Mississippi Teacher Corps

My MTC experience

2008-04-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

“I laughed, I cried, I lost 15 pounds” –Steven Colbert

How should I sum up my two years down in the Delta? I guess I’ll start with the beginning. I came down here just a few days after I graduated from college. I wanted to fight for social justice and give underserved children a chance for the future. I wanted to become a good teacher. I wanted to become a stronger, braver, more resilient person. At the end of May, I’ll leave my school for good. I’m worn out and tired of not getting the respect I want. But have I met the goals that originally drove me to come down here? Yes.

When I relive my first week of teaching in my memory, I literally get a knot in my stomach. I had only a few days to move down here before school started, and when the former owners of my house did not move out by the agreed-upon date, I was left with no home to move into for the first week of school. A second-year MTC teacher in town was kind enough to take me in, give me sleeping space, and take care of me during that time. Even so, not having my own living space during that very stressful week messed me up, and every time I needed something, I had to think about whether it was at my friend’s house, in storage at my landlord’s house, in the trunk of my car, or in my classroom. After the first week of school, I flew out of town for the weekend to see a friend who was living out of the country and only back in the US for a brief period of time, which meant that I was sleep-deprived and didn’t get to recuperate from the week. Before the kids showed up, we had a few teacher work days. Let’s say that I received less than a warm welcome from most of my new co-workers. I will always have a special place in my heart for my janitors, who were two of the very few people that were friendly to me from the beginning. During our first teacher work day, I went to lunch with many of the other teachers. As soon as I’d picked up my food, the teacher sitting next to me started grilling me on my discipline policy and asked what I planned to use as punishments. As I went through my list (warnings, writing assignments, phone calls, detentions, office referrals, etc.), she kept barking at me, “What else?” and then proceeded to lecture me on how the kids were “monsters” who wouldn’t do anything I told them to do unless I paddled them very hard. Other teachers chimed in their agreement, and after a meeting in the library, another teacher pulled me aside to give me more or less the same speech. When the principal started talking about corporal punishment, and I asked whether corporal punishment at the school was limited to paddling or included things like push-ups, the entire staff started laughing at me, and people I hadn’t even met spent the next few days teasing me and asking if I’d made any kids do push-ups. That day, I also received “helpful” advice from many of the teachers: the new seventh grade class was the worst class EVER to come through the school district. I went home that night and was so anxious I couldn’t sleep at all. For the first week and a half of school, I woke up with so much dread that I couldn’t even eat breakfast, meaning that I was weak and shaking from the time the kids showed up until I calmed down enough to have a snack. The more I think about those days, the more amazed I am that I survived all that. I would not go through those first days again for any amount of money.

During my first few months of school, I hadn’t even realized that we had overhead projectors, and I would furiously scribble notes on the board, then erase them, every single period! I spent a good part of my first year just learning about basic things to do and not do at school.

I am unspeakably glad that I’ll be done this stint in a month and a half. My first year, I gave out consequences like no other and had a horrible time with classroom management. My second year, I gave fewer consequences and spent more time talking to the kids about their behavior. It made things better, but I still don’t feel like I’m taken seriously as an authority figure. I’m sick of being disrespected and ignored, and I’m sick of living in a crazy place where a parent’s worth is measured by whether or not they buy their children new clothes, not by the way their children treat others. At least once a week, something happens at school that makes me come home angry. It’s not healthy for me to spend so much of my time being angry, and when I’m not angry about a specific incident, I’m angry about the state of my school in general. I’m sick of the crazy behavior, in kids and adults, that I see going on at school every day, and I feel that my talents would be better used somewhere else. As my guidance counselor said to me today, “You are extremely intelligent, and the kids here don’t appreciate that. Kids somewhere else will.”

That being said, I’m glad I did this. I spent so much of the past two years just trying to get kids in order that it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I realized how much I enjoy teaching. This realization came when our school went on a crazy test-prep schedule that involves putting 40+ kids in a classroom with one teacher who is actually teaching, and a second teacher who is just a classroom manager. With a 300 pound black male teacher in my room, I could finally teach instead of worrying that if I turn my head for two seconds, someone would throw something (not an exaggeration). It’s been great. It made me realize that if I go to a school where the kids are reasonably behaved because they’ve been taught manners, I’ll really enjoy my job.

During TEAM, I remember one of the veteran teachers telling me that I’m one of the 10% or so of teachers that are natural born teachers. Even so, I had a lot to learn about teaching. I am now fully confident in my abilities to come up with and teach an interesting and coherent lesson, and I feel that I’ve grown into a very good teacher during my time here. Last week, I had two student teachers observe me, and they both commented on how refreshing it was to meet someone with so much passion and energy, and that they could tell I liked teaching just by watching me teach. I’m in my element teaching.

Perhaps the most important thing that this experience has done for me is to give me confidence in myself. After two years, I still don’t stand where I want to in my classroom, and I’ve been knocked around so much that sometimes I wonder how I convinced myself to stay here at all. During the past two years, I have, at times, become very sick, felt useless, become depressed, felt alone, felt homesick, and just wanted to leave this crazy place behind. But, I can say something that many of the local teachers at my school who quit mid-year can’t: I stuck it out and survived. Shortly before I came here, I met a girl at my college who was from southern Mississippi, and when I told her that I was thinking of teaching in the Delta, she looked at me like I’d said I was thinking of jumping in a tiger cage at the zoo. Being too unfamiliar with the south to understand the difference between the Coast and the Delta, I responded, “But you’re FROM Mississippi.” She corrected me, “I’m from southern Mississippi. It’s different there. The Delta is crazy. If you can survive teaching there, you can do anything!” After my two years, I think she was right to look at me like I was crazy when I said I was coming here to teach. But when I look back on all the struggles I’ve been through and overcome, sometimes without anyone to support me through the tough times, I feel proud of myself. I feel that this experience has opened up a lot more opportunities for my future, because after surviving these two years, I’m not afraid or intimidated to do big things any more. I survived the Delta. Whatever other things I do in life will be easy after this.

spring in the delta

2008-03-27T04:12:00.001-07:00

Spring is the one season in the delta that I like compared to up north. Here’s a quick rundown of the other seasons. Summer: hot and humid to the point where I sometimes feel like I’m suffocating when I walk outside. No good for outdoor sports or most other kinds of hanging out outside. Fall: not as bad as summer, but the leaves aren’t all that pretty. Temperatures are bearable, but those awful fire ants prevent me from enjoying being outside a lot of the time. Winter: horrible. Everything is brown and dead, and it is cold enough to run my heating bill very high and keep my house from feeling comfortable and to make me feel uncomfortable, but not cold enough for snow. The cold is a damp, biting cold, not a dry cold. The worst part about the cold is that temperatures rapidly fluctuate between the 30’s and 60’s, meaning that I never really get adjusted to the cold.

I love spring down here, though. I noticed the first signs of it when I returned from break. First, the daffodils and Japanese magnolias come out, adding a little bit of color to the drab landscape. Then, the cherry blossoms, dogwoods, and more ground flowers come into bloom. Bright yellowish green leaves start appearing on the trees. Thanks to daylight savings time, it no longer gets dark shortly after I come home, making me feel like I have more time to relax after a day of school. I can smell springtime, too: the scent of the different flowers mixes together to give the air an overall sweetness, and I start to smell freshly cut grass from the neighbor’s yards.

Soon, the bayou trees will have leaves again and the bayou will look like a proper swamp. The white magnolias will start to bloom, brightening up the landscape with large white flowers. Then, the blackberries will ripen, meaning that I can wander the edges of the catfish ponds and cotton fields picking them and have enough to make a pie, or just have a bowl of big fresh blackberries to eat.

At night, I hear the sounds of spring: the birds continue singing throughout the night, and the peepers from the ponds sing their songs. Crickets chirp. But a few days ago, I heard the sound that, to me, heralds the official arrival of spring: the low, buzzing, almost mechanical song of the locusts.

assigned blog: spring break

2008-03-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

One of our assigned blog topics was to write about what we are doing for spring break. Well, spring break has already passed, as has the four day mini break we had for Easter, so I’ll talk about what I did for both of those breaks, since they were two of the best breaks I’ve had since I’ve been down here (especially compared to Christmas break, when I’d just got over being sick for a month with the flu, then had to have my wisdom teeth out and a birth mark removed…)

On the first day of spring break, I drove half an hour to a bookstore with a stack of nine weeks tests and six crates of notebooks. I sat in the bookstore for hours and hours and graded every test, scaled each one, and put them in Gradekeeper. Then, I went home and graded all the notebooks. It was a very unpleasant day. The grading was tedious and boring, and I grew increasingly disgusted with the lack of progress my students had made. Why did I do this to myself the first day of break? Because that meant I was scott-free the rest of break to do whatever the heck I wanted. Over Christmas break, I took my nine weeks exams home with me with the full intention of grading them, but kept putting it off, and every time I thought about them, I started to get anxious and couldn’t make myself sit down and grade them, and it got worse and worse until the night before I flew back to Mississippi, when I mentioned to my mom that I was stressed out about my grading, and she said, “I wish you’d told me earlier. We could have sat down and graded the tests together really quickly.” So, I had to fly back to Mississippi and do lots of grading. It made me extremely unhappy. I didn’t want a repeat of this experience over spring break.

Following the day of unpleasantness, I drove up to Virginia with a friend from MTC and backpacked in Shenandoah National Park for three nights. I loved this vacation. The drive to the park through rolling hills and pastures was a welcome change from the flatness of the Delta, as was meeting a lot of very helpful and hard-working people along the way. The park itself was beautiful; it was early enough in the season that there were hardly any other visitors. We saw bubbling streams, waterfalls, rocky ridges, and more. We cleaned off in freezing cold rivers after accumulating a few days of sweat. I bonded with my hiking buddy, and teased the poor guy for a good portion of the trip. Being in the woods and being physically active for almost the whole day did wonders for me, physically and mentally. I was amazed how strong and refreshed I felt when I returned from break. I can’t wait until the next time I have a few days off and can escape to the woods again (which will probably not be til the summer… but hey, that’s only 8 weeks away!)

After spring break, I had four days of school (thanks to practice state testing and having to hold homeroom for 4-5 hours, they were not four of my better days) and then Easter break. For Easter break, my mom flew down to visit, and we drove to the Gulf Coast, where neither of us had ever been. We stayed in Ocean Springs and also went to Biloxi and Gulfport. As I told my mom, had I gone to the coast last year, I don’t think I would have come back to my school this year. I would have tried to land a job at Ocean Springs or another school in the area and taken off for the coast (maybe)! There are certain things, like swamps, Spanish moss, and forests, that I’d associated with the deep South and been disappointed not to find in the Delta. The coast had all these things! It also had palm trees, palm fronds, and bright flowers surrounding everything, and beaches! The brackish swamps were my favorite site, apart from the big old live oaks; I saw alligators for the first time in my life. I could still see evidence of the hurricane; some destroyed buildings have not yet been cleaned up, and plenty of construction is still under way, but it was still beautiful. I’m not a casino person and stayed away from that scene, but I was amazed by everything else on the coast. We took a ferry out to Ship Island one afternoon. While I was on the beach at Ship Island, a pod of dolphins came so close to the shore that I could have gone out to swim with them if I’d wanted to (and the water was almost warm enough)! I saw jellyfish, pelicans, and all sorts of other cool marine life. We went to a Japanese steakhouse where the chef does a little acrobatic show as he prepares the food. I discovered my favorite blues joint/barbeque place to date: a place in Ocean Springs called The Shed. It has an outdoor stage where musicians perform. Strings of little lights radiate from the stage and shine down on the outdoor tables. There are more tables inside, along with all kinds of grafitti, signatures, signs, stickers, and all kinds of other things to look at; I could spend a whole week wandering around that place just reading everything. Oh, and did I mention it’s next to a big old brackish swamp? Sorry to offend the delta loyalists reading this, but wow, I’ve been missing out on the best part of this state.

Now playing: Soulja Boy- Report Card

On how my principal made me so angry I took last Friday off

2008-02-19T18:08:00.000-08:00

A week and a half ago, I was in a meeting with the rest of the science teachers at my school during our shared planning period. The principal was supposed to come to the meeting, too, but had not shown up. We had a lot to cover in the meeting, and I still had a few progress reports to fill out for students coming to me in the afternoon, so I was trying to keep things moving. Then, my assistant principal showed up and said that the principal had sent for me and the other 7^th grade science teacher.

We started walking toward her office, and I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It didn’t seem like she would call just two of us out of the room unless she had something bad to say, and it’s an acknowledged fact at my school that the principal has it in for the other 7^th grade science teacher.

We arrived at the principal’s office and found that the new career discovery teacher (as in this guy has been working at the school for all of one month) had also been called to this meeting. The principal ushered us into her office, closed the door, and handed all three of us a piece of paper. It was a written reprimand for- get this- making our kids write down notes. I kid you not.

The principal then proceeded to chew us out by saying that if we are just making our kids copy down notes from the overhead or powerpoint, it takes too long and wastes class time, and they are not actively engaged in learning. We pointed out that when we make our students take notes, we facilitate a class discussion about the notes, ask them questions as they are doing the notes, and have them solve problems afterward that make them use the notes (all things that our principal was implying we weren’t doing). She ignored this and continued to tell us that from now on, we need to hand out printed copies of the notes whenever we use the overhead or powerpoint. Hmm, so my students are not engaged in learning when I have them writing and holding a discussion, but they will be when I pass them a piece of paper that half of them won’t even bother to read, and three quarters of them will have lost by class the next day? Not to mention that I have a very good spiral notebook-keeping system to help my kids with organization, and this throws my whole system, the system that I took a good part of the first nine weeks to establish with my students, to pieces.

Among other insulting things the principal said, she told us that if all we were doing for our instruction was making kids copy notes (do any of us do that for the whole class period? No.), she could just have a janitor stand in the door and watch the kids. That gave me half a mind to walk out of her office and tell her that if she thinks the janitor can do my job, that’s who she’ll have to get to do my job for the rest of the year. I kept my mouth shut during this whole meeting because I know not to talk when I am that angry. She also told us that we were having classroom management problems because we make our students take notes. Huh? She said that too many kids are going to in-school detention from our classes. The funny thing is that the day after she told us that, there were so many kids in ISD that they had to split them into two classrooms, and how many of those kids were there because of me? One. The kid who isn’t even my student but walked up to me in the hall and shined a laser pointer in my eye. Clearly, my use of the overhead projector is the problem. She said that she has a problem with how many students are missing math, language arts, and reading because they get ISD from us, and that it isn’t fair to make them miss those classes. We aren’t MCT subjects, she said, so she could just throw away all of our referrals, but she’s not that kind of person. Gee, not throwing away my referrals makes you a saint, why did I never appreciate that before? Oh, and it was also really helpful to my classroom management when you told the students at the beginning of the year that if they messed up in math, language arts, or reading and got sent to the office, you would give them the maximum punishment. So, the kids heard that it’s OK to goof off in science because it’s not an MCT subject. Do you want to make this just about the test? Then I’ll point out that my students need to pass Biology I to graduate from high school, and they won’t be able to do that without my class.

Of all the gripes I had about this whole “meeting,” here’s my biggest one: the principal never mentioned to us that she had any issue with us making our students take notes! In fact, she has observed my class multiple times while students were taking notes and never said anything bad about it; she always told me that she really likes the way I do my instruction. She reads my detailed (by which I mean 2.5 pages for every DAY) lesson plans that I need to turn in each week, and she’s never made any negative comment about the students taking down notes. Here’s the kicker: I remember that during my first week at this school, my principal gave all the teachers a memo about use of the copier that told us we should each monitor and limit our use of the copier because our students need to learn important skills like (drumroll please) taking notes. Given all these events, call me crazy, but maybe my principal should have discussed the note-taking issue in a more open way before she called us into her office, wrote us up, and insulted us. These gripes (sarcastic comments omitted) are all going into a letter that I’m giving my superintendent on my last day of school in 12 weeks.

Now playing: The Hold Steady- South Town Girls

Favorite Students

2008-01-04T16:10:00.000-08:00

We were prompted to describe one of our favorite students. I thought about this topic for a while and decided to write about three of my favorite students. Here are the Breakfast Club-style descriptions of these three boys: the smart quiet kid who most teachers probably like, the boy who looks like he's about 8 years old and is severely lacking in some basic academic skills, and the juvenile delinquent "three-peater." The second two probably sound like weird choices, and it probably seems weirder that I'm grouping these kids together. As it happens, I have all of them in my 5th period class, and unlikely as it seems, they always choose to work together on any group assignments. I chose to write about all three of them because what I like best about them is how they help each other.

I'll start by describing the first one: the smart, quiet kid. He has the highest average in my class, and is the male student I took to the Ole Miss game (see previous blog). This kid never fails to amaze me. Every single time I give a test, he's the only one who makes a perfect score (others come close, but he's always just that little bit ahead). He's very shy, but always pleasant and cooperative. I think what surprised me most about this kid was when I took him to the Ole Miss game and he started telling me about his grades in other classes. He had a few A's, a few B's, and a C (in math! How did that happen?) After spending the day with him and the two other students I took to Ole Miss, I was very glad I'd decided to take him, because I realized that while the two girls had been recognized as excellent students by their teachers and families, I might have been the first teacher to tell this kid how smart he really is. He strikes me as extremely mature in that he has concerns for other people in a way that most of his classmates are not yet able to. I'll always remember how he said he felt sorry for the other kids in my class who didn't get to go to the football game with us, and how he asked me if I could take the kids with 100's for the second nine weeks to another game, so that he and the two girls could go again, but this time, even more kids would get to go because they would make 100's.

Next: the kid who is very, very behind in school. This kid is very easy to like. For one thing, he's adorable: he looks like he's 8 years old and talks in a very soft voice that makes him sound young. He's the only kid that actually whispered instead of talking in a normal (or quiet) voice when we went to the library. He's earnest, sweet, and also quite shy. In a lot of ways, he just seems like a little child to me. This view of him is spurred by the fact that the first time he told me he needed help with a long division problem, I realized he couldn't do single-digit subtraction and ended up asking him to hold up his fingers and use them to count as a way to do subtraction. At this point, you're probably wondering why this kid is one of my favorite students (after all, a likable person and a favorite student are not the same thing). The reason he's one of my favorite students is because he's surprised me with how much progress he's made. He barely passed the first nine weeks of my class (he made a 74, which was the highest grade on his report card) despite working hard the whole time and even coming after school to check on a missing assignment; he was just so behind that I couldn't see much hope for him and just kept wondering how he even made it to 7th grade. I spent as much time working with him one on one during class as I could, but worried that I was coming along too late in his academic life to help. The first student that I mentioned, just out of the goodness of his heart, took to helping this kid with his work, especially anything involving math. The last time I averaged grades, he had around a 90 in my class. His hard work finally started paying off, and I don't know how to explain it, but one day, things just started clicking for him. A few months ago, this kid told me that 10-8 = 7, and now he can do long division. Better yet, his self-confidence has increased. When I ask for volunteers to read or answer a question, his hand is often the first one up.

And, my least likely favorite student: the three-peater. I taught this kid last year, too, and if I'd made a list of my 10 least favorite students last year, he probably would have been on it. Last year, he missed three months straight of school, around which he had other extended absences. After this went on for a long time, the attendance officer finally caught up with him, and he was locked away in the juvenile detention center for a while. After he got out of the detention center, I spent my days hoping he'd just skip school so that I wouldn't have to deal with him throwing things, hitting kids, sleeping in class (that was on a good day), and doing everything except what I wanted him to do. I don't know how many times I sent him to the office. When I got my rosters at the beginning of this year, I found his name on my list and groaned. I wondered why they didn't switch him over to the other seventh grade hall, and the other seventh grade science teacher (who had him two years ago) said that he was like "salt in a wound." Despite all my negative feelings toward this kid last year, I'd recognized that he was smart. The first few weeks of this year, he goofed around and didn't seem like he was going to do much better. I'm not sure when he started acting better, although I do remember him staying after school one day to help me put away the classroom microscopes. I also remember another day when he came to school late, with no backpack, and put his head down on a desk once he entered my classroom. When I came over to see what was up, he told me he had nothing to write with, and I gave him a pencil. He worked hard for the rest of class. At any rate, somewhere near the beginning of this year, he became one of my favorite students. These days, he comes to school every day and often stays after. He works hard on all the assignments I give him in class, and even gets together with his study buddies (the two students I mentioned above) before tests to study outside of school. I told him that if he kept working this hard, I'd consider him for my Star Student award. He earned it, and his mother is proud of him. I'll never forget how happy he looked the first time I told him he was averaging an "A" in my class. But what really made me happy was the day he came to me after class and asked what he would need to do to join the science club. He's on the team now, and never fails to tell me every Tuesday that he's staying after for the science club. Then, he asked me if I had a book (not the textbook) that he could take home and read on his own to learn more about science. That night, I went home, found my "Pocket Science Facts" book, and gave it to him the next day. That book was a gift to me, and I happen to really like it. I trust him to take care of it, though.

Each time I give a major test, I pass out study questions the day before that students spend the class period answering. They may use their notes, books, me, and each other to find the answers. My favorite part about these review days is watching these three boys work in a group together. If one of them was absent on a particular day, the other two will make sure he gets the notes that he missed. While I need to practically sit on some of my students to make sure that they are talking about their study questions instead of whatever else is going on in their lives, these three will sit together and explain the material to each other and actually seem happy doing it! Once they've answered their study questions, I can hear them quizzing each other to commit the hard facts to memory. If only all my students treated each other this well.

Now playing: Kraftwerk- We are the Robots
Note: Anyone who personally knows me and wants to see a picture of these 3 kids doing the lab together, e-mail me. In the interests of anonymity, I can't post it on my blog.

The stupidest comment I've heard in my life

2007-12-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

This afternoon, I was walking down the street and passed three construction workers. One of them said hi to me, and I said hi back to him. The second one looked at me for a few seconds, then smiled and said, "Pretty Mexican." "Indian. I'm half Indian," I corrected. The third guy chuckled and said, "You Indian, me cowboy!"
I may love some of my students dearly, but there is no way in hell I am staying in Mississippi after this school year ends. I believe this anecdote sums up why I feel this way. Six more months and I can go back to New England.

Taking my students to the Ole Miss football game

2007-11-09T13:28:00.001-08:00

Last Saturday, I took 3 of my students to the Ole Miss football game. For those unfamiliar with this event, each fall, the MTC program director gives tickets to one Ole Miss home game to second-years wishing to take their students. Anyway, I had a hard time deciding which 3 students to take, so I took the 3 who earned 100’s for the first nine weeks in my class. This seemed like a fair way to do things, and it just so happens that I really like those 3 kids anyway. So, at 9:30 on Saturday morning, I met Tony, Jasmine, and Dominique (not their real names) in front of the school and ushered them into my car for the drive up to Oxford.

I felt awkward and tense at first. I’d failed to realize that Jasmine and Dominique were already good friends, but neither of them knew Tony very well. Tony is an extremely nice kid, but is shy and a little awkward. To make matters worse, he doesn’t always speak clearly, so I often have to ask him to repeat himself. Jasmine and Dominique chatted in the back seat of my car while Tony sat up front and toyed with his cell phone. I started to feel a little better when I struck up a conversation with Tony about how his father lives in Memphis, and he misses him.

When we first got to Oxford, I asked my students if they wanted to see the square. “The square? Huh? What’s that?” was the response I received. “OK, you’re about to find out,” I said. Once I parked in the square, we stopped at Square Books. At first, when I asked the students if they wanted ice cream or coffee, they were too shy to order anything, but after a few minutes, they caved in and ordered. It didn’t occur to me that some 12 year olds don’t know how caffeine affects them, and Jasmine ended up becoming hyper for much of the day after drinking a cup of coffee. But, as I told her, that was fine by me as long as she didn’t act that way during class (which she of course never does). We took a walk around the square, stopping along the way at a few stores, and I felt a little bad as Tony sheepishly stood in the doorway of the dress store that the two girls had rushed into. Soon, all three of them were talking about how the Square was the best place they’d been, and how they would ask their families to take them back there.

After a walk around the Square, I spent a very long time finding parking, then took a walk around campus (or at least a small part of it) with the kids. I didn’t want to linger long in the Grove; I felt strange around all the Southern aristocrats and made-up girls in stiletto heels and dresses. The students enjoyed the partial tour I gave them of campus and commented that it looked like a really nice school, but were tired after the walk from my car to campus, so we headed to the stadium pretty quickly.

On the way to the stadium, and once in our seats, I ran into a number of other MTC’ers with their students. I had never fully explained MTC to my students and had just told them that my professor for my master’s program had provided the tickets, so they were surprised at being introduced to all these other teachers. “What is this, Take your Students to the Game Day or something?” Jasmine asked. We found our seats, and the girls settled in pretty quickly, grinning and dancing with the introduction music. I was still worried that Tony felt out of place, especially since he was staying quiet, and about 20 minutes into the game, when I took him to get snacks, I asked if he was enjoying the game. “Yes. I’m glad I made 100 in your class,” he said. I was touched.

