End of the year?

I'm not really sure how people teach (or work, in general) full time, and still have the time and energy to blog. I really like this space, but I wish I could carve out more time to write about the things I've been learning, thinking about, experiencing. So once again, as always, I'm mindful of my absence but hopeful that I can one day write regularly.

With that said, I feel like I sort of stumbled upon the end of the school year. Looking back, it feels like I blinked and found myself proctoring Regents exams and trying to piece together final grades. I graduated from my master's program about a month ago, and just received word that my certification should be passed any day now. It's been almost 2 years since I began my grad work. Where did that time go? Doesn't matter; I know I'm doing what I should be doing, and I love it.

It's hard to pin down what I like most about my job, but one of the top 3 items is getting to meet and talk with new people every day. I'm wrapping up a leave replacement right now, and will be teaching summer school (at the same school) next month. So even though the school year is ending, I am still meeting new people in the building each day, or getting to know people a little better and work with them a little more than I would on a regular school day (as opposed to exam week). Not to mention working with 80-100 kids every day. I love that I get to laugh at least once (and usually much more than that) every single day!

What's on my summer to-do list? Right now I'm mostly throwing myself into planning for summer school. Next on the agenda is to spend more time here, developing ideas for using technology in teaching. I also want to create a site geared for my (future) students: my vision is for it be a sort of portal for ELA and study skills (but with a really sweet UI too!). We'll see what happens ... unfortunately, my little projects don't always come to fruition. :) Most importantly, I will be spending some time on the beach with my stack of summer reading!

I'm not sure what next September will bring, but there will be something. I have to believe that. This year was amazing in so many different ways, and I only hope that next year will be as rewarding. I will keep chipping away. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

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a fun pick-me-up

Ok I am finding I need to watch this at least once a day!!

More info on NYT

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Tired

Radio silence. I'm swamped.

The short of it is that I've been doing a long term leave replacement, ELA Special Ed. I'm not sure why, but with all of the other placements I've covered over this past year, none have so fully wiped me out each and every day. I also feel like I can be doing so, so much better with these classes, but I'm not sure what's in my way. Maybe it's just the very different nature of these classes that I'm not used to. It is excellent experience, I just hope I am doing my students justice and giving them what they need.

On another note, I'm graduating in two weeks! I'm sort of happy, sort of not-caring. I'm trying to convince myself that this truly is an accomplishment. For some reason it doesn't really seem like one. Maybe because I feel so worn out right now. I feel like I've lost sight of what I originally set out to do (lofty things - change the world, integrate technology into every-day teaching, make kids' lives better, yada yada). But then maybe I'm already beginning to do those things? (OK I KNOW this is corny, feel free to skip on the feel-fest.) Today I received an "extra credit" paragraph from one of my most challenging students. It was titled "My ELA Teachers." Apparently, for some reason, he decided to begin returning to class when I began teaching. I really don't know if that's a compliment or not, and I don't think I will change anything for him (especially because he likes to sing while I'm trying to read aloud), but maybe he'll get something via osmosis and that will be more than he was getting while chilling in the caf during our class period.

Anyways. I'm tired. I hope no one believes that teaching is something people learn how to do overnight. It's easy to just "do" teaching. It's hard to do it well.

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Soccer, or Critical Lens?

So last week I subbed for a one of my mentor teachers. This was a treat because I knew the kids and they knew me, which meant that the extent of trying to get away with this and that was at least somewhat diminished. They had finished reading The Catcher in the Rye a few weeks ago, and were beginning to outline and draft critical lens essays.

Most of the students worked diligently on their essays. The ones who would usually goof off, did. One was particularly and genuinely frustrated, and as the bell rang after 3 days of having his head down and his earbuds in, he delivered this to my desk:

I tried to call him back but he kept walking. Well, I definitely wasn't going to throw it away. Back up to the office it went.

I showed it off to a colleague while eating lunch. "You know what you should do, you should tie a little ribbon around it." Great idea! And so the next day, as he was walking into the classroom, I tossed this to the student:

He smiled and then tried to frown. Then he dunked it in the trash, where it barely missed the remnants of someone's pizza. I pulled it back out and passed it back to him, and proceeded to tend goal for another minute. We played soccer, basketball, and ping pong all in about 60 seconds.

Then finally, he grabbed the wad of paper, and I thought he was going to really put it out of its misery so I tried to grab it back. "No, let me untie the string." Ok, keep it, the bell has rung and I have to start class. I get everyone started, take attendance. I make my way around the room to answer questions about their essays and make sure everyone is working. When I get to the one student's desk, his paper is smoothed out, and he's finally reading the instructions. I give him a graphic organizer to help him get started.

"This is all I have to do?" he says. "This is easy. I guess I should have started this on Monday."

