Nerd-ing

So as I'm walking down the halls, I see a student wearing a Darth Vader helmet, chatting with an assistant principal about the dice used in D&D. Just a happy and random little moment.

Acting!

So I went back to the freshman class today. I hadn't been around much lately since, to be frank, I felt like I was distracting and I had reached as much as I could do as far as teaching with them. Ms. C really ran the class and, particularly after today, it was clear that I wouldn't be teaching there again.

However, I feel pretty okay about that. The class is really not going to reach The Odyssey, which is a shame. They began "Romeo and Juliet" today and have been doing pre-work on it since last week. With the term ending in mid-January, there's simply no way they're going to get through all of "Romeo and Juliet" and The Odyssey in an appreciable way and still do the final.

Today however was a lot of fun to watch. The students acted out parts of the play and while stilted and nervous, it was fun to hear. Ms. C is also pointing out the more ribald selections and the class (composed, as it were, mostly of Groundlings) has been getting quite the laugh out of the material. Ms. C has been frequently stopping them and going over what things mean, but has been assuring them that by Act III, they will be flying through Shakespearian English as if it were nothing at all. I'm looking forward to that.

Disheartening Holidays

So today marked the first of three days before the school's holiday break officially begins. Now to clarify foremost, I don't particularly enjoy this time of the year. Certainly it's nice seeing people and the giving and receiving of gifts is always enjoyable, but something about this time of year just makes me feel bleak and gloomy. It may have something to do with not getting enough sunlight, but I think it's more about the wider issues of commercialism and a host of other things which don't particularly serve the purposes of this blog.

But it is with these in mind that I went down to our holiday buffet -- set in the room the farthest away from the school, where only myself and one of the assistant principals were. Eating in mostly silence a few bites of some alright brownies. On the whole, it was just really depressing.

In regards to my students' papers that I talked about last time, I do feel mostly better. Ms. N assured me that, in fact, no lives would be forfeit and no colleges would be unaccepting of a single poor paper grade.

I think my feeling so down and harried in the last post stemmed from foremost my girlfriend departing for home in Illinois on Sunday, where she will be for the next month (and far away from myself), but also a student comment that she "felt uncomfortable with a student teacher grading papers." That felt like a kick to the gut. Had I done something so wrong? Were these truly good and worthy papers which I had unfairly and unjustly penalized with my grades?

Well, yes and no. Yes, the papers were well written. Yes, they were in many cases displays of analysis and careful thought that reflected on the unjust treatment the Narrator received at the hands of society. And yet, several didn't follow the directions I had given. These are the papers which I have been going back to -- not the papers of those who struggled but the ones of those whose analysis was good and yet who didn't follow the directions.

Now, it occurs to me that a creative and engaging paper is one which should be rewarded. However, is every paper you're going to write for college (and let us be frank, AP is without question a college preparatory course) going to reward creativity? If a teacher of a lecture class asks you "Write a summary of Chapters Six and Seven that mentions everything I've listed on the board," and you write a critique of the chapters, is that fulfilling the assignment?

I think that, in my experience, most teachers will fail that paper. I gave two weeks to work on the papers and projects (and interestingly I've heard no major complaints about the projects); including time in-class when I specifically made myself available to answer questions and provide feedback on writing. Out of a class of eighteen, three students asked me to look over their work.

So I don't feel any longer that I am proving ruinous to some of my students lives. Maybe their dispositions, but I think lives might be a bit much at this stage in the game. A poor paper grade is not going to make or break these students averages -- this course is designed by Ms. N to be tougher, but a single paper isn't going to prove the end of the world.

And lastly, as I present my defense to, well, the Internet (for what that is worth), each of these papers was read and commented upon by Ms. N, the established teacher with over thirty years of experience under her belt. If she had seen any grades which looked heinously amiss, she would have brought me to task for it.

And so I am not going to beat myself up over this or look desperately for a solution to a problem that is a molehill and not a mountain. If need be, the grades can be curved towards success if Ms. N deems it appropriate, but that will depend on how many students did well and how many did poorly.

I don't think I'm the most popular person in the class right now, but for what it's worth, I don't think I did a poor job.

Bother.

So I have learned, over the past two days, that I managed to accomplish the one thing I was setting out not to do during my time at the school -- I have been screwing up my students' grades and lives.

Damnit.

The AP class is very upset and with good cause -- they are upset with grades they've received on papers. I asked for very specific things on an essay on Invisible Man. It was meant to be a short essay, only roughly three pages, and focus on comparing three characters' treatment of the Narrator and a chosen subgroup within the community who has been rendered invisible. There was then a final comparison between the Narrator and the subgroup, looking at at least two similarities and a dissimilarity.

On the whole, most of the students didn't really do these things. Despite my best intentions, my directions were apparently unclear and now I need to figure out what I'm going to do. I really -really- don't want to screw things up for them with my time as a student-teacher. I would even say that is the one thing I really did not want. So -- what do I do now? How do I fix this?

I need to fix this.

Fluency

So the past two school days (Thursday and Friday) I did something called fluency testing. What this amounted to was having students sent to me one at a time and me listening to them read a small passage from Shelley's Frankenstein, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hounds of the Baskervilles and Baum's The Lost Princess of Oz while making notation of their errors in speech. As they all read the same thing, over and over, this got very tiring. While I was happy to help the English department, I really have to ask: what does this establish? Why did we do this?

One thing I find very interesting however is that Shelley's piece came first. Distinctly the hardest of the three, many students struggled with the language here. Why set them up for difficulty right away rather than easing into it?

This segues into some more details about my own life however -- I have now changed my topic for my Master's Thesis. I am going to be writing about the use of language in schools (a subject I had intended to write on from the beginning) in the context of empowerment and dis-empowerment. I think this will be a stronger thesis and also something infinitely more practical than my old plan (talking about educational jargon).

...so on that note, does anyone have any good book recommendations about language and education?

It's finally winter

So I really cannot adequately express how much better I feel having been in a snow storm. I real snow storm - not a flurry or freezing rain but a real proper snow storm. It felt unnatural in a lot of ways to be in Vermont and reach December without any appreciable signs of snow. When I first visited Marlboro College as a perspective student, it was snowing in October. Unsurprisingly, I associate Vermont with snow and winters, and so having 60 degree temperatures made everything feel very weird and left me feeling completely out of sorts.

We are also, in exciting weather related news, anticipating more snow to-morrow. What does this mean? I might get to experience my first snow day as a teacher. Some sources speculate five to ten inches of snow by morning and then turning into freezing rain. Quite the recipe for a school cancellation, and I am eager to experience the freedom and relaxation of a day off. Not that I don't want to be here -- far from it, a cancellation will actually muck up several of my plans, but at the same time there is a certain sense of giddy thrill that I think students and teachers share at the thought of getting an unplanned day off.

On a less cheery note, the odds of me getting to teach The Odyssey grow grimmer and grimmer. Ms. C still needs to teach Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet for three weeks and this was supposed to be the week we started The Odyssey. It is really unfortunate, since I love the story so much and I had been very eager to teach it, but it just isn't to be. It may even be for the best, since the translation used (The Christ), is really abyssmal and cuts out both the language, the poetry and the story (edited for content until only the barest ghost remains).

I'll stick with Fagles and (grudgingly) Lattimore and the pair of copies I own of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Sick

Backdated from 12/08/2009
I spent today sick. Unlike certain friends with blogs, I wouldn't want to post the finer details here, but suffice it to say I was awoken by stomach pains around 2:00 A.M. and realized by about 5:00 or 5:30 that I simply wasn't going to be in proper shape for going to school later in the day.

I hate calling out of any job, even those I am not being paid for. There is something about it which feels inherently like I am quitting. Not quitting the job per se, but failing to live up to the expectations I hold for myself. I am never comfortable calling out, and I feel a sense of shame surrounding it -- it's only some stomach problems, I should be able to tough it out. It's only the flu, I can keep going. That kind of mindset, I recognize from afar, is only detrimental to my ability to function, but in the moment I can't help but feel angry with myself for not pressing on.

I recognize though, particularly after the fact, that we all need days to rest and recover. I think it helped that I slept for fifteen hours.

Falling Behind

So despite my best intentions, I haven't been keeping the blog up. Which is really a shame, since my activity at the school is starting to pick up again. This post, however, won't really be about that. Instead I'm going to ponder in an open forum why, precisely, I am so exhausted lately.

Mentally and physically I feel just drained. I can no longer get up to work in the mornings and at the end of the day I just want to flop down on the couch and watch a movie then pass out. It is really disheartening -- I was getting tired by 6:00 yesterday evening. So I elected to go to bed at 9:00, on the couch, and wake up at midnight to correct a few papers and write a few reflective journal entries.

And Midnight came and midnight went and I diligently shut off my alarm and went back to bed until 5:00. Then 5:00 came and went and I slept until 5:30. Then I listened to the rain pattering against my window and roof until 6:00, when I finally dragged myself off the couch and took a shower and got moving.

It's odd, but in many ways this reminds me of finishing my undergraduate thesis. The hard part, the exciting part, was the oral defense. My old high school mentor was brought in and I had to defend the thesis I'd written to my faculty sponsors, my teachers and a large number of my peers. I did this early, knowing my teachers were going to be swamped at the end of the term.

And then I had a month to wait until graduating. I felt really detached and aimless and now that I've finished my intensive teaching, I find myself in a similar predicament. I feel like I'm adrift and I don't know quite what I'm supposed to be doing. It's a disquieting feeling and one I am not too fond of.