I felt just as wide-eyed as the kids did at the game. I’d never been to a Division 1 football game before, and this world of marching bands in military formations, cheerleaders, and dance teams was all new to me. I sat outside enjoying the warmth and sometimes chatting with my students, but feeling comfortable enough to sit and watch without the pressure to speak. Tony gradually felt more comfortable with the girls and was joking and chatting with them.

From a few days before the game, a big point of discussion had been where we would go to dinner. I’d told my students that I would let them pick a place and would tell them about some of the places in Oxford, and they were very excited. On the drive down, I’d tried pitching Two Stick because I wanted them to have the chance to try sushi, but none of them seemed to like this idea very much, and Jasmine said she didn’t like a lot of foods. Multiple times during the day, Jasmine had asked if there was a Pizza Hut, and also said she’d love to go to Olive Garden if Oxford had one because it was her favorite restaurant. Though I’d had hopes of convincing my students to eat at one of Oxford’s more exotic locales, in the end I suggested Old Venice, which I told them was a really good pizza place, and the girls literally started clapping. They also kept asking if we could see the Square again after the game. I went to Old Venice with many of the other MTC’ers and their students, and it was a great time. The whole drive home, my students gushed about how it was the best pizza in the world. Jasmine said that she liked Oxford so much that she wanted to stay “til really late!” After dinner, we visited the new chocolate place on the Square, took a brief walk around, and then headed home. On the drive home, the girls were giddy with excitement from the whole day, and though Tony was more subdued, I could tell he was really happy, too. He asked me if I could take them to the game again if they all made 100’s the next nine weeks, and bring even more people because even more people would make 100’s. He said that he felt sorry for the kids who didn’t get to go to Oxford with us. I let the kids take turns playing DJ with my iPod, and that happily entertained them the whole way home. When I dropped the kids off at their houses, they all hugged one another good-bye, and Jasmine and Dominique announced, “We made a new friend today! Tony is our friend!” What a great thing for a shy boy, and I hadn’t even planned it.

I loved taking my kids to the game, and I could tell that they all had a great time. The whole day made me think about how much I will miss these kids when I leave my school. It also made me realize how young they are. These three kids act serious and studious in class every day and are the kind of stellar students that never give teachers any grief, but outside of school, they laughed, joked around, acted slap-happy, and generally had a good time just being kids. I guess that really shouldn’t have surprised me, though. I was exactly the same way when I was in middle school.

Now playing: Soulja Boy- Crank Dat

required blog: what would I change about Teacher Corps?

2007-10-21T15:05:00.001-07:00

We were prompted to respond to the question, "If you could change one thing about Teacher Corps, what would you change?" My answer has nothing to do with the mission of Teacher Corps, or even per se the work that the corps members are doing. It has to do simply with making us feel more comfortable during our time here. My suggestion: place corps members in a smaller geographic area, send us to fewer schools, and cluster more of us at the same schools.

Let me explain my rationale. The nature of this program, and any other similar program that sends rookies to high-poverty, critical needs schools, is extremely taxing and difficult, and I don’t think that there is anything about that that MTC could or should try to change. I also think that teaching in the Delta is a lot harder than teaching in, say, an inner city school in New York City because of the cultural adjustment we need to make to living in the Delta. I made the decision to join MTC in part because I wanted to challenge myself by living in a completely different culture, but after over a year here, I still find myself wishing that I had an easier way to temporarily distance myself from it all at the end of the day.

A few months ago, I remember talking to another corps member about how the demographic profile of MTC participants has changed over the past few years. The program used to draw older participants, many of whom had held previous jobs or already had experience teaching, and many of whom were from the region. Now, MTC is mostly composed of people like me: straight out of college, never been to Mississippi, from another part of the country, never been a teacher. Going straight from the college setting and life to my life down here was a rough shock, and I often find comfort in talking to other corps members about our feelings about being here.

Last year, there was one other corps member placed at my school, and I was very glad to have someone else working with me from the program. However, there were only two of us, and I think I would have felt much more comfortable being an outsider at my school if there had been more of us. I often envied my friends who were placed in a high school half an hour from mine where a dozen of the teachers were current or former MTC or TFA members. Often, when a teacher or an administrator in my school did something that seemed completely illogical to me, and everyone else around me seemed fine with it, I wanted to turn to someone else from MTC and say, “Does that seem like a good idea to you? I’m not going crazy, am I?” This year, I am the only corps member at my school, and there is a first-year at another school in the district. I really enjoy spending time after school hanging out with this teacher and, if it’s been a bad day in the schools, having someone else to talk to about how crazy our district is. It’s really comforting to have someone else going through the same experiences, and I wish there were someone else at my school so that I could have more shared experiences.

Another reason that I wish we were clustered more is that as anyone who’s moved here from somewhere else will tell you, the Delta is a lonely place. I’ve become better about becoming a part of my community, and I enjoy attending football games and any other events where I run into students and their families outside of school, but at the end of the day, I’ll never be quite like the locals here, and I sometimes want to just spend some of my free time with people that I have more in common with. I’d feel more able to do this if there were a bunch of MTC people in my district rather than just me and one other teacher.

Of course, all of my ideas here are about a way to make the adjustment to the Delta easier for corps members. I have no idea what the implications of clustering teachers more closely would be for the program, but speaking just from my own feelings, I’d like to feel less isolated.

Now Playing- Back in Bluegrass- Money Talks

required blog: relaxing outside of school

2007-10-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to make any claims that I've figured out the best way to take care of myself outside of school, but I'm certainly trying. Here are my thoughts:

-Take care of yourself physically. This is the most important thing you can do for yourself and for your students. My mood is significantly better at school when I've eaten and slept properly. Make sure you get enough sleep at night, even if it means putting off grading of papers or something. Eat well. If you don't feel like cooking every day, make a big batch of something tasty and healthy over the weekend that you can save in the fridge for the days you come home and don't have the energy to do anything more elaborate for a meal than pop some food in the microwave. Also, do whatever type of physical activity helps you unwind. I'll often go running as soon as I get home from a long day at school and can't stand to think about doing school work. It clears my head.

-When you finish doing school work for the night, devote at least a little time winding down by doing something low-energy that you enjoy. Read a book, watch videos, eat ice cream, whatever is fun and relaxing for you. It even helps you sleep better.

-Front-load your week. This is not a matter of choice for me; my school requires me to hand in detailed lesson plans for the whole week each Monday morning. Sometimes I wish I didn't have to do it, but taking an hour or two on a Sunday to figure out what I'm doing (not down to every last detail, but at least a general idea) each day of the week makes my evenings less stressful. It means that other than taking a few minutes on a weeknight to put together a powerpoint or make up some practice questions, I don't have to devote much time to lesson planning during the week. This leaves me with time to focus on other things, like calling parents, grading (at least in theory), and of course sleeping.

-Talk to people. Socializing helps me a lot when I'm under the weather. Do something simple like meeting up with people to make dinner. If you're not around other MTC people that you can hang out with, call your friends and family who are somewhere else. They'll love to hear from you, and they'll remind you how awesome you are for doing this job and will offer tons of sympathy if things aren't going well.

-Don't feel guilty about doing nice things for yourself. If you don't do nice things for yourself, you'll probably wind up going crazy.

Now playing: The Knack- My Sherona

Required blog: Is MTC making a difference?

2007-10-09T09:47:00.001-07:00

Is MTC making a difference? Yes. Do I think MTC will ever “fix” the problems of educational inequality, racism, and everything else that plagues the Delta? No.
The way I see it, a successful corps member exposes students to new opportunities. I think a huge part of the impact of our program lies just in bringing educated young people from all over the country to the Delta. Many of our students don’t have exposure to the way people live outside of the Delta, and have never met anyone like their MTC teachers. I think that just by being present at our schools, we give our students ideas about what kind of possibilities exist for someone who gets a higher education.
By no means do I think this is the only positive influence we have on our students. A good corps member is more creative and inspired than the majority of teachers our students have, and even though I’m sure all of us have endured students’ complaints that we “make them do too much work” and are “boring,” there are those moments when we realize that we’ve made our subject matter, or even the act of being in school, much more enjoyable for some of our students. As a science teacher, I hope to convince my students that science is interesting enough that they will continue to take it, and I think I’ve succeeded in at least a few cases. A few weeks ago, I ran into a former student of mine outside of school. She happened to be one of my favorite students, and we chatted for about 15 minutes. She told me that science is her favorite class in school now because I made it that way for her. This anecdote, in a nutshell, is why I think MTC is making a differenced.
Now, onto my less optimistic thoughts on what I think MTC can’t do. We’re all working hard to inspire our students and increase academic performance, and I’m always impressed by my classmates who take their students on cool field trips, start a new activity at their school, or boast an amazing increase in state test results. I’m not trying to belittle these accomplishments in any way, but I don’t think that a few amazing teachers at a school are enough to turn the school around. If it were, the schools where we’ve been sending corps members for years would be good schools by now. I think that for the whole school system to improve, competent administrators would have to come in and make major changes, including firing a lot of teachers. I could write a few pages on all the things I think need to be done to make our schools good schools, but my point is that I don’t think any of these changes lie in the power of MTC. I apologize for the pessimism, but from talking to people who’ve lived in the Delta for decades, and even from watching the changes that have happened in my own school district over the past year, I’ve concluded that things are getting worse in the Delta, and I don’t realistically think things will improve any time soon. So, to sum it up: MTC is making a difference in the lives of a small number of students (which is a major accomplishment) but is not going to fix the Delta’s problems on a big scale.

Now playing: Lazy Monday

Questions that I actually enjoy answering

2007-09-04T17:34:00.000-07:00

The other teachers on my hall say that the group of students we have this year is much better behaved than last year’s bunch, although not as smart. Incidentally, I’ll take that trade any day. I definitely agree that this year’s kids are better behaved. It’s harder for me to judge which group is smarter; the kids I have this year are performing better, but it’s hard for me to sort out how much of that has to do with the kids’ innate abilities and how much has to do with me improving as a teacher. I do suspect that the other teachers’ assessment is at least somewhat accurate; I’ve noticed that my two “smartest” classes this year are not head and shoulders above my other students the way that my two “smartest” classes were last year. Something that has impressed me about this year’s class, though, is their ability to ask intelligent questions. I don’t recall having as many good questioners last year. Here are some of my favorite ones that kids have asked:

-After I introduced cells by saying that all living things are made of cells, and everything in our body is made of cells, a student asked me if dreams are made of cells. I thought about it for a bit and then said that we don’t exactly have “dream cells,” but that dreams are produced by brain cells as they transfer information from short-term memories to long-term memories. Wow, I needed to resort to my knowledge from upper-level biology classes to answer that one.

-In my beginning of the year overview, when I was talking about what percent of our DNA we share with various living things, I was asked if it’s true we come from monkeys. I had to be a little careful about that one, but I explained how primates are the group of animals with DNA most similar to our own, so there is good evidence that we share a recent common ancestor. I was then asked what was the first animal ever “created” on earth. I was stumped; I knew what kinds of bacteria were the earliest to emerge, but had no idea what living thing emerged as the first bona-fide animal. I looked it up and reported the next day that it was a sea sponge. As the other teachers at the school told me (I’m probably the only one who doesn’t go to church), the bible says that fish were the first animal. If I ever landed in hot water over what I said (which I doubt I will), I guess one could construe a sea sponge as a fish…

-Also in the beginning of the year overview, I talked a little bit about the space science unit we will do. I was asked if I believe in aliens and UFO’s, and what I think of Area 51. I told my class that I think there’s a pretty good chance that there is life elsewhere in the universe, though it might just be tiny bacteria, and I don’t think that any alien life forms have ever come to visit the earth. And I think most of the “information” we have about Area 51 is being spewed out by conspiracy theorists who don’t actually have a clue what they are talking about.

-After I showed my class a picture of a white blood cell attacking a bacterium, I explained how white blood cells recognize and attack things that are not part of the body but somehow get inside. A student stayed after class and asked if you went to the hospital and had Type O blood, but received blood from someone with Type A, would your white blood cells attack something in the Type A blood. We haven’t even talked about blood types yet! This is probably the most intelligent connection I’ve seen a student make.

-After a lesson on cells, a student stayed after class and asked if you could ever have problems from having too many cells. I thought about that one for a minute, then realized, sure, this kid just described cancer!

Now Playing- Sittin’ on Top of the World

The First Week of School: last year vs. this year

2007-08-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

I was asked how the first week of school last year compared to the first week of school this year. In short, they were nothing alike. I'll elaborate a little bit.

As a whole, the first week of school this year was much, much easier than the first week last year. The one exception I’ll make to this general assessment is that I had much worse anxiety preceding the first week this year. Having taught at my school for a year, I’d experienced the full spectrum of horrible things that can happen to teachers who are struggling to keep their heads above water: the vandalism, the thrown objects, the cursing, the defiant students, the utter chaos that described most of my “class” periods by the end of the year. Before school started this year, I would think about last year and never think of the happy things that happened, but recall instead all the awful experiences I had, and would constantly dread having to go back to my school and maybe face all of that again. I wanted nothing more than to go back home and forget about my school, and if I weren’t so stubborn, I probably would have. Last year, I was (very) nervous before school started, but a lot more optimistic.

Last year, when school started, I barely knew which way was up. I think back to that week now and wonder how I survived it: due to a problem with the previous owners of the house I was renting, I was homeless for the first week of school. I spent my nights crashing on an air mattress in the corner of the room of a second-year MTC teacher who was kind enough to take me in until I could move into my house. I would show up at school completely scattered, not sure whether what I needed was in my car, in my classroom, at my landlord’s house, or at my friend’s house where I was staying in the meantime. In the evenings, I would go to my new house (which I still couldn’t move into) and work on painting the walls and cleaning out the two years of dust that had accumulated in the previous owners’ tenure. At school, it took me several months to figure out that I could take an overhead projector from the library to use in my classroom. I remember being so discombobulated one day that I couldn’t even find a pen or pencil to write with and had to borrow one from a student. I hadn’t had enough time in my classroom to clean out the random items left behind by previous teachers. Seriously, how did I survive that week? This year, I came in and had things organized. I had my classroom set up, had my materials in place, and knew exactly what I was doing every day for the first week. I even had it all together enough to do a crazy little demonstration that involved soaking a five dollar bill in acetone and setting it on fire. I think that part of why I’ve had an easier time with the students so far this year is because they could sense that I was more confident and organized, and knew where I was going.

As I’ve told several people already, I’m really glad that I came back to my school for a second year rather than switching districts, even though I had such a difficult time last year. Before the students even showed up, I noticed that the other teachers were much warmer and friendlier to me, unlike last year, when I felt that they were all looking at me and thinking, “Who the heck is this weird little girl from up North, and why does she have all these crazy ideas?” I automatically gained a lot of respect from teachers and students just by showing up for a second year when other teachers left, and I could tell the difference as soon as students showed up. While none of my students this year were at the school last year (aside from the ones who failed), they had some sense that I’d been around and questioned me a lot less. During the first week of school last year, I can’t count how many times I was asked, “Are you 16 years old? I thought you were a student!” ‘Have you taught before?” “Do you speak Spanish/Chinese/Japanese/insert other random language resulting from misperception of my race.” This year, I haven’t had any of that (aside from a few of the kids asking me if I speak Spanish, etc., but I’ve even had less of that). Instead, kids ask me how many years I’ve been at the school, and sometimes seem surprised that this is only my second year. I have had one student comment that I look 18 or 19 years old, but no one has asked my age. They ask me if the Indian student at my school is my daughter.

It’s been nice to return to school this year and see so many of my former students, all the little ones who shot up half a foot in height over the summer. I love walking down the halls and having these kids recognize and greet me, and a few have even given me hugs. Last year, no one knew who I was at the beginning of the school year, and I felt out of place.

It’s hard for me to remember at exactly what point last year I started feeling that my classroom management sucked, and I know that it didn’t set in until long after the first week of school, but I remember having some smaller problems that early on; I remember becoming frustrated with my third period class on the very first class period I had with them because they would not stop blurting out, and I ended up threatening detention for the next person who interrupted me, and having to actually back that up by giving out detentions to kids whose names I hadn’t even learned yet. I’m sure I was already sending kids to the office, too. This year, I’m proud to say, I haven’t had to deal with any of that. When students aren’t doing what they are supposed to, I call them on it, and for the most part, they listen and I don’t even need to follow through with a “hard” consequence. In two weeks, I’ve given two writing assignments, one detention (to a kid who is taking my class for the second time and had already failed to correct his behavior after I gave him a writing assignment; he’s been doing beautifully ever since he served detention that day), and no office referrals. My classroom is silent when I need it to be, and when we do labs and group work, the noise level is reasonable and the students are on task. Of course, the kids will challenge me more as the year goes on, but I remember having kids who wouldn’t shut up during the first quiz I gave last year (which was probably in the first week of school), and I’ve had no problems like that yet.

What made the difference in my classroom? I think there are a lot of factors. For one, I have a new classroom where I can seat students in rows, supervise them at all times, have an enforceable seating chart, pass out papers in a matter of seconds, and move around the room without dodging ill-placed tables. I automatically earned more respect by coming back to the school for a second year. After a year of teaching, I am more comfortable in my role, and am better at putting authority into my voice. I’ve realized that instead of telling a student that he has a warning and then moving on to consequences if he doesn’t start behaving, I need to have a conversation with a student to explain why his behavior was a problem and, most importantly, exactly what I want him to do instead. Maybe high school students don’t need that, but middle school kids do. Unlike last year, when many of the “procedures” I’d come up with before school started were bunk because of things like my school’s 2 minute passing time, my classroom’s resemblance to an obstacle course, and so forth, this year, I knew exactly what routines I wanted my students to follow. Last year, I had a lot of trial-and-error with things like passing out notebooks at the beginning of class and sharpening pencils, and the fact that I tried something, realized it failed, and then had to introduce a new way of doing something meant that I was constantly becoming frustrated when a new routine caused confusion. This year, we spent the first few days of school doing nothing but discussing and doing activities on procedures, rules, rewards, and consequences. It was boring as all heck, but it was worth it because now, my students come in, take their notebooks from the crate, and start the do-now with no prompting from me (except with a few of the rowdier ones who have to be “reminded” to start their work once they get to class). I never have more than one student up at a time, unless we are doing a lab. If school had been this tame last year, I wouldn’t have spent most of the year wanting to tear my hair out.

Now Playing: Joel Mabus- Gerald and Jerald Lee

Another blog for the first-years: how this past year has changed me

2007-07-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

I decided to join MTC for the same idealogical reasons that have led many others to join: a desire to help an underserved population, to work with young people and make a difference in some of their lives, to fight social and racial inequities, and to learn how to be a good teacher. In addition, I had a more selfish motive for joining: wanting to make myself a better and stronger person. I told myself that the experience would either break me down or make me much more tough and capable. I survived my first year, and even though I don't always feel positive about the impact I've had on my students when I look back on the year, I have definitely succeeded in improving myself. Perhaps that means that I will have a better positive influence on my students next year.
A year ago, when I started teaching summer school, I was afraid to tell students to stop talking, or to call parents, or to do just about any sort of discipline. I'm over that. More importantly, I am much more confident getting up in front of a class and teaching. I'm used to the idea that I am an authority figure, and I feel more capable.
My personal growth is not just limited to my role as a teacher. This weekend, I spent a lot of time with relatives, and several of them commented to my mom that they were impressed by what I was doing and were proud of how much I'd grown up. The effect that I have felt most strongly from teaching in Mississippi for a year is how much less scared I am to take on challenges. In college, I changed my mind time after time about whether or not I wanted to go to medical school and become a doctor. A year ago, I'd decided I didn't want to do it. This was largely because I was intimidated by the idea of medical school itself. This spring, I started thinking that after I finish Teacher Corps, maybe I do want to go to med school after all. I thought about all the things that scared me away from med school and being a doctor and realized that after the experiences I've had this past year, none of those things seemed all that scary to me any more, and I am much more confident in my ability to tackle difficult tasks. Having to study really hard no longer seems daunting to me; though it may mean working more hours than I do now, it would not be nearly as emotionally draining. A year ago, I was not capable of taking this perspective.
On a less serious note, this past year has made my wit sharper and my sense of humor drier. Over the course of the year, I found interactions like the following one happening more and more frequently in my classroom:
Jon: Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, can I look at my notes for this test?
Me: Yes. If you want to get a zero.
Jon: That was good, Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket. That was a good one.
I'm very serious when I'm teaching, but developing the ability to joke with my students subtly was a good way to let them know that even though I'm serious about work, I care about them as people and like to have at least a little fun. I think they appreciate it.

Now Playing: The Hold Steady- Stevie Nix

Post for the first-years: thoughts on documentation

2007-07-05T07:04:00.000-07:00

My philosophy on documentation contradicts a lot of what I heard before I started teaching, but after a year of attempting to meticulously document all behavior issues and becoming very burnt out in the process, not to mention falling behind on grading as a result of all the time I spent documenting things, here's my advice to the first-years: don't sweat the documentation. Allow me to elaborate.
In an ideal school, I would have time to document everything that went on that somehow related to my class. I would teach several classes a day, each of which contained no more than 20 students. This would leave me with ample time during the school day to plan lessons, grade, and contact parents. The students would be well-behaved for the most part, the school would be well-organized, and the administration would have consistent policies. My school is the opposite of what I just described, and so are the other schools where MTC places teachers. Something that took me the greater part of the school year to learn how to do was balancing priorities at school. I decided at the beginning of the school year that I would limit the amount of time I spent each day on schoolwork so that I had enough time to take care of myself: getting a good night's sleep, going running, cooking, spending time with friends, etc. Granted, I didn't often do as much of the aforementioned activities as I would have liked, but I always made sure to fit in at least some minimal amount of those activities to keep myself from going crazy. In the time I set aside to handling school matters, I faced a multitide of tasks that I had to prioritize: planning lessons, grading, contacting parents, preparing incentives, documentation, and so forth.
At the beginning of the year, I bought into the idea that I needed to document everything. I set up a "behavior log" in which I made a spreadsheet for each class period for each week with a column for each day of the week and a row for each student. At the end of the day, I transfered the notes I'd scribbled down on my clipboard during class (e.g. "Laddarius- talking, chewing gum, did not spit out til asked 3x) to the behavior log. I then highlighted each incident to indicate the disciplinary action I took: copying assignment, request for detention, office referral, etc. Here's some advice: don't do this. During the few weeks that I kept up with this log before abandoning it, I spent so much time working on my behavior log every day that I didn't have time to grade papers until several weeks after I collected them. By the time I finished with the log each night, I was so tired of thinking about discipline that I lost motivation to call parents. My lessons probably were less creative, too. I also realized that the behavior log was unneccesary. Every time I spoke to parents or an administrator about a student who was a behavior problem, it was enough to say, "Jasmine has been talking excessively during class for the past few weeks. I've spoken to her about the problem and assigned her detention on multiple occassions, and I moved her seat to the front of the room. Several times, she was so disruptive that I had to send her to the office." Never was the legitimacy of such statements questioned. Even when I had the behavior log, I usually ended up making statements like the one above, not, "On January 15, Jasmine called out during class 5 times. She served detention on January 23rd." Bottom line: if you are like me and you have a reasonably good memory for how frequently a particular student violates your rules, and what actions you took to correct the behavior, you don't need to kill yourself writing it all down.
If I sent a student to the office, the office was supposed to send back a copy of the referral that indicated the disciplinary action taken by the administration. I only got the carbon copy back sometimes, and they often came to me weeks after the infraction. Your school will probably have a system for sending copies of referrals back to you. My advice is to keep these copies, but don't spend time trying to organize them. Just keep them in a folder, and if a situation ever arises in which you need to prove something, you can go through the folder to find the referral you need. This is a simple form of documentation that doesn't require much time on your part. Originally, I had a folder for every student that included a page on which I listed any disciplinary issues with that student (date and very brief description of the incident, e.g. "talking during class and insulting other students"), and I kept office referrals in these folders. The folder system falls into my "too much work at the expense of instruction" category.
I kept a parent contact log at the beginning of the year, but sort of abandoned it while I was on my behavior log trip. I think that keeping up with the parent contact log would have been useful, at least for my own reference, and would not have been a time-consuming endeavor. Notes in this log were short, e.g. "9/2- talked to Derrick's mother about throwing objects," "9/2- called Charles's house, number disconnected, sent letter home about talking," etc.
In terms of non-behavioral documentation, I would recommend making a folder on your computer where you save all of your lesson plans, handouts, worksheets, tests, etc. Divide it into sub-folders by topic. Save it on a flashdrive for easy access. This takes basically no work and will end up saving you a lot of time, especially if you end up teaching the same class two years in a row. If ever called upon to show what you've been teaching your students, you should be set.
I would also recommend having each student make a folder in which they place their major tests and quizzes after you pass them back and review them in class (you can include smaller assignments, too, if you desire). In addition, have students keep a notebook in the classroom (I did binders last year but want to do spiral-bound notebooks instead; read one of my older blogs for a full discussion of this) that they may take home to study, but generally leave in the room. If a parent ever comes in with questions about grades, you will have a notebook on hand to demonstrate whether or not their child keeps up with class assignments in a daily basis, as well as tests to demonstrate whether their child is studying adequately.
I used GradeKeeper for my grades and would highly recommend it to anyone else. Print out progress reports from GradeKeeper at least once every nine weeks to distribute to students; your school will most likely require you to give out progress reports anyway, and this serves as excellent documentation that you informed each student not only of his/her current average, but of grades on each assignment, any missing assignments, etc. If you can successfully get your students to do some sort of silent reading assignment for two or so class periods, you can even have individual conferences during class time about grades and have each student sign that they met with you to discuss their grade and understand what they need to do to maintain or improve it. This is very useful to some students, and your administration will probably love you for it. I did it the third nine weeks and wished that I'd done it earlier in the year.
One more word on GradeKeeper: print out all grades to date at least once every few weeks, and keep those sheets handy in your classroom. Also have print-outs of the grade spreadsheets from the previous nine weeks on hand. You never know when a parent will show up to ask about their child's grades, or when someone from the office will interrupt you in the middle of class to ask for the current average, as well as the previous nine weeks' averages, for a student moving to another school district, and will demand this information immediately.

