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!