T-shirts

I've always loved t-shirts with good messages, so I decided to use the magic of the internet to create a series of t-shirts. Here's the first one, click on it to go to the online store. I'm not in it for the money, so there's no markup. You pay the minimum price that CafePress will let me charge. The black t-shirts are kind of pricey, but there is an white t-shirt made specifically to fit into a teacher's budget.

Want to see something particular on a shirt? If it's motivating, thought provoking, or really funny I'll make it.

Creating people that must be controlled

Today Mrs. Teacher2 told me that I need to start collecting and grading the notes my students are supposed to write while they're reading.

Umm... N.F.W.

(For the unitiated, the N stands for "No," the W stands for "Way." You can do the math from there.)

It seems that her students don't do any work unless they know it's going to be graded. I can't think of a better way to make more unnecessary work for me, to tell the truth. The quizzes I'm giving them on the reading in this unit are open-note, but not open-book. I'll know how good their notes are from their quiz scores. I've modeled the notes they should take, I make sure to point out important information they need to write down while we read in class, we've reviewed them together, and I think they have plenty of instruction on what constitutes good note-taking.

But she's right, in a way. Because she's created an atmosphere in her class in which she indicates what's important by the grade assigned, she's trained her students not to do anything they're not specifically told to do, and not to do anything that doesn't get them immediate credit. One of the other classes failed to take any notes at all until we started writing things on the chalkboard for them, then they copied verbatim. No thinking, little learning, lots of writing.

I don't think she realizes that she's also creating a population of people that will always do the absolute minimum required, and will always be lost for a way to start an assignment until someone shows them how to do it.

I don't know about you, but I for damned sure don't want to hire anyone for my business that's been trained like this. Not sure I'd want my kid marrying someone that just did the bare minimum, either.

She also said that while they're taking a quiz (even an open-note quiz) I need to be standing up and circulating through the room to make sure that they're not cheating. She says that they can be very sneaky and ingenious about trying to cheat if they want to. I suspect that's true, particularly if you create a system of oversight that makes them work incredibly hard to sneak anything by. Necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe if they don't have to work so hard at sneaking anything by me, they'll be sloppy and easier to catch trying to cheat. I'm not really concerned about it in any case. I trust my students, and the ones that don't know the information tend to throw in the towel pretty easily (remember that bit about doing the bare minimum?), and I can't imagine many of them putting in enough effort to cheat.

This post is not about my dog dying

I had to let my dog die last weekend. (she's the one on the right.) I miss her, but she's not what this post is about.

Monday morning one of my students complained that she didn't have time to finish reading the novel because she had to do the family thing over Thanksgiving weekend and also had to work. The novel is really written at an 8th grade level, so I don't think there's any excuse for a 10th grader to skip 30 pages of light reading over a 4-day weekend. She wasn't the only one that hadn't finished the reading, but it surprised me because she's a good student and she knew we have a test coming up at the end of the week.

In all honesty, I didn't accomplish quite as much as I should have over the weekend, either. And I felt that I had no excuse. Dixie's death shook me up a little bit, but not enough that I had any excuse not to get my work done. This is the lesson we need to drive home to our students.

Everyone faces personal conflict on a regular basis. Those that are successful manage their lives and their work so that neither is a burden on the other.

There's good reason that it was snowing when I left school today.

Right now I'm teaching only 9th and 10th grade at major suburban high school with a good reputation. Keep this in mind while you read.

In the last four days at my school...

Lynn told me that she can't read and understand, even though she tests fine. Turns out that her mother has convinced her that she's not capable and she believes it. I promised her that if she worked with me I wouldn't let her fail, but I've only got two and a half weeks left to help her.

Four fights broke out. Two were major enough that two hall monitors were injured badly.

Two kids from the street broke into the school with a knife and a beebee gun.

Jamal turned out to be a drug dealer and was suspended for threatening a teacher's life. The system's failing him and he's going to get pushed in worse directions.

Mandy identifies too closely with the main character of the book we're reading (who has an abusive father), and told me that most days she wants to run out of class crying because it hurts too much to think about.

Before that, I found out that Jason lives in a crack house, Carl was beaten so much as a kid that it created emotional problems that have caused learning disabilities, Pete is an alcoholic and has been going to AA for a couple of years, Johnny drinks and smokes pot every day (though is still one of the best kids in the class), Natalie is going through some heavy stuff at home that she won't share, but it's obviously affecting her deeply... and these are just the ones I know about.

If not me, who?