Now playing: Van Morrison- Brown Eyed Girl

required blog: evaluating my performance

2007-06-27T13:56:00.001-07:00

Overall, I feel positive about how much my one student is learning in summer school. The other teachers in my room have taught great lessons, and I think that I have also been able to teach our student a lot. After the first day of summer school, she said that she’d already learned more than she’d learned all year, and has told us the same thing on several other occasions.

I think that the learning goal in which my student was the most successful is understanding the relationship between DNA, RNA, and proteins. If I gave her a sequence of DNA, she very quickly learned how to convert it to an RNA sequence and then a protein sequence. I covered a lot of material in this lesson, and when the death of a laptop forced me to use another laptop to show her the PowerPoint presentation I’d carefully thought out and prepared for projection onto the whiteboard, she still managed to stay with me. One reason that she was able to learn this material quickly was that I made analogies to real life during the lesson that excited her and helped her understand the reasons for the DNA to RNA to proteins processes. I compared transcription and translation to passing a note to a friend that is written in code so that other people can’t read the message. Your friend has a key and can crack the code, but because you were very careful in making sure no one could crack the code, you need two keys to decipher it. This seemed to click. Another reason that this lesson worked well is that I had a lot of short activities in a fast-paced lesson, and I included short independent practice activities throughout the lesson (given more notes in between) rather than just leaving it all until the end of my lecture.

Today, I taught about elements and the Periodic Table. The main focus of my lesson was on how to read and use the Periodic Table, but I also wanted to teach the definition of elements. My student had the Periodic Table part down pat, but at the end of class, she was unable to tell me what an element was. One reason for this is that I skimmed over that part of the lesson and did not give her any formal practice in determining whether or not something was an element. Another reason is that I introduced the concept of elements at the same time I introduced several other new words (homogeneous mixture, heterogeneous mixture, compound, etc.) I had her copy a simple flow-chart showing the relationship between these terms, and talked her through the chart, but never had her use this information in any way during the rest of the lesson, and never referred to any of these words again except for “element” over the course of the lesson. I liked the lesson I taught today, but when I rehash it to teach the same material next year, I would split it into two lessons. In the first one, I would spend much more time explaining the differences between elements, compounds, etc., and would give practice problems. I would also bring in examples of each (e.g. Raisin Bran for a heterogeneous mixture) instead of just talking about examples because I think this would help students remember the concepts better. I would not go into detail about the Periodic Table until the second lesson.

Something that has been a constant challenge for me as a teacher is my tendency to spend too much time lecturing, giving notes, and using other forms of direct instruction rather than having more independent practice activities. I have been consciously working on this in summer school, and I feel that I have made progress. I still give notes every day after the Do-Now, but I have reduced the amount of note-taking and included a wider variety of activities in my procedures. On days when I have a lot of content to convey and have to give longer notes, I’ve worked on breaking up the note-taking with short activities. I am still trying to work on reducing the amount of class time that I spend at the front of the room.

Another goal I’ve been working towards in summer school is having a wider variety of activities for any given topic to address different learning styles. This goes hand-in-hand with my goal to have more activities and less lecture time. I’ve been doing a much better job of teaching each topic in several ways to help different learners. For the visual learners, I’ve been using concept maps in a number of my lessons. I have also been integrating inductive strategies by showing unfamiliar pictures to students and asking them to explain what is going on. For example, during the mitosis lesson, before explaining what the cell does at each stage, I placed a transparency showing the stages of the cell cycle on the overhead, told the student that the squiggly lines were DNA, and asking the student to describe what the cell was doing at each stage. For the tactile learners, I’ve been integrating a lot more hands-on modeling; during the mitosis lesson, I gave the student six colored pieces of yarn and had her watch what I was doing with my yarn and do the same thing with hers to model what the chromosomes were doing at each stage of mitosis. For the auditory learners, I’ve been having the student generate her own pneumonic devices (for example, she made a pneumonic device to remember the stages of mitosis). Today, I played a song that a friend of mine wrote and recorded for a high school chemistry project about platinum, rapped to the tune and music of “The Real Slim Shady.” I asked her to write down as many facts as she could learn from the song about platinum, and she surprised me by reading off her list, “It has a weight of 195.08!” I didn’t do a very good job of varying my activities for different learners during this past school year, and intend to work harder on this in the future.

Now playing: Matty Kane- Pt

required blog: goals/objectives and inductive learning

2007-06-14T17:57:00.001-07:00

In the two days of summer school I've taught so far, I did the normal first-day introductory business (pre-tests and going over rules and so forth) and then taught a series of lessons on the cell. Now, I've never been a teacher who's found written objectives to affect the content and delivery of my lesson at all, but since I've been forced to write and state objectives every time I teach, I noticed that I'm now teaching objectives that are at higher Webb's DOK (or Bloom's Verbs, if you prefer) levels than I was when I taught this material during the school year. This is encouraging to me; the one student in my class (yes, I only have one student) has very little background knowledge in science, most likely because of poor teaching, but has done a stellar job of performing to meet my expectations and objectives.
I started with a basic introduction to parts of the cell, and had a slightly higher level objective even for this first lesson; I required my student to, after learning the definitions of the different organelles, explain their functions in her own words and make analogies. She was able to do it! Since I modelled this process for her (we talked about how the Golgi apparatus is like the post office, and how if she wanted to send a Christmas gift to her best friend in Indianapolis, she couldn't just throw it on the highway and expect that it would make it to her friend, but would first have to send it to the post office so that it could be properly addressed and packaged, just as cell proteins must be packaged by the Golgi before being sent to the ER), she was engaged in the analogies, and I think it really helped her learn the material. Today, when I asked her about the organelles, she knew them cold, and even used the analogies to help her remember ("the nucleus is like the boss, so it directs all the other cell parts.").
In the lessons that followed, I taught her cell theory and had her apply it to answer true/false statements (e.g. "A scientist can make cells in the lab just by mixing chemicals"), and had her compare and contrast plant vs. animal cells, as well as prokaryotic vs. eukaryotic cells. I think that having all of these lessons set at a higher level than knowledge improved my instruction; rather than falling into that unfortunate tendency I have to lecture for much of the period and give a lot of notes that contain the content that students are responsible for knowing, I had her doing a lot of quality independent practice activities, like concept mapping. This worked well because although I haven't spent enough time with my student to determine her learning style, odds are that she is a visual learner, and having a lot of diagrams and charts probably helped her remember the concepts. She commented to me that she likes the way I teach because I break things down so that she can understand them. Having her do a variety of practice activities seemed to help her retain the material very well; throughout my lessons, I frequently asked her questions that referred back to previous lessons, and without consulting her notes, she was usually able to answer me correctly. I feel very positive about this, given that she does not seem to have retained anything that she learned in her science classes over the past few years, but is quickly picking up the material and is able to recall as well as apply the different concepts I've taught her.
I used the concept forming inductive strategy several times today. It went much better than when I tried to use inductive strategies during the past school year; my students often did not seem to make the discoveries toward which I was trying to guide them, perhaps because the concepts I was using were too abstract for them to grasp. Today, after having my student think about things that humans can do that bacteria can't, I showed her unlabelled diagrams of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. She had to interpret the diagrams, label the organelles, and then make a concept map showing which organelles were in eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and both. She did beautifully with the assignment, and I think learning it this way made the information have more of an impact that having me just lecture on the information; she remarked with fascination how simple bacteria are compared to eukaryotes. Since prokaryotes lack a nucleus, we compared them to a school with no principal to keep everything in order, meaning that the school would have to be much smaller and would not be able to do as many things as a school with a principal (the eukaryotic cell). I taught the difference between plant and animal cells in a very similar manner, giving her diagrams and having her complete a concept map that we then discussed. She was fascinated by the fact that animal cells do not have any organelles that are not found in plant cells, and yet plant cells contain three organelles not found in animal cells. I think that teaching through this inductive strategy made the material more exciting and memorable to her, as she felt that she had discovered something rather than having me hand her the information. I definitely plan to use strategies like this in the future.

Now playing: Johnny Cash- Jackson

stayed in Mississippi a day too long

2007-06-02T18:56:00.000-07:00

I came back up North a few days after school ended, and I'll fly back to Mississippi tomorrow morning for a month of summer school, etc. Am I dreading leaving? No. Am I excited about going back to Mississippi? Emphatic no. Right now, I'd like nothing more than to spend two months at home with my family, reading and watching the Red Sox and visiting friends. Well, revise that to say I'd like nothing more than to do the above, and not return to my teaching post in the fall.
For a good part of the past school year, I had my struggles and successes like anyone else in the program, and I thought it was quite likely that I would continue to teach after I finished my two years with MTC, perhaps even staying at my placement school. That optimism has faded. Now, I am just trying to figure out how to get myself through another year before leaving Mississippi and leaving teaching. Yes, I know how disheartening that sounds.
Some time this spring, I started to feel that things were really out of control at my school and, worse yet, in my classroom. I knew that it was normal for teachers in my position to struggle with things like culture shock and classroom management. But, talking to others, I suddenly realized that even for a teacher in my situation, it was not normal to have students throwing objects at you, or vandalizing your room on a regular basis, or calling you nasty curse words so many times that you lost count. Granted, part of the problem comes from the fact that I decided to teach middle school instead of high school, but even so, I found myself driving to school every morning bracing myself for whatever disrespect would be thrown at me that day. I've felt very bad about my inability to better manage my classroom, and at a loss for what to do differently. I found myself getting homesick from time to time. I was fortunate enough to have a significant other living just down the road from me, and I think that having this support may have been the only thing that kept me from going completely crazy these past few months. The fact that my significant other has just left Mississippi for good makes me especially dread the start of a new school year.
The last week of school was very stressful for me, not because anything that happened in class was particularly bad, but because I'd been given my contract for next year and had to decide what to do with it. During the spring, I'd quite seriously considered trying to switch to a different school district, but ultimately decided that I'd be better off facing known demons. Once I had my contract in hand, I started questioning the wisdom of that decision. I was also extremely tempted not to sign the contract and to just leave Mississippi. I realized that the reason that this was such a stressful decision was that at various points during the year, I'd thought about quitting, but never got very far in my thinking because I knew that I'd never be able to shake the guilt of abandoning my students mid-year, as ungrateful as some of them could be toward me (of course, I'm not talking about all my students here; there were the ones that let me know that they appreciated me, and they kept me going). When I had my contract, it was the first time I'd had to make a conscious decision to return, and I questioned the sanity of, as it seemed, signing myself up for another year of abuse at the hands of students and administrators. I did it anyway, probably because I have a stubborn will to finish a commitment that I told myself I would see through to the end. Maybe I'll feel better about coming back next year after I've had some more time away from my school and no longer feel completely worn down and emotionally drained.
Recently, I've been focusing my energy on making plans for a year from now, when I finish teacher corps. I decided very recently that I think I want to go to medical school. It was something I'd been considering on and off since high school, and ultimately decided I didn't want to go largely because I was scared of the intensity of medical school and the profession, as well as the bureaucracy associated with the profession. After a year teaching in the Delta, though, none of this seems as intimidating. I've had to work crazy hours where I've had eight hour stretches with barely time to breathe (literally- I have asthma and sometimes couldn't even take my inhaler when I needed it because it would mean leaving students unsupervised), and I've had to deal with incompetent bureaucracy. And guess what? I survived it all. Having to study like crazy in medical school doesn't scare me much, either; after being at my school for a year, just having to spend lots and lots of time studying doesn't seem horribly stressful. As I realized a few months ago, now that I've been out of school for a year in my life, I'm excited about learning and being a student again. It will be the first time in my life that being a student will be a conscious decision for me; I grew up in a community where it was more or less assumed that 18 year olds would graduate from high school and go to college. I actually find it enjoyable to pick up old textbooks and read them now (laugh at that one all you want, but it's the truth). If nothing else, teaching for another year will strengthen my conviction that I can keep myself going through tough times, no matter how badly I want to give up.

Now playing: Bob Dylan- Mississippi

things I want to do differently next year

2007-06-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

In the final weeks of the school year, I thought a lot about systems I'd set in place at the beginning of the year that ended up not working out for me, and how I'd like to do them differently.
First and foremost: the notebooks. I required each student to keep a 3-ring binder for my class only with 5 dividers: classwork, homework, tests/quizzes, general class information, and bell-ringers. Every time I gave an assignment, I told them exactly where to put it in their notebook. I collected notebooks periodically to check that they'd kept up with their assignments, and kept everything orderly. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Well, when I say that it sometimes made me hate my job, I'm not exaggerating. Many kids never even bothered to get a notebook, even after I sold them in class and sent personal letters home through the mail to the parents of students who didn't have a notebook two weeks after the specified date to have all supplies. After two giant notebook checks, which entailed me coming home after school every day for a week and spending hours looking through dozens of binders with papers crumbled and shoved into random spaces, I pretty much gave up on doing notebook checks. I would check specific assignments in class, but that was it. I often wanted to scream when I saw notebooks carelessly thrown on tables with half of their contents spilling onto the floor as students left the room (I had a designated cabinet where each period was to place their notebooks). By the end of the year, more and more students abandoned their notebooks and kept papers in their backpacks, or didn't keep them at all. I didn't think that keeping a 5-sectioned 3-ring binder, with ample class time devoted to helping students set up and organize their binders, was unreasonable to ask of a 7th grader, but I won't do this again. It is not worth the headaches, or the energy, or the poor grades.
A good friend of mine had his students keep notebooks, but used spiral-bound notebooks instead of binders. I hadn't wanted to do this, since I wanted students to have a place to put handouts, but I'll make that sacrifice if it means more organization. Since spiral-bound notebooks are cheap (25 cents each if you hit the right deals), he bought enough for all of his students, thereby avoiding the problem of students who don't care enough to buy their own notebook. He gave each assignment a number (the first assignment was number one, and so forth), making it very easy to refer back to previous work, and also making it very easy for a student who was absent one day to check with another student and copy down the missing notes. This also makes it very easy to check notebooks by doing notebook quizzes (asking students to copy down information from a particular assignment in their notebook) rather than collecting and looking through all of them. I'm stealing this system next year.
As most teachers in the Delta probably do, I struggled with motivating students. When I tell students they need to take notes down and a number of them blatantly make no efforts, and I tell them that I will check notes at the end of class for a grade, and I tell them that they need the notes to study for a test, and they still don't take a word of the notes down, what am I supposed to do? Here's another idea I stole from the same friend: give lots of quizzes. For the last few weeks of school, he reviewed old material with students, and at the end of class, he gave a practice quiz. The next day, students came in, took a real quiz, and then proceded to have another review lesson and take another practice quiz. The day after state testing, I was disgusted with how many students came into class, didn't take a single sentence in their notes, and acted like school was out for the year. I came in the next day, pep talked them about the fact that they were still in school, and still had a final exam in my class for which they needed to learn new material, etc., and told them that we would have two to three quizzes per week until the end of the year, plus practice quizzes. It wasn't a miracle fix to the motivation problem, but it definitely helped, and it kept things moving at a pace I liked. The practice quizzes helped my students realize that nothing we were learning was as scary or as difficult as they initially perceived.
This year, I gave tests very infrequently, in part because I used this stupid program called SPMS that my school made us use to write tests (incoming first-years: if your school district toutes SPMS as a revolutionary learning tool or some other bull like that, be very skeptical) that had a very limited question bank, and required the use of scantrons that took 20 minutes to set up and would usually not be scanned by the librarian until two weeks after students took the test. I also felt that I needed to spend a lot of time reviewing before giving students a test. As I realized later in the year, most teachers at my school satisfied the SPMS requirement by just including a few questions from SPMS on their tests, not generating an entire test using SPMS as I had been doing (avoid doing this at all costs!). Next year, I'm not going to sweat tests as much, and rather than giving frequent graded classwork assignments where students rushed to one another to get the correct answers rather than making sure they really learned the material, I'll give frequent quizzes. I'll make them short so that students will take them at the beginning of class before doing something else, and I will be able to grade them and hand them back quickly. That way, if you work with someone else in class, you are still responsible for knowing the material yourself, and the consequences of playing around instead of paying attention are immediately obvious. I think this will keep things moving at a pace I like, and will give students frequent enough feedback that they will know exactly where they stand. I also plan to give each student a code name and post grades on the door to my room; I tried posting missing assignments this way once, with little success, but if I start at the beginning of the year by explaining to students that I will do this, I think it will work a lot better (and yes, I stole this idea from the same friend. What can I say, he has good ideas).

Now playing: The Beatles- Revolution

My experience trying to stop a teenage pregnancy

2007-05-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a classroom by myself, as no kids were currently placed in my in-school detention. Tara, the student I wrote about in a previous entry who was terrible at the beginning of the year but has become very close to me, came into the room to talk to me. She tried to ask me a question that had something to do with pregnancy, and phrased it in such a confusing way that I thought she was asking me about a placenta. After several questions back and forth, I finally realized that she was trying to ask me how long it takes for a woman to become pregnant after having sex. It seemed like a question that she was just asking out of curiousity; after all, I am the science teacher, and students ask me all sorts of random questions about the human body. I started answering the question biologically, explaining the process by which sperm penetrate and then fertilize an egg, and explaining the amount of time involved in the various steps. After I'd finished explaining, Tara confided that she was "afraid that might happen to me." Oh crap, I thought to myself. She's telling me that she had sex and wants to know if it's too late to stop the pregnancy.
I carefully asked her when she'd had sex. It had been two days before. I asked her if she'd used protection, and she said that she hadn't. The last time I'd had a personal conversation with her, she'd told me about her 17 year old boyfriend (she's 15) who had already dropped out of school, and I wondered if he was the responsible party, but thought it would be inappropriate to pry. I then informed her that since it had only been a few days, she was not pregnant, at least not yet, and could take a pill to prevent her from becoming pregnant as long as she acted quickly enough. I explained a little bit about the morning-after pill to her, and asked her if she had any interest in taking it, or at least finding out more about her options. She bashfully averted her eyes and said that she wasn't sure. I told her that I thought the health department would have the pill if she decided she wanted it, and said that she would want to go as soon as possible if she was considering taking it at all. I asked if she had someone who could take her to the health department. She didn't. Her mother is somewhat out of the picture for her, or at least not present in her life in any positive way, and she lives with her grandmother, who had threatened to put Tara out of the hosue if Tara ever became pregnant. She used to talk to her aunt about sex, but her aunt is dead now. So, that leaves me as the only adult she trusts enough to talk about this problem. I told her to come see me right after school so that we could talk some more, and said that I would take her to the health department if she wanted to go.
After she left, I called the health department to make sure that they had the morning-after pill available. I said that I was calling on behalf of a friend (it seemed safer than identifying myself as Tara's teacher) who was under the age of 18, and asked if she could still get the pill if she came in the afternoon, even without a legal guardian present. The health department said that she didn't need a legal guardian's consent.
After school, Tara and her friend Brittany came to talk to me. I kicked out the usual crew of kids who came into my room to chat and goof around after school so that I could have a private conversation with these two. Tara was very hesitant to take the pill, and was acting fidgety and distracted. I told Tara that the decision was hers, and I wouldn't tell her what to do, but was ready to go to the health department if that's what she wanted. Brittany talked Tara into going to the health department, at least to receive more information, since information could never hurt. So, I drove Tara to the health department while Brittany sat in my back seat for moral support.
At the health department, the two girls stood back uncomfortably as we entered the waiting room. Tara commented that she was embarrassed that all these folks would see her coming in. I went to the counter and explained the situation to the receptionist while the girls stood a few paces behind me. The receptionist asked where my friend was, and I beckoned Tara forward. The receptionist then said that the clinic was busy for the day and could not take any more patients. She asked what time Tara had been "exposed," and I answered for her. The receptionist instructed me to call the clinic back first thing in the morning the next day. I asked if there was any other place in town that I could take Tara to get the pill, or at least more information, but the receptionist said no. After apologizing to Tara, I dropped her at her house and drove Brittany back to school. As Brittany and I were driving, she commented that she might talk to her mom about Tara's situation. She told me that she and her mom were very open with each other, and that her mom had Brittany at the age of 21 and told Brittany that she didn't want her to make the mistake of having children that young, and wanted to do anything she could to keep that from happening. I told Brittany how lucky she was to have a mother like that.
The next day, I called the health department first thing in the morning to inquire about taking Tara there after school to get the pill. The receptionist asked when she'd had sex, and when I told her, she said that it was too late to help her. This infuriated me. I knew for a fact that she was wrong. It was just short of 72 hours later, and although the morning-after pill works best within the first 72 hours, it can be effective for up to five days. I'd looked it up on a medical website after Tara came to me. I told the receptionist that I thought the pill would still be effective, and she put me on hold while she asked someone else at the clinic. She returned to the phone and said that it was too late. I asked if there was anywhere else in town that offfered any services that would help Tara, even some place that she could go to find out more about her options, but the receptionist said no, and offered no further help. I was at a loss. I'd contacted the health department multiple times trying to get a time-sensitive and extremely important service, and they'd just screwed Tara over. How could a medical establishment, knowing the time-sensitive nature of the morning-after pill, be so callous as to dismiss Tara on the grounds that they were busy?
Tara and Brittany came to see me after school. Tara avoided talking about anything serious, taking a marker and working out math problems on the board, and when I gently asked if she wanted to talk about anything, she said that she just wanted to do math problems. Brittany told her to be serious, and I carefully brought the pill issue up. I told them that the health department wouldn't help, but that I could try and find another way for Tara to get the pill if she wanted it. At that point, Tara started saying that she wouldn't take it anyway because she can't swallow pills, and that she would just go home, drink vinegar, and hit herself hard in the stomach. I told her not to do that to herself, and said that if she didn't want to be pregnant, the pill was safer than what she was suggesting. "Didn't you say that I'm not even pregnant yet?" she asked. Not yet, I explained, but you might get pregnant. She said that it would be a waste of medicine for her to take a pill if she might not even get pregnant, so she should wait for her next two periods to see if she missed them, and then take the pill if necessary.
I explained to her that it would be too late at that point, and that if she waited that long, the only thing she could do to stop herself from having the baby would be to have an abortion. Brittany told her that she didn't want to do that. "I could get the baby adopted," said Tara. I told her that she could do that. She then proceeded to tell me that her mother tried to get her adopted, but for some reason was unable to, and that her mother was drinking alcohol while pregnant with Tara, making Tara "kinda crazy in the head like I am now." One of Tara's sisters had been adopted, and Tara said she wished that she'd been adopted, too, since her sister had a nice life. Wow. Brittany pointed out that Tara's grandmother would throw Tara out of the house if Tara had a baby. Tara said, "Well, maybe I'm ready to leave anyway. I'll turn 16, get a job, start working, have some money, have a place, get my baby adopted." I was really sad to listen to how easily she was resigning herself to and accepting the situation that I knew she was trying to avoid.
I ended up giving Tara the Planned Parenthood national hotline number and telling her to call it if she decided she wanted the pill, or even if she wanted more information. Just before she left, I told her that I wasn't her parent and couldn't tell her what to do outside of school, but asked her to do me a favor and use protection if she had sex again. I'd done everything I could think of to help her, but felt like I'd failed to accomplish anything. Above all else, I was angry at the health department for their apathy and their failure to do something very simple that could have a huge impact on someone's life.
Tara was suspended a few days after this incident for mouthing off to the principal, and I haven't heard much from her since. I'm just hoping that she gets lucky and doesn't get pregnant.
At various points during this episode, I realized that I could get in really serious trouble with my school for what I did, possibly even get fired, but decided that the risk was worth it.
Since this incident, I've been thinking a lot about the problems with the healthcare system. It's made me think that maybe I shouldn't have abandoned the idea of going to med school, and that I should go in a few years and be a gynecologist. I'll keep thinking on it.