So hopefully I can focus in and find a way to work successfully when I'm at home. At the school I can hammer out a number of papers and corrections and things, but as soon as I leave I just lose all focus. So perhaps having written all of this down, it will help me, both as a teacher and a student, get a handle on what needs doing and how to do it:

Things to Do:

-Write Reflections on student teaching which encapsulate a few specific experiences. Primary occasions to consider are the personal narratives done with the freshmen, the students I have seen respond differently with me because of gender, the experience of doing projects and papers on Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, chasing a student to the library for a paper, being the right teacher at the right time, reflection on the writing stations lesson with the freshmen.

-Write a case study on a student with an I.E.P. (Individualized Education Plan) and another case study on a student with a 504 Plan (a more generalized academic support plan).

-Correct essays on Invisible Man, and do a nice and readable write-up of the grades I've had for the students.

-Routinely update the blog and begin doing some back-dated entries reflecting on past lessons during the intensive period.

One other project that I'd really like to work on soon is a list of books I'd like to read. A semi-comprehensive list that I can then reference and add to and slowly work my way through. I always talk about how books are "on the list," but I've never actually made the list. I really should.

A moment

I just had the kind of surreal and genuine moment that makes this job worth doing -- that makes being a teacher worth the time and the turmoil and the lingering difficulties. Mrs. C came in and said "So, two of the students said they missed you."

I was confused and surprised. I inquired further and they apparently missed me being there and missed my "cool beard." I feel really touched. My freshmen, whom I haven't seen in about two weeks, genuinely miss me.

I've been exploring other courses, observing different teachers and doing some out of class work trying to catch up on everything I need to do for my graduate program. And then this just came out of nowhere. I am really genuinely touched right now.

Limitations

So, I am still alive for anyone out there worried I might have expired during my student teaching. Unfortunately, as the intensive period (what I've been referring to the point in time when I was carrying a full class load as) began, I found myself with less time in the day than I wanted.

Soon, things became untenable. I was forced to pick things to simply drop from my life, and this blog was one of the first victims. Sleep and food quickly followed and I pushed my health and body closer to their limitations than I should have. I routinely missed meals, I began training myself to sleep for only four hours a day and I kept myself well through Emergen-C and vitamins.

Now that the intensive is done, I will again be posting here (and also try to catch up a bit on what has happened in the past two weeks). I am much better than I was and things are now really winding back down in my life.

The play I was in went amazingly well and we received standing ovations, as well as people openly crying. It was quite something, and I am really glad I was a part of it. I am also glad we're done and my evenings are free again -- I've got some major relaxing and some major reflecting to do on both experiences.

I am really glad for what this experience has been, and I think I am better prepared for when I begin doing it "for real." From here, it's just a matter of transitioning back into an observer and then teaching The Odyssey to the freshmen.

I will be reflecting more in the coming days, on my classes, what worked and didn't work, my life, the show and on the murky and hazy future from here.

Still alive and standing,
-- Bryon

My personal nightmare

So yesterday marked the first occasion I've taught the freshmen truly solo. I was up there, without a safety net and I'm telling them about personal narratives. And I tell them the story of how I found out my friend Amanda was killed and they are in silence. I think I really got to them. And so the lessons are going well, and the students are responding and it isn't like pulling teeth and I am fighting off side-comments and playing it as cool as I can right until I look at the clock. The clock that reads 1:50 -- 1:50 and class ends at 2:20... so I begin stalling. Dancing. Buying time. Trying to engage them. Trying to do or say anything that will be enough to make the class take the full 88 minutes.

This was the nightmare I've been having for the past two months: I stand in front of my students and find I have nothing to say. They just stare up at me, almost expectantly, and I have no notes, no prep, no homework and no words with which to address them. And so, I stand (often at a lectern, I dunno why) and raise my arms as if I am preparing to deliver something big, something as big as Charlton Heston as Moses carrying the Ten Commandments big, and then I just say "...so..." and find I cannot think of anything in the world.

Facing this down, I had a moment of pure and unadulterated panic, and for the briefest of seconds thought about running out of the room. Pure terrified flight.

Just for: One. Single. Second.

And I put my head down for a moment, took a long breath to compose and steady myself, and then dove right back into it. I jumped to to-morrow's lesson (which I didn't have planned out yet, just had a dot on the calendar) and began riffing. Just trying to create spontaneously and from whole cloth everything I needed and wanted and it almost worked.

The students knew I was stretching, because I told them. They began suggesting "fun" activities like Seven Up or Duck-Duck-Goose, but I told them "We're here for serious reasons; we're here to learn," and that seemed to stifle down playing games.

All of this felt rather bad, but felt much worse because my supervisor was there. He commented that, in fact, I'd done a really great job with it. I imagine a large part of things had been my nervousness and worry over performing well, both for him and as my first solo class with the freshmen.

He assured me I did well, in fact that given the circumstances I had done even better than well. He had wonderful things to say, particularly about the sensitivity I showed in encouraging students to write about high risk subjects, the tolerance I showed when taking care of disciplinary issues and the patience I showed in encouraging some of the more troublesome students. I felt like I was doing acrobatics without a net, and now I get to go and return to it.

I will post again today (hopefully) about my second experience, as well as a primarily student led debate style discussion I had in AP today (which went great, but the freshmen experience may colour the rest of my day). This will catch me back up. No posts on Thursday or Friday as those are days off.

Did anyone catch the number of that bus? The one that ran me over?

So today I just feel exhausted. Despite my best efforts are coming in prepared today, I feel like I've been flying by the seat of my pants. I spent much of this weekend doing preparatory work, including finding a way to make Vocabulary more engaging and an activity to really engage people over one of the upcoming chapters of Invisible Man.

Last night I didn't actually sleep until 11:00 or 11:30 or so. I then woke up at 1:45 after having a terrible nightmare about evil clowns, including one that looked like Pennywise from Stephen King's It, save with shark's teeth. So that prevented me from sleeping for some time.

Then I got up at 4:00 A.M. I continued trying to do work this morning, and some of it I think is even good. But then once I got into school, I felt like I was adrift at sea. So I am mentally and physically exhausted, feeling under-prepared and I need to be ready again to-morrow.

Today's AP class went alright. It wasn't amazing, but it wasn't awful either. I felt good about it though, so I've got no complaints.

As I was busily trying to make copies this morning right before class, I ran into Ms. C who said: "You can prep, create or make copies; but never all three." So very true and it's not something I was warned about in my preparation work. Here's hoping I get s'more sleep.

Makin' a comeback

So yesterday marked, I think, a real turn around for me. I led a lesson that worked amazingly well and had the students really engaged. Yesterday I dumped the Wordly Wise vocabulary and the AP Prep and just talked about Ellison's Invisible Man and did an activity that really connected to the students' own lives.

We did an activity I first did up at Marlboro, where you write down your Name, Gender, Race, Social Class and Hobby on a piece of paper. You then gather in groups or four or five and discard one identity into the central pile. You then do so twice more. After that, the person to your left selects one of the two remaining identity items and discards it for you. Now left with only one part of who you are, you are allowed to go back into the pile and reclaim one item.

The choices of who we are and how we identify ourselves really show a lot about us. I then transitioned from this activity into one about the nature of names, the importance of names and the importance of those who lack names in the context of Invisible Man. I can safely say, based on student response, that this was my most successful day so far. My new task will be not looking at this day and weighing all others based upon it. Not every day is going to be a huge success, but not every day is going to bomb like Wednesday either.

My goals for myself now are to ride some of this success and engage with students about the text this morning and then over the weekend devise a more engaging system for vocabulary. I think I am onto something, so we will see.

Hemorrhaging

I think that teachers and doctors share a lot in common. We both work to help people, and have to deal with numerous similar factors, including difficult facilities, difficult patients/students, troubles negotiating with some administrations and burn-out. I am certainly not saying it's the case for every teacher or doctor, but the I think the majority are facing something that inhibits them from feeling they could do everything within their power. And just like doctors, teachers face the odd reality of the fact that they cannot save everyone.

It is something that I think doctors and teachers are aware of as soon as they choose their profession - that no matter what you do, students will slip through the cracks and patients will not respond to treatment. Yet you aren't really prepared for it until you experience it. Sometimes you try everything you can think of and things still just, flat line. I am not trying to say that having a lesson go bad is the same as having a patient die on the operating table, but I think over time the same mentality develops. With a resigned sigh, you shrug your shoulders and shake your head and say "Well, you can't save 'em all."

Today I had my first lesson go really wrong. I tried to cram in vocabulary done as per the book, and it was awkward and stilted and I didn't know what I was doing. I felt like I didn't have a personal connection to the activity and the students didn't really connect with it either. We then began an activity on conflict in Invisible Man, where I felt like I was getting my momentum back. This started slow and with some tentative responses, but started really getting going as we went. Then we moved on to an AP style prompt. The prompt contained the seeds of a better essay, but itself was awkward and stilted. I got a lot of questions on it, only to have it interrupted halfway through by students needing to leave for pictures. It turned out well over half the class was leaving to have photos taken today.

I don't feel like I've really lost any of my students yet, although a number are struggling. I still cling to the slim hope that they can salvage things. Yet I am also accepting that, unlike in the medical profession, they can still take actions to save themselves. Unlike a patient on the operating table, my students can show me their work ethic and prove that they want to pull their grades up. As one of my mentors put it, the "Average B.T.U. of [a student's] inner fire" counts for a lot. I've learned the hard way through a number of situations that you cannot save someone who doesn't want to be saved, and you can't help someone who doesn't want help. If they are determined, for whatever reason, to continue this course then you can only let them remain as they are going and wish them luck.

I am trying very hard not to beat myself up over this setback. It sucks and at the moment it feels very sharply cutting, but I am trying to look objectively on what I considered a failure and find what went wrong, what went right and how I can excise the former and promote the latter.