Goal.

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Watch:

Sign:

Stand with Planned Parenthood

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Best Intro Ever

I'm going to be picking up a leave replacement next month some time, and the teacher had an appointment yesterday, so she requested me as her sub. Most of her classes are inclusion, so she teaches with another teacher, who was also there yesterday. It was a perfect situation for me to introduce myself to the classes and try to get to know them a little.

As I was introducing myself, I heard one student whisper something to the other teacher. She responded excitedly, "yes I know, I was just thinking that!" What were they talking about?

Next, she explains, they've been reading Tuesdays with Morrie (one that I need to read still). In one part of the book, apparently they do trust falls, where you fall backwards and trust that the other person or people will catch you. Ok, cue my heart beating a litttttle faster. I am immediately having flashbacks to a 7th grade field trip in which I was blindly led through a forest, and my partner let me trip over rocks and walk into trees. I tell them about this, they laugh with me. But with 22 kids in front of me cheering me on, waiting to see how I'll react, there's only one choice.

I go to the back of the room and about 8 kids line up in 2 lines. Then the teacher pulls a desk over in front of the line. I have to get up on the desk?? "Ok, Ok, you'll definitely catch me, RIGHT??!" I ask them, about 5 times. "Yes, we definitely will."

I step up, they give me a countdown. I fall, they catch.

As I return to the front of the room, and the students to their desks, the kids are smiling. One of them says as he is sitting down, "You're one of us now."

I can't imagine a better introduction to a class.

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Race to Nowhere

Today I attended a screening of the documentary "Race to Nowhere," at my university. i thought it offered a number of interesting facts and observations worth thinking about.

the documentary focuses on the obsession with achievement in America: parents are focused on their children's acceptance into colleges practically from birth; children are then expected to engage in a multitude of extracurricular activities, while maintaining flawless grades; NCLB's emphasis on test scores, and its implications on curricula. but, the film asks, while all of these things may create higher grades or stronger resumes, are students really benefitting in the long run?

Perhaps one of the most radical ideas promoted in the film is that homework does not necessarily improve grades. one stat mentioned was that studies have shown that homework at the elementary level actually has no impact on student learning; at the middle school level, it helps somehwat - but after an hour, its benefits drop; at the high school level, that number rises to about 2 hours.

i think this is fascinating to think about. homework improves student grades only marginally, yet as teachers we still place so much value on its completion. One thing I frequently observed while student teaching was that students who did not complete homework were not at all unintelligent. many were very bright, and asked valuable and important questions that demonstrated they were trulying processing the content. but their failure to complete homework deminished their grades and often caused teachers to view them as less capable than they actually were.

One line i really liked in the film was somiething to the effect of "employers aren't looking for people who know how to use a semicolon." the point was that our workforce needs people who can think creatively and problem solve. if we continue emphasizing scores and testing achievement, how will we be able to tackle those problems that we've never before had to face? we need people who can apply thinking and knowledge to many different and unforseen situations, not just people who can sovle problems that we have already experienced before.

this bent of the film really resonated with me, particularly because the work i was doing in my "past life" was so very enmeshed with these ideals. the focus was "bleeding edge solutions," as we would say. the focus was on problem solving. the problems we faced with our clients were things that had never been experience before, largely due to the advent of various technologies. whatever the issues were, the core objectives were the same: come up with solutions that no one has ever thought of or implemented before, and do it efficiently and quickly. there were no "out of the box" soluctions, nothing to pull off of a shelf and sell. that was our holy grail - to create thos things - but at the time, we needed to do the boxing, to create the things to put on the shelves in the first place. none of it existed, and the problems were brand new.

i also think about my own experiences. although my family has always seen me as the "scholar," i've had my shares of failures, like when i failed calc or had to retake stats-heavy course in college. i hated myself for those courses. but looking back, i'm glad i failed them. i think it makes me a better teacher to understand what it's like to really hate a subject to its core, to have nightmares in which you envison your professor as a terrorist with a machine gun. i try to imagine what i could be like for a student who sees all of his teachers as assailants who terrorize him or her, day after day after day.

another good line from the film was "the world is run by C students." i like that. i don't think that's an entirely terrible thing. i find, among my peers and my students, that oftentimes the students with the highest grades are deathly afraid of taking risks. they are afraid of falling. if you have never failed at anything EVER, well, then failure is an incredibly powerful and daunting thing.

i'm not sure what my "real" homework policy will be. i am still thinking about this film, but i certainly recommend it, if for no other reason than to foster thought.

(sorry for the lack of capitalization. i wrote this up quickly and would rather post it than put off fixing it at the risk of never publishing. no, i'm not a bad English teacher for this!!!)

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