Now playing: The Apples in Stereo- Energy

teaching motivated students: my two days of bliss

2007-04-30T18:59:00.000-07:00

For the past three weeks, my school has been on a block schedule to prepare students for the MCT's. This translates to students attending only language arts, reading, and math classes, each for two hours a day. Each classroom contains twice the normal number of students, and the teachers who don't teach one of those subjects are assigned various other duties, usually managing the class for the subject area teachers. My school had never done a block schedule like this before, and many of the details were not worked out ahead of time, meaning that there was a very high degree of unpredictability. I often didn't know from day to day what I would be doing when I came into school, or rather, I thought I knew, but would sometimes be assigned to do something else at the last minute. For two weeks, I ran in-school detention on my hall, plus seventh period math remediation. I spent a few days managing the class of the language arts teacher on my hall, which mostly meant waking up sleeping students and occasionally telling them to stop talking or to focus (read: boring!)
One day, I came into school and was informed that instead of helping the language arts teacher, I'd spend the next two days assisting the reading teacher on the other seventh grade hall (meaning the seventh grade students that I don't teach). This teacher was dividing students into three groups based on their scores on practice tests. Each group went to a different classroom with a different teacher. I was assigned to teach the advanced students, or, as my principal phrased it, facilitate the advanced group. This sounded pretty exciting to me. Smart, motivated students most likely meant no discipline issues. Furthermore, I was told that I would probably have only about 10 students at a time. This sounded like the kind of class I can only dream of teaching.
When the reading teacher picked out the advanced students from her first period class, she told them that they had the highest scores on the practice test and that they were in great shape, and should just use the class time to see what areas they might want a little more practice with, and to teach each other and make up games, etc. She told them that I was there to help. The students were left with nothing more concrete than those instructions. So, I found myself with no plan whatsoever in hand, some state-test prep books lying around the room, and a group of students with their practice test results. It ended up being the most enjoyable two days of teaching I've had.
The students started analyzing and discussing their test scores without any prompting from me, and identified their weakest subject area. With each of the three groups I had, I did some combination of popcorn reading/discussion from the books and word games (mostly to practice prefixes and suffixes). The students came up with some ideas on their own, and I suggested some games to them. This learning environment is pretty much the way I picture my ideal classroom: student-centered activities with the teacher as the moderator, lots of cooperation, a healthy level of noise that doesn't excede my "too-loud" threshold, and the knowledge that at any given moment, I could ask the students to freeze and listen and know that they would cooperate with me promptly.
Toward the end of the first such class I taught, the students expressed their disappointment that they only had five more minutes before passing to the next period, and said that they wished the could stay all day. They were very excited to hear that I would be back to teach them the next day. One student commented that for the first time, he was excited to be in class. I received similar positive feedback from the other groups I taught. A number of students begged me to convince the administration to switch them from their science class into my science class, and one girl asked if she could come to my math remediation during seventh period (this would mean voluntarily giving up free time outside). The students were learning a lot during this time, so I am sure that their expressions of excitement were not an indication that they thought that it was a fun joke class or anything like that. I think that this is the first time all year that I've actually come home and told someone, "School was awesome today."

Since having these two days in teacher's paradise, I've been thinking about whether it would be feasible to use a similar type of group learning in my classroom. My rough idea is that I would split the class into three groups. The advanced group would have a lot of flexibility in deciding how and what to learn, just as my advanced group did. The other two groups would have much more directed activities and would probably be provided with review questions, practice problems, etc. I would circulate between the three groups, spending the most time with the low group. Now, here are the problems I see with this idea. This whole conception hinges on the idea that the advanced students are focused and self-policing, so I would probably need to exclude the high-achieving students with poor behavior from this group. I would need to have a good feel for the personalities of the students in a given class before implementing something like this. I think that the success of the reading groups was largely due to the fact that each group had a teacher present to facilitate. As I am the only teacher in my classroom, I would need to somehow circulate among the three groups often enough to manage them, but would also want to devote enough time to each one to help them with their learning activities. Realistically, I don't know if this is possible. I've been toying with the idea of trying to somehow coordinate with the other seventh grade science teacher so that we'd combine our classes and then group them (this way, we would have twice as many students, but two teachers instead of one), but I'm not sure quite how this would work. It would require that we are teaching the same material at the same time (a rarity). Our teaching styles are different enough that things could get confusing. Furthermore, we'd be up to two teachers, but that key third teacher would still be missing. I'll have to keep thinking about this one.

Now playing: Faith Hill- Mississippi Girl

Not my most dignified moment as a public figure

2007-03-31T13:20:00.000-07:00

I missed three consecutive days of school. These were the three days before spring break, and two of them were nine weeks testing days. I would feel really awful about missing those days, if I hadn't had a darn good reason for not coming in to school. I can laugh about this story now that a few weeks have passed, and maybe someone else reading this blog can do the same.

The Tuesday before break, we had the writing state test. Read: four hours of sitting in a classroom without moving, one hour of which was actually used for test taking. After my students finished the exam, and I had sent their exams out of the room, and all the other students in the rest of the school had finished, we still had to wait in the classroom for over an hour. It was lunch time, and my students started getting really irritated that I wouldn't take them to lunch. I explained that it wasn't my choice and we had to wait until the school called us to lunch, but they would not accept this explanation. They claimed that the rest of the seventh grade was in the cafeteria (they weren't, as they were all stuck in their respective classrooms), and that I would make them starve to death. Mind you, I was ravenous myself, and even had my lunch in a bag in the room, but thought that it would be really cruel to eat it in front of a bunch of hungry kids, so I suffered along with them.

We were finally dismissed to 4th period, more than an hour after we were supposed to eat lunch, and still not allowed to go. I was literally light-headed and dizzy, and had no energy to quiet down my students as I attempted to teach. My stomach hurt from being so hungry, and I was relieved when we were finally called to lunch.

For the next few periods, my stomach didn't feel quite right, and my energy levels had not recovered from having to wait to eat. I was dragging my feet through my classes, just trying to make it til the end of the day. After school, I still wasn't feeling very well. I spent some time working with students who had come to see me after school, then headed over to the high school, where the baseball team that a friend of mine coaches was playing against my district's high school team. After the first inning, my stomach felt pretty upset, so I decided to go for a quick run around town to maybe calm it down.

I enjoyed the run, since I must have heard at least a dozen of my students call my name out as I passed their stomping grounds. At one point on the run, I had to duck into the grocery store and ask to use the bathroom (usually for employees only) because I suddenly had to go. So, I thought that my stomach must have been upset all along just because I had to use the bathroom. I ran around for a bit longer, but still didn't feel quite right. As I ran through a neighborhood near the store, Keldrick, a student who was in my class for the first few weeks of school before being promoted to the eighth grade, called after me to ask if he could run with me. "Yeah, hurry up!" I yelled as I continued toward the school. To my surprise, a minute or two later, he caught up to me, huffing and puffing and complaining that his abs really hurt. I started walking with him and told him that he should go watch the baseball game with me, so we started walking toward the high school and chatting.

As we were walking through a field, my body suddenly gave me a sign that it couldn't keep it together any more. I broke off the conversation I was having with Keldrick to inform him, "Keldrick, I'm really sorry, but I don't feel right and I need to get sick. Walk away from me for a minute because you don't want to see this." I then proceeded to keel over in the field and vomit as Keldrick looked on. After I'd stopped, he asked me if I was OK, and I apologized to him again. The kid was nice enough to say, "It's OK, Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, I've seen someone get sick before." I explained that I was probably sick just because my eating schedule had been thrown off by state testing. We walked over to the gas station near the baseball field so that I could buy myself a bottle of water, then watched some of the baseball game. After a few innings, Keldrick asked, "So, do you feel like giving me a ride home?" He lives only a few blocks from the school, but it was after dark in an unsafe neighborhood, so I agreed (even though I could technically get in trouble for that kind of thing). As we were walking to my car, I started shivering from feeling sick, and Keldrick offered me his sweatshirt. This kid gets serious props for how he handled this bizarre situation.

I drove Keldrick to his house, and stopped my car just in front of it. He asked me if I wanted to come in and meet his grandmother. In response, I opened my car door, leaned out of it, and vomited into the street as my seatbelt kept me from falling out of the car. Keldrick's sister, who is also a student at my school, came out of the house. As I wretched, I heard him saying to her, "It's Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket. She's sick!" They both stood there watching, asking if I was all right, and I couldn't respond as I was still throwing up. When I stopped, I apologized to him for throwing up in front of him yet again, then drove back to the baseball game. I wasn't feeling well enough to make the 30 minute drive home. At the end of the baseball game, I found my friend who coached the visiting team and told him about my stomach problems. He very kindly offered to drive me home in my car, which ended up being a good thing because I threw up again in the Walmart parking lot as he went in to buy some toilet paper for me (I was out and had been planning to pick some up at the end of the school day), and one more time on the way home. Once home, I continued to get sick. The next day, I was so worn out that I tried to take a shower and ended up lying down in the bathtub because it was too draining to stand up for five minutes. It took me three days and two doctor's visits to feel healthy again.

Oddly enough, Keldrick seems to have decided that I'm the coolest teacher in the school since this incident, and has come by to hang out with me, give me hugs, etc. How many teachers can claim that they've earned cool points by vomiting in front of a student?

Now playing: Wallflowers- Three Marlenas

One of my favorite personalities at school

2007-03-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

Every school has at least one crazy teacher. The craziest teacher at my school, Ms. Bloomfield, is so off her rocker that she probably wouldn't be able to keep her job in a more functional school district. At the beginning of the year, I didn't like her very much because I couldn't get beyond the fact that she's, simply put, just insane. Over the months, as I've gotten to know her better, I've liked her more and more. She might be my favorite teacher at our school. I saw fit to honor her with a blog entry about some of my favorite Ms. Bloomfield moments.

One realizes Ms. Bloomfield is out in left field just by taking a quick glance at her. She looks to be about 60, is one of the few white teachers at my school, and has long gray hair. She's tall and somewhat husky, and I would describe her walk as a very fast waddle. I'm not sure how much of her strange walk has to do with the very high-heeled shoes she wears, or the fact that she seems to be bow-legged, or the fact that she's always rushing somewhere. Teachers at our school aren't supposed to wear anything sleeveless, but she's usually wearing a tank top or a sleeveless and shapeless long dress, even in the winter time, and is always fanning herself furiously. The other day, her arms were covered in bright blue and yellow Sponge Bob band-aids, apparently to cover where her cat had scratched her. She has early morning cafeteria duty, and she and I are usually amongst the first people in the building. When I see her in the morning, she is usually bent forward, furiously grabbing at her hair and trying to put it up, and has occasionally complained to me that her own hair is giving her a rash. She'll always stop fiddling with her hair to greet me as I come in, giving me a big grin and making sure to ask how I'm doing. It makes coming into school a much more pleasant experience.

The first clear memory I have of Ms. Bloomfield is the day that my entire school district had professoinal development, and all teachers were supposed to get on computers and use SPMS to create tests. Of course, this was a really stupid idea, since the system runs like molasses when so many people try to use it at once. I was working in the classroom of another science teacher in my school so that I could receive help in using the system. Ms. Bloomfield teaches across the hall from this teacher, and suddenly stormed into the room, complaining and swearing about the stupidity of our assignment. After ranting for a while, she made a comment about how her medicine was not working properly that day (apparently, she is bipolar and takes four different medications to help stabilize her). She showed up several more times during the day to do more of the same, including banging her fist on the computer and flipping the bird at the monitor. This was all before I had really gotten to know her, so I just sat there thinking to myself, "What is this crazy woman's deal?" The next day, she came to me and apologized, saying that she hoped I wasn't offended by her behavior, that her medicine wasn't working, and that she wanted to make sure that I understood that she was mad about the computers and the administration, not at me. I thought that was really nice. I think that part of why I like Ms. Bloomfield so much is because she expresses the frustrations that all of us have with the school in a blunt way.

Shortly after this incident, I asked the other science teacher what Ms. Bloomfield's deal was. This teacher proceded to tell me the story of what Ms. Bloomfield did for another teacher who was retiring from the school at the end of last year. Ms. Bloomfield went into this teacher's room during class and handed her a going-away gift in a bag, which the other teacher almost opened in front of the class, but decided that that might not be a safe idea. That was a lucky decision, because it turns out that Ms. Bloomfield had included the following in the bag: a large t-shirt with a picture of cats on it, a box of condoms, and a tube of KY jelly. No humorous note included. Wow.

One day, I was sitting with my students in the cafeteria during lunch and heard Ms. Bloomfield, who was walking behind me, call my name excitedly several times. When I turned around, she pulled out a banana, pointed it at me as though she were sniping me with a gun, yelled, "ba-NANA!" and waited long enough to see me start laughing, then waddled away with several more bananas held behind her back.

Several days ago, I was talking to Ms. Bloomfield in the morning as we clocked in, and happened to mention to her that I was placed on a plan for improvement because I forgot to clock out at the end of the school day on multiple occasions (and yes, I would have been suspended for a day if I'd forgotten again). As it turns out, Ms. Bloomfield was placed on the same plan for improvement, and we discussed how ridiculous it was that putting in lots of extra hours after school earned us this punishment. Ms. Bloomfield went into one of her short rants, "They see my punch in at the beginning of the day. They see my punch the next morning. What the F did they think I did, sleep at the school all night?"

Sometimes, I wonder if I would end up as crazy as Ms. Bloomfield if I stayed at the school for as long as she's been there.

Now playing: Van Halen- Jump

Thoughts about my physical surroundings and vandalism

2007-03-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, I took one of my friends who had never seen my school on a walking tour around the grounds, and showing the area to him made me reflect on how I perceive my physical school building. Just across the street from my school is the district's high school. The high school building is typical of a Delta school: yellowish brick, one story high, old. It is ugly, and could stand a renovation, but is functional. Go around to the back of my school building and you will see streets lined with shotgun houses, some of them dilapidated. If you leave though the side entrance, you will see a small driveway, and just beyond it, an empty, littered field, covered in dead grass, that still bears the sign for the factory that used to operate there. On the other side of the school, you will find the track and the football field that we share with the high school. The facility could use a renovation. Venture a half mile from the school grounds, and depending which way you go, you will either end up in one of the worst neighborhoods in town, by the factories and manufacturing plants, or on the stretch of highway that passes the local adult store. By no means is it an attractive landscape. Yet, my school itself is beautiful. Of all the schools in the district, including the elementary school located on the white side of town, my school has been renovated most recently. It is a modern brick building with columns by the entrance, a main hallway with many large windows, and a circular section with skylites that houses the library. Just outside the cafeteria is an outdoor patio with a few tables and chairs. Incidentally, as far as I can tell, the only time the patio gets any use is when students are waiting for their buses; I never see anyone eating lunch out there, and when I asked my assistant principal if I could take my lunch period class to the patio tables, he denied permission. It is a mere fluke that my school building is the most attractive in the district, but I like the idea that my school stands as a beautiful facility in a bleak landscape.

The part that kills me is that every day, I come in to school to witness students tearing up their beautiful new school. I teach in a classroom where the lab tables are positioned in such a way that the desks must be sloppily crammed around them. There is no neat way to position students in rows, and it is very difficult for me to have any sort of enforcable seating chart (I tried for several months to make students sit in assigned seats and eventually concluded that it was a losing battle that was not worth my energy). I also cannot move around the room or see what is happening in my room very well. When I moved into my classroom at the beginning of the year, I found the computers at each lab table in horrible states of vandalism. Additionally, gum, candy wrappers, crumbs, and empty bags of chips had been stuffed into the recesses in each desk where the computers are placed. It is virtually impossible to clean out these recesses, unless I wanted to spend several hours going around with a suction vacuum cleaner. Once the school year started, I witnessed this destruction continue under my own nose. Keys have been ripped off computers, wires have been torn apart, jacks have been pulled out of the tables, and all sorts of distugsting garbage from junk food has been stashed in the recesses. I no longer have a single functioning computer in my room. No matter how attentively I watch my students, or how much I walk around the room when I am speaking, there is absolutely no way that I can see what is happening behind the lab stations, and my classes are large enough that I must seat at least some students at the lab stations. Students litter the floor with paper, and have somehow managed to rip apart the plastic seats of almost every chair in the room. I have found all sorts of nasty and vulgar things written about me in textbooks, on desks, and elsewhere in the classroom. Someone has even thought to write insults on the piece of glass that covers my name sign next to the entrance to my classroom.

For some time, I thought that such vandalism occured in my room because of my inability to manage my class more effectively, or because of the poor design of the room itself, or some combination of the two. I no longer believe this, because I have seen signs of it elsewhere in the school. Students have pulled the balls out of the mice (mouses?) in the library computer lab. Sometimes, when I take my classes for their bathroom breaks, the boys walk out of the bathroom grimacing and tell me that they can't use it because someone has peed on the walls or floor and they are just too grossed out. The smell reaches me as I stand out in the hall, and I don't know what to tell my students who need to use the bathroom other than that I'm sorry that their peers have no respect for the facility. Recently, another teacher on my hall told me that she has neat rows of desks where she can easily observe the students, and will make them erase anything that she catches them writing on the desks, but still stays after school every day to wipe the grafitti off the desks. Students come from the dilapidated surroundings of the school and enter the beautiful school building only to tear it apart.

I spoke to two of my friends who teach at the high school in the town where I live, and they both said that their school does not have vandalism problems. We concluded that it must be a middle school phenomenon.

It goes without saying that I care about my students and want them to have the best resources available. Yet, I often become enraged with the gross lack of appreciation they show for the nice things that my school has. Their abuse of property has disgusted me to the point where when it came time to spend my EEF money, I chose to spend it on a printer for my own use (since the school provided most classrooms with a printer, but for unknown reasons, did not equip my room with one) rather than manipulatives or lab supplies for the class. I know that some of my students would respect and greatly appreciate updated lab equipment or other supplies, and it makes me sad that they do not have these things, but I cannot stand the idea of buying supplies for class use with the knowledge that these supplies will be thrown around, banged around, torn apart, and stashed into hiding places. I wish that I could somehow teach my students to appreciate what the school physically offers, but this seems like a value that I cannot instill in the 50 minutes I see them per day. So, besides hoping that my students start acting mature enough sometime soon to respect property, I have no solution for what to do about the destruction my school endures each day.

Now playing: Mr. Big- Be with You

How bizarre... how bizarre

2007-02-25T16:09:00.000-08:00

Back in the fall, I remember telling my mom over the phone about some of my students' recent antics and funny comments. After hearing some of my stories, she commented, "Those kids do some weird things, don't they?" I don't know what's going on lately, or if I'm just imagining things, but the incidence of downright bizarre behavior seems to have spiked in the past few weeks. I'm completely puzzled by some of the stuff the kids have done lately, and a few of these stories are too weird not to share. Cautionary note: if you are at all weak of stomach, skip the last story.

1. Grills.
They are against the school dress code, and have been since the second day of school (the principal noticed some grills the first day of school and subsequently decided to ban them). I've confiscated three grills in the past two weeks, two of which were in the possession of the same kid. This kid really flipped out the second time I confiscated a grill, and we had a 10-minute standoff in the hallway after school when he refused to hand it over to me. I ultimately lead him to the office and convinced him to hand it to the secretary in charge of confiscated items. And yet, this kid acted like I did him a horrible injustice. He loudly complained about the fact that I'd taken his silver AND his gold grill, and each one cost $300. Most recently, I confiscated a grill from another student who pulled it out in the middle of class, stuck it on his teeth, flashed a huge grin, and said, "Smile for me, daddy!" (for those of you missing the reference, that is a line from the Nelly song "Grillz"). When I confiscated the grill from him, he tried to get out of it by claiming that, "it wasn't in my mouth, I just had it in my hand!" The other student said the same thing BOTH times I caught him with a grill in his mouth. And by the way, the last time I checked, didn't the dress code say that we banned grills, not, "students may not wear grills on their teeth"?
Another student stuck gum wrappers on his teeth. I went up to him and told him to take that stuff off his teeth because it looked dumb, to which he tried to tell me, "This is on my teeth permanently!"
I'm reminded of a certain comment that Keisha made to me at lunch one day. "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, I don't know why all these boys are going around in their grills." I told her that I thought grills looked dumb. She said, "I bet they wear grills because they want to get girls." True words of wisdom, right there. After a pause, she said, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, I bet you could find you a husband without a grill." There's a gem I'll remember for a long time.

2. The hot pocket
A few days ago, during homeroom, I walked across my room to open the door, and when I returned to my desk a few seconds later, I found on it a tupperware container with a hotpocket inside. One of my homeroom kids, Demetrius, was standing in front of my desk with a goofy grin on his face, so I asked him what was going on. "This hotpocket was on that desk," he said, pointing to a student desk a few feet away. "It had a note on it that said it's from Antonio and his mom and they want you to have the hotpocket." Looking around the room, I commented, "But Demetrius, Antonio hasn't even come to homeroom yet." He started grinning even more. "I know, that's the funny thing, isn't it?"
One of my students was in the bathroom at the time, so I assumed that the kids were playing a little joke on her and taking away something she'd brought for lunch. When she returned from the bathroom, I asked her if it was her hotpocket, and she told me it wasn't. So, the hotpocket sat on my desk unclaimed for two days before I finally tossed it. I still have no idea what that was all about.

3. The paper towel
One day last week, I was giving a test, and one of my students, Brittany, did everything she could, short of blatantly yelling out, to disrupt the class. She filled in random bubbles on the test and told me within two minutes of receiving the test that she was "finished." I told her that she had to keep checking it over until the period ended, and she should go back and actually READ the questions. She sat there laughing loudly for no apparent reason, and asked me several times if she could go to the bathroom, to which I said no. Then, she asked for a tissue, so I handed her a paper towel. She started blowing her nose very loudly and deliberately making strange sounds. Up until this point, I understood what was going on: she was goofing off, trying to be funny, because the rest of the class likes you when you're funny. But then, her actions took a turn for the truly disgusting: she started EATING the paepr towel! The rest of the class went, "eew!" I showed as little emotion as possible and told everyone else to be quiet. She then asked me, "Do I disgust you?"

It's a strange life I lead.
Now playing: The Rolling Stones- Start me Up

tapeworms, parenting, and kids that break my heart

2007-01-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

A few things happened last week that made me want to come home from school and cry, which I did in fact do one day. I had glipses into the personal lives of a couple of my students that just pained me. I feel truly sorry for these kids, and sorry that I don't know how to help them. In summary:

1. One of my students, Tara, was a nightmare at the beginning of the year. She came into class and rarely did work, snapped at other students, and talked back to me. At her worst point, she openly defied me for several days in a row, and when I asked her to go to the office, she stormed out, yelled at me, screamed, "Bitch!" loud enough for the whole class and probably several other classes nearby to hear, and slammed the door. After talking to the guidance counselor that day, I learned that Tara is repeating the seventh grade, is actually doing much better this year than last year (I would hate to be one of her teachers last year!), is coming to school on a regular basis, which is huge for her, and commonly does things like curse at her teachers. She has some kind of messed up family situation: her mom is not in the picture, at least not in any positive way, and the only positive upbringing she receives is from her grandmother.
For reasons that still remain a mystery to me, Tara came into my class one day, maybe two weeks after this incident, and behaved like an angel. She took her notes, asked pertinent questions, answered my questions (correctly!), and did all of her work. She's been great ever since, and even earned my Star Student award one week for her improvements. I'm really proud of her.
One day last week, she came into my room during planning period to ask a question, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, my puppy got sick yesterday, and he was throwing up, and when he threw up, this thing came out that looked like a worm. What that is, Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket?" So, we had a little talk about parasites, a topic we covered a few months ago in the ecology unit. I told her that she needed to figure out a way to get her puppy to the vet (I'm really worried about the puppy because if you'll excuse my pessimism, I don't think this will happen). She told me that she'd meant to bring in the worm to show me, because she'd saved it for me, but had accidentally left it at home. My initial response was, "Gross!" but then after I talked to her a little more, she said, "I thought you'd want to see it, and I know Ms. Davis would want to see it." Ms. Davis is the other 7th grade science teacher, and was Tara's teacher last year. So, I had her come with me to talk to Ms. Davis about the worm. Ms. Davis praised Tara for thinking about science outside of school, and suggested that I give her 100 as a homework grade for her efforts. I thought this was a great idea. We asked Tara to bring the worm to school to show us.
A few days later, I snuck out of my homeroom to use the bathroom, and as I was walking back, I saw Tara standing outside my door, holding a glass wrapped in tinfoil. I asked her if the worm was inside, and she said it was, so I asked her to come into my room and show it to me. At this point, Ms. Stewart, another teacher on my hall, yelled at Tara, "Give Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket that cup and then get back over here. I'm still telling the principal what you said to me!" As it turns out, Tara had gone to my classroom with the sample, and when she did not see me in the room, she thought that I was absent for the day, so she went back to Ms. Stewart's classroom and started to dump the water in the cup into the trashcan. Ms. Stewart saw her, demanded to know what was in the cup, and when Tara didn't answer, Ms. Stewart told her to hand over the cup and stop dumping it in the trashcan. Tara lost her temper and told Ms. Stewart, "Shut up talkin' to me!" Ms. Stewart wrote her up, and although when students say things like that to me, they get a slap on the wrist or maybe at worst a few days of in-school suspension, Tara was sent home and suspended. When I spoke to Ms. Stewart about the incident, she said that Tara was rude in her classroom every day, had a bad attitude, and never did her work. In other words, she behaved much the same way she did in my room at the beginning of the year. This incident really upset me because Tara was doing so well, then did something stupid and impulsive that landed her in hot water. Worst yet, this whole incident happened because Tara was being a good science student and asking questions about the things she observed.
I showed all of my other classes the tapeworm and reviewed parasitism for a few minutes. They were all really excited to see a real parasite like that. It made me feel even worse that Tara was sitting at home as I showed the tapeworm to the class.