I don't feel like my doing poorly reflects badly on me. I am a student, who is still learning and studying and is bound to make mistakes. I don't think it reflects poorly on me to my cooperating teachers or even my students, who understand I am learning alongside them. What upsets me about this is that I feel in some ways I've let down my students by not being more successful, and that is what I can't stand. I am really committed to doing the best job I can for them, and so I want to take what went wrong and drag it (maybe kicking and screaming) back to the drawing board and rework it until it's in a shape that I like.

Substitutes

The past two days I've worked alongside two different substitutes. Mrs. C was out on Monday, and so I worked with a sub for her class. We were watching a film, and I had one student who just wouldn't behave. He's the one with the poor attitude I mentioned previously, and he would roll his eyes when I asked him to stop making noise or distracting his classmates. I finally told him "I'm not going to do anything right now, but I'm keeping track of how many times I need to talk to you for Mrs. C when she gets back."

The sub noticed nothing - I worked with her earlier in the year and it was the same then as well. She didn't notice when students misbehaved and she just pressed on with a lesson regardless of the success (or lack thereof) she was meeting with. When she said they were well-behaved, I personally felt a bit embarrassed and apologized for my one trouble-making student who wouldn't stop distracting people.

After that she began chiding me over giving up on him, and her immediately question was "Does he have an IEP?" (For those not in the field, it's an Individualized Education Plan, sort-of a guide for how this student needs to learn) "No," I said and I began trying to explain that this was a matter of attitude. However she kept talking over me and telling me her own experiences with teachers who say it's attitude and who "throw away" students. She began insisting that he should be tested to determine if he needs special services rather than just saying "He's got a bad attitude."

At the time I was livid -- you tell me I'm throwing a student away and that I should get him tested? Getting a student tested is a lengthy and expensive process -- it could require months of work getting the case file together, preparing the necessary forms and having all the needed meetings. But you advocate getting him tested for a Learning Difficulty (the current PC term) as if it were nothing. She would hear nothing of his lack of paperwork, his success in other classes, his intelligence and willingness to do some work yet his constant protestations that he's 'bored!'

By the by, a piece of advice for students: Never, ever, say you're bored within hearing distance of the teacher. Say the lesson isn't engaging, say you just aren't connecting with things, say you just aren't feelin' it, but don't just say you're bored. It's like telling someone the work they do is worthless, and is rather like a slap in the face.

I will spare the gory details, but this encounter with the substitute spoiled my night. External life drama and a sick cast and crew for "Spinning into Butter" left me feeling down in the dumps and wanting to do nothing but sleep and prep for classes.

Then today I had a sub for Mrs. N. The sub was a very quiet woman, she seemed out of place. She couldn't find the lesson plans (located in an enormous red folder in Mrs. N's mailbox), said that Italians are known for talking with their hands, mispronounced "Ghana" and was unable to locate it on a map. Also while going over a rubric, she was puzzled by the word "elocution," so much that she returned to it twice and read the elements of proper elocution twice. I didn't immediately know what proper elocution was, but upon looking at the rubric it becomes clear it is proper speaking and presentation. Then during Block 2, when I am teaching, she read a newspaper for half the class and then left. She never returned. Maybe she was bored.

This is in large part why I felt dissatisfied with substitute work. Between having no real management of the classroom at the time, I felt more like a glorified babysitter than a teacher. I am not trying to make a judgment on substitutes on the whole, but this experience has been very surreal thus far and I just don't know what to make of it all. I am, however, glad I didn't post anything immediately yesterday, as I likely would have had more... choice, words to say.

Learning the ropes

So today marked my first officially scripted lesson. I think things went fairly well, and for the most part many of my students seemed engaged and eager to talk. After talking with Mrs. N, she thought the content of the lesson seemed good but what I needed to focus on was some of the types of teacher behavior that set the proverbial stage for the students.

Things like closing the door, turning on the lights and having students take down chairs marks that the teacher is ready to begin the lesson. This also lets the students know that they should get ready as well. I had never quite realized this, but it does make sense. And so now that I am better aware, I intend to implement this.

The lesson on the whole went well. We did a reading circle, where one person reads a paragraph and the the next person reads, etc. etc. I thought it was important for everyone to hear the sound as interpreted by another person and because sound is so important to Ellison's work (he wanted to be a musician first and a writer second).

We discussed the poetry of the Prologue and looked at some poetic devices in this context too. I must admit, I'm feeling a bit worn out after just one class, so I'm uncertain how I'll manage three a day. But it should be fine. To-morrow we'll be discussing the famous Battle Royal scene from Chapter 1.

Unexpected Lessons!

So today featured a rather unexpected twist. Mrs. C, my cooperating teacher with the freshmen, had to leave early because of a family situation. After a small amount of negotiation, she discovered there were no subs available and so it fell to me to teach the class.

Now this isn't a huge and terrifying thing, since I was planning to begin solo-teaching starting this coming Monday, but this was very different. I realized as I went to the front of the room that I was armed with two note cards, my journal and a book. No big plans, no clue of what I wanted to accomplish, etc. And so, I set out to do the best I could on short notice.

Where the lesson really shined for me was in a discussion about the "Ladies Missionary Society of Maycomb County" in To Kill a Mockingbird. The society is frankly full of hypocrites - who are happy to claim to help the Mrunas tribe in Africa, but speak ill of them and are particularly loathsome to the African Americans in their own hometown.

We got a great conversation about the definition of hypocrisy and that it requires more than just lying, that it really takes turning the behavior back on someone. As one student put it, it'd be like if I told him he couldn't put his elbows on the desk, then asked how he was doing with my elbows on his desk. I liked that analogy.

We then got into a fascinating discussion about whether or not these ladies meant to be racists or not. Were they even aware that when they said things like "Darkie" that there were being racist or were they totally oblivious to this? I talked a bit about the idea of institutionalized racism - a form of racism that is so entrenched within our culture that we don't even recognize it for what it is.

I then asked, by show of hands, if anyone had ever said the phrased "gypped." More than three quarters of the hands in the room went up, as I'd expected. I then asked if anyone knew where the term had come from, and one student answered "Doesn't it come from gypsies?" Eyes lit up and you could see the wheels turning as students made the connection. I then said that it was a really racist term, but it had worked its way into our society such that nobody recognized it for what it is.

I let the conversation get a little off-task at this point and we spoke a bit about gypsies, now called the Romani or Roma, and one student claimed that there were no more Roma. I corrected that, explaining that they still wandered Europe and some of Asia, and we even had some people here in the U.S. who were Roma. We then made some vocabulary connections, including the idea of wandering from place to place with the word vagabond (not a necessarily negative connection either).

We were then to discuss Chapters 25-27, which features Bob Ewell's slow but steady revenge. I didn't entirely know the points Mrs. C wanted to cover, and so I did my best on short notice to find them. I tried to make the students call up as many points as possible and we covered three major points she'd mentioned: Judge Taylor being stalked at night and someone almost breaking into his house; Helen Robinson, the wife of Tom, being heckled by Bob Ewell until Mr. Link Dees stood up to him, and a teacher proclaiming the Nazis were evil and awful because of their treatment of the Jews but herself being glad an innocent African American man had been sentenced to death.

After that we did a read along, where almost the entire class chose not to read. While a bit annoying, I let it slide. Things got rowdy once we finished the first chapter of two, but I raised my voice and stressed that whatever we didn't finish in class was homework. We managed to push things back onto track and finish up the chapter.

On Monday we'll be watching the film version of the book. It should hopefully be relaxed and easy-going, and I'm looking forward to it.

Two Very Different Students

So I have two very different students in one of my classes. Both are struggling, which is to say that they are not passing. I feel for them and I want everyone to succeed, but these students are as different as night and day and their situations affect me in very different ways.

My first student, whom I've previously referred to as Mr. Dan, is struggling with his work. He doesn't enjoy the work because he's done this class previously but wasn't able to pass. He was close, and it is driving me mad because he is obviously bright and he obviously remembers enough of the material that he can call it back and fill in answers during class.

Unfortunately, he doesn't do homework. He also interrupts class a lot, in part because he's bored. What bugs me is that, if he would just do the work, he would be passing with flying colours. But he isn't, and so he's not.

The other student is, similarly, not willing to do the work. The problem is his attitude - he acts entirely too cool for school and as if I'm wasting his precious time by forcing him to be there. When I ask him to read or do work, he often won't. He rolls his eyes when I try to be funny, as if I'm just the uncoolest person in the world and he is the most amazing human being on the face of the planet.

What irks me most though, is not apparent ability but willingness to try. My first student is willing to try if I ask, and while he won't do the homework he cares about his fellow students. He knows what's going on and, I hope, I've made an impression on him that I care about his success. This latter student just can't be bothered whether I want to see his success or failure.

So I am weighing between these two students. I want to see them both succeed, but at the end of the day I don't know if I can help either of them do so. I can only keep trying to put the offer out there, and if neither one is willing to save themselves, then well, that's the way of it. It's taken a lot of living, but I accept that I can't save someone who doesn't wanna save him or herself. I can only do what I can do. The difference really is, if the first student fails it'll break my heart to see him struggle and flounder and fail; the second student never even flailed - he just went under and stayed there.

Pre-reading

So far in my student teaching, I feel like I've only made one really large flub. I had an assignment where I would discuss lynching, a concept which I don't think many kids in Vermont will really understand. I needed them, for the sake of getting how significant of a scene they were reading in To Kill a Mockingbird was, to really make the connection between what they were reading and what a lynching is really about.

To this extent, I showed them some fairly graphic images. As I passed out photocopies of these images (a copy made for each student), I told them that they were going to be looking at some really disturbing and violent imagery. In retrospect, what I wish I had done was first sit down and talk about what they were going to be seeing ahead of time. To really hammer home what this type of violence means and then use the imagery to support the details of how awful and terrible this action was.

