where the wild things are...(wild unruly students that is)

For those of you who read Connor's post on the alternative school at Kitsilano Secondary.. this is a bit of a follow up based on my topic I was supposed to (or will in the future) talk about in class.

My topic was originally diversity in the school... and what I thought I would be looking into would be the different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds within the school. After only a few days of observation I quickly realized that the real diversity that shines through at Kits is the different levels of programs available to students who are not meeting the expectations within the standard classroom.

One of the things I think is important to our work as teachers, and if anything, our responsibility as educators, is to understand what happens to students when they fall through the cracks. At Kits they seemed to develop a multi-level approach to dealing with misbehavior and/or students who fall behind in class.

The first level was SKILLS: Skills was a class where students would be required to attend a study block and work on their courses. Teachers involved in this course said it was pretty much touch and go most classes just trying to get the students to focus on their work and deal with never ending discipline problems. The teachers all agreed that the students would test you every class... interesting part about the class was the use of peer tutors. Other students would attend the block as a peer tutoring block and help out the other students... from what I saw this seemed to work really well.

The second level was MINI SCHOOL: Students who were in this program attended the majority of their classes with a team of two teachers who worked with them on variations of their courses. A large part of their work was based on practical work such as building a resume, attending interviews, and gaining work experience hours. These students seemed to be kids who learned at a slower or different pace then other kids, had difficulty concentrating on simple tasks, or had behavior problems. The teacher in this class was unreal... and really saw the kids for who they were.... nothing got by him in the classroom... and the students respected him a lot...

The third level was the VINERY: When students drop out of school and look to come back, they have a choice to attend alternative school, named The Vinery. The Vinery is not necessarily part of Kits High, but acts as a base school for the Vinery to work out from. Being at the Vinery was an amazing experience from our teacher showing us the art on the walls of his previous students (some who never made it back off the streets... others who have since graduated high school) to observing their lunch time home economics responsibilities. These programs help bring students back into the classroom where they belong, and allow them to work at their own pace as Connor described.

The biggest thing I took from those observations was that these programs thrive when teachers are informed and aware of the program and the students involved in it. I was fortunate to observe another teacher at the school bring in the kids from the Vinery for a "lab" in his biology class. The students would never have had the opportunity to be exposed to a science lab if it wasn't for another teacher forfeiting his prep-block to teach them a fun and interesting lab.

take home lesson: don't let your students disappear on you...know what options there are for them if they're falling through the cracks... and if they do....try and support the programs that might bring them back...