2. One of my students, Dave, is extremely needy and starved for affection. He often hugs me in the hall, hugs me during class, tries to come into my room when he has another class, etc. He tries to go to his other teachers for hugs, but they all tell him to get away from them. A few times, I've had to stop him because hugs are OK in my book, but putting your arm around my waiste is not, and putting your arm in my arm while walkin down the hall is not. It always struck me as really sad that he is so touchy-feely with me when I write him up for detention all the time and sometimes have to send him out of my room for being disruptive. He's not a good student, and is not well-behaved.
On Friday, I took his class to lunch (I usually take a different class to lunch), and during lunch, we started talking about his family a little bit. He lives in a really bad part of town (hears gunshuts out in the street on a regular basis), and his dad lived nearby until a few weeks ago, when he moved to Atlanta because he felt that the neighborhood was just too dangerous. Dave lives with his mom and some of his siblings, but, "my momma is crazy!" He then told me, "You know, you can't even lie down and watch TV in my house when you're tired. I tried to lie down and watch TV, and I hadn't been there but a minute when my mom yelled from the kitchen, 'Dave, get your butt off the couch and come over here!' and when I didn't get up, she came over to me and said, 'Dave, move your big fat self off that couch and come see what I want!'" Geez. Calling a slightly pudgy kid fat and lazy seems like a great way to build self-esteem in those vulnerable middle school years.
Dave then proceeded to tell me that he wished he could live with me instead of his mom. How do I even respond to something like that? No wonder he comes to me for hugs, no wonder I always have to tell him to stop talking, do his work, etc. etc.
Speaking of parenting, another interesting thing happened the same day. One of my students, Kevin, is a really sweet kid, will do well in class if I keep on him, is really excited and enthusiastic, but has a huge problem with calling out during class. He and one of his friends come to my classroom after school almost every day just to hang out, so I have a pretty good connection with him. I've spoken to his parents a couple of times before. A few days ago, his whole class was out of hand and continually interrupted me while I tried to talk. I've had a lot of problems with the hyperactivity of that class lately, and am trying to correct the students one-by-one. He was a major problem that day, and had been doing the same thing for a few days before, so I called his parents that evening to explain the situation. They thanked me, promised to talk to him right away, and promised that I wouldn't have any more problems with him. He came in the next day with a note from his mother saying that she'd talked to him, and asking me to call her and let her know how he was doing. He was great in class that day. When he came to me after school, I told him so, and he asked if I would tell his mom that he did well. I agreed, and said I'd go ahead and call her right then. So, while he and a few other students hanging out in my room listened (by the way, I'm still floored by the fact that 4 kids chose to spend a FRIDAY afternoon chilling with their teacher!), I made a positive phone call. His mom was very happy and thanked me for what I'd done, and made the comment, "You know, we want to do as much as we can on our end to help all the teachers, because really you're the ones who are mostly raising the kids, and we want to work with you." The parents of my students think that I am raising their kids. To say the least, this responsibility is a little intimidating.

Now playing: Jay-Z- I'm a hustler

Genetic Engineering

2007-01-20T20:50:00.000-08:00

I'm wrapping up the genetics unit, which is a real shame because aside from ecology, it's my favorite part of the curriculum to teach. Friday's lesson was on genetic engineering (and to a certain friend of mine who was teasing me earlier today: no, I did NOT brainwash them with my liberal views, though I'll admit it was very tempting). I gave the students a reading packet that explained what genetic engineering was, had an article that was fairly pro-GE, and another article that was fairly anti-GE. The students had to make a list of pros and cons, then write a paragraph telling a friend whether they thought GE was a good or a bad idea and why. To introduce the topic, I gave a bell-ringer with the following prompt: If you could change anything about your own genes, what would you change? I really enjoyed reading the responses. Here are some of the most interesting ones:
-I wouldn't change anything because I like how I am. (I had this one from several students. I hope they really mean this and aren't just trying to sound cool, because if this is an earnest sentiment, these kids are a heck of a lot more confident than I was, or any of my peers were, in middle school).
-Multiple students said they would like to have lighter skin and/or eyes.
-I would have stronger muscles.
-I would not want to switch genes with someone who is mixed. (ouch! I hope this kid didn't mean that as a dig at me. I don't think he did, though I'm still confused as to what he was really trying to say there.)
-I would have some long, pritty (sic) hair, like Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket has. (I wrote "Thank you! :: smiley face:: " next to that one.)
-I would have genes to make me look like Beyonce (this from a girl who is beautiful, smart, and very popular. Middle school insecurities are still thriving, it seems.)
-I would have Michael Jordan's genes because he is smart and athletic (a man after my own heart with this one, though I'm not sure I would have picked Jordan as the prototypical scholar-athlete).

Now playing: Lil Scrappy feat. Young Buck- Money in the Bank

Science Quiz Bowl: the anti-drug?

2007-01-16T18:06:00.000-08:00

During parent-teacher conference day on Friday, we had a fair amount of down time, so in addition to grading science fair projects (speaking of which, I HATE the science fair and the crazy things it makes people do... more on this later), jammin' to my stereo, and tidying my room, I spent a lot of time chatting with the teacher across the hall from me. He's in his early 30's, from the Delta, and black, meaning that the students relate to him in a way that they don't relate to me ("that crazy lady is a hippie!") and consequently confide in him. So, of course, I learned all kinds of dirt on my students from him.
There was one bit of information that he told me that I just have not been able to stop thinking about all weekend. Tyrone is one of my favorite students. He wasn't doing very well in my class at the beginning of the year, but pulled his grade up to a high B this past nine weeks. Given that he spent three of those nine weeks in alternative school, that's pretty darn impressive. He's great in class; participates actively, does his work, and gets really excited about what we're doing. The kid is very smart and has what it takes to do well in life. The three weeks he spent in alternative school were for two separate incidents, one in the school building and one on the school bus, in which he was fighting. I had no behavior issues from him in class the whole time, though. When I was talking to the teacher across the hall, I was really disturbed to learn that Tyrone sells crack after school in a "traphouse" to make some money for nice clothes and shoes and whatnot. He's not the only student of mine that I know is selling drugs, but it really bothers me that such a good kid is messing up in a big way.
Today, the other seventh grade science teacher came into my room to ask me a question about Science Quiz Bowl. She's coaching it, and I will be dropping by at some of the practices to help out when I can spare the time. I think that Tyrone was in alternative school for the previous announcement about Science Quiz Bowl where we passed around a sign-up sheet for interested students, because he didn't know what it was about but was really interested. He wanted to know whether he could do it even though he'd had discipline referrals this year, and I checked on the situation and got the OK to sign him up anyway. I told him, and I was being completely honest, that I thought he would be really good for Quiz Bowl.
I think it would be a really great thing for him to get involved in an activity that he'll excel at and enjoy. Maybe getting him off the streets for a couple afternoons each week will help to turn him around. It might not be enough, but I can hope.

Now playing: Jim Jones- We Fly High
speaking of which: I caved in and rapped for my students after school today, sort of. I let the three kids hanging out in my room talk me into doing a routine that went something like this:
Student 1: We fly high.
Student 2: No lie.
Student 3: You know it.
Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket: Ballin'!
priceless.

"When are we gonna study again?"

2007-01-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

There are a few students that I've made special efforts to help. One of them is Kelly. After about the second week of school, Kelly's mom requested a conference with all of Kelly's teachers. Based on what Kelly's mom and other teachers said, Kelly is not a very good student, doesn't work hard, and isn't very motivated. She's not a classroom management issue, but she struggles in school. Kelly's mom was concerned that Kelly doesn't do her homework, and I offered to call Kelly's mom each week to tell her what homework assignments Kelly would have that week (I've worked out a similar system with at least five parents). I've been calling Kelly's mom each week and have become fairly close with her; she called me once to ask if I could tell her any web sites that might help her with her nephew's science fair project.
Just before break, at the beginning of exams week, I made an announcement to all of my classes that I would be at Pizza Hut one evening holding "office hours" for anyone who wanted help studying for the nine weeks exam (and no, I will not buy you pizza, but if you want pizza and bring your own money, that's cool). I stole the Pizza Hut idea from a friend of mine who does TFA in the area. It sounded like a great idea to me; it would encourage students who needed help to seek it out, and would give me an opportunity to connect with them outside of school where I could be less serious and talk to them about things other than science. Those are two things that I'd really like to do a lot more of, but I've struggled to convince students to come for help outside of the school day.
Fifteen minutes after the set meeting time, not a single student had shown up, and I started to get very discouraged. Then, Kelly walked in the door. We ordered food for her (she decided to get the exact same pasta dish I'd ordered after asking what I'd be eating) and then sat down. She was the only student who showed up, which was very disappointing, but ended up giving me a really great opportunity to work with her. As we waited for our food, we chatted about nothing in particular; Kelly told me about her family, what she wanted for Christmas, and how she'd been really embarrassed when she sang at church and her boyfriend was there. After the food came, I turned the conversation to science. I asked her what she would like to study, and she didn't have any clear ideas of where to start. After a little prodding, she mentioned that she was a little confused about some of the genetics stuff, and showed me how she thought she was supposed to draw a Punnett sqaure. I realized pretty quickly that she was completely confused, so I started going through the genetics unit from the beginning and making sure she understood every part. Once I made sure she had the fundamentals down, I started drilling her, giving her Punnett square problem after Punnett square problem to practice, scrawling on the Pizza Hut napkins. I ended up taking one napkin and listing a step-by-step process for her to follow when doing one of the problems (which ended up being pretty useful for me, since I soon decided to give those steps to all my students).
After we'd been reviewing for a while, she made a comment that went something like, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, does it ever happen to you that you're helping your friend, or your friend is helping you, and you feel really good about it, but then later you don't know what to do?" I wasn't quite sure what she was getting at (was this a question about studying, or about life lessons?), and after asking her more about it, I realized she meant that she would study with a friend for a test, think that she knew the material, and then sit down to take the test and draw a blank. I asked her if, when she studied for a test, she would ever try to do a problem on her own, without looking at her notes or asking a friend, and checking to see if she could do it correctly. Kelly said, "Yes. Oh, you mean before taking the test? No." Bingo. We had a little conversation about study techniques, and I wrote a new Punnett square problem on a napkin that I told her to take home, attempt later that night on her own, and show to me the next day.
After we'd been there for a while, Kelly's mom showed up with Kelly's two-year-old sister, Carrie, whom I'd just heard all about from Kelly. Carrie's probably the cutest toddler I've ever seen. She walked up to me, said, "Hi Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, I'm Carrie," and proceeded to talk about all kinds of random things. I was amazed by her vocabulary and powers of articulation. I talked to Kelly's mom, who had just stopped by to see how much longer we'd be studying. She told me that she was fine with Kelly staying longer, because she desperately needed help studying. I asked Kelly what she wanted to do, and Kelly said, "I want to keep studying." I'm popping my collar a little bit at this point. I told her mom that if she felt comfortable, I could drive Kelly home when we were done studying so that Kelly's mom could get home (she's a single parent with a two year old, so I figured this could help her a lot), and Kelly's mom agreed. I studied for a while more with Kelly, and finally had to tell her that I needed to get home. As we walked out to my car, Kelly asked, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, when are we gonna study again?" Now I'm really popping my collar.
On the drive home, I let Kelly play with the tracks on the mix CD in my stereo, and she was endlessly amused by the fact that I had "Laffy Taffy" on it. When I dropped her off, her mom invited me to come in and see the living room. I told Kelly's mom that I'd heard from Kelly that the mom used to go to the blues club just down the street from my house, and I started asking Kelly's mom about it and told her that she should come out there some time. This conversation prompted a little giggling from Kelly; the idea of a teacher having some kind of social life outside of school is pretty funny when you're in seventh grade.
The Monday that we got back from break, Kelly found me in the cafeteria and asked when I would be at Pizza Hut again to study. I told her I'd do it again before the next major test. She came and found me later that day to tell me, "I'm dead serious about what I asked you at lunch. I'm gonna get my friends to come this time, too." A few other kids have asked me when I'll be at Pizza Hut again. Finally, something's getting through.
On a side note, the students are acting much more receptive to me these days. A few kids are coming by my room after school to get help or just hang out, and since break, the students have been on much better behavior. They're also coming to me for hugs now. That's a lot more fun than giving detentions.
Now playing: Jason Aldean- Amarillo Sky

Reflections on a nearly completed first semester of teaching

2006-12-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

The term will be over in 2 weeks, and the whole first half-year has gone much faster than I thought it would. My experiences were probably not all that different from those of any other first-year in Teacher Corps. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to bang my head against the wall, I got hopeful, I got discouraged, I felt like a failure, I felt that I meant something important to one of my students. Sometimes, all in the same day. Perhaps the most surprising part of this whole experience is the range of emotions felt in a single day; I had my share of great days and terrible days, and then the days that were a strange, rapidly paced mixture of positive and negative. I'm recalling a particular day when one student flipped me off, and another stayed after class to tell me that she liked me because I was different from all of her other teachers and I do cool demonstrations.

Throughout these past few months, I've spent a whole lot of time looking forward to my second year of teaching. It's taken me months of experimentation to figure out plenty of little details that can make or break a day in surprising ways. It took me a few months to figure out a good system for collecting and grading work. I only recently figured out that it is physically possible to use an overhead projector in my classroom, and now I use it at least a few times a week. I'm still learning how to best phrase assignments in easily understood terms. Some of these uncertainties come from the fact that it is my first year teaching, and some are about learning the ropes at my particular school. I'm not sure if there is any easy way I could have learned these things before starting teaching (aside from my school giving new teachers an orientation that dealt more with practical matters in the school instead of forcing us to listen to a speaker talk about how to use Bloom's verbs for 6 hours... but that's a rant that I'll save for a later date), since so much of my experimentation is about figuring out what works best for me. At any rate, the learning curve is steep, and I've spent so much of my energy figuring out the necessary small details that I couldn't devote as much attention as I would have liked to things like tracking individual students. Next year, I'll have a new group of students and will need to figure out what works best for them, but it sure will help to have the basics already down.

This past week has gone well in terms of teaching, and I saw some positive trends that I'm really not sure how to explain. All year, I've been encouraging students to come to me after school for help and to make up work. As it turns out, about 1 in 10 kids will show up to make up a test after being absent; the other 9 will never make it up and will earn a 0. I've really struggled with how to fix this problem; I tried posting lists of missing work, but stopped because it didn't help. I'm still having serious problems with this. However, this week, an unprecedented number of kids showed up in my room after school. Granted, not nearly as many as need to, but it was still something. And a few random kids that weren't even my students decided to show up, too! I've felt that students, in general, do not particularly like me, evidenced in part by the number of obscene notes I find about myself written on desks and in textbooks. Yet, all of a sudden, kids seemed to start liking me this week. A few came by my room just to talk to me about nothing in particular (speaking of which, today's memorable quote is, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, you don't have TV?! Man, THAT'S straight gangsta! " They generally seemed more friendly and receptive to me in class, too. Don't ask me to explain this one, but it's definitely very encouraging.

The biggest problem I've grappled with these past few months in which I seem to be making no headway at all is academic performance. I've literally stayed awake at night worrying about the number of kids that are failing my class. I don't even want to think about the percentage or write it here because it upsets me too much. A small part of this concern is selfish; I may end up getting in some hot water with the administration, eventually. Mostly, though, I take it as a sign that I'm doing something wrong as a teacher. Why aren't kids learning enough from my teaching to pass their tests, and why am I not motivating them enough to even make sure that they hand in all their classwork and make up missing work? It is because of this issue that I still have trouble thinking of myself as a good teacher. After the first 9 weeks ended, I was hopeful. I failed a lot of students, but thought that they would start increasing their efforts after the first report cards came home and they saw that I wouldn't just give them the pass unless they earned it. I planned to prepare them for tests better, and to do much more frequent classwork grades, both to give them an opportunity to offset low test grades and to create checkpoints for understanding before giving tests. If anything, the problem is worse now, since the kids frequently just forget to hand in their classwork, or don't care enough to put it in the basket on their way out, or don't make any real attempts to do work that they could easily complete. Still working on this. Suggestions are welcome.

I'm still struggling with classroom management. Again, much of it is experimentation. I came into the year unafraid to call kids out, dish out the detentions, and so forth, and still keep on them. Yet, there are days and students where it feels like my diligence is fruitless. I think I came into the year with the idea that I would spend a lot of class time in the first month dealing with classroom management issues and then would be able to just teach, but I'm realizing now how unrealistic that is. I became very frustrated when I first realized that I would have to keep spending lots of time every day cracking down on infractions. Words cannot express how sick I am of saying, "Close your mouth," "Spit out your gum," "Turn around in your seat," and so forth. I'm becoming more used to dealing with these stupid issues, though, so I don't get as frustrated.

One of the most dynamic aspects of my first semester has been feelings about the administration. I came into the year impressed by my principal and what a tight ship she ran. It is her first year as a principal, and she started the year out strict and strong. It seems that, like me, she became frustrated when things didn't fall into line a month or two in, and I went through a very bad period where it seemed like the administration was burned out and frustrated. They were inconsistent in their support, and seemed to think I was doing something wrong to have so many office referrals and detentions. About a month ago, the principal told me that she was "close to letting me fly" (by which I assume she meant that she was close to withdrawing her support of me). She doesn't seem to be making that threat any more, and I've stopped worrying about it. I still feel that the administration is not being consistent in the way it deals with students, but are on better terms with me because they have realized that the discipline problems are school-wide, not just a problem that I'm having. We had a staff meeting this week to discuss school discipline, and it seems like there is almost unanimous frustration with student (mis)behavior. This meeting was strangely comforting to me because it reassured me that the administration wants to do something, and that the staff of the school is going to do a better job of working together to deal with discipline problems. For me, few things are scarier than thinking that I will be completely cut off from support within my school.

Now playing: Young Dro feat. TI- Shoulder Lean

"You can back out of it"

2006-11-23T08:52:00.000-08:00

Almost all the schools around here had the whole week off for Thanksgiving, but mine was still in session on Monday and Tuesday (though I can't complain because we had a whole week off in October, when everyone really needed it). I've been going through a rough time the past few days and have been feeling very down for personal reasons completely unrelated to anything at my school. I called in sick on Monday because I couldn't pull myself together enough to face a day of school, and returned on Tuesday out of a sense of obligation but still feeling very upset. During first period, my planning period, I was talking to the guidance counselor about some of my problem students, and just before I left her office, she asked me if I was OK. I shook my head. In typical guidance-counselor fashion, she started to empathize with what she assumed was the problem. "I know the first year is hard. My first year, when I was at that school with the fourth grade boys, was the toughest year for me. And it's hard for you especially when this is a different culture, and this is such a rough group of kids that you have. You know, middle school is the toughest age group of all, it really is. And in this school, you don't have supportive parents, and these kids are really rough, and we don't have the support of the district- ahem, I didn't say that but you must have noticed it by now- and it's just a really hard place for you to come into. And I know that you committed two years, but listen to me, you can back out of it!"
As soon as she said those words, I snapped out of my nodding-and-agreeing mode and immediately responded, "I don't want to. I want to be here." (On a side note, I've been vaguely considering the possibility of switching school districts next year, but I am far from certain that I will even try, and I will be in the Delta, regardless). She seemed almost surprised to hear such a strong statement and began to pep-talk me about how I couldn't let the kids get to me. At that point, I mentioned that right then, I was feeling distressed for personal reasons, not because of the school or the kids. That got her off the subject of our school's troubles, but it made me reflect on the sadness of the interaction that had just taken place. With the exception of a couple of teachers, the guidance counselor probably understands where I'm coming from, and why I'm teaching at our school, better than anyone else in the school. I'm sure she's aware that my school is, by Delta standards, one of the better schools. And yet she reacted to my sadness that day by encouraging me to take advantage of the escape hatch! I'm not sure whether she was suggesting I quit after the end of the year or that I commit the exponentially worse act of quitting mid-year, but either way, it makes me sad to know that such an influential person at my school has so little faith in what the school is doing for these kids that she would actually suggest that I bail. It's not just the guidance counselor, either. More and more, I'm seeing signs that the other adults in the school have given up on the kids, and that makes me feel even more strongly that I need to be there and care about them. A few days ago, I was asking another teacher if I could use some textbooks for my class, and she responded, "Sure, take 'em all, I'm not even gonna bother trying to get my kids to use them because doesn't matter what I do, none of these kids do a darned thing in class any more anyway so it doesn't even matter what I try and teach." The same teacher reacted to my distressed state on Tuesday by assuming, just as the guidance counselor did, that I was upset about school, and commented, "So, teaching wasn't what you thought it would be, huh?" I'm starting to wonder how many of the people at my school assume that I won't last. Even though I frequently become frustrated with the school, my students, and the way that my own teaching often seems not to reach my students, I still maintain a hope that I will be able to make some small difference in the life of one of those kids. Though I don't seem to be helping the majority of my kids, especially given how many are failing my class right now and not making the minimal efforts needed to find out what work they are missing and make it up, there are the small moments that count. The girl who told me that she likes me because I'm different from her other teachers and I do cool demonstrations, the kid who's mom told me that I'm his favorite teacher, the girl who didn't do well in school and didn't focus on her work before this year but is making 100% in my class? They're reason enough to stick around here.
Now playing: Gillian Welch- Wayside/Back in Time

Required I blog: two weeks of consequences

2006-11-17T20:02:00.000-08:00

In mid-October, I started cracking down on infractions of my rules relentlessly and issuing out lots of consequences. I did this in part to require the MTC assignment that we pick one class, enforce every one of our consequences for two weeks, and blog about the results. I also did this because I wanted to start the second nine weeks strong by cleaning up my discipline problems, so I more or less attempted to enforce all of my rules in all of my classes for as long as I could. I'll be the first one to admit it: I failed. I did a much better job of cracking down on infractions, but I won't claim that I gave consequences for every single one. I tried, but there are times when I just get TIRED! Sometimes, it's easier for me to just keep talking to my class instead of interrupting myself to warn the kid who made a quick comment to his neighbor; there are only so many times I can jump on those little things in any given day before I start losing my focus.

My improved enforcement of consequences did not have the intended results. It may have helped to get some kids in line, but where I saw the largest effect of my actions actually had nothing to do with my kids or their behavior. My attempts at being stricter had the unanticipated, unintended consequence of rustling the feathers of my administration. Sometimes, I question whether it's really worth it for me to keep cracking down on infractions. My first consequence (after a warning) is a homework assignment to copy words and their definitions from the glossary of the book (10 words for each checkmark on the board denoting an infraction). Since at least 90% of my students never do the copying assignment, I almost inevitably go to my next consequence: detention. This is what has landed me in some hot water. Every time I give a detention, I have to write the student's name and infraction on a form and submit it to the principal for approval, wait a few days for it to come back, fill out 2 copies of another form, get the student to sign one copy (the worst part of all- I have to take class time to do this, and even though I am authorized to add more days to detention if the kid doesn't sign the form, I still have to answer lots of, "Gah-lee! What'd I do? When did I do that? That wasn't me! When do I gotta go to detention? How many days I got?" and by the way, at least several of these questions could easily be answered just by reading the slip), give the OTHER copy to the student to take home, and give the signed copy and approval form back to the office, by which I mean hand it to the cranky, bitter secretary who's in charge of discipline. It's lots of paperwork and time for me, the secretary is annoyed that I give her so many detention forms, and the principal called me in for a meeting to discuss discipline. The principal is concerned that I'm writing so many detentions in the second nine weeks, and is also concerned that I wrote so many office referrals last nine weeks (by the way, according to her records, I wrote 46 over the 9 weeks- that's an average of one per day, and I don't consider that excessive, especially given that I didn't write kids up every time I wanted to). This is really where the understanding breaks down between me and the other adults at my school: throughout summer school and TEAM, just about everyone I encountered advised me that I would be a teacher that would need to use lots of consequences, since I'm gentle and soft-spoken and physically unintimidating. This makes a lot of sense to me, and to be honest, I'd rather give a kid a detention calmly and with minimal words exchanged than yell at the kid to shut up until she did. My approach is precisely the opposite of that used by many other teachers at the school, who bark at the students and walk around swinging their paddles in a menacing manner. However, it seems that my administration and fellow teachers see the use of hard consequences as a sign of weakness and poor management. My principal has more or less said that I should get the kids back in line without using an official consequence because I should be able to look at them or say something to them that makes them do what they are supposed to be doing. To me, this is a difference in style, and giving a consequence rather than scaring a student into obedience is not a sign of weakness. And let's be honest: even if I tried harder to get students to listen by scaring them, a petite 22 year old from the North just doesn't have the same kind of power as the other teachers at the school. Try as I may, I just can't communicate these sentiments to my principal in a way that makes her see my point of view. Furthermore, she has told me several times that I need to start paddling. The other teachers sometimes tell me the same thing. I want to hit the next person who says that. I told the principal at the beginning of the year that I didn't intend to paddle, and when she asked me more about it, and asked if I'd ever feel comfortable paddling, I explained that I am against it, and, when pressed, gave some of my reasons for feeling this way. My principal said that was fine and she respected my decision. Shouldn't that have been the end of the discussion? Why am I getting pushed on the issue when she'd accepted my statement before?