And I messed up. I just let the images get out there with only the most perfunctory of warnings. It is with this in mind that I say, as Mrs. C and I move on to discuss Elie Wiesel and his book Night that I want to help do things right. This particular item of holocaust literature is deeply moving, fairly horrific and ultimately painful to read. Yet it's important to really understand the history behind the event and the nature of the book and experience. This intensely personal narrative is one that I don't want to simply throw the students into unprepared, and so she and I are going to work together and do some preparatory materials to really let everyone fell, well, prepared for things.

For my full student teaching where I'll be carrying a full class load, I am going to be doing eight days of Writing work (or maybe something else thrown in) and then two days of preparatory material for Night. I'm really excited about how this will ultimately turn out!

Testing

Today marks the start of the standardized testing for my school. Now I'm sure some people would have less than favorable things to say/write about standardized testing, but I must admit that, when I was a student, I really liked it.

It let me take time out of the regular schedule, it created a different atmosphere and truth be told, I've always been good at standardized tests. I learned little tricks and tips that I could use to beat the system, such as removing unreasonable answers to better my chances of guessing, knowing when to guess and when not to, etc. To me, standardized tests were like a game, one which I had cheat codes for and could exploit the system on.

In some regards this hasn't yet changed (ala my very solid PRAXIS 2 scores), but at the same time I dislike standardized tests because of the weights we (in the sense of some educators and a lot of upper levels of administration) place upon them. Standardized testing is, frankly, a tool. A useful tool even, but it shouldn't be the only one. I like to think of testing as a bit like a hammer.

A hammer can be used for a lot of things - prying stuff out, hammering stuff in, etc. etc. However, you can't easily remove a screw with a hammer and you certainly can't plane a piece of wood. Instead, you need a screwdriver or a plane (or something similar). This has been a rather extended metaphor, but I think an important one to take in - standardized testing is the kind of thing you should bring into your classrooms and help prep students for. They should learn the tricks on how to turn the test to their own benefit without having to figure it out for themselves and should also see how important these types of tests are. At the same time, you should talk with students about what a standardized test can't show about them. A standardized test can't show you're an excellent speaker or artist for instance, or that you have a big heart for people in need.

I had a weird experience yesterday. I was teaching an activity with my freshmen, and I kept trying to engage one of my more problematic students, whom I've previously referred to as Mr. Dan. I think I've at least reached him enough to let him know I'm concerned about his success and failure, but unfortunately I can't seem to actively get him engaged for any length of time. I tried bringing him into a lesson about To Kill a Mockingbird yesterday.

The students had been looking for quotes that described who a character was in Maycomb and what his or her personality was like. One group missed a long quote about public opinion on a character and Mr. Dan made a passing reference to it. I asked him about it and he said he didn't have his book out. So I then asked him if he had his book. He matter-of-factly told me it was in his bag. I then told him to take it out and try to find it, possibly even half-way down page 156.

And then the silence kicked in. He had the book out, it looked like he was scanning the page, yet he wasn't saying anything. A full minute to a minute and a half of silence set in, and then another student eagerly raised his hand and said he'd found the quote. Reluctantly I let him read it and let Mr. Dan off the hook.

I then noticed something. He had been spending class trying to be comforting to a student who began crying at the end of class. He knew from the get-go how upset she was by a student's death over the weekend, but Mrs. C and myself had no idea until the end of class when she burst into tears. On a previous occasion, he had been comforting a girl in class who was crying and asking if she was alright.

So the guy definitely has a big heart and is keeping an eye out for people on an emotional level, but he seems to adamantly refuse to play ball with the whole education process, and if he continues at this rate he is going to fail out of the course. I really don't want that to happen, but if he is adamant that he won't participate then there's only so much I can do.

Transitions

So Friday was a fairly major step for me on my path to teaching, since it marked the first day I am teaching two blocks (out of a total of three). I felt the day had its ups and downs, but it really wasn't until I'd finished and could reflect on it that I've been able to get a real scope of things and how they went.

In AP Lit, I taught a lesson on a poem called "The Shape of Mythic Lies." I personally love this poem, which is about the need to shake off the yoke of history/the perfection of the past and make for ourselves a worthwhile present, and the students really seemed to connect with the poem. My supervisor attended this class and had some great notes for me. He focused in that it was an extremely full lesson and that I might have wanted to tone it back a bit. I feel though that I was working backwards in building this lesson to end with a forty minute AP style essay writing, with enough scaffolding that the students felt comfortable about both the poem and the terminology they would need.

The only thing I wish I had thought to change was incorporating the poem more. I think if as a class we had gone around and used the poem itself to dissect and analyze the poetic terminology, it would have been so much better. My supervisor also told me that I needed work on transitions, moving between one activity and another. Having never researched or looked into these before, he was clearly absolutely right.

I then taught the freshman lit. class. I didn't feel as prepared for this one, but I had some idea of where I felt it needed to go. Unfortunately, I did not do a quality job explaining this to Mrs. C. I felt like in a lot of ways I let her down because of our miscommunications, and that the class didn't go as smoothly or productively as I had wanted it to.

What went well was a discussion of lynching and race. I felt that, not unsurprisingly, students who live in Vermont don't really know what lynching is about. "It's someone getting hung, right? By a mob of people?" Not quite. The act of lynching was an act of fear, designed to strip away someone's humanity and send a message of terror to anyone else that it could happen next to them. Thinking about it in that light, I wish I'd talked about the idea of terrorism, which is much closer to the students' own lives.

I think though that I really got the message across. Images of actual lynchings from the book Without Sanctuary hammered home the severity and reality of what is happening in To Kill a Mockingbird in a way that otherwise couldn't have happened.


While I feel this portion went extremely well and is something the students will bring with them long after the class period, I also feel I could have introduced the images better. I provided a minimalist amount of forewarning as I passed out the papers that we would be looking at violent and disturbing images, but I should have started talking about it prior to actually giving things out. Mrs. C really drove that home for me, and I have been kicking myself for not saying so ahead of time. I think it stemmed from the miscommunications I mentioned.

I originally wanted to pass the text around, but Mrs. C was adamantly against this because it would never make its way successfully around the room. I agreed, and she suggested copying the images. I did so with a small measure of difficulty, including a copy of one lynching photograph used as a postcard. I made copies for each student, and passed them around so that everyone could get one. Unfortunately, Mrs. C pointed out to me that I might not want students having these incredibly disturbing images and just passing them out. In hindsight, I should have made only a few copies and had them circulate through the room.

It was after this discussion had slowed down and we were moving (awkwardly, because I still don't understand transitions) into the next activity that I felt things began to break down.

I wanted students aware of a homework assignment prior to doing a chapter read around. I wanted everyone looking for specific characters, because it was going to be important for this homework. So I told them about this assignment and explained it prior to doing the reading activity. I felt like there was a stilted disconnect - the usual way things go, you discuss homework only at the end of class (if at all). So I had really mucked up the order of things.

The read around itself went well, but I felt that I could have done it better. I didn't really understand Mrs. C's participation points system until now, and so I wish I'd had a better idea of how that should look at the end of class. If I did, I might have given each student who read a +1 and students who read a particularly long section a +2. Instead I just took notes and when we ended the chapter 10 minutes early, I panicked.

After asking Mrs. C what I should do, she suggested I ask questions about the homework and, if I didn't have anything I intended to do with them, recollect the rather disturbing images I'd passed out. I suddenly realized what an enormous error I'd made. I rushed to collect these, and didn't ask the right questions while I was doing so. Because I'd made copies on single sides, the students had written on the backs and needed to take notes. I was rushed trying to sign participation forms and answer reading questions while making sure none of the copies got out of the classroom.

I felt like a complete failure during this last ten minutes, and Mrs. C seemed disappointed in how it had gone. She mentioned that I needed to work on transitions, but also needed to rush out and get her car repaired. I, still getting over my feelings of panic and fear, began jumping over her sentences and trying to think of something I could do to make myself feel more successful and helpful, like correcting quizzes or assisting with something else.

My greatest fear of teaching is going out with nothing prepared and staring down a room full of students who will ask "Well, what now?"

So it's been a long weekend and I feel like I'm in a better spot than I was Friday afternoon. I think AP went great and there were elements of the freshman class which went really well (even if there were some that didn't). Now, armed with a little bit more knowledge, I hope I've learned something out of what worked and what didn't.

So in my wider life, I made what might be a colossally bad or good decision this weekend and agreed to participate in a theater production with a friend. That goes up the first full week of my student teaching.

Now wait - wait! Hear me out! This really might be the best thing for me: I have heard from most everyone I've worked with so far that I'm still completely in my head, in the sense that I am thinking about thinking about teaching, and not living in the moment teaching. It's really completely true, so I feel the best way to help with that is to find an activity that is tangentially connected to teaching, but which draws upon a very different skill set. What I need is a different way to engage my brain on the subject of teaching and also, to have some fun.

I love acting, though I don't have much professional experience with it. However, I have had several great experiences with theater at Marlboro, my undergraduate school, and coming back for another performance feels good to me. This might be a huge mistake, and be putting too much into one time frame, but as a teacher this is also part of what I'll be experiencing and dealing with: my whole life can't just be how to teach. I need to learn to balance time, write open-ended lesson plans that feature wiggle room if we move too fast or too, and to begin the balancing act of school-time and out-of-school-time.

The fact I'm playing a Dean of the Humanities department can only help.

It's a date

So for my own ease of reference, I'm including the dates when I begin doing official teaching.

October 12th: Begin Invisible Man in AP Lit.
October 21st: Begin Night and teaching about writing a personal narrative to the students in Freshman Lit.
October 26th: Begin teaching Media Literacy and Awareness and Advertising in Journalism.

