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.