Small successes

A week or so back I wrote about how I was disappointed in myself for not feeling a sense of accomplishment by helping my students who struggle the most. I've always put myself on the side of the underdog, so this really surprised me. Maybe I just needed to be a little more patient with things, because my experiences with the struggling students in the past week have made me feel a little different. I've made breakthroughs, no matter how slight, with a few students in the past week and it really feels good.

Maybe I needed to realign my expectations, too. Any improvement in a kid's skills or attitude should be celebrated, but I'd let myself get in the rut that Mrs. Teacher 2 is in where anything less than an A is noteworthy only to judge how much a kid is failing. Most of these kids aren't going to get As. Most of them barely attend school enough to pass. One of the kids I'm thinking of felt so alienated during my first lesson that he tuned out completely and ditched class the next day, but now comes to class and jokes with me.

I'm not changing this kid's life forever, but if I can get him on a pattern of finding small successes for the next month maybe he'll be able to keep it up after I leave.

From the notebook

One of the things we forget easily in the digital age is that the physical act of writing is closely tied to memory. Write it down and you're likely to remember it and let it sink into your mind and your heart. Before I started teaching this fall I started a notebook to write some of these things down in. There are things I'd learned while teaching, things I'd learned from teachers, things I learned about myself and about others. Here are some of the highlights.

Focus on developing strategies; both developing strategies as a teacher and inhelping students develop strategies for themselves.

What people hear is sometimes more important that what you say.

Find ways to celebrate students' achievement without extrinsic rewards.

The broken record technique: If you catch a student misbehaving, repeat the rule until they relent. i.e. "In this class we do not interrupt others while their speaking." Repeat every time they argue. Do not accuse them of anything, this just opens up something new to argue about.

Use the things that students do best to help them learn what they need the most.

Emphasize the knowledge and skills that students already have rather than focusing on what they don't know.

Grading papers is hard work. Be sure that any assignment you give the students is also worth the effort you need to grade it.

We tend to equate silent, obedient kids with good learners, but the opposite is probably true. Active learning creates energy, and lots of it. Energy creates sound, heat, and motion.

Be positive. Try hard.

If a large portion of a class scores poorly, it shows that the teacher is not meeting the needs of the students, regardless of how other classes performed or how well the methods used worked before.

Students must be able to see themselves in the curriculum in order for it to be relevant and meaningful to them.

Showing a movie at the end of a book unit probably doesn't have much value. Showing it at the begining can help front-load the reading and give it more context, and showing scenes interspersed with the reading can help increase understanding.

Find a way to keep the morning classes awake. (If anyone figures this one out, please let me know!)

Setting priorities

A week or so ago I wrote about how hard it's been to balance student teaching with the rest of my life. Last week I finally snapped.

It's been tough to try to prioritize one thing that I love over another, but I finally realized that one of the things I love is too much of a drain and does not help me recharge, so I dropped it. I'm a search and rescue volunteer and training coordinator for the Air Force Auxiliary. Well, I was. That's been a role that defined me as a person, helped me grow as a leader, and provided great friends, but I had to give it up, at least for a while.

It was a painful decision to make. How do you tell a group of people that have been relying on you that you can't do the job for them anymore? I hated doing it, but in the time since I decided to set my priorities more carefully I've been more relaxed at school, able to put more thought into my lessons, slept a little more, been out on a date, played my guitars for a few minutes every day...

This is something I should have done long ago.

There's an energy in the room that these kids have when Mrs. Teacher 2 isn't around, and that energy transmits right into me as well. At first I thought it might have been that they think I'm softer than she is so they were more talkative and rambunctious, but I've come to believe more that it's because she bores them to death. So when they see the possibility of not sitting through English class with her, they're so excited that they can't help themselves.

Energy is going to manifest itself in the form of heat, light, sound, or motion. Kids are amazing containers of energy and can transmit it in all of these forms. As teachers, we need to be able to help them change their energy from one form to another in a way that makes our classrooms energizing places for all of us. We need to be able to reflect their light back to them and make them see their lightness themselves. We need to direct their sound in ways that it can be received. We need to turn their motion into work.

And we need to help them find energy that they can take with them after they leave our classrooms.

So this is what it feels like...

During our student teaching seminar a few weeks ago we were asked a question. I don't remember exactly what the question was, something akin to "describe your teaching experience in one word," or maybe something about our philosophies of education. A lot of the answers, including mine, were focussed on the craft, how we set up our lessons, etc. Jayme's word was "joy."