For Freshman Lit, I'm going to be working very closely with Mrs. C and really learning how to teach the book Night. She does extensive introductory material because, as she said: "I just can't throw them into a book like this. I just don't teach that way." I think for any book, but holocaust literature especially, you can't just let students rush in and get whatever they get. Don't get me wrong, I am all for personal interpretation and personal relevancy, but for some books I think the author's own feelings need to be made explicit.

After those teaching periods, it should return to a fairly relaxed atmosphere. I will be teaching lessons and doing units, particularly on and around Web 2.0 with students and how to include and incorporate that into their studies. It feels so weird to say Web 2.0: I actually had to Wiki "Web 2.0" in order to make sure I wasn't just saying a buzz word I'd heard at yesterdays in-service and parroting it, but it is what I mean.

I do have one more set assignment for the term though, which is:

December 7th through 23rd: The Odyssey with the Freshman Lit. class. I love this story, and I think it's worth reading/hearing. By then I should be confident and comfortable, this class should know me well and we should be able to have a really great time. It helps that Mrs. C really hates The Odyssey, so she is very eager to have me teach it. I am going to try and win her over that Odysseus is a great human being and that it's a love story, but she assures me it can't be done. We shall see!

In-Service

Today was a district wide in-service day. I was bracing for, well, I wasn't really certain since I'd never attended one before. However I really had a good time. The entire process proved interesting, and I got to see a lot of new educational technologies.

I also got to talk with a few people from other schools within the district, and while they were all middle school teachers, many had insights and thoughts on teaching high school.

I must admit I felt like the coolest guy in the room whenever someone had a technology issue and they turned to me. Mostly it was the simplest stuff in the world, like pushing a button or plugging something in, but it still felt quite good to be successful. We also got a great conversation going on the usage of wikipedia, of which I am a staunch supporter.

I also met one of the people from the Department of Education who is responsible for NECAP testing - that's the New England Common Assessment Program. This is a standardized competency test shared by Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Soon Maine will also begin using it. We touched upon many interesting issues regarding this test, but one in particular really surprised me.

We looked at one sample prompt, which presented a fact sheet by a 'student' and the test-takers were tasked with contrasting television in 1965 and television now.

This seemed fairly harmless until we began to really dig into it. Is this prompt fair to students who don't have television? In addition, the fact sheet was not written by a student but instead was written by professionals, and was designed to resemble student writing. This surprised me, since this meant it was intentionally difficult to read.

Now while I see the point, that students need to be able to organize, decipher and raise the worthwhile information from the chaff, it rubs me the wrong way that they were, well, deceived about it in some ways. If a student is unfamiliar with current television, then they won't have much to go on for a comparison. When I mentioned this, the reply I got was that a valid answer would be to say that you don't have/watch television.

How many students would think of that? Further, how would that answer score? As someone who is tasked with scoring a test of this nature, is it really a comparison between TV then and TV now to say "I don't know - I don't own a television" even if that's the case?

This whole matter is troubling to me, and is something I need to think about deeply. Looking at our NECAP scores, it seems by and large that Vermont as a state isn't doing particularly well. Does this stem from cultural differences between Vermonters and New Hampshire and Rhode Islanders? Based on the figures I saw, the mean scores for Vermont don't meet proficiency in any area - I can't believe that should be the case.

Troubling is really the only way I can think to describe it.

The September Plague

So yesterday marked the first day I've elected to take off since starting. I was required to take one day off when I got pink eye, but yesterday I was sick as a dog and wound up sleeping for thirteen hours. All this while struggling to do a paper and to take the numerous cold/sore throat/lost voice remedies prescribed to me by friends.

I at present feel like I'd been run over by a truck, but I can speak and thus it's a definite improvement since yesterday. I had been fighting off this cold for awhile, but this weekend I simply gave up the ghost. There was just nothing I could do to fight it off. On Friday night I received a call from my father about my Mom, who was in the hospital with pneumonia.

Now my mother is pretty tough, and she has quite the number of physical ailments. However she also has breathing problems and is on oxygen, so her getting pneumonia was a serious worry for me. I tried to really fling myself into other activities and not worry too hard, and I called her Sunday evening to check in. It had been as serious as I worried, and her doctor had actually asked her about next of kin information. Suffice it to say I was not in a place where I could think much about education, let alone about fighting off a cold.

And so for those aspirant teachers out there, let me say this: give consideration to your students. If you brush past a student who is chronically late with his homework or who bombed the latest test, try to take just a minute at the end of class and ask: Why? Not every student is going to tell you "My mother is in the hospital," or "I had to go to a funeral," or even "I was too busy this weekend taking care of my little brother," but these are real and legitimate circumstances in our students' lives. It can really make all the difference in the world, being asked why.

Digesting

So after a long lunch and a day to really think about the lesson plan and how it went, I thought I'd post my findings here.

On the whole I would say the lesson went quite well. Having to do two pieces of writing caught the students a bit by surprise and some had thought it was actually due for homework, but most seemed to appreciate that the second piece of writing was more laid back - in a way at least. It wasn't asking the students to process the story, just take a character you already like and already know about and let me know why this character is your favorite and use some of today's terminology about him or her or it.

I had two Holden Caufields, a Frodo Baggins, a Bilbo Baggins, a few from more esoteric books like One Hundred Years of Solitute and Love in the Times of Cholera, but also I had one person say God. One person also said Arya Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire while another said Rorschach from Watchmen. I got a little nerdy on that last one.

The students were engaged with the discussion and I think they both got a lot out of it and also had a good deal of say in how things went. I also gave the students a vocabulary quiz, which they were allowed to use their texts on. I took the vocab. words, which they typically only dealt with in a rather detached way and applied them to our reading in eleven or so sentences summarizing aspects of the reading. while on the whole results were mixed, I did hear some positive comments that the words felt more challenging in this context and it was also nice to see some of them used.

The downside was that I just overestimated how long things would take by a mile. Instead of taking forty minutes for discussion, we spend about 20. Thankfully one of Mrs. N's assignments had been left undone from the previous day, and so they could work on that and then silent reading, but I think until I get a better sense of timing I need to over-plan my lessons rather than under-plan them.

I'll be doing another lesson for the same class next week on poetry, examining Michelle T. Clinton's "The Shape of Mythic Lies." I'm excited to see how the students respond to this poem, particularly in light of many examples and parallels being drawn to the Garden of Eden mythology in their current texts.

Lesson Plan

While a bit rushed, here is my lesson plan for today's AP Lit. class. Comments, criticisms and thoughts are absolutely welcome.

Terminology for those not in the know:
Collins Type 1 Writing: A form of brainstorming for a set amount of time on a particular prompt. Uses the five type Collins Writing system.
Grade Level Expectations: The standards that Vermont had set for students.
Ticket to Leave: The requirement for a student to leave the classroom once class has finished. This may be sharing a piece of learning, handing in a paper, etc.


Focus: Students will explore characterization through Miss Brill and will explore the more practical side of the Wordly Wise Vocabulary words.
Grade Level Expectations: RHS6 (Shows breadth of vocab.), RHS10 (Demonstrates initial understanding of elements of literary text), RHS13 (Analyze and interpret elements of literary text - analyzing characterization),
Materials: Vocabulary Quiz, white board and markers, students for student discussion
Previous Homework: Read "Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield and "The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara.

Activator: Students will respond with a Collins Type I brainstorming ideas piece to the prompt: What do we learn about the character of Miss Brill through her perceptions and interactions with others?
Procedure:
1.SSR
(10 min.)
2.Collins Type I Writing to the prompt: "What do we learn about the character of Miss Brill through her perceptions and interactions with others?" These will be collected.
(10 min.)
3.Class discussion about parallel traits of characterization. Go around the room and get students to list one character from Miss Brill and write them on the board. Write on the board with two columns (direct and indirect presentation) (flat and round characters) (static and developing characters). Students will be asked to consider what each term may mean and then place various characters from the story in the appropriate column. If students struggle to fill the lists with characters from Miss Brill, we will go around the room and everyone will name a literary character who fits each type from any story or genre.
(20 min.)
4.Once we have populated the lists, we will add three more terms: dramatized, stock character and epiphany. Each will help better paint the picture of one of the pairs of words. We will then go over what each one means in relation to the whole. Exploration of stock characters could lead to a rich discussion if the students become engaged - if the columns went well then open up a discussion to describe various stock characters. If students struggled to name characters from Miss Brill, see whom they suggested for the lists and who is a round character, who is flat, who is static, who is developing, etc.
(20 min.)
5.Pass out vocabulary quizzes after a preamble about exploring using vocabulary words. If not finished in class, it will be due as homework the next day.
(15 min.)
Wrap-Up: Collins Type I Writing to the prompt: Name your favorite literary character and describe whether he or she (or it) is static or developing; flat or round; presented directly or indirectly and why that character is their favorite.
(10 min.)
Homework: Read "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather and "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.
Assessment:
Ticket to Leave: Both Collins Type I writings.
The two writings should demonstrate both whether or not the student read Miss Brill and the second piece should show a student's fluency with the terminology.

Proximity

Note: I was initially thinking of entitling this post "Don't stand so close to me," but decided that a Police song about a teacher-student crush is in no way appropriate for an education blog, though the irony does at least make me laugh.

Yesterday was an interesting day. I didn't have much time to write about and reflect upon it, since Mrs. C was out sick. This left me with a sub during the last period, and I found I had some big successes and some definite struggles. Because of the substitute's unfamiliarity with the material, I found that I took on a teaching role much more than I otherwise might have.