Also, the school says that they will give one day of ISD to any student who fails to report to detention on the assigned day, but given the number of kids I see in the detention room every day compared to the number that should be there, it doesn't seem like the school is following through on this rule.

So, in summary, negative effects of sticking to my rules more strictly: conflicts with the administration, pissed-off secretary, grumpy students, lots of paper work for me, mental tiredness and approaching burn-out for me. I need to wait longer to see if the positive effects outweigh all this, but right now, I have my doubts.

Now playing- Grateful Dead- Ripple

Required blog: classroom management

2006-11-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

My original classroom management plan went a little like this. Expectations: no gum; keep arms, legs, and objects to yourself; raise your hand to speak and listen while others are speaking; be prepared; respect others. Rewards: verbal praise, high five or high ten, cookies for the class, letter home, stickers, star student award. Consequence latter: warning, detention, office referral. Other consequences: move seat, phone call home, loss of priveleges, pop quiz for the class. I've stuck to it, mostly, with some changes.
I'm still trying to work out a good warning system. A few weeks into school, I started writing names on the board as warnings, and placing checks next to names to indicate detention. It helped me keep track of everything, it made it clear to the students that they were being warned, and it meant that I didn't have to interrupt myself to verbally warn a kid. I like this system, but I've been trying to move more from using the board to using the overhead projector, which means that I have to walk around to write names on the board and lose time and focus. About a month into school, I realized that I was letting too many minor things go because I couldn't issue detentions to half the class every day. I added an intermediate consequence between a warning and a detention: copying definitions out of the back of the book for homework. Ten words for every check next to your name, double the number of words if you hand it in a day late, detention if you still don't turn it in, and it's your responsibility to remember to give me thte words. I'm thinking about abolishing this consequence, since so few kids do the assignment. My principal actually suggested that I skip straight to detention because of the lag time involved: I have to submit approval forms to the principal every time I write a detention, then fill out two copies of a detention form, get the kid to sign one copy (which sucks because there is no good way to do it quickly without the inevitable, "What I do? That wasn't me! How many days I gotta go? What day I gotta go?" and my school does not have enough passing time that I can just ask the kids to stay after class and take care of it all right then) and give the other copy to the kid, send the whole thing back to the office (and possibly get evil looks from the secretary) several days before the detention gets issued. Bottom line: lots of paperwork, lots of delay. I'm giving out detentions like crazy but really wish I could figure out something else to do because of all the paperwork involved.
I had some clear ideas about how I would like the procedures in my class to work, many of which didn't work because of the weird half-class-half-lab setup of my room. I recently rearranged the room so that kids are sort of sitting in rows (albeit facing sideways and cornered on one side of the room), which makes it easier to enforce ideals I had like feet on the ground, bags under your chair. A recent procedure that I instituted that's revolutionized the start of class is a 6 minute time limit on the bell-ringer from the time the bell rings. In other words, 6 minutes to get your binder, sharpen your pencil (these were huge time-wasters), settle down, write the question and answer. After 6 minutes, I stamp the ones that are done, and I count up the number of stamps each kid has at the end of the week. The first day, almost no kids finished in some of my periods, but now they are almost all doing it.
Office referrals are the hot topic of the moment for me, since my principal has recently expressed concern about the number of detentions and referrals I write. At my school, teachers are supposed to write an office referral, not send the student out, and wait for the office to call the student down (which may take hours or days), unless the student is "an immediate threat to the learning environment". With almost all of my office referrals, I end up sending the kid out because if I could conduct class with the kid in my room, I wouldn't need to be writing an office referrral in the first place. I've been frustrated with how little the administration has done lately with the kids I've sent to the office: reprimand them, paddle them, and send them back to my class the next day, and have consequently been writing up the same kids over and over again. I tried to discuss this with my principal but didn't find the conversation particularly fruitful. We are allowed to send students to the guidance counselor for behavior issues, which I may start doing more if the administrators aren't doling out adequate consequences. I've also been sending students into the hall and making them wait to talk to me. More often than not, I'll just hand the student an office referral and say, "Go," but I'll sometimes step out and have a talk with them about their behavior and letting them back in the room on the condition that they stop whatever it was they were doing. The biggest problem I have with my consequences is that I have no serious consequence that is immediate, other than office referrals.
I've added a reward that I really like. It's very simple and informal: a student does well in class one day, I call the kid back as the rest of the class is leaving, I give the kid a piece of candy. This one is really fun because I call the kid back in a serious tone, see the kid some back with a really concerned look, ask me, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, am I in trouble?" and then get to smile at the kid and say, "No, I just wanted to tell you that you did really well in class today. Here's a piece of candy. Can you do that again tomorrow?" Letters home are similarly fun.
I've been lazy on my classroom reward system. I have a line drawn on my board with a sad face on one end and a happy face on the other, and have a construction paper cut-out of a car for each period. Good behavior moves the car forward and bad behavior moves it backward. Hit the sad face, I give the class a pop quiz on behavior expectations, hit the happy face and I bake cookies for the class. Part of the difficulty with this is that I haven't figured out consistent increments or anything of the sort, so it's all fairly arbitrary whether I move the car and how much I move it, and I've been largely ignoring the cars. Third period has never really moved past the sad face, and no one has earned cookies yet, although sixth period has been lingering close to the happy face for quite some time. I'm wondering if I should figure out a more consistent system for moving the cars or if I should just focus my time and energy on other things.

Required blog: learning styles

2006-10-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

I gave a learning styles inventory to all of my classes within the first few days of school, partly because I needed something for them to do after they finished the diagnostic test I gave them and partly because my mentor teacher was giving the inventory to her classes, and it seemed mildly interesting. At any rate, I let the questionnaires sit and collect dust until this week, when I realized that I needed to look at them for my blog. It was just one of those things that went on the backburner because it wasn't pressing, but I do wish that I'd thought about the questionnaires earlier in the year.
The overwhelming majority of my students are visual learners, a trend that is consistent across all of my classes. At the beginning of the year, I was doing very little teaching that involved visual learning and relied primarily on auditory devices (i.e. lecture and note-taking). In retrospect, I did this because my first two attempts at using visual devices to learn (having students draw lab safety posters and having students diagram a plant cell) failed miserably. The problem was not with the visual nature itself (which I had implicitly assumed), but with the fact that my students need VERY clear guidelines for any independent practice that they do, or else will sit and stare at their paper for the rest of the period. I've just recently started to have students represent information that I've already taught using visual devices, and I'm very happy with the results. I came up with some ideas after my school district pulled me out of school for a day to send me to a "Thinking Maps" workshop. I remember making lots of cynical comments to myself during the workshop about the fact that we were taking 7 hours to learn that stuff, and that the district thought it was worth all of my students missing a day of teaching, but when all is said and done, it gave me some useful ideas. I had students use a "double bubble" map (sort of a modern Venn diagram) to compare and contrast plant/animal cells, and a multiflow map to see the reactants and products in photosynthesis and cell respiration. This worked very well; I saw some students who never seemed to focus much during class become really engaged for the first time, and the visual aids seemed to really help students process what I'd been lecturing about every day. This was also the first time I'd been able to use student-centered classroom activities in a way that really seemed to work. Seeing the results of my learning styles inventory reaffirmed how important it will be for me to continue to use these visual devices in teaching.
Very few of my students were kinesthetic or auditory learners. I've been using auditory devices heavily, probably too heavily, but have used very few kinesthetic methods. On a side note, I found that fact ironic, given that when I took the learning styles inventory, I found out that I myself am a kinesthetic learner. I'll be doing a pretty sweet predator/prey activity next week that involves lots of kinesthetics, and as I figure out how to integrate lab-esque activities into my lessons (which hasn't happened very well so far for a combination of reasons: lack of classroom space, difficulty of obtaining supplies at short notice, and concerns about classroom management), I hope that I can use kinesthetic methods more frequently just to mix it up a little more.
As a final point, I'd like to comment on the biggest lesson I learned from giving the surveys, which had nothing to do with learning styles at all. As I mentioned, this was one of the first assignments I gave my students, and it made me realize just how hard it is for a middle school student to follow a complicated set of directions. Some students were confused about how to even fill out the questionnaire, and virtually everyone asked me questions about how to do the scoring at the end. This was an accurate preview of how much difficulty my students have following directions that are obvious to me. I've become increasingly more careful about making directions explicit, clear, and simply worded. I still end up explaining written directions to individual students more often than I should (a perfect example was the Sudoku bonus puzzle I gave to students who finished my nine weeks exam early... wow, I got tired of explaining that one after the hundredth time!), but I'm learning.
Now playing: The Eagles- Take it Easy

Just my imagination running away with me

2006-10-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

I'm one of the lucky few with a week long break in the middle of October. Flew back to New England yesterday, am staying with the folks and hopefully visiting my college later in the week. On the flight home, I sat next to a man who teaches middle school in one of the ritzy, techinally-public-but-who-are-we-kidding-it-may-as-well-be-private schools on the north shore of Chicago, who couldn't understand why I would actually want to teach in the kind of school I'm teaching in rather than a school like his, and kept on mentioning that his school would be a really great place for me to work (for the record: I'm not tempted in the least to move to Chicago and teach a bunch of rich kids). Over the past few months, I've had my moments of homesickness, but did a pretty good job of putting on the blinders and focusing on school, my reasons for being in Mississippi, and the wonderful people I've met down there. Coming home, though, all the feelings of homesickness I've managed to somewhat hold back come pouring out. I love New England. I was born and raised here, I went to college here, and it's in my blood. I look around the beautiful landscape and ask myself what I'm doing in Mississippi when I could have so easily stayed here.
I'm having strong emotional reactions to a lot of the little things I'm seeing when I come back home. Today, I went apple picking with my parents. It's the perfect activity to do on a fall day in New England, and it brought back lots of childhood memories. In my opinion, a New England fall is about the most beautiful thing in the world, and I found myself staring out the car window mesmorized by the red maples with their flaming leaves. Even the poison ivy looks beautiful in its fall colors. I went to the grocery store today, and thought about how nice it was to find all the foods I wanted so easily; no scrambling to find the vegetables I want or some hummus or some Stonyfield yogurt. At one point, I looked around at the crowd of people I was standing in and thought that it was nice not to be the only person in the crowd who was some kind of ambiguous, not black but not white, race. Little things.
I went through lots of my pictures from college today, and found an envelope full of nice personal notes that my teammates wrote me last year as part of my senior gift. Many of my college friends are still in this area, and I'll be seeing some of them this week. Having the kind of reactions I am being at home, I can only imagine how hard it will be to go back up to my college and see all the buildings, the trees, the spaces where so many of my formative experiences happened, and see all of my underclassmen friends whom I dearly miss, still living the life that is so distant from my recent experiences.
I ended up daydreaming a lot today about what I'll do when I'm done Teacher Corps. I think about it from time to time in Mississippi, and don't have a clear plan because I'm really living week-to-week right now and don't need to figure out anything that far in the future. Depending on the day, I might imagine myself staying in Mississippi for a while longer to teach, or going to all sorts of other places to teach, or leaving teaching and going to grad school, probably for public health. At any rate, I had lots of daydreams about living in New England today. I keep thinking of the Fountains of Wayne song "Peace and Love," "Sometimes I think I might just move to Vermont/Open up a bookstore or a vegan restaurant." I found myself talking to my parents about how maybe I'd like to teach in a poor, rural part of New England (found myself thinking of the Cider House Rules, somehow), or maybe the Boston Public Schools, or maybe (by my own admission, this one is much more of a pipe dream) become an organic farmer up here and grow all the vegetables and fruits that seem so hard to come by in Mississippi, where the chemicals that the crop dusters spray over the cotton fields make me wake up in the middle of the night wheezing. Maybe have some alpacas, too. Heck, during my nap today, I even dreamed about harvesting potatoes on the same organic farm where I worked when I was in middle school (huh, this must be why my students think I'm a hippie). My overly active imagination is running wild. I still haven't fully processed my thoughts about being here, and about what it will be like to go back to Mississippi in a week. In a way, I'm trying not to think too hard about it because I know it will be painful. In the meantime, I'm interested to see what else my imagination manages to cook up.
Now playing- Fountains of Wayne- Peace and Love

Resolutions for next term

2006-10-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

We have one more week left in the term before a week of break, and wow, am I looking forward to that break. Strangely enough, in some ways I am also looking forward to the beginning of next term. After coming into school at the beginning of the year with only the foggiest notion of what was actually going on, grappling with minor issues like figuring out how to keep papers from 6 classes straight and how to arrange the seats in my classroom (OK, maybe that one's still an issue, as I really haven't figured out what to do with the half classroom/half lab setup that somehow fails to make a decent classroom or a lab by trying to be both at once), there were just so many things about my teaching and organization that had to be put on the backburner while I struggled with classroom management and the logistics of little things. Now that I'm a little better settled and organized, I've been thinking a lot about things that I want to do differently, and even starting to do some of them. It may still be a while before I'm a good teacher, but I'll be a better teacher next term. Here are some of my goals.
1. First and foremost: stop talking so darned much!
I've ended up lecturing much more than I intended to because things always take me longer to explain than I anticipate, and I'll often have something planned as independent practice that I realize my students do not understand well enough to do on their own. I'm getting a little better about that. I've also been avoiding group work because the majority of the times I've tried it (and I've only tried it a handful of times), it flopped badly. Part of the problem is the physical layout of my room, and part of it is that I just cannot keep straight in my head which of my 130+ students shouldn't be put together because they are in rival gangs, because they will flirt with each other, because they just straight up don't like each other, etc. For all the reasons, I'm still going to mostly avoid groupwork. In part, I need to shut up (or, as my kids would say, "shut up talking to the class") for my own sanity; I hate it when my throat itches at the end of the day from talking so much. More importantly, though, the kids need to get more practice doing their own work rather than taking notes in class. I assign homework, which I basically count as bonus points for students who actually do it, but not everyone does the homework, and it seems like studying for a test outside of school is a foreign concept to some of my students. Plus, having kids do work during class gives them (and me) a better idea of how well they are understanding things before test time rolls around. I really resisted the idea of having kids just sit in class and do worksheets- after all, I want to teach, not babysit- but I think having them do more practice in class will afford me more opportunities to help them one-on-one, since no one comes for the extra help I always offer after school (heck, no one even comes to make up tests that they miss...) This brings me to my next point:
2. Keep kids posted on what they've missed.
Almost every day at the beginning of class, I repeat myself like a broken record, "Makeup Mondays. If you miss any work because you are absent, come Monday after school to make it up." I might as well be talking to a wall; I've had about 2 kids show up so far. Next term, I plan to collect classwork on a much more regular basis (see point 3), so I'll be more on top of what they've actually missed, and I'll post lists in the room to remind them of who missed what when they were absent. The whole make-up work issue has been really frustrating to me; a lot of the problem is that kids are unwilling to stay after school. They will occasionally interject in my Makeup Monday announcement, "How are we supposed to get home?" I'm tempted to tell them that if they can figure out a way to get home when they have detention, they can get home the same way for makeup days. Seriously. When I was in middle and high school, we had study halls (which turned into free blocks by high school) during the day, which was a great way that we could get extra help from teachers and make up work that we'd missed. I think the Delta schools would really benefit from requiring students to spend less time in class and having more opportunities like this (I could write a whole blog entry on my issues with the "more time in school is better education" philosophy that seems to be prevailant here), but who's listening to what some crazy young teacher from up North thinks, anyway. As far as the extra help goes, that's why my point #1 will be important, but as far as makeup work goes, they'll just have to bite the bullet and stay after school. I'm hoping that posting the lists will make them more motivated to do so, at least.
3. Grade less thoroughly and more frequently
I had this pretty dumb idea at the beginning of the year. I require my kids to keep binders (which stay in the classroom except for the few papers they choose to bring home to work on homework at the end of the day), and I thought, sweet, instead of dealing with the hassle of having kids hand in homework and classwork, I'll just check that stuff when I do binder checks! Stupid. A few reasons why: a. binder checks take so long that I do them very infrequently, so kids go for long stretches of time without getting any work back, b. many of my kids didn't even get binders, despite my constant reminders and my offers to sell them to the kids, and even the ones with binders haven't done a great job of organizing them according to the system I have in place, so homework and classwork inevitably get lost before I can correct them. This point is also tied to point 1, in that part of why I graded so little classwork was that I would have lots of days where kids weren't doing much beyond taking down notes that I gave them and discussing them. Just this past week, I started doing something new: I had kids do a little practice during class (in this case, I had them do concept maps of topics I'd already lectured on, advising them to use their textbooks and class notes to help them) and hand it in at the end. I spent about an hour total grading these assignments; I basically just glanced at them and gave slightly improvised grades along the lines of, "this kid got all the information down and was working hard in class- 100%," or, "this kid wasn't focusing very well in class and got down some of the stuff but not all- 70%" and then handed them back the next day. This is also great because it allows kids to have high classwork grades even if they do poorly on the tests (another problem I've been having relates to high failure rates). Confession: to make this work, I've had to do something kind of bad. I always felt that I should hand back graded assignments myself so that kids couldn't see other kids' grades, but this lost me a ton of class time because of the weird set-up of my room that makes it very hard to move around and that I really have no way of fixing. So, I've been handing back way too little work; I've just had papers sit in my "out" folder for weeks that never quite made it back (yes, I know how bad that is). Well, it got to the point where I decided that I'd sacrifice privacy for being able to give efficient feedback. So, I plan to keep this system up. It actually makes grading more manageable for me, too. I'm also planning to do daily mini-notebook checks next term, where I'll just walk around and ask kids to show me their bell-ringer and notes from the previous day and just check off to see that they have it. Having more independent practice time will make this much more feasible for me; when I talk for most of class, there's no way I'd have the time to do even spot checks.
4. Devote more class time to test preparation
This relates to point 2. I had an experience where I gave a review, then gave a test the next day, and almost everyone failed. I went over the old test and gave a retest. The day before the retest, I gave the kids all the same questions that would be on the test, and even told them that the review had all the same questions as the test. And yet, an embarrassing number of kids still failed miserably. I think the problem is simply that these kids didn't go home and study the answers that I'd basically handed to them. One time, I gave a homework assignment to make flashcards (and took a few minutes at the end of class to explain how to make and study flashcards), and some kids did it. Last week, I had several of my classes actually make flashcards in class as I walked them through it. The next day, I saw two girls in homeroom actually studying their cards! They didn't even have a test coming up very soon, but just pulled the cards out because they happened to have them in their pockets. Dude. When we were making cards in class, I had one boy comment, "This is really neat!" So here's my assessment of the situation: given a homework assignment to make flashcards, a lot of kids won't take the time to actually sit down and start writing out their cards. But given a stack of cards that they made in class (and by the way, even learning something in the process of making cards because it forced them to rewrite definitions), kids might have a few minutes of downtime and just pull out the cards and start looking at them. I plan to use this strategy frequently, and am looking for other ways I can have them do something in class that will help them study a little outside of class (suggestions, please?)
After writing all this, I feel a little weird because when I was in school, no teacher would ever have done things like have us study during class. Given the long school days with no built-in study time, and the very limited extent to which many of my students actually do work outside of school, though, I need to adjust my teaching somehow, and this is what I've got so far.

Now playing: Queen- Fat Bottomed Girls

Anatomy of a terrible day

2006-09-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

I called in sick today. My official reasons for doing so (all of which are true) are that my stomach has been upset for a few days, my allergies are acting up, and I had some pretty bad insomnia two nights ago, so I'm feeling pretty run down. All of these symptoms are things that I'd normally grin and bear, but in light of everything else that happened during school yesterday, I just didn't think that I could handle teaching today, so I took my first sick day. During training, we did lots of scenarios and discussions about crisis situations at school, very few of which had actually happened to me until yesterday, when for some reason all hell broke loose over the course of the day. Here are the highlights:
Homeroom: One of my students, Timmy, has been wanting to make me bang my head against a wall for the past 2 weeks. Timmy won't keep his mouth shut during class, questions me over stupid things, tries to get other students in trouble with me, and is generally just a jerk to the other kids in my class. I met his mom last Friday, and talking to her sort of made me realize why Timmy acts the way he does; I was trying to express my concern about Timmy's behavior, but all his mom wanted to talk about was how some girl hit Timmy. At any rate, during homeroom, Timmy grabbed another kid, pushed him agains the wall, and held him there. I came over and actually yelled at Timmy to back off, which didn't work, so I ended up physically pulling the boys apart. Being a female teacher, I always thought that if a fight broke out, I'd run to get the nearest male teacher, but when this incident actually happened, my protective instincts kicked in and I just had to intervene as quickly as I could. After I broke the boys apart, I was still panicking, so I made one boy come out in the hall with me and asked Mr. Sosa, the big football coach who teaches across the hall from me, to come into the hall. I told him what happened, and he pulled the other boy, Calvin, into the hall. Calvin is a big trouble-maker, but I still really like the kid. Calvin started saying that he wasn't fighting and that Timmy had grabbed him, and from what I'd observed, he might have been telling the truth. Mr. Sosa paddled both of them while I watched. I hate paddling, and I hate watching it. Calvin started crying after he was paddled, and I ended up talking to him for a little while to calm him down, helping him clean himself up, and escorting him to his first period class. I really hated myself after that happened, and I wanted to cry.
Immediately after that: I wrote up a report about the fight, which I gave to my principal. She asked why Mr. Sosa had paddled the boys, because he wasn't supposed to. She said that the punishment for fighting was suspension, and since he'd paddled the boys, the school wasn't supposed to punish students twice for the same offense. She wasn't upset with me, but said that Mr. Sosa should have known better.
Second period: Mr. Sosa comes in my room while students are working and tells me, "Next time I paddle kids, don't tell the principal. I paddled them to give them an easy way out so that they wouldn't have to miss school, and now they'll both get sent away for five days." I didn't want to discuss this in front of my students, so I just said, "OK." The fact that Mr. Sosa said this in front of students made three people (him, me, and the principal) look like idiots. Wow.
Fourth period: Two of my male students make sexually inappropriate comments about me. They repeatedly ask me if I have a boyfriend, to which I keep on answering, "that's personal." One tells me that he likes me, and I say, "Good. I like all of my students," prompting him to clarify, "I like you as a girlfriend," which I tell him is inappropriate. They keep on asking me for my phone number and home address (which of course I don't give them), and one tells me that he will come by and visit me after school, then mutters half under his breath, "'cause Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket and I can do whatever we want behind closed doors and it stays behind closed doors." He makes several other inappropriate comments over the course of class, and keeps winking at me, to which I respond, "Do you have something in your eye?"
Seventh period: I have my homeroom class back again. They are being rowdy and are annoyed at me for cracking down on them. All of a sudden, I look up and Calvin and another student, Peter, are grabbing each other and pushing. Someone tells me that Peter and Timmy are cousins, so Peter is standing up for Timmy. Again, I physically intervene. It's five minutes before dismissal, and I make everyone just sit in their seats without getting up or talking, and give them my two cents on what it means to respect the other students in the class. At the end of the day, I report this incident (and all the other events of the day) to my principal.
I talked to several other teachers at the end of the day, and one teacher even suggested to me that I take a day or two off (at that point, I'd already pretty much decided not to come the next day). She also told me that since I'm a small person, and some of my male students are large, I should be careful and stay in my classroom with the door closed during my planning period and not let anyone come in the room. I think this is overly reactive, but I'm kind of freaked out after hearing someone say that.
Now playing: Bruce Springsteen- Born to Run

