The Advisory Period from Hell

I instantly liked the teacher ... and instantly felt bad for her.

Prior to the start of the period, I asked the teacher, Maria, how she’d like me to help and mentioned that I was very new but eager. She was giving a presentation, and said to cover one side of the room and try to get people to pay attention if possible. She seemed forlorn. Students flooded in and the period started out of control, continued out of control, and wrapped up out of control except for a single moment I will describe later.

To start, maybe 5 out of the 25+ kids sat quietly at any point. The rest were either yelling, jumping, squirming, playing group games on phones, or purposely being disruptive. The boys seemed like middle schoolers asking to go to the bathroom, creating pencil towers, trying to lasso a mug of pencils with their lanyards. I’ll give them points for creativity. Apparently they were Sophomores and Juniors. I kept telling kids to listen to Maria which only worked for a few milliseconds.

Clap once if you can hear me.

Maria was started the period with this classic attempt. It didn’t work. She quickly started yelling to attempt to get order. “HEY!” … “HEY! JONATHAN!” … “GEORGE! NO!” One group had stolen someone’s phone and was playing keep away. She started speaking in Spanish. The game continued. She walked over and took the phone and returned it to its owner.

Here’s how you play cellphone Whack-a-Mole:

1. Kid A's phone is out. Walk over, tell Kid A to put phone away.
2. Kid B's phone comes out. Walk over, tell Kid B to put phone away.
3. Kid A takes phone back out. Kid C takes phone out. Walk over …
4. 🔄 📈

The kids in the back legit just ignored my request to put their phones away. Unresponsive children. I would firmly look them in the eye and say “Put your phone into your backpack please.” Only two kids did it. I really don’t get why we couldn’t just take the damned phone away. Later I wondered if just ignoring it would've made it better but I'm not sure if that was possible.

MacBooks do not have touchscreens. 😱

Maria was nice and trying really hard despite being beat down. She was also blatantly technologically illiterate. She kept trying to tap her MacBook screen thinking it was a tablet. It was such an odd thing to see. She also kept tapping any viable button on various remotes with a goal I’m not sure of, beyond trying to wake the TV up, but it was already on.

She needed help getting her presentation setup. I realized I could finally bring experience and value to the table. I screen mirrored her computer to the TV using the AppleTV hookup they had and put it on presentation mode. She was grateful.

The Seal of Biliteracy Presentation

I was genuinely eager to learn about the topic along with the students, as it was new to me. Time for Slide 2 … pause … Maria taps her MacBook screen again. This time swiping at it. I stride over from the back and discretely show her to use the arrow key to move to the next slide and repeat that the computer doesn’t have a touchscreen. This was the sole time in the class period where the kids were paying attention. They stared at the helpless soul totally incapable of using technology.

As she moved through the presentation, and I continued working the back quietly telling kids to please pay attention … I couldn’t help but think “Why bother?” As nice as she was, the presentation was honestly brutal. It looked like someone had taken photos of a dense PDF and slapped it on a slide. You couldn’t read half of it due text size or the image being distorted or blurred. I’m not at all surprised the kids weren’t paying attention. The more I asked them to be quiet, the less my heart was in it.

As she wrapped up, I nearly asked “What is the purpose of the Seal of Biliteracy?” After the presentation, I literally did not know. Her presentation legitimately went through all the steps to get this seal and yet provided no content on why you’d want to get it. I also wanted to ask, “Why should these kids care about this?” In the moment, I didn’t know how to ask these questions without undermining her. As an adult I can assume it provides you with some sort of credential in the workplace that is valuable but 🤷‍♀️

It was like someone presenting a detailed recipe for a bundt cake and the takeaway being that there’s a hole in it.

The bell rang and the kids bolted out, leaving a mess of wadded paper.

Maria warily cleaned up and I helped her even though the kids should’ve cleaned their own trash up. I tried out some of my Spanish and asked where she was from. Venezuela. I kept with it and told her about a good friend of mine who is from there and that I’d like to visit at one point. She smiled for the first time. I asked if advisory period was always like this. Sí.

Takeaways

• It was hard to help the teacher without overstepping. Perhaps this is learned with time.
• Perhaps Advisory Period should be recess and periodically mandatory in small groups?
• I need to see how other schools handle cell phones and where it works.
• 1 on 1 conversations (after the failed presentation) were productive.

Questions

• Why does Maria keep teaching?
• A cell phone is an incredible tool … why fundamentally in this setting is it the opposite?
• What schools leverage cell phones instead of fighting it? Is it possible?
• What percent of teachers are as technologically illiterate as Maria? 👀
• How many schools have advisory periods, and are they universally a waste?
• What proportion of the wild behavior can be attributed to lack of content relevance, resistance to coercion, and poor parenting?
• If it’s a fight from the start, is it ever not going to be a fight?