I also reflected upon my first real new learning as a student teacher - how close you are to a student in physical proximity makes a difference. I tend to move around the room when I teach - I don't like being stock still. I feel more comfortable moving when I speak (this is also in part so that I gesticulate less wildly, which I naturally tend to). I have one student who is extremely hyper and who knows when he is misbehaving. If I am less than half a room away, look at him and catch his eye, he immediately stops doing what he is doing. If I am further away than that however, it doesn't work.

So far this has only really happened during my work with the freshmen class - the other two classes are electives and feature students who want to be there and who are (more or less) committed to their own success. It's hard to be in an elective and feel like the class is being forced upon you, what with electing to participate and all.

Yesterday I found that whenever I moved closer to a group of students, they would be quiet and stop talking. I found this most effective if I walked up behind them, particularly if I walked up silently and surprised them.

Unfortunately this newly discovered technique also failed at one point. A student who has been having some problems in the class continued to talk, with me standing behind him. I finally told him (since we were watching a film) that "If you're not going to pay attention, I don't really care, just don't hinder everybody else."

This worked for a little while, but I think some kind of firmer disciplinary measure might go a longer way. This particular student really doesn't want to be in the class. He seems to take issue first with Mrs. C and secondly with English in general. He would rather goof off and play sports than pay attention. I think a large part of this stems from still being young - he is projecting a macho/tough attitude.

On a happier note, I'm having some good luck with another student. Let's call him Mr. Dan. Mr. Dan is in some ways a troubling case - he has gone through freshman lit previously, but failed the course due to disciplinary problems. He is smart although he chooses not to apply himself. He seems, to me at least, disaffected with school as a system and does not see the value in it for himself. Worse, because he is intelligent and has done the coursework before, he knows all of the material ahead of time and doesn't care about doing it/reviewing it.

Initially Mr. Dan was having some real discipline problems in this class too. Unlike the other student I mentioned, who is posturing, I feel Mr. Dan can really succeed if he wants himself to. I completely understand Mrs. C's point of view on dealing with problematic students though - you cannot sacrifice the entire class's learning for one student. Yet at the same time, I am becoming a teacher to make a difference in student's lives. I've decided to take this opportunity to try and reach out to Mr. Dan and help him find a reason to continue with school. I worry that he is going to bomb out at the rate he is going, but I think if he feels both appreciated and pushed, then perhaps he can succeed, at least in terms he feels matters.

Going out of my mind (But in a good way!)

So after having it mentioned to me by both of my cooperating teachers, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how, well, I've been spending a lot of time thinking. Whether it's putting together lesson plans of trying to talk to students, right now almost all of my free time is being spent in the act of thinking about teaching. The idea of thinking about thinking about teaching also strikes me as fairly ironic.

My nature is fairly thoughtful - I do tend to spend a lot of time just thinking. Not just about education, but about life and wider topics in general. So as far as thinking not only about my education, but about how I am trying to teach others, well, it is kind of exhausting.

So this weekend was spent recharging and in many ways getting out of the groove of teaching. I tried to avoid thinking too much about education all weekend and instead spent my time with friends and with my girlfriend. Friday feels like a century ago, although I did have something interesting to report from then.

Friday afternoon during my freshman class, Mrs. C stepped outside with a few students and left the rest of the class to do an assignment. As more and more students finished and grew restless (last block of the day, after all) things got rowdier and crazier. I had never been in a situation where I didn't have a plan or a cooperating teacher in the room. I tried to regain order and momentum by having students share journal entries, but it did little to stem the quell of leaping up, jumping around and general misbehaving from rowdy students.

I felt like, if it had been completely my classroom, like I would have thought of what to do. Because Mrs. C's meeting with the students ran for much longer than she anticipated (15 minutes instead of 5) I was really on my own. In this regard, I don't feel like I was very successful yet. This will be something to work on - having a few backup assignments on hand if things are winding down at the end of the day. In retrospect, I could also easily have just said it was time for silent reading until the end of the class - not only do students have silent reading books, but they also have a novel they're working on now and I can use having less homework as leverage against in-class misbehavior now.

Food for thought.

Accountability & Activity Success

I think that right now the single biggest question in education is "Who is held accountable for student success and failure?" To most of us, the answer feels obvious. How matter of fact could it be? But who is it you think? Why, the students of course. They are the ones taking the tests, the ones who decide how much to study and how much they wish to commit themselves to the material.

Well, yes and no. Other voices will proclaim that it is in fact the teachers who are responsible. I am reminded of an example of Plato, where he taught a young slave boy geometry. Initially the boy failed to grasp the concepts and Plato acknowledged the failure was his as a teacher and not that of the boy. By changing how he was teaching, Plato showed the boy how to find the measurement for the shortest side of a triangle when the other two sides were unknown. This is not a small task, considering the child had minimal at best reading, writing and mathematics skills.

Does the burden of proof then lie with the administration to set things right? After all, if they assigned students to teachers who could work best with them and responsively facilitated student and faculty needs, there shouldn't be any worries, right?

And so on and so forth as this issue gets more and more tangled.

My own opinion (and this blog is in many ways nothing more than that, my own thoughts on education) the responsibility lies between students and teachers. If a student is adamantly set against success, there is little a teacher can inherently do to help. Yet it then falls to the teacher to learn why a student is so defiant and reluctant to learn.

In a lot of ways, I view teaching as something more than just a job or even a career. It is something I have Afición for (a Spanish word blatantly appropriated by Hemingway for The Sun Also Rises and now appropriated by me in grand literary tradition). Afición means passion, but the type that goes beyond the normal or reasonable. Those who are fans of bullfighting are all well and good, but those with Afición know the bullfighters, know their records, connect with the bulls themselves as the fight goes on, etc. Teaching to me is something that is crucial to everyone, and I think that many teachers lose their Afición as time goes on. I might yet as well, but when I'm in the classroom I feel energized. A little shaky, a little nervous, but also so full of energy I can barely sit still. I have been working on becoming a teacher for about six years now.

Yesterday I had two big successes. In my first class, I lead a discussion on news sources. I handed out copies of a news story from Tuesday about Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who throw his shoes at George W. Bush last year. He was just released from prison and has said he was tortured. CNN initially didn't report anything about torture, but the BBC did. Then when the AP news story came out later in the day, CNN changed their story to match. I mixed up the stories, so that every four students had different stories and once everyone was done reading it, I asked what the headline was. Unfortunately it took long enough for everyone to read it that many students noticed they didn't have the same article.

If I were to do this assignment again, I would either find a different news source for each student or put them together in small groups and have them read and then discuss the stories. I also wish instead of using the BBC, the AP News and both copies of CNN's story, I'd just used both copies of CNN.

I learned something about accommodations in this class. While working with a deaf student, I should have provided the student with the material first before anyone else. This would have given the student a chance to read it more thoroughly and let other students read and catch up.

During my freshman block, I had a great opening activity. Mrs. C told everyone that I was going to be administering a test. Everyone grumbled but then I segued into telling them "Now Mrs. C and I have agreed that we're going to change around some classroom rules, and we're going to do so by voting. You all each get one vote, but we want only the best votes to count. So I've got a little test for you. If you get two wrong, you fail. If you talk once I've finished passing out papers, you not only lose the right to vote but I will also crumple up your paper."

After one student asked a question aloud after I put down the last test, I just walked silently over and crumpled his paper. After that the room went dead silent.

What I'd like to have done differently in this case was make all the students stand and then read the question and then the answer aloud. If it is wrong, have the student sit down. Instead I rushed the answer process because it was a foregone conclusion. The students were seething, and I then tapped into those feelings of anger and unfairness. We really started up a great conversation about the type of literacy tests African-Americans had to take in order to vote - and once I mentioned that anybody who actually passed the test had to pay me ten dollars per vote, they went wild! It was a really great success and I think I engaged with a lot of students who might otherwise have tuned out or just not connected with this type of lesson.

Community Service

So I'd like to talk for a moment about community service. I think that serving your community (however it is you choose to define community) is very important. Yet at the same time, I don't like outside forces dictating to me either who my community is or how I am supposed to serve them. It thus really catches me that the school I am student teaching at has a mandatory period of community service, which is a graduation requirement.

Now I highly doubt that any senior is going to grumble about serving their community. After all, a school is part of a community and as such should work to bring something back to the community. Yet at the same time, at least to me, it feels disingenuous to make that type of community service a requirement. A genuine desire to make your community a better place is a great thing; serving your community because you have to feels like it won't build up a spirit of community or social responsibility.

Of course there's another side to it as well. If students don't have mandatory community service, then how many will do it? My undergraduate college has a 'work day,' where students participate in beautifying the campus. I never participated. I felt that if I was going to serve my community, it shouldn't be just because it's the day everyone else is. Instead I would do things when the mood struck me or a particular problem caught my attention: I would throw out a bit of trash or sweep up some food garbage if it became particularly unsettling.

Can we expect students to gain a love for their community if serving it is a requirement? Do you become a better citizen because you really have to be? Just some food for thought.

Lesson Plan

For my own convenience I am putting down the core elements of what a lesson plan should consist of, so that I can return here and reference them. There are three preparatory steps and four effect steps.

Focus: A brief summary of what the lesson will be about and the overall goals of the lesson.

Grade Expectations: The Grade Level Expectations are what state standard(s) the lesson will be addressing. This should be clearly explicit in the lesson plan and preferably clearly explicit to students.

Materials: What you will need in order to accomplish this lesson.

Activator: An opening activity to get the lesson started and to help create mental connections.

Procedures: A step by step summation of major activities and what the lesson will itself include.

Wrap-Up: A closing activity to bring home what the students have been doing and to help finalize any previously unclear information. The stinger.

Assessment: A way to demonstrate student learning, whether that be something concrete and summative like a test or something more casual and formative like an end of class writing.