This made me feel jealous and guilty all at once. We were probably a month into student teaching, and by that time I had not experienced anything I would have called joy in my classes. We'd had fun with a few lessons, there were a few lessons that I thought really kicked my students in the ass and woke them up, but nothing that made me walk away from school with a smile on my face. I'm tough to please, though, so I don't think I really expected it anyway, not until Jayme said something.

But finally, after about 12 weeks of teaching, I walked away from school with a smile in my heart. My back was sore from standing half stooped over all day and I was tired, but I finally came away from a school day feeling the same way I do after getting lost in a good Motown record for a while. (Let me humbly suggest the Temptations Gettin' Ready or Meet The Temptations. Any greatest hits disc will do you good too.)

There was nothing spectacular about today. Mrs. Teacher 2 was sick and left lesson plans for the two classes that I haven't taken over yet, and they were really pretty light lessons. My classes were continuing to do research in the library, so with them I had to just keep them on track. I was pleasantly surprised to see most of them making good headway and didn't need to give them too much guidance.

The two lessons with the other classes were about as simple as could be, and I barely had to talk besides reciting the directions if I didn't want to. But I wanted to. I haven't worked directly with them very much, so we don't know each other well, but I could tell that they were anxious to change that. How much more flattering can a group of teenagers be to an adult?

And with that kind of open gesture coming from a group of 15 year olds, how on Earth could I not return the favor and put as much energy and creativity as I had into their lesson on prepositions? What would have been a slightly cute (but still boring) lesson on prepositions with a short passage from Dr. Seuss became a shout-out-loud contest to see who could get through a tongue-twister fastest. There was no great epiphany about what it takes to enjoy my job, but for the first time I walked out from work thinking about how much fun we just had and that I can't wait to get back to them tomorrow.

...so little time...

One of the things that I love about going to the seminar class every Monday night is that I get to spend a little time with my colleagues. Student teachers are in a unique--and sometimes very tenuous--position in schools. We have to take charge but still act as a guest in another teacher's classroom; we need to experiment and find our own style of teaching, while often being supervised by cynical and unimaginative teachers; we deal with supervisors who manage to make a month's worth of observations and comments in 40 minutes... And one of the things that I hate about this class is that the little time we spend together is far too little to really know each other and communicate in the ways that make people open up to each other. We share our thoughts, but rarely do we get to the point where real emotions come out. Some of us have a lot to be frustrated about, so some nights our conversations are much more frustrating than they are cathartic. I know that there are a lot of talented educators in my class, and I suspect that some of their talent comes from the way they are able to negotiate their emotions and make their student teaching a more rewarding experience. As someone that was raised in a family of glass-half-empty people, I wish I had more opportunity to tap into that. Most weeks after class I walk with Jayme out her car (our campus is situated in the middle of some questionable neighborhoods, this is one of those if I don't do it, who will? sort of things), and am rewarded with 5 minutes of good conversation on the level that is most rewarding to me. As important as the topics we discuss in the seminar are, sometimes I feel like it would be so much more rewarding to sit down at a coffee shop with four or five other student teachers and our supervisor, sit in some of those big, goofy, mismatched chairs and couches, and just talk for a little while and relax. Lord knows I need to relax more these days...

Another frustrating thing about these classes is that I always leave with so much more to say (or write) than I have time or energy to devote to the process. Tonight I'm ahead, so we'll see how much I can really cover.

It's late now, the dogs have been taken care of, dinner made and cleaned up after, laundry done, and my writing electrons don't have the positive spin energy they had when I walked home from class tonight. My glass-is-half-empty reflex is taking over and causing me to focus on something that one of my colleagues said about his teaching. He said that he was happiest as a teacher when he reached the kids that were struggling the most. And this bothered me.

I was always one of those kids that struggled in English. So it doesn't bother me because he said it, it bothers me because this was one of the things that motivated me to become a teacher, but I just don't find myself feeling that way. I feel like I'm barely keeping up to serve the kids that are doing well, and I know with total certainty that I've already made two struggling kids at my new school feel alienated. It's hard enough to be a teacher and talk with teens sometimes without making them shut down, but now I've made them close themselves off and I don't know what I can do to get them back. My cooperating teacher has already written them off and hasn't had any constructive advice besides not to let it worry me too much.

It doesn't help that the curriculum is boring, the teacher is boring, and she has trained her classes to be boring students. Critical analysis is out right now. They can find facts in a book, but they cannot tell me what they think at any level deeper than "this book sucks." I'm not sure how to get them off of this track and onto one that's more fulfilling for all of us, and my mentor is short on advice. At this point I feel more like I should just do what it takes to get through student teaching than to work on changing the atmosphere in my classes.

This is not the way I wanted to feel about my performance midway through student teaching.