This post is for Keisha

2006-09-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'd be lying if I said that the past 6 weeks haven't been difficult and at times really disheartening. Right now, I feel that I'm failing many of my students. I do mean failing in the literal sense (an embarrasing percentage are earning below 70% in my class), but also failing in the sense that they aren't responding to my teaching. The vast majority of my students failed my first test (and I mean some of them failed as in earning 8% or so), and I feel really disheartened when I ask a question and students just respond with a random unrelated term that they happen to remember from a recent lesson (e.g. "What organelle helps plant cells make energy from the sun?" "Oooh, ooh! Selectively permeable!") I feel like a complete failure sometimes, but I'm still going strong. Even though I still feel like so many of my students just aren't understanding what I'm teaching, once every few days, I'll see evidence of some student I've reached, some lightbulb going on in someone's head, and that's what keeps me going. Just this past week, I had perhaps my most powerful teaching moment with one of my students. I'll just call her "Keisha."
This story wouldn't mean much without the relevant background information. On the first day at school with all classes meeting, Keisha showed up in my fourth period class. The first assignment I had all my students do was to fill out a student information sheet. A girl in the class approached me and asked, "Can I help her write hers? She's slow," gesturing toward Keisha. I told her that she could. I watched Keisha struggle to even write her own name on her paper. Later in the period, I had all students write an essay about respect, and I allowed the two girls to work together. I then invited students to read their essays to the class, and Keisha volunteered. She came up to the front of the room with her friend, who held the sheet of paper and pointed to one word at a time for Keisha to read. The result was a painfully slow recital of the essay that lacked any rhythm or inflection, and I remember just looking around the room and thinking that I would want to kick anyone who dared to make fun of Keisha (to the credit of my other students, no one did). We have lunch during fourth period, so I had to take this whole class to the cafeteria and eat with them. I noticed that Keisha walked with a bit of difficulty and spoke very slowly, with a speech impediment. She sat next to me at lunch and smiled at me. At some point during the meal, she picked the juice box off of her tray, held it out to me, and said very slowly, "I brought you some juice." For reasons that I can't even explain, that just broke my heart. After school, I asked the special ed teacher about Keisha, and the special ed teacher told me that the school didn't have her accomodations so no one really knew anything about Keisha yet, but that she had heard a rumor that Keisha had been very sick the past year and missed school, had been very bright before she fell ill, and had returned to school the way she is now. At the end of the day, I explained this story to one of my roommates and found myself saying, "It's so unfair!" I actually started crying when I explained Keisha to my roommate. This is the only time I've actually cried since school started.
Over the past few weeks, I've become very attached to Keisha. She sits next to me every day at lunch and does incredibly sweet things, like cleaning up my trash for me without being asked to do so and bringing me napkins. I continued to struggle with how to help her. I've frequently asked the special ed teacher assigned to work with her about what I can do for Keisha, but this teacher has offered me nothing more than, "Well, I still don't have her IEP [individualized education plan]." I felt sad watching her in class and wondering how to teach a student who can write approximately one word per minute.
About a week and a half ago, Keisha missed school one day. The next day, she was at school, and while I was eating lunch with her, she mentioned that her stomach hurt. I had her drink some water, but she said that it still hurt, and said that she had missed school the day before because of her stomach. Tears started welling up in her eyes. "Keisha, what's wrong?" I asked. "My stomach hurts." I asked her if anything else was wrong, if she'd like to go the the guidance counselor, if she'd like me to see if the nurse could see her, etc., but she answered no to all of those questions. She said that she would call her momma to pick her up, but when I offered to let her go to the office and use the phone, she said she'd wait until 5th period, after my class ended.
The next day, both of Keisha's parents came by the school and wanted to talk to me. As soon as I finished my last class of the day, I met with Keisha and her parents in the office. Her mother was concerned that Keisha had been complaining about her stomach for a few days, yet had nothing apparently physically wrong with her, and suspected that Keisha was stressed out about school. I told her mother that I was very glad she came to the school because I had been hoping I could talk to her and figure out how to help Keisha better. Keisha's mom told me that just that day, she had physically brought Keisha's IEP to the school because for some stupid reason, a month into the school year, the school still hadn't received it from Keisha's elementary school, which is in the same district! She made a copy of the IEP for me, and we discussed Keisha's situation. Her mother informed me that Keisha has some sort of brain damage that started affecting her when she was five and caused her to forget everything that she'd learned up to the age of five. Keisha's handwriting, walking, and speech are still improving, and she functions at the level of a fourth grader but must be tested at grade level. Keisha's father suggested to me that they buy a tape recorder for Keisha to record my class, which I thought was a great idea, and I got the OK from my principal.
The following week, Keisha switched her schedule. It turns out that she was supposed to be in self-contained (that means with other special education students only) classes for at least math, reading, and English, but the school had put her in regular classes because they didn't have her IEP. Keisha wanted to stay in my class, though, so she did. I noticed an improvement in her performance. Keisha began raising her hand in class more frequently, and, here's the great part, answering my questions correctly! I could see a huge grin break across her face every time that happened. I'm not even sure how to express how proud I am of her. I called her over to my desk at the end of class, told her that she did really well, and gave her a small uninflated balloon.
This past Thursday, I attended my first PTSO meeting. At the end of the meeting, I saw Keisha and her mom talking to the guidance counselor, and I heard her mom telling the guidance counselor, "We love Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket." The guidance counselor smiled and responded, "So do we." That just made my week. I went over to talk to Keisha and her mom, and her mom told me that Keisha had seemed much better that week, and seemed to be adjusting better. She told me, "Keisha came home the past two days with a balloon, and I asked her where she got the balloon, and she told me she got it from Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket for doing well in class." I went on to say how proud I was of Keisha, and her mom said that they were, too.
It's for students like Keisha that I leave for school before sunrise every morning and deal with all the rest of it.
Now playing: Bonnie Rait- Angel from Montgomery

Understanding Poverty

2006-09-14T20:38:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty as our assignment for this weekend. I was able to relate this reading best to my own experiences when I reflected on perhaps my greatest frustration so far in teaching: a lack of organization, and a lack of ability to follow simple directions. Let me elaborate.
I require students in my class to keep 3-ring binders with all their work. The binders stay in the classroom so that I don't have to worry about kids leaving their binders at home. I have a specific system for setting up the binders that I introduced to students on Day 1 and have reviewed multiple times since. I gave the students a good week and a half to obtain their binders, reviewed how to set them up, and remind students constantly that I will be checking and grading their notebooks. As I've mentioned to my students, a lot is at stake in this grades since I usually will check class work and homework when I grade their binders rather than having them hand in these assignments separately. Every day, I instruct them to take out their notebooks at the beginning of class, and every time we take notes or receive a handout, I tell students where to put it in their notebook. I keep a sample notebook in my room with all the work we've done. When a large percentage of my students failed to bring in binders by the due date, I went out and bought a bunch myself and offered them to students for $2. Now, here's the part that kills me: a good third of my students didn't have their notebooks in the classroom when I graded them! So, I had no choice but to give all of these students 0's. Wow, that made me want to scream. Of the other two-thirds of my students, a significant number had binders with some of the work, but were missing significant chunks of work and didn't have anything in order, despite the fact that I at least mention notebook organization EVERY SINGLE FREAKIN' DAY! Today, when we were working on a review sheet for the test I'm giving tomorrow (as a side note, this is a retest for the exam I gave last week that the majority of my students failed, and failed badly... but that's a topic for another blog), I had one student sit in his chair, stare at the sheet without even attempting to write a single answer, and tell me that he needed help. Our interaction went a little like this:
Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket: OK, what questions do you have?
Student: I don't know this one, this one, or this one, or this one, or... [pointing to every single question on the sheet]
Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket: Why don't you try and explain to me what confuses you about the questions? We can start with the first one.
Student: I don't know any of it.
Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket: OK, why don't you take a look at the notes you took and the handouts about the cell?
Student: I don't have any of that.
Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket: You didn't keep any of the notes you took at all?
Student: No.
Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket: What about your binder?
Student: I don't have one. I don't have my notes.
Incidentally, this student kept on telling me for the first week or two of school that he was about to buy a binder. Even though I'm still working on a way to make sure students actually buy binders, I've grown somewhat used to the fact that a lot of my students just don't have them. But, for crying out loud, not keeping a single thing we worked on in class?! I was so frustrated that I told this student that if he didn't even keep his notes and handouts, of course he wouldn't know what he needed to know to study for the tests.
In addition to my notebook woes, I've had similar frustrations with students failing to follow directions that I give that seem abundantly clear to me. On the same review sheet that I handed out today, there were all of two lines of directions at the top of the page. It was a fill-in-the-blanks sheet, and the sheet had a word box that students could use. In bold letters, the top of the paper read, "You may use these words more than once." At some point in the day, I stopped counting how many kids asked me if they could use a word more than once. This kind of situation is standard fare for me; I have some students who still need to be reminded to put their names on their papers.
Coming into all this, I realized that my students probably wouldn't have the kind of organizational skills that they need to do well in school, but I had no idea that it would be this hard to teach them. I mean, tell kids step by step what to do, have them follow along, remind them a few times, and I should have almost everyone on board, right? Ha. Lately, I've felt like banging my head against a wall trying to figure out how the heck to get these kids to follow simple directions, and wondering why I've been failing with so many of them.
I wouldn't say that I have a solution to my problems after reading the book. However, Understanding Poverty made me realize that my students' struggles with organization are not the result of incompetent teaching, but a reflection of the lack of order in their lives. Payne wrote about how in poverty class, people do not tell stories in a chronological way, but in a non-linear manner that focuses on entertainment rather than plot. Hence the problem my students have following step-by-step directions that seem crystal clear to me. Payne also mentions the disorderliness that characterizes the lives of the poor: fluctuating personal ties, frequent moves, unanticipated problems that individuals lack the resources to solve neatly, and a focus on living in the moment. If my students think this way, it probably makes little sense to them to organize their notes, or in some cases, even hold on to their notes. I'm still at a loss for how to convey the importance of organization in academics to my students.

Completely unrelated anecdote that just makes me laugh so much that I couldn't resist including it in this blog: I give a Star Student award to one student in each class period once every two weeks (which causes its own issues for me, since I'm convinced my classes are rigged... I mean, seriously, more than two thirds of my 6th period students are on the honor roll wheras 4th period, I'll be happy if I get a coherent- not even correct, just coherent- answer from anyone... but again, that's a topic for another blog). One of the perks of the award is getting a little mix CD that I threw together. The Star Student award is starting to do great things for some students; I have students who are coming up to me and telling me that they will act right in class and study hard so that they can be the next Star Student. The CD has something to do with that motivation, methinks. Word is starting to spread that Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket actually knows the music that the students listen to, and that's earned me cool points. Today, my students started a new routine that seems to be catching on. It goes a little something like this:
Student: Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, what you know about dat?
Me: [smiling in amusement] I know all about dat.
*cue laughter and exclaimations of, "Oh snap! Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket knows about TI!"*
They even tried to get me to rap for them. Sweet.
Now playing: TI- What you know

Perceptions of race in the Delta: musings of a Sunday morning insomniac

2006-09-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated my blog in a long time, in part because we didn't get Internet access in my house until a few weeks ago and my ability to access the Internet at my school is, to say the least, sub-par. At any rate, I plan to soon add some entries where I talk about my students, my first month of teaching, other teachers at my school, and so forth, but this Sunday morning, as I grudgingly accept the fact that my body won't let me sleep much past 7 am anymore, even if I need to catch up on sleep, I'm pondering race. More specifically, I've been thinking a lot lately about how I really want to talk to my students about race in a meaningful way, since even though it's a month into school, students still ask me questions about my own race on practically a daily basis (in an effort to give this blog at least the semblance of anonymity, I'll just state here that I'm one of the many corps members of mixed race). I'd like to have some sort of conversation with my students where they explain their conceptions of race to me, though I'm not really sure how to make this happen (in addition to being unsure how to facilitate this sort of conversation with a bunch of seventh graders, I'm wondering how I can justify having this sort of conversation during a science class... hmm).
This morning, I started thinking about all this when I was reflecting on the puzzling fascination my students have with my hair. My hair is black and wavy, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that I like my hair. That being said, I don't think there is anything distinctive about my hair, and have been wondering why my students seem to be fascinated by it. They frequently ask me questions about my hair and will always comment if I put it up one day instead of wearing it down. Several of my female students have touched my hair out of curiousity and been surprised by the texture (one of my girls even commented to her friend, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket's hair feels just like tissues!"). What's the big deal? I keep asking myself. Just recently, it occured to me that perhaps my students are fascinated because they have never seen hair that was black but not kinky before. This explanation makes sense to me in light of all the other questions I've been asked about my race.
At this point, I've probably discussed my race with the majority of my classes, prompted by questions from curious students who have tried to guess my race and come up with everything from Japanese to Puerto Rican to African. A student told the guidance counselor that he'd seen that the school had an"exchange student" this year (yes, he meant yours truly). Yet there still seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding my race. After I told one student that I was mixed race, he asked, "What does that mean? Puerto Rican?" Another student asked me, after I'd explained my family's ancestry, "So what does that make you?" I think what this really comes down to is that to my students, race is categorical. In their minds, a person is either white or black, and most have a few additional categories that are more abstract to them, i.e. "Mexican" or "Asian." Many of them have probably never met someone before who does not fit neatly into one of these few categories, and I am confusing to them.
Sadly enough, this lack of knowledge about race does not seem to be the result of the young age of my students. Several days before students showed up to school, I had to attend an orientation for all the new teachers in the district. For legal reasons, all of us were fingerprinted, and we needed to fill out information on a card for the fingerprinting. There was a tiny box, too small to fit more than a single letter, labelled, "RACE." I looked all over the card to see where the code letters for each race were listed, but couldn't find them anywhere. I looked around to see what the other teachers were doing. It was an easy enough job for them; they were all putting either "B" or "W." I approached the personnel director, explained my race to him, and asked him what I was supposed to write in the box. Perhaps an "O," for "other," or an "M," for mixed? He looked very confused, admitted that he had no idea, and teased me that I was messing everything up.
The long and short of all this is that I've never felt anywhere near as conscious of my race as I do here. That is not to say that I feel that I am being discriminated against or anything like that, but when I walk down the street, I can tell that people are looking at me and wondering. Random Mississippians ask me about my race on almost a daily basis. The fact that my students are having such a hard time grasping my racial identity makes me feel the need to somehow make them more aware of race issues beyond the black/white dichotomy. I'd be really curious, too, to hear how my students perceive their own racial identities. At my school of about 500 students, there are 5-10 white students, two of whom I have in my classes. I've noticed that most of the white kids at my school bleach their hair, as though to look even more white and stick out even more. I find myself wanting to ask my two white students what it feels like to be the only white kids in their classes, but worry that it might seem insensitive to ask. A local TFA teacher was telling me the other day that it bothers him that there are so many blatant racial problems in Mississippi that no one is willing to talk about, such as the white side of the tracks/black side of the tracks phenomena in the very small Delta towns. I agree with him, but at the same time, thinking about all these issues makes me understand why they are so difficult to discuss.

TEAM vs. Summer School: Can I be a good teacher?

2006-07-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

Having finished my three weeks of teaching summer school and my week of TEAM teaching, I'm comparing my vastly different experiences doing these two kinds of teaching and wondering how much real school will be like either. I felt like a much better teacher during TEAM than I did during summer school. There are two obvious reasons for this difference: 1. I taught Algebra I during summer school and seventh grade science during TEAM, and 2. I was teaching to my peers during TEAM, not to a bunch of 14 year olds. Let me elaborate a little on both points.

By the end of TEAM, I was feeling great about how my lessons were going. My evaluators had good things to say about my delivery, my classroom presence, and my way of explaining things, and I felt good about the activities I had my "students" do during the lessons. I actually had a really fun time teaching that week! I enjoyed summer school but didn't love the teaching the same way, and had some lessons that I felt good about but probably more that I considered mediocre.

First things first: teaching Algebra I vs. teaching seventh grade science. I was a biology and math major in college and thus became certified to teach both subjects just by passing the biology PRAXIS. I think that MTC had originally slated me to teach math, but when Dr. Mullins called me to ask about my placement preferences, he asked me if I'd rather teach middle school or high school, and I mentioned that if I could teach science, I'd like to teach middle school. He almost immediately placed me in a middle school that had an opening for a science teacher. The reason I asked to teach middle school was that I wanted middle schoolers because they are more excited (and hyper, but I'll hopefully come to grips with that issue) about anything, including school, than high schoolers, and are also much less burned out with school. I asked for middle school science because I'll be honest here: I think middle school math is really boring! Don't get me wrong, I like math, but I just find it pretty routine until you get to about the level of Algebra II and start seeing some really cool applications. My experiences this summer have made me really glad that I requested to teach middle school science. During summer school, I just had a tough time being creative, and felt that most of my lessons just had the same kind of format each day: students do warm-up problems, class discusses warm-up problems, Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket introduces the topic for the day and does some kind of fun example if she can think of one, Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket gives the students notes, students practice problems and explain the solutions to the class, we do a little review of the lesson, class ends. It's not that consistency is a bad thing, but things just felt a little too routine for me. I would try to make things as interesting as I could, but it was hard for me to be inventive. By some strange coincidence, when my second-years made our teaching schedule, I got assigned to teach almost every single lesson that involved word problems. My students thought that I just loved word problems and taught them all the time because I thought they were cool, and I pretended like that was the case. I would have fun with the word problems by using the names of students and teachers (and even Napoleon Dynamite and Tina the llama one day), and the students really liked that. During my non-word problem lessons, I would want to make problems more interesting and wasn't sure how to do that without making word problems. I didn't want to give word problems on these days because a. I was already Word Problem Lady to my students, and that wasn't really a good thing in their minds, and b. My students struggled with word problems and took much longer; I'm pretty sure that literacy had something to do with this issue. So, there would be some days when I'd be teaching a lesson on something like simplifying negative exponents and would just have no ideas of creative things to do. I had a hard time acting excited about the topic I was teaching because quite frankly, I think that simplifying negative exponents is boring. I understand that it is really important for students to learn all the topics in Algebra I so that they can understand what's going on in high school math classes, where the cool applications come in, but I still don't find the stuff exciting.

Compare this to my experience planning and teaching lessons for seventh grade science during TEAM. This might say a lot about my dorkiness, but I actually think that science is cool and interesting at a middle school level. Plants making their own energy from the sun? Representing ecosystems with food webs? That stuff is fascinating to me! I had a great time putting together lessons, and found it easy and fun to come up with games, activities, etc. that illustrated the concepts I was teaching. Every lesson alternated between notes and at least one (and usually several) demonstration or activity. I actually felt animated and excited while I was teaching, even though the material was at a middle school level. I think that being excited about my content makes me a much better teacher.

Now, on to point number 2: teaching 14 year olds vs. teaching my peers. Obviously, teaching my peers was much easier because they all paid attention and did what I asked them to. By my own admission, I wasn't the best at classroom management this summer, and that hindered my teaching. A number of my friends from college are teaching at private schools and said that they chose to do that instead of teaching at public schools because they, "really want to focus on teaching, not babysitting." Well, I chose what I would argue is the more challenging task of teaching in a critical needs public school because I felt that I could make much more of a meaninful difference by teaching underpriveledged students who haven't had many good teachers than by teaching private school students, and I'll take the challenges that come with my choice. In my ideal world, all my students at my critical needs school would be focused, well-behaved, and studious... dream on! I think what it really comes down to is that I'll have to establish a "don't mess with Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket or you'll take the heat" environment from day 1, and then I'll be able to focus more of my energy on actually teaching rather than being a disciplinarian. The way I see it, it will be my classroom management that makes me or breaks me as a good teacher. I feel confident now that I can get excited about my content material, explain it to the students well, and have activities that are fun and engaging, but if I don't have control over my class, it won't make much difference that I have good lessons. I'm getting increasingly nervous about the first few days of school because that is when I will have to lay down the law for my classroom, and I think that a lot of my success as a teacher will be determined for how well I'm able to establish order.

Now playing: Howie Day- Collide

Watching myself on tape, Episode 2

2006-07-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

Although watching a video of myself teaching summer school back in June ended up being a far less painful experience than I'd anticipated, I was a little bit anxious about watching the videotape of myself during TEAM teaching (for those of you reading this blog who don't know what TEAM means, TEAM was a weeklong training thing where all the first-year teachers were placed in groups with about 5 other first-years who acted as well-behaved students while each day, the group members took turns teaching a lesson. A different veteran teacher observed each day and gave each teacher feedback and an evaluation after the lesson). The anxiety probably stemmed from an experience I had in sixth grade when I watched myself on videotape for the first time. My English teacher had taped a play that my class scripted and performed, and I remember sitting in class and cringing as I watched that tape because up until that day, I hadn't realized that I lisped and couldn't prounounce my "r's" correctly. Those problems are fixed now, but since I've seen so few videos of myself over the course of my life, I still get a little nervous about watching them. But that's neither here nor there.

I knew that I had a great lesson the day I was taped (I felt very positive overall about my teaching during TEAM, but that's a subject for another blog), and my evaluator had great things to say about that particular lesson. The tape confirmed a lot of my positive views. I didn't have too much criticism of myself, but I'll start with the negative things that I noticed.

I had some physical organization problems throughout TEAM: I'd have a clear plan of what I wanted to teach and how, and I'd have in hand a well-organized lesson plan, perhaps with some notes to myself jotted down in the margins, and a copy of whatever fill-in-the-blanks type notesheet the students were given for that lesson, and I'd often put some of my papers down as I walked around the classroom, forget where I'd placed them, and pause for a minute to think about a. what I was supposed to talk about next, or b. where I put the papers. Sometimes, I'd have my lesson plan in hand but take a second or two to look at the plan and figure out where in the lesson I was. On tape, I could definitely see these small pauses, and they're something I'd like to work at eliminating because my seventh grade students might not be patient enough to sit there quietly while I remember what I'm talking about next. It was by no means a major problem, but I'd still like to improve my flow. I have several thoughts on this. First of all, I want to get a brightly colored clipboard so that I know where all my papers are at all times. Second of all, I remembered that one time this spring (you know, when I was in college), I had just taken an oral exam, and my professor commented to me that when I speak, I don't need my notes as much as I think I do. Maybe that is the case when I teach. I definitely need to have some kind of plan written down that I can reference during class to make sure that I remember to say everything I want to, but perhaps having my 2+ page lesson plan as my reference is actually hindering me. The process of writing it out is great for me because it makes me think through exactly what I want to teach and how, and I am the kind of person that needs to feel organized going into a lesson, but maybe I should get in the habit of writing my lesson plan and then taking a fresh sheet of paper and just jotting down some notes to myself about what I want to say, do, etc. This would be easier to reference during class without sorting through lots of other stuff that I've written. I'd also keep my lesson plan on my clipboard just in case I needed to refer to some of the more specific stuff.

Other minor things: I nod my head a lot, which I think I do subconsciously to encourage students when they are answering or asking questions. I'd never noticed that before watching the tape, and none of my evaluators commented on the nodding, so it's possible that I only did it that one day. I should probably nod a little less often, since it made me look like I had lots of nervous energy. I also say, "exactly!" a lot, perhaps a little more often than I should.

On the bright side, I think my lesson did a great job of making students learn proactively rather than just listening to me talk. I switched several times during the lesson between giving notes and doing activities, which I think will be really key for middle school kids with short attention spans (and for this teacher, who also has a short attention span). I explained things in a way that I think was clear enough for seventh graders to understand, and I gave them lots of opportunities to come up with examples. Near the end of my lesson, I did an activity that involved playing games and acting out scenarios where the goal was to earn Reese's cups, and the students had to guess what kind of interaction (e.g. predation, mutualism, competition, etc.) each game or skit represented. I really liked this activity because it was fun and entertaining, but very educational at the same time. I know that I have an easier time remembering amusing things, and I think that students would have an easy time remembering types of interactions after seeing the concepts acted out like this.

During the group work segment of my lesson, in which I assigned groups to draw pictures of what the world might look like with a. no producers, b. no consumers, and c. no decomposers, I noticed on the tape that people were laughing and having fun with the activity, but were actually not talking about anything except the assignment! Of course, it helped that my "students" were a bunch of 22 year old college graduates instead of unfocused 13 year olds, but my hope is that I'll be able to have the same kind of learning environment for my students where I can have them do activities that they enjoy, but that are educational at the same time.

I like the way that I talked to the class. I spoke clearly and slowly, but not slowly enough to sound condescending. I did a good job of posing questions to the whole class, letting the question sink in, and then calling on a specific person. In my summer school classroom, I usually called on volunteers to answer questions because my students were so enthusiastic that they'd ask me in advance if they could do the next problem on the board, but during the school year, I'm not expecting that I'll have so many enthusiastic students. Furthermore, I'm thinking that I will cold-call students who don't have their hands raised even when other students do raise hands because I want to make sure everyone is paying attention. This was a big mistake that I made in summer school; I'd often ignore the two kids who weren't paying attention and focus my energy on the rest of the class because I wanted to teach the kids who were paying attention rather than take up teaching time to give the other two kids a metaphorical kick in the pants. However, I came to realize that if I let the two kids continue to ignore the task at hand, their attitudes would sometimes spiral out and cause other students to lose focus. During the school year, I plan to use the same kind of questioning strategy I used during TEAM where I pose a question to the class and then might call on someone with a raised hand, or might call on anyone else without a raised hand. When watching my tape, I felt that I did a good job of engaging in a dialogue with students who couldn't quite get the answer on their own, but could come to the answer by responding to some of the follow-up questions that I posed. I made students explain their answers to the class so that everyone could follow the thought process behind the answer, and when students asked me questions, I often asked them more questions to help them arrive at the answers to their own questions.

Finally, a few silly and pointless, but mildly entertaining observations: I had a bad hair day that day. Also, two of the walls in that classroom were white and two were pink, and I happened to be wearing a white skirt that day and a sweater that was the exact same shade of pink as half of the walls, so wherever I walked in the room, I almost blended in with the background!

Now playing: Indigo Girls- Moment of Forgiveness

And now for something completely different...