Chasing Sleep

So today itself is going to be a killer; however I am going to be spending it smiling. Last night was the finale of the post-wedding celebration and I got together with some dear friends, two of whom depart today for Maine and then Montana. This get together lasted until 12:00 AM when I got in and I wasn't asleep until about 12:30 AM. Having gotten up at 6:00 AM to come into school, I can already feel myself dragging and it's only 7:14!

It's what we were doing that relates (in my view) to education. For those who don't know me, I will happily reveal myself for the nerd that I am: I have played Dungeons and Dragons for longer than my students have been alive. After finding the first box secreted away in my basement like a buried treasure, I have been a fan of roleplaying games. Now I certainly don't mean anything weird by that - I mean the types of nerdy games one sees parodied on television where kids sit in a basement and pretend they are wizards or Conan the Barbarian and/or dragons.

I think that everyone has a desire to tell their stories. Who we are, how we got there and what has shaped us along the way are integral and important to each of us. As a kid, roleplaying games helped me find an outlet and voice for the emotions and difficulties I couldn't otherwise express. Sometimes yes, it is just silly fun, but at other times it can serve as a vehicle to explore concepts and ideas that I simply cannot voice or cannot deal with in the real world.

I personally think that a lot of students come to Dungeons and Dragons (and other sundry roleplaying games for those in the know) to explore who they are in some way. The finer details don't matter so much, but deep down the whole point of the game is collaborative storytelling. You and some friends are shaping a story in a way no other medium can allow short of children's games of pretend. You are telling your story at the same time your friends are telling theirs and you are both shaping and being shaped by them.

So yes, the medium itself has long held derision, controversy and self-effacing parody, but I don't think people would know it as a fad having started during the 70's if not for the stories. There remains something persistent about the idea of shared storytelling that no other experience can replicate. I don't think I can truly accurately explain it beyond my shots here in the dark, but I know that a surprising number of my peers, even some of the cooler kids, would play these games back in high school. It's important to honour a students' story (and as my graduate advisor would say, their second moral language) and in doing so you can find a connection with a student that you maybe otherwise never could.

Mrs. N ends each day with an activity. Each student must share or communicate something with her on the way out. Whether it's something they love or they hate about the school, something about their home lives or something surprising that occurred to them during an assignment, they need to share it with her on the way out. This short moment gives students a chance to, however briefly, share their personal stories with Mrs. N. She was telling me she had no idea the school had a serious drug problem until one of her students said "I like it her, except for all the drugs," and then a few more students echoed this comment on their way out.

Whatever way it is, whether a single moment before students leave the classroom to something as elaborate as pretending to be wizards and warriors after school, let people share their stories with you. That alone can be all the difference in the world.

In your head

So I've been thinking about something Mrs. C said to me and it has yet to leave my mind since she said it. After class one day, we were talking and she said "You're still completely in your head. It's like that during student teaching and the first two years or so. You're so wrapped up in your head that you're not there with the students."

This is really been one of my biggest problems, not just as a teacher but as a person. I tend to plan and contingency plan for if my plans go awry. It's more a defense mechanism to the possibility of failure but it's just become in a lot of ways the way I live. I plan and plan and structure and then when my plans start to break down I get a brief deer in the headlights moment before I roll with it and come up with another plan.

I've been trying to work more on improvisation. I know in a lot of ways teaching is an art, but for me this goes beyond just teaching. The ability to roll with the punches and change direction and tact is important to me and I feel as if often my plans are simply too rigid to necessarily work. This is another goal of mine for my student teaching: to develop better improv skills, such that I can at least get rid of the noticeable deer in the headlights moments.

The wedding this weekend was amazing and exhausting. I was part of the technical crew and we got it all set up and running. The wedding itself was on Sunday, and it rained and poured Friday and Saturday. Then on Sunday, the sun came out, the sky cleared off and it was warm and wonderful. I'm glad everything went well and my two friends (who have been dating for ten years!) are now married!

Tough but Fair

Something I am striving to find in my student teaching is how to create that fine line between being tough but fair. How do you communicate to students "I want you to succeed, on your terms and by how you define success, but I also won't let you hinder the success of others."

The Freshman class is a continual struggle. About a quarter of the class is loud, extroverted and disruptive. Four or five students in particular are really causing problems and actually have been sent out of class. Today I took the time to warn them that Mrs. C was losing her patience with them. I think it helped somewhat, but I wish I could have done more. I don't want to simply cut them off from the classroom and make the feel like they shouldn't be in there, but to some degree it might have to be done.

Mostly it's just a tough pill to swallow that you don't, as a regular classroom teacher, necessarily have a way to deal with everyone who needs additional support and help. The school that I did my pre-practicum at was really quite surprising - despite its small size they had a very active network of paraprofessionals, some who went with specific classes and some who went with specific students.

The idea of showing the students that I want to do right by them is still buzzing around in my mind. I hope that in large part I can accomplish it by being forthright, by being honest and by being stubborn as an ox about helping them. I think the biggest cause of students becoming disaffected is by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for themselves that teachers and adults in their lives just don't care. When a teacher tries to get closer, they make the effort to push them away and are then comforted to see their expectations fulfilled.

I think those are the students who most need someone to be tough but fair with them and to keep after them. To push without pushing away.

This whole teaching thing sounds very zen when I put it like that. Sorta like Wu Wei, which friends of mine during college loved to espouse on at length, which is perfect action through inaction. You set up events such that it falls out exactly as you wanted it to, without ever lifting a finger to see to it that it does. Or such is my limited understanding.

To-morrow's schedule should be visiting a few other teachers and checking out some other courses. I am following Mrs. N's advice and seeing some other teachers and trying to absorb a few other departments teaching strategies. I might do another day of it next week and then it's throwing myself completely into English and preparing to teach.

This weekend also marks the wedding of two dear friends of mine from college, so it should be quite hectic. It's ever-growing into a larger affair, with people flying in from all over the country and plans being made and people being invited to some activities and not other things because of space constraints, etc. etc. etc.

It's going to be great though and I'm really looking forward to it! Somewhere in that time I also want to begin writing up lesson plans for my upcoming student lessons.

Mental Batteries

So while I was at school today, I was really thinking about what I'd like to talk about tonight. What of the many topics that were running through my mind would be the best thing to post about on here. I ultimately decided to be self-reflective though and to say that today I was mentally exhausted. I don't doubt that it stemmed in large part from having a four day weekend and then getting back into the swing of things or that my eye still looks frankly awful. Make no mistake, if you ever tell people you've got pink eye, they will suddenly reel away from you like you're a plague victim. I spent the day joking that it was too late, and pink eye could be transmitted simply by sight - I'd infected them just by looking into their eyes. Both of those are very clearly causes to me.

Yet at the same time, I just felt completely unprepared today. I think this was also from not even being sure I should be in school today - while I had been using the anti-biotic ointment for a full 24 hours, that didn't change the fact my eye looked and felt absolutely awful. I found out once I was at school that I didn't bring my notebook and I didn't have any kind of discussion questions in mind for when I tried to lead a discussion on The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I came up with some questions, particularly ones that connected the text back to the previous text we'd read (The Autobiography of Malcolm X). I just never quite felt on-step during the day.

The freshman lit. course with Mrs. C didn't help either. She had a rough time with them yesterday and was forced to send a couple of students out of class. Today she completely rearranged all of the desks so that it was in a new pattern and it was disorienting to both the students and myself.

So once I got home, I wanted to do nothing. My eye hurt/itched and I was grumpy and tired and really wanted to do nothing but sleep. I only slept for a few hours the night before because I had so many things going through my mind. I also realized I had given a friend an old computer of mine (since I replaced my old one with a shiny new Toshiba) and had failed to clear out all the saved passwords from Firefox. Despite being tired however, I had promised my girlfriend that I would drive up to the local college and see her. I debated canceling since I felt like I'd been run over by a truck, but I decided not to and I am really glad I didn't. I felt dog-tired for awhile but then I started to pick up again. While my eye is still hurting, it's not nearly so bad as it was. I'm feeling much better at this point and ready to tackle to-morrow with renewed vigor.

On the one hand, I feel like things are suddenly moving much faster at the high school. I am now going to be solo-teaching for two weeks during the final two weeks of the first quarter. This means in about three to four weeks if my calculations are right. I need to start getting lesson plans together, discussion questions, assignments, etc.

All of this amounts to me feeling a bit nervous and worried that I might get overwhelmed. However, I think that if I take it one class at a time, figure out a week's worth of assignments and go over them with Mrs. N and Mrs. C and hammer things out, it's going to be fine. This is really unusual for how student teaching is supposed to go however - traditionally one starts by assisting with a lesson, then solo teaching a lesson, then assisting with a unit then solo teaching a full unit. Anyone who knows me though can attest to the fact that patience isn't one of my strong suits.

Better to jump in, I think, and figure out how to swim once I'm already in the deep end.

Illness

While I had a great labor day, sometime on Sunday I managed to get myself pink eye. After a two hour wait in the ER, I got a Doctor to confirm my self-diagnosis and now unfortunately am taking a painful prescription eye ointment and not allowed to go to the school today.

Hopefully by to-morrow it will be mostly cleared up and I will no longer be quite so infectious.

Distracting Distractors

So today's post will be fairly short because I am exhausted. Both mentally and physically, I am having difficulty keeping up with my own plans for the day. I think it's still going to take some time for me to get into the swing of the school experience, but I'm doing my best.

Today I really spent some time thinking about distracted students and also distracting students. Particularly in the freshman class, I have a lot of students who are simply very distracting. They whistle, they make noises, they hit pens onto things, they shift in their seats and one student actually keeps picking his entire desk up and moving it around.

