fact. How to summarize properly. How to sequence events.

Within the week, he was the top scorer in the program for the entire state of Texas. No idea how many students that includes, but I have never since had another student who came remotely close to his numbers. He literally completed over a hundred articles that week.

And began to swagger. Noticeably. Perked up, showed interest in the rest of the class, in the work we were doing. Began to answer questions, to speak up and give his opinion when working with others.

Once a month, I have my students submit a page-length writing sample. I use this to gauge the effectiveness of instruction in the class. This way I can tweak and monitor what they are learning as they learn it. Most months, I suggest a topic and a genre--fiction or informational, persuasive or entertainment.

That is how I assigned a personal reflection soon after his triumph. I was impressed at the newfound detail in his writing, which had been before now perfunctory and short. He went on at length about how he felt like a champion, how teachers he did not even know went out of their way to congratulate him--because you know I told everyone about his performance--and how he liked getting all the attention for his success. Of course he did. Of course he did.

I would like to say this one taste of success turned him into a scholar, that he passed the STAAR that year and graduated the ESL program. That was a little too much to ask.

But he did grow almost 3 years in reading level that year. He came to me reading on a 2nd-grade level, and at the end of the year, he was reading 5th grade texts successfully. That was a lot of deficit made up, and set him up for his 8th grade year only a couple of years behind. He did stop shirking work, as he saw he could stand with his peers and surpass them with a maniacal level of commitment.

And then he moved on after 8th grade. Moved to high school, and vanished from my student dashboard, as they all do. Khalil was one of the kids I always wondered about, and I used his story often in class, as an exemplar to what a dedicated student could pull off.

I saw Khalil two days ago in the municipal library. At first he was unfamiliar to me-those puny little 7th graders change A LOT after they leave me. When a tall and serious young man stepped out from behind his computer and hailed me with a firm handshake, that same impish smile he sported as a 7th grader broke out on his face. He was amazed that I remembered his name, his story, his classmates.

Sheepishly, he admitted that he realized he was NOT going to be the next Mr. Beast, or the next Messi. He told me that he had decided to become a serious student in high school, and he had just applied online to the local community college. Probably a healthcare career, since he realizes his personality makes him good with people.

Did I remember how he was the leading scorer in the whole state of Texas that week during Covid? That was one of his best memories of his school years, because it showed him he was a winner and was as smart as anyone else.