2006-07-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

My blog entries so far have been fairly serious and analytical and such, so I thought that I'd throw in one lighter blog before I go back to writing about more meaningful things.
So I like wildlife a lot: learning the names of different plant and animal species, and learning cool facts about them (OK, secret's out, I'm a dork). Mississippi has some pretty crazy wildlife, and though I haven't been able to go out and explore the forests and rivers and stuff as much as I would have liked since I arrived here, I've been trying to familiarize myself with the local creatures as much as I can. I'll do a little fact-or-fiction about two of the more interesting animals I've encountered. This stuff might sound really dull to some people, but I find it fascinating.
1. Armadillos
I have yet to see a live armadillo, although I've seen a couple dead ones by the side of the road. One night, when we were visiting some of the second-years at their house in the country, I came outside just after one of those weird things passed through the yard. I wanted to go into the soy bean fields to find it, but another first-year warned me to watch out for the armadillo, and I was sort of confused and said that I didn't think they were dangerous. He then informed me that armadillos are the most poisonous animals in the world, and that they will bite onto your leg and just knaw at it viciously. I still wanted to find a flashlight and scan the field for the armadillo, until my friend informed me that armadillos are attracted to the light! I sort of laughed at him and said, "What, would it charge me or something?" to which he told me that it pretty much would run at me, bite my leg if it could get at me, and not let go.
Several minutes later, he let me in on another fact: he made all of that up! Yes, you can laugh at my gullibility now, or, as said friend did, laugh at the fact that I'm teaching science next year.

2. "Alligator gar"
One day, another first-year told his students that he'd been swimming at Sardis Lake over the weekend, to which one student told him that he had to be careful of the "alligator gar fish" out there. Huh? According to this student, there were some kind of alligator fish things that could grow up to nearly eight feet long, and his dad, "had done near got his hand bit off by one of those!" Well, this sounded like a bunch of crazy talk. I mean, for one thing, what the heck is an "alligator fish" anyway, an alligator or a fish? We thought this kid was making up stuff. Then I went to good old wikipedia and found out that this kid was actually telling the truth! Among other things, these fish can actually EAT ALLIGATORS! Hearing about this weird creature made me feel less stupid about believing the stuff about armadillos; in my mind, at least, poisonous biting armadillos are less weird than alligator-eating fish.

thoughts on LaLee's kin

2006-07-06T17:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we had our first class after the long weekend. I knew that we were watching some kind of movie and then hearing Reggie Barnes, a former superintedent, give some kind of talk to us. I sort of walked into the classroom expecting it to be a really light day; after all, how could watching a movie and listening to a speaker not seem low-key after teaching summer school?
I was wrong, in a manner of speaking. The movie we saw, LaLee's Kin, made a major emotional impact on me that I couldn't have anticipated. For the benefit of those reading this blog who don't know what I'm talking about, LaLee's Kin is a documentary that follows a woman who lives in Tallahatchie County (for those of you who still don't know what I'm talking about, that's a county in the Mississippi Delta) named LaLee, mother of 11 kids, grandmother of 20-some kids, and great-grandmother of 30-some kids, and several of the grandkids and great-grandkids that are (permanently, temporarily or indefinitely) in her care. The movie also follows the efforts of the local school district, where Reggie Barnes was the superintendent at the time of filming, as it tries to raise test scores in order to get off probation by the state of Mississippi.

After watching the movie and listening to Reggie Barnes speak, I thought about what it was about that day that made me experience really powerful emotions in a way that an average day at summer school didn't come close to. I think that LaLee's Kin made me realize more than any of the other experiences I've had so far what life is like day to day for a very poor family in the Delta. On an intellectual level, I knew that Mississippi was the poorest state in the country, and the Delta was the poorest part of the state, and I could probably spit out a few statistics about unemployment rate, percentages of families living below the povery line, etc. I've heard stories from other people in the program about the things they've seen that we all wish no one had to see or experience. I had the general idea that the students I taught at summer school came from underpriveleged backgrounds and had difficult home lives, and once in a while I'd even see a small piece of evidence confirming this. But how could I really know what life was like for any single one of my students outside of the hours of 7:45 to 12:20? I never saw them outside of school, and even if I had, I wouldn't be hanging around their houses long enough to figure out what their lives were like. When I visited the town where I'll teach in the fall, I drove through town and saw how quickly the landscape changed from nice two-story houses to dilapidated trailers and shacks. So yes, I was aware of the effects of poverty in the Delta. After all that, though, I still hadn't seen what day-to-day existence looked like for any of the students I knew or have heard about through the stories of other MTC folk.

Well, LaLee's Kin really cemented that for me. At the beginning of the movie, LaLee is looking outside from a trailer with excitement as a truck delivers the new trailer that will become her home. Part of what made a strong impact on me was the story of Granny, one of LaLee's granddaughters. At the start of the film, Granny is living with LaLee and is trying to attend the sixth grade while LaLee forces her to shoulder the huge responsibility of looking after and helping to raise two of LaLee's great-grandkids. LaLee cares about the kids getting their schooling, but feels that she needs Granny to help her with the younger children. Eventually, Granny goes to Memphis to live with relatives of her father, and is able to excel in school. She proudly tells the camera that her school in Memphis told her that when she graduated from high school, she could have a scholarship to the University of Tennessee and study to be a nurse. Then, she gets called back to live with LaLee and help out with the chores and childcare. After the film, Reggie Barnes informed us that Granny had a baby while she was in high school, managed to finish high school, never made it to college, and is now raising the child on her own. That story was really tragic to me because Granny seemed as though she could break out of the poverty cycle, but never quite did.

Leaving me with at least as strong an impression, though, were the small details of the documentary that revealed the realities of life for a poor family in the Delta. For instance, LaLee didn't have running water in her trailer, and would send the children to collect water in jugs from the state penitentiary. Granny bathed the younger children in buckets.

After we watched the film, Reggie Barnes commented that the Mississippi Delta is really just as bad as a Third World country on some levels. My dad grew up in a developing country, and after class, I found myself comparing his life to the lives of LaLee and her family. Dad is one of six children, and he and his siblings were raised singlehandedly by their mother after their father died of a heart attack. Some of the kids were pretty close to grown-up by the time that happened, but my grandmother still had to work full-time to support the kids and bring them up at the same time. I always thought that was an amazing feat for one person to accomplish, and then I thought of how LaLee raised 11 kids on her own, and took responsibility for many grandkids and great-grandkids! Dad's family was middle-class in their country, and several years ago, Dad showed me the place where he grew up. Dad's family's first apartment was a far cry from luxurious. It had a kitchen, and at most 3 additional rooms, all to be shared among 10 people. He and his siblings often slept on shelves or boards. It was in a crowded area, and the whole complex was rather run-down. Here's the crazy thing, though: by my estimation, Dad's family was much better off than LaLee's family. Dad's family was able to access running water and plumbing, even if it was shared with at least 2 other large families in the complex, and they never went hungry. My grandmother pinched enough pennies to send Dad and all of his siblings to school, and every single one of them made it through college! Of course, a lot of that had to do with cultural values and the importance that my family puts on education. Even so, it just blows my mind that there are families living in the Delta, in the country with the highest GDP in the world (I could use this to go on a rant about how this is an example of why we shouldn't use GDP as the standard measuring tool for development... but I'll leave that for another time and place), families whose children I will teach in school, who have worse living conditions than an average family in a developing country, and have poor odds of achieving the kind of success that Dad and his siblings did.

I've never seen anyone dedicate a blog entry before, but it seems appropriate here to dedicate this blog entry to the memory of Mimi, Dad's mother, who passed away just over a month ago.

Focus paper reflection: school nutrition

2006-07-02T14:55:00.000-07:00

As they say, better late than never... I read Lily's focus paper on nutrition in schools. I'm particularly interested in this issue because I ultimately want to get involved in public health. I'm also a bit of a health nut, and I've been thinking a lot about nutritional concerns when I look around the summer school cafeteria every day. Lily's paper explains that school breakfast and lunch programs were started to address the nutritional needs of students, but legislation was not ammended until 2002 to require that school lunches meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Lily begins by talking about obesity, and mentions later in her paper that students have unhealthy alternatives, including vending machine products, to school lunches. She said that a recent bill that has not yet been approved calls for restricting vending machine contents to healthier items. I'm not sure what the current state of this bill is, but I think it sounds like a great idea. This past month, I noticed that many of my students at Holly Springs Summer School were overweight and appeared unhealthy, and I wonder how much of that would change if students were unable to access junk food from the vending machines in schools.
Over the past month, I've been eating the same breakfasts and lunches at summer school as my students (and no, I am not talking about "eating lunch" in the Jon Zarondona sense of that phrase = ) ), and have thus thought a lot about school food issues. I think that it's really important that the schools in the Delta offer free breakfast and lunch to many, if not all, of their students, but I wonder if this is enough. One of my concerns in eating at summer school was just the number of calories in each meal. I found myself always having to supplement the school meals with additional breakfast and lunch food. Granted, I'm more physically active than many of the students, but many of them are growing, and I remember how much I needed to eat all the time when I was in high school. One day, some of my students complained to me that they were all hungry because the school breakfast had been smaller than usual that day (point taken). I have to wonder if they're even getting enough food. Another concern of mine is how healthy the food is; Lily's paper stated that school feeding programs are supposed to ensure that foods from each of the five food groups are presented at each meal, but do an apple at breakfast and some lettuce and tomatoes on a burger at lunch really constitute an adequate daily dose of fruits and veggies?
Most of this is speculative, since poor nutrition and obesity are huge issues that I am not deluded enough to think that I can take by the horns (or at least, not any time soon). But, being a practically minded person, I started to think about what I could actually do about these problems. Lily mentioned that teachers can help by teaching their kids good nutritional practices. As a science teacher, I hope that I have this opportunity. I remember having health education in middle school where we had to learn all kinds of things about nutrition, and ultimately record everything we ate over a period of three days. At the time, I thought it was kind of a dumb activity in the way that I thought that most things we did in middle school health were kind of dumb, but I can appreciate now how much I learned from all that. However, I'm not sure how good an idea it would be to have my students do the "record all you eat" thing. I'm aware that some of my students won't have the means to eat enough quality food, and I don't want to humiliate anyone by bringing up a sensitive subject.
I might be coaching track at my middle school next spring, or, more accurately, attempting to start up a track team with my event-limited knowledge. My school district currently doesn't have a track team at the middle school or high school, but the athletic director was more interested in having me start a team at the middle school. He said that it would keep the kids out of trouble by giving them something to focus on, and would get them physically active, and his hope was that they'd already be into track by the time they hit high school, and I'm right with him on all of these points. But you just can't do intense athletic activities without eating right, and how many of my students will be properly fed enough to have the energy to go out and run, or jump, or throw, at the end of the school day?

School's out for sum-mer (June self-selected blog #2)

2006-07-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

Friday was the last day of summer school. I have mixed feelings about summer school ending. On one hand, I was struggling with classroom management; I was too lenient toward unattentive students when I came in, and I paid the price the last few weeks. I experienced just how difficult it is to come into school and try to gain control of a class after letting them go initially, and it wasn't fun; I felt like I was battling the class at times. On the other hand, I really enjoyed teaching, and I really liked my students, even the ones who caused me grief sometimes. It's hard for me to comprehend the fact that I won't see any of them again, and probably will never hear any news about their lives.
On the last day, I had to give the class an open-note group test for the first 2 periods. Some students just whipped right through the test, and almost all the groups did well on it, but one pair of girls failed the test (both still passed the class). They were the only group to use the entirety of the two periods allotted to the test, and it was obvious to me that they weren't focusing very well. I repeatedly stopped by their desks to check if they had questions, and to remind them to keep working on the test (they would start chatting to each other or keeping beat), but it got to a point where I felt that they had to take some responsibility. I'd given them the opportunity to use all of their notes and homework, and to talk to each other, but they were the ones who had to decide how to use those resources. They did finish the test by the end of second period, and answered every question, but had enough wrong answers that they failed. I'm still wondering whether they legitimately didn't understand the material well enough to pass the test, or whether they just couldn't apply themselves; I have a sneaking suspicion that the latter issue was at least part of the problem. I'm sure that I'll face similar situations next year, and I still don't know how to help at that point. In other sad news, my students took a post-test at the end of the day, and the highest score was 16/24. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself or for my students, but I sincerely believe that these scores were not reflective of the knowledge they gained during summer school. For one thing, they came to school that day, took a 2 period long test, had a period of review, and then took the post-test during 4th period. I sure as heck can't blame anyone who felt burned out and unfocused by the time they hit the post-test.
Other than those incidents, the last day of school was a really positive experience. During lunch period, my co-teachers and I ordered pizza for all the kids, who voluntarily stayed through lunch to eat pizza in the classroom and hang out with the class. My biggest reward for teaching summer school was hearing all the things that our class said on the last day. One girl wrote a thank-you note on the board for all the teachers and signed it, along with the other students. A number of our students thanked each of the teachers personally, and gave us hugs. One girl brought little candy baskets for all the teachers, and another girl commented that she was sorry that she hadn't brought us presents, too, "because I wanted to, but my mom was going crazy last night!" This same girl commented in front of the whole class that, "I just don't get it, how can I go to summer school for one month, learn so much about math, know everything, but last year I spent nine months in school and didn't learn a thing! That's just embarrassing!"
Over the past few weeks, I've had some issues with one of my students, "Picasso," who is frequently disruptive in class and was very angry at me for a few days when I dealt out the appropriate consequences. On Friday, Picasso, like many of our other students, gave a "speech," where she thanked each of the teachers in our classroom, but skipped over me when doing so. This did not escape the notice of the other students, who said, "Picasso, what about Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket?" Picasso looked at me and said, "Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket, I know I've had the most problems with you, and I apologize for being disrespectful." Later, when the kids all filed out for dismissal, she gave me a hug along with all the other teachers.
The other teachers and I did a little awards ceremony for the class where we announced the winners of each certificate (we made one for each of the students). The awards included "Most charming," "Most attentive," "Most improved," and "Star of the month." Everyone seemed really proud of their awards, even the students that got the really random ones. And of course, how could the last day of school pass without a musical interlude? After the awards ceremony, about half of the class started keeping beat together, grovin' in their chairs, and doing a little singing for all of us. Hunter took a short video of it on his digital camera, and I think I'll be watching it from time to time when I need a little pick-me-up.

Now playing: Jefferson Airplane (or Starship?): We Built This City on Rock and Roll

Watching myself on tape

2006-07-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

This past week, I videotaped (well, more like I had Hunter videotape) one of my lessons. I was surprised to find that watching the tape the next day actually didn't give me much new information about my teaching, which I suppose is a testiment to my self-awareness and to my mentor's attentiveness. Watching the tape, I could tell that there was a little too much chatter going on in the classroom, but that's not news to me; it's no secret that I've had some difficulty with classroom management this summer, and the level of off-topic talking in the class is the most common manifestation of my shortcomings in management. I spoke to the students clearly while teaching, and liked the way that I used hand gestures when I talked. The one thing that I noticed while watching the tape that I hadn't thought about before was my body language while I'm waiting for students to work through practice problems. I did a pretty good job of circulating around the room during this instructional down-time, which gave me an opportunity to remind students to get back on task if they were playing around, and also allowed me to answer questions and give a little one-on-one attention to the students who asked for it. Of course, I don't need to walk around the whole time students are working on problems, so I have very short periods of time where I just stand near the overhead projector and wait. I noticed on the tape that I should really work on my body language during these times. I slumped forward too much, and I ended up doing random things with my hands (running them along the table, picking up markers, etc.) that had no purpose. I want to work on both of these things; I think I'll look a lot more serious and purposeful if I stand up straight, look around the classroom, and stop playing with my hands in a useless manner. On the positive side, I was feeling sort of overwhelmed the day I taped myself; I was teaching all 4 periods that day, I'd woken up feeling fairly sick and continued to feel yucky once I got to school, I had been informed earlier that day that Joe Sweeney would be stopping by to observe me on that day, and I was feeling less positive overall because my past few days of teaching had not gone very well. However, when I saw myself on tape, I appeared much more comfortable and together than I actually felt at the time.

Group learning: using students to help each other

2006-06-23T14:39:00.001-07:00

Twice this past week, I had students break into small groups to work through problems. This strategy worked very well, and I plan to use it periodically in the future.
On Tuesday, we had a class period devoted to reviewing for the upcoming test. The previous week, I'd also taught a review, and it seemed like a drag for both me and the students. Part of this was the fact that the review was scheduled for 2 periods, but I think the bigger problem was that I was just having students work on problems one at a time and then take turns showing them on the board. My students love board work, but doing problem after problem for 90 minutes, especially when none of the material was new, got boring. So, for this week's review, I broke the class into small groups (strategically mixing up ability levels and behavior types) to work on the problems. Even though it meant that there was a little more chatter than there otherwise would have been, I think the group work was a great idea. All the groups were being productive, and the students stayed more engaged than they would have if I had just done the board routine. Another cool thing about having students work in groups is that I was able to get the chatty students to focus just by my physical presence in a way that doesn't seem to work as well in lecture. I moved between groups pretty frequenty, and if I just looked over or stood next to a group that I noticed was getting off topic, they often noticed and kept working. This was a particularly important discovery for me, since I've admittedly been having a hard time calling out kids who talk about non-math topics (side note: I still need to get tougher about that; group work isn't an escape hatch).
Today, I broke students into groups again. It didn't go quite as well; students were singing and keeping beats, and I didn't crack down on them hard enough. Nevertheless, I think today's group work was still beneficial. Last period yesterday, I had covered a topic that students were struggling with (graphing 2-variable inequalities), and I was given 2 periods today to cover a topic that I thought could be addressed in just one lesson, so my second-years gave me the OK to take first period to do some more work on graphing 2-variable inequalities. I had the students do some graphing warm-up problems, then went through a 2-variable inequality problem with them, and then broke them into groups. To me, the coolest thing that came out of it was seeing how students were able to help each other. One girl was struggling, and no matter how I tried to explain it to her, didn't seem to get it. Another girl in her group gave her lots of help, and she seemed to be understanding more by the end of the lesson. Side note: a really cool thing happened with the same student during second period. I asked her if she could try a problem on the board, and she said she didn't think she could do it, and I said, "I'll help you do it on the board. We'll work on it together." She immediately perked up and said, "OK!" She went to the board, did the problem out, and got it right! And pretty much all I did was stand there and tell her she was on the right track once or twice when she asked me. All she needed was to feel like she wasn't completely on her own. Neat.
The next time I do groupwork, I'm going to lay out some rules before I divide the students up. Talk to only the other students in your group, and talk only about math. Stay in your seat unless Ms. Long Skirt Blue Jacket gives you permission to get up. I'm also considering have students later hand in the problems they did during group work just to make sure everyone stays on task.

Summer School, day 5

2006-06-19T15:50:00.000-07:00

Today was my 5th day of teaching at Holly Springs Summer School, and I felt good enough about the day to compel me to write a blog about it.
Last Monday (a week ago), I showed up at summer school having just flown in the night before and observed my classroom. I hopped right into teaching the next day. After most of my lessons last week, I walked away feeling that the lesson had gone decently well, but would have one thing that I should have done a better job of; this could take the form of a moment when I didn't adequately alleviate student confusion, or, most commonly, a time when I didn't manage the class as well as I should have. Despite these mistakes, I felt generally positive at the end of every day about how things had gone. I also felt that I was making amends to my mistakes in the next lessons. Also, I enjoyed myself a lot, and am feeling better with regard to the self-doubts I had about becoming a teacher.
Today was a great teaching day for me. I felt like I finally integrated all of the things I learned from my errors last week into one lesson that just went smoothly. I was teaching a concept that I was concerned would be confusing to my students; as I learned last week, some of the topics that I thought were straightforward presented formidable challenges to many of my students. Today felt like a really good balance of breaking concepts down into a form that students could understand while at the same time successfully challenging some of my students to reach the next level of understanding.
This day could have shaped up to be a disaster. I was teaching 4th period, but due to a mistake I made in interpreting the class syllabus that hadn't printed correctly, I wrote a lesson plan for the wrong thing. Whoops. As I realized after getting to school, the lesson that I had written for 4th period was just another component of the 3rd period lesson that my co-teacher was teaching. No wonder it seemed like not much material! I told him about the problem and gave him the work that I'd done so that he could integrate it into his own lesson, which he did seemlessly. To complicate matters further, the school computers were effectively not working today. So, I had to sit down for one period while I wasn't teaching and scribble out a new lesson plan for 4th period. And I did it! I was able to organize my teaching, come up with relevant examples, write up a homework assignment, and make some overhead transparencies in a short period of time. This is very comforting to me; I'm progressing in how quickly I can write lesson plans without sacrificing the quality of my lessons, which will be an important skill once the real school year starts.
Something that my mentor teacher and I discussed last week was the importance of being positive. It's amazing how much of a difference positive comments make in student excitement levels; this effect can come from something as small as saying, "Great job, you almost have it. Who can tell me how to change this answer a little bit?" and saying, "Well, that's not quite the answer. Who can tell me how to fix it?" I did a good job today with encouragement; I continually reminded my class that we were doing difficult work and that they were doing really well with it.
Something I struggled with last week was the balance of having students do work on the board, demonstrating for students how to solve a problem, and having students answer questions for me while I worked a problem out on the board. It's not a good thing if I spend too much time in front of the board because no one wants to listen to a teacher just lecturing at them, but on the other hand, having too much board work leads to disruption. Every time a student gets out of her (or his, in the case of my single male student) seat to go to the board, she takes some time to get her notes together, and even though I try to have students explain what they're doing as they write, they inevitably end up writing for a while before they talk to the class. This can create too much down time, and other students will start talking about non math-related topics. One thing that I'm working on, and practiced to some extent today, is picking a student to go up while others are still working on the problem. Today, I felt that I had a good balance between me showing things on the board and students showing things on the board. I think that striking this balance had a lot to do with why classroom management also went well for me today. I'm getting better about time management, and was able to close the lesson with a couple of minutes to spare; I struggled with this a lot last week.
I can say a lot of positive things about how today went, but I think that the part of the lesson that makes me happiest at the end of the day was watching one of my students, Frannie (*this name, like all the other names of students and teachers in this blog, is a pseudonym) master a difficult concept. I introduced a concept toward the end of my lesson that I had been on the fence about including at all, since it was more complicated than the other work we'd done that day. I broke the problem into smaller steps and had the students help me with each step. I wouldn't say that all of them followed 100%, which is OK since it was meant as a challenge anyway, but Frannie did a great job of telling me what to do at each step even when the rest of the class was stumped. Frannie is not normally one of the quicker students in my class, so seeing how well she did today made me especially happy. During "lunch period," (when the students generally do homework for the 25 minutes before lunch), I called Frannie over to the desk and gave her a piece of candy, telling her how well she did today, and had my own reward of seeing her face break into a huge grin. She immediately ran over to her friends in the class and showed them the candy bar I'd given to her, and while bragging isn't such a good thing, I loved seeing how proud she was.
I hope that I have more teaching days like today. I'm also realistically thinking about how my summer school classroom is different from the kind of class I'll have in the fall: I have only 12 students (11 female), my students are well-behaved and excited about math, there are between 2 and 4 teachers in the room at any given time even though only one is teaching, and I started teaching only after my co-teachers had already established some sound classroom management. Truthfully, I don't even deserve a lot of the credit for the way the lesson went. However, I can think of today's lesson and everything that went well about it as something to strive for during the regular school year.

Cold-calling from index cards

2006-06-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

Today, I took two 45 minute periods to review for tomorrow's Algebra I test. I conducted the review session primarily by giving students a worksheet of problems on each of the topics we've covered, giving them a minute to work on a problem, and then calling on a student to go to the board and show the class how to solve the problem. Normally, I pick students to go to the board by asking for volunteers. Today, I tried something different. I made an index card for each student and announced at the beginning of the review session that I would choose people to do board work by shuffling the cards and randomly pulling out one card.
I ended up really disliking this method for my class. I have a class of 12 excited students who, on a normal basis, frequently ask ahead of time if they can go up to the board to do the next problem, and although they sometimes get distracted and try to talk to each other when they're supposed to be solving math problems, all of them will work on the problems assigned in class. The bottom line is that I am never at a loss to find eager volunteers to go to the board and solve a problem. For this reason, I was somewhat hesitant to even try the cold-calling card method for a lesson, but I tried it anyway.
As luck would have it, I ended up pulling the same person's name out of the deck multiple times, while there were 4 kids whose names were not getting pulled out at all. The kids whose names weren't getting pulled were not happy with this situation. They kept on asking me if they could do the next problem on the board, even though they knew that I was using the cards to pick people; several other students made the same request. By the end of the period, I felt like the 4 kids whose names I hadn't pulled were getting shortchanged, so I just abandoned the stack and called on each of them. When I talked to my second-year mentor teachers after the lesson, they said that I didn't really need to just randomly pull a card out, and I could stack the deck. Unless I have students who will personally resent me for calling on them when they don't volunteer, I would rather just call on random people than pretend to randomly draw names.
Another aspect I didn't like about the cold-calling method was the lack of personal attention. As I discussed with my second-year mentor teachers after the lesson, my students get very excited when they raise their hands and I pick them. The personal attention makes them feel special and proud, and cold-calling took away from this interaction.
I have not completely given up on the idea of using cold-calling in some future classroom if I have reluctant and/or unfocused students. One positive outcome I observed from employing the cold-calling method was how the students all fell silent and focused their attention on me every time I announced that I was about to draw a card for the next volunteer. In the case of my class, this was positive anticipation, since everyone was hoping I would draw their names. I think that in a less motivated class, where the anticipation would be more negative, the suspense would nonetheless draw students' attention and keep them focused, because no one knows what name will come up next.