Today the students answered the prompt "What is your ideal classroom environment?" Over half of them (13 out of 24) said it should be quiet, and many made mention of the other students being distracting. So what as a teacher am I to do? On the one hand, I want everyone to be able to participate and get the most from the class that they can. If someone is showing that they will hinder another student, that can't fly. Yet if I try purposefully to stop it, then it may only make the distraction worse or take more time away from the students who are set on learning.

Obviously I don't have any easy answers here. Just something I'm pondering. One idea I do like is trying to give distracting students positions of authority in the classroom. Perhaps make them in charge of collecting homework assignments or seeing that the class guidelines are followed. Something that gives them a way to 'buy in' to the classroom structure and give them a sense of investiture. I haven't tried it yet, but I think by helping these students to feel that they are a part, indeed an integral part, of the classroom, they will be more inclined to participate and less inclined to distract.

My current plan is to speak to the students to-morrow about what they wrote on the ideal classroom. I hope that if everyone sees how many students want quiet to help them focus, it might provide a social pressure to the distracting students and also help those students who want it to be quiet not feel as if they're alone.

It's just a place to start for now, but I think it's a solid one. To-morrow will mark the first time I'm up in front of the class wearing the teacher hat and doing the teacher thing. Let's see how it goes.

Technical Difficulties

Today felt much more calm than yesterday did. I think the first day jitters were wearing off for the students and for me as well. The real stand out moment of the day came from working with technology.

During the journalism class, Mrs. N wanted to show the first in a series of films on news media. She had them previously on tapes, but unfortunately there's a wrinkle to simply showing the tapes. One of our students is deaf, and trying to watch the tape and her interpreter would be very difficult. After a quick search, I discovered the videos were available for free on the web with closed captioning. Thinking the situation solved, we were all set!

And so I learned my first very important lesson of the day - before you try any lesson with technology, give it a run through first to make sure it works right.

Once we had everything hooked up, nothing happened. So I ran off and got the right cables and then - nothing happened. So we got the owner of the projector who explained to us that, first, you need to remove the lens cap.

Once we got the video showing with closed captioning (itself a challenge and a half) we couldn't change the video's size. This meant it was tiny. We resorted to tried and true methods of making a projection larger and tried pulling back the projector from the screen, but it didn't help much. The entire thing was really a fiasco. I found out way too late that I couldn't adjust the window size at all, and so it turned into a great big mess of tiny pictures and frustrated students and teachers.

It occurred to me only after the class that we could have asked the student if it'd be alright to show the video and set it up for her on the computer with the captions.

My last block of the day featured the freshmen again, somewhat less wound up today but still very excitable and loud. Today we went to the school's library and I got a chance to peruse the books. I am not a huge fan of Young Adult literature, but some of the book selections actually piqued my interest, and the students just ate them up. I was also really shocked to see a copy of Watchmen in the stacks. What high school offers Watchmen?

My current assignment is to think up an interesting class discussion on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. I think I might try to pick up on some of the threads from the AP Lit. discussion on authenticity. It's always been my biggest thought around the text - is it more authentic to relate events as they happened or to take literary license and capture more of the emotion in the moment?

The Real First Day

Phew! What a day! Today marked my first real day as a student teacher. This meant a great many things, including my first battle with the copy machine, getting into trouble for the first time and attending my first English department meeting.

To begin, there was a misunderstanding between myself, Mrs. C and Mrs. N yesterday. While the day was on a shortened schedule for students, I was not supposed to leave early and was to have a meeting with Mrs. N after the last block of the day. I hadn't realized this and skipped off without a thought in the world. I didn't think anything of it since Mrs. C (the teacher I intern with during the last block) had told me it was fine to head out. That is, I thought it was fine until I got home and discovered a stern e-mail waiting for me. I then felt absolutely awful about it, but I think we're doing just fine now.

In order to make all this really comprehensible, I will divide it up into the classes and portions of my day as they went.

Journalism: My first class of the day! I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this class, but I was pleasantly surprised by the relaxed atmosphere and enthusiasm everyone displayed. I'm sure it partially stems from being an elective, but the students really seemed to want to dig into journalism and learn more about it. The class was mainly spent getting to know everyone with a "Get to know you Scavenger Hunt." Everyone got pieces of paper which listed off certain qualities from the physical (wears glasses) to the personal (loves acting) to activities (has been bungee jumping) and skills (can operate a backhoe). It went really well, and the students seemed to enjoy getting up and moving about the room and talking to one another. I was a bit surprised that only one student spoke to me during the activity (to ask if I could juggle) but other than that I was fairly unnoticed.

I also got my first look at the Collins Writing System, the school's choice for English improvement. I can see the appeal in some ways - you choose certain areas to work on in each paper (up to three) and only assess based on those (called Focused Correction Areas). If started early, you can be sure the fundamentals are thoroughly developed by the time they reach high school. The system is being implemented only at the high school level however (as far as I'm aware) and so feels somewhat out of place. If a student needs to work on spelling or sentence structure, yet the paper is correcting only thesis statements and sentence variety, it feels a bit unfair to the student to not help with the earlier problems as well. Still, you work with what you have, and I think I can find ways to make this system work for me.

The only real bone of contention I have with the class is that I don't think news, any news, is objective. I think we cannot help but bring our own biases and perspectives into what we read, and even more so into what we write. I also think all journalism (and media) is persuasive writing. The author is trying to persuade you towards a certain point of view, even if it is only the view that the media is worth your time and attention, and so they will invest of themselves into the work and, perhaps consciously or unconsciously, inject bias. I suppose the key then is to eliminate obvious bias (which is more than we can say for many media outlets) yet that still leaves unintended bias in the work.

Something to maybe toss around in the class and see if anybody bites.

Advisory: This class was fairly short. Not so much a class as a group meeting, it served as a check-in with students - they received information, forms and got a chance to just say hi and have a moment's breather in the day before rushing off.

AP Literature and Composition: The big one! This is the class that I am most nervous about. As Mrs. N put it, the class is a "hybrid between a test-prep course and a great books course," and cannot skimp on either. It must also function as both a high school course (obviously) and also a collegiate course, with all the rigor and trappings of both. It is a bit intimidating to try and manage, and it is the class that I think will take the most out of me. It also has very dense reading, some of which I'm still struggling to finish. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is absolutely fascinating, but it never seems to end! I am not saying I want to rush to the end, but a time limit really cuts down how long I can spend with the text.

We began with another scavenger hunt activity. I was really surprised by the sheer number of musicians in the AP class. The majority of the class played an instrument, and almost all of them were saxophone players. I was also very surprised to hear how many students talked about the Harry Potter books when discussing favorite authors and books you grew up with. I came of age too late for Harry Potter (apparently) and actually didn't read the books until my Junior year of college. The first book came out in 1997, so I guess these current students were right in the thick of their publishing. I wonder if they will remain popular in years to come, or if they'll fade out of sight. Something to ponder.

Lunch: I have my third block open each day. Mrs. N and I will be using this time to discuss teaching, answering questions, etc. This is also lunch block, and so I sat down for my soon to be customary meal of ramen. Today however was something of a special day. Today marked the first day that gay Vermonters could get married. And at lunch, I got to participate in a (very) small wedding ceremony! I was so glad I could be a part, however small a part I was, and am so happy it went off went. The couple had a much larger civil union ceremony previously, but wanted to get married now that they could. I am not a big fan of weddings in general, and my thought is the bigger the ceremony, the less and less it actually is about the two people marrying one another and the more the ceremony itself takes center stage.

While not a fan of the institution of marriage itself, I am still deeply invested in people having the right to be married. So long as we have marriage intertwined in government, then it should be provided to everyone regardless of race, creed or orientation.

Freshmen English: Woo! Last class of the day! This one was definitely the most lively, and by lively I mean of course that they are freshmen, on their first day of full classes at the end of the day. Wired and loud would be ways of putting it mildly. Despite that, I really can't wait to work with them. One of my goals during the course of this internship is to develop improvisation skills.

Now let me explain how that relates to teaching and this class. All too often, lesson plans are constructed to take you from Point A to Point B. This of course never happens. Student interest is akin to holding onto a non-Newtonian fluid (look it up!) and once you lose it, it's gone. If a lesson plan bombs, as a teacher you need to find a way to save the class. This often means scrapping whatever you were planning and going from something that has caught student interest (or that you hope will) and going from there. You can't very well say "Well, that didn't work. Sorry guys. Do some quiet reading while I write up a new plan."

I find all too often I come up with a plan, not just in education but in my broader life, and follow it to the end. This sometimes entails banging my head against a wall until I eventually smash through it, but that just isn't productive. So with that in mind, I am going to try to be more fluid in my planning and find what works.

Now with a class full of freshmen, particularly some who are natural class-clowns and who are already trying to show off and make trouble. If I am going to help them learn and really feel like they're getting something from the class, then I have to find a way to hook them and keep their attention. This is a challenge, but it is one I am eager for. It helps that, as I mentioned, I'll be teaching The Odyssey and I think the book is absolutely fascinating. So I'm hoping my own enthusiasm will prove infectious. Can't hurt, at any rate.

Department Meeting: At the end of the day, we had a Department Meeting. I obviously won't be repeating the vast majority of things mentioned, but one thing that was brought up looked absolutely fascinating. There's going to be a conference held in Conchord, Massachusetts on learning and media influence on brain activity. I may try and tag along if anyone is going (and see if I can get the school's rate while I'm at it) if I can.

After School: This has little educational value, but I got my autumnal hair cut. I make a point of getting one hair cut per season. Having gotten my summer cut in May, it was starting to curl around my ears and on the back of my neck and so I felt the time was appropriate for a trim. I now have inch long hair again, and am happy for it to be so manageable.

I also think at this point I have enough of a log of back entries that it's time to begin sharing this blog with my co-workers, friends, family and other various and sundry people in my life who might like to read my thoughts on education.